Calling bloggers “amateur” misses the point entirely
Tuesday, August 31st, 2004Few things irritate me like the use of the term “professional” as it relates to contemporary journalism. John Podhoretz wrote a nice little piece for the New York Post about blogging and made some interesting points. Some of his positions are argumentative, but one sentence crosses my line and reveals much.
The success of the Swift-boat vets’ ads is the tale of the triumph of the nation’s alternative media. The mainstreamers didn’t want to touch the story with a 10-foot pole, and they didn’t. But the alternative media did. Amateur reporters and fact-gatherers offered independent substantiation for some of the charges. It turned out the criticisms of the Swifties weren’t quite so easily dismissed.
By definition, a professional is a person who gets paid for their specified activity, and an amateur is somebody who doesn’t get paid. Implicit in this is the assumption that anybody who’s not getting paid has a lesser degree of skill, for after all, if they HAD the skill, they’d get paid, right? It’s incomprehensible to us, for example, that Bobby Jones didn’t “turn professional” and get paid for his great skill at the game of golf.
The term “professional” also applies to a person who is part of a profession, which is further defined as a vocation or calling — especially learned or scientific. The profession itself determines who’s qualified to be a member of the club. Sometimes it’s a license. Sometimes it’s education.
I do not believe the term should be applied to the news business, and the fact that the press considers itself a profession is at the heart of the loss of the public trust. It suggests a separateness, a pedestal from which “professionals” are given special insight into truth. But journalism is not a profession — it’s a trade. And it’s best practiced by those who live and breathe among everyday people, not those who dine at the table of power. We owe the fruit of a “professional” press to Walter Lippmann and his Creel Committee cronies, who manipulated the culture to suit their own ends. As Chris Lasch so brilliantly noted, the decline in participation in the political process in the U.S. can be directly tied to a rise in the professionalization of the press. Lippmann didn’t believe people were capable of governing themselves in any walk of life and needed an educated elite to do the job for them. Thus was born journalism’s artifical hegemony — objectivity. But I digress.
When people like Mr. Podhoretz put bloggers in the category of “amateur,” they not only do a disservice to the movement, but they reveal that they can’t possibly understand the phenomenon whatsoever. Blogging may be many things, but one thing it is not is a group of wannabe amateurs posing as the press. Unfortunately, only those with eyes to see can see this, and the mainstream press is still largely left in the dark.
Repurposing news and programming content
Tuesday, August 31st, 2004Cable networks are finding value in repurposing their content for a Video-On-Demand (VOD) world. TV Week (Free registration required) reports on efforts by The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel, but it seems everybody’s getting into the game.
As content proliferates on multiple platforms-from the mother ship of linear television to the emerging media offspring of broadband, video-on-demand and wireless-content providers are mining their cutting-room-floor footage and recycling, repurposing and reusing material across the new screens.As a result, many networks are in the embryonic stages of determining how to rejigger their production and shooting schedules, and more important, whether such changes can yet be monetized.
The key is to shoot smarter, said Channing Dawson, senior VP, emerging media, Scripps Networks. “We are starting down the road of how to model financially, how to handle the shooting and the logistics. How do you piggyback production so you can produce five three-minute pieces for broadband or VOD in an additional three hours? Do you set up as a separate shoot or a piggyback shoot?” he asked.
Three cheers for Independence Air
Thursday, August 26th, 2004
It’s a beautiful night in New York, and I’m looking forward to my meeting tomorrow. This was my first experience with Independence Air, and I gotta tell ya — it’s the bomb! Friendly, hip, clean, quick, new jets, comfortable seating, no frills, great Website, and very, very affordable. I will use them again. Imagine getting a round trip ticket Nashville to New York for $425 with one day’s notice! If you have need to easily move about east of the Mississippi (they’re based at Dulles in D.C.), I strongly recommend you try Independence Air.
New York Bound
Thursday, August 26th, 2004I’ll be out of the office for the next couple of days meeting with a client in New York. I’m flying into Kennedy this trip. If you’re ever in LaGuardia, check out the display case in the terminal of items you can’t take on a plane with you. The chainsaw always makes me smile.
Today’s RSS is yesterday’s “smart filter”
Thursday, August 26th, 2004When this comes to pass — and come it will! — then they will know that a prophet has been among them. Eze 33:33
Tech prophet Frank Catalano has republished an essay written in 1991 that introduced the idea of “smart filters” for consumers getting news. Can anybody say RSS?
