MURL Building Blocks Blog

Savings the Neighborhoods

2007-05-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

Welcome to MURL and the first summer session. This is my
first post on our ‘buildingblocks’ blog in some time. Take
a look at this piece that I found on the Philly.com Web
site. The authors talk about the fate of the neighborhoods,
and offer up three areas that the city should focus on.
Read it over. What do you think? Do you agree? Are the neighbrohoods beyond 'repair'?
I know it is a toally different subject, but what's your take on the new wired initiative in Philadelphia? Is it a case of the have and have nots, or a chance to equalize things?
Professor TP

The fate of our neighborhoods
By BEVERLY COLEMAN & ALAN MALLACH
PHILADELPHIA HAS become two different cities.
One for the poor.
One for the prosperous.
While some neighborhoods are thriving, others are seeing
increasing real-estate speculation and absentee ownership.
Our middle class is shrinking.
Philadelphia may be turning into an anomaly, a city with
increasingly expensive housing and a tremendous number of
poor people. Despite real-estate prices that skyrocketed in
the last five years, residents are showing little growth in
jobs and income.
The future is uncertain. Will property values continue to
rise over the next few years, or tail off? What will follow
Mayor Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative now
that the money is nearly all spent?
How will casinos affect the city? What will the next mayor's
policies look like? Will the improvements of recent years be
a flash in the pan, or put the city on a path to genuine
social and economic health?
What we do know is that rising housing prices don't
guarantee healthy neighborhoods. If Philadelphia is going to
be a healthy city, it has to make sure that the higher
prices reflect real, sustainable improvement in our
neighborhoods, and that lower-income families benefit from
neighborhood change rather than being priced out of their
homes. The city's biggest challenge is to sustain growth
while improving the quality of life not only for the
affluent, but for all its people.
If it is to rise to this challenge, the city has to focus on
three critical areas over the coming years:
* Create an efficient, predictable, transparent process to
foster redevelopment and revitalization.
* Focus on rebuilding neighborhoods, not just adding housing
units.
* Make sure that the city's residents benefit from change.
Philadelphia needs a predictable, efficient development
review process, user-friendly for everyone from the family
rehabbing a house in Kensington to a developer building 500
condos on the waterfront. We need new, modern, user-friendly
zoning, land-use and building codes.
Incentives must be used strategically - such resources are
too scarce to be wasted. Young families should get them to
fix up abandoned houses and live in them, not be discouraged
by complex regulations and red tape.
And Philadelphia should use housing as a tool to rebuild its
neighborhoods, not add more housing as an end in itself.
Housing development should not take place in isolation, but
has to be targeted to the strengths and weaknesses of each
neighborhood.
By its location and design, every investment in new housing
should add value and enhance the physical quality of its
neighborhood. To enhance the quality of urban life, all new
developments should be linked to transit, open space, school
construction and commercial activity.
Philadelphia's redevelopment has to offer people of all
ages, races and incomes ample housing and a decent quality
of life.
We need to do more to hold onto upwardly-mobile families by
providing them with housing choices, safe neighborhoods and
good schools, while ensuring that lower-income residents
have sound, affordable roofs over their heads.
Land-banking, inclusionary zoning and other strategies
should be used to preserve and create more affordable
housing, building permanent housing stock for the many
families who can't afford what the private market offers.
Over the last few years, via efforts ranging from the
Neighborhood Transformation Initiative to the work of the
city's dynamic community-development corporations,
Philadelphia has demonstrated the ability to confront its
problems and move forward.
But the progress has presented the city with a new series of
challenges: how to build on success to produce sustained
growth, create healthy, economically integrated
neighborhoods, and ensure that all residents benefit from
revitalization.
We're confident that Philadelphia's government, development
agencies, educational institutions and businesses will rise
to the occasion. *
Beverly Coleman is executive director of NeighborhoodsNow.
Alan Mallach is resource director of the National Housing
Institute and author of "Building a Better Philadelphia."

