When WHYY launched NewsWorks a year and some months ago, I was a skeptic. While they were using the right tools, their terms of service agreement looked like it was designed to stifle any real community engagement. The ToS still reads like it was crafted by an RIAA lawyer who’d sooner hug a panhandler than give $40 to public broadcasting. But I was dead wrong about NewsWorks’ ability to engage its community.

In the year or so since they launched, the folks at WHYY have attracted and engaged people in civil and informative conversations. If that sounds easy to you, head on over to Philly.com and troll their comment sections for a minute. I don’t know the ins-and-outs of NewsWorks’ moderation process. I do know that good moderation requires more people, time and thought than most organizations are willing to budget for. Doing it well on a public broadcasting budget — that’s commendable.  Keep reading…

Tags: creative commons, newsworks, Philadelphia, Public broadcasting, whyy

After a year and a half running Philly.com, the Inquirer and Daily News, Greg Osberg and co. have made some impressive contributions to the canon of Deadly Sins in Journalism. Every week brings another teaching moment. Philadelphia has become a mad scientist’s laboratory of experiments in how not to run a newspaper. This needs to stop, and that means Osberg has to go.

I had high hopes for the dailies and their website when the new publisher took over. Osberg had the right credentials to shepherd Philly’s strong reporting into the online world. The experiment with the news tablet, despite its evident flaws, seemed to me like a risk worth taking. But my hopes faded, month after month, as it became clear that the new leadership wasn’t serious about addressing its biggest online problem. Keep reading…

Tags: Daily News, New York Times, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Media Network

More than a few lazy journalists in Philadelphia have committed attempted punditry this morning. Not unusual for the day after an election, but remarkable for the way these folks have tossed aside easy facts in favor of simple biases. It’s a different kind of expectations game.

In markets and politics we often judge winners and losers against expectations, and brands and politicians often seek to temper  expectations in the weeks before judgment day. It’s not the number you post — funds raised, profit earned, endorsements garnered — but whether it was higher or lower than expected.

Who’s expecting? Analysts. In the marketplace, those are the folks at brokerage houses who recommend what to buy and sell. In politics, it’s journalists themselves. Keep reading…

Tags: Journalist, Percentage, Philadelphia, Twitter, Voter turnout

Philadelphia embraced the “why can’t us” motto in the fall of 2008 as the Phillies headed to their second World Championship. The prospective new owners of the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer may have picked up that rallying cry in announcing Gregory J. Osberg as their incoming publisher.

He grew up in the region, got his publishing start at Chilton and advanced to run Newsweek, and spent the last several years running Buzzwire. Prior to his stint at Newsweek, he headed the sales and marketing operation at CNET. If your mission is to drag two dailies and a handful of weeklies into an age where people do everything with their phone, he’d be on your short list of hires.

“Someone has to be the first regional media company to figure out the successful model,” he told the Inquirer. “Why can’t it be us in Philadelphia?”

Both papers seem to think that’s the mission. It’ll be fascinating to watch. As last month’s J-Lab analysis points out, there are plenty of opportunities for collaboration here.

Keep an eye on the concessions the new owners want from the unions. Lots of work rule changes point to innovation; staff cuts, not so much. If they understand what it is that they just bought—a content factory—then they know they can’t continue cutting people who create quality content.

Tags: content factory, inquirer, osberg, Philadelphia, philadelphia daily news

Springtime in Philadelphia can only mean one thing ~ a flashmob on South Street. The Inquirer tells us that “thousands of teenagers” gathered and “swarmed” last night, creating another opportunity for a cycle of bad reporting and hack public relations work to spin out of control for a couple of news cycles.

Combine the two things that many folks understand the least and fear the most — teenagers and technology — and cry havoc. Reporters will spend their Sunday dialing-up the usual suspects to elicit their now routine quote about suing Twitter, monitoring MySpace or blocking Facebook. Their public relations advisors will exploit the opportunity to get their guy on T.V. and counsel gutsier quotes with a greater sense of urgency.

It’s fear-mongering. Keep reading…

Tags: fear mongering, flashmob, Philadelphia, public relations practitioners, teenagers