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Monthly Archives: January 2008

Habs bring ratings boost to HNIC

January 24, 2008 – 2:17 pm | Posted in Canadiens, TV

The Globe and Mail, at the end of a longer article on a possible new TV channel for CBC Sports, reports that the audience for Hockey Night in Canada actually went up last weekend when they telecasted the Habs game nationally instead of the Leafs, in every region except British Columbia. The increase is modest, and it doesn’t include Ontario (because they still got the Leafs game), where almost half the audience resides.

Still, a ratings increase speaks to CBC’s bottom line, so expect more nationally-telecast Habs games in the future.

The other part of the Globe article says the CBC is in the initial thinking phase of a new amateur sport TV specialty channel. They aren’t even close to going to the CRTC yet, so this is still a long ways off. It might also conflict with the Canadian Olympic Committee, which is also thinking of an amateur sport channel. (UPDATE: The Globe discusses some of the hurdles such a channel might face in getting regulatory approval)

Meanwhile, the CBC has applied to the CRTC for a license amendment allowing CBC Newsworld to setup an HD channel. It’s unlikely to face any opposition, so we could see CBC Newsworld HD within the next few months.

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Jamie Orchard takes the bus

January 24, 2008 – 4:03 am | Posted in Blogosphere, Media, Montreal, Opinion, Public transit

Global Quebec likes to run the occasional 5-second ad for anchor Jamie Orchard’s blog. I find this odd, because she updates it about once a month, which hardly makes it qualify as a blog, much less make it advertising-worthy.

Today, she added her first new post since Dec. 4, complaining about bus service on the island. It’s an example of what not to do with blogs.

Let me explain:

  1. It’s a subject that anyone can write about. In fact, as evidenced by two letters she cuts-and-pastes into the blog post, anyone has written about it. Orchard’s experience having buses show up late and not wanting to bike in the winter are not unique and she provides no unique insight into them. Journalists’ blogs should provide new information if not personal insight. They shouldn’t repeat what everyone else is saying.
  2. It’s blowhardism instead of journalism. Instead of explaining that delays are a result of a bus shortage, she rants about how “Montreal must do more” for public transit. Such comments make us feel good but are completely devoid of meaning.

There are other minor things like the horrible formatting, but those two are the most important.

Mainstream media outlets are clueless about this blog thing and are just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks. Unfortunately, that leaves us with a lot of junk. I don’t want my journalists to sound just like those uninformed idiots on MySpace. I want something new and interesting. The faster journalist-bloggers (and the media companies who don’t want to pay them a cent to do this extra work) understand that, the faster we’ll see blogs that are worth our attention.

And while I sympathize with people whose buses arrive late, I don’t think exaggeration is warranted here. This isn’t some third-world country. The vast majority of buses do arrive on time and take people to their destination without incident.

I lived for five years in the West Island taking a bus every day downtown to study. Up to three hours of transit time each day. Sometimes buses wouldn’t show up, and I’d be left out in the cold for up to an hour. But even when I got frustrated, I never condemned the entire system like others have. I moved closer to the city, next to a metro station where I don’t have to worry about catching a bus to get downtown.

Yes, Montreal (and Quebec, and the unions, and STM management and everyone else) should do more to ensure quality public transit. But Montrealers need to be a bit more tolerant toward small disruptions in service. Montreal’s transit network is among the most reliable in the world, and I think we’ve taken that for granted.

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7,000 words and still the story is unfinished

January 24, 2008 – 3:00 am | Posted in Media, Montreal

J-Source has a short article by The Gazette’s Sue Montgomery about the story she wrote on Dawson College shooter Kimveer Gill. Despite it weighing in at 7,000 words and being nominated for an award, she considers it incomplete. Gill’s father and brothers wouldn’t speak to her (only his mother did), and the coroner hasn’t released its report about Gill’s death, which would have answered some lingering questions about how exactly he died:

Gill’s mother says her son had a bullet wound on his arm (where the police shot him) and one in the back of his head, leading her to suspect the police may have killed him. The police say Gill shot himself by placing a gun to his chin, yet Parvinder Gill says his face was intact when they prepared him for burial. What really happened? Why can we not see the surveillance camera tapes from inside the school that day? And why, if it was a crime scene, did the police drag Gill’s body outside to lie in the rain?

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Toronto Sun sorry for plagiarizing Torontoist

January 23, 2008 – 9:40 pm | Posted in Blogosphere, Media, Navel-gazing

The Toronto Sun has apologized after Torontoist noticed an article the Sun ran copied a paragraph word-for-word from a blog post of theirs two days earlier. Though the blog considers the matter closed, Craig Silverman does his usual complaint that the apology is too brief, doesn’t explain how the error occurred and doesn’t say if there was an investigation into the reporter’s past articles for instances of plagiarism.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for one of the big papers to plagiarize one of my posts without credit. When is it going to be my turn?

