Six Times An Hour

“Producer Matthew” was never supposed to be a brand.

It was customary to sign off our Facebook posts with our names when I worked at the FOX affiliate in Sacramento. Producers would sign off with “Producer so-and-so,” while our news director would often sign off as “ND name.” There were two reasons for this: To keep track of who posted what piece of content, and to let our viewers know that human beings, not robots, were behind our Facebook account.

My sign-off was “Producer Matt.” When enough people recognized me from the posts I made on our station’s Facebook page, I decided to use the handle elsewhere — my personal Facebook profile, Twitter, MySpace and so on. However, on one of these accounts, “producermatt” was in use by someone else, so “producermatt” became “producermatthew.”

That was back in 2010, at least one year before my relationship with the station dissolved and I began a sort of entrepreneurial journalism that led first to a gig with ABC and later to a job at Reuters.

I never liked the name though. It read funny, it sounded weird and I hated introducing myself as “Producer Matthew.” On top of that, for the past 10 months, the “Producer” part has been completely irrelevant given my role at Reuters.

I decided I wanted my name associated with the work that I do, not an alias. It’s a little bit easy to start from scratch when an alias, and not your name, is attached to the work you do and the mistakes you make, but it’s harder when your identity is the chip you gamble with.

That’s just one of many reasons for the handle change. It’s not a huge deal, but it is something I had to think quite a bit about. In the future, perhaps I’ll share more of my reasons.

Every day, journalists and news presenters receive a grab bag of compliments and complaints from readers, listeners and viewers. But one email sent to WKBT morning show anchor Jennifer Livingston caused a social media firestorm.

The email, published on Facebook by Livingston’s husband and WKBT reporter Mike Thompson, called Livingston out for being overweight.

“Surely you don’t consider yourself a suitable example for this community’s young people, girls in particular,” the unidentified viewer wrote. “Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain. I leave you this note hoping that you’ll reconsider your responsibility as a local public personality to present and promote a healthy lifestyle.”

In a video editorial published by WKBT on Tuesday, Livingston said she tried to laugh off the email when she received it. But the note struck a chord with some of her co-workers, including Thomson, who published the note on the Internet on Friday.

“The fact that there are people out there like this…makes me sick to my stomach,” Thomson wrote.

As of Tuesday, over 600 people had left comments on Thomson’s Facebook post, most words of encouragement for Livingston, who decided to respond with a video editorial Tuesday morning.

Addressing the unidentified viewer directly, Livingston admitted frankly that she was overweight, adding, “do you think I don’t know that?”

“You don’t know me,” Livingston said. “You are not a friend of mine. You are not a part of my family, and you have admitted you don’t watch this show. You know nothing about me but what you see on the outside, and I am much more than a number on a scale.”

Livingston then turned her attention to children who find themselves in similar situations of bullying, adding that October is National Anti-Bullying Month.

“This is a problem that is growing every day in our schools and on the Internet,” Livingston said of bullying. “If you are at home, and you are talking about the fat news lady, guess what? Your children are probably going to go to school and call someone fat.”

Livingston said she wanted children who felt bullied to learn from her example, that “the cruel words of one are nothing compared to the shouts of many.”

“Do not let your self-worth be defined by bullies,” she said.

I tried to reach out to Livingston by phone Tuesday afternoon for a comment. A member of the station’s news staff routed me to her voicemail.

 

About two weeks ago, I decided to take the Reddit dive and launch one of those “Ask Me Anything” threads. I was surprised by how well it took off, and there were quite a few provocative questions posted by the community (I’d say about half of them were from my Twitter followers).

One question asked for guidance on how a social media editor might keep themselves from moving up the ladder of a news organization later on. I answered by saying a social media editor shouldn’t develop a strategy that causes them to be stagnant over the course of their career — in other words, tweeting out headlines and links on Twitter isn’t a bad way to start out, but they should advance their strategy and doing more five years from the time they opened their account.

Backing that up, I laid out my digital strategy as it pertained to social media over the past five years (I’m counting 2008 since I started in the middle of the year and 2012 since the year is nearly up, just in case you’re doing the math). In 2011, part of the strategy involved covering in near-real time global events — usually during breaking news situations — and mining social platforms for content. In 2012, the strategy evolved to providing people with greater access to news stories: Going beyond the headline to give people access to raw video, photographs, documents, transcripts, audio and so on when available.

Essentially, the goal is this: If I can get access to it, I want you to have access to it.

There are a lot of free services that have allowed me to carry out this strategy this year, but there are also some services that require me to shell out a few bucks. Some examples:

• I pay a service called RadioReference $15 for six months of access to its vast archive of emergency scanner traffic, which I’m then able to upload to SoundCloud when certain news breaks.
• To monitor and record audio from certain media outlets, I subscribe to SiriusXM’s online service, which costs $14 a month, and paid for software from Rogue Amoeba to record the audio (a license for which costs $32).
• Another streaming service I subscribe to, LiveStation, gives me access to BBC World News, Sky News and Al Jazeera English for $5 a month.
• For court documents, I use a service called PACER, which charges ten cents per page up to three dollars for a dossier  related to federal court cases, billed in quarterly installments. One quarter, my bill was a little over $21 (yesterday, PACER charged me $3 to down a criminal complaint against Nakoula Basseley Nakoula — the document has been viewed over 4,000 times).

Any costs, including the ones above, are paid out of pocket.  Since I don’t charge for access to the content, nor do I use advertisements or solicit for donations, the financial return on the investment is $0.

I bring this up for a reason: On Thursday, a Twitter user asked me if I would enable downloads on Scribd so they could mirror some court documents that I had uploaded the day before. Due to the cost associated with acquiring (and, occasionally, hosting) some of the content, I usually disable downloading on services like Scribd and SoundCloud. Instead, I make available the option to embed the content on other websites.

Some news organizations have taken advantage of this option. For example, the New York Times recently embedded audio of an interview between Rep. Todd Akin and radio show host Mike Huckabee that I uploaded to SoundCloud (months ago, SoundCloud generously donated a professional account for me to use). As of today, the audio file of Akin’s interview with Huckabee has been listed to over 9,000 times.

Other news organizations have also embedded the content I’ve uploaded. Multiple news organizations linked to this set of six jailhouse calls made by George Zimmerman. Newsrooms have also linked to the over 200 documents I’ve uploaded to Scribd, which has driven over 330,000 reads to date.

I feel like disabling downloads while allowing websites to embed the content I acquire and upload to services like Scribd and SoundCloud is a fair compromise. The numbers I see for the traffic being driven to the content helps justify my personal social strategy for this year as well as the associated out-of-pocket costs of subscribing to services, software licenses and so on.