More than 50 people watched a panel discussion in the 10! Show studios featuring NBC 10 staff Vince Lattanzio, Tracey Davidson and weatherman Hurricane Swartz.

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 media representatives had Yuengling and pretzels before seating in the 10! Show studios. The event was well-planned, well-run and well-received — though this writer is one of the local group’s organizers, outside of promotion, this event was entirely organized by NBC 10 social media editor Lou DuBois.

The event featured video clips from the WCAU station’s long history, presentations on the affiliate’s web and mobile strategies and then a panel Q&A session featuring the station’s tech trends reporter Vince Lattanzio, its consumer reporter Tracey Davidson and its weatherman Hurricane Swartz, moderated by social media editor and event organizer DuBois, who did a smashing job. It was a distinctly different (and so thoroughly compelling) event than our group’s other two programmed events like this, one with the Philadelphia Media Network and the other with public media outfit WHYY.

While the latter is a nonprofit and NBC 10 partner, the former also has to operate as a business with investors in mind. So, it was interesting to hear the suits talk so differently about the work they do.

It’s no surprise that TV and newspaper-based news business is different. But what was interesting to me was how from its web team to its business development team to, yes, even its ‘talent,’ local TV news speaks in a manner of audience acquisition: engagement, text tools, story teases and, as the weatherman said, what happened to Demi Moore?

Let’s be clear, one of the most important topics of the night was the NBC 10 mobile strategist talking about revenue plans — sustainability is key — but it was so stark to me that in an event that also featured people whose business cards have ‘reporter’ on them, there was none of the high-minded chatter of journalism — of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, of informing and engaging in civic discourse.

When the publisher of the Philadelphia Media Network addressed the ONA group last November, peppered throughout his pet project pining were the kind of Fourth Estate extolling that a man in his role is compelled to do but sometimes actually means.

There was none of that from NBC 10.

Understand: this is less criticism than recognition, and it certainly is no crime committed by only one local station. On the contrary, I’m trying to better understand why more substantive content isn’t generated by local TV news, and I’m getting closer to some answer. I rather like the NBC 10 crew, but maybe, as a friend said, the 10 o’clock news should be categorized more as entertainment than journalism.

Indeed, in the shallow pool of local TV news, NBC 10 does some genuinely compelling work — its Mayor Town Hall last year deserves an award and its FCC-mandated public affairs programming outlet ‘At Issue with Steve Highsmith‘ is consistently strong — but their competitive, inch-by-inch, Nielsen-obsessed business world is more different than I often realize.

Wednesday night after the event, I walked out into the mild, cool air through the dark station parking lot that straddles the border between Philadelphia and suburban Bala Cynwyd pleased with an interesting event. Still, in the pursuit of a smarter citizenry, the intractable issues at play may make it as likely to have NBC 10 cross City Line Avenue and move into higher-profile, more costly Center City offices as it would be to have that station, or any of its local competitors, ever offer much in the way of consistent public affairs journalism.

The trouble is that those residents that high-minded elites seem to suggest we most need to better educate, engage and empower are, for now at least, more likely watching local 6 o’clock news than reading an investigative story from the Inquirer. Or so we think.

Is that because they don’t care? Maybe, or even likely. But we have a few years yet before the solution leaves the local TV news studio, so it’s a good place to look.

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:

1. Long campaign hours — Same as workaholics, being away from home offers a lot of opportunity for philandering.
2. Lots of people interaction — When campaigning and legislating, you deal with a lot of people.
3. Charismatic, passionate leaders — Elections attract people who often have the attractive qualities.
4. Sense of entitlement — Those who do good, big work (like legislators) can easily convince themselves that they’re owed a little wrong.
5. You’re the boss — In interviews and campaigning and voting and such, legislators are taught to make and stand by their decisions. Not all of them are the right ones.

In order to develop a baseline, I did some estimating and created some crude graphs roughly looking at where my story ideas have come from in each of the first three years of operation.

In late 2009, I was interested in projecting out what types of content a hyperlocal news site might aspire to have, and this feels like a sensible follow up. I should be clear, of course, that these numbers are entirely made up, based on nothing more than a brief perusal of archives and memory.

