“Because social is something you are, not something you do, most organizations cannot succeed in the social space by changing what they do and not who they are.”

Olivier Blanchard speaks the truth in a great post titled “10 Truths about Social Media & Social Business you need to know,” over at The Brandbuilder Blog. Highly recommended.

Every once in a while I receive an interview request from a journalism student who wants my views on some aspect of digital journalism. Last week Adam Kveton of Carleton University was interested in how social media affected the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot and The Province‘s coverage of it. Here’s our e-mail interview:

Did journalists learn anything from citizen journalists throughout the Vancouver riots? Is there something that they are doing that we as journalists need to adopt?

Journalists vary widely in their affinity for, and aptitude with, digital tools. To many journalists, citizen reporters weren’t doing anything new during the riot. Other journalists might have had their eyes opened a bit. Still others, I’m afraid, don’t care and just want to keep doing the job the way they’ve always done it. My point is that it all depends on the individual journalist.

I noticed some citizens on the ground during the riot who were doing fantastic work and whom I would gladly have had on my staff. I can’t really say they taught me anything, because it’s my job to stay current on trends in real-time reporting and mobile tools. However, they were matching and in some cases exceeding the work of professional journalists in the field that night, because not all journalists have gotten serious about mastering this type of reporting.

One thing that did impress me was the speed with which Facebook pages and dedicated websites appeared during the riot. The ability to conceive and execute mini-projects that can capitalize on sudden interest in a hot topic is becoming increasingly important to news organizations, and some private citizens were really agile with it that night.

How do we as journalists have to change in light of social media taking over what, traditionally, has been a mainstream media role. What is our role now?

We have to find the good stuff. The volume of content on riot night was overwhelming, and while some people might enjoy sifting through all that, a large part of our audience doesn’t have the time or inclination to do so. When an event is getting blanket coverage on social networks, the journalist’s job is pull together what’s most significant or interesting, and make sure it’s authentic. It’s really an evolution of editing. Great film editors say they leave 90 per cent of footage on the cutting-room floor so what’s left is only the best of the best. Our audience should be able to come to us knowing they’re going to get only the top 10 per cent of citizen-generated social media coverage, so they aren’t wasting their time looking at multiple versions of essentially the same blurry picture.

Journalists used to be able to withhold videotapes and pictures from the police (in certain circumstances) because, if they handed over everything they had, their ability to collect this sort of information would be polluted in that no one would allow us to videotape them or take pictures of them etc. Now that everyone is a potential multimedia journalist, and what’s more, an eye for the police, what does this mean for new gathering? Do we just re-produce what citizens are posting online themselves? And how do we put that in context if that is what we are doing?

News organizations can now use readily available tools to easily embed or otherwise highlight social media content. When we do this, we don’t consider it our content and the police don’t, either. So it’s unlikely they would come after us for that — only for our original content.

Our position with regard to police requests hasn’t changed. We don’t hand our original content over. If they want it, they have to go through proper legal channels. In my opinion, there was more than enough citizen content publicly available from the Stanley Cup riot for police to carry out their investigation.

We will continue to do our own news gathering. I would never leave it all up to citizen journalists, because you don’t know what you’re going to get. You have to be there. You know you’re going to get quality photos from your own photographers and good, accurate reporting from your own staff. The citizen stuff, if it comes, is mostly complementary.

Every weekend I round up a few links that caught my interest as they drifted past during the previous week. Many are related to digital journalism and writing, but they may also touch on my other interests like sports, music or life in Vancouver. Here’s the seventh installment:

• A huge decision came down from the Supreme Court of Canada this week that allows internet publishers to link to defamatory content without making themselves liable — provided they don’t suggest approval of whatever it is they’re linking to. This is more or less the assumption we’ve been operating under at The Province for past couple of years, so it’s nice to know we were on the right track.

• I’ve always liked advertising (from a creative standpoint, anyway) and I think there’s more to like in the digital age than ever before. Just read this piece in which Campfire, a digital agency in New York City, is featured along with a couple of other agencies. It’s fun stuff they’re doing. Incidentally, Campfire’s associate creative director is Merrin McCormick, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Australia during Best Job in the World. She was copywriter on the Tourism Queensland campaign. Campfire’s founders were the ones behind The Blair Witch Project, a movie with a marketing campaign that was every bit as groundbreaking as Best Job.

• Speaking of marketing, this is a simple but great idea from Heinz: Send customized comfort soup to a sick friend via Facebook.

• I don’t think a lot of people use YouTube for editing, but it’s worth a look if you’ve never checked it out. The free, web-based tools available there, like WeVideo, are looking more and more like professional editing programs all the time.

• I’ve always liked the idea behind Waze, a mobile app for crowdsourced real-time traffic info, but without a critical mass of users it was useless. Sounds from this Mashable piece like they’re getting there. Time to take another look.

• Plenty to chew on in this interview with NFL Digital’s Jeff Berman, about how the football juggernaut approaches social media.

