Hidden --- some might say suppressed --- in my resume is the long-ago work writing about music. I made my way through school largely earning money writing about rock, and eventually it led me to the part-time (but full-time fun) role as the Canadian Editor for Billboard Magazine for nine years.
One of the people I got to watch carefully was Bryan Adams. I saw him again this week and wrote about it today for my paper, his hometown paper, the Vancouver Sun.
News organizations have been struggling to sort through the challenges of social networking and their applications to conventional media. Newsrooms I know use Facebook and MySpace for gathering content, and I belong to Linkedin and other social and professional networks for their excellent connective purposes. Trust me, in being new to this experience, I have hardly established great ground rules on how to blog. It should not be surprising that older people feel less trusting of Internet content and advertising. But a new Burst Media report of some 13,000 adults in the U.S. indicates that older people feel content is largely tilted to younger people. In essence, they're yearning for age-relevant content. Newspapers are now newsrooms and in some cases newscentres. Their steady momentum to the end of the day and the print deadline has been replaced by an incessant humming of the 24/7 digital priority. There is always sage work inside the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual State of the News Media report, and its trend analysis this time has much to offer the craft in how its work is being used. The fifth annual State of the News Media report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism was released this morning. While its examination is of U.S. print, broadcast and online news, there are implications worldwide of its findings. A laid-off sports columnist, Paul Oberjuerge of the San Bernardino Sun, has written a savvy primer on adapting to the new realities of the newsroom and surviving a purge. It's a little tongue in cheek, but not terribly extended tongue in cheek. I hope the piece will help get him rehired soon. In my little neck of the woods, everyone is fretting over the future of the newspaper. But the data indicates the biggest impact of the Internet is on the time spent with the television screen. Print reading is stable, radio listening is a little off, but TV viewing is down significantly as Internet use increases. I'm an occasional participant in the weekly At Issue panel on CBC's The National. It's a real privilege. I've worked as a host on CBC Newsworld with Chantal Hebert and as a colleague at Southam News and National Post with Andrew Coyne, who now makes his home as national editor at Macleans. |