As I’ve done in passed years, as this year comes to a close, I like to dive a bit into the work I’ve done here in the last 12 months to gauge what was popular and what I was most proud of.

Below, find my 10 best read posts of the year and a few others I thought were worth reading.

10. Rejection takes you further than success: why getting rejected a lot brought me here

9. Homelessness in Philadelphia: what I learned working for a social services startup for a year
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8. How to be a freelance journalist: real advice from another young, unknown journalist on freelancing

7. Five criteria for the flourishing of news entities of the future

6. Broetry Poetry Slam: ‘Portrait of a Bro’ in Spoken Word [VIDEO]

5. What Philly.com should be: a comprehensive, collaborative and open source for all news in Philadelphia

4. Selling Out: why some acquisitions are good and others are bad for Philadelphia business

3. Social entrepreneurship: how Philadelphia could have a regional distinction for startups

2. Why did you become a journalist?

1. Universities should host the newsrooms of their neighborhoods

And because popular rarely means best, Here are my favorite posts that didn’t happen to among the mos read:

1. January: Why Journalism should be like the catering business
2. February: Eleven lessons that shaped how I live my life
3. March: Why print will last so much longer than you think it will (hint: we can feel it)
4. March: 9 YouTube videos that changed my perspective on the world and the lessons I learned
5. April: 25 things I learned from the best newspapermen (and women) around
6. May: Gentrification: thoughts from seven years as student and young professional in Philadelphia
7. June: News needs to make more money on the popcorn
8. July: Technically Media meeting style: effective, productive and professional from home
   
9. August: Glengarry Glen Ross: 10 sales lessons from the 1992 cult classic movie
   
10. September: How 9/11 helped shape New York City for the better
    
11. October: Will jobs ever come back?: maybe there is an answer to the employment bomb
    
12. November: When you buy something, you are voting for its existence

A variety of strategies and expectations remain, but online media conversations can’t happen in good conscious without at least a glancing mention of business sustainability.

That was my first takeaway from the New Media Unplugged #UncappedLive event held at the historic Sigma Sound Studios in Center City Philadelphia Tuesday night.

On behalf of Technically Philly, I hosted the event with Tayyib Smith of 215mag.com and led the conversation, featuring a half dozen five-minute introductions from niche publishers seated in chairs amongst 40 attendees in the room, decorated wildly by lead sponsor Vitamin Water and featuring free samples of Heineken Light, which didn’t turn out to be half bad.

See below some of what I learned.

Photo lovingly stolen from Eric Smith

SPEAKERS:

• 6-630pm: people arrive and grab their first couple beers. 6:30-7:30pm: our conversation and questions. 7:30-8:30pm: people chat, meet and grab another beer or three.
• Tayyib Smith, who helped organize the entire two weeks of #UncappedLive in his role at Little Giant Media, introduced the event
• I introduced the event’s purpose (getting indie publishers to know each other and sharing best practices) and talked about kicking off Philly Tech Week 2012 plans, a major revenue generator.
• Eric Smith, Geekadelphia co-founder, talked about the site’s role and its recent success with Philly Geek Awards.
• Shannon McDonald, the founder of NEast Philly, talked about developing partnerships and raising awareness in Northeast Philadelphia.
• Adam Schmidt, the founder and president of Drink Philly, introduced his work and spoke of their plans for expansion.
• Jon, the new editor of Naked Philly, shared the site’s unique collaboration between a real estate company and news site for development news.
• David Raible, the executive director of new philanthropy news site Generocity.org, talked about its plans to democratize nonprofit insight previously most often only known to wealthy donors and Generocity’s goals to scale.

TAKEAWAYS:

• Talk business sustainability: Tayyib poked fun at himself for “blowing a half a million dollars” of investment on the (gorgeous) early editions of two.one.five magazine and asked to hear more about revenue plans. I gave my Technically Media spiel, Adam Schmidt talked about advertising and merchandise fueling Drink Philly and Erika Owens from the accomplished Public School Notebook talked about membership and foundation funding. What I thought was equally important was having Eric Smith talk about his preference that Geekadelphia remain a fun, labor of love, something he wrote about in his writeup on the event. The point was that even though Eric doesn’t want to make money, he understands it’s important to have that be a choice, not just an avoidance.
• Print still sells: Jimmy and Bob Smiley, the father and son team behind the Frankford Gazette, marveled that no one had ever approached them about an online ad after four years of work. After just two newsletter-like print issues to accomodate the neighborhood’s digital divide, “we already sold a $40 ad.” That’s not bringing on any full-time reporters, but shows what hasn’t changed for some.
• Print still has relevance: George Miller, the Temple professor behind music mag startup JUMP Philly, talked about nearing profitability by better paying print ads and being easier to be distributed, understood and shared.
• Different voices mean different audiences: Ashley Hahn, who recently joined PlanPhilly to help the built-environment news site launch a shorter-form blog, talked about the need to offer a different style than the site’s existing longform, detailed articles to attract a younger, more engaged audience.

