David Akin’s On The Hill

This is the first time I've seen this argument advanced

More audiences are turning to the Web for news. However, the Web isn't producing the profits needed to underwrite news gathering, which may lead to a decline in journalism quality, says a new media study. 

Here's an excerpt from the story:

The increased competition, especially in new media, has meant that the bulk of investment spending has been on distribution platforms rather than news gathering. In fact, tighter markets and slipping margins have led to cost cutting and a lowering of the number of people collecting and preparing the news.

There is a direct link to lower standards. This is exacerbated by the rise of cable news channels where increasingly, programming consists of the raw elements of news. For instance, vision from journalists embedded with US forces in Iraq went direct to air on cable channels without editing or contextual interpretation, lessening the role of journalists as gatekeepers over what is fact and what is propaganda, and eliminating the need for editors to package the news into segments for use in bulletins.

If there is a continuing decline in the roles and standards of journalism, profound social impacts will flow from that. When we had less choice, and a tighter control over journalistic standards and ethics, there was a greater common public understanding of news and the media operated more like a public town square for the exchange of views and information.”

 

 

Following up on yesterday's post/wish list for the Lexus luxury SUV that is powered by a hybrid gas/electric engine, General Motors Canada announced today that it is the first to market in Canada with a truck that uses a hybrid engine. GM is putting a hybrid engine into its Chevrolet Silverado and its GMC Sierra full-size pickup trucks. The products will only be available to its fleet customers right now but should be consumer showrooms by the end of the year.

I posted a new photo to Broll.

The poor old International Telecommunications Union toils away without getting much press in the mainstream media even though some of the stuff they come up with is just downright neat and would be great fodder for all kids of feature reporting. Today, the ITU reports on a workshop it held to assess the social impacts of mobile telephones. I did not realize, for one thing, that the number of mobile telephone subscribers worldwide was greater than the total number of fixed-line users around the world. At the end of 2002, there were 1.35 billion mobile phone users compared to 1.2 billion fixed line phone users.

At this workshop, experts from different countries talked about how mobile telephony was re-shaping social conventions and the way people interacted with each other. For instance:

• In Germany, young men who do not use SMS to reaffirm their love for their partners soon find themselves lonely.
• In Sweden, mobile gamers (“Botfighters”) track and “kill” other users nearby via SMS. When riding the Stockholm subway, SMS can also alert a small group of “fare-jumpers” to the presence of ticket collectors.
• In the Republic of Korea, downloading anti-mosquito ring tones helps to making camping a more pleasant experience while traffic alerts delivered to in-car navigation systems help Koreans to arrive at the camps-sites in good time

 

 

Yesterday, Nortel Networks Corp. put its top two financial officers on paid leave , including chief financial officer Douglas Beatty (pictured). This move comes a few days after the company announced it was going to restate its financial results for 2003. Nortel made a profit — it's first in six years — in 2003 of about $750-million (U.S.). Nortel did not say yesterday if it expected that profit to be smaller or larger as a result of the restatement. In fact, to the frustration of many investors and analysts, it said almost nothing yesterday beyond announcing the suspension of its chief financial officer and comptroller. I did a piece on this for CTV's national news and my Globe colleague Dave Ebner has more details in his piece in this morning's paper.

In high school, the Head brothers of Kitchener, Ont. called themselves the Canadian Jack Asses. Yahoo. Inc. is calling themselves something else: The world's worst spammers.
Eric and Matthew Head and their father Barry were named yesterday by Yahoo as defendants in a series of lawsuits filed by the world's biggest e-mail service providers. Paul Waldie and I have a story on this in today's Globe and Mail:

Four major e-mail providers have launched a legal attack on what they say are the world's worst spammers, including a Canadian father and his two sons.
Yahoo, Microsoft, America Online and Earthlink filed a series of lawsuits in the United States yesterday in a bid to crack down on unsolicited e-mails, or spam.
The companies claim that last year, Internet users received more than two trillion unwanted e-mails, accounting for about half of all e-mail traffic. They also say spam costs North American businesses $10-billion (U.S.) annually in lost productivity, network upgrades and unrecoverable data.

If you'd like more information, there is a press release here. You can also view the statements of claim filed by the various companies.

I've got this story in today's Globe and Mail:

Canada's public sector organizations are doing a better job than private sector companies when it comes to buying and using communication and information technologies, a new study suggests.
Public sector organizations also are doing a much better job than private sector firms when it comes to training their employees to use new technology, the study says.

“The Canadian public sector is leading the private sector in technological change and in supporting new technology acquisition change,” Statistics Canada researcher Louise Earl wrote in a report published by the federal agency yesterday.

Ms. Earl's report looks at the rate of technological change among public and private sector organizations from 2000 to 2002.

“That was just after the tech bust,” said Lynn Anderson, a vice-president with Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Ltd. of Mississauga. “A lot of spending was ratcheted back.”

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority is the group that's responsible for running the .ca domain, that's the top-level domain assigned to Canada. I've covered the establishment and activities of CIRA since it took over administration of the domain a few years ago. The domain used to be run by a guy named John Demco, a technician in the computer science department at the University of British Columbia. Not exactly Canada's version of Jon Postel but close enough. It was Postel, incidentally, who actually assigned administration of the .ca domain to Demco, who continues to sit on the board of CIRA.
Jon Postel, of course, was — and I'll get some argument over this broad generalization because he had and often sought help — the guy who ran the broader Internet's top-level domain naming system (DNS) of .com, .edu, and .gov for years. What he did was taken over by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Jon died before ICANN really got going but, those who knew him, say he would have been less than impressed with what ICANN morphed into.
Its critics say it has got involved in way too many fights over politics and technical standards that it was never supposed to and, as a result, has weakened itself and made the Internet itself less robust.
CIRA does not have the scope ICANN does: It does, after all, only look after Canada's little corner of the Internet. What it does have that ICANN sometimes seems to lack is a sense of modesty about its own importance. It has largely confined itself to running an efficient (if a little expensive) domain naming system for .ca and it's got 403,000 domains and counting!
Every year, CIRA elects a new board of directors and that time is upon us again.. Not anyone can run and not just anyone can vote. By and large, you have to be the registered owner of a .ca domain (or its representative) to vote. I've never liked that system. I think some seats — we could argue over majority or not — on the board should be elected directly by domain name owners but I think some seats should also be elected by all Canadian Internet users. Students and academics, at least, I would think, would be interested in some of the issues CIRA deals with.
And if I wanted to change things that way, I suppose I could run for the board and do my darndest.
The currenct board of directors though is, by and large, a pretty good group of smart and reasonable people.

I've got this story in today's Globe and Mail:

When Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.'s chief executive officer, unveiled iPod mini in January, critics frowned.

They said that iPod mini, a slimmed-down version of Apple's runaway hit, the iPod digital music player, was too expensive and that cheaper versions from Apple's competitors would eat its lunch.
The critics couldn't have been more wrong. Even before it hit the stores on Feb. 20, Apple had received 100,000 orders for the $249 (U.S.) iPod mini. (The item goes on sale in Canada next month, the company says.) The product has also won raves from reviewers, one of whom said using one was close to being a “religious experience.” Sales of iPod have also helped to win new fans among investors …
Read the rest of the story here