Neil Budde, founding editor and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Online

News has broken of the new CEO of the multi-million dollar journalism initiative housed at Temple, a project I’ve written about before here, but I hadn’t seen any confirmation posted yet, so I thought I’d share the press release from Temple that was sent my way.

PRESS RELEASE:

PHILADELPHIA – The Center for Public Interest Journalism at Temple University’s School of Communications and Theater (www.cpijournalism) has named Neil Budde as the founding CEO of the Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network (PPIIN).

Budde (pronounced buddy) will lead the development of PPIIN (a placeholder name until the organization is founded and branded), a collaborative organization intended to help increase the amount and quality of news and information in the Greater Philadelphia region. It is funded through a $2.4 million grant to the School of Communications and Theater from the William Penn Foundation.

Budde was hired for his demonstrated management skills in enterprises involving journalism and technology, and his experience in anticipating and successfully accommodating for innovations and trends. Budde was most recently executive vice president at ePals and president of DailyMe, a start-up focused on delivering personalized news and information. Prior to this, Budde served as editor in chief of Yahoo News and founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online (WSJ.com). Budde was also involved nationally in the Online News Association, serving on its board for five years, and The News Literacy Project.

“The center’s leadership is thrilled to have attracted a leader of Neil’s caliber to the region,” said Thomas Jacobson, director of the center and interim dean of the School of Communications and Theater. “He will provide immediate leadership and vision for this important effort to improve public affairs in Philadelphia through journalism, information sharing and data transparency and analysis. His mix of experience as an entrepreneur, executive, technologist and journalist will provide a strong foundation for PPIIN.”

Budde, who will serve as a consultant to the center while he develops a strategic plan and incorporates PPIIN as a corporate entity, plans to reach out to public interest journalism stakeholders as a first step in establishing priorities for PPIIN.

“The Philadelphia region is a dynamic hotbed of news innovation, and I’m excited to join the existing network of journalists and newsmakers here,” said Budde. “I look forward to working with them to develop a sustainable organizational model to support our mission of deploying public interest news and information to pursue good government, transparency and accountability.”

Budde is expected to begin work at PPIIN in March. While developing PPIIN as an organization, he will be supported by the staff of the Center for Public Interest Journalism.

“Our investment is intended to advance the public interest through high-quality journalism. We are eager for Neil to build an innovative, networked organization that will increase the amount and quality of public interest news in the region, particularly on issues that aren’t covered well now,” said Jeremy Nowak, president and CEO of the William Penn Foundation.

For more information:

Center for Public Interest Journalism: www.cpijournalism.org

The William Penn Foundation: www.williampennfoundation.org

School of Communications and Theater at Temple University: www.temple.edu/sct

###

I reported on the funding for Technically Philly. Read her story here.

In the world of radio, there were a few versions, and I don’t have the full version with my audio included, but below hear two of the audio pieces: one from Maiken and my audio clip that was played following the host’s intro.

LISTEN HERE FOR FULL VERSION

LISTEN HERE FOR MY CLIP

Chess player Garry Kasparov at an event from the Harlem Children's Zone, a nationally-celebrated program devoted to impacting kids at a young age. Photo by Mig Greengard.

Two hundred fifty students from the largely troubled neighborhoods of North Philadelphia will receive full, four-year scholarships to neighobring Temple University, my alma mater, during the next decade, as the Inquirer reported.

It’s a generous effort from a major urban research university often called on for more outreach in its surrounding communities. Good things, warm stories and, surely, great public relations will come as a result. Of a student population numbering nearly 30,000, 250 may seem small, but it’s always worth valuing.

All that said, a friend summed up my exact reaction to the situation. This is a kind, relatively easy, relatively small move. It ignores the reality that the biggest impact on the development of young people happens long before they are applying for college.

