Philombudsman

Commentary and criticism on the way Philadelphia media covers its own city.

[philombudsman-blog]

SEPTA Overnight Weekend Service Expanded Indefinitely. Good! Now Stop Fixating on the Cost

SEPTA, the Philadelphia area's transportation authority, announced on Wednesday that it would indefinitely continue 24-hour weekend service on its subway and elevated train lines, known locally as the Broad Street and Market-Frankford lines. This comes after a summer pilot program in which the agency gave overnight weekend service a try. The move proved successful enough to make the service extension permanent, at least for now.

So why are some news outlets still so worried about the cost of round-the-clock transit?

NBC's item on the Wednesday announcement, for instance, spent five out of eight paragraphs discussing the much higher cost of running 24-hour trains ($47,000 per weekend) than running after-hours Nite Owl buses ($13,000 per weekend). The affiliate didn't have to do this. Its competitors took a different approach: ABC emphasized the increased late-night ridership numbers (15,000 on average, as opposed to 9,000 on the Nite Owls) and didn't even mention the expense. CBS relegated the higher costs to a quick paragraph at the bottom of its story. Philly.com's take was blessedly free of dollar signs as well. 

Don't worry, though. Of all the real and virtual ink spilled over SEPTA's experiment with 24-hour service, much of it has dealt with how the agency will afford its investment. Which is not an inappropriate question by any means. We never want a boondoggle on our hands, especially in a city as broke as Philadelphia.

But when we talk about public services like transit, profit isn't and never should be the bottom line. After all, it's well documented that pretty much all public transit systems around the world lose money -- at least when it comes to revenues derived right from the farebox. (You can find a few exceptions in East Asian cities.) So we can add up the fares paid by those 15,000 nighttime passengers, control for people with weekly and monthly TransPasses, and see how close we come to $47,000. If there's a deficit, then SEPTA is... like every other transit agency out there.

The real profits of growing a city's public transit don't come from the farebox. They don't even come from the revenues of the local transit authority. Instead, they come in the form of more indirect but vital benefits such as: improved public safety; more people spending money around the clock; more customers patronizing local businesses; economic investment along transit routes; residents attracted to the city for its superior transit; less car traffic on congested roadways; and cleaner air.

Randy LoBasso laid it out nicely in an August Philadelphia Weekly column, copy errors notwithstanding: "[S]hould covering costs really be the be-all, end-all for a 24-hour train service that inevitably spurs economic activity and could result in less [sic] drunk drivers over the long haul?"

Yet for too many reporters, the money is more important than all of the above. Take the lede from this story, again courtesy of NBC, about SEPTA's decision to continue 24-hour service into this past Labor Day:

SEPTA is adding another round of overnight train service Labor Day despite the staggering cost of running the Broad Street and Market-Frankford lines each weekend.

Staggering? Give me a break. What's staggering is that Philadelphia, the fifth-largest city in the U.S., hasn't had 24-hour subway and el service since the early 1990s.

Photo by Flickr user camera_obscura.

[philombudsman-blog]

Shout-out to a (new?) group called West Phillians for this comedy short. It drags a bit, but the upside is that it takes on nearly every rationalization people use to distance themselves from the causes and effects of urban crime. If you've heard about the "othering" of people directly affected by severe crime and all of its requisite symptoms, here's a sterling example.

The bongos are a nice touch, too.

(h/t /r/philadelphia)

[philombudsman-blog]

Everyone Chill Out About the Gawker Accent Tournament

If you've been anywhere near Facebook lately, you may have read about Gawker's "America's Ugliest Accent" tournament. It's a poll where readers get to choose which of 16 cities has the "ugliest" regional accent.

It's also the sort of playful shit engineered to go viral. Countless people have shared the poll on social media, usually adding a comment along the lines of, "Unfortunately, I know [my city] will make it all the way to the end!" or, "Oh my god, [my city] just has to win this!" No one is taking it all that seriously. For the most part, readers seem to view it as a way to display their local pride in a palatable, self-deprecating manner, as well as to engender some friendly regional competition. (I assume most of the participants voted for their hometowns. I did, as did all my friends.) Gawker knows this, and it will reap the pageviews accordingly.

Three Pennsylvania cities -- Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Scranton -- have advanced to the quarterfinals. It makes sense, given each city's distinct and recognizable drawl, famous enough even to enjoy parodies on Comedy Central programs. There's no reason to feel any shame about this. All it means is that rest of the country takes as much delight in Pennsylvania accents as we do. I'd bet a good chunk of Gawker's readership skews East Coast and Pennsylvania, anyhow. It's no big deal.

So will somebody please tell that to Monica Weymouth? The Philly Mag writer is out with a post today that takes great, great offense at Gawker's approach to the whole ordeal. Even as she acknowledges that the poll isn't meant to be taken seriously, Weymouth can't resist playing the sanctimonious realist who will tell those Gawker hipsters what's what.

But it makes very little sense. How do you go from this:

I get that Gawker’s contest is, mostly, a tongue-in-cheek stunt written by some very funny, very smart people who have been in New York too long and just want to go back to Kansas and sit on a porch already... The editors at Gawker don’t actually think that New Orleans is a “steaming, fetid stew of aural bile” with “varied, and uniformly ugly accents.”

..to this:

From a site that’s usually spot-on when defending identity and pointing out this country’s sneaky prejudices, the “Ugliest Accent” tournament is a snobby, tone-deaf line in the sand. Writers, editors, “brand managers” and “strategists” over here; plumbers, cops, farmers and nurses this way, please (not for nothing, only one of these groups is any help in the apocalypse).

Wait. Which is it? A silly, fun way to have fun with regional identity? Or a shitty, elitist way to lampoon working-class people?

Weymouth is not wrong that Americans often take speech as an indicator of socioeconomic status, and that many people out there do look down on regional accents. Some say that strong accents make a person sound dumb. (If not dumb, then "coarse" or some other euphemism for "poor.") It's classist as hell, and it sucks. A few unfortunate souls out there even take elocution classes to get rid of their inherited ways of talking, in the hopes that streamlined speech will help them make friends, get jobs, etc. This strikes me as internalized oppression.

