Here’s my latest update on local media stuff:
- Congratulations to all the 2015 CAJ Awards finalists! CBC Edmonton’s Jennie Russell and Charles Rusnell are finalists for Smoked Out and the Edmonton Journal’s Larry Wong is a finalist in the photojournalism category.
- Congrats to the Journal’s Curtis Stock on winning his 11th Sovereign Award for this story.
- A couple of major anniversaries to note! Gordon Kent has been with the Journal for 30 years, and Su-Ling Goh has been with Global Edmonton for 10 years. Congrats to both!
- Alberta Street News may be forced to fold because the publication “no longer has any funding coming in to pay for the printing costs.” There’s more on the story here. A fundraising campaign has been setup to try to save the paper.
- Chad Huculak now has a book deal with new local publisher Monto Books for a collection of his popular End of the Earth comics. Looking forward to it!
- Yesterday was Kim Smith’s last day at CTV Edmonton. She is off to Global Calgary.
- Karen is back! Episode 35 of the Seen and Heard in Edmonton features Mayor Don Iveson. He talks about “how and why he started blogging, why he brings bloggers into his office once a year to talk about the budget, what he thinks about the shrinkage of local mainstream media, what it’s like to be a politician on social media, and what he thinks about the changes happening at The Gateway.”
- K97’s Todd James has been named an honorary board member of The Rock and Roll Society of Edmonton. He has also been nominated for the John Poole Award for Promotion of the Arts. Congrats!
- The print edition of The Gateway is no more, but Cameron Lewis argues that he’s not worried about the publication’s future.
- The business cards don’t lie! Dave Breakenridge is Deputy Editor for both the Journal and the Sun.
- Here are more details on the Edmonton Broadcasters Club luncheon taking place Wednesday that will chronicle the 60 year history of CFCW.
- Friday is the big day: Meet the Media Tweetup 6 takes place from 6-11pm at The Pint downtown.
Justin Jackson & Karen Unland at the Edmonton Podcasting Meetup
And here is some slightly less local media stuff:
- In her latest social media notes, Linda points to this article about the Snap Pack. “Even as they grasp that their postings can draw scorn, the Snap Pack seems unable to relinquish the habit of social media, and the illusion of image control it affords.”
- Postmedia has “struck a special board committee to oversee a review of its struggling business.” The news comes just after the company posted a Q2 loss of $225 million. “Faced with a continuing free-fall in print ad returns and an inability, so far, to offset those losses with digital revenue, Postmedia is pushing ahead with deep cost-cutting.”
- Jim Rutenberg argues in the New York Times that the Panama Papers signal a shift in mainstream journalism: “The official WikiLeaks-ization of mainstream journalism; the next step in the tentative merger between the Fourth Estate, with its relatively restrained conventional journalists, and the Fifth Estate, with the push-the-limits ethos of its blogger, hacker and journo-activist cohort, in the era of gargantuan data breaches.”
- A coalition of US newspapers including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post are concerned about Brave, “a web browser launched this year by Brendan Eich, the co-founder and former chief executive of Mozilla.” The browser blocks ads and apparently a future update will “introduce a feature that will replace the ads it strips out with others from its own advertising network.”
- Forget apps, bots are the future. NBC-owned Breaking News is now available as a personalized Slack bot.
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!
