From Al Ellis via Miriam Hiser – "Let the construction begin! June 20, 2009 will be a glorious day in Dallas, Texas. On that date, which happens to be Fred’s birthday, we will begin construction of the Fred Baron Habitat for Humanity Memorial Home.
While I realize many of our supporters do not live in Dallas, we would like to invite each and every one of you to participate in the first day of contruction on June 20, 2009. The first contruction day involves framing the home and perhaps installing roof trusses. It is always one of the most exciting days for building a Habitat home in that we start with a vacant slab and end the day with a completely framed home…. I predict beautiful weather and a heartwarming experience as we celebrate Fred’s birthday by beggining the construction of a new home for a deserving Dallas family.“
As we set off today on a new search for talent to anchor Rocketboom [see details here] we decided to take the opportunity to push ahead with the growth of our show, by searching for not just one anchor, but two. Now that we have our Los Angeles studio set up, we hope to soon find two stellar people from anywhere in the world, willing to help take Rocketboom to new heights.
In 2004, when I was just about ready to launch Rocketboom, there was no such thing as YouTube and so I went to Craigslist to search for talent. There I found Amanda and the show turned out to be great. When Amanda was ready to move on, we returned to Craigslist, and found Joanne. Joanne has been incredible on Rocketboom, everything she did was masterful.
So today, it only seems natural to return to Craigslist, where we have placed two ads, one in New York City, and one in Los Angeles. Of course we can not deny the chances that the undiscovered talent we seek is on YouTube so we have utilized our YT account to search there as well.
But what about Ellie Rountree? Everyone here at Rocketboom and a rapidly growing stable of fans see Ellie as a natural to assume the anchor role at the RB desk, but her proficiencies and interests have taken her down a different path. Ellie is working her magic by hosting *and* producing the Rocketboom Tech show (created in collaboration with Intel.) Additionally, she’s continuing her work as one of the creators and hosts of our Know Your Meme show, which has become, by almost all measures, as popular at Rocketboom.
So what about Caitlin Hill? Personally, I believe that Caitlin is perfect for Rocketboom and so when we had the chance to work with her, we jumped right in. If you saw any of the videos she was in on Rocketboom recently, I think you will agree, she is a natural talent. Both Caitlin and I both really want her on Rocketboom but, unfortunately, we have not been able to come to terms with her company, Hitviews. We went out of our way to try to work something out, even going as far as taking the show down for an entire week recently (an unprecedented move) and have gone without our staple news programming for the last two weeks in hopes of working out a deal. Maybe we will still find a way to make it happen in the future but for now, we must keep moving.
In the meantime, I dont know about you as a viewer, but not having a strong daily news program to watch is just the worst feeling for me. While our other shows are doing well for themselves, our daily news is our staple, the foundational center of our Rocketboom universe. I hope our search will expedite finding the right people to anchor Rocketboom, quickly!
We, of course, considered a contest, we considered crowdsourcing the job of finding talent over to our audience, but never believed that either of these would be the way we should go. A contest, of course, would lead to more popularity, buzz and excitement, but we don’t think this should be a competition with winners and losers. That being said, we’ll be taking note of all feedback and listening to our audience closely.
And in an effort to maybe be of use to everyone else in this new rising tide of online media, we have encouraged people to submit their application publicly, in case anyone at all might also find some wonderful talent for their own projects.
See http://talentsearch.rocketboom.com
