History, politics, people of Oly WA

Category: media (Page 1 of 3)

You can only save KPLU by letting KPLU go (Dr. Lonnie L. Howard is your man)

When I read the PLU president’s short blog post about why, despite public outcry, they’re going to go ahead and sell KPLU to KUOW, all confusion and anger left me. True, this certainly means the loss of an entire newsroom covering my home region.

That itself is a shame. A massive shame. And, it would have been better for PLU to have given their listening public the chance to step up (like in Crosscut’s Colorado example).

But, I hear ya President Krise: PLU doesn’t want to be in the radio business and there is no one that is going to make you be in the radio business. And, the deal is done with KUOW, there isn’t anything anyone can do about that now.

The best time to jumpstart a new public radio community non-profit to save the KPLU newsroom would have been months ago.

The second best time is today. And, we don’t need President Krise.


We do need President Howard though.

President Lonnie L. Howard runs the Clover Park Technical College. And, after the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University, Clover Park owns (but does not actually run) the third NPR news signal that covers much of Puget Sound.

Sure, the KVTI signal is smaller compared to KPLU and KUOW.

KVTI:

 

KPLU:

KUOW:

And, these maps don’t even include the small army of repeater stations that KUOW and KPLU deploy to cover the rest of the state.

But, that being what it is, the biggest issue is rallying the forces that are trying to save KPLU (or at least their newsroom) to focus on a newish creation.

By focussing on KVTI, these folks would have a much softer target, because Clover Park is a public school. PLU can do what it wants as long as their board is united. If they don’t want to be in the radio business, they don’t have a larger public to account to.

But, if the public wants KVTI to be something different, to end their agreement with Washington State University (which currently provides programming to KVTI under and outsourcing agreement).

But, then again, President Krise at PLU is correct. The market for over the air public radio content is shrinking. While the public need for an independent newsroom is great, the financial support for one might not be.

So, there might be another, in between, route that isn’t quite building a brand new public radio newsroom operation out of KVTI’s broadcast signal. And, therefore, breaking the agreement with WSU.

What we’re really talking about is the loss of locally produced, good and newsy (NPRish) audio content, whether is be over the airwaves or over the internet (streaming or podcasted).

Earlier this week, we saw the joining forces of KBTC and Crosscut. This is an example of a slow growing (but still growing by all accounts) web based news service and a traditional broadcaster.

It might be possible to string together a series of local web broadcasts and podcasts (similar to Panoply, Radiotopia or Maximum Fun) and partner with WSU to sideload them onto the air.

All things being equal, I think this second idea is better. It starts small, but it tries to in the end recreate what the KPLU newsroom had provided to the region in a more sustainable way. Being on the air is important, but it isn’t the only game.

Also, the battle with PLU over KPLU is all but lost. It is time to move on and find another solution. We are really losing more newsrooms and reporters in Puget Sound than we should. But, our efforts should be put into creating the new thing that trying to save the last thing.

Someone got a fake letter published in the Olympian yesterday under the name of a t.v. character. But, that’s not even the worst thing

Yesterday, the Olympian published a letter to the editor written under the name of Ronald Swanson (google cache version is still up). On reflection, it was a pretty blatant joke that I should’ve gotten at first blush. I watched Parks and Recreation, but the entire Chuck E Cheese token joke I forgot.

When I read it first thing in the morning yesterday, I didn’t pause. Dumb letter, I thought, then moved on. It wasn’t until later in the day when I saw other people reacting to joke that it dawned on me.

So, that it got past the few people left at the Olympian doesn’t surprise me. People complaining about parks is pretty common chatter here, as I assume it is in most cities like us.

Meta took a tour of the empty newsroom at the Olympian recently:

The bad news becomes apparent as one walks past the front desk and down the main hallway to reach the newsroom. First, there is a large nook with two desks, facing into the hallway as if to welcome visitors into a major customer service hub, but now abandoned. Then behind those desks is another room with row after row of cubicles, about 30 or more, containing nothing but some cleaning supplies, folding tables, recycle bins, and other bric-a-brac in need of a storage space.

