Facebook pushes traffic and helps build an online community. We’re over that. Joining Facebook and learning lessons from it is in the distant past. It’s time to have that next conversation. I’m interested in moving to the next step, creating more compelling Facebook pages that keep people coming back, attract more eyeballs, develop brands, help [...]

The FCC released a year-long study on the state of local accountability journalism and the view is pessimistic, as the Seattle Times reports. A lot of conversation has come from it, and I hope to add some greater thoughts here on the 40-plus page document. Download it here [PDF]. Author Steven Waldman gave a short [...]

Almost two years later, I read the entire Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, the report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. Debuted in September 2009, I tackled the 80-page document for “the Hardly. Strictly. Young conference I attended in April at the University of Missouri, which was dedicated [...]

The basic philosophy of one of those early web pioneers, Gary Vaynerchuk, was the subject of his buzzy, well-selling book ‘Crush It’ back in 2009. I’ve only gotten to it now that the second in his famed 10-book deal is coming out. The book does two very basic things: (1) outlines Gary’s general philosophy that [...]

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 [...]

Three great lessons were central David Carr’s memoir the Night of the Gun, published in 2008, which I only recently read. Carr differentiated his story from other self-described ‘junkie memoirs’ by taking two years to rigorously report on his own life, interviewing those closest and uncovering the records that might corroborate. Our pasts are more [...]

I’m late. I’ve been invited to the Hardly. Strictly. Young.  conference on alternative ways to implement Knight Foundation recommendations at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri [More on that later]. One of the fun precursors to the two-day event later this month has been participating in the Journalism Carnival of blogging, shepherded [...]

We at Technically Philly have had many short stops with sales help, making it one of our most prominent failures. Like  many startups, we found that the three of us did the best sales, particularly when we were getting started. I came across one of the better summations of why and what one could learn [...]

Action movies are supposed to be implausible. The action is meant to be superhuman — more violent, more outrageous, more daring and impossible than the last. They are not, then, in my opinion, necessarily good stories. They can be entertaining — with explosions, scene cuts and new sights — but I don’t look for an [...]

NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed rapper and cultural icon Jay-Z last month and it proved one of the more interesting episodes of one of the best, longest-running radio shows around. Jay-Z was promoting his new book Decoded (about which Amazon has an interesting video interview). You should go ahead and listen to the [...]