“[Temple] should have given full-day preschool from birth and full-day kindergarten to 250 neighboring kids and intensive parental training to 250 neighborhood new parents 18 years ago. That would have been more effective and ultimately cheaper.” - Dan Pohlig

Temple, of course, is a university, so offering those scholarships have precedence there. This is a fine act, but there are bigger issues and more interesting approaches to take on.

How large technology companies still lead innovation in the world is the focus of a freelance story I wrote for Temple Review, the alumni magazine of Temple University.

Read the story here or download the PDF here, on page 24.

An earlier nut graf: Innovation has been seen as strictly in the purview of tiny, agile startups, taking an idea and bringing it to market. But as the speed of new technologies continues to quicken, the need for large businesses to help bring products to market becomes even greater. So big corporations are not only playing a remarkably underplayed role in innovation, they are also innovating in how they change the world altogether.

Give it a read and then check some of the extras from my interviews that didn’t make it into the piece.

Munir Mandviwalla

• Founding chairman of Fox’s Management InformationSystems Department
• ‘Small businesses may be the inventor or the conceiver or even who brings that innovation to the initial market, but you really need the larger firm to actually see these innovations through
• LiquidHub is also a company that is letting IT lead. Campbell’s is heavily outsourced IT, while Merck has very high internal IT, but both focused on innovation.
• “We have this herd mentality of chasing the next great startup that will save the world,” Munir says. “We just believe it’s true, but we need a network of big players to make it happen globally.”
• “In corporate culture of the 80s and 90s, you’d say, ‘if you buy IBM, you cannot get fired,’ because there was such a movement with conservatism and IBM was that safe choice that would work and was no risk and did not really show innovation.
• “Really, the largest part of success with innovation in technology has to do with standardization. When there is too much standardization, you find new innovation, but to really grow that innovation to start, a company needs distribution power that startups or other small companies just don’t have.
• “There is a fortuitous relationship between small and large firms. Large firms have these tools to create success and small firms don’t have much to lose so they will bring new products, but in technology, they usually cannot grow themselves. They have to die or be acquired or have their idea stolen altogether, for it to really succeed.”
• Using the technology of Mosaic, a University of Illinois project that is called the first popular graphical web browser, Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and began packaging it with its Windows operating system. “Without Microsoft, the Internet and the browser would not be as ubiquitous as it is today. Despite the power of that technology, it took the explosion of what became a large company to truly spread that innovation to non-technical types.”
• “Cisco really did most of its innovation through acquisition.
• “But now, innovation is a hot word for old boring corporate America, and they’re serious about it because if they think it’s just a fad, they’ll never survive.”
• “A lot of companies want to sit on their asses, and wait for good things to come around. During the financial boom, it was much easier to finance innovation acquisition.”
• “You look at the creation of the Internet and find large, somewhat bureaucratic organizations really fuel that innovation, something like HTTP protocol needed to come from a force that was something like a large company to create standardization.”

EDWARD QUINN

• “It’s always interesting to make something from nothing. The larger companies provide a platform for when that technology becomes adopted.”
• “When you look at how quickly the country adopted radio, then TV, then the internet and now social networking, you see the role for the big company to provide market acceptance or infrastructure for all of those.”
• “We’ve had products sit in our vault and now we want to just take the intellectual property and package a solution when it fits a demand.”
• “Microsoft is moving to a cloud model. If you’re a big software company, you have to wondering how do you charge. The business models of the last five years are going to change like they did before then. We have to be excited to take risk.”
• “Big companies are becoming more flexible because they have to be.

