Zoltan Glass: A Journalist writing in his BMW, Paris 1934 © Science & Society Picture Library, UK

I was asked what it is I actually enjoy about this journalism world, its form and practice.

So I rattled off some answers:

• I like writing
• I like telling stories.
• I like getting a little bit closer to truth.
• I like focusing on different conversations.
• I love asking questions and learning.

All of my interest and focus on business has come from these passions, though, entrepreneurship itself has certainly become intertwined, as building your own company is one hell of an education.

Simply put, we build audiences.

At the beginning of December, I left another role and promised greater details on what I would doing. Here’s a start.

In the past few weeks, I’ve chosen a payroll services company, applied for tax status, requested a business operating license, closed an existing account and otherwise finalized the incorporation of a new business, of which I am now a full-time employee, answering early a resolution of mine.

Technically Media Inc. is a media services consultancy with three founders: Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and myself.

And, while I could get you lost in the details, all you really need to know that at its simplest form, we build audiences online.

What that means:

• We work with nonprofits, businesses, organizations and existing media companies to create workflow, review management, platform and promotion for using content to grow an audience online.
• Build an audience and turn them into supporters, donors, customers, and clients.
• This is a journalism conversation — We think the future of news and information dissemination will involve mission-orientated nonprofits and other organizations.

Examples of this work:

• Technically Philly — Technically Media publishes this technology news site that first brought the three of us together. (Previous to our recent incorporation, TM was a general partnership.)
• The National Constitution Center — Before Christmas, we launched Constitution Daily, a blog platform through which the major Philadelphia-based museum and event space will grow its reputation with meaningful content related to its mission. We will continue working with the NCC in 2011.
• Back on My Feet — In my role with this nonprofit, I created its media department, including helping to launch a platform and create workflow and content for a blog that drives audience around its members, organization and mission.
• Philadelphia Sports Daily — We launched the basic platform, workflow and technology behind the region’s fastest growing comprehensive sports news site. We are still offering services and direction.
• Circulation — On our TM website, we’re playing with content and editorial experimentation on a blog. See the landing page of the former version of this site here.

Get in touch if you want to hear more.

I’ll be writing plenty more on this site about the content strategy movement happening across the country and our particular interest in editorial strategy.

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.

Click to enlarge.

Americans aged 24 or younger could be part of a “lost generation,” says a new cover story from Business Week.

For people just starting their careers, the damage may be deep and long-lasting, potentially creating a kind of “lost generation.” Studies suggest that an extended period of youthful joblessness can significantly depress lifetime income as people get stuck in jobs that are beneath their capabilities, or come to be seen by employers as damaged goods.

It’s the latest stylish trend piece at a time when general stories on an economy that might not return for two or three years are already old hat. A lot of the numbers are fuzzy and the effect may be questionable, but there’s no questioning that it’s daunting for many 20-somethings.

We graduated and walked into perhaps the worst economy since before our grandparents were our age. A few more distinctions this author has taken on has made those statistics seem even more frightening, but outside of the occasional sobbing, I try to remind myself that there’s no better time or place in the world than where I am now.

First, how about five reasons why I should be professionally scared:

• More than half of Americans under the age of 24 are unemployed
  “The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept… During previous recessions, in the early ’80s, early ’90s and after Sept. 11, 2001, unemployment among 16-to-24 year olds never went above 50 percent.”
• “The unemployment rate for men is running 2.7 percentage points higher than for women”
  A “just unprecedented” spread, according to economist Mark Perry at the University of Michigan-Flint.”
• Philadelphia has one of the highest national unemployment rates for 20-somethings
  “While national unemployment is at 9.4 percent, people ages 20 to 29 face jobless rates of 12.7 percent nationally and 14 percent in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, including South Jersey, according to figures compiled by Mark Price of the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg.”
• Nearly 30,000 newspaper jobs have been cut since the beginning of 2008
  Yup, while I am working on building hyperlocal news sites and my own small business, I am freelancing mostly for newspapers and have first come into the tragically dysfunctional journalism business at the most dramatic shift in its more than two-centuries old history.
• Nearly one-third of employees with 401ks are saving even less than they did six months ago
  I was raised a saver and did so quite obsessively throughout my childhood, well into college. I always had a job and rarely made any unnecessary purchases, so I left college in May 2008 with a fine nest egg for a middle-class college graduate. But after backpacking Europe and more than a year under performing in the earning category, those liquid assets have been… mostly liquidated. That leaves me vulnerable in a small way like millions of Americans deal with everyday and limits a lot of good behavior.

I am a (1) male (2) 20-something in the (3) Philadelphia (4) news industry with a (5) decimated bank account.

That’s a lot (5) stacked against any young professional, but there’s balance to be had.

