After announcing I took a step away from freelancing, a legal aide with aspirations of a cushy freelance career shot me an e-mail. “Can people still even start a freelance career?” I did it for just a year and did so out of college, so I don’t pretend to be any sort of expert. Yet, [...]

Sometimes it’s the stories you don’t quite expect to, that get one of the warmest responses. I posted two weeks ago about a story on the secret lives of ballerinas I wrote for the Inquirer. It came on the same day as my Philadelphia Weekly cover story on suburban rapper Asher Roth. While the Roth [...]

The following feedback came in regarding my recent article about the halted expansion of the central branch of the Free Library, as collected here: I was at the library last week. I’m not sure the expansion is a necessary ingredient of the Philadelphia ego. Chasing technology as an improvement when the city is not flush [...]

I don’t want to repeat this anymore, so let me direct you elsewhere. I got an e-mail from a young aspiring journalist, still in high school and already coming to the questions I just started coming upon late in college. Her question: how do you buy spaces on a google seerch? Hey, even she will [...]

And I thought children hated me. Debbie Reinhardt’s second-grade class at the Kiel School in Kinnelon, N.J. sent me Flat Stanley, the title character of a children’s book from 1964. The flattened boy from the book gets sent around the world in an envelope. I’ve been charged with showing our pal Stanley around Philadelphia, but [...]

We had a good conversation on the merit of full-text or partial feeds on a post recently that I never got to address. I got a few e-mails on the matter, too, actually. (No surprise they were as conflicted as the comments) What we all seemed to agree on is that newspapers (or any RSS [...]

I’m always surprised and really proud to see my unique visitors and subscriptions increasing and love nothing more than a fresh comment to help create a dialogue I try to highlight on this site. Now, that has happily been a fairly regular occurrence for a good portion of this site’s one-year plus existence. Still, sometimes [...]

There are, I’m willing to bet, a lot of Jason Martins. One particular Jason Martin is an online marketing manager in Cincinnati, Ohio. He left a worthwhile comment on yesterday’s post about branidng your byline. It prompts a conversation I’ve had here and read elsewhere, but it’s always worth returning to. With a common name [...]

I already shared the wide array of reader response I got for a recent A1 story I had for the Philadelphia Inquirer that covered the Harrisburg reform movement [There's video for the story up now, too]. I got another call yesterday that I wanted to share. A Maria called to compliment me on the story [...]

Last week, I shared some reader response I received after a recent story on state Rep. Babette Josephs ran on the cover of the Inquirer’s Local Section. So it comes as no surprise that getting a story on the cover the newspaper – one about the Harrisburg reform movement yesterday – got some response, too. [...]