A few days ago I attended a “Blogger Summit” hosted by the local NBC station here in New York, WNBC. WNBC news wants to form a relationship with the blogging community, use their stories on TV and the website, and give credit. Paul got a similar invitation from NBC in North Carolina. Brian’s response is spot-on. More conversation here.
WNBC wants to take advantage of a more distributed information collection model. Fine. But this does not bridge the gap between old media (TV) and current media (blogging/internet). The internet is about conversation, removing degrees of separation between people, feedback…. I could go on. If WNBC is serious about participating in our world, they need to make their content accessible and usable after it has aired, allow feedback on their stories either via direct comment threads or forums on the website, and PARTICIPATE in these new tools. Have a presence on their forums. Adapt programming to the feedback… I know, I’m dreaming.
I mentioned this at the “symposium” and got a good response from the crowd. In fact some people cheered and clapped when I requested that the URLs to the videos never change. I know that was a little detailed given the context… maybe I should have told them to validate their markup and implement a semantic/style separation architecture…. :)
You can see their spiel about it here, and if you watch the top video in upper right, you’ll see my face and hand making motions, almost as if I were making important points. But of course this is television and they did not include the content of what I was saying, only the visual appearance. In fact, even thought they recorded the entire symposium, I think they didn’t use ANY of the audio from audience members.
Nice John! There is so much to say about how traditional media could improve. Especially if they want to work in our world.The MSM should totally open up their content to us. If they want to uses ours, which is open, it only seems fair. You are much more eloquent than I. :)
Congrats! Too bad that they didn’t do the audio.
Anyway, I am planning to be in NYC towards the end of the month. Let me know if you are in town and free around the weekend of 2/23. It will be great to catch up !