“I’m going wherever you’re going,” said one women stopping mid-conversation.

“Where’s the party?” yelled one of the guys manning the sponsor tables in the hall way.

As much I’d like to say it was because they saw our handsome faces in the conference program, it was likely more about the three 12-packs of Harpoon IPA we were carrying through the halls on the way to our panel.

I’m often critical of conference panels. Talks on theory don’t do much for me. I love actual examples, systems, numbers and next steps. And beer.

Which is why I was excited to speak at the Online News Association’s annual conference in Boston last weekend. I partnered with my Omaha-based counterpart Danny Schreiber of Silicon Prarie News for “Making it Work With a Small Staff” a panel about a growing sector of the media ecosystem: bootstrapped journalism startups with less than 10 employees.

We took great pains to include lots of actionable advice from the point of two people who are in the trenches. Our panel even got a bit meta as it was originally supposed to be a four-person panel. So we had to, um, make it work with a small staff. We did this by shifting our original structure of the panel and by creating a friendly environment by handing out a few beers before we began our talk.

We discussed how Technically Philly and Silicon Prarie News make money, how we sell sponsorships, who we plan on hiring next and how we keep tabs on our growing communities. We goes lots of questions on our events business and many people remarked on how our editorial advice sounded familiar.

We gave out a handout that I’ve included below that includes links to the actual sponsorship materials, invoices and other raw materials that we use at Technically Philly.

The full video:

Excepts from the handout:

Business takeaways:

• Establish a workflow for invoices.
• Have goals. Do you want to bring on your founders full-time? Hire three writers? Launch four sites?
• When selling, always have reference material. Examples: a sponsorship one pager for a large event. For a small event.
• “How can we get involved?” = “We want to buy something from you.”
• Focus your efforts on products and services that yield maximum return per hour invested. Spending an hour selling a $50 advertisement? Not efficient.
• Many online publishers are constantly approached by vendors. Avoid them.

Editorial takeaways:

• Schedule tweets/Facebok posts with CoTweet or Hootsuite.
• Keep a strict editorial calendar with weekly features and departments to ensure there site never looks stale. The simpler the better (i.e. a Q and A, link roundup, a weekly picture, unedited video content).
• Alerts, RSS and Google Reader are your friend. Have Google News, Crunchbase & Twitter mention alerts for all companies, places and people that you cover.
• Never send three reporters to an event when one will do. Let the community fill coverage gaps if needed.
• If you can write something in bullet points, write it in bullet points. Not every story is a narrative.
• Freelancers can be a great way to relieve pressure on your staff or a huge waste of time and resources. Choose your freelancers with care and provide them with tools to succeed.
• Have an ethics policy and keep it public. Refer to this when faced with controversy.
• Be absolutely ruthless with your time. Don’t meet in person when a phone call will do. Don’t call when email will do.
• If you do meet with someone, send an agenda containing the topics you want to talk about. This helps the other party prepare for the conversation and keeps you on topic.
• Your reporters may also sell ads. Disclose this. For most outside of the journalism community, this is enough. Example of disclosure.

Other ONA notes:

• Somehow, my bio in the program got replaced with Joshua Benton’s from Neiman Lab. I’ll take it.
• Advice for future panel speakers: be over-prepared.
• Also, spend lots of time with your fellow panelists and determine points of disagreement. This leads to a better conversation.
• Many thanks to Andrew Pergam for helping us organize our session.
• Much of ONA is dedicated to digital departments within a larger news organization. I found myself wanting more for the indy news site.
• Conference attendees want new services, tips and tricks that they can write down and immediately implement when they return to work.
• Before ONA11, Danny had never heard of ONA. The group should do more to reach out to these independent and profitable news sites.

Move in day at the Technically Media offices.

Last week, Brian Kirk, Chris Wink and I took the latest step in a process that began when I left my day job over six months ago: we formally founded Technically Media.

