Nearly a year after launching, the team behind the NewsWorks community-driven online news effort from WHYY, the Philadelphia public media organization, shared its lessons. It was the third event from a revived local chapter of the Online News Association. After an hour of beer donated by Boxcar Brewing, sandwiches from the Trolleycar Diner and pretzels [...]

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. Check the archived chat here. Below check out the Storify, I put together highlighting some of the more interesting responses to the series of questions put [...]

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. [...]

Sales tactics to lead and those to avoid are seemingly peppered throughout the classic, star-studded, independent black comedy Glengarry Glen Ross from 1992 that I finally got to watch — after quoting clips for years. “We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac El [...]

While I was at Back on My Feet, something I was proud of completing was, with the great help of a colleague, a company style guide. A style guide should be a fundamental piece of documentation that goes a long way to creating an institutional memory. If everything imploded, a style guide would help you [...]

Two more collaborative Philadelphia reporting projects in which I was involved have finished recently. Part of the JLab-funded Enterprise Reporting Fund that paid for the NEast Philly District 172 project I shared recently, Abandoned City was a partnership between Technically Philly, PlanPhilly and CityPaper and Broadband2035 was a partnership between Technically Philly and PlanPhilly. While [...]

The Columbia Journalism Review launched this year its News Frontier Database, meant to be a curated directory of independent online news organizations, included the two niche sites on which I collaborate. See the entire News Frontier Database here. Technically Philly was an early listing, having been contacted by CJR in March and launching in early [...]

Last month, I described the process of dissolving the Technically Media general partnership, so I wanted to close the loop by quickly sharing our process for incorporation. Mostly, this was a lesson in paying for a lawyer — doing it (mostly) right is worth paying. But I also wanted to share a few lessons I [...]

The parent company of the two largest paid daily newspapers in Philadelphia is making good on its pledge to launch an incubation program. We at Technically Philly first reported on that pledge last fall. We had heard of the likely partnerships with University City accelerator program DreamItVentures and the regional Ben Franklin Technology Partners, but [...]

I’ve been thinking lately about advice I’d give others about starting a niche product or, really, what I’d do differently myself. In doing so, I’ve focused on business rollout timeline. The social sites of the web 2.0 world have developed something of a reputation around building audience first and a business  model second. It’s a [...]