Hi. By way of introduction my name is Jim Stanton and this is my first blog for GovTech. I am a former TV journalist, a communications director and director of government relations for a major national organization. Since 1990 I have been running my own crisis communications company (www.jim-stanton.com).
I am very excited about being a blogger with GovTech and for the opportunity to reach out to state and local officials.
The purpose of this blog is to examine the implications of the new media - Media 2.0 - and how it affects day-to-day communications with emphasis on the role it plays when unexpected events occur.
The convergence of three factors; satellite technology, the Internet and Personal Administrative Assistants (PDAs) now provides the ordinary citizen with a means of instant, worldwide, communications at the touch of a button.
What this means is that every person with a cell phone or PDA is a potential citizen journalist.
Traditional media outlets recognize this.
Newspapers are buying radio and television ads to urge local citizens to use the newspaper's website as the go-to location for up-to-date information. Print editors know that people today are not going to wait to get the news in tomorrow's newspaper.
CNN, Fox and the other big three networks all encourage people to become "i-reporters," Internet reporters, and to send in their photos, videos and text messages to the station so it can lead the news.
The under 25 generation doesn't get its news from the morning newspaper or the 6:00 p.m. television news. They go directly to You Tube, the Huffington Post, NowPublic, Facebook and other new media sources.
Examples abound.
In a recent air crash on a remote mountaintop in the Pacific Northwest, search and rescue personnel were lead to the crash site by one of the survivors. Even though the cell phone component was not working, they were able to text a distress message to his boss.
Rescuers said had they not received the text message information, it was unlikely they would have found the survivors - the forest cover was dense and the mountains were extremely rugged.
An incident occurred recently on a Greyhound bus outside a small town in the remote Canadian prairies. A bus rider attacked a fellow passenger, stabbed him to death and decapitated him.
The world knew about this instantly because of the new media. Within moments of the incident information was sent by eyewitnesses by text message to all the major media outlets and the new media - NowPublic, Facebook, You Tube - and the world knew instantly what had occurred.
Friends of the victims, realizing the young man had not arrived at his destination with the rest of the passengers set up a Facebook site in his memory. Meanwhile, the police, waiting for confirmation of the victim's name, had not notified the family. By word of mouth, the family discovered it was their son who was the likely victim of this horrible tragedy.
In less than a week, 90,000 messages of condolence were posted on this Facebook site from around the world.
This incident points out one of the major concerns about the new media ... no one is accountable for fact checking or verifying personal information. The news is out there unfiltered and in real time.
What challenges does this present to state and local officials? This is the core of what I want to discuss in my blog.
How do agencies that are accountable to stakeholders governed by access to information and privacy regulations, operate in this "wild west" atmosphere of the new media?
The new media is not going away. In fact they are proliferating rapidly. One of the fundamental lessons I have learned in 30 years of communicating to the public is "the organization that gets out first with its messages, sets the communications template."
How do we manage this challenge of being first in the new world of instantaneous communications?
I will be writing a series of blogs to examine the current trends and their implications for state and local officials.
I look forward to having a dialogue with you about the challenges of communicating in the era of the new media.
Let's talk!
Jim
I am very excited about being a blogger with GovTech and for the opportunity to reach out to state and local officials.
The purpose of this blog is to examine the implications of the new media - Media 2.0 - and how it affects day-to-day communications with emphasis on the role it plays when unexpected events occur.
The convergence of three factors; satellite technology, the Internet and Personal Administrative Assistants (PDAs) now provides the ordinary citizen with a means of instant, worldwide, communications at the touch of a button.
What this means is that every person with a cell phone or PDA is a potential citizen journalist.
Traditional media outlets recognize this.
Newspapers are buying radio and television ads to urge local citizens to use the newspaper's website as the go-to location for up-to-date information. Print editors know that people today are not going to wait to get the news in tomorrow's newspaper.
CNN, Fox and the other big three networks all encourage people to become "i-reporters," Internet reporters, and to send in their photos, videos and text messages to the station so it can lead the news.
The under 25 generation doesn't get its news from the morning newspaper or the 6:00 p.m. television news. They go directly to You Tube, the Huffington Post, NowPublic, Facebook and other new media sources.
Examples abound.
In a recent air crash on a remote mountaintop in the Pacific Northwest, search and rescue personnel were lead to the crash site by one of the survivors. Even though the cell phone component was not working, they were able to text a distress message to his boss.
Rescuers said had they not received the text message information, it was unlikely they would have found the survivors - the forest cover was dense and the mountains were extremely rugged.
An incident occurred recently on a Greyhound bus outside a small town in the remote Canadian prairies. A bus rider attacked a fellow passenger, stabbed him to death and decapitated him.
The world knew about this instantly because of the new media. Within moments of the incident information was sent by eyewitnesses by text message to all the major media outlets and the new media - NowPublic, Facebook, You Tube - and the world knew instantly what had occurred.
Friends of the victims, realizing the young man had not arrived at his destination with the rest of the passengers set up a Facebook site in his memory. Meanwhile, the police, waiting for confirmation of the victim's name, had not notified the family. By word of mouth, the family discovered it was their son who was the likely victim of this horrible tragedy.
In less than a week, 90,000 messages of condolence were posted on this Facebook site from around the world.
This incident points out one of the major concerns about the new media ... no one is accountable for fact checking or verifying personal information. The news is out there unfiltered and in real time.
What challenges does this present to state and local officials? This is the core of what I want to discuss in my blog.
How do agencies that are accountable to stakeholders governed by access to information and privacy regulations, operate in this "wild west" atmosphere of the new media?
The new media is not going away. In fact they are proliferating rapidly. One of the fundamental lessons I have learned in 30 years of communicating to the public is "the organization that gets out first with its messages, sets the communications template."
How do we manage this challenge of being first in the new world of instantaneous communications?
I will be writing a series of blogs to examine the current trends and their implications for state and local officials.
I look forward to having a dialogue with you about the challenges of communicating in the era of the new media.
Let's talk!
Jim
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