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Well, Bob, I did get the cue and I did get it when I was sitting at my desk at my computer terminal in Rochester, Minnesota. I had been doing this localizing global news for about a year and I came across a transcript of Bob actually unveiling his secret plan last year at the conference, as some of you may remember, and I just immediately took to this and thought this is really something that I could do and would love to get involved in.
That’s what the front page of the Globalizer looks like and, as you can see, that’s a slightly different one. I’ll give you a little guided tour. I’m going to show you…this is the Web site for The Rochester Post-Bulletin, which is my hometown newspaper, circulation 50,000 or so. I do a column every week called ‘Global Rochester’ and we’re one of the few local papers that have this business. I’m really working hard on the publisher to reconsider.
Here’s the column that got me all that mail, especially from that guy who wants to send me to Japan to live.
Now, both in the paper copy and on the Web, we put this blurb down here, which Bob just mentioned in his talk. “Do you have a personal or a business connection overseas that would make a good Post-Bulletin article? It could be a connection through your church, your family, your social club, etc. We would especially like to hear from local businesses who do business with overseas markets and customers, so let us know and please fill out this short survey.”
This ran in the paper yesterday—it’s an afternoon paper—and so far, I hate to say, we don’t have anyone filling out the survey. And you know what? I think it’s because the first column was on handguns and it’s a very conservative corner of the state. I have about seven e-mails right now, all of them conservative, all of them against the position I took, which was that we should ban personal handgun ownership in the state. And you know what I think? I think the first…we’re going to run this column every week and we’re going to run this blurb every week and I believe that we’re going to get people to respond to the survey, especially when some of these columns I’ll devote to profiles of local companies. When one company sees what kind of treatment they’ll get, they’ll see. Right now, this is my fourth column and I seem to be carving out a niche for myself as a Reagan liberal in southeastern Minnesota. I think that will change a little bit.
Here’s the way it looks in the paper itself. This is our Editorial page and this is our op-ed page. It’s a little bit backwards. Most newspapers have it the other way around. Here’s my column and here’s the little box that asks people to stop by and take a look at the Globalizer.
So let’s just say they go to the Globalizer and here’s what it looks like. So you can see that they’ve been able to put in their own logo, the Post-Bulletin logo. That’s in their typeface. Speaking of saving dollars—it’s free—and you can actually put in your own logo as well— meaning an image or graphic up there—as well as your own typeface. That’s the Post Bulletin typeface and then it says, “PB Online, the Globalizer, surveying our community’s international links. Thanks for helping the Post-Bulletin write better stories about our community’s connections to international business markets, events, cultures and trends. We value your suggestions and will use whatever personal information you provided to contact you for further information. We will not share your information with anyone outside our newsroom.”
Then it leads people through fifteen questions. It starts off with contact information. Look at number two—name of other party completing survey, only if applicable. We put that question in because if the person who is putting together this survey right now is a reader, we’re also thinking that there will be reporters in the newsroom who—and you will hope there will be reporters in the newsroom who will also be building up the database in this way. In that case, we’re asking the reporter to put the reporter’s name in, and then to put in the contact name in number one. In what country were you born? These are all the sovereign nations of the world. They’d all fit on one screen, just like that. Do you work at a company? We ask for the company info. In what foreign countries does your company do business? In what foreign cities? Those are all the major cities of the world. In what industry is your company? There’s a list of the major industry categories. Underneath, you’ve got a chance to put in whatever you want as well, in case all the industries were not covered. That asks for company information and then number nine. Do you have a personal connection overseas?
And this gets to the second point that Bob mentioned. After asking for companies with connections, you can ask for personal connections. Relatives who still live in your native country, sons and daughters studying overseas, friendship connection and so on. So this asks for…and then finally, at the end, other open-ended questions. Describe what you feel is especially interesting or unusual. Other stories about Rochester’s international ties that you’d like to read. I don’t have a specific idea at the moment but I do have the following expertise, experience, interest and so on. Then when you hit ‘click’ at the bottom, having finished it, you go back to The Post-Bulletin front page.
I’ll just give you a quick look. You can then access the collected data by going to ‘Survey Monkey’ and looking at the data that has been input.
I should say that when Chris Waddle put together his at The Anniston Star, Chris felt that in his community that people would be more responsive to seeing the questions about ‘Do you have personal connections overseas?’ above ‘Do you have a company connection overseas or does your company do business overseas?’ So he customized his Globalizer by putting the personal connections first and the company connection second.
Also, in speaking with Kent Nichols, with us from The Tallahassee Democrat, and his town is very university-oriented with a couple of major colleges and universities there. So, in discussion with Kent last night, we were thinking that the Globalizer in that area might be customized more to the direction of asking for professors with specialized interests in certain areas and when they do research and where do they go when they do their research and do they travel for their archaeological digs or whatever it might be. So the Globalizer might be customized in that direction.
As I’ve talked to so many of you over the last day-and-a-half, after five or ten minutes of talking, a picture arises of the distinct, unique qualities of your community and then comes an idea of how to customize the Globalizer to get what you need in your particular circumstance. This software is extremely flexible and open-ended in that way and it should be able to bring you on board.
I just want to say one last thing that was inspired by what Bob said and what Raman said this morning. You know, when you get involved in writing stories like this, there may be only one reporter at the paper that is doing it to start with, but then it has a ripple effect throughout the paper. Raman was mentioning how the whole rest of his paper is taking contact names and sources from the people at Atlanta and the World. I can’t think of a better hookup, actually, with the Globalizer because the Globalizer is the way the system ties the gathering of those contacts and they can be shared with others in the newsroom electronically. The Globalizer at The Rochester Post-Bulletin has only been used for a couple of days, but I can tell you that in the year that I’ve been writing stories once a month, and now once a week, for The Post-Bulletin, I find a lot of stories have jumped into the newspaper, right on the front page.
For instance, when I wrote my profile of the Mexican restaurateur that everybody knew, that was the occasion that we found out that for the first time in Rochester’s history, Hispanics are the number one immigrant group in town. That’s an historic thing. Rochester has a lot of refuges because the Lutheran charities like to relocate refuges to the Midwest and Minnesota is well known for its social services and its safety net. So the Mung people of northern Laos, who were shipped by the thousands to Minnesota back in the early 1980s, were our number one refuge group and immigrant group for a long time and they were replaced by the Somalis after the Somali civil war in the early 1990s. So now the Somalis have been in Rochester for ten years and now it’s the Hispanics. The Rochester Post-Bulletin didn’t know that until I went and interviewed one of our leading Hispanics in town and then I called up the census and then I called up the Minnesota Demographic Center and found out, lo and behold, they’re our number one minority in Rochester. It really surprises people in Rochester because they’re a hidden minority, which, of course, makes me even prouder as a journalist that I found it out. Now it’s on the front page of The Post-Bulletin. They’re hidden because they work in a certain section of town and they don’t wear robes like the Somalis. So, we would have missed this unless we picked we picked it up from the numbers. We also found out that about half of them are illegal in the sense that they are neither citizens nor have a green paper or a good visa. So we are really digging up things that can be used in the rest of the paper and ultimately hope that the two kinds of coverage will merge together.
That’s about it for the Globalizer. I look forward to talking to you more about it this afternoon.
Larry, how about giving us an introduction to how this program (inaudible).
