The Founding Fathers would have loved and leveraged social media but been fearful of its future implications on privacy and speech issues, said a host of experts at an event on the impact of new communications patterns. Earlier this month, I moderated a panel on the subject at the National Constitution Center featuring Jennifer Preston, [...]

Local TV news is, perhaps even more than other in the media business, a ratings game. That’s a distinct takeaway I had, leaving NBC Philadelphia headquarters on City Line Avenue after the latest local ONA meetup featured the affiliate’s web strategy and news direction. More than 50 journalists, NBC 10 representatives, bloggers, freelancers and other [...]

The importance, sway and influence of one of the world’s most dominant 20th century newspapers was the focus of the 1998 collection of essays about the once powerful Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, edited by its former education reporter Peter Binzen, who also wrote Whitetown USA. Dubbed ‘Nearly Everybody Read It,’ a riff off the paper’s legendary [...]

There were a dozen or more daily newspapers in Philadelphia at one time, I hear. Trouble is, I couldn’t seem to find anyone who could name what all of those papers were. So I went and did some good old fashioned research — with some great direction from representatives of the following institutions. Below, find [...]

I attend a lot of hackathons, considering either I’m organizing them or sponsoring them or covering them. Though I hope to slowly change that a bit, I’m no programmer. Still, sitting around these events has led me to conceive of and, in some cases, suggest projects that never actually happen. Maybe they someday will. Here [...]

The groundwork of privacy, anonymity and free speech is being set now with evolving jurisprudence and legislation surrounding the concept of social networking. That is the overarching theme, as I read it, in I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did:  Social Networks and the Death of Privacy, a new book from [...]

The legacy of your work has a value harder to compare with pure money, so we should try our best to incorporate that in our professional decision making. I’m not a professional athlete. That may surprise many of you. Still, without any real awareness of the experience, I find myself scratching my head whenever a [...]

I’m moderating a panel on privacy, security and democracy concerns surrounding the social web at the National Constitution Center in Old City, Philadelphia next Thursday. You should come. More details here. It costs $10 for non-members. Number of Views:1136

When the inevitable annual news story comes out about the latest politician having cheated on his wife, people question why leaders cheat. There are some obvious reasons to me: Long campaign hours — Same as workaholics, being away from home offers a lot of opportunity for philandering. Lots of people interaction — When campaigning and [...]

In three years at Technically Philly, I’ve noted a change in the sources that bring me the ideas for the stories I do. It made me think if it’s a trend that other niche media follow. In order to develop a baseline, I did some estimating and created some crude graphs roughly looking at where [...]