Tag Archives: interactive media

“Even Chris Tindal was participating!”

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TVO's Steve Paikin used Twitter to report from the floor of the Ontario NDP leadership convention.
TVO's Steve Paikin used Twitter to report from the floor of the Ontario NDP leadership convention.

The Ontario NDP leadership race website reports that their online and social media coverage was so successful that “even Green Party activist Chris Tindal was participating in the discussion.” Yep, even me! (As you no doubt already know, I’m the prime indicator of success for stuff like this.)

In all seriousness, the provincial NDP’s interactive strategy for their leadership convention was very well conceived and executed. The coverage featured live video streaming, live blogs, and a Twitter feed that become one of the most active on all of Twitter during the leadership vote on Saturday evening. All this turned out to be essential due to the abysmal news coverage the convention itself received. (Like that Joe Trippi guy talks about: don’t get media, become the media.) From what I can tell, democratic wunderkind Dave Meslin was the driving force behind the whole thing, and both he and the party are to be commended.

Another positive indicator along the same vein is that Andrea Horwath, the new leader of the provincial NDP, had a very good (and probably the best) leadership campaign website. We can reasonably expect, therefore, that the NDP will have a strong interactive presence in the next general election.

This praise comes with two caveats from me. One is that the importance of a strong interactive strategy for Canadian political parties is, IMHO, currently overstated by many. (I am reminded of my favourite political quote of the year so far. While discussing ways to reach young voters, then-Republican chairman Mike Duncan said “We have to do it in the Facebook with the Twittering.” Priceless.)  The second is that while I sincerely wish Horwath the best of luck, I’m not convinced she was the best choice (I’m a Peter Tabuns fan), or that she has the right combination of ideas and rhetoric to move her party forward. More on both of those points later.

What I’ve been up to

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When I’m not playing politician or blogging, I have a very demanding “real” job. (That may seem like a profoundly obvious statement, but you’d be surprised how many people assume otherwise.)

My primary career so far has been in interactive media, first at Astral Television Networks producing sites like family.ca and themovienetwork.ca, then at Corus producing ytv.com. In late 2007 I moved to Metro Canada newspapers as their interactive Content Manager with a mandate, along with the director of the department, to completely relaunch Metro’s websites and essentially help build a new interactive business for the company.

Our first site redesign launched March 31st 2007 2008. It was a dramatic improvement over the previous iteration, but still not quite where we needed to be. So since then we’ve been working on major improvements, and earlier this month made another round of significant changes.

There’s a lot I’m very proud of with the new site, and I’d love for you to check it out. Metro Canada publishes in English in six cities (Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, and Halifax) and en français à Montréal. (It is, in fact, the only Canadian daily newspaper publishing in both official languages, among other claims to fame.)