Merging Traditional And Social Mediums To Better Serve An Audience

Photo courtesy Steve Inskeep’s Instagram account: @steve_inskeep.

 

There was a wonderful example of merging-the-mediums storytelling today, 2-4-16, with Steve Inskeep reporting from Tehran, Iran.

First, I got a “publicity” preview and teaser of what Inskeep and his NPR crew were up to in Iran from interesting photos of Tehran’s subway system on Inskeep’s Instagram account. I happen to be particularly intrigued by photos of subway stations and people using them, so the Instagrams caught my attention right away.

Framing his radio story around exploring Tehran’s economic realities on hand, Inskeep wove a fascinating tale of Tehran’s cultural and economic life, and the various divisions of such, through his more traditional radio medium on today’s NPR Morning Edition show. I’m glad I had the visual preview beforehand though, as then I could “go along” with them in a much more visually imaginative way.

I need visual prompts. I’ve never, despite years of work in visual mediums, been all that visually imaginative. I’m a text-oriented person who works (and writes) better with literal prompts and signs and messaging of a more graphical interpretation.

In other words, radio storytelling, especially in a culture and city as intriguing and vital as Tehran, has its limits despite even Inskeep’s mastery of the medium. And he’s nothing if not a visually-minded storyteller and reporter when he’s on the move. Snapping interesting, contextual photos for Instagram (or wherever) clearly was a perfectly natural response to his new geography.

Thus, social media served as a natural enhancement to and for traditional forms of broadcasting. Especially within a place I’ve long been intrigued by and had often heard stories about from relatives who’d lived there ages ago (Shah times). And hope to one day visit myself.

Reporting about a place and a people with an enhanced level of audience comprehension and service can only help forge a stronger, intriguing, and respectful relationship between two cultures.

Tip Your Huge Media Market Giant

A team of reporters from WSB-TV Channel 2 television news was there; someone apparently tipped them off to the arrest beforehand. The station has had exclusive access to the court proceedings since then.

Now I can’t speak to the matter of terrorism-related charges brought on anyone, let alone a Clayton County, Georgia woman who wanted to kill all the whities via YouTube. (Although this particular burden never stops Matthew Charles Cardinale, the editor of Atlanta Progressive News. But he’s in law school now, so off he goes. Go Matthew go.)

I can, however, speak to the stinky little underhanded and exploitative way in which virtually all federal and state-related arrest media straight out of Atlanta (that good ‘n juicy perp-walk stuff) gets handed to market-dominating WSB-TV (Cox Enterprises) alone, on a silver platter, by someone at WSB-TV’s brother who happens to work in federal (or state) law enforcement.

So let’s recap: someone who works in government serves up exploitative tidbits to a single, for-profit entity, Cox Enterprises. Over and over and over again.

This sleight-of-media-hand trick has been going on in the Atlanta media market for decades: exclusive access to media/news-gathering opportunities (those folk in big trouble with the law) which no doubt many other players in this same media market would also love to exploit for their organization’s financial gain.

May be legal, but it ain’t right.

The Craptastic Digital Life Of The AJC

Don’t vote? Then don’t complain about politicians.

No doubt you’ve heard that one before. Exactly why I never miss a voting opportunity, as I sure don’t like missing out on a good political whine.

But the matter of digital at the AJC.com (and other Cox digital products too, but I’ll worry about the others later) has gone beyond whining to just embarrassment at and for our flagship, hometown, news delivery outlet. (I’d call it a paper, but I’m not referencing any print product here. Just the digital stuff.)

I think of gorgeous pictures from the Atlanta Beltline lantern parade last night that could have enticingly filled out a compelling homepage this morning, 9-7-14, shifting to exciting sports-related photos later in the day to enhance the Falcons’ season opener, alongside the numerous political stories from the week in some kind of overview wrap-up. And, yes, even that craptastic Ross Harris (the dad accused of murder-by-hot-car) story somewhere in an appealing homepage-in-my-head Sunday edition presentation… and well, I just wanna cry for what could be AJC.com. And WSB-TV.com too. (They should be one e-product really, but that’s another rant altogether.)

When you don’t give a shit about digital, guess what? It shows! “Coming Sunday” on Sunday, plus all the cliched copy and grade school headlining imaginable? Gawd, today’s AJC digital product is so pitiful I wouldn’t dream of sharing it with my social network; I’d rather bury it out behind the woodshed.