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CRTC may radically change cable TV as we know it

January 23, 2008 – 8:20 pm | Posted in Opinion, TV

Those of you who have been following the TQS saga know that the CRTC has decided to reconsider whether over-the-air broadcasters should be able to request licensing payments from cable and satellite companies that retransmit their signals to Canadian homes.

But the hearings set to take place in April go far beyond that, and touch just about every regulatory aspect of cable and satellite distribution systems across the country.

It’s referenced as Notice of Public Hearing 2007-10, and is currently in the comment/reply phase. In it, the CRTC says it is considering changes to the following rules:

  1. The rule that so-called “Category 1 specialty services” (a handful of digital TV specialty channels that are protected as to format) be immune from direct competition in terms of format from other channels. This ties into a larger debate about whether specialty channels in general should have government-imposed monopolies, when in practice they tend to compete. (For example, TSN and Rogers Sportsnet are licensed as national and regional channels, though they compete for coverage of hockey games; CBC NewsWorld and CTV NewsNet are similarly technically-different-but-realistically-competing channels)
  2. Similarly, how distinctions between channels with high original Canadian content (like say Discovery Channel or TSN) and those with little original Canadian content (Spike TV, Mystery Television) should be measured, and what incentives should be given to those who have more CanCon (channel placement, mandatory availability, more advertising time, free cookies, etc.).
  3. The rule that more than half of the channels available to any customer must be Canadian. (I can’t legally choose a package that includes more American channels than Canadian ones, though this is rarely a problem in practice because of the dozens of mandatory Canadian channels that are added as part of basic cable service)
  4. Whether a rule should be added requiring distributors to have one minority-language channel for every 10 majority-language channels they add.
  5. Rules that restrict distributors in terms of related channels owned by the same company. (Specifically, whether distributors should have to prove that related channels did not get undue preferential treatment instead of putting the onus on complainants who do not have access to internal documents)
  6. Rules that set minimum requirements for third-language programming.
  7. In general, how HD versions of standard-definition channels should be regulated.
  8. The rule that requires distributors wanting to add a third-language non-Canadian service to make a Canadian service in the same language (if one exists) also available.
  9. Rules that require some specialty channels to get 75% of their content from “independent producers” unaffiliated with the network.
  10. Rules that prohibit on-demand and pay-per-view networks from including advertising
  11. What rules, if any, should be added to prevent on-demand services from competing with regular specialty channels
  12. The rule limiting specialty channels to 12 minutes of advertising an hour (this limit is already being phased out for over-the-air broadcasters)
  13. What rules, if any, should be added to require more vigorous vetting of specialty channel applications (according to the CRTC’s calculations, only 14% of the networks they’ve approved have launched and are still in operation)
  14. What rules the CRTC should not allow exemptions for on a case-by-case basis
  15. The rule that requires community channels be distributed as part of the basic service
  16. What basic service should mean for direct-to-home satellite providers Bell ExpressVu and StarChoice (who for technological reasons have to provide the same channels to the entire country)
  17. Whether the CRTC should get involved with customer service complaints concerning cable and satellite companies
  18. Rules that govern the ownership and use of cable infrastructure inside residential buildings (does your cable company own the physical cable coming into your home, and can they prevent others from using it for competing services?)

Basically, just about everything is up in the air here, as the CRTC looks to simplify and deregulate the industry.

The broadness of the hearing resulted in an overwhelming 213 comments from everyone involved on both sides. Most were positive about the idea of deregulation. The largest out cry came from small-market community stations who panicked at the idea their stations would no longer be required on basic cable. That should be sufficient to get the CRTC to drop discussion of changes in those regulations.

Many of the proposed changes are a result of the Dunbar/Leblanc report into broadcast regulations, which recommended sweeping changes to deregulate the broadcast industry. They include:

  1. Easing of genre protections in specialty TV services and merging the different classes of channels
  2. Removing limits on advertising (since most stations use much less than the maximum allowed, they argue that market forces are doing more to self-regulate this)
  3. Encouraging more competition in over-the-air networks by putting less emphasis on how new broadcasters will affect existing broadcasters’ advertising revenue and bottom line
  4. Eliminating many rules that restrict how distributors can offer non-Canadian channels (requirements that they must be packaged together with similar Canadian offerings, for example)
  5. Fine-tuning “priority programming” rules so that broadcasters can’t save money by creating cheap reality shows and showing them during prime-time wastelands like Friday and Saturday nights during the summer
  6. Radically changing or even eliminating simultaneous substitution requirements that give Canadian networks a huge economic incentive to simply rebroadcast American prime-time programming instead of developing their own
  7. Reducing requirements for broadcasters to use programming from independent producers
  8. Adding incentives for networks that have increased Canadian content in terms of mandatory carriage and other perks
  9. Drop the idea that “channel placement” means anything anymore (seriously, are you less likely to view a programming because it’s on a higher-numbered channel?)
  10. Allow the CRTC to impose administrative fines for violations of license, instead of brandishing the increasingly hollow threat of license revocation.
  11. Give up trying to regulate the Internet
  12. Delete the rule that requires all Category 1 channels to be distributed as a package
  13. Eliminate “winback” rules that prohibit cable companies from marketing to customers who have just cancelled their service
  14. Stop obsessing over format when licensing new FM radio stations since they can just go around and change their format without CRTC approval anyway
  15. Easing restrictions on campus community radio stations, eliminating advertising caps and allowing more flexibility in terms of programming

The report, unsurprisingly was praised by potential newcomers to the market and condemned by existing broadcasters, who say it’s “far-reaching,” particularly in recommendations for simultaneous substitution, the golden goose for CTV and Global.

I’d like to focus on a few of these issues that affect television consumers:

Simultaneous substitution

Simultaneous substitution has been an important part of cable TV for over 30 years. Put simply, it’s the rule that when a Canadian and American channel are showing the same show, the cable company has to replace the American signal with the Canadian one, including all Canadian commercials. So when you’re watching House on Fox, you’re actually watching the Global feed instead of the Fox feed.

The reasoning behind this is so Canadian advertising gets preference over American advertising. Advertising revenue stays in Canada and supports our networks instead of American ones.

There are minor annoyances with this rule:

  • Shows are not synchronized to the second, so you end up watching the beginning of an episode and then two minutes later have to re-watch it from the beginning.
  • We don’t get to watch the way-cool Super Bowl commercials in Canada
  • Though the CRTC requirement provides for replacement only when signals are of “equal or better quality,” in practice the quality is never better and in many cases worse, though not enough for the cable companies to want to fight over it.

But the big problem with simultaneous substitution is an economic one. Unlike CRTC rules that encourage the development of original Canadian programming, this does the opposite. It encourages CTV and Global to buy Canadian rights to American programming at a tenth of the price it would cost them to produce their own, and simply rebroadcast it with their own commercials. As a result, both networks try their best to max out on American simulcasts, to the detriment of Canadian programming.

Getting rid of simsub would force Canadian networks to compete with American ones. They could continue to simply simulcast the programming, and lose half their audience (assuming people just randomly select the Canadian or American channel), they could negotiate better deals with the American networks (whose border affiliates could charge more for advertising), air the shows at different times (so Canadians would have more choice of when to watch popular programs) or they could create their own programming.

Simultaneous substitution is nothing but easy money for Canadian broadcasters. It is a cancer on Canadian broadcasting and it needs to be stopped.

Unfortunately, the words “simultaneous substitution” appear nowhere in the notice of public hearing. Which probably means it’s off the table, and the CRTC is too chicken to seriously discuss eliminating it.

Specialty service competition

I still get confused about the different classes of licenses for specialty TV channels. Some are required on basic cable, others are discretionary. Some are analog, others digital. Some must be available on digital services but not necessarily as part of the basic package. It goes on.

The CRTC is looking to reduce the number of categories, which separate channels based more on when they began than what they offer. One of the goals would be to allow more competition between some channels which currently enjoy a government-regulated monopoly on their genre. Channels like MuchMusic, TSN, Comedy Network and others are prohibited from having direct competition.

In practice, these kinds of things are hard to enforce, and networks that are technically different are competing with each other. But this isn’t a loophole to be closed, it’s an evolution to be encouraged. The barrier to entry isn’t the same as it was in the 1980s when there were a dozen channels. With the exception of a few special-interest channels like CPAC (which aren’t likely to have competition anyway), these channels are profit-driven enterprises and shouldn’t enjoy special access to niche markets.

Commercial advertising

It’s interesting that not everyone is maxing out on their allowed advertising minutes. I remain a bit skeptical that some networks won’t increase advertising significantly if they get desperate for money, and I would recommend that programming minimums that are currently expressed in half-hour blocks that include advertising instead be converted to minimums that exclude advertising. That way networks can’t save costs on original programming by simply adding more commercials and making their length shorter.

