Executing Social Media Conference Day 1

It's not dead yet! From yesterday's presentation, hosted at Coke HQ.

Hillary Does The ATL

Blogging Touches Lives

And for once I'm not being snarky. Blogging really does touch our lives -- in a way that's unique and participatory and fulfilling. Of course it also often punches us in the eye. Witness my on-going little tit for tat with He Who Must Not Be Named. Or Those Little Boys Who Should Be Named, Called Out Often, And Taken Out Behind The Shed And Whipped Soundly By Their Mommas Since No One Obviously Ever Did That Before And Sometimes Folk Just Need Some Common Sense Beat Into 'Em. (Did I just say that? Man am I getting mean and cranky and showing too much southern in my old age or what.)

Witness the comment left here. Or read James' Academy Awards acceptance speech here after winning CL's Best Blogger in Atlanta award this week. And yeah, he earned that puppy. Congratulations James! Enough earnestness in one post from me. That's your annual allotment now used up. Let's all go get wasted. DBT tonight at the Variety. Yeah!

Metal Heads Used For Something

From today's AJC:

Brent Hinds, guitarist for Atlanta's ruling metal quartet Mastodon, is being treated in a Las Vegas hospital after he suffered what the band's management calls a "severe head injury."

Has Jeff Clark finally rained geek-vengeance down on Mastodon? Does make you wonder, since all encounters with this completely pointless band inevitably lead to, quite literally, skull cracking. From Clark, May '07:

The four Mastodonians are about as friendly, funny and easygoing as any dudes you'll meet. Even guitarist Brent Hinds, with whom I had a nasty, public brawl (a head-butt) eight years ago - in his pre-Mastodon days - has chilled out considerably. I suppose world metal domination will do that to a guy.

That full Stomp and Stammer piece here. What goes around comes around, eh?

OnLineAthens The Coolest Kids In Georgia Media

OnLineAthens dot com, the online version of the Athens Banner-Herald (note how they brand print and online separately), is seriously head-and-shoulders above the rest of Georgia "traditional" media outlets in offering good, locally-grown multimedia on their pages. Scroll down on their AthFest page to click-on a video featuring the AthFest awards ceremony... still viable and good to watch even after the festival is over.

Not only is OnlineAthens wielding excellent, localized reporting, they're toting some nice DV cams while they're out and about. Too bad the AJC can't tap into a blazing Atlanta music scene right now to offer jack shit. Who even clicks on their one-dimensional site anymore, for that matter? I just go directly to The Blogs... or to Athens.

Heck, OnlineAthens even links you to a site called AthensMusic.com. Talk about your one-stop shopping. Wishful thinking to feel that Atlanta musicians and artists could hope for but a crumb from Atlanta media/Cox Plantation table.

Chances are, when their paper version flutters away one day, and it will, as all papers are in the process of doing, the Athens Banner-Herald won't miss a beat; they "got it" long ago that it's all about the sharing.

Lady Reporter

That’s what they used to call women in journalism: Lady Reporters. Cute, huh? And they stuck ‘em on the society desk to write about Margaret Mitchell’s little book, charity events and the Junior League. Well, Atlantan Katie Johnson wasn’t having any of that! Instead, she made the Civil Rights beat in the South during the sixties her own while working for the AP.

Johnson has had plenty of opportunities to tell her stories lately. The retired reporter, who covered the civil rights movement for the Atlanta bureau of The Associated Press, figures prominently in a new history of the wire service, “Breaking News” (Princeton Architectural Press). The book, which traces the world’s largest news organization from the Civil War to the war in Iraq, devotes a chapter to the rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s. Johnson practically jumps off the pages.

Though she hasn’t worked for the AP in 30 years, it has given her quite a few assignments recently. She was summoned to New York for an oral history session. She appeared on a National Press Club panel that was broadcast on C-SPAN’s Book TV. She was invited to be on the program at the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock desegregation crisis next month, even though she had nothing to do with that story.

“They’re treating me like a celebrity,” she says, laughing. “They sure didn’t treat me like that when I worked for them.”

Full story here. What’s baffling and shameful is that Ms. Johnson isn’t given so much as a footnote in the “The Race Beat,” the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning book about reporting the Civil Rights movement by Hank Klibanoff, a managing editor at the AJC. What a glaring omission.

