I speak during Technically Philly's afternoon session at BarCamp NewsInnovation 2.0 at Temple University on April 24, 2010, organization of which was led by Sean Blanda, at left.

They weren’t from around here, were they, shouted my neighbor across the street over the weekend.

She was talking about a pack of young journalists — from Florida and Washington state and California — who had invaded my Fishtown rowhome the weekend before.

That was perhaps one of the largest take aways I drew from attending and, by way of Technically Philly, co-sponsoring BarCamp NewsInnovation 2.0 April 24 — the staggering drawing power of the event in just its second year.

Sean Blanda, who has become something of the event’s face, again brought together the national event at Temple University, with the help of the school’s journalism department and a litany of sponsors. Grab all the details of the event, including all the response to the event, here, but I wanted to share some of my notes and lessons learned.

There are practical lessons — there’s always too much coffee, we need to build in 10 minute intervals between sessions, fewer sessions in each time slot so I don’t have to miss as much and perhaps BCNIPhilly.com needs to be the home of a year-round conversation — but those bigger take aways are what are most important.

Blanda already put BCNI Philly in the widest context he could — as part of an evolving Philadelphia media ecosystem. So, I’ll bring the scope in quite a bit closer and try to coax out the purest, surest nugget I got out of every session I attended. (If Blanda gets his act together, we’ll also get video of the sessions to see.)

WHO WHAT NOW by Jim MacMillan

Jim once said to me in the basement cafeteria at the Bellevue in Center City that “the Web is putting me [the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist who took a buyout from the Philadelphia Daily News] on the same level as you [the idiot 20-something who had recently graduated college and was stringing together a freelance career and small-time media startups].

He didn’t mean it derisively — or at least I didn’t take it as such. Rather, he seemed genuinely astonished, and I think Mac remains one of the purest, most accomplished journalists out who is genuinely seeking truths with the intense curiosity and skepticism that only news people breed.

In his morning session, he spoke about a new venture of his — Who What Now — but the session was very much an exploration of what he had been doing, what he had learn and what he thinks may be next, with a bit of looking back.

The take away: We really have no idea where media convergence is taking us.

HOW PENTON MEDIA DEVELOPED AD REVENUE by Prescott Shibles

For anyone serious about the business side of publishing, Shibles is the kind of guy you’d want to find at a party. The founder of eMedia Vitals, the media profitability news site that employs Blanda, has a past with About.com and Penton Media to boot and he drips B2B conversation.

His session coasted through the type of business tactics that might make an ad exec at the Society of Human Resource Management magazine yawn and one at a newspaper beam. Lead generation, database development and data collection are absolute necessities.

I asked him whether collecting a sales force or pegging your audience was the first step and he answered without pause: get the statistics and data and makeup of readers pronto, even if you pay to do so.

The take away: Content creation can make money online. We just have to look broader and act smarter.

TWITTER IS STUPID by Shannon McDonald

As an accomplice to the founder and editor of Northeast Philadelphia hyperlocal news site NEast Philly, I joined in on this session, but the conversation was hers.

McDonald walked the dozen in the audience through the breakdown of the site’s content sources — real journalism, press releases, reader submissions and aggregation — sharing some lessons along the way, like sticking to the social media platforms and other methods that work for you (Twitter isn’t popular in her older, middle-class part of town, but Facebook and Philadelphia Speaks Web forum are).

It was a wiser, truer presentation than what we presented at last year’s BarCamp.

The take away: We’re getting smarter, and the localized Web isn’t going anywhere.

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION by Technically Philly

The three of us founders of the technology community news site shared five of our more embarrassing experiences in the past 14 months of growth and the lessons we drew from them.

So, for example, being called depressing reminded us to double (or triple) the expected time for growth in our business plan and my putting my foot in my fat mouth in front of a billionaire taught us to appreciate the opportunities working on TP had brought us (and humility… and to wait to talk about a meeting until leaving the building).

We didn’t even have time to share that Blanda wearing shorts to important meetings taught us that it’s OK to conform a bit and that the empty room for the lecture we prepared taught us to be versatile (and never make the effort to get all three of us to the same presentation unless we were paid or involved otherwise).

It wasn’t the hardest hitting of our presentations, nor the most fact-filled or forward-looking, even than last year’s BCNI chat, but it seemed right. We’ve come a long way and have learned quite  a bit.

The take away: We are young and unwise but only one of those traits are different than anyone else in media today.

EVOLUTION OF JOURNALISM EDUCATION by Andrew Mendelson

The chair of Temple University’s Department of Journalism hosted a lively session on the development of that department’s curriculum during the past decade, and included the announcement of its newest iteration due out the coming fall.

