How to Write for the Web

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From Cory Bergman’s (Lost Remote) Guide for TV Newsrooms. He offers 11 tips that apply equally well to radio newsrooms. My favorite was the one on writing headlines:

“The trick is writing headlines that not only compel people to click, but also show up in search results. It should be simple, straightforward and active. It should emphasize a twist or compelling fact in a story, such as “buried alive” or “gasping for air.” It should contain search keywords. And it should attribute when necessary.”

Flood images: YouTube and Flickr

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People in the midwest (Iowa and Missouri) affected by the flooding wasted no time in posting video to YouTube. Here’s some footage from Washington, Missouri.

Missouri Valley, Iowa got 5-7″ of rain in a very short period of time, which resulted in three levee breaks. This clip is part of a series … this guy (I don’t know why I think it’s a guy) decided to go with a rock video treatment … and here’s one from Wyeth Hill in St. Joseph MO. (Across the river, Elwood Kansas was in the process evacuating.)

A Flickr search for “missouri flood” pulled up 490 images. I’m sure I missed some good ones. Go ahead and post them in Comments.

The Basement Diaries Redux

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L-R: Richard Peck, Jim Bob Green, John Robison, Charlie Peck (seated), Jane Marshall, Joe Browning (seated), Lynn Strickland

I’m committed to the do-over for The Basement Diaries but I’m quickly discovering it’s going to take a lot longer than I anticipated. I keep discovering pages that had fallen behind the digital chest of drawers. I’m starting with just recreating all of the pages and getting them linked. I don’t want to think about re-scanning hundreds of photos. This is the signature image for The Basement Diaries. Everyone has a snapshot like this, that captured a time and place.

Next summer will be the 40th anniversary of “the basement summer,” so I’ll have to have the site back up before then. Which means even less blog time for smays.com.

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?