Thursday, September 08, 2005

And one more thing: Yeah! What he said!

One of the things that i find quite baffling, and quite frustrating, is that pretty much all the attention that the lockout has garnered in the media and the blogoshere has been entirely about CBC TV and CBC Radio. There has been little to no mention of the hundreds of CBC ONLINE employees that have been locked out, or of the product that is being produced in our absence.


This morning I pulled my head out of my ass long enough to read Pary Bell's Flukemedia. In his September 1st post he voices his frustration over the ridiculous glossing over of the loss of CBC ONLINE. I've been wondering about this myself. I remember hearing the brass go on and on about the success of CBC ONLINE. And most of the people I know (and many of them are NOT web geeks, thank you very much) rely on several CBC websites for their news and information.

I work(-ed) for ZeD and our site looks hideous right now. The Friday before the lock out I did a whole wack of updates, wrote new copy and chose a great feature for the homepage. Of course, none of the updates were made on the back end. I assume this was due to the lock out.

I can't even visit the site anymore. It's just depressing. There are hundreds of uploaded content items stockpiling that, at this point, may never be made public. Canadian artists waiting for editorial staff who no longer exist to give their work the go-ahead so that their painting/music/film/song/etc can go live on the site. For a while I was trying to answer ZeD member questions in the discussion groups, but I've recently given up. What's the point? I've nothing new to tell them. "Sorry, you know as much as I do." isn't exactly reassuring them. ZeD struggles constantly to defend it's very existance within the corp. It is common opinion that this little forced hiatus will be the haystack that crushes the llamas back - or something like that.

I dunno. Maybe the online community is outraged over the lock out. Persmaps they are firing off angry emails and exchanging frustrated IMs lamenting the loss of CBC ONLINE. It's just the internet afterall. A crazy fad. A passing craze.

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