Mutually Inclusive PR

Public Broadcasting Debate to Stay in the Open

What chance does CBC's management group have of containing future discussion of its future direction to an internal visioning type of exercise?

Answer: None at all.

The corporation's recent  eight-week lockout of most of its employees has drawn the attention of politicians, pundits and employees.

For anal control freaks, that kind of attention would be a problem.  For a public institution that has seen its funding shrink steadily over the past decade, you can't buy this kind of advertising and public awareness.

This is a chance for the corporation to make its case publicly for better funding and a renewed mandate to reflect Canada and Canadians to themselves.

The site publicbroadcasting.ca is being set up by Justin Beach to host a public discussion about the role of public broadcasting (not limited to CBC) in Canada. CBC employees are also planning to carry on a similar discussion behind the firewall, so competitors can't take advantage of some of the ideas generated.

Visiting the site today gets you this message:

PublicBroadcasting.ca when fully up and running

• will first and foremost an advocate for public broadcasting in Canada - not just the CBC but all public broadcasters.
• will monitor news related to public broadcasting and advocate for better managed, better funded, more representative and regional Canadian Public Broadcasters as well as advocate for the ideal of public broadcasting and the promotion of Canadian content and Canadian culture.
• will host and link to blogs and other writing, podcasts, video, and even music that meets the criteria of 'about Canadians, by Canadians, for Canadians'.
• will host listservs and other forums for the public broadcasting community, it's friends and supporters.
• will provide a free email account to anyone in public broadcasting or related professions who would like an account outside of the one provided by your employer.

My apologies for formatting problems. There seems to be some problems at Six Apart's Typepad service today, so my pathetic HTML skills are revealed (Formatting problems fixed.)

Thanks to CBCUnplugged.com for the link.

The Land Starbucks Forgot

I got a humorous group e-mail from my friend Judy Gombita in Toronto yesterday, titled "Things Never Heard in Saskatchewan."

Most of the items are the usual pokes at the stereotype of rural, styrofoam-baseball-hat-wearing, small-c conservative simple folk who supposedly inhabit this province.

The jab that struck a chord for me was the truest. You would almost never hear one of us hayseeds saying, "Aw, not Tim Hortons again! Why, there's a Starbucks just down the street."

The reason we hardly ever say it is that there really ISN'T a Starbucks down the street. Hard to believe in this age of a Starbucks on almost every corner (and sometimes two), but there are only a few lonely Starbucks locations serving this province of a million people. Here in Regina, there's just the one. And in Saskatoon (more of a university town), there are five.

More and more coffee bars are posting signs that say "We serve Starbucks coffee here", but everyone knows it's not the same thing as a Starbucks outlet, complete with heavily-gelled baristas cheerily foaming your grande machiato, or adding a flavour shot to your vente cappucino.

As a fairly devoted Starbucks customer, you would think I'd be offended by the lack of expansion in our part of the world. But it doesn't really bother me. When I worked downtown, I found several spots that served coffee good enough to make me fork over premium prices. And the ubiquity of Starbucks products in grocery stores makes the trek to the offical Starbucks (R) coffee store more of a comfort thing and less of a necessity.

In the meantime, I've got my trusty thermos to keep my home-brewed coffee warm at my desk, as I chew on a piece of straw, tilt my John Deere cap back, and survey the vista of grain fields and tractors outside my window (NOT!).

(On a related note, Colin McKay groans at the backwardness of Canadian Starbucks just introducing WiFi nationwide in 2005, not in 2002 on his Canuckflack blog.)

CBC Bloggers to Be Asked to Delete "Negative References"

As part of the work resumption effort at CBC near the end of an eight-week lockout, the union has apparently agreed to ask its members to remove "negative references" about the lockout and CBC from blogs, podcasts and web sites.

Good luck.

As Tod Maffin, publisher of the remarkable CBCUnplugged.com blog, says in his posting "I will NOT erase history":

"If the Guild or CBC wants something off my web site, I will gladly provide the contact information for my lawyer and would welcome the challenge in court.

"Bring it."

To Maffin, and others commenting on his site, the importance of the blogging effort in raising awareness of the issues behind the lockout and the need for vision at Canada's public broadcaster are too important to be erased because the comments might make some people feel uncomfortable.

"The last 50 days changed labour communications forever," Maffin says. "The worst thing we can do is erase history."

As usual, Maffin and his principled, non-partisan approach to the dispute is so much closer to the right thing to do than anything management or the union could come up with.

