Upcoming State of Media Forum In Atlanta

On Sept. 15, 2011 I will be speaking on a panel hosted by the marketing division of the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG). This is titled: The State of the Media: Traditional, New Media, and Analyst Panel.

Registration for that panel discussion/breakfast is here. More deets are not yet available. Hope to see  you there!

And I’ll add more deets about the rest of the panel when TAG adds more to their page on this particular panel. They crank through about 5 panels a day, so it seems, at TAG, so updating each one could take a little time. Be patient.

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…

Caroline Kennedy To Save Old Media!

Now that Caroline Kennedy has been cured of her allergy to the Democratic Party, she should certainly be designated Senator from New York just because she feels like it. Think of how a slide show a day of old Kennedy family photos could breath life into old, flagging media plantations!

The never-flagging, trend-setting Huffington Post shows you how it’s done. They’ve likely had 10-trillion hits to their front-and-center slide show already.

In other Kennedy matters, Matt Towery talks about the Kennedy family role in the Obama nomination here. It’s all in his new book, Paranoid Nation. Order your copy by clicking ad to your right. On book store shelves this week too.

Media Culture Clash

Old Media “slow and unresponsive?” Say it isn’t so. From TVNewswer today:

The New York Times’ Brian Stelter writes about former ABC correspondent Amanda Congdon, who has returned to her roots as a video blogger.

In September, Congdon left ABC News after a brief stint with the network.

Now Stelter reports Congdon is moving back to the web. “Congdon, feeling a little burned by big media, is back blogging and hosting and producing,” he writes. “Working with the independent production studio Media Rights Capital, she is reintroducing herself on ‘Sometimes Daily,’ an irregular look at life through Ms. Congdon’s eyes.”

Regarding her time at ABC News, Stelter writes, “She found producers at ABC to be unresponsive to her ideas, calling it a ‘slow and messy process.'”

The ladies of TrueGritz had something to say about Ms. Congdon when she first went to play in the Old Media playground.

New Media Tells Old Media What’s Journalism Now

From Southern Political Report’s Tom Baxter:

Convinced (former Alabama Governor) Siegelman was guilty and ready to move on, they (traditional media) were bailing out of the story just as the new media was beginning to pay attention. Since Siegelman’s conviction, the story has been kept alive on the internet — notably on the blog Horton writes for Harper’s and several spirited, Democratic-leaning Alabama blogs — and in a few of the state’s smaller and alternative newspapers.

At times, the animosity between the two sides of the media divide has equaled that between the two parties in Alabama. Horton has sharply criticized the Birmingham News, the Mobile Press-Register and the Huntsville Times, all former Newhouse papers now owned by Advance Publications, for their coverage.

Bloggers… whatcha gonna do with ’em?. Read more from ’em! All that Alabama dirt Mr. Horton at Harper’s has been digging in is here.