Featured Member

 

Our winter Featured Member is John Loo. John joined OWAC in 2006 and spends his days worrying about the Internet, social networking, and what it means to outdoor journalism.

He conquers writer's block by

  1. Typing out spontaneous thoughts on the topic
  2. Doing something else for a while (could be writing about something else, but usually involves something visual)
  3. Coming back, reviewing/reorganizing (1), then trying again
  4. Repeating 1-3 as needed.

John's favorite words? arcane, visceral

"I often fish offshore by myself in my 18’ skiff, usually launching at night. When people tell me I’m foolish, I tell them this story:

When I was 8, my Dad took a year’s leave of absence from corporate America to work with the UN. We were stationed in Iraq, in a little agricultural town call Abu Ghraib. There was no prison back in 1963, but we did manage to witness the coup d’etat that put the Baath party in power. Who knew they had so many guns at a US Embassy?

At the end of the year, Dad decided it would be fun to drive from Baghdad to Paris before we came home. Dad packed Mom, my sister (11), me (8), and my brother (6) into our ’62 Corvair (see Ralph Nader’s book “Unsafe at Any Speed”), and we took off for the City of Lights.

We passed through Jordan (where Dad was nearly shot for taking pictures of the Israeli side of the Jerusalem Wall), Lebanon, Turkey (where border guards took Mom and Dad away at gunpoint for questioning), and Greece (where the car broke down in the backcountry). We took a ferry from Athens to Rome (where we nearly had a head-on collision near the Forum); then made our way up the Italian peninsula through Switzerland and into France.

Foolish? Maybe, but it’s not my fault - I get it from my Dad."


You can find his work at: 

Beyond The Breakwater

Ocean Skiff Journal

Hosting an OWAC Conference

Hosting an OWAC conference is an incredible opportunity to focus California’s outdoor media on your region’s nature, sports, sites, recreation and beauty. OWAC members will be attending your conference to learn new, exciting, interesting and fun details about your region to report on to their readers, listeners and viewers — and their message reaches millions.

Unite your CVB and members

Previous hosts have commented how effective hosting an OWAC conference was in helping to bring together business organizations in their community. The travel, recreation, sports, lodging, food and logistics of an OWAC conference gives the majority of your members an opportunity to participate, establish beneficial relationships, and share in the exposure through the media.

Start profitable new relationships

The most important and profitable relationships are personal relationships. During an OWAC conference, your people have an opportunity to meet numerous representatives in the media on a one-to-one basis. They can answer questions and give these outdoor journalists something meaningful to share with their audiences.

Marketing exposure money can’t buy

Editorial coverage is like gospel. It carries far more influence then paid advertising ever will. Previous hosts have earned coverage in the San Diego Union-Tribune, OrangeCounty Register, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, a wide variety of consumer magazines and smaller daily papers, and on many radio and television broadcasts. This is a potential visitor-reach for you in the tens of millions. Hosting an OWAC conference is a marketing investment with a potentially huge return.

Just plain fun, too

Travel, outdoor activities and tourism are a lot of fun, and so are OWAC members during conferences. Yes, we are investigating, recreating, socializing, and having fun, all of which are the seeds for new media material which show up as professional articles.

Keeping the coverage going

OWAC members influence other travel media professionals through their other associations and conferences. OWAC members who cannot attend will read about the conference in our e-mail newsletter and on our Web site. As a conference host we invite you to come to a future OWAC conference to continue developing friendships, to meet new members and to keep the attention on your tourism marketing efforts.

For additional information on hosting an OWAC conference, contact Executive Director Zack Thomas at owac.director@gmail.com or (775) 562-4585.