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.

I’m late.

I’ve been invited to the Hardly. Strictly. Young.  conference on alternative ways to implement Knight Foundation recommendations at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri [More on that later]. One of the fun precursors to the two-day event later this month has been participating in the Journalism Carnival of blogging, shepherded by conference organizer, Spot.Us founder and leather jacket-wearer David Cohn.

In January, I wrote about the role universities should play in creating journalism,  and in February wrote about two ways to grow the number of news sources. In March, I was supposed to write on what the Knight News Challenge should do next and how the RJI fellows program could be a part of curating that innovation.

Fortunately, in being late, I can point to others who already did it better than I would. No, Cohn, this isn’t a cop out, this is cutting my losses. The undercurrent on both of these questions for me is that I’m not worried about the craft as much as I’m worried about sustaining the craft.

For the first prompt, Dan Gillmor has having already hit on exactly what I would suggest for the future of the Knight News Challenge:

If I were to change any single element of the News Challenge it would be this: I’d put at least half of the money not into grants but into equity investments in for-profit companies. To make this happen, the foundation would partner with a small group of highly qualified angel investors — people who cared at least as much about the future of news as returns on investment. Together we’d raise a fund that could offer seed and angel capital to digital media entrepreneurs whose projects showed the kind of promise that could lead to serious returns.

In fact, back in November, I wrote something somewhat similar, in highlighting what the News Challenge could learn from venture capitalists.

For the Reynolds question, Steve Outing nailed that the best, from what I saw:

Because the program is small, I’d narrow the focus significantly. In fact, for each fellowship year, I’d pick a theme and find fellows who all wanted to work on complementary aspects of the theme. Let’s say for the next crew of fellows, select all of them because they want to focus on variations on a theme of “business models for journalism in the digital age.” Next year, I’d pick a different theme. The key would be that the theme is the most important challenge or opportunity facing journalism at the time. Business models for journalism addresses solving a big problem for the news industry and for journalists who want to make a living. A theme that could address an opportunity instead of a problem would be best utilizing emerging mobile technologies in the news realm.

Focus, yes, something I noted was my goal for 2011 and one I thought the future of news conversations could take on.

The online documentation of my pursuit of accomplishing items on a Life To Do List that I made as a kid has moved to a subdomain of this site, at list.christopherwink.com. I first brought it online earlier this year and have since updated it.

It gives me more flexibility, control and organization. I have no expectations or desire for that blog to be any regularly updated place, but rather a true chronicle of meaningful experiences. If you find that at all interesting for whatever reason, there is an RSS feed here and an email blast here.

A few good recent examples might be my post on attending the competitive eating Wing Bowl and being part of the Mummers Day and a review of backpacking Alaska. I have only posted four times so far in 2011, and I figure that’ll be about average.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about it too much, as this here will remain my focus of professional work.

The old WordPress.com that I first shared in 2008 is now dead, though the experiment with distinctions between personal and private seems to be alive.

This is just about the last online piece of my January resolution to update my archives, which also included shifting over my college thesis to thesis.christopherwink.com and getting online my work from Japan. Those are just for archiving purposes, as those projects are finished.

Four years later, I’m finishing this piece of archiving business.

A couple months ago, I announced I had moved my honors thesis to a subdomain of this site for the sake of organization and archiving. Following up on that resolution to make more tidy a rambling online portfolio, I have brought another dated, collection of work of which I am proud under this house.

I spent the better chunk of 2006 in Tokyo video podcasting, writing, traveling and learning on behalf of NBC Universal Digital Studios. Now all of that work can be found at japan.christopherwink.com.

See all the Episodes here and all the Archives here. Go and explore.

A few things interested me from my work in 2006:

• Short, bad titles — The post headlines were all short and sometimes not even descriptive. I didn’t recognize then the importance.
• I wrote a lot — I far outpaced all of my fellow castmembers in output, which is great, but I could have made much of the content terser and more straightforward.
• I actually had comments — On many posts, I had a handful of comments. I haven’t transferred them… yet.
• I never linked – I didn’t have a single link to a past post.
• Photo albums, not in posts – Photos and the video episodes were never embedded. This is the one major change I’ve made, by incorporating them.
• Yes, I called posts ‘blogs’ — But that was 2006. What’s the excuse today?
• I learned and experienced so damn much — I interacted with an audience and explored and created multimedia, but ultimately, I was just a young kid learning. ..And what a clear stepping stone toward the WDSTL podcast I did while in Western Europe.