We have spent month of December “growing up” by taking our business from a side-project to a legitimate business. This means we did the more boring business stuff like officially incorporating and signing up a payroll services company. We’ve also been up to more exciting stuff like securing office space steps from City Hall in Center City, Philadelphia.

Additionally, Chris was able to come on full time giving Technically Media a staff of 2.5.

The next six months

Now that we’re in 2011, we’re hard at work on a small handful of journalism-related projects:

• Technically Media – Technically Media’s slogan is “We build audiences” and we mean it. Our goal is to build interested editorial products for institutions. We just wrapped up the main phase of our project for the National Constitution Center along with our friends at Happy Cog. We hope to help other institutions in a similar way and we think consulting on “editorial strategy” will be a large source of revenue of independent news outlets in the future. We also are strong believers in adding great content to the news conversation. (Remember #4 from this list?)
• Technically Philly – Our main editorial product, we will continue to publish Technically Philly and cover the city’s technology community. Especially with the help of…
• Open Data coverage – We have received a grant from the William Penn Foundation to cover Philadelphia’s efforts to release data to the public.
• J-Lab collaboration grant – We have received a grant from J-Lab to map out the impact of broadband in Philadelphia, along with our buds PlanPhilly.
• Philly Tech Week – A week-long celebration of technology and innovation in Philadelphia hosted by Technically Philly during the last week in April.
• BCNI Philly – The third installment of BarCamp NewsInnovation (and one of the final events of Philly Tech Week) looks to be the best yet. We have our first shared speaker and after being open for less than a week, the guest list looks wonderful.

I’m very excited for the year ahead. Both for the company and for all of the exciting things happening around Philly.

The recent news out of TBD mostly caught my eye because, in Technically Philly’s experience, it is often difficult and time consuming to forge partnerships with mainstream media. Of the handful of content sharing agreements we’ve sought out, none exist today. In some cases it was the choice of the partner, other times it was our call.

It appears that TBD is having a similar experience. The company has ceased selling ads for its partners and Brady confessed that the content partnerships were one of the reasons given for his departure:

The new venture needed to slot alongside the existing Channel 7 part of the organisation and it was the relationship between the new web savvy project and the legacy business which proved to be the most difficult thing for Brady to tackle. (as told to the Guardian)

If Allbritton can’t figure it out, what chance do the rest of us have? It’s starting to become clear that content partnerships sound great at conference panels and editorial meetings, but they are rarely executed with any success.

Why? Big sites and small sites simply don’t need one another to survive. For a few reasons:

Pageviews vs Engagement – Most niche sites like the idea and prestige of being published a more established player, but the partnership often does little to help keep the small site sustainable. In Technically Philly’s case, we like seeing traffic numbers grow but we know that a small but dedicated fan base is what keeps us afloat. The drive-by reader may make our Google Analytics spike, but it doesn’t help fill seats when we host a paid event. Conversely, larger sites need traffic to sell more CPM-based advertising.

It isn’t worth it for mainstream media – For sites like TBD.com, it isnt worth the time to sell ads for the little guys. Nor is it worth negotiating individual content agreements. It’s true that a well-executed content partnership can help the big guys fill coverage holes, but no smaller site will give up content without links, ad revenue or similar incentives that just aren’t worth the time it takes to manage.

It isn’t worth it for the little guys – Small news sites are like any other small business: every month is a fight for survival. Small sites are often undermanned and every man hour is valuable. At Technically Philly, we once wasted countless hours negotiating with a larger brand because they constantly thought our stuff was “too insidery.” Of course it is, that’s how we build our audience. We found ourselves rewriting posts and negotiating about what would be relevant to the big site’s audience. While it felt good to be published on the larger site, it wasn’t worth the constant back and forth.

The only content partnerships that seem to work are the ones with nonprofit money attached, like what J-Lab has been doing with newspapers around the country. Without the incentive from J-Lab, I’d bet that most of these agreements would crumble.

