Two hundred fifty students from the largely troubled neighborhoods of North Philadelphia will receive full, four-year scholarships to neighobring Temple University, my alma mater, during the next decade, as the Inquirer reported. It’s a generous effort from a major urban research university often called on for more outreach in its surrounding communities. Good things, warm [...]

Happy Fourth of July. A couple weekends ago, while filing a lot of copy, I was engrossed in the 12-part History Channel documentary called America: The Story of Us. It reminded me of what the History Channel does best. In a world where the access to information is endless, the context of that information was [...]

Last year, I left a position at a homeless advocacy nonprofit and returned to the journalism startup I helped launch. After sharing last month some of the member interviews I collected while working at Back on My Feet, I realized there were other lessons I wanted to share. I worked for Back on My Feet [...]

Tradition matters to me. It gives us culture. It is a way to pay remembrance for those who came before. Yes, it’s a little bit fun. In the world of news, there is a lot of tradition that needs to be lost. Unquestioned impartiality, balance without real context, an ignorance and distance of what funds [...]

Above, TED co-founder Chris Anderson talks about the impact of Youtube and other online video has on the world. Youtube was a powerful part of moving forward content dissemination on the web. Suddenly there was a free place to host, distribute and embed easily video that drove traffic and audience. About which time Youtube was [...]

I received some degree of criticism recently on a post about journalism classes I wish were more readily available in college J-schools. I openly admit some forms of them already are and that many colleges have wonderful professors looking forward and doing great work with them. Still, I stand by the conversation being an important [...]

I am on month five of full-time, professional freelancing. I think only now am I finding the hum and the rhythm of this craft, particularly in the doldrums of a sour economy and struggling print industry. You’re a college journalist, unsure about the future. So, tell me, why aren’t you trying to make in-roads in [...]

Shannon McDonald unwittingly speared a wide, if brief, revisit to a conversation about race and prejudice in one of the largest police forces in the country. She is 21-years-old. It was early December when Neal Santos, another friend of mine, was ensnared in his own media firestorm. Ever hear of Zunegate? Santos, the assistant online [...]

My friend Sean Blanda once regularly wrote on the failures of journalism schools. It’s not exactly my territory because I studied politics, not journalism in school. But, I’ve heard enough from friends and colleagues. It seems most everything they learned, I learned while working at my college newspaper. The journalism school at Temple University, like [...]

The University of Pennsylvania’s place in the open-source learning movement of higher education is the focus of my story in yesterday’s Philadelphia Weekly. I can’t find it online (seriously), but it sure did run. So go pick it up if you’re in Philly. If not, well, check below for what didn’t make it in! You [...]