Shooting at my Philadelphia subway stop

allegheny-subway-shooting-feb-21-2008-intersection.jpg

Sadly, yesterday a man was shot by two SEPTA officers at the Allegeny Ave. stop on the Broad Street Line, my stop.allegheny-subway-shooting-feb-21-2008-stretcher.jpgThis comes after reports of increases of SEPTA and city officers riding the subways, often derided as dangerous. I’ve never had a problem myself, but reports of teenage violence, particularly directed at younger riders, have been on the rise.The man was apparently smoking in the stop when the officers approached him. He tried to run and at least four shots were fired.I have video from CBS 3, but I haven’t been able to upload it on YouTube.(Photos by Greg Bezanis, a staff photographer of The Temple News) allegheny-subway-shooting-feb-21-2008-platform.jpg

First place Keystone Press Award

christopher-wink-keystone-award-2006.jpg

The winners of the Keystone Press Awards for 2007 were announced recently, both professional, academic and collegiate levels. The prizes are awarded by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association.

I will be sharing first place in the personality profile category with Tyson McCloud for a feature we wrote for The Temple News on a Temple University alumni who found and lost love in World War II. There are 16 categories in the collegiate level, and nine staff members of The Temple News were recognized in seven different categories. Last year’s award winners.

(Above photograph depicts me with a 2006 Keystone Press Award for a first place standing from news coverage covering a SEPTA strike in 2005. I shared that finish with others.)

Should you post an alleged rapist's photo?

The Temple News, the college newspaper for which I work, is certainly one of the better student newspapers in theunknown-person.gif country. Because of it, or perhaps in spite of it, we get criticized.

Last week, we reported on the alleged rape of two women by a student leader, with lots of friends in our university’s student government.The accused is indefinitely suspended from school and is awaiting a preliminary hearing, though there are rumors the charges might be dropped.

He has not been convicted, just accused, arrested and formally charged.We published his name, his photograph and the block on which he lives, all per usual protocol of dealing with accused sex offenders, all information given to us by the city’s special victims unit.

Yet, we’ve been overcome by letters, emails, phone calls and online comments from his friends, other student leaders and more, all criticizing our tactics. Below, I’ve included an editorial we will run in Tuesday’s edition of our paper. Read it if you’d like to hear more of our perspective, but what do you think?

How much should newspapers publish? All we know? Do we have a responsibility to our readers or to the presently innocent? Read on, or comment now.

Continue reading Should you post an alleged rapist's photo?

Dreamah’s nightmare

By Christopher Wink | Feb. 5, 2008 | The Temple News

She was young and energetic and fun.

And then she was dead. Ejected through a windshield and pronounced dead on the pavement of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, amid broken glass and unlived expectations.
wink-christopher.jpg
It is so rare that we are affected by what we expect. Much more often it is what blindsides us on an otherwise anonymous trip home.

Ciara Deprill was born on Aug. 20, 1986. Less than 7,000 days later, in the dark and forgotten morning hours of Feb. 3, 2006, she had other places to be.

It became a story. Deprill was riding shotgun with Dreamah Knoll, who was driving with a blood alcohol level a few ticks over the legal limit. They were coming back to the city, going westbound on the Ben Franklin. Those lanes can seem so narrow. A concrete barrier can change so many things.

Deprill is gone, but what might be worse is the risk of losing Knoll. There is no pain like the pain of those who survive. Those who are granted the privilege of living with unwarranted guilt and irreversible anguish.

Continue reading Dreamah’s nightmare

Dreamah's nightmare

By Christopher Wink | Feb. 5, 2008 | The Temple News

She was young and energetic and fun.

And then she was dead. Ejected through a windshield and pronounced dead on the pavement of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, amid broken glass and unlived expectations.
wink-christopher.jpg
It is so rare that we are affected by what we expect. Much more often it is what blindsides us on an otherwise anonymous trip home.

Ciara Deprill was born on Aug. 20, 1986. Less than 7,000 days later, in the dark and forgotten morning hours of Feb. 3, 2006, she had other places to be.