I believe that some smart folks will eventually figure out how to make content partnerships work between small and large brands, and Technically Philly will continue to try and work with folks to try new ways of sharing content. Seriously, get in touch.

After interviewing Brett, I thought “Why can’t Technically Philly pull this off?” While we don’t have the luxury of a Ruby programmer, we were able to pull together something similar for TP using the newly created custom taxonomy feature in WordPress. And better yet, we think it can help drive additional revenue.

Tags vs Taxonomy

If you use WordPress or any other CMS you probably have the option to “tag” stories. Different sites handle this in different ways. At Technically Philly we began with a lose tagging policy to tag all proper nouns. People, companies and places made up the majority of these tags. However, there was a problem: all of these tags were lumped together. WordPress had no way of distinguishing the name of a city from a company name. So our tag pages sucked:

A sample tag page. Click to go the actual page.

The tag page was nothing but a glorified search. It offered no context, no information. Is this a company? A person? How can I contact this person? If I entered this page via search, how do I know where I am? The user was not rewarded in anyway for clicking on the tag page.

After messing around with custom taxonomies we were able to create CrunchBase-like pages like the one below:

An example of a "people" page. Click to visit.

On the new tag page we see that Bill Green has been categorized a person. We see his picture, a brief description, his contact info and bit about his work history. We also see a timeline of TP coverage. Now if we link to this page in a story, the reader can instantly catch up on who Bill Green is and why he is important to the technology community in Philadelphia.

Here is step-by-step how we did it. I’ll warn you, I don’t know a lick of Ruby on Rails and I’m barely serviceable with PHP. But I know WordPress, HTML and CSS like I know the starting lineup of the Phillies. A true programmer would probably do this in a much more streamlined way. Ready?

1. Create your taxonomies.

There’s a few ways you can do this. If you’re familiar with WordPress, I recommend opening your functions.php file and enter in the following (replace “people” with your taxonomy name):

// Custom Taxonomies

add_action( 'init', 'create_my_taxonomies', 0 );

function create_my_taxonomies() {
	register_taxonomy( 'people', 'post', array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'People', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );
}

If this scares you, use the Simple Taxonomies plugin to get the job done. Don’t mix both techniques or you could have some duplicates.

2. Install some plugins

Whether you’re savvy enough to hardcode your taxonomies or not, I still recommend the Simple Taxonomies plugin thanks to the “yoast_term_title()” function it offers. This function returns the slug of the person, company or place name of the page we’re on. So on Bill Green’s page it returns “bill-green”.

Secondly, install Rich Text Tags. This allows your taxonomy description to be edited using a WYSIWYG editor.

3. Build your tag page

One of the oft-underrated features of WordPress is its templating system. With taxonomies (and tags and categories for that matter) we can create specific template pages by following the correct naming rules .

For example we have three template files:

• taxonomy-people.php
• taxonomy-companies.php
• taxonomy-places.php

So Bill Green’s template is really the taxonomy-people.php page. Also, if you’re really ambitious you can create specific pages for each taxonomy entry. So we could give Bill his own page by creating a file named taxonomy-people-bill-green.php. However, you can likely stick to the bulleted list above and be covered.

As you build your taxonomy pages, here’s some code snippets to help you out. You’ll need some HTML and CSS chops to make your taxonomy page look pretty.

Aside from the image replacement snippet, these were culled from dozens of help threads, blog posts and other sources that I foolishly did not keep track of. If you wrote these snippets, please let me know.

