Temple University | AxisPhilly | Technically Philly
Jim Brady plans to create a Philadelphia-based “news service that will seek to cultivate audiences currently disengaged from traditional news products,” Temple University’s Center for Public Interest Journalism says. The site will be called Brother.ly, Juliana Reyes reports in Technically Philly.
He’ll also teach at Temple, the announcement says.
That means local news initiative AxisPhilly will shut down, CPIJ says.
While the quality of the work on the site was lauded nationally, it did not achieve consistent local impact and fell short of serving as a collaborative hub for the emerging news ecosystem, both of which were goals at founding.
“AxisPhilly has been a worthy experiment and its staff has produced some remarkable work,” David Boardman, dean of Temple’s School of Media and Communication, says in the announcement. “But we and our funders are looking for new ways to have a positive impact on the local-news ecosystem in the region and to promote meaningful public-interest journalism. We’re excited about our incubation initiative, and in particular to create the opportunity for a visionary such as Jim Brady to work with our students and faculty.”
Brady was until recently the editor-in-chief of Digital First Media, which he left after it dismantled its Thunderdome project. Before that I worked with him at TBD, a local news initiative in the Washington, D.C., area that also shut down. Both Brady and Boardman are on Poynter’s National Advisory Board.