LEONARDO MATTIAZZI

• Mattiazzi, who relocated to King of Prussia in 2006 to launch Ci&T’s North American headquarters,
• Leonardo Mattiazzi, ’09, VP of International Business at Ci&T, helped oversee the product get to market. 37 [Feb. 8, 1974], 14 years with Ci&T, moved from Brazil in 2006. summer 2009 MBA graduate
• Ci&T has 1,100 employees but now 35 percent of revenue comes from North America. It’s a progressive, young company that relies mostly on a client basis of big corporations. It’s core business is developing tools and applications for large companies, like Johnson and Johnson and Coca Cola.
• “People focus on smaller startups because it’s sexier. It’s that simple. People love the idea of an entrepreneur taking an idea and creating something new. It’s a story worth telling. Everyone wants that person to be successful, we can relate to that as an individual.”
• Also, when you’re a smaller company, you’re usually identified with one product, so it’s easier for people to identify with your innovation. Walk into a supermarket and you’ll find Johnson and Johnson products everywhere, with innovation behind many of them, but it doesn’t feel innovative.
• “In order to really disrupt the market, an established company needs to take precautions because it’s often not beneficial to their core business. Their resources are assigned to their primary businesses, not creating new ones. Something new needing investment and resources is very tricky.”
• It’s somewhat slower pace of things because these big companies need to get their returns.
• These companies can also create things that are disruptive, but it’s difficult because it’s dangerous to what they have established.
• Big companies have more resources, more experiences and they have a process in place to get to market. You may be very bright but some things require a lot of equipment or expertise or direction. One thing is for sure, innovating requires a lot of trial and error and a smaller company or individual may not be able to experiment in the way a bigger partner can.”
• “A technology startup today is very inexpensive, creating an online product or a mobile app is very cheap today. There is the cloud, open source software, not much need for infrastructure.
  It can happen very quick, but not everything is online or a mobile device. When you look at physical products, like GE or Johnson and Johnson, things that need to be manufctured involves cost. Bigger companies are better prepared than some.
• “I think we’ll see a lot more small companies coming up in new places. There will always be big companies doing innovation, one way or another. Today it’s really expensive technology startup and this happens cheaper and cheaper. The barriers are lower, and they will be even lower in the future. that helps us as individuals.
• “Innovation has been centered in particular places, like the United States, a center of technology and other innovation, particularly in Silicon Valley and happening in other places, like Boston, D.C. and Philly. Now that other countries are becoming more and more important in the world economy, you’ll see this huge population that will have access to what they didn’t have in the past.
• Other countries that are becoming more important in the world economy, well, historically, they had a lack of capital, so people came to the U.S. Now these other countries are developing their own capital markets. It’s a huge opportunity for investors in the U.S., Europe and Japan to work with new places. It’ll be more decentralized.
• I don’t think that means that China will be the center of innovation. I think it’ll be across the world in lots of different places, and large companies have global experience. If a big company can apply ideas across borders, be a ‘cross-pollinator of innovation,’ well, they’ll do well.
• P&G has created products for rural China and India. Who else can do that? Not many smaller companies, when it comes to research, design and distribution.
• It’s one thing to distribute your new improved detergent in the U.S. through Wal-Mart and Target when they are a few blocks apart, but someplace in China, there not might be a paved road. What do you do then?
• How did Fox prepare you for your work? Other than the beer Happy Hours?
• “I had a lot of practical learning, but I needed the theoretical foundation for my work. Fox offers a lot of both.”
• Below check the preview of the Runens mobile app from Ci&T I mentioned in my lede and read from one of the developers or the TechCrunch coverage.

• I put roughly an hour and half for email, nearly that long for interviews, three hours for notes and a first draft and a bit more than an hour for finalizing, with another hour for filling new paperwork.

A team of Temple University Fox School of Business MBA students who won a March 2011 innovation contest for improving the North Broad Street corridor in Philadelphia.

When re-purposing technology tools as  solutions, the core problem and end user are often ignored and so little will be accomplished.

Back in March, I was on a panel of judges for Temple University’s Center for Design and Innovation NorthBroadband DesignWeek competition.

In short, nearly 100 Temple students from six different schools were broken into cross-disciplinary teams and given a week to conceive of plans to grow opportunity along the beleaguered North Broad Street corridor in Philadelphia. Community members, leaders and other thinkers on the subject were brought in, student teams were encouraged to take to the streets and employ what they already knew.

