When you have a creative person in the shop, just turn them loose. You may wind up with something wonderful.
Steve Baron at Fox Chicago is just such a person. He developed
LiveNewsCameras.com earlier this year. It's an impossibly wonderful collection of live streams from newsrooms around the country. Now, without taking a breath, he has come up with
AirFox Live, a mashup of his station's chopper feed with a Google map.
On AirFox Live, you can watch the chopper's camera feed and follow it along a map in real time. For the really geeky, the map also displays airspeed, heading, and altitude. The site is "live" from 5:30 am to 8:30 am Central, and during times when the station dispatches the chopper to news scenes. Otherwise, the map shows us that the chopper's at Schaumberg Regional airport, and the page has a nice live feed showing the downtown.
Steve uses the chopper's GPS feed to enable the map tracking. And, just like Live News Cameras, AirFox Live has its own URL - airfoxlive.com. Smart.
Back in February,
we wrote about Baron's adventures in putting together
LiveNewsCameras.com. What intrigued me most was this - Baron's a meteorologist by training. It shouldn't surprise me that a weather guy knows computers so well. Meteorologists usually have the best computers in the house. Baron works at Fox Chicago as the senior web producer, and fills in doing the weather. There may be other weather guys/web producers/developers in local TV. I just haven't met them.
Among Steve's many fine qualities is his humility about his work. I've tried like hell to compliment him personally, but he's so darned nice that he is quick to point out he's not in it for the kudos:
"I'm not sharing this stuff with you guys to make you think that I'm good at what I do - I'm doing it so you can show it to other people and get them thinking about how to make their newsrooms "work" in new ways. We've got a sponsor lined up for this page that will bring in good, web-only revenue. I hope one of your clients sees it, and figures out a way to make it (or something like it) work for them as well."
I'm sorry - did I bury the lead? The site launched with a sponsor - one that brought in web-only revenue.
So not only is Steve trying to help improve the state of the local web, he's also working with his team to bring in a buck. Steve says he hopes other stations will find a way to make something like this work. He's talking about this new site, but it applies to the way he and his team are doing business. Innovative development, risk taking, thinking different and working with your sales folks...
Yep. That will fly.
