At the Suburban Newspapers of America conference in Philadelphia recently, Journal RegisterCompany CEO John Paton announced that the newspaper chain will soon be launching an online, hyperlocal news portal in Philly.

JRC Vice President Jonathan Cooper is leading the company’s yet-to-be-named Philadelphia project, and will be speaking at PhIJI soon about this and other innovative endeavors at the company.

Please join us Tuesday, Dec. 7 at 6:30 p.m. at the Tuttleman Learning Center (TL-303AB), at the corner of 13th Street and Montgomery Avenue on Temple’s main campus. (Map)

Jonathan Cooper

Jonathan Cooper, age 36, is Vice President of Content where he is leading The Company’s yet-to-be-named Philadelphia portal project. He lead The Company’s Ben Franklin Project, an experiment to publish 18 daily websites and newspapers using free, web-based tools with a focus on crowd-sourced journalism.

Previously he worked as director of digital content and corporate multimedia editor for Journal Register Company. He has also served as managing editor and online director of the New Haven Register; and editor of The Herald (New Britain, CT) and The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT).

As director of specialty publications, he launched the company’s youth-market magazines in Connecticut and Philadelphia and also led the expansion of Journal Register’s Spanish-language portfolio in Connecticut and New York.

Mr. Cooper’s work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Post and Keene Sentinel (Keene, NH), and he recently taught digital reporting at Quinnipiac University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from Keene State College.

Mr. Cooper lives in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.

PhIJI will have more announcements soon. Subscribe at right via Twitter, RSS, or email – or join ourFacebook group.

Amy Webb

Webbmedia Group CEO Amy Webb stole the show with her Tech Trends presentation at the Online News Association conference in Washington, DC, last month, and is coming to PhIJI on November 30th with an update.

Please note the early 5:30 p.m. start time and join us at the Tuttleman Learning Center (TL-303AB), at the corner of 13th Street and Montgomery Avenue on Temple’s main campus. (Map)

Here are a few of the tweets that were flying around room in Washington during Amy’s presentation:

jackiesauter: I’ve been at this #techtrends workshop for 15 minutes and @webbmedia is already my hero. #ona10
dorsey: @webbmedia Killed it at #ona10. Such a great presenter, high energy, cool swag, awesome ideas and useful tips. #techtrends FTW
meghannCIR: @webbmedia is blowing my mind with our ability to search social media sites. #ona10 #techtrends
jackiesauter: mind = blown. #techtrends #ona10

You can also read a little more about the presentation with Nieman Storyboard.

Webbmedia Group CEO Amy Webb is an author, speaker and future thinker, adapting current and emerging technologies for use in communications. She has spent more than 15 years working with digital media, founding several web-based companies and now advising various startups, retailers, government agencies and media organizations as well as Webbmedia’s clients all over the world.

Amy began her career as a reporter/ writer with Newsweek (Tokyo) and the Wall Street Journal (Hong Kong) where she covered emerging technology, media and cultural trends. She has contributed to the New York Times, NPR, Economist, Philadelphia Inquirer and many publications and broadcast shows. Her work has been recognized with awards/nominations from Webby, Editor & Publisher, Investigative Reporters & Editors, Society of Professional Journalists, W3 and IAVA. She has a M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and holds a B.A. in political economics from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. She also earned Nikyu Certification in the Japanese government-administered Language Proficiency Test and speaks fluently.

Amy serves on the Board of Directors for the Online News Association, the SXSW Accelerator Advisory Board, Knight-Batten Advisory Board, the Advisory Board for Temple University’s Journalism Program and the Advisory Board for the International Center for Journalists. She is one of the Knight News Challenge judges. Amy is also a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (Interactive Media Peer Group) and serves as a judge for the Emmy® awards. She has been on the adjunct journalism faculty at University of Maryland, Temple University, Tokyo University and University of the Arts.

Clients have said that Amy has “an encyclopedic knowledge of the tech industry,” and “immediate access to all of the latest and most important trends.” She appears regularly on a number of broadcast shows, and is a keynote/ featured speaker at conferences and industry gatherings around the world.

For contact info and more, see Amy’s bio page.

Greg Osberg visits PhIJI at Temple University recently.Photo courtesy of technicallyphilly.com

This guest post comes to us courtesy of Technically Philly.

On a night when dozens of political candidates were making broad proclamations about the future, Greg Osberg stood behind a lectern at Temple University to lay out his vision for the Philadelphia Media Network, the newly formed parent company of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily Newsand Philly.com.

The former Newsweek publisher and CEO of the Philadelphia Media Network was speaking as part of the Philadelphia Initiative for Journalistic Innovation, a speaker series hosted by Temple University’s journalism department.