Occupy Wall Street gives birth to Occupy Vancouver this week, which may explain the political bent in this, the sixth installment of links I liked this week:

• I just discovered Peter Lewis, who explained in a post earlier this week that the outgoing CEO of the Gannett newspaper company will receive $37 million after overseeing the company while its stock priced dropped from $72 to $10. He compares Craig Dubow’s performance to that of Steve Jobs, and in a later post explains why it’s a fair comparison.

• After the Globe and Mail caused a ruckus this week with some subversive captions on a celebrity photo gallery, Toronto Standard made the keenest observation: “…a national newspaper makes fun of celebrity obliviousness, and even dares to show some sympathy to some anti-establishment views, and suddenly thousands feel like they’ve just glimpsed a glitch in the matrix. What should be entirely normal is now strange.”

• David Cohn writes that The Daily Show is not political satire, it’s media satire.

• This is quite interesting for a talking-head video. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff explains how views on family are related to a person’s political ideology.

• “A newspaper can happily support a few reporters and an ad guy if it gives up the paper, the offices and the rest of the trappings,” writes Seth Godin.

• Steve Yelvington does a great job of condensing the Digital First news philosophy into the real essentials.

• And finally, an appreciation of two of the best hockey players the NHL has seen — from somebody who isn’t even a Canucks fan!

Journalism blog 10,000 Words posted today about how The Guardian will began sharing parts of its story schedule publicly, to get pre-publication feedback and guidance from its audience.

I like this idea, and have for as long as I’ve worked online. However, implementing something like this raises some practical considerations. They have nothing to do with secrecy, and everything to do with timing.

We hold our first formal news meeting of the day at 10 a.m. Our schedule hasn’t completely taken shape by that time. Inevitably a few more ideas, and possibly some good ones, will trickle in by early afternoon.

To make our schedule public after the 10 a.m. meeting, we would have to compose a coherent blog post telling readers what we have in mind and what we need from them. That takes time.

Then we’d have to wait for the response. We likely wouldn’t get much feedback to act on until readers had their lunch breaks, read the post and provided some input. By then it’s 1 – 1:30 p.m. So if any new angles were to come up, we’d have three, maybe three and a half hours to act before offices start shutting down and people stop answering their phones. Not a lot of time.

Maybe I’m showing more concern for the 24-hour news cycle than a digital journalist ought to have. After all, stories can always be carried over to the next day — they take however long they take, and can be published when they’re ready. But 24-hour thinking is hard to shake when you hold a news meeting every 24 hours. And while I’ve never believed the fear of being scooped should stop newsrooms from crowdsourcing, even I would hesitate to leave spilled secrets out there overnight.

What do you think? Is it an experiment worth trying?

Every weekend I round up a few links that caught my interest as they drifted past during the previous week. Many are related to digital journalism and writing, but they may also touch on my other interests like sports, music or life in Vancouver. Here’s the fifth installment:

• Ezra Klein gets to the bottom of what this whole Occupy Wall Street thing is about, and I agree.

• Interesting thoughts here about what news organizations can learn — not so much practically, but philosophically — from the recent Facebook changes.

• Don’t remember how I found it, but here’s a site dedicated to helping journalists make a living abroad.

• And on that note, a new fellowship for Canadian journalists who want to do an international project.

• The good stuff in this post about how Steve Jobs changed journalism comes near the end. There aren’t enough thinkers like Jobs in news.

• In case you haven’t seen all of these already, a roundup of creative tributes to Steve Jobs.

• A friend tipped me off to this site offering free downloads of live bluegrass and Americana music.

• And another cool music site, where you can dig up just about every cover song and its original.

• Pro screenwriter John August explains his routine.

For someone who deals with crime news daily, I’ve spent very little time in a courtroom. I’ve received plenty of copy from the courthouse, but have never written any myself. I’ve always wanted to see a trial from the inside by serving on a jury, but when I got my call recently, I had to pass it up.

The summons arrived by mail about a month ago, directing me to the courthouse downtown at 9:15 a.m. on Tuesday. With two major projects to launch at work this month, it wasn’t a good time.

I arrived at B.C. Supreme Court to find a diverse crowd of about 200 people gathered in the atrium, looking as clueless about the whole process as I was.

They were selecting for two trials: a 14-day extortion trial beginning on Oct. 11 and a 25-day murder trial beginning on Oct. 12. This was all explained to the group by a sheriff, who described how the morning would go: You enter the courtroom, sit down, and they begin drawing numbers. You hear your number, you come forward. The sheriff lets you speak to the judge if you feel you can’t participate. The judge either excuses you, tells you to stand aside while selection continues, or leaves it up to the lawyers.

“If counsel challenges your selection,” the sheriff told us, “don’t take it personally.”

With what I have on my plate right now, I would have welcomed a challenge. I wasn’t alone in this.

We took our seats in the courtroom, including a big man in a wheelchair who got a special spot up front. It wasn’t until the judge read out the formal charge of second-degree murder that I realized he was the accused. His plea: “Not guilty.”