It was heavy on cross-departmental learning — like required computer science courses — entrepreneurship and multimedia work. Indeed, it was just what a whiny new media college alumnus might call for. But there are obstacles to making change in big institutions. To have Mendelson talk the talk and actively moving the bureaucratic boulders of academia made me proud to call Temple my alma mater.

Indeed, Mendelson seemed more bullish on this future than some in his audience. It was McDonald, the recent Temple alumnae and hyperlocal entrepreneur, who expressed concern over the lost focus on traditional writing and editing.

The take away: The conversations about change needing to happen in journalism and its educational system is long since over and action has long since begun.

Mendelson’s session was a good end before a righteous after party at a nearby college bar. Because that sentiment is what made this year’s BCNI Philly different than the last.

It seemed last year was largely still caught in the hand wringing on what had been lost and what could be salvaged of news from the past. Like the broader conversation, the focus this year was much more attuned to what is actually being done, by people like Mendelson and McDonald and Shibbs and MacMillan.

If that’s the conversation that was fostered, it was worth the shouts from my neighbor.

Updated 4/13/10 @ 8:50 a.m.: Regionally-specific hyperlocal is just part of the broader system

WHYY, the public media station for the Delaware Valley region, is hoping a $1.2 million hyperlocal news initiative for the northwest region of Philadelphia will be the first successful bold Web-first journalism effort from a legacy media player.

Updated: That northwest hyperlocal is just one very large, very expensive trial vertical within a larger rollout.

But will “NewsWorks” go the way of a handful of its predecessors?

BIG WEB JOURNALISM TRIALS IN PHILLY

If you talk to the big players in Philadelphia media, you’ll find that there have been more than a few starts and stops in launching Web-first journalism outposts here.

In 2006, during that tumultuous year in which the Inquirer’s then-parent company Knight-Ridder divested its newspaper catalog to rival McClatchy and that giant cleared the 12 most under-performing dailies from its holdings, one of the largest conversations took hold.

While the Inquirer was bought by an investor team led by PR magnate Brian Tierney, there was real concern leading up to that purchase that Philadelphia was going to become the first major city to lose its paper of record.

Former Inquirer Editorial Page Editor and current WHYY content honcho Chris Satullo

The William Penn Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts — the two biggest nonprofit funders with interest in media in the region — sat at a table with some serious industry leaders from within the city like former Inquirer columnist Tom Ferrick and Editorial Page Editor Chris Satullo and, I’ve been told, big names as distant as Entertainment Weekly founder and CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis.

As the Tierney era has soured, Temple University’s journalism department has continued to toss its young journalists into neighborhoods throughout the city as part of its much heralded Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab. In January, the Penn Foundation held a summit of sorts, the public culmination of more than a year revisiting the subject of how best to create the future of public affairs journalism in Philadelphia. Last month, Philadelphia magazine made a new, cautious step into a daily, content stream — steps that have also been taken by alt-weeklies CityPaper and Philadelphia Weekly, in addition to any number of angles from the Inquirer and others.

Small pieces, loosely connected — to paraphrase Web developer and community organizer Alex Hillman — are floating in the ether, like Technically Philly and NEast Philly, with which I participate, and conversations are ongoing to try to connect them and the aforementioned legacy media forays.

Yet, Philadelphia remains a city without any big, bold forays into innovative Web-first journalism from an existing industry leader. WHYY hopes very much to change that, and it’s about to go public about it.

NEWSWORKS: THE WHYY INITIATIVE

The northwest part of Philadelphia. Click to enlarge.

In February, I was invited to sit in on the first advisory board meeting held for a long-rumored hyperlocal initiative from WHYY, currently being called NewsWorks and pitched as a hyperlocal testing grounds for the northwest part of Philadelphia — much in the model of NEast Philly for the Northeast.

That northwest vertical is the first of what could be many in the NewsWorks network.

The meeting was a diverse collection of nearly two dozen bloggers, journalists, community members and WHYY big wigs — yes, including Bill Marrazzo, who has managed to develop a reputation for little more than perhaps being the highest paid CEO in all of public broadcasting, despite, as former Inquirer columnist and Philadelphia Weekly editor Dan Rottenberg wrote, “WHYY has never been mistaken for a world-class organization.”

This new project could be Marrazzo’s legacy, and it’s been long in the making.

As far back as December 2008, there was talk that the public media company was itching to dive into a big Web journalism push, after the 2006 initiative from Penn and Pew died after the local Inquirer purchase and ensuing financial collapse.

WHYY had looked to hire staff for this initiative — then dubbed in-house as “Y-Factor” — as far back as last May. But, as multiple sources had mentioned to me, they were waiting a fat check from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Simultaneously last spring, WHYY’s senior producer of Web news and information left — Dan Pohlig  [Full Disclosure: he's a friend] — and soon after the network of blogs he had maintained were taken down, going with it many a link and the public media company’s only serious Web journalism outlet.

