My first bylines were set in molten lead at one of the nation's oldest newspapers, The Hartford Courant, which eventually put a computer keyboard in front of me. As a result, I've been writing with (and writing about) computers for about 25 years. I've been a writer and editor for a software company, for national magazines, and I spent a few years as an editor at one of the Web's first 24-hour news sites, the Nando Times, while working on my doctorate at the University of North Carolina. In September 1999 I moved to Boston to begin teaching about news, computers and the "digital culture" of the Internet as a full-time member of the journalism department at Emerson College.

In 2003 I was in transition again. I moved out of my memorable fourth-floor-walkup office in May after Emerson sold the 130 Beacon St. brownstone that had housed the journalism department. Next came a summer 2003 trip to Chapel Hill to finish off my Ph.D. (Part of my dissertation on the evolution of a news website had already seen the light of day as a conference paper for an MIT Media In Transition event.) My final role at Emerson was as adviser on the last of my students' master's projects.

Then what? Stop in at stepno.com for further news about my post-Emerson career. Please switch any e-mail address listing for me to an @stepno.com address. If you have bookmarked Web pages I created, be aware that they will fade from Emerson's server, if they haven't already. However, you'll find archival copies of my "...emerson.edu/faculty/bob_stepno /..." work relocated to http://stepno.com/ec/..."

Emerson gave me a great opportunity to teach and learn, so thanks to all of the students and colleagues who have made the four years an education. Coincidentally, I'm not the only one leaving: My attic office will become someone's $4 million condo, while the Emerson Journalism Department settles into new quarters across the Boston Common, ironically upstairs over a bar named Pravda.

What I (& my students) did at Emerson...
Some of these student projects from my courses link to personal pages subject to change or removal; others were "frozen" on deadline as final-exam projects, warts and all. Others may be restricted to on-campus access.

• Online Journalism project snapshots
  
• Onward, from the Online Publishing class that began on Sept. 11, 2001.
  
• Grad Catalyst, survival tools for grad student life.
  
• Profiles in Journalism, stories about working reporters
  
• Covering the Hub, resources for Boston-area journalists
  
• The Career Connection, about job-hunting and internships
  
• Journalism Education, comparisons of U.S., Asian and European experiences.
  

Perhaps these "converged" media will someday appear to do "ivrything" for us the way the newspaper once did... according to my favorite 100-year-old Irish bartender, Mr. Dooley... which introduces to my other research interest -- the history of communication technology and journalism technique, including the innovations of a scandal-mongering newspaper from the 1920s.

(It's hardly "history," but a 20-year-old story and photo are the oldest examples of my own journalism online, resurrected by the organizers of the born-again New England Fiddle Contest.)

In addition to teaching about old and new media at Emerson, I served as advisor or co-adviser to the Society of Professional Journalists chapter at Emerson and an excellent but short-lived student Digital Media Group.

from my office window, at quitting time...

My 130 Beacon St. office window looked up Berkeley Street and toward skyscrapers around Copley Square, quite a switch after North Carolina's old oaks and loblolly pines. For folks who want to see what I did in Chapel Hill, here's is my old home page, with links to things like the syllabus for the first course I helped develop, Electronic Information Sources, as Professor Deb Aikat's first teaching assistant.

Emerson's support for its computing labs gets better every year, but at various times I've had to supplement it with things like these:
• Some basic Lab Tips, and an introduction to sharing documents on Emerson's PAGES Web server, including how to set network file privileges.
• An intro to Weblogs, a sometimes journalistic, sometimes self-indulgent form of self-publishing that I adapted to classroom use.
• Suggestions for an online journalism style guide.
• "Start a discussion" pages about communities for online journalists, alternative models, templates and visual design for information sites.
• Notes on News jargon and Computer Assisted Reporting.
• Instructions on making a Plain Vanilla Web Page with (ick) Microsoft Word.
• For various courses, as needed, an assortment of debugging tips and notes on using tables, backgrounds and multimedia on Web pages.
• For students who thought Web publishing was for experts only, my 1999 "15 megabytes of fame" page.
• This even older Born on the Web collection of readings about Web publishing may still have some working links.

Nuts and bolts:
This page was made mostly on Macintoshes, using BBEdit, Tex-Edit and whatever other Web page creation tools were handy. On Windows machines, I've used Notepad, Homesite and Arachnophilia (by Paul Lutus, whose CareWare concept is a breath of fresh air). Lately, most of my students have moved on to Dreamweaver, which among other things does a nice job of cleaning up quick and dirty pages made with word processors.

