Hurrah! Today is the official first day back for the Spark team. Thanks to everyone who contributed ideas to us over the summer. We just had our story meeting and came to the table with lots of new ideas for a brand new season of the show. This year, we’re really hoping to make the blog a place where we can collaborate with you on story ideas and hear your take on tech and trends.
The new season starts on the radio September 3rd, but we’ll be on the blog everyday with updates and looking for your two cents on the stories we plan to cover.
Do you have an idea for how “the making of Spark” can be more transparent, or thoughts about the kind of items you’d like to hear on the new season? Leave your suggestions in the comments, or send us an email.
Original photo by Carolyn Coles
I’m a long time listener, as well as a blogger and marketer (www.capulet.com). I’ve consider it, but to be honest, we’ve never had anything cool and mainstream enough to pitch to Spark.
I expect that you receive a ton of story pitches from marketers. Do they ever turn into stories? Or do you discover all of your stories through listeners, colleagues, your own research and so forth?
If you wanted to make things more transparent, you could automatically publish all incoming story pitches in a (non-front page) section of your site. You could implement a simple, Digg-like interface that would enable people to vote stories up and down.
You’d be under no obligation to cover the popular stories, but it would open up the story selection process, and reveal more about your relationship (or absence thereof) with PR people.
Hey Darren,
I like the Digg-y idea!
As far as marketing pitches goes, I think we might have done one or two stories based on pitches/heads ups from marketers, but not often. If we were a show that did product reviews and gadgets, it would probably happen more often. It can be a good way to learn about, for instance, new startups, though.
Thanks for listening, and commenting!