David Akin’s On The Hill

For the last several years, I've led some workshops at the annual conference for the Canadian Association of Journalists on computer-assisted reporting. This year, though, I'm going to lead a workshop and participate in a panel on blogging for journalists. I've started asking other journalists for their input as I start to think about what I ought to say and teach. I'll post some suggestions and responses as I get them (names removed to protect the innocent), but I'm looking for all and any input, particularly from journalists in Canada and elsewhere who blog.
From a former colleague who now teaches at a journalism school:

I think the issue of starting your own blog is a complicated one for journalists (we talked a lot about this in my online class). Does the blog represent part of the work the reporter does for the
paper? Or TV station? Is it entirely personal and if so, can the blogger reveal personal
views and biases and still operate as a reporter? What goes on the blog? Rumour you can't publish but want to get out? Is
that fair? All of this makes blogging pretty controversial for the professional journalist.

Here's one from a student in a journalism program at a Canadian university:

I have my heart set on freelancing (I know, I know…but let me experience the poverty before saying “I told you so.”) so my interest would definitely by more along the lines of starting a personal blog. For instance many blogs, yours included, have a little XML logo. I’m 23 and like to think I’m pretty ‘with it’ when it comes to online stuff…but I have no idea whether this is a specific company that has created these blogs (which would be good) or whether you and all the other bloggers out there are just really familiar with the XML language (which would be bad…very bad).
. . . My personal website will be up and running (hopefully) within 24 hours and I definitely would like to add a blog element there, preferably without having to rely on templates that are, frankly, ugly…but free.

And this from a broadcast journalist:

For whatever it's worth, I'm much more interested in
learning how to use blogs as news sources than I am in learning how to
immortalize my own priceless prose. This is no reflection on your blog. It
looks good and has some interesting stories. But most of us already have a
way to get our writing/broadcasting into the public eye. So, I'd be much
more interested in finding how to use blogs as an additional source for
news/features.

From a piece I did for CTV's National News tonight:

Don't look now but tech stocks are back.

Shares of Nortel have increased nearly eight-fold in just over a year; Intel and Hewlett-Packard are at 52-week highs; and investors are salivating over the prospect of an initial public offering from all-world search engine operator Google Inc. “As bad as things got during the technology winter, at least there's a bounce-back. Spending taps that were shut off at least were coming back a little. That's one of the reasons why the Nasdaq was up 50 per cent [in 2003],” said Duncan Stewart, a partner at Tera Capital Corp. which manages some technology mutual funds . ..; [Read the piece and watch the video]

If I could switch professional places with anyone, it would likely be with Henry Jenkins, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose job is to read lots of newspapers, watch all kinds of TV programs, ingest all kinds of books, collect comics and play videogames. He does all this so he can think and write intelligently about popular culture and teach others how to think and write intelligently about popular culture. Basically, he gets paid to do a lot of the things I think most of us would want to spend most of our day doing. Mind you, he's a pretty smart cookie, too, and, if you get a chance to hear him speak, an engaging lecturer.

This week, Jenkins has some important things to say about media literacy programs in public and high schools:

“Media literacy education must be integrated into our curriculum from kindergarten through college. But to succeed, educators need to update and rethink the assumptions shaping many existing media literacy programs.
. . . . Much media literacy education is actually anti-media indoctrination rather than an attempt to develop the skills and competencies needed to function meaningfully in the current media environment . . . Too often, media literacy advocates depict kids as victims. We are told that advertising is “killing us softly,” that we are “amusing ourselves to death,” and that the only real alternative is to “unplug the plug-in drug” [But] Increasingly, kids are demonstrating the capacity to use media to
their own ends and adult authorities are holding them accountable for their practices. Schools are suspending students for things they post on their Web sites; the recording industry is suing kids and their parents for the music they download. The problem of media power hasn't disappeared, but it operates very differently in an age of participatory media. The new media
literacy education needs to be about empowerment and responsibility.”

I think this is a really valuable idea.

But we urgently need just Media Literarcy 101. I'm frequently surprised at how poorly understood even the basic workings of a newspaper are by otherwise sophisticated business and academic professionals. Many don't have any idea what the difference is between a columnist and a reporter; between an editor and a publisher; and so on.
One of the big problems with our (by our I mean, those of us in the craft) relationship with a news audience, is that they have a better understanding of the making of a blockbuster like Lord of the Rings than they do of their own letters-to-the-editor page.

