Three, two, one… On air! On air? Yes, on air!

When Cable News Network, CNN, was 20 years old 20 years ago, it posted an very understable interactive feature (I did not find the 20-year commemorative but the 25-year one, instead)about how it operated from its newsroom to the communications engeneering that allows it to have global coverage. One of the things I wondered of, how it organizes when there is the famous breaking news.

CNN, which broadcast started on June 1^st, 1980, born as an improbable entrepreneurship, loses wherever you saw, pushed by a neurotic Atlanta, GA-native magnate named Robert Edward Turner III, Ted Turner for friends.

No one gave a dollar for a 24-hour news channel initially broadcasting from a basement. No one impressed of its informative power even when it moved to Omni Hotels compound facilities, partially renamed as CNN Center later, in Atlanta Downtown, the home of the one most popular sodas in the planet. No one belief the small cable market would make a difference.

No one until 1991, when the world realized it was CNN-adict to know what was happening in the Middle East during the Gulf War, the first warlike conflict practically broadcast globalwide on live-TV, and that redefined the notion of journalistic inmediacy, covering the story as it happens in the same instant it is happening. And covering a live-story is not an easy job. If not watch this clip:

Like every respectable newsroom, CNN has the space organized by topics: domestic, international, business, politics, etc. Each one has a section editor, which job is reviewing the work of the entire crew, selecting the most interesting and important, upgrading another level in charge of a senior editor, who sets the agenda we receive everyday.

Nothing extraordinary until here because that is made in every newsroom. When there is breaking news, the thing changes completely right there. The secttion editors give the position to the senior editor, becoming part of the crew they lead, and it’s this senior editor who organizes the whole coverage with an only purpose – checking the news fact as it breaks, and once the fact-checking protocols were accomplished, go releasing, or coordinating to the line producer for addressing the on-air presenter.

According to Live From Baghdad motion picture (HBO, 2002) and a story on Time magazine on January 1992 (which excerpt was lended to me by one of my Journalism teachers, María Luisa Portugal), during the Gulf War, Turner as well as his CEO Tom Johnson took the editorial control of the network during the historic broadcast on January 16^th, 1991 (when the Desert Storm Operation started), because they were aware the entire world –the entire world!—was watching CNN. It was the first time it was happening, so reducing the error margin was their main task. Here is the original broadcast of that afternoon (17:00 EST):

Independently the ideologic criticism it receives everywhere, when the news are breaking in this right instant, many people even tune CNN around the globe to know how the story is developing, and, of course, very few people are aware of the crew behind making that happens.

Indeed, since 1980s-ending and more emphatically in the 1990s, the around-the-clock, around-the-globe news channels offer has multiplied, so options are to choose, but the live-story formula has not suffered from major modifications, except the technology wwhich it is broadcast, smaller each time, enormous each chance. And 40 years later, CNn, the news channels, the journalists have a great story to cover, especially when the world asks more than understands.

What I learned after sharing good stories

One of the best ideas I could be involved this 2019 has been the production of a webcast (releasing contents exclusively on the Internet), what we called, objecting the rules of branding, A Good Story To Share, or BHC for the Spanish acronyme we chose it, which concept is simple – to tell and to release real, inspiring stories those give us back the faith in the good news.

It seems easy to write it, but 13 episodes later, it has been a whole challenge for sure, because the enthusiasm of Francesco Navarrete and Daniella Peña, who became my producers, was not enough, or the care we gave to choose the topics, or the contents management, or the performance of a complicated technique despite its simplicity – the sequence shot, the art to feature an audiovisual piece without edition cuts, even travelling the camera, plus –as we decided to complicate with our few resources—completely on live.

Who say it’s like making radio are wrong, not because the radio is more simple to perform, but they are two totally different languages. Also, the television has a critical component than the radio doesn’t have – images. But, being fair, inclusive the radio has like its main task to estimulate the imagination of audiences for creating mental pictures, so the only-audio media neither is a piece of cake. Meanwhile, let’s get back to the sequence shot stuff.