Display a list of popular terms:

<?php
//list terms in a given taxonomy using wp_list_categories (also useful as a widget if using a PHP Code plugin)

$taxonomy     = 'companies';
$orderby      = 'name';
$show_count   = 1;      // 1 for yes, 0 for no
$pad_counts   = 1;      // 1 for yes, 0 for no
$hierarchical = 1;      // 1 for yes, 0 for no
$title        = '';
$number = 5;
$orderby = 'count';
$order   = 'DESC';

$args = array(
  'taxonomy'     => $taxonomy,
  'orderby'      => $orderby,
  'show_count'   => $show_count,
  'pad_counts'   => $pad_counts,
  'hierarchical' => $hierarchical,
  'title_li'     => $title,
  'number'       => $number,
  'orderby'      => $orderby,
  'order'        => $order,

);
?>

<ul>
<?php wp_list_categories( $args ); ?>
</ul></pre>

Display a list of random terms (great for encouraging browsing]

<?php
//display random sorted list of terms in a given taxonomy
$counter = 0;
$max = 5; //number of categories to display
$taxonomy = 'category';
$terms = get_terms($taxonomy);
shuffle ($terms);
//echo 'shuffled';
if ($terms) {
	foreach($terms as $term) {
		$counter++;
		if ($counter <= $max) {
	  	echo '<p><a href="' . get_category_link( $term->term_id ) . '" title="' . sprintf( __( "View all posts in %s" ), $term->name ) . '" ' . '>' . $term->name.'</a></p> ';
	 	}
	}
}
?>

Show directory image
We also rely heavily on this piece of code that searches a given folder for an image that shares the name of the term. In this case it is the “directoryimages” folder. This way, we can bulk upload images.

<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/directoryimages/<?php echo get_yoast_term_title();?>.jpg" 	onerror="ImgError(this);">

But what if you haven’t uploaded an image? You’ll see we’ve inserted a bit of javascript (ImgError) to execute if the image is not there.

For the above line of code to fully work you’ll need to insert a bit of Javascript in your header.

<!-- Fix broken images if driectory page -->
<?php if (is_tax() ) { ?>
<script type="text/javascript">
function ImgError(source){
    source.src = "<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/directoryimages/blank_headshot.png";
    source.onerror = "";
    return true;
}
</script>

With the above two snippets, WordPress will look for an image in your “directoryimages” folder. If it doesn’t find one it will insert “blank_headshot.png.” Of course you’ll have to create the “directoryimages” folder yourself. You’ll also have to upload your own replacement image.

To echo a term’s description use

<?php echo term_description( '', get_query_var( 'people' ) ); ?>

Return the name of the term to use as a header

<!-- This is the name of the person-company-etc -->
	<?php
if(isset($wp_taxonomies)) {
	// This is getting the friendly version of a taxonomy
	// - not the hyphenated get_yoast_term_title()
	$term = get_term_by( 'slug', get_query_var( 'term' ), get_query_var( 'taxonomy' ) );
	if($term) {
		echo '<h1 style="font-size: 40px;">'.$term->name.'</h1>';
	}
	// If you have a taxonomy description, let'er rip!

}
?>
<!-- end of name -->

4. Go retag all of your old posts

And here is the fun part. At TP, there are three of us so we split up our 1,000 posts and retagged each one by copy and pasting tags into the appropriate taxonomy field.

5. Redirect all of your tags

If you regularly produce content, your tag pages likely ranked well in searches. Our tag pages would sometimes outrank a company’s official web pages. However when we switched to custom taxonomies, the permalink changed. So technicallyphilly.com/tag/comcast became technicallyphilly.com/company/comcast.

Therefore we had to redirect hundred of tag pages using a 301 redirect. This isn’t as daunting as it seems. Ready?

1. Make a page that includes the following code (replace “people” with your taxonomy):

<?php wp_list_categories('taxonomy=people&style=none'); ?>

2. View the source. Highlight the entire list and copy and paste it into a text document. It should be a series of links that look like:

<div id="_mcePaste"><li><a href="http://technicallyphilly.com/people/alex-alsup" title="View all posts filed under Alex Alsup">Alex Alsup</a></li></div>
<div id="_mcePaste"><li><a href="http://technicallyphilly.com/people/alex-cohen" title="View all posts filed under Alex Cohen">Alex Cohen</a></li></div>
<div>etc...</div>

3. Find and replace “<a href=”" and make it a space

4. Find and replace “” title=”" and make it a TAB. (If you’re having trouble making a tab, open up a new text doc. Hit tab. Copy the space it makes and past it into the replace box.)

