We were watching the news with half an eye the other night, when the announcement of a “new feature” caught our attention. The new “web correspondent” Heron Hanuman was standing in studio, in front of a plasma TV. He was reading comments from viewers, posted online, about stories they’d seen on TV.
It felt like a very clumsy way to enter the social media space.
A quick look at the CTV site tells me that they’re dipping a toe into the water, but aren’t getting into anything too wild and crazy yet. They’ve got links to Digg, Del.ici.ous, and Reddit; options to share the story, email the story and comment. But there’s so much more they could be doing!
CBC twitters breaking news. A search for CTV Vancouver didn’t turn up any results. They also don’t have a blog or any other kind of interactive features for viewers.
With the right social media strategy, CTV could be leading the way for other stations in the Vancouver Market. Engaging local Vancouver bloggers and offering some of the stories up to them in conjunction with the broadcast news for example. Give a couple of local bloggers an exclusive on certain types of content. With the rise of citizen journalism, and the amount of news websites that already exist, this wouldn’t dip into CTV’s viewer numbers in the least, and it would strengthen the station’s commitment to local people, local stories and social media.
I absolutely agree. Great post! I think the Vancouver market is slow to keep up with how people are actually communicating these days. It would be great to raise the bar on this particular media stream -- I'm so committed to getting my news from the web, television news doesn't even register.
Yeah but their plasma is, I think, about 4" wider than ours!! ;-)
I like their web correspondent talking about the question of the day and what people were saying on the site. Sure they don't have blogs but asking for their viewers to comment n the stories their cover is a good move. So too is there photo of the day feature. CTV vancouver website used to be very lacklustre and now it looks more like other mainstream U.S. news websites, with lots of video and features.
