Media Blog

During the first week of the Beijing Olympics, the Globe and Mail’s William Houston wrote an interesting article about the astounding popularity of the games’ online media coverage for both CBC and NBC .

After discussing the online coverage with the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Jacques Rogge, the head of CBC Sports Scott Moore says, "We both agreed that it is not the wave of the future," […] "It’s the wave of the present."

The amount of people that have gone online for Olympic coverage is staggering.

"CBCSports.ca is averaging two million page views a day. A year ago at this time, the site was getting about one million views a week.

"The CBC’s live streaming and video-on-demand services are receiving close to 250,000 hits daily.

"During the past NHL season, a Hockey Night in Canada telecast was streamed about 25,000 times.

"At NBC.com, it took only four days to surpass the entire Athens Olympics in page views. Beijing has 291.1 million views so far, compared with 229.8 million for all of Athens.

"On the first day of the Athens Olympics, NBC had 65,346 video streams. For Day 1 at Beijing, the number was 1.65 million.

On Monday, a day when people at work were more likely to use a computer for coverage, NBC provided 5.7 million video streams."

As both Moore and Rogge say, online news is indeed the wave of the present. In fact two of the CMRC’s latest surveys say the same: audiences are increasingly adapting to digital platforms.

In our survey on audience attitudes toward the media entitled The Credibility Gap , it is encouraging to note that 45.9 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 25 believe the internet is a very important source of news. In fact, nearly one-third of all Canadians who go online for news have stopped using other traditional media sources in the past year.

Another CMRC survey, Online Canadians and News , shows that Canadians consume an average of 2.3 hours of news and information per day. Consumers spend 24 per cent of their time watching television, while spending 22 per cent of their time consulting both the internet and newspapers.

The survey reveals the importance of the internet as a source for news and information for younger generations, accounting for 32 per cent of their total time spent, which is higher than newspapers and radio combined.

Both surveys show that traditional media must be concerned by the impact of technology, and the latest figures from CBC prove that new media must already be reckoned with.

Tags: New Media, Research

Last week, the CRTC released its first annual report on the communications industry, and there are several findings that are of interest for those concerned about the Canadian news media.

For instance, we see that the reach of new media is broader than ever and Canadian news organizations are well-positioned to connect with audiences via an array of platforms, should they choose to do so. In fact, the reach of broadband and wireless networks has attained nearly ubiquitous levels.

"Approximately 93% of Canadian households can access broadband services using landline facilities. Satellite facilities can extend this reach to virtually all Canadian households which is only limited by capacity constraints. Approximately 64% of households subscribe to high-speed Internet access service. Of these 75% subscribe to broadband service with speeds of 1.5 mbps or higher and 59% subscribe to service with speeds of 5 mbps or higher.

With respect to wireless services, approximately 98% of Canadians live within the wireless footprint. Wireless service providers have also benefited from technology and enhanced their networks to provide 3G or 3G-equivalent wireless service that is now available to 78% of Canadians. These Canadians now have access to a wireless network capable of providing them with broadband equivalent services."

Canadians are also becoming more accustomed in using new media technologies as part of their everyday lives. In fact, in 2007, 36 per cent of Canadians report using the internet for things such as watching video 31 per cent report using MP3 players.

Average hours of Internet usage has grown to over 10 hours per week, and it increases for those with high-speed broadband Internet access […]

Canada has the highest proportion of households taking up broadband connections among all of the G7 countries. Broadband to the home in Europe is primarily supplied via DSL technology over fixed telephone lines, whereas in Canada (as in the United States) consumers have more choice as broadband delivery is widely available over both cable and DSL.

The vast majority of Canadians have high-speed online access and many are embracing the many different forms of new media, demonstrating once again how vital it is for Canadian news organizations to take advantage of these new media platforms in order to reach new or migrating audiences. More

Tags: Research

Mark Glaser’s MediaShift posted an informative account of The University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and their multidisciplinary approrach to teaching journalism. The article comes from UBC Associate Professor Alfred Hermida, and he describes how the program keeps up with the way in which journalism is evolving.

"The philosophy behind this change is to provide students with an integrated approach to journalism, taking its cue from the shift at universities toward interdisciplinary collaboration. This builds on the idea of convergence journalism with its focus on training students in how to report for different platforms.

But it goes beyond teaching the next generation of reporters how to tell stories and understand the best way to deliver that story, be it in print, in a podcast or in a Google map. While this is important, our aim is to reconceptualize what we mean by journalism in a digital age, when the boundaries of what is news and who is a journalist are becoming increasingly blurred."

The UBC Graduate School of Journalism is one of the three partner members of the CMRC. [More]

Tags: UBC