On Thursday, March 17, in a big, open, light-filled seventh floor room of the university’s Alter Hall — minutes after watching the Temple men’s basketball team beat Penn State in the NCAA tournament — I was joined by a dozen other volunteer judges from different industries to hear final presentations, which were being tied together just then, in the collaborative, messy, fun space around us all.

An undergraduate team pitching 'Teacher Dashboard,' a collaborative social network for teachers.

There were 15 teams, though I only heard from five of them first and then final pitches from the best ranked half dozen. Of the 20 or so presentations I saw, all but one was technology driven: a website, a mobile application, an industry-specific social network, a cable-driven access point and the like.

The favorite of the judges — and of myself — and the eventual winner was from a team of first-year MBA students who wanted to partner with a bank to create financial literacy and savings incentive programming at area barbershops and salons.

Most of the 20-somethings were fixated on something glitzy and modular. Many of the ideas were fine tools in concept but very few seemed to attack the actual problem or pay any attention to a clear constituency.

While a hornet’s nest of obstacles face the banking-salon co-location idea — namely enormous socio-economic reasons why cash checking storefronts and barbershops out numbers banks in much of North Philadelphia and incentivizing the creation of a prototype — the idea was the most innovative and end-user focused.

The premise: many people in the surrounding neighborhoods were lacking basic financial literacy and so struggled to save for a better, more stable future of upward mobility, adding to a cycle of poverty. In walking these neighborhoods, the team said they found just how many more friendly, welcoming salon/barbershop hubs of activity were awake, while banks were intimidating and limited. We need to think of the consumers we’re trying to attract, and not force a limited vision of what a bank looks like and its roles.

That’s about thinking of the end user first, and trying to think innovatively about solving a problem. Technology doesn’t have to have anything to do with the solution. Instead, in this case and many others, technology tools can be used to make the solution more viable.

Thanks for the opportunity Center Director and Professor Youngjin Yoo.

Do news organizations have responsibility for their outcome?

That became the final and, I think, as yet unanswered close to a discussion I led during the final session of the third national BarCamp NewsInnovation, held Saturday April 30 at Temple University and rounding out the inaugural Philly Tech Week. [See past BCNI write ups here.]

Overall I felt this BCNI, with some 150 attendees from startup shops and some serious brands, featured more sessions that embodied that unconference spirit in being less presentation and more dialogue, something I don’t think I felt in the past. I was also interested to see the true step forward past social media and other tools and into sustainability, which I find to be a far more important place to be.

To that end and coming off Philly Tech Week, without preparation, I proposed a session in the day’s final hour: “A conversation on news as a convener.”

The TBD.com audience in the same room as my session, which followed.

Maybe 10 or 15 attendees, left in the day’s waning schedule, came — including former McClatchy Vice President Howard Weaver, Politico deputy editor Dan Hirschorn, freelancer and rabble rouser Amy Z Quinn, Philly.com producer Dan Victor, JLab editorial director Andrew Pergam [Full Disclosure: JLab is funding the Technically Philly Broadband2035 project] and other brilliant people — without much promised. All told, I think the hour conversation went somewhere.

The premise was that ?Technically Philly is a news site and so we build audience with content, but, as prominently evidenced by Tech Week, we’re moving rapidly into the space as convener in the more traditional sense of bringing people together in a room.

