One of the real pioneers of the new media is not in Radio or TV but serves on the force of the LAFD. Brian Humphrey who is one of the blogging team on the LAFD's blog. The LAFD have found that Twitter and Google maps are very helpful - they bring the community INTO the LAFD. Here are a few words of good advice from Brian for all of us who care about public TV and Radio:
While no funds have been earmarked for these projects, and Humphrey and Myers spend time on and off the clock working on them, the LAFD has more than 80 Web 2.0 projects in the pipeline that it is testing.
Humphrey advises other government agencies testing the waters of Web 2.0 not to fall into a common misconception about the technology: That it will allow an organization's voice to be heard louder, more clearly and over a greater distance.
Instead, "having this Web 2.0 presence ... allows us to listen more clearly and more accurately over a greater area," he said. "It is all about getting much more feedback [from the public]."
But, the department's journey to the Web has not been without its challenges. As Humphrey, a 22-year veteran of the department who has a propeller placed under his fire helmet in his office likes to note, "I don't have a problem running into a burning building ... but stepping out into the Internet was very intimidating."
Now to the main point of this post - how things begin: Here is an interesting insight spotted by Brian into how small TV was at the outset and how covering a disaster was part of it being taken seriously.
Only 350 TV sets in LA in 1947. The geeks of the time?
Lesson for us all? I wonder if in 50 years people will talk of KPBS and Twitter in the same way?
The City Then and Now ___________________________
By Cecilia Rasmussen
Deadly Blast a Proving Ground for Live TV
Since the film industry moved west shortly after the turn of the century, Los Angeles has been on the cutting edge of what has come to be called the information age. And, though it is seldom recalled, the first convergence of live television and disaster--a staple of today's TV news--occurred in response to the city's most deadly industrial accident.
Television made its American debut at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Within a year, Paramount had dispatched the brilliant Klaus Landsburg to build an experimental TV station--W6XYZ--in Los Angeles. Landsburg, who had invented a widely used FM radio receiver while in his teens, fled his native Germany shortly after the Third Reich classified his pioneering work on radar and sonar as a national secret. In 1936, however, Landsburg had participated in experimental television broadcasts of the Berlin Olympics.
He arrived in Los Angeles with an unequaled technical background and an abiding belief--gleaned from his Berlin experiment--that live television had the power to fundamentally alter people's understanding of the world around them.
There were 350 home television sets in Los Angeles on Feb. 20, 1947, when Landsburg's system was put to its first great test. At 9:45 a.m., a vicious chemical blast at the O'Connor Electro-Plating Co. ripped apart a four-block area in the manufacturing district on Pico Boulevard between Stanford Avenue and Paloma Street, leaving 17 dead and 150 injured.
Within minutes, W6XYZ reporter Dick Lane--later an institution on local TV--was broadcasting live from the scene to a tiny but transfixed audience.
The explosion that destroyed or damaged 116 buildings had opened a crater 22 feet wide and 6 feet deep. The blast shattered windows across a 1-square-mile area and was felt as far away as Long Beach and the San Fernando Valley.
