Author Archives: Steve Mays

Twitterize listeners to your radio station

Posted on by

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, I worked at a radio station that served a lot of small communities. We did our best to get news from as many of these little towns as we could. I remember one of the things we did was give away little plastic rain gauges (with a sponsor logo). On a morning following a big rain these “Weather Watchers” would call in and report how much rain they received.

I was reminded of this today when I came across @reportstorms, the Twitter page of ReportStorms.com. (“Almost 2″ of rain in Rockford, IL area”)
If I worked at a radio station that was trying to serve a regional audience, I think I might set up a Twitter page for each community and recruit a few people from each burg to feed them. I might even provide a mobile phone with minutes so they didn’t have to use their own. Bet you could build that into a sponsorship.

So when Holcomb, MO gets a down-pour, you get up-to-the-minute reports. Even pix. Nobody covering the Holcomb Hornets basketball game? Twitter away.

Pull the RSS feeds of all of these community Twitter pages into a branded and sponsored page on the radio station website. Maybe feature a different community feed on the station home page every hour.

Can’t find good news people to work at your station? Why not have hundreds? Once you get some traction, I bet you’ll have people waiting in line to join up.

Oh, and one more thing. The new iPhones coming out this summer are rumored to do video.

PS: As far as I know stations are already doing this. If you know of any, link me up.

Where do former newspaper reporters go?

Posted on by
Reply

Rebekah Denn has posted links to blogs “and other online works” from other staff members from the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. The list included a number of photographers but the thing that caught my attention was the variety of “beats.”

  • Reporter, food writer, former restaurant critic
  • Features writer, children’s book reviewer
  • Art critic
  • Restaurant critic
  • Freelance classical music writer
  • Reporter, specializing in neighborhood sustainability
  • Lifestyles editor, former sports columnist and TV critic
  • Environmental reporter
  • Copy editor
  • Business reporter
  • Investigative reporter
  • Researcher and editor
  • Pop music critic
  • Photo Assignment Editor
  • Illustration, graphic artist
  • Aerospace reporter

And that’s probably not a complete list of the positions that went away when the paper folded. My guess is, these folks really knew their stuff. And are good reporters and writers. I hope they find good jobs.

Knowing absolutely nothing about the newspaper business, it’s difficult for me to imagine how any paper could afford have all these. Did the restaurant critic write one story/column a day? How can you make that math work? Is it heresy to suggest the “food writer” also be the “restaurant critic?”  Why do you need a “pop music critic” AND a “freelance classical music writer?” “Environmental reporter” and “neighborhood sustainability” reporter?

And I DO understand the same sort of analysis could be done of our business. Or any media business.

I suspect they had all of these niche positions because they could. When the ad dollars were flowing in, why not. Let’s cover everything. But those days are gone.

One final thought. Rebekah’s blog is “Eat All About It: Food, journalism and recipes from the great Northwest.” It’s okay but I’m not sure it’s any better than this one by a former co-worker of mine, Lane McConnell. I suppose Lane is technically an amateur since she doesn’t get paid. And there must be thousands of of these. Probably hundreds in Seattle alone.

When such a wealth of information is just a Google search away, how does a newspaper make the case, “We have the best food stories, read us.”

I think it only worked when they could say, “We are one of only two sources of stories about food in Seattle.”

Phone call to the 14th century

Posted on by
Reply

If you had 30 seconds to give advice to someone living in the 14th century, what you tell them? Great segment from recent This American Life.

“Sketch comedy troupe Kasper Hauser performs a radio game show, where a race car driver, a guy fluent in middle English, and a teacher take turns cramming all the 21st century wisdom they can into a 30 second phone call to the 14th century.”

It’s a funny bit but what could you tell them that they would believe? If you received a phone call from 500 years in the future, would you believe it? Could you buy that human and machine intelligence had merged, for example. Could you even believe it was possible to make a call back in time?

I, for one, am reassured that we are incapable of imagining the future.

Good use of Web 2.0 tools by non-profit

Posted on by
Reply

One of the clients we work with is Missouri Children’s Trust Fund. It’s a non-profit that works with “partners” throughout the state to try to prevent child abuse and neglect.

When we started working with them a couple of years ago, they had an awful website that took days or weeks to update. They trusted us enough to scrap it and move to a blog (a scary word back then). Since then they’ve become master of their digital domain.

Their annual conference is underway and Kirk Schreiber –the executive director– has been posting updates to Twitter and –with a little help– posting photos from his iPhone.

Yesterday he whipped out a tiny digital recorder and did an interview with one of the keynote speakers for an upcoming podcast.