The ladder we seemed to follow:

1. Is it a news organization’s role to host (and profit, through tickets and sponsorships) events?: The answer from the crowd was a resounding yes, suggesting this was hardly a new concept.
2. Is it ethical for convening to lead to action?: I recently wrote about how I believe news organizations in the future will have to engage and act, but I was interested to hear this group’s take. With the help of my colleague Brian James Kirk, who joined the discussion, we shared my meeting with the City Planning Commission and first encouraging a dialogue around broadband in their citywide planning report, which followed a grant outcome of the aforementioned JLab grant project. We then encouraged the commission to have a lunchtime even to highlight the innovations in their plan to the tech community, which pushed on broadband and technology focuses. That and other stories shared, the group landed firmly on this being the age of ‘transparency, not objectivity,’ so that our editorial perspective was in line with our mission so provided that we disclose and share these conversations, it’s not only honest, it’s important.
3. Then, I queried the group: Do news organizations have a responsibility for action?: I brought up that infamous June 8, 2004 Times-Picayune stalled levee reconstruction story, that predated the disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina. In the future, if not today, should the Times-Pic take greater responsibility on pushing on something its reporting shows could be so dangerous? For so long, it feels as if the role of news was to point out what was happening and let others make action, perhaps going so far as offering the spotlight to help the cause, but I’m not sure I believe that’s enough anymore, particularly when the web makes it so much easier to disclose (like when I went to a lunch with local ACLU leaders). Here is where the group split, though it did seem like many (Weaver and Quinn pragmatically, and Hirschorn emphatically) tended to feel it’s untenable for news to also serve as actors, if only in a convening manner.

I’m not so sure, but I feel like this conversation was elevated for me after the session. So thanks for all who attended!

Wall Street Journal's Zach Seward leading group session on social media ROI and metrics.

Other sessions I attended: See the full schedule here.

[Full Disclosure: I have close relationships with just about everyone who presents at BCNI, so, you know, nothing here is coming without that perspective.]

• 10 a.m.: I was helping to make sure things were in order with the Open Gov Hackathon presented Tropo, which ran all day
• 11 a.m.: Finding a business model for hyperlocal (led by Tedd Mann, Gannet) — Early, the conversation dragged, but as people got more acclimated, I felt the last 15 minutes were productive. Joined by Ben Ilfeld from the Sacramento Press, Mann from Gannet, Chris Grant from Joystiq, Wendy Warren from Philly.com and others, I found myself in a group that was embracing the concept that news had to move past advertising, a concept I floated (with considerably less evidence and experience) in the same room, at the same event, in 2009. Now it was accepted and we had the experience to share: events, sponsorships, consulting and otherwise finding new ways to leverage audience. I shared my focus that news organizations need to find their ‘catering business.’
• 12:30 p.m.: Zach Seward group session on social media metrics and ROI — The group session, depicted above, was new and served as the end of lunch. Zach is bright and detail orientated, so he left us with a lot to mull over, sharing details from the Wall Street Journal. Most prominently: more followers does not mean more click throughs, which, perhaps more than engagement, can be a trackable end.
• 1:10 p.m.: Lessons from TBD: Dan Victor and team — I left very focused on the fact that this prominent D.C. experiment in online news was given only six months before the plug was largely pulled. We didn’t get to get the real lessons that we could  have out of this initiative.
• 2:10 p.m.: Come help Philly.com — Philly.com Vice President Wendy Warren and new community engagement leader Dan Victor, who also led the previous TBD session, opened up a dialogue on how to push Philly.com forward. I wished the group attending was larger and had fewer insiders (a handful of former Philly Media Network heads for example) so there could have been a more honest back and forth. I shared some thoughts and the overall tenor seemed to settle on three things: be more open (share), be more serious (fewer ‘photos with boobs,’ as Warren said) and be more relevant (personalize). I’m working on a more detailed post on my thoughts here.
• 3:10 p.m.: Reshaping public media online with NewsWorks from WHYY — A session led by Shannon McDonald, with some perspective in the audience from her boss Chris Satullo, I was interested to hear an update from the roughly six-month-old online news experiment from this region’s NPR affiliate and public media hub. All in all, it’s an interesting project — built from the ground up, often linking out generously, fostering interactivity and featuring hyperlocal deep dives — but it’s actually quite new to have many big lessons, just six months. Satullo said they have the funding for at least two years, which seems much more promising than what TBD got (a bit more than six months). They did share traffic numbers, as can be seen below, showing a spike from 69,000 unique visitors in December 2010 after launch to 170,000 unique visitors in April. That’s good growth for starting from scratch — the numbers, of course, don’t include existing WHYY.org — but for the powerful, regional, general interest impact they surely want those numbers to continue to spike quickly, without cheating with cheap content. No easy measure.
• 4:10 p.m.: Conversation on News as Convener — The session I led.
• 5-5:30 p.m.: Closing — My colleague Sean Blanda addressed those left, had title sponsor Center for Public Interest Journalism chief Tom Jacobsen speak about the initiative, unveiled the hackathon projects and kicked everyone out for the after party, with free booze and food (thanks to CPIJ) at local college bar Draught Horse.

