Although the hustle to get freelance gigs is tough, this one with BlogTO was one I was pretty pumped to hook up. Mostly because it involved doing interviews and profiling people, which is one of my FAVOURITE things to do. And it involved a pretty sweet photo shoot by James Kachan highlighting some of my fave indie filmmakers.
Check out my interviews with:
And, last but not least, The Campagna Brothers.
Considering I’m a nerd for doing interviews, I rarely am faced with the opportunity to be the interviewee. However, The Questionnaire recently reached out to do a Q&A with me, and I’m pretty pumped with the results. They profile notables within arts and entertainment, so I’m honored to be featured among the likes of Veronica Belmont, Amanda Congdon and The Guild’s Sandip Parikh.
While reading through the questions, it really reminded me of those Proust Questionnaires featured on the last page of every issue of Vanity Fair. They’re painfully fascinating and for such a concise limit of words offer an explosion of insight about an individual.
Here’s a snippet:
What turns you on creatively?
Strangely enough, showers are where I get the most of my ideas. I guess there’s some sort of clarity when you’re “washing away” everything else under a hot jet of water.
Brainstorming sessions get me buzzing and being around people who are passionate about what they’re doing really gets my creative juices flowing. That kind of energy is infectious and it always makes me think of ways I could connect them and help them reach their goals with my skill sets and vice versa. I love to collaborate.
If you were a mind-reader whose mind would you like to read?
Lady Gaga. That woman is one of the most intriguing public figures I’ve ever come across and I’d love to know if she’s really that abstract or she knows it’s a fantastically edgy angle to put out there for marketing purposes.
If you could travel in time, which era would you visit?
Ancient Greece in a time where Gods walked among men, being a philosopher was a real job, and everyday was a toga party.
What is your favorite sound?
The ocean. Or a huge, booming belly laugh from the people I adore.
Pretty cool, right? Check out the rest of the interview here!
I recently entered a rather FANTASTIC sounding contest with a fellow parter-in-crime, Marie Nicola of TwentySomethingTV and Karmacake.ca fame, to win the best travel job ever. Coincidentally that’s the name of the contest, BestTravelJobEver.com.
It seems like Flight Centre, who’s putting on the contest (along with a slew of sponsors including Intrepid Travel and Air Canada), have jumped on the social media bandwagon to rally up the most adventuresome, travel lusty communicators across Canada to create a short video about why they’re the best choice to win the contest.
The videos are up for voting for the month of April and then the Top 25 videos are evaluated by a panel of celeb judges. Six entrants get sent on a trip by Intrepid Travel to vlog to their heart’s content. And then the best two from that gets the GRAND PRIZE from Flight Centre.
Here’s our rather salacious entry. We decided to go for the tongue-in-cheek testimonial approach. Plus, it’s the first piece of video I’ve been the editor for in a looong while. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out:)
So guess who’s a columnist for Women’s Post?
Yep. Me. How rad is that?
It’s a bi-monthly column called “Bridging the Gap” and its aim is to discuss the interactions between Old Media vs. New Media.
I’m pretty pumped because I get to use this forum to analyze and geek out about all the different moves played by traditional media outlets like TV, magazines and newspapers to try to make themselves more relevant via the rapidly changing medium of the Net. On the flipside, I also get to talk about New Media and how its users have been working to legitimize themselves and build business models around the content they’re creating on the web.
My first column really sums it all up:
The Internet has been a catalyst for change for a lot of different industries, but particularly within the world of traditional media, like newspapers, magazines and television.
Over the last six years, I’ve worked various media roles, from a chase producer for Canadian network programs to launching five online TV shows. Coming from a background of both traditional and “new media,” which essentially means online publications and web shows, I have had the benefit of seeing how both worlds have been growing and adapting to each other to accommodate this paradigm shift in how media is being consumed by the general public.
With regards to video consumption, for example, ComScore’s latest Video Metrix data report released April 2009 ranked Canada as the highest in online video viewing - beating countries like the UK, Germany, France, and the U.S. - and reported that the average Canadian online viewer spent 10 hours viewing online content, up 53 percent from last year.
The Internet really is the Wild West for mass media and in this column I’ll be taking a look at how the web has affected traditional mediums and point towards concrete examples of stories like networks launching webisodes to complement their TV shows or original web-only series; citizen journalism or viewer-created content becoming more sought out by news organizations; and newspapers and networks embracing the two-way conversation the Internet has become notorious for.
I’ll even be bringing to light examples of how web start-ups have made the leap into traditional mediums, with online magazines expanding into print or web series being sold to networks and launched as TV shows.
It seems the medium is no longer the message. Not entirely, at least. Content is king. And hopefully this column will help make sense of it all and offer a forum to explore, discuss and bridge the gap between Old Media and New Media.
