Is our recession another blip in centuries of economic rises and falls or is something darker happening?

Part of me agrees with the recent post from media critic Jeff Jarvis, who voiced a concern I’ve been working through myself: efficiency-creating technology has continued to speed and, well, there are a lot of old people coming.

There is a real conversation happening that a new normal rate of unemployment should be expected, though there is counter to that — we’re just too close to the economic collapse to have any sense of what is normal.

But here’s one additional thought I keep gnawing over.

Whenever we have predicted the end — most famously, the common 20th century prediction that overpopulation would create wild hunger issues — something has happened. Well two things happened.

(1) Technology, in some form, created an answer. (2) Someone was born to make and harness that technology.

Now, yes, there is a very real possibility — sitting here in 2011 — that jobs are becoming obsolete (hiring sure seems to be at the moment).

But there has always been this answer about harnessing population: with more humans, we have more ideas, more creativity, more solutions to have a better, longer life with less an impact on the planet. In the case of the population bomb, hunger issues today have more to do with political instability than food shortages (though that impacts short term hunger concerns).

So, intuitively, as technologies reduce available jobs and we have more people who need/want jobs, we have an employment bomb. But, prognostications in the past suggest we live in a world of our own creation, so the answers may come in unexpected ways and from unexpected places.

An emblematic photo of a portion of my work with Back on My Feet, as taken early in the morning of the second day of the third annual Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24 race event, having coordinated an intervivew of Philadelphia chapter Executive Director Sera Snyder and Fox 29. For the 20in24, every major outlet in the region covered the event.

I am leaving my role as Media Director for Back on My Feet, the running-based program to combat homelessness.

I tendered my resignation last Thursday, Nov. 11 and our staff was alerted Monday. My last day will be Friday, Dec. 3, so I’ve offered a full three weeks to help the transition process at an organization with a mission that has come to mean a great deal to me since joining in January.

I’ll be sharing in greater detail here what exactly I will be doing, but, in short, I am taking a full-time opportunity with the media company I helped launch by way of starting in February 2009 technology news site Technically Philly.

Yes, things have been going well there since.

While there are lot of reasons why this is the right move for me, most simply:

1. I have completed a great deal of what I wanted to do at Back on My Feet, and this is a good time for a relatively smooth transition
2. My heart is with journalism, publishing, covering communities and all the conversations therein.

I will also be sharing here more reflections and takeaways from my year working for Back on My Feet, but, for now, I would like to quickly highlight how proud I am of the work I have accomplished in my short time there.

I want to thank the organization, its staff and founder Anne Mahlum for giving me the opportunity to come on to a startup and create from scratch a direction, mission and purpose for its media outreach.

I served five basic roles that were meant to circle my mission of growing awareness of the organization, all of which were mine, as I was a one-man department:

1. Traditional Media — relationship building, outreach, followup and organization of coverage by legacy media.
2. Social Media — Our conversation, push and interaction with social networks and their related communities.
3. Content and publishing — Our newsletters, email correspondence and managing our blog, which I launched, as noted below.
4. Website project management and IT — Managing our website, our relationship with our partner development company O3 World and other basic, related IT questions from staff.
5. Branding — Overseeing, approving and, at times, designing branding, marketing and event materials.

At the highest level, I feel as though I have established best practices and direction for my department and will offer easy-to-transition roles that still have direction and growth possibilities, all of which fits neatly into what I first pledged to do during my initial interview for this position.

I am so proud of these accomplishments for less than a year’s worth of work considering they span disciplines, which include, among many others, the following:

• Finalized an initial draft of a Media Department manual, detailing the responsibilities and goals of the work I’ve done in nearly 5,000 words and on 12 pages. This is the strongest asset I’ve offered to create institutional memory in my work. One of my favorite words: sustainability.
• Finalized an initial draft of an organization style guide — With the help of a colleague, that serves as the basis for our language, colors, logos and other branding basics. This started a conversation around using specific fonts, precise colors, branding and language.
• Launched and created staff work flow for a blog platform that, in fewer than six months of public operation, receives more than 10,000 page views and is on pace to surpass in 2011 our established website in daily traffic.
• Shared at least one member story a week for the near entirety of the blog’s existence and came to know the names and abbreviated stories of dozens of our members. In addition to sharing news around the issue of homelessness, I have set expectations that our blog will be a place for thought-provoking discourse and to find news about our mission, supplemented by organizational updates.
• Grew and matured our national monthly newsletter presence, in addition to training staff and creating systems for regularity, blasts and chapter independence.
• Prepared for, launched and created staff work flow for chapter-specific email lists and monthly blasts to grow independence of each individual city. When I first came on, we had one big pot of contacts, but I recognized the need and value of beginning to break out lists by geography.
• Designed draft national marketing materials that can be expanded upon and serve as the basis of such documents in the future. It’s nearly a dozen pages and, even if it’s a knock off of some pro bono work a designer did for one of our chapters, I am proud of the look. Download a copy here [PDF].
• Created spreadsheet of media contacts across all of our chapters and other national outlets that can further be developed in a concerted, targeted effort. Again, another step to maturing our media department.
• Developed a true conversation in our primary social media channels of Twitter and Facebook, the latter of which has also been delegated to newly-trained staff and represents an area that still warrants growth and attention. We started from nearly zero, so we went a long way, but there’s plenty more to do.
• Conceived of a direction for the utility of our existing website, developed the relationship with web development partner O3 World and helped move forward the possibilities.We’re planning to more than double in size next year, so some real forward-thinking was required.
• Wrote an organization profile that was anthologized by a major publisher in ‘the Ultimate Runner.’
• Created an initial version of a press kit to offer to media contacts to create base level knowledge about our organization. Find it here.
• Worked to manage expectations around traditional media coverage, which was no small feat for an organization that was on CNN, ABC World News and NBC Nightly News within its first two years. I pushed for us to focus on big, interesting stories and succeeded when we pushed, like, as depicted above, all major TV, newspaper and radio outlets in Philadelphia covered the third annual Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24 race event in July.
• Pushed for Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24 Race Event branding — While we still call our major fundraising event “the 4th Annual Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24 Relay Challenge, Lone Ranger Ultra Marathon, Midnight Madness Run & Pajama Loop,” I helped pushed into our lexicon the remarkably apparent necessity of a shorthand.
• Created organization shorthand — We were sensitive to being just a ‘homeless running club,’ which is what some newspaper writers had taken to calling us. I noted that we needed to offer a more descriptive nut to offer journalists. It required lots of approval and remains less universally accepted than I liked but, with the great help of a colleague: Back on My Feet is a “running-based program to combat homelessness.”
• Interfaced regularly with nearly each of our 30 staff members — I tried my best to fight bureaucracy and increase my dialogue with staff so I knew what interested them and what hurt or helped the work they did.

Back on My Feet founder Anne Mahlum and members of the organization in 2007.

I’ve decided to step away from self-employment.

I’ve spent the last year of my life freelancing, by some accounts, at perhaps the worst time to do so in my life and arguably the worst time in the history of journalism.

After a meeting of the most influential media leaders in the region made clear no drastic foundational investment would be made into niche news anytime soon, I knew I needed to secure my finances — as a new homeowner, especially — and take a more cautioned approach toward building News Inkubator, Technically Philly and NEast Philly.

A funny thing happened not a week or two after I made this decision. A friend made me aware of a job opportunity I actually wanted.

On Mon. Jan. 18, I walked into a Locust Street building in Center City Philadelphia and began defining what a media director should do for homeless advocacy nonprofit Back on My Feet.

I spent nearly three full semesters working with Philadelphia government oversight organization Committee of Seventy in the beginning of my college career, offering some policy research, the occasional graphic design tweak and other gap-filling. For almost all of it, I worked under the tutelage of a precocious, 25-year-old, workaholic, marathoner North Dakota native named Anne Mahlum.

She was fun and challenging, and I knew then that she had her sights set high.

