Newspaper chain Journal Register Company announces move to open source

The open source movement isn’t exactly won, but, in a surprise, a newspaper giant from the region just went that way.

The Journal Register Company, based in Yardley, Bucks County and once called among the 10 worst managed companies in the country, announced on July 4th that its 18 daily websites and newspapers were published that weekend using free tools and “crowdsourced journalism.”

“Does this mean that [moving forward] all newsrooms will publish using Scribus or will tone all photos using Gimp? No, but if an operation — part Journal Register or an outside company — wanted to, they could,” the press release read. “The tools we discovered, trained on and used as part of the Ben Franklin Project could allow a news organization to throw away their old methods and start anew.”

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Why Philly has only one Low Power FM community radio station

Shirley Randelman, host of Community Action Magazine.

In partnership with Temple University’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab, the university’s capstone journalism class, students Chelsea Leposa and Jared Pass will cover neighborhood technology issues for Technically Philly and Philadelphia Neighborhoods through May.

“Welcome to WPEB 88.1FM, the first station on your dial,” radio host Shirley Randelman says into her microphone. “You’re listening to Community Action Magazine, bringing you all the updates on what’s going on in the community and keeping it very real and personal.”

Randelman, whose show airs on Mondays from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. on West Philadelphia Educational Broadcasters (WPEB), says her’s is one of many programs broadcast on the local station. “We talk about things that are happening in the community especially where it deals with business, advocacy and education. We cover a whole potpourri of information,” she says.

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Gretjen Clausing of Philly CAM talks the technology behind public access TV

Gretjen Clausing thinks it’s “just perfect” that she grew up in Media.

She has lived in Philadelphia since 1989 — currently Roxborough — but from studying film and photography at Ithaca College to helping organize the first Philadelphia Film Festival to working at the Prince Music Theater or the Scribe Video Center, Clausing says she’s always had a hand in some form of media.

Gretjen Clausing

And now, the 45-year-old has a new role in the same industry.

Last June, Clausing took on the role of shepherding Philadelphia Community Access Media, the city’s long-awaited public-access cable channel. It’s a big role, considering, as she says, “that Philadelphia had the dubious reputation of being the last big city in the United States without a public access channel.”

There are public broadcasters like WHYY and WYBE, which has recently been rebranded as MiND TV, but Clausing says it’s time Philadelphians have a source for their best shot at getting the most local voices on the air. Now, Clausing is tasked with making a public-access cable channel that just launched in October a serious player in a two-decades old game, but she says she has all the advantages in the deck.

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Philadelphia magazine launches blog Philly Post

Updated 3/10/10 @ 12:17 p.m.: Added item from comment field

Philadelphia magazine wants to get back into the daily conversation.

The century-old glossy publication and regional staple has launched a general interest blog, the Philly Post.

�The goal is to be in touch with our audience not just monthly, as we are with the magazine, but daily,� said Editor-in-Chief Larry Platt in a release. The platform is WordPress-based.

Phillymag Executive Editor Tom McGrath will take the helm of the project. McGrath told Technically Philly that the venture will follow top stories in the region, use both original reporting and aggregation and will include pieces from both staffers and contributors in a Huffington Post-like structure.

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Inquirer online editor Chris Krewson to leave for Variety.com

Chris Krewson is going to Hollywood.

The executive online editor of the Inquirer, with 10 years in daily newspapers and a lifetime in Pennsylvania, is shipping off next month to become the editor of entertainment industry publication Variety.com in Los Angeles, as he tweeted last week.

“I love The Inquirer, and wish everyone there nothing but the best,” he told Technically Philly in an e-mail.

Krewson, 33, noted his enthusiasm for working alongside Leo Wolinsky, the former top editor for the Los Angeles Times who last month was picked to run the L.A. print product Daily Variety. Both Wolinsky and Krewson will report to Variety group editor Tim Gray.

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Friday Q&A: Ryan Davis, Philly.com President

Updated: colleague’s name @ 1:47 p.m. 1/8/10

He may not live in Philadelphia quite yet, but Philly.com President Ryan Davis says he’s “a southeast Pennsylvanian at heart.”

Ryan Davis

Of course, in the interest of disclosure, it should be made clear that Davis, who was put in charge of Philadelphia’s most visited Web site in October, lives in New York City, a rival if there ever was one.

The native of Allentown takes a daily train trip to Center City but says he, his wife and their new baby daughter — who he says has delayed the move — will be relocated to the region in the coming months.

If you’d think his location would keep Davis from the gig, the age of this 32-year-old might, too, seem like an obstacle. Yet there at the Market Street Philly.com headquarters he is, and, like every where else he’s gone professionally, he’s gotten there quickly.

