June 2009 – CGW's Blog

Three stories from one interview: Kevin Kiene of ezLandlord Forms

It started with a call about ezLandlord Forms, an e-commerce site with meaningful traffic that was based in Philadelphia.

I interviewed Kevin Kiene, the CEO and founder of the online provider of property-management legal documents with 300,000 members nationally, for a story for Technically Philly. During our conversation, I found out he was a Fox Chase native who now lives in Frankford, the same neighborhood I now call home, so I wrote a story about him for NEast Philly, too.

That got picked up by the father and son team at Frankford Gazette, who do a great job of chronicling the bad and more importantly the good of their native ‘hood. Suddenly, a few hundred new eyeballs know about Kiene and his product.

After the jump links to both stories I wrote, a couple quotations that didn’t make it into either and the video that prompted it all.

Continue reading Three stories from one interview: Kevin Kiene of ezLandlord Forms

A loose steer makes for a great test of local news coverage

Phillipsburg Patrolman Kevin Cyphers attempts to corral the bull Wednesday night after it first got loose. Express-Times File Photo | TIM WYNKOOP

When local news is at its best, it delivers coverage no one else on the planet it can. So, it’s important to take it seriously.

A friend revisited with me a story from northeastern Pennsylvania earlier this year that exemplified it wonderfully: a steer gets loose from a pen the night before a high school agricultural fair. For more than two days it runs wild. The local press, highlighted by the Easton Express-Times and then the Morning Call when it got particularly ridiculous, chased the high school teachers — friends of mine — and the students and administrators as they chased the steer.

It made great, fun, well-followed news. If lessons can be made from when news outlets make mistakes, they can certainly be made from their triumphs. And, livestock or not, this was a triumph. Follow the news feed from that magical May week and what seemed to work.

Continue reading A loose steer makes for a great test of local news coverage

Philadelphia Inquirer John Yoo controversy doesn't seem to be much of a controversy anymore

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Well that was a lot about nothing, no?

A Web site, Fire John Yoo is tracking all the news of the now dying coverage of John Yoo, who wrote controversial legal notices on torture during the Bush administration, and the virtriol surrounding his being retained as an op-ed columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

There were protests across the country calling for Yoo to be fired. He wasn’t. And, as news is want to do, it seems to have all but quieted. That’s how John Yoo became a household name and will soon be forgotten.

Inquirer Editorial page editor Harold Jackson, if not perfectly, did, I think, correctly assess the situation and why the controversy may not have been worth it all.

Continue reading Philadelphia Inquirer John Yoo controversy doesn't seem to be much of a controversy anymore

Grid magazine: Philadelphia factories are repurposed sustainably

The sustainable renovation of the Globe Dye Works, a former manufacturing complex in the Frankford neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia, is the focus of a story I have in Grid magazine this month.

For five generations and 140 years, the Globe Dye Works dyed and wound yarn, and employed hundreds at its peak. In 2005, unable to continue fighting the globalization and outsourcing that moved other businesses, Globe closed, ending another vestige of Philadelphia’s past as the Workshop of the World. Its 11 buildings and 165,000 square feet, located off Torresdale Avenue in the Frankford area of Northeast Philadelphia, were shuttered and left vacant. Read more here [PDF].

Check out the PDF and read the story on Page 18.

I also did a small feature on Globe Dye Works for NEast Philly. Grid is a fairly new magazine focused on Philadelphia sustainability and environmentalism, and it’s quickly growing attention for good reporting and sharp design. I’m proud to be a part.

Below see what didn’t make it into print.

Continue reading Grid magazine: Philadelphia factories are repurposed sustainably

Technically Philly vies for Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism

Update: We lost.

Grant money in journalism is flowing freely in a tightened economy and a historic juncture in print media.

Seems like an opportunity.

So, my two partners and I, who founded Technically Philly, applied for the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, a $10,000 grant to support new ideas in news. See our submission here.

We thought bringing together two niches — the geography of Philadelphia and the industry of technology and innovation — and diversifying revenue streams — going beyond advertising — was a new enough model that it might catch the eye of a judge or two.

We walked into a meaningful business, social and startup community in a major metro region’s creative economies and began reporting, relying on our interests in social media, community reporting and professional and ethical journalism.

We recently introduced advertising — a small first step in monetization –and feel that a grant for $10,000 could afford the three of us an opportunity to work full time for perhaps as much two months or more. Considering how pleased we are with our traffic growth and the response from the community, we’re thrilled by even the chance at the opportunity to give full time to a project none of us have been able to offer even part time thus far.

Unfortunately and entirely unsurprisingly, there is some stiff competition from the nearly 100 submissions that were entered. Below I share some of the more interesting submissions I saw and my thoughts on our viability.

Continue reading Technically Philly vies for Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism

Obituaries: a newspaper staple that should find a way into community news sites

memorial-obit It’s all about alternative revenue.

Newspapers, large and small, have served for generations as a gateway for providing information about the deaths of loved ones.

Without any real numbers to back this up, it sure seems that unlike things like job listings and other classifieds, obit profits haven’t been eaten away nearly as much.

When I look at highly targeted community Web sites — successful ones like Howard Owens’s The Batvian and My Missourian (read about if they are sustainable) — I don’t see them trying to do the same. Any site that has any meaningful geographic focus and critical mass of readership there needs to see this as an important monetization strategy.

Continue reading Obituaries: a newspaper staple that should find a way into community news sites

What if advertising wasn't in a recession, but dying?

downward-trend It would create a permanent fissure in the media world.

The question of whether plummeting advertising numbers are representative more of a broader trend than just the economy was the focus of an interesting post from James Fallows of the Atlantic, as I found from Philadelphia Inquirer online editor Chris Krewson.

The real problem is, advertising is dying. It’s just pulling down newspapers along the way. Next up: TV, radio, and Google.

This is why I was warning anyone who would listen that traditional media’s schadenfreude when the internet bubble popped in 2001 was probably misplaced. Because the reason it popped was one finally had the metrics to show Advertising Doesn’t Work. Google has forestalled the inevitable by doing the Net equivalent of the “tiny little ads” schtick of a decade or two back, but I think they see the writing on the wall, which is why they keep trying so desperately to find something, anything, other than search that’ll make money…. [Source]

Continue reading What if advertising wasn't in a recession, but dying?

What is a blog and why do so many people hate them?

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If you check out Technically Philly and you follow every minute change, you may have noticed that the tagline that we boast at the site’s top has changed slightly.

Last week it still read: “Technically Philly is a blog covering the community of people who use technology in Philadelphia.” Now it says, “Technically Philly is a site that covers the community of people who use technology in Philadelphia.”

It may be a small change, but we realized we were lying.

Twelve years ago December in Ohio, they say, Jorn Barger took to calling his Robot Wisdom site a “web log,” as his collection of links were, he said, literally logging the Web.

The type of Web site quickly took to house a variety of online diaries, often collecting news and commentary, too, but always flowing in some form of sequential order.

In 2004, with five million worldwide, the blog format was said to have hit the critical mass of being mainstream, bringing with it a new crew of news analysis and commentary, then largely from an outsider’s perspective.

Something happened then. While some even well-known blogs — like Deadspin, as Buzz Bissinger, Bob Costas and then-Editor Will Leitch made famous — maintained that the outsider’s perspective was crucial to the blog form, the world went silly with blogs.

Continue reading What is a blog and why do so many people hate them?