Updated: New Web content has found a home at WHYY.org, but the public media organization is looking to start a surer foundation.

Starting next Monday, WHYY will go public with NewsWorks, Y-Factor’s developed cousin, and using the motto “For You. With You. By You.”

WHYY will be sponsoring four neighborhood forums for the project, hoping to garner further community support — after already reaching out to leaders in the region.

Led by the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, the workshops will give residents a preview of what’s to come, input on what stories to cover and solicit recruits for contributions and a tease to the multimedia training that WHYY hopes to offer residents.

Update: So goes this hyperlocal start, will go the broader WHYY initiative.

Labeled a pilot project with CPB funding, WHYY’s NewsWorks — led by the aforementioned former Inqy scribe Satullo who jumped ship for the greener pastures and sure footing of public media — just might be the big splash that no other major player in Philadelphia has been able to make.

Most important here is how slowly WHYY is moving. They’re not projecting full launch of the northwest vertical until the fall — though Satullo has said they’ll begin content creation as early as this spring.

With as many major false starts as we’ve seen in Philadelphia, it comes as no surprise that NewsWorks will move carefully.

Community newspapers in Philadelphia remain wary of the Web, if any stock is to be paid to a morning panel from a journalism innovation conference held this month at Temple University.

Technically Philly was a partner in hosting PhIJI

Their thoughts just might be relevant to community-focused news gathers across the country.

Hosted by Temple’s journalism department, the Philadelphia Initiative for Journalistic Innovation was a day’s worth of smaller sessions focusing far less about the plight of big newspapers and more about smaller, more entrepreneurial ventures. Yes, the future of news just might be a series of conferences about the future of news, but I was happy to see a greater focus on the business side of the industry.

With the help of supportive chair Andy Mendelson, Temple journalism professor George Miller put together one of the first future of news conferences I’ve seen that tried to really pay attention to sustainability through profit. There’s incredible value in that, so I was thrilled to be a part of it.

Along with my two fellow co-founders of Technically Philly, I presented twice a session called ‘Be a Publisher Now’ on free tools that news-organizations and bloggers could make use of to create become more efficient and better prepared. See our presentation slides here.

I also got the opportunity to sit in on a session focused how community newspapers were dealing with the 21st-century’s dramatic paradigm shift in news-gathering. That’s where I was left more than a little puzzled.

“Would you like to know how much money I am making with the Web site?” asked Hernán Guaracao, the founder, editor, publisher and CEO of Al Dia, the 40,000-circulation Spanish-language power player on Philadelphia’s community news scene. “Zero.”

Despite that and fairly modest traffic, Al Dia, which is also the name of an unrelated Latino newspaper in Dallas, has built an altogether sexy Web presence, complete with active Twitter and Facebook accounts.

More after the video. Below watch Miller, the Temple professor who organized PhIJI, describe the conference to Al Dia.

Guaracao was the major player on the panel, which also included former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Tyree Johnson, who founded West Philly’s 10,000-circulation Westside Weekly, a business manager from Cambodian bilingual Khmer Post, which has a Los Angeles parent paper, and moderated by Heshimu Jaramogi of the Neighborhood Leader, which gets circulated in North and West Philly.

From left: Tyree Johnson, founder of Westside Weekly; Hernán Guaracao, the founder, editor, publisher and CEO of Al Dia; a representative of Cambodian newspaper Khmer Post, and moderator Heshimu Jaramogi of the Neighborhood Leader.

So it seemed Guaracao largely set the tone. And that tone was decidedly uninterested in the Web.

For four journalists serving communities that are likely less connected online than general interest dailies, that tone makes sense for today. But the question I wanted answered — and meant to ask before leaving early after becoming frustrated by a long, vague and, to be blunt, fairly trite digression into the state of big metro dailies — was whether any of the four had thought much about building Web platforms for the future.

• Had any thought about the power of using mobile technologies now or in the future to bring their audiences to their online presences?
• What lessons were they drawing from general interest daily newspaper struggles with Web erosion of core business models?
• Were there any partnerships, relationships or lessons to be learned from the city’s two alternative newsweeklies, which have similar publishing schedules and missions, but far more Web-centric audiences?

Both Johnson of the Westside Weekly and the Khmer Post representative made repeated references to their aging audience. It was their primary reason for not putting much stock into the Web. But shouldn’t any product with an aging audience be looking to find replacement consumers?

Jaramogi, the session’s moderator who spoke of a 20-year career filing radio reports for WHYY among others and mentioned utilizing Twitter for reporting, gave in too to the idea that the Web isn’t right for everyone,

I readily understand that these community news-gathering businesses don’t call for Web presences at this moment. Their core audiences pick up their print copy, as they have for years. But I fear these community mainstays — like the Northeast Times — are ignoring the potential for their next generation of readers to find a new place to find news and community online.

