Category: media

Liveblogging from CASE: The Dan and Dave show

This post is out of synch because I was moderating this particular session so couldn’t blog in real time, as they say.

One of this morning’s sessions — “Bloggers as Journalists and Journalists as Bloggers” — featured two terrific Philly bloggers: Dan Rubin, who has a full-time blogging gig at the Philadelphia Inquirer (the blog is called blinq), and Dave Ralis, who blogs for Phillyburbs as well as on his own site. Both of these guys have enjoyed long and successful careers as reporters but have made the transition to new media. Even so, they still consider themselves reporters and use that skill set in their blogging.

This session stirred a lot of discussion about the role of blogs and other social media in terms of traditional vs. non-traditional delivery of the news. A few of the points that came up:

  • Higher ed PR people should monitor the blogosphere — just as we do traditional media — to see who is talking about their institutions and how. This is easily done by searching for your institution’s name on Technorati, a popular blog search engine/aggregator. One of the conference attendees mentioned that she shares a “blog report” of mentions with upper-level administrators on her campus, just as many of us do with our “clips reports” of media mentions. (A good idea! Wish I’d thought of it.)
  • Bloggers are journalists, too. One question came up about whether media relations staffers should grant bloggers’ interview requests with college presidents. Both Dave and Dan agreed that PR folks should have policies for dealing with bloggers’ requests, just as we may have similar policies for granting interviews with journalists. (Another good idea I wish I’d thought of.) We discussed possible criteria such as blog popularity (the assumption being that granting interviews to popular or influential bloggers might be preferred, while requests from small-time bloggers could safely be ignored), but Dan noted that a post by some little-known blogger could be picked up by an A-list blogger and spread the story virally.
  • Correcting misleading information in the blogosphere can be tricky. If you discover a misleading blog post about your institution, it’s a good idea to post correct information in the comments section of that blog (if it has a comments section, and many of them do). Or if your institution has a blog of its own, you can post the correct information there.
  • We don’t control the message. Neither does the mainstream media. At best, we can help to influence the message by becoming part of the conversation in the blogosphere.

Similar themes came up in an afternoon session about crisis communications in the web 2.0 era. Does your institution’s crisis communications plan consider the potential impact of the blogosphere? The recent tragedy at Dawson College in Montreal serves as an immediate and evolving case study of the power of blogs, the photo-sharing site Flickr and other social networking phenomena to tell and shape the story of an ongoing crisis — and to become a big part of the story.

Blog identified as Dawson College gunman paints dark portrait

I’ll be blogging more about all the web 2.0 stuff being discussed today at the CASE Annual Conference for Senior Communications and Marketeing Professionals. But first, a harrowing example of how web 2.0 activities — in this case, blogging — gives the mainstream news media another stream from which to draw information and to provide context.

Story via Canadian Press:

(CP) – In an online blog, Kimveer Gill includes a photo of a tombstone with his name printed on it – below it the phrase: “Lived fast died young. Left a mangled corpse.”

The blog, posted on an online hub of goth culture, paints a dark portrait of the 25-year-old man published reports have identified as the trenchcoat-wearing gunman who opened fire on students at Montreal’s Dawson College Wednesday, killing one and injuring 19 others.

Gill’s image gallery, which contains more than 50 photos, depicts the young man in various poses holding a Baretta CX4 Storm semi-automatic rifle and donning a long black trenchcoat and combat boots.

“His name is Trench. you will come to know him as the Angel of Death,” he wrote on his vampirefreaks.com profile.

“He is not a people person. He has met a handfull (sic) of people in his life who are decent.” But he writes that he finds the vast majority to be “worthless, no good, kniving, betraying lieing (sic), deceptive.”

The last of Gill’s six journal entries Wednesday was posted at 10:41 a.m, about two hours before the gunmen was shot dead after the college shooting.

In the latest one, Gill extols the virtues of a morning quaff of whisky. Other posts Wednesday deal with topics as mundane as dry contact lenses, purple freezies, and eating eggs and toast for breakfast.

Eerie.

Full story.