Welcome to the Spring MURL Class

2007-01-22T18:30:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new semester, MURL and my first posting on the MURL BUILDING BLOCKS blog. This first posting is much longer than normal, so don’t be put-off by it. As we get deeper into the semester my hope is you’ll be heavily involved in covering neighborhood stories in the area surrounding the “golden block.” As the semester rolls out we can talk (and post) more about the specific neighborhoods, your experiences and insights. But, first, to get you into MURL multimedia mindset, I wanted to share with you three pieces I ran across on the Poynter Institute’s Web site. I’d you to read them….in one case, view the material. Feel free to add your thoughts here on the blog.

Here’s a chunk of the first piece, “Ten Toes in the Multimedia Waters” by Rick Edmonds with a link to the rest of his piece.

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=105128

Editor's note: This article is the second of a two-part series based on Poynter faculty members' visits to print and TV newsrooms this spring. Their goal was to learn more about what news organizations are doing to develop their online products. This article, and a previous post on breaking news, is an analysis of the insights they collected. For more information on the methodology of the faculty study and to see which news organizations participated, see the sidebar below.

It has been just two years since a damning University of Texas study found that a majority of newspaper Web sites were stocked with almost nothing but "shovelware," recycled versions of the morning's print stories. With the exception of a few high-profile converged operations, local television station Web sites were even more barren.

No more. Economic necessity has combined with fast improvements in audio and video, wild-card technologies like the podcast and the high penetration of broadband to make a cornucopia of online offerings the rule now rather than the exception.

We might simply count the varieties of multimedia content, but that list is long and familiar, full of permutations like combining photo galleries with an audio report, which has been a signature format at NYTimes.com since early 2005. You could call it a Great Leap Forward for the industry, though there is no reason to think it will end as disastrously as Mao's 1958-1960 economic modernization movement in China.

In multimedia -- as in, posting breaking news online -- our survey of more than a dozen news organizations this spring found a range of strategies and a set of emerging issues. At one end are the large, well-established sites. There, the order of the day, as one online executive put it, is "slow and certain growth." Caution, especially directed at the explosive incivility of wide-open user discussions, is very much a factor.

Regional newspapers and television stations, late to the party, may be more urgent and experimental in their online endeavors. "A land rush," one online manager told us. Get more people to visit and linger at the sites as soon as possible in as many ways as possible. Monetize the traffic later and be ready to scrap what doesn't work.

Here are some of the current trends that we found -- some of them particular to newspaper sites, nearly all of them have resonance across the board, and a number have a flavor of paradox:

Piece #2
Take a Blogger to Lunch (And Other Radical Ideas for Journos Struggling to Understand the Web)

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=115376

By Keith W. Jenkins (more by author)
Picture Editor, The Washington Post

Think: Hieroglyphics. Visual displays of information. MySpace. Boing Boing. Rocketboom. Second Life. Flickr. Podcasting. And even del.icio.us.

Journalists, here's some food for thought: What we do is going away because it has to. We can no longer claim the higher ground. There will be no "transition to the Web" -- the Web exists and is as different from 20th-century journalism as apples are from hand grenades.
If we are to survive as news organizations, survival will have to be charted by people who live in the new world, rather than by people who view the Web as either a threat or a tool to gain temporary power in a mortally wounded industry. New Media, Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, is powered by the people for the people. Join them or be ignored. (If you have any doubts about this, just take a look at the latest controversy stirred up by the cell phone videos of the Saddam Hussein execution.)
What our newsrooms need is a mindset that values the Web for what it is an extension of our human desire for community. The Web is a tool to talk to one anther.
We need to develop a culture in our newsrooms that lets us become part of the conversation that is already taking place; not as a dominant voice but as one of many. By giving up our position on high we may gain an even higher level of respect in the communities we live in.
You find the rest of the piece at: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=115376
The 3rd and last piece I’d like you to check-out is also on the Poynter site, but you’ll find it in the “News University” area. This is actually part of a course they offer for free. You’ll need to register, and then you can screen the seminar:
http://www.newsu.org/courses/course_detail.aspx?id=snap_heyward06

