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

All four episodes are available now to download. MediaStyle Studio edited the episodes and produced the intros and outros for each.

The bulk of credit goes to host of The Voice Graham Macachek. Graham handled recording, hosting, and producing duties on eVOLution and brought some top-notch guests to the table to discuss–among other hot topics–social media, emerging technologies, and the importance of integrity in the not-for-profit sector.

You can subscribe on iTunes here, and don’t forget to leave a review while you’re at it.

As my fiance and I have been planning our wedding we’ve noticed something funny. A lot of businesses just aren’t sure how to deal with same-sex couples.

We bumped into it again at the Bay this weekend – the wedding registry asks for “bride’s name” and “groom’s name” with a kit that suggests “his & hers” robes. Now, it’s not a big deal for Shawn and me. But, we did feel bad for the employee who had to say, “Oh, I’m embarrassed to ask this but who wants to be the bride?”

Unlike most places we’ve approached about this – Canada’s oldest company is actually doing something about it.

When we got home I tweeted the Bay corporate account and sent a quick email to Bonnie Brooks the CEO of the Bay. A small part:

My fiance and I were amused, if not slightly bemused, as to why “one of us needed to be the bride” – today as we were issued the neato scanning gun. A glance at the package as we perused your china provided ample clue: it’s designed for a heterosexual marriage. While this certainly accommodates over 90% of your clients, for those of us in Canada who are marrying same-sex partners would appreciate the accommodation.

I’ll admit I was a bit shocked when an email came back from Ms. Brooks herself – confirming that the registry was out of date, thanking us for bringing it to her attention and affirming a soon-to-be-unveiled registry in July will be appropriate for all kinds of Canadian couples. Oh, and on a Saturday no less!

Bravo to the Bay. Impressive customer service. And a heartfelt thank you Bonnie Brooks.

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.

I can’t think of another time in history (in my whole 24 years of being aware of it) when so much transition was happening in human communication. Or when so much of the work was being done by one entity.

In this case, it’s Google.

Andrew Madden is a former tech journalist and currently the strategic partner and development manager at Google News. He spoke in Ottawa on Nov. 9th, and if you’ve been following Google News’ campaign to quell the worries of the print industry, you’re already familiar with what he had to say, which is:

–The Internet has reached a wider audience faster than any other technology.
–The sudden growth of the Internet is terrifying, but creates enormous opportunity.
–Instead of scheduling themselves around media, people now expect to get media when they want it (and on multiple devices).
–Google News is a platform to support content: Google’s job is to get people as quickly as possible to content they need and to keep them off Google.

Madden was careful to explain the lengths that his team goes through to include newspapers in search results. This includes soliciting site maps to better find content, negotiating deals with stubborn (my word, not Madden’s) newspapers that use pay walls and meeting with newspapers to discuss their online plans. Not to mention endless experiments in content delivery and customization.

Which is why I can’t understand the fears associated with Google News. They seem to be putting in a lot of the grunt work figuring out how journalism will work online. And they aren’t a content producing, so they shouldn’t be a threat to newspapers. The audience, a group of journalists, editors, and publishers, provided a passive aggressive question period. There were two that caused me particular concern.

Liz Thompson (@LizT1) asked how journalists are to compete with “Lady Gaga” headlines.

Andrew Mayeda (@amayeda) commented that creating video and other online content was “fun”, but that we need to keep “serious” journalism alive.

Others wondered how to optimize their SEO without sacrificing integrity. Why wonder at all? Liz Thompson competes with Lady Gaga headlines on Google News just as much as she does when her story is printed anywhere. Andrew Mayeda’s serious journalism will continue to be produced no matter how many YouTube videos and blogs posts exist (Why bother making the distinction, anyway?).

It’s the Tyranny of the Masses. The Internet has shown what everyone is reading. It isn’t always (scratch that: usually isn’t) serious journalism, but knowing that shouldn’t scare journalists. The eyeballs that have always read print news continue to do so online. The Internet is an opportunity to keep those eyeballs and gain more, not to lament the eyeballs stuck on Lady Gaga news.

Madden ended the night explaining, “We experiment endlessly. Even if we fail, we learn.”

One of the many iPhone photos Shawn took from behind the major media outlets during his #OttVote coverage.

I’ve reported on a number of municipal or provincial election campaigns in my previous life doing radio news, so it was a pleasure to be reporting again for #OttVote – albeit in much different way. In the olden days I’d show up at McGuinty or Charest HQ on election night lugging two XLR-hacked Sony mini-disc recorders; two shotgun condenser mics, an extendable boom; extra mini-discs; pads & pens to take notes or time-mark good clips; and batteries of all sizes and persuasions…in addition to my laptop; charger and an odd box that let me use my cell for wireless (a true ’90s innovation).

However, last night’s plan was to cover the #OttVote Watson victory with nothing more than a laptop and a mobile device. In this case, I was armed with a 16GB iPhone 4 and wanted to see what I could do with the bare minimum. Over the course of my coverage I posted about 40 tweets; one Flickr set with 30 (meh) pictures; 7 AudioBoos; a failed Vimeo post and a private Facebook update to friends.