While the technological future appears bright for news junkies, as with duct tape and the Force, there is both a light side and a dark side. Will, for example, people hear the things they need to know, as well as the things they want to hear? It’s pretty difficult these days to tune out news about a Presidential election, or a major poisoning scare. But if your smart filter has been expressly told to ignore news items of general interest, will you hear about them other than over the office water cooler? Will it be too late to respond properly? Might not a national government require certain news items get a “universal” tag to make sure every filter puts it through?
10 Questions for Peggy Phillip
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004Here’s a fun little interview with Peggy Phillip, news director of WMC-TV in Memphis and likely the first blogger in the local TV news business. She began blogging two years ago and ran into intense criticism from colleagues and observers. Her blog is still going strong today, and while I’d to see her take the step of including comments from users, I do enjoy her insightful — and sometimes biting — comments.
Educating everybody
Tuesday, August 24th, 2004Dan Bricklin has written a concise explanation of RSS that is must reading for anybody in the TV industry, especially those who deal with the news business. It explains RSS in such easy-to-understand prose that I’ve posted a permanent link to it just above my blogroll. And while I’m at it, let me formally endorse Dan Gillmor’s outstanding book, We, the Media. If everybody would just read this, we could seriously advance the discussion on what to do next.
It’s time to put the brakes on pharmaceutical ads
Tuesday, August 24th, 2004Warning: The following entry contains a very bad word.
Am I the only one who’s sick of sitting in front of the TV and seeing an advertisement for one of the erectile dysfunction (ED) treatments in every commercial break? I mean, the four-hour erection warning was cute once, but it’s turned into another American ad embarrassment, so let’s call it off. Fifty years ago, liquor manufacturers voluntarily agreed not to advertise on television, and few people remember, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” So whether it’s voluntary or government forced, let’s get these things off the air.
Why? I’m no prude, but I hate the “wink-wink” with which these ads are delivered. Nobody’s fooling anybody here. This isn’t about helping a medical condition (although that’s the way it began); it’s about improving the sex lives of people who don’t really need their sex lives improved. The entire campaign is disingenuous and panders to the basest elements of human nature. And what gives such a greedy business the right to force erection discussions with little Johnny — or worse, force Johnny to experiment and learn on his own?
Nobody likes spam, but one caught my attention the other day. There it was — right in the message header — in plain English: FUCK LIKE A GOD! Well, I’ll be! Truth in advertising for a change! The Levitra ads no longer even reference erectile dysfunction, but they do talk about the four hour complication. Their ads are now about the “quality” of the experience — a nice, tender way of saying, “Come on, guys. Now you can fuck like a god!”
And little Johnny, caught up in the whole “wink-wink” business, breaks into daddy’s Viagra bottle instead of the liquor cabinet. These drugs are too new to have any reliable determinations about long-term side effects, but trust me, that’s coming. What happens when Johnny gets married to some young thing who’s enamored with his god-like attributes and discovers that he can’t, er, perform without the drugs? (”Well, Terry, cough cough, you have no, cough cough, proof to sustain, cough cough, such allegations.”)
According to the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey in 1999, approximately 22 out of every 1000 men in the United States sought medical attention for ED. (That’s .02% of the population) Estimates vary, but most of the literature today suggests that between 15 and 30 million American men suffer from the malady. It’s a serious matter for these men, most of them older, but they are not the target of the pharmaceutical companies.
Was anybody else embarrassed when Cialis sponsored an event on the PGA Tour?
Just because somebody has the money to advertise, doesn’t mean they should do so. This is increasingly the issue with the pharmaceutical companies, and nothing shines a light on it like these particular ads.
Perhaps my feelings are such because I’m a man, and I watch a lot of programming that men like to watch. Consequently, I see more of these ads that the average person. Yeah, that’s it, wink-wink.
The desperate search for the mass market
Friday, August 20th, 2004Intelliseek chief marketing officer, Peter Blackshaw, has devised a nifty little method of finding a mass market amid the nooks and crannies of the Internet. It’s found in an article in today’s MediaDailyNews ironically titled, “Next Big Player In Consumer Media: Consumers.” This is, in my judgment, an exercise in futility, but here’s his logical thinking.
