KEYSPOT is the branded network of computer literacy centers in Philadelphia, including city-backed rec centers, Free Library branches and private nonprofit efforts.

Since their federal stimulus-backed launch in 2011, we at Technically Philly have reported on the effort, including the impact, small numbers and celebrated successes. That’s presumably why I was asked to be one of a handful of people included in a public awareness advertising campaign — which also included rapper Freeway and has run on a few outdoor billboards, on SEPTA subway cars and in some train stations.

I’ve had a few questions privately and publicly about the appropriateness of a reporter/editor to be involved in such a campaign, so I thought it was worth sharing my logic.

Centrally, when I was asked to do the photo shoot back in January inside a Drexel University auditorium, I weighed the benefits and potential pitfalls and felt there was more reason to do it than not.

Let me share those thoughts:

Why do it?

• I personally believe in the need for greater awareness about the KEYSPOT network of computer literacy centers.
• The organization I most visibly represent has an editorial interest in that same greater awareness.
• After covering for years many of the stakeholders involved in the KEYSPOT effort, I believe, while impacted by politics and persuasions, that, on the whole, the people behind the effort believe in the mission.
• For the overwhelming majority of people who see the advertisements, I am nothing more than stock photography
• For readers and partners, this is a statement that I care about the mission-driven impact of our technology community around access and not just the wealth creation.
• Most shallowly, it was a new experience.

Why don’t do it?

• Other reporters, editors and others sensitive to traditional media ethics could view this as a misstep or breach of our industry norms. I am taken less seriously in my profession for being seen as too heavily involved in advocacy.
• The connection between me and an organization I cover could result in a reporting bias or, even harder to control, the perception of a reporting bias.
• I’m attaching my name to an organization I have no leadership in. So if it were to be involved in a controversy — or, more likely, when declining centralized funding and lack of central leadership leads to a fracturing of the effort — my name and, by extension, organization are associated with it.

I don’t like, nor do I take lightly, those reasons to not do it, but I simply don’t believe that action should only be taken when there are no negative side effects. There are always negatives, so that’s just a reason for inaction. I’d rather be involved in trying to solve something.

To put it most simply, I felt most of the reasons to not do this were governed by a small minority of peers in the news industry, whose values I don’t think have to reflect my ethical paradigm. Rather, I believe that to be involved in technology, we have to be aware of where our most vulnerable friends are being left behind, and news is involved in the communities it covers. I want to be a part of the solution in any way — even just public awareness.

Oh, and let me say this clearly: I have not received any compensation for this project, and if I had, I would have donated it toward a relevant effort around access.

When you worked under someone who will never be able to see as you as anything more than subordinate: intern syndrome.

Like many industries facing a disruption, experienced leaders that have earned their leadership through seniority rightly question a newer, younger cohort that asks a lot of questions and experiments with process. I think that’s partly the reason for sometimes uneasy relationships I’ve had with more veteran colleagues of mine.

(Read: our struggle at Technically Philly to establish any meaningful content partnerships, our decision to expand to other markets and, sure, the fact that BarCamp NewsInnovation will often have more people from other cities than the Philly daily papers).

I like barriers to entry, in which relationships and respect isn’t automatically transferred, but in recent years I’ve butted up against situations in which I felt the work of my peers or even myself was being cast aside because it was assumed to be inferior, because of our age, because of our having been subordinates to to many with whom we are now hoping to work. (Though this happens everywhere, when I find interference with the more established players in Philadelphia in a mentality of scarcity, I think of this city’s long troubled past with civic leadership, which is surely why so many people here struggle to share the stage.)

It makes me question the structure of seniority. Experience is very good at context and direction, but experience isn’t always good for breeding innovation. There is no shortage of stories of the startup or upstart who brings fresh perspective and new ideas to a situation. It seems then that our leaders shouldn’t be experienced, instead, they should newcomers, surrounded by those with experience — unless that leader is the very rare visionary who can decide what is a crazy idea and what is a new one.

I recently said something like that: People with experience should be valuable advisers to leaders who have nothing but new views. For example, maybe everyone in Congress should be younger than 45, with a team of wise experts.

Perhaps encouraging and celebrating new ideas from new comers, we could overcome Intern Syndrome.

It recently occurred to me that there are a handful of Internet memes that I just can’t shake, and why wouldn’t I share them on April Fool’s Day.

Though memes are meant to come and go, there are some I find myself going back to enjoy again and sharing with anyone who will listen. Here are some of them.

