Keen says citizen journalism sounds Orwellian, like a guy in a beret creeping around feeling very virtuous; doesn’t think journalists should necessarily be good citizens;

Brody says it’s a dumb term, like citizen dentist; says it is “the people’s view”; brand promiscuity; most younger readers don’t read just one thing, they search and read an average of 16 links on a story;

Rahaf (who is in her 20s) says she bought a newspaper a week ago — for her dad.

Keen says citizen journalism is part of a fetishization of the authentic, focus on the personal; cultural changes, has very little to do with media; take out your frustrations on something else — doctors or restaurants, don’t ruin media; big media has as much responsibility as anyone else; bowing to reality television and cult of celebrity;

Keen says big media should be less humble, more arrogant, more authoritative; saying we understand, you need a voice is … Recipe for disaster;

If you take that view, Brody says, you will be speaking to an empty room. It’s not good or bad, it just is.

Rahaf says having an arrogant journalist tell me what’s important, not interested in that; interested in a dialogue, and in individual voices.

Public view, human perspective and don’t trust single view — want to triangulate truth on my own Brody says; he says the vast majority of people don’t want to be paid; if they did it would be easier — love and ego are much harder to control;

Keen says when we generate something of value most of us want to be paid; not going to give away my labour for nothing; youtube model or wikipedia model, vessel they put their information into, bad in every way; one of the things that keep journalists honest is that they’re paid

Rahaf says that blogs have to develop a reputation, build up trust over time, effectively self-regulating; social contract

Brody says they want to be arbiters of their own truth;

Keen says no wisdom of crowds with Digg and Reddit — he sees new anonymous oligarchy with these sites; idealism of the Web 2.0 crowd, but reality is it’s an echo chamber, people becoming more and more ignorant;

Brody says moved away from the Long Tail to the nano-tail, the hyper-personal, Facebook feeds etc. Keen says that’s not news it’s just gossip;

Availability of different perspectives, Rahaf says, not trying to guide traditional media;

Keen says we can’t learn anything from children (after journalism students give their views of the future of journalism); says they are naieve and should probably get a job in a kitchen or something because they won’t have jobs — no one will pay them for their work.

Brody says he’s not that idealistic about it — it’s really just a technological split between breaking news and the analysis; newspapers like the New York Times are out of the breaking news business, but the need for analysis is still there;

Keen says hyper-local is the future, but Craig Newmark has ruined that business for traditional media, so taken away the ability to monetize local.

Rahaf says it’s about whether you care or don’t care — you could take away the Internet and put someone in a newsstand and if they don’t care about the news they will pick up a Cosmopolitan or whatever; doesn’t have that much to do with the Internet;

Brody says that the real potential of news is when you have GPS and you can see where people are and how close they are to a news event;

Keen says need to educate kids about the difference between a newspaper like the Times or the Guardian and blogs; teach them that some media sources have gatekeepers and are generally more reliable and some are not; media literacy is one of the things we need the most;

Questioner who is a media literacy educator, says she wonders whether kids are getting too used to reading about and paying attention only to others like them; they expect things to be highly tailored, and if it isn’t they’re not interested; what does that mean for them as citizens;

Brody says need to go back to what journalists were originally good at — pulling things together, aggregating and packaging, and presenting it; think that there will be an even greater hunger for that in the future;

Keen says he is actually optimistic about Web 2.0 tools because they can do a lot — if they are in the right hands; he says the new new thing will be expertise, now that people have realized that most of Web 2.0 is garbage.

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If the CBC Company was playing by the rules, Baidu would already have been declared a clear winner in this dispute.  According to Reuters, “The Web site of the Japan Intellectual Property Arbitration Center . . . shows that Baidu lodged a complaint with the centre, which last month issued a ruling that the domain name should be transferred to Baidu.”

But, as you can see, the CBC Company appears to have ignored that ruling.

To be fair, the CBC Company isn’t trying to pass itself off as the original Baidu; the Japanese characters on the disputed page declare, according to Reuters, that the “company has absolutely no connection with Japan Baidu K.K. and is a legal Japanese corporation.”  Still, cybersquatting is heavily frowned upon, particularly among the corporate heavyweights.

Google certainly didn’t react well to one apparent case of cybersquatting: it took a group of Polish poets to court over the domain www.gmail.pl.  Of course, those poets appear to have a valid claim to that site, and as our Jason Lee Miller explained, “Google hasn’t had much success in Europe claiming the variations on Gmail domains,” but it’s still useful to see how these big companies react.

Expect to see Baidu try a few more things to snatch back www.baidu.co.jp, then.  If it doesn’t succeed, well . . . this prince may just have to accept that its power doesn’t extend beyond China’s borders.

… mostly publicists-as part of an effort to cut $1.7 million from the department’s annual budget.

The employees-based in Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver-were told their work would be shifted to outside PR agencies, although the CBC will hire five “promotions managers” who will serve as a liaison between the network and the outside agencies, working to draw more attention to radio and TV programming. One of the PR people losing his job after nearly 20 years with the CBC said, “They basically laid off every TV and radio network publicist, with the lion’s share of affected jobs in Toronto.”

A CBC spokesperson, Ruth-Ellen Soles, was quoted in the story saying the effort was designed to target audiences within their markets rather than have all publicity efforts managed out of Toronto. Publicists working in local markets such as Calgary, Edmonton, and Regina will keep their jobs. “We’re moving toward more of an agency model,” Soles said. Or a model that costs less.

One wonders how good a job the communications department leadership was doing in quantifying the value of its efforts-or if such measurement would have kept the budgetary axe from falling. In any event, some of the employees affected have already taken the matter to the Canadian Media Guild.

Article Reference: CBC guts PR staff

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

Nortel will provide the company with software and hardware to allow connection from its cable TV and Internet technology to the public telephone system.

“The majority of cable operators around the globe who have chosen to deploy cable telephony have selected Nortel cable (voice-over-Internet) solutions,” said Dan Mondor, general manager of Nortel’s global cable solutions division.

According to a CBC article,

“Rogers’s move to deliver digital phone service is part of a push by the major players in Canada’s telecommunications and cable industries to expand outside their traditional markets.

The Brampton, Ont.-based company has already completed the restatement of 2001 to 2003 results, and issuing its first-half 2004 report.”

Nortel shares went up 10 cents to $3.65 and Rogers fell two cents to $33.76.

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“I think there should be no shareholders out there being totally unhappy about it,” said Tesma chairman and CEO Manfred Gingl. “But there’s always those who want more and that’s natural.”

According to CBC Business News,

“The class-A shareholders of Tesma voted 71 per cent in favour of the deal. Minority shareholders excluding Magna and related parties voted over 60 per cent in favour.

The privatization of the automobile engine and transmission maker is expected to be completed by February 6.”

Magna had a 44% equity stake in Tesma before the privatization.

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The Huygens probe, currently in orbit around the planetoid, has returned images that show liquid methane rain, which then contributes to the moon’s lakes, rivers, and seas.

An article by CBC News has in depth look at the probe’s visit. According the report,

“There is liquid that is flowing on the surface of Titan. It is not water – it is much too cold,” said mission manager Jean-Pierre Lebreton at a European Space Agency news briefing in Paris.

Titan is the only moon in the solar system known to have an atmosphere and scientists often compare it to a primitive Earth. But instead of water falling onto rock, as it does on Earth, Titan’s methane downpours lash through hydrocarbon clouds and erode a surface of water ice, the scientists said.

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