The CRTC’s suggested approach, phasing the limits out and carefully monitoring the situation afterward, seems prudent and justified.

Regulation of the Internet

When news first came out in the fall that the CRTC was considering Internet regulation the response from the public was immediate and overwhelming. They have since backed down.

Besides the fact that there are no barriers to entry on the Internet, no finite public airwaves to distribute fairly, and (net neutrality notwithstanding) no undue commercial pressures that favour some content over others, the simple fact remains that Internet regulation is pointless because it’s impossible to enforce.

The CRTC has seen the light on this, so thankfully we can move on.

The hearing is scheduled for April 7, 2008 in Gatineau. Comments are accepted until Friday. 

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Newspaper editors can never please everyone

January 23, 2008 – 12:35 am | Posted in Media, Opinion

I love it when the radical pundits of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict complain to the news media about their coverage.

A letter last week in the Gazette complains about a headline used on a story about two Israelis and two Palestinians dying: “Two Israelis, two Palestinians killed in West Bank clash.” You’ll note the article was published more than three weeks before the letter from Mike Fegelman of Honest Reporting Canada, an organization whose name sounds like they value fairness, but concentrates its efforts solely on trying to influence news coverage to make it more favourable to Israel.

The complaint in this particular case was that the headline did not make clear that the Palestinians instigated the attack and were killed in self-defence by the Israeli soldiers.

The idea that headlines should tell the whole story is a common complaint against newspapers. But headlines can’t tell the whole story by virtue of the lack of space available. If they could tell the whole story, there wouldn’t be articles underneath them.

But still, how about I suggest a headline The Gazette should have used for this brief article:

Two hero Israeli soldiers massacred by evil satanic terrorist Palestinian homicide killers in unprovoked cowardly attack, return fire in self-defence before tragically succumbing to their injuries; attackers also die in the fighting, ridding the world of two useless pieces of enemy scum

Now, that headline is a bit longer than the previous one, but it would more honestly tell the story, no?

Screw the court of law

The other complaint about The Gazette’s editing comes from both Honest Reporting and The Suburban, “Quebec’s largest English newspaper” (huh?). Both take issue with the paper’s removal of the adjective “terrorist” to describe attacks in a CanWest News Service news article.

The reason this “heavy-handed editing” (the removal of two words) happened is obvious: Despite its very public support of Israel, CanWest secretly employs Palestinian terrorist-sympathizing editors at The Gazette, who sneak into articles and try their best to skew the news against Israel.

The alternative explanation, that describing something as “terrorist” is a moral judgment and not a journalistic one (and if all Palestinian attacks are somehow by definition terrorist attacks, why do we need to add the word in the first place?) is too ludicrous to consider.

What gets me most about this argument is that it’s entirely academic in nature. Nobody seriously suggests that Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians are not terrorist in nature. Whether or not you believe the attacks are justified, or whether new Israeli settlements are justified, the nature of the attacks are very clear. It’s like arguing over whether we should call it murder when we say that a man shot his wife.

But the fact that people get so worked up over the use or non-use of a single word shows just how seriously people take this conflict and its most important front: the battle for public opinion.

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Montreal Geography Trivia No. 9

January 21, 2008 – 8:46 pm | Posted in Montreal, Pop quiz

Life-long Montrealers would probably say something about how the places in Column A relate to their counterparts in Column B.

And they would be wrong.

Why?

A B
Ste. Dorothée Boucherville
Berri-UQAM Longueuil-Université-de-Sherbrooke
Trudeau Airport St. Hubert Airport
Papineau-Leblanc Bridge Louis H. Lafontaine Bridge-Tunnel
Sacré-Coeur Hospital Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital
Claude-Robillard Sport Centre Olympic Stadium
St-Laurent Blvd. and Cremazie Blvd. Pie-IX Blvd. and Sherbrooke St.

UPDATE: The answer, as slowly zeroed in on by the group below, is that the places in column A are south (actually west-southwest) of the respective places in column B, while they fit the definition of “Montreal north,” a seeming contradiction.

The disparity comes because the island is crooked. Its major east-west streets turn toward the northeast as they pass through downtown, and the “South Shore” is more accurately the East Shore, surrounding the island on the south and east but also continuing northeast.

It may be simpler to think of every street as having only four directions (and the streets and highways are named as if this is the case), but don’t think you’re going to get to the Eastern Townships by taking the 40 Est.

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News should learn from Krista Erickson

January 21, 2008 – 8:26 pm | Posted in Media, Opinion

CBCgate

CBC announced today that reporter Krista Erickson has been punished for breaking journalistic ethics in the most horrible way possible: They’re sending her to Toronto.

