“TV news crews being dispatched out “in the field” to cover the Mall and other key gathering points are being told to pack for survival conditions, which includes likely toting along a five-gallon jug to use for bodily functions. Sadly, bathrooms may become the big issue as the big day unfolds. The city’s subway system is planning on locking all of its bathrooms for security reasons (they will post a total of 150 or so port-a-potties outside of the stations, concentrating them in the suburbs, outside of the city itself; Metro may also close some of its escalators to help with crowd control, leaving newly minted riders to walk up steep metal steps 100 to 200 feet high). The rest of the city plans to deploy up to 5,000 jiffy johns, which works out to something on the order of 10,000 people minimum per bathroom, optimistically assuming that not everyone will have to “go.” – The Daily Beast
Mayor’s blog
Let’s say you’re the mayor of a medium sized town in the midwest and you’re excited about work getting started on a new federal courthouse project in your city. You send a little press release to the local radio and TV stations and the daily newspaper, hoping they might shoot some video or stills of the big cranes or have you on the morning show to talk about what this means for the community.
You might get a mention but not much more. Let’s face it, your new courthouse has limited interest. So you take your Flip video camera out to the site and put a couple of minutes on your blog. And you do this for anything you think the people in your town might care about. How long before your blog becomes a regular stop for those interested in local news? Cost? Virtually zero.
I helped my friend John get started blogging but he’s figuring out the video and YouTube thing. And in all fairness, the local media might have done stories on this. But I can understand if they didn’t. I made similar decisions back in the day. After all, there was only 24 hours of airtime. You had to go with what appealed to the largest number of people. Now you can appeal to literally everybody.
You could have a local government page; a local sports page; a local church news page; a local education page… you get the idea. Provide the hosting; tools and training and use your medium to promote them all.
This is happening all over the country and it will continue. Because people like John have news they want to share and there’s just no more friction.
“News is being deindustrialized. No factory needed.”
Reply
I pulled the following from a recent post on Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine:
“But there is no more one job description – journalist – in one industry – newspapers – with one business model – print advertising – to pay them.
I believe, as I said here, that many slices will make up a new pie: more focused news companies contributing journalism and curation and other value; successful specialist bloggers growing large businesses (Gawker Media, TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider); smaller bloggers that are big enough to make them worthwhile to make (BaristaNet); volunteer bloggers and contributors who add to the pie because they care and share; public-supported journalistic activity (Spot.us, ProPublica); crowd-created efforts, and on and on.
Note, though, the verb that started that long sentence: “believe.” I don’t know yet. None of us does until we try and learn and share best practices.
But I am confident that journalism as an activity will not disappear, that there will be a market demand for it, that there are many new ways to fulfill the task (and debate about how it is done). But – bottom line – journalism and journalists will not disappear unless they insist on defining themselves as an industry that operates in just one way . The key to survival is reinventing what we do.”
“You’re not clever enough to be cute. Just be honest.”
Seth Godin explains (by the numbers) how to send a personal email. My three favorites from his list:
- Just because you have someone’s email address doesn’t mean you have the right to email them.
- Don’t mark your email urgent. Urgent to you is not urgent to me.
- Be short. The purpose of an email is not to sell the person on anything other than writing back. If you don’t have a personal, interesting way to start a conversation, don’t write.
Do I have the balls to forward Seth’s list to those who violate these simple rules? No, probably not.
First Bluetooth webcam?
So says Ecamm who showed this little bugger at Macworld. George saw it and says the video and audio are pretty good. And if you plug in a little dongle, you can increase the bluetooth range to 100 feet. Standard 640×480 H.264 video with 48 kHz AAC stereo audio and a promised four hours of talk time. Looks like it’s about the size of a deck of playing cards.
A career in radio prepares you for (new career goes here)
Missouri’s new governor will be sworn in tomorrow and, as part of the transition, about 150 people working at state jobs under the previous administration were terminated. This happens with every four or eight years.
A few days before the state ax fell, I had a routine meeting with the chief public information officer for one of the state departments. Like many in that line of work, he had –I believe– started in radio or spent a number of years in broadcasting. The years of consolidation in that industry had left this person weary from new owners, pay cuts, job elimination… and happy to have a more stable job in state government. Two days later the person is, once again, looking for a job.
It’s only a rumor but I’ve heard many of these communications positions will be filled by attorneys under the new administration. Our new governor was formerly attorney general, but I’m not sure why one would want/need a lawyer in these positions. As I said, that’s just rumor.
All of which reminded me of the dozen years I spent working in local radio. They were more fun than I can describe. Whatever skills I acquired during that time (talking on the radio (??); writing commercials; covering a news story (sort of) seem so… irrelevant now. Okay, it’s a quarter of a century later, so why should this surprise me?
