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.

Feather O. Houstoun, president of the William Penn Foundation, greets new Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com publisher Greg Osberg after his PhIJI.org presentation at Temple University Tuesday night. Thomas Jacobson, Dean of the School of Communications and Theater at Temple, looks on. iPhone photo by Jim MacMillan

Osberg announced plans to collaborate with journalism schools, new content sharing objectives, a Philly media incubator that will house startups free of charge in the newspaper building, and a journalism innovation competition with cash rewards for employees.

The William Penn Foundation has previously announced a collaborative journalism initiative that will aim to develop strategies to advance public interest journalism in the greater Philadelphia area. This project is meant to be the next step in creating networks for journalists and developing resourcing strategies and innovations in creating a networked community around public affairs issues.

Come back soon for more news from this and future events.

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.

Jan Schaffer

On Tuesday, November 9th, The Philadelphia Initiative for Journalistic Innovation will host a visit from Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, The Institute for Interactive Journalism.

At our recent PhIJI event, we spent some time with J-Lab‘s report: “Exploring a Networked Journalism 
Collaborative in Philadelphia: An Analysis of the City’s Media Ecosystem.”

J-Lab has also recently launched The Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Fund, “a pilot project designed to develop opportunities for amplifying public affairs journalism in the region.”

Please join us 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 event announcements are coming soon.

About Jan Schaffer

Jan Schaffer, former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (www.J-Lab.org) and one of the nation’s leading thinkers in the journalism reform movement.

She left daily journalism in 1994 to lead pioneering journalism initiatives in the areas of civic journalism, interactive and participatory journalism and citizen media ventures.

J-Lab is a center of American University’s School of Communication. She launched J-Lab in 2002 to help newsrooms use innovative computer technologies to engage people in important public issues. The center now spotlights new forms of digital storytelling on (www.J-Lab.org). It rewards innovative practices through the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. It funds cutting-edge citizen media start-ups through its New Voices project (www.J-NewVoices.org). It built web tutorials on how to launch and manage community news sites (www.J-Learning.org). It collects information on community, citizen and original journalism projects with the Knight Citizen News Network (www.kcnn.org) and it raises awareness of women in media in a partnership with McCormick Foundation through the New Media Women Entrepreneurs project (www.newmediawomen.org).

J-Lab is the successor to the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million project which Schaffer previously led. The center (www.pewcenter.org) helped to fund more than 120 pilot projects that developed new reporting techniques to engage people better in public life.

She brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to her work. Schaffer joined The Inquirer in 1972 after earning a masters degree from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. She held range of reporting and editing positions on the city desk, the national desk and the business news department.

As a federal court reporter, she helped write a series that won freedom for a man wrongly convicted of five murders. The stories led to the civil rights convictions of six Philadelphia homicide detectives and won several national journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service.

Also while covering federal courts, she broke the Philadelphia Abscam story about the FBI sting operation that used agents posing as Arab sheiks. She was sentenced to jail for six months for refusing to reveal her sources; the sentence was stayed on appeal.

As Business Editor, she directed the reporting and editing of two investigative series that were named Pulitzer finalists, one on pharmaceutical pricing and one on abuses in the nation’s non-profit sector.

Currently, she serves as a speaker, trainer, author, consultant and Web publisher on the future of journalism and is a regular discussion leader for the American Press Institute and other industry organizations. She is married to a Smithsonian Magazine editor and has two children.

About J-Lab

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism is an incubator for innovative news experiments that use new technologies to help people actively engage in critical public issues. Its core mission is to improve public life by transforming journalism for today and re-inventing it for tomorrow.

J-Lab spotlights dynamic news experiences and helps to develop interactive news ideas that not only educate people about public affairs but also invite their participation.

It rewards cutting-edge innovations through the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism funded by the Knight Foundation. It spotlights the creative assets of women with the McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs project. It funds pioneering hyperlocal citizen media ventures through its New Voices project and administers the community media e-learning sites Knight Citizen News Network and J-Learning.

J-Lab is a center of the American University School of Communication. To reach J-Lab, please visit the Contact page.

With 90 chairs - and overflow crowds on the floor and in the corridor - we are estimating the attendance at 120!

But we had a little more floor space.

We kicked off opening night at PhIJI 2010 with a full house in our space at the Tuttleman Learning Center on Temple University’s main campus Tuesday night.

We started with a look back at PhIJI’s one-day event last year, using it as a launching pad for our new series. We are defining journalists by what a Poynter Institute report called the Fifth Estate: “the broad network of people, journalists, both professional and non-, who are now participating in the news-gathering process.” In other words, we will have no exclusions.

The state of journalism innovation in Philadelphia seems to have been defined so far by several events at Temple, including last year’s PhIJI conference, Barcamp NewsInnovation, and PodcampPhilly.

We can look at Philadelphia more objectively via J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University, and their report last spring: “Exploring a Networked Journalism Collaborative in Philadelphia – An Analysis of the City’s Media Ecosystem with Final Recommendations.”

The report begins: “In the nation’s sixth largest city, a vibrant media landscape exists with niche reporting sites, legacy newspapers and an active community of creative technologists.  But there is also… little collaboration between these media entities.”

While key findings cited a drop in public affairs reporting, J-Lab also said that Philadelphians want to be involved with generating the news, and that “the city is awash in media and technological assets that can Pioneer a new Golden Era of Journalism.”

Among those assets, J-Lab cited the Department of Journalism at Temple University as an institution that “gets it.”

More recently, J-Lab launched the new Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Fund, a competition offering ten $5,000 awards for collaborative news projects

A status check on local media shows that Philadelphia Media Network – the new owners of the Daily News, Inquirer and Philly.com – now has contracts with all of its unions and is “set to close on its purchase,” effectively emerging from bankruptcy.”

Meanwhile, Journal Resister Company announced last week that the newspaper chain will soon launch an online, hyperlocal news portal in Philly. At the same time, hyperlocals Patch and Flying Kite Media are now operating in Philadelphia, as well as a Philadelphia version of Brooklyn’s Brownstoner.

Temple University journalism professor Susan Jacobson discussed her research on multimedia journalism on global web sites, including types of formats, the reporting journalists’ perspectives, and the coordination with primary text reports. Multimedia reporting at the New York Times reached an amazing 7,000 packages in 2008.

Jacobson concluded that young journalists need to be facile with multiple media for reporting, particularly video and still photography, will no doubt be teamed with programmers and animators for some stories, and will need to be able to reach audiences on multiple mobile devices.

Brian James Kirk, Web Editor of PlanPhilly and a co-founder of Technically Philly, told an engaging first person story about launching his career in this new era – and offered some actionable strategies for journalism students – but he really blew the room away when he revealed that he had graduated just a year and a half ago.

As promised, we will added Brian’s Google Reader bundle soon, launch a survey to get your feedback, and announce several upcoming events. We’re thinking about adding after-parties too!

Thanks for coming to PhIJI! -Jim MacMillan

Brian James Kirk brings it home. (Thanks to Prof. George Miller for the photos!)