Suck early, suck often, and you'll be okay.
This is the takeaway nugget from +Chris Yates for those viewers thinking about embarking on their own web show.
How fitting that Yates was a fill-in for the inaugural launch of a new weekly webcast that bridges traditional and digital media. Even better, he was the first journalist to interview Grumpy Cat at South by Southwest.
+Virtual Newsmakers, with guests lined up until mid-June, received its first cancellation just a few days before the show. But you know what they say. When one door closes, a better one opens. Chris Yates was that better door.
So here we are -- Friday morning, scrambling to finish blow-drying the hair and get the live link pushed out before hitting the On Air button. All goes according to plan, then poof! One of us disappears.
Yep, no matter how much one prepares and tests the equipment, you can't account for the complete shutdown of a laptop and a less than stellar Internet connection, even though you are wired in. Sigh.
This black screen is me scrambling to get back into the Hangout while the laptop s-l-o-w-l-y loads back into Google Plus. Impatient, because I'm using Chrome, I foolishly try to open Firefox at the same time, thinking that the browser will load faster, and instead, slows the laptop to an absolute crawl. It's so slow, I can't even see the spinning wheel of death.
All this is going on while my co-host flawlessly carries the show and Yates fires off nugget after nugget.
Like many productions, what you see on the front end doesn't always show what's going on in the back end. The only thing we know for sure is it can happen to anyone. Preparation negates panic and a production schedule with suggested questions can help guide a co-host with a security blanket, if needed, to carry the rest of the show.
See what you think:
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