I’ve been wrangling with my own sensibilities for months trying to make a single decision. Do I get an iPhone or a Blackberry.

The debate climaxed today with a decision. I’m getting the Blackberry Bold 9700, a sleek, simple phone that will do everything I need it to do and little more.

The main influencer on my decision was price. As a Western employee, I qualify for special pricing on a phone through our IT department. The price plan is almost half what I would pay for an iPhone per month. What’s more, the phone contract continues even after my employee contract expires.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Western doesn’t offer an iPhone on this plan. Probably because they don’t want to fund browsing and app downloading. Had they offered it, I might have considered spending extra. But there were other considerations.

I’ve owned the atrocious LG Eve for about a year. With all its whiz bang capabilities, it fails at the simplest task: being an actual usable phone! The touch screen is muddy and disobedient, the processor is slow and barely handles Android. I got it because it could do everything — like the iPhone — including downloading apps and surfing the net. But quickly I realized I don’t want to do those things on a phone. All I want is to make some phone calls, text message and check some email (if it wasn’t so cumbersome and annoying on the Eve).

All of these things are satisfied to a great degree on a Blackberry. It’s built as a phone, it’s probably the best for email, and its text messaging is supplemented by the apparently addictive (and recently highly advertised) BBM.

That’s why it’s a fit for me. I’ll be missing the app downloading and the iTunes integration. But that’s what my iPod Touch is for.

One of Twitter’s main strengths is its connectivity. When you post something, you can connect directly with other people with @ signs or through networks of people through hashtags (or # signs). People click on tagged words to find other related tweets instantly. Creating a hashtag is a fluid thing, formed through community convention and practicality. But here’s a few things to keep in mind.

1. They must be short

Good hashtags are as short as possible because they shouldn’t eat up characters. This results in things like #ldont for London, Ontario, and #UWO for the University of Western Ontario. In my circles, a debate formed over the #UWO hashtag because Western’s account uses #westernu. Obviously the shorter one is preferred, and thus used, but this brings us to number two.

2. They must be unique

Good hashtags can’t conflict with other topics. With #UWO, there’s also the University of Wisconsin, which might also use #UWO. Or take #USC, which in my circles easily stands for the University Students’ Council, but in the US stands for the University of Southern California, or USC.

In the first case, U of Wisconsin is prone to using #wisc more than #UWO, so the conflict was negligible. But with #USC, the twitterflow is overrun with posts from California. This nullifies the entire purpose of a hashtag! The hashtag is used like a search keyword for people to find other tweets related to that topic. So why use #USC to talk about student politics when all you’re going to get is football updates?

3. They can be funny

The other common use of hashtags is humour. From what I gather, it involves tagging something ridiculous that no one else is likely to tweet about. When I changed #USC to #UWOUSC, a Twitter follower said we should make it #UWO_USC to keep with a “institution_division” structure of similar hashtags. She followed this with #wowsonerdy. Needless to say, she’s the only one using that hashtag.

It was just over one year ago when I snagged the position of “Web-Print Editor” at the Gazette. The title later changed, but the dream remained. It was a position I proposed early on in 2009 after seeing an obvious lack of new media at Canada’s best campus newspaper.

The Way It Was

When I arrived as a lowly volunteer only two years ago, the Gazette was outsourcing its web content. The web editors worked outside the office and the EIC demanded they come into the office… “at least once a week.” The quota wasn’t enough. Everyone thought of web as a bonus and treated it with as much attention. Attempts at starting a blog quickly fizzled. Meanwhile, campus publications and groups (like CoPress) were revolutionizing college media. WordPress and in-house web departments beefed up what was happening on the web. EICs were crushing over online publishing and overhauled their newspapers to fill the void. This is what the Gazette needed!

My year as Web Editor

The year started strong. In the summer, we moved the website from university-owned servers to our own. I installed WordPress and created a new website with modern features that our US counterparts had long ago adopted. When the year came around, I tried being the cheerleader for online content and had some modest success convincing print journalists to put in more work for our online side. I started filming video and uploaded the first-ever Gazette videos.