That’s the top floor. The bottom floor was once the print shop, but it sits empty too, as all the printing is now done in Tacoma.

At the end of that main hallway, a sign on the wall offers directions to passersby. Three of the arrows on the sign point toward the empty room on the top floor (“advertising,” “production,” and “online”), two point to the empty bottom floor (“circulation” and “production center”), and only one to an occupied space (“newsroom”).

Clearly, while The Olympian has more local staff than some outsiders might realize, they have many fewer than they had in their heyday.

So, what I’m saying is that its understandable. But, not the worst part.

The worst part is that the joke letter (harmless) ran alongside a letter to the editor from a former Secretary of State. He was writing in to counter a previous letter to the editor that had run in previous weeks.

Sam Reed’s letter didn’t just argue against the opinion of the previous letter, it had to clean up at least one factual error. That error was an election result in a nearby county just last November. I admit it wasn’t regional news that Clark County passed a charter last November along the lines of a sensational murder.

But, it was a result that most civically inclined people I know noted. And, it was also a fact that would’ve taken less than five minutes to check.

We need to debate our own important issues here. A letter to the editor column is a bit of a ham-handed forum anymore, but it is still a vital one. And, the value of that public forum is lessened when we can’t believe what is written there.

I’m rooting for the staff at the Olympian, but mostly I’m rooting for Olympia.

How a newspaper works

It may seem as simple as interesting text and sells ads around it to support you writing interesting things, but Alec Clayton’s post on how he became a newspaper man shows there’s something deeper and something harder about it.

His description of Everything for Everybody, which was less a newspaper and more a representation of a larger community:

It was 1973, New York. I had recently joined a crazy kind of hippy employment agency/apartment finder/social network called Everything for Everybody and teamed up with a band of handymen who called themselves, variously, The Midnight Carpenters, Uncle John’s Band, and TANSTAAFL (an acronym for There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch), and moved in with two of the TANSTAAFL guys, Sam and Mike, in an apartment on 165th Street.

An explanation about Everything for Everybody is in order. It was an organization that claimed to do just what the name boasted—everything for everybody. For a five dollar monthly membership fee you could list jobs wanted, services offered, apartments for rent, or if you were looking for a mate or friend or wanted to start a book club or learn yoga. No limits on what you could list or how many listings. The listings were all kept on index cards in a storefront on 8th Avenue and 10th Street. Members had free access to all listings, so if, for instance, you needed someone to walk your dog you could find a listing for a dog walker and give him or her a call. It was as simple as that. All of the listings were also published in the organization’s monthly newspaper, which Mike and Sam put together. Sam was nominally the editor, but Mike did all the work.

Everything for Everybody is a drastic example, but a good newspaper should be for its community what the E4E newspaper was for its community, a representation of the social network between people. A newspaper should speak to the people within a community in a much different sense than how it would seem to an outsider.

In that sense, a newspaper can now be in a real sense, obviously not even printed. A tight online social network can serve much the same purpose E4E did.

It should also be hard to put together, because there’s a need to do it right:

We worked for a couple of hours until we discovered that there were many more listings than there was space for them. “They won’t fit,” Mike said. “We’ve got to leave a few out.”

He decided which ones to leave out. He cut out half the older listings.

We ended up eliminating about 50 listings that in Mike’s judgment were repetitious and unnecessary. We finished the newspaper about midnight, put the sheets in a big flat box and hopped in the A Train to take it to Jack in his apartment on Bank Street in the Village. We used to do a thing we called surfing the A Train, standing up and trying to hold balance with the swaying and lurching of the train without holding on. We did that all the way from 165th Street to 14th Street. We got to Jack’s apartment, handed him the sheets to look over, and Sam let out that we’d eliminated a lot of the listings. Jack went ballistic. He told us that the members paid for those listings and they could not be left out—as if he had to tell us that. He told us to go back and add four pages (for people who don’t know, you can’t add a single page; they’re sheet fed through the printer with four pages per sheet).