Al Dia founder Guaracao, to me, is an outlier. He seemed a very proud man, emblazoned in his newspaper’s logo, a sponsor of the day’s events and carting along a half dozen or more reporters and staff.

He repeatedly deflected a question from Pew Charitable Trusts project manager Thomas Ginsberg about traffic and future plans for Web monetization. The very Web presence that Al Dia has today shows a clear realization that those relationships with future generations of readers need to be met.

Yet, he downplayed the Web, with three representatives from significantly smaller operations. Whether this is a common dialogue among community newspaper publishers elsewhere in the country, I’m not entirely sure.

I had my hand up for the first few minutes of a 10-15-minute question session but soon felt my answers weren’t going to come. Three-quarters of the panel didn’t seem to take seriously any push online — even still, in 2009 and with clear signs of what has happened to others whose audiences forced them through an earlier Web push — and the fourth appeared far more protective of his intentions.

Inquirer lifestyle editor Deirdre Childress, Ginsberg and others quietly filed out early. With a speaker from Temple’s business school upstairs due to start speaking about proft planning, I soon joined them.

Below, watch a report on the PhIJI event by TU Update, the university’s student broadcast club.

Temple students during summer session. Rikard Larma for Metro.

I covered for Metro Philadelphia the political battle between my alma mater Temple University and another alumnus Rep. John Taylor, who is pushing to hold back a $175 million appropriation for the school because of a closed hospital.

Nathaniel Nnadiugwu says he feels like there’s nothing he can do about a political fight between Temple and state lawmakers that threatens to hike his tuition by $5,000.

Read the rest here, or pick up a copy if you’re in the city.

This Page Two story was my second in Metro today. I also had a front page piece. Below see some quotations that didn’t make it in.

Jon DeSantis, a 21-year-old senior, criminal justice major and one of two student body vice presidents

• They took 3,000 letters to Harrisburg.
• His student government organization was using social media to promote the possible tuition hike and showing students, even through Facebook, how to contact legislators and offering example sample letters.
• “I understand the community and Rep. Taylor are upset with the closing of the hospital. He’s upset with job loss, but his proposal is having jobs lost at Temple, so that doesn’t show a clear set of  values
• “At the end of the day, a hospital closure in Port Richmond doesn’t justify a 45 percent raise in tuition for uninvolved people.”
• “The students who had nothing to do with this are going to pay for this.”

Read the Temple University announcement to students here, and the Daily News story that broke the news before I got my hands on it here.

Kudos to my former college paper The Temple News for getting the interview with John Taylor that I didn’t get by deadline.

Sitting at my then clean and empty desk in Room 243, the newsroom of The Temple News, on May 21, 2008, the night before my college graduation.

One year ago I was cleaning out my desk in Room 243, the newsroom of The Temple News, the college newspaper of Temple University since September 1921.

I spent one year as a reporter, one year as a columnist, one year as a contributor and one year as an editor. It is, truly, where I first developed the craft, came to understand the rules and learned journalism and writing was a real professional opportunity.

I got a lot out of Room 243, TTN’s newsroom in the student center at 13th and Montgomery in Philadelphia, Pa. So, I thought it was worth revisiting what I did, what I learned and how it has affected me now 12 months clean.

First I should say writing, and even journalism, seemed a much more promising and lucrative profession even just in 2004. In October of that year I was settling into Temple University’s Peabody Hall, the first and only dormitory experience of my life. My resident assistant was a sweet-talking New Orleans-native named Donnell Jackson, now a TV news producer at the NBC affiliate in Winston-Salem, N.C.

My Start in Journalism

I played basketball, occasionally ate and often joked with Donnell, who came to know my interests in writing, which was then wholly undirected, as I grew up in a small town and graduated from a high school too small to have any school media presence. He encouraged me to get involved with The Temple News.

That sounded like about the coolest thing I ever heard of. And that’s how my journalism career began.

I soon came under the wing of Brandon Lausch, then a long-haired, skateboarding junior Editorial page editor raised in Lancaster County and now a reporter at the Courier News in central New Jersey. For him I penned the first clip of my career on Oct. 15, 2004, a giant 620-word, John Stossel-inspired attack on the FDA. I didn’t know what the Hell I was doing and can remember being at first intimidated by what I saw as the power of a 10,000-circulation college newspaper in the fourth-largest media market in the country. I consider Brandon my first teacher, I’ll even say mentor of journalism.

Because, it seems funny to say, I took just one journalism class in my entire four productive years at Temple University. I was a political science major and that one class I did stay in was more because I loved the professor – former Sports Illustrated scribe and NBA referee Chuck Newman, a funny and haggard, frazzled old cook – than any academic rigor.

