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Market-Frankford Line to begin ‘dramatic change’; Sanders wins Nevada caucuses | Morning Newsletter

Plus, the week’s most popular stories.

An eastbound SEPTA train on the Market-Frankford Line travels through Kensington. Beginning Monday, SEPTA is eliminating skip-stop service and increase evening frequencies on weekdays.
An eastbound SEPTA train on the Market-Frankford Line travels through Kensington. Beginning Monday, SEPTA is eliminating skip-stop service and increase evening frequencies on weekdays.Read moreHeather Khalifa / File Photograph

    The Morning Newsletter

    Start your day with the Philly news you need and the stories you want all in one easy-to-read newsletter

Happy Sunday, everyone. The results from Nevada’s caucuses are still trickling in, but yesterday afternoon, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was declared the winner. The Democratic presidential candidates vying for the nomination will soon start shifting their attention to the South Carolina primary next weekend. In today’s Q&A, we chatted with Inquirer reporter Joseph N. DiStefano, who has a fun job in trying to persuade corporate bosses to speak on the record.

Tauhid Chappell (morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

The week ahead

  1. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced yesterday that he will undergo surgery in early March to remove a likely cancerous tumor from his left kidney.

  2. While there’s plenty of time remaining in the race for the Democratic presidential nominee, the results of Nevada’s caucuses cemented Sanders as the national front-runner.

  3. Changes to the Market-Frankford Line to accommodate growing ridership on weekdays will go into effect Monday. This means skip-stop services will be eliminated, and there will be more frequent trains to accommodate commuters later in the evening.

  4. The Phillie Phanatic is getting a new look, but no one really knows what that means. These mysterious changes will be revealed this afternoon during the team’s spring training home opener against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

This week’s most popular stories

Behind the story with

Each week we go behind the scenes with one of our reporters or editors to discuss their work and the challenges they face along the way. This week we chat with Joseph N. DiStefano, who writes about companies, bosses, public investments, and what they do to people.

What does a “typical” day look like for you?

I walk six miles to the train through two state parks most mornings, in the dark, it’s beautiful and it clears my head. I check my messages in the train station, take a few notes, and if something’s blowing up, I can report and write from the train. I get in a little before the boss and he asks what I’m working on. There’s usually a new IPO or venture-capital round at Penn or something like that. If it’s interesting or large enough we might want to post pretty quick. There’s maybe national news with a local angle — the president defunds a helicopter project that could cost 500 people in Coatesville or 2,000 people in Delco their jobs, the company or the union or the local congress members push to get the money back in. Or there’s a spectacular-sounding business lawsuit in Common Pleas or federal or Chancery Court, which, by the time I read 10 pages, I realize is not as big of a story as I told the boss — or it is and I better jump on it. Then a local stock moves way up or way down, I check their filings. I call some of the people I know who own it — or own its competitors — and try to figure out what’s going on there.

I try to spend at least one and a half days a week in the field, covering events or looking up places and people in town or in the burbs that I want to write about. Sometimes I end up using notes a year later or more, when there's finally news with that person or company I visited. Of course, you have to check back and get the latest.

On our desk, I’m kind of notorious for my lunches, maybe I’ll microwave a sweet potato, which takes about four minutes, but I’m a journalist and easily distracted, so sometimes I forget them for a while, and by the time I remember, some joker has stuck a Post-It on it that says something like, “An Offering to the Yam God.” Or a handful of barley and a can of sardines, except when we have interns. You don’t want to expose young people to sardines, some of them have told me they find that traumatic.

How do you look around for stories and topics for your columns?

People who care enough to complain to me about stuff I write are sometimes pretty helpful in leading me to other problems worth attention.

A few times a month I might take people I want to talk to out to breakfast or coffee or lunch or a beer or a late-night sandwich and pump them for information. Sometimes it’s people who run things. I don’t go off the record with elected officials or the CEOs of publicly traded companies. People with regular jobs who want to tell me that something at their place isn’t right, but they’re afraid to get fired if I quote everything they say, I’ll promise them confidentiality and I thank them for telling me what questions I ought to be asking.

Everyone has employees, ex-employees, competitors, suppliers, and some of these people love to talk and point me in a direction. Sometimes it's the right direction.