It became a story. Deprill was riding shotgun with Dreamah Knoll, who was driving with a blood alcohol level a few ticks over the legal limit. They were coming back to the city, going westbound on the Ben Franklin. Those lanes can seem so narrow. A concrete barrier can change so many things.

Deprill is gone, but what might be worse is the risk of losing Knoll. There is no pain like the pain of those who survive. Those who are granted the privilege of living with unwarranted guilt and irreversible anguish.

Continue reading Dreamah's nightmare

The Temple News Web site launches

Thanks in large part to our online editor Sean Blanda, The Temple News, the college newspaper for which I work that services the Temple University community, has finally launched its independently designed Web site, based off WordPress.

I am happy to say I was active in the switch over and working with Sean on its design elements.

Check it out or read Seany’s blog on the real details of how the switch, from College Publisher which hosts most college papers in the country, went down.

Men's college basketball video

For The Temple News, the college newspaper for which I work, I filmed yesterday’s men’s basketball game between Temple University and crosstown Big 5 rival St. Joseph’s.  A friend and colleague, Sean Blanda, edited it. The quality is less than stellar because of some technicalities – this was our paper’s first foray into adding video to our Web site – but check it out. Temple lost on a buzzer beater.

Campus unknown named next dean of Japan campus

By Christopher Wink | Jan. 22, 2008 | The Temple News

Bruce Stronach was named the next dean of Temple University-Japan on Jan. 10, to replace the retiring dean, Kirk R. Patterson. Stronach will officially join TUJ on Feb. 1 but will not assume the role of dean until April 1.

An interim dean has not been named.

Currently, Stronach, a campus outsider with an academic career that spans three decades and two continents, is transitioning from his term as president of Yokohama City University, where he has been since 2004.

“I am very happy to have been selected as dean,” wrote Stronach in an email from Japan. “I am very much looking forward to working with everyone on the Temple team in Philadelphia, Tokyo, and elsewhere around the world.”

Stronach is accomplished, having been the first foreign president of a Japanese public university when he was first hired as president of YCU, a mid-sized school of 4,500 in a city of 3.5 million some 20 miles south of Tokyo.

Prior to that appointment, Stronach had been acting president at Becker College in Worcester, M.A. since 2003 and its chief operating officer before then since 1998. From 1990 to 1997, he held faculty and administrative positions at the Graduate School of International Relations at the International University of Japan in Niigata, eventually serving as the school’s dean beginning in 1994. Stronach also has held faculty appointments at Merrimack College in North Andover, M.A, and at Keio University in Tokyo.

Indeed, Stronach, 57, is the accomplished academic to his former competition, 37-year-old attorney Matthew J. Wilson, TUJ’s current chief legal counsel and the only other candidate to be named a finalist by the university’s search advisory committee.

Wilson had been a frequent de facto acting dean when Patterson was away on leave, most recently in the interim between Patterson’s TUJ departure Dec. 17 and Stronach’s appointment, according to some at the campus. However, some university sources said Wilson’s exact role was unclear.

No official announcement regarding an interim dean was named between Patterson’s official exit Dec. 31 and Stronach’s official entrance Feb. 1. TUJ’s semester began on Jan. 14, according to Stephanie Gillin, chief of staff to University Provost Lisa Staiano-Coico, who, with President Ann Weaver Hart, made the final decision on Patterson’s successor.

There had been some question to the delay in the decision to nominate Stronach, a longtime friend of Patterson’s. Official comment on the timing of the announcement has not been made.

“I am just beginning to absorb all the pressures of the transition and to bring myself up to speed on matters pertaining to both the home campus and the Tokyo campus,” wrote Stronach in the same email from Saturday.

He has not spoken to what, if anything, his friendship with Patterson, who was not active in the selection of his replacement, might mean for his plans and goals.

