Universities should host the newsrooms of their neighborhoods, towns and counties. If a university has a journalism department, college media and audience, this seems like a foregone conclusion.

Picture Temple University. It is a big, diverse, robust, public research university with a clutch of respected professional schools and an expansive undergraduate population that has been slowly and controversially expanding into at least four different, distinct, overwhelmingly black neighborhoods around it.

When you drive south on I-95 east of Philadelphia at night, look off to your right while only the tallest skyscrapers are yet in view a few miles in the distance, the blur of bright lights made of a dozen square blocks and a cluster of high-rise buildings among a swath of stout two story row homes is the university’s main campus.

Halfway between those stadium lights and Philadelphia’s iconic City Hall is another beacon of light, that old White Lady, 400 North Broad Street, the legendary location of the Philadelphia Inquirer and its sister paper the Daily News.

Mood lighting isn’t the only lesson Temple should take from the investigators of the Inquirer.

Every few months, Spot.Us founder David Cohn revives the Carnival of Journalism, in which a handful of media makers and molders opine a subject of his choosing. This session, the question focuses on the role that universities should play in covering our communities.

As Cohn put it:

One of the Knight Commission‘s recommendations is to “Increase the role of higher education…..as hubs of journalistic activity.” Another is to “integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.” Okay – great recommendations. But how do we actually make it happen? What does this look like? What University programs are doing it right? What can be improved and what would be your ideal scenario?

I can’t imagine there is a better example of how and why this situation should work than with Temple and North Philadelphia. Namely, there is an underserved collection of neighborhoods, which have a deep connection (in some ways bad – gentrification – and in some ways good – jobs) to Temple, and an entire crew of student journalists, professors and other smart people.

Why universities generally should give a hoot about covering its community:

• Relationships: Big universities have a long history of lacking support from the communities that surround them, despite being important jobs creators, covering surrounding neighborhoods can go a long way to sure up its connections with local leaders and residents.
• Communication: With faltering college newspapers, shrinking region-wide media coverage and in some colleges neighborhoods and towns (like for Temple), coverage is not being answered by the market. Universities want their stories told though, and, with journalistic oversight, they can be.
• Student Development: You want to get your students the best real-life experience you can? Don’t ship them down to a newspaper, walk them into a vibrant, hybrid journalism experimentation lab on your campus.
• Faculty Development: Keep them in the game by giving them resources to stay involved in the evolving conversation by consulting, working, reporting, editing or otherwise overseeing your initiative.
• Mission: Connecting with its community, educating and informing and all that good stuff surely fits a university’s mission.
• Funding: Between public affairs grants, foundation support, private philanthropy and everything that can come with incubating journalism, news and journalism can make money.

What the Temple situation might look like:

• As I’ve written before: It’s a bottom line-focused nonprofit that houses, supports and promotes for-profit ventures in news and information, in addition to public affairs-oriented nonprofit journalism. It has branding and a major landing page focused on data warehousing and partnerships.
• Though fiscally housed at a Temple institute, great pains would need to be made to differentiate and protect it from administration oversight.
• North Philadelphia newsroom: In addition to housing and bolstering news from throughout the region, Temple would host an editor and a paid reporter or two focusing on its part of the city, North Philadelphia, among Philadelphia’s poorest and blackest. While talking about incubating news and growing community coverage, I always thought Temple would be the tool to grow news-making in a commercial-poor (and therefore revenue short) section of an urban environment.
• Cross-departmental institute: This year, a journalism department-housed, cross-discipline institute will be funded by the William Penn Foundation to consolidate valuable resources, incubate other news programs and host educational and training events. That institute would fit house its North Philly newsroom.
• Hyperlocal reporting: Right now, Temple’s noted Philadelphia Neighborhoods program puts its students throughout the city. I’d propose two options for these students: work with existing niche or hyperlocal news sites or join the university’s robust North Philadelphia reporting team for a semester, before making it a year-long program to keep the students on for a bit longer to get to know the neighborhoods.
• College Newspaper as Vehicle: Like every newspaper should, Temple would sit down with The Temple News and have some real talk. When I was there, I talked about our paper having five audiences: (a) students, (b) faculty (c) staff (d) alumni and (e) community members. I wanted our paper to read more like a community newspaper, covering a part of the city. As TTN and other print college newspapers fight with the reality, its resources should be used as a mechanism to reach non-web-literate communities. Some sort of distribution model would be made, in which the university’s North Philadelphia newsroom content would run in the existing college newspaper.

