cupdate: dateline saskatoon.

The second day of the Canadian University Press conference in Saskatoon is going well.

Still riding high from meeting Jonathan Goldstein last night, I joined Joey Coleman and the author of grrrl meets world for this morning's bloggers' panel. There was some pretty interesting discussion generated around the current and future role of blogs and bloggers in politics and local reporting (I have also had a lot of good feedback from my session yesterday, which is always reassuring). I've had a great time presenting and meeting with delegates at this conference, and thank CUP for inviting me to speak (Saskatoon is also a nice city, so it was even more of a pleasure to be here).

I get the feeling that there are a lot of aspiring journalists at this conference who are seriously concerned about future job prospects in the industry. As coverage of local community and political issues will undoubtably suffer as the larger mainstream media companies continue to hemmorage staff and resources, I believe that new online media, like blogs, are well positioned to fill the gap in reporting. Though this may force the bigger newspapers to once again put resources into local reporting (which would be good), it also has the potential to critically change where Canadians turn to find their local community and political news.