If I had stayed in radio, what would I be doing now? Programming a “cluster” of stations? Managing? (unlikely) And what would those years have prepared me to do?
I have no idea why so many radio people go into public relations or become PIO’s for some association or state agency. I always suspected they were hired for their communications skills. Comfortable in an on-air interview; familiar with writing news releases (?); good voice?
Still a useful skill set. But what else do you need to know how to do in 2009? Blogging? Podcasting? YouTube? Social media? Couldn’t hurt.
I hope everyone that lost their jobs last week finds new ones. And better ones. Free advice every morning from 6:30 a.m. – 8:00 a.m. at the Jefferson City Coffee Zone.
Does size (of your audience) matter or not?
“What we are going to witness in 2009 is the diminished importance of how large your (radio) audience is and the increasing importance of how effectively you connect that audience, whatever its size, with the advertisers and marketers who have the goods and services that audience craves.” — Mark Ramsey Hear 2.0
For some reason this made me think of Apple. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an Apple or Mac or iPod spot on the radio. Lots on TV, of course. And Apple sales are through the roof. I’m trying to think of how I am “connected” with Apple products and how that came to be.
I’m just trying to think of ways radio stations can make –or are making– the connections Mr. Ramsey describes. And what does this trend mean for radio networks?
The best things in life (like Wikipedia) are not free
I was searching Wikipedia for something last month and noticed a big banner at the top of the page, asking for contributions to keep the site going. I didn’t give much but readily hit the PayPal button. Apparently a lot of folks did:
Huffington Post:
“Since November 5, the organization has raised $4.5 million, though the bulk of that came in late December when founder Jimmy Wales posted his annual appeal to the Wikipedia community. Add that to the $2 million in foundation grants and major gifts they’d received since July, and their entire $6 million annual operating budget has been met. The achievement would be remarkable in ordinary times, but it’s all the more impressive given the grim economic climate.”
Wikipedia Fundraising By The Numbers
136,000: number of donors
$35: average donation
16: number of currencies in which people donated
150: number of countries from which people donated
$6.5 million: total amount raised thus far
$3 million: amount raised in ten days in late December
I really like the idea of lots of people kicking in a few dollars to support something they believe is worthwhile.
Inaugural ball: “Like a massive high school prom”
Latest inauguration horror story (AP):
“Thousands of people converged on the coat check from three balls at the Omni Shoreham hotel. Fur flew, and not always to the rightful owners. Judges, politicians and assorted bigwigs rushed the coatroom and banged on the door.
“It was a mass of finely clothed and jeweled individuals starting to chant ‘We want our coats! We want our coats!'” said Martin, a Washington-area voiceover performer. “There were elderly women in this crowd, and they weren’t going down without a fight.”
Police were called, and the mob was sent out in the freezing cold, coatless.
“It’s like a massive high school prom, is the only way I can describe it, in terms of the crush of people and the level of sophistication,” said Sheila Tate, who was press secretary to Nancy Reagan. “It’s just packed.
The rest of the story describes the kind of situations I have spent my adult life avoiding. Should be some good photo/video ops.
http://twitter.com/inauguration
A week or so ago I got a ping that @inauguration was following my Twitter feed. I assume they just searched all Twitter feeds for “inauguration” and found me. As I always do, I checked the profile page and found:
“Get tips and helpful scoop as you plan for the Presidential Inauguration on January 20, 2009 when Barack Obama takes the oath of office.”
There was a link to a website but I didn’t click it.
@inauguration has been a great source for news about the upcoming event. With links to lots of news sources.
I finally checked the url on the Twitter page and learned that the feed belongs to WUSA-TV in D.C. Thinking back, a lot of the tweets have taken me to pages on the WSUA website.
We’re they being sneaky by not clearly identifying the TV station? Doesn’t feel that way since I now know they pointed me to a variety of sources for relevant news about the inauguration.
My point here is WSUA didn’t just feed the latest news from the station website. They didn’t just promote their coverage. Someone was smart enough to understand how Twitter really works and use it. Cost: zero.
This will be the norm for any big event. And it won’t always be news organizations doing it. It will often be the event organizers. And should be since they will have the most information and have it first.
Yes, I could have set up a Google Alert for “inauguration” but adding @inauguration to my feed was just one-click.
Seasoned Twitter users will remind me there’s a hash tag (#inauguration) that aggregates tweets from ALL Twitter users, not just one source. True, but there’s a lot of noise in that stream. Takes too long to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And to bring it down to the individual level, I could set up a Twitter page just for my tweets from the event, so that my “followers” aren’t drowned in my tweets from DC. Probably won’t be posting enough for that to be a problem, however.
In conclusion… I quickly determined that the @inauguration Twitter feed had useful and interesting information. I didn’t notice or care who was behind the feed.