WE ARE TERRIBLY DISAPPOINTED WITH YOUR CHANGES TO TV TIMES. THE MANNER YOU PROCEEDED WAS ARBITRARY, WITHOUT NOTICE NOR EXPLANATIONS.

YOU CANNOT CLAIM PAPER ECNOMY (sic) SINCE YOU HAVE WASTED NUMEROUS FULL AND PARTIAL PAGES OF SENSELESS GRAY FOR MANY YEARS. MORE TREES HAVE BEEN FELLED THAN TV TIMES WILL EVER REQUIRE.

SINCE THE DATA IS ALREADY DIGITIZED THERE IS NO ADDITIONAL LABOUR IN PRINTING THE INFORMATION.

YOU ARE CAUSING A SERIOUS DISSERVICE TO THE NIGHT VIEWERS SINCE THEY CANNOT PLAN THEIR VIEWING NIGHTS; THEY ARE TOTALLY IGNORANT OF THE PROGRAMMES AVAILABLE TO THEM.

IN ADDITION YOU ARE ROBBING THE SPONSORS OF THESE PROGRAMMES OF THE EXPECTED EXPOSURE OF THEIR PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. YOU ARE ALSO SHORTCHANGING US, YOUR READERS, OF AN ESSENTIAL INFORMATION THAT WE PAY FOR AND EXPECT.

WE SUGGEST THAT YOU USE YOUR EDITORIAL PAGE TO ADMIT YOUR ERROR AND APOLOGIZIE (sic) FOR THE INCONVENIENCE YOU HAVE CAUSED BY YOUR UNTIMELY DECISION.

SINCERELY YOURS,

ASSIDUOUS TV TIMES NIGHT READERS

The fax (who uses faxes anymore, anyway?) was followed by others, hand-written like they were ransom notes:

IT WASN’T BROKE

WHY SCREW IT UP?

TV TIMES IS A MESS

FIX IT RIGHT LIKE IT WAS

and

SNAFU

TV TIMES IS SCREWED UP

FIX IT RIGHT

Those faxes were resent at a rate of one a minute for over an hour before the faxes were shut off to avoid wasting any more paper. Over 50 faxes that powers that be will never see (unless they read this blog), and which won’t change anything.

But it served as a reminder that despite all the times I hear “I don’t read The Gazette” when I talk to people my age about it, there are plenty of people in an older age group who take the paper very seriously (and think their news judgment is vastly superior to everyone else’s).

Another reminder came as I started hearing (and reading) comments from readers who heard about the paper’s plans to make the Monday paper “more compact” like Sunday’s through a survey the paper commissioned. They’re almost universally opposed to the idea, and most took the time to complain that the Sunday paper needed to be fixed by adding more content and splitting up the sections again (currently it’s in two sections, the second being sports and classified).

The Gazette is also considering cutting the width of the paper by 2.5 inches, in order to make it more convenient to use as well as to save money on newsprint. (Considering how much I read the paper on public transit, any size reduction - provided the content stays the same - is welcome in my book).

A lot of people think they have better ideas on how to spend the paper’s money. More sports, less sports, more analysis, less analysis, longer articles, shorter articles, more hard news, more lifestyle features. Others simply demand the paper spend more money until it goes bankrupt.

I’m just glad they care.

See also:

• July 8, 2008 — Gazette’s thinner TV Times
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog
• July 28, 2008 — Globe reduces TV listings

"Yé tellement cute!"

Dammit, I want two cute girls to be (fictionally) talking about how awesome it is to be interviewed by me because of how amazingly cute I am.

Damn you Lagacé!

(Note to Chez Jules: I don’t understand the reasoning behind making it impossible to link to individual episodes, and hence I can’t here. Too bad.)

See also:

• August 12, 2008 — Coiffeur, do your thing
• August 11, 2008 — Montreal North riot OMG BBQ
• August 2, 2008 — Nobody wants to read 1,000 comments

This week’s Justify Your Existence is an interview with a member of Anonymous, the anti-Scientology group. Though she’s unnamed, you’ll recognize her as the same young woman I made fun of talked about earlier when a video was posted on YouTube in which she said Scientology conspired to get her fired from her job. Though I suggested she was weird, to her credit, she was willing to sit down with me and explain herself. Reaction on their forums is starting to build here.

