Rock Iowa

Rock Iowa is Do-It-Yourself cultural journalism from Des Moines, IA — DIY from DMI.

Rock Iowa’s home is this website, RockIowa.com. We also make appearances at events and will soon have our content appearing in other media and on other partner websites.

Rock Iowa’s contributors are a network of videographers, photographers, writers, event producers, web developers, and volunteers. They spend their time and energy to cover the things that are important to them in Iowa’s creative culture. The traditional news media often has neither the time nor interest to give Iowa’s creative class the kind of media attention it deserves. And even when they do, we usually take it just a bit further with a different angle and a more personal approach. Think of us as super-groupies for everyone out there doing something unique, creative, and interesting.

Get Featured

If you have a band, event, gallery, cultural event or something else that you think Rock Iowa should cover, drop us an e-mail at scott@rockiowa.com. Give us some details, dates, and contact information. A lot of people also contact us through our MySpace. MySpace can make communication a little more difficult sometimes so please include as much info as possible in your first message.

Get Involved

We are looking for photographers, writers, designers, web developers, video editors, video shooters, and event volunteers. Volunteers for Rock Iowa often get free access to shows and events, get exposure for their own blog or portfolio, and get access to a great networking opportunity. Drop an e-mail to scott@rockiowa.com with a little bit about yourself and what you’re interested in and we’ll find a place for you. If you have existing content from Iowa’s cultural scene (photos, videos, articles) that you think would be a good fit for Rock Iowa drop us a link and we’ll take a look.

How do I share stuff from Rock Iowa OR I got featured, now what?

Every post on Rock Iowa has a cool little button on the bottom that says “Share/Save”. Click it and you’ll open an awesome menu that lets you share your Rock Iowa link about any way you can imagine, from MySpace to Digg to e-mail to Twitter to StumbleUpon to a few dozen other places. If you’ve been featured on Rock Iowa and want more people to see it this is a great tool to use. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE - if you’ve been featured by Rock Iowa, spread the word. Post a bulletin, announce it at a show, stick it in your profile. Bands should know this especially well, the person most able to help promote you is you. A lot of our time and energy goes into developing the content and maintaining the site and we need your support to spread the word!

Can I embed Rock Iowa videos?

We prefer to have viewers come to our site to view Rock Iowa content. This builds pageviews and visitor counts for us and will eventually help make the site self-sustaining with ad revenue and sponsorships. However, we’ve been known to share an embed link or two with people that ask nicely or have a high profile place that they can feature Rock Iowa. We also have a few videos on our YouTube Channel that you are welcome to share and embed wherever you like.

Can I use Rock Iowa photos?

If there are one or two photos from an event you’d like to feature on your personal site, MySpace, or Facebook, feel free. Please include a clickable hyperlink to either the main website or the photo gallery on Rock Iowa and encourage people to visit us and view more photos. If one is included, please also add a photographer credit. Our photographers are not only volunteers but the copyright holders of their photos. If you’d like to use more than one or two photos or have interest in a commercial usage of the photos, please contact us via e-mail. These photos are copyrighted works and you do not have permission to use them commercially without asking. And yes, even a MySpace site for a business or band is a commercial usage as you are using it to promote yourself. We’re not going to be jerks about it but if we find a whole bunch of our photos somewhere with no credits and nobody asked us we’re going to be understandably grumpy. You won’t like Scott when he’s grumpy (we think it may be physically impossible for Andrew to get grumpy).

You screwed something up

It happens. We spelled something wrong, we didn’t caption a photo, we put in a bad link. We’re sorry, okay? The best way to report something goofy is to leave a comment right on the article so that we have an easy time finding it. Let us know the problem or what needs changed/edited/credited/corrected and we’ll be happy to oblige!

Services

Rock Iowa is produced by The Revue Creative, a video marketing and live event consulting agency. If you have need of professional video or marketing services please visit the services page for more information (coming soon).

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