Who reads this and has no most notion about audiovisual contents production, or still has no notion about how to produce mass-releasing contents at worst, could think it’s about pre-historical television, when there were no 1-inch tapes those allowed to keep images neither, but curiously, the simple in times of digital recording, storage, and distribution formats, is turning on the camera, making what it must to make, cutting, and gathering all by edition, especially if bloopers have happened a lot. And if there are mistakes, there are filters in post-production.

It’s not about  screaming action!, or cut!, or print! Is easy neither, what I say is, suddenly, many producers are seeing in edition an easy resource to make contents, and it’s not so. If the play is not set up in three acts with its related plot points, even when it’s about non-fictional reality, then that magical moment to play with the emotion of audiences will not be gotten, technique we inherited from Classic Greece, that must be about 3000 years old as a little.

Lesson 1 – Live means on live

On preset-content on live television, as made in Peru until mid-1960s (and in the U.S. during the 1950s), there were no option to cut. Probably some adjustment in sound, lighting, but basically performing everything, to begin, requires three key characteristics: a very good communication in the whole crew, that the on-camera talent (not only the anchor) has enough resources to save the frame if something gets out of control, and whenever losing the awareness that there won’t be reverse back once the first second gets released.

The first was solved  by handling a checklist that sets that is going to be spoken, to be shown, which moment is going to be shown. It seems I were talking about a teleplay but it’s not strictly. Yes, who thought that the webcasting just began, Nelson started to speak the first coming to his head like a parrot, get wrong. Behind the camera, my producers were marking me timing, topics, and time. And the work document was the checklist I wrote.

The second, even when you don’t believe it, was to apply casting. There are people who know that proposed us themes and characters, but they were never included in the season. The answer of why we didn’t include them is simple: the stories were not pitched adequately, or they didn’t sound consistent, so it would be complicated to understand what hook would be we can use to catch the audience. Is it possible to get? Yes, it is, and I’ll comment how to get it later.

The point is when we began to work with other persons on camera, whom we named the stars (not the guests because, basically, we were to get inside their daily space to webcast), we became rehearsal sessions and even we did rehearsals before going online to be sure that everybody was synchronized.

And the third was definetly a general focusing exercise –not only the producers or mine, I repeat—where the main instruction was forget abot there’s a camera, continue talking to me and the another was if something goes wwrong, there’s no problem ‘cause we solve it on the way. What I can say, indeed, is every webcast was a weekly conversation topic for everybody was sure we were speaking the same language. Of course, details broke out, as the camera trembling so much, or the wi-fi signal fell down bitting pieces of audio or video, but, in general, the work was really good.

Lesson 2 – The story is more important than the technology

When we were to webcast on location, some stars expected we appeared with a huge camera, cables everywhere, lights, microphones, and a truck with large dishes linking the signal up to any satellite outside. We are sorry to deceive you but everything was made with a smartphone linked to a wireless Internet signal, and there was no more car than Homero, the red VW beetle that transported us through the city and around.

Of course, when it came to the ears of our competitors, they started to say us for introducing this device or this one or this another one, and the truth is every suggestion has been very good, and that proves the feature generates interest as much as your competitors wanted it improves. But in this first season, Francesco and I wanted to encourage ourselves for taking all the possible advantages that a such little device as a cellphone allowed us, making things not needing to carry more equipment, and that is the sign of this time – the convergence allows you to put in public anything including with a spy device. More than a technological challenge, it was a technical challenge.

Then, if the technology was not our spot, which was it? The story, the narration, the data management, the logic of the storyline. And overall this, the veracity of the released. And the proof of that is the multimedia version, we mean a content that the audience can play again and complement with additional information in text, audio, and video existent on the net and in sources those are not necessarily belong to or are controlled by our feature. Research, in other words.

Like I said up before about the facts, the next was to dose them someway so the interest went growing in the audience. And another challenge came here: everybody is usually assuming to tell something in two, exceptionally five minutes. ON BHC, we took until 29 minutes 30 seconds to make it, uncut (remember it), and the reason why is pretty simple: the narration became too good  at the time to perform it that basically we let to flow. The stars have much of the credit, and this is not about we discovered the penicilin.

