News – Christopher Wink

Five criteria for the flourishing of news entities of the future

Late at a bar in my neighborhood, a friend asked me: how are you innovative?

His general assessment was that Technically Media, a consultancy, and Technically Philly, a news site, weren’t particularly innovative or interesting for 2011. We’re an online-based startup of 20-somethings creating journalism-fueled content. That might barley bass for envelope-pushing in the late 1990s.

Sure, we think editorial strategy — in which all organizations create content to build audience to have impact — is interesting, and that’s a big part of what we’re doing, but I wasn’t satisfied.

So I’m going to share what I came to: the five criteria of news entities of the future.

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What a news story on a boy who wore the most underwear means

I can only pray that this video isn’t the last remnant of our culture thousands of years from now.

A 1:32 news piece on a 10-year-old boy who puts on 215 pairs of underwear to break a world record. Two shots of parents expressing their praise and then an afterthought at the end: a paralyzed marine.

Changing ways in which society collects information

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The way we have gained information has apparently changed in the past 200 years, according to a really interesting and insightful graphical analysis of those trends by online magazine Baekdal.com.

The graphic analysis, as depicted above, aims to give some sense of the how the sources of information developed in common society. It suggests that in the next 10 years, we’ll find more and more news and information via social networks, with declines in TV, general Web sites and blogs.

After a few hundred years of newsletters, pamphlets and other written news sources known of in Europe and perhaps present elsewhere, the idea of a regularly published, verifiable collection of news source was developed in the United States in Boston, New York and Philadelphia in the mid-18th century. Leading to that turn of the century, more than 50 newspapers of varying stripe were bubbling in the colonies, leading to the idea of “freedom of the press” when the 1791 Bill of Rights were ratified.

This graphic and its explanation — well worth your time — gets the history down, if briefly, but I can’t say I agree with all its prognosticating about the future of news gathering.

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Strange encampment near FDR Memorial in Washington D.C.

The entrance of the Roosevelt Memorial, tonight adjacent to a strange cluster of unidentified tents.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial is in left field of a well-worn baseball field, wedged between the icy Potamac River and the city’s Tidal Basin.

Tonight, so is a strange encampment of brown tents, bright lights and vehicles with federal government license plates.

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Recession thick, but some sectors still hiring

People in line for unemployment benefits in Detroit. (Photo by Francis Miller, January 1952)

I now know a handful of bright people – some family, some friends, some young all smart and competent – who are victims of what is becoming a growing economic hysteria, made worse by media… and blogs. This from the Washington Post:

New unemployment figures from the Department of Labor show average new jobless claims for the past four weeks up more than 200,000 from a year ago to their highest level since Dec. 1982.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll found job cuts reaching a broad swath of Americans: nearly two in 10 reported they or someone in their household had lost a job in the past few months, and almost three in 10 said their household had been hit with a pay cut or reduced hours at work.” [Source]

That can only affect this freelance journalist, as it does millions of Americans.

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I heart John Baer: Move Pennsylvania Society weekend from NYC to Philly

Ed Rendell and others at 2006 Pennsylvania Society dinner in New York City.

One of the largest and, admittedly, one of the many embarrassments of old Philadelphia is that the annual Pennsylvania Society dinner is held in midtown Manhattan.

It seems like a suggestion that Pennsylvania’s largest city – the city of firsts, the workshop of the world, the first great city of the United States – isn’t good enough. Or as Fred Anton, head of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association, told eminent Daily News columnist John Baer, Philly isn’t “exotic” enough. His recent most column lambasted the 109-year-old celebration:

Cancel next month’s Pennsylvania Society weekend in New York City, or curtail it, or work on moving it to its home state.

In the worst economy since the Great Depression, with 1.2 million jobs lost this year, with state unemployment at 5.7 percent, the highest rate since right after Gov. Rendell took office in ’03, with the city facing job cuts and a $1 billion shortfall, it just strikes me as a tad unseemly to, you know, party hearty. [Source]

But, this deal is even more twisted than even Baer acknowledges, though I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I was once in a group photo with him.

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Thoughts on City Paper cover story on Philly porn star

So turns out one of today’s biggest, brightest and youngest upcoming porn stars lives in South Philadelphia.

And really, where else could Stoya live.

Philadelphia City Paper devoted its latest cover story to her. Nearly 5,000 words, friends. Writer Matt Stroud is getting beaten up a bit in the blogosphere and on the story comments – though some are complimentary – and there’s been some buzz around it, so I gave it a read, though I’m currently out of Philly.

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NYTM: Barack Obama makes racial politics go away

From left: Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia; Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina; Representative John Lewis of Georgia; and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama. (Nigel Parry for The New York Times)

Interesting, if already well-circled, story in the recent-most New York Times Magazine, entitled “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter got some face time in its main graphic, as seen above, and in a large portion of the story, briefly excerpted below. A beginning excerpt that stuck with me:

Obama was barely 2 years old when King gave his famous speech, 3 when Lewis was beaten about the head in Selma. He didn’t grow up in the segregated South as Bill Clinton had. Sharing those experiences wasn’t a prerequisite for gaining the acceptance of black leaders, necessarily, but that didn’t mean Obama, with his nice talk of transcending race and baby-boomer partisanship, could fully appreciate the sacrifices they made, either. “Every kid is always talking about what his parents have been through,” Rangel says, “and no kid has any clue what he’s talking about.”

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Dwight Evans owns the world

Very good story by Brad Bumsted – top notch State Capitol reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review – on Philadelphia’s own Dwight Evans.

Evans’ star rises to top of House

HARRISBURG — Over the past year, Rep. Dwight Evans has emerged as the most powerful member of the state House.

“Dwight Evans is the real powerhouse now in the (Democratic) caucus,” said G. Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster.

As chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the affable Evans, 54, of Philadelphia is the fifth-ranking member on the depth chart of Democrats, who control the House by a one-vote margin.

Read the rest here.

We also learn that Evans loves Dancing with the Stars.

Image WHYY.

Philadelphia police beating is not as bad as Rodney King

You’ve heard it by now.

Fox 29 captured an 11-minute video following a Philadelphia police chase that ended with officers punching and kicking three men, suspected of a drive-by shooting minutes prior.

In case you’re smart enough to avoid cable news, you might not realize that the story is being recycled again and again each news hour with new perspectives with the same information. Here’s the footage discussed with a New York City lawyer on CNN.

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