Back in February, Philadelphia magazine profiled Doogie Horner, a quirky stand up comedian who has gotten some national attention, a major publisher’s backing and has the audacity to think he’s going to stay living in Philadelphia. Doogie Horner is a comedian, and he isn’t encouraged by what he sees inside Noche, a Center City bar [...]

Three recently shared numbers stand out to me as being incredibly powerful, evocative and important for the future of Philadelphia: 8,456 The tiny, 0.6 increase in Philadelphia’s population from the 2000 to the 2010 U.S. Census, a small grow that halts an enormous trend: 50 years of population loss from a 1950 height of 2.1 [...]

With the passage of Resolution 110218, Philadelphia City Council officially named the last six days of April officially as Philly Tech Week, as celebrated with a reading of the resolution in council chambers Thursday morning. There, my colleague Sean Blanda and I, two of the three co-founders of Technically Philly and organizers of Philly Tech [...]

Back in July 2008, I finally got around to updating a WordPress.com I had been using to track the work I was doing on my undergraduate honors thesis researching the future of the beleaguered Philadelphia Republican Party. Two and a half years later, in looking to get a jump start on a 2011 resolution of [...]

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 [...]

A lot of legacies over at WHYY are going to be forged with whatever comes out of Newsworks, the online news re-branding and redevelopment initiative from Philadelphia’s NPR affiliate that I first wrote about back in April. In short, NewsWorks, which had its official launch last Monday, Nov. 15, is WHYY’s new online news brand, [...]

I am not going to write about the brief media blitz that surrounded the controversy of the City of Philadelphia enforcing its business privilege license requirement for bloggers. My good friend and Technically Philly co-founder Sean Blanda already handled well my perspective. (Quickly, Philadelphia, like many municipal governments, requires a license to do business in [...]

My reading of choice tends to be contemporary Philadelphia non-fiction — its true stories, histories and cultural anthropology. Across nearly all of this writing from the 20th and early 21st century is a very unexpected theme: someone growing up angry and put-on in some forgotten neighborhood and developing a very hateful relationship with their city. [...]

Philadelphia has developed this reputation: Killadelphia or something like it. In a prominent New York Times profile of Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams last week,  the city was described as having been “battered for years by the worst sort of superlatives — the highest murder rate, the lowest conviction rate.” What a damaging and sweeping [...]

Last month, a study from the Brookings Institution was a major news story. White flight? In a reversal, America’s suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities, the poor and a rapidly growing older population as many younger, educated whites move to cities for jobs and shorter commutes. [Source] It’s complicated of course: [...]