Temple Pulls Plug On AxisPhilly.org; Project To Reboot As Journalism Incubator
By Kim Glovas
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - The 2-year-old Axis Philly website will close down Thursday.
Axis Philly was a non-profit run by Temple University's Center for Public Interest Journalism. David Boardman, dean of Temple's School of Media and Communication, started his tenure last fall, and saw that Axis Philly needed an overhaul.
"It was burning through its grant money very quickly, and was getting very, very little traffic and not having a lot of impact in the way that its funders, primarily the William Penn Foundation, had intended."
Boardman says the site didn't generate enough interest, "It was a worthy experiment. Things were learned from it. I think it created new relationships, and they did some good work, but it was not a sustainable model, and it didn't seem to be the best thing that Temple could be involved with."
He says now the center will be used as an incubation center for new start-ups. The first one will be run by Jim Brady, the former executive editor of WashingtonPost.com. Boardman says Brady will create a Philadelphia-based news service for those who do not use traditional news outlets.
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