[Ken Leung]

I would love to see channels like the discovery channel, and the learning channel do some specials on the FIRST competition. After all, TLC do specials on junkyard war, as well as other robotics competition. The FIRST competition is competitive enough, and should get pretty good rating considering the audience for those channels should be interested in these sort of things, especially when they find out they can participate in it very easily.

I have been reading a book about the power of media recently, and I am fairly convinced that if you want something big to happen, like using FIRST to change the culture by inspiring young minds about science and technology and keep doing it, you will need the media to acknowledge your effort and say good things about it... And its very important to get the big name media cooperation to start talking nice things about your project before the little newspaper/TV station start following their lead and say nice things about it. I guess this is why Dean promoted his Segway so much on ABC.

So, in terms of getting big name publications to start giving FIRST the publicities it deserve… I would definitely like to see technical magazine like Popular science or popular mechanics start making reports on FIRST, and more popular magazines like Times doing stories of the competition.

Until then, it would be hard getting local news stations and newspaper to be interested in coverage of this competition if they don’t see bigger companies like NBC, CNN, and ABC’s involvement…

What do you think?