CGM (consumer-generated media) refers to commonly archived online content that is readily accessible by other consumers or key marketplace influencers. Blackshaw uses the term CGM–and not word-of-mouth–because there is one crucial difference between the two terms: CGM is highly measurable, although very few market research firms do so.As opposed to other media, Blackshaw said, “the Web, really, is first about listening,” and consumer dissatisfaction, in the digital age, can be detrimental to a brand if it strikes a nerve in the wrong kind of person. These wrong kind of people are called speakers–and they represent roughly 10 percent of the population, but trickle through to influence 90 percent of the population, called seekers.
According to research conducted by Forrester and Intelliseek, the trust factor for consumer-to-consumer communication is near 90 percent. As Blackshaw says, so-called speakers “are finding reach in ways that have never been experienced before,” through various online mouthpieces such as blogs, bulletin boards, public/private discussion boards, forums, reviews and opinions on product pages, and consumer feedback on branded Web sites.
…each (GCM) leaves a digital trail behind it for an enterprising public relations or marketing person to follow, according to Blackshaw. “CGM can be a very powerful means of auditing your entire marketing mix, because it’s entirely measurable,” he said, noting that CGM requires vigilance on the part of PR agencies and marketers.It also enables them to figure out who their clients’ influentials are–something planners could take advantage of by segmenting this audience, sending it product samples for testing, or generating marketing ideas based on the buzz they create, etc.
The mass market is no more, and despite the best efforts of the status quo to prove that it isn’t, all these types of ideas do is validate the new reality. If you don’t think so, consider what happened to Warner Brothers Records.
Implicit in the concept of the mass market is Walter Lippmann’s notion of the ability of smart elites to “manufacture consent” from among the legions known as the masses. That means “manipulate in the name of some political or business objective.” The Internet is the first place in the 100 years of manufacturing consent where people are able to resist, and that freedom is what’s driving everything about it.
Influence exists and will always exist when the ground is level, but the decision to BE influenced is completely up to the individual.
Reality show woes
Friday, August 20th, 2004There’s an important lesson about the new information paradigm in the ongoing reality show wars between Fox and the other networks. Earlier this week, the California Supreme Court refused to block Fox from airing its boxing reality show, “The Next Great Champ.” NBC took them to court, claiming Fox stole the idea they’ve been developing for a show called “The Contender.” You’ll recall Fox also jumped ABC on the idea of a mom-swapping reality show.
I have to come down on the side of Fox in this, and here’s why. It’s difficult to prove stealing an idea, especially in Hollywood, but I don’t think that’s the issue anyway. What’s at stake here is the belief that one can sit on an idea in today’s new age, because programmers — like other hierarchical entities in a Postmodern world — aren’t in charge anymore. Control now is clearly in the hands of consumers, and they want what they want when they want it. This is what’s birthing the year-long season and why I think NBC and ABC only have themselves to blame. Fox producers knew the others would want to wait, and that — I’m sorry — was an invitation to get screwed.
In today’s marketplace, when you’ve got something, go with it.
Speaking of reality shows, have you seen the kafuffle over the new HBO series, “Family Bonds?” It seems the star of the show, bounty hunter Thomas Evangelista, was arrested in 2001 on charges he was running a sex club on Long Island. There will be a hearing on the misdemeanor charge Monday, and Evangelista maintains innocence.
Who knew that when we started making real people into celebrities that one day we’d learn that they are, well, real people? Maybe that’s why they’re so interesting.
Huge: Grokster not liable
Thursday, August 19th, 2004Via Reuters: In a major defeat to film and record companies, a federal appeals court on Thursday ruled several Internet file-sharing software companies are not liable for copyright infringement for digital video and music files traded online utilizing their programs. Let’s hope Congress takes note. This is what the INDUCE Act is all about.
UPDATE: Tim Wu at Larry Lessig’s blog lists 7 reasons why this case will end up in the Supreme Court.