Atlanta's Fat Ass

Jeff Haynie, a successfull web-based entreprenuer from metro Atlanta has a fascinating blog entry he's titled: How To Build A Successfull Startup Environment in Atlanta. Note his use of the critical word "environment." Jeff's really on to something here, something we need to help him grow:

I can’t even compare our environments to other major areas like the Valley or Boston - it’s just not much of a comparison. So, I won’t. Atlanta can become it’s own community and has the ability to not only do what others have done before us - but also innovate in it’s community environments. And, we need more people - “completely unknown” around town - to step up and make it happen. We need 100 Billy Payne’s passionate about making Atlanta a successful startup community, as much as the real Payne did for the Atlanta Olympic quest in the late 80s.

Full post here. I urge reading it carefully. There's just so much good stuff all through it. I've had to the good fortune to work with Jeff on media issues and making some cool new media. He's completely inspiring to be around. He gets things like, oh say, SoCon07 done. And Southern Fried Tech.

Like others who have come to get to know one another through SoCon07, PodCamp Atlanta or Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs, Jeff is anxious and willing to help build a strong e-entrepreneur community right here in the SE. Let's hope our entrenched media establishment, some of which he talks about in his blog entry, will keep the faith, the open mind and the initiative needed to help drive just this very thing -- a vibrant web-based entrepreneurial environment and community. Not only is it in our interest, their audience base and eyeballs, it would seem to be in their own self-preservation interests too.

FYI... Jeff's on to BarCamp Atlanta come October! I say... whatever was strong in Mr. Payne, is also strong in Mr. Haynie. Let's move beyond the entrenched way of doing things, the good 'ole boy network. Let's learn, create -- and above all -- share.

Two Cool Music Things To Do Tonight - Tuesday

Free ice cream and beer at Decatur CD tonight, starting at 6pm. Knowing all the hipster-deadbeats likely to show up, best get there early. More info here on their blog.

Then later in the evening is cool country music from Jason Isbell at The Earl. More info about that show on Sara's blog.

Let me clarify with a bit of a rant... when I say "country" I will NEVER mean that country-lite Kenny Chesney crap. Lordy hon, don't get me started on the creepy hideousness that is "New Country." Vaguely inspired by Ugly Bobby's recent blissed-out ravings of mediocrity over what is simply really bad music and processed musicianship, I listened to way more than I ever should have of "New Country" while driving around the tri-state (GA, NC, SC) area on vacation. I've never heard so much mediocre, pedestrian, plebeian, manufactured, canned, trite, odes-to-McNuggets (I'm not kidding) and The Wal-Mart-Inspired Life, seriously average, fakey kinda "music" in my entire life. The worst offender was the feeble attempt to lull us all into drone-like stupidity by that nutwrapper jeans-wearing Kenny Chesney. UUUGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH.

See youz guys 'round the ATL tonight.

Judith Owen Sings "In My Father's Voice"

Activists To Converge On The ATL

The U.S. Social Forum, think G8-style protest crowd kinda theater-esque activism, is scheduled to hit the ATL in late June. Atlanta City Council is already running scared and writing-up rules and regs and ordinances as fast as they can for increased crowd-suppression techniques for APD to freely make use of.

Bloggers are organizing as fast as they can. Stay tuned to this unfolding event as we head to June 27th.

HT: GD

Things Change

Let me recount a little story a dear friend of mine told me about when she was a reporter for the AJC and used to cover technology, back when they actually cared about technology...

Friend said she had "sent herself", late nineties I assume, to a biggy music industry conference, just as the music industry was starting to have some serious shifts in their tectonic plates. Napster was running loose through the industry, and the industry was fighting back hard... in all the wrong places. At some point in the Biggy Conference, the head of the RIAA stated that the industry would go digital and drive themselves totally off the industry farm via the MP3, and I paraphrase here, over her dead body.

At that point, a young indie music techno type stood up and yelled towards the titans at the front of the room, "You're a fucking dinosaur, lady." Others took up the chant. All hell broke loose, and my friend, always the intrepid reporter, ran off to call the AJC desk in excitement to say things were just completely in chaos in, gee, of all things... the little 'ole recording industry, and that she needed a LOT of room, like maybe the front page even, to tell this kind of story the way it should be told.

The utterly disinterested (editor) voice on the other end of the phone told her, "You can have 10 inches."