Weekly in Print. Daily online, I suggested.

I wrote it on a piece of paper and posted it in my cubicle, as editorial page editor. In the mid-1990s, our newspaper staff rather presciently decided to move from printing three days a week to just once, having already dropped from a daily a few years earlier.

The intent, a front-page story read at the time, was to reduce costs at a time when the Internet would soon be the source of all news. Gosh, they were a bit too early, but dead on. So, they’d update daily online and follow-up with the biggest stories weekly.

A fine concept if it had carried through. However, at some point, the legendary NEWS, as old-head TTNers call it, fell into disrepair in the late 1990s and into the 21st-century. Despite some bright spots and top talent, the paper became a tabloid weekly at best.

By the time I got to Room 243 in October 2004, things were already improving. By my senior year, we were returning to national recognition — having repeated with an Online Pacemaker, awarded by the AP’s Collegiate division. I wondered if a tagline could further change the culture of a newsroom.

So, among a slew of other initiatives, we set about, as a staff, returning our focus to daily online updates, with bigger, more feature-orientated pieces in the weekly product. We started the action, so the pledge seemed to be a logical next step.

The 21st century graduates of The Temple News at the 88th anniversary alumni reception: (Back from left) Andrew Thompson, '09; Chris Reber, '08; ; Alex Irwin, '08; Brandon Lausch, '06; Lucas Murray, '05; Christopher Wink, '08; Mike Korostelev, '09 (Second from back row) Sulaiman Abdur-Rahman, '07; Chris Stover, '09; Morgan Zalot, '11; Dave Isaac, '09; Anthony Stipa, '09; Kevin Brosky '10; Kriston Bethel, '10; Tracy Galloway, '10; Unclear (Third from back row) Brian White, '04; Holly Otterbein, '09; Leigh Zaleski, '08; LeAnne Matlach, '09; Jen Reardon, '10; Sherri Hospedales, '10; Stephen Zook, '10; Chelsea Calhoun, '10; Maria Zankey, '10; Brian Dzenis, '12; Shannon McDonald, '09; Sean Blanda, '08; Rachel Playe, '08; Brian James Kirk, '08 (Front Row) Brianna Barry, '08; Melissa Dipento, '08; Ashley Nguyen, '12; Malaika Carpenter, '08; Charmie Snetter, '07; Nadia Stadnycki,'06

You just aren’t doing everything you can.

It’s the seemingly unintentional, passive-aggressive jab that I sometimes get from older or otherwise more established journalists, writers and editors. Most often and in many ways, I’m sure the sentiment is pristine in its accuracy, often abutted by the never-to-be-defended-against “it takes time,” which, of course is always true.

But I can’t help but think what’s happened since, say, 2007 or even later, is something bigger that is changing the value of a lot of once rock solid professional advice for young and otherwise aspiring journalists, and making it awfully hard out there.

Two weeks ago, The Temple News, a college newspaper with ample history, held its semi-annual reunion. The reception pulled 150 or more proud Newsers from 1949 through to current staffers, fairly impressive for an 88-year-old campus mainstay.

It was a fine event held not far from where Temple University began more than 125 years ago, and, while mostly alumni clustered to those from their decade of graduation, there was co-mingling, which is always refreshing to see.

Before the reception, there were tours, mingling in the current newsroom and an alumni panel, of which I am proud to say I was a part.

