The old saying goes that a reporter is only as good as his sources.

To tell or find a story, one needs to have the resources and access to perspective and insight. In my few years as a journalist, I’ve taken considerable effort to build relationships and gather sources.

That mostly amounted to piles and piles of business cards. Thankfully, two tools have allowed me to take considerable control over that mess.

First, almost since the very beginning of my collecting sources in college, I have obsessively updated my contacts in my Gmail account, including emails, phone numbers, even birthdays and mailing addresses when possible. Taking it further, I include headshots and a description of when I first met the person and what their relevance is, to ease my ability to remember the person.

Second and most recently, with my first smartphone and Macbook following this and this,I’m able to sync those Gmail contacts to my phone, allowing me to have access to those contacts more readily, as I try to develop as many text and Gchat relationships, it’s proven a great tool.

Which is good, because as important as it is to have good sources, it doesn’t matter if you can’t find them.

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

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 act of selling products, of course, is like finding your Atman of the service industry, so, acknowledging that that is at the top of the pyramid and any kind of client work is the foundation, let’s look at what helps these service businesses thrive enough financially to ever endeavor to trial a product or two: the three “R’s.”

By service industry, I’m thinking of professional firms that do things like web design, marketing, consulting, strategy and other high-level tasks that many companies will look to outsource.

There are three “R’s” that every successful company in a service industry achieves in building into its revenue strategy:

• Retainers — In most cases, you first work with a client around limited, deliverable-driven projects (or at least this is what we find valuable for both us and those with whom we work) for six months or a year. These are often big lifts that make heavy use of staff time, resources and insight. Good work happens here. But ideally, if value can be offered long-term with maintenance or further staff development, longer-term or continuing contracts of smaller value but steady income allow real stability and scale in the type of business (service) that isn’t very good at either.
• Recommendations — I can remember questioning the value of someone else speaking good on your work — words pasted on some leaflet or buried on a website. But in the past few years, I’ve found occasion when those very words, even when detached from the human being who supposedly said them, have been requested. Having a list of published testimonials and the client list that comes with them is endlessly valuable to draw upon in discussions, sales and strategy. When you’re starting out, use past work or give up some free work to start building that network.
• Referrals – This is surely related to the recommendations but quite a bit more valuable. Of our work at Technically Media, most of our clients come as a direct result of an introduction and private suggestion to work with us. Referrals are prized for a legion of reasons: cold calling sucks, you can better calendar-out clients, it becomes a curated list of clients with whom you want to work, the expectation is for you to succeed so winning is easier and more.

Following President Obama’s much hyped jobs speech, small business owners have been discussing the direct ramifications for if his proposals were enacted by Congress.

My Technically Media colleagues and I were specifically interested in these details, as provided by the New York Times:

“The centerpiece of the American Jobs Act is an extension and expansion of the cut in payroll taxes, worth $240 billion, under which the tax paid by employees would be cut in half through 2012. Smaller businesses would also get a cut in their payroll taxes, as well as a tax holiday for hiring new employees.” Also: $4k to any business that hires an employee that has been looking for a job for six months.

Beyond the fact that those proposals aren’t actually in place yet, I wanted to share the basic, common reasons for why independent contractors and freelancers are still the way of the world, particularly in publishing.

*Note, I am far from a financial planner. These are just commonplace words of wisdom and direct advice from professionals.

Benefits of independent contractors:

• Save 12-15 percent of expected money paid to the individual, in employer-matched payroll taxes, worker’s compensation and related costs
• Be absolved from worker liability and many workplace expectations
• More easily trial individuals and work on short-term projects with a clear end
• Simply collect a W9 for all individuals and then file a 1099 for those paid more than $600.
• Avoid expectations for health insurance, retirement plans and other additional benefits not already providing early in your business.

Benefits of full-time employees:

• Encourage work from a central office, to foster collaboration and connectivity
• Encourage similar working hours to foster better communication.
• Allow employees to use tools and resources provided by your company (computers, equipment, paid tools)
• Pay them through payroll, instead of paying a variable, monthly invoice
• Dictate all or the majority of the assignments and work projects for the individual

Important Reading:

• Independent Contractor (Self-Employed) or Employee? [IRS]
• Is This An Employee or Independent Contractor? 
• Independent Contractor definition [Wikipedia]
• W2 for full-time employees, 1099 for independent contractors
• W9 and 1099 forms for independent contractors
• 1099 vs W2 at around $60k/yr: How much actual difference?  [ars technica forum]

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 learned and some resources I used.

Why we decided to incorporate: (a) I expressed concern that as a new homeowner, I wanted greater protection from liability for our work (like liable or breach of contract concerns), and, as an added benefit, (b) we wanted to be W2 employees of our company, for the credit value of guaranteed payments. Moving forward, we also recognized (c) the benefit for the possibility of hiring employees.

Find the steps and resources below.