The very talented Mexican artist Verónica Castro told once that an interview with late singer and songwriter Juan Gabriel scheduled for two hours (music included) extended five due to the guest deserved to take more time. The funny thing is I was not much inspired on  la chaparrita. Rather, my reference, as I told it to many people, is the Cuban journalist Cristina Saralegui. And in fact, thinking of her, we have talked about the possibility to migrate to a live-audience format, but we are still thinking of it, because everything is submitted to funding.

Lesson 3 – The trust in the own story

Another challenge of this first webcasts package happened since the episode 8, when we left the monologues and incorporated the participation of the stars. Actually, the idea to bring in more people on camera began since the episode 3 when I shared the anchoring  and we had our first star, but different factors, the availability of the other person among them, made we to postergate it for four more webcasts.

But what people would be able to share us their stories? During the first half of the second phase, we worked to search and convince them  that their experience, including to be inspirational, had to be told on camera not like an interview but a natural conversation between old buddies rather. Getting it was such as complicated as building trust in the format, in the manner how we were to treat the contents, and in myself.

And in this sense, the webcasts working better in terms of positive feedback were the ones starred by women. There’s no much science to explain why: the women value better their life stories than the men, and when they tell them, they update them so much that the audience connect to them so easy, instantaneously. Right for those webcasts. Our remaining challenge, if we launch a second season, is to alternate a webcast starred by a male to another one starred by a female, as we encourage initially.

In the second half of the second phase, the stuff was relatively simple. People watched on the video what we were making, trusted in the format quality, and started to appear within who we invited to feature on camera and who requested to be featured on it. So now, what’s the power to share a good story? First, you re-validate what you lived no matter wwhat kind is, second, the lesson you learned is a learning to be useful for somebody else, third, you contribute to change the attitude of people turning to a much positive vision of the life and themselves. In brief, we build peace culture by using a mass-media.

Lesson 4 – The planet wants to meet you

No doubt – the accurate thing of the format was when we included  a star on camera in terms of impact on the people who watched every episode. And the magical comes here: not only we reached netsurfers around Sullana (the city where our headquarters are located, actually), but we got beyond it and expand to the north as much as Canada and the U.S, to the south as much as Chile and Argentina, around as much as Western Europe and even Japan. Wherever a native or adopted Spanish-speaker was, the content works perfectly the same, and as we try the style to be unactual, if you play it right now, is so current as the day it was webcasted.

Then, when somebody features on the BHC project, must consider not only is speaking the buddies known face-to-face or via Facebook, but is able to generate the community spirit joining thousands around the globe. The point is to face. That’s why the show’s slogan is the planet wants to meet you.

The challenge in this sense is going out Sullana, exploring other towns. We became to make a webcast in Piura, and other elsess left to launch. But good stories also appeared in Chulucanas, Ayabaca, Catacaos, Paita or Huancabamba, other places in Piura Region. We couldn’t cover them because a logistic issue (sponsor wanted, by the way), but we would like to feature on the screen.

Other activities we have thought around the format, and I’m going to announce right now, are living on live experiences which we teach you to identify your good story and hhow to use our own platform or the yours to go sharing with your buddies as well as everybody, so if you are interested to have your own, where you are, go to https://facebook.com/BHXoficial and leave us a little message. Also, you can watch all the episodes on their three versions.

And I close this year with the footer of the show, and that should be a kind of manthra for 2020 and the upcoming years – I have a good story to share, and you? So, the planet wants to meet you!

Please, forgive me if you don’t speak Spanish, but I share along this posts some webcasts with a better impact in our audience. Leave me your comments on my Facebook or Twitter accounts, my YouTube channel, or right below here.

Introducing #aGoodStoryToShare

Let me introduce you what this is about. As we know, bad news are easy to find and to share. Even we do that. What we propose is not ignoring bad news, but also not ignoring good news. And we are looking for good news, and good news for turning us up, for inspiring us, for moving us to make a change.