In short, the two biggest trends I feel have happened are that (a) we rely considerably less on other media than we did when we started and (b) many, many more people reach out to us directly than in the beginning. OK, that may seem obvious.

Perhaps more interesting is my overall assessment that, despite what I might want to believe, relatively few stories are based purely on a hunch, a thesis or an idea of mine. They happen — and I’m proud when they do — but, like journalists have always been, my role is still more to give context and connect dots.

Find the graphs and breakdowns below.

Year One: 2009

Email pitches and press releases: 10 percent

Following up on social media: 10 percent

Other publications: 30 percent

In-person pitches and events: 20 percent

Original ideas: 5 percent

Followup: <1 percent

Outreach to new people: 25 percent

Year Two: 2010

Email pitches and press releases: 15 percent

Following up on social media: 15 percent

Other publications: 20 percent

In-person pitches and events: 20 percent

Original ideas: 5 percent

Followup: 5 percent

Outreach to new people: 20 percent

Year Three: 2011

Email pitches and press releases: 30 percent

Following up on social media: 15 percent

Other publications: 10 percent

In-person pitches and events: 20 percent

Original ideas: 10 percent

Followup: 5 percent

Outreach to new people: 10 percent

Sitting with Whitetown USA author Peter Binzen and PlanPhilly Editor Matt Golas.

Prideful, working class white ethnic neighborhoods in cities have been ignored and poorly represented for at least a half century, goes a major theme of Peter Binzen’s 1968 Whitetown USA dissection. [Google Books here.]

Written by a former Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper reporter with whom I was thrilled to have lunch last month, the book attacks the principle that whites are a monolithic group of privilege. Binzen, a former education reported, focuses heavily on the school system in the book to tell a tale of why working class and even upwardly mobile middle class whites were opposed to affirmative action and other social welfare programs perceived to help blacks.

The first third of the book features the similarities of Whitetowns from cities across the country: white neighborhoods often with many recent immigrants that are working class, prideful of place, protective, provincial, conservative and often seen as bigoted. The rest dives deepest into Kensington, a decaying industrial corridor then and a decayed shell today, and its adjacent Fishtown, a smaller, more residential neighborhood where I now live.

As I often am eager to do, I wanted to share some of my favorite passages and thoughts from the soft cover copy I tore through:

• “Already in 1888, James Bryce, in The American Commonwealth, was saying that ‘the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States.” He notes that immigrants, particularly the Irish, are unfairly used to blame for corruption, crime and filth there. (p. 17)
• Immigrant Americans have always sought military life in disproportionate numbers. “Of the first one hundred thousand United States Army volunteers in 1917, no fewer than forty thousand were said to be Polish Americans.” The trend continued then during the Vietnam War. (p. 19)
• Fascinating immigration controls, predating a 1965 law signed by President Johnson on Oct. 3, 1965 that returned decisions to individual merit rather than nationality quota. (p. 22)
• An immigrant’s letter home with phrases like “Schools here are free for everyone.” (p. 24)
• Machine politics fit immigration by giving neighborhood leaders a connection to taking care of their own. “As City Hall reformers installed computers and began accounting for every paper clip, they lost touch with the ‘little people’ in Whitetown and Blacktown.”(p. 26)
• “[Working class urban whites] are the stepchildren of the industrial system. For Negroes, the true orphans of the system, they have scant sympathy left over.” (p. 35)
• “In changing times, the Whitetowners oppose change.” (p. 36)
• Pennsylvania constitutions in 1776 and 1790 called for locally-established schools for the poor but the mandate was ignored until the first such school opened in Philadelphia in 1818. Separate but (un)equal started early (p. 38)
• In 1844, religious riots killed a dozen men and resulted in 50 burned homes and churches in Kensington over a dispute over allowing the option to use a Catholic bible in public schools (rather than just a Protestant version) may have set the course for the Catholic School system.
• Into the late 19th century, school books had comically cartoonish capitalistic propaganda. (p. 42)
• Landmark James S. Coleman study in 1966 found little difference in between white and nonwhite schools. Class, less than race, was seen as a true gulf. (p. 54)
• “The whites are prouder and more quiescent, the blacks are more concentrated.” Though future decades would disrupt this trend, in 1968, Binzen was showing poor white neighborhoods were in worse shape than poor black neighborhoods. (p. 56)
• “They don’t expect help and they don’t get it.” (p. 62)
• A popularly cited 1966 op-ed giving reason for affirmative action push back among unions, whose members wanted their sons to follow them into their positions: “Don’t we all discriminate? Which of us when it comes to a choice will not choose a son over all others?” (p. 63)
• In 1968, Kensington was 99.7 percent white, though the specific boundaries were not shared. (p. 81)
• “Philadelphia lacks Boston’s brains, New York’s bounce, Chicago’s brass and San Francisco’s press agent….” Louis I. Khan has said Philly has ‘a character of personality, not impersonality.” (p. 84)
• “In 1960, Fishtowners successfully routed from houses or apartments two Negro families, two Puerto Rican families, one dark-skinned Portugeuse family and a Cherokee Indian from North Carolina. In the fall of 1966, they joined in five days of rioting against a Negro family that moved into a near-by Kensington section.” … “Kensington is more a state of mind than a geographic entity; its boundaries shift as housing patterns shift.” (p. 86)
• “There is probably no city in the known world,” wrote a visitor to Philadelphia in 1842, “where dislike amounting to hatred of the coloured population prevails more than in the city of brotherly love.” (p. 89)
• In 1891 a businessman wrote in a pamphlet called Kensington: “A city within a city, nestling upon the bosom of the placid Delaware, filled to the brim with enterprise, dotted with factories so numerous that the rising smoke obscures the sky, the hum of industry is heard in every corner of its broad expanse. A happy and contended people, enjoying plenty in a land of plenty. Populated by brave men, fair women and a hardy generation of young blood that will take the reins when the fathers have passed away. All hail, Kensington! A credit to the continent, a crowning glory to the city.” (p. 93)
• “Just when Kensington seemed to be going down for the count, World War II came along. Kensington revived. Its shipyard expanded enormously. Its factories were worked overtime. Its biggest and most famous firm, the Stetson Hat Company, employed almost five thousand men and women and maintained a hospital for them…. It seems clear now, though, that the seeds of Kensington’s destruction were sown in the war it supported so spiritedly. Military service widened the horizons of young Kensingtonians.” (p. 96)
• Whitetowns need help but they won’t accept it. (p. 103)
• “Indeed, funerals are important social events in Kensington and undertakers, along with taproom owners, are among its most affluent citizens. (p. 107)
• “Kensington’s intolerance is so savage because its people are so insecure.” (110)
• An educated Fishtown resident does nothing while his neighbors riot around a Negro family moving in. (112)
• Philadelphia School Board of Education had refused standardized testing until 1967. (146)
• For nearly 30 years until 1963, the school board was effectively run by its business manager, who had a tenth grade education.
• Philadelphia public school standards were high into the 1930s. Students were held back if they failed until they reached 14, when they could be kicked out. In the 1930s, reforms raised the compulsory school age to 17, with some exceptions, and as the great Migration of Southern blacks hit Philadelphia, the system was inundated with kids behind in schooling. (166)
• Central High School moved in 1939 from a ‘mid-city neighborhood’ turning black to move to a white neighborhood near LaSalle College (which is now a black area), and in the 1950s, Northeast High also moved to a white neighborhood, pressured by alumni. (168)
