Jay Rosen and his students asked Mark Hamilton for a quick survey of Canadian newspapers and their bloggers. Hamilton, who teaches journalism at Kwantlen University College in Richmond, B.C., looked around and had some interesting observations:
His two chief findings:
Most major Canadian newspapers have sporadically used blogs as part of major event coverage. During the last two federal elections, there were “reporter’s notebook” style blogs at most major newspapers. But I just took a look around, and couldn’t find anyone blogging from the Turin Olympics.
With a couple of exceptions, big Canadian dailies haven’t jumped on blogging to extend their storytelling, or to bring voice to their web sites. None that I can find have tapped into their local blogosphere to increase their coverage or spread the local conversation . . . [Read the full post]
I saw posts about Hamilton’s findings at Bill Doskoch’s blog and at Antonia Zerbisias’ blog. I like this kind of discussion because it has important things to tell us about how to be a better reporter; how citizens relate to the news and news organizations; and how news organizations can maintain and improve their business. So I chimed in with a reply at Blue Plate Special, where Hamilton’s observations were first blogged, to Doskoch’s site and to Hamilton’s site. Doskoch, in turn, took my comments to Canadian Journalist and Hamilton re-published my comments as a separate post.:
One suggested corrective to what seem to be many of the assumptions here: Blogging — be it in the U.S. or Canada — is not the highest form of evolution for journalists employed by newspapers. It may be for certain types of journalists but it probably isn’t for most. Many commentators — academics often but bloggers mostly — believe that because mainstream news organizations do not blog, then that must mean they are the failures; that they are the dinosaurs headed for extinction. Not true . . . [Read the full comment]