Of the ten panel members, five had graduated this decade and the other half all had left the Temple News offices before 1981.

That means there quite literally was a generation a gap, at least 20 years between half the panel and, you know what, while the conversation quickly followed that track, the career advice that came later found a divide along more recent lines.

TALKING AND REMEMBERING

After everyone introduced him or herself, we were asked to share memories of our time with The Temple News. It felt natural  to let the older cohort take hold of the conversation, and it seemed my fellow, younger panel members agreed, none of us saying much if anything more than that first introduction.

It became a sharing of stories from the panel members — and then the older folks from the audience of more than 30. Stories from people who were working in or breaking into the industry during a past generation of the industry.

Most young journalists love the old nostalgic talk of hot press/cold press/teletype and all the other once technologies of newspapering. So we, the younger generation, both on the panel and in the audience, of Temple News alumni, listened to them remembering.

Reunions are about remembering, so no one blinked when Mike Sisak, a copy editor on the New York Times’ sports desk and a 1962 Temple News editor-in-chief, called for anyone from his generation in the room to identify him or herself and talk about his or her experiences.

That, quite frankly, is the divide I expected.

The panel members who could perhaps still pass for someone’s child would mostly listen, while those who might more likely be called a parent or more likely still a grandparent would talk about the past. That’s how it’s meant to be.

CAREER ADVICE

With the last 10 minutes of the nearly 90-minute pre-reception event, current Temple News adviser and 1998 graduate John Di Carlo called for questions from the audience.

One of the last and, to me, the most interesting question, came from former TTN News Editor and 2009 graduate LeAnne Matlach.

The bright, competent and hard-working aspiring broadcast journalist asked, as inevitably is the case at these types of events, asked for advice on grabbing that first job in the industry. Saddled with student loans and several hundred applications deep seven months past her graduation with not much to show for it outside a food service job, Matlach is, it seems, awfully frustrated by her lack of success despite, it seems, making a lot of the right decisions.

I almost cringed. Not because the question was unfair and certainly not because it wasn’t the time to do it — the room was full of the bright and excessively successful in an industry she wanted in on — but rather because I expected advice that wouldn’t help and, maybe, hurt her, in my opinion.

Here’s a quick review of some of the advice as I remember it:

1. A 1959 graduate said try spicing up your applications or clips you send in. To get one of his first jobs, he sent in a cartoon.
2. A 1962 graduate said reach out to alumni.
3. A 1968 graduate said not to ignore Web products and asked, with a laugh from the crowd, if NEast Philly founder and 2009 graduate Shannon McDonald or I were hiring.
4. A ~1970s graduate said to try public relations or other fields before finding a journalism gig.
5. A 1991 graduate said ‘be annoying.’ He “graduated in a tough economy too,” but he got a position by persistently approaching the editor at a publication for which he wanted to work.
6. A 2004 graduate said apply to smaller markets.
7. A 2005 graduate says freelance, freelance, freelance.

Mike Sisak, Phil Jasner, Shannon McDonald and I on the alumni panel.

You see, while the broad conversation was split along traditional generational lines, the conversation about career advice appears here to be affected more by the great big newspaper collapse that didn’t happen in its most popularly-recognized form until after 2006.

I think every since piece of advice above was absolutely viable even five years ago. I think they’ve all become more complicated since the quickened pace of newspaper decline, combined with a historic stall in advertising, the worst recession since before World War II  and a complete rethink of the industry.

