Graphics by Monica Ulmanu. 

Photo by Cliff1066

We have GREAT content on this site. It's timely, relevant, and innovative. We have covered a lot of perspectives that cumulatively provide important information that can help Americans make more informed decisions regarding energy use. But who is going to hear these perspectives? How do we ensure our work does not live in a vacuum?

One way we came up with is to invite opinion leaders who care about our views to join the discussion. By the end of July, I had recruited nine writers for what our team originally dubbed the “Huffington Post” section of the Web site.

We hatched this idea back in March when our marketing strategy was in its infancy. We decided to invite UNC alumni and energy experts from government agencies, non-profits, the corporate world, and of course, Hollywood, to share their opinions on “how we should be powering our nation.”

By the end of April, I had sent letters to over two-dozen alumni, celebrities, CEOs, and government officials, inviting them to contribute 300-word essays.

Danny Orlando, the regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s southeast ENERGY STAR program, and Robbie Cox, a former Sierra Club president, agreed immediately.

Senator John Kerry, whose office Eileen and I stopped by during a trip to Washington, D.C. for my story “Reclaiming Creation," replied yes the same day I e-mailed his press secretary.

Our list of expert contributors continued to grow. We received essays from the CEOs of two of the nation’s largest power companies, Duke Energy and Progress Energy, and the vice president of energy and environment initiatives at IBM, as well as a reverend, a documentary filmmaker, and an international reporter.

These energy editorials were just one component of our larger marketing strategy, which included social media marketing, blogger relations, outreach to power companies, and outreach to high schools. For example, we are in the process of hiring a science teacher to turn Powering a Nation content into lesson plans that will be promoted by LearnNC, a Web resource for teachers in North Carolina.

I am proud of our first effort. We have done an excellent job fostering relationships with organizations and opinion leaders who share our views and can distribute our content through their networks and activities. But there are things we could have done differently. For example, a key component of marketing is to define a target audience, learn it inside out, and then develop a product that meets its specific wants and needs and adds value.

During the initial planning stages, I am concerned we did not clearly define or understand our audience. We had a demographic profile and a media consumption profile in mind, and we considered existing research into this group's media consumption habits. But we did not conduct original formative research to understand exactly what a very targeted segment wants and needs when it comes to energy information and news.

An area for future improvement is to ask readers in what format they would like to receive this information and from which channels would they like to be told about it.

That being said, perhaps experimental, innovative journalism need not adhere to textbook marketing processes. First, do what hasn't been done before; then, adapt it it to appropriate audience segments.

 

Fortunately, this fall, marketing professor Dr. Heidi Hennink-Kaminski of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication will lead eight teams of marketing students to design a total of eight marketing plans for four different target audiences of Powering a Nation. This will ensure that next year’s team has a solid foundation from which to market the product, while at the same time allows us to aid experiential learning at UNC.

I am certain our marketing efforts will pay off and that by next year, with the help of Dr. Hennink-Kaminski's class, we will have a better understanding of who is reading our content, how we should reach them, and what we can do to serve better their reading needs.

I am also hopeful that marketing communications, as a critical media management function, will be required of future News21 teams.

I wanted something memorable for our viewers that quickly connected food and fossil fuels. The term “eating oil” is sometimes used in text articles to highlight the use of fossil fuels in the U.S. industrial food system. How do I represent “eating oil” visually? I had an idea of taking photos of people with oil coming out of their mouths like a horror movie, a play on “you are what you eat.” My boyfriend suggested making black Jello and having people eat it. These exciting ideas got killed for being extreme.

Eventually we decided that we would instead douse a plate of food with oil, since we needed to get a shot of a plate of food anyway. So my teammates Eileen Mignoni and Nacho Corbella stepped in and set up a photoshoot in the basement of the journalism school. Ashley Zammitt and I got to act as art directors. Ashley cooked up the food, and I got a hold of used oil. The shoot was great fun and yes, a bit messy. But we ultimately didn’t use the oil spill for the "From Pasture to Plate" piece of The High Energy Diet story. My coaches Dan and Barbara thought it confused the message. Mike Schmidt and I thought it was innovative and memorable, but those in charge backed my coaches. So it goes. But I couldn’t let the oil spill go to waste, it was cool – especially in reverse. So,the plan is to use it as a promo piece. I hope some folks will see the clip and remember that fossil fuels may contribute to what’s on their plate. Perhaps it might spark different choices.

Ashley and I asked to do our interview with Michael Pollan in his garden. We found him sitting there at a table at the appointed time, quite friendly but also on a bit of a tight schedule. After our 45 minute interview, Michael agreed to let us take some shots of his small but packed garden, which we did before running off to talk to locals at the farmer's market down the street. Since his garden and gardening talk was cut out of our final video on food and fossil fuels, I quickly put together for the blog some of Michael's thoughts on gardening with some shots of the various plants we found him growing in Berkeley, California. I like considering his idea that gardening is part of the solution to our fossil fuel problem. It make me want to start a garden asap.

Following is a brief peek into Michael's garden. Enjoy!

Finding yourself in the middle of a big story is a daunting position to be in. Mountaintop removal, with its myriad supporters and detractors, is certainly a huge story that seems to be unraveling more and more rapidly. For the past week, I have wrestled with my interviews and b-roll, looking for a way into the narrative. When you are working on a project like this, away from daily deadlines, there is this temptation to make your piece the end-all say-all on the topic. Especially when you step into a story as epic as coal. The history of coal in West Virginia is a rich and often tumultuous story with no shortage of compelling characters.

But it's a preposterous idea. Let's face it, no story can be the end of the conversation on a particular topic. The best you can do is effectively tell a small part of that story and hope that it adds something to the canon of reporting that's already been done by people far more experienced and knowledgeable than yourself. Ira Glass has said this best when he talks about restoring intimacy and "human scale" to storytelling in an effort to get away from the "know-it-all" mentality of broadcast journalism, which he says "makes the world seem smaller and stupider and less than it really is.”

So here's to telling small stories that show how big and complicated the world really is. Back to editing.