Innovation

This October, Montreal-based career journalist and businessman Warren Perley is launching a new online business model, beststory.ca, for freelance journalists who love the written word and wish to indulge that passion to the exclusion of video. He tells J-Source the genesis and rationale of this new business model.

 

We at J-Source are always on the look-out for new and interesting ways of covering big stories and events. Thanks to the increasing social media storm surrounding the so-crowned Twitter election, we've found plenty of neat stuff. Last week, we talked to David Skok over at Globalnews.ca about his site's debate video/Twitter analyzer mash-up. This week, we talk to the Toronto Star's web editor Sarah Millar, who, in case you missed it, recently spoke at CNW's Breakfast with the Media about all things digital. While the rest of us ate brekkie, Millar told us why text-based articles don't always tell the story best. Take the Star's coverage of vote mobs, which is, essentially, a video round-up with the bare minimum of text. It tells the story of the until-recently unheard of movement in a way a text-based story can't. We talk to Millar about why, sometimes, a video tells it better -- and how social media is, and isn't, changing the way journalists tell stories.

OK, so it's been coined the "Twitter Election." And, indeed, much has been made of the Twitter traffic surrounding Tuesday's English-language leaders' debate. But which debate comments set off the most traffic? And which leader was really most popular on Twitter, and when? And, how do journalists cover that story? Globalnews.ca has created an innovative answer to that last question -- and in doing so answered our other questions, to boot. How? A fascinating interactive feature we like to call the debate video/Twitter analyzer mash-up. We talk to David Skok, managing editor of Globalnews.ca about how social media is changing the way journalists cover big stories -- and how they pulled the Twitter analyzer off in less than 10 hours.