5. Copy entire text document and past in excel. Make the a and b columns REAL big and you’ll see on left you have url on right you have junk.

6. Delete the second column, the junk one.

7. Duplicate the first column into the second, you should have two lists of links.

8. Find and replace ONLY THE FIRST COLUMN. Find: “http://yourdomain.com/people/” Replace: “redirect 301  /tag/”.

9. Now copy columns a and b into a blank textpad document. You want the text to look like:
“redirect 301  /tag/abby-fretz http://technicallyphilly.com/people/abby-fretz” The number of spaces isn’t important, though keeping it clean will help manage future redirects.

10. Copy the contents of that text document into your .htaccess file.

11. Test by visiting one of your old tag pages. It should redirect to the new taxonomy page.

12. Repeat for each of your taxonomies. We had to do this process for “people” and “companies.”

Thanks to Dan Levy for helping me figure that one out.

6. Profit

This is the stage TP is in now, so no sagely advice from me. However we envision these pages being one of the benefits of a membership package.

We’re thinking about a company page with contact info, company description, who works there and other information. When packaged with our revamped jobs board, a display advertisement and event discounts we think it will be worth a few hundred dollars of a company’s marketing budget.

However, we’re still exploring options and will likely announce a plan sometime in January.

7. Share

Next up ,we’d like all of the hyperlocal sites in Philly to share the same directory page. Imagine Councilman Bill Green’s page pulling in information from local political sites and other source to deliver a complete (and independently reported) picture of a local personality.

If we make the directory page editable by anyone we could have a highly relevant but local Wikipedia that can help add context to hyperlocal news sites.

Hm. Sounds like a Knight News Challenge grant…

Since that CUNY meeting, I feel that the community has made significant progress. Gone are the debates about whether a journalist can sell advertising (they should) or whether a reporter can become a cheerleader for their community (they can). People were less concerned about ethics and more concerned about best practices.

There are plenty of more comprehensive write-ups, but after stewing for two weeks, it seems as the debate on how to make money is over. Slowly but surely people are making a living off of journalism. However, I’m now worried about the toll it is taking on the journalist.  As of now, community journalism can not scale, resulting in low salaries and overworked journalists.

In talking with an owner of one news startup, the owner said he works 50-60 hours a week to generate roughly $100,000 in revenue a year which he has to split with another employee. Not profit. Revenue.

Most of the attendees were obsessed about how to sell advertising to local business, but not many people mentioned that most journalists are chasing down $100 ads from local business to try and cobble together a decent income. The advertising space is an uphill battle as journalists not only have to learn the sales game, but have to educate advertisers about the web, design the ad, place the ad and then chase down the payment. Oh, and they also have to write.

I’m (very, very, very, very) glad to see independent journalists focused on revenue, but now it’s time to get creative. There were probably less than five people at Block by Block that could afford to work a sub-50 hour work week and make a middle class living.

We should no longer be satisfied with sustainability, we should push for scalability.We should push for the consolidation of sales across various local news sites. We should push for using our knowledge of the web and our community to land a few big wins as opposed to the pizza shop down the street. But mostly, we should push to build a better career path for journalists where we can still report the hell out of our communities without 50 hour work weeks.

I don’t have the answer. But judging by how far we’ve all come in just a year, we’ll get there.

The story has been republished in the Washington Post, Mashable and other outlets after first being reported by my old employer, the Philadelphia Citypaper (though local message board Philadelphia Speaks wrote about this before anyone else). Many of these sources are asserting that the city is targeting bloggers with a new tax.

