The Mid-Ohio food bank desparately needs food to help the needy. Channel 4 and WNCI are taking food donations at the NBC 4 Studios on Saturday, November 15 from 8 a.m. – 2 p.m. Please stop by and donate some food for this worthy cause.

NBC 4 Studios
3165 Olentangy River Road
Columbus, OH 43202

Channel 6 and Channel 10 have not yet left the stone ages. While Channel 4 twitters and builds a relationship with its viewers, the others continue to lag behind. And they’re lagging behind even further.

Now, Channel 4 is beginning to use Brightkite, which is a location based social network. You check in at a location and then all your posts, including uploaded photos, are associated with that location until you change it.

Channel 4 videographer Andy L. is leading the charge. Recently he’s posted photos from the news chopper and from today’s tornados (?). Since I’m a brightkite friend of Andy’s, I have the ability to have his updates sent directly to my phone. So when he’s out on assignment, I can get a preview of the stories he’s covering. Very cool.

Channel 4 twitters! Much like the Dispatch does.

But what’s so much cooler, is that so does some of WCMH’s employees. I follow them, and it seems like I’m ease dropping a bit as to what’s on tap for the evening news. But that’s a good thing. Because they’re *building a relationship* with me (whether they know it or not). When they say they’re sending the feed of some report for editing, I want to watch it. Thus, I’m going to watch Channel 4′s newscast over the others.

Cheers to Channel 4! Now I’m off to see if the other stations are a cool as them.

UPDATE 4/8/08: No, I wasn’t able to find other twitteres from Channel 6 or 10. Too bad for them, they’re missing out.

The RVA Blog from Richmond linked to this post and expanded upon what I had to say:

I just talked to a co-worker, Ryan Squire, the Managing Editor at NBC-4 WCMH-TV, our NBC station in Columbus, OH. Ryan and his crew recently fired up a Twitter account for the station.

Ryan understands the value of Twitter as a communications tool for the station but he and the staff are taking it one step further by maintaining personal accounts which let you look in on the inner working of the newsroom.

What I’m really excited about is the opportunity for people that follow the Channel 4 folks a chance to suggest stories. To provide leads. To “interact” with the news. I really hope they keep it up.

Note: I had Channel 10 on in the background and heard a commercial for the Channel 10 news. I immediately changed the channel to Channel 4 to watch their news.