1. These is a stated legal conflict on the Sony standard as between the 7th and 9th Circuits;
2. The 7th and 9th Circuits disagree (albeit in partially in dicta) on the relevance of willful blindness to secondary liability;
3. The Court has these matters in hand: it has granted cert. in many similar cases historically (Sony, 1980s, White-Smith (the Piano Roll case) 1909, Teleprompter and Fortnightly (Cable / Broadcast, 1960s & 1970s);
4. The Court has a vague sense that some far-out stuff is going on in the field of “Computer Law” that maybe it should check out;
5. Law clerks use P2P technology to plan basketball games;
6. JJs. Stevens and Breyer deeply dig this stuff;And most importantly,
7. The Court loves to be the center of attention, and this would make it so.
UPDATE:Tim changed the 10 reasons to 7, so I’ve updated the list.
Cory Bergman: I turned off CNN and watched my computer
Thursday, August 19th, 2004Cory Bergman’s thoughtful report on how WBBH-WZVN in Fort Myers was able to serve the world during Hurricane Charley is a must read for any local station who is serious about the Internet.
Broadband penetration crosses 50 percent threshold
Thursday, August 19th, 2004In what is one of the most important developments to date in the New Media revolution, Nielsen/NetRatings is reporting that over half of the Internet population (51%) accessed the Web via a broadband connection in July, up from 38% in July of 2003. This is staggeringly significant, because the 50% threshold is considered critical mass by Madison Avenue.
I remember a CBN staff retreat 20 years ago during which an executive from Saatchi & Saatchi addressed the group about this “50% threshold.” At the time, we were considering the ramifications of the remote control. I recall the degree to which this magic line was significant, because as each new application (VCRs, etc.) crossed the line, it meant greater difficulty for broadcasting in general. I often recall that meeting, because I’ve since watched many other technologies cross the threshold. It’s one of the reasons I’m so convinced that broadcasters need to move into other forms of distribution in order to maintain market share.
The caveat in this announcement is that the threshold applies to mass marketing, and I’m equally convinced that’s a dead horse. The point, however, is that this will accelerate the movement of revenue away from broadcast and to broadband based applications, such as the advertising noted below.
UPDATE: Reuters is reporting that broadband growth slowed in the 2nd quarter to the lowest pace in a year. Caveat: the study is of cable and phone company numbers only.
Online video ad model established
Thursday, August 19th, 2004MediaDailyNews is reporting this morning that Microsoft has quietly moved its Web video advertising technology out of beta and into the marketplace.
Now officially called MSN Video 2, the broadband video advertising platform became available “for general sale to a broader set of clients late last week,” according to Eric Hadley, director of marketing and advertising for MSN. He said advertiser demand has been considerable, and there is now “substantially more inventory available.”Hadley said that ads on MSN Video 2 will appear “somewhat like TV ads,” except that only one 7-12-second video ad will appear for each piece of content. Hadley added that while consumers don’t necessarily need a broadband connection to view MSN video, the video capabilities are limited for narrowband users.
Dayport makes it easy to handle all of this, and I’ve long loved their software (Viacom seems to like it too!). The only objection I had was that it wouldn’t work with 30-second commercials, although clients like TBTV in Canada have successfully used that formula. The new Microsoft model is much more reasonable to me, because they’re delivering what people will accept. Very smart.
This is pretty big news, IMO.
Yeah, I hate Web PDFs too!
Thursday, August 19th, 2004PDF files suck, according a wonderful discussion underway on Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine and other sites in the blogosphere. I encourage you to at least read Jeff’s post. I’d like to add my voice as saying I’m with the majority here. Adobe makes great software, and PDFs have their place in shipping documents that need to be PRINTED before reading, but they are a terrible idea when it comes to the Web. Why?
1. They force users into loading Acrobat in order to read them. Acrobat Reader is standard equipment these days, but this extra step — in the name of quality — interferes with the user experience. This is also why I like EyeWonder so much as a video streaming company, regardless of what people think about the technology. I don’t want to have to have anything “load” before I can proceed with “my” experience.
2. PDFs are hard to navigate, and, as such, are hard to scan. They are meant to be printed and scanned. This also interferes with the user experience, which is anathema to the Web.
3. They are clearly top-down when used in Web applications. It is the ego of the publisher that’s interfering with the user experience, and that is so 20th century.
Discussions like these are one of the reasons I love the blogosphere.
Will video ever drive the Internet?
Wednesday, August 18th, 2004Video streaming by broadband Internet users was up 42 percent in the first half of 2004, according to the Broadband Viewer Metrics and Market Analysis 2000-2004 report by AccuStream iMedia Research. AccuStream research director Paul A. Palumbo noted that content published for broadband users is increasing and “broadband advertising is also appearing there more frequently.”
