An Agreement to Support Heritage Tourism
Our joint publishing agreement with Warren County is now official.
February 1, 2022
The joint publishing agreement we signed today with the Warren County Department of Planning and Community Development cements a one-year collaboration to strengthen heritage tourism in western Warren County. It culminates a discussion that started when the Warren County Board of Supervisors passed the resolution at right last November.
With this agreement in place, Bill Walker and I are inviting dozens of experts on western Warren County history to join us in 60-Minute Civic Conversations over the next year. We're also reaching out to area colleges and schools to connect with highly motivated students who, envisioning careers in journalism, public relations or digital media, would like real-world professional experiences to get started.
Work produced by our student "cohost/reporters" will be published on Stories from Open Space.
Students will get real-world writing assignments that teach them new skills and give them voices in the "public square."
Experts will generate visibility for the agencies, nonprofit organizations and companies they represent.
The community will get a steady stream of high-quality content that supports the county's effort to strengthen heritage tourism and community development in its history-rich First Wilderness Heritage Corridor.
Warren County will promote all hosted by the Smartacus Story Collaborative on our YouTube channel. The experience for students will be a little like hosting an interactive television talk show and and then writing up the highlights. It’s a substantial writing assignment on which Bill and I will provide step-by-step coaching.
Today's speech-to-text translators enable us to mine the knowledge of experts with unprecedented speed and accuracy. Basecamp enables us to quickly edit transcripts i in collaboration with students. We piloted the approach with eight Skidmore students last year. The rich history of the First Wilderness makes it an ideal focus for a new round of conversations.
We’ll host our series opener on Friday, February 4, at 3 p.m. That's when Claire Seleen, a junior at Glens Fall High School who will be awarded IB credit for her CRI internship will cohost our Civic Conversation with County Planner Wayne LaMothe. Since Wayne launched the First Wilderness collaborative with seven Hudson River towns in 1997 and has been driving its development for 25 years, mining his knowledge with our Nine Questions strikes us as the natural place to begin.