Currently we are exploring that kind of news inside our community around. Then, we compose them into a webcast spoken in Spanish that we post via Facebook Live. Once finished, the uncut copy is uploaded to my YouTube channel. So, we prove the people that the good stories deserve to be told and to be shared. The project includes a living, motivational live experience, whether individual or collective. Our purpose is teaching the people to go inside their insights, identify the good stories, let them emerging, build them a display, and use all traditional and virtual media to make the world to learn about.

But, we wwant to step up. We want to use our skill of speaking English to get our people close to you, who don’t speak Spanish. Additionally, we want you to use that chance to connect with our people. So we are goint to build bridges by using the information technologies. Obviously, we also can perform the same kind of live experience with you, your organization, or your community. And everything starts from choosing the good news. Thus, that’s our challenge for you.

Follow us on Google and the social media with #aGoodStoryToShare

This is the time to begin.

We have a good story to share. What about you?

More reports spoken in English - Why not?

One of the things I consider as a part of the contents production, especially the journalistic coverage, is that the audience would like to receive them in its language. It’s true the translator, whether text or voice, can break such barrier, but if the producer or the speaker can do it, why not trying to produce or adapt those contains in your language?

At least, when we analyze the performance of the webs and blogs we are involved into, we detect that English-speaker audience interacts better than the Spanish-speaker one, even when our mother language is not the English and our production headquarter is located in Latin America, where Spanish or Portuguese –Romance languages- are mostly spoken beside the native ones.

We assumed that as an opportunity, so we have a bilingual contents offer – a good competitive advantage.

Now, I’m encouraging my producers as well as myself to produce more English-spoken content, not only text, that could be something easy. Speaking implies to display more communicative skills, use more resources, open to a wider market. Then, our commitment is try to include more audio and video in your language, reaching to make it on-live at any time, in order to you can interact with us simultaneously. Meanwhile, I leave you this little clip Marco Flores aand I recorded last September 18^th, in West Sullana City, Peru.

I hope to know what you think here on the comments box or on my Twitter account. You can also get me on my Facebook account to chat live.

A community brand? Never forget this

It could seem we are living a revolution about the brands in the last years. It could seem.  If you start to read a little, you’ll see since the humankind organized the commerce in the Ancient Age, it already spoke about brands, many of them referred to places. And it was enough the salesperson mentioned the site, whether it was true or not, for the client authomatically evaluated the purchasing option in terms of quality. And it was a wworldwide trend.

What happens is as we go into the real-time information society, the brands became more competitive than ever before. They have increased in number, some have increased their quality, but the manner to choose a brand has not changed in almost ten thousand years of history.

Then, why has it reached so much importance in the last decades? Simply, because if you don’t get to place your brand, you are not. And if you’re not, you don’t sell, understanding it as the process to provide a good or a service deserving a value in exchange, what doesn’t necessarily reduce to money.

 

So, what is a brand?

It’s every element  posible to see, to hear,  to perform once and once again in the same way, and what is our own , not nobody else’s. This is the fundamental requirement. It’s possible the others imitate it or overcome it, but what we are and it’s nobody else’s, it’s, precisely, our brand. So, each one is a brand. Then, each one has an own brand.

Although the components of a brand are different according to the author you consult, I think we can pay attention on three that are fundamental, in my opinion.

1. Name: It’s the word or words how we differentiate from others, and what is own. It can be written, spoken or sounded, or it can be both ways, but it’s ours and it allows us to differentiate from others in our species or any other species. No matter it’s a known name, a name I took from other language, the name of a place or a person, or even a name I invented, my brand makes known by a name, first.
2. Symbol: It’s, indeed, that artistic performance what is my own and nobody else’s or nothing else’s. Like the name, the symbol can be a graphic feature or a sounded performance.
3. Identity: It’s the whole set of characteristics those are ours and nobody else’s or nothing else’s, and those differentiate us from someone else or something else in an inmediate way. Said in five words: it is what describes us. So, our identity is unique, not nobody else’s.

