Eric Schwartzman | New Media and Social Media Communications

Think Beyond the Press Release. Vloggers and podcasters want content, as long as it is genuinely compelling to their audience.

Paul Way, Associate Publisher, Webcasting, CMP Media is responsible for The News Show, an online video program shown on four of their most popular websites including InformationWeek, and this lesson is inspired by a comment he made on the morning podcasting panel.

“We’re soliciting our audience to contribute pieces. At the point where our audience starts contributing pieces this thing starts to really take off…we’ll tell you how to do it…we actually list it on our site how you can create something like this…we make recommitted for what to buy…we’re trying to get to that momentum point where people are going to start contributing and the show starts to take off, and there’s a precedent for that…MTV is always ahead of these sorts of things. MOTIF had a show called unfledged where this is what they did. They had their audience film clips and send them and they turned into a news show and that’s great because they didn’t pay anything to those people to contribute those things and they ended up with a compelling show.

Reality television uses the same thing. They don’t pay anybody for that stuff and everything is reality because its cheap to produce and it makes a lot of money. Well, news organizations are struggling. Television news organization are struggling. They’re not exactly profitable, so it’s not inconceivable that a portion of your local broadcast would actually be done by people in your community…”