But the biggest difference might have been social media. Two years ago, the Gazette wasn’t in the same ball park as social media. Now we’re sleeping in the same bed. I started a Twitter account and persuaded a few journalists to join. One of them showed reluctant support for the venture. Now he’s our biggest convert. The branding and number of editors participating beats out any other Canadian campus publication I’ve seen, rivalling some U.S. papers too. Our Facebook account grows by the day and supplies our most inlinks (aside from Google, of course).

But the dream wasn’t without its problems. After some trouble in the news department, I volunteered to lend a hand and soon wrapped myself in as a news editor. The time demands and excruciating schedule made it hard to supply the kinds of online content I was hoping for. We still shot a bunch of videos, supplied unique online graphics and even started a new volunteer base with a web and graphics team.

And Today?

We boast around seven Twitter accounts, about 500 followers on Facebook with accounts on YouTube, Issuu, Scribd and Flickr. Our new website is rich with comments, debate, videos, social media tie-ins and infinite flexibility. A new website is on the horizon for launch in September. We’ve struck gold with Gazette Books. Our editorial board was reworked for more creative input and suddenly two years ago seems like a millennia.

It’s easy for kids like me to imitate professionals. Look at big newspapers in the world and copy them. This can affect the ideas you try, the tone you create, the conventions surrounding headlines and photos and layout and everything. There’s a sense that straying from how Big Boys do things is a mistake, one made because there’s a novice decision-maker behind the scenes who hasn’t quite figured out how they do it.

But is there any reason why the Big Boys are the authority?

For years the newspaper industry battled with itself. Its standards and conventions were used to defend the newspaper’s authority while readers yawned and looked elsewhere. The new objectivity was born online. The industry changed. But despite all this the newspaper stayed the course, buried beneath conviction in its own tired ways.

It’s okay to not do things like the Big Boys do. In fact it’s necessary. You can do the exact opposite in fact. So long as the intentions are true and the meaning remains. Try, fail, try harder, fail harder. The Big Boys can stick with what they know while the young try to reinvent them. Doing this consciously as least gives you the satisfaction that these differences aren’t mistakes. They’re intentional attacks at the status quo.

I realized over the past two weeks that print is a very different world than radio. This was always implicitly obvious. But it wasn’t until I started writing my own radio show that the differences were so apparent. What you can say in writing, you have to show in radio. Your arguments are too amorphous if they’re not grounded in reality.

That’s partly why the Age of Persuasion is such a successful radio show about media. It takes actual advertising clips and plays them. When it’s not being “visual” that way, its personalities are busy venturing into space or transporting through time (through the technology of canned sound effects). You can do this in print, but it’s much easier in radio (in practice). But it’s also much much harder, because you need to create and use sounds instead of words, which are free and easy to come by.

Hopefully I’ll finish this radio script and my radio colleague will be satisfied with the product. This my goal this week. On top of putting out a newspaper.

Social media is so much a part of my business that I sometimes forget how other generations or businesses might not understand it. This became obvious when my mom, who works in retail, tried her hand at using Twitter for her business. She had some of the basics, like following people and getting followers, but at first missed the real point of the tool. Here’s the basics.

1. Social media is a dialogue

The great revolution in corporate communication is from monologue to dialogue. Instead of vomiting some well-thought-out jargony little advertisement or promotion, companies use social media to talk with consumers and, more importantly, respond to them. Look at RogersHelps, a Twitter account the hunts down negative Rogers tweets and responds to any questions directed its way.

2. Social media has a face

One easy mistake to make is impersonalizing your social media presence. On Twitter, this means posting your company logo as your profile picture and not identifying the tweeter. On Facebook, this means posting serious, corporate-style posts and promotions rather than using a conversational tone. These are easy fixes. Add your own photo and overlay your logo, like we do at the Gazette. If you want to use your company name as your Twitter name, update the bio to describe who’s tweeting, like Starbucks, which provides “Freshly brewed tweets from Brad at Starbucks in Seattle, WA.”

3. Social media is on your website, too

Another big mistake is to view social media as starting and ending on Facebook and Twitter. These are social media platforms, not social media. Comments are are also a social media tool. Good websites use their web presence to build relationship with consumers and help them create relationships with each other. Salon.com, named after the “Ideal Speech Situation,” allows users to post their own articles in their Open Salon platform. The Daily Kos has a deep, rich, active back end of user-generated content called Diaries. CBC Radio 3 invested big money into their new website, which is hands down the best radio website on the internet. On your website, you can do something simple like allowing users to create their own profiles.

