 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
A Note from Doug McConnell and Carl Bidleman
Carl Bidleman, Paul Schoos, M'Gee Johnston, Doug McConnell and Jim Wirth
Who We Are
In the spring of 1993, we began a friendship and working association, and they both have grown pretty strong over the years. We love to explore roads, alleys and paths less-traveled in search of great adventures, terrific characters and memorable stories. We've found literally thousands of them producing a twice-weekly television series for KRON-TV in San Francisco. While Doug continues to happily host Nissan's Bay Area Backroads on KRON and hopes you watch it if you can, (www.bayareabackroads.com) we've long wanted to build a global online travel community that grows out of the interests we and millions of others share in discovering unexpected treasures hidden, often in plain sight, along the OpenRoad. Joining us in our efforts are Jim, Paul and M'Gee.
What This Website Is About
We are excited about OpenRoad.TV. We are stocking it with all the video, knowledge and insights we've compiled over the years and continue to collect. We're putting it into easily accessible geographical and categorical contexts, and we invite you to vastly enrich it by adding your own stories, photographs and videos. Between you and us, we can develop a website that's extensive, deep, entertaining and informative, and becomes a terrific resource to help us all imagine, plan and book our travels and get to know intriguing fellow travelers in the process. We're looking forward to learning from all of you and having a very good time, too.
What This Website Covers and How It Will Grow
Our videos are drawn from the vast library we've generated while producing Bay Area Backroads. We'll continue adding new videos, notes and useful links every week from California, Hawaii and throughout the American West. That's our area of special expertise. Doug has spent a lifetime traveling, living and working throughout the region from Alaska to Arizona, and Montana to Hawaii. Doug's a fifth-generation westerner, but both of us have a deep affection for this immense, beautiful and fascinating region. In time, we'll cover hundreds and hundreds of western locations with our videos and related content, and we hope you add many thousands more. We can hardly wait to see and read your stories about travel in the West and get the benefit of your suggestions and ideas for places to go, people to meet and things to do in the West ... and beyond.
Although we'll concentrate on the West, we won't be limited to it, and you shouldn't be either. In the months ahead, we'll add fresh material of our own from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Costa Rica, and other nations and regions we enjoy exploring, and we hope you do as well. OpenRoad.TV will be as much about a state of mind and an approach to travel as it will be about a specific region. We believe in slowing down, looking around and being open to what the world has to offer no matter where we go. If we take the time to listen, people everywhere will always tell fabulous stories worth hearing. Life is short, the world is large and we don't want to miss a thing. The OpenRoad can lead down the block or around the world, and we encourage you to send us your tales from near and far.
Our Values and Principles
In developing and planning to manage OpenRoad.TV, we've been guided by a few important values and principles. First, and perhaps foremost, our content hasn't, isn't and won't ever be for sale. We always have and always will maintain a strict and substantial barrier between our editorial judgments and the desires of our advertisers. Every video story we post, every piece of writing we add and every useful link we provide will be based on our own independent judgments and will not be influenced, directly or indirectly, by advertisers. We want you to trust what we say and have absolute confidence that our opinions have not been bought and paid for. We do, of course, need and encourage appropriate advertising. It pays the bills and makes this site possible. But we go to great lengths to insure that there's not even the appearance of conflicts of interest. Organizations cannot pay us to do a story about them, and institutions that are featured in our content cannot advertise on pages where they appear.
Our Request of You
We ask all of you to follow the ethical standards that guide us. In posting your own stories and participating in our discussion forums, please refrain from using the opportunity to sell your products or attack your competitors. We want your content to be as trustworthy and as valuable as we hope ours will be. The more we can share our best and most objective ideas and opinions, the more useful OpenRoad.TV will be for everyone. Our forum moderators will help set the tone and enforce our few rules of the road, but we are depending on all of you to take the lead. We want this to be fun, engaging and useful. Working together, we can all make that happen.