Steps we took:

• Get a recommendation for an efficient, effective lawyer. (a small, simple incorporation is relatively straight forward and cost us less than $1,000.00)
• Choose a type of incorporation (if possible, have this in mind ahead of time, so you don’t need your attorney’s consultation on the matter. We went with an S-corp because, as three equal partners, we’d rather not pay federal income taxes and have the gains go to us as individuals.
• Have your attorney file the paperwork with the state and feds
• We now know that to incorporate, you’ll need to assign corporate officers — These don’t have to mean the same hierarchy for staff work, but for corporate structure, ethics, lines of credit, opening bank accounts and the like, you’ll need a president and secretary at least. As partners, we all received equal shares in  the company.
• Get your corporate bylaws and endorse them — Our attorney provided us with cookie cutter corporate bylaws in a binder, which we supplemented with some language from our existing partnership agreement.
• Open a bank account — to hold all that moolah
• Get worker’s compensation insurance — Unless you waive the need, see below.
• Choose a payroll services company — Because we didn’t want to mess with quarterly filings and other S-Corp tax requirements. It’s not our core competency and others agree with that mentality. If you can do it, do it.
• Get an accountant — Because we didn’t want to again fumble through our taxes, particularly now that we were closing a partnership and opening a new corporation
• Get a credit card to start earning business credit — So you can buy that big warehouse space someday!

Resources I used and lessons I learned:

• Pennsylvania Open for Business
• Reach out to your local government business groups — Call the City of Philadelphia Revenue Department and the Pennsylvania Commerce Department or your local answer to those two — Opening businesses are damn good for government, so they tend to be pretty helpful. I didn’t find (much) bureaucracy in this process.
• How do I choose a payroll services company for my business
• How to get a business credit card
• How to open a business in the City of Philadelphia — Also an overview here
• Worker’s Compensation Insurance: Find out whether you need it-and how to get it — Pennsylvania option here
• In Pennsylvania, if all employees have at least five percent ownership, you can waive the need to have worker’s compensation insurance.
• Pennsylvania Tax Guide — Simple About.com post, but it answered (sorta) a couple questions I had about our choosing to tax ourselves.

1. Signing off initials — If you have multiple people using your organization’s account, sign off with initials for transparency, personal connection and ease.
2. Do create regular content — Part of my schtick is having a lunchtime regular feature, like Noontime Number for Technically Philly and Running News at Noon for Back on My Feet. It’s something followers come to expect and helps you be sure to fill content.
3. Do take the RSS feed from your blog and then do a second (or third) tweet later for ifferent audience — It helps feed the beast, but also means your next tweet will hit for a new audience. Note, though, that some feel Twitter should be all engagement, so sending an RSS feed is somewhat looked down on. Still, I think as long as an RSS feed doesn’t dominate your Twitter conversation, it’s an added value.
4. Do tweet your content more than once — Yes, as a follow up to the item above, keep in mind that Twitter users tend to focus in at different times, from the morning to lunch to the evening or something like it, so by tweeting a story a few times (without getting spammy), you have a better chance of hitting an interested party.
5. Do use CoTweet to manage multiple accounts with multiple user — the former central Pennsylvania startup has a lot of good features for archiving messages, assigning followup and forward posting tweets.
6. Instead of just responding, RT a meaningful message — When you reply to someone, RT her message and add your own when space allows. This gets other people into the conversation. If no one is interested, then take it to DM or email.
7. Do more often have a call to action — (usually a link) but don’t be afraid to offer meaning in words. It’s a push media, so what are you pushing? Don’t take that to mean you should always be pushing your stuff, but conversation, engagement, sharing, linking, etc. are all good calls to action.
8. Do be able to share a specific point in those 140 characters — So, ‘Man speaks at classroom’ is a whole lot less effective than ‘this is how we can make homework suck less, man says,’ which can inspire conversation or thought or response or, even better, a click.
9. Tweet strong quotes or (even better) hard numbers – I’ve always found pushing clear information and statistics travels better than something less actionable or more vague.
10. Break quick news on Twitter — When you’re reporting on something, feed good, interesting, independent content on Twitter. When possible, sure, having a link of yours can help you capture the clicks, but ultimately, you’re trying to create an audience and you do that with content, so Twitter needs its own material.

I’ve done this enough times to figure out how to do it without screwing everything up.

Suppose you start a project on a free WordPress.com, and, as it grows, you want to move it to a self-hosted platform version of WordPress, like I did with this site and NEast Philly and my thesis and others.

So, in case you need to do the same, here are the steps:

1. From the Tools option in the WordPress.com sidebar, choose to Export.
2. Download the XML Export file, being mindful that all fields in the drop down menus are chosen, so you are downloading everything.
3. Open in Wordpad and change your file extensions with a Search and Replace. i.e. So, in the XML file from my thesis site, I replaced ‘phillypolitics.wordpress.com/’ with ‘thesis.christopherwink.com/’, meaning that the links would then associate
4. *Make sure permalinks are the same from your WordPress.com to your new site.
5. From the Tools option in your new self-hosted WordPress platform, choose to Import.
6. Browse and choose to Upload the XML file that you downloaded from your WordPress.com and then edited in Wordpad.
7. **Easy-to-miss step** Upon selecting your XML file, under ‘Import Attachments’ be certain to check off the box next to ‘Download and import file attachments’ so that your photos and other uploaded media will be transferred to this new database. (I’ve missed this step before to much frustration).
8. Delete the old jawn — Take down the old WordPress.com or, if you want to transition some search engine love, you can block the WordPress.com from being picked up by search engines but keep it alive for old links with a post pushing to the new site and eventually delete.