Almost two years after ONA last visited the old Inquirer building to hear about major plans from our city’s biggest media company, Join editors from Philly.com, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News to discuss the role that all three of their web presences play in parent company’s Interstate General Media’s digital future.
Leah Kauffman, executive producer for entertainment and lifestyle at Philly.com, Frank Wiese, senior editor for multimedia projects at the Inquirer, and Josh Cornfield, digital editor at the Daily News, will discuss their individual websites and how they’re working together to expand the reach of the region’s largest website and daily newspapers.
Wiese and Cornfield will discuss the recent launches of their respective members-only websites, which seek to improve the newspapers’ relationship with their audience, while Kaufmann will discuss Philly.com’s move toward becoming more of a portal site with its own distinct voice.
Come around 6:30pm, we’ll get started at 7pm and wrap up by 8pm for a Happy Hour. Details to follow.
Please RSVP via the WHYY signup here. (This event is $5 for non-members of WHYY. )
The second week of March is Sunshine Week, “a nationwide discussion about the importance of access to public information and what it means for you and your community.”
In Philadelphia, WHYY is hosting an event with the editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation – and once Inquirer Reporter – Bill Allison. The event will include a discussion with WHYY reporters Dave Davies and Holly Otterbein, who will share stories from the trenches. The panel discussion will be led by WHYY’s Vice President for News and Civic Dialogue, Chris Satullo.
Data and open gov are hot topics in journalism technology right now, so this is a great time to learn more about the open records and information laws already on the books.
Join us for a roundtable discussion with an impressive panel of national tech reporters discussing national trends in technology and innovation and how Philly fits into it all.
Erica Ogg, of GigaOM, reports on Apple, though occasionally she’ll detour into stories about how personal tech intersects with two of her favorite things: travel and food. Timothy B. Lee, of Ars Technica, covers tech policy with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. John-Paul Titlow, of ReadWrite, has been writing for ReadWrite since June 2011. His areas of focus include the future of music and entertainment, the ongoing online copyright wars and Apple. Chris Grant of Polygon, is the founding editor of the year-old national video game culture news site, after a previous stint as an editorial director at Aol’s Joystiq
This event will also offer a brief intro to some of the exciting things happening in each of the five tracks in which PTW is organized: Art/Creative, Access/Policy, Design/Development, Entrepreneurship/Investment and Media/Transparency.
ONA Philly: Meet SPUN: unveiling of a local news discovery app
How will professional content be discovered in the mobile age? Publishers have spent 20 years optimizing discovery for traditional web browsing by SEOing content by keyword, but mobile presents new opportunities for optimized discovery. Our phones know where we are. In the mobile age content will be optimized by location. Phones will automatically surface articles about the Brooklyn Bridge for users in downtown Manhattan; just being in front of the Philly Museum of Art will be the catalyst for surfacing an interview with Sylvester Stallone or the famous clip from Rocky.
This meetup will talk about what it means to find new avenues for content distribution that take advantage of consumer behavior on mobile devices. Scott Lindenbaum will also talk about how his company, SPUN, is doing just this kind of thing in an iPhone app. They’ve partnered with content providers like The Awl and Gothamist to test our theories.
SPUN is the easiest way to keep your finger on the pulse of a city. It’s local news on steroids, with articles from local experts and professional publishers. Users don’t have the time to check every local website every day. City dwellers need a one-stop aggregation of juicy articles. SPUN is the ultimate urban lifestyle guide.
Scott Lindenbaum is the President and COO of SPUN. Scott has been covered by CNN, MSNBC, and FOXnews, and has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and numerous other outlets. For ten years, Scott was a halfpipe snowboard competitor sponsored by Burton Snowboards. He holds an MFA in creative writing, has studied Behavior Design with Stanford Human Interaction professor BJ Fogg, and is currently working with Apple on the UI design of future SPUN iterations.
Are you interested in learning about HTML and writing for the open web? Or, are you already comfortable with HTML and eager to share your skills with friends and colleagues?