Broadband users accessed an average of 15.4 video streams per month during the first half of 2004, up 42.6% over 2003 for sites with 90% broadband usage.Out of 5 billion total video streams analyzed this year, 79.1% were served at broadband rates (100 Kbps and above), with an average bit rate of 225 Kbps and length-of-view of over two minutes per stream.
Including all video streams served, per unique user consumption of streaming video rose 23% to 3.17 streams on a per month, per site basis.
I remember several discussions with friends that began with the statement, “Video doesn’t drive the Internet.” I lost the arguments back then, but this growth is undeniable. Video still may not be the essential driver, but it is certainly finding a home here.
Press Freedom and the Internet
Tuesday, August 17th, 2004Cory Bergman over at Lost Remote got me thinking about lawyers in an entry about Walter Cronkite suggesting lawyers need to be looking for libel and slander on the Internet.
Cronkite disses the internet
First let me say, I love the guy. Walter Cronkite is a legend. But in his final newspaper column, Cronkite has a few choice words about the internet:
“I am dumbfounded that there hasn’t been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet. I expect that to develop in the fairly near future.”Why all the bad blood? Apparently Cronkite was the subject of a nasty joke on the web in the mid-90’s. That’s still no reason to call out the lawyers on online journalists and bloggers. (Via Rogers Cadenhead’s letter on Romenesko)
The news business and the law business are on a collision course in America.Lawyers hate our guts. They look upon ‘free press’ as our work character, just as we look upon ‘fair trail’ as theirs. But they have us outnumber, outdollared and outgunned.
The three part separation of powers, as we all learned as children is central to our system, gives one branch to lawyers by definition. They seized the other two long ago by naked aggression and have held them ever since as zones of occupation.
Today it is impossible to function in an executive or legislature unless you are a lawyer, or are in thrall to lawyers — lawyers on your staff or the lawyer you work for or, perhaps, the lawyers on his staff. All restrictions on how news is gather and presented are imposed by lawyers, and when we want relief, we must go other lawyers to fight them. Whatever happens happens their way. And, whenever we decide to do something about it, we must do it their way.
Lawyers do not understand what we do, because they do not think as we do. Their thinking is organized, ritualized and bipolar. Ours is disorganized, individual and multipolar. When a reporter goes forth on a story, he has no idea of what he will find and only a general idea of what he is looking for. He does — or at least he should not — be seeking only such information as buttresses a conclusion he has already reached.
You can see the difference (between reporters and lawyers) when you realize that, if his story becomes part of a trial, his notes may be subpoenaed by both sides (in the lawsuit) each looking for something else.
The fair trial will always win over free press, not because it is nobler in concept, or more central to the workings of democracy, but because whenever the choice has to be made, it will be made by a judge (who is also a lawyer).
While a lawyer is protected by the confidentiality of the lawyer-client relationship, the reporter has no such protection fore the raw material of his craft, a craft which the Constitution says the country needs.
In the history of this republic, many judges have gone to jail, but I know of none who went there on a matter of principle. Freedom of the press is threatened. It’s supposed to be threatened. It is — I believe, intentionally — an irritant factor in our system. Those who operate the system are supposed to dislike it, to try to suppress it. When they find nothing about us to resent, to try to stifle, there will be no point to a free press. If it ever does not need defending, it will not be worth defending.
RSS ads: salvation or Pandora’s Box?
Tuesday, August 17th, 2004According to a DMNEWS report, contextual advertising firm Kanoodle has struck a distribution deal with news aggregator Feedster to sprinkle paid listings in Feedster’s feeds of search results.
Feedster, San Francisco, which indexes more than 8,000 news sources, lets users have their searches sent to them through the Really Simple Syndication feed. Feedster already displays paid search listings on its Web site through Yahoo’s Overture Services. Its search feeds will include Kanoodle’s ContextTarget listings labeled as advertisements.Feedster will offer its users the option of paying $10 per year, via PayPal, to receive an ad-free RSS feed.
The impetus for the expansion is the maturing of the search market. A Jupiter Research forecast for the search market released this month concluded that most of the industry’s growth would come from price increases, since supply continues to lag demand for search listings.
“We believe content is a real solution to the supply problem,” said Mark Josephson, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Kanoodle. “We really view RSS as an extension of content.”