I'm very pro-accent, myself. I don't believe someone should change the way they speak in order to be taken seriously. I also don't know why a flat, universal accent is desirable. When you travel to new places, you don't want to see the same architecture or sample the same cuisine everywhere you go. (Hello, big box stores and fast food restaurants!) Why would you want to hear the same patterns of speech?

That's why I voted in Gawker's poll -- because I'm proud of the regional accents I grew up hearing and continue to hear. I voted for New York because I can't imagine my childhood without whiny Lawng Island voices in the background. I voted for Philly because I've come to love my neighbors in Soufilly and Fishteown. It was a fun little statement about identity and what I consider home. To paraphrase Mos Def, it was a way to say, "this is where I'm from, and where I'm at."

Will some readers use the Gawker poll as an excuse to air their elitist viewpoints? Of course. That doesn't mean the poll itself is condescending, classist, or anything other than a way for people to take pride in their hometowns. It's snarky, yes, and lightly combative -- the online equivalent of taunting chants at NFL games -- but there's nothing wrong with that. This is the same website that ranked "The Worst 50 States in America," after all. 

[philombudsman-blog]

There's a Reason Why Jannie Blackwell Stalled Those Zoning Changes in West Philly

Inga Saffron's latest column deals with one of the more esoteric policies that shapes the way Philadelphia grows as a city. Councilmanic prerogative is the power vested in district representatives -- that is, the 10 members of City Council elected by district, as opposed to the seven elected at large -- to have the final say over any and all development projects in the neighborhoods they represent. Saffron calls these district reps "mini-mayors around town who rule their turf with near-absolute power."

Despite her obvious bias against the policy, though, Saffron offers up the clearest and most concise definition of councilmanic prerogative that I've ever come across. If I had to explain the obscure practice to out-of-towners, I would point them in the direction of Saffron's column. The first three paragraphs should be required reading for anyone interested in zoning and development in this city.

That said, the column leaves a lot unexplained about the specific case that it aims to take on. Saffron sets her sights on Jannie Blackwell, the city councilmember who represents a big chunk of West Philadelphia. Blackwell's district includes a vacant lot at 43d Street and Baltimore Avenue where developers seek zoning changes in order to build a mixed-use project with ground-floor retail and 132 "upscale" apartments. While gathering community input, the developers found an unusual amount of support among neighbors, given West Philly's long history with NIMBY squabbles. Yet when they sent the zoning changes to Blackwell's office for approval, they never heard anything back. Even after the developers asked neighborhood groups to step in and nudge Blackwell in the direction of approval, the councilwoman remained silent.

Saffron paints Blackwell as the antagonist here -- a politician using her excessive powers to stall a healthy development for West Philadelphia, seemingly without a good reason. Indeed, Saffron seems downright perplexed over Blackwell's silence. And, granted, the councilwoman hasn't voiced her reasoning to the press or anyone else. 

But I think any reporter familiar with real estate in Philadelphia could guess what's going on here.

The area of West Philly around Baltimore Avenue, from 52nd Street to about 38th Street (near where the University of Pennsylvania campus begins), has lately been one of the fastest-gentrifying parts of the city. This has to do with the nearby colleges, whose housing programs have brought university staffers and their families into the neighborhood as homeowners, and whose patronage of coveted primary schools has led to local inequalities in public education. Then there's the abundance of cheap, gorgeous Victorian rowhomes and duplexes -- the historic designation of which Blackwell has also stalled, to Saffron's chagrin -- and the army of urban-minded post-grads who want to live in them. Hell, most of my own friends moved to the blocks around Baltimore Avenue over the last 2-3 years.

Meanwhile, Jannie Blackwell's main constituency is Black West Philly, largely the same population at risk of displacement as gentrification creeps westward down Baltimore Avenue. While organizations like Friends of Clark Park and the Spruce Hill Community Association might not have a problem with 132 new luxury apartments popping up down the street, I bet there are plenty of locals who view the project with wariness and suspicion. A "sleek new development... that promised to include space for a high-end restaurant and a fitness club" just doesn't mean the same thing to West Philly lifers as it does to moneyed newcomers.

So it's politically risky for Blackwell to give the project her blessings in the form of zoning changes. Nor does she want to piss off the well-heeled development community by actively and vocally opposing such a project. Therefore, silence. It's like the City Council equivilent of a pocket veto. On the ground, this might not make much sense -- as Saffron explains, the developers could easily build a lesser project without the zoning changes -- but I'd bet that at the ballot box, it seems like a smart move.

Hey, I don't like councilmanic prerogative either. But even politicians with "near-absolute" power have motivations for doing what they do. Sometimes, given the context, they're even understandable. It's worth keeping in mind when we write about things like housing development in West Philly.

[philombudsman-blog]

The "Mom" Problem With Shaneen Allen

Shaneen Allen, a 27-year-old Philadelphia woman who happens to have two children, was arrested near Atlantic City in October 2013 after she brought a firearm across state lines and ran into New Jersey's stringent anti-gun laws. Although she had a permit for the weapon in Pennsylvania, she faced up to five years in prison for carrying it into the Garden State. Last week, prosecutors reportedly eased up and allowed Allen to enter pretrial-intervention program and avoid further jail time. (She had already spent 46 days behind bars.)

Much has been written about Allen's story, from its implications for race and gun control to criticism of the judge and prosecutor (the same judge and prosecutor who went easy on NFL star Ray Rice's domestic violence case but took a hard line against Allen for her seeming ignorance of the law). I don't have much to add to what's already been discussed, except for one comment about the media's portrayal of Shaneen Allen, the person.

Here's how innumerable journalists have characterized her in their headlines:

What makes Allen's parental status so important as to include it in all these headlines? Do readers care more about women facing jail time when children are involved? Do mothers deserve more sympathy from the legal system than women without kids? I see what the editors are trying to do, but it feels icky.