Paying it Forward
We hope this website encourages and helps you to get out and explore, and every now and then at least, leave the computer behind. We also hope you come to love and appreciate the American West and find ways to help care for its rare and special qualities and its long-term well-being. We'll provide links to many non-profit organizations that we believe are doing good work to make the West, and the world beyond for that matter, better places to live in the years ahead. We urge you to consider supporting them and other fine groups you discover, and then pass your experiences and suggestions along for the rest of us to consider. Let's have a good time traveling the OpenRoad and leaving it in better shape for those who follow us.
Many Thanks and Kudos
Without wanting to sound corny, it truly has taken a village to design and launch OpenRoad.TV. We have lots of villagers to thank, starting with KRON-TV for supporting Backroads for years and its great teams of producers, photographers and editors who helped build the video library we are privileged to present. You'll meet some of these extraordinary people in the months and years ahead. They are a delightful and talented bunch, and they are among our very best friends.
We owe much to many others as well. In the spring of 2006, we hooked up with Paul Schoos. Paul's become our partner in many important ways, and is our wise and knowledgeable CFO. He's methodically helped two old television guys learn the ropes of organizational development and turn an idea into a business.
From the very beginning, we've benefited immensely from the brilliance and strategic savvy and gentle prodding of our very good friend, Sherry Bartolucci. More than anyone, Sherry's reminded us to always build our ventures on our values.
Guy Lampard has generously given us countless and priceless hours of guidance, insight and encouragement. Guy's challenged us and cheered us and given us confidence when it was sorely lacking.
Jim Wirth joined us in the early fall of 2006, and he's become an indispensible advisor and confidante. We've come to rely on Jim's long experience in business development and marketing and he's rolled up his sleeves to coordinate the development and management of our travel community and discussion forums.
We absolutely could not have created OpenRoad.TV without Paul, Sherry, Guy, Jim and many other kind advisors and counselors too numerous to acknowledge here. However, we can and must ask our formal advisory board to take a bow. They've been patient and essential guides for us during this long journey. In addition to Sherry, Guy and Jim, they include: Suzanne Badenhoop, John Coate, Bob Hamer, Greg Ingram, Jim Kuhns, Jamis MacNiven, Mark Oppenheim, Alain Piallat, Jill Reber, Jason Weisberger, Kennen Williams, and J.B. Woods. We both (Carl especially) have played very active roles in designing this website, but the real stars of that process have been the members of the excellent team of Zeek Interactive in Huntington Beach, California. We couldn't have asked for a better (and wittier) crew, led by Steve Zehngut and including Rebecca Smallwood, Kiran Robertson and Susie Gottlieb.
We both (Doug especially) have worked very hard to select, write and prepare all of our content as it appears on the site. But we relied enormously on the talents, persistence and humor our two fantastic production associates, Jennifer Thorpe and Michelle Sampior.
There are many others that we are reluctantly and apologetically not including here. However, we must end with the very best, our families who've supported us through some thick and a lot of thin. Doug's wife, Kathy Taft, has been a huge help throughout, and has had to proofread all his text, the poor woman. Their sons, Nicolas and Patrick, who sometimes show up on the videos, have become great travelers in their own rights and want this website to succeed so that their college educations can be paid for.
Carl's wife, Karen Ciesnicki, has been patient beyond all reason and enormously supportive through the many periods of doubt that are part of starting a new venture. She has contributed ideas and feedback and helped gather photos and useful links. Their dog, Jack, has provided quiet counsel on morning walks and looks forward to hitting the OpenRoad and sharing his valuable travel insights with the OpenRoad canine community, including Pumpkin and Josie in the McConnell clan.
As we look ahead, we hope OpenRoad.TV will serve many useful purposes for many people from all over the world. We also hope to have a companion television series broadcast in the United States and beyond, and we expect that our content will become increasingly available in new, portable technologies so that you can take us on the road with you, if and when you want. We look forward to those trips and to the community of engaged travelers we'll build together in the years to come.
In the meantime, enjoy the freedom of the OpenRoad, and stay in touch.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Copyright 2009 ConvergenceMedia Productions, LLC. All rights reserved. |
|
Site Design by Zeek Interactive
ServInt |
|
|
|
