My process
Creating media continues to become easier and more varied every day. Humans are the only species to develop the practice of recording history.
So whenever we are in a moment we regard as a distinguished experience — travel, first-time moments, extraordinary circumstances — we are bound to have this motivation to record that history as best we can.
Continue reading Photos, video and social media at events are our newest form of applause
WordPress, among the most popular web content management systems in the world, offers users an out-of-the-box solution to organize content in two ways: tags and categories. To better understand those words, I’ve taken to referring to tags as the topics of the site and calling categories the themes of the site.
Continue reading Categories are themes and tags are topics: WordPress users
For anyone who traffics in ideas, relationships and communication (and reporters are certainly that), “one of the most important soft skills you can have is handling a high-volume of email,” said Merlin Mann in his well-trafficked 2007 “Inbox Zero” Tech Talk.
The idea here is that time and attention are irreplaceable, finite and the most valuable resources of knowledge workers. So, as silly as it sounds, managing efficiently your email is a major skill.
Yet we all get overwhelmed by the fire hose that is our email inbox (and don’t put any workforce development time to this). For an industry that needs to keep our sources organized and be able to manage relationships (and do so by emailing better), that’s a sin. As I’ve brought on a couple reporters, I’ve found myself working with my cofounder Brian James Kirk, a true student of email productivity, to coach them on better email practices.
In journalism conversations, there is a lot of concern about the need for a public square, a place in which a community can learn and share a common set of facts.
It’s something I’ve talked about in research from the Knight Foundation. The concern of filter bubble, in which the personalization of the web allows us to only reach information that confirms our beliefs, rather than challenges it.
Nationally and in some cases statewide, there is a growing patchwork of meaningful journalism practitioners. Though lacking in many ways, there is a wealth of niche and hyperlocal news providers developing in many corners of the country.
But the hole remains in broader metro regions, where broader metro daily newspapers have been hardest hit. They were, largely, the purveyor of these common sets of facts to build broader community.
We aren’t witnessing the end of this powerful form, I believe, we are simply waiting for the transition.
Quietly last fall, NEastPhilly.com, the hyperlocal news site for Northeast Philadelphia, marked three years since having been launched as a college project by now WHYY NewsWorks feed blogger Shannon McDonald.
Though I spent much of that time contributing coverage, I now play the role of web editor, helping keep the site up and functional. Shannon has had more than 20 contributors, a handful of them to date, and has done serious journalism and meaningful community coverage, on her own and with outreach from residents and readers.
Though an after-hours labor of love of hers, I’ve remained impressed with the relative impact of NEast Philly, so, three years later, I wanted to share some metrics.
Continue reading NEast Philly: traffic, data and graphs on a hyperlocal news site
There’s no shortage of conversation about the end of search engine optimization. As search gets more personalized — cache and cookies and the rest — ensuring that your business, organization or another site ranks highly when people use web search tools becomes less straightforward.
Still, it’s naturally something that I get asked about a lot — how do I get more people to find my website online?
Continue reading SEO: the difference between the basics, the detailed and spam
I’m a fan of the fun collections of ideas, images and concepts that find their way onto personal Tumblr accounts, often driven by crowdsourcing contributions.
Recently a handful of ideas have come to mind that I wish were actively being created by someone. I’d happily contribute.
I attend a lot of hackathons, considering either I’m organizing them or sponsoring them or covering them. Though I hope to slowly change that a bit, I’m no programmer.
Still, sitting around these events has led me to conceive of and, in some cases, suggest projects that never actually happen. Maybe they someday will. Here are some that have crossed my mind:
The groundwork of privacy, anonymity and free speech is being set now with evolving jurisprudence and legislation surrounding the concept of social networking.
That is the overarching theme, as I read it, in I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy, a new book from Lori Andrews, law professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Ahead of moderating a panel at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia featuring the author and two other esteemed panelists, I read an advanced copy of book.
Details of Thursday night’s event here.
It’s a book worth reading, dense with stories and examples of the gray line of privacy and the constitutionality of the social web. Below, I share some of my favorites bits.
In three years at Technically Philly, I’ve noted a change in the sources that bring me the ideas for the stories I do. It made me think if it’s a trend that other niche media follow.
In order to develop a baseline, I did some estimating and created some crude graphs roughly looking at where my story ideas have come from in each of the first three years of operation.
In late 2009, I was interested in projecting out what types of content a hyperlocal news site might aspire to have, and this feels like a sensible follow up. I should be clear, of course, that these numbers are entirely made up, based on nothing more than a brief perusal of archives and memory.
In short, the two biggest trends I feel have happened are that (a) we rely considerably less on other media than we did when we started and (b) many, many more people reach out to us directly than in the beginning. OK, that may seem obvious.
Perhaps more interesting is my overall assessment that, despite what I might want to believe, relatively few stories are based purely on a hunch, a thesis or an idea of mine. They happen — and I’m proud when they do — but, like journalists have always been, my role is still more to give context and connect dots.
Find the graphs and breakdowns below.
Continue reading How the sources for story ideas change for a niche news site through three years