City of Atlanta Malaise

Mayor Reed, at his speech to the Atlanta Press Club last week, Monday January 31, 2011, said there was a *pall* over Atlanta. And that we citizens needed to snap out of it. And think big. Look to pie-in-the-sky dreaming and shiny, glory-ridden kinds of projects to get us over our dark funk. Something along the lines of the Olympic games! Remember those? I hardly do.

The thing about living in COA (City of Atlanta, and I have for over 20 years now) is that it is a city mired in deep, determined, and wearisome bureaucracy. It’s hard to be cheerful, hopeful, have fun and think big when you’re beaten down from years and years of battling bureaucracy, over and over and over again, just for the most simple of services and responses.

My small Home Owners Association (HOA), for example, is beaten down financially with the weight of the extreme water bills we’ve had to pay for almost two years now. I tried, to no avail, to get help from my city council person, with literally reams of documentation sent to that office on this matter. To no avail. I was told we had no problem, and that all was fine. This was over a year ago. We now know there were some extreme problems at the Watershed Dept.

At the time, over a year ago, I went to the Dept. of Watershed management personally. To no avail. I’ve called and emailed, over and over again, assorted local news media personnel. To no avail, despite their numerous media attentions to the matter of city water bills.

And that’s just one department! Every department is a struggle in futility. Just getting a new Herbie Curbie from the city takes a monumental effort of citizen resolve and determination. Just finding an email or a phone number for an APD community contact is a struggle. How many times have we all been put on hold when calling 9-11? And we’ve all heard the horror stories of trying to get a building permit from COA.

After years of doing battle with the bureaucracy that is City of Atlanta, I feel worn down and wiped out. I feel that *pall* Mayor Reed talks about, in my spirit… at the thought of having to do anything that involves City of Atlanta. I think often about about moving out of City of Atlanta now, something I never used to do.

Mayor Reed’s administration seems to be energized to try to break through some of our crippling bureaucracy. I just hope our crippling *pall* doesn’t get to them too. We residents are about as low as we can already go.

We’re looking to Mayor Reed to talk us back up to a point where we can even CONSIDER calling downtown for a new Herbie Curbie, let alone start thinking, with any hope of renewed energies, of anything big and futuristic and hopeful for this city.

UPDATE: As I wrote this editorial, CBS-Atlanta was working-up a classic, un-sexy example of the daily bureaucrat struggles of just one intown Atlanta neighborhood… to add a traffic light or not. See their news package here. This neighborhood had to beat a very loud drum just to get the city to meet with residents and solicit their input over this critical matter. It is also critical that we have local media support by independent news outlets such as CBS-Atlanta to get City of Atlanta officials to just return a phone call or read an email from a resident. Fortunately, CBS-Atlanta is always responsive to residents’ concerns. Always.

What Would You Pay To Go Full Multimedia?

I recently completed a 4-month long project during the course of the Georgia General Assembly’s 2010 session; from opening day to Sine Die (last day)… give or take a week or two off here and there when the legislators had to excuse themselves to, like, go figure stuff out.

This online video project was taken on with veteran southern politics newsman, Tom Baxter, at the behest of CBS-Atlanta, WGCL. You can review some of the 30 videos created and promoted here.

CBS-Atlanta had no designated political reporter at the onset of the project, that began in January of 2010. They needed to supplement their broadcast product with targeted, specialized online media. Not more “Tough Questions” ambush-style product (Saltzman is perfectly capable of THAT gig all by her scowling self), but with more feature-type of media offerings from a seasoned reporter who understands Georgia politics.

Baxter delivered the goods. At times it seemed as if there wasn’t a single person, of the daily hordes walking up the gorgeous marble staircases of the State Capitol, that he didn’t have a full bio on… stored in his usually-in-need-of-combing head. In four months of activity, I saw only one politician refuse an interview request with Baxter, and that was a pol who had just been demoted by the House Majority (or Senate, I forget) leadership, so the pol had to go off and lick his wounds, thus brushing-off Mr. B. in his haste to process all that new-bad karma.

So well regarded was Mr. B in the long history of work he’s done in southern political (print) journalism that powerful people seek him out to have a moment with him. Hell, the dude could just stand in the hall with a mic turned on (as I rolled media card) and every single person in the Capitol would come by to say their piece – and be delighted to be doing so. It makes ’em feel special.

Baxter doesn’t deal in rumor and innuendo. Nor commando-style microphone shoving into faces whilst yelling ridiculous questions. All you’re ever going to get from a bizarre method like that is decades of resentment. You’re certainly not going to forge relationships. More like you’re just banishing yourself into the political wilderness, for no apparent reason, where you’ll be left alone with no one to go on the record for you when you might need them, say ten years down the road of your mutual careers in politics and/or journalism.

That or either you’re in it for your personal careerism, perhaps thinking you are getting yourself off to that mythical place that no longer exists called “the networks.” Like anyone wants to go THERE nowadays. It’d would be the journalistic equivalent of being shipped to Siberia if you ask me, which of course no one did.

Politics is local. Anything you do at the national level is just pack mentality pointlessness of rote meme recitation to mass media consuming drones. For a bigger paycheck and a whopping mortgage in Arlington, VA, with Ivy League to pay out the ass for bratty kids who should be sent to community college anyway.

