The importance, sway and influence of one of the world’s most dominant 20th century newspapers was the focus of the 1998 collection of essays about the once powerful Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, edited by its former education reporter Peter Binzen, who also wrote Whitetown USA. Dubbed ‘Nearly Everybody Read It,’ a riff off the paper’s legendary [...]

There were a dozen or more daily newspapers in Philadelphia at one time, I hear. Trouble is, I couldn’t seem to find anyone who could name what all of those papers were. So I went and did some good old fashioned research — with some great direction from representatives of the following institutions. Below, find [...]

If you cover a big city with rambling and varied regions and neighborhoods, your reporting and writing should reflect that. Yet, from a culture of journalism that cycled reporters through various markets to urban decay that encouraged too many of them to live outside those big cities they covered, one of the more common complaints [...]

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 [...]

I am not going back to freelancing. Last month, I came on full-time with Technically Media, a company I helped launch and produces Technically Philly. Still, going back on my own, in some form, has returned me to thinking about and combing through some of the advice I collected in 2009, during my year freelancing. [...]

It was sometime this month two years ago that, while still an undergraduate at Temple University, I started tossing around what I hoped to be a new tagline for The Temple News, the college newspaper on North Broad Street. Weekly in Print. Daily online, I suggested. I wrote it on a piece of paper and [...]

I came across this dated quote from Clay Shirky: “So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this – the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to [...]

You just aren’t doing everything you can. It’s the seemingly unintentional, passive-aggressive jab that I sometimes get from older or otherwise more established journalists, writers and editors. Most often and in many ways, I’m sure the sentiment is pristine in its accuracy, often abutted by the never-to-be-defended-against “it takes time,” which, of course is always [...]

Nobody in business will ever say he isn’t concerned with listening to the customer. Really proving it, of course, is the difference between well-loved companies and those that aren’t. Even notoriously frustrating Comcast has gained ground with its use of social media — a powerful mechanism for communication that, despite all the attention, we still [...]

When local news is at its best, it delivers coverage no one else on the planet it can. So, it’s important to take it seriously. A friend revisited with me a story from northeastern Pennsylvania earlier this year that exemplified it wonderfully: a steer gets loose from a pen the night before a high school [...]