We had two breakfasts in summer 2007. During one, she told me about telecommunications giant Comcast luring her to a high-paying lobbying gig. During the second, she told me that after accepting the job, she reconsidered and launched Back on My Feet, what started as a homeless running club and has now become an advocacy agency that creates a community around running and then connects participants with job training and job placement programs and will be in four cities by May.

Nearly three years later, her organization needed a 14th staff member and thought it should be someone to handle the group’s Web presence and develop relationships with traditional media.

I interviewed with Anne and others Monday Jan. 11, had a follow up by phone that Wednesday and accepted later that day. Told I was pitted against an older crop of more traditionally experienced marketing people, I pitched hard on my role extending to content creation around the issues of homelessness, job creation and other related social advocacy plots.

Back on My Feet had caught the attention of runners already, but to continue to grow they needed a world of people interested in social justice. To attract them to our site — and eventually bring them on as volunteers and donors — let me create a blog that chronicles the plights of the men and women with whom we work and the conversations that are happening around these issues.

It could prove to be more serious journalism than what I’ve done the past year as a full-time freelance reporter.

After I started, here’s what I more officially wrote out:

My five primary responsibilities now as I see them currently (I put them in order of time I think I’d spend on them, from most to least time):

1. *Our own content — I think this has the potential to be most important and involve the most time. The primary vehicle for this would be a blog placed highly and incorporated fully into BackonMyFeet.org. This would be the daily-updated stream of all BOMF content, including standard organization updates and offers, but buttressed with multimedia, interviews/day-in-the-life pieces on residential members, tracking of media coverage and perhaps a weekly/monthly podcast on homelessness and systemic joblessness.
2. Social media — Interject BOMF into the conversation, connect with people online and build branding (Twitter and Facebook to start)
3. Legacy media — Make traditional story pitches to established media, leveraging my existing relationships.
4. Partnerships and events — I think my role is natural to help develop, or at least highlight potential partners in content and in our mission (other nonprofits, academic and research institutions, etc.)
5. Independent media — Indie blogs, smaller niche publications and the like shouldn’t be ignored — smaller, more targeted audiences often mean they’ll take even more seriously the coverage

To start, I’ll have to trim down our existing bloated site and otherwise transition — introducing myself and finding my place. Beginning my third week, I’m quite pleased and look forward to tracking our progress.

I’m sure there will be updates to come.

Some measurable starting points:

1. Using internal analytics, but also a (perhaps very) rough guide can be seen publicly here, which shows about 3,700 unique visitors in December
2. Social media accounts: (Starting on my first Monday morning) Our Twitter account had 335 followers, 99 tweets and was listed 30 times, in addition to just about 35 @replies since April (I got nearly half that yesterday alone, including GPTMC); Our Facebook account had 727 friends and had fallen inactive; Our Youtube account had 10 uploads and 12 subscribers
3. We’ll also try to track the volunteers and donors who come over the transom of the Web.

Though certainly now only during nights and weekends, I will remain an active partner in Technically Philly and NEast.

If you peeked at my Blogging clips on this Web site recently, you may have noticed that I have begun contributing to uwishunu.com, a very cool arts and entertainment blog in Philadelphia.

If you have managed some RSS feed for my Disclosures on this site, you may also have seen that uwishunu is a product of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corp., which means I am currently receiving small funds from a public relations organization.

I’m over it and hope you are, too. If it causes a conflict, we’ll cross that bridge when we have to. Because, right now, I enjoy the work and love the product – I was subscribing to uwishunu long before I became involved.

Below check some of my work and extras from those assignments.

See all of my posts here, and my profile here.

One of my more recent posts was on a celebration of the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin at the Academy of Natural Sciences. I came across some great information about Darwin’s relationship with the Academy [link, PDF].

“Most paleontologists (with some few good exceptions) entirely despise my work,” Darwin wrote to then-Academy curator Dr. Joseph Leidy on March 4, 1860. “Consequently approbation from you has gratified me much.”

The work with uwishunu also gets me out of my apartment and my neighborhood from time to time, forcing me to have some fun with a night out to review Philly events I first preview.

