There are at least five big things I’ve learned about reporting for a living over the past few years since graduating college and some stories to back it up.
That amounted to my half hour talk and Q&A period with a classroom of students at my alma mater Temple University in the PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.com capstone on Monday. I called myself the ghost of the near future — having graduated in 2008.
Continue reading 5 things I told a classroom full of journalism students yesterday
Cities want to attract and retain young educated talent to fuel their knowledge economies, drive a tax base and create a community that can continue to grow by welcoming more new people in the future. Modern markets are insatiable and indefinitely incomplete.
That’s the clearest, simplest mission I can glean from all the chirping about celebrating gains Philadelphia has made in its old brain drain problem.
But last week at a Knight Foundation session with the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, I wanted to push that thinking forward in two ways that I don’t think I hear often enough in that conversation: (a) the idea that too much change can in effect take away what is distinctive about a city and (b) that any real success would improve the lives of existing Philadelphians too, not just push them out like in other cities.
WordPress, among the most popular web content management systems in the world, offers users an out-of-the-box solution to organize content in two ways: tags and categories. To better understand those words, I’ve taken to referring to tags as the topics of the site and calling categories the themes of the site.
Continue reading Categories are themes and tags are topics: WordPress users
It was once that in the reporting process, publishing a story was once the end.
Get an idea, find a source, develop a story, write and edit, then publish and hope the impact comes from elsewhere. Wrap advertising around the printed product and move on to the next issue.
No longer. News organizations have a responsibility for action to make their communities better. The tools and opportunities and methods for transparency are too rich. The need is too grave.
Continue reading Publishing is no longer the end of the reporting cycle, it is the middle
Every few years, I reach out to longtime family friend Greg Babbitt to go out with him for a day of deer hunting. He’s an experienced outdoorsman and high school agriculture teacher.
We went out after a Wawa hoagie lunch, hunkering down in thorny brush on farmland owned by one of his students and sitting there for in the cold, with a gentle snowfall a week before the close of hunting season.
At dusk, a fox came as near to us as I had ever experienced before being startled when he realized we were there, but not even a spot of anything else, though we heard some deer as we got up to leave. Still, it was a beautiful day with a good friend.
Afterward we went out to dinner with my friend’s new wife, before I drove home out of the growing snow storm.
Back in September, my cofounder Brian James Kirk and I moved our Philadelphia operations from Temple University Center City at 1515 Market Street to the new University City headquarters of First Round Capital.
This month, Geekadelphia visited the 10,000 square foot renovated space, in which we are now based.
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The regional distinction that the Philadelphia technology and business community is trying to carve out for itself is integral to the continued improvement of attracting and retaining talent, and that has little to do with the fool’s errand of trying to recreate itself as a far smaller, broad-based Silicon Valley copy cat.
That was among the bigger conversation topics on the hour-long Radio Times episode on which I appeared this week, along with Roseann Rosenthal of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital and Bob Moul of Artisan mobile.
Continue reading Philadelphia’s technology distinction: Radio Times appearance [AUDIO]
I wanted to own a firearm enough that it was on my original list of 26.
I was no gun zealot, like many young boys. I didn’t even have much experience with firearms, . So, the desire to be a firearm owner wasn’t part of a healthy family tradition, nor was it a less healthy, although phase-based, violence obsession.
I suppose I instead understood early that it was important for me to experience and be comfortable with a potentially dangerous, but popular, healthy part of the American tradition.
Today, with a Living Social deal of a one-hour safety training seminar and shooting range practice for three people for $75, I did just that at the Gun Range above Spring Garden Street near 10th Street above the Callowhill neighborhood of Philadelphia.
After a half hour of training, I used a half hour of training time, armed with a small, simple, cheap .22 gauge Ruger handgun, with limited recoil at the request of the person with whom I attended. Good experience, I shot fairly well, am more aware and will want to practice more in the future.
It’s part of my intention of maintaining a basic level of comfort and respect for an outsized American cultural influence.
Continue reading Firearm ownershipIndividuality is a heavy load is among the largest themes of the 1976 Tom Robbins novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that I recently finished.
Last year, I read and loved Robbins’ book ‘Still Life with Woodpecker,’ but I think I liked this even more.
Continue reading ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’: My favorite passages from the 1976 Tom Robbins novel on individuality
The small, if compelling, story of two friends and me launching and growing Technically Philly after graduating college was the focus of a feature in the winter 2013 issue of the Temple University alumni magazine.
It also included a pretty fun photo shoot of my cofounder Brian James Kirk and I (our third cofounder moved on as an employee last year), as shown above.
Continue reading Temple alumni magazine profiles Technically Philly