I am blessed with great privilege and a great country of opportunity. I have been put in a time and a place in which I can experiment quite easily with new media models, relatively risk free. I have been forced into a state of entrepreneurship that I probably never would have executed otherwise. I am a thousand-times stronger manager and developer than ever before.

Lots of people are saying just these same things for the news industry specifically and shouting really loudly about what to do.

If I have to bus a few tables, make a few photocopies, talk a bit about social networking now for the opportunity to build a business, make my own schedule and choose what I want to do, can there be any hesitation about this time being a great opportunity?

If what I’m doing now is “sacrificing,” I’ll happily do that to build what I want to build. ….Now, if this whole ship is going down, well, then, damn.

At least when you fail, it helps knowing your entire generation is trying to figure this out.

I have at least three fairly different resumes stored in my Google Documents, ready to e-mail to editors, mentors, advisers or welfare agents.

For Philadelphia’s newest admitted freelance journalist, it’s a must because I am never quite certain exactly how I am branding myself and for what sort of work I might be pursuing.

How many resumes do you have? Are you ready to bust them out the moment someone of even the vaguest professional merit comes within sniffing distance?

Now some question whether paper resumes, or even their digital cousins, are still relevant, as I have about business cards for journalists, but if you aren’t ready to shake that tradition just yet, it behooves you to be able to fit yourself in multiple professional roles – preferably ones you might actually like and certainly ones you can defend with a mental resume.

Here are details on my three resume versions.

• Freelance journalist: Even for a freelancer, a resume, planted online like mine here, is a necessity. Screw your one-sentence “Objective” in this industry, unless you’re applying for a permanent gig and that sentence is directly tailored to the position. For journalism, bump that education to the bottom (sorry, your GPA doesn’t matter here), and instead lead with professional experience. I think it’s worth having a list of experiences because the more of those you have the better writer you just might be. Give a nod to travel, unrelated internships or unpaid work in unrelated fields that might lead you to have some perspective when writing. While the argument against resumes is that it gives employers a reason to shoot you down, instead, many editors ask of me a resume and a clips, as a stall and a low barrier. With two links, I pass the stall and cross the barrier:

See examples of my writing here and my resume here.”

• Government and research: I graduated Temple University with a political science degree, so, I am supposed to have some form of knowledge there. Here I lead with my education, pretty GPA and Latin phrasing. Instead of phrasing a newspaper internship by the section for which I wrote, I describe it more generally as work with an urban daily newspaper. I drop some of my blogging experience, and instead include the work I’ve done with the Committee of Seventy.

• Nonprofit: Now, in my experience, there are two broad types of nonprofits. Corporate nonprofits, like Seventy, the country’s oldest political oversight group with offices in Center City, and advocacy nonprofits, like the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, which connects residents with welfare programs from its offices in the Tioga neighborhood of North Philadelphia. I’ve worked with both and seen the tremendous good they do on relatively stringent budgets, but I might rearrange this third resume of mine depending on what kind of nonprofit with whom I would be working. For a corporate nonprofit, I’d begin with my education, then follow with professional experience, but for advocacy, I’d likely lead with any related experiences, whether they were paid or not. One is looking for a high functioning candidate with a lot of brain, while the other is looking for one with a lot of heart.

When you’re entering the freelance world and offering varied services, like I am trying, it’s important to be able to spin yourself in a variety of ways. While resumes are most often associated with permanent gigs, even temporary work, like freelance writing for any group, parttime research or otherwise, comes down to resumes still. Have yours ready.

Now, personally, I strongly benefit from pursuing a Liberal Arts education, which afforded me experiences outside the newsroom but even if you haven’t you can turn your work into something any group, organization or editor would desire.

If  you want any advice or have thoughts, then drop a comment below or contact me here.

Photo courtesy of TempAgencyChicago.

Google Reader I am back.

Last month I returned from five weeks backpacking Europe and moved into a new home in Frankford, a neighborhood in lower Northeast Philadelphia.

Somehow, even though I was travel blogging and video podcasting at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com, my month-plus European tour was an Internet vacation (IV) for me.

It was a chance to look at what social networking devices are easiest to put on hold.

Yes, I was regularly blogging, but I am obsessed with finding ways to exist openly and expansively online without it dictating my being.

So, after squirelling away more than 30 posts, I was able to forward post every other day on this site. With a weekend of writing, a couple months of ideas, and an RSS feed, I was able to let my social networks grow while I was gone for more than a month.

• Twitter: A site of microfeeds, of course, should be the hardest to keep alive while you’re gone. Fortunately, someone went and created Twitterfeed, which Tweets an RSS feed. Better still, one can add multiple feeds to one Twitter account, which means I could have had my feed for ChristopherWink.com, in addition to the one for WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com.  That’s hardly microblogging per Twitter’s famed standards of incessant updates, but one to two Tweets per day keeps you involved, to be sure. Since I have seen drops in my followers during even moderate absences from Tweeting, a single post per day can keep you well covered.
  
