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

I’ll let this quote from Reynolds’ for itself:

I don’t think that your opinion about gay marriage or sexual orientation or whatever should ever come into the hockey business. I’ve been in the hockey business for 28 years, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Let’s hope this at least sparks some discussion on the topic.

The handle “@uptownhockey” seems to be trending the most in Toronto, Vancouver, and Chicago according to Trendsmap.

More on this tomorrow when their PR team picks up the pieces. Hopefully it’s a case of an overzealous tweeter that doesn’t represent the views of the company.

I’d like to know how you think Uptown Sports Management should handle the incident.

Update: two similar situations (and their resolutions) have been previously covered on the blog. Tim Hortons and Chrysler.

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.

Organizers raised over $12,000 for The Royal Ottawa Foundation for Mental Health. The organizing team did an awesome job putting this event together, and we’re thrilled to know that TwestivalOTT was in the top 10 highest-grossing in the world!

The tweet came from an employee at New Media Strategies, the firm that handles Chrysler’s social media. Chrysler reacted sternly yesterday, apologizing for any offence and explained that the employee responsible had been fired.

The Red Cross suffered a similar social media mishap when one of their tweeters announced their hilarious drunken weekend plans. The Red Cross rolled with it, and it even turned into a fundraising effort by Dogfishhead Brewery.

How do you think Chrysler handled the tweet? The commenters on their blog think they might have been a little too corporate about it. Was the tweet too egregious to turn into a Red Cross-style save?

Here are a few interesting news stories I’ve seen this morning that deal with the  intersection of social networking and politics:

Tweet breaks Commons rarified rules?

House of Commons procedural wonks (Full disclosure: I’m one!) are amused and bemused by the Speaker being forced to rule on a possible violation via Twitter by a Conservative MP. Long standing practice (and precedent) is that you can not point out the absence of MPs in the House of Commons. The Bloc is arguing that’s exactly what Royal Galipeau did when he tweeted about the numbers of MPs in opposition seats.  As the Citizen reports:

A couple weeks ago I stood up in front of a whole bunch of people and explained that I was a failure. I told the story of how one of my online projects had been a complete, total, and epic failure. Is it counterintuitive to expose your mistakes? To be certain.

People like to be celebrated–and I’m no different–so the very idea of “outing” yourself as a failure all seems, at first glance, to be crazy. But think about how all successful communities feature some element of sharing success and failure.

Unlike religious communities, we don’t have high holy days to gather around. Unlike cultural communities, we don’t have a common food, dance, or art to flock to. Unlike geographic communities, we don’t have a physical space we commonly use.

Online people communicate in many spaces. I use my WordPress blog here, my Twitter, and my Facebook as my three main digital rooms. Others prefer more gated and adaptable communities like Ning or stick-with-what-they-know-music-loving-MySpace.

In the physical space the so-called “social media community” has serialized events or one-off fundraisers. DemoCamp, BarCamp, ChangeCamp, Ignite, Social Media Breakfast, Third Tuesday, Social Media Book Club, TEDx, PodCamp, Twestival, and a whole host of others.

None of these spaces lend themselves to the natural airing of failures at the “actual” level rather than the theoretical or “ideas” level. Which is to say,  a group of action-oriented individuals saw a gap in the Ottawa event-market. A place for informal, serious, yet lighthearted examinations of online communications case studies.

Case Study Jam is the creation of a group of core “doers” in Ottawa, as they call themselves. These are people you see online everyday and attending  tech and “social media community” events.

I was pleased to be able to have a venue to get my personal online communications failure on the table.

The DailyBlogPost account came about as a “free idea” from Julien Smith, the Montreal-based podcaster and co-author of Trust Agents. So, I thought – great idea! I’ll register the account. Everything after that went awry. It became a chore, there was no feedback from people, community didn’t gather around this one-tweet-a-day account. In short, the idea had a kernel of good, my execution was what was wrong.

Here is how I heralded its arrival on my blog.

The short take on my personal FAIL:

• DailyBlogPost was a very bad attempt at a Twitter account.
• Being inspired by Internet superstar Julien Smith didn’t mean guaranteed success.
• I broke every rule I had learned with my personal Twitter account.
• I gave up. Thirty tweets in; I plum didn’t care anymore. Bad attitude.

You can listen to my whole presentation here (I think I was channeling @Julien that night; my presentations are usually more PG) and read the recap of the whole night lovingly crafted by the team at Case Study Jam.

Also, @DailyBlogPost is up for free again. Want to take it on? Fix my mistakes? Comment below (or just comment to add ridicule and scorn).

Friends of mine of online and off know my love of cupcakes. I started really turning them out after leaving Parliament Hill–Twitter and baking helped pass the time. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would find the San Francisco and Toronto versions of Cupcake Camp and help bring the unconference to Ottawa on March 29 last year. Over 3000 cupcakes arrived at Jack Purcell Centre that rainy spring afternoon and a bunch of money was raised for a great charity.

So, to answer the many tweets and emails: Yes, Capital Cupcake Camp is coming back!

Last year, @Sobbee, @RantingNRaving, and @Snobiwan (Tanya, Nicole, and Andrew…) and I met week-after-week in coffee shops to pull this event together.

A quick Capital Cupcake Camp primer:

• It’s an open source event
• It’s about cupcakes. No more. No less.
• You can bake them, or just eat them.
• It’s a bit chaotic.
• Milk is served.

Click here for the MediaStyle.ca event round up from last years event.

The biggest lesson I learned from organizing an (un)conference experience was: you can never be too ready. This is where you come in. If you aren’t planning on baking cupcakes this year and have 10 hours or so to spare: our first organizing meeting for version 2.0 will be next Thursday night in Centertown Ottawa–please email me ian [at] mediastyle.ca for all the details.

Last year we raised just over $3000 for Women Alive–And, in 2010 with the cupcake-scene in the Capital just heating up, I’m pretty sure Ottawa is ready to bake harder than ever.

Rebbeca Flemming wrote a fantastic article for The Globe and Mail about how she wasn’t the start of the Gordon Lightfoot death hoax. You can find it here. She deals with the situation with a fine wit and a literary flare. Although, one portion has slightly too much artistic license for my taste.

Specifically, I feel compelled to respond to this:

“By the time I went back online, Gordon Lightfoot was officially undead (phew!) and the witch hunt was on (uh-oh!). Media guru and sleuth Ian Capstick was hot on my trail, and even had my picture and the dreaded tweet in question on his blog. Commenters were gleefully posting personal information about me: my full name, where I lived, whom I worked for. So I did what anybody in my situation would do. I opened a bottle of wine, and began to drink.”

First, it’s not a “witch hunt” when you are trying to explain, analyze, and investigate the start of a hoax.

And, let me be very clear: While I had all of Flemming’s personal information moments after I sorted out she was the first online to declare Lightfoot dead; I only posted her then-deleted Twitter account handle. I also did not allow the posting of her name, GEDS information, or other personal data that was not connected to the @fleminski Twitter account (two commenters referenced the Google cache of @fleminski that revealed her full name). The photo mentioned was her Twitter avatar snapped via the Twitter search.

I received over 10 comments that I didn’t post that day because of their personal nature. Until today, I hadn’t had Flemming’s full name on my blog. Just wanted that to be clear that it’s never my intention to drive people to drink–unless in celebration.