We’re joining our friends over at Hacks/Hackers who did the hard work of getting together to offer a free, helpful class for reporters and other ONA members who want that reminder or kick-in-the-pants to get down some of the basics and beyond of one of the foundational languages of the open web.
Do you post your content to a content management system? Do you want to make small style edits to your blog? Do you have an online portfolio or want to learn how to make one? Or are you simply a trained journalist and feel a little shameful to not know even the basics of how words get written one way and displayed another online?
Well come on out to this shame free zone.
During the workshop, we’ll use and explain “hacktivity kits,” a kit for running learning events. We’ll use a kit designed especially for journalists and talk about hacking the kits to fit other learning objectives. We’ll go through some exercises and discuss tips and tactics for leading informal learning sessions as we conduct the workshop. Participants will leave with more familiarity with HTML and additional resources (and excitement!) for leading learning sessions.
This event is BYOL – Bring Your Own Laptop!
(Really, an actual laptop. If you don’t have one, folks can partner up, but tablets/mobile devices won’t work.)
A hackathon is a weekend creative competition in which smart people (technologists and non-technologists) come up with small technology solutions (hacks) that can be built in a short period of time together.
The fourth local installment of the global Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon will take place at Drexel University the weekend of Dec. 1 and 2, 2012. (see coverage of past RHOK projects here ph.ly/randomhacks)
The Friday night BEFORE, we call out subject matter experts, nonprofit leaders, civic and community representatives, journalists and, yes, technologists to come by, grab a beer, meet other like-minded Philadelphians interested in how to make our city better through technology and pitch ideas for building tools over the weekend.
This reception is cross-listed with Hacks/Hackers and the Technically Philly meetup group.
We also want you to come to the actual hackathon and help guide the development of projects. (RSVP for the actual hackathon here)
This is our December ONA event!
We’ll be throwing down at the very cool new First Round Capital headquarters in University City. RHOK is sponsored by Drexel University and Technically Philly.
For our reception, local GIS powerhouse Azavea and Technically Philly will provide some tasty local beer and SEO firm Rocket Dove and Technically Philly will provide some pizza.
Trends in Online Reporting from national ONA conference
In September, a dozen Philadelphia journalists and local ONA members headed out to San Francisco for the annual national Online News Association conference.
In addition to relationships, our friends and colleagues also discussed and shared the trends in web reporting. To help spread the brain share, we’ll have a slew of people who attended offer quick, actionable takeaways about what they learned.
Hosted by the Temple University Journalism Department, this event will feature quick, high-level presentations about the innovations that are happening inside Philadelphia’s college newspapers and other student media outlets.
After the presentations, we’ll walk over to Tir Na Nog at 1600 Arch Street for a few beers to discuss the event (and reminisce about our own student newspaper days).
This is NOT a college-only event, but rather a discussion about how the young crop of future reporters are rethinking their industry.
Presentations will include:
Daily Pennsylvanian of the University of Pennsylvania
The Temple News of Temple University
The Hawk of St. Joseph’s University
The Whit of Rowan University
and others
**For more information and for FULL REGISTRATION DETAILS, please visit here: http://dartcenter.org/content/philadelphia-workshop-on-covering-suicide-targets-regional-journalists **
In lieu of a September event, our local ONA group is recommending this workshop for journalists on covering suicide, organized by the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma and sponsored by the Thomas Scattergood Foundation for Behavioral Health and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. It will take place September 21 and 22 at WHYY in Old City Philadelphia.
News, information, context, organization, stories, balance, opinion, objectivity, transparency, whatever you think makes a journalist distinct (if you think there’s anything at all), we want to hear it. And we’ll discuss it while sipping cold beer. Or, you know, while waiting for Quizzo to start. Come out and bring an opinion.
Teenagers really are over Facebook. In a deep report published on Tuesday, Pew Research explains that teenagers departing the social network’s blue confines are looking for something more… authentic. Which, ironically, was the initial draw of Facebook, and has become something of a calling card for Tumblr and Twitter. Somewhere, Marissa Mayer is smiling.
