APS Embraces Social Media. Finally.

I’ve been watching everything the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) social media person has been doing with their social media outreach via their Twitter/blog/Facebook over the last few critical weeks.

I even met the APS social media person at the governor’s press conference to announce the results of the state’s investigation the other day. We set-up media shop next to each other, coincidentally. 

And WOW what an amazing transformation their social media game has undergone! Just in the last two weeks alone.

Suddenly, they are very responsive to the world around them. To their community here in Atlanta. They’re even dabbling in transparency and straight-up honesty too.

The live Tweets from @APSUpdate during a public forum with the new super Davis last week were very candid. And full of helpful and useful information.

• The APS blog is here.
• Facebook here.
• Twitter here.
• YouTube channel here.

What a difference a criminal investigation can make, eh? But the thing about social media, as any serious practitioner can tell you, social media is a garden; it only produces when meticulously tended.

Let’s watch and see. And participate, cultivate, in this transformation too.

Video Blogging The 2010 Georgia General Assembly Session

Some have gone before me. Bloggers venturing forth to blog the Georgia General Assembly (don’t ever call it The Legislature) session at the State Capitol. And gotten themselves in a bit of a sticky wicket for their nondisclosure efforts in the process. (Atlanta political blogger Andre Walker of course comes to mind.) No one has ever gone video blogging down Georgia State Capitol ways. Until now.

I spent last week getting the lay of the land at the Gold Dome. Tagging alongside (trying to keep up is more like it) with veteran political newsman, Tom Baxter. Baxter and I are video blogging for CBSAtlanta, Channel 46, WGCL, a Meredith property.

The special web page they’ve created to house our multimedia materials is Covering The Capitol.  (I do photos too.) And yeah, it’s not real pretty. Not yet. There is the proverbial ways to go.  The video player won’t do right in some browsers. (Although it works fine if you select the videos via the “Videos” tab up top.)

Our videos are sure not real pretty either. Not yet. We’re all on a steep learning curve right now. Like Chloe, I’ve got new software and new gear issues. And also like Chloe, no one is the least bit sympathetic. Maybe if I wish hard enough my Jack Bauer will emerge from the mist, but I ain’t holding my breath on that ever happening. Sometime around the end of the session, mid March or so, I expect we MAY begin to level off of the steep ride up. I hope you bear with us though as we’re offering up loads of unique Georgia political media you simply will not find anywhere else.

My hat’s off, way off, to CBSAtlanta (on Twitter as @CBSAtlanta) for trying new online media things… and for having an open mind with their willingness to let me and Baxter have a go at in-depth political coverage during the course of the 2010 General Assembly session. As I like to say, “be the media you want to see.” That’s CBSAtlanta all over – a true community news outlet.

This is an amazing opportunity for me. To tag along into the Celestine Sibley press gallery, to march along the floors of the stunningly gorgeous State Capitol, meeting and greeting as we go, is infinitely thrilling and fascinating. For instance, after one week I know where the “good” lobbyists hang and where the “bad” ones perch. I know a few new faces and names by now, good and bad and in between ones. I don’t yet know where all the bodies are buried, but rest assured Mr. Baxter does! (The remains to your left live in the Governor’s Capitol press office, BTW.)

I feel like a cub news producer again. A trainee. The new girl. And that’s ok. I am nothing if not adaptable, and our system of government in Georgia, as we face a fiscal crisis such as we’ve never experienced, is having to adapt… like it or not. These are exciting political times for Georgia. Out with the old and in with something new. (At least in theory, right?)

I’m delighted to have a front row seat for the 2010 session to share with you. Tom and I will be using every mobile social media tool we have (before our batteries need re-charging at least) to bring you word and media from our State Capitol. Heck, before the session’s over I hope to have done some live streams and broken at least one very juicy story.

Follow me as SpaceyG on Twitter (I’ll be tagging material as #GALeg there) and follow Tom Baxter as twombax. CBSAtlanta is just that on Twitter, and their special General Assembly page is here. Friend Baxter and me on Facebook. CBSAtlanta is on Facebook here. Watch  CBSAtlanta broadcasts in the mornings, at 4pm, 6pm and 11pm for special broadcasting appearances too by Baxter.

