Christopher Wink – CGW's Blog

We’ve retired Klein News (né Barcamp) News Innovation Camp

This was originally a Linkedin post, related to this announcement.

I’m proud, and a tad nostalgic, to announce that Technical.ly is retiring our 17-year (!) running unconference focused on the future of news and information.

It’s been primarily called Klein News Innovation Camp, as a thanks to our longtime host and partner Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University — as led by the remarkable David Boardman (and first brought in by Jim MacMillan, with help in the first years from Andrew Mendelson and Donna M. Lamborne more recently). The first few years it was called Barcamp News Innovation, when my friend and cofounder Sean Blanda first raised his hand on Twitter (remember Twitter!) to host the national version of something Jason Kristufek was helping to organize.

Full announcement here, and a few extra shoutouts below.

Technical.ly accepts Online Journalism Award for technology reporting excellence

This was originally a Linkedin post, shared here for archiving purposes. (I previously shared about the win here)

Well, at last night’s splashy Online News Association in New York, they may have given more stage time to producers of The Daily Show, leadership at La Nacion in Venezuela and the Reuters team who fearlessly covered the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. That included enthusiastic hosting by Vitus Spehar of Under the Desk News.

Still, let it be known that last night, Danya Henninger and I were plenty proud that Technical.ly was honored in such company for excellence in technology reporting. It was a genuine honor to stand next to the impressive WIRED team, including Vittoria Elliott and Andy Greenberg. Congratulations also to Nilay Patel and The Verge team, which was up for several honors (I meant to say a proper thank you for the inspiring work for us locally.)

Keynoting the LION Publishers conference on AI usage

I led the opening plenary for the LION Publishers conference held in San Diego this month.

I couldn’t be away from the kids for too long, so I arrived late Tuesday evening, had dinner with a friend and checked into my hotel. The next morning I walked some of downtown San Diego before returning to the conference opening.

I led a conversation on real-world, practical AI uses, and sat in a slate of sessions. That evening a reception opened by honoring Technical.ly as one of just 11 local news orgs that have reached a mature level of sustainability.

Then I flew back home the next morning. Details here and photos below.

A data center developer is suing my news organization

A data-center development company spent $250,000 pitching the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Now it is suing the Technical.ly team to keep you from reading it.

TECFusions is building a data center campus on the site of a closing aluminum plant in Western Pennsylvania. Our editor Katie Malone filed a routine open records request for what the company told state officials. She won partial release through the Office of Open Records. The company went to court, arguing the deck contains trade secrets.

The project has since received $2 million from state government. The case is still pending, and our reporter is named in it.

Technical.ly is one of just 11 “sustaining” local news orgs in the country

Technical.ly received special recognition during the 2026 LION Sustainability Awards as one of 11 Sustaining news organizations in LION’s updated maturity model for independent news publishers. The announcement was made in San Diego at the annual conference of the well-regarded national association of local publishers.

That’s 11 out of close to 500 audited, or 2.5 percent. I wrote more here.

This really shows how rare, and how hard, sustainability is in local news in our post-newspaper digital era.

Technical.ly awarded national Online News Association award for tech reporting

Incredible honor: I am overcome with pride for the Technical.ly’s newsroom big win at the Online News Association’s annual awards, first announced last night.

Alongside Wired and Reuters, Technical.ly was honored for Excellence in Technology Reporting. The only local newsroom to get this distinction.

This particular award is for our deep, insightful and balanced data center coverage, led by Danya Henninger, Katie Malone, Alice Crow and Sarah Huffman, and the kind of work we’re now doing in 10 U.S. states and growing. It took 18 years and many hands to get to this level.

Vigil by George Saunders

What might the chief architect of the oil and gas industry think about on his deathbed, as the effects of climate change only worsen and his lobbying prove even more effective?

That’s the setup of Vigil, the new satirical novel by George Saunders, the celebrated American writer. It’s a magical device to explore regret, comfort and legacy.

A few friends and I have admired and followed George for close to 20 years. We’ve discussed his short stories, attended his talks bought his collections and more recently his longer works. He helped me understand what writing can be.

Those friends and I were divided on Vigil. Two friends feel he’s narrowed too much into one voice that came from his short stories, into Lincoln in the Bardo and returned for this one. In contrast, I view this as a defining style — the incomplete sentences, particular pacing and sparing coarse language and themes — and I love it. I found it comforting, and thought-provoking, visual and world-making.

I always remember George talking about how every writer “climbs the mountain” of another writer’s voice, before finding their own. He’s done it, and I’m on a lifelong journey to do the same.

Below, I have a few notes I wrote down memorably from the book for my future reference.

Why the joint stock company was one of the world’s best inventions

A company pools capital for entrepreneurs, and distributes risk for investors.

The oldest forms were extensions of the state, typically time-bound efforts to reach some goal of an empire. Victorian England introduced “limited liability,” in which investors were not liable for anything beyond their investment, and tradable shares.

This invention of invention helped fuel the Industrial Revolution. That’s from the 2003 book The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

More than 20 years old, the short snappy book was written in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom scandals. Before even the Great Recession, these business journalists were already asking: “Is the company essentially a private association, subject to the laws of the state but with no greater obligation than making money, or a public one which is supposed to act in the public interest?”

That questions remains important today. Even as it’s become far easier to start a company, as the authors write: “The modern company still needs a franchise from society”

Below I share my notes for future reference

The case for a throwback summer

What is your favorite childhood summer throwback?

I, for one, remember a lot of morning sitcom reruns, sandlot baseball, the icy-chill of a well-conditioned library and an annual block party. What’s yours?

I enjoyed joining the impressive Cherri Gregg and Avi Wolfman-Arent on WHYY’s Studio 2 this week, alongside Stephanie Humphrey and Marc Faletti.

This is especially timely as the parent of young kids, as I embark on a summer of activities and camps — balancing developing and fun, boredom and screens and all the rest. Give this a watch and let me know what you remember from your own summer childhood! https://lnkd.in/gZ-VqfVr

What is human consciousness?

Consciousness is “under siege.”

Suddenly lightning-fast computing seems to recreate tasks we commonly associate with intelligence. Yet we’re unprepared as a society to define, let alone create and control, something as pervasive as being. Across close to two-dozen scientific theories of why consciousness appears at all, the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” none has widespread agreement.

We’re behind in part because at the dawn of the Enlightenment, early scientists focused on measurable phenomenon, in part because they believed that leaving the soul to the church would avoid a political backlash. That allowed hundreds of years of scientific flourishing, but left an underdeveloped sense of self.

That’s from A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, a 2026 book by author-science journalist Michael Pollan. Across dozens of interviews and an approachable survey of the research landscape, he ably walks the reader through what we know now. Two stages are easier to test than the two later ones, since it requires consciousness to describe consciousness, but to put it simply:

Cognition is processing information, perhaps by instinct
Intelligence is, as William James defined it, “a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it”
Sentience is a precursor to consciousness, or, as Evan Thompson described it, “the feeling of being alive”
Consciousness is a sense of self, of knowing you know

It’s a fun book, I recommend it.

Below I share my notes for future reference.