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Its been one of those weeks. Brown boxes and sealer tape. Everything tagged, marked and labelled and then the trek up and down two flights of stairs to get the office out of 10-13 Thomas St and over to Adelaide Chambers, Peter St. Its still Dublin 8, we’re only a stone’s throw from The Digital Hub, but its a big marker in the short seven year life of Athena Media. We moved into the Digital Hub in May 2004 after I started the company in September 2003 just a couple of weeks after coming back from a year out in the US, at Harvard University. I left the relative comfort of management in RTE with the idea of starting my own thing, my own little thing and growing it step by step. I had always wanted to focus on story-telling and to get the chance to run my own company so Athena Media, from day one, was called a content engine with the emphasis on stories rather than the medium. From day one we did radio, television, print and online seeing the future of content as being about stories that could flow from one medium to another rather than being defined by that medium.
In the beginning there was just me and a couple of freelances, then quite soon after the shift to the Hub Sarah Mulkerrins joined the company straight out of DCU. Sarah is now with the BBC in Manchester and she has gone from one achievement to the next since her time with Athena Media and her director role in our TV series ‘Winning Women’ 2008. Along the way Anita Walsh joined us when Sarah went off the Oz for a year and again Anita like Sarah came back and worked a few times with the company. Anita is now in New York and occasionally freelancing with us. She played a big part in who we are and in the TV programmes we have made from ‘Winning Women’ and ‘My Private Everest’. Gill Quinn, multi-media graduate from DCU joined us for a year or more post her internship with us during her degree and again she’s gone on to great things and along with Anita was the force behind our Joyce’s Dublin podcast project and website. Sarah, Anita and Gill all work as producers on our one time music podcast channel Making Waves, a weekly show which ran for three years, and that’s how we met Jack L and Julie Feeney the current stars of our 26 part radio series High Fidelity, a century of recorded song with Jack L and Julie Feeney, running on RTE lyric fm. That series is being edited by someone we’ve worked with since 2007 - Lochlainn Harte . Lochlainn is now part of the Athena Media family but he was the audio editor behind our Gold winning radio documentary ‘Tower Songs’ in 2009 and he is the editor of ‘An Opera for Carlow’ a major project and documentary we just completed for RTE Lyric fm. Niamh Kinane was the researcher on ‘Tower Songs’ and we’re delighted to see her now at the heart of Amnesty Ireland. Niamh was back with us for a stint in the summer and lovely to re-connect with her. One of our other regulars who had several stints with us is Linda Stanley, the researcher on ‘Women and Words’ our 2008 series for RTE Lyric fm on women writers and a recordist for the series ‘Urban Beauty, Urban Blight’ for Newstalk in 2009. Linda when to 4FM for a time and was back with us until last September when she moved to London and now works with the London Olympics planning - which is pretty impressive!. Another star recruit is Paula Cunniffe who freelanced with us during her degree and worked as an assistant on the TV series ‘is it just me?’ about young people coping with tough times, along with Chris Clarke. Paula came on board full-time when she graduated and spent a year with us before heading to Florida to complete her Masters there. She even came back and did some work over Christmas on ‘An Opera for Carlow’ which had very much been her baby.
This time last year a wonderful young woman Lisa Essuman came to work for us and she went from freelance to full-time when Linda went to London and Paula went to Florida. Lisa is a DCU communications graduate and we’re extremely lucky to get her full-time. Lisa took over ‘An Opera for Carlow’ and is now the recordist on a new documentary for RTE Lyric fm called ‘Word of Mouth’ about Fighting Words, Roddy Doyle’s creative writing centre in Dublin.
We’ve had some great interns like Sean Sweeney and Niall Brew. Sean worked with us on ‘Belmayne: Gorgeous Living’ our film which we’re still editing and Niall is working with us as a freelance. Our video editor and cameraman since 2006 is Barry macNeill who is very much part of the Athena Media clan and one of our recent projects was a lovely piece for RTE Capital D called ‘Drimnagh is Good’.
A great recruit this year has been Naomi Maccleod who is a pro-tools editor and worked me every day in The Irish Times right through February when we helped the Irish Times put out a daily audio podcast and mentored their staff on online content. Naomi had been the key force on high Fidelity before her had a horse-riding accident at Easter but thankfully she is coming back for a few half morning next week in our new offices and she is nearly healed!
So great people, great projects and the years have flown. We launched Podcasting Ireland in March 2006 with associates Joe Conway and Simon Factor and while we’re all doing our own things now we still love to work, whenever we can, with Joe and Simon. In the move we had the support of another new face Natalia Pulber who is a wonderful person and very supportive. Natalia has just completed her Masters and did her placement with us and now freelances with the company along with Sean Corcoran who also came to us via his college work placement.
The move is a big shift; leaving the digital hub which has been home, but its time for a change and for a new beginning. We’ll miss the lovely company of all the staff at the digital hub, Lynn in the digital depot coffee shop and the regulars like gary and andrew in kavaleer. But Adelaide Chambers beckons and this bright, big new space offers us the room to grow and flourish even in these tough times.

A lot of fuss this week about Dublin’s Social Media Day which I have to say seems a lot of hype and nothing else. But on the other hand beneath the endless lists of social media news a lot has changed in Ireland online this year. There’s an incredible 1.9 million Irish facebook accounts (Now they may not all be active but the growth and sustained activity on facebook in Ireland is significant given that half a million is a massive audience in any Irish broadcasting rating. On twitter we’ve anything between 200,000 to half a million twitter accounts depending on what analysis you read. twitter is still small compared to facebook but extremely influential given that figures earlier this year showed there about two thirds of all Irish journalists on twitter! The general election in February was a turning point for twitter in Ireland (Neworld, 2011) and traffic/engagement on that platform jumped. Increasingly a company without a twitter account or social media strategy is seen in the same way companies without websites where seen about ten years ago. It is no longer an option but something which everyone who needs to communicate has to engage with, embrace, learn and develop.

One of the interesting pieces of content around this I’ve seen this week is this video Social Media Revolution 2011 which provides an interesting bird’s eye view of the global transformation. The current internet/social networking battle is between facebook and Google and with the launch of Google Plus its clear google is determined to re-shape the social media environment based on its own mantra of ‘the future is search’. While Google Plus is still brand new and in development many were quick to rubbish it this week and one digital expert described it as the ‘wedding seat plan’ approach to social networking. But do not dismiss Google. Their view that social relationships are niches rather than one big happy facebook umbrella may yet prove true and while the terminology they are using seems cumbersome the concept is right. We connect based on emotional trust and have different layers of relationships in business and personal lives and our social media interaction needs to have that same level of intuitive knowledge. People, in our social media and online content workshops, are always asking me ‘what’s the next big thing?’ The reality is we often miss it because we’re so busy dismissing it. The big lesson for all of us is that the platforms are not permanent. The social patterns driving change, the push for interactive and intuitive communications and inter-relations is constant, but the platforms are grow and fall depending on how well they adapt to user demands. Look at MySpace - now a bargain basement sale. While facebook today seems unstoppable new challenges and innovations will keep pushing forward. It is not a given that the future has to be facebook and twitter. We, as users, will shift if other places become more adaptable and useful. Don’t get too attached to the platforms. It’s the patterns of behaviour which are constant, which will drive change. The platforms may come and go as MySpace and Bebo already have.