"Touched By An Angel..." - New Media & the ACS

(Disclosure: The Boulder County Business Report - the partial subject of my blog post below - is a media sponsor for the ACS.)

Here's a recent article titled 'Touched By An Angel' in the BCBR.com about angel investing & the Angel Capital Summit. I encourage you to read it. There are some good observations in it about both the process and the landscape.

The ACS event has been getting a lot of media coverage lately, which is cool. Some of it's been new media - the blogsphere, primarily - and some of it's been old media. Considering that there are now over 11,000 Google references to "Angel Capital Summit" and that 6 weeks ago there were about ZERO, it's been interesting to watch this happen.

So here are some of my observations...

New media talks, old media reports. By this I mean that old media - the Denver Post, by example, is more bound by the conventional journalistic protocols involving fact checking and reliable & verifiable sources.

This is good, though seemingly conservative in this hypernews day & age. However, they've much to conserve. More so than any blogger, a local newspaper has a covenant with its readers to get the facts right. Attending to this covenant is a responsibility that I deeply appreciate the Denver Post and all the other local newspapers for when they do it well. They generally work pretty hard to get it right. This is good, as somebody should.

(Where would we be without our local newspapers? You've gotta love the blogsphere, but 'getting it right' isn't always the driving focus of their efforts. By example: AnnCoulter.com)

So what's w/ the Boulder County Business Report? Is it fish or fowl? New media or old? It reported the ACS event in the article above after a series of interviews with angel investors and investor networks both online and off - and prior to the ACS event itself!

As the Chair of the ACS, I like this. But did they get the facts straight? I'm thinking yes, if only because they didn't write about everything I talked about or publish the interviews of everyone I introduced them to. In addition, they went well beyond what was included in our conversation and sought out other sources - some of which were "jaded" or frustrated with the lack of vertically focused investor networks.

All this is true. All this is useful. So score one for the BCBR and how it values & manages its covenant with its readers...and score them another point for working effectively to bridge the gap between the new media - us talkers - and the old - the reporters.

And all of this is also about problems we're trying to solve @ the ACS - and not just for this event, but for the market itself. So stay tuned and watch - and blog about, talk to us about & write about - what happens!

It's only through your input that what we're doing becomes valid.

Cheers,
Kevin