Wigley and Associates

Last Thursday I drove to Atwater, Minnesota and spent the afternoon doing video interviews at the offices of the Atwater Sunfish Gazette, the town’s newspaper, now one-year old. I’d been contracted to do the interviews by Bill Densmore, Director of the Media Giraffe Project within the journalism program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. (I’d met Bill last fall when he interviewed me about Northfield Citizens Online and Northfield.org.) He’s putting together a documentary on giraffes — “neck-above-the-crowd individuals making innovative, sustainable use of media (old and new) to foster participatory democracy and community.” 

I interviewed (left to right above) Atwater Sunfish Gazette board members Connie Feig, Bob Carruthers, Margaret Weigelt, and Donna Detlefsen and editor Sandy Grussing (below). Click photos to enlarge. (My apologies for the poor photo quality. I got so wrapped up in doing videos for the first time that I didn’t take photos. These are made from the video clips.)

The paper got quite a bit of press coverage a year ago after its launch (see, for example, this this AP article in Editor and Publisher) so I’m not going to recap its history. Rather, I thought I’d offer some commentary.

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A local non-profit organization, Laura Baker Services Association, held their 10th annual auction here in Northfield on Saturday night. (See my Locally Grown blog entry for all the details.)

  
Left: One of my blogging clients, Ed Kuhlman, of Kuhlman Auction Service, did the live aution. See this video clip of Ed auctioning off some rare wine (1 min, 25 sec).

Right: that’s me in the middle with bloggers MASA Executive Director Charlie Kyte on the left and Ray Cox, MN State Representative and owner of Northfield Construction on the right. Click photo to enlarge.

I am exploring Windows Live Writer, wondering if the word processor can be a good blogging client, even better than my current favorite, Zoundry Blog Writer.

First test is to see how it handles images and whether or not it allows text to be wrapped easily. Looks good.

Can it link URLs to images? Apparently, yes.

Can it do linked thumbnails? Apparently, yes.

I met U.K. Councillor Matthew Ellis back in July in Budapest at the the International e-Participation and Local Democracy Symposium, as he’s the chair of ICELE.

He attended my leadership blogging session and decided shortly afterwards to hire me to help him put up a website with a weblog. He’s a Conservative member of both the Staffordshire County Council and the Lichfield District Council. I’ve been working with Matthew and his wife Cath Finch to get the site up this past month and last week he started blogging.

Upper Midwest Gourmet, a wholesale distributor of specialty food service ingredients, organic coffee, gelato, equipment and supplies, now has a weblog on its website. I’ve helped them with a complete site conversion using WordPress with their exisiting design.

I’ve been working most closely with Western Sales Manager, Michael Applen, who has taken on full responsibility for the site. That’s Michael on the right in the photo (click to enlarge), along with company founder and CEO David Chall… who today, posted his first blog entry titled Upper Midwest Gourmet is getting ‘Greener’ everyday.

Michael wants the UMG weblog to be a group (staff) blog. I warned him of the perils of a group blog so he’s taken an interesting approach: assigning staff to blog once a week or so as if they were beat reporters. If he wears the editor’s hat with the CEO’s support, this just might work because they’ll know that no one else is going to be blogging on their topic area (”beat”).

Earlier this week, Kevin Selig, Director of Sales, posted a story about his recent visit to a customer, a local coffeehouse. Without any coaching from me other than “Tell stories, Kevin,” he’s shown himself to be a natural born blogger. He weaves his own business philosophy in with a little Italian business philosophy as he describes what the owners have done with the shop and its role in helping to strenthen the fabric of the community. His mentions of the UMG products are subtly sprinkled into the blog post. They don’t distract you from the story, yet their presence and links to the relevant pages of the site serve the overall strategic goal of selling UMG products and services.

Next up: they’re going to start using audio and video clips, not only in the blog but on the product pages, too. Cool.

Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer had lunch at The Ole Store today with two of my clients, State Senator Tom Neuville and State Representative Ray Cox. (I stopped by briefly as an on-duty photographer, but being a blogger too, I had to weasel my way into at least one photo. Click to enlarge.) All three are incumbents running for re-election in November… hence, my links to their campaign sites above instead of their office-holder websites.

I also wanted to meet Mary because of the Minnesota-Slovenia connection I learned about in Budapest this summer when I met Jože Gricar. Now I have a good excuse to contact Jože and start figuring out how to get myself over to the Minnesota-Slovenia Friendship Gathering that’s being held next June, coinciding with the 20th Bled eConference.