By Leo Valiquette
Quality writing, whether it is for journalistic, marketing or public relations purposes, is too often considered a commodity service. For those of us who have experience with the community newspaper business, where editorial content (to quote a colleague of mine) has often been viewed by publishers as “the shit that keeps the ads from bumping together,” this was painfully evident long before the advent of the Internet content mill.
The question is whether our present-day age of real-time, on-demand news and information is driving this to an extreme and leading many writers to, either accidentally or intentionally, break those tenets of ethical writing most often talked about in the context of journalism.
To be frank, some forms of content are a commodity and can be pumped out far more quickly than others. Nor are all writers created equal. I have worked with no shortage of wordsmiths who, despite the fact that this is their profession, still agonize for hours to produce something on a deadline that will still read much better if they are granted a second crack at it the next day.
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By Denzil Doyle
Productivity is a topic that attracts a great deal of attention at both the federal and provincial levels of government in Canada. Most observers paint a grim picture of Canadian productivity across all sectors.
A recent entrant to the debate is Donald Drummond who authored an article in the June 26 issue of the National Post which carried the ominous heading, No more excuses for business. Mr. Drummond is described as “one of Canada’s foremost authorities on economics and an avid contributor to and commentator on Canadian fiscal and public policy.” He is obviously someone we should listen to on a topic of such importance.
I scanned his article carefully to see if it elevated the debate beyond the quagmire in which it has been trapped in recent years. Unfortunately, it did not. Like the others, it leaves one with the impression that Canadians must run a little faster on the treadmill and apply more technology in our manufacturing sector if we are going to close the alleged productivity gap that exists between us and our major trading partners, the U.S. in particular.
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By Francis Moran
An article in The Verge this week posited the not uncommon suggestion that as goes RIM, so go the fortunes of its home town, Waterloo. Now, I’ve been travelling down to Waterloo every couple of months for the past four or five years, and we’ve written a heck of a lot here about what’s going on in the tech scene there. And I just don’t see any circumstance wherein that town needs to throw itself on any RIM funeral pyre. (And, for the record, I’m a long way from believing that RIM’s demise is in any way yet predestined.)
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By Leo Valiquette
On Monday, Francis shared some highlights from last week’s International Startup Festival in Montreal, which of course raises the obvious question, why do we not have these kinds of events in Ottawa?
After a false start, serial entrepreneur and all around community booster Scott Annan has launched his Mercury Grove startup incubator. Over at Exploriem, Bruce Firestone and the team are ramping up the scale of their operations. And then there’s the whole reincarnation of OCRI as Invest Ottawa.
There is no shortage of activity in this city in support of early-stage and growing technology ventures. Isn’t it time to knit this all together with a signature event that would feature the best and brightest from locally and abroad sharing their insights with the Ottawa community?
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To all our neighbours down south, happy Independence Day. Regular posting will resume tomorrow.