• Paul Goodman has said: “any literate and well-intentioned grownup knows enough to teach a small child a lot.” Goodman and others were advocating for smaller, neighborhood schools focused on subjects — which sounds like the charter school movement of today. (183)
• “There were 28,044 vacant buildings and 15,604 vacant lots in the city as of July 31, 1969. The number of vacant buildings had more than doubled in three years.” (185)
• “Say what you will about the public schools, they have staying power. Year after year, they do their business, whatever it may be, for good or evil. The system was built to last.” (187)
• The word ‘changing’ in Kensington meant getting blacker in 1968. Now, it means getting ‘whiter.’ (190)
• A ‘Richard D. Hanusey’ was the city’s best school administrator, Binzen writes (192)
• Troubled kids aren’t reached until they are too far gone. (207)
• “E.E. Cummings said that before you can do without punctuation, you must learn to use it perfectly. The same goes for discipline.” (214)
• By 1970, getting a big city school teacher appointment was no reason to celebrate. In 1940, it was. (217)
• “They give back what they get. There are teachers who teach thirty years and retire. And there are teachers who teach one year thirty times and retire.” (220)
• Poorer black and white parents are more similar in their wants for their children’s education: conservative and discipline. (225)
• Binzen describes a school administrator who goes into a community meeting completely unaware of the distrust the neighborhood has for any authority so is unprepared to defend a position. (232)
• “It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the entire structure of Catholic education in Philadelphia — the nation’s fourth largest diocese and the one most fervently committed to the proposition that every Catholic child should attend a Catholic school — rests on such shaky underpinnings.” Bingo, technically illegal, is a large fundraising tool. (239) Though, bingo seems to play much less of a role in Catholic education today.
• A large portion of Catholic church funding in Philadelphia came from Bingo: “It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the entire structure of the Catholic education in Philadelphia — the nation’s fourth largest diocese and the one most fervently committed to the proposition that every Catholic child should attend a Catholic school — rests on such shaky underpinnings. “(239)
• Why Whitetowners like Catholic education: “Unexciting, un-stimulating, anti-intellectual”(240)
• A prescient phrase: In 1968 “Catholics now hold firm control over most branches of the city government, and they will probably retain it until Negroes take over.” (244) Stereotyped as ‘social outcasts.’ (243)
• “As late Jesuit editor Paul L. Blakely said: ‘The first duty of every Catholic father to the public school is to keep his children out of it.” (245)
• Of the American Catholic Church, Denis Brogan said: “in no western society is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism lower than in the country where, in such respects as wealth, numbers and strength of organization, it is so powerful.” (246)
• “Philadelphia parochial schools pride themselves on their handwriting instruction. Their pupils learn to write very neatly, their letters well rounded and carefully formed. It is said that you can distinguish a parochial-school child from a public-school pupil by comparing their writing.” (254)
• Binzen transcribed recordings of a debate on integration at a Polish Catholic school, featuring starkly honest assessments on civil rights, largely focusing on blacks. (261)
• In 1965, the Archdiocese was boasting of an expanding enrollment and support. Two years later, it sought government aid for the first time. (269)
• In 1968, Pennsylvania became the first state to authorize state aid to non-public schools. (270)
• In the mid 1960s, as change was coming with a new school board and superintendent, an already disaffected principal had called the school district like an ‘arthritic turtle.’ Binzen calls Mark Shedd one of the most promising superintendents. (273)
• More on how a controversial school district business manager had run the school district. (275)
• After Sputnik, legislation in 1958 for the first time offered federal funding to support basic education. (277)
• New superintendent Mark Shedd chased federal funding and outperformed all other school districts. (283)
• The difference between reform in City Hall and the school district: “The contrast is that City Hall had a political mandate. This gave momentum for reform. The schools don’t have it.” (287)
• Nov. 17, 1967: a bloody battle between police and then commissioner Frank Rizzo and black students (288)
• The late 1960s changes in the School District were called the “most dramatic revolution in a city school system in the postwar period.” (294)
• There was a movement by black students to rename Ben Franklin High School after Malcolm X, the movement was rebuffed by a school board trying to gain support in white communities. (297)
• Of education reformers whose children don’t go to public schools: “In a great many instances those people and groups most vocally supporting change are safely outside the battle and would be unaffected by it.” (298)
• “In housing and jobs, as well as in education, black gains are made in competition not with WASP liberals [who cheer the change] but with lower-class and lower-middle-class Irish, Italians, Poles and Jews.” (298)
• White-collar workers waste more time in their cubicles than blue collar workers in their stations, a study shows. (299)
• “The lower class whites especially are a closed people moving in tunnels.” (304)
• Education will either make or break cities. (305)

