AN INNOVATIVE USE OF GEOSCIENCE IN MASS MEDIA - GEOLOGIC TELEVISION AND NORTH TEXAS

Television is a mass medium that reaches millions of viewers worldwide each day. The recent skyrocketing growth in the popularity and expansion of specialized science, history, and outdoor recreational/travel programming networks on national cable and satellite television has helped create opportunities for geoscience-specific and geoscience-integrating television projects on national, regional and local scales in both broadcast and cable television.

Explore America, a new nonprofit organization based out of Arlington Texas, produces and distributes a geoscience-oriented education and outdoor recreation/travel cable television show for the Dallas-Fort Worth region. Mixing travel and science, the show integrates local travel and tourism with accurate and timely educational topics in various fields such as geology, geography, zoology and other topics in natural and geologic history. Hosted by an actual geologist, and with input from the professional and academic geoscience community, the result is a viewer friendly, accessible, entertaining, and inviting look at the "stories in the backyards of North Texas". The show, entitled "North Texas Explorer", and it's companion website, Outdoorflix.com, have proven to offer a unique service as an outlet for geoscience within the Dallas-Fort Worth and regional Texas community.