As regular readers of this forum know, I am a great fan of fireworks. I attend the competition since sixteen years. As many other fans, I appreciate to get information on this event, like fans of sports, musics, or movies do about these various hobbies. In the 1990s, I closely read newspapers reports on the Montreal International Fireworks Competition, especially Georges Lamon's articles, and those published in other printed media as well. Then, Mr. Lamon retired from La Presse, as the media coverage became rarer. To my knowledge, no major news media in the Montreal area provides a regular (and, above all, substantive) coverage of this major event (a fact which remains a mystery for me).

Fortunately, as a fireworks fan, I can be informed thanks to various web-based outlets. Paul's website was the first one, followed by Mylène's blog and, more recently, Simon's own website Pyro-Québec. Bob also records the displays and its videos allow fireworks fans community around the world to know what the Montreal competition is. In fireworks as in most other areas, the Internet has become a major source of information, especially for specialized topics like this one. While these people are not professionals from news media, they often provide more substantive and accurate information because they get a huge amount of knowledge on the specific area they cover, process the information professionnally (or almost) and they format the stuff in interesting ways: reviews, interviews, photos, videos, and so on.

I am not a specialist on public relation activities, but I nonetheless spent more than 4 years at the Département d'information et communication at Université Laval, including three years as a professor. Most of my undergraduate students and many of my colleagues were in the public relation field. These days, it is obvious that various organizations (including political ones, which are the focus of my research works) have to take a turn with the digital media economy. News media, which are still paramount, are no longer the only way to share information and, in some specialized areas and for hard-to-reach audiences, they are by-passed thanks to the Internet. These changes obviously bring many challenges for all kinds of organizations, which have to deal with these new realities. In opposition to the news media, whose journalists are easy to identify and undoubtedly reach large audiences, organizations now have to make distinctions between "serious" web-based communicators and those who may improvised a web-based outlet only to get some privileges. In this context, I think these communicators' regularity and the quality of their outputs become useful criteria.

Bob, Mylène, Paul and Simon all do incredible work to bring us all sort of information about the Montreal competition. They put a shocking amount of time to get and to process all these materials. They are also full-time workers, so they have to insert these activities in a busy schedule, even drive to Montreal from other cities more than once a week to do that, as their work may bring them away. In contrast with news media journalists, they are not paid to do that; instead, they invest their own money to get the right equipment, to design and to make their websites online, and so on, without any financial return.

With this post, I want to support them and to acknowledge them for the incredible work they do. As a fireworks fan, I really appreciate to have these valuable sources of information!

Thank you guys!

Fred

Fred,

thanks you so much for your kind words. I'm literally speechless.

Paul.

Dear Fred,

I agree in your statement and wish to thank you for the initative to show this appreciation for all the work done by the good people for all of us enthusiats who are not able to attend the shows.

So also a very large greeting with thanks to all of you who make it possible for me to follow the competition from a distance. I miss seeing the shows for live but until next time I have the chance to visit I find it incredible that I thanks to the dedicated people mentioned by Fred can watch good videos from Mr Burch, read Pauls reviews, see the pictures etc.

For the teams participating it is also a great support and this whole dedication shows how important the competition is.

So once more thank you to all of you. The huge amount of work really is appreciated!

Passion + Effort = impact!

Sincerely,
Lars

Wow ! Merci beaucoup Fred ! Je suis très touchée !

With all the problems encountered during a season, i often ask myself if i want to go through all this pain, but eh, words like yours and Lars and the different firms who talk to us about our web impact worth it big time !!! Thanks for the boost for this last strech !

Mylene.