Nick Belardes, a long-time Bakersfield blogger, gets the nature of networked media. He has long used MySpace to promote his blog and his various media projects (books, films, music). He was an early adopter of Bakotopia.com. He has been a champion of local bloggers for as long as I’ve known him.
Not long ago, he took an online job with one of the local TV stations.
Bakersfield.com has a content-driven social network on its site.
Nick is using Bakersfield.com to promote ABC23.
Kudos to Logan Molen and his team for not taking it down. After all, it’s all about the conversation, and in a civil discussion, all media is welcome.
I hope Nick is reciprocating and linking back to Bakersfield.com where appropriate.
He also started a MySpace page for ABC23. He’s also made his own blog a regular linkfest to Turnto23.com.
[…] Do you read the pithy commentary and back-and-forth in our Lost Remote comments? Since Howard Owens does, he knows that I have wondered frequently why stations don’t start blogging themselves to increase their content footprint and grow potential eyeshare. Along those lines, Howard notified me of this post on his site where he mentions that Nick Belardes is doing just that. As a longtime blogger who now works at ABC 23 in Bakersfield, Nick is using the social networking tools built into the newspaper-driven site Bakersfield.com to promote his station and share their content. Blogging and posting station video that is hosted into YouTube in the voice and style of a vblogger, Nick offers a whole different package that adds to the the media mix for his station. Leveraging existing social media outlets is the smart online promotional strategy to grow audience while taking the message to the masses, and it is great to see that ABC23 also has a myspace page. Thanks, Howard! […]
It’s all about perspective, you know? Nick and I come to these jobs without a formal journalism background, as bloggers, where it’s all about linking and referencing and talking back and forth across traditionally erected and maintained lines (my turf vs your turf, audience vs producer). I know that, when Nick put his blog up on our site, I didn’t give it a second thought, while others higher up on the food chain may have needed reassurance that this wasn’t improper.
But there’s some interesting stuff happening when you blur those lines. Take a look at his latest post on his ABC23 blog on Bakersfield.com: Should ABC23 have aired this video? The editor of the website of a market’s lowest-ranked television news station is asking folks on the blogs on the website of the market’s major print news product to engage in media criticism about decisions made by the broadcast news side of his employer, possibly at the expense of his employer if the comments tend toward the negative.
Just think about that for a minute–boundaries deemed sacrosanct in decades past ignored and pushed out of the way, because those ingrained-thru-training prejudices and rules of the road aren’t there for us.
It’s an interesting experiment, to say the least.
(And yes, the linklove is flowing every which way. Heh.)
Wow, thanks!
I think the ‘ABC23 Files’ blog on Bakersfield.com does add to the conversation. Over the weekend it was one of their top read blogs.
And kind words from people in the media working together in the blogosphere. I think what’s great is various segments from the media are not afraid to disagree or to say kind words about each other in an honest way that is appreciated by other readers in the blogosphere…
You’re right. Reciprocating is key to growth in online relationships.
– Nick
ABC23
Noveltown
And kind words from Jason Sperber. See, there you go: experimentation, conversation, blogging exploration.
[…] Previously, I wrote about how Nick Belardes is pushing a very web-centric, network-aware distributed media effort in his new job at KERO in Bakersfield. […]