Edmonton’s NextGen Invites Submissions for Pecha Kucha Night in September
Edmonton’s NextGen invites submissions for the next Pecha Kucha Night (PKN) in Edmonton held on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at the Myer Horowitz Theatre. Edmonton’s Next Gen was the first to host Pecha Kucha Night in Western Canada. The event usually sells out to an audience of 450-600. Read more 
CRTC Renews Licences of English-language Television Services
Today, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) renewed the licences of all English-language television services operated by Rogers Media until 2014, and the licences of the services operated by Bell Media, Corus Entertainment and Shaw Media until 2016. Over the next five years, Bell Media, Corus Entertainment and Shaw Media must allocate at least 30 per cent of gross annual revenues to the production of Canadian programs. They must also direct at least 5 per cent of these expenditures to finance programs of national interest, with the exception of Corus Entertainment who will have to allocate at least 9 per cent of gross annual revenues. Read more
United Way Edmonton Launches New Magazine to Celebrate their 70th Anniversary
The United Way of the Alberta Capital Region launched a new magazine this summer to “explore a number of current topics, including: homelessness, unsung heroes, stories of struggle and triumph, donor support, and the latest facts about our community. It is a magazine about our community, for our community.” In it they plan to cover the most pressing social issues experienced in the region, create meaningful dialogue, encourage support and celebrate the successes. United Way is active throughout the community year-round, leading initiatives, delivering programs and events, working with partners, creating awareness, sharing results and more. “What better way to talk about all of these activities,” writes the editor Nancy Critchley, “than in a magazine, unique to the cause and to the collective efforts?” Read more
Edmonton Journal Invites Readers to Name Their Community Newsroom
We’re building a vibrant new community newsroom at The Journal. It will be a place for you to help report on news in our community, share photos (like the one above), stories or videos, and send us data to be mapped and analyzed. We want to reach out to the experts in the community, tap into your passions, and build bridges into areas we haven’t yet reached. By working with you, we can share more about what’s going on in Edmonton and northern Alberta – and find out why it’s important to you. You’ll get a chance to contribute to the stories our professional journalists are working on, adding your expertise and first-hand experiences. It’s about collective wisdom: a story or project with many voices should will have more impact – or simply be more fun. Read more
MacEwan University Rebrands their Student Newspaper to The Griff in September
Come September MacEwan will rebrand their student newspaper from Intercamp to The Griff with a nod to their athletic teams, The Griffins. The student newspaper began as a newsletter in the early 1990s when MacEwan was still a community college. This name Intercamp reflected and united the four individual campuses that make up MacEwan. When MacEwan dropped community from its name in 1999, Intercamp was being published as a full-fledged newspaper. MacEwan has come a long way since then, and to celebrate this evolution, they decided it was time the student newspaper followed suit. See the rest of the posting by Jenny Feniak, former events reporter for the Edmonton Sun.
Alberta Media Bytes
Here you’ll find little bytes of information about media in Alberta that were not detailed enough to warrant their own article but are nevertheless interesting announcements in the media landscape in Alberta. New broadcasting licences, new magazines or newspapers and new online news initiatives such as GigCity.ca and YEGnews.com. Read more
Edmonton’s YegNews.com Launches a New Editor
YegNews.com is a purely online news website focused on news of, by and about Edmonton and Edmontonians. Their goal is to “produce informative, interesting and entertaining original reporting in a variety of areas including, but not limited to — Breaking news, Politics – local, provincial & federal, Sports & games, Entertainment, Food, Music, Night life, Business & technology, Opinions & Editorial, Health, Education, Letters to the editor, Profiles of Edmontonians. ” Launched this last May 2011 with Scott McKeen, former columnist of the Edmonton Journal, Scott has since departed and Dave Clark, MacEwan journalism graduate and former news reporter for the Sherwood Park News, is now their new editor. Read more
Before You Hit the Send Button on Your Next Email Read This
I was a big fan of Jian Ghomeshi host of Q on CBC Radio One. After today’s show, I am an even bigger fan. Today he interviewed Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and curator of the TED Conferences. The topic was on the eMail Charter Anderson had posted to his website. From Anderson’s perspective (and mine and at least 9,564 others according to the Like button posted next to the charter), email has become the “tragedy of the commons.” One of the reasons, as Anderson points out, is because email takes less time for the sender to write than than it takes the recipient to respond. Read more
Build Your Own Joomla! or WordPress Website Workshop Online
If you’re a creative writer with an eye to publication, you need a website. If you’re a business owner, with products and services to sell, you need a website. If you’re the communications department for your nonprofit organization, you need a website. But why? Where do you start? And more importantly how much time and money will it take to build or rebuild your own website? To be present on the web is to be archived on the web where your content is searchable, accessible, shareable and more durable than any article or ad in newspapers, magazines or on television or radio. If you, your company or your organization aren’t discovered online, you don’t exist. If you’re already online and your website hasn’t been updated in the last couple of years, it won’t be ranked highly by the search engines and you don’t exist. In the new rules of marketing and personal branding, if you don’t have your own website or blog, you don’t exist. Read more
Shelley Youngblut: Calgary’s Swerve Magazine Rebel with a Cause
Shelley Youngblut had a problem. How can I get people like me to feel they can do home improvement? She was working on art ideas for a cover story titled “What’s the Worst That Can Happen?” So, when the Swerve editor-in-chief saw someone dressed as Mike Holmes at a Halloween party, she thought, Wouldn’t it be funny to put him on the cover? She found a local impersonator. Perfect! But she didn’t stop there. What if Mike Holmes had a terrible disaster? What if he ended up with a nail in his head? Read more
ACCESS Television in Alberta to Rebrand as CTV Two
Access (styled ACCESS) is a privately owned educational television channel in the province of Alberta owned by Bell Media. The channel is primarily designated as “satellite-to-cable undertaking” serving the whole of Alberta, and is therefore carried throughout the province on cable, but it also operates two terrestrial transmitters, CJAL-TV (channel 9) in Edmonton, where the channel’s main studios are located, and CIAN-TV (channel 13) in Calgary. Access is also available on the Bell TV satellite service on Channel 267, and on Shaw Direct Channel 351. Access airs a variety of educational and informative programs along with entertainment programs all of which include children’s programs, documentaries, feature films, talk shows, dramas, comedies and more. Since August 2008, Access has aired programming from Bell’s secondary television system A (and additionally modified its branding to more closely resemble A’s), while maintaining its educational mandate. On June 8, 2011, alongside the announcement of additional news programming at CTV’s Edmonton station, it was revealed that Access would be re-launched (as part of Bell Media’s rebranding of the A system as CTV Two in the fall of 2011. Read more
Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton Launches New Magazine for their Heroes
In April 2011, the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton launched a new magazine called Hero in order to acknowledge the heroes within and those that support the hospital. They produce 40,000 copies four times a year which they send to donors. The remaining 10,000 copies are racked throughout the city and placed in doctor’s offices. According to Jan Archbold, the Vice President of Marketing & Communications for the Stollery, and a colleague of mine many years ago, the magazine came about as a result of research they conducted. Their survey showed that donors wanted to know more about the people who work at the hospital, the patients, new technology, and about the many things that make the Stollery a centre of excellence. “When we went through the process of ‘narrowing down’ what stories to include in the magazine we realized the significant impact donors have on the quality of care and of the lives of the kids in the Stollery.” Read more
Marilyn
Jones is a corporate and social media advocate for individuals, small businesses
and nonprofit organizations in Alberta. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta,
Canada and is the proprietor of RiverCity Productions. You can contact her
by phone at 780-695-5675 or by email at marilyn@mediamag.ca.