These are not my kids. I don't even have kids. This is a photo I found online of a bunch of kids using laptops. It's meant to be mildly representative of where we are today, in shoving digital technology in everyone's hands.

Two premises:

(a) Generations are cyclical.

(b) Technology is everything we were alive to see invented.

If my peers today are a part of an incredible age of change and innovation, when what is new is what matters most, I believe that my children’s generation in 20 years or so, will be characterized by rebelling against what is new — if that doesn’t happen sooner. (I don’t have kids yet, but I might have ‘em someday and so I’m talking broadly)

What is considered technology today — things like web-based communication, geo location-centric discovery and adaptable information gathering — will not be abandoned necessarily (because those will be everyday tools 20 years from now) but I do believe consumer interest will go elsewhere from the newest and latest around technology in as obsessive a fashion. New ideas fuel consumer interest, but I suspect my kids won’t care about technology in the same way we do today.

What will replace technology, well, I’m not quite sure yet.

Choosing between local impact or broader scale is a vital differentiation in our professional paths.

My buddy Daniel Victor was named the new social media editor of nonprofit public affairs news outfit Pro Publica, and so I reluctantly bade him farewell from his brief few months at Philly.com and with the local ONA chapter.

Having developed a good friendship with Victor, I’ve followed his exciting and deserved fast-paced climb up the journalism ladder: from Harrisburg, Pa. newspaper the Patriot-News to D.C. news startup TBD to regional powerhouse Philly.com to investigative, foundation-supported journo-brand giant Pro Publica. Knowing my personality, I took some time to think about whether spending the past few years building a very local, very niche outlet like Technically Philly was the right fit for me.

Frankly, I’m not altogether certain, but it has occurred to me that we can only choose one of two paths professionally: local impact or broader scale. There’s a pendulum somewhere, and it swings between those two extremes. We can touch both, but I think mostly — with the constraints of time and focus and work — our professional lives fall on one of those two tracks.

It’s some variation of the 80/20 rule, where in any given industry or community, 70 percent of the people have a marginal impact, 25 percent have a very local impact and five percent have a very national impact. What is, at times, perplexing is that national impact doesn’t always mean more impact, or impact on more people.

In the most high minded of ways, impact is meant to mean influence: influencing people’s decisions, policy, action, perspective and events. Most often, it never reaches that level, so we must understand our work will only ever be found by a very small group of people.

When your work is national or even broader in scope, it will find more people but might resonate deeply with far fewer of them. When your work is local, it will find far fewer people but might resonate deeply with many of them.

We need people pursuing national and local work. There is good in both and reason to do both.

So it’s a question of choice. Many people will confuse scope with impact — more audience must mean more meaning — and so will chase the wrong direction for the wrong reasons. Others get it — Victor wants a bigger stage and new challenges and he has earned it — but it’s important to know what you want.

News organizations should recognize themselves to be either a fire hose or a neighborhood block party and, if particularly robust, they should have both and discern the different strategies for each.

After joining an Aspen Institute Roundtable in D.C. back in June, I met up with NPR Project Argo’s Matt Thompson, who I teamed up with around CAT Signal a few months earlier. As we tend to do, we got lost in a long and rambling conversation that came to a philosophical point from Thompson: not enough news sites recognize what they are, simply a fire hose, spreading their audience to what is interesting and important.

First, two quick definitions in this context: (a) a fire hose site has relatively large traffic with more drive-by readers and (b) a block party site has relatively less traffic with highly focused and more loyal readers. In our conversation, Thompson introduced the ideas of fire hoses. I started thinking about block parties.

Right now, Thompson said, the organizations behind those fire hoses are limiting their future by focusing on the decaying destination site model and so limiting their fire hoses to only their own content. That is, as I’ve written, Philly.com should be a hub community gathering all the best information in the region, but, despite some early experiments, it isn’t significantly playing the game. The site only points to content from its sister papers, the Inquirer and the Daily News, so when, say, the Inquirer misses (or flat out ignores) some big stories, it’s as if they never happened.

