Carolinas Magazine
Let me tell you exactly what i’m up to for those of you who try and keep up with me and don’t understand my cryptic emails and websites. I’ve been wanting to do for some time. Let me explain.
When I was in high school (Chapin High School) I used to cut school to go drive back roads and take photographs of South Carolina. I was our photo editor for our newspaper and went to summer journalism camps at USC. Some days I would end up in the mountains on these drives. 15 years later, after driving and living all over much of the country, I’ve learned how much I love the Carolinas as a culture. Sure… we’ve got problems like poverty and poor schools in some areas, urban sprawl and traffic in others but overall the people, places, and culture of the Carolinas is unique. Sometimes I forget that it wasn’t too long ago that we didn’t see Walmart and CVS on every corner, hear the same music on every radio station and have the same retail stores in every town. One of the most disappointing things about seeing this country is realizing that all of the places look and feel the same minus the geographical features. It’s just in the last 20 years that our country has seen a tremendous amount of homogenization with the mobility of businesses and people.
I live in a town that has weathered these changes somewhat poorly. McClellanville is a very small town nestled between Charleston and Georgetown that survived hundreds of years as a coastal fishing village. Well guess what?… the grocery and restaurant franchises don’t carry local shrimp or fish, the people buying the seafood aren’t concerned with sustainable economies of scale or the fate of the McClellanville fishing fleet and in return there is a fleet of boats sitting at the docks and very little profit is made by those fisherman who stick with it. Organizations are trying to help with media campaigns and legislation but the fate of the fleet is still up in the air.
On a personal level.. I always try to give my hard earned monies to local businesses in one way or another and I never endorse or shop at franchises or chains when possible. I watched my father spend his whole life in radio only to be knocked out by a corporate outfit buying up media outlets with no local ties or interest in the area excepting the poorly paid employees who continue to push their homoginized crap on the rest of us. I believe that the public is much smarter than anyone gives them credit for. They will seek out the unique and local and the will remain loyal to their communities provided they can afford to. I want to give these people a tremendous resource online.
What all started this? Almost two years ago I started building websites primarily to promote real estate listings. I saw a terrific opportunity (financially) realizing that most home buyers were searching for real estate almost exclusively online. The programming came second nature, the graphics and photography I was trained for and the rest just fell into place. I enjoyed photographing homes and property, I enjoyed building complex videos and panaramic photography.. but after a while I moved into freelance web design. I built a bunch of sites, learned to work the search engines, taught myself every new technology that came along, and had fun while doing it. I kept telling clients that web publishing is a very inexpensive form of advertising that was invaluable to their budgets. They listened and we had some success stories from it. But what I really realized is that publishing online is simply put, another form of advertising. And the real draw was getting people to the website in the first place, often times through other higher traffic websites. I recommend to many clients upon evaluation that their needs would best be served by google apps, a small business registration on google, a simple template and a blog that I could do in under an hour. I considered an advertising agency with my father and brother to capitalize on our talents, but we decided that the day to day operations can be very tedious and that we would still be at the whim of our clients wishes. That’s not me. I am a think tank type of guy.. come up with an idea and go after it. I’m insubordinate enough to cut loose my own clients if they don’t follow my ideas. While well meaning, this doesn’t bode well for business and I had to find another way.
My most recent project was a large set of music for a couple new restaurants for an old employer of mine. (Louis Osteen) While doing them, I spent a lot of time researching the music as the only stipulation is that the music must be southern in origin and I consider myself an amateur musicologist. What I realized is that almost all American music is southern in origin and much of what we call the “American Songbook” was stuff that people had homoginized, copywrited, and published in tin pan alley. And how much the arts as a whole owe a debt of graditude to southerners for their contributions to the arts. My father and uncle spent a lifetime gathering audience share on the radio by playing “race records” (black music for white people) and made quite a name for themselves doing it. What I realized is that the media as a whole (radio, tv, magazines, newspapers, websites) could promote anything through advertising as long as they served the public what they wished to see, hear, and read.
So I took up researching what people are actually looking for online. Suprisingly enough, it is very similar from town to town and I had noticed some time back that a site called Sciway, which bills itself as the South Carolina information highway had tremendous amounts of traffic and on some days beats out any of the states newspaper websites for traffic. What was disappointing is that it is a very difficult to navigate and all of the directories, excluding government and non-profit are paid links. The site also features very little content excluding the links themselves. At least they recently added some new photos because I had grown tired of the other three. Another thing that pushed me towards this, is that recently two guys started South Carolina magazine. I said to myself…I know this state backwards and forwards and it’s more than promoting gated communities and golf courses. The state has much more to offer in all the small towns and niche culture that makes it such a unique place.
So I’m putting together a directory of everything local in the Carolinas that is easy to use, complete, and entirely missing banner ads. Which I might add are almost completely useless because when someone goes online they can use a search engine to find what they are looking for and rarely if ever do I follow a banner ad link. I also intend to leave out any information about any franchise or chain. The directory is extremely robust and required some great technical programming skills to coordinate. I’m acting as creative and publishing director under the banner of the Windham Agency by coordinating the review, editing and production of the video, audio, copy, and contributors. I’m going to publish 9 unique articles with video and imagery every three months from contributors around the Carolinas. I’ve trademarked the term Carolinas Magazine and you’ll see it in print before long. The support of the magazine will almost be entirely financed by supporters who get a small star and an unobtrusive hovering box above their directory listings. We will be doing micro sites to accompany the listings for the cost of production. We will be welcoming contributors who will share in the revenue of any adjacent directory listings and offering syndication to other websites including your own. Besides regional features and directories of information the site will contain all the normal stuff…news, weather, etc.. including a micro search engine so that you may spend less time surfing for the information you are looking for about the Carolinas.
Wish me luck.. Carolinas Magazine is being designed to exclusively promote the authentic and unique culture, businesses, places and people of the Carolinas. For now.. I’m riding my bike down the road to get some homemade quiche from Burbagge’s Grocery on Broad Street if anyones knows what i’m talking about. And if all of this sounds rather ambitious to you, then you don’t know me. My brother and I were convinced that we had built the largest straw ever and needed to call the guiness book when we were around ten years old by putting together thousands of straws so that they wrapped around our house a bunch of times. Ambitious is an understatement, go ahead and bookmark Carolinas Magazine because I promise none the copy will be as long and rambling as this.