Letters from the Editor in Chief

I believe all the Media Centre's conclusions but the last one: "Authentic. Trust is the new Trust."

It would be nice if new New Media news became authentic, the way some blogs are today, or some anchormen and scribes were yesterday.

But look who's trusted now! Fox News? CNN? Others closer to home? They've all got agendas, they're all inauthentic in their way, and they're all trusted by many.

How is the platform-agnostic universe going to reckon with that?

Tony Burman replies: Good question. One answer is a familiar one: 'Trust' that's built the hard way, day by day, story by story, in a spirit of openness - so that people come to believe that a particular news organization, or blogger, is reliable regardless of the 'platform'.

I find this article insightful and interesting.

One are that wasn't touched on in the new reality of the future, is getting the quality of news improved. this I believe will happen when the "participatory" part of new increases, and the "print" industry starts to understand that quality of what they write will attract readers not push them away.

Thanks - great article

Alex Fuller

How I see the news being delivered is a far, far cry from how I want it delivered. I want the news delivered in a timely fashion with pictures and, above all, TRUTHFUL. There is a huge conspiracy afoot for the last 25 years to make Canada part of the USA. The mainstream media became the major dispenser of propaganda for that conspiracy with fodder provided by the Fraser Institute, Canadian Taxpayers Federation, etc., so I stopped subscribing. Even CBC, perhaps unwittingly, reflects a pro-Israel, pro-corporate point of view, simply by lazily repeating McNews from Reuters and the FI,CTF, etc., replete with corporate euphemisms like “labour disputes” instead of management-labour disputes and “corporate loss” when there has been none—only a misjudgment of anticipated “profits”. Searching for truthful newspapers, I found only the People’s Voice, the Columbia, Briarpatch and other social issues-oriented publications. I also check on the ‘net, and a pox on the mainstream media! I do miss the old daily newspapers, like the Winnipeg Free Press in the late ‘60s or The Province, as it was in the early ‘70s. There's nothing like a newspaper with your morning cafeeine:)

A concern of mine is that there is no public space guaranteed in this new media environment. We have sold the so-called information superhighway infrastructure to private interests and so now they have a monopoly on the future.

From the development of radio (and the carving up of public versus private spheres within the bands) onto television broadcasting and now the Internet, it seems that with each new interation, the fight to protect a public sphere is more and more a losing battle. At every step, the lobby for privatized radiowaves, airwaves, etc., has quietly bought the farm before we as a society ever had the opportunity to ask whether that was the best model?

Democratic values are in real jeopardy when all information is controlled by profit-driven media oligarchs with no concern for the public good. In the future, the CBC may exist as one car on the highway, but the oligarchs will now forever own the roads. Rich media, poor democracy.

T.B. replies: You may be right but I hope history shows you are being overly pessimistic. The media have always been dominated by big companies - some enlightened, others the opposite. The trick has been to keep figuring out ways that credible, public-spirited journalism endures. The game is different now - and it's ever thus - but I don't think it's unwinnable.

Getting news in the future will not be hard. Already there is a plethora of "news" websites, from the standard broadcast websites like CBC.ca to what are pretty much user-generated sites like Digg.

And here is where I see two main problems for the future. The first will be distinguishing the factual news from the opinion, the spin, and the outright lies. Sites like Digg and Wikipedia are ahead of the curve. They are, in fact, one giant social experiment attempting to answer the question, "can user-generated content, also be successfully user-validated?" To this point I would say these systems have been somewhat successful. A lot of bad information is being corrected or ignored. However, there are concerns that a form of group-think can take over, and users may be validating information if its what they want or expect to see. Steven Colbert of the Colbert Report coined the term "Wikiality" to describe this effect. This will need to be examined closer going forward.

The second problem will be the reduction in accurate source material. The rampant increase in cheap, user-generated news will necessitate a reduction in paid, professionally-generated news. But unfortunately, the quality is not the same. Professional journalists are trained in recording the details, and are willing to take the risks the average person would not take in order to get the story. With fewer of them, there will simply be many stories that will not get out or that will not be covered accurately.

Considering these two problems together, I fear for the accuracy and variety of news going forward. I fear that we will not hear the tough stories that really move us, really make us think about ourselves and our world. Instead, we will be living in some sort of Wikiality.

