Welcome to the Living St. Louis blog. To be perfectly honest with you, this blog thing is a bit new to some of us. We’re broadcasters, so we’re used to delivering our product to tens of thousands of people at appointed times. (We send. You watch.) But this is different. It gives us a chance to interact with you in ways broadcasting doesn’t allow. And I hope that we can reach people we’re not reaching through our air. One of the things we’ve learned in recent years is that viewing patterns are changing, and audiences don’t want to sit in front of the television at a designated time to watch something.
Maybe you’ve seen Living St. Louis. It airs on Mondays and Tuesdays at 7 p.m. on KETC, Channel 9 – St. Louis’ public television station. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a magazine-format program that features three or four segments per show highlighting interesting things going on in the St. Louis region. We feature people, neighborhoods, art, architecture, local history, interesting events and trends.
And now, well into our fourth season, we have developed a good-sized audience of between forty and sixty thousand people per show. Nobody is as surprised by its success as the producers, because when we first came up with the idea we didn’t really have much of an idea as to how it would look. It developed over time from the creative input of four very different producers – Jim Kirchherr, Anne-Marie Berger, Ruth Ezell and myself. Last year Kate Shaw joined us as associate producer, doing a lot of the behind the scenes work.
Maybe the success of Living St. Louis comes from the fact that there’s nothing else quite like it in St. Louis – a program reaching a large audience that explores the region in a way that gives the audience credit for having intelligence and curiosity.
Over the past four years we’ve produced close to five hundred segments on life in St. Louis, and we’ve hardly scratched the surface. So, I personally don’t buy the “St. Louis is boring” mantra and will always speak up if I’m in the company of someone who isn’t aware and curious about the long overdue revitalization of St. Louis.
Please, drop in on this page when you get a chance and give us your input. It’s still obviously under construction. We’re not sure what it will look like when it’s finished, but we didn’t know how Living St. Louis would turn out either. I suppose you’re going to have as much impact on what it becomes as we do.
You can expect links to our stories, and some back story on how we produce the program and what we’ve discovered in the process of creating it. One of the very cool things about being involved in a program like this is – it’s kind of like having a back stage pass to a city and a region. We get to go behind the scenes, see the little man behind the curtain, and pass it on to you.
So, I feel like I’m tossing a note in a bottle into the ocean. I know broadcasting. Now it’s time to go a’blogging. We’ll be checking the mailbox.
Patrick Murphy
KETC