CBC will need a blogging policy, so employees can continue to publish their thoughts within reason and without fear of reprisals. But management lost the right to dictate to its employees how they express themselves publicly when it locked them out. Any such corporate policy could not and should not apply to anything written when someone is not an employee of the corporation, or when they are unemployed through strike or lockout.

Maffin left a note on the blog that he's taking a break, working on his health, and will be exploring opportunities to be back at CBC in the future. In the meantime, his regular blog I Love Radio will continue to cover broadcasting, podcasting and the future.

Note: my spouse will soon once again be able to say she works at CBC.  And once she's back at work, I will return to my practice of commenting on CBC from the point of view of a devoted audience member.

Previous lockout posts:

CBC Deal Reduces Abusive HR Practices
CBC Corporate Disengagement Plan Is Working
Where to Get Your CBC News During the Lockout (Not on CBC)
If Tod Was in Charge, CBC Would at least Have a Vision

 

Google News Map Visualizes Online News Popularity

I've been blissfully unaware of Newsmap, a web-based tool that presents Google News in a visual way, similar to a tag cloud.

Given that Google is purposefully very text-based and very black-text-on-white-background, the map is an interesting tool.

It assigns greater visual size for news items that are popular in the past day.

Marcos Weskamp, a designer in Tokyo who created Newsmap describes it:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and  the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

Thanks to Dan Misener for the link.

CBC Deal Reduces Abusive HR Practices

After years of treating "temporary" workers like crap, CBC management has finally agreed to do the right thing and treat them like human beings. CBC and its union signed a deal overnight, setting in motion a return to work (subject to ratification by union members).

I was dubious about the Canadian Media Guild's resolve in defending the roughly one-quarter of CBC employees who work short-term contracts. Once the lockout was resolved, I was ready to lambaste the union leaders for selling out the temps. Well, I was wrong. The deal announced tonight makes major concessions in their favour.

The only word I can think of that accurately describes the way management has been treating the "temporary" workers is abusive. As a standard practice, the corporation has been requiring people to take unpaid time off, in order to avoid triggering a clause in the contract designed to recognize that someone who is working at their job for an extended period of time are no longer temporary.

They may have stayed within the letter of their agreement with workers, but they were light years away from the spirit of the contract, which clearly called for people to have some stability after they've been toiling away at CBC for a few years.

Microsoft used to do exactly the same thing. They lost a lawsuit filed by their "temps," and had to acknowledge that they were just playing games with their labour relations.

Congratulations to management for finally doing the right thing.

Congratulations to Tod Maffin, Shelagh Rogers and many others for proving that blogs and podcasts can reach internal and external audiences in new ways. They helped keep the McJobs problem at CBC in the spotlight.

Earlier posts:

CBC Corporate Disengagement Plan Is Working
Where to Get Your CBC News During the Lockout (Not on CBC)
If Tod Was in Charge, CBC Would at least Have a Vision

Frank Magazine not so Dead

A while back I reported that Frank Magazine had not been resurrected.

When the news came this summer that Frank was back, I was on holiday, and neglected to pass on the link to the new Canadian political satire online publication.

Unlike the Frank of old, which could be tucked away in a desk drawer or a briefcase, this Frank can be detected by corporate IT folks when you get your fill of salacious gossip, innuendo and satire.

No problem. If anyone questions what you're doing spending all that time reading Frank, just tell them you're doing research to protect your boss's reputation.

Thanks for the link to Antonia Zerbisias.

Reporter's Reputation Hit by Drive-by Blogging

Toronto media blogger Antonia Zerbisias posted an item yesterday about veteran foreign correspondent Paul Workman losing his gig in Paris next June in favour of David Common, who in the past three years has been doing more and more national and international reporting.

For Workman, it looks like a hard slap for refusing to file stories during the CBC lockout (foreign correspondents are apparently not part of the Canadian Media Guild).

For Common, the blog posting has career-limiting possibilities. See also a report and dozens of anonymous comments on CBC Unplugged.ca.

Zerbisias was asked in blog comments whether she asked straight-out whether Common was offered the job. She says she stands by her post, indicating she has details about the offer to Common.

More important than asking her CBC management source about the deal, why didn't she ask Common? Her posting could have a big impact on his reputation, yet she seems to run it without offering his side of the story.

She may have made an attempt to contact the two reporters mentioned, but she doesn't indicate that in her post.  In the absence of that effort, it resembles a drive-by shooting.