1. The Spider picture email — It was 2008, when the exchange between a man and a utility company got me laughing.
2. Alien Contact How-to Infographic — Finally, the step-by-step infographic on what to do if you’re the first to make contact with an alien. Launched in 2010, I share this endlessly with friends.
3. Youarelistening.to/Philadelphia — Started in early 2011 with Los Angeles, a developer mashed up city police radio with ambient electronic music. When I’m writing, I find myself often listening to Philadelphia’s.
4. Hoodrat stuff with my friends — Also in 2008, a seven-year-old took a joyride with his grandmother’s car and had a memorable interview with the TV news.
5. Ain’t nobody got time for that — The finest of the autotune-the-news, which is a wonderful meme that has its way of poking fun at the man-on-the-street style of TV news.
6. Stupid Fucking Cat — Last year, among my favorite

What we have lost in investigative reporting units at news organization in the last two decades will be at least partially replaced by mission-orientated groups that can find other value for doing such work.

Foundations, think tanks and mission-minded nonprofits may be the more ethically normalized groups, but in elections and government, the idea of campaign opposition research will almost surely come to wider prominence. The idea that a campaign would hire investigators, lawyers or others to dig up shortcomings on political rivals is not new at all, but we’ll hear more about this.

Awareness of it will change for a pair of reasons:

• Campaigns can grow their own audience through social media channels and direct-to-voter relationships so their research can gain a wider audience faster.
• News organizations will often lack the staffing and experience to do such public affairs work on their own, so the reliance on competitors will only growth. This is exactly why one-party municipalities and states — like Philadelphia — are at a disadvantage for pushing for efficiency and transparency.

Having more eyes is good, though bias reigns. The question will be how well the web can encourage transparency and if the mass media news organizations that survive can retain credibility to put their stamp of approval on the best opposition research.

A photo of the crowd at an All American Rejects concert at Xfinity Live in September 2012.

Creating media continues to become easier and more varied every day. Humans are the only species to develop the practice of recording history.

So whenever we are in a moment we regard as a distinguished experience — travel, first-time moments, extraordinary circumstances — we are bound to have this motivation to record that history as best we can.

This photo was spreading around the web comparing how people were experiencing the papal announcement in 2005 and then in 2013. H/T Paul Wright

That’s why those drunk girls are taking so many photos at that concert you’re attending. It doesn’t matter that it’s dark and their flash won’t help.

For as long as applause and cheering was about getting involved and being part of a moment grander than we are, sharing media — photos, video, social media messages — is the natural progression. Perhaps if we get better at sharing a collective narrative, more of us will feel comfortable just simply watching the fireworks, rather than taking a photo of each and every one of them.

That just might be what determines whether we’ll ever reach an apex in multimedia creation or if we have a lot more to come first.

There are at least five big things I’ve learned about reporting for a living over the past few years since graduating college and some stories to back it up.

That amounted to my half hour talk and Q&A period with a classroom of students at my alma mater Temple University in the PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.com capstone on Monday. I called myself the ghost of the near future — having graduated in 2008.

1. You need to build your own thing – Build a niche site or a place online to contribute to conversation, for a starting job like me or just for awareness when applying for gigs. Today, students can build out their own résumé to get that 2-3 years experience like never before. A few newspaper clips just show you haven’t thought through the future.
2. You need to know how your industry makes money — You have no excuse to be ignorant and it can keep you from succeeding. What industry are you in? Not news, but rather advertising, events or marketing, with reporting tied to it. Journalism isn’t dying, newspapers are dying and they have always done the most, best journalism. That’s OK, many people are working on solving this with new business models. Read Nieman Journalism Lab, paidContent or the like. You won’t all do sales, but you need to know how it works if you want to be part of an organization that survives.
3. You should understand how many new organizations are doing reporting work — You might get deep reporting work with a foundation, nonprofit or think tank. Maybe a for-profit company wants to grow its awareness. Journalism jobs posting sites are starting to have these, but you also must push on a supervisor for a marketing job to think innovative and develop relationships wide and far so you can have other reporting opportunities.
4. You’re college students, so why aren’t you finding connections for your future? — Both your peers, mentors and advisers. They’re the ones that help you get a reporting job in and out of the industry. If you’re blessed to be in a big city, you need to get in the network game. In Philadelphia, I was amazed how few of these seniors have been to events like ONA.
5. In the new economy, you might have to start with a gig, not a job — This is across industries, but I told them about how i started as a freelancer, which I got a lot of questions about, and how many reporters, including our own, start as independent contractors. I told them about how much I struggled with freelancing, but I left them with what I found were the keys to make freelancing work: (a) steady parttime work, relevant if possible, but something to make up regular, consistent pay, (b) a niche that distinguishes you and allows you to own some coverage, though this may happen on accident, and (c) and an awareness that you don’t start with meaningful stuff, that takes time.

There were lots of questions and I hit some other points, but these seemed to be the most important and what I’d want to say when I speak to a class like this again.

Cities want to attract and retain young educated talent to fuel their knowledge economies, drive a tax base and create a community that can continue to grow by welcoming more new people in the future. Modern markets are insatiable and indefinitely incomplete.

That’s the clearest, simplest mission I can glean from all the chirping about celebrating gains Philadelphia has made in its old brain drain problem.