Conclusion

This has a powerful effect on readers — especially in the newspaper industry. For far too long, newspapers have been viewed as faceless monoliths, which bred the kind of cynicism that works against journalism today. Especially on the campus journalism level, social media can help drop the veil between student and student-writer. The same can be said for student governments, who need to invest more in developing social media if they want to see any actual difference in student engagement. So don’t do this.

Guy across the aisle on the window side are talking to each other.

Window: That’s the thing, the first little interaction we had, and then we went in. And I didn’t want to talk about it. You didnt. Then we went to the trian. I didn’t want to be presumptuous. Like it’s too bad. I’m so conscious sometimes you can tell it’s a good day and you’re fine. And other days you have a bad day and you know. But the thing is that I was thinking about, I dont think it’s that bad. To me, whatever your preference is. It shouldnt make me feel, you know.

Little girl behind me: The W! The W! AHHHHH!

Dad behind me: Yes, the W.

Window: Yeah exactly.

(Window’s phone rings)

Window: How you doin? Whats going on? Oh not too much, just on the train to toronto. Yeahhh. What are you up to? Ha ha ha. No I’m on the train. Hahahha. No no. What’s the score? Montreal? Oh really. Ah, Essiah is down from Vancouver, so she’s got some extra time tomorrow and I’m going to hang out with her. And then find some trouble. I don’t know if Toronto’s big enough for me. It’s me and my friend Terry. We’re on the train. We’re drinking wine. We were going to take the bus. And then we were the last three standing at the bus, thinking we weren’t going to get on. So we went to the train station there, went to the bar, had a beer. Yes sir. What’s going on? Oh Mark and Sterling went? No I don’t. Do you have tickets? Yeah, yeah just get them. Yeah. Have you been parked for long? I’m triyng to get a hold of him. Maybe he was in the shower or something. I was trying to get a hold of  him. Alright.

Girl: AHHHH!

Window: Not sure yet. I’m taking the train down because Nigel’s down. So. Yeah no I’m staying there. No they’re coming home tonigtht. And they’ll be working tomorrow. Yeah. Where? Oh wow! Yeah. With? Why? He’s not buying any. (It went on like this for a while.)

Girl – Look, at that! What’s that!

Young guy near back (unrelated to the girl): Yeah the Sears catalogue.

Window (still on phone) – There’s breakfast? Ha ha ha ha. Yeah. Well we’re thinking about coming home on Sunday because they expire in June.

Girl – Yeah, the pants. The paaants. Yeah, the pants.

Window – What’s that? No no no. I’m completely out.

Guy directly beside me (his phone rings, he answers): This better be good news. Three nothing? Who scored? Super. Second period? Excellent. That’s great news boy. Off we go. Gotta hold them back. Who’s playing goalie, is Halak in net? And he’s doing well? Excellent. Ok. Call me if anyone scores. Love you.

Girl – Meawahhhhh. Oooooh!!

Window – Yeah, next stop’s Woodstock. Yeah definitely. Yep. For sure. Alright Dad. OK. Yup, alright. Yup thanks Dad. Alright, love you. Bye.

(Guy beside Window returns from the bathroom with a French accent): So I was in there, and turned the water on. And it just, like, splashed out!

Window: hahahaha

Aisle: It was amusing, but a little bit scary!

I heard a political analyst talking on CBC Radio this morning about risks. Companies have thrived on risks. They’re lauded for taking them and showered with rewards when they prove successful. Governments, on other hand, he argued, are told to not take risks. They’re condemned for doing so and are evicted when risky decisions fail.

It got me thinking: are newspapers more like companies or governments? It seems at the campus journalism level, it’s easy to avoid risk-taking. Campus journalists are usually students, usually green, usually scared of the world. Risks are the gateway to lawsuits and condemnation, letters-to-the-editor and public embarrassment. Risky editors are seen are careless, not creative.

But if risks are also the source of incredible benefits, success and innovation, how can they be avoided — especially at the campus journalism level?

I’ve finished a version of my sunrise theme from a few posts ago and added it to the site. I’ve also added the ability to select which theme you’d like to use, so feel free to customize as you like by selecting something on the right.

I’ll probably add more themes as the days go on.