One of Beth Kanter’s insightful comments at our conference (and she said it way more concisely than this) was about the progression folks take on-line:
Baby steps=you’ve got an e-newsletter going.
Walking and chewing gum at the same time=you’re blogging.
You start to develop pimples=you’re developing a social networking site for your niche community, whatever that may be.
On that scale, a national site for community development pros is coming of age.
Getting On Air, Online & Into Print 2009 will have, obviously, fewer journalists in it–because there are fewer, which not to put too fine a point on it, sucks. It’ll also have more bloggers in it.
Yeah–we’re taking some of our writer pages and devoting them to bloggers this year. Bless the Internet. We’ve got a new survey (link below) to make sure we’re still keeping track of folks appropriately. Read the rest of this entry »
Since we are in the throes of producing our annual directory of Chicago-market journalists, Getting On Air, Online & Into Print, pitchable is a pretty salient concept around the office.
BTW, Andy Huff from GapersBlock is polishing up an awesome tipsheet on how to pitch bloggers for us right now (I’ve seen the first draft, it is going to be very useful for folks and will show up online as well as in the 2009 guide).
As I was blogging yesterday about Latina Voices, I thought about a couple of other favorite by/for/about Latinos/-as sites and wanted to highlight two very different ones:
Finding Latino/-a voices online will get a little easier thanks to a $10,000 grant to one of our local heroes, Teresa Puente: Columbia College Chicago journalism professor, Chicago Sun-Times editorial board member, and now leader of a blog platform, Latina Voices that will deliver serious news by, for, and about Latina women (geez, when are you gonna sleep, Teresa?). Of course she’s a Studs Terkel Community Media awardee… from back when she worked at the Tribune, in 2000! Read the rest of this entry »
Sunday’s Chicago Tribune was a great one for me. I saved four articles out of the paper: Cops reporter Angela Rozas wrote on Jody Weis’ first five months as police superintendent, which are looking more and more mediocre,
one that scored super-high on my relevant “news that matters” scale about Curtis King, who suffers from the same cancer as Sen. Ted Kennedy, by Judith Graham,
Monica Eng’s article on an Illinois Food Tour, get-out-of-town overnight for $95. 95 bucks! I will never do this, probably, but you can dream, right?
Susan Chandler’s story on what happens when a family inherits an “inner-city” home (not a fabulous treatment, I felt, but such a great issue, topical of course, and a compelling story about homeowner Shari Lawrence).
So even though it’s been hard times for the news business in general and for local journalists in particular, I felt pretty good about the Tribune when I went to work Monday. Then Monday editor Ann Marie Lipinski, quit. Read the rest of this entry »
Should have been posting this stuff as it happened last week, but never got around to it. I was in Dearborn outside Detroit for my second visit to an Alliance for Nonprofit Management conference, where consultants, management support organizations, MSOs, and others who spend their time advancing nonprofits’ effectiveness get together. Was it worth the money and time? Absolutely! Met a lot of folks, got to eat a Coney Dog, and learned a couple things to report to you, including a nugget on how much nonprofit consultants are charging for their services.
How much should I pay for custom consulting? Read the rest of this entry »
Somehow we went on a tangent talking about stories Tuesday night during a spokesperson session for New Communities Program group Claretian Associates in South Chicago.
It ended up being the high point of the evening and got me thinking about why so many workshops — from us to Andy Goodman to the American Marketing Association’s event next week for nonprofits: “Telling Your Story: From Vision to Results” — are featuring storytelling front and center in their communications workshops these days (of course many folks have been talking about the power of stories years, but my sense is it’s becoming ubiquitous). Read the rest of this entry »
Still can’t believe that we trained right after Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr. spoke Thursday, to a group of young democracy activists who will be registering people to vote from now through the fall election.
Katty Salgado of event organizing Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and I, who were leading the workshop, heard a classic spokesperson horror story about what happened to a guest on a national TV show when the host told her the show was over. Read the rest of this entry »
Content aside, there’s a nugget of tip in the new blog of a Chicago neighborhood leader.
Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood just got a little more virtual real estate in the blogosphere. The author of the blog “Faces,” anonymously posts his own poetry, musings on life, and links to stuff he thinks is cool as Philosoraptor.Even though it just started last week, Mr. P has done two things really well: Read the rest of this entry »
Community Media Workshop
Connecting the community with media, the Workshop promotes news that matters... through coaching and training that reaches about 2,000 nonprofit communicators a year.
