Ironies in Calgary: Fear and Loathing

I have a rare occasion here in my Calgary hotel room to collect some thoughts.

Below: My general impression of Calgary. My experience as the resident evangelist of citizen journalism.
Happy go-lucky meetings with local Calgarian geeks — thank goodness we are all connected!

First off – My general impression of Calgary

A beautiful clean city. The downtown is going through some HUGE development. Even without being told I could tell that this is oil
country. The analogies to Texas are everywhere: from Cattle and oil to the overall conservative nature of the city.

I came here for a media and law seminar put on by the Law Society of Alberta Calgary.

The first two-thirds of the day were interesting, but also not in my field of interest. For one, I don’t know the nuances of Canadian law, which apparently is different than in the US to the chagrin of Canadian journalists.

My moment was during the third panel – where I was the resident citizen journalists.

It was clear from the beginning that I didn’t have the home court advantage that I often experience at tech meetups or unconferences,
where blogging is both understood and accepted as a viable form of getting information. In those situations I’m really just preaching to
the choir. To be honest, it was nice having to defend citizen journalism. To systematically explain how the Internet brought us here,
why it’s not going to go backwards and what journalists can do to embrace and own citizen journalism instead of running scared.

But to really grok this takes a lot of background knowledge or experience on the web. If you never read blogs (which we did a survey and guess what — only two people in the audience did and I was one of them) then the whole concept might be too foreign.

The rhetoric alone that was used to describe what I do bothered me. There was this assumption that blogs = citizen journalism. Blogs are a platform, just like paper. I can use paper to write a crappy poem, a little love letter or write a news article. Not all blogs are important for the media, YES… I get that. But a lot are and in the States people are using them to aggregate information and become engaged in civic conversation. There was this assumption that since some blogs don’t abide by professional standards then NO blogs do. And if no blogs do — then everything online is just chaos.

Hey. Look at PaidContent (Columbia Alumni), TPM, HuffingtonPost or any of the other major blog networks out there. These people hold themselves to standards because it’s in their interest. Otherwise — why would I continue to read them. Journalism is about the exchange of information – and it’s a free market. May the best man win.

I understood that the lawyers in the audience might not be with it. Hey, it’s not their job to focus on the changing media landscape (although I did tell them to check out Blawgs). But a lot of the Canadian journalists didn’t seem to get it either.

I was happy afterwords to speak with a reporter from the Calgary Herald who was not only hip to it all, wants to bring change to her own
newsroom. Amen and good luck. I know how hard change in a newsroom can be.

It was also nice to meet other journalists from the area like Dawn Walton from the Globe and Mail – who has real insight on the
differences between American and Canadian journalism.

So after all that lawyer talk which involved defending citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, I needed to geek out. Here’s where the irony comes in.

Calgary is home to some serious web 2.0 startups.

In addition to iStockPhotography, which has changed the way photojournalism is done Calgary is home to the Cambrian House (which helped to fund Assignment Zero…thanks guys!). So while I was here I met with two people from Cambrian House.

Cambrian House is all about “crowdsourcing” — they own it, they want to spread it. So much of what I talked about at the panel is that citizen journalism is close to a tipping point — and just needs that breakthrough moment. And here, in their own city, is a web startup that is trying to figure out how to create that breakthrough moment. It’s right under their nose. That both these startups and others like them are starting up in Canada suggests there is a vibrant geek community in Calgary. Hell, StumbledUpon started in Calgary — which has a direct relevance to journalism in my opinion (social news as an act of journalism).

Meeting up with Jasmine and Sarah from Cambrian House was a perfect juxtaposition from the seminar earlier in the day: talking geek with them about everything staying open, open spaces, and online communities in general reminded me that — I’m not crazy. This is really happening and I should only continue to defend and promote citizen journalism to those that don’t necessarily understand it.

So that was my trip to Calgary. Tomorrow I spend the day flying.

Monday I’m going to visit Yahoo’s campus in the Bay Area. I’m not sure if I can blog about why yet (no — it’s nothing that exciting, I just don’t want to step on anyone’s toes). But if I am able to write about that — I will.