I am pleased to say my first post was on a concert that included Mischief Brew, a band fronted by Upper Darby-native Erik Peterson, 31 [1/29], of whom I first became a fan in high school when a friend gave me a bootlegged collection of his really cool, acoustic punk ballads. It was a different experience, interviewing an artist whose music I like, than the business reporting, gritty community stories and politics and government stuff to which I have grown accustomed.

I look forward to much more work with uwishunu and Eric Smith, the editor and fellow Philly lover.

Screenshot from Notcot.org.

Philadelphia’s technology scene is, well, growing, expanding, maturing, developing, whatever.

There are a host of worlds and working parts to it, different scenes, from Center City, to Old City, to South Philly, to the northwest and West Philly, up to the ‘burbs and, well, in some way, everywhere in between.

The problem is that there is no one home, no one portal, vessel for all of those cultures and news and events and updates.

I think I’ve found it.

With Web designer Sean Blanda and graphic designer Brian James Kirk, I am proud to introduce Technically Philly: covering the community of people using technology in Philadelphia.

We very-soft-launched on Feb. 9, then slowly followed different people on Twitter, and now want to go into an open beta of sorts.

We’re regularly posting news, views, Q&As and profiles and we think we now have the most comprehensive, easiest-to-navigate calendar of the Philly tech scene of all, but we still have a number of surprises yet to unveil. Anyone interested in this emerging scene or technology communities at all, ought to be following us, no matter your location, but particularly if you’re fortunate enough to be in Philly.

Read more about the project here.

All Web and graphic design-credit goes to Sean and Brian. Mark me down as a staff writer at best in the credit category, but I’m happy to be a part of the project.

I’m really excited about TP for a number of reasons, not least of which is the potential to better unite this very growing, thriving community of people. We want to be a must-read for everyone there.

I’m also excited because it feels good to let this project go. I have at least three more announcements in the vault, waiting some more organization, structure and development – a couple more might be worth more note, too, soon.

Lots going on, now let’s just hope it all runs somewhere.

For now, just add Technically Philly to my spiraling list of blogging experiences.

Subscribe to Technically Philly here. Follow us on Twitter here.  See my posts here. Contact us here.

Whatcha think?

The cover of a book I published with Blurb. Hire me to do something similar for your family.

Hire me to tell your story.

For a birthday, anniversary, wedding or another special event, let me tell your story. I will interview you or your family and compile a commemorative profile, just as it might appear in a newspaper or magazine. If you choose, it can be printed and framed in a variety of styles to your preference. I also could use a publishing service to create a book in a style of your choosing.

It is a unique gift idea that can last forever. See a family book I made for my own mother as a Christmas gift here (cover seen above).

My work has appeared in a variety of the country’s largest newspapers and other publications. Read more about my experience here.

Contact me here. See examples of my journalism here or other writing in the navigation bar above. This is one of several services I offer, part of my role as a freelance writer.

It would be unfair of me to not mention I delayed posting this after I read that Inquirer reporter Mike Vitez is offering a similar service.

People in line for unemployment benefits in Detroit. (Photo by Francis Miller, January 1952)

I now know a handful of bright people – some family, some friends, some young all smart and competent – who are victims of what is becoming a growing economic hysteria, made worse by media… and blogs. This from the Washington Post:

New unemployment figures from the Department of Labor show average new jobless claims for the past four weeks up more than 200,000 from a year ago to their highest level since Dec. 1982.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll found job cuts reaching a broad swath of Americans: nearly two in 10 reported they or someone in their household had lost a job in the past few months, and almost three in 10 said their household had been hit with a pay cut or reduced hours at work.” [Source]

That can only affect this freelance journalist, as it does millions of Americans.

I got this e-mail from the editor of an established, successful industry trade publication in the Philadelphia region with whom I have a mutual personal contact:

Unfortunately with the hazy economic picture, we’ve cut back on some of our freelancing… Perhaps things will improve in the Spring, but for now I’m booked up.”

Maybe we’re all pursuing the wrong jobs.

…[There is] a select swath of the U.S. economy that’s been protected – so far – from the bad economic weather. They’re schools and health care providers, information technology firms and green energy start-ups and other firms that, while not thriving, are at least still hiring.” [Source]

I better focus on that technology and multimedia end of my resume. Maybe you should too. Or go back to nursing school.

