A life and death tale of mountain climbing will be the topic of our next episode of Studio SPJ on Saturday, Aug. 20th at noon Eastern.

Our guests will be Jim Davidson, a climber and science writer from Fort Collins, Colorado and Kevin Vaughan, a reporter for The Denver Post.

They are the co-authors of the recently published book “The Ledge – an Adventure Story of Friendship and Survival on Mount Rainier.”

The book tells the story of a 1992 incident in which Davidson and fellow climber Mike Price were trapped deep inside a glacial crevasse.

This episode of Studio SPJ is sponsored by the Montana Pro SPJ chapter. Chapter President Ian Marquand will serve as moderator.

Studio SPJ is a series of conversations among journalists on interesting topics. 

For more information on the program, visit SPJ’s Liner Notes blog at:

http://blogs.spjnetwork.org/linernotes/

Here’s the link to listen to the program live on Aug. 20:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/spj/2011/08/20/st-udio-spj-the-ledge-a-survival-story

To dial in during the live broadcast with a question call 347-857-2441.

Karen-Lee Ryan

Studio SPJ recently featured an interesting discussion on how to use social media tools to better cover and report natural disasters.

Our guests included Rick Smith of the National Weather Service in Oklahoma City and Karen-Lee Ryan of the Tennessean in Nashville.

Here’s an except in which Ryan explains how her newspaper used YouTube by posting a news video of a flood and got dramatic results in terms of viewership.

“Not a lot of folks knew that Nashville was underwater. It somehow didn’t make it into the national media. There were a couple of other big national stories going on.” Ryan said.

“And we had exclusive footage inside the Opryland Hotel. And that is where a lot of people who’ve been to Nashville – they’re familiar with Opryland.

“And so when we put a video out there showing Opryland Hotel under ten feet of water and inside the rooms and public spaces suddenly we saw on Google that “Opryland Hotel flooded” became a search nationwide.

“And that’s actually how a lot of people found out that Nashville was having flooding.

“So we used YouTube and that video ended up getting more than 500,000 views in a couple days and rose to the number one video on YouTube.”

You can listen to the entire podcast of this program by clicking here.

This program was co-sponsored by the Arkansas and Oklahoma pro chapters of SPJ.