But last week at a Knight Foundation session with the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, I wanted to push that thinking forward in two ways that I don’t think I hear often enough in that conversation: (a) the idea that too much change can in effect take away what is distinctive about a city and (b) that any real success would improve the lives of existing Philadelphians too, not just push them out like in other cities.

My breakout session with a number of smart people resulted in a few interesting thoughts that I wanted to save:

• “Philly is the most beautiful city in the country that people elsewhere consider ugly:” Dave Raible
• “We’re leaving this mentality of scarcity to a new age that needs collaboration,” said Zoe Selzer, but many institutions and groups and people are still fighting after the crumbs.
• Philadelphia is a big forest with small trees, Economy League chief Steve Wray said his predecessor would often say, noting that despite it being a big city, Philadelphia is made up of regional groups and smaller players.
• Perhaps Philadelphia needs to do more minor planning than master planning, was the result of discussion between Phoenix Wang and James Hartling of Urban Partners. Their point was that major planning for things like the Delaware waterfront stalled for decades because of the enormity of the scale, in contrast to the movement now that is on a smaller scale (Race Street Pier) and what has happened on the Parkway, like Sister Cities Park.

Echoing my first point, as part of the brainstorming, we were asked to give a headline or two we’d want written about Philadelphia 20 years from now. Mine were the following:

• “Poverty drops in Philly through educational attainment, not population change” because I want to lift up more Philadelphians than just add new ones.
• “Philadelphia embraces young talent, but retains distinction” because I want this new energy but find a way to keep Philadelphia distinctive.

Word cloud of terms used on this site, as of March 1, 2013, using Wordle.net.

WordPress, among the most popular web content management systems in the world, offers users an out-of-the-box solution to organize content in two ways: tags and categories. To better understand those words, I’ve taken to referring to tags as the topics of the site and calling categories the themes of the site.

Still having used WordPress for more than five years, having trained dozens of people on the platform, spoken and shared about it, I always found those two words and their distinctions confusing to many. Even I found myself duplcating terms as both tags and categories, which limited the effectiveness of them as organizing tools and bloated the number.

In going through a redesign at work and thinking more critically about the user experience of those terms, I’m happy with a better explanation for the two terms, which has helped me here and elsewhere since discussing them.

• Categories are the broad themes of your site. For a site with a good focus (depending on size), there are probably just a handful of these. On Technical.ly, that means Access, Business, Civic, Creative and (web) Development. Here that means Process, Entrepreneurship, Media, Personal and Writing. This is an effective way to keep your publishing focused and give a way for users to find like-minded content on your site.
• Tags are the narrower topics of your writing. This means the departments and types of content you schedule on your editorial calendar and the nouns that you’d want to group your content around. This is an effective way to organize and share specifically grouped content.

Even new views of data-driven journalism too often sees the release of coverage to be the end of the reporting process. Where is the action?

It was once  that in the reporting process, publishing a story was once the end.

Get an idea, find a source, develop a story, write and edit, then publish and hope the impact comes from elsewhere. Wrap advertising around the printed product and move on to the next issue.

No longer. News organizations have a responsibility for action to make their communities better. The tools and opportunities and methods for transparency are too rich. The need is too grave.

There seems to be very little thought for creating impact in even more updated, modern reporting processes.

Want to keep a news organization relevant? Here are a few ways publishing should be seen as the middle, not the end of the reporting process.

• Your coverage should set your agenda — If your view of independent journalism keeps you from having a mission of making your community better, then what’s the point? If reporting points to excessive partisanship, a lack of investor relationships, lack of employment, a failure of broader understanding of an issue, then your organization should be a part of the solution. We either need to bring the mission to the news process or the news process will come to the mission.
• You’re not a news organization anymore — The web makes every organization a publisher, and so, increasingly one with a mission. Our industry needs to understand we aren’t simply in the business of reporting. What is our catering business — the more profitable backend services and products that benefit from our audience? That, too, means publishing is in the midst of the work to be done.
• Your audience should be part of your business strategy — If you can’t make an audience do something, like vote or donate or act, then you don’t have the impact you thought you did. More people isn’t the only focus, but instead curating an audience that is part of your sustainability. There are simply too many chances at connecting audience to revenue, and the news industry is letting them slip away. Publishing is part of that process, but not its conclusion.

Standing at left with reporter Juliana Reyes, events coordinator Corinne Warnshuis and my cofounder Brian James Kirk. Photo stolen from Colleen Reese of Geekadelphia.

Back in September, my cofounder Brian James Kirk and I moved our Philadelphia operations from Temple University Center City at 1515 Market Street to the new University City headquarters of First Round Capital.

This month, Geekadelphia visited the 10,000 square foot renovated space, in which we are now based.

After spending nearly two years in our old offices, moving proved to be a bit of a trip.

Moving everything out of our office.

Loading everything up in the car.