Photo courtesy of Life Magazine.

Talk to me in a few weeks. I ought to be some sort of expert on the global energy industry.

Largely on the back of my internship with the Philadelphia Business Journal and my blogging experience in a variety of venues, I am proud to say that I’ve gotten a gig blogging on the energy industry for BNET Industries, an industry-news provider and subsidiary of CBS Interactive.

That means I have a steady alternative revenue stream – for the time being. It isn’t full-time, so no health insurance, but for a freelance journalist, it’s a golden gig to get some steady money (more tips like that in a future post).

Here’s the explanation of my work that I put in my updated Blogging experience page:

BNET Industries (December 2008 to present): I am a regular contributor to BNET Industries, an industry-news provider and subsidiary of CBS Interactive. Daily, I review trends, corporate plans and other news affecting all facets of the global Energy industry, from the politics of OPEC to state nuclear programs to green technology startups and more. Browse my “Energy Roundup” posts with BNet here.

That’s one post a day. I subscribe to more than two dozen industry RSS feeds and review each every morning.

The daily gig, which certainly won’t make me a wealthy man, will give me a chance to develop a business-writing niche, which can be more lucrative, and offer the opportunity to find more writing work over time. Plus, I am getting paid to write and report, if only in comprehending, selecting and disseminating news.

See my post today here, and check out my debut on Tuesday here. This here is yesterday’s, 12/18, and here you can see my roundup on Wednesday, Dec. 17.

I should be able to set up an RSS feed, but for now, all my of Energy Roundup posts should end up here. Because they are just news briefs, I won’t be double-posting or even linking to them regularly from here. I will be setting up an RSS feed to my Twitter account, though.

A few months ago when I thought there was a possibility I just might be freelancing, I knew I wanted some steady income, blogging being in what I had the most experience. My first attempt was at being a regular news blogger for BNET Industries, but I simply didn’t have the knowledge for any particular industry. My test blog led to an initial let down back in October.

But I stuck with it, and feel I am well-equipped to slosh through a day’s news and discern what is most pressing for BNET’s readers, who have years of professional experience on me for the energy industry. It’s a challenge, a chance at developing a niche knowledge base and a chance at some regular, steady income.

So, hey, if you have any inside information on the Energy industry, toss it my way. If you have any questions on that broad global business, I am in the process of developing a rich knowledge base.

We’ll see how that goes.

Any thoughts, questions, or, hey, any advice?

Image courtesy of Hulu.com.

So, when I saw that BNet, an online business news site launched in 2007 by CNet Networks, was looking for bloggers, I wanted to give it a go. I’ve been in talks with some folks there, who wanted me to start with some trial posts. Trouble is, I’m in Europe.

I did get one done before I left. However, it seems I missed their focus a bit. I got an e-mail from one of BNet’s editors yesterday, thanking me for posting but telling me the following:

We tend to avoid pieces about stock and commodities prices. Were more interested in the goings on inside Energy companies.

Backpacking in Europe these days keeps me a little busy, so I’ll try to figure this out when I return.

After the jump check what I submitted.

With market volatility, when some sectors fall, others stumble.

Monday, as light, sweet crude oil trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange suffered huge losses federal lawmakers announced that negotiations over tax incentives for the production and use of renewable energy have stalled.

Nymex oil fell $10.52 to $96.37, the largest percentage drop since 2001 and second-largest dollar fall in history.

The House and Senate failure to agree on extending expiring federal tax law affecting renewable energy users and providers came before Monday’s historic fall in oil, but they are likely related. With expectations that crude oil prices may remain below $100 per barrel and a global financial crises building, attention for solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative power sources has fallen, too.

Democrats and Republicans in both chambers are struggling to find common ground over offsetting the legislation’s costs and whether the tax incentives should be further expanded.

Many suggest a roll back or interruption of federal involvement in renewable enegergies could cripple the still-developing industry. House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland told Reuters that he would continue to work with Senate leaders to pass the legislation, “even if it’s next year.”