“Every morning, the business and political elite in the biggest province on Canada’s East Coast turns to an unlikely source of information about their own world.

Among all the online news organizations trying to find a way to profitability, consider AllNovaScotia.com, which has just celebrated 10 years online and now challenges its historic print rival for the attention of the province’s leaders …”

Read more at Nieman

The Canadian Association of Journalists Ethics Committee released  guidelines for updating and correcting information published online.

This is the first comprehensive statement on best practices that we know of. The guiding principle of the document is transparency — that we don’t simply “scrub” news content and hope that no one has noticed.

Kathy English at the Toronto Star and Craig Silverman should take the majority of credit for this report. But I and a few other journalists played a supporting role.

Take a read.

I delivered the paper April 1, 2011 at the International Symposium on Online Journalism held in Austin, Texas.

You can also read a summary I wrote up for the Nieman Journalism Lab.

The research looked at the type of editorial content editors were placing into Foursquare and also the roles and tasks the editors were performing. Broadly, the newspaper content placed in Foursquare was:

• An opinion, review, guide or first-person account
• Described with the goal of inspiring action
• Timeless — or about an event of 2+ days
• About a specific location or an activity done at a specific type of location
• Placed at a location where people gather socially

Read the full paper or view the presentation slides below.

We’ve referred to it informally as “the digital take on journalism fundamentals.” The book takes the approach of focusing on the Internet as the primary medium for news. So, for example, we don’t have chapters on radio or television, or even traditional news writing. Instead, we have chapters on audio, video and structuring stories online.

The core of the book, however, focuses on critical thinking, ethics and research applied to publishing on the web.

It starts off with rigorous “think pieces” that frame the state of the news industry within the tremendous change brought about by the Internet. These are authored by a great team of authors from the news business:

• Former Globe and Mail communities editor — and now tech journalist for Gigaom Mathew Ingram — discusses journalists’ changing relationship with the audience in Chapter 2.
• Open government advocate David Eaves and scholar Taylor Owen outline seven lessons newspapers can learn from the Internet in Chapter 3.
• Consultant and NYU prof Clay Shirky argues that society needs journalism, not newspapers in Chapter 4, a re-print of his hugely influential 2009 blog post.
• David Beers, founder of the highly respected independent news and commentary site The Tyee, recommends strategies for collaboration and niche publishing in Chapter 23, the final chapter of the book.

The co-editors are my colleagues Paul Benedetti and Kim Kierans. They are supported by a top-notch roster of academics from Canadian and U.S. universities who have written the remaining chapters on topics such as interviewing, media law and social media. I’ve written two:

• Chapter 8: Roles and Skills for Cross-Platform Reporting
• Chapter 20: Data Visualizations and Interactives

Take a look at the sample chapters available — just a small part of what I believe is a superior guide to journalism fundamentals in the new digital landscape.

I’m excited about the upcoming launch of a new journalism textbook I’ve co-edited with my colleagues Paul Benedetti and Kim Kierans. It’ll be published in May 2010 by Emond Montgomery Publications and it’s tentatively titled “The New Journalist: Roles, Skills, and Critical Thinking.”

We’re referring to it as “the digital take on journalism fundamentals.” It’s a guide to critical thinking, ethics and research in an age of rapid technological change.

I’ve written two chapters:

• Cross-Platform Reporting Roles and Skills
• Visualizations & Interactive Content

The other chapters are authored by a top-notch roster of Canadian journalism professors and practitioners. More details on the launch date coming soon.