Posts tagged twitter
Four Mile Fire in Boulder could have ended up like the North Fork fire : loss of life
Apr 29th
I have had some experience covering Forrest fires. They now call them wild land fire, but I prefer forest fires when they are in the trees. In the 80’s I covered the Black Tiger Fire which destroyed over 40 beautiful homes up on sugar loaf. I covered the Yellow Stone park fire and most shockingly the Storm King Fire near Aspen where 13 smoke jumpers lost their lives. So I knew just how rapidly a fast moving forest fire could kill people.
When the ferociousness flames of the Four Mile Fire hit on Sunday morning Labor Day weekend 2010, I new we were in big trouble. I was up on flagstaff Mountain when it started, talking with a city of boulder Parks open space officer. I could hear all the radio traffic coming in to his truck radio. He had about 7 channels going. The most frightening ones were all of the fire crew channels.
It was bad. People were running for their lives. Fire crews were running for their lives. And the fire was running right up the mountain buring everything in its path. The fire had started at about 10:30am, but by noon I knew we had lost over 100 homes and the winds were still blowing. I got out my laptop and started to write.
The fire had crested Sunshine Canyon road and was on the move down the other side. As a reporter I started reporting what I heard and saw from Flagstaff. Boulder OEM hadn’t opened yet, and I could not get any assistance or information officially on the fire. I decided, to hell with it and not wait. First why wait? Secondly this fire was a potential killer.
I sat in the Boulder Channel 1 TV production truck and then did our first video from Flagstaff with the fire as a back drop at 11:30. Donna Marek, one of our reporters wrote the first story at 11:10. She was talking with fire crews from Downtown Boulder. Ron Baird our news editor called me on my cell and had the first report from the city at 11:40 . He filed the second story.
Ron Donna and I talked about how serious this was. It was decided that I should post the life threatening stories based on what I heard on the radio and let resident know this was a fire storm and get the hell off the mountain. Before I did, I talked with Patrick Vonkeyserling, the city PIO. He told me he couldn’t confirm anything, but it was really really bad and that if i could use social Media: ie Twitter and our on line news paper, it would help get the word out to people up on sunshine.
With that I started posting stories and updates: “People are running for their lives” “We are going to burn to death” “3 feared missing dead” “possible corpses found near burned out Car” Over 30 updates in the first 3 hours.
The idea was to shock people into leaving their homes and not wait. People from Sunshine and the surrounding area started to tweet and call me. “should we leave?” were the questions. “Yes I replied , get out now”. People on twitter said don’t listen to us, that we were fear mongering. To witch I replied get out now or burn to death in your homes. Ron Baird called me and said.
“fuck the people on twitter just keep reporting what is going on.”
In the aftermath of Four Mile Fire , the Four Mile fire chief thanked me for our aggressive coverage early on. You helped us evacuate people he told me one day over coffee at Great Harvest Bread.
But I had taken a lot of flack from the Twitter community following the fire. At the time I was really upset by their reaction, but now I realize they were just upset viewers and readers who had no idea or access to what was really happening up in Fourmile. I did. I had a direct line to dispatch, OEM, Sheriffs, the Forrest service and I was sitting in a city open space truck taking it all in from a vantage point. I never should have paid any attention to twitter.
During the days of the fire, Boulder chief, Larry Donner told me that the fire was moving up to 40 miles per hour early on and was spreading embers the size of house shingles 1 mile in front of the flames. He said most people go into denial and under react and that’s when they get killed. He also told me it was good that I scared the hell out of everybody and made them move during the early stages.
He said, as did the Sunshine chief , the people on twitter were wrong to criticize you. “You did the right thing even though there were no deaths. “You scared people into action and that is what’s needed in a fast moving wild land fire. But criticism comes with the territory.” he said.
The sheriff was criticized for cutting the power all over the mountain area. He wanted people uncomfortable and he wanted them to get out! The truth is it is a damn wonder people didn’t lose their lives in that fire. Yep, we caused fear and shock in our reporting. We intended to. Hopefully, we helped save some lives. The alternaticve to agressive evacuations is what happened at the North Fork Fire. In hind sight we’d report it the same all over again.
I had apologized to the twitter people for a week. But it did no good. They had their minds made up. We did our jobs at Boulder channel 1. Thanks from the fire departments was icing on the cake.
Interesting Ron Baird who is a seasoned editor and Donna Marek a seasoned reporter, kept telling me. “Don’t listen to Twitter, they don’t know what you know. Just keep telling the story as it unfolds.”
