Prompted by Technical.ly’s year-long THRIVING reporting series, I joined the CityCast podcast. We’re interviewing hundreds of people from a half-dozen other cities, plus following 10 Philadelphians for a full year to help understand: What are the obstacles and opportunities to economically thrive?
Listen here.
The New York Times gave a nice nod to good local reporting by Technical.ly’s Holly Quinn.
We published this simple interview with a State Auditor candidate that added to the public record to inform this piece by the country’s paper of record.
I originally posted this on Medium here. It received considerable endorsement, including here, here and here.
Early professional news networks in the 14th and 15th centuries were couriers on horseback, informing warlords and merchants. Even competitors saw the value in shared professional news gathering, when there wasn’t a state-owned alternative. Subscriptions, then, subsidized the first foreign affairs and business reporters.
Over the next 500 years, innovations in distribution and in printing and paper technology shaped professional news-gathering into the 20th century model we most recognize today: advertising revenue subsidized relatively low unit costs to ensure widely available mass media (albeit almost exclusively from a white male perspective, but that needs its own post entirely).
Today we’re well into the first generation of the digital transformation of news-gathering and distribution. Yet we as journalism practitioners are still managing to underestimate how dramatically things have changed.
Continue reading ‘Journalism Thinking’ doesn’t need a business model. It needs a call to armsA decade ago this month a couple friends and I started down a pathway that became Technical.ly so in the next couple weeks I am going to do some sharing.
A couple weeks ago, we hosted our inaugural Alumni Ball — gathering both current and former staff at the Pen and Pencil Club — and on February 26th in Philadelphia, we’re hosting a public celebration, conjoined with our largest jobs fair. We’ll also run plenty of editorial mentions honoring this anniversary.
First things first publicly, I wrote a Twitter thread unashamedly showing off about how lucky I feel about the team I am a part of right now. I’m sharing that here, with slight editing.
Continue reading A thank you to my coworkers ahead of Technical.ly’s 10th anniversary
Long a believer in the importance of the nascent civic technology community, I’ve been a fan of national nonprofit Code for America. So I was thrilled for the chance to support the group in producing its first ever Brigade Congress, a national unconference focused on civic tech, last month.
Continue reading I helped organize Code for America’s inaugural national Brigade Congress
Earlier this month, we at Technical.ly hosted the third annual Delaware Innovation Week. (Find Technical.ly coverage of DIW17 here)
Ahead of it, the Delaware Business Times did a Q&A with me here and in print.
The sixth annual Baltimore Innovation Week has already kicked off, and so I’ve been thinking, as I always do, about what’s different or special this year.
Continue reading A few notes on the 6th annual Baltimore Innovation Week
I bylined a challenging profile of a Philly tech community member that published on Technical.ly last week. It was a 30-interview, 7,000-word kind of longread, something different than work I’ve done before.
I felt the story was important for a local community I serve, but I also felt there were broader lessons and concepts that I believe have relevance to other small communities everywhere. Between that and my own personal interest in continuing to develop my credentials in that kind of work, I invested quite a bit of my free time to the project over the last month.
We have published other pieces of longform — see other examples here. But this was the first person-specific long read profile I’ve written — others came close but were far less exhaustive. I have some thoughts to share below. If you haven’t already, please read the piece here.
Continue reading Notes on reporting a challenging community journalism profile
The importance of artificial intelligence and the algorithms that power them is still understated.
That’s among the big themes from Weapons of Math Destruction, an important book published lat year and written by Kathy O’Neill, a computer scientist.
Proudly, Technical.ly had a small contribution, as this story of ours was cited in the book — this story informed that later reporting. There have been a few other examples of that sorta thing but I haven’t captured them. Just kinda fun to see.
Writer John Marchese profiled Apu Gupta, the CEO and cofounder of image intelligence startup Curalate, in Philadelphia magazine this month. It’s a good piece, so read it.
(Last year, Phillymag kindly profiled my cofounder and I too )
I’ve followed Apu and Curalate since their earliest days and been long eager to discuss entrepreneurship ecosystem building in the Philadelphia region — as I do in a dozen other communities in the country. (Find Technical.ly coverage of Apu and Curalate, including the offices we shared).
Business communities need to grow new, dynamic companies. In a still young Philly tech startup sector, we’ve asked the question of whether Curalate will be that region’s next big story, as part of building its scene further.
So in trying to contextualize Apu’s importance, John joined me at our annual Super Meetup this summer and asked me some questions. I wanted to share a few more thoughts on the piece.