For the most part, other than a wild flame-out or two here and there, politics is a long haul endeavor. And if you don’t cover it with that in mind you’ll get nothing. Nada. (Just ask Dale Russell.) If you don’t ask nicely, you’ve just made yourself a career-long enemy… if you are young, unwise, and think that is how news must be churned – with impolite, disrespectful behaviors as a motivator. And you can go back to your newsroom and call it news if you wish. Or a report. But trust me, it will not be journalism.

Baxter is a genuine journalist. The news he writes and the stories he tells come from the people in power and elsewhere who are willing to go on the record and talk openly and with transparency about the political process. And there are never just two sides of a story. Rather, especially in politics, it’s more like there are 10-15 sides of a story. Baxter lets ’em all whisper their various POVs in his ear, weighs all the chatter with his years of experience in the game, and then he writes. Or in our multimedia case, talks out perfectly crafted sentences off the top of his head – no script, no rehearsal. Dude was a born TV broadcaster and never knew it!

Anyway… getting to the point of this blog post, which was supposed to be about money and budgets, but if you’re going to entertain a thought towards southern politics Baxter will get your attentions. So, on to the point… here’s the gear list and pricing (retail) for what amounted to a series, an archive really, of about 30 videos. 30 videos,  most in the 3-minute range, that incorporate what will be Georgia’s 2010 political history. And yes, I wish news orgs would see themselves more as archivists and librarians who also exist to serve the greater historical good, but that’s a whole other discussion, eh?

• Camera, Kodak Zi8: $170. on sale at Target
• Tripod, some cheap crap off of eBay – $30. (will not last longer than a few weeks without breaking, but if you’re going cheap you work with what you got, right?)
• 8-gig memory card – about $40.
• Adobe Premier editing software package – about $100.
• Audio-Technica Pro 24 external mic – $100.

So there. For under $500. you too can get yourself a multimedia broadcast production facility. Moreorless. Of course that’s just the gear. You must then determine just how much time and cost you are going to invest in your multimedia online endeavor. What is worth the multimedia online treatment in your shop? And what is it worth to you in this social media, online world we’re all creating and growing day by day?

You tell me. Or better yet… let WaySouth Media tell you.

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

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I Went To An Atlanta Local News Station And All I Got Was This Flip Cam

In all fairness, I also got a tee shirt when I went to the CBS46 “Blogger Summit.” And a nice highlighter pen thingee in the goodie bag, in addition to the Flip cams CBS6 news director Steve Schwaid and co. handed out to the 25 or so assembled Atlanta blogerati who filled up an empty studio with pizza and some lively chatter about community, social networks, and what bloggers can and cannot add to the broadcasting milieu on July 20, 2009.

Come to think about it, CBS46, or WGCL, did a remarkable thing this evening – they invited Atlanta bloggers and social media utilizers from the metro area into their station to talk about, er, stuff. I can’t say this has ever happened before in Atlanta – the MSM reaching out in such a way, other than that one ill-fated meeting at WSB-TV a couple of years ago, but that meeting was so pointless and futile it’s not really worth mentioning so I’ll leave it at “ill-fated.”

I admire their chutzpah at WGCL if nothing else. It may be a case of nothing left to lose so why not go for broke? But to widen the net towards taking seriously Atlanta’s numerous community content providers seems like a reasonable, if not likely highly lucrative, approach.

The chit chat at CBS46 was brisk and spicy, as was the A-listing of some of Atlanta’s longtime, well-regarded bloggers who showed. Spotted in the crowd were Blog For Democracy’s co-founders Catherine Smith and Melanie Goux, Peach Pundit’s Buzz Brockway, Dan Greenfield of BernaiseSource, Amani Channel of My Urban Report, Rusty Tanton of Georgia Podcast Network, Tessa Horehled of Drive A Faster Car, and Doug Richards of Live Apartment Fire.

(Oddly enough, as CBS46 isn’t a Cox Plantation property, a couple of reporter/bloggers from the Cox Plantation Big House showed too, but I’m not sure why they were there as they never said a word. Go figure. Your guess is as good as mine.)

CBS46 wasn’t too coy about why they wanted us bloggers and SM users there. They wanted us bloggers and citizen journalists and writers and marketeers and promoters there to ask us to provide content. For free. To them. (Thus the handing out of the Flip cams.)

And that’s ok. I didn’t think we were invited in to be given paying jobs as journalists and anointed Queens and Kings of the ATL. CBS46 wants to try new things. I assume they need to try new things. They’re willing to experiment, in a rather large way, with citizen journalism and the news content they broadcast. My hat’s off to anyone willing to experiment with change in a traditional medium and not be crystal clear as to what, or even where, the road ahead is going to be. (That approach having been my personal MO for the last couple of years or so.)

But I gotta tell you, with so many places to give our content away for free, other than our own blogs, at some point I’m going to get hyper-picky. No one’s offering grownup money, so until they do we’ve got to be happy with a tee shirt, free pizza,  and an occasional guest flash of our homemade news-style content wherever we can get it.

I don’t know if this is the formula for changing the world, and somehow I doubt it is. But in the Atlanta market at least it is a fresh approach and a start to messing around with the status quo of local news broadcasting as we’ve historically known it.  (White anchor, black anchor, traffic chopper, and a whole lotta crime scene tape.) And that’s got to be a good thing.

So is the nifty Flip cam handed out by CBS46. I’ve been wanting one of those puppies for a while now. I got mine home and pointed it at the dog. She didn’t seem to mind:

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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.

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

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