A major part of The Next Mayor project that has so far gone a little unheralded has been the video platform of this "multi-platform" undertaking. If you're a frequent viewer of WHYY TV-12 you may have noticed a number of our Next Mayor "interstitials." These are 2-3 minute-long videos that run in between our feature programming, mostly during the news and information time.
The first set of these videos are known as "Counter Intelligence." These reports were gathered by an elite crew of WHYY staffers working on The Next Mayor project. We traveled all throughout the region, other cities and to special events to ask anyone who would talk to us what they think the major issues for the city and region are and what qualities they consider important in a leader. We also looked for their personal impressions of the city, its government, the region and the relationship between the city and region.
It took some work but I've finally been able to make all of those videos available on thenextmayor.com. If you go to the main page, you'll see a section at the top of the right side that says "Video from WHYY." Just click on "Counter Intelligence" to see the currently featured episode and find links that will take you to the archice with all 21 episodes.
Beginning this week, we're releasing a new series of videos known as "Issues Forums." Using what we learned from our Counter Intelligence excursions, we identified 16 different issues or qualities of leadership that were most important to people in the region. We then assembled panels of experts for each of those issues and brought them to our WHYY conference room.
They talked about best practices in other cities, ideas that haven't been tried here in Philadelphia. These experts explained in great detail just how complicated and potentially troublesome the issues are. In many cases, they also had suggestions for the next mayor about how to go about tackling these problems.
We'll be releasing two videos a week for the rest of the summer. You can see them on WHYY TV-12 starting on Mondays of each week. I'll make them available on thenextmayor.com on Wednesdays and Fridays. This past Wednesday we talked about economic development and today we have quality of life (litter, nuisance law enforcement, small time crime, etc.)
Finally, these videos have given us a chance to step into the latter half of the first decade of the 21st Century and experiment with video podcasts. All of the Counter Intelligence videos are available for download as video podcasts using iTunes or some other podcasting software or RSS reader. In fact if you have iTunes on your computer, just click here to launch iTunes and be taken directly to the Counter Intelligence podcast.
Unfortunately, "experiment" is an apt word. I screwed up encoding the videos so they won't play on a video iPod, after downloading them, you take the additional step of "Converting Selection for iPod," an option you find under the "Advanced" menu of iTunes.
The podcast for the Issues Forum just started up yesterday. Here is its iTunes link. Having learned my lesson about video encoding, these videos will go onto your iPod without the need to "convert" them.
I think they look pretty good on the video iPod. They sound good and the video is crisp, clear and sharp. It's possible that a certain current mayor can also watch them on his new phone.
And don't worry, I'll have them all up on our YouTube site soon so that you can share them on your own blogs.
So stay tuned. We have 14 more videos to go. I'll even give you a hint about Wednesday - the "t word."