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Bruce – thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right, local mass media can’t be everywhere. But they can be places the rest of us can’t. That’s where the “do what you do best and link to the rest” idea comes in!

Great post!

I wonder, is the news social media?

For mass media producers,news is a means to aggregate an audience, sell time.

Social media is a means to communicate and share.

Anyone with an enabled device can publish to the internet. Evidenced by the Meteor story. Citizen journalists were first up with that one. ‘They’ shared it!

First is an archaic metric media companies have difficulty abandoning. Today the value of the scoop is diminished. The value is analysis Even with extensive human and technical production resources,local mass media can’t be everywhere. Citizens with camera phones are.

Mass media organizations need to move beyond reportage. Before ‘they’ engage social media platforms, ‘they’ need to understand how news is consumed, in chunks and on demand.

The absence of RSS, Content Sharing and Citizen Journalism components to their web platforms suggests they don’t.

For the most part their content remains locked down. In Edmonton, it’s still ‘their news’, instead of our news, or ‘my’ news, like you have created with the sources, feeds, you peruse.

Global Edmonton does have a news feed for their
Global Video Stories (http://www.globaltv.com/globaltv/edmonton/video/index.html)
While I love Global Edmonton for separating their stories individually and having a link – they really should add an embedding featuring as well.

Metro Edmonton
Sometimes (not too often, but getting better) some of their stories will include corresponding CityTV coverage – nice example of both print and TV media working together

Edmonton Sun – Videos
Not sure how often people view their news videos – but I find them to be pretty good considering they have embedding links.

I’m still trying to learn more about social media and all its networks. I like the idea of being able to cross promote and share news and ideas on different websites.

The copy sounds good, but in reality the site is unimpressive. The design is poor (and broken in Firefox if you have JavaScript turned off). Although the site delivers on its promise of allowing inhabitants to share their stories, photos, and videos, it does this in a very disconnected manner.

It’s a shame that the city wasted an opportunity for what could be an excellent social networking experience. If “myTBay.ca” were truly interactive, a forum for discussion of Thunder Bay rather than a poorly-implemented attempt at promoting the city, it would be an excellent place for locals to discuss the city and build a better sense of community.

Here’s the thing – if they don’t do it, someone else will. A smaller, more nimble, and more efficient organization will come along and do all the right things. I think there’s a lot of opportunity.

Five years is an eternity!

Also, in regards to the arena… I understand CityTV had it at noon… but a full story was up around 4pm on iNews880.com. It had the video, what happened at city council, and soon after, pictures of Gene Dub presenting as well as a picture of the plan. I believe everyone else picked up the story this morning… but the two news radio stations had it that afternoon. Just saying.

I think individuals will always have to drag corporations into the future… because the people with the power to make the decisions in a company are usually too busy doing other things to pay attention at first. (Not that they’re slacking in any way… but sometimes it needs to be noticed.)