No, my classroom was The Temple News and my teachers became the talented young journalists just a year or two older than I was. It was in this way I became so devoted to the power of college media, young people gaining confidence and self-realization by teaching and learning from their peers.

The Editorial Board of The Temple News in fall 2007. From left: Managing Editor Jesse North, Editorial-page Editor Christopher Wink, Editor-in-Chief Chris Reber and, lying, News Editor Tyson McCloud.

Freshman year 2004/05 – First began contributing to editorial-page commentary

Sophomore year 2005/06 – Continued commentary, while also acquiring news and features clips

Junior year 2006/07 – Mostly gone while traveling and studying in Japan, though I contributed late in the year

Senior year 2007/08 – Named Opinion editor, leading the editorial page, its board and commentary, additionally wrote weekly column, created multimedia packages, news and features clips

My Most Memorable Experiences

I’d like to share some experiences.

My Work

During my remarkable tenure with The Temple News I took photos, video, cut audio, edited multimedia, reported news, wrote features, filed a weekly column, edited a section, led the editorial board, helped with Web design, alumni relations, archive-organization and future planning and development. The value of working with a storied, historic, large college newspaper is entering a culture and finding a world of knowledge and learning, particularly being able to cover big city news. But all of that happened in the friendly and fun culture of a college newspaper. I learned more there than I may realize.

I’d like to share some of my work below.

I took photos of a Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign rally that was held at Temple University March 4, 2008.

Community Visions

Headshot for The Temple News

I wrote a weekly column called Community Visions, which another writer continued after my departure. Its purpose was to bridge the often wide gap between the Temple University community and its surrounding neighbors. So I covered those communities, what affected them. I developed relationships, got calls, e-mails, even letters from community residents. They picked up the newspaper from time to time already, now they had a real reason to do so. I knew there was a void in coverage and felt it was an opportunity to bolster our readership.

Temple-News.com

Temple-News.com is the Web version of the student newspaper of Temple University. I helped our Web editor Sean Blanda organize and design the very large move from College Publisher CMS to a WordPress-based site. Read more about Sean’s heavy lifting here.

Peter J. Liacouras Multimedia Package

Photo by Mike Korostelev

I was eager to develop multimedia packages. When I realized the 25th anniversary of the Temple logo nearly coincided with the completion of a host of projects first launched by long-retired university president Peter J. Liacouras I reached out to him the August before my senior year. By October we met, and, after a couple more meetings with a photographer and videographer, we had our packge, again with the help of Blanda. See the finished product here.

Hall & Oates

A bit of a server problem lost the final product of my second multimedia package for The Temple News, despite the hard work of Web Editor Sean Blanda. Still, I got the chance to interview both Daryl Hall and John Oates, who were gracious and bright and proud Temple alumni. My primary feature on Temple University alumni Hall & Oates is still available though, as is an online-only feature I wrote about the Hall & Oates impact on the Sound of Philadelphia and the Uptown Theater.

Rockers Daryl Hall and John Oates of Hall & Oates, former Temple University students both of whom I interviewed for The Temple News.

Barack Obama Race Speech Feature

Barack Obama in Philadelphia, delivers speech on race at Constitution Center

By Christopher Wink

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., addressed race and bigotry, crucial issues in the ongoing Democratic presidential primary of late, during a speech at a private rally in a full second floor hall of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia this morning.

“We’ve been in a racial stalemate for four years,” Obama said to a crowd of several hundred, including a throng of media. He spoke at length of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., a former pastor of Obama’s in Chicago… Read more.

I was there, and I’ll always be able to say that. I took that photo, among others, fought the crowds and saw what will be called one of the most meaningful political campaign speeches ever given.

See all my posts for Broad & Cecil, TTN’s news blog that launched in September 2007, here, and all my posts for Room 243, the alumni blog I helped launch, here.

With a first place Keystone Press Award for spot news in May 2006.

Students learn. Now let's teach them something they need.

My friend Sean Blanda once regularly wrote on the failures of journalism schools. It’s not exactly my territory because I studied politics, not journalism in school.

But, I’ve heard enough from friends and colleagues. It seems most everything they learned, I learned while working at my college newspaper.

The journalism school at Temple University, like many other top j-schools, is chock full of talent. Temple is dripping with accomplished reporters, so I long decided j-school is for contacts, not knowledge.

That’s never more true than now, because, well, most all professors at j-schools are from an era that digitization is fast making irrelevant (There are many exceptions, two at Temple being here and here). The rules are broken and more than ever, journalism schools are repugnantly, distastefully, woefully far from leading students to careers, aside from the Temple name and, yes, the contacts they make.

I’m nearly a year out and embroiled in a freelance career, so I thought up a few classes I’d like to see j-schools teach.