Here's how journalists should characterize Allen:

The stories in my second screenshot all mention Allen's two children somewhere down the line, but they don't feel the need to call her a mom right up top. They call her a woman, and avoid putting her on a pedestal because she gave birth in the past.

The kids are relevant to Allen's story. I just wouldn't consider them headline material.

[philombudsman-blog]

It Won't Kill You to Question Urban Casinos

By now you have probably heard that Revel, the $2.4 billion Atlantic City casino that opened in April 2012, has closed its doors. Heralded at the time of its opening as the glass gem that would save its beleaguered hometown, Revel's financial woes and subsequent bankruptcy caused many to question the very role that casinos will play in Atlantic City's future. Aside from the 3,000 lost jobs and imminent hardship for many New Jerseyans, this all came as promising news to me. Casinos have been slowly eating away at AC's urban fabric since they became legal there in 1976. Maybe Revel's closing would indicate a sea change for this oceanside city of almost 40,000.

My hopes were too high. On Tuesday, according to the Inquirer, a Toronto-based company that owns casinos in Las Vegas and the Bahamas placed won the bankruptcy auction for Revel.

"Brookfield Asset Management's winning bid of $110 million for Atlantic City's Revel Casino Hotel, and the company's intention to operate it as a casino, have generated excitement," the Inquirer's Harold Brubaker writes. [Emphasis added.]

I have a general complaint here, something that's been brewing in my mind ever since news of Revel's closing hit the Philly-area and South Jersey media. When reporting on the casino market in Atlantic City -- or, really, in any city -- I implore journalists to please, please, please acknowledge the growing argument against urban casinos. That is, rather than mimic New Jersey politicians who threw up their hands when casinos failed time and again to turn AC's economy around, reporters could bring in a different viewpoint altogether.

Trumpeted by urbanists new and old, the notion that massive casino complexes don't belong downtown has been gaining traction in recent years. Bringing this argument to the table, in mainstream papers with broad readerships, could help combat the urge for cities to fix their casino problems by turning to, well, bigger and costlier casinos (hence, Revel). 

It's an urgent topic for many cities beyond AC. A growing number of states have legalized casino gambling since the 1990s, leading to a proliferation of casinos in urban downtowns as city leaders vie for the latest megaproject to rehabilitate their image and attract tourism dollars. Despite the lessons we can learn from 40 years of stadiums, convention centers and shopping malls, city halls still view giant commercial developments as sound investments for the neighborhoods they govern.

Casinos are the 21st-century version of the convention center. Everybody wants one, even if it means shoehorning an out-of-scale monolith into the downtown fabric. Cincinnati has one. So does Cleveland. Detroit has three. And Philly is thinking about a second.

Meanwhile, few commentators outside the urban planning world (and Gawker) are questioning the wisdom of relying on casinos to spur economic development, attract tourists and, presumably, make life better for everyday residents.

Example: Developer Bart Blatstein got so many Philadelphians excited when he proposed turning 400 N. Broad St. (former home of the Inquirer) into a casino that even Inga Saffron, Philly's foremost architecture critic and usually on point, gave it her blessings. Never mind that no matter how impressive their design, casinos are meant to keep people inside and off the streets -- the exact opposite of what North Broad Street needs for investment to trickle up from Center City and turn it into a safe, buzzing, commercially viable corridor once again.

Even coverage of Atlantic City, a testament to the civic failures of urban casinos if I've ever seen one, tends to go light on criticism of casinos in general. This otherwise great Washington Post story hits upon AC's problems in an intelligent way, except to challenge the way the city has come rely on casinos like junkies rely on heroin -- even as it hints at a way out of the town's casino addiction:

The casino industry’s downturn happened as most of the rest of the Jersey Shore finished up a banner summer, with revenue expected to be up by 4 percent over last year, less than two years removed from “Sandy,” the superstorm that ravaged the beaches and turned the governor into a national figure during the recovery.

Atlantic City has resources to capitalize upon besides its palaces of blackjack and craps. It has a piece of the most coveted ocean waterfront in the Northeast. In spite of its high levels of abandonment and foolish attempts at urban renewal, it still has a dense street grid that can be recreated into the sort of city that young people and their employers increasingly seek out. These aren't radical ideas, but they've been largely absent from the dominent conversations about the town's casino problem.

Photo by Flickr user drpavloff.

[philombudsman-blog]

Hey, Philly.com: Stop Calling Entire Neighborhoods "Gritty"

I was browsing philly.com's homepage this morning -- sometimes I act like it's still 2008 -- when I came across this troubling item in the upper left:

The link takes you to a story by Molly Eichel, the Daily News's gossip columnist, about how the Sex & the City star was spotted in town. Parker has indeed been shadowing two other Daily News writers in preparation for a film adaptation of the nonfiction book Busted, about police corruption in Philadelphia. Apparently this involved a trip to parts of North Philly, including Kensington.

But why go through the trouble of naming specific neighborhoods, when philly.com editors can use lazy shorthand that reinforces the worst stereotypes about an entire swath of the city? Let's just call it "gritty." Readers will know which part of Philadelphia we're talking about.

I don't want to put the blame on Eichel here, as it's likely that she doesn't write the headlines accompanying her columns. (Although her lede does make me scratch my head: "Sarah Jessica Parker was mobbed in the Badlands." As in, poor people recognized a TV star?) And the editor who settled on the "gritty" line probably did so quickly and without much forethought. But it's exactly this knee-jerk categorization of neighborhoods as either "good" or "bad" that local journalists, who guide the conversation about this city and all of its parts, should avoid.

I've spent most of my time in Philadelphia living in the kind of low-income neighborhoods that so often get the "gritty" treatment in news stories. Three out of my last four apartments have been in North Philly, and one of those in Kensington. I heard all the stories about crime and drugs and prostitution. And yes, I saw some of that. For the most part, however, I saw ordinary people -- working families, usually -- coexisting in a tight-knit community where people hang out on stoops and nod hello to one another and keep an eye on one another's children as they play in open fire hydrants.