If the online audience comes to realize that, Philly.com could lose that viewership. Fire hoses, Thompson and I discussed, need to be indiscriminate in their blasting. If it’s good, credible, relevant content, spray that fire hose. That becomes the value of the fire hose in the future.

What I pushed on was that block parties need to be intensely local (in geography or topic), attracting those loyal, relevant readers. The wider in coverage a block party goes, the more it risks failing. Indeed, the transition from block party to fire hose is a tricky one.

However, something Thompson and I did talk about was how in any given relationship within reason, a site could be a fire hose in one case and a block party in another, if done correctly. Meaning, Philly.com could be a block party (for Philly readers) and, say, a Yahoo News page could be the fire hose, yet that same Philly.com site could be a fire hose for Technically Philly, which, in turn, could be fire hose for a web developer’s project blog.

The revenue, marketing and editorial strategies of any given site should be focused around a true understanding of which it is first: fire hose or block party. That can mean everything.

The celebrated HBO historical drama Boardwalk Empire, set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, is making its way through its second season, and I’m catching up, having recently finished watching the first season.

The well-funded period piece, with backing from Scorsese, Wahlberg and others, tracks the life and times of a character based on a real political boss of the time. It’s a compelling story, tinged with real happenings, heavily researched authenticity and complex characters. In short, it’s a great watch.

Having finished the first season, there are a few takeaways I found myself internalizing:

1. ‘You have to learn how much sin you can live with,’ said the lead character ‘Nucky,’ played masterfully by Steve Buschemi, in one episode. How much of it and what kind are life decisions worth making early and sticking to through your efforts to live a life you cherish.
2. Know what your asking price is — Whether it comes out or not, the most artful dealings are made by men in this series who know specifically what they want, what they’ll be willing to give up and what could be defined as success and failure. We could all do a better job of having clearer objectives and asks before walking into a meeting.
3. Have an inside man and treat him well — You won’t please most of the people, so it makes sensible strategy to keep close associates who are leaders of their respective communities. It can be a source for information, effective lobbying and essential insight.
4. You’re either moving up or coming down — If you’re in a competitive market, business, industry or organization, your political power, talent, awareness, impact or clout is either improving or falling. Those directions can change winds, but mostly, they’re trending in one direction. Know which one and act accordingly.
5. Freedom of expression gains never cease to amaze me — Any remotely accurate historical drama always leaves me thinking that everyone in the past was stupendously suppressed, in emotions, sexuality, gender, race, hopes, dreams, attitudes and anything else possible. The obsession with normalcy that came out of our country’s massive influx of immigration was frightening.

For the few of you who haven’t seen the show, check out the first season trailer below.

Is our recession another blip in centuries of economic rises and falls or is something darker happening?

Part of me agrees with the recent post from media critic Jeff Jarvis, who voiced a concern I’ve been working through myself: efficiency-creating technology has continued to speed and, well, there are a lot of old people coming.

There is a real conversation happening that a new normal rate of unemployment should be expected, though there is counter to that — we’re just too close to the economic collapse to have any sense of what is normal.

But here’s one additional thought I keep gnawing over.

Whenever we have predicted the end — most famously, the common 20th century prediction that overpopulation would create wild hunger issues — something has happened. Well two things happened.

(1) Technology, in some form, created an answer. (2) Someone was born to make and harness that technology.

Now, yes, there is a very real possibility — sitting here in 2011 — that jobs are becoming obsolete (hiring sure seems to be at the moment).

But there has always been this answer about harnessing population: with more humans, we have more ideas, more creativity, more solutions to have a better, longer life with less an impact on the planet. In the case of the population bomb, hunger issues today have more to do with political instability than food shortages (though that impacts short term hunger concerns).

So, intuitively, as technologies reduce available jobs and we have more people who need/want jobs, we have an employment bomb. But, prognostications in the past suggest we live in a world of our own creation, so the answers may come in unexpected ways and from unexpected places.

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter gave an hour of his time this week to answer resident questions that came to host NBC 10 by way of email, Twitter and Facebook, as we reported on Technically Philly in sharing video of the event.

