It shouldn’t be this easy to find a shooting scene.

But on the average, at least one person has been murdered in Philadelphia every day over the last 25 years — and more than three-quarters of them have been killed with a gun.

Last week, local photojournalist Joe Kaczmarek took us to this scene just after a man had just been shot multiple times — but there has been no other reporting on any of the crime scenes he showed us that night.

GunCrisis.org is a new open source journalism project intended to fill in the gaps.

We will strive to avoid polarizing debates but contend that there is an epidemic of homicide by gunfire in Philadelphia and similar cities.

We will study the landscape and the roots of the crisis, seek the individuals and organizations working to disrupt and intervene, and expand the community of citizens who refuse to rest until we make a difference.

Join us at GunCrisis.org

I am preparing a workshop on video storytelling for some of my students — and that brought me to revisit this video I made for a conference I could not attend last year. It’s getting old in the sense that more alternatives are now available but still a pretty good wrap:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I produced this video in lieu of appearing on a panel that I was unable to attend at the National Press Photographers Association’s Northern Short Course in in Warwick, RI, in March 2011, considering tech concerns for educators teaching photojournalism students. Related links are below.

Gorillapod - iPhone Tripod Holder - Photojoj iPhone telephoto lens - Eye-Fi cards - Virgin Mobile MiFi hub - Zoomit - Posterous.com

New York Times staffers present "A Year at War"

I enjoyed the great fortune of attending Spring Semester Prep Day 2012 today at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism as a guest of Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs. This annual mini-conference of academic, career, writing and reporting tips and advice is one of “Dean Sree’s” innovations and welcomes students back from the holiday break before the semester formally begins.

Concurrent events and aggressive students networkers kept me from attending every event, and after the first panel I noted that the busy social media backchannel had already burned halfway through my iPhone battery.

The program opened with a panel featuring the New York Times staffers who produced “A Year at War,” a dynamic interactive story about the ongoing deployment of troops to Afghanistan — and winner of the 2012 duPont-Columbia Award for Digital Reporting.

After lunch, “Rock Center” executive producer Rome Hartman talked about what it’s like to launch a new primetime newscast.

Students in my Peace and Conflict Journalism course at Swarthmore — and journalism students everywhere — are now preparing pitches for stories to cover this semester and Hartman was full of actionable advice.

Hartman says 100 stories or more are pitched for each one that you see on “Rock Center” and that there “are a million reasons to say no.” He looks for “brevity and clarity” in a pitch “in two paragraphs that get me interested.” He also looks for passion and says it should “come through that you’re jazzed.”

Hartman avoids the familiar and likes stories “that take people places they wouldn’t otherwise go” or stories that deliver a “snapshot that illuminates a larger truth.”

I also dropped in on an expert panel called ‘Everything you need to know about business reporting if you aren’t taking a Spring business reporting course” and “Writing – and Publishing – Your First Book” with Prof. Sam Freedman, who runs Columbia’s legendary Book Writing Seminar.

I am rushing back to Philly for our 10th annual Philadelphia Conference ”Year in Pictures” event but NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was scheduled to speak at Columbia this evening and students are planning gather again for a conversation with Lara Logan of CBS news on Friday night.

Above all, it’s hard to ignore the energy, optimism and enthusiasm among the students at Columbia, absolutely undeterred but the economic impediments confronting most traditional media companies. The place just rocks.

If you would like to get a glance at this vibrant community, it’s still not too late to register for the Columbia School of Journalism’s Social Media Weekend on January 27th through 29th: http://bit.ly/smwknd

I marked another online community milestone today: 10,000 Facebook subscribers. And I am pretty excited about it.

Next if not already, social media editors — with conspicuously smaller communities — will be droning on about how Facebook subscriber totals, like Twitter followers, don’t mean a thing. They will be right and they will be wrong.

For example, studies over the last couple of years have proven that many Twitter followers represent either spam accounts — or more likely — visitors who tried Twitter for a day and never came back. And we have all seen the stories about politicians and others buying followers.

So true, but equally incomplete. I don’t put much faith in the numbers, but trends, proportions and perception also come into play.

While many other facets of social media identity can work for journalists, will a source be more likely to respond to a tweet if you have thousands of followers or just dozens? Can’t we infer a little about Twitter accounts which grow, stagnate or contract?

I had a great deal of success as an early adopter with Twitter – with over 80,000 followers — but my tweets rarely resulted in over 250 clicks. Sticky content meant more, and it was fun when that happened, but not incredibly rewarding.

The real benefits come with the countless personal relationships that have emerged. “I follow you” has been a priceless ice breaker at professional events because it proves and reminds us of out mutual interests. Of course, this happens as well without great followers counts.

More recently, I have shifted my online reporting efforts — with a combination of original, crowd-sourced and curated content — to my personal Facebook profile. The Facebook subscription function made this platform more expansive than my previous journalist page — about four times over during the first few months.

Curiously, I get many more new subscriber notices than the total seems to represent, and more than a few names look like random keystrokes — as if the spam follower process is repeating itself. Many of the comments would seem to endorse this perception as well. Perhaps others unsubscribe because I post too often or because they don’t like the content.

Beats me, but amid the churn and spam I am finding more community — with real discussions — happening on Facebook than I have ever experienced as an individual user. Of course there is little opportunity for direct monetization via Facebook — but what I learn about community development, content consumption, and myself — is no less than priceless.

I missed the early wave of blogging but every social media experience since then has proven that early adoption is the key. The good news, I think, is that it’s still pretty early in the subscription process. Get started today!

Evangelists tell me that Google+ plus will next open the social space — thanks to their integration with search, YouTube, Blogger and more — but for the moment, I’m hitching my wagon right here. Subscribers matter to me.

I checked in on #OccupyPhilly this morning and found it smaller yet still present after yesterday’s eviction deadline. I counted roughly 40 active demonstrators, possibly a similar number of other residents, and slightly more police and old media than usual, but there wasn’t much going on. The veterans section appeared unchanged.

Photos by Jim MacMillan ©2011