Skip navigation

Tagged blogging

Over the top

May 8, 2008 – 4:07 am | Posted in Blogosphere, Media, Opinion

Being a journalist makes you a quick enemy of a lot of people who take things very personally. They’ll take something you say as evidence of a personal bias against them, and start taking a fine-toothed comb to everything you write, pointing out every mistake and interpreting everything you say in the most negative way possible.

Political journalism is the worst. People take the most minute things in politics very seriously. I got a good taste of that in university covering the Concordia Student Union. National politics is worse because there’s a much larger audience, because it’s professional (people get paid big bucks to be politicians), and because people think that it’s really important.

So you can imagine what happened to The Gazette’s Elizabeth Thompson (an otherwise straight-faced reporter whose copy I have mercilessly slashed to bits lovingly edited with care many times) when she made a few good-natured but insensitively snarky jokes at the expense of the prime minister’s director of communications, Sandra Buckler, who’s having surgery as part of cancer treatment.

Though there was no malice intended, making fun of someone who is being treated for cancer is a bit lacking in taste, the kind of insensitivity I’ve shown myself on many an occasion when I post before I think.

Reading the comments attached to the post, however, you’d think she started cheering for her to die:

  • I’ve called the Managing Editor to bring it to his attention, and will be contacting CanWest advertisers to let them know I will be actively boycotting their products.
  • Liz Thompson of the Montréal Gazette whose lack of common decency and narcissism has lead the Parliament Hill reporter to refuse to take the high road and apologize for her vile blog in which she defamed the Director of Communications of the Prime Minister
  • That is about the worst thing I have ever read.

There are also other (Conservative) blogs that have picked up on the issue and gone so far as to call the paper’s managing editor to express their outrage (another reason I do not covet his job).

To her credit, Thompson apologized to Buckler, and has left (most of) the comments attached to the post, many of which are a bit less hot-headed about her crossing the line.

In the end, hopefully everyone has learned that behind all the politics and professionalism, everyone is human.

UPDATE: Thompson follows up with a heartfelt, honest mea culpa, explaining the lessons she’s learned.

8 comments
Tags: , , ,

Do bloggers have to fit the stereotype to be accepted?

December 7, 2007 – 6:44 pm | Posted in Blogosphere, Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion

In October, blogger Mario Asselin asked his readers to evaluate what makes a good journalist blog. He was researching an article that has just been published in Le Trente about Quebec’s journalist-bloggers. In it, he concludes there are only two who fit the proper definition: TVA’s Dominic Arpin (ironic since he’s since stopped blogging) and freelancer Nicolas Langelier.

Now, I’m not upset that he didn’t include yours truly in his über exclusive list (especially now since Michel Leblanc has my back). I’m used to being left out of the Quebec blogosphere as an anglophone (mostly because there’s an assumption that “Quebec” and “francophone Canadian” are one and the same). What bothers me more is the criteria used to distinguish a good blogger from a bad one.

It’s something I see a lot of. Because “blog” doesn’t have a very clear definition other than “website with entries displayed in reverse-chronological order,” people are making up their own definitions, putting additional restrictions on the term.

Among the restrictions Asselin and his readers seem poised to apply:

  1. Must have comments enabled for each post (and respond to those comments)
  2. Must be personal and talk about personal, behind-the-scenes issues
  3. Must produce original content (instead of aggregating the content of others)
  4. Must comment on other people’s blogs and otherwise have a presence outside their blog, like going to YULblog meetings
  5. Must update at regular intervals (at least one post a week)
  6. Must write about other bloggers (and especially competing bloggers)

Though all of these things sound great, are they all absolutely required in order to produce a good blog?

The Kate McDonnell’s Montreal City Weblog doesn’t have comments. Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error doesn’t discuss personal issues. Pierre-Léon Lalonde’s Un Taxi La Nuit has sometimes gone weeks without updates. The Gazette’s Habs Inside/Out is mostly aggregation of other people’s content (including that of The Gazette), and Stony Curtis is almost entirely just reposting stuff he’s found online.

Are these not blogs? Are their authors not bloggers?

Where do you draw the line between a “real” blogger and “fake” one?

6 comments
Tags: ,

How to piss off a blogger 101

December 1, 2007 – 2:25 am | Posted in Media, Navel-gazing, On the Net
  1. Setup a website that purports to be some sort of independent news source.
  2. Take a blog post and put it on your website without asking permission. At the end of the post, include a plea for money.
  3. When the blogger you just stole from err, politely requests that the post be taken down, respond by replacing his byline with your own, removing the link to the blog in question and keeping the plagiarized content pretending it’s your own.

