Last weekend I saw Page One: Inside The New York Times, the documentary about the influential newspaper. The movie opens with a brief history of print and the sudden decline of print media in the Internet age.

Bracing for the Internet fear-mongering that loving portraits of print media usually present, I was surprised by an even-handed treatment of the subject by director Andrew Rossi and the New York Times subjects he films.

Blogger-turned-Times writer Brian Stelter is seen in a classroom telling students that journalists who aren’t on Twitter are irresponsible.

The famously cantankerous, hard-boiled reporter David Carr discusses his transition from Twitter-fearing to Twitter-loving. He wrote about the same topic here. This is after claiming that he feared the Twitter-using Brian Stelter was a robot designed to destroy him.

Executive Editor Bill Keller is seen talking frankly about cutting staff over decreased profit, but looks optimistically toward the iPad’s potential and the introduction of a Times partial paywall. The Times paywall, by the way, is a novel idea that seems to be working.

This is a marked improvement from the last time I saw print journalists discussing online media. I blogged about Ottawa publishers fearful questioning Google News last year.

I hope Page One, in a small way, can help change the print media discourse from “The Internet is scary” to “the Internet is scary, and full of possibilities”.

Banner image courtesy Josh Liba

Nick Taylor-Vaisey (@nonstopnicktv) is a prolific Ottawa freelancer and the editor of OpenFile Ottawa (@OpenFileOtt), the recent extension of the OpenFile news service. If you’re not already familiar with how OpenFile works, it’s a collaborative news site that allows citizens to open files and suggest stories for freelancers to cover. Files stay open after the are published, and the community is free to add to it as the story evolves. A process that Nick describes as, “”The best possible marriage between citizen journalism and professional journalism.”

I sat down with Nick, a former colleague of mine at the Fulcrum, before the OpenFile Ottawa launch today. Be sure to follow OpenFile Ottawa on Twitter and make an appearance at the launch party tomorrow night at Spin.

How do you see OpenFile behaving in ottawa?

Ottawa is a very well covered city by existing media. Having said that, I think there’s a real place for OpenFile to succeed because Ottawa is a big city that has this lingering reputation as a small town. Translated to OpenFile, that means we have a lot of very small, tight-knit, connected communities throughout the city who will really embrace the idea of being able to shape their own stories. You pitch a story, we assign a reporter to the story, together we shape local news. I think that idea will be really popular, and I don’t think that’s just wishful thinking.

What kind of audience do you see it having? Do you think it will skew toward a younger audience because of it’s digital nature?

I’m not sure. When you look at the experience in Toronto, there are a lot of young people involved, but that’s not to say that the older demographics don’t use the Internet and aren’t engaged citizens… You know, I’m not sure I want to answer that question yet. I want to see how it plays out. I’d like to see it attract everybody. I know that there are a lot of engaged young people who are attracted to social media, which of course OpenFile loves and tries to exploit at every opportunity, so maybe that’s something that attracts a younger crowd. I think we might surprise people with the diversity of our readership.

How have you tried to grab an audience so far?

In addition to trying to attract all kinds of excited freelancers to the mix, I’m also going out and meeting as many community associations and as many community groups as I possibly can. Everyone I talk to is excited about this because they love the idea of being able to be a part of the news gathering process. We’re not asking people to be journalists, but we’re asking people to be our eyes and ears and help shape the news that we report.

In a past interview with the MediaStyle blog, OpenFile’s online journalism director Craig Silverman said that OpenFile came from a separation between the people and the newspapers they read. Do you think this is an problem, and do you believe OpenFile remedies it?

I think the first thing to note is that we’re not out to get traditional media. Once we all become millionaires things might change, but at this point we’re not trying to replace traditional media. They’re very important for a lot of reasons and there is always a place for them. I think there is something to be said for the top-down model that broadcast media and newspapers have adhered to for years and years. I’m not saying that’s the wrong way to do it, but we’re just trying to do it differently. So instead of getting together for a story meeting at 9 a.m. and figuring out what is news for people, we’re going to go to [the people]. We’re going to say, “What do you guys think?” We’re remedying the problem, I guess, but we’re not out to revolutionize anything. We’re trying to fill a role that we don’t think is being filled right now.