• Facebook: Tossing an RSS feed into your Facebook microfeed is easy enough to maintain an active presence in one of the more popular social networks there are. To go one better, add the Twitter application on Facebook and allow your Tweets to be automatically posted as your Facebook status. If you have a Twitterfeed, particularly one that only checks for new posts once a day, you could have duplicate links to your Web posts, but at alternate times of the day.  I have learned what great traffic Facebook can bring your site, so it’s worth maintaining, and perhaps even embracing redundancy.
• Flickr and Youtube: Well, if your IV is for travel, it’s worth getting online from time to time to upload photos and video. Considering I was runing a blog while backpacking Europe, and still got a break from the Internet, this is completelely reasonable. Throw up some examples on a simple WordPress or Blogger blog and you can put that RSS in your Twitterfeed. Putting up travel content is a sure way to grow subscriptions for both of your accounts. If this is a general IV, well, then these such social networks will have to grow stale.
• Couchsurfing: Similarly, if you have a CS account, which you should, and your IV is travel-related, then you better be signing in, to meet great people and get cheap places to crash. Oh, and that way your official sign-ins, which are tracked geographically, will dot the planet. With a general IV, this grows stale, too.
• LinkedIn: There isn’t much to be done here. If you’re on an IV, you aren’t looking for professional networking anyway, right?
• MySpace: You should have already thrown in a widget to offer some semblance of an RSS feed from your site, but otherwise MySpace is lame. Let it go, friends.
• Wired Journalists: This site has actually afforded me at least three professional relationships of value, still, I only sign in when I get an e-mail addressing an update. Otherwise, all I’ve done is slap an RSS feed in there and let it sit, which I can do on an IV or otherwise. This goes for similar journalism sites like Publish2 or NextNewsroom.

Of course, I didn’t much keep up with news. That meant, my Digg account (or ones for other news aggregation sites, like Del.ico.us or other active memberships like Stumble Upon) would grow stale, as did my Google Reader feed.

I had 10,000+ items in my Reader. Here’s some advice: “Mark All as Read.”

Find me elsewhere:

When unemployed, author grows beard and develops pirate tendencies.

I probably could travel forever.

Traveling can be cheap. That’s something I relearned early on the European backpacking trip from which I just returned. I could freelance a bit, and continue out in the world.

But I’m not. I came home and am on the prowl for more permanent work. I still had money in my back account, places I wanted to see and people I wanted to meet. Why did I come home? Why are you working?

It is good to parse what you want and what you are supposed to want. If ever they are the same, it becomes even more difficult to decide how influenced you have been by the world. Everyone who ever wrote on this matter in the United States like to reference the Protestant work ethic. Apparently more Americans work themselves to death than anywhere else. I have no proof of that.

I do know that other English speakers I met while traveling – from former British colonies themselves – recognized this trait in me. My desire to return home and work. To prosper. To be a good citizen. The Australian girls told me to go enjoy the beach. The Canadians told me to relax and have a beer.

Whenever this conversation comes up, I think of a cartoon I posted while travel blogging at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com.

Animation probably shouldn’t make me think so seriously about the great decisions of my life, but I suppose anything that makes us think is good.

Sometimes I do get caught up in a race with a destination not worth reaching. As exciting and sexy as we make travel, does anyone else like the thought of some stability? A home to make our own. A career at which we can succeed. Money, yes, money, so I can have some independence to do what I want and pass on to my children. I worry less than my parents did at my age. They, certainly, worried less than their Depression-era parents. I want to do the same for my kids, though financial outlook is bleak at the moment.

So, in my mind, I want a job. The trick is to get one I actually enjoy doing. …I am terrified that some people would label that an idealistic notion. …Just to enjoy what I do 40 hours or more a week. To get there, I am willing to promote myself silly. You should be, too.

Authors and newspaper columnists make money writing on these subjects. That goes for Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle:

It’s a bitter duality: We scowl at those who decide to chuck it all and who choose to explore something radical and new and independent, something more attuned with their passions, even as we secretly envy them and even as our inner voices scream and applaud and throw confetti.

Our culture allows almost no room for creative breaks. There is little tolerance for seeking out a different kind of “work” that doesn’t somehow involve cubicles and widening butts and sour middle managers monitoring your e-mail and checking your Web site logs to see if you’ve wasted a precious 37 seconds of company time browsing blowfish.com or reading up on the gay marriage apocalypse” [Source]

So maybe we cut folks down who are doing something different because that takes balls we don’t have. I try to tell myself that if it makes someone happy and isn’t hurting someone else, God bless them. It gets trickier than that, I suppose. Our society has a lot of guilt and responsibility to pass out.

I feel crummy for doing anything but being efficient.

In writing this, I found a commentary piece written for Law.com. The piece is directed towards lawyers, but I took something out of it.

