What made this story matter to citywide readers was the involvement of Councilwoman Blackwell, and that was the focus of the article. Other articles, with other foci, could validly have focused on other details.
While First Thursday is always open to anyone, it is explicitly designed to further information flow between Penn and agencies and groups that are active in West Philadelphia. More than 90% of its attendees are affiliated with a wide variety of community-outreach workers. That's why Blackwell chose to be there, why Wendell chose to be there and why Bryan set it up that way. By definition, the attendees all work in West Philadelphia and many of them are also residents. That's whom you're always going to get at a First Thursday meeting: affiliated activists, for the most part. This fact should not belittle the role of those unaffiliated activists who did show, although most of them did have a personal history of group leadership as well. With all respect to Al's views, politicians citywide do not make the same strong distinction between community groups and residents that he does. In general -- as a class -- they are treated as important means of communicating with ordinary residents, not as forces opposed to ordinary residents. I see no possibility that will change in the foreseeable future. So the article of necessity, to be truthful, focused on how affiliated activists in particular perceived the issue. It did, however, feature one non-affiliated resident very prominently, placing her on Page One. -- Tony West ----- Original Message ----- From: S. Sharrieff Ali I don't think the article gave a fair depiction of what really happened at the First Thursday Meeting. It was a combination of multiple statements from community residents at the meeting, 300 signatures on a petition delivered to Jannie Blackwell which she presented at the meeting (not mentioned in the article), along with Councilwoman Blackwell's statements which represented the full indictment of UCD and their polices. I believe the Record article didn't properly frame the issue. The issue with UCD is the on-going management and polices of UCD, it just came to a with the John Fenton issue. Folks were upset with UCD and their handling of the Baltimore Avenue corridor. The fact there was a petition of signatures and multiple voices at the First Thursday meeting "joined" with Councilwoman Blackwell to question the transparency of the UCD government is a more accurate way of framing the debate. So Al, there is a strong community resident component to the complaint and process.
