Earlier this month, the New Yorker had a big profile of Nick Denton, who famously launched in 2002 national blog network Gawker Media. It’s interesting, of course, for its personality, but I was drawn most to a few grafs focusing on news profitability.
Check out the profile in its entirety — or another recent big profile on him from New York Magazine — but below, find my favorite sections.
Continue reading New Yorker profile of Nick Denton dives into online news profit
As I first shared last month, we at Technically Philly last week hosted Switch Philly, a tech demo event that we hope to host with some regularity and served as our first major, paid event.
It is the first in a series of events that a big part of making TP a sustainable business.
On the night of one of the most meaningful playoff baseball games in the sport’s history, we welcomed 170 people into the historic Levitt Auditorium of Gershman Hall at University of the Arts to hear five local companies pitch their latest, greatest innovation in just seven minutes, with no PowerPoint presentations allowed — though we made an exception.
That crowd included Councilman Bill Green, Inquirer columnist Mike Armstrong, RobinHood Ventures co-founder Ellen Weber, Genacast Ventures Managing Partner Gil Beyda, Independents Hall co-founder Alex Hillman and dozens more venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, journalists community leaders and more.
It was — for a tech business demo event — fast-moving, crowded and inspiring for the continued acknowledgment of this region’s technology community. We hope to have our next in early 2011.
Below, find a roundup of the successful event, including video, media coverage and more.
Continue reading Switch Philly: a roundup after the first major, paid Technically Philly event
I am not going to write about the brief media blitz that surrounded the controversy of the City of Philadelphia enforcing its business privilege license requirement for bloggers.
My good friend and Technically Philly co-founder Sean Blanda already handled well my perspective.
(Quickly, Philadelphia, like many municipal governments, requires a license to do business in its environs. An unnamed amount of bloggers who declared on federal tax documents some form of revenue from their publications were compelled to pay for a $50 yearly or $300 lifetime license, the latter of which both Technically Philly and NEast Philly acquired as we brought on revenue. Philadelphia CityPaper reported that the city had begun reaching directly out to bloggers demanding they pay up, a reality first noted on web forum Philly Speaks and, admittedly, ignored by us at TP, and the whole concept exploded. Soon, far flung media outlets were implying that the city’s license — which is required of anyone doing any kind of business in the 135 square miles of Philadelphia — was for bloggers only. It isn’t. And anyone solicited by the city had advertising or had otherwise declared related income federally. So, considering much of the revenue was limited to tens of dollars, it may have been a foolish chase, but certainly not illegal or unfair.)
Instead, I wanted to share two thoughts on the future of blogging that came out of this controversy.
I dug into this Business Week profile of Henry Blodget from the the Business Insider a few weeks ago.
Blodget is the editor of TBI — a business and technology aggregation and content site dubbed the ‘hooters of the internet’ — after being forced out of a financial analyst career for fraud allegations.
I wanted to share two passages from the piece that spoke widely to discussions around the future of news.
Continue reading Businessweek on Henry Blodget: Passages on the future of news sites
If you have a mission, nonprofit or otherwise, you ought to have a voice in your mission.
On the Back on My Feet blog, we don’t do enough of it, but when issues surrounding homelessness come up, we are sure to share them with our readers.
So when the very big news of the country’s first national report on homelessness was published and was part of a call to end homelessness in five years, we certainly shared it promptly, following our primary source of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.
That happened June 25, so I was certainly interested to see the first mention in Philadelphia of that big report come by way of an editorial from the beleaguered Inquirer on July 5.
That’s a startup nonprofit feeding important industry news to its supporters before news media. Note the obvious trend.
Eighteen months ago, I was searching for the best metro columnist in Philadelphia.
I felt the Inquirer’s Dan Rubin was the nearest in a legacy of citywide voice boxes, telling the broadest and widest ranging stories. Perhaps that’s true.
But it’s been nagging me that outside of some media-focused friends — and even then — I never hear Rubin or his other traditional columnist colleagues with any sort of regularity.
Instead, the columnists whose names I read, hear mentioned and myself reference the most are increasingly niche orientated. They’re not writing about the city, they’re writing about and for a very narrowly focused part of it. These are other critics and writers who have long existed in newspaper parlance, but I believe the increasingly niche-dominated media ecosystem means their voices carry greater power than before.
Riding into the White House, the angle was that Barack Obama would be a president whose celebrated communications skills would work to balance his governing inexperience.
But Jonathan Alter, a Newsweek senior editor and author of a new book chronicling Obama’s first year as president, says Obama has instead taken to private, dispassionate discourse on the issues, which he has struggled to liven up to connect with American people.
“So he seems aloof,” Alter said last night in front of a paying crowd of nearly 250 inside the Kirby Auditorium of the National Constitution Center. “And that has hurt him.”
Continue reading Jonathan Alter at National Constitution Center, a storyteller with authority
Last month, The New York Times Magazine had a big piece on the price of online journalism… or at least content of some kind. I only dug into it this weekend.
It was a big piece riddled with stories of a handful of struggling entrepreneurs and a few buzz-y sites that haven’t prospered, but three paragraphs interested me most.
Let me share them below.
Continue reading New York Times on the price of online journalism; broken pieces to return
The cover of a regional edition of the highest circulated daily newspaper in Philadelphia featured a news story of my own yesterday.
Rumors on the possible sale of an alleged drug-infested nuisance property veiled as a recovery home in a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood that came out of last week’s Frankford Civic Association meeting was enough to warrant front page coverage of Metro. The property has been seen as something of a rallying call on the issue of illegal ‘recovery homes.’
I attended the meeting as a former resident and occasional contributor to NEast Philly, the Northeast hyperlocal, that started last month a content partnership with the Philadelphia edition of the international free daily newspaper franchise.
Continue reading Metro cover on Frankford recovery homes, their content partnerships
The second annual BarCamp NewsInnovation was held last month at Temple University — see my notes here.
In addition to sharing all the failures we’ve had at Technically Philly, I spoke with founder and editor Shannon McDonald about the progress we’ve had with Northeast Philadelphia hyperlocal NEast Philly, including most prominently the breakdown of where our content was coming from.
See here the notes from our 2009 BarCamp presentation on being an online news startup in a print-heavy community.
Below find the notes and slides from this year’s BarCamp presentation entitled: Twitter is stupid…and other foundations of our content strategy.
