Red faces all round at the CBC as it is forced to backtrack over its attitude towards staffers maintaining blogs. Last Friday, the Inside the CBC blog reported that new rules had been circulated on blogging. The document said that any CBC employee who wants to start a personal blog which “clearly associates them with CBC/Radio-Canada” now required their supervisor’s permission. The dictate provoked an angry response from some CBC

A piece by Slate “outing” Rudy Giuliani’s daughter apparent support for Barack Obama once again raises questions about Facebook. Slate reports that that according to the 17-year-old Caroline Giuliani’s Facebook profile, she’s supporting Barack Obama, rather than her father, for president. The magazine was able to see her profile as it was not locked, meaning that anyone with access to the Harvard or Trinity School networks could see her detailed

The rise of social media poses new ethical dilemmas for journalists. One of these is whether journalists on Facebook should befriend their sources. Adding a source as a “friend” could lead to accusations of bias, but not doing so could risk offending your contact. The CBC has stepped into this ethical morass by instructing its journalists to avoid adding sources or contacts as friends. A policy document distributed to CBC

There’s a comprehensive journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing at the Online Journalism Review. It offers a useful primer for reporters struggling to work out what is the difference between citizen journalism and crowdsourcing. The OJR’s definition: Crowdsourcing, in journalism, is the use of a large group of readers to report a news story. It differs from traditional reporting in that the information collected is gathered not manually, by a reporter or

Canadians are spending more time online and less time watching television, finds the CRTC’s annual Broadcasting Policy Monitoring Report. This is hardly surprising, given that the 70% of Canadian homes are now online, up by 6% from the previous year. And high-speed access is also on the increase, rising from 36% to 60% over the past four years. But the Internet is not killing TV. According to the CRTC report,