Category Archives: Media & Culture

NHL Capitals make news by reporting it

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The Washington Capitals, a National Hockey League team, plan to send four reporters to Moscow to cover the International Ice Hockey Federation World Championship (underway). The Capitals will partner with Clearspring Technologies to deliver audio, video and text content to their site for Caps fans, as well as to local, national and international media outlets via a specialized widget.

The local medea elected not to cover the event so the Capitals decided the could and would. And share the news with new and traditional media outlets and syndicate it far and wide. [E-Media Tidbits]

My mind reels at the implications of this.

Let’s say the Pooterville Drum and Bugle Corps make it to the national finals in Bangor, Maine. The local radio station can’t afford to send a broadcast crew but the kids could throw up a blog and go crazy posting video, audio, stills, minute-by-minute reports… all brought to you by the Pooterville Sports Boosters Club. Does anyone doubt that a couple of passionate, knowledgeable fans can provide better, more complete coverage than the local radio station? And if the local station wants to air some of their stuff…great.

If I were running the local radio station (or newspaper, or TV station)… I think I might encourage this and provide the tools, training and web-hosting.

What are we going to build?

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“A huge portion of our lives (as marketers, as consumers, as voters, as citizens) has been dominated by the fact that there were three or twenty TV networks. That this was a scarce resource. It’s not. Not any more. So, if there’s unlimited real estate, what are we going to build?” – Seth Godin

During my years doing affiliate relations for our news networks, most (all?) of our programming decisions were based on what we thought we could convince radio stations to “clear.” Coming up with an idea that 30 or 40 radio stations (out of 60) might agree was worth putting on the air was daunting. Mr. Godin’s post brought this to mind:

“Why not start the Debate Channel? 20 hours a week of live debate available online. Get a cable network to run three or four hours of highlights every week as an inducement to the candidates, but it will really be about the Net. If a candidate doesn’t show up, the others get more time to talk.”

We still have to program for our affiliates but we are no longer limited by that. So, what are we going to build?

Future of TV? Live video from your cell phone to the world

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“At the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters show, ComVu Media demonstrated live video transmitting at 30 fps at 640 x 480 resolution from a mobile phone over a wireless data network.

ComVu used its PocketCaster software to broadcast full screen video from a Nokia N95 multimedia device, transmitting over HSDPA data connection. Anyone using a Nokia N95 device — including field reporters — can now capture and broadcast video directly to air and concurrently stream live video to Web-portals, blogs and 3G-enabled phones. ComVu CEO William Mutual called the end-to-end solution “the future of news gathering worldwide.” — Podcasting News

If I was running a news operation, I think I might invest in one of these and see if it’s as cool as it sounds.

Triblocal.com

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Tribune in Chicago just launched a new hyperlocal site today called Triblocal.com that encourages users to submit stories from nine communities, with more to come. Explains the Tribune, “The site, which will be largely unedited and self-policing, is designed to let citizens and organizations publish their own stories and post everything from high school team photos to favorite restaurant menus.” Triblocal.com also employs four of its own staff reporters to cover stories in those regions, and many of the stories from the site will be reverse-published to print. [Lost Remote]

This seems like a really good idea to me. There must be examples of radio stations trying similar things. I’m just not finding them.