The online magazine The Tyee is running a series on journalism by Steve Anderson, co-ordinator of Canadians for Democratic Media and the Stop the Big Media Takeover campaign. Anderson’s first piece, “Why Big Media Is Failing,” blames Canada’s media crisis on “the highly concentrated media ownership in Canada combined with the deepening bottom-line mentality of…
The Canadian Press, already embroiled in restructuring, took a major blow from Quebecor Inc., which announced it will pull out of the news co-operative in mid 2010 to cut costs, and grow its own in-house news agency, said reports. Quebecor — owner of the Sun Media and Osprey chains — is CP’s biggest media member…
Canadian Press reported that award-winning CP photojournalist Tom Hanson, “a fierce champion of journalistic rights whose sometimes brusque manner belied a devoted husband with a gentle soul,” has died suddenly after collapsing while playing hockey. The Canadian Press story — an elegant and sad elegy by James Mccarten — is here.
Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is beta testing an open-source, automated online media research tool called Media Cloud. According to the Center, Media Cloud software can already code full-text content from an extensive range of traditional and new media outlets, including blogs, and issue comparative reports about news subjects, terminology correlations and geographic…
CBC reports on Alberta’s new censorship law, Bill 19, “New Alberta film bill creates movie czar, inspectors.” Cinema owners and movie distributors in Alberta are upset, said CBC, because the law would “create a team of theatre inspectors and a new movie czar with indisputable authority” that could act on the “whim” of the government.…
Rogers Communications vice-chairman Phil Lind told the CRTC that a proposed small levy to support online Canadian content is illegal, a view later echoed by Shaw Communications, reports The Globe and Mail, setting the stage for a possible court challenge.
According to a report in the Globe and Mail, Rogers Publishing CEO Brian Segal has told the National Magazine Awards Foundation to scrap this year’s program honouring magazine writers, photographers, illustrators and editors, because there is “no money for any activities outside of producing magazines.”
This week’s Big Issue editor scoured J-Source for good news – and there was more than you’d think. It seems tough economic times get people thinking about what’s working right. Tough times also inspire us to be better journalists. So here’s a dose of our good news, with a challenge: share your own good news…
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Delfin Vigil has put his money where his job is: he’s taken out a substantial ad on page 9 of yesterday’s Chronicle, suggesting that if the guys in suits won’t or can’t save the newspaper (and other struggling papers across the country) then they should hand it over to the reporters.
New York University professor Jonathan Zimmerman proposes an interesting solution for resource-challenged newspapers: get university professors to write for free.