CTF and Missouri KidsFirst –a companion organization– have very small staffs but they’ve tapped into these web tools to tell their stories and they’re doing it themselves, for little or no cost.

Old growth media and the future of news

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve never been worried about the future of news but I couldn’t quite imagine what it will look like as old business models stop working. Steve Berlin Johnson –speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin last week– sees today’s media as “…closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media.”

“So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative  or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce.”

And near the end of his speech, this warning:

“We’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone.”

Pew: State of News Media

Posted on by

TV consultant Terry Heaton offers his take on the latest “State of the News Media” report from Pew (Project for Excellence in Journalism) and offers a few predictions:

  1. It’s gone and it’s not coming back. Acceptance of this is the beginning of reinvention.
  2. Future revenue is about enabling commerce, not about serving advertising adjacent to or as an interruption of “content.”
  3. Journalism will survive the death of its institutions.
  4. Most journalists will be independent and work for whoever pays them the most, on a non-exclusive basis.
  5. Journalists will develop and exploit niche specialties.
  6. “The News” will be fast, transparent and authentic.
  7. Anchors will become mostly obsolete, like other middlemen that the Web routes around. I simply can read faster than I can have it read to me. Those that remain will be live hubs that filter multiple content inputs.

From the reports intro:

“There are growing doubts within the business, indeed, about whether the generation in charge has the vision and the boldness to reinvent the industry. It is unclear, say some, who the innovative leaders are, and a good many well-known figures have left the business. Reinvention does not usually come from managers prudently charting course. It tends to come from risk takers trying the unreasonable, seeing what others cannot, imagining what is not there and creating it.”

Will Ferrell’s “You’re Welcome America”

Posted on by

Even HBO was unwilling to air “You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush” in prime time. Perhaps it was the giant photo of a penis Will Ferrell kept calling up on the screen behind him.

But if you weren’t offended by the last eight years, you’ll be okay with this amazing one-man show. Ferrell was at his raunchy best. As funny as he could have been during his SNL salad days if he could have shrugged “fuck it” when appropriate.

It was difficult to distinguish which words actually came from W’s mouth and which were pulled from Ferrell’s very funny ass. So difficult in fact, the word TRUE would be flashed on the big screen to help us know the difference.

As with Oliver Stone’s W., I came away feeling more sad for #43 than mad.

Eagles concert

Posted on by

The Eagles provided the soundtrack for an important period in my life. Equally true, I assume, for others in the audience at last night’s Eagles concert. A lady sitting near us wasn’t born when the Eagles hit it big, but grew up listening with her parents.

The boys had to strain to hit a few of the notes but the memories were picture perfect. I like to think it’s more than Boomer nostalgia that keeps filling auditoriums for Stones and Eagles concerts. Which of today’s big artists will still be filling the seats in thirty years?

This photo was taken from the Cessna 350 as we flew over. But I’m not really complaining. We could see the jumbotron screens and music was loud enough, even from a couple of thousand feet.

It was a good show. The guitar licks alone would have been worth the price of the ticket.

Claire McCaskill’s blog

Posted on by

Watching MO Senator Claire McCaskill play with her new blog.

“These (photo) are the Generals and Admiral all testifying at our Armed Services hearing this am. I will ask questions shortly.”

The thought of a member of Congress “reporting on” a hearing she is covering is… is… sacrilege? Heresy? What word would be strong enough? The obvious problem is, the senator is –by definition– partisan. No way you could trust what she reports. Right?

So, how is this different from Sean Hannity? Or Chris Matthews? Or Rush? No doubt about which side of an issue they come down but they have thousands of viewers. Can we automatically assume every post by Senator McCaskill is tainted and unworthy? That every tweet by @joliejustus is designed to mislead and spin us?

Or can we mix it in with all the other “reporting” we get, factoring in her point of view? I don’t know the answer to that question but if there is one, every reader will come up with their own.

Claire McCaskill news conferences will never be the same

Posted on by
Reply

Good post by Post-Dispatch reporter Tony Messenger on how social networks like Twitter are changing the game.

“While covering the Democratic lovefest last weekend, I put a note on Twitter (I’m @tonymess, by the way) about how Republicans were exchanging nasty news releases about the Senate race in 2010 while the Democrats were uniting behind Robin Carnahan. Within minutes, the note had been passed around by countless Twitterites. The next day, Gov. Jay Nixon made the Republican infighting a central point in his speech to the group. Coincidence?”

Yeah, that must be it.

Man, all of this is SO painful for the old hands who can’t or won’t understand what’s happening and how to make it work for them. And so exciting for those do.

UPDATE: Here’s a screen grab of McCaskill’s most recent tweet. Call me naive, but I’ll be she gets some suggestions and I bet you reads them.