Phew, "what a long strange trip it's been"! Yesterday, talking with my NEW old friend, Don Melcher. Don is a "radio guy", he also has a passion for model railroading. Our connection, however, comes from our mutual interest in communications technology.

Our conversation, yesterday, brought this five year journey back to its roots for me. Back in 2014 we started doing promotions on a TV show in Fresno. A group of us started meeting at the Gold Coin on
Saturday mornings to discuss promotion and technology around the program I was doing, Old Town Mariposa, with Chuck Leonard on KAIL-TV in Fresno.

We spoke of many things, I recorded meeting "Notes" here on this Blog, and eventually, we moved our "production" to Mariposa, from Fresno, established a studio here in Mariposa and build an Internet based Old Town broadcast that "aired" on YouTube and Facebook.

"Image" and "presentation" were the primary focus of our early meetings, among other things, we were concerned about how the WORLD saw us in as much as we had a "visitor driven" economy!

Image and presentation were the primary issues that Don and I spoke of yesterday, although we spoke of many things (Cuban Cigars?). Of course, the world has changed significantly since those days back in 2014 but our early concerns about how we appear, as a community and a County, is still a big deal.

Our "shows" have a fairly big audiance, by Mariposa standards; we are a rural community with around 17,000 residents. BUT we have Yosemite NP in our back yard that attracted over 5 Million visitors last year; a record breaking year! While there is no way of getting to the actual number, some have guessed that we MILLIONS more visitors to destinations, outside of Yosemite, in our County.

It is for this, and the Yosemite visitor, that we have developed  our Internet based Travel Guide. That's getting off-topic through. The point is that Don brought up the point that our Old Town Mariposa, 2MC shows have "morphed" from a "promotional" production to a "news" production.

The "Mariposa County Update" show, and the "Bob & Marshall" show have evolved into an "information" resource for people in Mariposa. This is a new role, and RESPONSIBILITY for our little Network and NOW we need to revisit the question of "Image and Presentation" from a whole new perspective.

In these politically charged times, its NOT a good time to be branded as a NEWS organization! My partner, Walt Hebern who is soon to be moving to Fresno, has concerns about venturing into this new role. We will be re-establishing a "Meeting" schedule, open to the community, to discuss this new role. Did I mention that Don, in his younger days, was a journalist?

Moving Forward, this first day of March, 2017.