writer, photographer, web person from Washington, DC.
Author: Joe Flood
Joe Flood is a writer, photographer and web person from Washington, DC. The author of several novels, Joe won the City Paper Fiction Competition in 2020. In his free time, he enjoys wandering about the city taking photos.
I first met Allison more than ten years ago. She used to run the FilmBiz Happy Hour, a monthly meetup of aspiring filmmakers in Washington, DC. Held at the former Biddy Mulligans, these fun events attracted a diverse crowd of writers, actors, directors, voice artists and others. What made them different was that every month, Allison selected a charity to benefit from the happy hour. The charity collected the admission fees and also got to speak about the work that they were performing in the community. Allison brought a real passion to finding deserving organizations. She researched them, talked to their leaders and vetted them – they had her stamp of approval and meant a lot to her on a personal level.
So, it wasn’t surprising to me that she wrote Visionaries in our Midst: Ordinary People who are Changing our World. The book profiles amazing people working in the shadow of our nation’s capitol finding innovating and expansive ways to serve the citizenry and, in particular, the most vulnerable among us. And she got a quote from Studs Turkel!
“This is a book of wonders–and hope. It tells us of extraordinary things `ordinary’ people can do.”
What’s impressed me over the years is Allison’s compassion. I remember discussing with her the hopeless case of DC’s public schools. Hopeless from my perspective. She believed that positive change was possible.
Allison is speaking at her (and my) alma mater, American University. Here’s the info:
Book Talk and Signing with Allison Silberberg
Visionaries in our Midst: Ordinary People who are Changing our World
Wednesday, April 6
7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
School of International Service – Room 300
Admission is complimentary, but please RSVP online.
Contact Judy Donner, 202-885-1616 for more information.
Parking is free after 5p.m. in the SIS garage – entrance on Nebraska Ave. at intersection with New Mexico Ave.
The March DC Film Salon offered tips from Allied Integrated Marketing on promoting your independent movie or documentary. The salon is a free monthly networking opportunity for film and video professionals.
The meetup began at six, allowing filmmakers plenty of time to mingle before the presentation started at 7. There were about forty people at the super-hip Gibson Guitar Room, one of my favorite venues in DC. Located near the Verizon Center, it’s a beautiful space complete with a piano and scores of electric guitars.
After showing a “sizzle reel” (a flashy intro movie about their agency), Ivory Zorich and Gloria Jones from Allied Integrated Marketing shared their expertise on how to bring a film the attention it deserves. Allied Integrated Marketing is a marketing agency that specializes in the entertainment industry. They have offices around the country, including a small one in DC.
Ivory and Gloria shared examples of how they promoted the films that they represented. Their talk held some interesting tips for anyone promoting a product:
All marketing is local these days. Even in Washington, newspapers want to see a local angle. You can’t just have a story about a movie – you have to tie it to the local community somehow. For example, if one of the stars is from the area.
Secondary press partners are key. These are smaller publications like the City Paper that are easier to pitch too.
Use niche marketing. For example, with the film Sin Nombre, they targeted Latino audiences. Milk was aimed at the LGBT community.
Tastemaker screenings are another useful marketing tactic. These are preview screenings for “tastemakers” in the community, i.e., influential people who love movies.
Partnerships. If you have a documentary about AIDS, then you should partner with AIDS organizations to get the word out.
New media. They mentioned Brightest Young Things as a “hipster” site to reach out to. (I am not hip – I find BYT to be unfathomable.)
One question I had was, “How do you measure results?” That’s difficult to do, according to Ivory and Gloria. It’s hard to tell if a movie’s success comes from PR or something else. I think that’s part of the reason why the field can be so frustrating to people – if I bought Google Ads, I can track how they’re performing. But how do you measure schmoozing tastemakers?
Still, these are all excellent ideas for getting the word out about your movie, or your product. The most important thing is to think about your movie from the perspective of the audience, and tailor your efforts accordingly.
Check out my latest article for the Pink Line Project on local filmmakers – this time I look at Silent Code Features. This local production company is helmed by Anthony Greene, a screenwriter I’ve known for a couple years now. He writes very punchy, topical scripts.
