By Francis Moran
The news earlier this week that Transcontinental Media was discontinuing publication of the Halifax Daily News was probably as inevitable as it was unfortunate for the 92 people who worked there. They joined scores of other newsroom and media workers who have been pink-slipped over the past little while in what is probably one of the worst employment periods for the journalism business in decades.
For those of us who worked at the News in what might charitably be called its heyday under cowboy founder and publisher, madcap Fleet Street refugee David Bentley, the news of its demise brought back — shall I say — interesting memories. My good pal Sherri Aikenhead, who was a summer cub reporter on the News the year I started there, recalled for a Globe and Mail story this week the night we ran a sensational scoop under the headline, “Agonies of a princess,” that, contrary to all rules and protocol that prohibited directly quoting one of the British royal family, directly quoted Diana, Princess of Wales, on the pain she felt when the media wrote nasty things about her. You’d think we’d nominated Hitler for sainthood the way the local and international media excoriated us for breaking the so-called rules.
Read More
By Danny Sullivan
I was over in Canada last week for some important meetings and it really drove home to me the value of being able to converse face-to-face. As a remote worker, I spend a fair amount of time joining meetings by phone, which is an effective but impersonal method of communicating.
My experience last week of sitting in a new client’s boardroom with about ten other people in the room was very positive. Ideas were being exchanged and the conversation was flowing dynamically. Had I been forced to participate in the same meeting by conference call, it would have been a far different story. Simply trying to determine who is speaking at any one time would have been a huge challenge, let alone trying to interject with constructive comment from my little speaker in the middle of the room!
Similarly, the roundtable I had with colleagues during my visit was a highly constructive one. The benefit of being able to interact in a lively conversation, without having to wait for a suitable period of silence to make oneself heard is a real benefit. Those little physical gestures that we use to convey humour, emphasize a point, or to imply something else than what is being said, all become moot to the guy on the end of the line.
This may all sound obvious, but in today’s productivity focused workplace, we often feel that the time spent traveling to sit in the same room as a colleague or client is time that could be better spent on other things. Why not just catch up by phone and save yourself those precious minutes or hours?
Read More
By inmedia
The blogosphere seems to be abuzz with the revelation that Canadians hold many powerful positions in the U.S. and international media. We’re everywhere! An article in yesterday’s National Post tweaked Gawker and the Huffington Post to the fact that a large contingent of Canadians are influential media pundits, editors and journalists. Just as Canadians seemingly dominate the entertainment field, be it music – Celine, Avril, Shania, Nelly, Feist et al – or movies – Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Ryan Gosling, Ryan Reynolds, just to name a few – or books – Malcolm Gladwell, Douglas Coupland, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and so on, so too does it seem that the true north, strong and free is well represented in the list of influential decision-makers in the media. Anecdotally, I was indeed surprised last year when my mother was planning on attending her high school reunion and discovered that she went to the same high school as Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor in chief. Pleasantly surprised though I was, sadly, my subscription cost remains the same.
By Francis Moran
What does an RFID infrastructure company from St. John’s, Newfoundland, have in common with the Livingston, Scotland, outfit that makes the world’s most advanced prosthetic hand? Well, besides being inmedia clients, Cathexis Innovations and Touch Bionics both find themselves this week at the same trade show, Arab Health 2008 at the Dubai International Exhibition Centre in United Arab Emirates.
Touch Bionics is there to exhibit its i-LIMB hand, the world’s first artificial hand featuring five individually articulating digits that has been been fitted to scores of patients worldwide since being launched this past summer. Cathexis, whose mobile RFID reader IDBlue is also a world first, is demonstrating its event-management application at the show, a massive undertaking billed as the largest science gathering in the Arab world.
I can’t help being tickled by what I’m going to do next — email Cathexis’s CEO Steve Taylor and Touch Bionics’ marketing director Phil Newman and suggest they look each other up. At the risk of sounding — hell, let me be honest, at the risk of being — a bit self-promotional, it’s a lovely example of both the broad range of technologies represented in our client portfolio and the truly global scale on which these companies operate. I only wish I could be in Dubai to personally introduce these two chaps to each other.
By Linda Forrest
Many moons ago, I had the great pleasure of taking a communications course with Dr. Eric McLuhan, son of world famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan. A well-respected author and professor in his own right, Dr. McLuhan’s course was designed in order to provide the students, who were studying a range of topics in business management, with a solid language base upon which to establish themselves as competent writers and communicators.
Through course material, we were taught the wonders of styling sentences and how to properly use punctuation. These sound like fundamentals and they are, but the amount of proper grammatical and punctuation training included in a typical primary and even secondary school curriculum is positively lacking. This post-secondary course had us circling grammatical errors, doing word puzzles, correcting punctuation, and learning the true value of a semi-colon among other activities in the name of strengthening our communications abilities. As a result, I feel that each student in that class ended up a better writer and although I’m not certain of the whereabouts of the majority of my classmates, I’m confident that they’re better communicators today because of it.
Having always had a love of language and reading, I consider myself quite the philomath and get positively giddy at the prospect of learning a new word (being in technology PR, this opportunity presents itself quite often, as you can imagine.) Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day email has been coming into my inbox for years now. Having had no idea that I would end up in public relations as my career, my strong feeling is that no matter where I ended up career-wise, I would have been well served by my love of knowledge and language, in part fostered by the course taught by Dr. McLuhan.
Writing is predominantly what we do here at inmedia. Although we may not subscribe fully to the idea that the medium is the message, I feel lucky to have been educated in part by Dr. McLuhan and to this day still make use of some of the reference materials provided in that class. Everyone, even professional writers need to “sharpen their saw” on a consistent basis and I’m glad to have these tools at my disposal. So, thank you, Dr. McLuhan.
