Day: August 29, 2005

Inland tropical storm Katrina

Rex Hammock4 Comments

Inland tropical storm Katrina: As I head to bed, it’s raining in Nashville. (Here’s a link to the National Weather Service’s Experimental Radar from Nashville, although I’m not exactly sure what the experiment is. Southest of Nashville, towards Chattanooga, there are tornado watches and throughout most of middle Tennessee, there are flash flood watches and an “inland tropical storm warning.” I’m sure they’ve been issued here in the past, but I can’t recall ever hearing that specific “inland tropical storm” alert before.

If it’s really windy outside later (30-40 MPH is predicted), I’ll get up early in the morning and go stand outside and pretend to be Anderson Cooper. As the utility lines in my neighborhood are tree magnets, I predict some web-access challeges in a few hours.

Developing.

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WKRN’s ROI on investing in the Nashville blogosphere

Rex Hammock

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 devastion some of his Lousiana 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.

Terry Teachout’s Katrina efforts

Rex Hammock

Terry Teachout’s Katrina efforts: I’m very appreciative of Terry’s work to keep up with Katrina bloggers. A great example of running as fast as possible to keep up with something heading in way too many directions.

Also, his note at the bottom of the post speaks for lots of people:

I’ve never been to New Orleans, but I was planning to spend a few weeks there this fall doing research for my Louis Armstrong biography. To all those bloggers posting from the Gulf Coast, and everyone else caught in the path of Katrina: we New Yorkers know about disasters, and our hearts are with you. May the world reach out to you as it did to us.

What Terry said.

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