Media Monday Edmonton: Update #169

Here’s my latest update on local media stuff:

• How can I not start this update with the latest episode of Seen and Heard in Edmonton which features food blogger Sharon Yeo! She and Karen joke in the episode that “a couple that blogs together stays together.” I guess that’s true, she’s beside me writing food notes as I write this! Also be sure to check out Karen’s latest roundup of local blog posts.
• Jesse Beyer has earned his certificate from Mississippi State University and at 27 years old is the youngest ever chief meteorologist at Global Edmonton.
• Here are some thoughts from David Climenhaga on the recent offer to Journal subscribers to add the Sunday Sun. “How long before the Edmonton Sun and the Edmonton Journal are rolled into one newspaper?” he asks.
• Marty Forbes caught up with former CTV Edmonton anchor Carrie Doll for his latest column. “Carrie still is very active, and enjoying a great new career while getting that much desired quality time.” Check it out for all the details!
• There was a little uproar this week when the National Post ran a story about arena funding with a photo of Don Iveson grief-stricken after the Constable Wooodall shooting. After being alerted on Twitter, he asked them to change it, which they did pretty quickly. Here’s the story.
• Chandra Lye is leaving CTV Edmonton for a new role in B.C. – good luck!
• The most recent Capital Ideas Edmonton event took place last Wednesday and was an opportunity for the team to thank and say farewell to Karen Unland. “She’ll be greatly missed,” tweeted Barb Wilkinson.
• Here’s a clip of CTV Edmonton anchor Daryl McIntyre from 1987! Talk about a blast from the past.
• The latest End of the Earth by Chad Huculak is all about newspapers and Uber and the future. Clever!
• Oddly, CBC Radio had “a catastrophic failure across the network” this morning. Fortunately it didn’t seem to last long. CBC says the outage was caused by “an issue with the satellite feed.”
• Enjoy your time off Paula. Actually if you’re reading this, put down the phone!
• Here’s the FAQ page for the new Metro News website. Still no city-specific RSS feeds as far as I can tell.
• Variant Edition writes about On Spec Magazine being forced to go completely digital. “If there comes a time where this strategy can be revisited and recalibrated, it will.”
• As mentioned previously, former Global Edmonton anchor Lynda Steele is moving from TV to radio at CKNW AM 980 in Vancouver. Now her replacement at CTV News has been announced – Ross McLaughlin, who anchored weekday newscasts at ITV here in Edmonton in the early 90s, will be taking over.
• Have you checked out The Expats yet? Sounds like it has been receiving a lot of recognition and early success. Congrats Adam!
• Here are the latest social media notes from Linda. Her top link is about liking Instagram photos, or not. Don’t take it personally if I don’t like yours – I only check Instagram a couple times a day and rarely see everything I’ve missed!

Waiting for a news conference to start at City Hall

And here are some less-local media things worth sharing:

• Another National Post uproar! A column written by Margaret Atwood criticizing Stephen Harper was posted, taken down, then reposted. Why? First the claim was a lack of fact checking, then it was because it didn’t align with the values of the Post and its readers. The issue was dubbed #hairgate on Twitter.
• “That Conservative Leader Stephen Harper dislikes the media is well known,” writes Jeffrey Simpson in The Globe and Mail. He goes on to say that the party “beats up on the press to raise money” and is successful doing so.
• Did you read the massive New York Times feature on the culture of Amazon’s workplace? Public Editor Margaret Sullivan examines whether the portrayal was on target or not.
• The Columbia Journalism Review asks, is it ethical to write about hacked Ashley Madison users? “On Thursday morning, the hosts of an Australian radio show invited listeners to call in if they suspected their partners of cheating. The hosts would then search for the supposed cheaters’ names in the membership rolls of Ashley Madison, a dating Web site that appeals to married adults…” Yeah, it didn’t take long for that to go south (or do they say “go north”, being down under and all?).
• Another interesting one from CJR: How local papers are looking ‘over the top’ as part of a new model for video. I’ve definitely thought about this in the context of the Edmonton Journal. They’ve been doing more and more audio and video, and it’s good stuff, if you’re willing to deal with the horrible website to launch. But what if they had their own digital streaming channel?
• Reading long-form journalism is a part of my weekly routine now, but the idea of ‘slow journalism’ takes that to another level, with long pieces written over long periods of time. “Slow journalists measure reporting time in months or years, rather than days, and see the form as something more than just a reboot of long-form narrative nonfiction.”
• This one is only tangentially about media, but I found it fascinating: The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t. “In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.”

You can follow Edmonton media news on Twitter using the hashtag #yegmedia. For a great overview of the global media landscape, check out Mediagazer.

So, what have I missed? What’s new and interesting in the world of Edmonton media? Let me know!

You can see past Media Monday Edmonton entries here.