And of course, if you’ve got a great tidbit you’d like me to turn my under-$200 HD camera on be sure to tell all. You know how to get in touch. Hope I see you on the floating marble staircases. Can I get a quick interview if so?!

Atlanta Media Folk on Social Media

What do a few longtime Atlanta media folk have to say about social media? What blogs do they read? How social media savvy ARE they? And what about Twitter? Their answers may surprise you. This has been a WaySouth Media quickie production: waysouthmedia.com

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Atlanta Media Folk on Social Media on…“, posted with vodpod

Amani and SpaceyG Talk Edwards’ Affair and Media

Good Luck With That Olympics Embargo Thing, NBC

Don’t want to wait for NBC’s ridiculously delayed coverage of the Olympics? There are plenty of places to get it now, get it live. The NYTimes Olympics blog has a list of what’s going on here. And Silicon Valley Insider has many tips and tricks on where to get it all live and off the NBC media plantation using the tubes.

“Exclusive” and “embargoed” – two words that need to be retired from the broadcasting milieu with the advent of live Internet streaming.

BONUS FEATURE: The NYTimes also has this nifty Olympics Events Tracker tool you can customize to optimize your many sporting options during The Games.

Rusty’s (New) Blog

Well thank Gawd and Baby Jesus! Rusty Tanton, one of the first bloggers I ever met, and creator of one of the first, possibly THE first, Georgia political blog (Radical Georgia Moderate) I ever read is at it again. This time with Rusty’s Blog, where he will bog about whatever the f he cares to blog about.

I was about in tears when Rusty announced he was shutting down Radical Georgia Moderate, but I got over myself and acknowledged that longterm (lifetime?) blogging takes a toll. Sometimes it’s weary, pointless, defeating, saddening, difficult, crushing and just too compelling and needy on your time and energy. And then, sometimes you simply don’t like the directions and themes of how you were blogging along just fine for several years. You need to make a radical shift in concepts and direction, and thankfully Rusty’s done just that. We will all be better off because of his (continued) good sense and good writing.

Online Living Changing Journalists Lives – And Styles

Journalists are evolving. The Internet is changing them. It’s changing all of us – for better or worse. For instance, I read something somewhere (I’d link you to it but that URL is long lost to Interweb vastness and my personal media overloading) that someone said they had always been a voracious, careful, plodding reader of books, but that now, because of so much of his life lived online, he found his mind wandering all over the place, and all over the narrative and the plot, after a few pages into a book.

I too find it difficult to read an entire book straight through lately, something I used to do all the time, constantly and with little waver, in the best of times and worst of times, from the day I learned to read, back in first grade or so. Reading books, from start to finish, was just the way I, gulp, was.

Then again, it could be that living the life of a multimedia-driven soccer mom just leaves me too exhausted by 10pm to stay-up and read for another hour at least. I hit the bed at night, I’m out like a light. And the lure of fascinating TV coverage, ignited by AC and his band of pundits mostly, in this delightfully fast-paced political primary season, is far too strong for my e-driven mind too to be terribly bothered with books right now.

Anyways, back to the point I was planning on making… journalists are really changing. Everything about them is changing. Read over some of these fascinating comments from the UK’s Guardian:

Riazat Butt says it was Islamophonic – the award-winning podcast about Islamic affairs – that changed the way she thought about the world.

“I very quickly realised what the advantages of working for an online audience are, but there was a time when I thought online journalism wasn’t journalism because they would just read the wires and rewrite it. Now it means more to me to get stories onto the web than in the
paper.

“Internationally there’s a greater appetite for stories, and the other advantage is that people link to you. It’s a great way of promoting your stuff and promoting the Guardian brand as a place for
religious news.

“My rival at the Times, Ruth Gledhill, writes about anything and everything – like her skiing holidays – and she has now got one of the highest rating ‘religion blogs’.

“The greatest example has been through the podcast. We did a pilot and it was so good that we put it straight up. I think the way I treated Islam and Muslim life helped me get a staff job on the paper, because they wanted something more accessible into the paper – not just about theology and all that.”

More here. Fire-up that “religious” podcast, eh?! Or at the very least, if you want to be a serious, paid journalist nowadays, best get down to some serious blogging. I hear it’s what the cool journo-minded kids are all doing.