Jann Scott’s Journal
from Boulder Colorado
Business’s How to fight back at Twitter, Yelp and other threats from Forums
Dec 9th
What can you do when you are targeted by individuals on Yelp, Twitter, or forums? Well I should know because I have been personally targeted by hate campaigns organized in a variety of places. And I have survived even thrived to tell about it. But you have to be willing to fight to the death for you right to your place on this planet. If not you can always hire somebody like me to do the fighting for you……. not that this is a pitch……..but you can fight back and win.
First a little history. For me it started early in my career in the 1960’s when we were all fighting corporate greed and corruption. I was in media then and learned how to campaign a war. I learned from the right and the left.
In the 1980’s and 90’s I was in talk radio and talk TV where the battles were with hate talkers on t
he “right and left”. I went after the Militias and the anarchists. Rush Limbaugh and Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice. In those days the fight was a little more straight up than it is now with weasels on twitter. One case was a right winged hater named John Hall who lives in Boulder kept writing me and calling me and told me he was going to come to my house and shoot me. Sometimes Radical Patchouli oiled hippies would start fights at the post office of a coffee shop or on the street. I could deal with that openly. The solutions were simple. Carry a gun, wear body armor, have a body guard, call the police and or fight back. There was a common theme. The individuals who hated me did so because they didn’t like something I wrote in the newspapers or something I said on the radio or TV.
In the late 90’s the people who ran public access TV tried to remove me. I launched a public media and legal campaign. When it was over they had resigned or were fired.
In the early 2000’s the Boulder city council tried to end my TV career and a 4 year battle ensued where 7 of the nine of them came after me. My solution to that was to go after each of them and their families on TV, in the press and legally. It was nasty brutal and bloody. But I remain on TV and most of them are gone.
By 2009 the Boulder landscape had changed sufficiently that all new tactics had to be implored to win. The twitter and SM crowd feel invincible because they can gang up on one person or company and destroy them. They tried that with me because of my coverage of Ignite Boulder , the Boulder Fire, Start up Boulder. A guy named Andrew Hyde and Pug rallied their hate team to try to stop me. I just went around them and didn’t pay any attention to them. But before I did I filed legal actions with the city, police, FBI office of justice etc for civil rights violations. They tried to run public events as a private club and caused themselves to become impermanently under investigation.
I used this same tactic with the city of Boulder. They were so cock sure of themselves that they thought they were above the law. They weren’t. They ended up with a congressional investigation and two law suits by Seth Brigham which he won. I call that the Nazi model. When you have a mass group out to destroy you, they feel invincible and that is their weakness.
Another tactic is to isolate one of the people coming after you. I did that with Mayor Shaun McGrath. He went crazy and eventually dropped his fight and moved out of Boulder. Elaine Ellis the SM girl at Trada started going after our sponsors on Boulder channel 1. That’s illegal hell since her company competes for advertising with us. A phone call to her boss ended it, but Trada is now still exposed to a law suit by me for a host of illegal anti trust acts. Pug the guy I mentioned earlier is the SM guy for Crispin Porter + Bogusky. He announces it right on his twitter page. So anything he or Elaine Ellis do or say publicly reflect right back on their companies and they leave their companies exposed and liable. The brilliant part is is they argue it does not which digs their whole deeper. But for Elaine or pug to attack our company or our sponsors violates all kinds of federal laws and I once won a lawsuit with Comcast over the same. But these are dumb kids and think they are invincible….their weakness.
When Andrew Hyde tried to intimidate me I wrote to his boss Brad Feld and told him to reel his Guy in. Feld immediately disavowed any connection to Hyde, even though his company had Hyde listed as a Honcho. Feld knew what was coming and he wanted no part of it.
Recently Doyle at Metzger pr was bereft over Steve Jobs death. He did not like the tribute Boulder Channel One had to Jobs, so he wrote me a scathing letter and threatened to use all of the resources at Metzger to destroy me. I wrote him back and said You’ve got to be shitting me. For why? But I reminded him that I am a fighter from way back and it would be Metzger and associates who would lose. Why? because I fight to the death, dirty and I don’t quit. I drop everything and focus on the fight. While Trada, Metzger or Crispin Porter goes about their daily business, my daily business in a fight would be assembling a team to go after each employee, and their families. But in the case of Doyle and Metzger, I think John Metzger had a talk with Doyle and asked him ” have you been drinking” ? I dunno for sure. Yesterday, Doyle referred to a PR piece about what to do in a crisis or what not to do. But Doyle and Metzger is a PR firm. He and they are not a battle hardened army like we are at Boulder Channel 1. We are the God Damn news media. We live for war. They live to shake hands.