There’s also a protest today at 11 near Lafontaine Park, for anyone interested.

UPDATE: For those of you who are reading this article because it was posted on the Anonymous forums and have never read it before, Justify Your Existence by its very nature takes a tough stand against its interview subjects — part of the reason it’s tough getting interviews sometimes.

Also, from the Enterbulation forums:

NO WAY!!!!
His name is Steve Fagay?????

Actually, no it’s not. But I’m touched by the maturity.

Finally, I’ve already got hate mail. Sweet.

NFL vs. CFL

This week’s Bluffer’s Guide is about the Buffalo Bills game in Toronto this week, and what the NFL testing the waters in Canada could mean for our national football game. There’s suggestion that the Bills might move to Toronto after its current owner dies and the franchise is sold off. Such a move, worryers say, would spell the end to the Toronto Argonauts, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and probably even the CFL itself.

It comes the same day as this piece from The Gazette’s Herb Zurkowsky, quoting league officials worried about the NFL threat. He also has some interesting history in his notes that I wish I’d stolen from is useful for context.

See also:

• July 14, 2008 — Fair Game
• January 19, 2008 — TWIM: Kenya and bus schedules
• December 29, 2007 — TWIM: Griffintown and telemarketers

I was doing the Olympics pages last night, and there was a story from Cam Cole of the Vancouver Sun about how the American journalists are starting to make fun of us for not having won any medals.

Just before midnight came word that a Canadian wrestler had reached a final and would be guaranteed at least a silver medal, so the piece needed a significant rewrite.

UPDATE: This New York Times story looks like it was similarly rewritten on deadline. It points out that Canwest News Service has 28 journalists in Beijing, and our medal-to-journalist ratio looks almost as bad as our medal-to-athlete ratio.

See also:

• August 19, 2008 — This is what I love about the Olympics
• August 19, 2008 — Beijing Games online coverage analysis
• August 18, 2008 — Olympics’ assault on fair use

Last week, while putting together sports pages for Sunday, I selected a nice photo of Rafael Nadal throwing a wristband into the crowd at the Rogers Cup in Toronto as the cover art. He had just reached the men’s singles final (a match he would, of course, win) by defeating another player.

In the caption below the photo, there was a reference to that player being from the U.K., so I changed “U.K.” to “England” to fit the paper’s style guide.

Unfortunately, that player was Andy Murray, who I would learn from a few sources (including a particularly offended coworker) is Scottish, not English.

It’s bad enough when you learn you’ve made a mistake. Worse when it results in a correction, and horrifying when it results in an editor’s note. But when you have to read a letter to the editor correcting one of your mistakes, that hurts.

I will, of course, be posting a letter of formal apology to Scotland’s president at 10 Downing Street in Belfast post-haste.

UPDATE (Aug. 4): My attempt at penance as a headline-writer.

See also:

• August 20, 2008 — More “clarifications”
• August 14, 2008 — CTV Montreal’s $23,600 “clarification”
• August 12, 2008 — NBC is lying to you

That was also the subject of an interview Pat did on CIBL with Michel Dumais (Mario Asselin has the details) in which Pat totally name-drops me (near the end of the audio clip):

Dumais: … Vous êtes très fréquenté, vous générez beaucoup de commentaires. Mais ça serait pas intéressant pour vous peut-être de commencer à fréquenter aussi des autres blogues et à laisser des commentaires? …

Lagacé: Oui, j’essai de faire un peu. En fait le seul blogue ou je le fait, j’estime que c’est le meilleur blogue de couverture médiatique à Montréal, c’est le blogue de Steve Faguaiylle … Faguy… son blogue c’est Fagstein — qui couvre les médias montréalais, surtout anglo, mais un peu québecois… francophone aussi. C’est le seul ou je vais. Les autres, je sais pas. Un peu de manque de temps, un peu de manque d’intérêt.

(If my blog were a movie, that quote would go at the top of the poster.)

