Image via Wikipedia With the 2010 Winter Olympics starting in Vancouver, one of the more interesting aspects will be the role of social media. Alexandra Samuel has described it as “a living social media experiment“: Social media was around for the Summer Games in Beijing, but this is the first time it will be deployed in a free and democratic regime. There’s good reason to expect that the Olympic experience

Please join me in congratulating my journalism students on the first edition of this academic year of our online publication, TheThunderbird.ca. My colleagues and myself at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have been working with our grad students on stories from their beats in Vancouver. It was their first major assignment of the semester. This week was crunch time, with Thursday being an intense day of final edits and

The Vancouver-based Tyee online publication has raised almost $15,000 in donations since it asked readers to give money to pay for provincial election coverage. The experiment has exceeded the expectations of Tyee editor David Beers, who expects contributions to hit $15,000.  That amounts to double its monthly reporting budget. The appeal comes as Canwest, the owner of the two Vancouver daily newspapers (the Vancouver Sun and Province) is cutting costs

CBC Vancouver is holding is holding an all-day workshop on social media.  The aim is to “find out how some of us use it to make our jobs easier, and how others can learn to tap into its power”. The CBC is tapping into the wealth of talent in Vancouver on social networking, with a wide range of speakers, including Kris Krug and Megan Cole. You can follow the day

Image via Wikipedia There are just a couple of days left to get in your Knight News Challenge proposal. The deadline to apply for a slice of the $5m up for grabs is November 1 at midnight PDT. On Wednesday, I submitted my idea – Legacy2010.com: Helping Vancouver citizens understand how the Winter Olympics are changing the city. The 2010 Winter Games are a source of controversy in Vancouver. Supporters

Susan Mernit was in Vancouver on Monday for a Knight News Challenge meetup. Around 40 people were there to hear how to get a slice of the millions the Knight Foundation is investing in innovative projects from around the world. Susan explained that the Knight News Challenge is looking for four things in a proposal: It has to be innovative. But this can also be dependent on the geographic location

We have some positions open at my J-school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. If you are looking for a position and this is a good fit for you, I hope that you will apply. If not, please help us let others know about the opportunities. I would be happy to talk with anyone who is curious about the positions, the school, the university, and the city. Assistant/Associate

CBC is reaching out to the Chinese community in British Columbia with the launch of a Chinese-language news service. The website is fairly basic at this stage, with a list of headlines leading to local, national and international stories in simplified and traditional Chinese characters. The stories are picked by staff in the Vancouver newsroom and translated by journalists at Canada’s international broadcaster, Radio Canada International

Restaurant reviews are the sort of content that lends itself to the web, unless it is published on The Globe and Mail website. A review of a local restaurant in Vancouver, The New Bohemian, caught my attention for two reasons. Firstly, the negative experience of the reviewer contrasted with my rather more pleasurable visit to the place. But secondly, I was surprised by the lack of any web features on

I’m speaking at a couple of conferences in Vancouver this week, discussing how public service broadcasters can sustaining citizenship and civil society in an internet age. In particular, I will be looking at the rise and fall of the BBC’s Action Network and propose new ways of moving forward as the BBC prepares its digital democracy project. Friday May 2: When Citizens Decide: The Challenge of Large Scale Public Engagement