Nutter has already been praised for use of Twitter – a move we had asked him about during a Q&A in July 2010 , a few months before the city imported communications director Desiree Peterkin-Bell, who had helped transform Newark Mayor Cory Booker into an urban political social media star.

The Ask the Mayor event — prompted by NBC 10 social media hire Lou Dubois and Bell — was unique, interesting and compelling. NBC 10 deserves credit for only sharing a single softball question — about cheesesteaks, of course — and Nutter and his team deserve praise too for participating in something new and relatively open. It was clear and admirable that Nutter hadn’t been prepared for the questions.

Granted, none of those questions amounted to public affairs journalism, but many did seem to represent the perspective of Philadelphians. Watch the five video segments of the event here or watch the first below and see what I learned about Nutter watching them.

What was most interesting to me though was the opportunity to watch some 40 minutes of Nutter speaking without a speech. I came away with a few takeaways about him:

1. He knows governance — Throughout the several dozen questions, Nutter offered very practical, straightforward answers. He seemed like a smart, practiced man of governance. And that has largely been the most accurate swipe against him: he’s been just a competent caretaker. Any high-minded rhetoric we heard from him was — get ready for the surprise — while campaigning. Remember Nutter the tax man? That said, I was impressed to see the inspiration set aside for directness. One thing that hasn’t changed — from his days on City Council — is that he is good in the wonkish detailed corners of government.
2. He hasn’t fully grasped the public-private partnerships his administration has embraced — I’m interested in being able to separate what decisions a leader OKs and what decisions a leader seems to lead, if not conceive of himself. The city is full of examples of cost-cutting private partnerships — something I’ve seen with a growing frequency — but I didn’t catch any highlight of that at all. Nutter quickly mentioned PhillyRising, but not its use of community groups. When asked about the need for trash cans in South Philly, I expected a call for civic action. He didn’t, nor did he talk about any of the other initiatives in that vein. He had a traditional top-down perspective on governance.
3. He hasn’t lost that ‘dry wit’  — When first running for mayor in 2007, every profile that came out mentioned Nutter’s ‘dry wit,’ his deadpan demeanor. If you catch it, he’ll make you laugh. At one Nutter press conference I was in, I asked what differentiated Philadelphia enough to earn a grant from IBM, he looked at me and said, “we’re just better,” and, for a moment, looked for another question, before a trickle of laughter brought him to dive a little deeper. Yes, I remember that Michael Nutter. In the fifth segment of the NBC 10 piece, Nutter answered with exaggerated disbelief at a resident’s request for the city to shake down people who rummage through recycling. “Of all our problems, I am not going to send people after someone with a cart to get a few aluminum cans,” he said. He was funny: “I was feeling some kind of way,” he went on earlier. He can be fun — and, well, he can even do so while acting black — but it’s not something he has always succeeded at sharing, like the legendary Ed Rendell.
   
4. He still doesn’t have a central issue – This is not news (and Patrick Kerkstra has argued it’s an asset) but it seemed as clear on this night as I had ever recognized before. I remembered candidate Nutter talking tough on crime because he needed to do so and really seeming to dive into the ethics and efficiency of a new Philadelphia government. Yet, in an hour of question answering, I heard no talking points on making City Hall cleaner, leaner and greener, though he does have progress to point to. Early on, I had thought technology would be of interest to Nutter — its ability to cut costs, offer transparency and improve systems seems to fit — but nothing has emerged. He was even fed a question about the city’s Wireless Philadelphia initiative and had no real answer. The public-private partnerships mentioned above or the green movement abounding citywide could be subjects to grab hold onto, but I didn’t see it. He got handed a crappy economy — I buy into that — but nobody’s central issue should be a recession.
5. He thinks his central issue is education — He was given a great question: what was the city’s most important problem and how he and others were facing it. He went hard on education and was suddenly where he got the most rhythm of the night. “It should be the centerpiece of everything we do.” He called for volunteerism and for parents to demand more of their kids. With Arlene out — even if she was the victim — maybe that is a subject he can run with in a second term.