A peek behind Technically Philly’s Knight Grant Application

Last spring, Brian Kirk, Chris Wink and I had a problem.

All recent journalism grads, we were having trouble finding writing jobs in Philadelphia, so we attempted to create our own. The three of us started Technically Philly, a site to cover the city’s tech community, in February. We spent the next few months building connections, covering events and interviewing community leaders to serve a population that, until now, was lucky to receive a write-up every few months in the local media.

We heard responses like “We needed this” and “Thank god someone is finally giving this the attention it deserves.”

Once we decided to get a little more serious, we had to create Technically Philly as a legal entity. But we didn't have the slightest clue about the procedures. Do we incorporate? Do we want to be a partnership? How do we pay taxes? Chris Wink dutifully attended hours of small business courses to come up with the answers.

And then it came time to sell advertising. Can we, as the editorial side, also sell ads? How do online ads typically get paid for? What’s the protocol? As three journalism nuts we shamefully had no idea how, exactly, the advertising process worked. But, we managed to scrape together a few ads after hours of failed cold calls and blind emails.

Soon, fellow Philly bloggers began emailing us.

“How did you guys sell ads?””
“Can you sell ads for us”
“Can you set up a job board for us?”
“Can we get sued for libel? Would I lose my house?”

Turns out that there are over a dozen of small community sites in Philadelphia. Some cover specific regions of the city, others cover subcultures, but they all have one thing in common: They need help.

For (one of our) Knight applications Technically Philly has proposed the creation of a sales, administration and support hub for the city of Philadelphia. Picture a single office with a small handful of salespeople, a computer programmer and legal advisers that could take the administrative burden off of local news startups to allow them to focus on their core competency: covering the hell out of their community.

On their own, a small hyperlocal site often struggles to offer an ad salesperson enough commission or a programmer enough hours to merit full time employment, but if over ten sites band together? That could fund a small staff.

With the administrative burdens outsourced, the barrier for creating a sustainable news organization in the city is lowered dramatically. It took Technically Philly seven months before we saw any sort of revenue. Part of this reason was an education gap of not knowing business nuts and bolts, and part was the result of spending time away from creating content to structure our business.

Journalism in Philadelphia doesn't need a non-profit. We don't need donations. We need investment. We need entrepreneurship.

Mostly, we need to cultivate a culture of journalism-as-business to fund (big J) Journalism. The creation of an administrative hub won’t make headlines like sending 1,000 Flip cams to New Jersey, but it is a low-cost experiment to create a completely sustainable news ecosystem in a city where the largest news organization is in bankruptcy.