Looking for Volunteer Editors

As you may have read a few days ago, David Newland has handed me the antlers to the Gordy the Moose. It’s not easy riding a moose by oneself, even a friendly folk/roots loving beast like Gordy. It’s especially challenging when you have BIG plans and no money.

So what are my BIG plans? It’s very simple: Roots Music Canada must become the online hub of what Corin Raymond famously calls The Small Time, the community of dedicated, professional Canadian folk/roots musicians that perform at clubs, house concerts, small soft-seaters and festivals across Canada. Additionally, it must serve the presenters and promoters of the scene.

Most importantly, Roots Music Canada must find, engage and maintain an interest from the fans of this music, those who may only go to one festival or one house concert per year, many of whom look exclusively to CBC to act as their roots-music-curator. We can do better – it’s all about putting the scene in perspective.

I need your help to make this happen. The first phase is to put together a team of leaders.

• Editor – Essential Information. We’ve done a nice job over the years. What we haven’t done is give people (especially fans) a compelling reason to check the site for information about our scene. Gigs, venues, festivals, resources, artists, links to media coverage, all from a national perspective. It’s a huge portfolio, and one that will take an army of volunteers to populate with accurate and timely information. It’s a service we need to offer, and the information is all out there on the web. It’s just a matter of pulling it together, daily.
• Editor – Columns & Reviews. Big shoes to fill, David Newland did a marvellous job here. This is creative writing and all those rules: word counts, grammar, presentation, fairness, accuracy. As with most other gigs listed here, you are not expected to run this department alone, but you are expected to hire competent volunteers to support you.
• Editor – Video. This is not video production, I will still look after that personally. There are hundreds of videos on the web of our scene in action, some live videos, some commercially produced. Beyond artists’ own Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and web pages, they don’t really have a home. We need to create that home for them.
• Program Director – Roots Radio. We’ve started making radio, but it’s only a blip of what we want to accomplish. Roots Music Canada will be the home of a 24/7 streaming Roots Music station with a heavy emphasis on our scene’s output. We’re currently working out the logistics, but it’s closer than we thought possible a few months ago. We need the PD to lead a team of programmers, music director and technical director.
• Website Editor. We need to adjust the site to accomodate the above. This editor should know enough about WordPress and widgets and layouts to be able make decisions and changes fairly expediently, and of course, when and where required, to source out other volunteer helpers to make it hum.

If you are interested in any of the above roles, please contact me at andy [at] rootsmusic [dot] ca as soon as possible. Let’s create something world-class and truly meaningful together.

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