[NEohioPAL] Plain Dealer/Cleveland.com online theater initiative

[MICHAEL NORMAN]

My name is Michael Norman and I am the Online Arts & Entertainment
Editor for The Plain Dealer. We are in the very early stages of building
a comprehensive online guide to community theater in Northeast Ohio. I
am coordinating the project, which we hope to launch with much fanfare
on our affiliate website, cleveland.com, sometime in the first quarter
of 2011. We will also be promoting the project in The Plain Dealer.

The idea is to create an extensive, interactive guide to community,
high school and college theater online at cleveland.com. Each theater
will have its own home in the guide featuring a profile, links and
nifty, embedded widget that will allow us to import your up-to-date
performance schedule.

We want to do much more than that. In fact, we’d like the guide to be
a high-profile portal through which theater people and audiences can
access news, reviews and other interactive features. We will feed Plain
Dealer and Sun Newspapers’ community-theater stories, reviews and
features into the guide. We’d also like to develop a network of
bloggers, and contributors from the theaters themselves. The idea is to
give you access to the guide to post reports on your shows, features on
important people, audition notices, photos, video, etc. We’ll also be
reaching out to important, established community-theater advocates and
organizations to involve them in the project.

As you well know, there is a passionate audience for community theater
in Northeast Ohio. In my experience as arts editor for both our printed
newspaper and website, there is only one group of folks more passionate:
The people who put on the shows. We’d love to tap into that energy and
create a great online resource for audiences and theater folk alike.

To get things started, I was wondering if you could assign someone to
fill out the short survey below. We’ll be using this as a starting
point to write the profiles of each of your theaters. I will be
following up with phone calls later and hope to interview at least one
person from each theater. Thanks for reading. If you have any questions,
you can reach me via email at mnorman at plaind.com or by phone at
216-999-4109 (o), 330-416-7968 ©.

Michael Norman
Online A&E Editor, The Plain Dealer  

SURVEY
Theater Name:

Mailing address:

Performance venue/venues, addresses:

How the public can contact you: 
Phone number:
Email:
Website:
Facebook URL:
Twitter URL:
MySpace URL:

Theater History: Please provide 2-3 paragraphs of history on your
theater.

Latest news: Give us a paragraph or two about your latest initiatives,
performances, etc. 

Important players: Names and titles of key creative and administrative
personnel.

2011 Schedule/Highlights:

Private contact information for Plain Dealer (This information won’t
be published)
:
Names, email addresses and phone numbers of key personnel, i.e.
artistic director, marketing director, trustees, etc.





Michael Norman
Online Arts & Entertainment Editor
The Plain Dealer
1801 Superior Ave.
Cleveland OH 44114
Phone: 216-999-4109
Mobile: 330-416-7968
Fax: 216-999-6269


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