I can’t/won’t put my finger on what should pass as good or bad design or storytelling after just one month with Duy and Carla. But I will admit that I have a much better understanding of, “What is news?” now, an understanding that I frankly do not think I grasped well enough at my old job.

What is news for a journalist?

1. The obvious: Fire burning down main street. News is a recent or unreported event that has impact on a person or group of people.
2. A trend. The rise of the finger-generation, for example. That is, as touch screen devices proliferate, younger generations are using their fingers to squeeze and pinch content in ways that those ol’ fuddy-duddy Gen-X-ers used to use their thumbs for.
3. (This is my favorite.) Something you didn’t know you didn’t know. Often this sort of news materializes itself in the “weird” section of a Web site or newspaper. For example, like tramp stamps for Barbie.
4. Information that is “contrary to popular convention,” to quote Duy. This is often a combination of items two and three. For example, a trend is emerging that you didn’t know you didn’t know. Example, despite the preponderance of Google’s search engine, there are several companies out there offering a range of unique methods to find what it is your looking for faster and more accurately.

At City Weekend, I ran editorial meetings much like a factory manager would. Articles were largely chosen less on their news value and more on how accessible the story was to the busy editor, its relevance to the readership and whether it was deemed “interesting” enough (by me/us). “What is the story? And why is it interesting?” was the best I ever got. I believe we produced stories that seemed like we could get done. That’s not to say we didn’t hit the bull’s eye every now and then, but little thought on my part was given to news value.

Part of the reason I started this blog was to jot down some of the major lessons learned at Columbia, in the event that if I ever went back to work for my old entertainment publication, I’d be better at it than before. If I had run many of the story ideas discussed in our old editorial meetings through this “what-is-news filter?” below, I think I would have hit the mark more often, and as a result, produced not only a useful guide, but also, a more newsworthy magazine.

So, nearly one year after I started at the J-school, and only three months before I graduate, I attempted hastily cobble this blog article together. I give credit to my RW1 professors, Ari Goldman and Pam Frederick, Duy Linh Tu and Carla Baranauckas for shoving the importance of this, “What is news?” exercise down my throat. I’ve begun to genuinely appreciate the value of understanding what is news. Hopefully, I’ll get better at how to plan, budget, sell, design and build it too.

One of the highlights of my time here at J-school has been meeting Cyndi Stivers, currently the managing editor of Entertainment Weekly. Stivers launched Time Out here in New York as publisher and is now teaching a class on magazine production at the J-school.

We met after the “dog-and-pony” show, where professors of spring classes pitch their upcoming courses to fall students, and quickly hit it off on the topic of content management systems. I never thought of myself as too knowledgeable on the subject, but after having helped design an online system in Django, City Weekend, I suppose I’m keenly aware of their power and menace. Stivers expressed interest in me stopping by her class and presenting my former work.

The above slide show is the result. It’s a short dek that simply touches on what is a CMS, what to look out for when choosing one and how the right CMS or approach to database management can help in magazine and web production. As I am so fond of saying, our CMS published a user-generated Web site, that also happened to make a magazine, email update and mobile phone service.