Last night the Legion of Tech delivered another successful installment of Ignite Portland. If you’re not familiar with the event it’s an evening of presentations from people who are passionate about their topic, any topic. Presenters are given a set amount of time to talk with a predetermined number of slides which advance automatically as they speak.
Ignite typically hits a wide range of topics and subjects and is often peppered with Top 5 ways to do this, or the 10 commandments of that. Ignite moves along so swiftly it’s like watching a stand up comedian telling spitfire jokes, some of them are sure to hit and make you forget about the ones that don’t.
The highlights of Ignite Portland Were:
- Five Things Portland Can Learn From Kentucky in Five Minutes – Jeff Hardison was fast, articulate, funny and entertaining. His presentation was a template for how to do an Ignite presentation.
- Dating Rules for the Actual World – Alexis Rehrmann gave one of the best talks on dating I’ve ever seen. Her brutally honest take on the realities of dating was so well done, I could see her turning it into a book.
- Story as Bloodsport: Battling to craft narrative – Melissa Lion showed that even with a technical glitch, having intelligence and poise means you can talk about anything to anyone, anywhere. It’s no surprise that Melissa heads one of Portland’s top storytelling functions
- 10 Karaoke Commandments – Alex Williams’s finale proved to be the most useful presentation of the night. His 10 commandments of Karaoke should be printed out and pasted up anywhere that people do Karaoke in Portland.
The biggest failure of the evening was KGW’s reporting. KGW has been getting its toes wet with social networking and so they decided to try to get involved by covering the event. While it’s easy to forgive Stephanie Stricklen for not knowing how to use the @Reply function on Twitter, Joe Smith’s coverage of Ignite Portland is almost unforgiveable. In some of the worst bumbling reporting on Portland Television so far this year, Joe Smith clearly had no idea where he was or what he was sent to cover. The reporting was so bad, no words can really do it justice, it really just speaks for itself. (View KGW’s reporting of Ignite Portland).
Ignite Portland 5 is scheduled for Feburary 19 and submissions are open now for talks. I’d really like to see the event reach out deeper into the Portland creative community and have a stronger representation from outside the close nit Portland Tech Community.
13 replies on “Ignite Portland 4 Hits but KGW has an Epic FAIL”
Yeah, the coverage was unbelievably bad. Bordering on insulting. I don’t think you can simply blame the reporter—KGW was simply ill-prepared to deal.
I saw the KGW report.. yes it was lame, but you have to admit that really, really, really… a bunch of powerpoint preso’s aren’t inherently valuable just because you have a 15 in 5 minute format. So the guy, in fairness, stumbled through it partially because he overreached trying to make something that is really very inane sound newsworthy.
@lynnette – As a journalist I can tell you it’s ALWAYS the reporter’s responsibility to be prepared. Any time I’ve ever done a live (or taped live) interview, I’ve always done a good pre-talk with the people I interview so I get a feel for what they are talking about and what questions to ask them. Joe Smith blew the basics, like the names of the people who he was talking to (even though they were all wearing name tags).
@Andrew Deal – You’re right, the presentations in of themselves aren’t necessarily newsworthy. But the phenomenon of the event is. It’s a good example of “which story are you telling”. Perhaps they picked the wrong angle on it. Still, it’s hard to excuse the basic failures in the reporting.
Oh I think you can blame the reporter for the getting Adam and Melissa’s names wrong. KGW is to blame for calling it a hipster event and sending the totally wrong reporter for it. He does Your Money Your Business or something doesn’t he?
Wow, thanks for the kind words regarding my Kentucky presentation.
I agree with Madame Fishbones on this one. Sorry Geoff. Both the reporter and the station shirked some responsibilities.
As an editor, it is my job to make sure that a suitable writer is paired with each assignment. Call it quality assurance, but it makes for much better editorial. My medium is web and print, but I can’t believe there isn’t some similar level of responsibility in TVland.
@ lynette – Sorry. To hear we not only blew it in your mind, but were also borderline insulting makes me feel lousy about it. That was not our intent.
@ blf – I’m the one who called it a hipster event. That is all me. And I apologize. Won’t make that mistake again.
~In my mind, we wanted to cover it because it’s the kind of event that doesn’t get any press in traditional newscasts these days. The last thing we wanted to do is give it the kind of press you think it could do without (worse than no coverage at all). So, I’m sorry we let you down. It’s such a cool event. Maybe work will let me off early enough in February so that I can apply to do a presentation on the “Top 5 Ways To Quickly Piss Off Smart, Tech Savvy People”. Thanks, Steph
Thank you Steph (can I call you Steph?) for posting this. I like you and your approach and I am hoping to see more of your coverage of this stuff. I’m not pissed I’m just disappointed that it “came out wrong”.
PLEASE keep trying! And I think you’d have a great presentation no matter what subject you pick. How about “Life of a News Story” or “Day as an anchor” or something?
@Steph Stricklen I was manning the door from 4:00 – 7:00 with 5-6 other people and the audience was extremely diverse, far more than I expected.
Yeah, “hipster” hit me as odd, and definitely not the group to which I belong, but attendees were definitely looking for entertainment of a different sort. Ignite is PowerPoint juggling, a wide range of topics and folks hoping to hold attention for five minutes each without dropping the ball. Amazingly, most succeed. But hipsters doesn’t describe the audience.
I also watched Joe prepare and he took quite some time gathering his notes. I think this was just one of those things–unfortunately, your failures show up on TV!
Come check out @beerandblog, we are not all that bad as a community. Hope you better luck next time!
@ blf – You can totally call me Steph if you don’t mind me calling you blf. Actually, good friends call me Stef. As witnessed by my twitters, I’m a lazy typer who typically forgoes good, old-fashioned puncuation, proper grammer (unless I’m writing for TV), and spell-checking. Somehow, I’ve convinced myself that a lifetime of typing an “f” instead of a “ph” will add up to MINUTES of time I will be able to spend watching reruns of BG (January can’t come soon enough). Or now Twittering, too. Anyway, I’m only attempting proper punctuation here because I forgot my flame-retardant gear at home and don’t want the apology to get lost.
I know that some of you will cringe at this, but we will keep trying. It’s that, or we look like every other news show on TV.
Hey, thanks for the shout out! My name was wrong on that news station (I don’t even have TV, so whatever) and the techy glitch thing, but I still felt good — thanks to my shoes. Forget intelligence, go out and get some tall shoes!
I was TOTALLY remiss in not mentioning your shoes at Ignite. The video test run on your site is a hoot! Can you ever forgive me 🙂 ?
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