Course Title: New Habits of News Consumers: A Seminar Snapshot
Instructor: Andrew Heyward
A NewsU Seminar Snapshot captures the key learning points of a seminar presentation at The Poynter Institute or at other training events. A snapshot features edited video highlights and other materials offered during a seminar presentation.
What will I learn? Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News, analyzes how technology is changing news media and its readers and viewers. He offers his vision of the future, in which news content and credibility count more than the source of the information. This Seminar Snapshot was recorded March 12, 2006, at the “New Habits of News Consumers” seminar at The Poynter Institute.
How long will it take? The Seminar Snapshot is divided into eight sections. Total playing time is about 24 minutes.

About the instructor: Andrew Heyward was president of CBS News from 1996-2005.

Note: This course requires the Flash Player 7 plug-in. For the highest quality viewing experience, we recommend using Flash 8 or higher.

Cost: This snapshot is free for those watching it on NewsU. NewsU is exploring ways for you to download this material for a modest fee. These funds would be used to offset NewsU's cost in creating this form of e-learning.
http://www.newsu.org/courses/course_detail.aspx?id=snap_heyward06

Let me know what you think...add your comments

Professor TP

What's Next

2006-11-06T12:05:00.000-08:00

This is a rather lengthy post, but I hope you find it instructive, and helpful.
A few days ago, I copied over some startling statistics from Editor & Publisher…an audit of the top 25 newspapers in the United States and the circulation number. It’s pretty depressing. Circulation is dropping like a rock. Below those numbers is a piece I copied over from the Boston Globe. Much of it focuses on Philadelphia and what’s going on at the Inquirer.
None of this really surprises me. Why? Every semester I throw out a question to my classes, “how many of you read the newspaper regularly?” Few and fewer hands go up. But, when you ask how many of you go to the Internet and web sites for your news, more and more hands are raised. That’s a no-brainer, I suppose. But, where does that leave the neighborhoods? If more and more are in trouble, covering less and less of our neighborhoods, and circulation is dropping, where are they getting news…where will they get their news? If you watch a local TV newscasts these days, many of the stories are fly-by shots of a neighborhood accident scene, some fire or the aftermath of a crime with flashing lights and cops on the scene. We could spend of lot of blog-time beating up on local television, or cry about declining circulations, but the answer to me is: okay, if this is the way it’s going, what’s next? We looked at EPIC 2015 in class about what some believe is the future. What’s your vision for the future? If you could, what’s the perfect TV newscast…the perfect newspaper model for the cities and the neighborhoods? Is it electronic? Forget print, move all the stories online? Is it bureaus everywhere? Is it more neighborhood newspapers? Leave it alone!

As a point of reference, here’s the material from Editor & Publisher as well as the piece form the Boston Globe:

Editor and Publisher
(Updated with a list of the top-25 papers.) From the Audit
Bureau of Circulations FAS-FAX report for the six-month
period ending September 2006:
* Los Angeles Times daily circulation dropped 8%; down 6% on
Sunday.
* San Francisco Chronicle dropped 5.3% daily; down 7.3% on
Sunday.
* New York Times dropped 3.5% daily; down 3.5% on Sunday.
* Boston Globe dropped 6.7% daily; down 9.9% on Sunday.
* Washington Post dropped 3.3% daily; down 2.6% on Sunday.
* Wall Street Journal dropped 1.9% daily; WSJ Weekend
Edition down 6.7%.
* Chicago Tribune dropped 1.7% daily; down 1.3% on Sunday.
* USA Today dropped 1.3%.

