I’ve been bartending on Capitol Hill for two years. My customers, for the most part, are awesome. But Capitol Hill is a busy place on the weekend, attracting people from all over the Seattle area. Lots of us joke about the hipsters on the Hill, but the fact is, we (they) live here, and so if they want to continue sceneing it up on the weekend they know to display at least basic courtesy. Ask, pay, drink, tip, repeat!

I’ve got a lot of beef with the most recent social media vengeance story currently making the Internet rounds. On Friday night, according to Cha Cha/Bimbo’s waitress Victoria Liss, a customer ordered $28.98 worth of food and beverages, didn’t tip, and scrawled “you could stand to lose a few pounds,” on the bottom of the credit card receipt.

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Sabrina Roach is Brown Paper Tickets’ Radio/New Media Doer. She has worked in community and public radio for the past 10 years at KBCS 91.3 Community Radio and KUOW 94.9 Puget Sound Public Radio in various capacities.

Prometheus Radio Project’s summer interns explain why the radio dial is so crowded, and how the FCC plans to make room.

We have two online community radio stations in the Seattle area: Hollow Earth Radio and Voice of Vashon. I’m consistently delighted to see how they engage their communities and generate creative, hyper-local media. They also invest in organizational and facility development. These are two particular stations I love, but surely not the only ones doing great things. Do you have an online community radio station you love? Post it in the comments.

Both online radio stations have been working on getting terrestrial signals for the past several years. Both have been hopeful in watching the progress of Low Power FM (LPFM), as it traveled from President Obama’s desk where the Local Community Radio Act was signed in January, to July when the FCC released a proposal to save channels for community radio, and opened a period of time when public comments would be accepted. Applications to apply for stations will be due as early as June 2012.

I recently viewed a map of the top 150 radio markets, which showed that some urban areas have room for new community radio stations. Seattle currently isn’t slated to get any LPFM frequencies, though advocates are pushing for more flexible technical rules that should allow a few stations to squeeze in.

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I first joined Facebook because it seemed like a good way to stay in touch with close friends and family who are scattered across the country (What a quaint idea that seems like now).  But I didn’t get really serious about Facebook until the newspaper I worked for – the Seattle Post-Intelligencer – went belly up in 2009.

Left with no outlet for writing and/or pontificating, I, like everyone else in the United States at the time, started my own blog.  I also started working with the Seattle PostGlobe, an online news startup that was founded by former P-I journalists.

It didn’t take me long to realize that Facebook could help drive traffic to my blog and to the news site, and that the more friends I had, the more traffic I could drive.

So it began – the quest for Facebook popularity. By the time my quest was completed I had thousands of “friends” and every time I posted from my blog or from the PostGlobe, it increased traffic to those pages.

You may have had a similar quest, or you may be on it now.  Maybe you’ve started noticing that all your friends – real ones and those new ones you’re slowly starting to get on Facebook – have way more friends than you do. I know. I know. It can be embarrassing. Read more…

This post is the first in a regular series of profiles on digital media careers.

Content Strategist is a new position for many organizations and an attractive career option for copywriters, editors, content managers, journalists, freelance writers, and other digital media professionals with a passion for content—and an appreciation of a paycheck that matches their talents.

Digital agencies have long had content strategists on staff, but a variety of organizations are seeing the need to add someone to their team to be in charge of “the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content,” as Kristina Halvorson defines the job in Content Strategy for the Web, the book that popularized the term.

Because few people have been employed as content strategists, employers are open to considering job seekers looking to break into the field.

“All of the people in content strategy that I know have fallen into it through different routes,” says Vanessa Casavant, Content Strategist for Electronic Media at AdoptUSKids. “I came into it through journalism. I realized that it wasn’t the best career outlet for me and the outlook of having a job in journalism wasn’t that good. But I really enjoy the part of telling stories and finding the story within the story.” Read more…

There was a lot of clamor in digital music world last week as Amazon unveiled their new Cloud Player. Industry experts labeled it as a move to increase pressure on competitors such as Apple and Google, which are rumored to be releasing similar digital locker products later on this year.

Launched last Tuesday, Amazon’s Cloud Player gives users the ability to listen to their music collection anywhere they have an Internet connection, either via a Web app that’s compatible with all major browsers or an Android app. Amazon trumped Google by creating the first digital locker of it’s kind on Google’s own Android operating system. That’s no small accomplishment, although that makes you think Google is likely planning something even better.

Naturally, all of this is drawing staunch criticism from major record companies who aren’t happy with the Seattle company’s decision not to secure music licenses from labels and publishers before releasing its service. Read more…

Special to Flip the Media from Naomi Ishisaka, MCDM Board Member and Former Editor of ColorsNW

When the earthquake struck Japan on March 11, former Bellevue KBCS program director Robert Jefferson was on his way home to Kamakura-shi, Kanagawa, from his job as an anchor at Japan’s public broadcasting station NHK in Tokyo. After a frightening journey home, he did what many thousands of others in Japan did to reassure their terrified loved ones: he got on Facebook.

I made it home…
by Robert Jefferson on Friday, March 11, 2011 at 1:09am

Hi family and friends. I made it home from Tokyo to Kamakura safe and sound. Power’s out, so I’m using candles, which I have lots of and the batteries on my wireless computers ’til they peter out. Since I’m a prepper I’ve got food and water to last quite a few days. … This is the biggest quake to hit Japan in 300 years, so reports Al Jazeera. Thanks you all for your concerns and prayers. The next few days are going to be tough for our brothers and sisters in northeastern Japan. Let’s keep them in mind.

Much love to you all, Robert

Jefferson says Facebook has been invaluable during this crisis. Read more…

The Seattle Refugee Youth Project is premiering digital stories created by local refugee youth on Saturday, March 5 from 1:00-3:00 in UW’s Kane Hall 120.  To accompany this blog post they granted Flip the Media a sneak preview of one of the stories:

My career in journalism started just as newspaper publishers began their awkward and ultimately impotent dance with Internet. As a photojournalist, I watched publishers and editors struggle with how to fit the paper’s Internet presence into their business model.

At the time, the notion of citizen journalists and crowd-sourcing stories would have seemed absurd. The journalist’s role was that of a gatekeeper who filtered what the audience needed to know from the noise. Read more…

“It’s not about what you got…it is how you freak it.”

Our walks be-get our thoughts – which then can be-come steps of action.  In my B-Side Docs about Seattle vignette produced as part of MTV’s $5 Dollar Cover Seattle, I had the opportunity to take a walk with musician Gabriel Teodros to places not typically highlighted on Seattle tour maps.  The sixth cut from his album “Love Works” starts with the lyric, “We got a lot of work to do.”  Indeed, taking a walk with Gabriel is work but just like the beat driving his song there is the tickle of a piano line which be-speaks hints of play and fun.

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