Leo Laporte of This Week in Tech at the Online News Association: Stellar!

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Leo LaPorte: main host and head honcho of the geek online network, TWIT TV.

Leo is one of my invisible gurus. I was supposed to actually be a guest on TWIT show put together by Jason Goldberg, who runs the essential news site, Social Median. I got caught up in a client thing and screwed up the time, kicked myself, but, to be honest, I really want to be on TWIT when I’m announcing my successful new videocast, or e-book, or iPhone app, or…etc.

Anyway. If you’re at all interested in: the future of journalism, new media and the power of interested audiences, and so on, this speech is totally worth your time. The blogosphere buzz seemed to have focused on Leo’s numbers: he has 7 people on staff at the TWIT network, yearly costs of $350,000 per year, and yearly revenue over $1.5million per year…and growing.

Now, of course, as one of the audience noted, he got reasonably well known on mainstream TV and had at least a small geek following before he started the network. But, what I take away is that, to be successful in new media:
1. find your passion. identify it. revel in it. figure out how you are most comfortable talking about it (writing, speaking, photos, videos, etc).
2. make sure your content can be found by other people who have that passion (or flavors thereof); join those communities, be of service, start your own community.
3. look for advertisers and sponsors with products and services that you already use yourself, and kick it old school: no dopey, fakey voiced ’spots’ (ugh), but real story telling about your own experience with the product. If it’s something you don’t know anything about: learn…or drop it!

Now, is this scalable? Who cares? I’m not looking to dominate any world but my own, thanks. I’m not anti-growth. I’m anti-stupid growth. I’m all for sustainable growth.

I’m not anywhere near there yet. And I doubly appreciate folks who are lighting the way. So, for that: thanks Leo!

Hat tip to another one of my invisible gurus Jeff Jarvis (Odaiji ni, Jeff: get well soon!).

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