Campaign opposition research is a type of investigative journalism

TheOppositionBook

What we have lost in investigative reporting units at news organization in the last two decades will be at least partially replaced by mission-orientated groups that can find other value for doing such work.

Foundations, think tanks and mission-minded nonprofits may be the more ethically normalized groups, but in elections and government, the idea of campaign opposition research will almost surely come to wider prominence. The idea that a campaign would hire investigators, lawyers or others to dig up shortcomings on political rivals is not new at all, but we’ll hear more about this.

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Photos, video and social media at events are our newest form of applause

A photo of the crowd at an All American Rejects concert at Xfinity Live in September 2012.
A photo of the crowd at an All American Rejects concert at Xfinity Live in September 2012.

Creating media continues to become easier and more varied every day. Humans are the only species to develop the practice of recording history.

So whenever we are in a moment we regard as a distinguished experience — travel, first-time moments, extraordinary circumstances — we are bound to have this motivation to record that history as best we can.

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5 things I told a classroom full of journalism students yesterday

reporting-help

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.

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Attract and retain new young, educated people but keep our cities distinctive [Knight Milennials]

knight-millenials

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.

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Categories are themes and tags are topics: WordPress users

Word cloud of terms used on this site, as of March 1, 2013, using Wordle.net.
Word cloud of terms used on this site, as of March 1, 2013, using Wordle.net.

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.

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Publishing is no longer the end of the reporting cycle, it is the middle

Even new views of data-driven journalism too often sees the release of coverage to be the end of the reporting process. Where is the action?
Even new views of data-driven journalism too often sees the release of coverage to be the end of the reporting process. Where is the action?

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.

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Hunting

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.

New Technically Philly office space

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.

Brian, Juiliana and I

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