Although the number of comments on Pat’s blog causes a bit of professional jealousy on my part (second only to hair jealousy), it’s very rare that I’ll read the comments attached to one of his posts. Not so much because of the trolling (though it is apparent), but because there’s just so darn many of them. I don’t have time to read all the posts on blogs I’m subscribed to as it is. I certainly don’t have time to read 50 comments attached to each post, especially when they don’t have anything interesting to add.

And then there’s situations when the number of comments simply gets out of hand. The decapitation-on-a-bus story I talked about earlier now has 1,700 comments, most of which are repetitive. Has anyone read them all?

One easy solution is to stop approving troll comments. We set minimum limits (usually legal ones) for the types of comments we approve in moderation, but why set the barrier so low? Why not set them to the same level as we do letters to the editor? Just because there is space for more doesn’t mean we should bury any truly interesting comments in a pile of useless junk.

But even then, the number of comments can still be unbearable in very popular blogs or news stories or anywhere else one might have an attached discussion forum. When that happens, it’s time to start removing comments that aren’t really interesting (comments that simply agree, disagree, approve, disapprove, or otherwise give a comment without explaining it or adding anything new, as well as those that repeat things already said by others).

The standard response to that is: That’s censorship. It’s not though, it’s moderation. Nobody’s stopping you from posting your useless comments about my blog post on your blog or on some other forum somewhere. When I disapprove a comment it’s because I find it of no use to my readership.

But some still think that’s too far. So is there another method to get these runaway comments under control?

Well, Slashdot answered that question years ago with its comment system. The website, whose format looks very similar to blogs even though it predates them, has a threaded comment system, so comments can be traced back to their parents and sorted according to thread. This level of organization (and the ability to turn it on or off as needed) helps a big deal when dealing with a large number of comments.

More importantly, though, Slashdot has a peer moderation system that allows users to rate each others’ comments. Positive reviews increase a comment’s rating, and negative reviews decrease it. The result is that each comment is assigned a numerical rating (from -1 to +5), and readers can filter comments based on that rating. Set it to zero to get rid of just the trolls. Set it to +5 to get only the dozen or so truly exceptional or interesting or useful comments you need.

I’m surprised that every large-scale blogging system ever made hasn’t copied this system in some way. Instead, you see unthreaded comments with no rating system. The only judgment made is whether they meet the minimum requirements for posting, and that’s not good enough when our attention is so limited.

My blog, though it gets quite a few comments, doesn’t get near enough to start implementing stricter screening or peer moderation, but if I had 500 comments a day, I would certainly seriously consider it.

See also:

• August 18, 2008 — I have hair too!
• August 12, 2008 — Coiffeur, do your thing
• August 11, 2008 — Montreal North riot OMG BBQ

Some of us are working alone in the Sports department late at night, hoping beyond anything else that an announcement doesn’t come out of the blue to screw everything up.

See also:

• February 20, 2008 — Comeback of a lifetime
• February 2, 2008 — More changes at The Gazette
• November 10, 2007 — Habs Inside/Out redesigned

UPDATE: The article has apparently gotten people interested and donating, and he’s already raised more money than last year. I’ll go ahead and take credit for that.

See also:

• August 2, 2008 — Nobody wants to read 1,000 comments
• June 18, 2008 — Another blogger war with the Evil MSM
• May 8, 2008 — Over the top

But then a funny thing happened: The show’s ratings weren’t horrible. It got more than 8 million viewers in its premiere, and 7 million last night, winning the night against such fierce competition as repeats of America’s Funniest Home Videos and more repeats of Most Outrageous Moments. Now CBS is talking about potentially renewing the show beyond its 13-episode order.

Then again, that Just for Laughs ABC show also had adequate ratings in the face of critical failure, and it didn’t last long. The plug on that show was finally pulled in May.

UPDATE (July 22): The plot thickens. CBS has rewarded Flashpoint with a switch to Thursdays at 10 (Swingtown does the reverse). The Gazette has a piece on the show, with a dig about how the franco press aren’t covering it.

See also:

• January 29, 2008 — U.S. network picks up a Canadian series
• August 16, 2008 — TWIM: Scientology, the NFL and other threats to our existence
• August 12, 2008 — A, eh?