It was, truly, a friendly place. Not without hardship, of course: Walking under the Market-Frankford el at night was frequently depressing for the sheer number of somnolent addicts nodding off in front of dark, empty buildings. But that was only one slice of a diverse, dynamic neighborhood. As I wrote in an essay for The Billfold, my experience on East Huntingdon Street usually skewed "damn-near idyllic in a Jane Jacobs sort of way."

How often do you hear about the Kensington that I knew? Unless you have lived there, probably never.  Outsider tendencies to automatically label the entire place as "gritty" -- or worse, "sketchy" -- are the reason why.

[philombudsman-blog]

Maybe It's Time to Lay Off the Heartstrings When Reporting on Crime

Something strikes me as off about this well-intentioned but none too informative column by Daily News writer Helen Ubiñas. In an attempt to provide readers with a glimpse into the tense, stressful lives of people who live in Philadelphia’s high-crime neighborhoods, Ubiñas and her editors fall into the same trap that ensnares many reporters who cover violence, poverty and other unsavory aspects of city life.

She confronts a problem, finds someone to humanize it — in this case, a grandmother and block captain in Fern Rock, where two died in a shooting last week — and makes references to vague, far-off solutions. Yet like many before her, Ubiñas stops short of actually exploring those solutions, or delving at all into the complex systems of marginalization that foster so much violence in the first place. Even as she does a good job of unpacking cliches like “senseless violence,” she doesn’t offer much in the way of seeing beyond those simplistic views of Philly’s deadliest crisis, either.

What we’re left with, when it comes to last Thursday’s issue of the Daily News, is a bleak but quietly hopeful story about a grandmother who makes the best of a horrifying situation. I wouldn’t exactly call it condescending or even sentimental, but the story doesn’t rise too far above the The Black Eyed Peas in terms of revealing anything about urban crime.

Ubiñas takes issue with the defeatism implied in phrases like “senseless violence,” but the column fails to move the conversation in any way that would suggest an alternative view. “Here is another prisoner of her own home,” Ubiñas writes of the grandmother, all but daring readers who “live in one of Philadelphia’s bubbles of prosperity” to take pity on her and her circumstances. “There are reasons, and solutions,” another source tells us, “they just don’t necessarily make us feel better.” Right here would have been a good moment to start exploring those reasons and solutions -- shouldn't a reporter taking on challenging topics be expected to challenge her readers with uncomfortable realities? -- but instead the story then returns to the resilient grandmother. Five short paragraphs later, it ends on a dark but somewhat inspiring note. 

Just once, I’d like to see a major newspaper step back and take a broad view of what leads people, and especially city people, to crime. I’d like to see an acknowledgement of the intergenerational poverty and bleak job prospects that make people desperate. I’d like to see nods to research that has found how urban renewal erodes social cohesion, and how disparities in policing have allowed the drug trade to fester in certain areas. Without finger-wagging, I’d like to see journalists call out middle-class flight as the cause of an eroding tax base and, therefore, conditions that facilitate joblessness and crime.

Similarly, I'd like to see reporters turn a critical eye toward various ongoing efforts at gang interventions, student retention in public schools, job creation for unskilled workers, and investment programs for low-income, high-crime areas. I want to know what kind of successes these programs have had, what kind of obstacles they've run into, and where they have gone totally wrong.

This is all very Urban Studies 101 stuff, but it’s surprisingly absent from even the most compassionate stories about crime and criminal behavior in papers like the Daily News.

One last point: I want the gods of journalism to put a moratorium on any and all uses of the word “sketchy.” It’s a terrible descriptor that serves only to classify the urban poor and their circumstances as “other.” It’s befit for high schoolers who talk about the kids smoking weed out in the parking lot, but it doesn’t belong in news stories.

[philombudsman-blog]

A Few Thoughts on Billy Penn and the 'Reinvention' of Local News

I was but a fresh-faced undergrad living in Washington, D.C. when TBD, a since-shuttered website then hailed as the future of local journalism, went online and got everybody talking.

The idea behind the site moved me for its novelty and simplicity: Along with a staff of regular reporters and editors, TBD would also partner with already-successful news outlets in the D.C. area, capitalizing on their local knowledge and influence while delivering their work to a wider audience. These outlets included both established, “professional” news sources as well as neighborhood blogs run by ordinary people with an interest in keeping their communities informed. TBD staffers would run original reporting and aggregate key stories from these partner sites, pointing to a bright future where journalists respect both the traditional values of the job and evolving consumer trends that theretofore had threatened their careers. The concept, so democratic and Internet-friendly -- so 21st century -- excited J-school people like me. Once I even asked, via Twitter, about internships. (I didn’t get one.)

Two years later, TBD was dead. Many blamed its owner, Allbritton Communications, for pulling the plug too early. Others took aim at the quality of the work itself. Whatever the reason, TBD didn’t take. 

Fast forward to 2012.  I’m working at a certain Philly-based web magazine when Louisville's Neil Budde called a meeting at the Pen & Pencil Club to announce AxisPhilly, a website that would rely on both original and aggregated reporting to deliver local news to Philadelphians. I couldn’t help but remember TBD. If the idea didn’t work in D.C., by far a more media-minded town than Philly, why would it work here? Still, I withheld judgment. After all, AxisPhilly had snagged great reporters like Isaiah Thompson. Maybe it would pull off what TBD, for whatever reason, couldn’t. Alas, AxisPhilly floundered and shut down this past June.

One month after that, yet another middle-aged white man from out of town called yet another meeting at the Pen & Pencil to announce yet another ambitious website that aims to change local news forever by marrying -- you guessed it -- original reporting with vigorous aggregation. Jim Brady, the man behind TBD, has turned his attention to Philly in the hopes that a similar site, this time called Billy Penn, will succeed where past ventures have failed.

