Beginnings say as much about who begins them as they do about what they begin. Journalists and writers, of professional kind or independent and online, take very seriously the ledes they produce and how others see them. It’s very likely that I have had harsher scrutiny for ledes I’ve written than for anything else, and [...]

I shared the rough curriculum I had established for working with a journalism club at a neighborhood school before my time there was cut short. Just a week after I took a full-time job and told the club’s adviser that I’d have to take a bit of a sabbatical from my time there, I wanted [...]

Before I suspended my trips to Frankford High School to work with the school’s journalism club, we established what would have been a nice rhythm. Every Thursday, I would come and give a lesson, and the following Monday, the students would use what we talked about and put it into practice by getting out of [...]

I spent portions of a couple school years while at college helping get a newspaper underway at the Franklin Learning Center, a strong, diverse magnet school in the Spring Garden neighborhood of Philadelphia. So, I was excited to take some time away from my freelancing work once a week to work with the journalism club [...]

As I wrote Tuesday, social media ain’t all bad. Indeed, the over-heightened echo chamber of circular praise and obsessive coverage and conversation on those now familiar Web-based tools stem from their truly trans-formative power. I’ve taken an interest in all of that. Enough so that, in addition to the conferences at which I’ve spoken, conversations [...]

You’re supposed to learn from teaching, or something like that. I suppose with that knowledge in hand, I knew I’d learn something when, two years ago, I first walked into the Franklin Learning Center, a magnet high school in the Spring Garden neighborhood of Philadelphia. I was there to help launch a student newspaper. I, [...]