Monthly Archives: June 2007

The Local News Food Chain

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Until pretty recently I would have
told you that the way local news flows online is as follows:

  1. Local news outlet breaks a story
  2. Local blogs pick it up, provide commentary, go nuts, etc.
  3. Local news outlet reports online reaction to the story they reported, thus
    creating a "local reaction story"
  4. Start over

Lately, though, I’d say that the information flows both ways.  Here’s a
classic example:

  1. Winston-Salem based blogger Esbee gets a comment on one of her
    blog posts that asks if she’s heard anything about a flurry of break-ins in the
    Sherwood area.  The commenter had pasted in the text of an email that was making
    its way around the community.
  2. She hasn’t, but she writes
    a separate post     with the comment in the body to see if anyone has heard
    about them.  She also checks the police calls and finds some
    corroborating information.
  3. She gets comments asking her to remove the address that police provided,
    although it’s really just a block number AND it’s public info that’s on the
    police website.  She does remove the address but points out that it’s public
    info.  The last comment on her post says, "How the hell did the Journal miss
    this?!?!Now that I look through, there are like 5 "investigative support" things
    at that address, too! Do they actually look at this stuff, or do they wait for
    the police to spoonfeed what the police would have us hear?"
  4. Today the Winston-Salem Journal runs this
    story     with the headline, "Police report multiple
    break-ins in Sherwood Forest area"

I’m willing to bet that the Journal reporter came across Esbee’s post and
then did what reporters are paid to do, which is dig into it. I’m not saying
this is a bad or improper thing, I just think it’s a natural evolution of the
form and I only write about it because I constantly hear people say that blogs
are a bunch of narcissistic ramblings written by people with nothing better to
do.  Obviously I disagree.

I IM’d Esbee about this and she pointed out
that the real food chain was:

  1. Email or comments are sent to blogger about a community issue
  2. Blogger looks at it and finds the story viable (i.e. not a hoax)
  3. Blogger posts, which generates more comments and feedback and fleshes out
    the story
  4. Media picks up the story

I think she’s right, and sometimes there’s even a little bit of personal
experience involved just like I had with
the allegations
against a teacher at my son’s school. But the main point is that local blogs
provide another avenue for community information to be shared, and in the
atmosphere of shrinking budgets and reporting staffs that newspapers are
operating in they would be foolish not to follow the leads that the blogs
provide.  When you think about it, how have news operations traditionally gotten
their stories? Tips via email, and phone calls, press releases from companies
and institutions, monitoring the police scanner, etc.  How is monitoring blogs
any different?

One thing I’d like to see is that if a paper does
pick up a lead from a blog that perhaps they reference the blog in their
article. If nothing else it would give readers an opportunity to get the back
story and it would acknowledge the contribution that the blogger is making to
the community. Another reason I’d give is that newspaper folks have complained
for years that local TV newscasts get most of their stories from the newspapers,
so I’d hope that newspapers would be sensitive to the same issue with the
bloggers.  On the other hand maybe they take the view that if the TV folks
aren’t going to give them credit for story leads then why should they give
bloggers credit?  The "kick the dog" theory as it were.

Side note: I
just noticed that Esbee’s been removed from the Journal’s blog
page.  Since Life in
Forsyth is easily the most informative blog focused on the Winston-Salem
area I’m a bit surprised by this.  I certainly hope it’s not because she wrote
this
a while back.  That would be a bit like biting the hand that feeds if you ask
me.

More Fallout from the Mr. Snow Situation at Lewisville Elementary?

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We just received an automated phone call that stated that Lewisville Elementary School principal Ron Rash is transferring to South Fork Elementary.  No mention as to why, but I’ve already gotten one comment on a previous post about the Mr. Snow situation asking if anyone knew why Mr. Rash was transferring.  I think anyone with more than one functioning brain cell would assume that the transfer is a direct result of the events surrounding Mr. Snow’s suspensions this past year, but I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.