This is untrue. The city created no new tax and any publication saying otherwise is doing some terrible reporting and any outrage about the anti-blogging attitude of the city is a knee-jerk reaction to some poor research.

Technically Philly, in fact, has paid $300 to the City of Philadelphia. However, this was not for any “blog tax,” it was for the business privilege license, a one-time $300 fee required of all businesses in the city. The purpose of the Citypaper story was to point out that the city was considering blogs claimed in tax returns as “businesses” that need to pay for the license.

It’s certainly a horrible waste of resources to pursue blogs with revenue in the hundreds when some companies and individuals owe the city millions in back taxes, forcing the city to do things like offer a tax amnesty to the dead beats.

To be clear: there is no “blog tax” in Philadelphia. None.

Admittedly, the city doesn’t help its public perception when city council threatens to sue Twitter and Facebook over the flash mobs or when the city’s Twitter account vomits Facebook links and often posts in all caps.

However, while these slip-ups over social media may be easy fodder for the Internet savvy to make fun of, there is a much larger issue revealing itself here: the city’s tax structure which can be crippling to entrepreneurial activity and innovation.

As I interview local entrepreneurs every day for Technically Philly, I see a common thread: any business located in the city boundaries of Philadelphia is here despite the city government and not because of it (see the 15 steps one businesswoman had to take). The ridiculous city business privilege tax (which is different than the license) and the wage tax which far outpaces other cities of comparable size are just a few examples of the hurdles many businesses face by choosing to do work in Philadelphia.

When applied to bloggers, the economic impact of the city’s awful tax policy is small while its impact on the web is inflated due the “victims” of the tax. However, when applied to small and mid-sized businesses the impact is, well, cities like King of Prussia and Cherry Hill that are located just outside of the city’s borders. These cities offer a more favorable environment for businesses looking to flee taxes such as the business privilege tax and other fees. The only reason Comcast is headquartered here is because the city created tax breaks just for them.

While the outrage over asking a hobbyist to pay $300 for a blog is understandable, it pales in comparison to the scores of companies that chose to set up shop outside city limits to avoid paying city taxes. While it won’t get headlines on Mashable, those lamenting about the blogger tax ought to direct their energy to urge the city to reconsider the taxes that keep companies, and jobs, outside city limits.

And those looking to do cheap, drive-by digs at Philadelphia should know that they look foolish and out of touch. Don’t believe me? Come visit.

As of last week, we can check that one off of our todo list.

Starting at the end of this month I will be leaving my position as editor at Vital Business Media to begin working full time on Technically Philly, the news site I co-founded with Brian James Kirk and Chris Wink in February 2009 to cover tech news in Philadelphia. More appropriately, I will be working full-time at its parent company which includes our work on News Inkubator and Technically Media.

Why?

The business has grown beyond our initial aspirations, and the exhaustion is beginning to affect our growth. However, thanks to that work, we’ve amassed enough of a runway to make a serious go at a journalism startup, something that’s been a personal dream of mine since I was in high school.

It’s also a chance to address the incredible frustration that builds up when you can see the path you need to walk but don’t have the time or resources to do so. I would often attend journalism conferences or read about innovative media entrepreneurs and become overwhelmed with a feeling that Technically Philly could have a deeper impact on Philadelphia if, damnit, we just had more time.

I feel that Technically Philly sits at a crossroads of a growing technology community and a rapidly changing journalism ecosystem here in Philadelphia, an amazing opportunity if we are able play our cards right. I’m tired of seeing wonderful things happen here in Philadelphia with not much coverage from larger or national media outlets. The community here deserves to have a louder voice, something we hope to do a better job at moving forward.

Vital

I also want to take the time to thank everyone over at Vital Business Media. I had a blast working there and I’ve learned a great deal about startups and the media world through our work at emediavitals.com. Covering the media industry while working for a startup gave me a unique perspective on both worlds and I will surely apply the things I’ve learned as we build Technically Philly to be a more sustainable media company. As I’ve told them many times, it felt like getting an MBA.