There you go folks. Getting on my shit list in three easy steps.

So to be clear: “The Canadian National Newspaper”, a.k.a. AgoraCosmopolitan.com knowingly plagiarizes content.

UPDATE (Dec. 1): It goes without saying that I’m not the only one they’ve ripped off.

9 comments
Tags: , , ,

Free speech isn’t a right on blogs, it’s a privilege

November 29, 2007 – 3:32 am | Posted in Blogosphere, Law, Media, Montreal, Navel-gazing, Opinion

There’s a minor crisis happening in the Quebec blogosphere over Richard Martineau’s blog. He and Canoe are being sued for $200,000 over allegedly libelous comments made by visitors to his blog about lawyer Susan Corriveau.

The concern is over what impact that might have on comment policies at mainstream media sites. Traditional media (especially local empires in Quebec) are still trying to figure out what to do with this whole Internet thing, and are entirely clueless about the implications of user-generated content. They think forcing users to click a button that says “I agree not to post libel” is enough to protect them from liability.

Coincidentally, an earlier post this week by La Presse star blogger Patrick Lagacé mentions that he’s asking for tougher moderation of user comments to get rid of the junk and even cap the length of some discussions.

Ironically, both Martineau’s blog and Lagacé’s blog require user registration before people can make comments. This stands in contrast to websites like The Gazette’s which removed the login requirement to encourage more comments. (Then again, even The Gazette is starting to move back — their only popular blog, Habs Inside/Out, has changed its policy to require moderation of anonymous comments.)

As any forum gets more popular, it starts to see problems it couldn’t predict. Spam is the first to show up, in the form of junk sent by computer to advertise some money-making venture. That can be solved by installing a spam filter, requiring registration or manually moderating comments (or a combination of these).

But then comes the problem of real people posting unwanted things. Libel, flame wars, factual mistakes, personal attacks, trolling, copyrighted works, personal information, pornographic images, off-topic comments, the list goes on. The worst ones will get deleted outright. Border cases might get a polite warning from the blogger or moderator.

For some reason, there’s the implication that the goal is to have unedited, unrestricted, free communication in the comments section of blog posts. This innocent-until-proven-guilty mentality means that a lot of useless, mean or uninteresting comments get attached to blogs, comments that are of no use to anyone and are a waste of time and space.

Little by little, big bloggers are starting to restrict that freedom and filter out the noise.

Good.

I moderate comments on this blog. I don’t require user registration (because I know how annoying it is), and I tend to let most non-spam through. But nobody but me has the right to say what is published here. I have deleted plenty of personal attacks, unhelpful garbage, trolling comments and other junk that doesn’t belong here, and I will continue to do so. At the end of the day, I’m responsible for all the content published here, and it’s my ass in the courtroom if anything crosses the line.

I welcome criticism (in fact, some of my best comments are those who reject my entire hypothesis and ridicule my interpretation of the facts), but you have to show your work. Comments like “you suck” and “you’re gay” have no place here or on any other blog.

4 comments
Tags: , ,

Influential bloggers all look the same

September 17, 2007 – 7:00 pm | Posted in Blogosphere, On the Net

North x East (never heard of them either) has a list of their 50 most influential bloggers in the world. Building these top 50 lists is easy, so we see a lot of it. They’re also heavily subjective. This post, like many others in this category, doesn’t give any criteria for who is selects to its list, so I guess we can just assume they pulled the Technorati Top 50.

That said, it does give an insight into what’s considered an influential blog these days. And looking at the list, a lot of their subjects seem to repeat themselves. Here’s a breakdown:

  • Twelve on the list run technology blogs (web development, electronics, software etc.)
  • Seven run or are heavily involved with celebrity gossip blogs
  • Six run political blogs
  • Five bloggers run blogs that specialize in search engine optimization or search engine marketing
  • Five run marketing, media or social networking analysis blogs
  • Four run or are involved with “life hacking” or personal development blogs.
  • Three make money writing blogs about how to make money writing blogs

That’s 42. Leaving only 8 outside of these six categories. And of them, four aren’t known for their association with one particular blog, but for running blog networks or blog services.

That leaves four bloggers — Heather Armstrong (Dooce) Jason Kottke, Matthew Haughey (MetaFilter) and Mark Fraudenfelder (BoingBoing) who are there because they run general-interest or personal blogs that have gained a huge following.

Are these the only categories of blogs that can be considered influential in this world? Or is it because big-time blogging is still so new that it’s confined to these technology-related and niche subject areas?

Post a comment
Tags: ,