So we surfed the train back home and added four more pages. Now we needed filler. Mike wrote an article, and I think I wrote one too. I designed a big ad for TANSTAAFL, creating a logo on the spot and hand lettering the acronym with a felt tip pen, and we found a cartoon and a poem that had been submitted by other people but never used. We worked all night and delivered the finished newspaper to Jack at seven o’clock the next morning. He said it was the best looking edition yet—which was not saying much; I’d seen earlier editions and they were not much to brag about.

How to download Olympia city council videos

Spurred on by a report of some fun stuff at the city council meeting last week (turned out to be a yawner, but that’s for later), I went to the city website looking to download the video. There’s actually a feed for a podcast, but content hasn’t been put on that particular feed since 2007.

There’s also a roundabout way to download the videos via the stream their published on.

But, the most direct way is to poke around for an RSS feed that the city’s contractor publishes on the video front page. There is no direct link to it, but if you’re using Firefox, you click on the radio logo in the URL bar, and its the first one in the list that pops down.

Here is the direct link.

From that feed, you should be able to find a link to a .wmv file that is published in no other place on the city’s or their video hosting contractor’s website. The files are usually more than 200MB, but if that doesn’t bother you, you can download a useable file to edit and repost as you see fit. I mean, if you live in Olympia, you’re paying for it, so you might as well use it.

Here comes Olympia Power & Light

Which is a pretty cool name for a newspaper, especially one that strives to “bridge the gap between big media coverage and blogs.” Which you will do how exactly, Matt?

Well, here are some friendly ideas:

1. Be like the Portland Sentinel. Put your content online before you print. Of course, hold some big feature stuff back for the print edition, but since the paper is only coming out “fortnightly,” (links to pdf) you can keep stuff rolling by putting it online. The Sentinel calls itself a “neighborhood news forum,” which totally embraces the bloggy spirit of the organization

2. Nice name, now you need a killer logo. The paper is sort of plane Jane right now.

I’m thinking of something along the lines of the logo used by Andrew Rasiej when he ran for public advocate in NYC a few years back.

Which was of course based on the old TVA logo.

3. Bring in voices from across the blogosphere. I was thinking of something a few months back, putting together a local blog digest. Taking what stuff I could pull from Olyblog, Jim Anderson’s various efforts and other locally focussed blogs and putting it in a downloadable pdf. Maybe someone would run off copies and leave them around town.

I never got around to it, but it seemed like a good way to bridge the gap between the local blogosphere and folks that want a printed piece to hold on to.

4. Super happy someone is picking up this project. Ever since the Sitting Duck (which I had no love for anyway) left, there’s been a need for something like this. Glad is seems pointed in the right direction too.

Unfiltering the legislative session

The response to the fewest number of credentialed reporters covering the legislative session wasn’t that a blogger was eventually credentialed, but rather this.

Or, a lot of stuff like that.

This winter and spring the four caucuses (but the Dem ones the most and the Senate Dems the most most) have been rolling out social media tools that allow them to directly connect with the people that would typically read legislative coverage.

  • Sen . Lisa Brown is writing a seriously blunt blog, taking issues on in a somewhat dense, but very direct way. House Dems also have a less fun blog, but its still there.
  • Each caucus has embraced twitter (SD, HD, HR, SR), though I’m a bit unsure of how this is an advancement beyond or just the use of a tool. Here’s a funny thing about caucus twitter feeds. I though I was already following the senate Republicans because I followed WASenateGOP. Turns out that is their campaign committee and the actually caucus twitters at WashingtonSRC.
  • Same thing with each caucuses use of video and audio casts. Its great to make all the stuff available, but its another thing to distill it in some form.

Does the lack of reporters covering the legislature drive the caucuses to adopt social media? Probably not, I’ve heard conversations around these topics for years, but everyone was getting hung up on rules (that you apparently couldn’t blog during session because it was campaigning? Weirdness).