My head is reeling, because the hard-working journalists, the few left around there, the proud, have done plenty of heavy journalistic lifting all through the past week, especially regarding the nasty level of corruption all through Georgia state and local politics. There’s been great work from numerous Cox employees reporting a massive amount of hanky panky straight out of DeKalb County, our bustling courtrooms, the AG’s and the governor’s offices, etc.

Only to piss it away on digi-crap you see a sample of in the above picture/screen grab. And on a Sunday too, the prime news reading and media consuming day for a serious journalism audience. And I’m not even highlighting their hideous homepage, whatever’s there, or not, now. Nor the online AJC’s rampant level of daily copyediting (or lack thereof) boo-boos. I’m scared to go back to their weekend-neglected homepage.

Since I gave-up on the AJC’s digital presentation with my croissant, second cup, and screens this morning, I thought about buying the paper product with which to properly absorb the Georgia political and otherwise news of a busy past week.

Not now. I’ll just put my $2.50 towards a NYT and call it a Sunday.

Local Data Mining: Where No Georgia Press Dare Go

Investigative tech reporting in Georgia is non-existent. Other than cheerleading, Chamber-type stuff from the Atlanta Business Chronicle. There are startups incubated at Georgia Tech in the for-profit business of scraping data from social media sites, and then selling it back to organizations and business people, particularly folk in law enforcement. What’s commonly called “enterprise data mining.”

I know this because one company tried to sell me their lovely dashboard thingee. To which I replied, in a business-like manner of course at the meeting, “No thanks, I roll my own.”

Georgia law enforcement stores (years of) data scraped and mined from the general (presumed innocent) public, via such technology as license tag scanning. Lord knows what they then do with such data, and where (NSA?) they then feed that data, and the associated metadata, on to.

The head of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Vernon Keenan, announced that factoid, rather proudly, to a room full of journalists at the Atlanta Press Club this summer. Not a single follow-up story on that matter, at least any I’m aware of. Not one.

Hasn’t the data-mining dilemma revealed by Glenn Greenwald piqued the slightest bit of interest on local angles to the dilemma just a little bit amongst Georgia press leadership? Seems not.

Come on MSM in Georgia. Do better.

Loose DeKalb Lips Make Waves (Of Oppression) For AJC

Ahoy! Botched metaphor. I know.

Loose lips might sink ships, circa 1942, but they never torpedoed any ships of journalism. To the contrary. Lip flappers, whistleblowers, gossips and media whores power and embolden entire journalism empires, causing ships to rise off of copy tides. Just look at the numbers for the Guardian empire lately. Off the charts!

Over in less high profile seas, say here down South, in today’s 1-minute news cycle there really is no such thing as a genuine “scoop” brought about by wildly exclusive information. Except when there (rarely) is, of course.

But don’t tell that to the powers-that-be at the AJC, as they’re lashing any remaining, hardworking reporter-bees left on their deck to the mast and thrashing them mightily, as punishment for having failed to sight enough scoops in their cruddy little scopes.

Two independent sources have now told me how Atlanta Journal & Constitution reporters, good ones, are being “written up” (or threatened with some type of disciplinary action) for failing to bring home the bacon fast enough. Failing to reel in genuine news “scoops.”

(“Scoops” being 100% exclusive 411 about specific, non-public events – but before the event occurs, allowing for a news organization to be first out of the gate on disseminating word of that particular news situation; to “own the story” in other words, something that’s increasingly hard to do in our hyper-connected world unless Edward Snowden or Julian Assange just happens to waltz by your office and dump raw intel on your desk. And “written up” being a documented threat by one’s superior to take away one’s job, rank, authority, paycheck and/or general livelihood should you, the super’s underling, not perform in some sort of, subjectively, better manner.)

Mark Winne at WSB-TV, for example, often gets genuine scoops about soon-to-be-made arrests by various Georgia law enforcement, and is thus frequently the first and only reporter in place for that classic, high-value video, law enforcement-enhancing moment – ye olde perp walk.

Of course it’s one of those open secrets in Atlanta old media circles that Winne’s brother is an FBI or GBI agent (I forget which agency) who tips his family member, Mark, off to lots of special events soon to happen. If that’s the case, they’ve had a lock on a good-visuals franchise for years now, and will continue at that game for as long as the gig works, I suppose.

