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Greg Meriwether and Rick Portier of 9News, Baton Rouge - wafb.com
Well, Channel 9 News just helped make my 50th birthday a great one. A few days before the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina Greg Meriwether covered the story of my blog for his superb "Street Beat" segment of the nightly news. Channel 9 ran the story tonight and as soon as I get a link to the video I'll post it here. Check out their website, anyway, as there are some really good Katrina related stories and news posted on their site tonight.
The above is a photograph I took from my Palm Treo 650 smartphone of Rick Portier taping Greg as he reads my blog for our "Street Beat" interview. Hmmm...now whose story is this? Seems I'm documenting them documenting me!
One of the really interesting things about being a citizen journalist is I sometimes get to turn the tables on the traditional journalists. We're all inquisitive storytellers at heart so when you get a few of us in the room together there's just no telling what might happen! I know I couldn't resist the temptation to turn the tables on them for a moment, and they were really good sports about it. They even helped me figure out the best way to set up the shot!
Now there is a metaphor in all this and a powerful one at that - It's the blending of traditional media and new media. We all know what traditional media is but what I mean by new media is real time, collaborative, personal and social media such as blogging, citizen journalism, and other forms of personal publishing.
Now this conversation represent a whole body of knowledge and passion I've been accumulating since I started blogging Katrina, and its too big to cover in this one post. The point is there they are - Rick and Greg - documenting me with their Channel 9 news camera, and there I am in the background documenting them with what basically amounts to a cell phone. The idea is that old and new media seem to be coming together in a way that is more than either and bigger than both and that's really what excites me about blogging.
...and by the way, I'll let you in on a little secret. Rick Portier's a blogger! I'd love to link you to his visually awesome blog, but if I told you where it was I'd have to kill you. I am kidding of course but I do need to ask him if it's okay before I pass on his blog address.