Billy Penn shows more promise than AxisPhilly ever did. But I’m not holding my breath for a number of reasons.

As Simon van Zuylen-Wood lays out in a well-reported and reasonably skeptical profile of Brady in the October issue of Philadelphia magazine, a few things distinguish Billy Penn from its predecessors. One, it’s for-profit and won’t have to rely on volatile grants from philanthropic organizations for funding. Two, it won’t have for an owner the same dude who owns Politico. Three, the people behind it, proponents will tell you, are more modern-minded than others who have made a go at Internet-based local journalism. “Jim Brady is precisely the opposite of someone who ‘grew up in the old world,’ ” Zuylen-Wood writes. He goes on to quote an anonymous D.C. journalist who testifies to Brady’s Internet savvy and argues that “old-fashioned legacy media” is what has held back web-based journalism so far.     

Beyond web design, however, I don’t yet see what will set Billy Penn apart from its more entrenched peers. A cursory look at its beta site reveals headlines that don’t seem all that different from what I see on, say, philly.com. I mean, Billy Penn looks way better. But good design isn’t the only thing readers want. What about the meat of the endeavor? What sets apart the reporting and the editing? The framing and presentation of news? Here’s a sample of what I see on Billy Penn’s home page right now:

PENN STUDENT DEATH: SIGNS OF SUICIDE, BUT HOMICIDE DETECTIVES ON THE CASE

FORMER SPORTSCASTER DON TOLLEFSON PLEADS GUILTY IN CHARITY SCAM

VOLUNTEERS PULLED 116 SHOPPING CARTS FROM THE SCHUYLKILL

Below each headline are links to posts on other websites. I also see links to PlanPhilly, a local urban planning and development website, and a New Republic piece about Philadelphia Public Schools. It’s not exactly the kind of stuff that turns heads (or earns clicks) and makes one think, “Now here’s a 21st-century newsroom.” One trap on the horizon is that the aggregated work will prove better than the site’s original work. With any number of ways (RSS, Twitter, Facebook) to access PlanPhilly posts already, why would readers feel the need to go through Billy Penn?

Then there’s the notion that, well, Billy Penn will fail to connect with its intended audience.  I don’t mean to play the asshole, but at times the effort comes off as Dads Trying to Be Hip. Take this cringe-y paragraph from the Philly Mag story:

The website, Brady told the crowd at the P&P, will be geared toward the city’s growing millennial population. Its underlying mission will be civic improvement, and it will be calibrated for your iPhone. During a big story — like the 2013 building collapse — it will morph into a throbbing, constantly updated local news hub stuffed with both aggregated and original content. On a slower day, Krewson added, Billy Penn might be “reporting out a great hashtag” or treating you to the “five best Vines” related to Philadelphia.

Stuff like this doesn’t inspire much confidence that Brady, a 46-year-old from the D.C.-area suburbs, is in touch with your average Philadelphia millennial (or, at least, your average civically engaged Philadelphia millennial). The right words are there: Hashtags! Vines! Content! But “The Five Best Philly Vines” sounds a little too much like a newspaper site taking a page from the BuzzFeed playbook and not, you know, a reinvention of online media.

Look at the fracas over Billy Penn’s initial name: Brother.ly. Zuylen-Wood writes that this proposal “was scuttled after a small band of critics deemed it too sexist and/or lame.” But someone who wants to market to twenty- and thirty-somethings, in 2014, ought to have a hair trigger for things that could potentially come off as “sexist and/or lame.” Social justice issues are becoming more and more important to readers, especially younger readers. Successful websites (from Slate to nymag.com to Upworthy) have figured this out. You can’t afford to remain tone-deaf about it and risk the very name of your endeavor sounding the least bit exclusionary.

The mere fact that Brady chose the Pen & Pencil Club, billed as "the nation's oldest press club," for his Philadelphia debut speaks volumes. I like Pen & Pencil -- I’m not a member, but I’ve been there as a guest four or five times and enjoyed posting up inside to watch the 2012 presidential elections. You have to admit, though, that the place is stodgy. To get in, you must prove yourself as a member (initiation fee: $40), or be the guest of a member, and then someone buzzes you in. Talk about exclusive. Once you do get in, the room is dark and smoky, but not in a super-cool Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar sort of way. It’s more of an older-men-chomping-cigars thing. 

Brady and his cohort spend a lot of time touting the merits of “digital-first” newsrooms. Aside from his unwavering belief in the Internet, however, I don’t see much to prove that he’s ready to deliver modern journalism to modern readers who would like to see a break from the past.

Zuylen-Wood compares Brady’s fervor with Silicon Valley idealism. Brady himself backs this up when he talks about making local news “scalable.” In a post on his personal blog, tech and media writer Simon Owens challenges the idea that local reporting needs to be “scalable” -- that it needs to have these grand ambitions of uniting citizen bloggers with professional journalists to become profitable enough to appeal to big advertisers. Owens points to the “hundreds of examples of niche, local bloggers who have figured out ways to sustain themselves financially” and chides observers who focus “on only corporate or VC-backed entities that try to simply mimic large-scale institutions.” He’s saying that people have made local reporting work without the help of anyone trying to revolutionize the digital landscape. And that’s what ultimately puts me off about big-name publishers who say they want to shake up the media game for good.

None of this is to put down a new start-up in the city. If Billy Penn works, more power to Brady. I’m just wary of the idea that decent, Internet-based local journalism will come from people who want to disrupt more than they want to inform.

[philombudsman-blog]

Surprise! All the Attention on Kathryn Knott Might Have to Do With Sexism

Real fast: I like this tongue-in-cheek pie chart from Philly Mag's Victor Fiorillo. Jokes aside, though, he may have hit upon something unsettling that has colored coverage of the Center City gay bashing aftermath -- the outsized attention on Kathryn Knott, one of the three suspects who turned themselves in to police after social media vigilantes identified them on Facebook and Twitter.

