Culture & Sports

#PartyWithCaution: Police Force Drops Some Education On University Froshers

With a fresh school year kicking off across the country this week for close to 2 million students in Canada, the promise of Frosh Week lingers in the air.

The annual tradition that celebrates the first week of university life for freshmen, and the return to school for older students, is often one of the best parties of the year at campuses from coast to coast.

Contentious and controversial, Frosh never fails to garner significant media coverage. Despite recent calls for Frosh Week traditions to “grow up” or for schools to crack down, the tradition will surely live on in dorm rooms, student houses, pubs, and clubs.

With that in mind, York Regional Police have come up with a brilliant and creative campaign to warn students about the potential costs they could face if they party too hard.

The police force tweeted out the expense list earlier today, which covers the obvious like streaking, under-age drinking, and open container violations (cleverly referred to as “Popping bottles in the back of your friend’s Corolla), to the not so obvious, like putting cement mix in the laundry machine, illegal gambling, and, I quote, “forcing a pet to smoke marijuana.”

Educating students on the potential repercussions from not “Partying With Caution”, as the release says, is important. But too often it gets bogged down in an authoritative tone that’s easily glossed over.

Instead, the YRP have done an incredible job delivering this message to students in a more accessible voice. They’ve managed to introduce some humour to the situation (“Dropping excessive bass at 4 a.m.” and “Downing Jager-bombs in public”) while still reminding students to remain safe and responsible.

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Ice Bucket Challenges Around the World

In the streets of Hyderabad, a city in south India home to some six million people, journalist Manju Latha Kalanidhi pulled out his bucket.

Unlike hordes of Canadians, Americans, Brits, and others who have been filling their buckets with ice and water, Kalanidhi filled his with rice. After loading it up, he didn’t dump it over his head – instead, he donated it to the country’s poor and hungry population.

Dubbed the #RiceBucketChallenge, the spirit of giving is in the early stages of sweeping the nation. So far, the campaign’s Facebook page has received over 54,000 Likes.

India charity ALS

These four steps make up the #RiceBucketChallenge. a campaign starting up in India.

The team behind Thrill, a start-up dating app, took to the streets to participate, and their video gives a good example of what this new campaign is all about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbLROtlZXVg

As reported by Reuters, other companies institutions are also trying to get more people involved. The Indian Institute of Management has already participated, while AirAsia India said that its senior management will complete the challenge next week. As more companies join on board and send out nominations for others to join, the hope is the campaign will continue to snowball.

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UVic’s Brilliant Use of BuzzFeed

If you’ve ever attended, applied to, or even just stepped foot close to a university campus, you’ve probably seen them. Bright, colourful photographs of students showing off their school colours in all sorts of safe locales. Maybe they’re sitting in a campus café, or lounging under a giant maple tree, or chatting at a study table in the library, or just philosophizing on the meaning of life and their place in the world on the steps of the campus’ most iconic building.

These pictures are everywhere. And they’re unrealistic. The photos often feature those representing the student union, showcase clothing that would decimate a student’s budget faster than happy hour, and represent a homogenous school culture that appears to be the exact same no matter what campus you step foot on. Despite these shortcomings, this approach perseveres as the norm.

But could that be changing?

@cspeti4 Instagram photo samples

One of the students the University of Victoria featured in their BuzzFeed article, Corey. All photos from @cspeti4 on Instagram.

Enter: the University of Victoria.

While they’re still very much in the experimental phase, UVic has signed up as a “Brand Publisher” on the internet giant BuzzFeed. As one of the web’s most visited sites, which pumps out shareable stories by (what feels like) the minute, the fit might seem odd for a stuffy-old institution like a university to host its stories.

In reality,  it’s a perfect opportunity. They’re putting content out on the places that their students (both current and prospective) spend their time, as evidenced by Alexa’s response that people browsing from school are greatly over-represented on BuzzFeed. Rather than trying to drive traffic to their site, they’re being active in pushing out stories through a medium that students actually want to spend time on.

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Twitter Legitimacy Through Speed: A Sportswriting Perspective

Last Thursday’s Major League Baseball trade deadline kept baseball fans on high alert. Big deals were struck, fan favourites shipped out of town, and some writers even declared it the best deadline day in the history of the league.

One of those writers was Ken Rosenthal.

