FoJ

Blogger/Journo meetup tomorrow w/ John Grooms

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when: tomorrow, Jan 17, 4-6pm
where: Amelie’s

Our guest at tomorrow’s blogger/journo (#FoJ) meetup is Creative Loafing columnist and author, John Grooms.

From his bio on Main Street Rag:

“John Grooms is a multiple award-winning writer and editor, as well as teacher, public speaker, event organizer, music lover, rock history fanatic, husband, father, recovering worrywart, conflicted Catholic, pastry hound and incurable smartass. He has lived in Charlotte since 1976, was editor of Creative Loafing in Charlotte from 1988 until 2005, and has been a featured columnist for the newspaper since then. During his tenure at CL, the newspaper won more than 40 state, regional and national journalism awards. Grooms is the “tragicomic product” of a bilingual postwar home in a small South Carolina town, interspersed with spurts of living in Brussels, Belgium. He?s overweight, often profane, has been called a “progressive populist” among other, worse names, and on most days would rather be at the beach.”

See you there!

FoJ Meetup tonight w/ Jeff Elder

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Come out this evening and hear Charlotte Observer columnist Jeff Elder discussing the finer points of social media, including things he’s learned from his year-long fellowship studying the topic at Stanford, and his experiences meeting people like Biz Stone & Ev Williams (Twitter), Craig Newmark (Craigslist) and Loic Le Meur (Seesmic).

This is another one of the monthly Blogger/Journalist meetups, hope to see you there!

time: 6:30 – 8:30pm
place: Amelie’s French Bakery

#FoJ Freelance Survival Guide w/ Andria Krewson & Rhi Bowman

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illustration: Jack Knight

Come out this evening and listen to Andria Krewson (@underoak) and Rhi Bowman (@rhibowman) discuss taking care of yourself and your business as a freelancer. You can submit questions to be addressed via Google Moderator. This is another one of the monthly Blogger/Journalist meetups, and looks to be very informative. RSVP, if you like, at Social Media Charlotte.

time: 6:30 – 8:30pm
place: Amelie’s French Bakery

#FoJ Mini-Camp, Sunday June 14th, 1-5 pm

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#FoJ = the Future of Journalism, for those not following along.

We’re really excited about this event. Come out to meet and talk with David Boraks, founder and publisher of DavidsonNews.net, arguably Davidson, NC’s leading outlet for local news; and David Cohn, via live video on Skype from San Francisco, founder of Spot.us, a groundbreaking platform for community-funded reporting.

left: David Boraks, right: Dave Cohn

Also stick around for a screening of Us Now, “a film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet”. We’re showing a slightly abridged version that will only last about an hour, down from the original hour-and-a-half.

It’s at the atrium behind Amelie’s this Sunday, from 1-5 pm. Which means delicious pastries, coffee and sandwiches are just an order away throughout the event, at your leisure.

place: Amelie’s French Bakery
day: Sun, June 14
time: 1-5 pm

The event is free, of course. You can RSVP on the Facebook event page if you like, but it is not required. Hope to see you there!

Blogger/Journo group meetup Monday, 7pm at Amelie’s

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day: Monday, May 18
time: 7pm
place: Amelie’s French Bakery

The next blogger/journo meetup is this coming Monday, 7pm, and Amelie’s in NoDa. Our guest is blogger/writer Dave Munger (@davemunger on Twitter) of Cognitive Daily, and founder/president of ResearchBlogging.org.

Join us for casual discussion about the present and future of journalism and media. And pastries. We’ll meet in the atrium right behind Amelie’s.

Five Ventures finalists announced

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We talked about Five Ventures a little bit last week, saying we had been selected (CLT Blog) as finalists. Five Ventures is an early-stage, high-growth business competition for the Southeast US. Companies compete in one of five different sectors: Biotechnology-Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology-Devices, Information Technology/Software-as-a-Service, Service/Retail and Student/Non-Profit.

$100,000 in professional services are up for grabs, and all teams selected as finalists receive mentoring and coaching from volunteer professionals throughout the region.

UNC Charlotte publicly announced the 16 finalists late last week. You can read all about them, and us, in the press release on BusinessWire, and an article in the Charlotte Business Journal.

It’s no secret we love Twitter; we have the largest following on Twitter of any media organization in Charlotte, and we definitely use it a lot more. We thought it was interesting to point out that one other finalist is also on Twitter, and many of you might already know him pretty well: Michael Gibbons of Buttons of Hope (@buttonguy and @buttonsofhope). His organization helps people raise money for charities and fundraisers through personalized pin-back buttons.

The Five Ventures finals and conference will take place on April 9 at UNC Charlotte’s Barnhardt Student Activities Center. For information on attending, see the info provided on Five Venture’s website.

We’re not pitching CLT Blog as a standalone organization so much as we’re pitching the philosophy and software framework we’ve been developing for almost a year now. (Trivia: the Five Ventures finals are being held exactly one year to the day of our launch in 2008, how nice of them.) We hope to talk more about our plans in the future, and look forward to pitching our company this coming Thursday!

CLT Blog is a Five Ventures finalist

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video: Erik Button; watch this video on Vimeo

Justin Ruckman and I made official appearances as CLT Blog editors in last Thursday’s presentation to the semi-final round of UNC Charlotte’s Five Ventures competition. We were selected as semi-finalists after submitting our executive summary, and prepared the presentation excerpted above for a shot at the finals.

Our eight minute talk contained 81 PowerPoint slides and a ton of information packed into a small amount of time. A huge opportunity for a new approach to journalism is enveloping the community of Charlotte and CLT Blog. Frankly, we are just along for the ride.

Fortunately for us, our judges saw the potential of distributed journalism and we were notified this weekend that CLT Blog is a Five Ventures finalist. Being a finalist means we have a shot at $100,000 along with other business services, and we’ll have the opportunity to review our models and improve our pitch with a small panel of coaches. We couldn’t be more excited about an opportunity to work hard at building a platform that can enable everyone’s ability to share local information.

The video above is heavily edited down from about 13 minutes. Some of our specific plans are excluded due to the sensitive nature of the competition, but we hope to be discussing them at more length soon. Feel free to shoot us any thoughts you have on the presentation. The audio is a little tough to hear when the speaker isn’t looking at the camera; but we weren’t trying to make a fuss with a proper recording setup.

Our hope is to help build a future for community journalism. A future where writers can be fairly compensated and where citizens can be rightfully informed (and entertained).

CLT Blog