In a clever bit of PR, the folks at Edmonton’s water utility, EPCOR, released this chart showing city water consumption during the gold medal hockey game last weekend (click for a slightly larger version):
I wonder if there will be any impact on other parts of our lives? Will there be a small blip in the number of babies born nine months from now?
Small, related marketing lesson: I originally found this graphic on a coupleof blogs. I genuinely tried to find its original source on EPCOR’s website, but couldn’t. Google was no help either. When you’ve got a clever idea that gets some legs like this, make sure that people can discover and link to its original context easily.
If you’re suffering from Olympics withdrawal (as opposed to me, who’s suffering from a bit of a Olympic hangover), this might please you. It’s a video of False Creek shot while Sidney Crosby scored the overtime winner last Sunday. It’s the audio you’re interested in–you can safely fast-forward to the one-minute mark:
This morning I had breakfast with some American friends who have been up in Vancouver for the Olympics. We discussed this Tim Horton’s ad that tells the story of the reunion of an African family in a snowy Canadian airport:
It’s pretty touching, in a corporate coffee commercial kind of way. In a minute, the ad explores those two pillars of Canadian culture: the immigrant experience and Tim Horton’s.
Tim Horton’s is, of course, a much-loved Canadian brand. It’s also an incredibly mainstream brand–there’s nothing edgy about the Timmy. So this ad isn’t meant to provocatively appeal to the coasts–it’s a commercial for every Canadian watching the Olympics. And I think it’s probably appealing. We are, of course, nearly all immigrants to this land.
My American friends explained that this commercial would never, ever air in the United States. They said that there’s simply too much ill will and anger around immigration. It would mean corporate suicide for a big company to run this piece in the States.
I can’t say that I was surprised by their observation, but it’s a little sad. It’s also a reminder of how, in certain respects, we’re so different from our neighbours–spelled with the ‘u’–to the south.
“Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism.” –Graham Greene
This weekend I received an email from a local arts organization that began:
We appreciate your work as an active citizen journalist and would like to invite you…
“Hang on,” I thought, “I’m not a citizen journalist”. I am often a curator, sometimes an editorialist and occasionally a critic. I rarely ‘cover’ something, inasmuch as I attend an event and report on it, but I don’t really self-identify that way. That arts group isn’t alone, though–I’ve heard plenty of others equate “blogger” with “citizen journalist”.
For me, it’s about intent. I don’t think “I’d really like to go report on that concert”. My thought process is pretty unexamined, but it’s more like “I like Cat Power, and I like writing about the arts, so I’ll write about my experience of attending her concert. Others might be interested in what I write.”
The Most Documented Games Yet
That email got me thinking about citizen journalism. Thanks to the Olympics, it’s an idea that’s much in the public eye these days. From groups like True North Media House and Vancouver Access 2010 to dozens of individual bloggers, Twitter users and rich media makers, these are surely the most documented Games yet.
There’s no shortage of reportage. We’re going to events and writing about them. We’re photographing the Games and the streets and everything in-between. We’re having fun.
We’re covering stories. But how often are we uncovering them?
Where is the local, investigative citizen journalism? To put it another way, who’s doing the citizen reporting that isn’t fun?
Who’s pounding the pavement, making calls, sifting through government reports, sitting in town hall meetings and doing all of the difficult, time-consuming work that professional journalists have been doing? Because I sure ain’t.
I asked on Twitter, and received a couple suggestions. Sean Holman’s work at The Public Eye is one example, as are Linda Soloman’s Megan Stewart’s stories on toxic chemicals for the Vancouver Observer. Notably, both Sean and Linda are professional journalists.
Can you think of other examples? Has any citizen journalist broken a story around the Olympics?
Five Percent Off the Top
I’m not trying to discredit or criticize citizen journalism. I just worry that most of it is, by its nature, lightweight and short term. Few of us have the time, resources, expertise, connections and (most importantly, I think) motivation to do the in-depth work of your average investigative journalist. On top of those discouragements, the web doesn’t particularly reward the long-form article or feature-length documentary. It’s a bite-sized medium.
If we assume that the writing is on the wall for much of the mainstream media, where does that leave us? I liked how Clay Shirky put it in a 2009 talk at Harvard:
Which leaves us with a giant hole, and a very threatening one. And in the nightmare scenario that I’ve kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they’re shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.
Will citizen journalists step in to fill this void? I hope so, but you’d be hard-pressed to get me to sit through even one town-hall meeting. I’m happy to volunteer my time for good causes, but monitoring city hall isn’t a priority.
I know I’m describing a problem without offering many solutions. Here are a couple of ideas:
There are examples of an emerging kind of citizen statistician, who uses access to open governmental data to uncover political or corporate malfeasance.
