When You Need to Know, It's Joe on 1140...

MySiouxFalls.com controlling owner Joe Prostrollo is oh-so-busy setting records straight. Here's the straightest poop you can get, from his interview with Rick Knobe, Viewpoint University, KSOO Radio this afternoon:

1. Shawn Cable does not work for MySiouxFalls.com... yet. Prostrollo said he is involved in negotiations right now to bring Cable on board, but nothing has happened yet.
2. Shawn Cable does not own MySiouxFalls.com. He owns some associated domain names, but as Prostrollo has stated on these pages previously, that was because Cable was helping Prostrollo park some possible domain names for the impending media venture.
3. Here's where the rubber starts to hit the road: Shawn Cable did help Joe Prostrollo develop the concept for MySiouxFalls.com. Prostrollo says he actually started forming the idea for an entirely online local news service while he was working in Denver and seeing the online technology for similar media projects develop. Later, while working at KELO, Prostrollo asked his fellow employees whom he might talk to get some advice on how to start a project like MySiouxFalls.com. He ended up talking to Cable, who in addition to being a talented musician, sharp weatherman, and intrepid storm chaser, is also quite the web guru. (It's that good SDSU education: gets us ready for anything!). Cable and Prostrollo had some productive conversations about how to make something like MySiouxFalls.com work.
   
4. KELO management may be "perturbed" (Prostrollo's word) at Cable's involvement with Prostrollo's project. Cable did not write the code or do any other actual development work on MySiouxFalls.com as it exists today; Prostrollo said that work was all done by a California company. Cable may well have been looking at the possibility of a change in employment. After all, as Prostrollo pointed out, Cable is just 33, he's been working at KELO for a long time (longer than the combiend tenure of the entire weather staff currently at KDLT), and he's entitled to want to try new things. But in the world of contracts with anti-entrepreneurial, anti-free-market non-compete clauses (what, in a right-to-work state? more on that in a later post!), KELO may have decided Cable's interest in Prostrollo's venture was more than they cared to countenance.
   
5. Joe Prostrollo talks the talk of a businessman committed to local economy. He emphasized that, while the site design work was done by a California company, MySiouxFalls.com is a local venture. No out-state investors, no big media conglomerates dictating what happens. There may be money telling Prostrollo what to do, but at least it's South Dakota money. The money his venture makes in advertising stays in South Dakota, says Prostrollo. And even if this venture survives and thrives to the point where it catches the attention of some big media conglomerate that wants to buy him out, Prostrollo says he would demand of that buyer some sort of commitment to local control. As stated previously, South Dakota is woefully short on truly local media. MySiouxFalls.com may give us a good alternative to the majority of outside-owned media outlets giving us our news.