First, there was a Storify that collected Knott's tweets and revealed her to be an entitled brat with some tolerance issues and a well-connected father. Everyone from Slate to (ahem) Philly Mag picked it up. A few days later, and there have been numerous posts mentioning her by name, often in the headline. The /r/philadelphia subreddit loves to hate her. And there have been a whole bunch of headlines like this, from ABC News: "Daughter of Police Chief Among Trio Charged in Gay Couple's Beating."

What do we know about the other two suspects, both of whom are male? Not a whole lot. Just their names and the fact that they are in custody. Neither has been singled out in the way Knott has.

If you think this at least in part has to do with her gender, you're probably right. (Good on The Advocate for noticing this, too, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that Knott deserves our "sympathy.")

Meanwhile, a second pregnant woman in as many weeks was shot and killed in North Philly, but it's not like anyone has taken a journalistic microscope to her story. Of course not. It happened in North Philly, where the scary stuff always goes down.

[philombudsman-blog]

Good Job, Would Read Again

In the spirit of keeping negative vibes to a minimum, I'll periodically post news stories and blog posts and other snippets from Philadelphia journalists that I've liked. Here are five from the last few weeks:

Cassie Owens on the Rap Quotes project that hit Philly with ill shit from Black Thought, Jay Electronica and other MCs. I still haven't seen any signs in the wild. Hope a few are still around. 

Dan McQuade with a jokey-joke about the brouhaha over renaming Philly neighborhoods, and the absurdity of real estate branding.

Hidden City always does zany stuff. Here's Rachel Hildebrandt with a long-ass retrospective on Philly's bygone roller skating rinks. 

Inga Saffron on the political posturing over bike lanes that has kept 22nd Street in Fairmount unpainted and unsafe.

PlanPhilly's Jon Geeting with a map on where the 2015 mayoral candidates live, which is the sort of thing I always wonder about but never seem to learn.

[philombudsman-blog]

City Paper Runs Odd Argument Against Hate Crime Laws for LGBTQ People

Daniel Denvir, City Paper's veritable crusader for progressive politics and policies, is out with a post about hate crime legislation that's sure to alienate some of his regular readers. In light of the Center City beating of two gay men that caught the national spotlight earlier this month, many observers have called for Pennsylvania to expand its hate crime laws to include sexual orientation and gender preference. That way, state policy will recognize hate crimes against LGBTQ people as, y'know, something that really exists.

Not so fast, cautions Denvir. Although he makes a passing nod to the importance of collecting data on hate crimes, he's wary that bolstering hate crime laws, which tend to extend prison sentences for those convicted, will perpetuate all the problems of the American prison-industrial complex.

"The problem is that these laws typically are used to lengthen pri­son sentences," Denvir writes. "Whether it is drugs or violence, we have tried our best to police, arrest and incarcerate our way out of almost every problem. As a result, the United States is already the most incarcerated nation on earth (at least on record) and has very lit­tle to show for it, save for an archipelago of human misery."

Well... he's not wrong, in a sense. "Law-and-order liberalism," as Denvir calls it, is certainly a trend I recognize. (Think Michael Bloomberg with stop-and-frisk, or even President Obama with his gung-ho stance on border security.) And if the data proves that tougher sentences do nothing to deter hate crimes, then I'm all for doing away with them. Unjustifiably lengthy prison terms, propped up for various reasons by politcos on the left and the right, do a lot of harm in cities like Philadelphia. They raise recidivism rates, do little to keep the public safe, and ruin job prospects for usually young, usually lower-income, usually black men and women. If an urban area suffers from high crime, tough-on-crime policies tend to help keep it that way.

But we ought to draw a distinction between teenagers who end up with rap sheets because they're caught smoking a joint or tagging a warehouse or hopping a turnstile, and people who harass, beat on or kill others. And, for the sake of those like Diamond Williams and Kyra Kruz -- both transgendered women murdered in Philadelphia over the last two years -- we ought to make a legal distinction when people harass, beat on or kill others specifically because of the victims' LGBTQ status (whether real or perceived).

I don't mean merely to keep track of hate crimes on the sidelines, so that they only enter the public consciousness when, say, Human Rights Watch releases a report. I mean recognizing hate crimes for what they are, and making it clear to those convicted (not to mention observers and Pennsylvania citizens at large) that this is what you are guilty of, this is what we charged you for. Symbolic, maybe. But as long as the legal system doesn't recognize hate crimes against gays, the idea that people do target gays for violence based on nothing more than the victim's perceived sexual orientation -- and that these perpetrators ought to be punished for such -- won't become normalized. It's about narrative. It's about guiding the conversation. It's about the state recognizing the everyday struggles of marginalized people and taking an official stance against hate.

If these things sound too abstract right now, they make a world of difference, down the line, to the gay or transgender person walking down the street.

Which isn't to say that Pennsylvania should extend prison sentences. What Denvir fails to mention is that you can favor hate crime laws while still opposing America's love affair with incarceration. He warns that " 'Sending a message' is not sound public policy," and he's right. With that in mind, I'd like see the thousands of young people in jail for marijuana possession go free. What I don't want to see is any ambiguity in the legal system over why Kevin Harrigan, Kathryn Knott and Philip Williams chose to beat up those two men.

And for six years, funny enough, there wasn't this sort of ambiguity. Here's another key point absent from Denvir's op-ed: Between 2002 and 2008, Pennsylvania had a hate crime law on the books that gave protections to LGBTQ people. However, the state Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional on a technicality -- something to keep in mind the next time someone from either the left or the right argues that Pennsylvania can't handle such a law.

[philombudsman-blog]

When It Comes to Graffiti, the Daily News Is Stuck in the '80s

Daily News editor Sandra Shea has had an epiphany. In a story this month, she reveals that, although it might sound crazy, her feelings about graffiti in the city of Philadelphia are a little more complicated than blanket repulsion and scorn. Despite the fact that, as she writes, Philly graffiti is back on the rise and "no one thinks this is good news," Shea just can't bring herself to stand with the finger-wagging killjoys who view tags and wheatpastes as the most visible manifestation of the broken windows theory. Ladies and gentlemen, Sandra Shea has thinkpieced her way to nuance. 

