Meeting People Just a Click Away

Meetup.com was started in New York City in 2001 after the events of September 11^th. Co-founder Matt Meeker noticed that people around the city were waving to each other, something New York City residents aren’t known for doing. Meeker thought this was a sign that people wanted to connect with each other in a way that they hadn’t before.

Meetup.com is different than Facebook and Twitter in that while those sites allow you to meet people from all across the globe, Meetup.com puts the emphasis on meeting locals with like interests. While other sites encourage you to stay put in your home, Meetup reaches its full potential by meeting in person.

Meetup.com has events all around the Nation with some in smaller cities, but most in the bigger ones. One of the most active groups on the site in Norman is the Norman Naturalists. They have several events per month where they meet and talk about their religion in various locations around Norman, including Gray Owl Coffee.

The group founder David Wheelock, who created the group in 2008 said about Meetup.com, “It’s about getting people together face to face, who are local to each other.”

The Naturalists may be one of the most active groups here in Norman, but the website has lots of different groups; some of the local groups include the Moms and Margaritas, the Oklahoma Red Dirt Paddlers, and even the OKC Tall Club, where you have to be a certain height to join.

Since the site is geared toward finding what you like, you can find people with similar interests, it can be a good way to meet people. Courtney Crites, a Norman Naturalist member, said “Meetup itself is really cool, it’s safer than just going up to a random person and saying lets be friends.”

There are other sites that you can use to connect to local people. Reddit has a similar feature, and so does craigslist. While these sites don’t have near the popularity of Facebook and Twitter it is good that there is an option for those who want to meet locals.

Meetup.com is the largest social site for people to find groups to join or start their own. According to the site it has 11 million members and there are 340,000 monthly Meetups in 45,000 cities.

For those wanting to meet new people Meetup.com may just be the tool you are looking for. 

Hope for Newspapers Yet

Sharks must continue to swim, or they die. That was essentially the point of Rob Curley’s speech on Monday night. He pushed for the evolving of newspapers to not merely survive, but thrive.

Curley did not tell the audience of about 100 how to do fix all newspapers; he only told what he had done at past publications and how it worked for him. Above all Curley pushed for newspapers to be aware of what their audience really wanted, and then give it to them.

Curley presented the listeners with 5 P’s for giving the consumer what they wanted. These were Passion, Practical, Playful, Personal Communication, and Porn. Before any article is published they must be in at least one of these categories. Curley also stated that instead of focusing on the classic formula of Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How he is now focuses on only the How and Why. He feels these are the most pressing questions that face the readers.

One of the most powerful images that Curley used was a bar graph that compared the steady rise in population with the stagnant sales of newspapers over the years. Stephanie Wingfield said that the graph was one of the most surprising things about the speech.

A large portion of the night was spent talking about Curley’s time at the Las Vegas Sun, where the readership increased eightfold from the time that they started to integrate multimedia.

 The management at the Las Vegas Sun noticed viewers were reading the online versions of stories longer. They found that this was due to a point in a webpage where advertisements are no longer a distraction. This is called the “book zone,” where a reader is able to focus on only the article. A reader never reaches this zone in a print newspaper and so therefore they rarely read an entire article.

Curley went over some of the more glamorous facets of the Las Vegas Sun, such as a virtual history of Las Vegas with information on the past mob ties of the city and a virtual strip that can be altered by changing the year and seeing the corresponding buildings that were on the strip at that time.

Curley ended the talk with asking the question of how to increase the amount of readers of the Oklahoma Daily.  It is an important question, and a seemingly much more positive outlook than many give the newspaper these days.