March 2014 – CGW's Blog

Philly Tech Week: 5 events I’m most proud of happening

Event production is stressful, chaotic and labor-intensive. It is also an act in designed collision. There is a lot of learning to be done in all of these ways.

This Friday will kickoff the fourth annual Philly Tech Week Presented by AT&T, far and away the largest collaborative effort in which I have ever taken part. To track what I’m learning in the process, I pulled five of the more than 130 events happening during the week from which I believe I’m learning the most.

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“How it became cool to be a geek” Inquirer quote

How did it become cool to be a geek? The ubiquitous Internet has helped. The like-minded can find one another, no matter how narrow their interest. “You’re not the other,” says Christopher Wink, cofounder and editor for Technically Philly, a technology news website. “You’re not so strange.”

Makers, density and the rise of the rest: tech in 2014

In something of a followup to our first Technical.ly podcast, I addressed nearly 40 attendees at the last Delaware Tech Meetup in Wilmington with big trends we see happening in tech communities across the East Coast.

Here’s what I said:

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How Spring Street could thrive: survival for small towns in a new urban age

Newton is a small town in the northwest corner of New Jersey, where preserved forests, protected open space and state-backed farm land has curtailed suburbanization to maintain the foundation of what could be a thriving community in an urban age. It has a dense Main Street corridor and the anchor institutions of a 250-year-old town, as a gateway to this beautiful rural region. It also happens to be where I grew up.

Elsewhere in Sussex County, there are lake houses and golf courses that attract vacationers and tourists (and reporters) from the New York City market — that’s where my parents and other families came from. Though I believe there are unique assets, I also think this story is one that will relate to communities throughout the country and certainly elsewhere in the U.S. Northeast.

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Here’s the final math on my middle class $100k college education

I have now fully paid the $100,000 that my college experience from Temple University cost. Here I share the breakdown of some more specifics on what those costs include and how I paid them.

This month, six years after graduating from Temple, I will put $1,800 to close out the last of my student loans. As many of my peers, who attended ‘out-of-state’ universities and are from, relatively speaking, privileged, middle class families will tell you, I accelerated this process considerably. I don’t like debt, so each year since 2010 when I was able to do so, I paid more than I was required to in order to speed the process of getting debt free.

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To pitch a reporter, there’s an invisible point threshold you need to cross

While part of a roundtable on media exposure at a Knight Foundation grantee event last year, an audience question got right to the point of what many organization leaders want from reporters: what will it take for you to cover my work?

The idea is that we in media have a bigger audience and offer an endorsement of legitimacy. Whether or not that’s true, it’s why so many seek any snippet of coverage. It also got me thinking about trying to create some data point to help others outside of this industry understand what it takes to get the attention of a reporter and an editor.

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