Here are some course selections I’d like to see become tried and true j-school classics:

1. The Business of Freelancing — What’s a sole-proprietorship? What are all the tax implications of basing my business wherever I do? How do I and why would I get a business checking account, credit card and fictitious name? What is tax exempted? What isn’t? How can I make money on my car, my phone and my camera? This all has real world relevance. Students will finish the class with an EIN, just like they will a sense of pitching in e-mail.
2. Web presences and reporter branding — If this could ever be done by folks who no longer find Facebook or Twitter novel, this would be key. Let’s talk about the future some suggest brands might have for reporters, both on-staff and freelancing. By the end of the class, students will have a simple Web presence, understand RSS feeds, have clips and their resume online and ready to send out. They’ll understand the link economy and why it matters.
3. Journalism entrepreneurship — You see, 2008 was unsurprisingly a move toward young journalists being more business-minded. This year, with a sour economy and struggling print industry, we’re at it again. Friends and I launched Technically Philly. I’m contributing to NEastPhilly.com — which, to be fair, was started as part of a journalism class. I am helping with research on a large-scale project I’ve yet to disclose, like I haven’t yet mentioned a couple other smaller works. The old model of climbing from small paper to medium paper is dead, at least in a print way. I don’t know where it’s going, but the most successful journalists are going to be smart brand-builders and heady business minds. For the kid who wants to start a magazine or thinks he can make money on a blog, here is the class that explains how and the obstacles ahead. Again, heavy in tax status, employee-implication and other science-heavy material.
4. Multimedia journalism — And I don’t mean trot out a professor who can teach you writing for radio or how to do a TV news stand-up. That’s garbage. The future is the convergence of media, not the dominance of a more visceral medium. So, let’s talk real knowledge. What are the basics of video and photography and audio? Cram one media in a week. Blogging and other social media. Editing, etc. What camera is best, what are the aspects we need to learn or understand?
5. Programming for journalists — Let’s face it. The Web is a language journalists need to know — yeah, the Web and Spanish, in my opinion. We don’t need to know it all, but we need to know what’s what. HTML, CSS, Flash, Java, and whatever the Hell else it out there. What’s the newsroom practicality?
6. Newsroom culture and innovation — How many young people go to newsrooms and realize, wow, everyone hates them! Let’s talk bureaucracy and curmudgeon-culture. Let’s relish in the history of journalism, and the future everyone hates. I want to hear from old-heads. Teach me how they feel about me, this young guy. Why don’t we read Angryjournalist.com everyday. I want to know what I’m getting into, how there will be great pushback in institutions against innovation.
7. Local, Niche and Community — Everyone in the class has to highlight a niche community they want to cover or support. Cross-listed with entrprenuership journalism and in the business school. Each student needs a real business plan, a monetization strategy – non-ad based, I should add – and a coverage pattern. Tax status included. Contributors, etc. included. Why it can survive, what it’s sustainability is, etc. Then they launch it.

We are so done with the inverted pyramid. Fuck it, kids have to know how to write. We can teach the rules as we go — attribution, nut grafs and the rest. I picked it up through my peers at a college newspaper, so no longer can anyone think an entire major — four years of someone’s life should be devoted to it.

These other skill sets are important. They are things you can learn from places like Multimedia in Minutes.

But my point is practicality. I wanted to hit my head against the wall when a friend of mine, still a j-student at a certain large urban university recently ousted from the NCAA tournament, who was required to build a site for class. Cool! Oh, except, it had to be something entirely new and had to be hosted by the university. …So it dies after class. …No you can’t build a professional portfolio or a community-news platform. …That’s a waste of time. Period.

Practical learning is the best learning in the world, particularly for journalists, so students should get oodles of credit for freelancing, internships or other bylines. Writing for the college newspaper should be a given.

What’s more, students should come away with hard and fast lessons they learned – not theoretical stuff and not the equivialent of knowledge from a j-textbook from 1967.

Did I miss any classes? Is anyone teaching these or has anyone taken them? Any university want to pay me the big bucks to teach them?

To: President Ann Weaver Hart
Re: Professor Eugene Martin
CC: University Provost Lisa Staiano-Coico, SCT Dean Concetta M. Stewart, BTTM Department Chair Jan Fernback

President Hart:

One of the great honors of my young life was to be named the speaker at my graduation from Temple University on May 22, 2008. My five minute speech to more than 8,000 people in the Liacouras Center focused on what became my passion while studying at the big urban research university of my dreams: community involvement.

When I first walked Diamond Street long enough to realize it doesn’t stop at 17^th Street, I didn’t know Eugene Martin. When I first began to realize North Philadelphia was a complex amalgamation of nearly a dozen distinct neighborhoods, I didn’t know Eugene Martin. I started my journey beyond Temple’s Main Campus before Eugene Martin, but it was never the same after meeting him.

