A move of that magnitude, I think, deserves a bit more detail.
Last January at the prestigious Union League after speaking on a panel about the future of journalism, I met and started a dialogue with David Eisner, the new CEO of the National Constitution Center, an innovative museum and event space devoted to the U.S. Constitution that is based in Philadelphia.
By May, we agreed that NCC needed to toe into the waters of content to grow its own audience who could become supporters, donors and visitors. In June, we started that work with an asset analysis and creating work flow and a platform direction.
At the beginning of December, I left another role and promised greater details on what I would doing. Here’s a start.
In the past few weeks, I’ve chosen a payroll services company, applied for tax status, requested a business operating license, closed an existing account and otherwise finalized the incorporation of a new business, of which I am now a full-time employee, answering early a resolution of mine.
Technically Media Inc. is a media services consultancy with three founders: Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and myself.
And, while I could get you lost in the details, all you really need to know that at its simplest form, we build audiences online.
Directories are normally pretty boring. We think ours won’t be.
It’s certainly a small step, but, leveraging WordPress custom taxonomies with some incredible thinking power of Sean Blanda and plenty of sweat equity from myself and Brian James Kirk, we have launched pages for the nearly 1,000 companies and almost as many individuals we’ve covered at Technically Philly in the past two years.
LESSON: If you’re noticed, your work will be scrutinized.
4. Potential Partners — “I don’t see the point of meeting.”
FAILURE: Turned down an opportunity to meet with a key business leader.
LESSON: In this new media environment, everyone is a potential partner.
5. Investment (sappy anecdote) — “Well, that wasn’t THAT depressing.”
FAILURE: We started Technically Philly (and said some silly things in front of important people).
LESSON: We’ve learned much, met many people and improved what we know in the space of journalism.
The presentation is also available here. See and hear the presentation from Samurai Tours here.
When we were asked for more embarrassing stories, we realized we should have also shared the story of our speaking engagement with the Women’s Press Association of Pennsylvania, in which no one showed except the organizer and former Philadelphia mayoral candidate Queena Bass. Or we could have told one of the half dozen times Sean has been under dressed when going to cover events.
It was a fun session with a few practical takeaways, we hope. If nothing else, it seemed well-received.
Some Tweets
Anthony Ruiz of Samurai Virtual Tours quotes me about being stupid
With a bit of a twinkle in our eyes, my colleagues Brian James Kirk and Sean Blanda, today, we launch a small testament to our love for that city that lives in Philadelphia’s historic shadow: New York.
It’s not much now and probably won’t be in the future. Just a small landing page for a mentality.
Yes, it comes from that old New York Times trend story that chronicled — in a somewhat condescending tone — the young people from that city, particularly Brooklyn, who were migrating to old transitioning neighborhoods of Philadelphia.
Philadelphia, the story suggested, was the ‘next borough’ so the ‘sixth borough.’
To be honest, we’re not always sure exactly what it is the young journalists at Technically Philly are trying to accomplish at the site. Are they attempting to chronicle the local media’s often-painful transition into the web-centric era? Well, yes, there’s certainly that. But it sometimes seems that TP’s contributors are trying to bring about the future of media by loudly declaring themselves to be the future of media. The guys—Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Chris Wink—are certainly good at getting their names out there: The trio appeared last spring at BarCamp Philly, a gathering of veteran journalists, to explain the virtues of their approach. And if that approach appears to be a combination of web links, brief stories and occasional interviews that skim the surface of the local scene—well, who’s to say that isn’t the future of media? [Source]
Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and me on Saturday, April 25, 2009 in the atrium of Annenberg Hall at Temple University after discussing at the BarCamp for NewsInnovation at TechnicallyPhilly.com, which we co-founded.
There are a host of worlds and working parts to it, different scenes, from Center City, to Old City, to South Philly, to the northwest and West Philly, up to the ‘burbs and, well, in some way, everywhere in between.
The problem is that there is no one home, no one portal, vessel for all of those cultures and news and events and updates.
Today, my colleagues Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and I, debuted TechnicallyPhilly.com, a news site covering the community of people who use technology in the Philadelphia region.