Feedster also will sell its own sponsorships for some of the RSS feeds, while using the Kanoodle contextual pay-per-click ads for its nonsponsored search feeds, Scott Rafer, Feedster president and CEO said.Within the next three weeks, Feedster will start incorporating the sponsored links in its feeds. It will clearly label the ads, which will appear as every sixth headline in the RSS feeds, Rafer said. While it will start with the feeds generated from search results, Rafer said Feedster eventually will expand the ads to other feeds as well.
It is the purity of RSS and the control it gives users that makes it so attractive. Cluttering it up with spam is counter to that, and I think it runs against the foundational principles of the Web. I support branded readers completely, but mucking with the feed content crosses my line.
If I want an ad feed, I’ll subscribe to one.
So the FCC is revamping the alert system, eh?
Tuesday, August 17th, 2004Warning people of imminent danger is one of the cornerstones of broadcasting. Consider the current debate in Florida over broadcasters’ decision to tell viewers that Hurricane Charley had changed course and was headed through central Florida. The National Weather Service gave the alert 2-3 hours after broadcasters. Two hours! Three hours! WFTV news director, Bob Jordan, told NewsBlues, “We don’t consider (the NWS) the holy grail anymore. There was a time the post office was the only game in town. Those days are over too. No self-respecting TV station simply regurgitates the weather forecast.”
The National Weather Service got defensive. According to NewsBlues, Meteorologist Bart Hagemeyer reacted, “This competing thing is not right. We’re supposed to work together. It’s a longstanding tradition.”
That tradition has become increasingly irrelevant as technology has enabled broadcast meteorologists to do their own thing. In Huntsville, Alabama, WHNT meteorologist, Dan Satterfield, has long taken the position that he will do and say whatever it takes to save lives. This has ruffled feathers at the NWS, who rightly say that only they have the authority to issue tornado warnings.
So now, the FCC has unveiled a plan to — as reported in Broadcasting and Cable — turn the Emergency Alert System from a Cold War relic into a digital-age defense against terrorist attacks and other catastrophes.
Ultimately, the regulators are seeking to require that all broadcasters relay local alerts via an always-on digital version of today’s system. They envision a day when interactive DTV links could deliver evacuation routes in a local disaster, for example, to Web sites or even to cellphones and other wireless devices. Citizens could ideally access alerts away from home or receive wakeup warning calls.The top goal is give the public better information about pending storms, toxic threats, medical facilities and evacuation routes during local emergencies, a component that has been an afterthought to most emergency planners since the system was conceived in the 1950s.
I hate to come off as cynical, but as someone who lived through the 50s Cold War, I can tell you that the people of this country felt a genuine, ongoing and imminent threat back then. We didn’t do air raid drills at school because we enjoyed it; we were preparing for an attack. When the Emergency Broadcast System was launched, we accepted the routine tests as a necessary evil. More than anything else, those tests reminded us of the clear and present danger, which was just fine with the political side of government.
This blogger is getting married
Monday, August 16th, 2004
Alicia Faith Smith of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, and Terry Lee Heaton of Hermitage, Tennessee, will be married October 9, 2004.
She is the daughter of Jane Hughes Smith and the late David Russell Smith, Sr., of Lawrenceburg. The bride-elect’s grandparents are Mary Charlene Hughes and the late Douglas R. Hughes, and the late Mary Lankford Fowlkes Smith and Benjamin L. Smith, Sr.
Miss Smith is a graduate of the University of North Alabama. She has worked for numerous companies in the broadcast news industry, including WAAY-TV, WOWL-TV and WSMV-TV, as well as the Tennessee Statewide Radio Network and the Big River Broadcasting Company. The bride-elect is currently working on a novel.
He is the son of Dorothy Heaton and the late Norris Heaton of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The future bridegroom is president of DONATA Communications of Hermitage and an internationally published commentator on the television industry and new media. Mr. Heaton worked in news management positions at nine television stations throughout the U.S. and was executive producer of The 700 Club in the early 1980s.
The wedding will be at 2:00 p.m. at First Baptist Church, Springer Road, Lawrenceburg, Pastor Bertis Ray of Rogersville, Alabama, presiding, with a reception immediately following at the home of Bill and Carolyn Alexander in Lawrenceburg.