Local ownership isn't cure-all for newspapers
By Robert Gavin, Globe Staff | October 27, 2006
As Philadelphia is finding out, local ownership of big city
newspapers isn't a panacea.
With a local group considering making a bid to buy The
Boston Globe from The New York Times Co., media specialists
warned that newspapers, regardless of ownership, face huge
challenges as readers and advertisers move online, and the
industry seeks a financial model to support extensive
newsgathering operations.
In Philadelphia, a local group earlier this year bought the
broadsheet Inquirer and tabloid Daily News from the
McClatchy Co. chain, sparking hope within the community and
the two papers for an end to the relentless cost-cutting
under its longtime corporate owner, the defunct Knight
Ridder chain. (Knight Ridder sold itself to McClatchy, which
in turn sold some of the papers it acquired.)
Last week, however, the new owner said layoffs
were "unavoidable" because revenue was falling so quickly
that the company would not be able to meet its debt payments
next year. Meanwhile, with the company pushing for deep
concessions in union contracts that expire next week,
members of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia,
which represents editorial, advertising, and other workers,
last night authorized union leader s to call a strike.
With tensions rising yesterday, union leaders were
unavailable for comment. Neither was Brian Tierney, a former
public relations and advertising executive who led the group
that bought the papers.
"The sentiment of local ownership is noble, but the
economics are still brutal," said Jay Harris, formerly
publisher of the San Jose Mercury News and now a journalism
professor at the University of Southern California. "The
good news is the desire to have strong local papers
committed to local service. But the industry is still
thrashing around, looking for a sustainable long-range
model."
After decades of big, publicly traded media companies
gobbling up local papers, that trend has recently showed
signs of reversing. Wall Street has been battering newspaper
stock prices, prompting companies to cut costs. The result:
Local groups led by wealthy residents are popping up across
the country with hopes of protecting and preserving the
papers.
In Boston, where falling circulation and advertising
revenues at the Globe have led to job and cost cuts, a group
led by Jack Welch, former General Electric Co. chief
executive, and Jack Connors, cofounder of the advertising
firm Hill Holliday, has emerged as possible bidders for the
Globe. In Los Angeles, entertainment mogul David Geffen is
among a group of local executives expressing interest in
buying the Los Angeles Times from Tribune Co. Local groups
in Hartford, Long Island, and Baltimore have signaled
interest in buying Tribune Co. papers in those communities.
Media specialists said local ownership could take some of
the cost pressures off papers, since, as private companies,
they wouldn't have to meet Wall Street expectations. But,
they added, they still face the pressures of paying off
loans that typically finance the purchases and providing
promised returns to private investors.
"Even a private ownership group has to operate in the
black," said Lou Ureneck, chairman of the Boston University
journalism department.
New owners would have to tackle newspapers' tricky
transition to the Internet. So far, newspapers' online
profits haven't come close to making up for declines in the
traditional business.
Another big challenge, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the
Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonprofit Washington
research group, is that newspapers operate under a model
foreign to most other businesses. Newspapers' mass audience
is their readers, and the circulation revenue generated by
sales to readers is important. But newspapers make most of
their money by selling space to advertisers based in part on
the papers' credibility with readers. That credibility must
be protected even at the risk of sometimes angering and
losing advertisers, Rosenstiel said.
"When you have management that has been in the business,
they know the integrity of the news product is what they're
selling," Rosenstiel said. "It's not clear whether the new
local owners understand this unusual economic model."
There are concerns that a new breed of owners, who have
largely become rich in other businesses, would interfere in
the newsgathering process to boost their own financial
interests, reward friends, or punish enemies.
In Philadelphia, the Tierney group signed a pledge not to
interfere with news decisions made by editors. The Boston
group, so far, has not made any such pledge.
Stephen Burgard, director of the Northeastern University
School of Journalism, pointed to Santa Barbara, Calif., as
an example of the vulnerability of locally controlled
newspapers. At the News-Press, at least five top editors,
including the editor and managing editor, resigned over
interference by the wealthy copublisher, Wendy McCaw, who
bought the paper from Times Co. in 2000.
Among the incidents prompting the resignations was when
McCaw stopped the publication of the drunken driving
conviction of one of her loyalists at the paper. McCaw said
in an e-mail that she was merely following the paper's
policy of not reporting drunken driving convictions unless
injury or death was involved. They weren't in this case.
"Local ownership is potentially wonderful and potentially
disastrous," Burgard said. "The question is, what is their
sense of community stewardship?"

