September 21, 2008 – 4:16 am
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Posted in Media
As part of incremental changes to reduce the amount of newsprint it uses and otherwise cut costs, The Gazette has made its weekly tabloid Books section into a monthly one, while increasing its size to about double what it was.
For you math experts out there, doubling the size of a section but having it run only a quarter as often will result in 50% less content overall on average. (It’s actually a bit better than that, because on Saturdays when the section doesn’t appear there will be a page from it in the Saturday Extra section).
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to people who have been following the newspaper industry worldwide, as fewer and fewer papers still have such sections at all. If anything, the surprise is that the section wasn’t eliminated entirely.
The Science section, which appeared at the back of Books every week, gets cut loose from that odd-couple relationship and will rejoin the Insight section (which is now part of the A section) on Sundays.
As part of the metamorphosis, the paper gets a new online Books page, which includes a blog called Narratives, and both will get updates between appearances of the big monthly section.
I’ve never been a big book-review-section person myself, so I’m not particularly affected by this decision.
Perhaps that’s the problem.
UPDATE: Andrew Phillips has a post about this on his blog. He mentions that the local literary community was consulted and that, generally, it’s an agreeable compromise.
Gazette photographer Allen McInnis is putting up some initial posts on a style-spotting blog called Street Views.
Andrew Phillips posts a graph showing that traffic to The Gazette’s blogs has more than quadrupled over the past year. I’ll go ahead and assume it’s because I keep linking to them.
Stephanie Myles’s frequently updated Open Court tennis blog is by far the most popular in terms of page views. It’s also by far the most updated (about as much as all the other ones combined).
UPDATE (Aug. 7): Andrew also points out a huge increase in traffic to the Habs Inside/Out blog, which is getting regular updates on the Mats Sundin situation from resident funnyman Mike Boone.
As editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips explains in a blog post, The Gazette is jumping on the bandwagon and has launched an Olympics website to cover the Beijing Games that start next week, at www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/sports/beijing2008/index.html. Most of the web content is provided by Canwest, which has a similar page (as does the Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun, etc.)
Other media outlets have already launched Olympics pages, which I have almost universally panned. That said, it’s clear the news media is making a much bigger effort toward these games in terms of online coverage. (It remains to be seen which of these websites will have better live coverage of the Games.)
As part of local coverage of the Games (and to justify the oodles of money spent sending him there), The Gazette is also starting a blog for photographer John Mahoney, who will accompany reporter Dave Stubbs to Beijing (Stubbs already has a blog up with funny little stories leading up to the Games). Mahoney has a first post relating Beijing to his first Olympics in Lake Placid in 1980.
The paper, of course, will also have special coverage. Mahoney has photo profiles of different athletes each day starting Saturday, there will be a special Olympics preview section on Wednesday, and each day of the Games will have special Olympics sections with pages of coverage (some of which will be edited by yours truly).
Gazette business reporter Allison Lampert is schmoozing it up with Bombardier bigwigs at the Farnborough International Air Show in England, throwing up some notes on a blog.
Two more blogs from the Gazette were launched today with premiere posts:
Just for Laughs Festival is the cleverly-named blog covering … wait for it … the Just for Laughs Festival, which runs July 10-20.
The Ciné Files similarly follows all those film festivals that happen here during the summer. Fantasia, FFM, FNC, Joe’s Super Awesome Film Fest, etc.
They’re both self-explanatory, no?
The latest blog from The Gazette is “War and Peace” from Alyson Grant. She’s aboard the HMCS Toronto as it goes on NATO exercises and a diplomatic trip to Dublin.
UPDATE: Dave Stubbs has also started a Beijing Olympic Games blog.
May 29, 2008 – 11:56 pm
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Posted in Media
The Gazette’s Dave Stubbs and Randy Phillips have dusted off the Canadian Grand Prix blog and are posting to it again.
The Grand Prix, which brings in a gazillion tourist dollars from really rich people with excessively-bimboed girlfriends and features way-too-expensive cars, is next weekend (June 6-8).
