I think we all know what my New Year’s Resolution is

I think we all know what my New Year’s Resolution is: blog more!

My thoughts on The Future of Media: Part 1

When I found out my boss was planning to attend her first Toronto Girl Geek Dinner, I jumped at the chance to join her. I’m a girl and a geek; plus, I figured I could use the networking experience and something fun to do on a Monday night.

I was also very interested in attending because the discussion topic was “The Future of Media.”

As a recent journalism graduate and someone who is now working as an editor in what I’d consider to be on the way to the future of media, I’m really interested to hear what others have to say about this and how other young women (a demographic that seemed to dominate my j-skool classes, but which is sometimes scarce in traditional newsrooms) are shaping the future of media as well.

What Lauren and I found ourselves in was a room full of women who mostly work in the areas of media which are so broken that people speculate every day when the mainstream media’s metaphorical “end of days” will come (or if those days are already upon us). They are: radio, television, print and telecommunications, plus the academics who teach those subjects in our colleges and universities.

And that’s fair enough. Why wouldn’t these successful, technologically engaged, intelligent women want to be at the forefront of a huge shift in their industries?

(As an aside, from what I could see, Lauren and I were the only people who raised our hands to indicate we were both content producers and marketers. I’ll bring this up again in the later parts of this series.)

However, as led by these women, the hot topic of conversation was not “The Future of Media,” but the present of mostly social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Connect, hype, digital literacy, privacy concerns, etc. You can read the list here.

At the end of the night, I felt let down and left the dinner thinking that the women driving these debates completely missed the point: social media is not the media we should be talking about.

We should be talking about the media that we all work in; the media that people who don’t know everything turn to in order to find the information they need to know.

The only aspect of “The Future of Media” that was actually discussed was the CBC’s Angela Misri briefly explaining CBC podcasts and switching the livestreams to mp3 format.

I’m a huge fan of CBC Radio One. I listen to the station live in the mornings while I get ready for work, but some of the best shows air during working hours or later on at night, and I miss the live broadcasts.

I also don’t enjoy scheduling my life around my favourite programs, whether on radio or TV. So I think of the CBC podcasts kind of like TiVo or online streaming video – I can listen to the shows when I want to, skip the interruptions (traffic, weather, hourly news, etc.) and pause when I need to.

Yes, the CBC is doing a great job and is potentially ahead of the curve, but it can’t be the future of commercial media because it’s publicly funded. It doesn’t have to make money. There are no ads, just information. Companies and products are often mentioned, and endorsed, because the CBC thinks they’re of interest to its audience, but no money changes hands because it’s a publicly funded media outlet.

To survive and thrive, media outlets will have to become more like the CBC, but advertisers will actually pay the content producers to turn the advertising into content that is relevant to the outlet’s audience.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series on The Future of Media, in which I will discuss what exactly I mean by this statement, how it will work and why content producers won’t have as much trouble avoid corruption as we think they will.

No, I haven’t died

I haven’t written here in two months, and I can’t believe it. I honestly feel like I wrote that last post … last week? Maybe two weeks ago. But not two months.

I still don’t have the Internet at my apartment, and I’m kind of getting used to it because it gives me the freedom and the time to do other things. But it also means I don’t have any time for blogging. And that sucks.

But I’m not going to beat myself up about it too much. I’m just going to post an article of mine that was published yesterday, and move on.

TalentEgg has been providing content for the careers and education section of the new free Toronto evening newspaper t.o.night, which is available in some newspaper boxes at major hubs (such as Union Station), but which is mostly handed out by old school newsies in the downtown financial district. For those of you who have access to t.o.night, our content appears every Tuesday.

I’ve simply edited some of the articles we’ve published in the past and passed it on to the editors at the newspaper, but this week I had the opportunity to report and write a short news story about the Canada’s Top Campus Employers rankings.

It’s the first thing I’ve had published in print since my stint at the National Post (which, dramatically, was almost shut down last week) and although I publish my own writing online through TalentEgg almost every day, there’s just something special about print.

So, here it is. (Somewhat surprisingly, they don’t publish any of their content online, so I’m going old school with a scan.)

September monthly goal meet-up

Following my very cliché quarter-life crisis post, I realized that in order to feel good about my life I have to be continually setting goals for myself and working toward them. Achieving goals once in a while is great too, but what really gets me out of bed every morning is just the fact that there are thing to do.

I was inspired to track some of my goals here on my blog after seeing Rebecca Thorman do the same over at Modite earlier tonight (check out her post for the “rules”). I think it’s a great idea to establish and track goals in a such a public forum. I’m not a To-Do List person at all, but I like this concept a lot.

To start this on the right foot, here are some goals I had for August – some of which I accomplished and some I didn’t:

• Negotiate for a raise so I can move back to the city and not have to live in a cardboard box
• Go to the gym 3 times a week (I left my gym shoes in my cousin’s car and I haven’t seen her again yet, so…)
• Get a new cell phone and get on a plan instead of doing “pay as you go” (got a BlackBerry!)
• Start looking for an apartment for October 1st (found a cheap apartment in a good neighbourhood for September 1st, but with half price rent for September – score!)
• Go to Montréal to visit family (this is long overdue, but it had to be postponed because I can’t afford rent and such an expensive trip at the same time)

Life and career goals for September:

• Move into the new apartment, get all nest-y and finish painting over Labour Day weekend
• Go to the beach a few times before winter sets it since I live right on it now – I already took my first early-morning beach walk last weekend when I crashed at the empty apartment to begin cleaning and painting
• Get the Internet at home (!!!)
• Throw a house-warming party
• Hire an intern to help me with all the insanity at work
• Actually trust said intern enough to delegate tasks to him/her

Let the ritual begin

I’ve had a really hard time blogging this summer because I’ve been in limbo and I hate being in limbo. It’s tough to be inspired when I’m not moving forward. Hell, it’s tough to be inspired when I don’t leave the house for days on end.

Also, I don’t like blogging about how much I hate parts of my life. I did that for years as a teenager, and while I still have plenty of teenage angst inside of me at age 23, I stopped writing in my livejournal for a reason. I used to feel better when I spilled out all my negativity into a space like that, but now it just makes me feel worse. If I don’t write it down, then I can just forget about it.

But now, things are starting to move again. I’m moving again, literally. I got a cute one bedroom in The Beaches and although it requires a lot of TLC, it’s worth it. It’s cheap and it’s small, but it’s just me so it’s a good size. The lake, the beach and the boardwalk are one block away. The neighbourhood is full of families and dogs and ridiculously in shape people who all seem very relaxed because they live by the water. I like it.

I took it even though I promised myself I wouldn’t paint another apartment for a long time, and even though it needed to be cleaned from top to bottom. I’m tired of painting and the walls in particular were unbelievably dirty.

But as I scrubbed the walls of their grime and wiped away the cobwebs, I realized it’s a good experience to go through. It’s like a ritual that allows me to see every centimeter of my new home up close and personal. I’m a nester by nature, so painting everything the colours I love and putting my things just so are very important to me.

And I’ve moved so many times that it takes such a ritual for a space to feel like home. This will be my 13th move and more than half of those were just in the last five years. It took me along time to allow any place feel like home because home always meant my mom was there, and she wasn’t. She wasn’t anywhere. But I’ve come to terms with that now.

So, I move in next weekend. And I will have a life again, with friends and actually going into work every day and living in a city that is a living entity all on its own.

I think this means I can write again. Thank goodness.