The Little Beer Truck Story that Could

Last Thursday's little story about Hillsdale’s tipsy beer truck has taken on a web life of its own. Sort of like the one posted here last summer about Sarah Palin’s glasses.

I confess to getting the beer truck ball of web-yarn rolling by forwarding photos to The Oregonian, which immediately posted them on OregonLive. That was good for nearly 200 visits to this site.

But OregonLive postings are ephemeral and maddenly un-user-friendly. (Note to Oregonian editors: Please tell your corporate managers at Advance Publications to give you control of OregonLive, which is presently run by folks who just don't get it.)

The good news from the OregonLive posting is that two TV stations e-mailed me go ask for photos. The bad news is that, as far as I know, the stations neither aired the photos.

I also sent the story to Jack Bog’s Blog (aka bojack), the hugely popular local blog put out by Jack Bodansky. Jack didn’t post a link to the story pictures until Friday, but when he did, visits to The Red Electric skyrocketed, at least by my normal, staid standards. Friday netted 400 plus visits, and the high numbers continued through the weekend. I reckon 800 visitors came over from bojack.

Today one of the photos was picked up by a site called Unique Daily, which posted a link to The Red Eclectic. The numbers are on the rise again.

It’s great to get new visitors. After interest in the beer truck wanes, I hope a few check in from time to time for my slightly less bizarre stories and comment. You know, the ones about outrageous executive salaries, Oregon's absurd "Civil War," Quakerism, TV-B-Gones, and Northwest wanderings.

Oh, and about media madness and the odd lure of stories like the one about a tipsy beer truck.

Citizen journalists to the rescue

Over at Jack Bogdanski’s excellent, provocative and popular bojack blog, Jack has posted a section of a speech given by Gary Imhoff, editor/blogger at the DCWatch web site in the nation’s capital.

No, the site doesn’t track the comings and goings of lobbyists and legislation. Instead it keeps an eye on the city, its government and its neighborhoods.

Imhoff's speech contains the following "new media" call for citizens to transform themselves into journalists and to submit their stories to DCWatch:

We try to convince reporters and their editors that they should cover the stories that are interesting and important to us. Occasionally, we succeed; more often we don't. But in our local neighborhood listservs and in themail, we are able to act as reporters ourselves. We escape the filters of ‘news judgment' that keeps a lot of important news out of our news outlets. We get to inform others directly, and in the end we all end up better informed.”

Jack offers his site as Portland’s place for amateur reporters to share news items. In fact, if you read the bojack site, you know it already does, with barbs added.

If you live in or around Hillsdale, I welcome neighborhood news from you for my on-line Hillsdale News. Write me at editor@hillsdalenews.org.

Meanwhile check out Jack’s post (and the dozens of comments to it) on how the right-wing has jumped on-board and has positioned itself to lead the Sam Adams recall effort. Jack, who favors the recall, thinks the right-wing involvement of celebrities like radio-talker Lars Larson could be the kiss of death for the recall initiative.