Exploitation of Georgia’s Children In Reality TV Programming

After telling the officers in Douglas County, GA that she’s a gangbanger, Deja’neke continues the jail tour in shackles. Photo courtesy of AETV.

Shame on Douglas County, Georgia. Shame on Disney (A&E’s parent company) for supporting and funding (but mostly exploiting Georgia’s children), for profit, the production and broadcasting of the reality show Beyond Scared Straight on A&E.

The episode airing tonight, Thursday July 25, 2013, on A&E’s Beyond Scared Straight at 9pm features a juvenile reform program in Douglas County, Georgia that was created and implemented using tactics and practices of fear, violence and intimidation.

Of such tactics, Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University’s Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, has this to say in an editorial:

They (academics studying conflict management) can tell you a few things about how violence begets violence and why piling trauma on kids who have suffered trauma their whole lives is not such a smart approach. Ever hear of programs like restorative justice?

Governor Nathan Deal should weigh-in on this media matter, as he has spoken out recently on matters of criminal (and juvenile) justice reform in Georgia, and he, Deal, fully supports reforming Georgia’s juvenile justice system.

However, this exploitative show features a method of “reform” that is not only dangerous, cruel and unusual, but has been demonstrated to be grossly ineffective; thus significantly undermining the effort, and new legislative mandate too, to legitimately and wisely reform our system of juvenile justice here in Georgia.

Georgia Politics Continue To Inspire Georgia Media To Heights Of Status Quo

I am concerned about Michelle Nunn’s campaign for U.S. Senate already. And not because of her qualifications as a candidate to represent us here in Georgia. (Those seem just fine. Far better than most, come to think about it.)

But rather, what concerns …me is that, IN LESS THAN 24 HOURS, this candidate for U.S. Senate has already done two Georgia media-related things that annoy me something awful:

1.) Given Karen Handel yet another reason to NOT shut up and go away.

2.) Inspired Georgia’s usual-suspects-posse of mostly white male political writers to even greater heights of their predictable copy/keyboard pounding.

Perhaps my favorite example, thus far, is the AJC’s Jim Galloway attempting some Pat Conroy-like (gooey) prose in his “exclusive” interview with candidate Nunn, whilst sitting at Thumbs Up diner, of all non-interesting settings to announce one’s senatorial aspirations:

… a last name that bespeaks Georgia centrism.

Wake me up when anyone in Georgia political media ever does anything remotely innovative, disruptive, or interesting.

Google Glass — Can I Get A Witness?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Don’t get me wrong, I can’t stand gardening. But the first thing that came to mind when I put on Google Glass was my mother’s organic garden.

You won’t catch me outside in broiling 98-degree southern humidity struggling to hack through a dense, painfully stinging row of okra, or pulling nasty, squirming wormy things off dozens of tomato bushes. No siree! But you will catch my mother doing that crazy stuff. For hours on end, day after day, week after week, throughout the south’s high summer months.

That said, if you can get past the oppressive heat and humidity there really is no more verdant and glorious vision of bounty, robust health and natural beauty than a southern organic garden at its summer harvesting peak.

Thus the thought of me strolling, beatifically wired, through rows of an organic garden in full, wearing a pair of Glass with my mother narrating the purvey and provenance of every lush plant and vegetable, set my pan-media-tuned mind into high and sunny gear.

Who wouldn’t want to document and share that kind of rich media in our connected world? To be fresh content-enabled, breezily so, by merely putting on glasses, something I’ve done every day since I was 7-years old anyway.

One of the great things about living near the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech, of course) is participating in some of the innovations and events churned from there. Whether beta testing products in development, networking, attending concerts or lectures, there’s a wealth of experience and knowledge available to the university’s surrounding community, so last night (July 11) I hopped over to nearby startup nurturer, Flashpoint on West Peachtree Street.

There, Randy J. Mitchell, the founder and CEO of Plisten, along with Google and Hypepotamus, hosted a meetup for Google Glass developers and designers. My friend/mentor and sometime colleague, veteran political reporter Tom Baxter, who’s always up for some new media-creation adventures, tagged along too.

Is Facebook The Right Forum For Asking About Victims’ Names?

UPDATE: The victims of the Alaska plane crash have since been identified in an updated story in the Post and Courier. With attribution of the names given to The State newspaper.

