Media at Nationals

[Jessica Boucher]

Okay. Who's bright idea was it to post a thread I really want to answer thouroughly in the middle of my finals?

Anyway, my first question is, what happened? Back in the day (positive reps to whomever remembers when Sandra ran media for FIRST ) a lot of these solutions that we're suggesting were in place. There were specific areas for media crews, we walked the news crews around that would be most likely to make the most disturbance, we had the media platform to keep the crews off the field (as much as everyone hated that thing, it did alleviate the issue somewhat).

It could just be that the bar has been raised on what is considered "good" press since then...and because of that the "power of the supplier of media" (aka, the media itself) has strengthened...thus giving FIRST less leverage in getting them to come to the event. Because of this, FIRST may need to offer more access than has been offered in the past, just to get the crews to come. We're also not thinking about any extraneous contracts that FIRST may have made without us knowing. Maybe CNN had a contract with FIRST for certain access in exchange for air time on their stations, and TechTV had a different contract with different terms.

So what does FIRST need to do?
-Make the venue work. All of these suggestions (the use of the 2nd balcony, the winners area, etc) are great, and should be put back into place. Is this just a matter of growing pains dealing with Arena-style FIRST? If it is, then it should be one of the summer's objectives to make this work by Nationals 2005.
-Stand up for itself. Bring everyone's aforementioned suggestions to be, but in return, setup a press conference with Dean, or something equally attractive. All it takes is a bit of negotiation.

Of course, to bring these things to be, we all know what this means...more volunteers. And although the media job is rather interesting, if we are in a general volunteer shortage, then we're going to have trouble finding people to fill the void, no matter what. My solution to that? Approach a local Atlanta college communications or media relations academic department and open the positions to them as an experience-based volunteering job or an extra credit assignment. You would have people fighting over the positions!

-Jessica "I feel old because I was in the media tent in 2000" Boucher