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On net neutrality and Internet access
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April 27, 2010 - Posted by Dana Lacey
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Steve Anderson of OpenMedia.ca appeared before a House of Commons committee today to discuss net neutrality, media ownership and internet access. Listen to the podcast...
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Cracking down on web scofflaws
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March 16, 2010 - Posted by Regan Ray
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 Pay up, or risk being shut down, U.S. web content watchdog Attributor warns. Ira Basen looks at the California-based company that targets unlicensed article reprints.
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All about paywalls
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February 9, 2010 - Posted by Regan Ray
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 It looks like paywalls are going to be a fact of life, writes Ira Basen, after The New York Times announced plans to raise a "metered paywall" on its website. But not all readers should be treated equally.
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Arianna Huffington: pirate publisher or saviour of newspapers?
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February 5, 2010 - Posted by Regan Ray
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"A few years ago, Arianna Huffington, a 59-year-old immigrant from Greece, secured millions of dollars of other people's money to launch an internet newspaper modestly called the Huffington Post," writes Ira Basen in his most recent CBC Media Watch column. "Now, nearly five years later, with the mainstream media reeling, the one fact about Arianna Huffington that is not in dispute is that she and her Huffington Post are clearly bucking the trend." Will her model help save newspapers or will it have precisely the opposite effect?
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The future of journalism is...Radiohead?
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February 3, 2010 - Posted by Regan Ray
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When magazine writer Paige Williams self-published a 6,000-word profile that "had no other home," readers contributed money online. In this case, Ira Basen writes, crowd funding worked, but what drives readers to donate?
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Could Apple's tablet save print journalism?
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January 6, 2010 - Posted by Regan Ray
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As the hype surrounding the rumoured unveiling of an e-reader tablet from Apple Inc. grows, New York Times columnist David Carr jumped into the conversation and suggested the new device could be a saviour for journalism. In a Jan. 3 column titled "A saviour in the form of a tablet,"
Carr asks, "So, is the Apple tablet a figment of so much Web-borne
pixie dust or is it the second coming of the iPhone, a so-called Jesus
tablet that can do anything, including saving some embattled print
providers from doom?" While the existence of such a device from Apple is still only rumoured...
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Memo to j-boomers: times change
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December 8, 2009 - Posted by Regan Ray
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 In his final editorial, J-Source's outgoing editor-in-chief, Ivor Shapiro,
has a message for fellow members of his generation: Whining about the good old
days isn't just boring; it's blinkered. The golden age of journalism may have
just begun.
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Confessions of a news 2.0 junkie
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November 24, 2009 - Posted by Ira Basen
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We all know that in an age of social media, news is consumed in many
different ways. The days of waiting until the newspaper drops on your
front steps to find out what has happened, or having a news anchor
inform you "that’s the kind of day it's been," are long gone.
But
you may not have realized just how much audiences can now control the
gathering and distributing of news, until you've read this fascinating post in TechCrunch. The author...
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Tweeting tragedy
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November 24, 2009 - Posted by Ira Basen
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It is now widely accepted that the first stories and images to emerge
from natural or main made disasters are more likely to come from
citizen journalists using social media tools than from professional
journalists. After all, there are more than a billion people in the
world who now have the capability to shoot videos, take pictures, write
stories and share them with the world.
Sometimes,
the product produced by amateur journalists can make history.
The murder of Neda Agha Soltan by Iranian police was recorded on a
camera phone during anti-government demonstrations in Tehran last June,
and quickly became a symbol of the brutality of the Iranian regime.
Her story has now become the subject of a documentary broadcast on the PBS series Frontline, but without that original cellphone video, her death would have passed unnoticed outside of Iran.
So it is not surprising that when a U.S. Army Major opened fire on his fellow soldiers in Fort Hood Texas earlier this month...
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News 1.0 meets News 2.0 on YouTube Direct
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November 24, 2009 - Posted by Ira Basen
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Send us your videos!"
That's the plea that now regularly goes out from mainstream media outlets to their online audiences. Everyone is looking for user generated video content. The reasons are not hard to decipher. Those videos can help forge a tighter bond between mainstream media outlets and their audiences, and that can potentially put them on the receiving end of the first images to come from a bombing, earthquake, or nasty weather event somewhere in the world.
But so far, most mainstream outlets are finding those pleas have largely gone unanswered. Sure, they get plenty of online comments, and lots of photographs, but for videos, the pickings have been pretty slim. And one of the reasons why, is that when it comes to uploading videos to the web, most people think no further than YouTube. More than 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, more than a billion videos every day. Why go anywhere else?
But now YouTube has come to the rescue of those video-starved media outlets.Last week, it launched a new service called YouTube Direct, which allows media outlets to...
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10 ideas for change
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October 27, 2009 - Posted by Regan Ray
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 Online journalism professor Tim Currie attended the 2009 Joseph Howe Symposium on the future of news at the University of King’s College in Halifax and pulled together ten ideas for change. Here's what the experts want to see more of.
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David Olive's "stubborn faith in newspapers"
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October 20, 2009 - Posted by Regan Ray
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Toronto Star business and current affairs columnist David Olive explains his "stubborn faith in newspapers" in a recent post to his Star blog Everybody's Business. He outlines the reasons for his positive outlook under these main headings...
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edited by Ira Basen
In a world where billions of people now have the ability to distribute pictures, videos and stories instantaneously around the world, questions about what is journalism and who is a journalist have never been more relevant, and the answers never more elusive. This section will explore the future of journalism in an age of social media.
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There's no such thing as free news, according to Rupert Murdoch, and he's prepared to go to great lengths to prove it. 