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
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The Washington Post’s Mark Luckie gave an insight into his role during a session on innovative storytelling at the Journalism Interactive conference. Luckie is national innovations editor at the Post. His job is to be responsible for web section of the national coverage, figuring out a web strategy for the stories that reporters are working on and editors are planning. Luckie explained how the Post had moved away from the web as an
Here is the video from the emerging research panel I took part in at the Journalism Interactive conference at the University of Maryland. The three presentations were by Zizi Papacharissi of University of Illinois at Chicago, Adrienne Russell of the University of Denver and myself. The session was moderated by Kalyani Chadha of the University of Maryland. The research presented: Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer; by Alfred Hermida.
One of the leading thinkers on journalism ethics, Stephen Ward, laid out a six-point approach towards teaching journalism ethics at a time of media transition at the Journalism Interactive conference. Ward’s starting point is that in a mixed media environment, everyone has the potential to perform an act of journalism. As a consequence, he argued, ethics is for everyone. The responsible use of media tools needs to be taught across the
Amy Webb of @webbmedia took the Journalism Interactive conference on a tour of emerging tech trends for academia. She started off by talking about gestural technology, showing as an example a Wacom product that allows you to draw on paper and upload the image digitally. Webb also mentioned Livescribe which plays back audio from notes of an interview. It also has OCR so can convert notes into digital text. She showed
The Journalism Interactive conference at the University of Maryland kicks off with a panel on social media, with an introduction by Mashable editor-in-chief Adam Ostrow, @adamostrow. Jim Long, @newmediajiim, from NBC News, starts by pointing out how social media has shifted power from a few people at the top to everybody. Liz Heron, @lheron, social media editor for The New York Times, picks up on the theme. In her view, social media has
The wealth of multimedia or social media storytelling tools available can be bewildering for journalists. Often seasoned pros asked me, what is the one thing I should learn and add to my reporting toolkit? To my mind, that’s the right attitude but the wrong question. Journalists need to be open to new ways of telling stories and engaging with audiences. But it is not about adding a new tool to
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. Print
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