Also, I have to ask if anyone’s surprised that it’s been 28 days since the announcement of Mr. Snow’s second suspension and there hasn’t been an update from the schools or the sheriff?

Missionary Stew

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About 20 years ago I came across an author named Ross Thomas.  I don’t remember how I found him, but I’ve been a huge fan of his since I first read Missionary Stew (this link takes you to a book preview in Google) and I’ve recently been reminded how much I love his writing. I’ve been re-reading Stew since I found a copy at Edward McKay a couple of weeks back, and even though some of the political references are dated (it was written in the early 80s) the observations about the power class in the United States is as accurate now as it was then and the dialogue is as refreshing as I remembered.

What set Thomas apart from other mystery writers were his dialogue and character development.  Almost all writers in the mystery genre can be easily defined by their formula, to the point that after you’ve read one of their books you know what’s going to happen and how it’s going to happen by the end of the first chapter of the next book you read.  While Thomas also has a formula it is not nearly as predictable or dreary as most of the other myster writers’ and even if you figure out the plot line the dialogue still makes it a fun ride.  Smart and witty best describe Thomas’ work.

Thomas died in 1995 and unfortunately his last effort, Ah, Treachery! is not up to his usual standards.  It would have been nice if he could have gone out on top, but let’s cut the guy some slack since his other dozen or so books are great reads.

To preview a bunch of them go here.

Let Customers Promote You by Marketing Themselves

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Last month I traveled to France with my family and we stayed with some
other family members and some family friends.  One of those friends was
Helene Blowers the Public
Services Technology Director for the Public Library of Charlotte &
Mecklenburg County.  Helene maintains the blog LibraryBytes.com which
is a great resource for anyone who’s interested in the applications of
evolving online technologies and services.

Recently Helene gave a presentation at the ALA 2007 conference and she focused it on one slide in her presentation that said the following:

The best way to get customers to market your brand is to allow them to promote you (the Library) by marketing themselves.

All you have to do is substitute "your company" for "the Library" and
this statement is applicable to just about any business.  Many elite
brands figured out long ago how to help their customers promote
themselves and by extension the brands simply by putting their logo on
items.  People who buy high-end items want the world to know that they
can afford said items so they want the brand symbol to be prominent.
Back in the 70s that meant wearing shirts with the Lacoste crocodile
and in the 80s it was the Polo pony player.  What Helene is talking
about, however, is deeper and is specific to the world of Web 2.0:

For me, this is really what web 2.0 is all about. Tools
that allow
users to express themselves, participate in the conversation, and
celebrate and showcase their individual talents. So in looking at web
2.0 and the potential that they hold as marketing tools, it’s important
to realize that "the library" is really not about us (aka the library,
it’s staff, and services); it’s about our community. And what better
way to market to your community and create a sense of ownership then by
letting your community members use your brand to celebrate and market themselves.

While you might think this only applies to companies that provide web
2.0 services, companies like YouTube, Flickr and Yahoo, it really
doesn’t.  Helene’s library doesn’t create Web 2.0 applications but it
does use them to help their end customer.  Your company can probably do
the same, and here are a couple of "off the top of my head" ideas to
demonstrate how:

  • A restaurant could use a service like Flickr to have a t-shirt design contest and have customers create design ideas, enable them to show off their designs to friends and family, and prompt them to have their friends and family vote on the design.  It would make for some great word of mouth marketing and announcing the winner would be a natural PR opportunity. 
  • A small company can create its own channel on YouTube
    and have customers submit advertising ideas for your company.  This is
    basically stealing a concept from a few Fortune 500 companies that hosted their own ad contests, and now the evolution of YouTube and like services allows any company, no matter how small, to do the same.  Of course the company should do the same things as they did with the first idea (invite family and friends to view and vote) and it also has built in PR opportunities.

Your first step should be subscribing to LibraryBytes.  Helene knows what she’s talking about.