Just an additional note about the identity of a brand. If somebody wants to be how I am, is imitating me. And if I want to be like somebody else, I’m imitating.

The imitation is not a kind of identity. It’s the absence of identity, rather, what is called alienation.

But, it’s supposed we are building a community brand.  We already reviwed what a brand is, but what about the community?

The community

A community is all human group that feels linked by a common origin, history, space, and objectives. Let’s go unwinding that concept.

• First, it’s a human group. It’s not an only-1-person set.
• Second, it feels linked. I mean it feels united, connected, joined, included. It’s not about we link them and that’s it. They’re people who feel that link goes beyond time and distance, at the point that although they’re too far, they ever will feel they’re here.

Then, let’s think of a community as the set of people within I ever want to be because I feel good, and the rest makes I feel OK. So, we feel as we were only one, Like we were a common unity. Like a common unity. Community. Once we get that almost magic feeling, the rest comes alone, especially the common objectives issue. And one of those ones may be the building of its own community brand.

If there’s not that sense of a community, so there’s no community brand neither. Of course, it could be managed as a brand the same, but it wouldn’t represent anybody but the person who manages it. That’s why the important is everyone feels included.

Why is the inclusion important?

The inclusion is the action to integrate. And that integration breaks out mainly from knowing to identify common insights in every person, despite the insights differentiating us. In fact, to integrate is to generate unity despite the differences. And we have to start from basic consensus for that.

A consensus is a unanimous agreement, an agreement of everyone without exception under we’ll do or leave to do something very real. Another aspect – a consensus is not the agreement a majority imposes to a minority, or the opposite. For we to talk about a consensus, we need the 100% agrees. Sure, we also could build agreements upon the majority’s opinion, but they’re not consensus. They’re majority agreements. I say it for the term not to be used wrong.

As much as there’s a consensus about what makes your community unique, every member will feel to contribute something useful that builds in favor of it. If that happens, then the community progresses. If despite the reached consensus, the people decide to go by their own, then it doesn’t work in a communitarian way but individual or rather group.

From these concepts (Brand, community, inclusion), we already can begin to work. So, what do we commit to by consensus? That’s the next step to make. You can write me at factortierra@gmail.com, talk to me on my Twitter account, or leaving me a comment right velow.

Eberything begins with a click

Original prompter  of my presentation to the Piura’s Regional Council of Youth, October 13th, 2014. Edited and translated by the author.

Thanks for having me, and I hope to give you  useful information, if not you bull me at the time of the questions. How to do marketing on the social media? The key of everything is making a click. Of course, making a click is the easy part. The complicated is to build all the strategy that becomes that magic moment meaning a click. But making a click has few magic and much science, indeed.

First, let’s define  what marketing is. In simple terms it’s the ability that I have to satisfy a need of the people in any field, so they ever continue to choose me. Said simple – it’s the art of selling. We offer a good or a service through every sale in exchange of another good or service. The trick is in the verb to offer. Because it’s not the same to say “buy those potatoes” instead to say, for example: “Make your family to enjoy tonight – put some Piura’s fried potatoes to your crispy chicken.” Essentially, we’ve said the same. The difference is in how we present it, and how this presentation satisfies a need of the people.

The Malingas Initiative

Well, what do the social media have to do in all this?I learned how to edit webpages for myself 14 years ago. When I thought to have some experience on the issue, I decided to launch my personal website in September 2000, and one month later I launched FactorTierra, what we call FACTORTIERRA.NET now. The most of our coverages has been social-environmental conflicts, until an interesting door opened to us in December 2008.

After a problem related to  natural resources predation in Malingas, Tambogrande, story we became to release, a community’s leader sat down with my crew in March 2009 and made us a challenge: to put Malingas on the map. For making that, the first we realized was to research in-depth how this community is, so we spent a full week living with it. Initially, we were  to focus on the agriculture and cattle topic, what was that you could see straight, until ending the first day of research, Luis Correa, one of the producers, came back with news: a new petroglyph. Who knows Malingas, its best known archaeological vestige is The Devils of Guaraguaos Alto. But, what Luis Correa was saying to me was we had more sites.

