In 1997, Jennifer Musser-Metz, a web producer at Philly.com, sat at her desk turning piles of raw interview tape into RealAudio files, preparing them for uploading to the World Wide Web. The interviews were by thePhiladelphia Inquirer’s foreign correspondent Mark Bowden, and the subject was the American military adventure in Somalia of 1993, one of the defining episodes of the early Clinton presidency. Bowden had not yet published the book that would bear the titleBlack Hawk Down,and the Ridley Scott film was four years away. But as Bowden and his editors at the newspaper prepared to run...

The Philadelphia branch of the Independent Media Center (IMC) movement, a network of more than 150 participatory media projects around the world, opened its doors in 2000 to cover protests at the Republican National Convention. One irony of the Philly IMC’s early journalistic success is that the organization was originally conceived as a limited, “tactical” media intervention documenting a rolling series of political protests. It was not originally seen as a permanent “citizen journalism” project per se.¹ While it would be a mistake to identify the establishment of the Philly IMC with the “birth” of participatory journalism in Philadelphia, the...

On Wednesday, July 16, 2008, an early-morning news story broke inside thePhiladelphia Inquirernewsroom. It was not a dramatic tale; nor did it shape city politics and culture for years or even days to come. Indeed, it some ways it was the kind of story that even journalists themselves shudder to admit they take seriously: it was a report of a car crash, a multiple-fatality accident on Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia. What turned this story from a run-of-themill crash piece into a story worth devoting news resources to, in the minds of the reporters and editors at the...

This chapter broadens Chapter 3’s ethnographic analysis of newswork, focusing on how a single news story—the wrongful arrest of four area home owners on trumped-up charges—diffused across the entire Philadelphia news ecosystem. Chapter 3 looked at newswork practices from the vantage point of the traditional newsrooms; the events discussed in this chapter also occurred inside the editorial nerve centers where newsroom managers, bloggers, and reporters exercised their news judgment. However, the chapter also examines how the story in question leapfrogged across different media and how different news outlets contributed original reporting, analysis, and commentary to the journalistic mix....

At approximately 10:00 A.M. on an ordinary Monday at the offices of thePhiladelphia Daily Newson 400 North Broad Street, a well-sourced columnist took a surprising phone call: Anne d’Harnoncourt, longtime director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a leading member of the city’s cultural elite, had passed away suddenly the previous night. She was only sixty-four and seemed to be in excellent health; her death came as a shock to members of the tabloid’s staff. Also something of a shock was the possibility that, if it could report the tip quickly enough, theDaily Newsmight scoop...

As the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close, the Philadelphia media ecosystem seemed to be perched a knife’s edge between rebirth and collapse. While earlier parts of this book alluded to the various pressures affecting the professional status and occupational stability of journalists and journalistic organizations, this chapter explicitly discusses exogenous factors reshaping journalistic work: the encroachment of web metrics into formerly autonomous journalistic practices, the increasing precarity of newswork (as the number of digital content producers increases and the ability of news organizations to extract revenue from advertising declines), and the fragility of modern informational...