Best pizza this decade. Half number two (granny smith apples, smoked Gouda, and roasted walnuts) and half this week’s special (grilled eggplant and parmesan with a dank tomato sauce).

Wednesday night: Delta non-stop flight from JFK to PDX. Michelle got a bulkhead seat, and I an exit row, so she traded the guy sitting next to me.

Thursday: few calls in the morning, purchased new running shoes, hour swim at The MAC, delicious lunch at Paragon in the Pearl, haircut with Brenda, drive to Eugene, and dinner at Pizza Research Institute with Shane, Hugh, and Michelle (both the chef’s special and the pear and pesto one were superb).

Friday: Breakfast at the Glenwood, drive back to Portland, afternoon nap, Prosperity Park out and back run with mom, and family picnic dinner in the park.

Saturday: 30 minute swim at The MAC, walking in Forest Park with Andrew, lunch and a Digital Journalism Portland sesh, hanging out downtown with Michelle and her sister, and a wonderful salmon dinner at home.

Relaxing weekend was just what I needed. Next trip I’m bringing my nice camera.

New York

Portland

Eugene

Pretty neat. The hotspots in each city are most commonly where I live and work. Unlike Zach, I check-in copiously, even at private residences, as a way of logging where I’ve been. The most unexpected insight from building these heatmaps is the sheer distance between Portland-area check-ins. It makes sense, but also is surprising compared to the other two cities.

• TEAC stereo, 125 watt KLH subwoofer, two bookshelf speakers, and four floor speakers
• Matching dresser and night stand
• IKEA standing desk and chair
• IKEA futon mattress

If you know of anyone looking for home furniture in very good condition, I’d be willing to make a deal.

One thing I’ve observed: the market is absolutely flooded with second-hand furniture right now. I imagine this happens every June. I also know that it was nearly impossible to find the things I needed when I moved down here last August or September. This smells like a market opportunity to me.

The idea that came to mind immediately was a centralized solution: the enterprising entrepreneur would rent an empty house or storage unit, pick up all of the furniture on the market at depressed prices, store it for a couple of months, and then resell when the demand picks up again. I’d imagine that most items listed on Craigslist or on display at garage sales in June are discounted at least 50%, if not more. The biggest issue with this model, although, is that there are serious costs associated with moving the furniture twice, first to storage and then to the buyer’s home, that might well cancel out any margins.

There’s got to be a cleverer solution.

Creativity tip: if you have a hankering for a massive salad, but don’t know what to put on it, go to the salad bar and make a list of everything available. Then, go to the veggie section of the grocery store, and buy everything on that list and then some. With luck, you should end up with a delicious mix of beets, baby corn, carrots, cucumber, chard, olives, peas, avocado, potatoes, and tofu.

Informational interviews are a key part of finding stories, David says. He consumes a lot of coffee, talks with people about what they’re working on, and then also asks about what else they’re working on. That secondary information can lead to interesting pieces down the road.

Marshall has a detailed workflow for tracking down stories in the tech sector. He’s been working for ReadWriteWeb for the last year and a half, and is responsible for two to three posts a day. Most of the time, stories are “interrupt-driven” or dependent on the news of the day. The whole staff logs into a single Fever account to share RSS reading responsibilities.

One source of feeds is pretty ingenious. A research assistant dug up people who first linked popular web services such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. on Delicious. He did so for a number of startups over the last couple of years and put all of that information on a spreadsheet. Based on this aggregate information, he was able to identify 15 or so people who regularly link upcoming web services before anyone else. Subscribing to these Delicious accounts has multiple stories a week about hot new startups.

Most of the ReadWriteWeb writers use Tweetdeck for Twitter. Marshall has the 4,000+ people he’s following organized into different categories, including NY Times, analysts, augmented reality, etc. The team has a Skype chat they keep open 24 hours for coordinating on stories. They use hashtags within the conversation to enable people to find information of a specific type (i.e. which stories need editing with #edit).

For tracking reactions to pieces he’s written, Marshall searches for conversations based on a specific URL with Friendfeed, based on the ReadWriteWeb domain in Digg, and recently favorited tweets.

Libby Tucker notes that the differences between David and Marshall’s reporting styles. David flies to Urbana, Illinois to interview a scientist, whereas Marshall notes that if he has to put his pants on, it’s a big day.

The lunch session at SPJ’s Building a Better Journalist conference today was YAPOTFON, or Yet Another Panel On The Future Of News. Conversation was facilitated by President-elect Hagit Limor (@hlimor).

DJ Wilson is the President and General Manager of the KGW Media Group in Portland. “More than ever, people are consuming media.” Part of it is the 24/7, anytime, anywhere demand from consumers. KGW is a content business that works to meet that demand.

Rita Hibbard (@rthibbard) is the executive director and editor of InvestigateWest, a reporting non-profit in Seattle started by ex-Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers. The bad news is the sheer number of journalists that have been laid off; the number of credentialed reporters in Olympia, Washington has gone from 25 to 6. [Ed note 10/25: This may also be due to waning interest in covering government] “Readers and news consumers are starting to wake up to what’s being lost out there.” We’re not replacing the investigative troops, but figuring out new ways to get the job done. InvestigateWest is brand new; incorporated in May, website launched in July, and first story will be out next month. It’s a piece on the misuse of public lands. They generate original, high-level investigative content. The business model is to syndicate it to as many media partners as possible, not build up their website. The first grant InvestigateWest received was from the Bullitt Foundation, which hasn’t traditionally funded journalism.

“Collaboration is a big part of this new media ecosystem.” InvestigateWest is working with a number of media partners in ways that would not have happened five or ten years ago. “The era of one dominant media source in a community is over.” News will now be an ecosystem of many parts.