Because of his insistence, we got an archeologist who we started to research with by our own, and we found, at least, a dozen of archaeological sites in a 200-sq-km area. The evidences we got to gather set that the petroglyphs could be until 4000 years old. Only as a reference, Chavín is 3200 years old. With all this information, we began to build a microsite you can visit, now if you want, on http://www.factortierra.net/malingas

When we closed the research in 2011, we decided to pack all those sightings on an article that made viral. In May that year, we released El secreto de Malingas (The Secret of Malingas), that was first ranked by RPP Noticias and Radio Cutivalú, and what came later was a load tthat included Andina News Agency, that is the official news agency of Peru, and other media across the nation and abroad. In the next two days, the story of the 4000-year-old petroglyphs in Malingas went around the globe, literally. The challenge that they imposed to our crew, to put Malingas on the map, was gotten, at least in a first step.

(An award to the) identity

And wwhat was the secret of Malingas? The truth is that the secret was seen for everybody: its own identity. We all have our own identity, or we should have it. The same happens to the products. And if we understand Malingas as a product, then the first one we have to look for is the own identity, I mean what makes it unique in the world and different to the rest. And when you bet to the identity, you make a trend.

Obviously, we put the link to the original article and the rankings on Facebook, and they had too likes and shares that it almost made pretty viral. For Malingas, it was an opportunity that costed more than the gold because they could add the touristic activity to the agricultural and cattle activity, so they could improve their life conditions.

Because of the impact we got –remember that our goal was to put Malingas on the map-, we received the Environmental Citizenship National Award for the Best Media Campaign, ending 2011 . This trophy, granted by the Peru’s Ministry of environment and the Peru’s Pontifical Catholic University, is the first one that Piura got. The other one was gotten by my colleague Alberto Navarro for a beautiful series about the carob tree. The formula applied by Alberto is exactly the same like the ours: betting for the identity, for the own. The own sells. But, is enough to bet for the identity to sell?

Originality (Via Satellite)

I think the other reason for what Alberto by his own, and my crew by its own, received the award is the manner we presented the product. I don’t know if Alberto, but the exigence inside my crew was to be very creative in the manner how we presented each one of the features we published. In other words, we bet for originality. The opposite to the original is called copy-and-paste.

Originality means you are capable to create something from nothing, or you can set what was already created so it is seen as a unique, different  thing – to innovate, in other words. Then, to do marketing  on the social media, we need identity and originality, and we get innovation with both. But, and what about the social media themselves? They’re simply platforms. They’re only tools to magnify all those contents. And did we have additional results plus the award? Yes, we did!

In 2013. History Channel Latin America network came to shot the Alien Contact series, and it contacted us because it was interested on an original story we produced at Huancabamba highlands, where the identity was what sold. The episode wwhich we featured was premiered in July 2013, and it’s reprised by the network up to today, and we’re penetrating in about 40 million homes from Bravo River to Patagonia.

The anecdote of that show is the reenactment of the story could not be video-taped in Huancabamba because, when the crew came to shot, the road got interrupted. So we needed a petroglyph, water, trail, and people. All this segment ended to shot in Malingas, Tambogrande.

Marco Paulini

And can the identity-plus-originality formula work for other products? Yes, it can. On May 30th  this year, I met a Young proffesionist from Sullana. We were becoming friends. You know the friendship is based on the gradual aknowledge of the people. I learned this way this guy had made a research by himself, in a Pacaipampa’s village.

He is an obstetrician and his speciality is the sexual and reproductive health of the people. What did his research discover? Between 7% aand 8% of teenagers from that village know what a condom is, but between 5% and 6% would use it. When those data were processed, we advised him to write an article to be understood for the most people as possible. We got to release it on El Regional de Piura website, on last July 30^th, just two months later we met each other. The feature now overcame 2000 hits. Why?