My former colleague Barb Shecter — at not one, but two papers, in fact — makes the rounds of the possible scenarios for more consolidation in Canada's media sector in 2004-05. Some old rumours in this good read but also plenty of new ones, or at least some new twists. She touches on just about every major media company — including my employer, rumoured to be ready to sell the Globe to the publisher of [the Canadian version of] TV Guide this fall (although it's my gut instinct the Thomson family would die before that happened) — except for what I think might be among the juiciest of rumours: Torstar Corp. meets Gerry Schwartz and Onex Corp. meets the Asper family meets the National Post. This is one that's been around for a while now and it goes a bit like this: Schwartz' Onex puts some significant cash into Torstar Corp. and Torstar Corp. makes some deal — either an outright purchase or some sort of operating agreement — to become the publisher of the National Post, relieving Canwest of the financial burden of the Post and giving the Star its entrée into a national footprint
and putting an absolute lock on Toronto-area readership and and sales.
Aaah, the new year and rumours . .
Here's a clip from Barb's article

Media shakeup expected

Canada's broadcasters and publishers look set to head out on the acquisition trail

In the minds of investment bankers, 2004 will be the year of renewed consolidation in the Canadian media sector. After a flurry of activity when the new century began, calamities including terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the collapse of dot-com companies took the steam out of what was then called convergence.
Yet according to a number of high-level executives at Canadian broadcasting, newspaper and entertainment companies, investment bankers are working overtime conjuring up matches, public floats and spinoffs.
“There's not a quarter that goes by that any of us in the business aren't being talked to about various combinations and permutations,” said John Cassaday, chief executive of Corus Entertainment Inc. . .

Lots of neat discussion in the United States in the wake of last Sunday's
column by Frank Rich in the New York Times. The piece was titled “Napster runs for president in 04”. In it Rich says that Big Media — the NY Times, the Washington Post, American network television — just don't understand how Democratic hopeful Howard Dean's use of the Internet and an “interactive” campaign are changing
the way politics works in the U.S.
Rich writes: “It was not until F.D.R.'s fireside chats on radio in 1933 that a medium in mass use for years became a political force. J.F.K. did the same for television . . .” Dean, Rich suggests, is, like FDR and JFK, the first to really understand and use a new medium. But the beltway media are missing this point: “The condescending reaction to the Dean insurgency by television's political correspondents can be reminiscent of that hilarious party scene in the movie
“Singin' in the Rain,” where Hollywood's silent-era elite greets the advent of talkies with dismissive bafflement. “The Internet has yet to mature as a political tool,” intoned Carl Cameron of Fox News last summer as he reported that the runner-up group to Dean supporters on the meetup.com site was witches . .”
Jay Rosen, chair of the journalism program at New York University, reconstructs Rich's essay and provides some commentary of his own: “If it's true the press plays a vetting role in the campaign, then it must be true that the press is a player. Or to put it another way, political journalists have come to understand themselves as supplier of a service–vetting the field–that the body politic cannot handle itself, because of high information costs and low motivation to bear them. “Too many
choices, too much information to present.” But what happens when these costs shift, and new motivations spring up?
Suddenly the supplier may be supplying something that people can make for themselves, or no longer want from that source– like, say, political proctology via the pens of Washington journalists. . .”
The San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor sounds a bit pessimistic that things will get better before they get worse. “What worries me most right now is that political journalists are even failing even in their gatekeeper/megaphone role. It beggars the imagination — hell, it terrifies me — that a majority of the American public still believes that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi and that Saddam somehow had a key role in this.”

Matt Goyer is almost finished his studies at the University of Waterloo, a school famous for turning out top techies. (Research in Motion and lots of other top Canadian tech companies set up shop within spitting distance of the U of W campus). He was keen to put his new degree in computer science degree to work at either Microsoft or Amazon.com. Turns out he got job offers from both. Read his blog to find out which one he took and also go through a fascinating journal of the hiring process at both. Congratulations Matt!

Following up on my earlier post about the popularity of Apple's retail stores with customers in Tokyo, we're now hearing from an Apple vice-president that says it's harder to get a job at Apple's retails stores than it is to get into Stanford University. Apple VP says the company has 17,000 applicants for 1,200 jobs at its stores. And how popular is that iPod?

