I am not going to write about the brief media blitz that surrounded the controversy of the City of Philadelphia enforcing its business privilege license requirement for bloggers. My good friend and Technically Philly co-founder Sean Blanda already handled well my perspective. (Quickly, Philadelphia, like many municipal governments, requires a license to do business in [...]

I have noticed what I think is a change  in style from the New York Times — or at least it seems new to me –in its use of the phrase “middle class.” Notice this use of it in this story on the battle brewing on extended so-called “Bush’s tax cuts.” “But they have pledged [...]

Eighteen months ago, I was searching for the best metro columnist in Philadelphia. I felt the Inquirer’s Dan Rubin was the nearest in a legacy of citywide voice boxes, telling the broadest and widest ranging stories. Perhaps that’s true. But it’s been nagging me that outside of some media-focused friends — and even then — [...]

Philadelphia has developed this reputation: Killadelphia or something like it. In a prominent New York Times profile of Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams last week,  the city was described as having been “battered for years by the worst sort of superlatives — the highest murder rate, the lowest conviction rate.” What a damaging and sweeping [...]

I can only pray that this video isn’t the last remnant of our culture thousands of years from now. A 1:32 news piece on a 10-year-old boy who puts on 215 pairs of underwear to break a world record. Two shots of parents expressing their praise and then an afterthought at the end: a paralyzed [...]

I’m pretty passionate about the web allowing greater public affairs accountability journalism, not worse. I was reminded of this while skulking around the Internet searching for a column I remember reading back in 2007. Noted Philadelphia Inquirer scribe Tom Ferrick — who has since launched politics coverage site Metropolis — crunched the numbers on the [...]

Last month, The New York Times Magazine had a big piece on the price of online journalism… or at least content of some kind. I only dug into it this weekend. It was a big piece riddled with stories of a handful of struggling entrepreneurs and a few buzz-y sites that haven’t prospered, but three [...]

Last month, a study from the Brookings Institution was a major news story. White flight? In a reversal, America’s suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities, the poor and a rapidly growing older population as many younger, educated whites move to cities for jobs and shorter commutes. [Source] It’s complicated of course: [...]

It’s very easy to politicize what is around us. I fight that urge, too. Whenever accusations about cops and misdeeds make their way into headlines, most of us either rush to defend them or revile them. Wherever we rush to usually has to do with what camp we most align: either (A) policing is damn [...]

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright seemed to enjoy the production just fine. That was the lede I submitted to Philadelphia events blog uwishunu in my review of last month’s U.S. premiere of ‘Leaving,’ the first piece in a generation from acclaimed playwright and former Czech President Vaclav Havel, at the Wilma Theater on [...]