To kick off this year, we at Technically Philly ran a weekly Tuesday feature interviewing a technology community member and/or entrepreneur who left Philadelphia. It is called Exit Interview and the weekly portion of the series is winding down, with perhaps one more to run next week.

The three of us who founded TP love Philadelphia, in particular its creative and entrepreneur communities. Journalism aside, we tend to think those whom we cover are going to be a big part of improving Philadelphia, its perception, its government, its taxes and its reputation.

Journalism should uncover truths and push forward dialogue. That can come with important public affairs coverage and institutional oversight, but it can also by highlighting key issues among its audience.

So I felt strongly that to further the conversation among these communities, it was our role to face directly concerns holding it back. To do so, I led the move to bring together nearly a dozen interviews and will now roll back out Exit Interview when new perception comes forward.

Today, on the Technically Media blog, I shared six lessons I took from running the series.

To get a quick sense, here are three example headlines from the series:

• Ben Kessler: Philly has “a lack of leaders looking to take the risk to start a company”
• Megan Wendell: “I felt that Philadelphia taxes were significantly holding back” our business
• Notehall on Philly perception: ‘To be honest, generally, it’s not very good’

It's a roundup: Cowboys and pickup trucks push the herd of buffalo across Lame Johnny Road during Monday morning's Buffalo Roundup at Custer State Park on Monday. (Kristina Barker/Journal staff)

This fall, I started doing something on the Back on My Feet blog that should probably be the first step of every community news site ever: a weekly aggregated roundup of existing news on homelessness.

It’s something I advocate to any content creator in which I am involved.

A primary rule of anyone with mission today is to share content related to that mission, as you probably can pretty easily beat bigger media on issues relevant to your work.

But the specific virtue of a simple roundup can be profound. It follows any number of rules of the web today.

• Do what you do best and link to the rest — You probably aren’t yet a content creator, so link to those who are. It’s only in the past year or so, that we’ve seen most progressive news outlets following this long-held logic.
• Cover greater ground — There are more content creators today, not fewer, so don’t duplicate that work, just push your audience to those already doing it.
• Build your own audience — Beyond PR or updates on your organization, build an audience of people who care about your work and they probably are the ones most likely to support you in other ways.
• Learn — Educating yourself and your staff of issues around your mission is never a bad thing, so curating that conversation is a fine start.
• Own your niche — Most importantly, you want to be able to tell your audience that anything that falls into your coverage area (or mission) can be found on your site or blog. You won’t cover or break it all, so push to those who have.

At Technically Philly, we run some sort of roundup every day of the week: events on Mondays, venture capital on Tuesdays, startups on Wednesdays, Comcast on Thursdays and general links of community interest on Fridays.

So this is an obvious starter for nonprofits, niche news sites and bigger players. Own your niche.

The cover of a regional edition of the highest circulated daily newspaper in Philadelphia featured a news story of my own yesterday.

Rumors on the possible sale of an alleged drug-infested nuisance property veiled as a recovery home in a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood that came out of last week’s Frankford Civic Association meeting was enough to warrant front page coverage of Metro. The property has been seen as something of a rallying call on the issue of illegal ‘recovery homes.’

I attended the meeting as a former resident and occasional contributor to NEast Philly, the Northeast hyperlocal, that started last month a content partnership with the Philadelphia edition of the international free daily newspaper franchise.

NEast Philly Editor Shannon McDonald says she entered the agreement, which features repackaged NEast content every other Wednesday, for the branding and larger distribution. Metro, which currently only pays McDonald for a feature Northeast freelance piece that usually leads the package, gets cheap content for a niche geographic readership for whom it can sell more direct advertising.

But it’s part of a growing direction for the scrappy free daily, which is likely more respected in Philadelphia than in its other U.S. markets of Boston and New York City but still takes heat for its short form, image and graphic driven product.

Since announcing the deal on April 29, Metro also has a partnership with noted cityblog Philebrity.com, which offers highlighted nightlife listings for the coming weekend, and has an agreement with election news blog pa2010 and the Philadelphia Business Journal.

It goes beyond Philadelphia.

As eMedia Vitals reported, like the Northeast for Philadelphia, the New York paper rolled out a Queens edition and uses Mashable content on Thursdays. The Canadian arm partnered with FourSquare.

The free daily is leveraging independent publishers who want to grow their reach and hit print readers to get free or low cost content and those communities and niches. It’s an angle that print isn’t dead — it just needs some cost cutting and realignment.

It seems like a brilliant strategy in my estimation.

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.