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Communications is a critical
component of what we do here at the City of Bend
In our next story
we
we'll see how we get information and news
out to you, the citizens.
City government is one of the biggest producers of information
in the community and it's our job to
get that information out to the public
A lot of times we use the media but sometimes the media
won't find some of those stories newsworthy
or they won't pick up the stories. That's where we
come in and use our own tools to
put that information out to the public
It's important for the public to know what we're doing
Now more than ever the City needs to have good
communication with it's citizens. This means
making sure not just
a meeting but real time information
can be exchanged and we need to do that
in a cost effective way.
Traditionally cities use things like newsletters
and publications and we use those too
but we've also moved a lot into the electronic
realm for a few reasons
One it's very inexpensive
or absolutely no cost to the city
and two it's more immediate. We can reach people
faster and more timely with our information
Over the past several months we've
instituted some real good communication tools
electronically. We have an electronic
e.mail service where people can sign up
and get e.mail info from the city
Our FaceBook is how we're using social
media to outreach to residents.
We have over 1500 people who have become who have become fans
of our FaceBook page and there we can
send news releases newsletter
items, pictures any information
we need to push out right away and it's readily
available to people who are using FaceBook.
Our City Edition video news magazine
is distributed in a variety of different ways.
Visually of course it appeas on cable
channel 11 on BendBroadband but
we've extended that electronically and viewership
has increased dramatically as a result
We have our City Edition videos on YouTube
so you can watch them on your computer. We also
take our CityEdition videos and we embed them
on the City's home page so they're easy for people
to find and since doing that, the hits
on the videos that have been on the homepage have increased
hundreds of times. We also PodCast
our CityEdition videos so you can go on
iTunes and download to your iPod and watch
them where ever you want.
It's important for the City to communicat to all of it's citizens
in a variety of different methods and
an example of that is
Closed Captioning all of our videos
and we're doing to make sure that we are reaching
those who are hearing impaired.
Obviously the City is going thru some challenging times right
now and now more than ever we need to communicate
with our residents. The electronic
forms of communication we're using
are perfect ways to do that because they're more
timely, they're immediate and they