Another solution is to divide the work of one journalist among 15 citizen journalists, and have each of them attend four town hall meetings a year. Collaborative tools make this approach possible if challenging.
The more I think about it, the investigative citizen journalists of the 21st century are the activists of the 20th. They care enough about a particular topic to dig into it with enough effort and fervor to uncover new truths.
What do you think? Where will we find the investigative journalists of the future?
The subtitled Hitler trope is a gift that keeps on giving. I don’t know why I find them so entertaining, but whether it’s the Sundin trade or problems with Windows Vista, they always amuse me. Maybe it’s because I saw the original film, and each send-up reminds me of the original’s super-serious tone?
In any case, Graeme McRanor has produced this latest example, on the Winter Olympics. Rated PG for frequent cursing:
Watching and reading coverage of the Olympics, I’ve observed a lot of projections and comparisons involving Canada’s medal haul for 2010 and previous years (the latest example was in a Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick). I’ve a lot of graphics showing medal totals for the previous Olympics held in Canada.
It’s a rich vein for the media, and a natural one. After all, it’s a sports competitions, where achievements are measured empirically.
I got to thinking about whether those were fair comparisons to make. Surely the number of medals has grown over the past, say, 35 years. And surely the number of participating nations and athletes has grown as well. So, I did what I always do when I wonder about something. I made a chart (click for gold medal bigness):
It shows the number of medals up for grabs at each Olympics, and also the number of nations participating. Interestingly, since 1976, the number of available medals and nations attending have grown at similar rates–they’re at 175% what they were. As you can see, the rate of medals has, recent years, exceeded the growth of participating nations.
And then there’s the number of athletes participating. In 1976, there were roughly 30 athletes per event. In 2010, that’s still the case.
My analysis is pretty rudimentary, but it seems like the amount of competition has stayed consistent over the past 35 years. It’s no more or less difficult to win a medal at the Olympics than it was when I was born.
What do you know? I wasn’t a Debbie Downer after all. Media folks, compare medal counts until your graphic designer cramps up.
James sent along this great, long profile of the city from The Walrus magazine. It’s by Gary Stephen Ross, the current editor-in-chief of Vancouver magazine. He’s written an insightful, well-observed piece that’s neither cheer-leading nor bitter:
Amid the stereotypes, of course, obscured by them, Vancouverites live substantial, complicated, inaccessible lives. Newcomers say folks here are quick to engage you in a friendly chat but slow to invite you over for dinner. There may be a flaky, hippie vibe to the lineup at Trout Lake Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, but there is a seriousness of purpose as well, an act-on-it conviction that organic tomatoes from the Okanagan are in every way superior to industrial tomatoes from Mexico. Local initiatives to address the Downtown Eastside, too, are more than compulsory nods toward civic responsibility; they are attempts to ameliorate vexing problems before they ossify into permanence.
For anybody wanting to understand our city, this is a terrific place to start.
One of the undervalued aspects of the Internet is its endless capacity to enable nostalgia. Whether you had a childhood love of My Little Pony, Dungeons & Dragons or a defunct hockey team, there’s a website (and probably an eBay auction) where you can revisit that pleasure of your youth.
I was reminded of this phenomenon over the weekend, when a friend and I were discussing a new Olympics-themed video game called Vancouver 2010. Like many Olympics computer games before it, it enables you to play a number of the sports from the Winter Games. Here’s a trailer:
It’s noteworthy that the Games’ three sports that are most popular among Canadians–ice hockey, figure skating and curling–don’t appear in this game. It’s not surprising–hockey has its own franchise games, figure skating would be tricky to program effectively (imagine the control scheme) and curling, well, is curling. That said, I think curling would make a great game for the Wii.
The Heady Days of Microsoft Decathlon
My friend reminded me of a slightly earlier sports mini-games-within-a-game for the PC. It was called Microsoft Decathlon, and, believe it or not, it was published in 1982. 1982! The first version of PC-DOS, on which is ran, was only released in August, 1981. I probably didn’t play the game until 1984 or 1985, but I played it a lot. When I watched this video, the sense of nostalgia was visceral:
The crazy midi theme, the four colour interface, the high jump mat labeled “FOAM PIT”–it all came back to me. The whole video is 10 minutes, so don’t bother watching the whole thing. I might draw your attention, however, to the awesome rendering of the shot-put event.
When you compare those two videos, it’s a little shocking how far games have come in 25 years. What will they look like in another 25 years? How much will innovation slow down, as has happened in television and film?
In the past few days, I’ve gotten news from sundry friends and longtime readers about projects, causes and sundry stuff they’re working on. I thought I’d pass it on:
Phillip’s been working on this interesting project for the Cultural Olympiad of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The display interface is very fancy.