In what Jonathan Kay calls Pablogate, and Mario Asselin calls CBCgate, and is really not a gate at all, Erickson fed questions to Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez about Brian Mulroney’s connection to the current Conservative Party, which Rodriguez asked Mulroney during the Mulroney/Schreiber inquiry over the Airbus affair.

Through this story there’s been a lot of outrage but not much analysis of what exactly went wrong here. The CBC says there was no partisan or unethical intent, and I believe them. It was an unconventional method of getting answers to tricky political questions.

What this story is more indicative of, however, is the amount of informality in beat reporting. It’s nothing new. Reporters and the people they report on have been chummy for decades. That’s how they get the scoops, how they know what’s going on, how they get access to important people.

But the downside is that there can be a perception of partiality when there’s the slightest hint of cooperation between the two. It’s a real problem, and it needs to be tackled in a realistic way by news organizations rather than arbitrarily decided on a case-by-case basis when someone complains.

News organizations should learn from this incident, and update their codes of ethics to cover the problems inherent in beat reporting. The paragraphs the CBC quoted in their statement are far too vague. At the very least, add this situation as an example of what not to do.

UPDATE (Jan. 23): The CBC News Editors Blog discusses the subject without mentioning Erickson’s name (what are we, idiots?). Though it talks briefly about the problems of becoming part of the story and the need to be “inside” while still staying objective, it fails to go into depth about the familiarity problem other than to deny it exists.

Meanwhile (via the Tea Makers) Facebook groups supporting and against Erickson have popped up. Do I even have to point out that the pro-Erickson group was started by a Liberal Party activist and the anti-Erickson group by a Mike Huckabee-supporting Tory?

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Clearer picture about overpasses

January 21, 2008 – 4:02 am | Posted in Montreal

At-risk overpasses

I’ve updated my map of Quebec’s at-risk overpasses to reflect the current state of inspections at the Ministry of Transport. More than half of the original 135 overpasses have been inspected, and most have had weight restrictions lifted.

The map (which started six months ago) contains about 150 bridges and overpasses, including the 135 deemed requiring inspection by the ministry, others whose structures were looked at by municipalities in the past year, and historical notes of ones that have collapsed or been demolished.

In the map above:

  • RED indicates bridges and overpasses which have been closed, demolished or are to be replaced
  • YELLOW indicates bridges and overpasses which require repairs or continue to have weight restrictions
  • GREEN indicates bridges and overpasses whose restrictions have been lifted and no repairs are deemed necessary
  • BLUE indicates bridges and overpasses which still need inspection or whose inspections are still under analysis

UPDATE (Jan. 22): Radio-Canada mentions the map on their “Sur le Web” site, complete with video summary. They got it from the Courrier International blog.

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Bye bye, ByeByeLogement

January 21, 2008 – 2:03 am | Posted in Business, Opinion, Technology

Here’s one of those “really stupid business plans” examples: A startup called ByeBye Logement launched a month ago. For the low low price of $7, you can put a classified advertisement announcing an apartment for rent of sub-lease for 90 days on their website. It becomes part of a massive searchable database (a global search reveals they have a grand total of three listings across Canada right now).

Now, you might ask, why should I pay money to add an apartment-for-rent listing to a website nobody’s ever heard of (and whose visitors can’t even get access to my contact info without signing up first) when I can post to Craigslist or MoreMontreal, high-traffic sites with thousands of listings, for free?

And if you’d asked yourself that question, you clearly would have done a lot more market research than the people behind ByeByeLogement.com.

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The boring bagel brouhaha

January 21, 2008 – 1:47 am | Posted in Media, Montreal, Opinion, Slow News Day

Everyone’s gotten into a tiff over Hamilton (a small Ontario town, I think Sheila Copps came from there) selling what they call a “Montreal-style bagel.” Problem is it’s not a Montreal-style bagel. It’s got an icing sugar coating, which Montreal bagels don’t have.

Seeing an opportunity to make themselves relevant to the world, the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce has proposed a blind taste test so that we can tell which is the better bagel. The Gazette has accepted the challenge, confident that Montreal bagels will prevail.

