Bob @ Stepno.com

Visit
my blog Boblog 2009 or my bookmarks
or   my Radford page 

About this site...

For most visitors, this home page is here to anchor the links in the top right corner: My Radford page is for students looking for information about my courses or the blog items and bookmarks that are sometimes related to what we do in class.

Boblog is my main blog, at least until I build a new home for my Other Journalism blog, whose server space is going away in December 2009 after seven years. It's now mostly an archive. The right column of my Boblog page also has links to my last OJ posts, plus my latest Web bookmarks.

Also useful: The RU School of Communication website, which I had a hand in building in the summer of 2008, while also moving into a new office (map) at 704 Fairfax St. (Apt. K).

Before returning to "main blog" status, for a few months Boblog just consisted of items about the One Laptop Per Child project, where I volunteered some documentation while trying out OLPC's little green laptop, which I still think is very cool, even if I don't have time to be more involved.)

Photo of Walter and Hildy taking on the mayor and a deadline The right column is full of links to Web sites I use and recommend, including one that allows you to play my favorite old newspaper movie -- full length and for free -- just by clicking the picture at the right to open a new window, or by using the player at the bottom of the page. The rest of this left column has some biography and links to things I've written on the Web or on paper.

In August 2007 I added the Scottish tartan background on this page to celebrate moving to the "home of the Highlanders" -- not Scotland, but Radford University in Radford, Va., where I joined the Media Studies Department, which has since become part of a new School of Communication.

As much as I enjoyed spending three years in Knoxville, the new position offers more flexible teaching, research and tenure opportunities than my lecturership at UT, and the celtic coincidence was an extra selling point. "Bob" (or "Robby") is short for Robert Bruce, so my becoming a "Highlander" might have some Glasgow ancestors smiling. They even had the same name as a county next to Radford, the inspiration for using using one of the "Montgomery" clan tartans.

Besides, my mother's clan should like the background's Irish-friendly color. And my Polish relatives may be amused that the county across the river is named Pulaski. What's that song about "coming home to a place he'd never been before"? (Wrong song and mountains, but I'm getting the same feeling.)

Blogging tools: I've tried most of them and keep demos around.  Radio Userland is what I used for my main blog, until Userland announced it would discontinue hosting customers' pages. For seven years, it had replaced Blogger as my main blogging platform. Since then, I've also dabbled in Drupal at KnoxViews, and WordPress at both Blogsome and  Harvard's Berkman Center, which started out on Userland's Manila content-manager software.

Lots of links: My blogs and the right column of this page have long been ways to share links to interesting sites. My del.icio.us bookmarks do that in an even bigger way, with more than 1,000 links tagged with dozens of keywords for information categories you can combine.  For instance, use http://del.icio.us/bstepno/django to see my links related to the site-construction framework by that name, or make that django+Holovaty for links related to a particular Django co-author. 

About me and this home page...

I started writing with and about computers when The Hartford Courant put one of its first Atex editing terminals on my desk some 25 years ago. (Out of nostalgia, I grabbed the Web address couranteer.com, although I've never exactly decided what to do with it.) A few years of writing for a software company inspired my 1988 master's thesis about hypertext, well before the Web spread that word around the world. I have been publishing on the Web since 1994 in one form or another, at least trying to keep track of useful resources.

My beat had been "higher education" for most of my newspaper career, and I have been in and out of my own higher education ever since: Three times as a grad student (of culture + computers + communication), then as a teacher at UNC Chapel Hill (summer 1998), Emerson College in Boston (1999-2003), the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (2004-2007), and now at Radford.

This "stepno.com" domain and home page aren't just an ego trip, but look more like one in the summertime. During the school year, the link on top takes students to course material at Radford. (My previous academic creations are archived at stepno.com/unc, stepno.com/ec.) The rest of this page makes a handy parking space for past, present and future projects, personal news, and a right column full of links I use myself and recommend to others, as well as a few mild-mannered amusements. As the banner suggests, you can reach me by e-mail as

If you're another Stepno, or looking for one, (If you thought the "stepno" address was short for "step number," in either a computer-coding or 12-step sense, you're in the wrong place -- but feel free to look around.)

My main Web spaces:

  • My old Other Journalism Weblog was for thoughts, notes and headlines about news reporting, personal and "pro-am" community journalism on the Web, demos of technical tricks, and (less often) photos and news of personal events. The blog's left column has links to essay-style pages that I update from time to time, usually to preserve link that might get lost in the calendar-accessed daily blog entries. Blogging itself can be an "other journalism," hence the name.

  • I've sorted out my newspaper-related blog items as a subset to link with the website I manage for a journalism educators' group, the AEJMC Newspaper Division. I've also saved my notes from my Digital Archives panel at the AEJMC 2006 national convention in San Francisco.