Out of the four films by Silent Code that I saw at a special screening on March 12, the one that I liked best was “The Favor.” Greene handles controversial material with a deft touch. It’s also a very funny film.
Last night was opening night for DCist Exposed, a gallery exhibit of some of the most interesting photos from around the Washington region. Read my FAQ to learn more about this interesting show which, by the way, runs until March 27 at Long View Gallery.
After hanging out there for a couple of hours, drinking beer and talking to photogs, what did I learn?
Long View is almost too cool to be in DC. It’s enormous, sparse and separated by historic Blagden Alley by just a glass garage-style door. Last year, it played host to the opening party of DC Week too. One drawback: only two little bathrooms in the back, not ideal for large crowds served beer.
I cannot tell the difference between the various varieties of Yeungling that they served last night.
Giving the photogs and DCist staff name tags was an excellent idea. You could easily spot the show’s participants.
From Samer Farha, one of the show judges, learned that Mpix was a good place for prints and Apex in Virginia was a great place for framing. We both agreed: insanely expensive to print at home.
Brian Mosley informed me that you don’t have to go too early down to the Mall on July 4th to get a shot like this. I find this hard to believe.
Art lovers bought photos on opening night, including this classic shot of a stunned-looking Mayor Fenty. The photographers don’t know who buys their pics.
Selling tickets in advance was a brilliant idea. No fire marshals and there was plenty of room for everyone.
Heather Goss, who started DCist Exposed, has about five different jobs. But not to worry, she’s apparently a machine.
People liked my line in the FAQ I wrote for the Pink Line Project about the DCist commentators being a “riotous crew of misfits.” That’s me literary background.
Be sure to check out these great photos of the night from Vincent Gallegos. Can’t wait til next year!
I wrote a short article for the Pink Line Project on the DCist Exposed Photography Show. It’s a really neat event. DC photogs submit their photos and then the best are selected for a show at Long View Gallery. I had a photo in the first year of the show. It was awesome seeing one of my pics hanging on a gallery wall and I got to meet some great photographers who I’m still friends with.
It’s so popular that this year there are two opening nights, March 15 and 16. Get your tickets now – it will sell out.
SXSW Interactive is an annual conference of social media and web geeks in Austin. It’s a huge, exhausting event that takes place over a long weekend in March and is popularly known as the conference that introduced Twitter and other new forms of communication.
The criticism now is that it’s gotten too big and too corporate, dominated by giant corporations trying to be hip. And that it’s gotten to be such a chaotic moshpit that it leads to network outages.
I went to SXSW in 2007 and 2008, just the right moment before it became mainstream. The conference taught me to love the brilliant minds at 37signals, whose radically hopeful ideas about the future of work cannot arrive soon enough. I learned that project management should be as simple as possible. Gantt charts and MS Project should be avoided in favor of clear goals that everyone can understand. REWORK is their vision for the ideal work environment, where meetings and busywork are eschewed in favor of collaboration and results. Their philosophy is subversive and attractive for anyone stuck in boring meetings or lengthy conference calls. Continue reading “Why I'm Not at SXSW This Year”
Greg and Ben will be sharing best practices and how you can take the next step with WordPress as a platform. Pulling from their wide-ranging experiences in journalism, publishing, government, and development, they’ll be discussing how you can use WordPress to craft your personal brand, and what lessons that can be learned from how journalists use WordPress.
We’ve invited the DC Hacks/Hackers group, a meetup for journalists and developers, to join us this month. You can learn more about them at http://meetupdc.hackshackers.com.
Here’s their cheeky bios:
Since 2007, Greg Linch hasn’t had a journalistic job or project in which he hasn’t thought about using or — in most cases — used WordPress. His current job at The Washington Post is the only exception, but it’s only been a few months, so give him time. Most notably, Greg led The Miami Hurricane’s migration to WordPress in 2008 and co-founded CoPress to help other student news organizations do the same. (Twitter: @greglinch.)
