Year: 2011

FCC report: local accountability journalism is lacking, impact small when present

The FCC released a year-long study on the state of local accountability journalism and the view is pessimistic, as the Seattle Times reports.

A lot of conversation has come from it, and I hope to add some greater thoughts here on the 40-plus page document. Download it here [PDF]. Author Steven Waldman gave a short presentation at last Thursday’s Aspen Institute roundtable.

Technically Philly is mentioned briefly, but in a section lamenting that what modest successes the Philadelphia market has had in local journalism is having a relatively small numerical impact, in terms of traffic. The report’s premise was defining meaningful impact by those sites that account for at least one percent of a region’s overall traffic.

The broad comScore coverage also allows us to piggyback onto recent in?depth studies of local journalism in the digital age. First, the Institute for Interactive Journalism authored a recent study of the online news ecosystem in Philadelphia. They claim to have identified 260 local blogs, including “about 60 [with] some journalistic DNA in that they report news, not just comment on it” (Shafer 2010). While J?Lab does not provide a full listing of the sites, they single out several as particularly successful examples. Metropolis is an online news outlet staffed by professional journalists with experience in traditional media. TechnicallyPhilly.com focuses on the city’s tech community. Public School Notebook covers Philly schools and local education issues. PlanPhilly.com concentrates on planning and zoning. SeptaWatch.org provides coverage of local transportation. The Broad Street Review provides coverage of the local arts scene. The Philadelphia media market provides the fourth?largest panel in the sample, making it easier to find low?market?reach sites here than it is almost anywhere else. PlanPhilly.com shows up just in the February data, with 7 visitors out of 7967 panelists. None of the other online news sources show up at all.

Read the entire report here [PDF].

Important reading and takeaways:

Aspen Institute Roundtable on Local Journalism and the Public Square

How the fractured media landscape can come together in a ‘public square’ was a dominant theme of a roundtable conversation held last Thursday by the Aspen Institute in Washington D.C.

Along with fewer than 20 varied industry leaders, I heard the presentations of two new white papers from the institute, which are a follow up to the Knight Commission Report on Informing Communities.  This was the seventh in a series of roundtables.

There’s quite a bit that came from the morning session, but I wanted to start by sharing some initial takeaways on the presentions and subsequent conversation.

Norm Ornstein on Creating a New Public Square

  • Mid 20th century America created a public square with limited-choice network TV news and widely circulated newspapers. This featured ‘a common set of facts’
  • Future public squares may be varied, but there should be largely shared set of ideas.
  • This is a reason for partisanship today, a lack of shared perspective
  • Keep newspapers alive until business plans arrive — this could be seen through growth in tablet usage

Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World

  • If journalism was created today what would it look like?
  • $1 billion in federal spending annually on advertising, largely national, but that could be brought locally to grow public affairs on a smaller level

Questions I was left asking and interesting take aways I had:

  • The web has put a mirror to ourselves, and the web metrics question our belief in audience interest in our best product.
  • Aren’t social networks and other web-based tribes the future of the public square?
  • Can the need for heavy broadband infrastructure be someday trumped by advanced wireless technology for access
  • Steve Buttry: “We operate the only machine named in the Constitution” meaning newspapers

Hitchhiking in South Dakota: Story Shuffle 7 audio is now live

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

For Story Shuffle 7, held in a fine rowhome in the Newbold section of South Philadelphia inside a beautiful and eventually stormy night, I told the story of my first hitchhiking experience in South Dakota.

My lesson: trusting in strangers is a great risk that often comes with great reward.

Check out all the stories here. Listen to mine here or by using the player below.

LISTEN HERE

Talkadelphia: talking to podcast about Technically Philly, Philly Tech Week, business

For years, I felt there was a shortage of good, long-form podcasts in and about Philadelphia.

Last year, Talkadelphia came about and has helped, offering weekly conversations with mostly younger Philadelphians in the arts, though Kishwer and Gino have traveled a lot of ground in more than 30 episodes.

The pair visited our Technically Media offices, and we talked about Technically Philly, Philly Tech Week and starting a business. Listen to the podcast here.

Knight Commission Report on Informing Communities: crib notes on the seminal 2009 project

Almost two years later, I read the entire Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, the report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities.

Debuted in September 2009, I tackled the 80-page document for “the Hardly. Strictly. Young conference I attended in April at the University of Missouri, which was dedicated to brainstorming alternative recommendations for implementing that report.

Not a journalism-only report at all and backed by a year of conversation, outreach and testimony, I wanted to share my notes and thoughts on diving into the seminal report.