  • In 2003 I started listening to audio weblog "podcasts" and in 2004 I started thinking about having one of my own. I decided to make it a "hobby" site about folk music, rather than pretend to be in the news business. I named it "podfolk." The testing was a success, but I decided not to try regular podcasts while school is in session. For now, it's an infrequent text-only blog about music, and a place to hang some of my photos of musicians.

  • My Red Liner Weblog takes its name from the site's Harvard-crimson motif and the MBTA subway I used to take to get to Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society for Thursday night blogger meetings. (See the disclaimer in the blog's right margin.) Originally, "Red Liner" was a combination of notes on issues that came up at Berkman meetings and an excuse to learn to use the Manila community blogging system. For a while it continued mostly for classroom demonstrations and special situations.

  • About Weblogs, my original year-2000 discussion page about the subject, survives, with many updates, as a sidebar to my main weblog. Newer pages there explain RSS Syndication, podcasting and video blogging.

  • AEJMC Newspaper is the home page I update now and then for the newspaper division of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, along with the newspaper-related weblog items I mentioned above.

  • My old Boston-based "Resources for Reporters" collection of more than 1,200 Web bookmarks for my students, became a New England Society of Professional Journalists Resources database for a couple of years, but did not survive a change of SPJ sysadmins.
  • My Emerson College faculty archive of pages created for courses in the Department of Journalism and the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson. Here are samples of student work in my online journalism classes.

  • My grad school archive of pages built at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 1994-1999.

Old News: After four years of teaching in "all but the dissertation" limbo, I officially became "Dr. Bob" on Dec. 21, 2003, the day of winter graduation at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism & Mass Communication in Chapel Hill. More "who am I?" biographical information is at the top of my earlier home page. My old freelance/consulting resume may be of interest to a few people.

More of my writing

Nuts and bolts: This page and those linked to it were created with a variety of computers and software, including (new in December 2007) a cute little green laptop.org One Laptop Per Child machine in Linux terminal mode, as well as Macs and PCs with BBEdit, Nvu, Notetab,  Dreamweaver, Arachnophilia, Emacs, SSH, Pico and Userland Radio.

Thanks to my friend Richard Silverman, former occupant of what we informally call "The Robert S. Stepno Chair in Mathematics" at Wesleyan University, for hosting this page and helping me learn to be a little more of a geek... (I wonder if my Dad's big brown chair is still in some math grad student's office?) And what's all this nonsense about typing "chainsaw murderer" into "Google" and clicking "I'm feeling lucky?"

 Some favorite tools and places...

for searching...
  • Google.com usually finds whatever I'm looking for online, but I also visit Amazon's A9.com and other search engines. Know your sources: Whois can help identify owners of Web domains, while Who Owns What? identifies owners of mass media companies. The Center for Public Integrity lets you search for television, radio, cable, broadband and newspaper companies within ZIP code areas. Here's Radford
  • I use del.icio.us to make my bookmark list searchable using overlapping categories and keywords, but rarely have time to go back and delete dead links. Combine keywords with a slash and a plus sign, like this: del.icio.us/bstepno/radford+technology
  • Archive.org is a great place to find old Web pages, copyright-free music, and even classic films like "His Girl Friday" (left), my favorite newspaper movie.
  • Wikipedia offers anyone the opportunity to inform or misinform you, and you can do the same for them. Go to any page on a topic you know something about, then check its "history" and "discussion" tabs to see how the "facts" have changed.
  • Craigslist is almost everywhere, including Southwest Virginia, where Radford ads appear in both the Blacksburg and Roanoke sections.

news biz buzz

Virginia news

old news friends

blogs and feeds

headline news

magazines and other pastimes

Journalism at the Movies

Archive.org has started allowing other Web publishers to "embed" video players in our pages, so here's "His Girl Friday." Grab some popcorn and click on the play button to start the Hollywood-plus-Web magic... or just go to http://www.archive.org/details/his_girl_friday_ipod and download a copy.

"His Girl Friday" began as a Broadway play titled "The Front Page." In it, "Hildy Johnson" was a male reporter trying to escape his boss. The added complication of making the reporter the editor's ex-wife -- a Hildebrand-to-Hildegarde sex-change -- is the His Girl Friday innovation. The two-guys script was made into a movie a couple of times. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon took on the starring roles in the 1970s, but Archive.org has a free copy of the original from 1931. Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns may be a more believable tough-guy editor, if less romantic than Cary Grant, but Pat O'Brien is certainly no Rosalind Russell. See for yourself:

Finally, evidence that the habit of newspaper reading (and listening to the radio at the same time) sticks when started early...

with grandmother and our paper 1948
photo by R.S. Stepno

That's probably a Sunday Boston paper or Springfield Union. The past week's Daily Hampshire Gazettes are stacked on the radiator. (My father took the photo.) I started delivering the Gazette in junior high school and still remember columns by Arthur Hoppe making me laugh--the first byline that ever stuck with me. When today's 12-year-olds are turning gray and entering their anec-dotage, will they remember the first Web page, blog or podcast they subscribed to?

Last (partial) update June 24, 2009. Please report bad links to