Technical.ly has been awarded a $150K Lenfest Institute local news sustainability grant

Technical.ly will produce these new tools and more, thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

The two-year award is part of a $2 million Local News Sustainability Initiative from the Philadelphia-based institute. We’re proud to be among a cohort of 17 local news orgs striving to serve their communities.

Lenfest earmarked this funding for efforts that help make local journalism sustainable, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for Technical.ly. We often write about startups making a key pivot. Well, we just made the first big one in our nearly 15 years of history.

Technical.ly’s fine-tuned events model was upended during the pandemic, and we’ve spent the last four years reimagining how we operate. Our focus on research, client engagement and digital services that drive quality connections for our community of technologists and entrepreneurs is working. With support from this funding, we’re bringing on staff to extend these new lines of business, analyze our audience, and increase reader engagement via our email newsletters and social media. (Are you following our LinkedIn yet?)

It’s all in service of helping us continue providing deep coverage of local trends within the tech industry, explaining key entrepreneurship policy issues, exploring digital equity and access, telling stories of economic change, and connecting established and aspiring technologists around the region.

This grant is exciting because it’ll ensure we can keep doing our work — and because we’re building some cool stuff that can help make you better at yours.

Here are some of the grant-supported opportunities to look for going forward.

Reader advisory panels

Even without as many in-person gatherings, we’re committed to continuing to weave our communities together, and the Lenfest sustainability grant will support the launch of reader advisory panels in each of our markets.

We envision these groups comprising a small group of diverse and representative power sources we engage regularly, with the mission to help Technical.ly best serve our audiences.

Interested in participating?  Email us.

State of the Tech Economy reports

This one we’re really pumped about: Earlier this year, Technical.ly launched our first local tech workforce dashboard powered by data provider Lightcast to deepen both our journalism and strengthen analysis in research and client reporting.

With help from this grant, our newsroom will have more capacity to share this data into charts and graphs, and we’ll spend more time interpreting the trends for our community and clients. Our reporters will use it to understand trends and glean insights about the changing ecosystems that interact with the tech workforce.

We’re also using that info to produce our State of the Tech Economy reports, the inaugural editions of which are now available for free download.

Guide to ethical use of generative AI

AI isn’t only in our tech reporting, it’s also brought about a wave of ethical debates in the journalism world we inhabit. Huge media companies have been exposed for exploiting it as a shortcut, from Gannett to Sports Illustrated.

But there’s little doubt generative AI is here to stay — it’s getting better scary fast, too — and there are plenty of ways local newsrooms can wield it as a tool while staying true to their craft. Technical.ly is well positioned to balance the two perspectives — skeptics and so-called accelerationalists — to sketch out when, where and how local newsrooms ought to be using these tools.

What are ways to ethically use AI in local reporting? Technical.ly has begun experimenting with it (you’ll always be told when it’s used), and we’re building an internal guide to best practices. With support from this grant, we’ll release it as a playbook so other news orgs can take our findings and build on them.

Aspiring or experienced, we’re here for you

Technical.ly is a resource for people navigating the programs and resources available to start tech careers and begin their entrepreneurial journey. It’s also a way for experienced tech pros and entrepreneurs to stay tethered to where they live, resulting in greater civic engagement.

We’re proud to continue advancing innovation and the relationship a news organization has to its community, and grateful to the Lenfest Institute for the support.