Steve Woodward (@nozzlsteve) is CEO and a co-founder of Nozzl Media. Nozzl Media is a startup that builds tools for news organizations to provide real-time, personalized streams of information to their audience.

“A lot of people in newspapers thought the internet was a fad and wouldn’t go away. When it persisted, they didn’t understand why it persisted because they didn’t use it.” It’s important, Steve argues, to learn from the past. Newspapers have moved online, but they aren’t learning new tricks. Display advertising online is forecasted to peak this year and then decline. Newspapers need to think seriously about video ads, search ads, and other formats for helping businesses get their message out.

85% of all potential advertisers in any given market are never contacted by ads salesmen. Most are just going after the same 15% over and over again.

“Be the competition,” Steve argues. Sales staff should act as an ad network now. Sell ads for your competitors too, to allow the client diversify the platforms, and take a cut of that.

Abraham Hyatt (@abrahamhyatt) is the founder of Digital Journalism Portland, an award-winning journalist, and currently working on a year-long research project looking at innovation on mainstream media websites.

Abraham hates the phrase “the death of newspapers.” It’s a crutch, he says, that polarizes thinking and limits the realm of possibilities. The really interesting examples of innovation are the super-local shops. The one or two person news organizations that are experimenting and have a willingness to fail. “It’s the little guys that are weaving together a tapestry of innovative ideas.” They’re the ones that are going to shape the future of news.

DJ says that technology is driving the core of what they do. On a business side, they’re balancing revenues with expenses and using technology to keep up. Abraham mentions that small groups are the ones that are nimble enough to try experiments and DJ says there are multiple groups within KGW doing this. She also believes that there will always be money in producing content; it’s a matter of figuring out how to deliver it on all of the platforms.

What are media sites doing well? Abraham has been pleasantly surprised by the number of organizations that are making money on mobile. They aren’t making money on their content, rather they’re building different consumer applications. DJ says that KGW is doing a lot to optimize their video delivery on their website. They’re also generating revenue by working with many businesses to offer coupons, and then taking a cut from any sales generated. Steve hasn’t seen much innovation from newspaper websites. “They have a lot to learn from tech companies.” The Palm Pilot was very successful in the 1990′s because they spent a tremendous amount of time measuring shirt pockets. This is called “form factor” and is really important. Newspaper companies don’t think about form factor. “No one under the age of 40 likes broadsheets, they like tabs… Why aren’t there special coffee shop versions of the paper that are more tailored to the experience?” Newspapers, Steve argues, need to invest in significantly refining user experience, both on the web and in print. They redesign at a drop of the hat but nothing ever changes significantly.

The topic for this BarCamp? Redefining J school. The news industry is going through epic change that most J schools are ill-equipped for. It’s time for a new style of learning. We brainstormed several possible sessions:

• What courses should you take to supplement your journalism career? What are good minors to a journalism degree?
• What do students want from professors? How can students take initiative and enhance classes?
• Crowdsourcing, and leveraging the knowledge of the community to put together a story
• Where’s the line between PR and journalism?
• Digital basics (blogging, Twitter, Google Alerts, etc.) and how those tools can be used
• How to get paid internships (i.e. kickstarting your career while still in college)
• Where’s the line between work and life when building your personal brand online?

Granted, I’ve done a lot of punditry in the last year talking about how J school is obsolete and needs to be completely reinvented. It’s time to translate grand ideas into action.

We’re planning to meet at 6:00 pm PT in the EMU Fishbowl, next Tuesday the 6th. Join our Google Group to stay in touch, or leave a note in the comments.

On Tuesday, July 21 around 11 pm Pacific, I stumbled across a serious information security flaw in DuckWeb, the University of Oregon’s student information portal. For some of the work I’ve been doing with Publish2, I’ve been paying close attention to the composition and beauty of URLs. When printing out my degree audit for a trip down to Eugene the next day, I realised that the print version of the degree audit had a unique string of digits at the end of the URL. Curious, I changed the last two, refreshed, and ended up with someone else’s degree audit.

Now, I believe this is what security experts might call a “really stupid programming error.” Better yet, I found out that I could log out of DuckWeb and, with the URL I had copied and pasted into a text file, still access the print view of my degree audit.

According to an article published today in the Daily Emerald:

The glitch originated in the system the University uses to upload degree audits. All degree audits for which information has changed on a given day are uploaded simultaneously that night and assigned what [University registrar Sue] Eveland said is a randomly-generated nine-digit number called a batch number. That number is at the end of the URL for the printer-friendly version of the audit and it is the one Bachhuber used to access the degree audits.

Eveland said only the first audit uploaded on a given night was accessible through the glitch. She also said the University removes the data tied to the batch numbers every 30 days, which she said means that only “15 to 20” audits would have been available to those who knew about the glitch at any given time during a 30-day period.

To correct the facts stated in the article, I originally emailed both the Registrar’s office and University IT Help late Tuesday night. I didn’t expect a prompt response during the summer, and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly they both responded to my email and acted on the flaw (by first disabling the print functionality and then later adding a patch). One of the people I corresponded with credited the screencast I originally made of the exploit as “very valuable in [their] initial testing.” Additionally, I did not look at the degree audits of three other students.

If I were doing the reporting on the story, I would also vet the claims of the University in regards to the number of student records you could access with the exploit. Only allowing “15 to 20″ student records to be publicly accessible to anyone is still in violation of FERPA and, depending on how the system works, the exploit could have allowed access to different student records at different periods of time. I’m pretty sure that I’ve been able to print my degree audit the entire time I’ve been at the University of Oregon.