Public companies file quarterly financial reports and many of them take questions from shareholders which are broadcast and transcribed. I try to at least glance at those for companies in our area. Private companies also file public documents, and sometimes they have owners who report information.

And when something’s in the national news and editors want a local angle, there’s always someone around who is in that business and maybe they can shed some familiar local light and make this big national or global story a little less mysterious.

What are some ways you work to get bosses and companies to open up and speak to you on the record?

Of course, the CEO tells a great story — that’s her job. I’m not too interested. If the investor who’s putting in millions or this customer who’s spending millions will say why, and it makes sense and fits a familiar or a really novel need, maybe we have a story.

The current Philly Fed president, who I knew when he ran the University of Delaware and a couple of my kids went there, kept meeting with private company and bank CEOs and wouldn’t take my calls. So I went to an event I heard he was holding with the president of Drexel, worked the room, ate a couple hors d’oeuvres, asked everybody a lot of questions. They called security and threw me out, but the next day he called and he’s been taking Inquirer calls since.

Once the CEO of a really big financial company stopped talking to the press. I found out he’d grown up in a housing project in East Falls. I called his assistant, she said, no reporters, but I said, I don’t wanna talk about his business, I want to drive him out to the projects and have him tell me how it was. We ended up spending five hours driving around Northwest Philly and the Lansdale area, he gave me great stories. Of course, we ended up talking a great deal about his business, and I used it all in columns and stories. I’ve gotten him to talk to three other reporters for stories in the past few years.

What are some hurdles you face while trying to do your job?

People are constantly giving us wrong information. And yet some people, because of their circumstances, have incentives to give us good information. You can call that the hurdle of human nature — who can I trust and how much? But it’s also why we add value, we check out the information, put it in context.

It's a special hurdle with business reporting, that there is more information than ever, but it's hard to organize and prioritize. But mostly this is a great job to have. Reporting and writing, helping tell the stories of many people and groups in our time and this place.

5. What’s one thing you hope readers take away when they read your coverage?

I hope they see that we source the facts we report. The great question with anything you hear or see is, “How do we know?” You would think the internet would have made us all smarter, all that information at our fingertips. But many, many people don’t understand how to distinguish between bald, unsourced statements and the counting and recounting of material events by multiple sources. In fact, I think we, as a society, are falling further behind in our ability to distinguish entertaining stories from reality. We have a lot of educating to do, and by writing and engaging with readers, I hope to be doing at least my share.

You can stay in touch with Joe on Twitter @PhillyJoeD or by email at JoeD@inquirer.com.

Through Your Eyes | #OurPhilly

Nothin’ but the facts here. Thanks, @devon.leigh for sharing!

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and we’ll pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout-out!

#CuriousPhilly: Have a question about your community? Ask us!

Have you submitted a question to Curious Philly yet? Try us. We’re listening to our readers and doing our best to find answers to the things you’re curious about.

Our readers’ latest question: What happened to this particular community garden in Philly that’s now turned into a vacant lot?

The answer: You can thank rodents for its demise.

What we’re…

  1. Eating: scallops with black trumpet mushrooms and gingery carrot mousse at Townsend’s new Rittenhouse location. The French restaurant moved from its East Passyunk location and, during the span of its move, opened two other restaurants, including the more casual Townsend Wine Bar.

  2. Drinking: Argiolas Costamolino, an affordable, citrusy white wine with piney herbal notes that pairs perfectly with your next seafood dish.

  3. Watching: The Call of the Wild, which focuses on Harrison Ford conquering the outdoors with a faithful canine by his side. Ford recently opened up about the experience working on movies that lean on CGI use.

  4. Viewing: The new exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which will feature more than 70 works by African American artists from the collection of Constance E. Clayton. Clayton was the first African American woman to serve as superintendent of Philly schools and donated the works to PAFA last year.

Comment of the week

Thank you Mr. Salisbury for this story. Its disturbing that the historical society is just auctioning off collections they don’t feel are of historical value, so they can line their pockets. Getting a retiring deputy attorney general was clever on their part, so no one would raise a fuss about it. Thank goodness there are journalists like you to look into and expose these shenanigans. — ronaldod, on Cash-strapped Historical Society of Pennsylvania is selling off parts of its collection.

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