If you’d like to work for those guys (and you really should) they’re hiring.

Also, I’m putting this out in the open so I force myself to hold to it: I want to blog here at least once every other week with an update of the things we’re trying and how they are working out. I hope you follow along.

Brian James Kirk, Christopher Wink and I have been hard at work trying to do our part in making our ideas and best guesses about local media into a reality (with different rates of success, I’ll add).

I figured I’d shed a little bit of light about what we’ve been thinking and what we’ve been up to. Here is a very broad idea of where we see this whole local media thing heading. I welcome your thoughts and criticisms.

A citywide advertising network

The first generation of news startups are largely by people with an editorial background. It is only after a few months of working for free that most people begin to consider revenue streams.

However, just like newsrooms saw cuts during the recent recession, so did many sales staffs across the business world. Technically Philly thinks that the two sides can come together to help editorially minded news sites pull in some income that is sold by a sales staff with preexisting contacts in the local business world.

We think that an advertising network of high-quality blogs and news websites can offer an appealing option for large of national clients to purchase across an entire city, while the individual verticals can better chase advertisements that are relative to their niche. For example, our buds at Geekadelphia and Technically Philly have very similar audiences so, within our Philly network, we could have a tech vertical.

By neighborhood and by niche

Blogs that cover a neighborhood are nothing new, and monetization efforts expand all the time. Mainstream publications are also increasingly looking to these neighborhood sites to cover the nitty-gritty subject areas to free larger papers up to cover more broad topics. For example consider my good friend Shannon McDonald’s partnership with the Philadelphia Metro’s northeast edition. I worry, however, that traditionally underserved communities will remain underserved as tech savvy areas make the most sense for neighborhood news websites.

We also think that there’s room for local niche sites like Technically Philly that cover a certain vertical refined to a local area. This enables more revenue to be made from events as 95 percent of your readers are within a 20 miles radius and in the same industry. Making connections and building sources are also much easier when refined to one city. We also think that if you own an industry locally, national advertisers and vendors will begin looking your way.

Sharing back end services

It simply doesn’t make sense for each site to have their own lawyer, salespeople, accountants etc. We proposed a solution to this problem with News Inkubator. We didn’t win the Knight News Challenge, but we still think it will be absolutely crucial to build a sustainable local news ecosystem. We need to enable content creators to do what they do best, while pooling our collective knowledge to help flush out best business practices.

J-Lab surmised as much in its report about Philadelphia:

Any Networked Journalism collaboration must respect the fierce independence of these startups while validating their strengths and shoring up their weakness with a business support system, which could include business plans, legal help, tech support, even employee benefits.

Business services

News websites are great at building authentic communities but not so great at working on business models. Large businesses are great at making money but are struggling to build communities on the web. There is a natural overlap here.

Breaking silos

I swear I wrote this before Ryan Sholin’s excellent piece on skills media folks should have to be valuable (a must read on its own). But the silos I refer to are the silos within your town and your community. Local online news can be a meeting ground for people that naturally self-segregate. With Technically Philly we’ve seen the startup community, the video game community, the venture capital community (to name a few) all show up to low key meetups we’ve hosted. We think there’s room to grow, but its a good example of people that could benefit being in the same room, but may often need an extra nudge to make it happen.

Local media can be that nudge.

Partnerships with traditional outlets

Like Shannon’s partnership with the Metro, TP has partnerships with Philadelphia Magazine, Philly.com and several local blogs. Several newspapers have taken to building content networks with local blogs and maybe are exploring ways of sharing advertising revenue. These relationships will mature and evolve as the parties try different models.

A short road map, but I hope you can see where we are going here. Local media needs to be part of a larger ecosystem of other businesses, publications and its readers. I’d love to hear your thoughts about our plan.

