At ISOJ, John White, deputy editor for online, Winnipeg Free Press, Canada, outlined the paper’s News Café. A year ago, the Free Press created the café downtown, a space co-managed by a news organisation with a journalist in residence. Part of the reason was that the paper itself moved out of town to an industrial park. But another reason was to broaden the audience for the paper, which is mostly 55 plus.

Watch the video of our lively discussion of the impact of social media on journalism, featuring  Liz Heron, Social Media Editor at The New York Times,Karen Pinchin, founding editor of OpenFile Vancouver, and Steve Pratt, Director of CBC Radio 3 and CBC Radio Digital Programming and myself. The event was held on November 7, 2011, at UBC Robson in Vancouver, sponsored by UBC Continuing Studies and the UBC Graduate School of Journalism.

I’m honoured to have nominated as Canada’s top social media maven in the 2011 Digi Awards. Also up for the award are Erica Ehm, who set up the online magazine YummyMummyClub.ca, and YouTube personality Nadine Sykora. The winners will be announced on December 6th at the finale of nextMEDIA Toront,. The social media maven award recognizes “medialites that demonstrate innovation in creating and connecting online communities.” It goes on to explain that  “the top Canadian social media mavens

Here are the slides and audio from my presentation at the Journalism Interactive conference at the University of Maryland. The title of the talk was Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer. Abstract: Social media is becoming ever more ingrained in the experience of news consumers. Social networking sites are evolving from being more than spaces for personal exchanges, becoming one of the mediums for sharing and recommending the

Hubert T. Lacroix, President and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada, addressed UBC students on the future of Canadian public broadcasting at the Liu Institute for Global Affairs, UBC, on October 18 2011. In a wide-ranging talk, Lacroix touched on CBC’s mandate, public funding, access to information and the feud with Sun Media

The latest survey of Canadian online habits offers some interesting reading for the news industry. The Stats Canada survey found that more than two-thirds of Internet users (68%), read or watch the news online. Keeping up with events is one of the top online activities, following e-mail (93%), browsing for goods or services (74%) and electronic banking (68%). The figures also point to rapid uptake of social media in Canada,

For this month’s Carnival of Journalism, host Andrew Pergam asked “What is the role of online video in the newsroom of the future?” Online video has been around for more than a decade but it has taken some time for journalists that video on the web is not the same as video on television. Best practices of online video are evolving. It is not just about giving all your reporters a Flip cam and asking

The runaway popularity of social media is prompting a rethink of rules on election reporting in Canada. During the last federal vote in May, Elections Canada warned people against tweeting or sharing on Facebook the results from polls in the east of the country, before voting had ended in the west. A 70-year-old law prohibits the premature transmission of election results.  The idea was to prevent radio broadcasts of results in

You can almost hear journalists across newsrooms in Canada breathing a sigh of relief. Canadians still trust the mainstream media, despite the rise of social media, according to the latest Canadian Media Research Consortium (CMRC) report. According to a recent online survey of 1,682 adults, nine out of 10 Canadians judged information provided by traditional news media to be reliable and trustworthy. This compares to only one in four who say

Figuring out how and whether you want to get into journalism can be a challenge for students as they embark on their college education. We had several questions around this topic in the first-year undergraduate course at UBC in new media and journalism that I teach with my colleague Candis Callison. In particular, students wanted to know about promising, emerging journalists in Canada who they could look to as role