Melissa Block Reports from the Scene of the Chengdau Earthquake
In the years to come, I think Melissa Block’s reporting from the Chengdu earthquake will become a defining moment in her career. She and Robert Siegel were in China working on an unrelated series for NPR’s All Things Considered when the earthquake struck. Block’s initial report on All Things Considered is some of the most compelling radio I have ever heard. It’s not just a matter of being on the scene as it happened. It’s not just a matter of capturing amazing sound. What makes this so striking and so memorable is the human face Block puts on the story from her amazement and wonder at the event to the horror of the scene of a collapsed middle school. I cannot imagine how difficult this report was to file and I am really in awe of the skill and grace she brought to this work.
And Now, The Industry Podcast
Christopher Penn casts a long shadow in podcasting circles. For as long as I can recall being aware of podcasting, The Financial Aid Podcast has been part of the landscape. In a recent posting to his Awaken Your Superhero blog, Penn addresses the subject of my previous post regarding traditional media seeking expert commentary from new media sources. The relevant portion that caught my attention…
So what does this mean for old media? Instead of bouncers keeping out the masses, old media is evolving to become a content filter, finding decent stuff in new media and using its distribution networks to take the best stuff and bring it mainstream. The reason this model works is that advertisers provide an automatic filtering mechanism – if an old media outlet shows enough crap, people will stop tuning in to that show, to that channel, and advertising dollars will follow.
…may not exactly be what I was talking about previously, but I think it’s a valuable insight for content producers, traditional and new alike, to take to heart.
“In the industry podcast…”
This is not, I expect, the first time this has happened, but tonight in the story “Alabama County Faces Bankruptcy” filed on NPR’s All Things Considered, WBHM’s Tanya Ott does a terrific job of pulling a highly relevant piece of sound from the derivative management services industry podcast, DerivActiv. It happens around 2:25 into the story.
I recently quietly marked the three-year anniversary of the first pitch I made to a prospective client regarding podcasting. As I looked back on my slides from that meeting, I found I had predicted that traditional media would embrace and even dominate podcasting, but there would be considerable business opportunities in enterprise podcasting. Goes to show that even when you’re right, you’re probably only guessing part of the picture. I would never have imagined the sort of on-the-spot expert commentary that an enterprise podcast could provide to traditional media.
It certainly changes the way I think about news-gathering.