One, TechnicallyPhilly is doing as well as any of us could hope when it comes to traffic and community response, so we are making our first moves towards monetization with the slow rollout of our advertising infrastructure. This has been both an exciting and frightening prospect as it is now time to see if we are all as smart as we hope we are. Of course, as we surmised at BCNI, ads are just the first and easiest baby step, and there are many more ideas in the pipeline that I will be certain to share here once we release them.

Thus far, the only equity we have put into the business is sweat and dinners for our bi-weekly meetings. But as we said in our post announcing the effort to our community, we don’t want this to be a hobby or some also-ran of entrepreneurial journalism endeavors. We want this to be our part time job. Or, if we are lucky, a full time gig one day.

How I got a job

Speaking of full time gigs, I’m very happy to announce that I was hired early last month as an Editor at Vital Business Media, a startup headed by Prescott Shibles, former Penton VP of New Media. The job has me traveling to work in their New York City (aka the 67th Ward) offices twice a week, while working from Philadelphia during the rest of the work week.

I really wish I could talk more about what I have been up to, but you’ll have to wait until we launch our first editorial product.

What I can say, for everyone that just recently graduated, is how I got the job. I was put in touch with Vital and their management with someone who was a regular reader of this site. After the hiring, I was told that I was given a serious look because of the side projects I was building while freelancing to pay the rent.

The lesson? Chances are there will be not be a job waiting for most journalism grads. While we can sit around and lament the loss of the “traditional” path, it won’t do anybody any good. Take a side job and then hustle to create your own path. Gather some peers and start your own publication. Organize an event. Start a podcast. Try something. Anything.

Use your newly discovered free time as an incubator for all of the ideas you have about saving journalism and media.

At worst, you fail and you learned that idea X wasn’t valid and you don’t waste any more time. If you succeed, you can find yourself new opportunities.

When I showed up an hour late to the bar, something seemed funny. As I walked down the sidewalk I had to step over bikes that were thrown anywhere there was space. Most of the bike rack slots were taken. A ton of noise was coming from the inside, and the guy guarding the door was staring at me like I was a 15-year-old trying to buy beer. I was greeted with a sign that said the event was full and nobody else was getting in.

There were no rock stars in there. No bands. No comedians. Just a bunch of Philly locals talking about innovative products and ideas. And those local people managed to pack a bar to the brim like it was a Friday night. And that’s when I knew, something was happening here. Philadelphia was about to get a kick in the pants from the tech community.

I spend a lot of time that summer and winter trying to convince my friend Brian James Kirk to start a technology-based news site with me. He said things like “no” and “wait until I graduate” and “seriously, Sean get off of my doorstep before I call the cops.”  He had been writing a tech column named Technologicology the local blog Philebrity, and was gathering a loyal readership (see his Ignite wrap up here). Well, after a lot of convincing I’m proud to announce Technically Philly, a joint collaboration between myself, Brian, and Christopher Wink.

While in a soft launch phase, we have confirmed what we always knew: The Philadelphia tech scene is thriving. Every day we add a handful of start ups, design firms, or locally-built Web applications to our coverage list. Our event calendar is packed to the brim, and we feel that we have barely scratched the surface. People are emailing the three of us out of the blue to show signs of support and to offer information.

But my personal motives for co-founding this site go further than a desire for news. Personally, I’m tired of Silicon Valley getting the bulk of the technology coverage on the Web. I’m tired of Philadelphia getting breezed over when it comes to hosting large technology-based events. I don’t want innovative thinkers in Philadelphia to feel that they have to move West to accomplish anything. It’s about time that Philadelphia stood up and let the world know that wonderful things are happening here.

For all the above reasons and more I’m proud to unleash Technically Philly to the world. I hope you follow along and subscribe. We are also always in search of local companies and people that are doing wonderful things in the city. Please, drop us a line.

Oh and I’ll be presenting more details about how we got the site up and running in less than a week at my BarCamp News Innovation presentation.