In a telephone call on Monday evening, a reporter for The Globe and Mail asked me if I was surprised that Sunday’s Canada-U.S. hockey game had become most-watched sports program in Canadian history. According to Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, an average audience of 10.6 million viewers watched the Olympic showdown, beating the 2002 Salt Lake City Canada-U.S. gold-medal game’s 10.3 million viewers. The figures are not surprising, despite the
PDF A couple of days ago, the University of British Columbia campus was under lockdown following a threat against students in the Bio Sciences building. I was on campus at the time and, like others here, wanted to find out more. One of the best sources turned out to be not mainstream media, but the citizen media site, NowPublic.com. One of its contributors, ScienceDave, happened to be in the building at
The Vancouver-based “citizen journalism” site, NowPublic, has attracted US$10.6m from a range of venture capital firms. According to co-founder and CEO Leonard Brody, large media companies were interested in buying up NowPublic, but the company decided to stay independent. The influx of cash can be seen as a vote of confidence in the site, coming after the demise of similar sites such as Backfence and Bayosphere. By comparison, NowPublic has
A teen stabbing in Vancouver has caused a flurry of activity on Facebook, which has led the police to appeal for calm. The reason has been angry comments left on the memorial groups set up on Facebook for the dead 13-year old Chrisna Poeung. While his friends were reluctant to talk to the press, they poured out their grief and anger online. Elementary schools have gone as far as blocking