You mentioned you’re going out and talking to community groups. You said they’ve had a positive reaction, but how much do you think they’ll interact?

Well, I hope they interact a whole lot. I mean if people don’t, we’re not really different than anyone else. There’s been excitement from the get go. They’re just refreshed. A comment I had from one person so far, he said, “It’s really hard to pitch stories to the CBC and to the Citizen and to the Sun, and this is kind of a neat idea.”

And this is exactly what we’re going for. A lot of times people might give story tips to news rooms and it’s a gamble. Maybe the story will be assigned a reporter, or it may be a day when the email or phone message goes unanswered. Here, this gentleman can be confident that when he opens a file, I’m going to see it. And, if it’s a compelling story, assign a reporter to it.

And you’re up for the challenge?

Yeah, it’s going to be a great challenge. And it certainly will be that. This is not going to be easy. It’s a whole new way of doing things. And even people who are excited about it, still aren’t comfortable with it. They really like the idea, and they want to jump on board, but it’s hard to get used to this idea. On our side it’s a bit of an adjustment. We’ve all worked in a media environment where it’s all about the ideas that we have. Our ideas are still important, but now we have to drop our guard a little bit and be a little more transparent, open ourselves up a little more and listen to the people.

Remember to attend the open file launch, and read our past interview with OpenFile’s Craig Silverman.

Banner image courtesy RobMan170.

This post by Shawn Dearn

This is one of many Remembrance Days I have attended or reported on in Ottawa. While they each follow a predictable program, I have to say this one was really something special…and I’m glad I got there early.

Maybe it was the happy and cheering crowds. Maybe it was the Press Gallery allowing me to witness it from the inside, where most Canadians don’t get to go. Or maybe it was just the glorious sunshine warming my skin against the chilling wind (it’s rained on a lot of recent Ottawa Remembrance Days). Whatever it was, November 11, 2010 felt somber, but with an electrified sense patriotism.

I bumped into CTV Chief Political Correspondent Craig Oliver, no stranger to Remembrance Day ceremonies, who felt similarly. He’s a great story teller and shared some thoughts on the day, the crowd and general catchings-up.

It was great to be a part of this Remembrance Day ceremony, to have a close-up look at our new Governor General and to be able to share it with you here. To all my friends in the Canadian Forces, I hope you’ve had a wonderful Remembrance Day and I was thinking of you all today.

Lest We Forget.

Rumors are rampant in official Ottawa. Silly season arrived weeks ago.

What must Canadians think of all this talk of mergers, coalitions, fake lakes, and bailiffs chasing political staff around town? The ruckus on Rideau has drowned out some pretty legitimate debates: spiralling costs of the war, the environmental debt we are creating on the back of Conservative inaction on climate change, and millions being wasted on PMO PR while the public service is under threat.

One debate I didn’t think we would be having is about Fox News North.

In case you live outside of Ottawa, “Fox News North” is the nickname given to a new television venture by Quebecor’s Pierre Péladeau to be developed by his new VP, former PMO Communications Director Kory Teneycke.

It’s up for its official unveiling tomorrow and recently picked up two long-time Hill journalists to add to the Sun Ottawa bureau.

A number of people seeming to declare this the end of Canadian media as we know it. One columnist said this network was being brought here by people who don’t, “like Canada as it is and [want] to make lasting changes.” Another suggests that Fox, “mainly spews out propaganda that is dangerously misleading and often factually wrong.”

Predicting it’s entry into the market would create a seismic shift in Canadian politics and declaring the people behind it to want to change the very fabric of the media landscape these columnists and big-thinkers are giving a lot of credit to a station that doesn’t even have approval yet.