Traffic numbers for NewsWorks.org, shared during BCNI 2011 presentation April 30. As noted during the presentation, see that one of the top search terms is 'slabbers,' which is one of their more outgoing freelance photographers, who is constantly promoting the site while taking photos.

Outcomes:

• We held a hackathon during a journalism conference, encouraging interaction
• A group of hackers scrapped city data to create a tool that allows property searches in Philadelphia to happen by name, a project suggested by an attending journalist.
• We held the first group session, led by Zach Seward, as described above, bringing all the attendees together over lunch.
• The Inquirer previewed BCNI in print and then followed up the event with the giggle-worthy headline of ‘Bloggers, other gather.’
• Daniel Bachhuber wrote up a bit more on their conversation of a ‘Github for News.’
• As in the past, we got old journalists and new, students and practitioners, Philadelphians and not, web-first and print heavy, all in a room, talking about moving forward the practice with real results and examples.

The Hackathon crew watching their projects be unveiled.

Take Aways:

• This was the first BCNI we organized as full-time employees of Technically Media, our business that formally organized the event. …Any extra time and effort that would have afforded us, we took away and had less because of the overall Philly Tech Week.
• Thank goodness we baked in the 10-minute intervals between sessions, which is an obvious, important step.
• Name tags and whatever else to help foster new introductions, perhaps at the beginning of sessions, as we got some strong thoughts from @purplecar that there wasn’t enough mixing.

After party at the Draught Horse. This was the first year we had the sponsorship support to offer free booze and food.

Some of my favorite #bcniphilly tweets:

• “Is it just me, or are folks in Philly really, really friendly?” @phillipadsmith
• This year’s #bcniphilly was even more awesome than last. Brilliant group of people. Props to those who made it happen. @danielbachhuber
• Feeling like a part of something @bcniphilly. @Brydels
• @christopherwink real talk in p.m. posed good questions @ how and why we do what we do. @AmyZQuinn
• Been doing that “add + to the end of bit.ly links to track hits” thing a lot since @zseward showed us at #bcniphilly. Fascinating. @DSMacLeod
• Sounds like #bcniphilly is the place to be this morning! @brianboyer
• “Everyone in the newsroom should be thinking about community engagement, every moment they’re reporting.” – @TBD folk @elizakern
• Flash ads have no place in the future of journalism. @danielbachhuber
• Pick a language that someone you know knows well and is nice enough that you can bug them with inane questions, says @albertsun @greglinch
• I remember at the first #bcniphilly, in 2009, it was a trending topic on Twitter. Oh, how times change …  @pazzypunk
• Very little success with ad networks in the room too. Experiments, but mostly failures. @danielbachhuber
• Key takeaway: For anything, define what success is beforehand. It’s much easier to figure out when you’ve hit it. @danielbachhuber
• Zach Seward @wsj #bcniphilly: many followers don’t actually exist; therefore, more analytics value in clicked links  @sejorg
• @zseward: “there’s mo correlation between the vast reach that an account seems to have and the actual reach.”  @DSMacLeod
• One TBD lesson: you can’t ignore the big beats just cause the big boys own them. CIty Hall is still City Hall  @pkerkstra
• Raymond Williams: “There are no masses. There are only ways of seeing people as masses.” via @zseward @BradyDale
• “The colon is a very subtle call to action.” – @zseward on theories of retweetability @elizakern
• Sacramento Press also does social media consulting, website building as a side business — 1/3 of their revenue.  @DSMacLeod
• it takes about 18 months for a blog to start sustaining regular traffic. @charingball
• Sacramento Press does social media consulting, because that’s what they’re good at. Sell what you’re good at. @bydanielvictor
• My new Twitter strategy: Don’t give away the milk for free (in a tweet). Make them buy the cow (by clicking the link). @BurbsAndBeyond
• TBD saw itself as a news org to cover the whole metro with only 8 reporters. What an uphill battle. @benilfeld
• @zseward: Good news spreads faster on Facebook because of the “like” button. Bad news spreads well on Twitter.  @DSMacLeod
• I like this idea of “showing your work” in journalism (like you do with your algebra homework). @pazzypunk

