Kealey Communications

My website rejuvenation project is almost complete and as you can see I’m now set up as a consultant with much less emphasis on my research. That being said, you can still go through the archive of the blog (all the way back to it’s inception in November 2009) to find much of the work I did over the last few years for my thesis research.

As a consultant my goal is to help small businesses and not-for-profit organizations with their media and social media outreach. I very much enjoy the problematic of how best to communicate and to whom that these types of organizations face in their outreach goals. Social media is especially interesting, as it is an ever expanding world with many, many different platforms. I’ve heard more than once that “we need to be there” without any thought given to why, how or where. It is fun to jump on bandwagons and try new things out, but thought needs to be given to the why. Tools are not strategies and the many different social media platforms often distract you from your actual goal. Always remember the why and then you can figure out the who, what, where, when and how.

As my thesis is officially submitted and I near the completion of my MA in Communications from the University of Ottawa, I find myself wanting to redirect this website. It will be less about my thesis and more about my future. While the old blog and thesis existed under the name “The Future is Not Black and White,” I feel that the future is indeed full of promise and lots of colour!

Stay tuned for news about what’s next in the world of Kealey Communications!

Alan Bass, John Stackhouse, Kirk LaPointe, David Estok, David Beers

The annual Canadian Association of Journalists meeting is happening right now in Montreal at the Grand Plaza hotel. This is my first time attending and I really enjoyed Rob Curley’s keynote yesterday morning – I tweeted a great deal of the highlights if you want to read the blow by blow. The Las Vegas Sun is doing some really interesting stuff. Below is the audio from the session – the audio can be slow to load so be patient!

Online journalism panel – You Can’t Fight the Future with Kirk Lapointe of the Vancouver Sun, Greg Horn (Kahnawakenews.com, David Beers of The Tyee

Ottawa’s Information Lockdown and What Journalists Should DO About it with Rob Russ, CP, Kady O’Malley, CBC Ottawa and Pierre Duchesne, Radio-Canada – please note the stars I’ve drawn are book marks in the audio if you want to move around the recording.

Day two at the Westin is trucking along. Here are two of the panels – the third is taking place right now and I will update once it’s done.

The first panel was “Business sustainability: who will provide quality content and how?”. It featured Robert Picard, who is the Director of Media Management and Transformation Centre at a University in Sweden as well as a Fellow of the Reuters Institute, University of Oxford and Dr. Fred Fletcher, UBC Grad School of Journalism and Canadian Media Research Consortium. The panel was moderated by Ottawa’s own Carleton University prof, Christopher Waddell.

The second panel discussion was the “Role and relevance of national cultural policymakers and regulators in a borderless world” – any star is a bookmark and you can download it. Panelists were Sheridan Scott, Bennett Jones LLP, Richard French, CN Tellier Prof of Business and Public Policy at the University of Ottawa, and Peter Menzies, Commissioner, Alberta and Northwest Territories, Canadian Radio and Television and Telecommunications Commission, all of whom were moderated by Mary Lou Finlay of CBC fame.

The third panel of the day was moderated by the very talented and lovely Jennifer Corriero from Taking IT Global (who tried to get me to be a big brave girl and ask a question but I couldn’t bring myself to face the microphone), and she was in charge of the discussion entitled “Alternative content production and distribution models” which was gave the audience a good view into The Tyee through its Founding editor, David Beers, Tou.tv by Executive Director of Internet and Digital Services, Genevieve Rossier and Donna Logan who is President of the Canadian Media Research Consortium. Again, each star is a bookmark so that you can fast forward through the talks.

Andrew Potter gives a reflection/summary of the two day symposium:

Jeff Jarvis spoke tonight to a group of 150 people here in Ottawa about “Why global media are in crisis and what to do about it” at the Public Policy Forum’s event: Reinventing Canadian Media. Here is an embedded file of my notes and the audio. It takes a while to load, so please be patient!

David Mitchell, president of the PPF and David Walden, Secretary-General, Canadian Commission for UNESCO did the introductions:

This is the version of the paper I just submitted to the CCA for my talk on June 1. I’m going to be re-working it for the actual presentation – both because it’s too long for my ten minutes and because I’m hoping to have more data analysis done by then!

Download research paper

As always feedback welcome!

C.

Canwest’s Parliament Hill reporter David Akin (@davidakin) spoke to a room full of PR and Communication professionals today during a CNW event called The New Media Ecosystem. I livescribed it and as per usual please be patient – the audio load time is a bit brutal.

I haven’t posted in a while – I’ve been busy trying to figure out ways to conqueror my insane amount of data (as well as quite possibly repeatedly banging my head off my desk). For my discourse analysis on the future of newspapers, I was going to use the tweets of the top media experts including the first level links that they tweeted (including comments where available).

Sounds big but manageable, maybe!? Well … the original data set is over 18,000 tweets from 25 people over a two month span. I always knew I was going to narrow that down to the top 20 experts but that still leaves me with 16,000-odd tweets. After having several mini-strokes and maybe a few drinks I went to see one of my committee members who quite rightly pointed out that it just wasn’t doable by hand. He smiled and knowingly said “Get Nvivo”.

Nvivo is a qualitative data analysis software that is apparently going to make my life easier but thus far I’ve found out that it won’t run on my mac, costs $200 and is only installed on four machines on the entire University of Ottawa campus. Nonetheless, I’ve recalled all the books from the library on the program and have set out to try and figure out how to parse my data into the program. Thus far I have had no luck. I am desperately hoping to find someone who actually knows how to use the program!

So yeah, if you know Nvivo and want my undying love (or some reasonable facsimile) please let me know!

Was lucky to be able to go see Yochai Benkler this morning at the University of Ottawa. He spoke fast for an entire hour because the event started a bit late – I didn’t get to stay around for the Q&A unfortunately. But I recorded and took notes the best I could!

Please be patient as always because the audio is a bit slow to load.