Almanac and Almanac: At the Capitol
Almanac is a live, one-hour public affairs show broadcast weekly by Twin Cities Public Televison (tpt). The show's website features an archive of past shows, a Producer's blog, links to guests' websites and special sections of collected show segments. The show's production team maintain a Facebook page and a number of Twitter accounts. By special arrangement, the entire video of each week's show is also posted on YouTube.
Link to a copy of the Almanac site from the Wayback Machine dated 8/17/09.
Almanac: At the Capitol is a live, half-hour show focused on Minnesota politics broadcast weekly by tpt during the state's legislative session (usually February through May). The show's website contains the entire video from show, political segments from that week's Almanac show, a blog written by the station's political reporter, animated shorts created by the station's political cartoonist, a "Found Footage" section, and an archive of past shows. The site was created and maintained on a Drupal content management system.
Link to a copy of the Almanac: At the Capitol site from the Wayback Machine dated 4/12/2010.
Responsibilities
- Segment, meta-tag, write descriptions and post Flash video of the shows on appropriate subsites and YouTube channels.
- Write and edit site content.
- Design and build pages for special video collections.
- Maintain Facebook pages for both shows.
- Assist Mary Lahammer, Almanac's political reporter, with blog posts.
- Create Twitter accounts and coach the show producers and political reporter on the most effective use of the tool.
Considerations
As the Interactive Content Producer at tpt, I was responsible for running the websites for the station's two public affairs shows. Traffic analysis of the sites showed significant usage on the days the shows were broadcast, so we worked hard to get the video posted online as soon as possible. Since the shows were produced live, I targeted having the shows up on the sites before midnight on show days. I also worked closely with the show's producers and correspondents to identify already existing online content to post in support of segments on the shows.
The station's political reporter, Mary Lahammer, is a fixture at the state capitol in and posts entries in her blog at least daily during the legislative session. Because she worked remotely, she often needed help handling photographs,formatting text and embedding links in her blog posts. I also helped her tie her blog into her Twitter account and the show's Facebook page.
The grant funding for the Minnesota Video Vault project ran out in the spring of 2009 and the fiscal hard-times at the station led them to eliminate my position. After freelancing for the second half of the year, the Almanac team brought me back to help them during the 2010 legislative session.
In the fall of 2010 tpt launched their new on-demand site. As part of their redesign effort, they took down the Almanac: At the Capitol Drupal site and the Almanac site I maintained.
