With a gunman on the loose, should Brunswick News have lowered its paywalls?
Culture & Sports
Social Media and the Y.C.J.A. – Revisiting Identity and Privacy in the Digital Age
On Monday, CBC Ottawa broke the news that a 16-year-old from Barrhaven is facing 60 criminal charges related to “swatting,” which apparently involves placing 9-1-1 calls in the hopes of attaining a large emergency response.
The boy is allegedly behind thirty false alarms across the continent, including fake bomb threats at schools in Calgary and Milton. According to the CBC, he also allegedly used Twitter to take requests for future targets.
In both the print story posted to the website, and a broadcast story run on the evening news program, the boy’s suspected Twitter handle was made public. On the broadcast, images of the account’s feed and recent tweets were also displayed. Judy Trinh, the CBC correspondent who reported on the story, also tweeted a link to the story including the handle of the accused. Within a couple of hours of the story breaking, other Twitter users began to reply to past tweets from the boy, many of them discussing hi future in jail.
Here’s a screenshot of CBC reporter Judy Trinh’s tweet which links to the accused’s Twitter account. The handle was faded out by me.
Others who apparently knew – or at least followed – the accused, included his first name in tweet streams linked back to his account.
This is where things start to get dicey.
Google Glass, Meet Citizen Journalism
Citizen journalism just got a whole lot more high-tech.
CNN is bringing iReport, their citizen journalism site that allows anyone to post content free of editing, fact-checking, and screening, to Google Glass. This will expand the opportunity for iReporters to submit video and photo coverage of breaking news as it happens.
As with all other content on iReport, CNN can choose to edit and ensure the validity and credibility of photos or videos taken with Google Glass, and broadcast them on their platforms during live, or recorded, news coverage.
Using user-generated content in order to stay on top of spot news is nothing exclusive to CNN, of course. In times of immediate breaking news, especially during times of emergency (natural disaster, security concerns, etc.) TV news outlets scramble to ask permission to use tweeted photos or call for their viewers to submit content to them.
The tragic events and subsequent investigation of last year’s Boston Marathon bombings became one of the first real explorations of the power of crowdsourced news during crises in the U.S. In Canada, a shooting in the food court at Toronto’s Eaton Centre demonstrated the same shift north of the border.
While news teams rush to gather their equipment or redirect their van to the scene of events, smartphones and tablets of those on scene were already capturing the action. The major broadcasters repurposed tweets, Instagram photos, and YouTube videos of the scene at the Marathon’s finish line. During the pursuit of the perpetrators in the following days, the news media relied on social media to get images of the police sweep. Andrew Kitzenberg had his photos of the manhunt shared across not only social media, but the television screens of major broadcasters. CNN even profiled Kitzenberg in the video below.
Dogecoin Joins NASCAR Chase – Yes, Really
Wow.
So fast.
Much cars.
Such racing.
Wow.
It sounds like a headline from The Onion, but everyone’s favourite Shiba Inu meme-inspired digital currency will get its moment in the Talladega spotlight next weekend.
Dogecoin has sponsored the #98 car for the Aaron’s 499 at the Talladega Super Speedway next weekend.
Reddit Starts Trending
There’s a new way to discover communities on Reddit, as one of Twitter’s most popular and useful tools has migrated to the “front page of the internet.”
Redditors now have the ability to see which subreddits have been trending on the day, in an effort to get users exposed to the site’s smaller communities. According to Tech Crunch, the site will use an algorithm to highlight a handful of non-default subreddits that have been seeing high amounts of activity.
The “Trending Subreddits” logo on Reddit
The trending subreddits are located near the very top of the front page, above the top post on the first page. The trending subreddits for today were “oddlysatisfying,” “JapaneseGameShows,” “smashbros,” “minimalism,” and “gameofthrones.” The focuses of these are pretty self-explanatory.
The deafults, that ate excluded, are those that non-registered users see when they visit the site, and include, among others: Gaming, AskReddit, Funny, Pics, Technology, TodayILearned, WorldNews, and Music.
So far, reactions have generally been positive. The highest-voted comment on the “TrendingSubreddits” thread, reads,
Huh this is new, I like this idea. Its a good way to discover new subs.
Others used words like “fantastic addiction,” “one of the best new features in years,” and “great feature.”
Twitter Activism on a Local Level: The Day a Bridge Tweeted
“I am frustrated….I am alone and cold and I have been left all alone here for a long time!”
These words make up the biography for the “Airport bridge” Twitter account. That’s right, the airport bridge.
The Twitter account continuing to play up the non-human character.
Launched Monday of this week, the account personifies one of Ottawa’s longest-running municipal disasters, a proposed pedestrian bridge originally scheduled to be completed in October 2011. Nearly three years later and $4.5 million over budget, the bridge remains incomplete.
The bridge has faced a number of problems, from faulty concrete that needed to be torn down and re-poured to rethinking its entire design. While the city expects the bridge to be complete by this year, no construction is currently underway.
As a result, one fed-up citizen decided to take the matter into her/his own hands, and where better to turn than social media?
After a relatively quiet first two days, the Huffington Post published a story about the Twitter account on Wednesday night, when it had 35 followers. By Thursday, the account had taken off. At the time of writing, the bridge’s account was up to over 620 followers.
While the creator of the account has been extremely loyal to the idea of being a personified version of the bridge as opposed to revealing his/her identity, s/he has remained active in pursuing media attention.
Moving Women’s Sports from the Margins to the Living Room
Published on Elle Beaver – March 20, 2014
Close to 13 million Canadians tuned in to watch the women’s hockey gold medal game at last month’s Olympics, with a peak of 6.37 million viewers in the dying minutes when Canada mounted their incredible comeback against the U.S.
During the previous summer games in London, 3.8 million watched the semi-final soccer match between the same two nations.
So please, say again that women’s sports are boring. Or that the players aren’t as athletic or skilled. Or the games aren’t competitive.
The numbers don’t lie. It has been a slow progression, but Canadians are showing that such criticisms are outdated, and more to the point, founded in thin air.
With the Canadian Interuniversity Sport winter championship season in full swing, Rogers has reached out to provide Canada’s top student athletes a national stage. Two weeks ago, the men’s basketball championship was broadcast on Sportsnet, while the semi-finals were on Sportsnet360. This past weekend, the women’s basketball tournament had two semis and one final game on SN360, while the women’s hockey gold medal game was also broadcast on SN360.
Of course, the fact that Rogers’ SportsnetU programming is showing any winter championships is progress in and of itself, as broadcasting anything aside OUA football games of the week and national football playoffs was generally unheard of before this year.
Taking on a new direction, however, Sportsnet broadcasted the semi-finals and title games of the men’s and women’s basketball and men’s hockey championships, as well as the final game of the women’s hockey championship. It’s high time that our amateur student athletes get a greater national spotlight, but in a hockey crazy market that broadcasts the Tier II Junior “A” championship tournament across the country, the fact that the university championship for basketball is shown cannot be understated in itself.
When you add in the lack of media coverage for women’s professional sports (like the CWHL and WNBA), the fact that our female university stars can shine on such a stage is even more important.
Kyle Brown 