Continue reading Knight Commission Report on Informing Communities: crib notes on the seminal 2009 project

Fahrenheit 451: my favorite passages from Ray Bradbury’s classic

I finally dug into the 1951 American dystopian classic novel ‘Fahrenheit 451‘ by Ray Bradbury. It focuses on a world in the future in which firemen play a very different role, with a message of anti-censorship. If you need a refresher on the book, check out this wrap video here.

It quickly became one of my favorite novels. I wanted to share a few of my favorite lines and my favorite passage from the book.

Continue reading Fahrenheit 451: my favorite passages from Ray Bradbury’s classic

News needs to make more money on the popcorn

A friend recently told me that everyone should have at least one good analogy every few months.

He’s already heard my Journalism needs a catering business spiel, in which I suggest meaningful, public affairs reporting needs to be an audience or reputation grower for something more profitable. That is, if journalism is the low yield equivalent to a coffee shop, to really succeed, it needs a back-end catering service that really supports sustainability.

So I returned to another I tried passing: movie theaters don’t necessarily need more people in the seats, they need more people in the seats buying snacks. Because, the thinking goes (though hell if I actually know this to be true) that snacks and soda are much more profitable than your movie ticket. News needs to make more on the popcorn.

Meaning, simply chasing more eyeballs for more advertising hasn’t felt like a real strategy to me for at least a couple years now. Instead, we should be curating audiences of greater value, who are more engaged and, one way or another, help fund our work.

Technically Philly does about 22,000 unique monthly visitors, which is a fine number but nothing any big player would take notice of. But in that raw number, we are cultivating a community that comes to events [that attract sponsors], hires people within the community [and pays to use our jobs board] and, we think, will be interested in some form of membership that will offer free access to these and other opportunities [that help support the service we provide our engaged community]. In turn, we even fine haven’t an engaged and connected community has brought in some passive advertising [and resulted in actually successful campaigns] and other related funds.

Getting more people in our theater is great — and as we build community that is happening — but a bigger audience isn’t as interesting to us as a more loyal, more engaged audience, preferably one with popcorn.

NewsWorks Tonight: talking OpenDataPhilly.org, SEPTA’s TransitView and OPA Data Liberator

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

NewsWorks Tonight, the daily, local, drive-time news radio program on NPR-affiliate WHYY in Philadelphia, invited me on for a segment that aired Monday about the launch of OpenDataPhilly.org and other new data initiatives.

Though I was sure to note during my interview that OpenDataPhilly was built by development shop Azavea, unfortunately that was cut in the tight finalized product.

Listen to the entire show here. Below, listen to my short segment with host Dave Heller.

In addition to OpenDataPhilly.org, Heller asks me about the OPA Data Liberator project and SEPTA’s new TransitView initiative. To be clear, while related in audience and now included in ODP, those projects were not specifically created by using the data catalog’s information.

LISTEN HERE

I was recently interviewed for WHYY on eBay’s acquisition of regional e-commerce powerhouse GSI Commerce, but this was the first time I appeared on the new local radio program, which launched in May.

Philly Geek Awards: nominated by Geekadelphia for Philly Tech Week, Story Shuffle, Constitution Daily

As I shared on Technically Philly today, the team behind Geekadelphia, the playful geek culture blog, has announced the first ever Philly Geek Awards to take place Friday, Aug. 19 at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

I am proud to say I have my hand in three of about a dozen or so nominations. Thanks Eric and crew!

BEST NEW BLOG

BEST NEW PODCAST

BEST NEW ANNUAL LOCAL EVENT

 

 

Art and Technology: moderating City of Philadelphia Creative Economy panel

What are examples of ways artists can leverage technology and how might the Philadelphia artistic community differentiate itself that way were topics of conversation during a panel discussion I moderated Tuesday night.

Held by Creative Philadelphia, the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, in its gallery space at City Hall, I was charged with leading the Art and Technology event programming, our three presenters and moderating questions afterward. As anyone who knows me knows, my utility was more Technically Philly’s coverage of the intersection of arts and technology than any discernible artistic ability I might have.

I kicked off the night by offering some examples of organizations and institutions doing interesting things, as covered by TP or participating in Philly Tech Week. I then handed off to our far more competent and capable panel members.

The event was live streamed here. Some photos here. See my slides below.

Thanks much to Gary, Moira, Josh, Jeff and the staff at Creative Philadelphia for putting this, the first in a forthcoming series of events, together and for including me.