Carrying the message of first....

[OScubed]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

You're asking how to be acknowledged for what you do? The first step is, of course, to be visible. You need to have your team recognized as doing things -- community service projects, technical assistance for festivals, demonstrations at regional fairs, etc. You need to emphasize a connection between your team and your community. How can you win a Regional Chairman's Award at Chesapeake without having a good team-community partnership?

Thanks for your comments. Of course we as a team DO have a good relationship with the media, compared to other teams. As you can see from the blog entry outlinks - we did have recognition for our year-round effort in the paper (I even provided links to the stories) throughout the year, and that our team does ALL those things and more. We were featured on 3 different TV stations, 2 different papers on multiple occasions, and numerous blogs, etc.

We even had an online story with video and pictures published about us in the lead-up to the competition, and have had several stories in different venues throughout the year. We were the ones that arranged for a reporter and photographer from the local paper to come to FRC and guided them through the process of getting a press pass and when would be the best times to come photograph. Pictures made it into the online edition, but nothing went in the paper after the event, and there was no coverage of the winners.

I'd consider our TEAM-COMMUNITY link strong. Unfortunately I can't say the same about our SPORT(as a whole)-COMMUNITY link. We press released we were going to Chesapeake and press released as soon as we got back. The paper's reaction? Nada. No coverage of the results of the event, or the results of our team. I am just as outraged at the treatment of FLR's Chairman's award winner as I am about ours, and strongly suspect that this is an endemic and cultural problem with media across the nation (with the possible exception of local newspapers in smaller towns).

I'm not talking about the recognition for our team (which compared to many other teams in the area has been phenomenal - mostly because of the outreach that won us the award in Chesapeake). This is the more systemic problem of having our team sport and other team's academic achievements be ignored by the media, while they waste space on athletics. I see the same treatment given to Science Olympiad, Mathletes, Odyssey of the Mind, etc.

There is no way that a local sports team would make it to an international championship and have it NOT be covered with at least 1/2 page coverage (including the results) in the sports section.

So, rant over (and I just repeated most of the stuff you could read in the blog post), I'm looking for positive suggestions for engaging media at a more systemic level to enhance coverage of all academic team events, and to devote the resources and coverage to these teams that they deserve. MadeAtMidnight gets it - it's about achieving visibility and recognition for the sport as a whole - not for our team.

Specifically:

Do we work more together with other academic competitions to try to pool resources and apply more pressure to media representatives for better coverage, or is it better for each organization to work alone?

Is it productive to engage directly with the main editor of the paper, or is it strategically better to work through one of the sub-departments?

Has anyone had success stories for getting better coverage for the regional and/or national events and if so - how did you go about approaching the paper/tv/news station about the event that worked?

Are there resources at FIRST that we're not tapping into that could help us?

Are there things WE can do for FIRST that would help them do a better job of getting coverage at the Regionals?

My corporate sub-team's goal and mission for the next year is to get better more thorough coverage of academic team achievements in my region for FIRST and other academic teams. I'm not yet sure HOW I'm going to do it but I sure would like some ideas. Enquiring minds want to know