Flu, craps and fake photos

I tip my toque to bloggers with full-time jobs who keep up their ramblings in the midst of a flu outbreak.

My newsroom had casualties, and we’ve never been so busy -- and so efficient. We’re a mixed bag of talkers and doers, and it turns out the talkers were rendered mute by sore throats. With that heavy layer of administration out of the way, reporters have been producing more and better work.

There appears to be another wave of layoffs in media. With my own newsroom in mind, I find myself hopeful that our chaff might being separated from the wheat. An opinion piece on The Globe website reminds me of the bigger picture. As media hemorrhages staff, we're losing the ability to fight the onslaught of supplied photos and information. We're guilty of blindly posting information that's supplied to us, although that has stopped for a time thanks to the flu bug, not good judgment.

Stephen Harper’s team is busy releasing heroic photos of him, including the infamous kinder, gentler leader performing on the piano during a gala last month. His handlers apologized for releasing wrong information when it was learned the photo was taken during a rehearsal, although they’ve never corrected the cutline.

http://tinyurl.com/yct4mwg

More people are receiving or distributing news through blogs that rely on supplied photos and information, but they don't challenge what’s being fed to them. Government and business supply photos all the time. The difference is now they know media are losing the workforce they need to challenge this information.

They hold all the cards while we're losing our players.

The Hyper Journalist

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Lessons in unlikely places

I almost embarrassed myself. More than usual.

I was ready to make fun of the Hudson Bay Post, dubbing it the Delta Force of online news because it didn't exist, at least according to the first link I tried.

It calls itself Churchill's monthly newspaper, published occasionally by a privately owned publishing house and "chock full of not-necessarily-true-stories about not-so-late-breaking news but the cover always looks great!

Its website polarbearalley.com features facts and fiction about the northern icon and landscape. "It is a strip of white sand beach along the coast of Hudson Bay near the former site of the Churchill garbage dump. A beautiful place for a picnic if you know how to handle a shotgun."

It caters to a niche audience that's interested in northern travel, facts about the area and tall tales.

Just when I think it doesn't have much to teach about digital journalism, its website is updated far more often than some mainstream news sites.

I didn't expect to find a lesson in the polar bear capital. That's the beauty of travelling online, especially when it's already snowing there and I haven't even taken my woolies out of storage yet.

The Hyper Journalist

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Don't trust licence plates

Quebec’s plate offers the enigmatic Je me souviens. Beautiful British Columbia is straightforward. Ontario promotes, promotes, promotes Yours to Discover.

Friendly Manitoba may describe the good people who live within its prairie borders, but it masks the mood of some online newspapers.

There doesn’t seem to be much consensus about the best business model for online news. How much do you charge for web advertising when the overhead is less than print? Will the public pay for news? Will the public pay for anything?

Yesterday’s news is more valuable than today’s headlines at the weekly Boissevain Recorder. An annual online subscription is $40 and up to $190 per year for access to its archives dating back to 2004. Its website only offers one article every Friday. Read it while you can. The price will jump in a year to view it.

The Brandon Sun online content is free to seven-day home delivery subscribers. Selling milk to a cow. Despite already having a subscription, they still have to register online, input their account number, username, password, DNA, retinal scan, fecal smear, presumably each time they visit unless their computers are set to remember the data.

The site offers the first few sentences of an article and the chance to click to view the full story, only to direct users to an order form.

It took a while to find how to type an umlaut, but it’s worth it to mention the Lögberg Heimskringla, a Winnipeg-based publication featuring Icelandic culture, yours online for only $35 a year. The closer you live to its home base, the more you pay. A one-year print subscription is $47.25 anywhere in Canada, and bumps up to $50.40 if you live in Manitoba.

Takið þið við krítarkortum?

The Hyper Journalist

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