Cross posted on LowderEnterprises.com

Not Easy to Go on the Lam if You’re This Guy

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DumbconThe guy pictured to the left is a convict in Utah who is accused of killing a corrections officer during an escape attempt.  He was free for a part of one morning, but can you imagine this guy trying to go underground for any amount of time?  I don’t think dying his hair would do much good.

More evidence that this guy is probably a few bricks shy of a full load: he managed to tick off his fellow white supremacists in the prison system so he was being held in a single-bed cell for his own protection.  Even in prison this guy’s gonna stand out so I don’t think he’ll have a real positive incarceration experience.

Lenslinger I Ain’t

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A couple of weeks back the youngest’s little league team won the AA league championship and I actually managed to film most of it for posterity’s sake.  Normally when I film something I promptly forget about it and it falls into the Lowder Film Archive abyss, which houses too many unlabeled tapes to count.  This time I decided that I’d take some initiative and create a little movie to share with the rest of the youngest’s team and in the process I learned a few things.

  1. When you’re filming a sporting event you need lots of tape and batteries.  In an effort to make sure I made it to the end of the game with tape and battery to spare I filmed only the at-bats of both teams, while lots of play in the field went undocumented.  I made it to the end of the game but let’s just say that there wasn’t a lot of context in the final version.
  2. I don’t have the steadiest of hands.  My little Samsung DV-8 was fluttering like a butterfly in the wind.
  3. Digital video chews up a buttload of memory on a computer.
  4. My computer’s processor, which seemed like such a screamer when I confined myself to work related stuff online, was sucking some serious wind by the time I finished my movie project.
  5. Synching video and audio is trickier than you’d think.  My transitions between scenes were a little, uh, stark.
  6. This video stuff is F-U-N.
  7. This video stuff is H-A-R-D.

By the time I was done I had a 35 minute movie that I copied back onto a DV-8 tape and then burned DVD copies on our recorder in the living room.  For whatever reason my computer’s DVD/RW drive won’t copy to DVD-R formatted discs, of which I have a gazillion, so I decided to utilize the recorder attached to the TV while we watched other stuff on Tivo.  I sent a copy of the DVD to the team’s coach to make sure I had all the kids’ names right in the credits and to have him get word out to the rest of the team that the DVD was available IF he thought it was any good.  He emailed me a couple of days later saying he thought it was great and to let me know he was going to email the rest of the team parents so they could contact me directly to request copies.  I’ve since sent out seven copies and I’ve already gotten back one really enthusiastic "thanks" and I have to say it’s about as gratifying as anything I’ve done in a long time.

So I may not be a Lenslinger yet, but I might be looking at a career switch in the near future…nah, it’s too damn hard.

That’d Buy a Lot of Space Rocks or Pinhole Cameras

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When I was a kid my mom signed me up for a couple of Saturday classes at the Smithsonian Institution.  One was a photography class where we made our own pinhole cameras and then traipsed around the Hirshhorn Gallery taking our pictures and then developing them ourselves in a darkroom.  The other was a nature drawing class that taught me how to draw a beaver that looked suspiciously like an elephant (I’ve always preferred the abstract).  The Smithsonian was also the destination for countless school field trips and excursions when friends or family visited from out of town, all for free.  Well the classes weren’t free, but the excursions were.

Now it looks like the guy running the show for the last several years, Lawrence Small, tried his best to ruin the free museum party for everyone (Source: Washington Post).  To wit:

Former Smithsonian secretary Lawrence M. Small took nearly 10 weeks
of vacation a year during seven years running the vast museum complex
and was absent from his job 400 workdays while earning $5.7 million on
outside work, according to an independent commission report to be
released today.

