Closing out this Disaster Declaration, we want to make sure we hit all of our identified audiences. We’ve done lots of TV, radio, and newspaper interviews…but we still believe there is great benefit in the Public Safety Announcement or PSA.

In my deployment bag, I have a small hand-held voice recorder just for this reason. This little device has some seriously good audio quality and once I’m done recording the audio, I can plug the connecting USB into my compute and send it off via email in an MP3 format. Here’s an example of what a newer version of mine looks like.

So I guess you can say it’s a workable dongle.

However, I expect more out of my PIO peeps.

Most analog stations don’t have conversion software…esp in a disaster.

Does anyone have an MP3 player? (Still downloading from Napster?)

Wav files are waaaaay to big to send via email. (If you try to zip or condense, you will easily degrade the file.)

So you want another solution? YouTube it! The world currently uses YouTube as a verb so why not use tech to your advantage. A quick upload and splice w/ a screen shot of topic, duration, and key points is best.

Here’s our two PSAs that we are using 30-seconds and 15-seconds respectively.

and

Simple, nothing fancy, but news agencies can pull that PSA right off YouTube and use. Additionally, you can use YouTube’s analytics to measure downloads and other deets. Document, document, document right?!?! Proof is in the pudding…I mean analytics.

So how did we do this?

Step-1: Standard contrast picture (I took a picture of the wall).

Step-2: Overlay text graphics over background. Make sure contrast is clear and key info can be seen to reinforce key message being read by talent.

Step-3: Splice the audio-track over still picture.

Step-4: Upload to YouTube!

Step-5: Have another sip of coffee.

No need for a pro studio bec we don’t have that kind of luxury in the field. So here’s the down/dirty setup.

Awwww yeah. Lapel mic + phone holster + pillow = success. The pillow deadens the echos and the mic clipped to phone holster allows talent to project his/her voice as opposed to talk down to their chest.

And trust me, the natural mic on your phones will not do a good job (omni-directional w/ arbitrary sound isolation).

Sunday rest? Nope. External Affairs is continuing the hard charging effort meet the objectives set in this operational period.

@rusnivek