From Writing
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Living Can Kill You
“Living Can Kill You” first appeared as a chapbook poems in 1994, before being the name used to describe a regular blog starting in June of 2000.
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Community is not another buzzword
Something’s been wrong with mainstream news when The New York Times is considered innovative by acting like you’d expect your neighbour would.
Before community became a buzzword, it referred to the people you lived with. The people you relied on in your daily life. Newspapers used to play a big role in that community.
Then they gave up.
Online, they let the robots take over their news feeds.
They banned reporters from speaking openly on social media.
And as for genuine discussion, news outlets abandoned comments — just like the letters to the editor before them — to the trolls and the preachers.
Now, after more than five years of struggling with communicating online, things are starting to change in newsrooms.
The New York Times’ “innovations,” for example, include letting humans control the headlines and trusting their journalists to be the people they were hired to be. Mozilla and Knight Ridder are working to change how we talk about the news online. And The Globe and Mail is looking to transform its entire organization to foster a more participatory news process.
This week I head to Mesh to listen and join in on the conversations around making journalism once again an effective voice of the community it represents.
Two weeks after that, I’ll be at the MoSo Conference talking about how The Globe is using and mobile and social media to present more honest coverage of the news in this country.
And later this summer, news outlets like The Globe may actually help make your neighbourhood a better place.
So if you see me around during the next few months, let’s talk about how we can improve our communities.
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Reading and paying for news
Within days of the The New York Times pay-fence being unveiled, a number of reports about the well-being of the newspaper industry in Canada have been released. The sources, are, as usual, biased, but do present some interesting details.
One of these reports is from the newspaper industry’s own research arm, NADBank. The results suggests that in regions where printed papers are available, 78 percent of the adults read a newspaper on paper, or online, in an average week. That puts online-only readership of newspapers at about 23 percent of the adult audience, with about five percent reading exclusively online.
Of note, nearly a third of those printed newspapers read are free dailies, like Metro.
In that context, the second report may seem less surprising. The Canadian Media Research Consortium found in its survey of online news readers (which is about 85 percent of the adult population), only 19 percent would consider paying for news. If given no other news choice (an idealized option, yes, but also suggestive of the worth of news), 30 percent would pay.
Of those willing to pay, most preferred a subscription model, with The New York Times’ metered approach being a close second.
Granted, I do work at The Globe and Mail, and like all newspapers, there’s a strong interest in having a more financially sustainable product online, but, like all posts here, this is my own opinion and shouldn’t be taken to suggest anything more than that. By the way, here’s the The Globe’s take on the NADBank report.
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A year (almost) in photos
Three-hundred and seventy-five days ago, I took a picture. It was to be the first in what was a planned to be a photo-a-day, documenting a year that had me settling into my life in Seattle and travelling to new countries.
That plan didn’t quite work.
With only 224 photos posted to Momentile, nearly four months of the year went undocumented in that set. And while I did travel (throughout the western U.S., and to Southeast Asia), I also ended-up moving from Seattle to Toronto.
(Unfortunately, many of the photos were badly been distorted when Momentile updated its service — often, the thumbnails show a better view)
Nevertheless, the result is, for me, a surprising reflective photo narrative of my thoughts.
Most of the photos in the first third are me pushing myself to discover new ways to look at familiar situations (usually taken during my walk to and from the bus to work).
September and October becomes sporadic as I tried to capture what I knew would be unrepeated moments — saying goodbye to my life in Seattle and encountering Asia for the first time.
November onwards is even more inconsistent — the pictures show an attempt to bootstrap my mind into remembering and recognizing the once familiar sites of Toronto, and Canada, in the fall and winter.
Will be interesting to see what the 12 months reveal (you can follow along with Momentile or using Instagram).
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Nothing queued, Netflix
Canada feeds off American culture — the history of Canadian media can be read, in part, as a nationalistic defence against American influence (which in turn can be explained by the events 199 years ago). In the digital age however, with geo-fencing thriving, access to Hollywood is being limited in the Great White North. No Pandora. No Hulu. And until recently, no Netflix.
As a recent American resident, I became a immediate Netflix junkie. In less than three years, I watched more than 500 movies (and rated another 2,020 and had 3,573 suggestions). There were nearly 400 more in my DVD and Instant Viewing queue.
My move back to Canada coincided, coincidentally, with Netflix unveiling a Canadian streaming-only service. And the results have suggested Netflix is struggling to understand its customer base.
The first example, not including the unnecessarily astroturfed launch, is that Netflix has no way to import U.S. account history into a Canadian account. This despite the fact many Canadians retain U.S. residency for part of the year and others pretend to do so.
More bizarrely, there is no way to queue movies.
Each time a Canadian wants to view a movie on Netflix, he needs to search for it and hit play — and that is a powerful disincentive. In the U.S., my curated list of movies was the reason I returned to the site. That queue made it so simple to find those movies I’d discovered by using Netflix. In turn, it was the reason I renewed my service month in and month out.
Netflix allegedly thinks queuing isn’ for streaming movies. The lack of the feature in Canada suggests similar changes may be coming to the U.S. as well. (Already, the add to DVD queue functionality was removed from the connected devices on the U.S. service.)
For a company famous for iterative improvements to its user experience, I still am having a hard-time understanding the business justification for removing a tool that justified for customers a reason to keep watching movies.
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The danger with ending Newsweek.com
Media mergers are rarely as great as they sound on paper — part of the brand of a news media company is the culture of its staff. Change the make-up of that staff, you change the core of the brand. As such, the announcement of The Daily Beast’s “marriage” with Newsweek intensified speculation about what it meant for the just recently sold magazine.
What’s more unusual, though, is what some of that speculation has resulted in.
Past and present employees of Newsweek’s Web site are rising to its defence. And rightly so.
While at msnbc.com, I occasionally worked with some of Newsweek’s online team and what they are doing is impressive. Newsweek.com has lead the media industry to Tumblr with its efforts there. The last redesign is simple, online-friendly, and relies on HTML5 for its underlying code. And, the team has elevated design to be a defining element of its online presence.
Ten years ago, merging one online property with another was, if not defensible, and least difficult to argue against. The rules of the game were still being defined, and revenue was something to worry about later.
Now, however, online media has become, for most people, the primary point of contact with any media brand, and Newsweek is no different.
Redirecting Newsweek.com to TheDailyBeast.com reflects an understanding of online media that resulted in mergers like AOL and Time-Warner. And even if the printed Newsweek were to be renamed The Daily Beast, the damage to the online presence will take years to rebuild.
Barry Diller et al., if they really want The Daily Beast to flourish, would be wise to heed those voices tumbling across the Web.
A few hours after posting this, Tina Brown posted to Twitter saying Newsweek content will live on under its own banner on The Daily Beast site. Not surprising, but still at odds with what the voices are suggesting.
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