“Why do we work?” Samuel Johnson supplied an obvious answer when he famously observed, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” But I am not being paid to write this article, and instead of labeling myself a blockhead, let me refer to the insight of eminent psychologist Theodor Reik: “Work and love — these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.” Why do we work? For money, but also for sanity. We expect and need to be compensated in nonmonetary ways.” [Source]

He identified five things we should get out of work other than money. Reasons to work other than in a trade for the means to be happy outside of work.

1. PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY
2. PERSONAL PRIDE
3. IDEALISM
4. RECOGNITION
5. INSTITUTIONAL PRIDE

I do want to establish a reputation in a field. I like competition – Americans like competition, yes? So through work, I can develop another identity – one respected for high quality, intelligence and creativity. I can have pride in that and feel the gleam of recognition for it. Don’t be confused. While it’s important to do what do for us, there is nothing wrong, I’d say, in taking a little glow from admiration. Society may be a cruel metric, but it does have some reflection on what we’ve done.

I also would like to think my work is important. …Yeah, well very little of anything we do is important, but, to me, telling stories serves plenty of noble causes. Any position that has great history behind it – like writing – has been time tested.

When looking at jobs, I hope they meet these ends for me. But, I am not silly enough to not recognize I want monetary benefits too. I want health insurance. There are too many dangers, and I like to play too much to not have some safety net – other than building my own crutches for that broken leg.

Without fully comprehending what it all meant, I took on massive debt as I studied at Temple University for four years. This month I begin paying it all back – principal and interest, my friends. My parents have done enough for me. The bills I already have, like the housing and accommodations that make me happy and allow me to be near to other people and things that make me happy, need to be paid, too.

Money is important. I have to incorporate this prism into any career decision I make to know that the aggravation of any job isn’t near to what I get out of the work I do there.

I am looking for a job.

When I mentioned that yesterday to a neighbor, he asked for one of my business cards to pass off to a friend.

I don’t have one. I didn’t want to spend the money. I never knew what to write on one. Being young and transient, I feel like my information and location would change to quickly. …I think I’d feel uncomfortable slipping one to someone.

A good friend Neal Santos, a talented new media journalist and celebrated young photographer, keeps cards around and I’ve seen him divvy them up. What’s more, he has gotten calls from people to whom he’s given a card.

Still, every time I have gotten close to making the purchase, I’ve felt I might get a job that would it silly to do so. Even now that I am in a serious hunt for a job in Philadelphia, I’m hesitant. I envision business cards as a top down process. Someone with more power gives one to someone with less power – or in a situation of real collaboration. I have no power and, really, no means of collaborating.

Won’t my card just become the trash of a potential employer or wallet-clutter for friends?

I suppose I could print some with little more than my name, “journalist” title and address to this site. But, really?

Who has them? Who doesn’t? Does anyone have any advice or thoughts for young professionals of any flavor?

Image from Business Card CD – my editing.

During recent weeks backpacking Europe, I have had a great deal of time to think about my future – mostly on long train rides between the great cities of Western history, Vienna and Berlin, Brussels and Prague. I want very badly the opportunity to write, to tell stories in a resurgent metropolis.

Right now, I am trying my very best to make that Philadelphia – the home of my alma mater, Temple University, from which I graduated in May.

Since the world seems to be in financial meltdown, it might seem silly for me to question the sluggish hiring of me and my peers, but I can’t help but wonder if Philadelphia is on the road to better retention of graduates from its many, varied and respected colleges and universities.

Yes, I’m telling myself it’s the economy, not that folks like Sean Blanda, Neal Santos, Brian James Kirk, Alex Irwin and dozens more I know are unemployed, underemployed, or wrongly employed because Philly doesn’t yet have the companies to do them better.

That thought is troubling. I am looking for a job I want. And, for the time being, I am looking exclusively in Philadelphia. They tell me that could be a problem.

I am not just a little worried that I am tripping over writers, reporters and journalists in Philadelphia, and not just those pushed out by the Inquirer and Daily News, but those bright, young people with new media talent over whom any sensible company – newspaper or otherwise – should be salivating.

Is this Philadelphia’s problem? While it is the fourth largest media market in the country, it isn’t considered an ideal place for those communications majors in the world.

To be fair, Philly’s health care sector is considered one of the best in the country, and I can name three friends – not a Philly lover among them – who are sticking around after graduating because they got jobs in medical industries. A law student-friend and another with a legal studies-background are planning to and have started to live in Philly respectively more because of job opportunities than love for the city.

Cities compete for educated residents. The easiest way at succeeding is to retain their own graduates, so Philly should be at an advantage, with dozens of colleges and universities in town – including the city six, among the country’s top. But we’ve struggled with keeping those graduates around [Source, PDF].

The city is supposed to be making ground, but – media industry or otherwise, recession or not – I don’t like what I’m seeing.