When I graduated from college, I was afraid. Afraid I was going
to have to choose a single medium for my storytelling career. Instead
of choosing, I combined my skills with those of a fellow storyteller, my
dad. We looked at modern day media and realized that most “news” is
filled with negative stories. Our mission: let’s bring positive stories
to TV, radio, newspaper, and the internet.
Sounds simple. Now what? Well, we started with our location: Vermont. We ended up with a plan to tell a story from Vermont’s history, every day. The stories were funny, sad, historical, or quirky…and there were a lot of stories. (365 stories per year and 366 on leap year, to be exact.)
The program, “The Vermont Book Of Days,” was designed as a vignette. We put together demo kits and presented them to Vermont media outlets. And we had the naïveté to think that the outlets would pay for content that was meaningful to the audience. Nope.
One year after our first demo kits were distributed, we launched the program. It took almost one year before we had our media network. “The Vermont Book Of Days” would air three times per day on Vermont’s National Public Television affiliate, three times per day in a network of 11 radio stations, in four newspapers, and on our website www.vtbookofdays.com.
The stations and newspapers weren’t paying us for the content, but they did air the program at specific, high-volume or targeted audience times. We redesigned the program with sponsorship pods, so we could find program sponsors who would benefit from affiliation with the program content in these media outlets.
The program, the sponsors, the media outlets, and Vermonters all benefited from the multi-media nature of the program. The stories were powerful, and each medium brought a different element. Television, for example, brought viewers on-location with live footage and newspapers gave the audience unlimited time to study historic or current photos.
A few things I learned:
1. Some media outlets will immediately recognize content that’s going to resonate with its audience. Others will need to have that proven to them. A very few either don’t know, don’t care, or don’t have the ability to step outside the pre-determined content box.
2. Vermont is rural. (Okay, I knew that.) But I expected this to naturally lead to collaboration amongst media outlets, since there aren’t many of them and they face similar challenges of trying to survive in rural America. I did find collaboration, but I also encountered fierce competition. The most surprising element to me was that the competition varied primarily (though not always) according to medium. Print: cut-throat. Radio: teamwork. Certain TV stations: cut-throat; other TV stations: teamwork.
A few things I knew that were confirmed:
1. “The Vermont Book Of Days” was created for Vermonters and it resonated with Vermonters. The program ran for more than six years and, due to popular demand, we published a full-color, hard-cover compendium of stories which sold more than 1,000 copies in the first 10 days of release.
2. Much media in Vermont is put together by very hard-working people, working too many hours for too few dollars, working miracles with limited resources. To these storytellers, information gatherers, and pillars of community – thank you.
The demands of “The Vermont Book Of Days” were many. A two-person crew to research, write, film, produce, edit, and deliver daily stories for TV, radio, newspaper, and the web is not a small task. But the gifts of “The Vermont Book Of Days” were also many. Vermont is an amazing place, and I’m grateful to have shared some of her stories filled with some of her people.
Sounds simple. Now what? Well, we started with our location: Vermont. We ended up with a plan to tell a story from Vermont’s history, every day. The stories were funny, sad, historical, or quirky…and there were a lot of stories. (365 stories per year and 366 on leap year, to be exact.)
The program, “The Vermont Book Of Days,” was designed as a vignette. We put together demo kits and presented them to Vermont media outlets. And we had the naïveté to think that the outlets would pay for content that was meaningful to the audience. Nope.
One year after our first demo kits were distributed, we launched the program. It took almost one year before we had our media network. “The Vermont Book Of Days” would air three times per day on Vermont’s National Public Television affiliate, three times per day in a network of 11 radio stations, in four newspapers, and on our website www.vtbookofdays.com.
The stations and newspapers weren’t paying us for the content, but they did air the program at specific, high-volume or targeted audience times. We redesigned the program with sponsorship pods, so we could find program sponsors who would benefit from affiliation with the program content in these media outlets.
The program, the sponsors, the media outlets, and Vermonters all benefited from the multi-media nature of the program. The stories were powerful, and each medium brought a different element. Television, for example, brought viewers on-location with live footage and newspapers gave the audience unlimited time to study historic or current photos.
A few things I learned:
1. Some media outlets will immediately recognize content that’s going to resonate with its audience. Others will need to have that proven to them. A very few either don’t know, don’t care, or don’t have the ability to step outside the pre-determined content box.
2. Vermont is rural. (Okay, I knew that.) But I expected this to naturally lead to collaboration amongst media outlets, since there aren’t many of them and they face similar challenges of trying to survive in rural America. I did find collaboration, but I also encountered fierce competition. The most surprising element to me was that the competition varied primarily (though not always) according to medium. Print: cut-throat. Radio: teamwork. Certain TV stations: cut-throat; other TV stations: teamwork.
A few things I knew that were confirmed:
1. “The Vermont Book Of Days” was created for Vermonters and it resonated with Vermonters. The program ran for more than six years and, due to popular demand, we published a full-color, hard-cover compendium of stories which sold more than 1,000 copies in the first 10 days of release.
2. Much media in Vermont is put together by very hard-working people, working too many hours for too few dollars, working miracles with limited resources. To these storytellers, information gatherers, and pillars of community – thank you.
The demands of “The Vermont Book Of Days” were many. A two-person crew to research, write, film, produce, edit, and deliver daily stories for TV, radio, newspaper, and the web is not a small task. But the gifts of “The Vermont Book Of Days” were also many. Vermont is an amazing place, and I’m grateful to have shared some of her stories filled with some of her people.
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