Chess player Garry Kasparov at an event from the Harlem Children's Zone, a nationally-celebrated program devoted to impacting kids at a young age. Photo by Mig Greengard.
Two hundred fifty students from the largely troubled neighborhoods of North Philadelphia will receive full, four-year scholarships to neighobring Temple University, my alma mater, during the next decade, as the Inquirer reported.
It’s a generous effort from a major urban research university often called on for more outreach in its surrounding communities. Good things, warm stories and, surely, great public relations will come as a result. Of a student population numbering nearly 30,000, 250 may seem small, but it’s always worth valuing.
All that said, a friend summed up my exact reaction to the situation. This is a kind, relatively easy, relatively small move. It ignores the reality that the biggest impact on the development of young people happens long before they are applying for college.
“[Temple] should have given full-day preschool from birth and full-day kindergarten to 250 neighboring kids and intensive parental training to 250 neighborhood new parents 18 years ago. That would have been more effective and ultimately cheaper.” – Dan Pohlig
Temple, of course, is a university, so offering those scholarships have precedence there. This is a fine act, but there are bigger issues and more interesting approaches to take on.
“The centerpiece of the American Jobs Act is an extension and expansion of the cut in payroll taxes, worth $240 billion, under which the tax paid by employees would be cut in half through 2012. Smaller businesses would also get a cut in their payroll taxes, as well as a tax holiday for hiring new employees.” Also: $4k to any business that hires an employee that has been looking for a job for six months.
Beyond the fact that those proposals aren’t actually in place yet, I wanted to share the basic, common reasons for why independent contractors and freelancers are still the way of the world, particularly in publishing.
After an hour of beer donated by Boxcar Brewing, sandwiches from the Trolleycar Diner and pretzels from the Center City Soft Pretzel Co., I kicked off the night and introduced WHYY editorial chief Chris Satullo.
Satullo and Don Henry, two of the many leading faces behind the NewsWorks initiative, shared five tasks they got right and five tasks they got wrong. Text of them all and video of the first few below.
The Business of Journalism was the focus of the 82nd episode of the popular, national #wjchat Twitter chat Wednesday night, and I’m happy to say I hosted the affair.
Below check out the Storify, I put together highlighting some of the more interesting responses to the series of questions put out by the facilitator. As host, I was meant to drive conversation, outreach and use any expertise I had on the subject.
It is the last major feature of the Transparencity grant project I’ve been leading, and one of the more detailed investigative reports I’ve done in my journalism career. The feature, which details the nearly two-year struggle to go public with a project with internal support, is meant to show the lessons learned and obstacles faced in the hopes that future city agencies can more efficiently release their data publicly for development and citizen use.
Give it a read, for lessons to be taken for any local government. and then find some of what didn’t make it into the piece below.
The New York 9/11 terrorist attack site view on Sept. 12, 2001 from the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus camera on NASA's Landsat 8. Click to see original. H/t Gizmodo
That is brutal and sobering and tragic and heartbreaking.
TL;DR — Why I believe the pain of 9/11 helped shape NYC for the better.
A long history exists between pain and strength.
After 9/11, Americans embraced New York City as patriot territory.
After the attacks, an even stronger NYC identity has developed.
Following that day, NYC is now protected by more of a veil of patriotism than it perhaps has ever had.
Why I wrote this: To argue that a dramatic shift in our national perspectives on NYC changed after 9/11 and it has largely benefited the city.
I grew up in northwest New Jersey, a rural enclave in the New York City region. Like many others there, my parents were from the city and arrived an hour west chasing suburban sprawl. Much of my family still lives in and around that city. They worked in and around the Twin Towers. A couple times a year, my parents would take my sister and me to Manhattan for nice dinners with family; I always wanted to play sandlot baseball or get lost in the woods instead.
I was a sophomore in high school sitting in English class that September Tuesday, but I don’t want to rehash my story. Plenty are doing that and, quite frankly, they are doing a better job of it than I can. Moreover, many people with whom I was in class had parents or other close family working there or near to the buildings. I didn’t, after some confirmation, so my personal story isn’t compelling.
Instead, I want to suggest what might be considered a rather unsettling thought, but I think it’s an important one.
That the most costly, most visual portion of the Sept. 11 attacks in lower Manhattan have, looking back at the last 10 years, been good for New York City.
People died. Real people. At a different time, my uncles, or cousin or sister could have very likely been in that number. Philosophy isn’t developed enough for us to understand why not. Very little is ever worth death. But, I believe, these attacks have propelled New York City to first city status among the few generations of Americans alive for 9/11 in a way that nothing else ever could.
I am not a resident of New York City. Never have been. The city was around me — literally and by means of familial roots, but, no, I wasn’t there that morning and know little of that moment. My arguments here rely most heavily on outside perception, so having roots and family there, but being distant enough to evaluate that perception is a strength, I believe.
Now let me tell you why the idea that something so painful could be beneficial is not only plausible, it is clear.
A variety of strategies and expectations remain, but online media conversations can’t happen in good conscious without at least a glancing mention of business sustainability.
On behalf of Technically Philly, I hosted the event with Tayyib Smith of 215mag.com and led the conversation, featuring a half dozen five-minute introductions from niche publishers seated in chairs amongst 40 attendees in the room, decorated wildly by lead sponsor Vitamin Water and featuring free samples of Heineken Light, which didn’t turn out to be half bad.
If you cover a big city with rambling and varied regions and neighborhoods, your reporting and writing should reflect that.
Yet, from a culture of journalism that cycled reporters through various markets to urban decay that encouraged too many of them to live outside those big cities they covered, one of the more common complaints I have from established, legacy media is a frightening disconnect from where they report.
There’s surely no better example of that than the wildly popular Right NEast/Wrong NEast column from Northeast Philadelphia hyperlocal news site NEast Philly, which skewers the very common mistakes by TV and newspapers here, when the get the wrong neighborhood name, street name or worse: tiny details that matter very little to reporters who have never been to those places but matter a great deal to those who live there.
But there’s a more subtle example of this that has long frustrated me, particularly here in Philadelphia.
It’s the kind of heart-wrenching story that happens too often, some 100,000 times in this specific case. But for most of the country, the story ends there. A local tragedy seen through the lens of local media.
I couldn’t find the news report, but I seem to remember a similar tragedy happening in Manhattan around the same time. It was a story like this one from April, where the New York Times reported on a terrible fall that made its way onto the NBC Nightly News and, if I remember correctly, other national media outlets.
This wasn’t the first time, and it hardly was the last. Tragedies are painful no matter where they happen, but in these cases, they’re representative of something else.
My Technically Media colleagues Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and I kept running into situations where we needed headshots or team photos.
Even as a startup, for conferences and speaking engagements, we’d send out photos taken by friends or shots that had landed on Facebook and we realized we needed something a bit more formal.
So, as noted last week on our company blog, we worked with Philadelphia Photographer Colin M. Lenton, whom we know from our college newspaper days, at his rental photo studio in the Frankford section of Northeast Philadelphia. We’re really pleased with the results. See the low resolution versions on our company Facebook page here.
(As noted here a couple months ago, we actually had a few fun shots taken by another great Philadelphia photographer, Neal Santos, but that just in preparation for another photo shoot altogether and weren’t formal headshots.)
