Monday, December 21, 2009

Dobie's latest project 'as close to heaven as it gets'

Former Nashville Scene editor Bruce Dobie is now with Dobie Media Inc., which produces the EvieSays online calendaring platform (did that phrase exist five years ago?) for major media sites. The company is raising $1.5 million in new capital, our former chapter president Milt Capps writes in a new post at Venture Nashville:

Although Dobie said he misses writing, he described the daily challenges of advancing EvieSays as being "as close to heaven as it gets."

He explained: "At this moment, as the media world is reinventing itself and transforming into something digital, my little company is at ground zero. We are right in the middle of the creative destruction. This is much more entrepreneurial than the Scene. The Scene was a copy-cat--we simply started something that had done well in other markets. You can argue about how well or poorly we pulled it off, but it wasn't truly original.

"But at eviesays," Dobie continued, "we're writing the rules. It requires looking around corners, lots of imagination. On top of that, our potential audience is not just Nashville, but it's everyone on the planet who has access to a cell phone or computer. When I come to work in the morning like I did yesterday, and my sales guy is yelling out that we've just gotten an email from someone in Macau asking for our calendar, and then we all rush to look up just where the heck Macau is, well, it doesn't get any more exciting than that."



Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Proud to be a 15-year member of SPJ

When I took my mail out of the mailbox this evening, I didn't know why I was getting a little package from SPJ.

When I opened it up and shook it out, out fell a letter from headquarters -- and my 15-year pin.

It's a little hard for me to believe it's actually been 15 years, but I'll take headquarters' word for it. And I'm proud to have been a member of SPJ for 15 years now.

If you're a journalist and you're not a member of SPJ, you should be. Join now by clicking this link.