Separate Identities

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Although the act of nurturing another’s spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one’s own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved. The genuine lover always perceives the beloved as someone who has a totally separate identity. Moreover, the genuine lover always respects and even encourages this separateness and the unique individuality of the beloved. Failure to perceive and respect this separateness is extremely common, however, and the cause of much mental illness and unnecessary suffering.

Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Disrupter’s DNA

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Clay Christensen (who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma and came up with the idea of “disruptive innovation”) put together a study called The Innovator’s DNA, which attempts to take us inside the minds of successful innovators. Christensen and his fellow researchers believe it's more than a case of good genes when it comes to disruptive innovators. Christensen found five habits common among them:

  1. associating: Innovators connect seemingly unconnected things (He writes, "Innovative breakthroughs often happen at the intersection of diverse disciplines and fields).

  2. questioning: Innovators keep asking why things aren’t done differently ("What would happen if we did this?"). Questions outnumber answers in conversations and a good question is respected as much as a good answer.

  3. observing: Innovators are also intense observers. They pay attention to detail.

  4. networking: They are great at networking ideas. They are constantly "finding and testing ideas through a diverse network of individuals."

  5. experimenting: Innovators are constantly trying out new experiences and ideas. They "explore the world intellectually and experientially, testing hypotheses along the way."

Read more here.

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Disruptive Innovation

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Innovation distance explains why so many of those who turn an industry upside down are outsiders, even outcasts. To understand this point we need to grasp the difference between the two types of innovation. Sustaining innovations are improvements that make the product better, but do not threaten its market. The disruptive innovation, conversely, threatens to displace a product altogether. It is the difference between the electric typewriter, which improved on the typewriter, and the word processor, which supplanted it.

Another advantage of the outside inventor is less a matter of the imagination than of his being a disinterested party. Distance creates a freedom to develop inventions that might challenge or even destroy the business model of the dominant industry. The outsider is often the only one who can afford to scuttle a perfectly sound ship, to propose an industry that might challenge the business establishment or suggest a whole new business model. Those closer to - often at the trough of - existing industries face a remarkable constant pressure not to invent things that will ruin their employer. The outsider has nothing to lose. But to be clear, it is not mere distance, but the right distance that matters; there is such a thing as being to far away.

Tim Wu, The Master Switch

25 free (mostly one hour) Journalism courses

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Free short online courses to strengthen your skills and add a line to your resume. Most of these Poynter courses are one-hour in length or less.

Journalism Fundamentals: Craft & Values - A five-hour, self-directed course that covers basics in five areas: newsgathering, interviewing, ethics, law and diversity. 

Telling Stories with Sound - Learn the fundamentals of audio reporting and editing in this self-directed course.  

How to Spot Misinformation Online - Learn simple digital literacy skills to outsmart algorithms, detect falsehoods and make decisions based on factual information

Understanding Title IX - This course is designed to help journalists understand the applications of Title IX.

Clear, Strong Writing for Broadcast Journalism - One-hour video tutorial  

Powerful Writing: Leverage Your Video and Sound

In this one-hour video tutorial, early-career journalists will learn how to seamlessly combine audio, video and copy in captivating news packages.  

Writing for the Ear - In this five-part course, you’ll learn everything you need to write more effective audio narratives.

Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to Verify Everything Online 

News Sense: The Building Blocks of News - What makes an idea or event a news story?

Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More - Finding and fixing the most common style, grammar and punctuation errors.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Fabrication - For authors, editors, educators, journalists, journalism students, news producers and news consumers. 

The Writer’s Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use - Ethics of Journalism Build or refine your process for making ethical decisions.

Conducting Interviews that Matter  

Make Design More Inclusive: Defeat Unconscious Bias in Visuals 

Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Publishers - Three important areas of media law that specifically relate to gathering information and publishing online: defamation, privacy and copyright.

Freedom of Information and Your Right to Know - How to use the Freedom of Information Act, Public Records Laws and Open Meetings Laws to uphold your right to know the government’s actions.

Journalism and Trauma - How traumatic stress affects victims and how to interview trauma victims with compassion and respect. 

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust (International Edition) - What news audiences in various parts of the world don’t understand about how journalism works.

Is This Legit? Digital Media Literacy 101 - MediaWise’s Campus Correspondents explain the fact-checking tools and techniques that professionals use in their day-to-day work.

The On-Ramp to Media Literacy - Center for Media Literacy  

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust

Dignity and Precision in Language

How to Avoid Being Sued: Defamation Law in the 21st Century

Conducting Interviews That Matter

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Justified Anger

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To be “angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way -that is, not within everybody's power and is not easy.” The Greek philosopher Aristotle offered that observation more than 2000 years ago.

Justified anger revolves around boundary violations, but sometimes, a proper boundary is never put into place or maintained. In their book Boundaries, Henry Cloud and John Townsend write about how a person’s skin is the first boundary. People who are sexually abused as children are often confused about maintaining that boundary, not realizing that it is appropriate for them to claim ownership.

There are other psychological boundaries we fail to set. Regular violations of that psychological marker make it hard to see things for what they are.

One way to gain clarity is to think about your children. If a boyfriend, boss, etc, treated our child the way they treat us, how would we respond? This is when anger is justified.

Seeing a situation from a different angle—putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes—helps us to work around our distorted boundaries and more clearly see the situation for what it really is.

Stephen Goforth

8 Articles about How Companies are using AI

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