Here’s what I used to do it:

MediaStyle Top five On-Location Citizen Reporting Apps

• Twitter – Allows for fast, “breaking news” style updates with possibility to include pictures and geolocation. Be sure to #hashtag your tweets properly so they’re picked up by CoverItLive or other live blogging solutions.
• AudioBoo – Great for quick audio recordings, pre-planned interviews, atmosphere, etc. A generous five-minute recording buffer in the free version; geolocation; tags; pictures; and quick online publishing make this application a must-have in the field. The 3-2-1 countdown timer is useful when recording streeters, as it lets everyone involved know when they can start talking.
• Camera – Just the standard, Apple-issued camera app. I find its onboard video trimming feature very useful if I need to make a change before being able to get it back into my laptop. However, there are a tonne of great camera apps out there. Experiment until you find the one with features that suit your needs.
• Messages – Again, just the standard Apple-issued instant message App (wireless provider charges apply), but it made it very easy to keep near-instant and private communication with folks in-studio, or on the ground when I was not attached to my laptop.
• Dropbox – Self-proclaimed to be “the easiest way to synch and share your files online and across computers,” I have to agree. We make extensive use of Dropbox at MediaStyle to help share content and projects across offices and in the field. If Watson HQ had had WiFi I would have been creating more and waiting less for 3G uploads, which would have led to greater use of Dropbox to share video file coverage with the Rogers 22 studio.

While I was on the ground chatting with the Watson faithful, sharing information online and then watching reactions, it became clear that quick and unique snapshots, videos, quotes or funny tweets were going over well. I also realized quickly that some citizen journalism is just like real journalism… minus the support.

Here are some things I thought I’d share about covering my first citizen journalist event along the herd of regular, or “traditional” (shudder) media.

Top five Tips for Citizen Journalists Covering Election Night

• Just like online, be social! Introduce yourself. Make friends. Feel lost? Ask someone with a big camera or headset in the media area who they’ve been dealing with. That’ll usually get you in touch with organizers pretty quickly.
• Bring an extension cord or arrive early. Those TV guys suck a lot of power and saving outlets for bloggers and other riff-raff is not a priority. An extension cord eliminates 15% battery life panics while still uploading Flickr pics via iPhoto and a lame video to Vimeo.
• 3G tethering or a mobile Internet stick is a must. You’re never guaranteed to find WiFi on location, so unless you’re gathering content to pull together at home later be prepared to keep yourself connected and able to post your content.
• Provide lots of colour. Try to convey what you’re seeing and hearing, as well as atmosphere. Use your words, your voice, your camera/pictures, your video and most importantly, your observations and opinions about what you see. Use humour and let common-sense guide you. If someone sounds like they’re bullshitting you, they probably are. Call them on it.
• Capture. Upload. Share. Repeat. If you’re on your own at an event, you’ve gotta be quick and efficient at obtaining and turning around your digital content to get it online. WiFi will make your life a breeze, but if you’re doing things via 3G you’ve gotta keep audio interviews to about 90 seconds; photos curated to highlights-only and build time into your process to allow for uploads. FYI, that short video I shot was roughly 25MB and took about 12-minutes to upload to Vimeo on 3G. If the event is hopping, that’s a lot of downtime.

That’s it for now and I hope you enjoyed the wrap-up. If you were out covering the election for online audiences and have some tips of your own or would like to make suggestions, please comment below.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been asked to contribute my opinion on how our local candidates in the Ottawa election are handling the digital shift in campaign communications:

During this election Ottawa’s municipal political candidates are getting to know the digital world a little better — with mixed results.

If you aren’t certain that what politicians do — or don’t do — online has any real effect consider this: Alex Cullen was knocked out of the mayoral race, in part, because of his poorly designed website.

Ottawa voters would search for would-be-mayor Cullen’s ideas and platform, only to be confronted with a website that looked like it was created in the late 1990s, with no cohesive brand or message. Voters expect a polished and well-designed site to interact with — and Cullen’s failed to deliver. People were unconvinced he was ready for prime time and donors didn’t give — online or off.

Websites are as important to political campaigns today as the rally was in the 1960s. A candidate’s web presence should tell the story of the person running, share ways to be in touch and facilitate involvement in the democratic process. Smart digital campaigns stretch past the website and use other online collaborative tools to interact with voters: Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums are good examples where personality can truly shine through.

Read the rest at the Ottawa Citizen.

If you want to get to know more about the candidates for mayor don’t listen to them, talk to your friends and neighbours.

As one of the social media moderators at the interactive mayoral debate Tuesday night, I got an up-close look at the four leading contenders for the top job — Jim Watson, Larry O’Brien, Clive Doucet and Andy Haydon. Even if you didn’t get as close as I did, you can likely guess how the candidates behaved.

Ottawa’s would-be mayors couldn’t stop repeating attack lines long enough to listen to one another. It’s a shame because the rest of the city is busy talking about issues that matter while four long-time leaders were hunting for the knockout punch.

Under the glare of TV lights and the pressure of live Twitter questions tossed in their direction, the candidates retreated and retrenched into already-hustings worn catchphrases with a direct attack tossed in here and there.

Seeing as the debate was touted as one that would focus on youth issues in the city, it was a prime opportunity for campaign teams to flex their digital muscles.

Over 200 questions were asked via Twitter, YouTube and on the live blog. Only one of the campaigns (Doucet’s) had someone tweeting responses and following up on questions that weren’t selected for the live debate.

In 2010, candidates need to understand their website and social media outposts are the primary source of information for a lot of voters. Young Canadians don’t trust the TV news in the same way their folks do. When making a decision on who to vote for, the youngest voters seek direct information from the candidate and from their friends’ impressions of that candidate.

This can only mean one thing: Campaigns should spend less time trying to cook up lines to knock out their opponent in debate and more on talking to people with real questions.

Read the rest at the Ottawa Sun.

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.

I interviewed Rob at Northern Voice about his company and how the social web can use a laugh every now and then. (I should note that in former lives we worked on the same NDP election team, he was the dashingly funny speech writer who swanned in with brilliant bon mots – I was the rumpled press flack in the corner with the cell phone smoking a pack-a-day. At least that’s how I remember it. And, yes I’ve since quit smoking.)

Interview with Rob Cottingham from Ian Capstick on Vimeo.