I recount this tale only to warn of times here in a town long run by Cox Plantation Enterprises, and one other alt publication, that the music industry fought and raged against the new, digital machine, and they lost. Their entire industry is in turmoil. And as we move towards what the APC so quaintly calls "New Media" here in the news biz, don't be surprised if we too experience a few You're a fucking dinosaur moments of our own. It's not so much "New Media" as it is an industry-smashing tsunami.

As I mention over at Radical Georgia Moderate, it is a sorry day in hell when journalists like Doug Monroe, who at this point in a fine career should be running papers, are run out of town, and the papers are left to be run into the ground by the likes of Ken Edelstein and Julia Wallace.

Then again, with arrogant, clueless jerks in charge of papers, we have nothing to fear. They’ll only help steer an entire industry right into the ground… just like a lot of aging dinos did with the music industry. As if all the people watching ‘em crash and burn, here on the ground going digital, could care less.

I hope they don’t ask us to come and haul their derisive, dismissive, divisive, arrogant butts out of the wreckage either… we’ve got new media product to keep on cranking.

On The Wings Of A Gulfstream Full Of Poodles

Silly me, I've been so wrapped-up in my fantasy world of committing new media, I completely and utterly failed to acknowledge the passing of a Cox Media Plantation belle, Barbara Cox Anthony. Hon, Mrs. Cox Anthony could "do boards" like nobodies business!

My favorite Mrs. Cox Anthony story is how she had one of the numerous family jets fly a load of her poodles over to meet up with her in Paris. Men may come and go, and Lordy how they came and went from Mrs. Anthony's splendid life, but a real lady knows the value of a snappy little lap dog to an aging, weary heart. And Dear Reader, ladies' hearts, be they rich or poor ones, all get a little saggy as the years go by.

Thinking on the Cox's bags of billions, I do have to laugh a bit when people wonder if new media is "monetizable." Honey, all information is pure gold... to those who can make it come to life. Just ask a Cox heir. I think there are still a few left around this town.

Pretend Voices Carry

Couple of magical thinking ops for "the public" coming up...

1.) The DNR is solicitous of your thoughts on our state park system. More info here. My only wish is that they reinstate Sally Bethea to the developer-skewed board. But you likely already know that if you read this blog.

2.) Atlanta Press Club wishes to dismiss, excuse me, discuss new media. I'll be there to help facilitate the stoning of -- myself. Or to mangle a line from Life of Brian: "Crucifixion? Excellent! Just ahead on your right."

3.) Neither here nor there, but it needs to be said to Creative Loafing:

I hope you (CL) are happy with your smug, arrogant, snotty-ass, pompous, over-inflated selves and sense of media importance now. You’ve managed to really
hurt and confuse a lot of hard working, indie bloggers by playing favorites, first time out of the cover story gate, with a piece about the Atlanta blogosphere.

You might as well be 17-year old cheerleaders at Wheeler High for all the maturity you’ve shown towards our new media community. We’ve worked so long and so hard and created such amazing bonds and systems of support, only to have you announce to the world that not only do you not understand social media, you want to trample on it at every given opportunity.

I’m so angry right now, I can hardly see straight. I hope I calm down enough by the time we ever cross paths again. You’re no better than Newt Gingrich with your divisive, derisive ways.

So there. Got that off my chest I suppose. It's not yet noon and I need a drink and a smoke. Plenty of that, and hot air too, all around.

The Multimedia ATL

I am just freakin' constantly blown-away by the cool multimedia shit being done by folk here in the ATL. Whether political ads, political campaigns, podcast parties, excellent blogs, videoblogging, music, film, Twitter happy hours, you name it... I am proud as a momma bear to call so many of these creative wonders friends. One dear old friend and colleague, Home Depot TV days, who keeps pushing his own envelope and impressing me on a daily basis is Chilton. Here's something steamy from his world to ours. Where Chilton sees that bad moon a'rising, I see only creative blue sky.

"A Divorce On Paper Only"

(This post cross-posted at Peach Pundit too)

Rest assured, some folks' worlds are getting ready to get severely rocked. And when Alan Judd's through with this story, a lot of people who thought they might have slipped quietly out under the radar, Kai Franklin for instance, may just be headed to the pokey instead.

Judd's extremely effective investigative work just overturned, thankfully, the inept, lethal anthill that was our state mental health system. (A shame Dr. Andrea Bradford there was allowed to resign; she should be prosecuted for murder, same as the legislators who have continually slashed funding to the state system of mental health care. But that's another story I suppose.)