This Facebook post from Charleston, S.C.’s Post and Courier newspaper is an interesting news-and-social-in-real-time case to keep an eye on. As the S.C. newspaper doesn’t yet know the names of the (presumed) South Carolinians who are victims of a plane crash in Alaska. Thus the paper asked for possible names (of victims) in a Facebook post.

Do you know anyone who might have been on this flight? Nine South Carolina residents were killed in a fiery crash at a small Alaska airport Sunday: http://bit.ly/12TpJw6. The pilot also died in the crash. There were no survivors. The plane caught on fire shortly after 11 a.m. Sunday at the airport in Soldotna, about 75 miles southwest of Anchorage on the Kenai Peninsula. Initial reports indicate the plane crashed on takeoff.

Thus far, there are many “Likes” to a comment posted alongside the Post & Courier’s  Facebook request that to place names on Facebook before any family were notified would be “tasteless.”

If I put on my journalist’s hat I see Facebook as simply another tool of the (news-gathering) trade. I don’t see anything too reprehensible about asking for names of possible victims in a Facebook post.

Do you? (We don’t really know, yet, if family members of the victims have been contacted, or not, at this point. We must assume they have not as, according to the Post & Courier, the identification of all the crash victims could take some time.)

Wave Your Magic Media Legitimizing Wand

I sleep like a baby at night, knowing I always bust MY butt to be the best illegitimate media source I can be. And there are plenty of others in Atlanta/Georgia who go at their illegitimate media efforts like bunnies, too.

Recent good examples are Todd Rehm at Peach Pundit and Matthew Cardinale at Atlanta Progressive News. Heck, Cardinale takes illegitimate media to a whole new magical level; suing the crap outta the Atlanta City Council for violating Open Meetings/Open Records law. And winning too.

I don’t want to re-cap that long and very winding issue right here. The Daily Report, Atlanta’s legal community daily, just did a good cover story on the messy matter of Mr. Cardinale. Alas, they’re big honkin’ capitalist pigs over there at the Daily Report, and they lock-up their legitimate media behind a firewall. New media curses on them.

Of course anyone with an Internet connection and a Facebook account has already copied and pasted the Daily Report’s story about Matthew Cardinale, and is merrily circulating it that way amongst Atlanta’s media and political cognoscenti. I’ll leave you on your own to find your, er, unique way to it.

But Peach Pundit, for a bunch of boisterous, loud conservatives (with fun, boozy happy hours too!), is very good at keeping information free and flowing to us lowly masses. So there’s an ongoing updating of the Atlanta City Council open meetings/records saga there. Seek away.

And please… do your part. Always be the illegitimate media YOU wish to see. You never know who will be the one to legitimize you with their magic, media-legitimizing wand.

I know I stash several, top shelf Media Legitimizers around my palace. Now if I could just figure-out where I put the damn things…

How Does An Atlanta Fox News Affiliate Cover Murdochgate?

Very quietly, that’s how.

After seeing some stuff in The Atlantic and on CNN (what’s a 10-foot turban?) about how Fox News/News Corp’s many American media outlets are being very quiet, ok almost silent, on the parental company’s, News Corp’s, Murdochgate scandal raging overseas, I got curious. (Every now and then curiosity will happen. Even to me.)

What kind of internal memos are being issued (and I’m almost certain there are memos being blasted out) across Fox News/News Corp’s vast American media farms right now on just how to cover (or not) Murdochgate stateside?

Being that one’s backyard is always a great place to start, and up to this point no one has fowarded me any internal communiques, I checked-in with the Fox News affiliate here in Atlanta, Fox 5 Atlanta. Or just plain WAGA, as us longtimers still call our TV news stations.

I found a few links on the My Fox Five (hey, it’s mine, so let me see what’s going on inside) website’s International section, the latest being a scrubbed-up piece about the Murdochs now agreeing to testify in the British Parliament. But that was about it. Anyone heard anything on their broadcast product? If so, let me know in the comments here. I could have easily missed it.

Creative Loafing used to, moreorless, be on the e-blast list every time Julia Wallace issued one of her now-infamous memes to the AJC staff about how great they all were but they were getting the ax. And thus I (we) could tune-in to Cox Plantation internal maneuvers that way.

But that, er, two-way street isn’t quite as wide open in Fox News/News Corp Land – Atlanta. So I gotta get out a machete and hack around a bit. Make phone calls and stuff.

