Technically Media Inc., the online content strategy firm and publisher of Technically Philly, today announced it had joined the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce.

TM co-founders Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink highlighted five reasons they were interested in chamber membership:

• Supporting the local business community of Philadelphia and helping to make it among the most respected in the world.
• Gaining access to networking and connecting relationships, events and opportunities for partnerships and collaboration.
• Access to unique services, like event hosting, business resources, discounts, legislative lobbying and more.
• Introducing the established business community to the vibrant, growing and independent technology-focused, small business and entrepreneurial communities.
• To be seen as a valued and involved member of the Philadelphia business community.

Our regional technology publication Technically Philly has, this year, wrapped up or is close to finishing a number of journalism projects backed or related to the William Penn Foundation, a robust, locally-focused foundation — with interests in journalism, the built environment, and community — which calls Philadelphia home. The foundation released its annual report late this summer, which you can view here.

Through the year, we’ve worked with a discretionary grant with Temple’s Institute for Public Affairs to investigate Philadelphia’s open municipal government movement, a project we call Transparencity. We’ve recently submitted a final report on the subject and we’ll be sharing the outputs and outcomes of that grant soon.

In August, in partnership with City Paper and PlanPhilly, Technically Philly helped launch an examination of Philadelphia’s Redevelopment Authority and the properties it had offloaded for redevelopment. Using relationships pulled together through Technically Philly’s open government hackathons, we were able to put a top notch developer, Tim Wisniewski, on the project to create a map of properties that remain undeveloped after the exchange. The project was funded by a $5,000 award from journalism catalyst J-Lab, paid for by William Penn.

We continue work on our Broadband2035 project, another of partnership between William Penn and J-Lab, and have been recently asked to participate in the organization of a master broadband plan in Philadelphia as a result of our coverage. Our final piece of the series, examining the neighborhood economic and social impact of broadband, is due this fall.

And, before coming on full-time in June, Technically Media co-founder Brian James Kirk wrapped up a six month project at PlanPhilly, which was featured high in William Penn’s annual report. Kirk helped handle the online presentation of an extensive multimedia series investigating a transformed neighborhood in Eastern North Philadelphia reported by former Inquirer city hall reporter Patrick Kerkstra, and talented CityPaper staff photographer Neal Santos.

We needed headshots and team photographs of our three co-founders, so we worked with Philadelphia Photographer Colin M. Lenton.

Lenton, whom we know from our college newspaper days, welcomed us into his rental photo studio in the Frankford section of Northeast Philadelphia. We’re really pleased with the results.

See low res versions of the rest on Facebook here.

My colleague Brian James Kirk and I dropped in on the WHYY and Philadelphia Daily News newsrooms last month to offer a brief overview of data tools for journalists.

For general interest shops with varying degrees of knowledge, it was more an introduction than anything.

We shared this rough document and basically ran through the below presentation.

I highlighted some very basic, existing, local data-driven applications, and Brian suggested how journalists could take it further: perhaps with Google Fusion or other free tools.

Last week, our Christopher Wink led an informal discussion and Q&A session focusing on how and why to create of quality and relevant content for your audience as part of the University City Science Center Quorum Ask an Expert series. The presentation was focused on startups and other smaller technology businesses.

Mostly, the hour-affair was a discussion on practical solutions and steps forward.

See the presentation slides above or here.

At Technically Media, we strongly believe in pushing the journalism conversation forward, especially concerning the sustainability of content online.

When we launched Technically Media with our first property, Technically Philly, in 2009, we knew traditional display advertising was not a realistic means of funding content. So we staked out to try and experiment with a handful of revenue sources. The experiment is still on-going, but we’d like share our results thus far. That is, we’d like to share the sources of the revenue that makes us a profitable business.

The charts below illustrate revenue earned in 2010 and 2011. The charts were created and compiled by TM co-founder Brian James Kirk for Rowan professor Mark Berkey-Gerard who spent a week at our offices conducting academic research about how we operate. The charts were made to help Mark better understand our business and had the side effect of forcing us to evaluate where we receive our revenue.

Some notes:

• “TM Consulting” is the editorial strategy services that we offer businesses and non-profits. For our clients, we are tasked with building an audience to be converted into supporters, donors or customers. For more information on our consultancy, be sure to read our services page or drop us a line or page through our PowerPoint presentation on the subject.
• Many of the Technically Philly grants expire before the end of 2011, so in future years that slice of the pie may look much different, but we continue to pursue new grant opportunities.
• Technically Philly’s advertising doesn’t pull in much revenue. However, we do not spend nearly as many hours on advertising as we do for events or consulting business development. Advertising is often combined with some other type of sponsorship. Were we to have a dedicated sales person, this chart may look much different.
• Philly Tech Week, a large part of our event revenue income, was in its first year in 2010.

Technically Media is profitable and supports three full-time employees: myself, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink. We’re each co-founders of the business and joined full-time in June 2010, December 2010 and May 2011, respectively.

We view this company as an ongoing experiment, and we are proud of our first two-and-a-half years. We hope that insight into our internal revenue can help inspire or educate other content creators who share our vision of creating sustainable editorial properties.

We’re kinda obsessed with data here at Technically Media.

We’ve helped host a handful of events to harness the power of municipal government data here in Philadelphia — one of the missions of our flagship publication Technically Philly, an online newsmagazine that covers the technology community in our homebase, Philadelphia.

We’ve seen the future folks, and the future is data.

When we’re not busy helping Philadelphia realize the potential of it, we’re getting our hands dirty with data to shape the content and editorial strategies of our clients.
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The 2010 Muse Awards on Flickr. Photo by lidjawma

We’re happy to announce that Constitution Daily took home the bronze Muse Award in the “Digital Communities” category at the American Association of Museums conference in Houston, Texas.

The Muse Awards identify innovative media and technology initiatives in the museum industry.

“The jury found that this conversational platform focusing on the US Constitution facilitated a wonderful online dialogue,” wrote the judges. “We liked that the site serves as a ‘switchboard’ for information, blog posts, social media outlets and relevant external links that keep the user tied to the site and engaged with the content while providing easy outlets to take action.”

We didn’t get a chance to make it down to Houston to accept the award, but a huge thanks to our friends at Happy Cog for the site’s design. Of course, Constitution Daily would not be possible without the hard work from the dedicated staff at the National Constitution Center. The folks at the Center are the most passionate in the museum business and earn every accolade they receive.

As we wrote in our case study post, our primary goal with Constitution Daily was fostering online discussion so we’re very proud to take home the bronze. Hopefully, we’ll be in Minneapolis next year to accept a gold.

Last November, Technically Philly, our publication about the technology community in the Philadelphia region, was awarded a $5,000 grant from J-Lab, a journalism innovation foundation at American University, to help inform the creation of Philadelphia’s comprehensive city planning vision Philadelphia2035. We saw an opportunity to do research and provide perspective about the importance of broadband infrastructure as a vital public utility in the city’s future. We continue to work on the project, but here’s an update on its progress.
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In the third edition of Whiskey Chats, we speak to our friend Daniel Victor, now of Philly.com and right off a gig at TBD.com, the local online news experiment in D.C.

We spoke to him in April, just before he started with Philly.com, talking about lessons learned from that project and what he hopes to accomplish in his new role.

Whiskey Chats — 03 — Daniel Victor