Creating a bold and serious collaborative niche membership network with existing and emerging independent media should be a primary objective of WHYY, the Delaware Valley public media organization. Highlighted by its six-month-old NewsWorks online news site and hyperlocal news experiment, WHYY has attempted to recast itself as something more than a stodgy PBS TV channel [...]

Do news organizations have responsibility for their outcome? That became the final and, I think, as yet unanswered close to a discussion I led during the final session of the third national BarCamp NewsInnovation, held Saturday April 30 at Temple University and rounding out the inaugural Philly Tech Week. [See past BCNI write ups here.] [...]

Data, context and engagement were the themes of the Hardly. Strictly. Young. event at the University of Missouri Reynolds Journalism Institute this week, says Michael Maness, the Knight Foundation Vice President of Journalism and Media Innovation. Also read a Columbia Journalism Review overview from fellow attendee, new friend and total asshole Craig Silverman, who takes [...]

Late at a bar in my neighborhood, a friend asked me: how are you innovative? His general assessment was that Technically Media, a consultancy, and Technically Philly, a news site, weren’t particularly innovative or interesting for 2011. We’re an online-based startup of 20-somethings creating journalism-fueled content. That might barley bass for envelope-pushing in the late [...]

Print is going to last longer than we might think because we can prove print in a way we cannot prove with digital. Someone recently mentioned to me that in 10 years, we’ll still be predicting the death of newspapers. I think sitting here, in my office, looking at a copy of the Wall Street [...]

Someone with great influence and interest in the future of news and journalism once spoke with great concern of the loss of serendipity. When someone picks up a newspaper, she shared, that reader is very likely to come across a story he didn’t expect or otherwise know about. In fumbling with pages and jumps, a [...]

To increase the number of news sources in a community one needs to do two things: (1) grow audience and/or (2) grow revenue. In a followup to a prompt that ushered in a post last month, Spot.Us founder David Cohn again opens the Carnival of Journalism, in which a handful of media makers and molders [...]

I was inside Di Bruno Bros., Philadelphia’s beloved, 70-year-old artisan cheese shop and gourmet delicatessen, when something very apparent sunk in for me. They’ll sell me a block of Manchego sheep’s milk cheese for $5, or bratwurst or beef from the region for a few dollars a pound. It’s profitable and prominent. But I’d bet [...]

Universities should host the newsrooms of their neighborhoods, towns and counties. If a university has a journalism department, college media and audience, this seems like a foregone conclusion. Picture Temple University. It is a big, diverse, robust, public research university with a clutch of respected professional schools and an expansive undergraduate population that has been [...]

Smart people are making calculated investments in Philadelphia’s journalism community. The local NPR affiliate here is getting attention for its NewsWorks online news campaign. The William Penn Foundation is moving ahead with its mission-orientated drive toward increasing public affairs journalism in the region. New ownership for the Inquirer crew can mean some fresh ideas. Independent [...]