I forgot to mention a detail. The research was made in Bellavista de Cachiaco, Pacaipampa, the same place where the Guerrero-Neyra family comes from, the creator of Corazón Serrano band. Los riesgos del amor adolescente en tierras de Edita (Risky Teenage Love – Somewhere Piura’s Andes) is now one of the most successful original articles in Piura. And how this guy decided to bet for his own professional and personal identity, he gave it added value. Then, we recommended him to activate his Twitter account 

After that first article, he wrote one about how to use a condom correctly. The feature wwent over 2500 hits. Then, it came another about having bareback sex. It overcame 2000 hits. And he just released one about teenage pregnancy, a little time ago, October 2^nd, that already overcame 1200 hits. All these features have been released by El Regional de Piura.

El Regional receives, at least, 10 dollar cents for every hit because it’s subscribed to the Google’s AdSense programme. For this montth’s ending, we estimate that the four Marco Paulini’s articles can overcome 10 thousand hits. That means Marco Paulini could give 1000 dollars to El Regional de Piura for the end of October. And for the end of the year, we think he could generate about 2000 dollars. What would you do with 2000 dollars?

Plus, it’s enough you post something that says “Marco Paulini” on El Regional de Piura and the visit counter triggers inmediatly. What? Does Marco have magic powder? No, he doesn’t. It’s the same recipe than Malingas’ – identity and originality, what becomes him an innovator. And what does Marco gain from all this? Well, ADDING they start to consider him in Sullana for some activities, he had a tweet that said something like, and I’m paraphrasing: “Marco, what do you propose from your region for Peru to enter the first world?” Signed: Annual Conference of CEO’s, CADE 2014.

Rather, his article about teenage pregnancy has been marked as Favorite by Peru’s Vice-President Marisol Espinoza. Also, the Health Integral Insurance recommends everyweek on Twitter to visit the @MarcoPaulini account, at the same level than Pan-American Health Organization, Aldeas SOS, or journalists as Pilar Higashi or Ana Trelles. Now, Marco and my crew are looking for funds to prove what he found in Bellavista de Cachiaco repeats across the region, and if urgent rules are not taken about, we’ll have a population crisis in the next 10 years. To make it simple: there will be few food, few place for many people.

Conclusion: The Malingas and Marco Paulini formulas are no lab ccreations. They’re products that have identity and originality. Through the social media, we also prove they’re an innovation. If they could do it, you too. If you doubt of how to do it, look for me. I already said you I’m on  http://www.facebook.com/nelsonsullana and http://www.twitter.com/nelsonsullana  And what I do? I turn local ideas to global impacts. And I’m waiting for my next challenge.

© 2014, 2019 by  Nelson Peñaherrera Casyillo and Asociación Civil Factor Tierra. All Rights Reserved. Authorized reproduction quoting the source.

How you must report in case of natural disasters

The natural disasters are the type of coberages whwhen the whole technical and technological abilities of press crews are tested, especially the fact-checking protocols and the precission which the journalists and hosts treat the issue. But maybe one of the biggest challenges during those events is acting with enough serenity to have perspective at the time to report and provide useful data to our audience.

And here it comes the first lesson: the journalistic coverage in time of natural disasters must take as a main purpose to clarify the view of everybody and to be a a processes conduit between authorities and community, not a booster of fear and panic that ends to create chaos.

It is also true that press and media crews  are joined by persons which reactions are influenced by their individual experiences dealing with this kind of events. Then, is it possible to form an accurate response when they break? Theoretically yes, and that implies to work preventively before the disaster, proactively during it, and sustainabily after it happens.

