I was sitting on the deck reading the morning paper while slurping my cuppajoe when I stumbled upon an article in the Local section titled Salem Promo Attracts Notice with an accompanying picture of Oprah Winfrey in standard graduation ceremony dress. It sounded hauntingly familiar and I knew why when I read this:
What kind of women go to Salem College?
Let's hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand …
Oprah Winfrey?
The indomitable talk-show host attended Tennessee State University,
but the above lines from a promotional video for Salem College are
generating a lot of buzz online.
The video aired last fall as part of a showcase of Piedmont colleges done by WFMY-TV.
Lucy Cash recently posted it on her blog, "Life in Forsyth," spurring a wave of reaction.
"Everyone seems to be reading that blog," said Jacqueline McBride, the director of communications at Salem College.
I knew it! Esbee, aka Lucy Cash, wrote a post about the rather misleading Salem College promotional video featuring Ms. Winfrey. It's misleading in the sense that it makes the average person think that Ms. Winfrey has a deeper relationship with Salem College than her appearance as a commencement speaker in 2000. Esbee really is a muckraker isn't she?
But let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture and see the news cycle for this particular story. First there's the fact that this video was produced by a local television station, WFMY, for a feature on local colleges. So a local station, with its own news operation, didn't see anything untoward about the school's allusions to Winfrey's ties to the college. Next, the school so likes the video that they buy it and post it on their website and their own YouTube channel. So far, so good. Over six months later Esbee finds the video and posts about it. **Correction received via email from Esbee: "Small correction: Salem didn't put the video up until last week. It aired six months ago, but i
didn't see it until they posted it on YouTube." ** Then, almost two weeks after that the Winston-Salem Journal picks up the story and runs with it.
This leads me to ask the same question I've been asking for at least two years: why in the world doesn't someone at the Journal figure out a way to get Esbee under their umbrella? I suspect they get plenty of story leads from her that she never gets cited on, which I understand is the way the game is played since her blog is a public domain and Journal staffers have as much right to read it as we do, but they don't get any of her traffic. Instead they've floundered about with their own blog efforts, trying to get their already stretched staff to blog in addition to their reporting, but not realizing that just because you can write a news piece doesn't mean you can be a good blogger.
Folks like Esbee, entrenched in their community, gifted with a "voice" that attracts local readers like honey to pollen, are gold. You can't fake what she does and you can't snap your fingers and say to your metro reporter, "Hey, I want you to invent something as creative as 'And I mean exact'." I'm not even saying they should have tried to hire her. They could have simply approached her with some sort of offer that would have allowed her to retain her independence and yet benefit them with traffic and ad revenue.
But who knows. I'm sure there's some perfectly logical reason, and who's to say Esbee would have gone for it. Maybe they did try to woo her, but somehow I doubt it. This is the same organization that is trying to survive by making the tactical decision to cut head count, which in my humble view is a strategic error that could sink the business. I've written many times that the one advantage that newspapers have always had is their "feet on the street" and depth of coverage of local events. Sadly, that 'tis no more.
Oh, BTW, Esbee's next "And I Mean Exact" is being posted at 1 p.m. today. Be there or be square.