So, while I try to get better at making goals and sticking to them, I have an eye to my work here, because this has always been a place for experimentation and learning, where I develop my thoughts, my writing and my style.

So, like I did last year and the year before, I’ve looked at the 15 most trafficked posts I’ve written here.

Looking at the list I think there are two specific lessons to be learned:

• Original Reporting rocks — It’s just what I saw in Technically Philly’s roundup of top stories. In this list of 10, seven featured first-issue original reporting, two offered insider commentary and one offered a strong opinion. No aggregation, summaries or general perspective made it to the list, though I do all those kinds of posts too and those kind of posts dominated my 2008 list and had more influence on my 2009 list.
• Time matters — This site gets a relatively low-level of traffic (the top post on this list received fewer than 500 hits this year), so the sheer amount of time a post is up is magnified. With bigger traffic sites, the first week of traffic can largely overcome a long tail. However in my case, just one of the 10 posts was created in the last four months, and I don’t think that’s due to lack of relatively meaningful content. So, with lower traffic sites, the longer a post is up has a greater impact on its overall traffic than with higher traffic sites.

That said, here are the posts. Draw your own conclusions:

10. Newsworks: WHYY online news brand launching means a lot to these legacies — Nov. 22

Find the other nine below.

9. U.S. theatrical premiere, Madeleine Albright and what it means for local journalism — June 7

8. Inquirer: My first couch surfing experience — Apr. 16

7. Announced proposal for William Penn Foundation hyperlocal investment (Jan. 13) — On an initiative that just had its greater details released last month.

6. How to set up a freelancing sole proprietorship – Feb. 8

5. Welcome to Fishtown [Jan. 8] — In which I announced my home purchase.

4. Stories that never ran: What does a sex columnist look like? – Jan. 20

3. NewsWorks: WHYY will announce new hyperlocal news initiative for northwest Philadelphia (April 12) — In which I first wrote about the news initiative that was more recently detailed in the No. 10 post above.

2. Murder rates in Philadelphia and other cities are all marketing — July 2

1. Stories that never ran: ‘Can the Devon Theater survive in Mayfair?’ — Jan. 6

Any favorites? I was a little surprised by that top story.

Less trafficked, strong posts from 2010

And also, because it isn’t all about traffic, here are six posts that I think are among my best that didn’t get the most traffic:

• William Penn Foundation three-year $2.4 million investment in Philly journalism — Dec. 22
• If I had unlimited money to invest in growing Philadelphia journalism — Dec. 13
• Patch is about as evil as Starbucks (and that’s less than you might want to believe) — Nov. 8
• What the Knight News Challenge could learn from ABC’s ‘Shark Tank’ — Nov. 19
• Lessons I’ve learned on writing better ledes — March 1
• The Wire: yeah, the HBO Baltimore drama is mad decent — Sept. 17
• Ten things a journalist should never do — Jan. 27

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 its environs. An unnamed amount of bloggers who declared on federal tax documents some form of revenue from their publications were compelled to pay for a $50 yearly or $300 lifetime license, the latter of which both Technically Philly and NEast Philly acquired as we brought on revenue. Philadelphia CityPaper reported that the city had begun reaching directly out to bloggers demanding they pay up, a reality first noted on web forum Philly Speaks and, admittedly, ignored by us at TP, and the whole concept exploded. Soon, far flung media outlets were implying that the city’s license — which is required of anyone doing any kind of business in the 135 square miles of Philadelphia — was for bloggers only. It isn’t. And anyone solicited by the city had advertising or had otherwise declared related income federally. So, considering much of the revenue was limited to tens of dollars, it may have been a foolish chase, but certainly not illegal or unfair.)

Instead, I wanted to share two thoughts on the future of blogging that came out of this controversy.

First, blogs, or any online-only venture, can be business.

There was a time when municipal governments wouldn’t know what the hell a blog was. Or what they did. There was a period of transition when they didn’t care. But that’s all changing.

We at TP are less blog by conventional assertion, but are certainly a blog format, and we’ve interviewed Mayor Michael Nutter and David Cohen, the number two man at Comcast, and investment celebrity Josh Kopelman.

Our coverage is real and, though perhaps meager, so is our revenue. That’s a real change and says something about where blogging has come in less than a decade.

Secondly and perhaps more novel is the mechanism through which people found out this news. I was contacted by no fewer than 12 friends, family members and colleagues about this controversy. Only two — yes, one of five — duplicated the same source.

