During Mass Comm Week I was able to attend several panels. I went to Entrepreneurial Thinking with speaker Chris Perez of Citygram Austin, Trisha Espinoza, BET Programmer and former Texas State student, Better Outside with Texas Parks and Wildlife, and Crisis Coverage: The Memorial Day Flood. I tried to live tweet as much as possible during all of the panels as well.
Entrepreneurial Thinking was a really interesting panel. I was inspiring to see that Chris Perez was actually an engineer who worked his way into the digital media world. He taught himself a lot of coding and within 3 years had created Citygram Austin. It was encouraging to me to know that you don’t always have to stay within the bounds of your major, but it was also nice to see the changes in media now that the digital world has evolved so much.
While I really enjoyed this panel, my absolute favorite was Better Outside. Surprise, I know, because I’m always writing about hiking and visiting parks. Better Outside was really just up my ally. The videos that Earl Nottingham makes are absolutely beautiful and really share how special Texas parks are. Whitney Bishop, the Social Media Manager, is credited with changing the way the park service was perceived by Texans. With her help, they went from a stuffy government entity to fun and follow-able. I would love to be involved with the park service one day so every park of this panel was awesome to me! It was so cool to hear them talk about how they’ve made changes to TPW’s online image. I also loved how Nottingham explained how he made is videos and used time lapse effects.
