OKC needs a city blog. essays, photos, video, music, all things good about this city. There are amazingly good things here, a rich seam of characters and stories and projects and goodwill begging to be told. from a pitch I wrote to one of the people running the city sentinel:

What I am proposing is an Oklahoma City news blog, with breaking news stories, video, photo essays, and features built for the web. Oklahoma City is severely lacking good online content of the kind that draws lots of hits. I just looked at the Oklahoman online; what they're doing is trying to be a newspaper and a television station on a different pipe. It lacks focus on real day-to-day life. There's very little good multimedia, local stories, there is a flavor of reporting that often gets overlooked in a normal paper but that fits very well with the average internet user, because the constraints on the storytelling are very different on the internet. Local markets, community events, characters famous and infamous, there is a rich seam of stories begging to be told. Nobody is doing it here at all. There is a huge vacuum of good web content. Your organization is small and flexible, and I think could manage the translation.

What I mean by 'for the web': Text online can be both longer and shorter than in media; a little blurb can inform sometimes as well as a several column story. At the same time, it's possible to put out a 5000 word character portrait right next to that same little blurb. Videos with talking heads suck, everybody knows that, anything longer than about five minutes loses people online, so what is required is a quick, abrupt documentary verité. Don't dress it up, just tell the story. Be funny, be original, and genuine, that goes for everything. Photos are great alone, but do even better with audio, which gives context in place of a caption.

The great thing about the internet, well, two great things about the internet: It is the most perfect and cheap printing press (copy machine) ever, and it reduces organization cost to zero. You have almost infinite space to do the story justice, and the more content you create, the more ad revenue you get; more stories mean more space; it's no good to bombard people with floating banners and flashing garish animations, but there are spots in a style where ads fit well and don't hurt the content. If the content is good, people will come, and come back, and spread the word themselves, and even send in news and photos.

To see the news tonight, the world is falling apart. We need an antidote to that. A viable alternative. I'm telling you all this because maybe you know people who might be interested in working on this with me? The onerous, terrible part: I'll have to sell ads. The amazing, wonderful part: the overhead is as close to zero as it could possibly be. We don't need an office, server space is cheap, all we have to do is keep maybe three or four people paid well enough. But they have to be three or four intensely creative passionate people. people who can keep up with long hours and no sleep and real insanity. You know anybody like that besides me?