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Not my words, but I certainly agree with them! "This is a good example of how MSM (mainstream media) is creating partnerships with smaller players to obtain content that they don't have the resources to gather."
WindyCitizen Deal With CBS2 Website May Be Wave of the Future
valeriedenneycommunications.blogspot.com - 29 weeks ago - 673 views
18 Comments Have your say. Vote up the best responses. ↓
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This is awesome. I feel like I'm hanging out with the cool crowd.
That's because you are :)
I don't know about that...
*looks across room at the Superman windbreaker hanging in his closet*
Superman windbreaker? Nice.
Always knew you were onto something, Brad. It's been a good week for the Citizen.
AWESOME! GO CITIZEN!!!
Did you see the latest news? You guys are on a roll: http://thecitizenspeaks.windycitizen.com/2009/04/30/announcement-the-chi...
I guess the next step is for Valerie Denney's blog to add a widget.
Ha. Well-played.
That said, they've posted a good number of links here on the Citizen over the last few months and they're usually pretty interesting. I went on a bit of a rant about PR stuff on Twitter yesterday, so it's cool to see a communications firm adding some value to the conversation beyond simply pushing for their clients.
My old firm, Arment Dietrich, has a cool PR ethics blog called Spin Sucks. I'll suggest they get in the game over here.
Brad, Thanks for the kind words. I think PR is like journalism or programming or ditch digging or any other job in that there's good, bad and in between work being done.
parkeral27, I added a badge on the side and the "share" button in new posts.I can't fit the feed in our sidebar without it looking weird. If you guys have code for a slimmer version, we're all about it.
Where's this at? I can check out the size of the space and take a look at slimming down the widget so it works.
We'd put it in the sidebar of our blogger blog, which is ~200 px wide.
http://valeriedenneycommunications.blogspot.com/
I messed with the size in the code and it created scroll bars that I did not enjoy.
Over at Community Beat we discovered Windy Citizen after a friendly reader (why, it was Hugh McMullen of VDC!) posted one of our pieces there and set off a string of referrals and comments. Since then I've posted a number of stories from the general media stream as well as the best of our own stuff. For us, it brings a small but important bump in traffic.
More importantly, I'm starting to use Windy Citizen as a way to find new news. I don't like the fluffy crap that sometimes climbs up the ladder to "popular," but maybe that just means we need more readers with high standards voting up the good stuff and pushing down the junk.
I think the fluffy stuff is a consequence of the site and the community here still finding its way. It's been just 4 months that folks have been posting here with frequency. In fact, I think this might be the first actual meta discussion on the site, which is a great sign that it's coming along.
If people spot stories they don't like. Vote them down. Or leave a comment that explains why you think it has no place here. That will help.
Patrick, I'm thrilled to hear you finding use here as a news source.
The goal is for this to be a community driven news-source that uses crowd-power to draw on the best of what's out there.
There are a few ways I see this creating value:
1. Offering a place for intelligent discussion of the day's Chicago news. The conversations about local news on existing local sites are often pretty bad. They're not discussions so much as long strings of disconnected comments. I think we can do better.
2. Offering a place where undiscovered local gems can find an audience. Chicagoans are posting mountains of Chicago-relevant stuff to the web every day. The Citizen lets people find, share and rate the best of it in one place. Ideally, we'll be finding stuff a day or so before the rest of the media picks up on it. And that's already happened a few times, with the Cop-on-the-bus video and the Pittsburgh Samaritan.
There's a point, and I don't know where that is, when the community will grow large enough and "smart" enough that it will grow into both of these aims. We're definitely not there yet, but we get a little closer every week.
One way folks can help is by helping man the new stories queue. I watch it like a hawk 24/7 and have a handful of friends who help as well, but we really need people voting up the good stuff that rolls in there, and voting down the stuff they don't care for.
Participating in discussions like this is also really helpful too. It's an encouragement to me and the many people who help keep the Citizen going. It's also great feedback. So if other people have thoughts on how things are going. Speak up.
Patrick, I feel the same way you do and Brad's prescriptions are exactly right. If you don't like stuff being posted, vote it down and, better yet, post some stuff that you feel is more worthy. Also, tell everyone imaginable about Windy Citizen if you think they would find it interesting or valuable. The bigger the crowd here is, the more there will be a greater variety in what is posted.
Wow. Heady stuff.
Tell me, am I lowering the tone by sharing this?
Len, I love it! A nice encapsulation of the problem, as it were, with the 24-hours online/cable news cycle. Personally, I often long for simpler times. Now if I want to be one of the first to know something, I have to be plugged in ALL the time. It used to be so much simpler when news traveled slower and there wasn't a constant stream.
Ha. Fair point. I get busy for an afternoon and my Google Reader has had 1000+ items waiting for me...
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