InsectaPod Blog

I was glad to find recently that some people have seen fit to pick up the press release CANR wrote for us (clearly, because this is the third post in a row related to it). Something’s been bothering me about it, though.

Looking at one of the websites, Green House Products news, I’m not sure how genuine their use of release is. There’s a move in online publishing to have new content, regularly updated, in order to get people clicking back. The relevance of the content to the audience is really, in many models, secondary to the relevance of the advertising. GPN is a trade journal targeting greenhouse products buyers. I doubt they count a lot of iPod-toting bug freaks among their readers, but a quick look and I know they definitely have advertisements for greenhouse stuff. Doesn’t really mean I’m not glad they used the release, I am glad. I just find it useful to examine the way people are using written content online and to be aware of what their motives might be.

The other thing that is more substantial. The sustainability center at Aquinas College didn’t link to Insectapod Cast, they linked only to the newspaper article from which they lifted their information. This is annoying, because it drastically reduces that chances that anyone who reads that item on the Aquinas page will actually make their way to our website. I think if there was just one rule in online writing, it would be “write concisely and clearly.” But if there were two rules, the second would be “link everything.” Failing to link not only reduces the reader’s ability to take action on what they read on the site, it also limits your sites involvement in the rest of the online world. Hyperlinks are the greatest innovation in writing since the movable type printing press. We should use them.

I’m finding some new things each day. The Daily Press in Escanaba put the release on their web site. And the folks at the Sustainability Center at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids noted it on their news board (there’s no permalink, though, so it’ll probably only be viewable for a few days). It’s nice to see some things happening with the release and I’m impressed with the reach the folks in the College of Natural Resources communication office demonstrate. I’ve seen them take dairy scholarship press releases and get tv stations frothing, just because they used a (totally accurate) phrase like “ozone burning bovine emissions.”

Early in September I met with a colleague in the communications dept for the college to develop some strategies for getting the word out about the podcast. She put together a press a release that went out a a little over a weeks ago. I’ve been keeping an eye out for references to insectapod, and today found some things.

The Michigan Farm Radio Network apparently made mention of us last week. I found it through a google hit, but they don’t archive their news, so the cached google description is the only evidence. I’m wondering if that means we were discussed on one of their programs? If they podcasted I could have a listen and find out…

The other reference is from a Greenhouse Product News, a publication based in Illinois. The link is here.

I actually found out about both of these from viewing our web stats. Both the Michigan Farm News Radio and Greenhouse Product News Web sites have been driving traffic to InsectaPod Cast.

I was hoping the campus paper, the State News, might bite. It’s a little confusing that InsectaPod doesn’t rate in a paper that ran an article about nail polish today.

Putting together a podcast about insects is easy… packaging it as a narrative is difficult. The people we interview most often keep the subject matter at a comfortably academic distance, and there’s little chance of actually grabbing the insect’s side of the story, which might be a bit more emotionally. And this is a problem, because, as Jack Shafer points out in a Slate article today, “Show me a narrative that’s free of bruises and psychic contusions, and I’ll show you a slumbering reader.”

That writer is speaking about travel writing in the New York Times, and the soporific effect of articles that “float on a mattress of comfort and cheer.” The result of such writing, he says, is that three pieces about Michigan’s magical Leelenau peninsula can be run in seven weeks because the vapidity and formulaity of the stories makes the subject matter inconsequential.

I think those dangers are all the more threatening in an audio format, where listeners expect and even more sensatory relationship with the material. Finding the conflict in a bug story is tough because lot’s of times there isn’t one. But finding something exciting, or unique isn’t so difficult. We’ve found some people who can speak excitedly about the world of insects and the environment, and those interviews do a lot to strengthen an InsectaPod Cast episode. We can’t always find “bruises and psychic contusions,” but we make do with what we have.

Anna and I spent the labor day weekend with some friends in the woods of northern Michigan and came back with around an hour of bug-related recording. We had a chance to speak with our friend about his impressions of and interest in insect life on a 100 acre property that was recently rid of 30 acres of red pine. Then we also took a walk and recorded while Anna discussed all the bug activity she observed.

I feel good about those recordings because they’re real, very illustrative of how normal people view and interact with “people, insects and the environment.” Some clips will turn up in a future episode of InsectaPod Cast; others might be bound for some other insect related new media effort.