The problem, though, is that Shea's story relies on old stereotypes about graffiti and its role in urban life, even as it implies that the public's perception of graffiti is evolving. Because of this, the story, in the end, doesn't reveal very much at all.

Let's start with this assertion, presented as common knowledge:

[Graffiti] is a painted manifestation that something is wrong: a stumbling economy, high poverty, chaos throughout the world, disaffected young people so lacking a voice they’re moved to risk arrest and physical danger to spray paint their names 6 feet high.

This, at the very least, is an outdated idea of who does graffiti and for what reasons. What's more, it was never entirely true. Sure, the narrative got hijacked sometime during the anti-urban 1980s and cast graffiti as a thing of gangs and turf wars, a dirty thing, a poverty thing, a frightening thing and -- yes -- a black thing. But even in Style Wars, the 1983 New York-set documentary that for many Americans served as their first introduction to street art (and breakdancing, and hip hop culture in general), you see kids of all classes and races writing on subway cars and warehouse walls. You see black kids, Latino kids, and white kids. You see wealthier Upper West Side Jews and working-class Italians from the outer boroughs and poorer black kids who convene on the basketball courts outside their NYCHA high-rise towers. One of the wonderful things about Style Wars, in fact, is that it numbers among the most inclusive documentaries about an American city that I've ever seen.

So, despite the assumptions that for decades have informed reporters at the Daily News and elsewhere, graffiti never was the sole province of the poor, the needy, the "at-risk." Hell, one of the very first modern taggers, TAKI 183, was a Greek-American kid from Washington Heights. And the emergence of artsy, thinky, educated superstars like Banksy and Shepard Fairey make it clear that in recent years, graffiti has become even less racialized and rooted in economic hardship. Beyond that, the graffiti aesthetic has been appropriated for the nouveau chic crowd on everything from sweatshirts to the decor at Center City's suitably named Graffiti Bar. I don't know why journalists at major dailies continue to assume that "nobody is happy" about graffiti when clothing lines and restauranteurs are more than happy to sell it to eager millennials with spending money.    

That's why the line between graffiti and legal murals, which Shea also explores, has blurred. After all, sanctioned mainstream art has always borrowed from unsanctioned countercultural art. This is nothing new. Just this past summer the Philly street art community got into a tizzy when one local DJ, suffering from an apparent lapse of Wilson Goode-era thinking, took it upon himself to buff a commissioned mural by Stephen Powers (known as ESPO) in Fishtown because he thought that it "attracted graffiti to the neighborhood." So much was written about the incident -- my favorite response comes from Powers himself -- but nobody spent more than a passing moment musing on the ways in which official murals sometimes resemble illegal tags. Why? Because the people who discuss these things have known about this for years.  

Which is why the notion that graffiti's presence leads to other, more serious crimes, if it were ever true, holds less water today than it did 20 years ago. Broken windows theory -- yes, theory; why journalists and city officials alike have widely accepted it as fact continues to baffle me -- states that petty crime begets further serious crime because of public perception. But if the public's perception of graffiti has evolved, if people flock to one of the swankiest bars in Center City precisely because the owners left the tags untouched on the walls out back, then why would the pattern continue in the 21st century?

Yet the Streets Department continues to confuse correlation with causation, and the Daily News continues to fail to call them out on it. Shea notes that, “Not surprisingly, ills like graffiti and short-dumping tend to converge in certain neighborhoods.” OK, but why? Do people drive around the city with garbage bags looking for TOBER’s tag before they throw their refuse out the window? Or is it because both taggers and short-dumpers seek out isolated places shielded from view, and that one activity actually has little influence on the other? The broken windows approach cries out for new evidence -- which may be all the same to the Streets Department, but shouldn't be good enough for journalists.

Finally, Shea falls back on the old line that many in the anti-graffiti crowd resort to when they run out of other arguments: the practice's financial cost to the city.

Leaving aside the fact that the Streets Department could always reexamine its priorities and choose not to take graffiti as seriously as it does, I'll let Shea herself respond to this concern with a number that she dug up for the story:

"...it takes a crew of 38 and a budget of nearly $1.5 million a year just for graffiti." 

Wow. Nearly $1.5 million? That's a pittance. A drop in the municipal budget bucket. It wouldn't help to offset any major problem that Philadelphia faces -- not the school closures, not the drug crime, not the abandonment, not the rampant fires, not the dearth of good jobs for working-class people. As my girlfriend put it, "give the schools $1.5M and they'll spit at you." 

I could go on: The nonsensical statement that graffiti has become “deafening,” how the only tagger with a voice in the story left the game 40 years ago, etc. But it’s all pretty much to say that when Philly reporters talk about graffiti, they sound like they’re writing for a jumpy audience of white flight-prone 1980s throwbacks. It makes sense, given how much of the Daily News’ and philly.com’s readership skews older and resides in the suburbs. But it makes for boring stories about graffiti.

However, it was cool to see the taggers TEXAS and GANE getting shoutouts in the Daily News. I love those cats. 

[philombudsman-blog]

When You're Reporting on a Hate Crime, Try Not to Start Any Sideshow Boycotts

It didn't take long after the hate crime happened for the story to go national. Ask anyone from Tacony to Tacoma, Wash., and likely as not they'll be able to tell you what went down:

On the night of September 11 a group of about a dozen people attacked a gay couple in Center City. The victims wound up in the hospital. A digital manhunt ensued, with one Twitter user recognizing the suspects from a security tape as the same people from a group photo taken in a nearby restaurant just prior to the incident. Another Twitter user, a South Jersey man who goes by FanSince09 and ordinarily jokes about the Eagles, managed to track down the attackers using the photo and some impressive social media sleuthing. With their identities known, three suspects eventually turned themselves in and will reportedly face charges.

