The National Post Embraces Twitter

I retweeted an article from The National Post the other day, and I got a thank you tweet back. I thought, hmm, that's pretty cool, if not unusual. So I'm not surprised to see this interview with Chris Boutet, the Senior Producer of Digital Media at the paper. From Mediabistro, "The National Post: How One Newspaper is Embracing Twitter [Interview]" (via Mediagazer). And here's this from the piece:

What are some of the goals the National Post has for its Twitter accounts?

We want people to engage with our content, first and foremost. We want people to share our stories, retweet our Tweets, and get involved with our reporting.

For example, we have a campaign where we send out @mentions thanking people for sharing our content or for mentioning us in their tweets. We want our readers to know that we appreciate their engagement, and we are actively using our Twitter account.

We also use Twitter as a way to build the personality of our brand. We are an irreverent newspaper, with a dry wit. We don’t take ourselves very seriously, and we encourage our readers to take everything with a grain of salt. Underneath this is a vaguely disguised optimism. All of this comes through on Twitter.

And clicking over to the homepage right now, here's the screencap:

I've posted a couple of times on Christie Blatchford, via Blazing Catfur and Kathy Shaidle.

And from Rex Murphy, "University of Waterloo Ignoramuses Accomplish Their Doltish Goal":

The University of Waterloo is inadequately and belatedly trying to make up for the shabby treatment afforded Christie Blatchford at the renowned institution. It has apologized for the hijacking of her talk by self-ordained (they always are) “anti-racism” activists — five ignoramuses who took the stage before her, chanted “racist, racist, racist” at her, denied her right to speak and denied the audience who came to hear her their right to hear her.

The apology at least recognizes the insult done to Blatchford, and to the people who came to hear her. A knot of intellectually vacant hooligans, whether united neck to neck with bike locks or not, should never be alloted the power to say who speaks and who does not speak at a university. (Or anywhere else for that matter.) Waterloo has also promised to reschedule the event. However, the apology only became necessary because the university — she was there at the invitation of its bookstore — didn’t toss the smug nuisances from the stage in the first place. Nor does the apology — which wears the whiff of “damage control” — quite measure up to a real acknowledgment of the ugliness Blatchford endured that evening. As the Post editorialized Thursday, the shutting down or abridgement of free speech at universities — especially by “progressive’ protesters” — is growing so commonplace that we fail to notice how aggressive and mean the actions and words of the protests leading to the shutdowns actually are.

The Waterloo clowns smeared Christie Blatchford horrendously: She is, by their description, a “hack” and a “bigot” who preaches “racism” and “hate.” She’s a “fascist”; she has “no right to speak”; she “dishonours” Waterloo by being invited to speak there. If you listen to or read the words of Don Kellar, the putative leader of the vile and petty coup, Christie Blatchford is all of these things — but wait ...

More at the link.

And the Blatchford excerpts are here.