Patterson, who served from 2002 to 2007 and announced his retirement on Aug. 27, will likely be remembered for a tenure highlighted by unprecedented growth, though marred with late coming criticism of his leadership style, which some suggested was too controlling. Sources, including TUJ administrators and faculty, who afforded this characterization would not speak on the record but additionally praised the fiscal successes Patterson led.

“My successor will inherit an institution that is very optimistic,” wrote Patterson in an email from early December. “TUJ is becoming a first in the world model for international education.”

The man Stronach beat out, Wilson, had a leading role in the Patterson administration. He noted during interviews on Main Campus in November that his direct experience with TUJ was a prize advantage in his quest to become dean.

“I won’t have an on-the-job learning period,” he said while on Main Campus in November.

Despite watching an outside leapfrog him for the chief spot he coveted, Wilson intoned his intentions to stay on with his role at the branch campus.

“I am excited that Dr. Bruce Stronach has agreed to join the Temple family,” he wrote in an email to The Temple News from Tokyo on the day of the announcement. “[I] look forward to working with him in my capacities as Associate Dean and General Counsel.”

Wilson, who is narrow, blonde and noted for his boyish features, rapidly ascended through administrative ranks during a four and a half year TUJ career.

Wilson was taken on as a professor of law at TUJ in April 2003 and began what has been a startling ascension. Just two months later he was named the law program’s director. Then, a little over a year later, he was installed both as TUJ’s chief legal counsel and associate dean. Those positions, which he still holds, were coupled with a semester as director of TUJ’s undergraduate program last spring. If he had been appointed, he would have been the youngest dean in that campus’s history.

But he wasn’t and, where Wilson’s rise through Temple administrative ranks has been heralded, Stronach’s youth was less direct. His first attempt at college failed.

“You should be committed to your education because I wasn’t,” he told The Temple News in a November interview on Main Campus.

Young Stronach grew up on a small farm in Massachusetts and first left home for Boston College in the late 1960s. The football player who got caught up in the anti-war movement struggled to find a desire for academics, so he left in 1970. The next three years of his life were spent working as a truck driver and in various manufacturing capacities.

“The first half of my life was spent in factories, on trucks,” he said in the same interview. “So, I think I have a pretty good idea what the real world is like.”

Stronach has two daughters, one of whom currently attends Wake Forest University, another is a student at a high school outside of Boston.

In speaking with The Temple News, Stronach expressed an interest in further developing TUJ’s image as a permanent fixture of higher education in Japan and working on partnerships with other Japanese universities.

“I want TUJ to become more of a Japanese institution,” he said in November, while still just a candidate for the position. “Not just the extension campus of Temple University.”

Still, he admitted not knowing much about the daily operations of TUJ.

“I don’t know all that much about TUJ,” he said. “But I think that is more of an asset than a deficit.”

-30-

The Temple News originally misreported when Stronach will officially become dean. He will join TUJ on Feb. 1, but won’t become dean until April 1 as changed on Jan. 23 at 6:21 p.m.

This story was prepared for the 1/22/2008 edition of The Temple News. See it here. This is a follow-up in continued coverage of this story. See the original on this Web site here.

Nearby Francisville is led by a man with a past

By Christopher Wink | Sept. 25, 2007 | The Temple News

In June 1968, two months after his death, the Francisville community of North Philadelphia named what they boast to be the world’s first monument for Martin Lutherwink-christopher.jpg King, Jr.

In June 1968, Fred Sneed, who now works for Temple University’s facilities management, was a member of the Morocco’s, a dangerous part of a growing gang community in Philadelphia.

It has made all the difference.

TROUBLE COMES YOUNG

Sneed was born in South Philadelphia in early 1954. He lived with his grandmother, either five or 5 million miles away from his mother in North Philadelphia, depending on whether you were trying to get there by car or by hope. He started young, giving a gun to a friend who killed a rival not long after Franciscville’s monument to peace went up. A boy needs to be with his mother, they said. So, Sneed moved north and transferred to Ben Franklin. He ran with a fast crowd based around 18th and Ridge.

Continue reading Nearby Francisville is led by a man with a past