Its more likely that the ramping up of caucus based social (or at least internet) media and the nose-dive of traditional state house reporting are happening on parralel, if not slightly overlapping, tracks.

You’ll always have the Olympian

Because McClatchy will never be as stupid as the owners of the King County Journal/Eastside Journal/Bellevue Journal-American/South County Journal/Valley Daily News.

A little background. Ken puts it out there that the end is nigh for the Olympian. The new Olympian publisher responds a little too directly.

Ok, so this is why:

For over ten years the owners of the King County Journal rearranged the masthead, trying to catch up with a readership that was running in the other direction. The problem is, as soon as you change the brand of a local product, you end the need for that local product. The two original papers (Bellevue Journal-American and Valley Daily News) had a combined circulation of 66,000 over ten years ago. That evaporated to a very optomistic 41,000 a decade later.

I’m convinced that even if they had consalidated all production in Kent (as they eventually did) and leave a small bureau in Bellevue, but producing two papers with different mastheads, there would still be two additional dailies in King County.

This sort of thing — reducing the cost of production by having it all in one place, but scattering reporters into their communities — is sort of what the eventual owners of the King County Journal did. While they shut down the dying daily, they actually ended up increasing news content in most of their communities by increasing montly newspapers to weeklies and starting new publications in some communities.

Anyway, McClatchy has pretty much moved all production — pagination, printing, copy editing — to Tacoma, but the Olympian remains.

And, if you look at how McClatchy is arranged nationally (here and here), this sort of “hub and spoke” arrangement is how they operate. There is generally a large dominant (parent) daily surrounded by a few smaller weeklies and dailies. All of the children properties maintain their identities and brands, but all non-essential functions are taken care of at the parent paper.

Port of Shelton, Paul Harvey and Genocide

Beyond the entire interesting part of governing from a three person commission (one commissioner cannot make a decision alone) was the part about the port commissioner wanting to lower the flag to honor the death of Paul Harvey.

A lot of people seemed to like Harvey, but I’m wondering about the wisdom of honoring somone who looked fondly back on the North American genocide and nuclear war.

Hey Chase Gallagher, are you going to run for port commissioner up there anytime soon?

Is the Williams Group relaunching The Sitting Duck?

This got me thinking.

If you go to where the old Sitting Duck website used to be (thesittingduck.net), it takes you to the Williams Group’s (a local full service PR/publishing/Marketing firm) website. This implies that while Sitting Duck in charge Terry Knight said he was looking for a buyer late last year, he actually did find one.

The domain registration tells a different story. While the name servers are pointing to Williams Group, the registration remains with the old KnightVision organization.

I wonder what the Williams Group is going to do with what they bought, if they did indeed buy it.

How TVW helps citizen media, civic dialogue

Last year when TVW launched its embeddable and time markable media tool, it was mostly because political bloggers griped for it. Its application by bloggers has been slow going (I hardly ever see anyone using it), but this week, something cool happened.

Both sides of the local isthmus debate went up to the Capitol to testify of house bills that would regulate development downslope of the capitol campus. Both groups used the TVW embed tool to highlight their testimony. Here is Friends of the Waterfront and a much more agressive use by Oly2012.

While the local legacy media was only able to give the hearing a short story in the paper, TVW gave local groups the tools they needed to give the issue a much more thorough airing. It took a commenter to even link to the actual TVW footage at all.

Local debates are ripe for this kind of use of media. It would be great to see if TVW would be able to export its custom flash player to local governments so they could offer the same kind of embedable and time customized media tools that the state legislature deliberations enjoy.

Actually, wouldn’t it be great if city’s like Olympia, instead of using an out of state company like Granicus, be able contract with a local non-profit whose sole purpose is to distribute public deliberations? I’m not saying that Granicus does a bad job, but they’re an out of state for profit company when we have an in-state not-for-profit that could, if they decided to, do the same thing only better.

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