Here are my concerns:

1. This might translate today to a solid multimedia presence, something Matlach is trying, though perhaps she could do more. She is building a bit of a presence on Twitter and has her reel on Youtube, seen above, which dominates a Google search of her name. The fact remains that journalism jobs have been cut at a historic rate over the past three years, so entry level jobs are now being absorbed by people with years more experience. The newspaper bubble is popping and no cartoon is gonna overcome that.
2. Reaching out to alumni is always valuable, and I saw Matlach wisely speaking to this alumnus after the reception. But in a room of 50 or more successful journalists at newspapers and news outfits of big and small acclaim, only one could even begin to speak honestly of any freelance opportunities for someone starting out — Barry Levine, the executive editor of the National Enquirer and a 1981 graduate.
3. The growth of Web news is, of course, a real one and likely we’ll see a huge hyperlocal movement in the next few years. I’m also a passionate believer that the most successful of these will be for-profit entities, but this is a surprisingly nascent movement. Without the real help of alumni in No. 2, a recent graduate would have to have a lot of luck to get on board with a profitable online news arm. Knowledge of this is simply way ahead of the actual businesses.
4. See No. 1. With so many unemployed people generally, and particular in the media industry, I think established journalists are underestimating how difficult it is to find that writing-related, but not-quite-journalism job. Still, the point should be taken, but keep these struggles in mind.
5. It’s frustrating for recent graduates to hear the folks from the early 1980s and 1990s talk about the tough economies they graduated into. Please understand that this is a new beast. Not only is unemployment for 20-somethings the highest since records were first taken in the 1940s, but when we’re talking the news industry, there is simply no generation of journalism graduates who have ever faced the entry-level obstacles that today’s graduates do. That 1991 graduate who came out in a “tough economy, too” came out to a newspaper industry that was still growing in some ways — the historic peak for the number of newspapers with at least 250k readers didn’t come until 1993. All that said, persistence sure is virtue, but the jobs, even those internships, simply aren’t there.
6. Sure, entry-level folks need to look outside Philadelphia if they are still going to try to play the newspaper/media climbing game, but, say it with me now, more than 30,000 newspaper jobs have been lost in the past two years. Matlach told the audience that she had applied for positions in Guam, and she’s also applied for gigs in North Dakota. She’s trying.
7. I agree with the sentiment of freelancing and I’m doing it myself, but having spoken after the panel to the alumnae who made this suggestion, I know there is a misunderstanding about how available that is for recent graduates who need money. You’re not supposed to freelance when you’re just starting out, when there’s a recession nor when the news industry is in a period of massive readjustment. They’re all happening now, so it’s harder than ever for young freelancers. I believe that, particularly because while the number of outlets for which to write has jumped, the number of paid opportunities has not.

Reality TV star Danny Bonaduce attended the reception that followed the panel to speak about his aunt Jackie Steck, who was a Temple journalism professor. I'm standing in the back left of this photo in the handsome green argyle sweater.

No one, particularly no one on a fancy alumni panel celebrating a college newspaper with a proud tradition, wants to give a bleak response or offer no real help. So you give the advice you’ve been given. You say things that have worked, but that doesn’t mean they’ll work now.

This is what I would have told Matlach, though she already knows my thoughts here.

1. Ride out this recession. Get whatever job you can now to pay your bills because the recession is lessening, some advertising money will flow again, business models will be rehashed, news orgs and other big companies will feel less of a pinch on their legacy debt, unemployment will reduce in the coming years and the like.
2. While you’re doing that, do three things so as not to waste your time: Do freelance. This is a lot more difficult than I think many established journalists want to believe, but you do have to keep your name out there. It won’t pay your bills like it has for others for reasons: there are more freelancers now because of unemployment; there are smaller budgets for it and you’re young so you’re least important, established and networked. Understand the pros and cons.
3. Do create the strongest multimedia presence you can. I am hardly a Web developer, but I’ve continually focused on trying to develop my ability to own Web news, writing and reporting and, though Matlach is strong in these areas, I know she, like most others out there, can learn plenty more. When this thing turns around, you’d be a fool to not be the strongest out the gate.
4. And, I think most important, start creating your own job. No one is entirely certain how long it will take for employment numbers to return to whatever was once normal. Even when they do, no one is entirely sure what the media landscape will look like. Hell, maybe the world isn’t ending, but this may be a very dramatic pardigm shift in the world of news. Find a niche and start trying to create a job, a business and a life around news and reporting and journalism if that’s really what you want. Learn to write a business plan.

