I'm not going to make excuses for anyone or hopefully criticize volunteers, but I'm just going to speak from experience - having been a competitor, a ground crew member, a "team leader" (whatever that meant) and a pseudo-media guy -

Media is tough for this race. It always has been. The nature of the beast is that your media subjects are basically unobservable for 99% of the time unless you have a high powered drone or helicopter. It's not easy.

Add on to that fact that if you're part of a team or the race committee and you're doing double duty, media falls by the wayside easily. I can tell you that after getting in from competing, the last thing I wanted to do was boot up the tablet or laptop and pen a story. When I was a ground crew member, after spending 2 hours under a boat in the sand gluing new gaskets into a dagger trunk, the last thing I wanted to do was boot up the laptop or tablet and tell everyone what was going on out there.

The only time I felt that I did an adequate job was when I live streamed the race from my cell phone back in the day when live streaming was just catching fire. These days its almost stupid not to do a periscope or youtube live stream with any number of connected devices. The Florida coast has SOME LTE deadzones but back in 2008 when I did my coverage from my OG Droid, I was getting solid signal at most Tybee checkpoints.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that to do media properly for this race, you need a dedicated resource whose JOB it is to do media. BK and JW did a great job in 2006, and I still go back and watch those videos with sentimental nostalgia. Hell, I have the DVD downstairs (I just tossed it into a moving box) However, with the tools available these days on social media, covering these races should be a lot easier than in years past. One guy with an iPhone and a few external battery packs (and a good data plan) could stream the whole race from start to finish.

Last edited by ThunderMuffin; 05/23/16 09:27 AM.