Hi, and welcome to Convergence Commons.

This blog will serve as a repository of findings and thoughts on the topics of new media, community journalism, public access, the social web and media education as I write my thesis on how these all intersect.

A little about myself: I’ve been involved with web design since 1999, virtual community development since 2003, online publishing since 2004, and a mix of multimedia journalism, public access television and teaching workshops for the past two years.

And for the last several months, as I watch our media landscape in flux, I’ve been thinking one thing — it’s an exciting time to be a journalist.

Maybe I’m just an optimist. Sure, print newspapers may be in a death spiral, and the industry hasn’t yet figured out how to sustain itself online, and reporters are losing jobs, and we fear a future where all news media is petty and trivial, miles wide but only inches deep. But I believe that there has never been a better time to reinvent media culture as we know it than now. Right now, we have an unprecedented opportunity to explore wide open frontiers, to examine what works and what doesn’t in the old institutions (keeping the former while scuttling the latter), and to develop new, improved models for access, education and civic engagement.

We have in our hands a perfect storm consisting of the rise of a participatory online culture, the reshaping of national politics by the Internet, the mass migration of old media to new media, and an entire generation of young digital natives on the cusp of entering society.

It’s an exciting time to be a journalist, and my hope is that this blog will be a useful contribution to the dialogue surrounding the future of journalism and how we teach it, as we enter this new era together.