My newspaper employs an entire department of people whose sole function is to make it look nice. Mainly, they focus their efforts on the front page of the paper, meticulously adjusting every headline, deck, skybox, label, photo and other element to make it most appealing to people passing by with a dollar to spare for the guy running the news stand. But they also design important internal pages, and usually have a hand in cover pages for feature sections.

Sports doesn’t usually get that kind of treatment because of how last-minute it is. Aside from the web pointers above the banner, the rest of the page is designed by the editor in charge, and usually consist of a large photo, a main story, a smaller story or column along the side and a feature with a small photo at the bottom.

But on Sunday, with one major story dominating the sports news, I had a problem in the section’s design. The photo I wanted to use, of tennis player Rafael Nadal collapsed on his back in exhaustion and celebration of having just won his first Wimbledon title and unseating five-time champion Roger Federer, was horizontal (mainly because Nadal was horizontal at the time), and the layout was vertical (since the paper is a broadsheet and it was the only story going on the page).

So I turned to the design desk for help, gave the design editor on duty a headline and she went to work. The page shown above is what came back, and is much better than anything I could have come up with on my own. The photo turned out very grainy (due to the fact that there was almost no light at Wimbledon when the game finally ended), but the message got across loud and clear.

And that’s what good design is all about.

See also:

• August 19, 2008 — Don’t mess with the readers
• August 18, 2008 — Infographics infographics infographics infographics
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog

Looking through them, it was obvious someone was sending out spam mail with a forged address at my domain. I foolishly setup a catch-all for that domain so everything goes to me. None were angry messages professing eventual death, which was nice. Some were away-from-my-desk messages, others were anti-spam confirm-you’re-a-real-person messages. The rest were bounces.

Then I looked in my spam box. There were hundreds of bounces. At least 300.

Thankfully I have Gmail, so cleaning that up was pretty simple.

UPDATE: I wake up, and the same thing happens again.

See also:

• April 3, 2008 — Porn spam sinks to new low
• February 14, 2008 — Getting biblical about spam
• December 1, 2007 — Cell Unlimited not above outright spam

Because NHL contracts are complicated, I figured some training might be useful for us less-than-insane fans and well-wishers. In order to do that, of course, I had to read the collective agreement that was signed in 2005 after the lockout.

Unfortunately, I failed to realize that the agreement is over 450 pages long (PDF).

Didn’t get a lot of sleep that night. And I’m sure I still got a bunch of things wrong.

Not that I’m worried. If I fail at journalism here, I can always sign in Russia, right?

See also:

• August 16, 2008 — TWIM: Scientology, the NFL and other threats to our existence
• July 19, 2008 — TWIM: Can Flashpoint become Due South 2?
• July 2, 2008 — Salaries in perspective

But for those of us who work on the north side of the building, it can get rather irritating when we’re trying to work. This, despite the fact that we’re on the third floor and the windows don’t open.

So what do we do to take our revenge on this menace to our daily concentration?

Apparently, we write a feature story about him. And record a video.

Why are we enabling him?

See also:

• No related posts

If you notice something wrong about today’s sports section, feel free to blame it on me. Yesterday was my first shift in the big chair in sports (editor Stu Cowan is on a well-deserved vacation). It’s the most stressful job at the paper, especially on the weekends, because it involves filling eight blank pages of stories and photos from dozens of different sports, and half of the stuff arrives close to deadline.

Mind you, the job was made a bit easier this week since most of the stuff happened in the afternoon, including the Great Victory of Spain.

Incidentally, today’s Driving pages are also my creation, having been put together last week.

See also:

• August 19, 2008 — Don’t mess with the readers
• August 2, 2008 — Gazette starting Olympics page, photographer blog
• July 25, 2008 — Myles has given up on baseball

Somehow, despite working 42 hours this week, I managed to put together another bluffer’s guide, for the Liberal carbon tax plan. Liberal leader Stéphane Dion calls it Green Shift, which I guess is not to be confused with this Green Shift. From the video, it seems to have something to do with stock photos of plants and animals, combined with people in suits clapping awkwardly in a white room.

The 48-page plan (PDF), which ironically wastes quite a bit of space by having blank pages and one-word all-green title pages, explains far more details than non-Liberal politicians would have liked, because now they can’t attack Dion for being unclear.

