I had a fantastic time at the SXSW Interactive Festival, and really enjoyed meeting everyone I got a chance to speak with. Some of the best conversations I've had in months. I'm working on recovering my slides to try to get them online... however, my laptop died (hardware failure) less than an hour after my presentation - at least it was after and not before - whew.

The big theme that resounded with me in the talks I attended was the accelerating transformation (or death) of print media. Clay Shirky has some sobering, thought-provoking thoughts on the subject here: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. It's obvious that big changes are happening, with the biggest question being "how will journalism be supported"? Note that I did not ask "how will newspapers be funded", but journalism - how will the reporters and photographers who are out there in the world digging for the stories and telling them to the world support themselves?

Shirky's answer to that is "I don't know", and I think that's about the most coherent thing that can be said at this stage. There is an appetite for news, for reporting, storytelling and photojournalism - a need for reliable and engaging windows into our world, from hyperlocal spaces to interstellar space. The best thing we in the storytelling business can do is keep experimenting, refining, responding.

In that vein, here are a couple of efforts and articles that I find noteworthy, (both new and old):

- Open Blog from the NY Times - where they keep us up to date on all of their efforts to open up the NYT digital space (via APIs) to developers, and through them the rest of the world.

- The Guardian UK's Open Platform, where they open up access to a Content API and the Guardian's Data Store

- The death of the news, an intriguing look at a possible future with no professional journalism

- Some interesting ideas here at Design is Philosophy, especially number two, where he points out a 'Big Picture' trend among several European online papers, including Aftenposten, Dagbladet and VG, where large images dominate front pages and major articles.

- Zoom.hu has their own Big Picture, with captions in Hungarian

- UPI.com has their own Big Picture galleries too, but I can't figure out how to navigate to them. If you go to their News Photo page, and choose a story, you'll get a small-image gallery - But if you edit the URL a bit, and make the third part of it read "gallery", you get a Big-picture view - small vs. big. (let me know if I'm missing something simple)

- And, last but not least, from my friend Sam: a single-serving website called isthebigpictureabummertoday.com