It’s all a little apocalyptic. Canadians brains are about to be turned to mush by a libertarian anti-environmentalist? I think not.

I’m mostly amused by the assumptions.

The knee-jerk reaction to the word “Fox” is no worse than the 2002 knee jerk ruling by the CRTC requiring Al Jazeera to be set on a delay and monitored 24/7.

Kory is a very smart communicator. Using the political show at CBC’s Power & Politics – which as many of you know I debated him on a few times–afforded him a way to demonstrate to the Quebecor executives that this style of brash
TV works. But I think reviewing that experience points us to the understanding that any “Canadian version of Fox” would be playing in a very different market.

Overall, the picture of news in the US is bleak. CNN isn’t objective. MSNBC isn’t either. Their local news has been sliding downhill for years–was this the fault of Fox? Or is this simply an American cultural trend driven by ratings and inherent commercial needs?

It hasn’t happened here. By and large our local news is pretty good, CBC maintains a high ethical standard, as do the folks at CTV stations. This is the market the new “Fox-style” station enters.

Plus, with all of the assumptions being made about how this would strengthen conservatism in Canada, has anyone looked beyond the American context?

Look only to the UK for a real-live example of how this can work. The media outlet that ostensibly pushed New Labour into Downing Street? The Sun.

Who was it owned by? Rupert Murdoch. Not a noted lefty. Oh, he also owns Fox?

What I’m trying to say is that this is a lot more complicated than some talking heads want you to believe. Do I like or believe anything Kory and Conservatives say? No. But, do I defend his right to say it? I certainly do. I’m not saying I know what it is this station will look like or stand for; but it seems pretty clear to me declaring it against the public interest is going too far.

Freedom of speech and open access to airwaves can’t simply be an ideal to uphold when you agree with the content being broadcast.

Craig Silverman is the journalist behind Regret the Error, the co-author of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It’s Still Broken, and the managing editor of PBS.org MediaShift. [Full disclosure: MediaStyle principal Ian Capstick is a contributor to the MediaShift blog] He’s also part of the team, headed by Wilf Dinnick, that is creating the transparent, multimedia, open-sourced news website OpenFile. In the first of this two-part interview, Silverman discusses the genesis of OpenFile, what separates audience from news, and the business model of news online. -Travis Boisvenue

What’s the elevator pitch for OpenFile?

The short version is that it’s a collaborative local news site.

Collaborative meaning that anybody from the community in Toronto–maybe they’re seeing something happening on their street and they’re wondering, “why are all these trees being cut down?”–they can go to the site, open what we call a File, and say, “there are trees being cut down all over the street, I’m wondering ‘why?’”

And if we at OpenFile, the editors, look at that and say “this is a good story”, we assign it to a reporter.

So the idea is that rather than just having a bunch of editors decide “here is what the news is today”, we’re going to be working with the community, with the people. Their ideas, their suggestions, and then the actual process of reporting is also collaborative. We’re going to be inviting people to be part of the process of putting a story together, we’re going to ask them to add information, add insights.

We’re very very focused on local stories. The term “hyper local” is obviously very popular. Stuff that a larger city paper might not care about is something we definitely care about, and because everything on the site is geo-tagged, as we build up more and more information and Files on the site, you’ll be able to go in and enter your postal code and find a whole page full of things that might be as relevant to you.

It’s aggressively local, it’s open, it’s collaborative, and, of course, it’s online only. So we’re going to be doing a lot of stuff with multimedia.

The ideas behind OpenFile seem to come from gripes with how print media is being run.

I think there’s that element. Overall, we see it as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. A lot of the things that we’re trying to do have been suggested over the years, and in a lot of cases tested.

I would say one of the core problems that we’re trying to address is the separation between people in a community and a news organization that’s supposed to represent and cover that community. It’s true that you could call up the local newspaper and say, “I have a story” and get someone on the phone, or send in an email. But the chances of there being any follow-up, let alone you being part of that process beyond that initial phone call, let alone any credit or acknowledgement for you in any official way, that’s pretty unlikely.