Here’s something completely unoriginal: you’re going to get flat-ass rejected, crushing whatever self-indulgent perspective you have on yourself, and then you will go some place magical and it will change you.

Here’s my submission to the #jcarn FAIL blog ring.

In 2003, I was an involved and eager high school senior who struggled to focus and was a lot more interested in creative side projects than studying or school work. I thought it made me unique and valuable. Turns out, it just made me a shitty student.

I grew up in rural northwest New Jersey, where the population was made up mostly of either generational residents or the extended foam of the New York City white flight wave. My parents were the latter and my family all lived in or around the 67th ward.

I wanted to go to college in a big city, without following the footsteps of my classmates or returning to ancestral roots, so I applied to colleges and universities throughout the Eastern Seaboard. I am wildly involved, have decent grades and, come on, I’m a total hoot, I thought, these freakin’ schools are going to be fighting over me.

Until the very thin envelopes from universities started to come in.

I was rejected or wait-listed (which, in my case, was worse than being rejected because there’s so much longing) by more schools than I probably even remember or have found the papers for:

• Boston University
• Boston College
• New York University (OK, this was my New York exception, but my maternal grandfather had started here)
• Rutgers University (yes, I believe my own state school wait-listed me, though I can’t find the letter for proof)
• College of New Jersey
• Drexel University
• American University
• George Washington University

Then I started reevaluating myself. I really didn’t do particularly well on my SATs — in one particularly embarrassing incident, after a night of blowing my nose and staying up late sick, my nose started bleeding on the test and got special permission to leave the packed gymnasium — I seemed to have more B’s than A’s, and I had gotten into some trouble, mostly for goofing around, but some a bit more serious.

I wasn’t feeling particularly proud as early 2004 wore on and my senior year began to close. I felt like I failed. I was really, emphatically embarrassed.

I remember now, filling out forms in my basement, dismissing my mother’s cool and gentle suggestions that perhaps I shoot a tad lower. She did so with greater aplomb than I can do so here, as she was always encouraging, but I wouldn’t hear it, and she didn’t push.

I’ll try to remember that, looking back, I’m glad my parents didn’t instruct me to do otherwise, and I hope to handle such a situation the same way someday.

Because at some point, I got an acceptance letter from Temple University in North Philadelphia.

As a senior at Temple in 2008, I remember assessing how perfectly timed my application was to Temple, a big state-related university that historically had educated Philadelphians and featured a prominent black student population. In 2004, then President David Adamany was trying to bolster its reputation, by increasing SAT scores and bringing in students outside the region.

When I joined Temple, I was a pretty good student by their standards, who came from a different region and was involved in various student groups, with interest to study abroad. All fit into Adamany’s push — even though I was rejected by the school’s honors program.

By the time I graduated Temple, I had improved my grades each semester, squeezed into the honors program, finished a thesis project, studied abroad twice, became a leader at the school newspaper and, oh, my academic standards from high school were no longer good enough to get me accepted. In four years, Temple had made sure that, if the timing was different, they too would have rejected me.

