Best in Show - see it here!

It was a great honor and privilege to present RTNDA regional Edward R. Murrow awards to Texas and Oklahoma winners at our yearly banquet on April 21. For the second straight year, RTNDA teamed with the Texas Associated Press Broadcasters and the Austin Headliners Club for an all-in-one awards gala.

It was an even-greater privilege to edit clips from about 30 of the evening's winners to show them at the ceremony. For those who couldn't attend, or even for those who did, you can see the clips we showed by downloading this 5mb Powerpoint presentation. Note: if you don't have PowerPoint installed on your PC, no worry. You can download Microsoft's free PowerPoint Viewer from their website. Once you've got the PowerPoint loaded, you can select the "Slide Show" menu and click "View Show". Click anywhere in the video screen to play a clip. For radio clips, look at the bottom of the page and click the little speaker icon.

Thanks to Diana Heidgerd and our friends at the AP, we had a professional photographer on scene to capture everyone's smiling faces. Three of the photos are in this post, including the photo at top, featuring KTBC FOX 7 Austin's lovely and talented Arezow Doost, who's accepting a TAPB award on behalf of her station KTBC for her stories of returning to Afghanistan, her homeland. With her is my longtime friend and TAPB president Kevin Benz.


If you download the PowerPoint and watch and listen to the clips, check out the video clip with the farmer. It's page 5 in the PowerPoint, and it's a great story by KJTV-Lubbock reporter Christal Bennett (above photo, center) and photojournalist Chris Knight (left).


And finally, here are two legends in the business. Actually, one of them is me, and I'm most assuredly not a legend. But the man next to me hardly needs an introduction in this state. Neal Spelce has been a reporter, anchor, writer -- you name it -- in the Austin area for decades. That is his voice broadcasting those haunting words live to Austin viewers the day of the UT Tower Shooting in 1966. And while his work won both Murrow and TAPB awards this year, for the 40th anniversary UT Tower Shooting documentary (produced by my friend Rachel Elsberry at News 8 Austin), here he's giving me an award. He's presenting the Headliners Club award for a story that I had nothing to do with, except be in the same newsroom as Becky Oliver and our FOX 4 investigative team for their award-winning story "Airport Insecurity". I was our station's only representative at the ceremony, so I got to take the picture with Neal.

Blogging at RTNDA!

Hope you're here in Las Vegas this week, cuz this is where it's at. I'll be blogging for the RTNDA website, so click here and then click Blog to read more.

I'll leave you with this. One of these ladies you probably already know, Amanda Congdon. The other one caters to a younger set, but all of you are going to hear from more her in the very near future -- Zadi Diaz of JetSet.

The yearly trek to Las Vegas and RTNDA@NAB

Travelling later this week to Las Vegas for the annual RTNDA@NAB convention. Like I have for the past 5 years, I'm producing (or co-producing) a handful of the training sessions on the RTNDA side, including these:

• The opening session Sunday, "News 2.0: Leading and Succeeding in the New Journalism World"
  
• "Preparing for HD" -- This is a must-see for broadcasters moving toward 16:9 and HD production
  
• "The New VJs: Are They Just Another Way to Say One-Man Band, or Are They the Future of News Gathering?" -- From small-market to large-market, this trend is taking shape across the country.
  
• ENG via WiFI: How to Send Video over the Internet and other tips and tricks.
  

Plus, I'll be participating as a coach in RTNDF's "One-on-One Coaching" seminar. It's quite an impressive list of coaches RTNDF has assembled (Bracco, Burdick, Geisler, Ginther, Green, Libin - shoot why do they need me?!?). I suppose we'll all have our little corners of the room, and people can come in to ask advice about management or leadership issues. My little corner will look like the picture up above. Bring your nickels!

Looking forward to meeting some real visionaries, including Michael Rosenblum, Travis Fox, Mike Sechrist and Amanda Congdon, and seeing many new and old friends too, including my favorite bloggers from Lost Remote, News/Web 2.0 guru Terry Heaton, my fellow RTNDA board members and our great RTNDA staffers, the Poynter gang, old friends from the NAB exhibit floor, and great people like Rhonda Aubrey and Jason Crundwell.

I'll be in Vegas starting this Friday to help with last-day preparations. We have a board meeting Saturday, and the opening session is Sunday. If you're going to Vegas, please look me up. I'll have my Treo for calls (469.222.1002) and e-mail (chip@smartbusy.tv). I'll be at the Hilton from Friday to Wednesday. I'm planning to blog every day with photos too, so check back to this page, or subscribe to the RSS feed.