There’s three problems with this:

  1. We’ve been through this before. A year ago, The Gazette and the Toronto National Post had a blind taste test of bagels by their staffers. Montreal won, and the Post ate crow. Why do we need to repeat this experiment with a lesser city?
  2. The entire point of the controversy was not, as in the Toronto case, that the other city claimed their bagels were better than ours. The problem is that they’re labelling something a “Montreal-style bagel” when it’s not. Call it a “Hamilton-style bagel” and the controversy is over. Everyone will accept its inferiority.
  3. How do you do a blind taste test for this? One is coated with sugar, the other is not. Even the most undeveloped tastebuds will quickly tell the difference and be able to detect which group the bagel belongs to. And if the Hamilton bagels are stripped of their sugar coating, then we forget the fact that the sugar icing is the point of the controversy in the first place.
  4. Bagels are meant to be served fresh. There’s simply no logical way to do blind taste tests of fresh bagels from two different cities simultaneously. The best they could do is set themselves up in Toronto or Kingston and have bagels rushed down on trains or planes. They’d still be a few hours old at that point. Of course, they’re not going to go that far for a friendly experiment like this, so either one set of bagels is going to be fresher than the other, or everyone is going to be eating stale bagels.

Why are we wasting the time of so many journalists repeating something we’ve already done, that has no journalistic value and above all doesn’t make any sense?

UPDATE: On Sunday, the paper prints this article, which is a cut-and-paste (typos and all) of this discussion forum, complete with thoughtless opinion from whoever had a minute of free time that day and wanted to rant.

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Quebec Press Council wants to know what’s wrong with the media

January 21, 2008 – 12:51 am | Posted in Media

Jealous, I would guess, of the immense success of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation (and how it neatly solved the problem of cultural differences), the Quebec Press Council has announced it is going on a Quebec-wide tour of the regions to get people’s opinions on the state of the news media in Quebec.

The consultation document (PDF, surprisingly an English version was available) suggests the main points are the usual media hot-button issues: media consolidation, the quality of local news reporting, and what’s up with this whole “Internet” thing.

They stop in Montreal March 27. (Full schedule PDF)

Rather than wait until they’re finished, I’ll save them some time and go straight to the conclusions:

  • Big media doesn’t cover local issues in the regions and all the news comes from Montreal
  • Too many media outlets are owned by too few companies
  • TV news doesn’t do journalism well
  • Radio doesn’t do journalism at all
  • We need to save TQS
  • We need to get rid of TQS
  • Big media have an irrational bias against Israel and in favour of Palestinian homicide bombers
  • Big media have an irrational bias against Palestine and in favour of the murderous Israeli military occupation
  • Big media refuse to expose the truth about (insert nonsense conspiracy theory here)
  • The media are too sensationa… hey did you hear about that story in the Journal?
  • The news is filled with fluff. Journalists don’t focus on important issues like … umm … I don’t know, I spend most of my time on TMZ.com
  • The paper didn’t print my 45,000-word letter to the editor explaining the sociological implications of fonts used on instruction manual cover pages in South Africa
  • Only bloggers provide accurate news coverage
  • Bloggers are stupid and incoherent
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Local bloggers on Test the Nation

January 20, 2008 – 8:29 pm | Posted in Blogosphere, TV

Test the Nation

Bored? CBC’s latest rendition of Test The Nation just finished on TV (though you can take the test online). Among the six teams fighting it out in studio were “bloggers” (Here are their mugshots). The team includes some well-known Montrealers:

Nulman has guaranteed that the blogger group will be victorious over celebrity look-alikes, cab drivers, backpackers, chefs and flight crews. Can they pull it off? Considering how skewed the questions are toward technology trivia (there’s even an entire section on it), I wouldn’t be surprised…

UPDATE: 26 questions in, and the bloggers are leading.

UPDATE: Nulman breathes a sigh of relief, as the bloggers easily take the competition with an average score of 50/60. Highest is Rick Spence at 57. I scored a still-respectable 47.

UPDATE: The CBC actually does a pretty darn decent job rounding up the post-test blogger reaction. They also put up some fun statistical stuff (StatsCan they are not), which shows that meateaters scored better than vegetarians, heavy Internet users scored more than light Internet users, and that Quebec outscored every other province (HA! Suck it Alberta!). The best: Nunavut. The worst: PEI.

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It’s time to re-think anonymous sources

January 20, 2008 – 4:10 am | Posted in Media, Opinion

Anonymous sources are important tools for journalists. They can provide information that changes the course of history (insert obligatory Deep Throat reference here), usually in the form of an insider whose conscience gets the better of them.

For example, an article in The Link this week, which talks to an anonymous member of Concordia University’s Board of Governors about events that happened in closed-door meetings. Because the source is violating a trust in publicizing such information, there’s a legitimate reason to keep that source’s identity secret. And because the issue of Concordia’s president is an important one in the university community, the issue is of sufficient importance to base an article mainly on the information provided by such a source.