It is my understanding that Professor Martin’s services for the Broadcast, Telecommunications and Mass Media department of the School of Communications will not be retained for the spring semester, despite an outcry of student and faculty support. Few announcements have shook my love for and pride in a university whose founding mission – one of Russel Conwell – I believe I have based my life on for longer than I knew a word of ‘Acres of Diamonds.’

Martin is a filmmaker. Martin’s research and curriculum do not fit in BTMM. These are arguments to be made, but not ones I can answer – I do not write curriculum or make decisions on whether a professor’s research is befitting my department.

I can answer a million other questions about Professor Martin, though. Like that I took the maximum two semesters taking Martin’s Community in Media class and then fought for independent study research so I could stay under his wing. I was a political science major; attracting students to BTMM has to be an asset for the university.

Because of Martin I have been in the homes and the cars and on the basketball courts of the people who are often seen as untouchable, invisible in central North Philadelphia. Not because of hatred or even bigotry, because how do you come to know someone you can never know? Professor Martin has transcended socioeconomic canyons, bridged cultural oceans. His work is unfinished, just now growing faster still at the Village of Arts and Humanities and in other institutions around Temple’s Main Campus.

I am very young, President Hart, so forgive me for thinking Martin’s profession and curriculum seem irrelevant to the work he and his students do for this university, this community and this city.

Temple is a business, not a charity. I wrote maybe 50 columns with this same theme for The Temple News, the 86-year-old college newspaper of your university. What I came to find, though, is that educational philanthropy is one of the surest ways toward educational enlightenment.

Martin isn’t filming North Philadelphia teens for his benefit. His curriculum isn’t based on his needs. He is traipsing twice weekly five or six blocks north – where increasingly fewer Temple students understand and almost no other faculty will go – with a collection of Temple students, whose number is growing each semester. He is putting cameras and equipment, multimedia and ideas, in the hands of college students – many of whom are white and increasingly suburban – and having them show the youngest slice of Philadelphia’s other half what their world looks like through a lens.

That breaks barriers, not the least of which are in broadcast, telecommunications and mass media.

Letting Martin leave is to ignore Russel Conwell- to ignore the mission for which Temple University has come to be known. He is a Philadelphian. He is a Temple graduate, a noted and celebrated alumnus. He wants to work in communities that were supposed to have died 25 years ago. He wants to bring Temple with him.

During interviews and on applications to become commencement speaker, these are all answers that would have made me a prime candidate. To be seen as one with the Conwellian tradition. To think a professor like this will be allowed to leave, but the hundreds who do not leave their offices, who subscribe to a type of academia that will only make Temple a standard university in a questionable environment, rather than an exceptional and unique university surrounded by work that is to be done, shakes me to my core. Truly. It’s insulting to me, a recent alumnus who thought this university did take seriously its history.

I hope you can remedy this situation, through mediation, advice or counsel. I always found you to be bright and translucent in your believing in Temple’s mission. Please know there are but a handful of people in this world for whom I would write an impassioned letter on their behalf. One happens to be a professor at Temple University. I hope he can remain so.

Best,
Christopher Wink

Ow, that hurts.

My very good buddy Sean Blanda was named among the 100 best young journalists in the country. And, rightly, so, got a nod on the front page of Temple University’s School of Communications homepage.

I was gleeful over getting the same nod – a place on the UWire 100. So where’s my love?

Now, I do have to be fair. I did not graduate with a journalism degree. That’s true.

But I’d figure Temple’s journalism school would want, like any other, to claim as many “honorees” as they can. It was hard to miss me, I was even quoted in Seany’s profile. I didn’t make the cut, though, when it came to SCT boasting.

Also, I was an editor with The Temple News, the celebrated college newspaper of that university, that has to be considered a driving force in promotion for the school’s journalism program.

Is this petty? Of course it is petty!

But don’t worry, this got more of a laugh than much of a whine out of me.

That’s because I am apparently developing a long history with Temple University when it comes to half-starts, half-honors and good, old-fashioned kicks in the balls.

At my desk in the newsroom of The Temple News after graduating and cleaned out May 21, 2008.

In April I wrote a piece to run in the commentary section of The Temple News but never ran it. My last column was an open letter to the university’s President Ann Weaver Hart. Since last week I shared video of my commencement address, on which this column focuses, I thought I would share the column that never was.

By Christopher Wink | April 18, 2008 | The Temple News (never ran)

I am your commencement speaker.

A committee of professors and administrators have decided that I am serviceable enough to represent my 4,000 fellow graduates on Temple University May 22 commencement ceremony. I will speak to you, our families and our friends, more than 8,000 people in the Liacouras Center.

But, I, too, have sat through graduation speeches of little note and boring memory. I want this to be yours as well.