“It’s going to take a couple of years to pull off this miracle,” he said of the current financial state of the company adding that, in the past five years, the company has lost half of its advertising revenue, 25 percent of subscriptions and 90 percent EBITDA.

Osberg made eight proclamations about the company’s future including his plans to house a startup incubator:

• The sales department has reorganized to sell across all platforms instead of specializing by platform.
• The company will launch an incubator on Jan. 1st that will house businesses focused on local. “I want us to find the next Foursquare and house it at Philly.com,” Osberg said. The newspapers will offer the companies free rent and allow the startups to test products on Philly.com.
• The company will give quarterly cash awards to staff that submit innovative business or editorial ideas.
• The editorial content of the newspapers and Philly.com will likely see changes. ”I can’t tell you what the editorial mission of the Inquirer and the Daily News will be,” he said, “but I can tell you they will be different. The circulation trends are hard to ignore.”
• Osberg says that the company will launch some sort of paid content effort –though we’ve heard that one before from former publisher Brian Tierney.
• The company will release its first iPad application in November. The new app will be sports-focused.
• The hedge fund that owns the company also owns other local media companies. Osberg says that he imagines lots of collaboration between these businesses.
• The paper will eventually start ”policing content on aggregators.”

Disclosure: The three founders of Technically Philly have freelanced for the Inquirer and are Temple University graduates.

Jan Schaffer

Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, The Institute for Interactive Journalism, is coming to PhIJI Tuesday night to present “10 Trends in the New Media Ecosystem.“

New developments are bursting across the media landscape in Philadelphia, and J-Lab has been involved with most of them.

Schaffer will also discuss J-Lab’s recent Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism and the even more recent Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Fund winners, as well as J-Lab’s report from earlier this year “Exploring a Networked Journalism Collaborative in Philadelphia: An Analysis of the City’s Media Ecosystem.”

Please join us Tuesday, November 9th at 6:30 p.m. at the Tuttleman Learning Center (TL-303AB), at the corner of 13th Street and Montgomery Avenue on Temple University’s main campus. (Map) PhIJI events are free and open to the public. More event announcements are coming soon.

Read more about Jan Schaffer and J-Lab below.

Greg Osberg

On the night he was named to lead region’s largest news organization, Greg Osberg told the Philadelphia Daily News that one of his three main goals will be “to encourage and reward innovation throughout the company, with an emphasis on digital innovation,” and that he plans to steer the company toward a heavy emphasis on digital content that will be delivered on the latest mobile devices.

As president and worldwide publisher of Newsweek and Newsweek.com from 2000 through 2008, Osberg’s top priority was growing the company’s online traffic and revenue. Previously, he had been the president of CNET, and most recently served as President and CEO of Buzzwire, a Denver-based provider of news, data and streaming media over mobile phones.

Osberg said ensuring relevancy, innovation and profitability would be the key to long-term success and that “the overarching goal is to become the most successful regional media company in the nation.”

Having grown up in the Philadelphia region – where his mother still lives and he has other family ties – Osberg said that the challenge that brought him back is to build the first major metro news organization to thrive in the digital era.

Please join us Tuesday, Nov. 2nd, from 6:30-8 p.m. at the Tuttleman Learning Center (TL-303AB), at the corner of 13th Street and Montgomery Avenue on Temple’s main campus. (Map)

PhIJI events are free and open to the public.

More: Greg Osberg on WHYY’s Radio Times and Fox29, and in the Daily News.

At the Suburban Newspapers of America conference last month in Philadelphia, Journal Register Company CEO John Paton announced that the newspaper chain will soon be launching an online, hyperlocal news portal in Philly.

JRC Vice President Jonathan Cooper is leading the company’s yet-to-be-named Philadelphia project, and will be speaking at PhIJI soon about this and other innovative endeavors at the company. Come back soon for more information.

Jonathan Cooper

Jonathan Cooper, age 36, is Vice President of Content where he is leading The Company’s yet-to-be-named Philadelphia portal project. He lead The Company’s Ben Franklin Project, an experiment to publish 18 daily websites and newspapers using free, web-based tools with a focus on crowd-sourced journalism.

Previously he worked as director of digital content and corporate multimedia editor for Journal Register Company. He has also served as managing editor and online director of the New Haven Register; and editor of The Herald (New Britain, CT) and The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT).

As director of specialty publications, he launched the company’s youth-market magazines in Connecticut and Philadelphia and also led the expansion of Journal Register’s Spanish-language portfolio in Connecticut and New York.

Mr. Cooper’s work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Post and Keene Sentinel (Keene, NH), and he recently taught digital reporting at Quinnipiac University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from Keene State College.

Mr. Cooper lives in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.

PhIJI will have more announcements soon. Subscribe at right via Twitter, RSS, or email – or join our Facebook group.