But anonymity can also be used for less altruistic purposes, like politicians smearing mud about their opponents while staying squeaky clean. (Henry Kissinger was notorious for this)

This week, journalists from La Presse were ordered by a judge to divulge the sources of information about Adil Charkaoui. Charkaoui, living under a “security certificate” which allows the government to restrict freedoms without presenting any evidence to the accused, is suing the government and trying to get all the information about him released. He says this information is entirely false.

The use of anonymous sources has become more prevalent in reporting. The phrase “spoke on condition his name not be used” is all over the place, many times for information that doesn’t advance the course of the story at all. A reporter writing about an untimely death goes to the home and finds nobody there. He then goes to the neighbour’s place, and gets a quote or two on condition of anonymity. The quote is the same generic “he was always a good kid” stuff that everyone says, but this particular source just isn’t crazy about having his name in the paper. Is anonymity really necessary in this case?

In recent years, newspapers have started implementing rules about anonymous sources, the most visible being that articles must state the reason a source has been left anonymous. Unfortunately, in most cases that explanation turns out to be “spoke on condition his name not be used” or “spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject” or something similar.

It’s time to start re-thinking how we use anonymous sources, understanding that they diminish our credibility, especially when it’s later discovered the source was wrong or outright lied. I wouldn’t go so far as to ban them outright, as some news organizations have done, but I would make sure certain rules are enforced (and most of these are enforced by professional news agencies):

  • Make every effort to get sources to go on the record with information. “This is off the record” isn’t a one-way conversation, it has to be an agreement with the reporter, and it should be done for a compelling reason.
  • Provide information about the source (like “senior White House aide”) so we know where they’re coming from.
  • Investigate the reliability of the source. Refuse to publish information anonymously from sources whose reliability is doubtful or who are clearly attempting to manipulate the media. Do not accept blind anonymous information (documents left in a paper bag) unless that information is verified.
  • Investigate the reliability of the information. Require corroboration for all anonymous material. Do not print anonymous rumours, no matter how many anonymous sources it comes from. Do not agree to anonymity when the information is self-serving.
  • Verify all anonymously-obtained documents through an official source. They can be faked.
  • Disclose the identity of all anonymous sources to an editor (this helps avoid fabrications). Require editor approval before an anonymous source is used.
  • Provide information about the source’s agenda if relevant (and the reason a source comes forward anonymously is always relevant). If information about a Liberal MP comes from a Conservative one, this should be noted (and be subjected to even greater scrutiny).
  • Verify the information provided using official, reliable sources. Avoid relying on the anonymous source if the information can be obtained elsewhere. (Even if this is done, note that it originally came from an anonymous source.)
  • Include why the source requested anonymity (and make sure it’s a damn good reason).
  • Do not provide anonymous sources for opinion or conjecture.
  • Avoid quoting anonymous sources directly. Don’t quote an anonymous source just because the quote is interesting.
  • Make the agreement contingent on the information being accurate. If it’s determined that the information was knowingly inaccurate or that the source was otherwise dishonest, identify the source and do not use again.
  • Do not write stories based on stories from other news agencies that quote anonymous sources. Especially if those sources include celebrity gossip websites or supermarket tabloids.
  • But most of all: Use anonymous sources only when the information provided is vital to the story.

We have reputations to uphold. Anonymous sources are exceptions to the rule that should be used only when absolutely necessary. They’re not a loophole to be exploited when someone’s uncomfortable or a journalist is lazy.

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Good riddance, vaporware column

January 20, 2008 – 1:46 am | Posted in Media, Opinion, Technology

The Gazette has dropped Mark Stachiew’s Canwest-syndicated NETworthy column, which every week lists a bunch of websites to visit. His last column was this past Monday. It’s one in a sea of columnists who are either leaving outright (Matt Radz, Lisa Fitterman) or who are leaving the paper as employees and sticking around freelance (Jack Todd, Mary Lamey).

In Stachiew’s case, I’ll say: Good riddance.

Stachiew himself seems like a nice guy, but the column is pure shite. Rather than focus on interesting websites that provide useful information, it’s filled with laughably forgettable single-function dot-com websites that sound like they were brought back in time from TechCrunch deadpool posts from six months in the future: meeting schedulers, CV or invoice templates, task managers, bookmark replacements or highly-focuses social networking sites (”It’s like Facebook for X” always prompts me to ask: Why not just use Facebook then?)

In exchange for providing these ridiculously trivial services, the websites try to get you to pay for them after using them for free, through the clichéd limited-time-free-trial, free-for-non-commercial-use or pay-for-advanced-features methods.

