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"Postmodernism is a change-or-be-changed world. The word is out: Reinvent
yourself for the 21st century or die! Some would rather die than change."
Leonard Sweet, cultural historian.

08/30/2005 Entry: "Katrina: another breakthough moment for the Web"

Aaron Bernhart writes in the Kansas City Star (Registration required) that ongoing severe weather coverage -- long the bread and butter of television news alone -- has a new suitor: the Internet.

...as TV cameras struggled to capture video of the rare Category 5 hurricane, news Web sites and amateur blogs offered snapshots and analysis of Katrina that were arguably better.
I believe we're going to be reading more and more things like this as media outlets, including blogs, continue to mature online. While I agree with Mr. Bernhart that the Web provided some excellent material, I think a combination of the Internet and broadcast/cable provides the best coverage. Of course, one day those'll be one and the same.

I'm very proud of the online work done by my client here in Nashville, WKRN-TV. They're dedicated to the blogosphere like no other station in the country, and they've maintained a constant stream of quality postings that have been very, very well received by the online community. At one point yesterday, the station's weather blog, NashvilleWx.com, was getting 12-hundred hits a second, which caused the server to slow down until the Sausage Hosting technicians could ease the problem.

A Google search on the hurricane found the site ranked 10th; that's not too shabby for a local weather blog. When you see the station's chief meteorologist, Lisa Patton, actually interacting with commenters on a blog, you must acknowledge that something new is occurring in the media world.

Another station blog, Nashville Is Talking, lived up to its mission in providing smart aggregation of what others in the local blogosphere were saying and doing with regards to the weather.

This has not gone unnoticed in the local blogosphere. Rex Hammock -- himself an A-list blogger of considerable repute -- writes as an observer, and I'm sure he won't mind me sharing the whole entry with you:

WKRN's ROI on investing in the Nashville blogosphere: The WKRN weather bloggers at NashvilleWX.com are displaying how blogging is different than reporting. For example, Justin Bruce, who's been to most Nashville blogger meetups I've attended has posted details of the devastation some of his Louisiana relatives have experienced.

WKRN isn't merely using a blogging platform to format news "content" (which I would applaud even if that were all they were doing), but they are using their blogs to help do away with the concept of "on-air-personality" and to replace it with, what?, on-air human beings -- The station manager is even jumping onto the weather blog to let us know when one of them has to go home to get some sleep, when one of them gets sick.

The station has spent months inviting Nashville bloggers to the station (and even giving them and their kids air time. They've come to wherever bloggers find themselves together. They not only talk-the-talk but walk-the-walk. In short, they've earned "street cred" with a community of bloggers who, when we find ourselves in the midst of breaking news, will not only blog it ourselves as citizen journalists, but will gladly volunteer to be citizen stringers to help the station get the news out.

Bottomline: You can't wait until the big news happens to put together this type of strategy.

How true, and let me add that the local blogosphere has now grown six-fold since we held our first meet-up in February. What my contemporaries don't seem to understand is that the local blogosphere is a very real community and one that's actually quite representative of the community as a whole. Touch local bloggers and you touch the community, and Rex's post clearly speaks to that. On-air human beings. What a concept!

Meanwhile, we've gotten mostly rain here in middle Tennessee. A friend who handles a morning paper route in Huntsville, Alabama (90 miles south) wrote this morning that it wasn't a lot of fun.

Papers this morning were an incomprehensible disaster. My body will eventually be the same; my car will never be.

I can say no more without screaming.

The weather is one thing in life that impacts us all, and it's why media companies -- especially television stations -- spend huge resources predicting it and covering it. As we're learning here in Nashville, it's very wise to dedicate some of those resources to unique online coverage as well.

Replies: 1 Comment

Striking in comparison to the quality of material coming from the blogs was CNN's attempt to have a "blog" as well, which was damn near laughable.

Posted by Chris Wage @ 08/30/2005 12:24 PM CST


"The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create."
Leonard Sweet