As of 2:45pm I called the VP of News at WAGA and got that person on the phone, and, once I explained that, yes, I guess you could call me a reporter, although I’d rather be called a blogger, I asked if reporting *guidelines* on Murdoch and co. were being circulated there on Briarcliff Road.

I was politely referred to, conveniently with name and contact number, the Fox News corporate PR person in NYC. A Claudia Russo, a familiar name actually, although I can’t place where I’ve come across it. Likely Mediaite or some other TV news blog. Or maybe she used to be with GMA? Every time I can’t place a name in corporate news I assume they worked for GMA – a people-churner if there ever was, but I diverge.

I put in a call to Ms. Russo, left a message, and never expected to hear back from her. Ever. But, get this, I just did. Russo referred me… on down the line. Sigh.

Will keep at this little endeavor in media bureaucracy and let you know what I come up with. But should I ever get someting, and that’s doubtful, you’ll get it first and faster on Twitter. Of course.

Or someone with My Fox Five Atlanta WAGA Whatever could just forward me any internal memos! I promise not to tell where I got ’em from.

Until then…

Under The APS Investigation Atlanta Media Circus Tent

As I’ve died and gone to Atlanta media circus heaven lately it’s been hard to break away to play ringmaster by providing the necessary, critical blog posts. Facebooking and Twitter alone are about to do me in.

Honestly, I’ve been having too much fun sitting back with my peanuts and cotton candy watching from here in the cheap seats. But someone’s gotta play local TV news farm media critic in this town, other than @RichardsDoug; and there is, of course, no one better qualified to do so than me.

Thus, let me take a moment to pry open the laptop and reflect on just last night’s Atlanta local TV media hightlights and lowlights before I go back in for more. (Thank goodness for that new, 4-5pm block from Channel 2, eh?)

Last night WSB-TV, or WizBee or Death Star Two as it’s called in the biz around here, was on disjointed fire! When they open a 6pm with longtime, hysterical crime reporter Mark Winne (his Facebook fan page is here) rest assured we’re going to be served drama.

The local TV news station that can’t do ’em some news drama, in a city as ragingly dysfunctional as Atlanta, is just dead to me. Otherwise, why bother to exist? Anyway… getting to the point.

Winne led-off with pretty good shrieking over the hilariously mule-headed refusals by a few implicated (now kinda sorta fired) APS school administrators to… go down without a public fight. I think they were bellowing for a publicized *hearing*, whatever the heck that is. Good luck with that tall order.

The best part was a replay of Winne grilling, weeks ago, one of the most mule-headed APS admins fingered in the whole royal cheating mess, Tamara Cotman.

Low and behold, Cotman was, once again, right up in our living rooms. Still looking slouched down and bloated from all the investigatory stress and educator cake she’s been consuming over the years, defensive and sliding down a slippery conference room leather chair slope of no-where-else-to-go prayer.

Cotman was posed in the classic ATL local TV media perp tableau – lawyer on one side, Mark Winne leaning in with a question on the other. Talk about media places you never want to be seen in this town.

Bless her tired, stressed, cake-laden heart. I almost felt sorry for her, as, so far, Jesus has yet to come to her emotional or otherwise rescue. Maybe next year. Keep those prayers and cards and letter coming, Atlanta!

I Spy Scandals In ATL Media

There are two lovely, slaphappy, public office-related messes playing-out right now in Atlanta you won’t want to miss a moment of: the APS cheating scandal and Governor Deal’s trail of dubious dealings.

Thing is, the media attentions applied to both situations are so random and all-over-the-place it’s like Dick Cheney on a quail hunt; you never know where the shots are coming from, nor what they’re going to hit.

There is no clearinghouse of information, so you’re bound to miss something… if you’re not paying close attention.

Investigative journalism is an odd bird. Although news farms like to say they get their content from some pristine well of hard work, that’s not really the case.

Most get their news from the other news farm down the street. And most scandals erupt because people are gossipy tattletales and can’t keep a secret.

And sometimes people will even tell a journalist if they’re a hardcore whistleblower with stuff like paperwork to flaunt, and not just your common trash-talker over at Manuel’s.

But ultimately, it’s up to a near-solo, working journalist to keep the fires of an investigative situation burning… with loads of  seasoned skepticism and doubt mixed-in with better-than-yours sources.

Says longtime, Atlanta investigative reporter, Jim Walls of Atlanta Unfiltered and the AJC :

The trick is to know your topic thoroughly, keep asking questions when things don’t add up, and sometimes even when they seem to. Focus on what people have done, not what they say they’ve done. And do not assume that the most likely explanation is correct, or at least 100% correct. There are nuances to everything.

