Don’t be a carboat

I’m reading this interesting book on branding I picked up called, The Origin of Brands by Al and Laura Ries.
When I bought it, I didn’t know anything about the Ries pair (father / daughter), and I must admit I was actually looking to pick up Godin’s new book. But the theme of the book caught [...]

Go down swinging

Lately there’s been a lot of projects (both for my company and personal) that I’d like to accomplish. Often these projects involve coordinating other people, convincing them, explaining, selling…
And often it takes a lot of convincing myself: Is this worth it? If this fails, how bad will it affect me? It will take a lot [...]

Community media project, part 4 of 4: Other applications

I’m going to go ahead and wrap up my initial thoughts on this community media project with a few of the ways I think it could be used elsewhere.
Up until now, I’ve focused on some specific small-town media sources and lobbed a lot of large stones toward their small staffs, budgets and circulations. I’m not [...]

Idea for community media, part 3 of 4: How to build it

I’ve discussed the mission of my media project and I’ve offered some thoughts on the content, the sources and a few of the ways people would adopt it.
Now on to the practical issue: How do you build it?
When thinking about this project, a few things really matter:

It’s got to be simple. Simple to add content, [...]

Small town media idea: You asked, I typed

I love the reaction and discourse that’s developing around my community media idea. A big thanks to both Jim and Julie for bringing up some good discussion points in the comments.
Here’s a few of my thoughts on some of these points (paraphrased):
1.) “This isn’t investigation, it’s not breaking news and it’s not a third-party watchdog. [...]

I heart cheap and effective marketing

Wow – check out this 1 min. video (it’s workplace safe) I saw Seth Godin post today:

Idea for small town media, part 2 of 4: Content, sources and buy-in

In my last post I outlined the mission of my community journalism project. This project takes a tool (social media) and places it in an environment with little to no existing conversation.
In case you missed it, here’s the mission again:
To create an online forum to offer a conversation about the existing diverse passions and stories [...]

Idea for small town media, Part 1 of 4: The mission

In my last post, I outlined my general thoughts on the crappy media coverage that small communities endure.
I also gave a vague overview of a possible solution – a blog-based site in which the content is provided largely from the community itself.
Think Huffington Post, only very different.
But the platform of the Post got me thinking [...]

My journalism idea: Small town news that doesn’t suck

Let’s take a look at my home county’s online version of the Osceola Sentinel-Tribune. Here’s today’s top story about the upcoming (actually, it happened last Friday) opening of Wal-Mart. I didn’t even have to dig for this glorious sample of apathetic journalism. It’s the number one story.
In all honesty, this pisses me off. It pisses [...]

Two random ambitions

My current top two random life ambitions:
The first is to travel and get paid for it. Not in the Peterbilt and bull-hauler trucker sense. Rather, I’d like to wander to various places and translate my experiences into written words accompanied by dynamic photography.
I recently realized that being a journalist wasn’t necessarily my dream. Instead, all [...]