The voices of Nashville’s cyber community
Two important events here in Nashville for your consideration.
One, WKRN-TV’s General Manager, Mike Sechrist, has started to blog. It’s really good stuff from a man who runs a TV station and understands what’s taking place in the media world. Put him on your RSS reader; you’ll not be disappointed. Here’s an example from an entry today:
Getting back to Virgil (manager of the local Comcast franchise), I received a letter from him recently saying Comcast was going to “realign” its digital line-up in March. If you don’t have a Comcast digital box yet it won’t matter to you but if you do WKRN’s HD feed will move from channel 180 to channel 231 and our 24 hour weather feed, Nashville WX Channel, will move from channel 185 to channel 245.This is the start of a lot of changes to come with not only cable but satellite as well. Congress has set 2009 as the year we all lose our traditional analog channels. No more 2,4,5,17 and so on. Add this to the loss of traditional revenue streams for local stations, throw in declining audience shares and the internet, and you get some grumpy station managers around town.
The other event is a milestone. Nashville Is Talking, the dual aggregator site maintained by WKRN-TV, recorded its 5,000th post today, just nine months after launching. The local blogging community in Nashville is vibrant and growing (up 800% since May 1st of 2005), and NiT, as it’s lovingly referred to, is one of the big reasons why.
Nashville is talking. Are you listening?
January 26th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Just a thought here, and I’m hoping that some of your other readers will also comment. I don’t like that you used the word "cyber" in the post title. Perhaps I’m hypersensitive to language, but it seems to me that "cyber" is used to mean something isn’t quite real. Like "So-and-So’s cyber home" (as opposed to their real, i.e. important home) or "The such-and-such company’s cyber store" (as opposed to their real, i.e. important store.)
The blogs on NiT, which I absolutely adore and click on all day long btw, aren’t Nashville’s cyber community. They’re Nashville’s community. The real community, just communicating in a newer way. When everyone got telephones, they weren’t the phone community. Just the community, talking in a new way.
Just a thought.