A friend of mine, who is a bright young multimedia journalist by any standard, a fellow 2008 Temple News alumnus and even-keeled in his temperament, recently expressed, perhaps only partially in jest, his concern that he might be unable to stop from shouting down the next established journalist who tried to lay the claim that things were harder when he was starting.

It’s not that not-yet established journalists don’t respect their more accomplished peers. We do. But for every old timers story about how they didn’t have the Internet and other Web-based technologies and tools, it’s difficult to not hear any sympathy for how difficult it is right now.

That’s going to change in coming years. But graduates from, say 2006 or 2007, particularly those in journalism fields, through to the next couple graduating classes have it damn tough, and it’d be nice for some of that to be respected and understood, instead of criticized.

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.

Temple has been built on the backs of the dead. It’s late October, and we think about the old, the hidden and the dead. Temple University has its ghosts, indeed.

This is its beginning. Read the piece in its entirety or see other writing of mine here.

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.

An open letter to President Ann Weaver Hart

By Christopher Wink | May 12, 2008 | The Temple News

I am graduating. After four years on North Broad Street – two more than you – I have plenty I want to share with you. Space is limited, so forgive my suddenness.

Throw your students into the surrounding communities.

For 45 years, this university has tried to figure out how to trick middle-class students into studying amid one of this country’s densest collections of black people, many of them poor and uneducated. So we built walls and took publicity shots facing south. We closed North Park Avenue, tried to close 13th Street and turned inward.

So, each year, a portion of accepted students confuse Temple with shootings at the Norris Apartments and confuse Philadelphia with an abandoned row home at 20th and Diamond streets.

That’s backwards. Have Provost Lisa Staiano-Coico amend our new general education requirements to involve 10-credit hours of “community education.” The engineering students can take a class on the most efficient means of backfilling condemned buildings, architecture students can figure out what’s wrong with the North Philadelphia subway stop, and students of the social sciences can work with the nonprofits that are trying to help our neighbors.

Leverage our intellectual capital and market it as the most unique academic experience in the world.

End Temple’s shuttle-industrial complex.

At a time when environmentalism is cool, Philadelphia is hot and SEPTA is actually sufficiently funded, Temple should buy in. Many Philadelphia grade school students get monthly TransPasses for free because of state funding. In Pittsburgh, college students can get free access to the city’s mass transit. Sell half your busses – sell off the rest when you solve that nagging Ambler campus problem – and buy passes to give to students. Send us into the city.
Embrace Philadelphia.

I almost gagged when I read that the Office of University Housing and Residential Life dropped all its listings, aside from a handful of private partnerships that surround this university [“Housing removes listings,” Mary Hagenbach, April 28, 2008].

There is an enormous difference between a city college and a college in a city. For much of our existence, Temple has been the first. If we keep attracting students to rowhomes around Main Campus, we’ll create another thick, invisible wall between the community and us.

Go to the 2000-block of Carlisle Street. Just four years ago, it was filled with mostly premanent residents. Now just three remain.

Give students a TransPass, a bicycle, and have the Owl Ambassadors tell parents how many Temple students live in Center City or Francisville or Mantua. Have them boast to parents how many students live in Philadelphia, not on campus.

Walk into the Howard Gittis Student Center and find room 217 on your own. If you can’t do it, then you need to get someone to renumber the rooms if it’s meant to be a center of student activity. Buy artwork from Tyler students to decorate this university. Do something about the Bell Tower – it’s embarrassingly ugly, like a monument to urban blight and the worst of 1970s architecture.

Lastly, cherish traditions. We don’t have many. Spring Fling. A men’s basketball game against Duke University.

The community, trains and Philadelphia could be others. Develop them. Nothing brings in money like tradition, a feeling of belonging and a sense of individuality. That means keeping Temple unique.

I think some of these ideas would do just that. I wish you the best of luck, President Hart.