T.B. replies: I think your fears are justified. Or, as Stephen Colbert would put it, there's more than a bit of 'truthiness' to your message. But I guess I feel that this simply makes it even more important for people who value quality journalism to keep demanding it. Your second point- about the reduction of journalists- is a crucial role. It was featured in yesterday's announcement by NBC that it may eliminate as many as 300 journalistic jobs in an effort to "better serve" its audience. We shall see. I found the comments of Bill Kovach in response to the NBC development very telling. He is a highly-respected former editor with the New York Times and now chairman of the U.S. Committee of Concerned Journalists: "If a major news organization like NBC is going to reduce the number, and it sounds like a significant number, of the people who go out and gather information to go into the daily stream of news, it's going to thin our knowledge of the world."

The media as we know it today may not be as socially relevant in the future. In the age of internet, a story or event published in a newspaper is no longer considered “news”. In some cases, it was seen on the internet hours before.
The Future of the News article mentions the relevance of reporters and editors in the future, as well as trust in journalism. Reporters and editors will still be needed. That’s where trust comes into play. Most of us would like to think there’s someone out there we can trust in investigating reports and putting a human touch on the events. Something computers still haven’t mastered.
It may be that in the future, we will be getting most of our information from the net

I would tend to agree with the assessment by the American Press Institute as to the future of news and respectfully suggest that the future is now with one caveat, I would like to reserve judgement on ‘authentic’.

For my part I rely on multiple sources of ‘e-news’ that include the CBC, CTV, BBC, CNN, FOX, Euronews and Aljazeera in an attempt to gage the broadest possible perspective on relevant events. As with the print media ‘e-news’ opinions, attitudes can and will vary greatly from one media source to another however I believe this to be the key to informed judgement?

My greatest concern is that the freedom of access to ‘e-news’ will also be restricted because of political, social and or religious bias by the powers to be, by way of example one only needs to look at the restrictions placed on Google and their willingness to accept censorship placed on them by the Chinese as the price of gaining admission into their market.

‘News’ connotes content, which varies between ‘objective content’ and opinion. But ‘news’ has no meaning without listeners/viewers ‘consuming’ it. In order to see ‘where ‘news’ is going’, MacLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ comes into play. It is not what ‘the machinery’ does that is most influential (‘it matters little whether it produces cornflakes or cadillacs’) but how it induces change in our relations with one another and our shared living-space dynamic. Similarly, ‘it is not whether the news-media make product that is more accessible or authentic that is relevant, but how news media inductively shapes our relations with one another and our living-space dynamic’.

Today’s news media give us many views of the same event, enlarging the ‘dimensionality’ of the public view. Easy access to CBC, CNN, FOX, Al-Jazeera and myriad internet news-nets give us a ‘cornflakes-to-cadillacs’ smorgasbord of ‘news’. This ‘softens’ the ability of ‘news’ to polarize public views compared to the ‘hardness’ of 50 years ago, eroding the power of turf-protecting politicians and central-control-based-organization heads to manage ‘credibility’ while opening the door to ‘brothers-without-borders’ dynamics (as indicated by rising emergence of NGOs, rising influence of global (Islamic etc.) brotherhoods on local politics, etc.).

In today’s news-regime, conservative-idealists who put loyalty to turf, cronies and ‘high ideals’ (good vs bad) first, are increasingly undermined by liberal-pragmatists who would allow behaviours to be shaped by the sustaining of social harmony. As a result, centralized control by political heads of state and corporate executives is challenged by internet-coordinated brotherhoods

The future of media jobs is probably the same as the future of all jobs: stale, old ideas lose, flexibility, creativity and global networking wins.

American newspapers are better than tv news, and BBC is more believable than any American source. I now only read CBC because it seems most imparital and is more interactive.

One thing that will never change is that the media's job is to educate the public, not in an academic sense, but to give out global and local information. The media has to know what information the public would like, and many people are clamoring sound scientific information.

The public is more science saavy than it has ever been. People today use words like "antioxidant", "ecosystem" and "ozone layer" in their every day vocabulary. This was unheard of twenty years ago. This is because the media chose inform people of new discoveries.

The CBC has cornered the market on impartiality and seamless interaction with its audience. But the BBC has mastered informing us of cutting-edge scientific discoveries and conservation issues.

The "Science" and "Technology" sections are muddled into one area. The CBC may do well to become more compartmentalized. Conservation issues deserve a better space than that.

