Just finished publishing a bunch of j-student work on Vancouver’s local elections at TheThunderbird.ca. This was the final big assignment for this term for the students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. There is a wealth of content on the race to be mayor of this beautiful city, the controversial $100m loan for the 2010 Winter Olympics and the debate over the future of the UBC Farm. The students
PDF During a session I moderated to the Knight New Media Center seminar on Election ’08 on Thursday, we discussed the networked nature of news in the era of the Internet. This was one of the themes that emerged in other presentations too. It is the idea that news organisations are part of a network of information. In this digital and discontinuous environment, users forage for information, going from source to
Amy Gahran discussed how journalism is a conversation at the Knight New Media Center Election 08 seminar. Her notes are available in two detailed blog posts, one looking at how to foster community and another one of the tools of engagement. But in her talk she unveiled what she described as the secret weapons of conversational media. And what are these secret weapons? All journalists have them. We all have
Day two of the Knight New Media Center seminar on Election ’08, kicking with a session I moderated on the internet’s impact on journalism. My main argument – this is a great time to be a journalist, with the more ways to reach more people than ever before. I cheekily entitled the session, Jam Today, taking my inspiration from this quote from Lewis Carroll: The rule is, jam to-morrow and
Twitter has attracted quite a bit of attention, as people share what they are doing right now. As with so many Web 2.0 ideas, it new and untested. But Amy Gahran from Poynter has come up with an interesting use for it. Like myself, she is a speaker at the Knight New Media Election ’08 seminar. Instead of live blogging the event, she is ‘twittering’ the discussions. It reads a
How can politicians use online video to reach voters? Not by using it as a platform for traditional political message, argued Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum. Speaking at the Knight New Media Center seminar on Election ’08, Sifry contrasted the approaches of Hillary Clinton to UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron. In his view, the Clinton campaign is using online video as it would be conventional TV –
I am at a four-day seminar on Election ’08: Covering Politics in Cyberspace organised by the Knight New Media Center at USC Annenberg. The event kicked off with a keynote by political scientist Michael Cornfield. His message to the journalists in the room – interview the donors. In particular he highlighted how the number of small donors has doubled between 2003 and 2007. In a wide-ranging talk, Cornfield explored the