The blog is part of a larger Grand Prix website, which also includes multimedia and stories from the paper and its special Grand Prix section, which will be running all week starting Monday.
Though it officially launches on Monday, The Gazette’s latest blog went live today (and this morning’s paper includes a small pointer to it). It’s called Patent Pending, and it’s the blog of a veteran Gazette copy editor who is undergoing the transition from male to female.
It varies from other Gazette blogs because it’s personal. Very personal. In fact, you can’t get much more personal than this.
The editor is Jillian (formerly Bill) Page, whose service at the paper is measured in decades more than years, and whose long-time coworkers were shocked to say the least when they got an email one day explaining that Bill was now Jill.
Coming out in this way is a challenge in itself. It’s still a bit awkward for me to override my habits in the use of personal pronouns, and I’m one of the youngest ones there. You can imagine how difficult it is in an environment where the average age is about 174.
As the inaugural post explains, expect the blog to vary between seriously discussing the social, political and health aspects of such a transition and humorously discussing some of the unexpected quirks that sitcom-like awkward situations that arise when you try to get everyone to switch from “he” to “she.”
My evil misunderstood overlords at The Gazette have launched two new blogs this week, bringing its total to 1,425:
Stage and Page, which I have to admit is a kind of catchy title, is the blog of new “culture critic” Pat Donnelly. Formerly the books columnist, she’s taken over Matt Radz’s theatre beat as well, bringing herself to a level of cultural aptitude that simply puts the rest of us to shame.
Green Life, by reporters Monique Beaudin and Michelle Lalonde, is the environment blog, which was launched last Tuesday as part of the whole Earth Day thing. It’s part of a larger “website” devoted to environment issues. There will also be a weekly column on the environment on Mondays (including a big splash in today’s Arts & Life section on reducing your carbon footprint in 12 easy steps). The column will alternate between the two as they teach us new and disgusting ways to make us greener.
(UPDATE - April 30):
Showbiz Chez Nous, by Brendan Kelly, follows the same subject matter as his weekly column: TV and movies in Quebec.
The Gazette launches a new blog today (with a mention on A1 and article/picture on D1) called On Two Wheels, which deals with cycling. The blogger is classical music freelancer, copy editor and all-around great person Kate Molleson, who when not asking me to cover her shifts on weekends can be seen biking around the city in all sorts of are-you-insane weather.
Her first post includes a mission statement.
Andrew Phillips, The Gazette’s editor-in-chief, is kicking the tires on a new blog in which he’ll discuss the behind-the-scenes inner workings of the newspaper and cry over wax poetically about the current status of the newspaper industry. Look for real posts at Ask the Editor starting soon.
What would you like to hear from the editor-in-chief of a major metropolitan daily newspaper?
Fresh off his successful campaign to have Montreal Alouettes head coach Jim Popp removed, The Gazette’s Herb Zurkowsky is breaking the news of his replacement, a guy named Marc Trestman, and in the same breath suggesting the new guy is as incompetent (if not moreso) as the old guy. Could another campaign be forming?
Zurkowsky is starting to live up to his mean-looking mugshot.
UPDATE (Dec. 18): The Alouettes confirm the news, and Zurkowsky adds a pessimistic post about how bad a choice it was.
The Gazette’s Juan Rodriguez goes postal (verbally) on Madonna, calling her a fraud and saying she’s “the worst piece of meaningless trash ever propagated by pop culture.”
Then he starts getting mean.
It’s been a while since The Gazette launched a new blog. Fresh off the assembly line is From Oil to Dust, a blog of business reporter Allison Lampert’s trip to the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. The first post recounts a conversation with a taxi driver in Dubai.
I’m not a cinema buff, but since I’ve announced all the other blogs The Gazette has launched recently, I shouldn’t ignore this one.
The Festival du nouveau cinéma blog (2007) is getting contributions from Gazette researcher Liz Ferguson, film critic John Griffin, freelancer Al Kratina, columnists Brendan Kelly and Bill Brownstein, and editor Basem Boshra.
