While I was at Back on My Feet, something I was proud of completing was, with the great help of a colleague, a company style guide. A style guide should be a fundamental piece of documentation that goes a long way to creating an institutional memory. If everything imploded, a style guide would help you [...]

I’ve squabbled with people over domains and publication names, of projects and story titles. There was a moment of inaction in creating the technology news site for Philadelphia that I am now proud to say continues to take on readership and bring on partners. Technically Philly certainly isn’t descriptive on its own and makes for [...]

When you’re launching a business or a brand, a check for domain availability has to be part of the brainstorming. I worked with Shannon McDonald to launch a hyperlocal news site for Northeast Philadelphia. Initially in late 2008, she wanted the product to be the Web presence of a print product she wanted to call [...]

It was sometime this month two years ago that, while still an undergraduate at Temple University, I started tossing around what I hoped to be a new tagline for The Temple News, the college newspaper on North Broad Street. Weekly in Print. Daily online, I suggested. I wrote it on a piece of paper and [...]

Once I admitted I was late, I just kept delaying the inevitable — buying business cards. I got into the full-time, freelance writing back in December, so I ought to have had something right away. I could have passed them out when I spoke at a high school journalism conference and with the many sources [...]

The frequent mention of market dominance is when a brand becomes a verb. Xerox that. Get a Band-Aid. Of course, that has clearly followed online. Google that. Digg that – though not Digg me. Facebook me; the confluence of Twitter and tweet and twittering. You don’t LinkedIn someone, which might relate to how Facebook could [...]

We are stuck in an echo chamber, a friend said to me recently. While the digital divide is slowly lessening and more people are online all the time, there is a very small community that is always repeating itself  on whatever the social media of the moment is – lately that has been Twitter, of [...]

You should be blogging, even if casually and infrequently and briefly. I’ve already said that journalists of all stripes, anyone interested in media, research or anything in which your writing, your name and your credibility is best served defended and re-defended somewhere it can be found. One of the best reasons to traipse into this [...]

It’s the attitudes that got them into this mess – newspaper executives thinking the party would never stop, but newspapers need to combine an appreciation and interest in learning the future with the confidence of being the most powerful news sources in the world. Too many just seem to be running scared. Number of Views:333

I don’t want to repeat this anymore, so let me direct you elsewhere. I got an e-mail from a young aspiring journalist, still in high school and already coming to the questions I just started coming upon late in college. Her question: how do you buy spaces on a google seerch? Hey, even she will [...]