Canadians would rather buy wi-fi access by the hour than by the day, says a
study published this month by the Ottawa office of
Decima Research, a polling and market research
firm. In quizzing actual and potential users of wi-fi hotspots, Decima found
that Canadians would rather pay-as-they-surfed, buying time on a wireless
LAN in hour-long or two-hour-long chunks. Buying a 24-period of time wasn't
so popular.
Moreover, those polled said they would pay between $4 and $10 for that one
or two-hour chunk of time.
[I'm afraid I cannot provide an URL of this report at Decima's site. Decima
e-mailed me a PDF copy of the report. Contact info for Decima is at the link
above and these findings are from the firm's Report on Wireless of
Dec. 3.]
Interestingly, the survey found support for all-you-can-eat monthly pricing
plans with an arbitrary price point of $25. The survey said students and
Albertans (?!?) were the most enthusiastic about the monthly flat fee idea.
And here's another encouraging stat: Decima said that one in 10 Canadians —
not one in 10 Canadian Internet users, but one in 10 Canadians — have
already accessed a wi-fi hotspots. Folks in Ontario and B.C. love being
wireless the most (12 per cent said they have used a hotspot) while those in
Manitoba and Saskatchewan are little behind the curve (6 per cent of those
living in Canada's flatlands say they've surfed from a hotspot.) Younger
Canadians are more likely than older ones to have used wi-fi technology.
Decima also finds that Canadians use hotspots for fun as much as they do for
business.
The survey of more than 2,000 adult Canadians was conducted by telephone
from November 13 to 23. Decima said the results of the survey are accurate
to within 2.2 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Consultancy International Data Corp. of
Framingham, Mass. has published its predictions for the IT industry for 2004
and they're relatively thought-provoking, as lists at this time of year
ought to be. Here's what Frank Gens, senior VP, research at IDC has to say
about 2004:

• A tech resurrection will occur In its most recent official
  forecast IDC says worldwide spending on tech stuff will grove 4.9% in 2004
  compared to 2003, “the first significant uplift in several years.”
  Unofficially, IDC says spending could grow by as much as 8%.

• Commodity strategies will take the lead Software and hardware
  vendors will finally get the message from their customers, that is, they
  want standards-based technology products, not proprietary ones. As a symbol
  of that trend, look for shipments of servers pre-loaded with Linux to eclipse 10 % of all server sales in
  2004.

• Utility computing will equal futility computing Utility computing is a good long-term bet, IDC says, but the concept is still waiting for a market leader, despite the mega-marketing by the likes
  of IBM and HP. Vendors are focused too much on the infrastructure market and not enough on solving problems that businesses have, IDC says.

• Offshore IT services are here to stay Offshore outsourcing in 2004
  will double to $16-billion. Offshore, in this context, means “not in the
  U.S.”. Canada, incidentally, is right up there with India as a beneficiary
  of this “Offshore trend” in the U.S.

• IT suppliers struggle to put on a business faceIT vendors must
  and will do a better job of explaining to their customers how the purchase
  of software, hardware, and services actually helps their customers'
  business.

• CEO-level business priorities will drive spending From issues
  surrounding new regulatory compliance to an improved return on invested
  capital, IT vendors, products, and services that help with the priorities of
  CEOs will do well in 2004.

• An RFID bubble will form — and burst The interest of Wal-Mart
  and the U.S. Department of Defense won't be enough to make 2004 the year of
  RFID. There will,
  however, be lots of hype about it next year, IDC says.

• The Wi-Fi race is onThe number of wi-fi hotspots
  worldwide will double while big business customers test out new ways to
  deploy wi-fi within the enterprise.

• A new China and a new European Union will emerge China will
  consumer $30-billion in TI spending in 2004 and a newly enlarged EU will
  also mean newly enlarged business opportunities.

• The next digital leap will be in the house From Dell's decision to start selling TVs to the increasing popularity of camera phones and DVD
  recorders, digital media adoption by consumers will be one of the big
  stories of 2004. Oh, and for the first time in 2004, more than half of
  online households in the U.S. will have broadband access.

ZDNet columnist Dan Farber identifies offshore outsourcing, utility computing, and wi-fi as his big issues for 2004.