It helps that this story went a little batty pretty quickly, but I was so taken by the six Gchats, two tweetss, one email, one Facebook post, a couple Google Reader finds and, yes, even a text message. All, aside from a duplicate Gchat, referencing a different source.

1. Two Gchats for the original CityPaper story
2. Gchat about the Philebrity write up
3. Gchat about the Slashdot link
4. Gchat about the Time magazine slice
5. Gchat status about the Guardian story (which quoted Blanda)
6. Tweet about the NBC Philadelphia short
7. Tweet about the Washington Post item
8. Facebook message about the CNN story
9. My Google Reader feeds displayed the Inquirer City Hall blog version
10. My Google Reader feeds offered the Phawker aggregation of the New York Magazine and this blogger
11. Email about the Washington Examiner post
12. Later, I saw a tweet to this Redlasso cut of a Fox 29 clip

So, to recap: blogging has gone beyond mainstream to just straight normal (now pay up) and media is so damn diffuse that it’s easy to rip someone off on their story, get the clicks and be sure that no one has to ever send the same link twice.

Today, I’d like to announce the official content platform for homeless running nonprofit Back on My Feet.

I announced in February my taking a job with the Center City-based organization that uses running clubs to create support around homeless populations seeking to move forward. From my first interview, I highlighted the need to use a blog to share the heavy dosage of content, member stories and updates that come from the nonprofit’s now-four chapters and growing.

I’m very interested in tracking all the web metrics I can, from traffic to social media trends, for Back on My Feet. Launching this blog — a project I initiated and have led — came without question and has been a great source of pride thus far.

Before I came on, the nonprofit was sticking content on a newswheel that should be much more static for, say, press releases and fundraising event information. Now, we chapter and topic-specific feeds in both daily e-mail blasts and trackable RSS feeds.

It’s a way to develop an audience that extends beyond our existing supporters and volunteers. I’m planning on doing that by going beyond organizational posts. I’m running compelling content around our mission and heavy amounts of our member stories.

Get an RSS feed or e-mail blast on our selective mission-orientated updates — conversations around issues of homelessness and important and compelling member stories which rarely flood you more than once a week. Full feed here.

Weekly stats from our new Back on My Feet blog after a recent soft launch. Click to enlarge

Some obvious lessons from the blog early:

• Consistency — You need to consistently — yeah, like daily — offering content
• Interesting content — Go beyond your organization and offer powerful content around your mission
• Get the entire staff involved — Everyone has to chip in to make it bold, well-rounded and regular

Two of our most trafficked posts:

• Antonio LaBoy speaks about his path
• Kevin Brown gives keynote speech at Boston chapter launch breakfast, which you can watch below

I’ll be updating more on this project in the future for sure and offer insights I find. Stay tuned.

Much love to the boys and girls at Northern Liberties design firm O3World, which offers pro bono hosting and design work for the organization. Their propriety CMS backs the BOMF website, and they helped me tweak out and integrate the WordPress blog platform.

That’s the question posed here by Alana G.

Consider a simplified 2×2 matrix: content is either good or bad and distribution is either good or bad. Bad content with bad distribution is going nowhere. Good content with good distribution is in the best position to succeed. But there’s a lot of sports content that lives in the other two quadrants. There are distribution resources being wasted on bad content, and there are plenty of small bloggers making good content with bad distribution. This last category of unseen content may be even better quality than some of the content with good distribution, but this content will not float to the top on its own. [Source]

I like this 2X2 model of bad/good content and bad/good distribution.

A couple points come to mind. One, I think good content can develop distribution more easily.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly, distribution is faster than content at bringing in traffic. That is, good content over years can develop distribution. Distribution could immediately build traffic for bad content. One seems more likely to last and I think that’s why the “content is king” maxim has some veracity — but only for those truly willing to invest time.

There’s an entire cottage industry of spammy marketing agents and SEO experts who talk about speed and churn — that’s where distribution needs to play a much larger role if you expect to gain real eyeballs.

It’s also a question of the value of high traffic, as some are starting to see more value in lower traffic but focusing on different metrics, like time on site, repeat visitors, bounce rate etc. Those SEO experts want traffic for Google adsense or whatever other scam, so distribution is key.

High traffic may be an entirely different game than what most should be playing. For the rest of us, content is certainly king and distribution focus will be the playland of what few national sites and blogs might remain going forward.

Below, dude gives today’s pretty traditional understanding of this “content is king” take. Note how he seems to dismiss distribution. Unless you’re willing to devote the serious time to building an audience, content might, indeed, be side-stepped for distribution.