Convergence Happening at Carmel

Tom Britt, Publisher of the Carmel Community Newsletter and atCarmel.com

When I’m out talking to people about the latest scoop around Carmel, one compliment I hear often is how far we’ve come with the atCarmel.com properties. What started out as a clunky website has turned into a print, Internet and video business that focuses on local news like none other.

What most people don’t know is that during the dot com boom, I was traveling all over the world speaking on the future of media as we knew it back then: Internet, television, and newspapers. I was the CEO of a start up that catalogued all the audio and video being streamed on the web and presented it back as a channel guide of live and recorded content called Channelseek.com. It was the first of its kind and we forged relationships with the biggest and the best in online video: Rolling Stone, CNN, NBC, ABC, Comcast, Sprint, Road Runner, the House of Blues, and many others.

Back then, I talked about how the Internet was going to make everything local, that citizens would become journalists, and that all content would eventually be delivered through the Internet. Sound familiar?

With that in mind, atGeist.com was launched in 2003 as a laboratory in my own backyard. We just launched atCarmel.com last summer. In the spirit of curiosity and entrepreneurship, I carved out a niche in how to integrate print, Internet, and video to create something unique. The experiment continues, but the direction is always the same: Media convergence.

While most print magazines and newspapers are selling ink on paper or column inches, we are bundling our services to provide visibility in a very targeted way. Now with our online video services, companies can have cost effective video produced and played through CarmelTV (www.atcarmel.com/tv), promoted in the Geist and Carmel Community Newsletters, promoted through Facebook and Twitter, and embedded on their own websites. Print ads can carry a similar theme as the video spots, and online ads rotating through our websites can link to the spots as well. And this whole ecosystem works because it is surrounded by local news and people profiles that we are genuinely interested in reading about.

Not all experiments have worked out by the way. We published the Fishers Community Newsletter during the Geist annexation days. Chalk that one up to bad timing. Most recently, we launched the free coupon website, TowneClipper.com. That one bombed, too.

All told, I’m pretty proud of what we’ve built and how it continues to push the envelope as a local news service. If you want to see the future of atCarmel.com, check out CarmelTV. If you really want to get futuristic, watch it on your iPhone (sorry Droid users).