Who has the Image Responsibility

2006-10-15T13:11:00.000-07:00

On Thursday we almost had a full-house at Congreso’s E3Center on Germantown Avenue – so thanks. I know these ‘field trips” can be difficult for some. I think its one more opportunity to see what some are doing in the neighborhoods, and a chance to see the flip side of life – as Stephen Schaeffer said, people came into the Center with a “lot of layers” and some pretty tough ones at that…drugs…parental abuse. You name it. The one theme that ran through all of what Stephen Schaeffer recounted from their clients is that their kids hear….heard constantly from a parent or someone else responsible for them, “you’ll never amount to anything.” I think Stephen mentioned that a few times when he talked about some of the young people who have come in the Center. There’s this sense that the negative is constantly pounded into these kids...maybe there’s a neighborhood parallel here. If a neighborhood constantly hears how bad it is, or nothing but the negative…then it lives up to the negative. As someone pointed out in our session, there’s a certain cache to say “hey, I survived the ‘bad lands.’” Does that make sense? My entire Journalism life has been dedicated to a sense of balance and peeling back the layers on a story, and I’ve never considered myself a “happy news,” or social engineer kinda’guy, but as I think about the impact on imagine that news lays on a neighborhood, I wonder – how do you change the media image of the neighborhoods and while maintaining my sense of balance and accuracy. There are tons of problems in neighborhood. They’re real. Crime is on the rise nationwide. Gangs and drugs are everywhere – not just in North Philadelphia, but in the far Northeast, West Philadelphia. It's everywhere. If we close our eyes to it, we ignore our responsibility to report the news accurately, so maybe it’s simply about fairness and balancing some of the bad with the good. But, what stinks about that, you get into a numbers game. One bad story here, so let’s put in one good story there. Perhaps more importantly, maybe the neighborhoods should be taking a more active roll in making the image change…maybe this is an argument for citizen journalism. Is there too much pressure on the media to be the “good guys” and are we letting the residents off the hook? If you look at the Latino organizations and Hispanic population in Philadelphia, you can’t help but be impressed by its sense of community and willingness to take care of its own population. Should we expect this from all the neighborhoods…from all the people who want to make their communities livable and safe?
Who do you think? What did you think of our E3Center visit?

GoogleTube

2006-10-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

It has been some time since I last posted. There has been this rush of mouth-dropping crazy news from the Amish Shooting in Lancaster County…and the Denver School incident… to the Foley scandal…to the nuclear test in North Korea…and the announcement the other day about Google’s acquisition of YouTube. All of it seems to have a way of keeping you off-balance. Everything you hold to be ‘normal’ is suddenly thrown off-center. You would think the safest place in the world – a one-room school house in Amish country – would be safe. Apparently not. I know it doesn’t have the same emotional gut feeling as the shootings, but the whole Google acquisition of YouTube makes me wonder about the future. I suppose it’s good for the ‘new media’ world, but it does make me wonder about those left behind…people in the neighborhoods and the inner-city. Google isn’t exactly top-of-mind there…as least, I don’t think so, not when you have trouble just getting city services, and staying safe.
Will we wind-up with a whole generation, whole sections of our cities left behind? Or, should we see it the other way with the GoogleTubes of the future as the great equalizer, where everyone can post, everyone can have a video...the new Internet town square?

Journalism and Motivating Change

2006-09-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

After our Thursday discussion in class, I thought it might be worth talking through more of the issues we touched. I was surprised at a few of the sentiments. Namely, I got the sense that some of you believe what we do is worthy, but doesn't really motivate change.

If we don't tell these stories and motivate the change, who will? In a way, doesn't this bring us full-circle to where this blog started? And that was the email from the guy who wrote about walking away from the neighborhoods - to give it up. We wasting our time?

I'm also curious, why are so few of you not interested in journalism as a career? Is it as one person put, "I want to make money."

