I must admit that when the whole “MyCBC” thing was announced a couple of weeks ago (the new direction in news programming), I got a little lost in the blizzard of management buzzwords. Incubators, platforms, tri-medial integration, stakeholders, and techtonic shifts (my personal favourite) — I really didn’t quite understand what they were trying to say, but I did manage to get four corners. 
Now, thanks to an editorial by Tony Burman, it’s becoming a little more clear. Burman was replying to Warren Kinsella — National Post media columnist, lawyer, and member of punk rock band “Shit from Hell” (true), who wrote about CBC’s news direction recently.
Burman shot back and explained the MyCBC thing this way:
We’ll be looking for more user-generated content and more interactivity with our audiences. In turn, Canadians will be able to self-select the news and information programming they want from us.
CBC can no longer think of itself as a television or radio broadcaster.
Rather, we’re a content provider and our objective is to provide news and information to Canadians via their network or platform of choice.
The new service, then, will be far more than a revamped TV supper hour newscast. Though television and radio remain important platforms for us, our newscasts will also be available online, on cell phones, Blackberries and, eventually, on new emerging platforms.
Ah. Much simpler. I really hope we move on this immediately — like tomorrow — because this will be a game where the winner will be first-to-the-plate. We need Canadians to think of MyCBC as soon as they shoot a picture or video that might be newsworthy. (Remember, there are dozens of online video sites — but people only talk about YouTube.)
The biggest threat to MyCBC’s success won’t come be related to the technology or marketing, it will be if we try to apply our old rules to this new medium. Despite well-intentioned talk about how we should all take more risks, like every other large public institution people spend too much of their day worrying about making sure they follow the right process, go through the proper channels, and cover both their rear ends plus their boss and their boss’s boss.
We will have to be willing to, frankly, drop a lot of the rules and structure that was set up with the statement: “We need this extra layer of management/editing/approval just in case.”
The “just in case” rules will kill us in this new world. We’ll have to take real risks — occasionally, those risks will lead to mistakes. But it’s the only way we’ll learn.
Because we’re already behind. Alliance Atlantis launched BlogTV.ca, a clever citizen-produced video site. The kicker: It was developed by Claude Galipeau, who used to drive CBC’s new media strategy. He left earlier this year to return to A.A. Clearly, he took with him a good sense of how slow decisions can be made around here and exploited that. It’s hard to say we didn’t have it coming.
Update: Kinsella replies to Burman’s response.
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Gee, I hope with all this blaring of ‘citizen journalism’ that the CBC doesn’t forget about its talented core of freelance journalists, the journalists it has constantly demanded more and more from in terms of broadcast rights over the past few years with measly increases in rates to go along with those demands.
The last thing we need is a posse of ‘citizen journalists’ going out there armed with cellphone cameras and cheapo DV cams taking away our right to make a living because producers will have ’so much material’ to work with. Some reassurances in a commitment to keep commissioning freelance journalists from the top would certainly help.
A concerned freelance journalist
Promo girl on Radio One is MIA, though I hear her voice in Sears commercials. What happened to her?
Don:
My thinking as a viewer runs this way: Journalists, freelance and staff alike, will still be needed to help make sense of all the incoming material. In fact, I’d say they’ll be needed more than ever and their skills will be focused more and more in an investigative direction to build on the raw material supplied by the public at large. Your jobs aren’t nearly done for yet. And if anyone in upper management at CBC believes it ought to be otherwise, they’re dreaming in Virtual Reality.
Oh no! We’ll have to come up with something more innovative than a geofenced Youtube clone!
I can remember a time when CBC Engineering would not allow home videos on the air, no matter how spectacular. It didn’t matter if somebody had captured a destructive tornado or a 50 car pile-up on the 401, it didn’t meet “standards.”
Makes me laugh now.
In what way did Galipeau “develop” BlogTV? It was licensed from an Israeli company (and, moreover, has 1996-era code, with 112 layout tables on the homepage). Remember: Nobody talks about anything but YouTube, and nobody goes to Alliance Atlantis for news.
As a listener/viewer, I am both intrigued and perturbed by all the ‘citizen journalist’ stuff available. Intrigued because it feels like a public conversation and it is changing politics and life. Perturbed because it’s mostly crap and I have not enough hours in a day as it is. So much so that I subscribe to online journals that are sorting it out for me as I speak! If we do it for the right reasons and share it well, it will be wonderful. If not, it’ll just be fashion and, like fringes on bell-bottoms, missing the whole point of the underlying philosophy.
On the original question, I’d propose the following rule/guidline - “It is better to apologize than ask permission”. I’d like to see a little more of that at the Ceeb.
I don’t know how ‘citizen journalism’ is going to affect professional journalism, or freelance journalism. I do know that it will affect it, and I know that it will happen whether CBC gets involved or not, and I’m pretty sure that if CBC doesn’t get involved the affect (ratings and revenue wise) on all CBC Journalists will be greater than whatever impact ‘citizen journalism’ might have.