But if people are attacking your company and spilling your blood, you have to single them out and kill them, before they kill you.
With Twitter during the Boulder fire I kept a record of each person who attacked me and then went after them individually on several internet TV shows. I exposed each person and hammered them. I isolated a few of the worst. The result was some of them were horrified and told their friends. They are not going to expect you to fight back in unconventional ways.
Recently a guy on twitter who calls himself pearlstreet sent out a bunch of tweets asking people to rally to destroy me and my company. He’s been hiding anonymously, but he has so severely broken fair trade laws since he’s a competitor, it’s only a matter of time. But these people are gangsters, criminals and they feel justified in victimizing you.
Stuart Gallo, the publisher of Boulder Weekly once told me about a situation he had with the Daily Camera. Daily Camera advertising sales staff were bad mouthing Boulder Weekly to its advertisers. Stuart was furious, so he threatened legal action to the cameras publisher. The Camera apologized and changed it’s sales strategy.
A girl named Red Head Writing attacked me on twitter and then rallied her pals to assault my writing….based on style. So grant it she is pretty immature, but she typify s the gang attitude on twitter…..which is to assassinate people. She was using obnoxious spam ads on her column in an online Entrepreneurial Magazine. I asked her about it. She immediately went on the attack rather than simply address a solution. I point her out because she is supposed to be an example of good business. God help America if she is.
Every restaurant I know hates Yelp. Yelp is a place where your average poster can be a terrorist. One guy can ruin a perfectly good restaurant. We have clients who have hired us to go to any length to stop Yelp. I always find it funny when Yelps Denver sales rep try to sell ad space to the people the beat up. It must be a horrible job. Yelp has been accused of extortion by Fightback.com. Locally I have been hired to deal with Yelp critics who try to ruin restaurants. One thing you can do, if you are an owner, is get everyone you know to post positive reviews to offset and organized hate campaign. You just fucking have to do it and not be intimidated by Yelp or their dumb rules. Seriously, fuck them. You have to fight back. Yelp and the commies on Twitter hate anything that is corporate unless it is a darling like Whole Foods. If you are a local franchise of a chain, get ready to fight or you will be destroyed by these douches bags.
But Yelp has not come up against a formidable foe yet. One day they will and it will cost them . I feel the same about Twitter. They are exposed. I don’t know how many law suits either have going, but I am sure they are busy. Eventually law suits will crush them. Facebook and Myspace have actively tried to stop illegal attacks by posters.
You can’t fight these people back on their home turf like twitter or yelp. You won’t win. They own it. So you go to other playing fields they feel are out of bounds but vulnerable. They’re jobs, they’re families etc. You have to pose an extreme threat and still keep it legal. The cops, government agencies. But most of all you have to be committed to a 24 hour a day fight. Again remember, the people you are fighting are criminals. Just because Elaine Ellis is a cute love able girl, she still violated federal trade acts by coming after me. Its called unfair competition. And if her boss didn’t call her off he’d be defending his entire company in Federal court right now, getting ready to write me a big fat check from Brad Felds checking account. See how it works. ?? If these twitter yelp kids are trying to kill you or your company , you have to be ready to burn their fucking house down and make their personal lives absolutely hell…..each and every one.
So with Elaine Ellis you’d have to isolate her and make her feel like she was about to lose her job just to get her to stop attacking your customers. She is no different that the dope dealing thug in Compton who wants in on your turf. These little fuckers on Twitter are murderers none the less. You get the metaphors?
If you are an individual or business who has been singled out by attackers, it is important that you are in the right. At least it helps.
Of course I used My Space to go after Tony Perri when he ran CATV 54 and violated my civil rights. I also used the media, internet, lawyers and government. He was so busy defending, he quit at CATV and moved out of Boulder.
But if you are a business or individual and they gang up on you on Twitter, forums or yelp, I have found the best solution is to hire somebody who is suicidal and beyond the pale. Some one who will drop a nuclear bomb or shoot the entire office staff, kidnap the guys kids or shoot the dog. That ups the game. And no one, lawyers or cops want to fuck with that guy.
Also, good people respect a guy like that. Business’s will sponsor a business with serious balls. Everyone is sick of the 18 to 34 year old little shits who think they can trash a business and get away with it. I’ve beat them back and so can you.
from pussy Boulder
Jann Scott
(ps did he really say kidnap our kids and shoot the dog??) yes he did. You get the drift…this is a parody