Something else funny happened.

I fell madly, obsessively in love with Philadelphia.

Yes, almost certainly it had something to do with an appreciation for anyone taking me as a college student. Yes, I am a prideful person by nature, so no matter where I went to school, I’d sure take pride.

But equally true was that I found an enormous city that was 90 miles from my childhood home, but that had surprisingly less outside interest. This was where everything in our country started, but no one knew it. It had all the nascent underground communities — in music, art, culture, cinema, technology, food and more — that other cities covet or promote, but was doing so subtly and quietly. It had all the infrastructure of an international city but wasn’t yet there.

I came to believe I had a winning horse that for some reason was characterized as an underdog. I wanted to be here to help it win.

So I started a business. And bought a house. And offer my time back to the university (whose reputation has grown considerably in a very short time, so I totally get credit for that). And my neighborhood. And I love it.

I hope to someday thank all of those other universities for rejecting me.

Specific Lessons:

• Do not criticize others for attempting or reaching, provided they are actually trying.
• Innovation, success, forward movement, all comes most successfully when you reach a bit.
• Do reach, accept when you fail, share it online and let others learn from it.
• You don’t really know what success and failure is in the moment, that takes time.
• Timing will dictate more of your success and failure than you’re going to want to admit.

In conjunction with the Technically Philly open data grant project, our Technically Media Inc. parent company has moved into a working office space at Temple University Center City at 1515 Market Street in Philadelphia.

It’s important to note that this office space is specifically for the six-month Technically Philly grant project, and so the office is used for those purposes and is only leased for that time.

It’s also important to note that we at TP take great interest in respecting, honoring and, in some ways, continuing the traditions of the past.

Having a flask on your desk isn’t about being drunk all the time, it’s about honoring Bob Woodward’s old saying: “All good work is done in defiance of management.”

Short of stereotypes of any order, journalists are close to the ground — regardless of whether we’re covering the war in Afghanistan or the school board — but we take great pride in remaining fiercely independent.

A flask — or the whiskey and beer and the cussing and the industry aphorisms — go right along with our interest in asking relevant, important questions. Or so we think. (Yes, delusions of self-importance also seem to be a journalism staple)

Come in and see the office, and we can have a drink while we talk it over.

Illustration by Samuel Rhodes for Phillymag

In this month’s Philadelphia magazine, former CityPaper news editor Jeff Billman covers the forthcoming William Penn Foundation-funded news institute at Temple University and notes its roots in Technically Philly’s News Inkubator pitch:

…Quality journalism costs money to produce; these sites need both enough readers to attract advertisers and somebody to sell them ads. And that’s where the incubator comes into play. Ultimately, it may build upon an elegantly simple proposal pitched (unsuccessfully) last year by local tech blog Technically Philly to the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge: Packaged together, a dozen or more independent sites could offer advertisers hundreds of thousands of visitors, rather than a fraction of that on their own...

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It’s seen as a great compliment that News Inkubator in any way influenced.

Click to enlarge.

On behalf of Technically Philly, I have started work on a six-month, William Penn Foundation-funded journalism project called Transparencity, covering the open data movement in Philadelphia, as was announced this morning.

Conducted in partnership with the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University (which is chaired by my college honors thesis adviser), the project’s focus is “toward collaborative projects using technology and journalism to increase the availability and use of actionable government data.”

The support helps bolster existing coverage and allows me to strengthen relationships with new and previously only tenuous sources. Read all about our goals and expectations on the Technically Philly post here.

Those outputs show our work will extend beyond traditional coverage, but, to start, that has been a large part. I’ll update more here on the reporting that I am doing.

The William Penn Foundation is technically funding the nonprofit Institute, which, in serving as our fiduciary agent, is contracting out for-profit Technically Media Inc.’s Technically Philly news site. …Did ya get all that?