See it here on The Temple News Web site.

© Pete Marovich /drr.net

Yesterday I wrote for The Temple News another in a series of stories on a controversy surrounding the possibility of Joe Frazier’s Gym closing. There will be more to come, for sure.

Joe Frazier has developed a reputation for business failings that rival his status as a boxing legend. That much is confirmed by those closest to him.

But debate over the recent closure of Joe Frazier’s Gym, the North Philadelphia landmark at North Broad Street and Glenwood Avenue, has pitted a British boxer and her fiancé-manager against the 20th century sports icon’s business manager.

Read more.

For the next month, at least, I am a student journalist.

I have been a proud staffer at The Temple News serving the community of Temple University in Philadelphia for four years. While I have reported for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Business Journal and elsewhere, there are few places I’ve learned more than in Room 243, the newsroom of The Temple News, and otherwise in my functions as a student journalist.

There are so many complications to it all.

Particular to working at a big university in a big city, I am inevitably competing with professional journalists, without seeming reactionary or amateurish. Competing with the very people whom I hope will want to hire me. At a school like Temple a great deal of our coverage is high profile enough to merit attention from the faces that make Philadelphia the fourth largest media market in the country.

Hillary Clinton comes to Main Campus, and my colleagues are with me as I fight for photos of the presidential candidate.

Yeah, but I have class the next day, or, more frequently, in a few hours. But, if I want to grow this paper’s readership, I need to cover our smaller community better. In an industry that is rushing to reduce its coverage area, to cut costs while still being able to squeeze a denser readership base and sell more expensive ads for its narrower demographic, college newspapers are already set up in this form. Tight base, attractive demographic: truly one phase of the industry that isn’t dissipating entirely.

Still, ‘student journalist’ is a phrase that, understandably, screams unprofessional. Why, then, would anyone take me seriously, irrespective of how I handle myself and that I am weeks away from working in a professional setting?

So, I often keep it out of my explanation of who I am. I never refer to The Temple News as a student newspaper when asking for an interview, but rather, it is the college newspaper, an improvement — though short of the community newspaper distinction I think TTN should shoot for in the future.

A complication comes when others don’t let student journalist come to their mind. I have had a handful of public relations and communications directors with whom I have interacted request a connection on Linked-In. Journalists are a commodity for these people, though, of course, once I agree to any connection, they see I am a student journalist, an intern, a go-fer.

One actually offered me a position, others likely feel taken, regardless of the product I create.

A few months ago I interviewed a former high-ranking official in city government who had turned to the nonprofit sector. Though the interview went well, upon meeting me after a phone call, she looked me up and down.

“Boy, are you young.”

It is interesting for me to think that if I do land and accept a reporting job, it will likely be easier. Away from the editing role I fill now, I won’t – have to – think about my coverage well into the night. I won’t have school work, internships and the social pressures of being a 20-something all crushing on me in the same way.

Of course, another likely change will be that I will lose my passion for the gig. Because working for The Temple News does me little other than the enjoyment of the product, I am here for my passion. Outside of this environment, it will, I fear, quickly turn to a job.

Then, I will quickly turn to dismissing student journalists.

Image credit.

With a great deal of help from Sean Blanda, the Internet Jesus himself at The Temple News, I recently unveiled a multimedia package on former Temple University President Peter Liacouras. He held the top spot for 18 years, from 1982 to 2000, and a great deal of expansion, both academic and geographic, happened under his tenure.

I first met with him, a member of the university’s Board of Trustees and Temple’s longtime community relations director, back in October. Then I met with them again on March 18. In all, I spent more than five hours with the group, and another 90 minutes with the community relations director. It was the most work I ever put in for a story.

Check out the multimedia package here, read the profile I wrote on him, watch him talk about choosing Temple’s logo 25 years ago below, and let me know of any of your thoughts on the man, his administration or anything else. I also wrote a piece about his relationship with the community, that included a great deal on the two other men with whom I met for the story.