Business and journalism rarely come together they way they should at conferences. So I was delighted to moderate a panel at the What If Innovation Festival last month at Temple University.
The festival was organized by and targeted to students at the Fox School of Business, and I moderated three lightening panels with Philadelphia entrepreneurs about starting, growing and sustaining young businesses. Continue reading Panel moderation: What If Innovation Festival
I had the opportunity Nov. 13 to geek out with other community managers and socially savvy reporters when the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association invited me to keynote their Sharon Johnson Memorial Workshop on community engagement.
My speech focused on what I refer to as “maximizing the message and minimizing the messenger” — basically, putting news and information ahead of an organization’s brand.
The work I do at Billy Penn revolves around engaging different communities according to their preferences, and making sure the first thing we do is inform them. So often — because it’s so easy for content to get lost online — news organizations make it a point to remind their audiences who’s informing them. Only News 1 spoke with this councilman about this issue! Our reporter Jane Schmo attended a major education meeting and has all the details for you! Where’s the information in those sentences? Why have we forgotten that our job as news professionals is to inform people?
I kept my speech to about 15 minutes so everyone at the workshop could have a full half-hour to ask questions of me and others, and to share their experiences with community engagement. There were about 25 people in attendance, and I think this is one of the most productive conversations about industry issues that I’ve been a part of in these workshop settings. It doesn’t matter if you work at a small startup like I do, at a legacy newspaper covering state politics, or for a smaller publication covering local issues — everyone has community engagement tales to tell and scars to show. Continue reading My keynote address at the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association community engagement workshop
Nov. 4, 2014 was easily the most fun and most productive I’ve ever felt on Election Night, and there are two clear reasons for that:
1. I’m working at Billy Penn, a very lean news startup. There’s no room to be unprepared, and all-hands-on-deck basically means looking across a table to communicate with all my colleagues. Having a plan and sticking to it was pretty easy.
2. We hosted a shared newsroom that night. And though it ended up being a historically short midterm gubernatorial election, we had a great time. Continue reading Billy Penn’s Election Night shared newsroom
I now work for Billy Penn. The Philly news site, not the person.
It was a tough decision to leave NewsWorks after four years (and they didn’t make it easy to say goodbye), but as the title of this post suggests, I’m ready for a new challenge.
The bootstrapped site (formerly known as Brother.ly) is the work of Jim Brady and Chris Krewson, and I’m thrilled to be working with people who really understand news from a consumer’s perspective. We’re operating under the tagline, “a mobile news platform for a better Philly.” Continue reading And now for something completely different: Working at Billy Penn
Just because I’m a social media editor doesn’t mean I spend all day at a computer using Facebook or Twitter.
Actually, it does sort of mean that, but if you’re a journalist in 2012, you’ve got to be able to multitask and you really ought to develop skills across several platforms. That’s partly how I came to be on live TV Nov. 6 to cover the 2012 election. Continue reading Covering the 2012 election on live TV [NewsWorks]
Back in March, my boss at NewsWorks/WHYY came to me and offered what I then considered to be just a fun opportunity to spread my wings at work.
Months later, I’m still working on the project that’s basically changed the things about my life I’ve always accepted as truth.
Through a grant from WNET and the Henry Louis Gates “Finding Your Roots” initiative, I worked with DNA analysts and genealogical researches to confirm what I’d always been taught about my roots: I’m Native American, but not Irish. Turns out neither is likely true.
The full story is below. It originally ran on NewsWorks as a two-video package. Continue reading How a work project uncovered my true family roots [NewsWorks]
![Covering the 2012 election on live TV [NewsWorks]](https://shannonawink.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/img952375.jpeg?w=825&h=510&crop=1)
![How a work project uncovered my true family roots [NewsWorks]](https://shannonawink.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/screen-shot-2012-06-25-at-7-20-23-pm.png?w=568&h=494&crop=1)
Shannon Wink 