For a second year running, Reportr.net, is one of the finalists for best blog in the Canadian Online Publishing Awards. The blog is nominated (PDF) in the business-to-business, professional, scholarly category. I am honoured that the judges selected my blog as one of the finalists. Reportr.net won best blog in this category last year. The work of my students at the UBC School of Journalism has received four nominations, including

On Friday 9 September, I am presenting a second paper at the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff on how social media is changing the way we get our news and information. Here is the abstract and slides from the paper, Your friend as editor: The shift to a personalized social news stream This study examines the impact of social media spaces on news consumption, based on an online survey

There were two significant developments in the media in Canada last week. The Huffington Post crossed the 49th parallel to set up Huff Post Canada and one of the largest newspaper groups, the PostMedia Network, dipped its toes into paywalls. In my first post for the HuffPo, I discuss the metered model being tried out by PostMedia at two of its newspapers. In the post, I take issue with the

An interesting project that seeks to help journalists and editors connect with each other has just launched in Canada. MediaCooler.com is the brainchild of my friend, Alison Yesilcimen. I’ve been following the development of the service since September last year. I’ve had long conversations with Alison about it, providing feedback and trying out the alpha site. MediaCooler aims to be a marketplace for media.  In an e-mail, Alison said that she “always

This comScore briefing on the digital media landscape in Canada has valuable data about what Canadians go online. The presentation delves into social media, video and mobile. comScore Briefing – State of the Digital Media Universe View more presentations from AchillesMedia. (Via Newslab.ca)

Image via Wikipedia An internal briefing note by CBC President Hubert Lacroix on the broadcaster’s financial crisis provides some insights into its future. The note aims to answer some of the questions raised by CBC staff following the announcement of sweeping job and programming cuts. One area that was spared was CBC.ca as it is part of CBC’s digital strategy heading forward and its transformation from a broadcaster into a

CBC News Sunday featured a piece on the future of newspapers for which I was interviewed last week. The piece airs on CBC-TV at 10:00pm in Canada and the segment is about an hour into the two-hour show.  For those of you outside Canada, the video is already available on the CBC News Sunday website (though I wish I could embed it here). While newspapers do much of the original

Supporters of network neutrality have suffered a setback with the CRTC ruling in the case against Bell over Internet throttling. The communications regulator denied the Canadian Association of Internet Providers’ (CAIP) request that Bell Canada cease the traffic-shaping practices it has adopted for its wholesale services. However, this is turning out to be just the first round in the battle over network neutrality. The CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein acknowledged

Image via WikipediaThe Globe and Mail has finally realised that placing its best online content behind subscriber walls is a bad idea. The newspaper has scrapped its subscription program, freeing up access to its columnists, horoscopes and more. The question is why it took the Globe and Mail so long to decide that content wants to be free on the Internet. After all, the New York Times dropped its TimesSelect

Canadian TV network CTV is the latest to jump on the citizen journalism bandwagon with the launch of a site dedicated to user-generated content at MyNews.ctv.ca. A breathless news release from CTV headlined “Attention all Citizen Journalists!” told Canadians that: Now, anyone with a digital camera or video phone can contribute to CTV News. Beginning today, video footage and images from citizen journalists across the country will potentially be used