Outside of college, Davis has never spent as much as three years with a single organization during his precipitous rise from aspiring journalist to newspaper dot com chief executive.

After graduating from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2000, Davis spent 29 months reporting with the St. Petersburg Times and then two years and nine months at the Baltimore Sun. He spent two years in Manhattan with executive management consulting firm McKinsey before taking the director of strategic operations position with Philly.com in February. Nine months later, he was named president of the 70-person staff.

That rise, he says, has put him where he wants to be when he wants to be there.

“It’s an exciting time when a lot of people are trying to figure out what local means on the Internet,” he says.

Below, Davis explains living in New York, lays out his priorities for improving on 72 million monthly page views and talks about the coming explosion of local on the Web.

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Friday Q&A: Video Games Live co-creator Tommy Tallarico

Music from the video game Zelda is performed during a 'Video Games Live' show in London. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)

This interview was conducted for a new geek culture column called Peer-to-Peer that will publish monthly for Philadelphia City Paper. See it in its original form.

On Sunday, video game music composer Tommy Tallarico will bring more than 20 years of gaming history with him to the Kimmel Center.

Before Madden started licensing real rock tunes, back when Disney’s Aladdin was the coolest Sega Genesis side-scroller this side of the playground, when Epic Games was just launching its Unreal series, Tallarico was there for all of it. In fact, he composed tunes for all of those titles. He even holds the Guinness Book of World Record as the person who’s worked on the most video games.

But this isn’t a gaming history lesson.

Tallarico is the co-creator of Video Games Live, a globally touring, full symphony that plays video game classics. The geeky orchestra will perform dozens of anthems backed by video accompaniment, light show, and rock ‘n’ roll appeal, Tallarico says. There’s even interactive segments, like live Skype sessions with famous game designers and composers.

Did we mention there’s a medley of 25 arcade classics, starting with 1972′s Pong to 1986′s Tetris, with Donkey Kong, Defender, Frogger, Dragon Slayer and more? Now you know.

But we admit our skepticism: Is this just too dorky�even for us? We caught up with Tallarico in a phone interview recently to try to figure out if we’d ever be down. What’d did we learn? We are down. So, so down. Questions and answers after the jump.

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PECO invests $4 million in smart distribution switches

PECO customers in the Philadelphia region could soon notice improvements to their electrical service. Or if things go as planned, they won’t notice at all.

PECO announced yesterday that 50 “smart” switches, which help prevent wide outages and improve service, are being installed on its grid in Delaware, Chester, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties this year, according to a press release.

At $50,000 to $60,000 per device, PECO has invested $4 million into the project. Installation will begin as soon as this month in Media, North Wales and the Roxborough section of northwest Philadelphia.

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Fake Philly news station KLMT created for scam

Updated July 1, 12:00 p.m.: A reader suggests that the site generates location information dynamically, so this is not a Philly-specific scam. We verified this fact with a virtual browser renderer.

No, that’s not a new local news station to compliment Philadelphia’s famed television channels. KLMT News 3 35-year veteran reporter Katie Wilson doesn’t exist.

Despite a mostly convincing Web site that includes Philly’s forecast, a Philadelphia tag-line and an attractive Photoshop mock-up of several lead anchors, the site’s a scam, reports Lost Remote.

Well duh, right? It might not trick the locals, but it’s a convincing presentation that could lead readers outside the region to believe that a local reporter has actually researched the prospect of making cash from Google Adwords. Links throughout the site lead to Google Money Master.

In fact, according to the site, our faker Wilson reports that the station secretary Vivian quit her job to pursue the promising $70 per hour work-from-home gig. We hear that, Viv, we hear that.

Hat tip to TVSpy Shop Talk.

Philadelphia Inquirer will launch a paid-content model for Web

5/31/09 – 10:38 a.m.: Updated.

The Philadelphia Inquirer will launch a paid-content model on its Web site before the end of the year, according to a commemorative online package that will appear Sunday.

Philadelphia’s paper of record will debut the special multimedia presentation on Philly.com to commemorate its 180th anniversary, which Technically Philly was given a preview of today.

See our sneak peek at the project here.

The presentation includes a news story attributing the mention of paid content to Brian Tierney, Philadelphia Media Holdings Publisher and Chief Executive. Further details about the plans were not provided.

Inquirer Executive Online Editor Chris Krewson could not confirm the time line or the decision, but said that Tierney has spoken publicly about the possibility.

“In the past three months it’s been pretty clear from Brian’s statements that there will be a move to paid content on the Internet,” Krewson said in a telephone interview with Technically Philly.

“It would not surprise me at all to see us do something with paid content by the end of the year.”
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