And from my background I’ve spent a lot of time looking for accuracy and errors and corrections, that’s an area of expertise for me. And there is kind of a truth about errors and corrections that I think relates to journalism in general, and it is that we rely on people to spot our mistakes as journalists, and in a lot of ways we also rely on the public to tell us what’s going on, but the problem with corrections is that a lot of the time people won’t bother to report an error that they spot because they think that people in the newsroom won’t care. They don’t know how to go about doing that, and in a lot of cases they don’t think that journalists are all that interested in being accurate.

If you think about a general news example, a lot of people don’t know how to go about getting someone at a newspaper to report something, especially if they’re a regular member of the community, not someone with a PR person. There is a real barrier when there is not a clear message being sent by media organizations saying, “listen, we want you to be a part of this, we want to know about what issues matter to you and what your ideas are”. There is no formal process for it, and that’s sort of a core thing in [OpenFile's] mandate. We’ve got a clear process and a clear message saying, “we want to hear from you”, and we’re not just going to take your story idea and hope that you hear about it later.

Another challenge is figuring out a viable online business model for journalism.

What’s that business model looking like so far?

Our plan is to do advertising rather than to do a pay wall. If you look at the beta site right now, there is no advertising. Obviously, that’s going to change. But one thing you’re probably not going to see, or ever going to see on the site, are your typical google ads, banners, text ads–that kind of thing. In terms of a sustainable model, if you are only selling those kinds of ads, banners, clicks, and things like that, you’re going to have a hard time supporting real journalism. So there are two things we are going for. Number one, we’re going to be looking at a sponsor model, something along the lines of what you might see at PBS where specific programs are paid for by specific foundations. So we are talking to larger organizations about becoming founding sponsors and offering them exclusive placement and positioning on the site.

The second part is the long term part. We’re geotagging everything that goes on the site. As the site evolves and there is more and more content, and as we see where people are distributed over the city, all of a sudden we can do location-based advertising. We think that advertising is more and more looking towards contextual, looking towards location-based.

You mentioned “real journalism”. What kind of distinction do you make between print journalists and bloggers that haven’t had print experience?

For right now we probably are working with people who have done published work for pay. And frankly I don’t distinguish if they’ve written for an online publication or if they’ve written for the Toronto Star. If someone has written real, quality reportive pieces and has been paid for them, that to me is journalism. If someone is writing their own blog and that’s something they do as a hobby–and we see that there is quality work there–and we think that there is a story that they might be really good at, I think think that we’re willing to take a chance on them.

Our vision over time is that people who start on the site as users and typical citizens–if over time they build a reputation and show that they are really good at sniffing out facts and sniffing out stories–if they seem to be good in terms of writing, we do see a time in the future where we can promote people to be reporters for the site, even if they aren’t a full-time reporter.

Do you see OpenFile as a model that could replace traditional newspapers?

As a general statement, I think that if your idea is you launch something new and its going to erase things that have been there for hundreds of years, you’re probably not going to have a lot of success. I see it as an “and” situation rather than as an “or” situation. There are things that the Toronto Star does, for example, they we’re probably never going to be able to do. They maintain a full-time bureau covering city hall. We don’t see ourselves doing that. We certainly see ourselves doing a lot of reporting about city hall and decisions made there and how they affect local communities. I think those institutions for the most part will continue.

For me, it’s just a broadening of options available to people, and really offering a different kind of relationship, experience, and ultimately a different kind of information product. So yeah, I see there to be an element of coexisting. If you look on the site, we already are linking to all kinds of different reports at National Post, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Toronto Sun. We’re linking to the great work they do when their work touches on areas that we’re looking at. And obviously i think that that’s a bit of a distinction: they’re starting to link out a bit more, but they’re pretty hesitant to show somebody what’s going on at a competing place, whereas we very much embrace the idea of doing that.

Interview with Alfred Hermida from Ian Capstick on Vimeo.