Before they get distracted by multimedia bells and whistles, I advise students to see Jacob Nielsen's UseIt.com for thoughts about "usable" information design. Journalism students will notice that Nielsen says writing in newspaper style is a valuable skill online. I'm also a fan of the Yale CAIM Style Guide for Web page design, and of Philip Greenspun, who wrote Philip & Alex's Guide to using open-source software to build database-backed, community-oriented Web sites like the photo.net online community. (Philip is a triple-threat: programmer, photographer and a fine writer.)

The right column of this page has links to about 100 of my favorite Web sites. Those links are from my thousands of bookmarks, which I'm gradually sorting into categories to post at my new home.

• Google.com, Altavista.com and alltheweb.com usually find whatever I'm looking for online. Whois identifies domain owners.
• For news media issues and news, I check Jim Romenesko's MediaNews, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, Society of Professional Journalists, FAIR and the Poynter Institute, as well as local columnists Dan Kennedy and Mark Jurkowitz.
• Globalvision's MediaChannel.org is another valuable resource. Walter Cronkite explains why.
• For technology news, I watch Slashdot and The New York Times: Tech, Salon, and CNet.
• I visit WRAL OnLine, the News & Observer, and NandO Times for news from North Carolina and more.
• Boston.com is no slouch, either. For local news, also see WBUR (public radio), the Boston Herald, Boston Phoenix and Community Newspapers, a list of Massachusetts dailies, a more complete list at Newslink, and a list of college papers at dmoz.org.
• Also based in Boston, The Christian Science Monitor, has thoughtful coverage of world and national issues.
• Emerson students and faculty can search the full text of the Globe, the Herald and more, using the Emerson Library's dozens of databases and electronic resource subject-lists.
• The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has made some improvements in its website, including an easier name: mass.gov; it includes a section with information for students living in Massachusetts.
• Journalism students also should know about The Society of Professional Journalists and the Emerson SPJ Chapter, which helped put on the Northeast Journalism Conference 2001, with SPJ, RTNDA & AP.
• The Berkeley Beacon is Emerson's student-run weekly newspaper. JSONS, the Journalism Students Online News Service, is produced by students taking classes with Manny Paraschos; Emerson Today is, despite its name, a monthly.
• JSONS and the Beacon use the College Publisher system created by former Emerson students. So does Communicator, a School of Communication newsletter.
• For "All the news..." The New York Times requires you to register, but there's no charge for basic services. Also see The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, ABC News, and for variety The Irish Times, The Guardian and The Yomiuri Shimbun (in English).
• The Associated Press Web pages, for today's news (enter through the Boston Herald), or review the AP's history.
• For world news: Reuters, the BBC, and CNN.
• For crime news: APB Online, although a shadow of what it was before the dot-com shakeout.
• Anyone can add news headlines to a page using Moreover.com, a new kind of news service that points to individual articles at a wide range of publications, and sorts them into more than 300 categories, including Boston news.
• The Communication Technology & Policy division of AEJMC, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. I also belong to its Newspaper Division, among others
• For professional journalism issues see: Freedom Forum, National Press Club, Poynter Institute, Investigative Reporters & Editors, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Student Press Law Center, the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists, and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
• For background on media issues, including corporate mergers (1987) creating global media giants (1997), see the archives of FAIR's magazine, Extra.
• For more specifically "wired" issues, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its publications on online free speech and censorship
• For more alternatives to the traditional news media, see VoxCap.com, Adbusters, or this collection of alternative media links created by journalist-satirist-agitator Michael Moore
• Speaking of satire, The Onion is funny, offensive, and often wonderful. Those adjectives also used to fit the more Web-oriented, but now archival Suck.com, which even linked to one of my pages once...before the dotcom shakeout. 
• Online "magazines" with no print counterparts are defining a "not-newspaper" genre: Salon, Slate... and the political gossip and the link list at the Drudge Report.
• The School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Information & Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill, the UNC library and ibiblio (when it was called Sunsite) are where I first got my hands on the Web. As Ibiblio, the site still houses everything from Jim McGuinn's folksongs to the archives of John December's Computer Mediated Communication Magazine, and the Internet Poetry Archive.
• Journalists and academics interested in online news publications gather at the Online-news mailing list. The list's creator, columnist Steve Outing, writes the "Stop the Presses" electronic publishing column for Editor & Publisher magazine.
• For journalism industry news and issues, see American Journalism Review, Editor & Publisher, Columbia Journalism Review, Annenberg West's Online Journalism Review, and the WWW Virtual Library journalism page by John Makulowich.
• C|NET for industry news, reviews more. Really speak geek? See Slashdot.org, Hotwired or Internet News, formerly "The Netly News," Internet-related business news from internet.com, not to be confused with WWW.w3.org, the World Wide Web consortium itself.
• Here's something to read if you're concerned about the "liberal media," from Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?"
• Oz, for when I really have to get away.
• Finally, Web Pages That Suck, because they haven't found me yet.