Daniel Sinker is a Journalism faculty member at Columbia College
Chicago, where he has a focus in entrepreneurial, online journalism
and the mobile web. He is the owner of Independents' Day Media, a
Chicago-based independent publishing company and was the founder of
the influential underground culture magazine Punk Planet and the
editor of its line of fiercely independent books, Punk Planet Books.
He is also a graphic designer whose design for Joe Meno's "Hairstyles
of the Damned" was named one of the 25 "new classic" book covers of
the last 25 years by Entertainment Weekly.

He was a 2007-08 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where
he studied the impact of mobile technologies on traditional publishing
models, and recieved his BFA in video production and new media from
the School of the Art Institute in 1996.

He blogs about the changing state of journalism at MEGO: My Eyes Glaze
Over
and is on Twitter @dansinker. All of his
various online activities are collected at Daniel Sinker's Metablog.

Blog Entries by Daniel Sinker

No Leaf Clover: Newspapers Keep Pointing to Google as the Source of Their Problems; They Should Be So Lucky.

48 Comments | Posted June 5, 2009 | 01:20 PM (EST)


When a newspaper goes to bed at night, this is what wakes it up in a cold sweat, its newsprint wrinkling and ink running:

You don't have to have an MBA to realize that the chart is heading in the wrong direction and that it's getting worse...

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When the Left Went Teabagging: As You Chuckle at the Right's Newfound Activism, Don't Forget That the Left Sucked Balls for Years

322 Comments | Posted April 17, 2009 | 01:25 PM (EST)


The Lorax. It took me a while to figure out what the fuzzy red costume with a big yellow mustache was supposed to be. Ten minutes of staring at the photo and it finally hit me: The Lorax, from the Dr. Seuss book about the pollution caused by the production...

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"This Song Ain't About You": The Media Misses the Real Message of the Stewart/Cramer Interview

Posted March 13, 2009 | 04:53 PM (EST)


If you didn't watch Jon Stewart's interview with Mad Money's Jim Cramer last night, don't worry--it's unavoidable today. Here's just a selection of front pages from news sites around the web:

2009-03-14-tribune.jpg

Yes, you're seeing that right: the Governor of Illinois (the new...

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Where is Our Orchestra? What Journalism Can Learn From the Mind-Blowing Remixes of Kutiman

Posted March 11, 2009 | 11:30 PM (EST)


There are two ways to watch the works of Kutiman: in revelation or in revulsion. To the former, he's carving out a new form of expression, building majestic orchestras from modest parts. To the latter, he's a crook, misappropriating the works of others for his own gain. It's best,...

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Appetite for Destruction: why an "iTunes for News" is a bad idea

Posted February 24, 2009 | 05:51 PM (EST)


You can learn a lot of the wrong lessons from Apple: You can attribute the success of the iPod to the fact that people like white plastic, and so you can dip your crappy doodad in a can of paint. You can say that the success of the iPhone is...

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Face/Off: How a Little Change in Facebook's User Policy is Making People Rethink the Rights They Give Away Online

Posted February 17, 2009 | 04:58 PM (EST)


Facebook's getting really good at the non-apology apology. They practiced it in 2006 when they first launched the now-ubiquitous News Feed. They did it again in 2007 when they launched their short-lived Beacon ad service. In 2008 when the New York Times and others reported that it was...

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My Governor Got Led Away in Handcuffs, and All I Got Was This Lousy Newspaper

Posted December 9, 2008 | 04:33 PM (EST)


Be glad you're not Rod Blagojevich. In addition to having a terrible haircut, he's going to go down in history as the worst politician in the history of Illinois politics--a high bar to pass, but one he's passed handily. Trying to sell the Senate seat of the next U.S. President...

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Grant Park, the Day After

Posted November 5, 2008 | 03:31 PM (EST)


I wasn't able to attend the rally in Downtown Chicago last night (too busy liveblogging, I guess). But today I decided to take an early lunch and walk over to the site of the rally, Grant Park's Hutchinson Field. Maybe I could find a little token from history to...

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Election Results Liveblog, via Chicago

Posted November 4, 2008 | 06:49 PM (EST)


Read more Election Day Liveblogs, Reaction and Analysis from HuffPost Bloggers

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Goodnight, Vietnam: Tuesday Night Will Finally Put to Rest the Ghost of a War that Ended 35 Years Ago

Posted November 2, 2008 | 10:09 PM (EST)


I was born in November 1974. The Paris Peace Accords had been signed by Richard Nixon in January of the previous year. The war, for all intents and purposes was well over by the time I came around. Except it never ended. The shadow of Vietnam fell over American culture...

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Why 2008 is Not 2004 Redux: Remember the Bush/Kerry Matchup? Kerry was Polling Strongly, Right? Think Again.

Posted October 27, 2008 | 02:35 PM (EST)


I've heard whisperings the last few days that, despite the polls, people shouldn't be too confident in an Obama victory next week. The reason? Kerry was polling well leading into election 2004, but Bush won the election. While the latter is true--obviously, we've all been suffering under it--the former is...

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Poll Numbers? We Don't Need Your Stinkin' Poll Numbers -- We've Got Google Instead

Posted October 24, 2008 | 11:44 AM (EST)


Back during the Democratic primary (which, when you think about it, feels like an entire lifetime ago) I looked briefly at how Google Trends, which shows the popularity of different search terms, so closely resembled the data coming out of the national pollsters. Google's search stats not only...

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Slipping Backwards: The Loss of Two Journalists of Color at the Chicago Sun-Times Reflects the Growing Whitewashing of the News

Posted October 16, 2008 | 05:52 PM (EST)


Teresa Puente's bad day started when she learned that Deborah Douglas, her colleague on the Chicago Sun-Times' editorial board, and the last African-American voice on the board, had been laid off. Her day got worse when she found out that Douglas wasn't the only one to get the boot;

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One Step Closer To Nationwide Free Wireless Internet

Posted October 14, 2008 | 03:15 PM (EST)


The FCC has announced that they had finished a series of tests of a swatch of radio band that they're setting aside for a nation-wide, cost-free wireless internet service. Those tests concluded that that spectrum will not interfere with current mobile carriers signals (though ATT, T-Mobile, and all the rest...

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