Basem Boshra, The Gazette’s new Arts & Life online manager, is very busy these days. He was hired as a copy editor in March after a four-year absence. Now he’s launching blogs like there’s no tomorrow (and posting almost 100 posts to them already) like Inside the Box (TV), Words and Music (music) and Year One (university freshman diary).
The latest is The Constant Shopper with fashion editor Eva Friede. (The fashion section, for the unfamiliar, is those couple of ad-filled pages on Tuesdays that feature photos of must-have garments and accessories on white backgrounds.)
The blog’s inaugural post (actually more like three posts) chronicles, among other things, her search for the perfect watch. She rejects a $5,300 diamond-studded timepiece because it’s “too big”.
This is where Eva and I differ. My watch was bought for $10 at a street sale, complete with fabric/velcro strap. And it has a stopwatch. And I couldn’t be happier (well, except for the fact that I have to press a button to check the date).
(Don’t get the wrong impression, she also shops at Winners. But don’t expect MTL Street here).
The Gazette has convinced yet another of its beat writers to create a blog. Golf writer Randy Phillips takes his Tee to Green to the Interwebonets. (The only caveat: Someone screwed up the HTML and the blog’s banner points to a different blog)
There’s nothing better on tonight (except re-runs of Family Guy/American Dad on Global, Anchorman on ABC, the NFL’s New England Patriots on NBC/TSN, and the Weather Network’s long-term forecasts), so I’m watching the Emmys.
Of course, it’s not enough to be watching the Emmys, you have to read someone liveblogging it too. Something to keep you entertained during Ray Romano’s monologue. (It’s clear why some of the awards were previously presented, because they needed more time for long, unfunny monologues and skits.)
There’s a few options for Emmy liveblogging, but I’ll point to two with opposite mentalities:
FOX has five people you’ve never heard of sitting in the audience with blackberries in their hands, contributing to a blog on its website. The blackberries apparently prevent them from using punctuation, capital letters, or from spelling anyone’s name right. Here’s a sampling of some of the comments:
- “ray remono is a comedic genious he had the audience in tears”
- “I’m quick like a squirrell.”
- “whod of thought eva l could get any hotter”
- “hahaha yay justin!”
- “queeny is in the house”
Most of the other posts have about the same level of insight and grammar.
On the other side of the spectrum, The Gazette’s Basem Boshra is sitting in front of a TV liveblogging the Emmys for the Inside the Box blog. A sampling:
- 8:47: Biggest upset of the night so far as Late Night with Conan O’Brien snags the writing in a variety, comedy or music series trophy over heavyweights such as the Daily Show, Colbert Report and Late Show with David Letterman. (Although the winner for best goofy video to accompany the list of nominees - always one of the high points of any Emmy broadcast - goes to the team from Bill Maher, for their priceless send-up of the Sen. Larry Craig mess,)
- 8:59 p.m.: A grizzled-as-ever Robert Duvall spends a little too long extolling the virtues of the western after winning the award for best actor in a minseries or movie for Broken Trail, presented to him by Heroes’ Ali Larter and 24’s Kiefer Sutherland, the latter who was in full-on Sutherland-gravitas mode.
It’s not like the latter tells me much I couldn’t tell from simply watching the show. But at least it doesn’t treat me like an idiot.
UPDATE: From Sunday’s Gazette:
Sacrilege! How could they get the name of his show wrong?
For the past month, The Gazette has been launching a new blog every week on average. Year One, Words and Music, In the Game. Good ideas which sadly use the badly-designed CanWest blogging platform instead of the proven successful formula of Movable-Type-based Habs Inside/Out.
The latest is Inside the Box, a TV blog featuring former TV critic Basem Boshra along with TV Explorer columnist Denise Duguay, Gazette online manager Asmaa Malik and blogging favourite Mike Boone.
It’s nice to see the paper get back to original TV coverage, and hopefully this blog will concentrate on local television instead of what’s coming out of Hollywood and start talking about local TV again. It’s something that’s been seriously missing since the TV column was outsourced to CanWest’s Alex Strachan.