FYI, a total treasure trove of Georgia-specific podcasts, everything from politics, interviews with politicians, authors, producers, bloggers, culture, lit, southern stuff liked discussions about sweet tea, religion, news, current affairs, southern history, sports, technology, business, music… whew… can be found in two wonderfully homegrown media gardens: South Georgia Attorney Wilson Smith’s What Is Goin’ On? and Amber and Rusty’s, our local Atlanta Internet prom Queen and King, Georgia Podcast Directory. Enjoy!

Should Journalists Be “Allowed” To Have Personal Blogs?

According to Bloggasm blogger, Simon, who conducted a comprehensive survey of 250 editors and publishers (not all of those bothered to respond to SImon’s survey though):

Approximately 44% of newspaper editors and publishers wouldn’t allow their staff writers to maintain personal blogs without prior approval.

Full story here. It’s that word “allow” that is so troubling, isn’t it? Especially in the context of writers and journalists. Take the buyout kiddies. Blog to your heart’s content.

And any journalists out there reading this (and I know who you are), Bloggasm is a terrific blog. With plenty of that precious “credibility.” On top, of course.

Blog To The Death

Blogging – only the strong survive. From today’s NYT:

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Full story here.

Blog Your Boondoggle

Georgia’s Secretary of State, Karen Handel, is blogging her trip to China with Governor Sonny P. Go China! Beat Crush Tibet!

Where Were You While We Were Getting High?

This is just plain meanness, and things are really pathetic on Marietta Street when they make their Pulitzer Prize winners face their “audience” via the crude muck that is the blogosphere. Blogging is simply not for everyone. Anyone who’s spent even an hour blogging could tell you that.

But bureaucrats don’t actually DO things like submerge themselves in cyberspace for a few years to find out, firsthand, what it’s all about. Rather, they just hear they should be “interacting” someplace they personally would never be caught dead at; for example, the Clermont Lounge twenty years ago.

Sign of a perfect bureaucrat? When they have no qualms about making others slum for them. Then everyone on Marietta can pass themselves off as being so “in the know.” Even carrying on like “online leaders.” Careful what you ask for.

The AJC’s bureaucrats, maybe even a Director of Culture and Change, remind me of the evil step-sisters in Cinderella who wish to cram their feet, or Cynthia Tucker’s delicate toes in this particular case, into glass sausage casings, making them appear… obnoxious and ugly.

Leave Cindy T. to her quiet hearth and ashes, for chrissake.

“Real” Reporter At GPB Likely In Total Shock By Now

Get the smellin’ salts, Pork! Oh poor Capelouto… not only are the rogues at Cox Plantation linking to bloggers today, but Atlanta blogger content direct from the Gold Dome (Shelby’s) is, GASP, getting picked-up and distributed by… the Associated Press. Oh how the sky is falling!

[livevideo id=B7F16661FEB548F6B3C46F68250CFE0E/543838/street-team-08-the-democrats.aspx]
Street Team ’08: The Democrats’ right to defend

More Proof Bloggers Will Take Over The World

You gotta love a blogger/programmer who pole dances so beautifully… in her geek glasses even. Women are truly amazing.

CNN Producer Fired For Pimp Rolling

Not exactly. Rather he was fired for blogging, at the Huffington Post of all places, about the recent “pimp as a verb” issue over at MSNBC. (Since the producer didn’t run this one up the management flagpole, it’s going directly to both WTF and Corporate Land catagories.)

CNN spokesmodel says, “We don’t comment on employee matters.” Well hon, we at Mostly Media sure do. Seems MSM just isn’t ready for the verb “pimp.” Another one uses it, then promptly loses it. From TVNewser:

A CNN insider tells TVNewser (CNN’s) Pazienza was let go because, “he did not get permission to publish personal writings.”

Those personal writings come from The Huffington Post, where Pazienza has been blogging since January 23. His most recent post, on February 10, took on the controversy surrounding MSNBC correspondent David Shuster.

Dated February 10, the post was titled “Pimp My Riot: In Defense of David Shuster.” In addition to supporting Shuster, the post also attacks MSNBC where, according to his LinkedIn profile, Pazienza worked from 2001-2003. 

More dirt here. Welcome to the blogosphere, the hard way, Paz!