Making TWO lists, actually.

I talked to Western Mass AFSC and Traprock Peace Center staff to see if I might get a copy of their media contact lists for newspaper, radio, etc. in the Pioneer Valley. Both Doug and Liz were very helpful. AFSC’s 46-page list (originally from riseup.net) is quite comprehensive, but it was last updated in 2005 and it’s a PDF.

So, putting my recently oiled geek skills to work, I spent a couple hours converting it back to a usable database. After downloading the PDF, I emailed it to myself (at gmail), then used gmail to view it as HTML. I saved the HTML version in a new file and wrote a quick PHP program to parse it into (x,y) coordinates and data bits, output to a CSV file. Finally, I imported the CSV into MS Access and wrote a VBA program to group the related data bits back into named fields in individual records. Et voila! Actually there were a few glitches that took an extra hour or two, but I won’t bore you with more details.

Concurrently, I created a new database of the 68 towns of the Pioneer Valley, combining the one Ethan had created this summer with downloaded population data and library phone numbers. And I began systematically calling each town’s library to find out what’s the best place in each town to give a talk and details about each such venue. For the smaller towns I am also asking about their local newspaper and email newsletters, to round out the media list.

I plan to complete this research in a couple more days, then schedule 60 talks for December and January. Our ten partnering organizations, plus the press and another dozen organizations that support the project, will pepper the populace with publicity.