Aside from the shitty, shitty event that set it in motion, the story that followed the beating turned out to be an uplifting one. For the most part, observers recognized the hate crime for what it was and demanded justice. Members of the public banded together, using social media to do some vigilante detective work and help police apprehend violent, homophobic assailants who probably would have terrorized other gay Philadelphians in the future. (The attackers are from suburban Bucks County. Color me shocked.) For the most part, the news media has acted responsibly and served its purpose well.

That's why I'm a little disappointed that a few writers at Philadelphia Magazine, writers whom I usually quite enjoy, unwittingly helped kick off a distracting and totally unnecessary boycott of the restaurant where the attackers dined that night, La Viola West (or "Ovest."). 

Here's a timeline of the sideshow: After the connection was made between the suspects in the security camera footage and the group photo at La Viola West, Philly Mag's Josh Middleton posted a story titled, "Does This Photo Show the Suspects in Gay Beating Having Dinner at La Viola?" He went on to write that he had reached out to the restaurant's management, but that they "could not, however, confirm whether the photo was taken that night. They also said they do not know who made the reservation, as they tear up their reservation list each night. They say they have not heard from police."

This is the sort of speculation that one expects to remain on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. Despite the fact that the suspects in question did dine at La Viola [West], the story was posted in haste without very much to connect it to what was then known about the attack. As a result, readers got riled up. They began to target the restaurant itself, acting as though the place had something to hide. (Even though nothing about the staff's behavior was out of the ordinary -- why should restaurants be expected to keep meticulous records of their patrons?) Hence, calls for a boycott. 

Philly Mag writer Victor Fiorillo posted a quasi-mea culpa the next day, further explaining what happened. "Much of this anger comes from our reporting in Tuesday night’s story about the La Viola West photo," he wrote, "and I’d like to set the record straight about the conversation I had with the restaurant." He went on to clarify why there was no reason for readers to take out their justifiable outrage about the attack on the restaurant, its management or its staff. 

Still, he neglected to explain something else that was going on. Caught up in blogging about an ongoing, fast-breaking, high-profile story, Philly Mag staffers made a mistake that everyone who reports news on the Internet is bound to make at one point or another: they jumped the gun. It's understandable, given the insane pace of Internet news, but it shouldn't happen.

Rather, Middleton should have waited before publishing a wildly speculative story with a baiting headline. After making the call to La Viola West, he should have realized that there was no story here -- all he had found out was that the police hadn't contacted the restaurant and that its management didn't know anything. Why would this warrant an item on the website of the region's major news magazine? Eventually, FanSince09 used the name of the restaurant to dig up the suspects' Facebook accounts. Fine. But plastering La Viola's name on phillymag.com and connecting it flimsily with the most infamous story of the summer revealed nothing about that story, as far as readers were concerned. Instead, it put the reputation and jobs of many people on the line. Perhaps Middleton could have Tweeted his speculation instead?

In retrospect, it was a small mistake. Things could have gone worse. And, overall, Philly Mag did a good job of keeping the public informed about an important story that unfolded before our eyes. Pretty good shit, notwithstanding the slip-up.

On the other hand, I'm not even gonna touch that Delaware County Daily Times column on hate crimes that FanSince09 currently has in his sights. I won't even link to it, because a) a gay bashing apologist wrote it, and b) the poorly designed website will break your computer.  

[philombudsman-blog]

Here's What We're Gonna Do

Four months ago, I took to Twitter to lodge a complaint about this column in the Daily News. Apparently, the writer had thought it newsworthy to ride the 23 bus and see what sort of cuh-razy antics she would find among the proles on board. She was, and this is a direct quote from the lede, "expecting a freak show." What she found was... ordinary people going about their lives.

In 2014, a newspaper columnist in Philadelphia was wary about riding a city bus. When she finally did hop on board, she was pleasantly surprised that, contrary to what exploitation websites like People of SEPTA had led her to expect, nothing frightening or disgusting happened. In 2014, a newspaper columnist in Philadelphia thought this was worth sharing with her readers.  Stuff like that isn't rare among the city's major news outlets. A few days after the Daily News column ran, I came across this wildly tone-deaf item in Metro, a local bite-sized commuter paper that just bought the alt-weekly City Paper.  Not long after that, I laughed to see a middle-aged Wall Street Journal columnist advise students at UPenn's Wharton School to ride Uber (??) to Dirty Franks, a Center City dive bar. He suggested that although Dirty Franks is a scary-looking place (??), business students could learn a lot from its marketing plan: "[D]elivering a product your target customers want, at a price they can afford, which yields you a reasonable profit." Real groundbreaking stuff.  Around the same time, I took NewsWorks to task for dropping the ball on a story about affordable housing and eminent domain in South Kensington. 

We have a media problem in Philadelphia. Sometimes, it seems like the reporters who cover the goings-on around here don’t know all that much about this city. I don’t necessarily blame them: It’s as if the brass at the Inquirer, the Daily News, Philadelphia Magazine and the like have a mandate to serve the interests of their majority-suburban readerships by discussing Philly like it’s still the 1980s, the city and its people are something to be feared, and few outsiders would ever think about moving here. 

It’s annoying. It’s unfair. It’s absurd. And as a kick-ass city — the fifth-largest in the U.S. and growing for the first time in half a century — we deserve better.  I plan to use this blog to critique the way local and national media covers Philadelphia. I plan to be fair but unflinching, chatty but not catty, a tough grader with high standards who understands why they aren’t always met. I don’t promise constant activity, but I doubt there will ever be a paucity of stories to discuss and comment upon. And every now and again, I’ll highlight the work of local journos whose work I really do admire. We have a lot of talented people in the city doing a lot of great things. I want to champion them as much as I want to nudge disappointing work in the direction of something more worthy of having come from Philadelphia.

As for me, I live in Fishtown and used to work as an editor at Next City. Currently I’m an editor at SPOKE magazine, which you should be able to pick up in bike shops and coffee spots around town soon. You can yell at me on Twitter.