The "World" section also seems neglected compared to the "Canada" section.

Personally I plan on keeping the CBC (and my local Massachusetts newspaper) as my main sources of news. Just to point out, though, there has never been a more relevant time to focus on environmental and global issues.

great article,almost bloggish. its really really hard for us here at water.ca to feel anything but glee. after all the BIG media has made it a
point to dismiss, humour and snicker at the web.
until now. its amazing to see these rich, or almost infinitely backed tv,newspapers jump on our free network to cop a living. these people
could have come down from their high horses, with the oh so important editorial personal observations and made something out of this incredible thing called online. instead its the same news on different web sites with the
same pompous people saying the same stupid things. our water aint fixed and neither is anything else. be proud media! be proud you have done absolutely nothing to fix ANYTHING.

T.B. replies: ...and a Merry Christmas to you too!

This article has a lot of relevance here in Kamloops, BC. Recently, the CBC and local broadcaster CFJC disassociated leaving those viewers on rabbit-ears without access to CBC TV. The CBC normally would have established a set of its own transmitters to maintain the broadcast but felt that Kamloops, a city of 82,000 people, were not reliant enough on broadcast TV (versus cable or satellite) to justify building these towers.

Without a doubt, people are becoming more interconnected via cell phones and the internet. We act like we need to be "fed" our brain-candy but I'm not convinced that there is a large degree of quality associated with it all. (When the rate of childhood obeisity was called an epidemic, did the experts say, "Yep, eating garbage is what the public wants, stop promoting nutrition, it's a waste of money." No - they realized that the long-term costs to the country were less if we promoted healthy foods and healthy lifestyle. Could the same happen for our junk-news diet? Ultimately, most people do what is cheap and easy. We are lazy creatures but we need to think of the big picture.

Everything is cyclical. Is part of our obsession with the pricey gadgets and gizmos (and their monthly fees) we use to "plug in" a fad that goes along with our high-octane economy? What choices will people make when interest rates rise and employment slows down? When the kids eventually move out from their parents basements and start living real life, will they chose to pay for all the superficial connectedness???

Locally, losing the CBC has been a short-sighted, misguided decision that has robbed us of the opportunity to dial into the Canadian Community as an audience.

I've rambled on enough - have a great day. (Talk to your neighbour over the fence, visit your local library, and go for a walk through your neighbourhood. Heck, try saying hi to a stranger!)

CHeers - Pam

I have not watched CBC news for over 7 months after being a loyal viewer for a good two decades. And I suddenly feel way more informed about what is going on in the world. In fact now I go out of my way to tell people to avoid CBC newsworld if they want to actually be informed.
CBC still pedals in the old right/left paradigm and has lost the new generation who, thanks to the outrageous lies of the past 6 years that mainstream media has ignored, is growing immune to this cynical manipulation. Against this backdrop the CBC is a very transparent phony left gatekeeper and is losing it's audiences while sites like prisionplanet and infowars have grown. Small wonder old media is actively trying to shut down the internet with lobbying for communist like regulations and taxation on homemade videos and media.
CBC and papers such and the New York Times are trying to ignore and pretend that things such as the 911 truth movement is on the fringe when in scientific polls those who do support the governments official story only make up 16% of the population. Do you think nobody notices you consistently avoid anyone credible or critical on these subjects that are affecting everything about our lives, freedom, liberty and security?
Seriously Mr. Burman, why not just stop broadcasting altogether and pipe your channels directly into geriatric homes. Although you just may lose credibility with that audience as well as their grandchildren bring them ripped copies of films such as 911 Demolitions, Terrorstorm and Loose Change. I suppose this is why you want to rely even more on tax dollars sucking us dry in order to keep us all misinformed.

The future is the present as I currently get my news 50% from online, issue focussed sources (cbc for local, aljazeera for middle eastern, surfer mag for results of the recent contest etc.) and 50% from Le Devoir a slimmed down daily light on advertising and classifieds. After all, whipping out a newspaper while standing around waiting for the metro or whatever has a comfort to it somewhat like a cigarette once did. Nevertheless, our information needs are better served by niche providers with a greater grasp of the field, lower costs, and a global clientele. Trust is still the unique selling feature differntiating the competition. There is still more blood to be shed at the do it all dailies with oversized costs and diminshing relevance.