Expect the same treatment with the Graham case, as Judd picks up where CL left off. From today's AJC cover story:

Franklin and Graham remained in regular contact, according to evidence presented during his sentencing hearing. Graham's co-defendants testified that while he was a fugitive, he sent drug money to Franklin: one bag of cash holding $25,000, another with $20,000. She also got portions of $150,000 that Graham invested in her father's business, King testified. David Franklin said last week that the investment never occurred.

In California, King said, Graham bought a pre-paid cellular telephone to call only his wife, thinking it would be difficult to trace. King referred to the device as "the Kai phone." "They would talk about different things," King said, "but sometimes about paying bills."He said Franklin regularly sent bills to Graham at the house where he was hiding in suburban Los Angeles.

King said Graham told him "he still had responsibilities to take care of for Kai."Graham used postal money orders to pay Franklin's bills, an Internal Revenue Service agent said. They apparently took pains to make the transactions difficult to track.

Franklin, agent Wayne Wright testified, bought the money orders in a "structured fashion" to avoid scrutiny. She had each money order issued for less than $3,000, the amount that triggers reporting requirements designed to detect illicit transactions. And she allegedly bought multiple money orders at multiple post offices on the same day, or in different lines in the same post office.

Wright said authorities have obtained about 60 such money orders. Other alleged discussions between Franklin and Graham during his time as a fugitive were of amore personal nature. When Graham wanted to see his child from a previous relationship, Rivera testified, Franklin picked up the boy from his mother and dropped him off for a flight out of DeKalb Peachtree Airport on a chartered jet. Rivera said he ferried drug money back to Graham in California on the same flight.

The visit troubled King."I just told Tremayne that he has to tighten up," King testified, "because he can't let something like that let the authorities track him through his son." Rivera said he accompanied the boy back to Atlanta several days later. He left the child with Franklin, he said, in her Cobb County home.

Redneck Literati Underground

Slim and his boys have quite a honky-tonk weekend lined-up, with a special ticket-price nod to mommas on Mother's Day.

Friday May 11 at Smith's Olde Bar - Slim Chance & the Convicts will be playing at approximately 8:55PM as part of the 500 Songs For Kids event. Come early to see all the other cool acts, each doing one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (as determined by Rolling Stone Magazine). We are doing #79, a tune about a guy with a tambourine. Music starts at 7PM, Cover is $7 and it all goes to a children's charity group. (SGR staff may try to make this one.)

Sunday May 13 at Smith's Olde Bar - the Wrights with opening act Byrd's Auto Parts, featuring the amazing Jon Byrd. Showtime is 9PM, I think the cover is $12 adv, and Mothers get in for half price.

PS: Mark your calendars for June 23, when Honky Tonk Meets Heavy Metal at Lenny's. Slim Chance & the Convicts will perform along with Dark Overlord!

Let The Great SC Dissing Begin

Trust the NYT's Alessandra Stanley to fire an opening shot at my ye 'olde home state. As if I could possibly have expected otherwise. I've been totally intimidated, dissed too, by seemingly scores of Ivy League women, given my dubious education credentials and pronounced accent.

It's really rather pathetic, in a Bridget Jones way. Those Ivy Leaguers of all genders could be so haughty and dismissive, and just kinda mean-girl when we used to rub shoulders in network news.

Then again, I could always drink their lipflapping, snotty, privileged, toned butts way under the table... in my day of course. And dissing SC is my territory, Alessandra. Not yours. Nobody really can do it better, if I do say so myself.

Least I can still go out drinking here in Georgia with whomever, wearing whatever, whenever I damn well feel like it, wearing only a comforter and a push-up bra maybe! Lord knows what the women of Iran won't be allowed to do next. This is sickening here. Just sickening. It knots my stomach in a billion different ways for the hell it implies. No need to wonder why I have always been an unapologetic feminist.

Bombing back to the stone age to free women from religious, nonsensical oppression? Sounds plausible, initially; but if I was for that, we'd have to start here in Georgia, given our own religion-inspired nonsensical legislation.

One other thing before you run away... congratulations to Mara Shalhoup at Creative Loafing for her Best Journalist in Atlanta award last night at the APC awards gala. She really deserves that recognition for being the hardest working, lowest-paid reporter in this city. I hope the NYT comes a'callin' for her kinda talent soon.

