Resurrected new media publishing course at SFU shows strength: Ouimet

The re-launch of a new media publishing course through Simon Fraser University (SFU) is being touted by one well-known expert as proof that the industry has made a comeback. Robert Ouimet, now an independent consultant after spending years in CBC Radio’s new media shop, says the At Large/SFU Publishing Across New Media Platforms course, being offered July 25-27, is strong evidence that platforms such as mobile communications, corporate intranets and the web have taken firm root as publishing tools. He adds that the university’s gamble that professionals will want to attend the course shows strength in the industry. The two-day course, which will feature case studies and executive workshops on using the web and wireless devices, and a half-day conference, The Future of Publishing, haven’t been offered since 2001. The new version will be scaled back from what was held in past years, when the university’s Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing offered an intensive eight-day, 14-hour-a-day, program dating to 1996. That program was discontinued when the dot-com bubble burst in April 2000. When the school offered the course in the summer of 2001, there was little to no interest, Ouimet says. "Some people felt it was, you know, eating into their business, and others felt that it was competing, or that it just wasn’t viable, or whatever. So, post dot-com crash, you couldn’t even get the time of day (at the school)," he notes. Last summer, though, Ouimet and colleague Emma Payne re-approached SFU about bringing the program back, this time with a different perspective on publishing and armed with industry data showing how mainstream new media publishing platforms have become. "The publishing community isn’t only people who publish magazines and periodicals and make books. Electronic Arts is a publisher. There’s a variety of people out there who have content that are publishing to all sorts of new platforms that are not only web-based, but also using new mobile technology and phones and a variety of things," Ouimet states. "So, we managed to at least pique (SFU’s) interest, and talk to them a lot about what we were seeing in the marketplace that we work in every day, which was… start(ing) to talk about getting information about whatever your product or business is to the public in a variety of new and different ways. People are interested in doing that and are spending money doing that, and are still in a lot of cases very unaware of the options that are out there and the various issues involved with doing it." Ouimet notes studies that indicate that millions of text messages are now being sent per month using SMS technologies. He says he won credibility with the school by citing figures that show 83% of Canadians aged 15 to 24 claim they always have an Internet connection available to them. "If you look at the way people consume information now, they don’t go to the library, they go to the web," he points out. "They don’t go to the magazine rack, necessarily, they go to the web. And, if you’re a publisher and you’re not on top of those trends, they’re going to bite you in the ass." Return on investment, Ouimet says, will be an important part of the course. He says potential attendees will come from the business world, and will have the bottom line firmly in focus as they study the material. "At the end of the day these are people in business who need to see that it’s worth doing. It’s not a labour of love or just because they like the technology," he notes. The course has assembled an impressive list of faculty and speakers, including Electronic Arts’ Shannon Emmerson, CBC.ca’s Claude Galipeau, Exponentia Communications Corp.’s Andrew Gregory, and president and CEO of Communicopia Inc. Jason Mogus. Further information on the workshop and half-day conference is available at http://www.ccsp.sfu.ca/pubworks/publish-media.htm.

Resurrected new media publishing course at SFU shows strength: Ouimet

Broadcast | May 13, 2005

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