So I welcome any and all ideas, suggestions and comments, particularly, but not only, from those who are graduating with me on May 22. I would love to hear any of your stories so that I might include them in the brief 5 minutes I have to address you all, your families and my own.

There comes a time in our lives at which we first feel the weight of our being. Traditions are meant to ease this burden by helping us understand who we are and where we are meant to go.

So as we finish another stage of education we are told middle class living dictates is necessary, a day of graduation, of speakers and caps and gowns should calm us.

We can take photos with family, crowding out into North Broad Street. I do not take lightly the opportunity to forever be the commencement speaker for Temple’s Class of 2008.

I take a great ownership in this university. I was among the first Temple volunteers to endeavor on service immersion trips to Tijuana, Mexico and Laredo, Texas and New Orleans and White River, South Dakota. I was in Sullivan Hall before President Ann Weaver Hart, Lincoln Financial Field before Al Golden and was wearing cherry and white before Fran Dunphy.

But with that must come humility. How difficult it is to grasp the history of this university. Temple students were servicing the world long before I was born. Sullivan Hall, and even the Linc, were envisioned before I even moved to Philadelphia, and Fran Dunphy has bled Big 5 basketball longer than he likely cares to admit.

These have been lessons in community for me. How old this university, this city, this world is, yet how often fresh ideas and fresh lives are welcomed. I get warm and gooey when I think about Temple and Philadelphia welcoming me – a fair student from a rural northwest corner of New Jersey.

As I have learned about community, I have learned of the true expansiveness of Temple and this urban play land in which for four years I have been allowed to bicycle through, and subway through, and bus through and slink warm and satisfied through.

But we do not live in postcards or pictures or fine Victorian paintings.

There is trash on your corner and a broken antenna trailing my car. We have survived a college existence that holds in it fundamental geographic differences than those of suburban, true, a great many urban, universities. It is impossible to ignore this. So I will not.

I hope your stories will help me remain balanced and true.

I have learned that speeches on graduation day are meant to remind you that on that day, everything changes. But it isn’t true. No one will leave here different. Because the changes have already come.

In a Center City cubicle, a bar on Chestnut, or a house on Carlisle Street. With your girlfriend on Buery Beach. In the first row of the student section at a men’s basketball game. At a party in McGonigle or at 1:30 a.m. on a Tuesday in the TECH Center. On the Broad Street Line or a narrow dormitory bed in Peabody Hall. Maybe even in a classroom.

I began college with less than complete focus. By my sophomore year, I learned enough to get B’s. By my junior year, I learned enough to get A’s. This year, I learned enough to know that I haven’t learned much at all.

Maybe the greatest gift Temple has ever given me, leaving aside the city of Philadelphia, is the knowledge that the universe is littered with what I do not know and will forever struggle to understand.

I hope you all learned something like that or your own lessons of importance while studying on North Broad Street. Write me, call me. Tell me what else I need to include.

See and read my speech and other related materials.

Four months ago I graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia.

I was honored enough to be named student commencement speaker. Read text of the speech here.

Only now have I gotten video of my speech online. Have a watch below.

Alumnus and Board of Trustees member Bill Cosby spoke also, after a four year hiatus from Temple commencements – after more than 20 years as the school’s featured speaker. Former University President Peter Liacouras first brought him into the fold, sexual harassment allegations pushed him out, and – I like to think - a commentary piece written by my friend Sean Blanda brought him back. He makes sure to get a laugh at my expense, watch that.

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I submitted to Newsweek a piece on meeting and warming up the crowd for the Cos – it was rejected, but why shouldn’t I force you to read it, too?

Bill Cosby told me I shouldn’t worry. No one was going to remember anything I said anyway.

In May, I graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia and was honored to address my peers and their families as our student commencement speaker. For my portion, I urged Temple graduates of 2008, in addition to those of the past and those yet to come, to stand by our obligation to leveraging our intellectual capital in the communities that surround the university’s Main Campus in central North Philadelphia.

Temple’s gift is that it is surrounded by neighborhoods that aren’t as near to any other university as large and as influential. I hope my fellow graduates and I remember and forever appreciate that, I said.

Cosby – the seminal 20th-century entertainment icon turned controversial race commentator – addressed my fellow graduates after I did.

“I told Wink,” Cosby said to nearly 10,000 new-alumni and family members. “Wink, don’t give that speech. Nobody’s going to remember a thing you said, Wink.”

He told me something similar before we went on.

“Nobody will even be listening,” he assured me. Read the rest here.

Indeed, the university’s commencement was great – better than my individual College of Liberal Arts event - not only because of Cosby or even the privilege of addressing my fellow graduates, but being in our school’s basketball stadium – the Liacouras Center – with 8,000 people, and all the excitement that Temple graduations have come to represent.

A great way to end a memorable and important time of my life.

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