The last full week of August somehow wound up being Media Week at owenyoungman.com, maybe because I had been gone to Santa Fe for the opera and chamber music season for the previous 10 days. In addition to some interesting meetings involving the journalism school, the computer science school, and a prospective media partner for some of our work, I found myself on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight on Aug. 27 and on WGN Radio’s Extension 720 on Aug. 28.
The Chicago Tonight gig (16-minute video at WTTW) was precipitated by the Chicago Reader’s changing hands, an outcome of the bankruptcy filing by parent Creative Loafing Inc. Not surprisingly, the Chapter 11 status of the Tribune and the Sun-Times was also a focus, although the three cases are pretty different (particularly the Sun-Times’; see yesterday’s post). And we talked about the state of community media on the Internet here in town, since one of the guests was Thom Clark, co-author of “The New News: Journalism We Want and Need” from the Chicago Community Trust.
The next night’s chat with Milt Rosenberg was two hours of unadulterated fun. (Here is a 19-minute video excerpt of the opening of the program from the WGN Web site.) With Brad Flora of Windy Citizen – that’s @bradflora to you – and Bill Adee of the Tribune – that would be @Bill80 – we held forth on some of the same topics, but with way more emphasis on blogs and blog aggregations, social media, and all things digital (to coin a phrase).
(n.b.: Should you want to have the whole two hours playing in the background sometime, here’s the link. To quote a Kevin Pang tweet to me during the broadcast: “This is too entertaining for a Friday night….just hearing Uncle Milt say ‘Twitter’ makes me squeal with delight.”)
As we like to say, enough of the pasture. Next up: more of the future.