It’s clear from the columns that they’re written based not on thorough searches for interesting new websites, but on a random handful of press releases picked out of the inbox from companies who spend more on marketing than creating a product people will be interested in. Some websites are featured in this column before they’re even launched, or are based on the hope that user-generated content will eventually make it worth visiting.

There’s a hunger out there for lists of interesting websites to visit. That’s why people visit Digg or Fark. But these websites are not interesting, and unless the focus of the column changes it’s not good enough to put in a newspaper.

So ends my rant.

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LCN/Canoe needs to learn HTML 2.0

January 19, 2008 – 9:22 pm | Posted in Media, Opinion, Web design

One of the recurring elements of my criticisms of big media websites is that you have to learn Web 1.0 before you try at Web 2.0. Uploaded stories from newspapers still don’t have clickable links, URLs are way too long, related stories aren’t linked to each other, etc.

Another example of this comes courtesy of Quebecor’s Canoe.ca website, which is presenting a “survey” with Quebecor-owned TVA/LCN, Quebecor-owned Journal de Montréal and Corus-owned Énergie 98.5 FM. The survey asks people questions in order to track down differences between Baby Boomers and younger generations (or more precisely, find out what the generations think of each other). Certainly no surprise for the Journal, which prefers to create divisive scandals rather than report on news that’s already out there.

But the version of the survey published online is ludicrously low-tech. Rather than have visitors fill out a web form (a technology that we’ve only had for about 12 years), it presents the options in barely-formatted paragraphs and then asks readers to cut and paste their answers into an email (that they format themselves).

How about I save everyone some time: Young people think Baby Boomers are old, boring, intolerant, stubborn and out of touch. Baby Boomers think young people are impulsive, irresponsible, weird, stupid and disrespectful.

Now where’s my Pulitzer?

UPDATE (Jan. 20): The first results are in, and ranking of priorities shows no real difference between the age groups (though I’m sure they’ll try to find one). Continuing the we-don’t-know-this-technology-stuff motif, the full results are a PDF focument of a scan of what looks like a bad photocopy of a fax of printed sheets of computer-generated charts. Have these people never heard of email?

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When 90% just isn’t good enough

January 19, 2008 – 7:23 pm | Posted in Business, In the news

Here’s another stupid idea: Giving small business tax credits for speaking French, something they’re supposed to be doing anyway.

How do you accurately judge something like that without doubling the size of the language police?

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TWIM: Kenya and bus schedules

January 19, 2008 – 5:43 pm | Posted in In the news, Montreal, My articles, Public transit

This week’s Bluffer’s Guide concerns the unstable political situation in Kenya, which has already claimed hundreds of lives in a country that was supposed to be one of Africa’s democratic leaders. Worth taking a look in case you feel bad knowing more about the status of Jamie Lynn Spears’s pregnancy than about the difference between Kenya and Rwanda. For more, check out the excellent special sections from The Guardian and BBC News.

This week’s Justify Your Existence concerns the STM’s bus service improvements I mentioned a week and a half ago. Asked why three buses (18 Beaubien, 24 Sherbrooke and 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu) had reductions in service (primarily on the weekend) when they were announcing service improvements, the response was that these are normal seasonal variations in service for these lines. The STM changes schedules four times a year, and compared to the winter schedule of January-March 2007, there are no reductions in service:

At each schedule change, we look at the weekend offering, and we adjust based on customer demand. The 24 line, for example, mostly serves business workers, so fewer people take it during the weekend. There will be about 14 hours less service on the weekend for those three lines, but we’re adding over 115 hours of service to those lines during the week.

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Toronto Star reaches tentative agreement

January 19, 2008 – 5:30 pm | Posted in Media

Toronto Star: No strike

The Toronto Star has reached a tentative agreement with its union after days of round-the-clock talks that went 14 hours into we-can-call-a-strike-at-any-time territory, and three days after the union’s members voted near-unanimously in favour of a strike.

No details are being released about the agreement, which must still be ratified by the union’s members. But a notice from the union suggests that a decent compromise has been reached, phasing out Sunday pay bonuses, increasing wages 2% each year and no changes to the overtime pay formula.

UPDATE (Jan. 25): The agreement has been ratified by union members, making it official. There will be no work disruption at the Star for at least another three years.

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Today is yesterday again

January 19, 2008 – 2:23 am | Posted in Media

Apparently all the pages of Le Devoir today were accidentally labelled Thursday. I’d understand accidentally putting 2007, or getting the date wrong, but how does no one notice the day of the week is incorrect?

As for the suggestion that, like a stamp with a mistake in it, these copies will be worth something someday: don’t hold your breath. Mistakes in newspaper folios are common, and embarrassing.

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