That doesn’t mean they won’t attack the Liberals though. The Tories have already setup a they-think-it’s-funny website mocking Dion and his plan, saying everyone but the tooth fairy and leprechauns will have to pay more taxes as a result of it.

Basically all you need to know about the plan is this:

• It would tax polluting fossil fuels and cut income taxes to balance the money difference
• It exempts gasoline, because politicians are too scared to admit that high gas prices help the environment when suburban soccer moms are griping about how much money it takes to fill up their SUVs. This makes the plan useless for its intended purpose.
• It’s a Liberal plan, and the Liberals have to become the government and get support from a majority of MPs before they can implement it.

See also:

• June 15, 2008 — Sorry for the genocide
• January 7, 2008 — GST, PST, MST?
• December 29, 2007 — TWIM: Griffintown and telemarketers

I went outside to check out what was going on and I found this:

A fire broke out just past 3am at 370 Crémazie Blvd. E., near St. Denis St., in a space shared by Club Magnum downstairs and Studio 88 Swing upstairs.

Fortunately, because of the late hour, the bar was already closed and there was no one inside the building. There’s no word on what started the fire, but firefighters took a good look at the air conditioning system at the back of the building where the fire broke out.

One thing I always find interesting when I stumble upon stuff late at night is the eventual arrival of the newspaper photographer or TV cameraman. In this case we had both:

Some of the larger media outlets still keep people on standby at all hours of the night to take pictures of fires, car crashes and other routine-but-visually-appealing events that happen.

See also:

• September 20, 2007 — Balcony BBQ taboo

The latter is certainly a good idea because despite the huge amount of information out there, a lot of it is contradictory and it would be nice to get some more accuracy about a very shameful part of Canada’s history. I had a lot of trouble with conflicting information about when the schools started, when they closed, where they were located and how many there were and what their ages were (in other words, about half the information in this Reuters factbox). We’re still not entirely sure how many people are involved, but it could easily be over 100,000.

That said, for further reading I would recommend the Indian Residential School Survivor Society and the residential school settlement website.

Also, be sure to check out this classic 1950s CBC educational video about the school system. It’s so cliché it hurts.

See also:

• June 22, 2008 — TWIM: Dion’s carbon tax idea
• December 29, 2007 — TWIM: Griffintown and telemarketers
• August 16, 2008 — TWIM: Scientology, the NFL and other threats to our existence

Naturally, because I’m drunk with power, I included a near-non-sequitur about Stephen Colbert:

But what about Stephen Colbert? True, the city did name March 20, 2007 “Stephen Colbert Day” after the mayor lost a bet with the TV satirist over a game between the Oshawa Generals and Colbert’s favourite Saginaw (Mich.) Spirit, who named their mascot after Colbert. This came after Colbert encouraged Spirit fans to throw copies of GM’s earnings reports onto the ice during a game, a gesture that would perhaps seem not so tongue-in-cheek now.

See also:

• August 16, 2008 — TWIM: Scientology, the NFL and other threats to our existence
• July 19, 2008 — TWIM: Can Flashpoint become Due South 2?
• July 7, 2008 — NHL free agency explained (I hope)

So I always have a smile on my face when someone talks about me without my having asked them to.

A case in point in a local media discussion forum:

Fagstein =
Just another
Asper blog

Poetic, isn’t it? I’ve never met any of the Aspers, but you’re damn right I swear unfailing allegiance to them. That’s why I’ve never criticized any Canwest media. And I never will. Because they’re so perfect.

See also:

• No related posts

I have no clue how they managed to get that GAZETTE EXCLUSIVE … I mean, unless they read my blog post a month ago saying there would be a new bus (No. 515) along reserved lanes linking Old Montreal and Berri-UQAM.

The route comes into service on June 23 (when summer schedules come into effect), and is expected to be eventually replaced by a tramway. The route is a circular one, running along René-Lévesque, Peel, de la Commune and Berri.

See also:

• June 25, 2008 — On the 515
• July 22, 2008 — Bus route suggestions on the cheap
• July 14, 2008 — STM to add evening service to downtown routes