Before the disaster

1. The basics is to see what the conditions of our work space are and how much it is prepared for having any type of disaster. Our work space must not be safe, it must be highly safe for a simple reason: if something happens, the audience will trust we are on the air or online for knowing what to do. Then, request the authorities or reliable specialists to inspect your facilities and guide you how to set them up or improve them for they to response adequately before any event.
2. Learn what type of disasters are frequent in your community or your region. Look for all the information you can, study its nature, and the existent data about how it happened in previous times. In general, the land uses to react the same way like how it reacted years, decades, or centuries ago. So, it is possible to prevent which the potential damages could be and how you are going to react about them in informative terms.
3. Organize and participate actively in simulations summoned by the authorities. Use not only your meddium to release or promote them. Make your medium to turn the disaster-mode and and have an evaluation form for how much prepared your crew is for reaction. Organize internally scheduled and surprise simulations for training your crew and teach it constantly about how to act if it could happen.
4. Order before everything. Your whole crew must know where each thing is when the disaster happens and who are vital during the coverage. So, you guarantee the safety of everybody and the information flow.
5. In the same way, assign responsibilities  those active authomatically when the disaster occurs. So, you will not improvise at the last moment, or you will improvise only if the case urges it.
6. Have all your protocols and evaluations written, and in quick-access documents. Then, your crew can review them constantly, beginning with you. It’s not a bad idea you share them to your audience for educating and enriching the knowledge and the positive attitude, especially.
7. Work out physically and mentally focusing in the moment of a disaster. In one hand you have enough agility and strength for passing through the exigence of covering it, but you also have to neuroprogram for keeping calm and handling a huge breaking information amount, or what to do if there is not enough information. Remember that the ghost doesn’t scares when you are aware of how it is and how it uses to scare.

During the disaster

1. Calm over everything!! It is the time to apply all your plans and protocols, as well as accomplishing the assigned responsibilities during the simulations.
2. Strictly only if it’s safe, go into the studio or the newsroom and have in touch to your audience. The first message you have to launch is a call for tranquility, open your lines for receiving the information and questions those will begin to break.
3. Unless your source be highly reliable, doubt of the first fact you receive and cross-check it right before releasing it. In case of disaster, the certainty is above the scoop or the exclusive.
4. Your breaking coverage has not to be limited in providing facts. This is the time you must give orientation, advising your audience what it must do. Now you are their leader, so your reliability and knowledge are useful for everybody.
5. Go to the official source. Every government assigns an office to release the exactfact, or the official one at least. Distrust the data from others, don’t share them neither, especially if they seem incredible. In fact, many use to be hallucinations or panic expressions.
6. Hold free phone lines at you medium, those don’t be known by the public, for you to guarantee inmediate information with your crew or sources. Ever have your cellphone with full battery because it is going to be pretty useful during the emergency. If you are a ham, know the emergency frequencies where verified information is shareduseful for you and for your audience (some countries have emergency frequencies in AM, FM and even SW).

After the disaster

1. Against your bosses could claim you, don’t monopolize the statements of the authorities. Despite, they should have press conferences where the whole media have access, so the most quantity of possible public knows what happened, how to act. What you can demand from your authorities, indeed, is their briefings have a known periodicity (the ideal should be each six hours at least) in order to serve all your time targets.
2. Help from the medium with the damages report. Don’t struck it with wrong data or fake news. That means you cross-check even the facts from some authorities who are not official spokespersons, and give them to you for having exposure to the public.
3. Collaborate with other local or abroad media. During a disaster, the information is not the property of anybody, but a right the people have to take better decisions.
4. Educate about the post-thraumatic stress syndrome (PTSS) and use the medium for the people to detect it and look for urgent professional help. An audience with this condition trends to believe easily in fake news, not on your verified fact although it is buzzing on their face. Identify this condition in yourself and treat it with Clinic Psychology. If a person ouside the media prones to response with panic, a PRSS-diagnosed journalist or host is dangerous three times: misinforms, breaks fear, causes more damage.
5. Plan future coverages for analyzing the response of everybody in case the disaster happens again. Keepn intelligently the issue in the best interest of your audience.

Let’s share more tips? Let’s use the comments box for a dialogue, or we also can do it on my Twitter account.

The Second Episode Of "This Is Tambogrande" In Pre-Production