The Tooting of the Atlanta and Georgia Journalism Horns

Many heartfelt congrats to my Faceboook friends who won awards for their reporting last night at the The Atlanta Press Club’s annual Awards in Excellence.

Including: Dale Russell for being Dale Russell and just so gosh darn Dale Russell-y. (And other things, of course.) Jim Burress for Best Radio Reporter/Eagle bar raid reporting. Alan Judd and his AJC colleague, Heather Vogell, won Journos ‘O Year (2010) for their (ongoing, eh?) reporting on the APS cheating scandal.

Thomas Wheatley was nominated in Best Online/Multimedia reporting, and should have won for his constant gardening over at the terrific Fresh Loaf blog, but whatever. He was far more gracious about some other person winning than I was, on his behalf.

I was delighted to meet newer FB and Twitter pals face-to-face for the first time too, such as Mr. Burress and Mr. Charles Edwards, both of WABE radio here in the ATL. And the innovative and interesting Ms. Orit Sklar.

Journalism is alive and well in the ATL. But there is no Men’s Warehouse kinda guarantee that it will stay that way forever. Or even through next week.

A bad editor could pull a great reporter off of a key beat. The elderly people in the biz might continue to ignore innovations in journalism-related technology. The recession could continue for decades. The AJC could add more layers of dopey bureaucracy, with their finger on the pulse of, for example, just Walton County.

We must support the troops out there in the fields. Lordy knows there’s enough muck to rake through in this town to keep the journalism industry here flourishing… with our support. Do what you can.

That is all. Back to work. Complete list of winners on Facebook here.

The Great Atlanta Media Leap Forward

We’ve got a lot of, er, *transitioning* ahead of us in Atlanta. We can read between the lines, here in this greatest of Southern cities, and understand what the underlying code is there. And yeah, if we weren’t so darn cowardly about those matters we could have an open conversation about the City of Atlanta *transitioning*, but I don’t think we’re quite ready for that yet.

Anyways… that’s off-topic, as what I’d like to point-out today is the great effort by 11AliveNews, or what we used to just call WXIA, to live-stream the critical Atlanta Public Schools (APS) board meeting for the community yesterday, January 24, 2011. The meeting whereby board members were first chastised by an outside accreditation group, not for the elephant that remains in the room (CRCT cheating), but for *infighting* issues among board members.

Whatever. The board was soundly scolded, given a deadline and loads of impenetrable rules to waste a lot of meeting time trying to follow. Then some local politicians got up to say their, rather futile, piece. Get their crucial face-time in.

And then the board did what we all knew they were going to have to do to move their game piece forward – voted to adopt the SACS recommendations to fend-off loss of accreditation.

Chris Sweigart, the all-things-online dude at WXIA, a Gannett station, grabbed his laptop and treated the Atlanta (and beyond) online community to open air and sunshine – via a live-stream of the APS board meeting. So the stream suffered from low audio and a dubious 3G connection. Nonetheless it let us play along at home. Kinda like we were the first village to have a scratchy broadcast from a new, magical device. And everyone gathered around to listen carefully to an important  live event.

The thing about Internet live-streaming is that pretty much anyone can do it. You need an Internet connection and a smart phone with the right (free) app. That’s it. And you’re off and running. Politicians could do it. PTA moms could do it. Third graders could do it. Community agitators could do it. Facebook Group enthusiasts could do it. But people don’t do it as much as we should.

And of course our various interest groups and stakeholders are so laughably hell-bent on public lip-flapping and having their turn at a podium and getting their egos stroked that they rarely, if ever, take time to understand that technology has enabled a world of blazingly bright sunshine on our public and governmental and community proceedings and processes.

Reporters are so deep in not missing a word as they type or write down the proceedings they seem blissfully unaware, in a press box, of technological advances that most third graders could set-up and distribute on a playground social network. Who knows where their media bosses are in all these new technologies. (I don’t want to even get an answer to that, given that I still hear horror stories of executives who require an entire secretarial pool simply to print out their own damn emails.)

The fact of the matter is that the community can watch and listen live, to whatever, and come to their own understandings and conclusions. When we do, we hardly need to have what we’ve already been subjected to parroted back to us in all the usual, traditional media ways. For instance, in that increasingly obsolete TUNE-IN WAY LATER IN THE DAY!, tease-oriented TV/radio media environment. Been there; done that. Why tune-in later?!