The judge gave us a sober speech off the top about the importance of this civic duty, and discouraged us from begging off unless participation would cause us genuine hardship. I doubted “super busy at work” would meet his definition of hardship, so decided to let the lawyers decide my fate if I was the first one called. I had spoken to my boss about it, and he seemed to think a member of the tabloid press could count on a challenge from one side or the other.

A young woman went first and broke the ice. Her boss would pay her only for “a few days” of jury duty, she told the judge. This was a five-week trial. The judge let her stand aside.

The line shuffled forward. Most people asked to speak to the judge. The ones who didn’t were either sworn in and sat down in the jury box, or were challenged by the lawyers and returned to their seats. The lawyers don’t have to give any reason for their challenges, so when somebody’s challenged, everyone else just stares at her and silently speculates while she returns to the pack.

I got through the first selection without being called. That jury got a brief pep talk from the judge and was told to return next Tuesday at 10 a.m. They’ll work Tuesday through Friday for five weeks, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a 90-minute lunch break and coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon. Not a bad deal if you’re still getting a salary from your employer. Once they begin deliberations, however, they won’t be allowed to leave.

For the second trial, it was the same judge and the same process, but with new lawyers and a new accused: a tiny Filipina woman wearing a hoodie.

My number came up when the jury box was half full. By this time half the people called had asked to be left out, so I was comfortable telling the judge about my projects at work. “So you’re in a situation where, if you’re not there, it doesn’t get done?” he asked, before letting me stand aside. I was relieved, but now I’ll never know whether one of those lawyers had planned to challenge my selection. That would have been interesting.

I think I would have preferred the extortion trial to the murder trial. I guess most people would choose the latter, but I was vaguely familiar with the murder case and it was the kind we see over and over again in the newsroom: a couple of down-and-outers get into a fight on skid row and one of them ends up dead. That’s not particularly interesting to me. I was much more intrigued to learn how this tiny woman who speaks only Tagalog came to be accused of extortion. It seemed like a better story, and a window into another world — one that’s out there in Vancouver, but about which I know little.

Twelve people will get to hear it. I’ll be at work, wondering if someday I’ll get another chance.

Every weekend I round up a few links that caught my interest as they drifted past during the previous week. Many are related to digital journalism and writing, but they may also touch on my other interests like sports, music or life in Vancouver. Here’s the fourth installment:

• A great, detailed post from Howard Owens about how to launch your own local news site in 10 steps. These aren’t small steps, but having worked in both community news and digital news, I can assure you that if any blueprint is going to succeed, it’s this one.

• Voice of San Diego‘s New Reporter Guidelines are inspiring. Most journalists would love to take this approach, but could a for-profit news organization succeed with it?

• David Skok reminds journalists that the rush into digital doesn’t necessarily mean they should leave the tried-and-true behind.

• How B.C. surfers have used the satellite imagery in Google Maps to find seldom-surfed breaks along the coast.

• Canadian Business takes a look at what the NHL might look like in 2025.

• “Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects.” Interesting thoughts as always from Seth Godin.

When the Canadian finance minister dutifully writes a letter to major American newspapers, Canadian media report it like it’s a big deal. That isn’t necessarily the case. These stories need to be followed up.

Media coverage in mid-September made it sound like Jim Flaherty was riding to the rescue of Canadians affected by aggressive new U.S. tax policies. American-born Canadians learned this summer that the U.S. considers them American citizens, with all the inherent annual tax obligations to the IRS. This news came as a shock to many, and they had been waiting for their government to do something before Uncle Sam comes to get their savings.

Then came Flaherty’s ‘public’ letter, which generated a flurry of coverage in Canada:

Flaherty slams IRS over cross-border tax crackdown, Globe and Mail

Back off our taxpayers, Flaherty tells U.S., Financial Post

Flaherty takes on IRS over tax crackdowns in Canada, Huffington Post Canada

Flaherty takes on IRS over tax crackdowns, Ottawa Citizen

One problem, though: Not one of the big American papers mentioned in these stories has published Flaherty’s letter online — at least not that I can find. I’ve copied distinct phrases from the letter (easy to obtain from the Canadian websites trumpeting it), put them inside quote marks and asked Google to look for them on the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Nothing. Canadian media have overlooked this small detail: Nobody south of the border seems to care what the Canadian finance minister has to say about the issue.

That’s actually kind of newsworthy when you think about it.

Now, I don’t subscribe to the print editions of these papers so it’s possible they did publish it. Please send me a scan if you’ve seen it. However, I’m guessing if they can’t find room for Flaherty’s letter on the infinite space of their websites, they aren’t finding room for it on their op-ed pages, either. The likelihood is that it would have received just as much U.S. exposure if you or I had written it. Newspapers try to print news that matters to their readers, and why would Americans care about this? Money from us means more money for them. It may be home-page news here, but it’s crumpled up in some editor’s wastebasket there.

Hopefully Flaherty has more in his arsenal to fight this issue than what amounts to a press release to Canadian media. And hopefully all this Canadian coverage isn’t giving affected Canadians the false impression that Flaherty has put the issue on the public agenda down south.