Scenic byways are made for audio touring

I'm working on a more complete list of audio tours along the Mississippi River. See Northeast Minneapolis, Wisconsin's Great River Road, and Quad Cities for some good examples. But I know there are more out there. I'm thinking of you, St. Louis...

Tonight, my search brought me to this driving tour page from the National Scenic Byways Program. It lays out a great, take-your-time style 2-day Mississippi River trip in Wisconsin. What's more, it almost precisely follows the route of the Great River Road Stories audio tour I wrote about in May -- still the best audio driving tour I've sampled so far, with interpretation of the cities, landscape and history all along the way. These sites are prefect companions for one another and it makes my wonder why more byways don't have this sort of grassroots audio tour.

The Scenic Byway Program is relatively new. It started in 1992. There are 125 designated routes all over the U.S. that meet a certain criteria. From the Byways.org:

The U.S. Secretary of Transportation recognizes certain roads as All-American Roads or National Scenic Byways based on one or more archeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational and scenic qualities.

If you must travel by car, these routes are a great alternative to the Interstate highway system. The program stimulates local economies, highlights scenic or historical sites, and it helps the towns along the way work together -- like the Wisconsin Great River Road Stories group did. Oh, and the Byways are apparently becoming more bike friendly (though road biking isn't encouraged on the Wisconsin road yet).

Just last week, the Department of Transportation announced 41 million dollars of new spending on the Byways, including a lot of money focused on interpretation. Signs and visitors centers are great, but I think all 125 of these routes should have audio tours about the sights and cities along the way. After all, you're sure not going to watch YouTube videos in the car.

(photos from byways.org)

Canoeing the Mississippi on the radio

I don't spend much time "on air" in my job. I'm more comfortable calling the shots on the other side of the glass from the microphones. But the latest place-based project at Minnesota Public Radio was my idea and I took the opportunity to voice one of the stories myself.

During the week the Ken Burns documentary "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" aired on PBS, I wanted to air stories about the National Park Service sites in Minnesota. Five days, five parks -- how perfect.

The full series is here. Three of our reporters in greater Minnesota were nice enough to be part of the project and they made three surprising stories about places I think most of our neighbors don't even realize exist in our state: Voyageurs National Park (which still has a tense relationship with its neighbors), Pipestone National Monument (which still offers a working -- and sacred -- rock quarry) and Grand Portage National Monument (which is a grand experiment in dual management -- half federal government, half Native American tribe).

Last Friday, on the last day of the series, I went into the broadcast booth to talk about my experience in Minnesota's most unusual National Park site, the Mississippi National River and Recreation area (which has virtually no land of its own, but enviable access to millions of visitors). Here's the audio:

I know this is broadcasting rather than placecasting, but there is a close relationship and the same qualities of presentation, information and surprise are key to both. But with broadcasting, it's more important to paint pictures for the audience and include sound to put them in the location. (With placecasting, of course, they're already there!) In this case, the sound of kids having a blast in the canoes is priceless.

Oh yeah...the fifth park is the St. Croix National Scenic River. We share that one with Wisconsin (kinda like Brett Favre, eh?). We didn't send a reporter there, but we had a good phone conversation with one of the rangers there.

(image from MPRNewsQ.org)

Civic Tourism in Northeast Minneapolis

(UPDATE 8/29: The walking tours are available for download here: http://www.newalkingtours.com/)

I'm excited to attend the launch party this weekend for the new neighborhood walking tours of Northeast Minneapolis. I wrote about the project here. The folks at ArtShare pulled together a diverse group of volunteers to comb the community for stories and present them to neighbors and visitors alike via walking tours.

It seems the artists who conceived this project already understood something that the tourism industry has only recently started mulling over. It's called Civic Tourism.

I stumbled across this description today for an upcoming conference in Colorado:

"Civic Tourism’s mission is to 'reframe' tourism's purpose from an economic goal to a tool that can help the public enhance what they love about their place. It provides a forum for citizens to decide if, how, and for what purpose the ingredients of place (cultural, built, natural) can be integrated to create a dynamic, distinctive, and prosperous community. Ideally, Civic Tourism involves all stakeholders to build strong partnerships..." (emphesis added)

In other words, place matters because it is what every member of a community has in common. Communities that embrace place will have stronger internal ties (call it "culture") while appealing to visitors seeking an authentic experience.

But isn't that obvious?

I think the hyper-development of places like Wisconsin Dells, Branson, Missouri or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee indicates otherwise. Places once visited for their unique natural features now sprout indoor water parks and T-shirt shops. These attractions are economically successful, but they do not enhance the place around them (indeed, usually quite the opposite).

The Civic Tourism conference organizers seem to be proposing a different way to measure the benefit a communiy receives from the appeal of its place.

(As a journalist, I can't help but compare this notion to civic journalism -- the movement to treat readers and the community as participants in journalism rather than just consumers or advertisers. I also wonder if its fate will be the same...a good idea that is nearly impossible to implement in the context of a successful business model.)

Northeast Minneapolis is an up-and-coming neighborhood that isn't drawing tourists yet, but it is getting visitors from the rest of the city. So let's see what happens when the community is proactive about embracing place. I bet business can learn quite a bit from the artists.

The ArtShare walking tour release event is Saturday 8/29 from 10 to noon. Details here.

More on civic tourism here: http://www.civictourism.org/

More Mississippi: River walking tour in the Quad Cities

Cities up and down the Mississippi River are re-embracing their riverfronts for tourism and business. I just found a nice walking/biking tour of the river in the Quad Cities. (Quick, can you name all four...??)

The folks at RiverAction do a lot of education and programming along the river here and they've put together a cell phone tour that takes you on a loop from Davenport, Iowa to Rock Island, Illinois and back, starting at the famous Arsenal Island. (If you want to see Moline and Bettendorf, you'll have to head upstream on your own.) According to a rough Google Map I made, the full tour route is about 3 miles. A printable map of the route is available here.

But there's no need to do this tour in the order from start to finish. Each stop gives information about a couple of the sites nearby (the clocktower on the island, the lock & dam, the Rock Island Line railroad -- even a stop on Main Street), but it weaves no larger narrative from stop to stop.

I appreciate that you can spontaniously take the tour with your cell phone when you see the signs on-site, but that you can ALSO download MP3s of the tour stops before you go and listen on your iPod. As more and more organizations turn to cell phone tours, the smart ones are posting the audio on-line as well. It's strange that the MP3s in this case are still just telephone-quality audio, but the content is just voice reading a script, so fidelity isn't critical to the experience.

I listened to a few of the stops on this tour and was impressed with the breadth of information -- from history to architecture to the environment. Stop #1, for example, talks about the history of iconic clock tower on Arsenal Island, but also includes information about an eco-friendly parking lot nearby. The tour stops are heavy on superlatives (the first..., the biggest..., the most...) and statistics without always putting them in context. It also often fails to take advantage of the fact that it knows exactly where its listeners are standing. There isn't much "look at this...", "you'll notice that...," or "now turn around to see...". These kinds of devices are really engaging to users and are a unique advantage placecasting has over broadcasting.

I spend a fair amount of time in Iowa, and I look forward to getting to the Quad cities to enjoy this good tour on-site.

Link to the Quad Cities Riverway Audio tour