Rosenthal, a reporter with FOX Sports, is one of the league’s best analysts. As FOX’s on-field reporter for each of the last five World Series, he’s become a well-known and likable authority on the game and a go-to source for rumours, news, and insight.

Online, he’s racked up over 500,000 Twitter followers, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a number of fans were receiving their deadline updates from him. The day was a busy one for him, frantically tweeting and re-tweeting any reliable information.

A new trend was also emerging throughout the day, though. While Rosenthal worked his own sources and would try to confirm rumoured deals, he would also tweet recognition of whoever was responsible for first breaking the story, usually local affiliates with the team, but also national analysts with competing networks, like CBS.

It’s not a new development that Twitter has created an all-new race to be the first person to break a story. In fact, in almost all cases of breaking news, reporters turn to Twitter to try to scoop all other competitors. As Brendan Nyhan wrote for CJR in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and manhunt, “Fast and wrong beats slow and right.”

Rosenthal’s approach, though, was starkly different. He was giving credit to the reports/analysts who first broke the story. It flew totally in the face of what we’ve grown used to, where all outlets report the same story as their own.

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AEJMC, Part 2

A quick update to say that next Wednesday, I will be presenting on a panel at the Association of Educators in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference in Montréal.

Here’s a quick abstract of what I’ll be presenting:

Molly Vs. Goliath: Studying the Relationship Between Social & Mass Media in Contemporary Social Activism

Historically, one of the greatest challenges facing social and political activists is the ability to deliver their message to the public. Due to constraints, such as a limited newshole and reliance on official sources in mass media, activist voices often fall on deaf ears. This study examines Molly Katchpole’s use of social media in a campaign against Bank of America, leveraging public support and mainstream media coverage, as she successfully halted the bank’s unfair fees.

For more information on the conference, please visit its website.

 

Seeing Automation As Opportunity, Not The End

As if journalists needed anything more to worry about, robots look poised to begin a gradual takeover of basic newswriting tasks.

The discussion surrounding robot, or automated, journalism has fired up this summer, following The Associated Press’ (AP) announcement that the majority of U.S. corporate earnings stories will go automated, thought-provoking pieces by Nieman Lab and the Guardian, and discussions at the Global Editors Network regarding automated journalism launching in Europe as early as next year.

robots

The concept of automated journalism first gained widespread attention this March, after an earthquake provided an early wake-up call to the residents of Beverly Hills, California at 6:25 a.m. The Los Angeles Times had a story about the quake on their website up as quickly as three minutes later, according to Ken Schwenke, the reporter who’s byline accompanied the story.

How? The brief had been written by Quakebot, a program that extracts information from the U.S. Geological Survey, plugs it into a pre-configured template, and then pushes it onto the Times‘ content management system, where it waits for Schwenke to publish it.

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Inanimate objects on Twitter is a new way to spread awareness.

Fence on Twitter Raises Awareness of Looming Globe & Mail Lockout

An ongoing labour dispute between Globe & Mail management and staff took a drastic turn this week when a chain-link fence was erected outside of the newspaper’s offices in Toronto.

The fence went up on the same day that a strike vote was held, and over 92% of Unifor (the union representing the Globe‘s staff) rejected the company’s contract offer.

A key issue in the labour dispute stems from the fact that management will require editorial staff to produce custom content, that is content paid for by advertisers. The issue of custom content in Canadian newspapers is not new and has been covered well by Jonathan Sas over at The Tyee. As he succinctly describes the process,

A business agrees to buy pricey ads with the assurance those ads will be accompanied by stories that fit desired themes but which seem to have sprung straight from the publication’s newsroom. Indeed, custom content often runs under the bylines of staff reporters and without any disclaimer. Naturally, though, it’s understood those stories aren’t going to be muckraking extravaganzas targeting the ad buyer or their industry. “Custom” is inevitably a euphemism for “soft.”

Other issues leading to the dispute include reduced salaries to sales staff and lower job security, according to iPolitics. On Monday, many stories ran without a byline, as reporters carried out a “byline strike,” the second to hit a major Canadian daily in the last three months. Roy Greenslade writes that reporters seem prepared to launch an alternate publication, or at least take their writing to personal websites, in the case of a lockout.

As we’ve seen recently with an unfinished pedestrian bridge in Ottawa and a disgraced mayor’s luxury SUV, people are finding that one of the best ways to help spread awareness of an issue (while inserting your own opinions on the issue) is through a parody Twitter account.

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