An aspiring attorney, a coder, and an all around geek, Ben Balter is a J.D./M.B.A. candidate at the George Washington University and a member of the FCC’s New Media team. When not working or in class, he enjoys tackling otherwise-impossible challenges to sharing information using nothing more than WordPress, duct tape, and occasionally a pack of bubblegum. (Twitter: @BenBalter.)
NOTES
Andy Nacin introduces and thanks sponsors for the beer and space.
April 12 next meetup. Format: lightning round. Looking for speakers.
Greg Linch
Used WP on multiple projects, including Miami Hurricane. NYT using it for blogs. Davis Enterprise using WP for content, then imported into InDesign for print. It’s web to print. (I am skeptical of all-in-one solutions, having seen balky print-to-web systems pushed by journalists who hated the web back in the 90s.)
EditFlow: assign stories, set status for newsrooms. It’s a WP plugin.
AssignmentDesk: interact with community, an open assignment desk.
NPR’s Argo Network uses child themes for local blogs.
WordPress goes well with a delicious IPA.
WP Courier is an email newsletter plugin. (I need that.)
LivingStories is an interesting experiment in online storytelling.
Good question: how to get reporters to use? Show em how simple it is.
Washington Post is getting a new commenting system. (Yea!)
Ben Balter
Using WP to craft personal brand, take back Google results. Dynamic speaker but then goes into brandspeak, i.e, “what is a brand?”
You’re the Chief Marketing Officer of your brand. Search engine management needed for professional reasons. They show pics of modems.”This is how people used to connect online.” Everyone laughs. I feel old.
No longer defined by a company, you need an online brand (like joeflood.com!). Your content online is your brand, including the embarassing pics. It’s like your college transcript.
73% of recruiters Google you.
WP makes it simple to tell your story.
Grab a domain (key in google searches), describe yourself on your site, setup a basic WP site, start a blog for credibility and engage others, use Google Reader to find things to blog about. It’s like an online brochure about you.
Use Google Analytics to discover your most popular posts.
Be social. Use Facebook, Twitter, etc to promote your posts.
Every journalist should have a web site. Every potential journalist should have a site. Every job-seeker should have a site, if only so that your embarrassing Facebook photos don’t show up in a Google search.
I’ve met writers and editors before who don’t have web sites. They don’t want to learn HTML and still look at the web as a lesser medium. That’s short-sighted. WordPress is not difficult. If you can use Word, then you can create a site in WordPress.
WordPress DC meets monthly. It’s a nice mix of developers, writers, bloggers and other creative and technical folk.
DCist Exposed is back! This fascinating photography show returns to the Long View Gallery from March 15 to 27, 2011. Out of over 1,000 individual entries, 43 winning images were selected by a panel of judges to be included in this year’s DCist Exposed exhibit. DCist.com prides itself on engaging and promoting emerging local photographers through its daily use of images from the popular, reader-generated DCist Flickr photo pool. Each day, DCist.com selects photos from the pool for use in its daily coverage of local news, arts and entertainment, food and sports.
The opening reception, held March 15 and 16, will be epic. In fact, it was so popular that last year I couldn’t even get in. DCist is attempting to remedy that by selling tickets in advance. Get yours now!
I had a photo in a previous year’s show. To see my pic hanging on the wall was inspiring, and I got to meet some amazing photographers who have broadened my concept of photography. The DCist community is awesome. They’re nice people who like a good drink and they all have their own unmistakable style. Just glancing at my Flickr contacts, I can pretty much tell who shot what – Samer Farha (beer), Erin McCann (coffee), Jim Darling (iPhoneography), Matt Dunn (portraits) and Chris Chen (street life).
To accompany the DCist Exposed show, there’s also a special edition magazine featuring the winning photographs from all five years of the show. The issue can be purchased online at MagCloud for $27.50, which comes with a digital version, or at Long View Gallery during the receptions for $25.
DCist is also bringing back the popular special event for emerging collectors, Emerge Exposed, on Monday, March 21, 7 to 9 p.m.Co-hosted by DCist and the Pink Line Project, a panel of experts will share tips and ideas on how to begin collecting art.
What I like best about DCist Exposed is that it demystifies the art of photography. You don’t need to have expensive lenses or your own studio to be a photographer. You just have to take a decent photo.