WHYY Studio Visit

2006-09-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

Soooo, what did you all think about out visit to the WHYY studios? The datacasting presentation from Bill Weber, as always, helped me get a better fix on datacasting. And, believe it or not, I've heard the presentation several times. Each time I pick-up something new. Actually I thought your questions, and the responses from Bill and Ryan Dumont's made some things even clearer.
Any "take" on the video from the kids at the Congreso E3Center? Some tough situations.
On the templates...many of you had lots of great ideas.

Community Correspondents

2006-09-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

Hi folks, I've been impressed with many of your postings, but I also think people are either holding back, or saying things that are very PC...."under-covered...under served" and all that.

I was thinking about a few things I've spotted over the past 24-hours. Pappas Television has launched something they call "community coorespondents" at many of their television stations and within their news operaions. hey just added a few more stations to the project. Average folks can publish material, write scripts, do all the things that a 'journalist' would do...they say it's their effort at "citizen journalism." Do a little research on it. I'd be curious whether it's a worthwhile effort. Do you think something like this will engage people? WCAU locally has something simlar going. I believe the Cox stations have also started something.

Did any of you watch the Couric debut, or second night? I was struck by something Professor Harper found in his class and frankly something I've seen in mine...many of you don't watch TV or network news. True? What does that mean for news?
Back to the urban issues and the Philadelphia neighborhoods. I saw a statistic about the homicide rate about the same as last year, maybe a little lower. What the heck is going on? It's still high. And when you turn on the news, it's the violence in the neighborhoods that stands out. Is it my perception? I think this goes to a post...Carrie I think...where we seem to have this lousy self-image in the City? Ya'think?

BTW, on the Couric debut, I thought it was telling that one of the post on the CBS News web site was from a viewer who gave Couric heck for "wearing white after Labor Day." It's pretty bad when news is reduced to what someone wears. As a former news director, it was disheartening running a newsroom and rather than people applaud or pick on your jounalism, they would comment on the anchor's clothes or hair.

Welcome

2006-08-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the MURLbuildingblocks blog and the launch of our "Building Blocks" initiative.
The Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab (MURL) is the cornerstone of Temple University's Journalism Department and its mission to better tell stories in the under-covered and under-served neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

Central to the MURL mission is exploring ways to better tell stories in our under-served and under-covered urban neighborhoods. And, in the process, give some voice to those working to make their neighborhoods a more livable place. But to do it – “give voice to voiceless” - assumes the neighborhoods have a certain ease of access to technology and the means to pull-in multimedia content, “news.” We don’t make that assumption. Gut instinct and observation tells us something different. People are focused on survival; generated a decent income; and maintaining some balance in their world and with neighbors along the block.

This year in our MURL capstone class, and in partnership with WHYY-TV, we'll experiment with some relatively new technology - "datacasting" - to deliver hyper-local news content back into targeted Philadelphia neighborhoods. Our efforts are supported by a "New Voices" grant from the J-Lab at the University of Maryland. The J-lab projects are supported with grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Over the next year, we'll select two neighborhood locations along Philadelphia’s “golden block.” In partnership with WHYY-TV and using the station’s “datacasting” system, MURL students will send out a hyper-local neighborhood newscast/program/stories targeted to that community. The “datacasting” technology will enable us to send the content directly over the air to rooftop receiving antennaes and down to desktop computer(s) located at the community centers. The program built by Temple University Journalism students - MURL students – will be a mix of multimedia stories and “service news” produced by students and neighborhood “news” stories as seen through the eyes of the residents themselves. Neighborhood residents will use a combination of disposable digital still and video cameras as well as low-end digital audio recorders to tell the multimedia stories of their neighborhood and their “block.” All of this will contribute to building a 360 degree media view of the neighborhood

This MURL brand of news provides a form of hyper-local coverage missing from our urban communities. In an environment of where Journalists are mistrusted and a media that sees the dark side of their neighborhood, a level of transparency is created by this project - we hope.

There it is. This is our start and a place to begin building blocks in the neighborhoods.