Sigh... I fear a total Bridget Jones kinda afternoon coming-on here for real. Bloggers must have so many self-esteem issues. Sigh... Know what could really pick me up though? Anyone got ANY good gossip from last night's APC soiree? Did anything remotely resembling monkey biz transpire without me there to blog it? Come on. The SGR needs some good 'ole schadenfreude-dirt right about now.

Party That Must Not Be Named

So I go to this Party That Must Not Be Named tonight, although the (not yet branded) name is blazed all over the place in lights overlooking, uh, a certain park in Atlanta associated with the Olympics, but I've been told beforehand not to blog about it by a certain Power That Really Wantstobee, and all I can say is... Thank you Jesus for sending us Tom Houck, who also showed up at Party That Must Not Be Named. That Tom Houck will remind anyone outside of a coma of just what being old school is all about, and why anyone with just a wee bit of genuine flare and flavor about 'em has enormous cultural value still.

Chiefly, Tom's just plain-ass bawdy fun and loads of excellent gossip, an Atlanta civic treasure if you ask me (or dare attempt to censor me). If it wasn't for him, Party That Must Not Be Named would have been one completely packaged poseur yawner. Basil tea martinis are pretty to hold in your hand, but when it gets down to it, nothing substitutes for plain rowdy-fun behavior, a way with the ladies, and excellent southern partisan political bullshit.

All these cute new southern musicians and artists and utterly flavorless young writers are all just too precious on paper, and what person under 30 doesn't want to buy something glossy in which to read about 'em in (as long as they can read about it on their cell phones that is)?

Honestly, all I really have a hankerin' to really read about lately, from that good 'ole southern POV, would be a day in the, current, life of, say... Bill Campbell! And who would know best to tell that tale than the South's finest, our best longterm man-about-town... Mr. Bi-Partisan Houck.

Sometimes, even I wonder if southern culture altogether shouldn't, finally, just be put in a museum... alongside the flag. Catch it if you can I suppose, no matter how processed the packaging could turn out to be.

Let's Conversation! With The AJC

Announcements

Whew... they are starting to pile up on me, so lemme knock out some right now for you. Get your calendars at the ready...

1.) Social Media Club Atlanta is Wednesday April 4 at 6:30pm at Earthlink. Details here. RSVP as soon as you can.

2.) Slim Chance and the Convicts are playing Smith's Olde Bar this Wednesday April 4, opening for Wayne "the Train" Hancock. It will be an evening of real roots oriented country music. Showtime is 9PM Sharp, and the cover is $12 adv. & $15 at the door. Welcome to the Redneck Underground. (Slim also was our first ever TG musical guest. What a legend!)

2.) Deja Blue, the TrueGritz kinda sorta house band, will be playing 3X this spring! Now where else can you hear "(Blaming It All On The) Lights of Broadway" as a bluegrass, kickass tune? Only with Deja Blue. According to Mark, their upcoming shows are:

• Saturday, April 7th, @ 8:25 pm: we'll be performing a set for the WRFG "Georgia Grown" Bluegrass festival ( A.K.A., Peach Blossom Festival) at the State Farmer's Market, Exhibition Hall. Bands will be playing from 11:00 am to 10:00 PM. Definitely a slice of life. We'd love to see you there.
• Thursday, April 19th, @ 9:00-ish, we'll be headlining at the Red Light Cafe. Come early, bring your acoustic instrument, and jam before the show. (NOTE: Pauline Ashley-Wilkes threatening to sing backup vocals at this pre-gig event.)
• Saturday, May 12th @ 8:00 PM, we are performing at the Red Top Mountain State Park. Great camping opportunity!

3.) Tania keeps (monogamous, romantic) hope alive here.

4.) James Marlow kicks-off his campaign for Georgia's 10th Congressional tomorrow, Tuesday April 3. Disclosure: I'm going to be supporting this campaign, so if you don't like hearing about it, too bad, leave a comment.

5.) Caroline Monroe has her biggest Athens, GA gig to date, coming up April 26 at 8 p.m. at The Melting Point. Support the South's most gorgeous country music new voice.

6.) Save the date for the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper annual River Revival party on Thursday, May 10th at Park Tavern at Piedmont Park. This is an awesome party with dancin' and Dames A'Flame and food and booze and bluegrass, and also a fundraiser to help keep Georgia's rivers, and our drinking water here in Atlanta, clean. I'm on the host committee again too, so if you buy tickets online, please list me as your host committee member.

Thanks!