Monday the Pfister Hotel announced a new hire: A 10-hour-a-week blogger whose assignment is to roam the storied hotel’s hallways and lobbies, meet and greet the guests and find tales to tell. (Think Quoyle‘s beat in The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx – with people instead of boats, a hotel instead of a harbor.)
Julie Ferris, who works in the public relations office at City Hall, gets the 6-month gig. She’ll keep her day job. “My boss is really supportive of the opportunity,” Ferris says. “The beauty of the Pfister is my goal is not always to try to be there at the same time.” One off-hour story she hopes to get: “To be there at bar close and follow all the people who are there lurking for celebrities. I don’t think it’s a 9-to-5 building.”
The position was created, says Pfister General Manager Joe Kurth, to capitalize on the hotel’s strong connections with people in the community. “When you tell someone you work at the Pfister, nine out of 10 people have an anecdotal personal response,” he says. It also builds on the hotel’s three-year-old artist-in-residence program, an “experiential marketing” venture that has served to “touch people and get people engaged” with the hotel. He suggested that the stories collected by Ferris – and her successors in the rotating Narrator position – can engage people the way National Public Radio’s “Story Corps” has for nearly a decade.
Ferris says she sought the position – which drew a score of applicants winnowed to five finalists – “because I have always been a writer, but I’m also trying really hard to make Milwaukee my home.” With a background in academia and a Ph.D. in Mass Communication and Journalism from the University of Iowa, Ferris pivoted her career in 2007 to come work for the City of Milwaukee from a faculty post at the University of Alabama.
In the summer, Ferris has joined the paid cast at the Bristol Renaissance Faire, where she dresses as “an Elizabethan trollope,” she says. “I went with people on the pub crawl every day. Part of our jobs as actors was to engage the people who came there and entertain them. I would have couples who talked to me for an hour and a half, and I would just nod and smile. They would tell you why they were there and what they loved.” She’s drafted an academic paper drawing on the experience.
“People don’t get to talk to each other any more,” says Ferris. “We just message them or tweet to them or send them texts. I really enjoy being social and talking to people.”
Ferris will post blog items at least twice a week. She shies from calling what she’ll do journalism – it is, after all, ultimately an aspect of the Pfister’s marketing program.
“I’m chronicling what happens there,” she says. “I don’t think the sole purpose is to [simply] inform as much as it is to inform and enlighten and encourage people of the city to see parts of the city in new ways. I’m adding so much of myself to the story. It’s not my goal to do straight reporting.”
But she acknowledges that she’s taking up residence in a still-evolving media space. “That’s a debate I’ve had with my students,” Ferris says. “There’s a raging debate over whether community journalism like blogging has that value. The evolving space of Web 2.0 and the way we find each other there, the way we surf it, the way we present information there, can rally people together and serve the function that journalism serves.”
So what does all of this have to do with traditional journalism?
Once upon a time, readers interested in the sort of stories Ferris is to produce might have found them in the work of a newspaper or magazine feature columnist – albeit without the product placement that the Pfister gets. And it shows just how the boundaries are shifting in the media space these days.
And it brought to mind this post the other day by Alan D. Mutter, one-time Chicago reporter and editor, now a consultant out on the West Coast. Mutter took note of the fact that a small, locally owned ice cream shop in San Francisco has more followers on Twitter (301,352) than the San Francisco Chronicle‘s daily circulation (223,539) and way more than the Chronicle‘s Twitter followers (10,639):
Think about it: A barely two-year-old business with no marketing budget in a modest storefront in a less-than-fashionable part of town now has a larger and arguably more passionate audience than a once-mighty metro daily that traces its history back to 1865.
As Gannett Blog owner Jim Hopkins notes, the store’s operators were once the sort of bread-and-butter small advertisers routinely found in newspapers like The San Francisco Chronicle. But that’s changing rapidly in the new world of online marketing, now dominated by free, do-it-yourself promotion.
All is not lost, though, Mutter concludes:
Newspapers can be social media, too – even if they are printed on dead trees. To build passion, community and interaction, they must:
* Build buzz by providing compelling, if not to say provocative, coverage – the more unique, the better.
* Build community by incorporating all manner of user-generated content, including ratings, reviews and comments.
* Build value by helping consumers save money and by helping advertisers make money.
If newspapers continue tottering along as the staid, imperious and unimaginative institutions that many of them have come to be, then get ready for the third decade in a row of continuously shriveling circulation.
Of course, a killer rum-raisin ice cream might help, too.
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In other media news of note…
It’s Election Day, and The Marquette Tribune last week turned out a piece on Republican candidate for governor Scott Walker‘s past as a student pol during his time as a student at Marquette University. While it’s mostly a clip job, the piece still represented an interesting bit of enterprise.
Also … The online magazine Salon certainly leans left, but it’s far from doctrinaire. And of all the writing on the midterm elections we’ve come across, these three pieces on today’s midterm vote seem the most clear-eyed out there – and offer a trenchant critique of the dominant media narrative. Money quote (from the second one):
There will be plenty of gloating from Republicans in the coming days and weeks (as there has been for months now) about how the country has turned emphatically and decisively against Obama and the Democrats – the same blind chest-thumping in which the Democrats of ’82 engaged. What they won’t admit is that their good fortune will last only as long as the economy falters; something that Reagan demonstrated to Democrats in 1983 and 1984.
And finally… Another Halloween has come and gone, but while you rummage through the last of the trick-or-treat candy, you can work off your sugar buzz or distract yourself from the election returns with these fascinating roundups from The Wild Hunt on the media’s annual ritual of discovering modern pagans.
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