Mack the Flack

A new report from the Human Resources Professional Association outlines three possible futures – two not good and one good — for Canada’s economy and society in 2025.

If we do everything right, train a tech-savvy, diverse and engage workforce we’ll be the “Northern Tiger”. That’s the good future.

The “Lost Decade” will occur if Canada fails to make wise choices about education and employment. We’ll have too many unskilled people looking for jobs and too many jobs looking for qualified people.

Currently we turn out 10 education grads for every available teaching job and nearly five lawyers for every legal post. Meanwhile, Toronto alone needs close to 10,000 trained IT specialists a year and Canada only turns out 2,400 such grads annually.

“Unsustainable Prosperity” will happen if our education system fails to adapt to these new labour market realities. We have to produce post-secondary grads with market labour skills.

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I resent this article I found on Poynter.org.

The article, 8 strategies for reaching elusive young readers, has some great ideas. However, the second point – Hire young people – strikes me as a bit of ageism. It would have been better to phrase it: Hire young-thinking people.

Normally this sort of thing wouldn’t bother me but I’m getting cranky in my old age.

D’oh!

Anyway, great read. Here’s the link.

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• To learn more about digital journalism, enrol in the New Media Journalism Certificate program offered by Simon Fraser University Continuing Studies. Click here to register for a June 23 information session on the program.

Turns out Twitter may be more addictive than booze, tobacco, caffeine, sleep and sex. A 2010 study of US college students forced to go 24 hours without a tweet found 72% of participants described the experience as everything from “physically and mentally distressing” to “isolating”.

Mack thinks we’re also addicted to the attention we get from social media.

From the guy who dumps his partner with a tweet from Tim Horton’s to Jason Russell’s (Kony2012 maker) viral YouTube activism video and subsequent personal meltdown, social media has become our (sometimes unwanted) attention drug of choice.

· 100 million active users tweet 250 million times a day, every day.

· The Japan earthquake created 5,530 tweets/second (tps).

· News of Beyoncé’s pregnancy generated 8,869 tps.

· 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every second. 4 billion videos are viewed a day.

Learn about tweets, tube, texts and tactics of the addictive kind.

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The Pulitzer Prize medal.

If digital journalism needed an official endorsement, it got it Monday (April 16) when the online-only Huffington Post and reporter David Wood received a Pulitzer Prize. Wood’s series Beyond the Battlefield took the honour in the national reporting category. The series delved into the challenges faced by severely wounded American soldiers after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan tours.

The Huffington Post’s win represents the first Pulitzer for a digital only news outlet. But it’s not the first time they’ve recognized online journalism. In 2010 the Seattle Times received the prize for breaking news as a result of its coverage of the shooting deaths of four police officers in a coffee shop. The Pulitzer singled the out the Times for both its online and print coverage.

The Pulitzer Prize board, to its credit, has not separated digital and print journalism. Instead they have melded the two together in awarding its prizes. Good journalism, according to the Pulitzers, can be found in both formats.

To learn more about digital journalism, enrol in the New Media Journalism Certificate program offered by Simon Fraser University Continuing Studies. Click here to register for a June 23 information session on the program.

After 244 years the Encyclopedia Britannica, the 32-volume, gold-lettered reference has gone out of print. The reality of the digital world and competition from the free Wikipedia website killed off the $1,395 US print version.

Mack grew up in a household where Britannica was proudly displayed. All 29 pounds of his family’s prized reference was sold at a garage sale a few decades later. Britannica only sold 8,000 copies of its last printed edition and print encyclopaedias account for less than 1% of Britannica’s revenue.

Perhaps a little sadly, Britannica is the latest of fading print publications – from reference books to catalogues – that are out already out of date the moment they’re printed and have, perhaps, outlived their purpose in a digital world.

Learn more about online references, research and the changing digital landscape.

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I came across this journalistic tip searching Google… no surprise.

Search engines like Google have long been a journalist’s best friend. Not only do we use these algorithm-powered web crawlers to help research issues and people, we’ve started using more advanced search features to get the jump on our journalistic competition.

For example, reporters were quick to take advantage of tools like Google Alerts, which alerts you whenever new content is posted that matches search terms you’ve previously input. For example, I’m alerted by email when content is posted using key words and phrases like ‘digital journalism’ or ‘new media reporter.’

But here’s a new tool to add to your online toolbox.

Web analytics, which we normally use to track visitors to our websites, can also search out potential stories. Chris and Laura Amico, who run the crime news website Homicide Watch D.C., rely on analytics to scoop the competition on previously unreported murders in Washington, D.C. What they do is run analytics to find out what search terms are being used by visitors to get to their site. Then they compare those search terms to their website content. If a search term doesn’t match up to the content, they assume visitors are searching for information on an unreported homicide.

Next they search the web using those terms. If they get a hit it’s often on Facebook and Twitter, where people are quick to post digital memorials and inform family and friends of the bad news. The Amicos call their technique online shoe-leather reporting because they’re listening to what people are chatting about.

To learn more about digital journalism, enrol in the New Media Journalism Certificate program offered by Simon Fraser University Continuing Studies. Click here to register for a June 23 information session on the program.

The Google Generation refers to those who have grown up in a digital world and are both mobile and impatient.

More than 3 billion Google searches – that’s 34,000 per second – are made every day. One in 7 of these searches are made on 5.9 billion mobile phones and 1 in 4 mobile users browse only on their mobiles – not desktops, laptops or tablets – just their phones.

Mobile users spend an average of 27 minutes a day texting, talking and browsing. Despite all this time online mobile users hate to wait. Half of mobile users will abandon a search if the website takes more than 10 seconds to load. And 75% will not return to a site that is too slow.

Learn more about mobile communications and social networking.

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