The first week of the election across the pond is over and the stakes are really heating up. Labour and Conservatives are locked in a horse race. And, with the Liberal-Democrats  included in the first ever national debates–anything is possible on May 6th.

Canadian political watchers love UK elections. There’s more humour, more gossip, and usually more fun than the hustings in the Great White North.

Each week day MediaStyle producer Travis Boisvenue will be curating the top political links directly from the UK. Travis has been editing our blog for a little while and I’m thrilled that he will be taking a more active role in curating content.

The news highlights:

• Election at-a-glance [BBC]

• Brown-must-go blogger plays high-profile role in manifesto launch [The Independent]

• No bloggers, but Tories also host a digitally aware manifesto launch [BBC: dot.Rory]

• UK Independence Party’s Farage promised the “edgiest campaign” in British history, delivers ejaculation jokes [the Guardian]

• Marketing experts say Tory leader hoped to benefit by association with “workaday” products [Times Online]

• PM and challenger tackle image problems by dispatching wives to campaign trail [AP]

• Clegg’s wife criticizes press: “Voters deserve more focus on the policies and less on the clothes” [politics.co.uk]

• Labour candidate sacked over Twitter rants [Times Online]

• Twitter, Youtube, and snail mail: targeting marginal constituents [the Guardian]

• Swapping drafts online: the team behind the Tory manifesto [Times Online]

• Keane pull a Muse, pissed at tories for using song [politics.co.uk]

I suppose this was bound to happen when you take away the team of highly trained producers, but could anyone have guessed Mike Duffy was going to fall on his face this many times?

The Canadian Press reports:

“Senator Mike Duffy has attacked the University of King’s College and other Canadian journalism schools for exposing students to Noam Chomsky and critical thinking….

“When I went to the school of hard knocks, we were told to be fair and balanced,” Duffy was quoted from his speech in yesterday’s issue of the Amherst Daily News. “That school doesn’t exist any more. Kids who go to King’s, or the other schools across the country, are taught from two main texts.”

“According to Duffy … those two texts are Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky’s book on mainstream media, and books about the theory of critical thinking.”

Atlantic radio host Rick Howe responded to the recently appointed Senator’s assertions better than I ever could, and he says what a lot of people in Ottawa have been thinking:

“Speaking of blowhards, I see where Senator MIke Duffy was spewing his dribble again. In a speech to Conservative party faithful in Amherst (who else would waste a night on Duffy) the former CTV News employee slammed journalism programs, like that offered at King’s here in Halifax, for turning out what he called leftist graduates. Duffy claims he went to the school of hard knocks where he was taught to be fair and balanced. If I correctly recall his nightly interview show on CTV, there was little fair and balanced about it. And of course today Duffy enjoys his reward for his pro-Tory bias.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Rick.

(h/t @nationalnewswatch for the Howe bit)

Photo credit

I’ll admit to being skeptical about how fresh a WWII documentary could be. Even with George Stroumboulopoulos as the narrator, HD location shoots, and and new historical footage from Russia and Japan.

I’m happy to say I was wrong to doubt. The CBC/Radio Canada coproduction Love, Hate & Propaganda hits all the right marks and lives up to the promise of a refreshed focus on a topic that has already been the subject of countless documentaries.

The writing and production truly shine. Weaving in first person stories from all sides of the war–and most interestingly from the citizens exposed to the fighting–propaganda, and aftermath of the war.

The particular episode I previewed, Selling War, had a brilliantly conceived segment demonstrating how Nazi propagandists used the Warsaw Ghetto as a “Hollywood back lot”. While the copy I was sent was a “screener” (and a rough cut at that), even without the slick animation Strombo’s careful narration was a solid backbone for the images, clever edits, and elegant first person sequences.

Fascinating exploration of the war. I’d suggest it will become regular viewing in high school history classes over the next few years.

Airing each Thursday until April 8th on CBC Television, 9pm in most areas.