The Smithsonian’s second-ranking official, Sheila
P. Burke, was absent from her job as deputy secretary for 550 days
while earning $10 million over six years on non-museum work…

Small, while taking substantial time off, earned his full salary —
$915,568 his last year on the job — because he was permitted unlimited
leave. Burke, who also had no restrictions on leave, earned $400,000 in
her last year on the job. The terms of Burke’s employment were known in
most instances only to Small and Burke. Information about Burke’s
outside employment and activities on more than a dozen nonprofit boards
and commissions was not shared with the Board of Regents, the report
found.

Small resigned in March and Burke announced her resignation on Monday on the eve of the independent review report.

The
investigators found that "Mr. Small placed too much emphasis on his
compensation and expenses." Small’s compensation far exceeded that of
prior Smithsonian secretaries — 42 percent higher than his
predecessor’s when he began in 2000 and 250 percent higher when he left
seven years later.

Small "aggressively guarded each and every
element of what he viewed as his rightful compensation package,"
including his $150,000-a-year housing allowance. Small’s contract
stated that the allowance was meant to compensate Small for his use of
his home for job-related entertainment, but the review board determined
that it was "simply additional salary."

The Post article goes on to point out that Small’s exhorbidant salary was justified by his stellar fundraising, but the report actually shows that yearly fundraising had fallen during his tenure and some of the biggest fish he was credited with landing were actually landed by his predecessor.  In other words the guy was an overrated bum, and I’m willing to bet all those members of the Smithsonian Associates program are a bit peeved right about now.

Oh the Inanity

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Anyone who has or has had teenagers will learn nothing from this post.  Those of my friends who have little ones who are yet to reach teenager status, take this as a warning.  Here goes: teenagers, or at least teenagers in the middle school age range of 13-15, are as vacuous and disturbingly dense as any being on the face of the planet.  While they never, and I mean never, are at a loss for words they rarely if ever actually SAY anything.  They open their mouths and spew a series of random words that will sometimes form incomplete sentences with the word "like" interspersed between every third word, but they never, ever actually form a verbal paragraph much less a coherent story line. 

When young teenagers speak all parental ears can hear is "blah, blah, blah" until those fateful words "Can I have…" or "I want…" appear and then the parents know to prepare for the inevitable tantrum when their blathering progeny don’t get what they want.  Of course that’s when the kids attempt to put together a cogent argument in support of getting whatever they desire, but because the part of their brain devoted to logic has atrophied due to extended non-use they manage only to put together rambling soliloquies that cause their parents to wonder if perhaps their children are more than a little touched in the head.

I’m told this is a phase that will soon pass only to be replaced by a far more odious phase.  Older and wiser parents have informed me that while young teenagers are infuriatingly inane, they are relatively harmless.  In military terms they are fighting with broomsticks, while apparently in high school they pick up live ammo.  I believe it because it’s dawning on me that these same kids that can talk for hours about some poor girl at school with that hair will be driving in less than two years.  Armed indeed, God help us.

South by Southwest, Winston-Salem

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Celeste and I had dinner with our friends the Ewings last night at South by Southwest on S. Marshall Street in Winston-Salem.
Celeste had the Mesa Verde Grilled Fish soft tacos, which she described
as absolutely delicious.  The fish was finely grilled, moist and
light.  She found it to be a little bland, but once she added some
salsa from our chips appetizer she found it perfect.

I had one of their specials, a  pork tenderloin and pineapple fajita
that was huge (one of the few times in my life I’ve had to ask for a
doggy bag) and extremely tasty.  The pork was moist and tender, the
spices were just right and if anything I could have used about 15 more
soft tortilla to wrap the meat in.  Like I said, it was HUGE.

Entrees range in price from around $11 to $20, the atmosphere is casual
and cozy, and it’s definitely a very relaxing night out.  They open the
doors for their bar at 5:30 and they begin seating for dinner at 6:00,
and are open until 10:00.

Highly recommended if you like New Mexico style  food and are looking
for something thats a step or two above your average Tex-Mex fare.

Google map link.

Cross posted on TriadFamily.com