Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Postacrime and Jamie Colby of Fox News

Wow. The last few weeks have seemed like a blur. First, the Seattle Times did a story on us. That resulted in Fox National News calling us to appear on the show Fox Online on Saturday morning hosted by Jamie Colby. I drew the short straw and was elected the one to be interviewed by Jamie. Actually I wanted to do the interview because I love talking about Postacrime. It is only through generating such attention that we will achieve our objective of being the largest crime prevention related site on the Internet.

Doing a national interview was exciting as well as nerve wracking. The people at the Fox Studio were extremely nice and supportive. The day started with me meeting up with Krista Koster, a PR rep who is a friend of fellow Co-founder, Ben Sharpe. She generously donated her time to assist me in my preparations in addition to being our representative with Fox. She was extremely helpful and it put me at ease for her to interact with the producer so there would be no surprises. Getting my makeup on was painless and I had a great view of Lake Union from the 30th floor. After makeup, I took a seat and got wired up. There was a large background mural showing the Seattle skyline. There was a TV monitor in front of me below the camera that I was able to look at while I was being interviewed. They informed me that I would hear Jamie in my earpiece but that there would be a two second delay between what I saw on the floor monitor and what I heard in my ear. That was a bit unnerving because this was "live" and there was no chance to edit or redo it if I screwed up. The floor monitor was very distracting so I just sat there looking into a camera listening to Jamie and trying to do my best to explain what we're trying to accomplish with Postacrime to a national TV audience.

All in all it was a blast and something I hope to repeat many times in the future. We are very grateful to Fox News and Jamie Colby for the exposure.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Postacrime on Fox News

One of the benefits of being in a major paper is you get lots of interested and interesting readers. We had one especially interested reader: Jamie Colby. If you're familiar with Fox News, you'll know that Jamie is the host of Fox Online. A show "where the news meets the net."
So, we got a call from the producer who wanted to put Postacrime on Fox Online. We put David Stone on there to talk with Jamie. They had also invited Officer Grannis of the Bellevue Police Department. Officer Grannis raised some valid points, and I think David did a good job addressing them. Please remember this: If you're the victim of a crime, please please please report it to the proper authorities first.
David did an awesome job on the show and really conveyed what we're trying to accomplish with the site. I'm going to see if I can convince David to write about what its like to be on national television. I'm also going to see if I can find a video of the interview so I can post it here, check back.

-- Edit by Adam --
I found the clip on YouTube

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Postacrime.com in the Seattle Times

We've just wrapped a really exciting week: we've had two definite major events (and we'll have two blog posts)
The first thing is that Postacrime was written up in the Seattle Times. This was really exciting for us because it involved some new stuff for all of us:
  • The coolest thing that happened was the 30 minute photo shoot for the picture in the paper. Erika took about 200 pictures. And I know I speak for all of us... we really like the picture that got published in the newspaper.
  • We actually heard someone who wasn't so keen on our little idea. (read the article, and you'll see)
  • We found out that our site can handle a decent amount of traffic. We had our biggest day ever: 1400 unique visitors
The cool thing about Postacrime being written about the Seattle Times, is that it has a pretty large readership... so we've been getting a pretty good attention from all over the US.