It’s not that it’s not well parroted back later at some other point in time. It’s just that waking-up to, for example, an excellent WABE report on an APS board meeting you paid careful attention to as it played-out, comprehensively in real time, becomes untimely and somewhat redundant.

Again, I can’t stress enough how what I point out is hardly a condemnation of quality journalism capability. WABE has that in spades when it comes to covering APS matters. Yet to ignore and not even begin to put one’s quality journalistic efforts and deep experience more to the matter of real time, live eventing, and how technology is evolving there, is ignoring the media elephant in the room – the real time, technological capability of the citizen. Or let’s call it *the audience* – that elusive entity always being chased after, especially in memos from suits in Dunwoody-based offices.

Perhaps it is there (live-streams, not Dunwoody) where more of our very capable journalism efforts should be directed. For example, Chris Sweigart had a hard time keeping his live-stream going and answering the many questions his audience (me) had regarding the who, what, why and where of what was playing-out on our laptops back at the coffee shop or airport or Dubai for that matter.

Live-streaming always has some techno glitch that needs attention. All the while, editorial attentions must be paid too. That’s where good journalism comes into play. Citizens may have a smart phone, a Ustream.tv app and a wi-fi connection, but they may not have the journalism experience to go along with their gee-wiz techno toys. It thus becomes a matter of improved multitasking.

The Atlanta media outlet that finds a way to combine more local, community-based, comprehensive live-streams with some ace journalism is the one that can give that precious, all-important, techno-advanced *audience* what they really really want. And that news outlet will take a great leap forward for Atlanta pan-media in the process. I know who I’m keeping my eye on.

Amani Channel Post-Morts The CBS46 Blogger Summit on 7-20-09

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about ““, posted with vodpod

Interview with Help A Reporter Out’s Peter Shankman

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “MUR Interview: HARO’s Peter Shankman“, posted with vodpod

Local TV News Directors Speak to the Atlanta Press Club

Local TV News Directors Ellen Crooke, WXIA; Budd McEntee, WAGA; Marian Pittman, WSB and Steve Schwaid, WGCL spoke at an Atlanta Press Club Newsmaker Luncheon on June 9, 2009.

Emory Student Gives Journalist Her Facebook Login Info

While it’s ugly and disgraceful that Atlanta’s Emory University has been the scene of on-campus incidents of obvious intolerance between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students, what’s almost as distasteful is the thought of giving a journalist, of any stripe, one’s user ID and password info to one’s personal Facebook account –  just to prove a point.

But this Emory student felt compelled to do just that for Atlanta Progressive News:

Saba Khalid, 20, a junior at Emory and an activist, told Atlanta Progressive News she believes she knows who three out of four of the perpetrators are, and that they include student leaders of pro-Israeli groups at Emory.

Atlanta Progressive News obtained copies of Facebook messages between Khalid and another Emory student, Eddy Goldfarb, which appear to show Goldfarb implying that he was involved in the incident and saying he knows the identity of all the participants.

After receiving the copies of the messages, APN confirmed their authenticity by obtaining the password to Khalid’s Facebook account from Khalid, logging in to Khalid’s account, and verifying the conversation in Khalid’s inbox. With Khalid’s permission, APN also reviewed what appeared to be, by all indications, Mr. Goldfarb’s public Facebook page.

Full story here.

When We SHOULD Blame It On The Media

When a comedy show rant can do what the collective wisdom of MSM “journalism” can’t seem to. From Philly.com:

The Stewart piece also got the kind of eyeballs that most newsrooms would kill for in this digital age — planted atop many, many major political, media and business Web sites — and the kind of water-cooler chatter that journalists would crave in any age. In a time when newspapers are flat-out dying if not dealing with bankruptcy or massive job losses, while other types of news orgs aren’t faring much better, the journalistic success of a comedy show rant shouldn’t be viewed as a stick in the eye — but a teachable moment. Why be a curmudgeon about kids today getting all their news from a comedy show, when it’s not really that hard to join Stewart in his own idol-smashing game.

Full post here. I used to think no one was trying to kill journalism, just the obsolete delivery platform called newspapers. Now I’m not so sure. Could be that Old Journalism needs to wither on the vine alongside their precious newspapers too? Hmmmm…