They turned him down.

In 1996, he tried again. Again, they said no.

He was pissed. How dare these bastards say no? Once he could understand, but twice? Either that newspaper is run by clueless managers, unable to see greatness before their very eyes, or this kid wasn't nearly as good as he thought he was. Clearly, to him, the former had to be true.

So instead, he began small. A researcher for Radio-Canada in Ottawa. A journalist for a community weekly in Hawkesbury, Ont. The next year, he began working at Le Droit, the francophone paper in Ottawa.

In 1999, a recommendation from a journalist friend got him an interview at the Journal de Montréal. It's not La Presse, but the largest francophone newspaper in North America is certainly a step up.

The interview was very serious. He had to bring in clippings of his work and show them to the group of managers who were judging him for employment. And he had a few good, serious articles with him. But knowing the Journal's reputation for, as the French call it, "faits divers", he tailored his application to that target audience, and rearranged his clippings to put a less serious story first. It was a story he did for Le Droit about a child getting bitten by a dog. The headline: "Circoncis par un chien" (I imagine the details are self-evident).

When his interviewers turned their pages past his CV to see that headline, they started laughing. He was hired as a reporter.

His name: Patrick Lagacé.

Patrick Lagacé takes his job very seriously.

Yeah, that guy.

The rest of the story is more familiar to the public. His job eventually led to becoming a columnist for the Journal and becoming a pundit for various TV and radio outlets. In 2005 he replaced Benoit Dutrizac as Richard Martineau's co-host on Les Francs-Tireurs on Télé-Québec. He also began blogging for Canoë, becoming one of Quebec's most-read bloggers. In late 2006, after a falling out with management at the Journal (in part related to that blog), he pursued what he had originally dismissed as a half-joking offer from La Presse and left the former for the latter. He started up a new blog at Cyberpresse, which is now the most-read blog in Quebec.

Recently, I had dinner with Lagacé at an undisclosed location, as his girlfriend brought his four-year-old son Zak to see his first Canadiens game. Having an unusual curiosity for local media figures, I asked him a bit about his career and what it's like behind the scenes.

I started off with an anecdote I had learned about him two weeks earlier at a panel he participated in during McGill's student journalism week, about his applications for an internship at La Presse. He was actually rejected three times (he applied again to be a sports reporter) before he became a star at the Journal and was lured over.

I asked him what he felt, finally getting that job, after repeatedly asking for it and getting turned down, only for that same newspaper to come calling a few years later and start chasing him instead. He struggled to find the right word in English. Not redemption, but ... satisfaction.

Of course, the management at La Presse had changed significantly in the decade since. "It was a different management, not as prone to managing as wonderfully as today," he would tell me in a follow-up email punctuated with a smileyface emoticon.

His own schedule

So how can a guy have three jobs (newspaper columnist, star blogger, TV host) and still have time to have a life, maintain his sanity and raise a four-year-old kid?

Being a columnist has its advantages here. Unlike a general assignment reporter, Lagacé doesn't punch a clock. He sets his own hours, writes his columns when and how he wants. He works about 50-55 hours a week, but he gets to decide what those hours are, working one job around the demands of another.

"I'm not saying it's much, it's never too much when you have the insane luck of doing what you love," Lagacé said. "On the other hand, I make my own schedule, sort of."

No two weeks are the same. The shooting schedule for Les Francs-Tireurs goes into high gear in the fall and then tapers off. ("From August to March, it's like a plane, full throttle in August, September and October. After that we're getting to cruise altitude and in January we're starting our descent in terms of effort.")

A column, meanwhile, might take a couple of hours, a brilliant idea just flowing from the fingers, or it might take lots of painstaking research. And, unfortunately, there isn't always a direct correlation between the effort put into a column and the response to it.

Patrick Lagacé contemplates his hair.

Cheesy, but true

Lagacé is the first to admit he's living the dream. "I know it's cheesy," he said, "but if you would ask me to draw my dream job, that would be it. Either of them [journalist or TV star], and I've got two."

"This is the high point of my life. It's all downhill from here."

He doesn't drive a fancy car (I've been in it, it's tiny). He isn't mobbed by teenagers on the street (well, not most of the time anyway). His TV show isn't the most watched in Quebec. But he's a star columnist for one of Canada's largest newspapers, and his thoughts are read by thousands.

"I know I'm privileged. I know. Just having les Francs-Tireurs or La Presse, it would be a wet dream."

As it stands, not only does he have both of those, but he has the blog too.

The column comes first

"I'm always focused on the column," Lagacé says of his priorities. "I think about the blog, but it's always the column."

Of course there's a lot of overlap. Many blog posts are related to columns (usually adding something to complement it instead of just a link), and some ideas come out of the work he does at Les Francs-Tireurs.

Pause Kit-Kat de type «Pause Kit-Kat»

Lagacé estimates he posts to his blog 4-5 times a day, almost all on weekdays. That is corroborated by my Google Reader analysis, showing 22.6 posts per week, or 4.5 posts times 5 days. He schedules some of his posts in advance, taking advantage of a WordPress feature that allows this. The timing is important: there always has to be a new post up in the early morning, when people are just getting to work (and, apparently, not working). Usually another follows later in the morning, a third in the early afternoon, and maybe another in the evening.

His "Pause Kit-Kat"s (which are not, by the way, sponsored by Kit-Kat, though they did try to send him a couple of bars as a gift), amusing videos with little commentary, usually go up in the afternoon, when the 9-to-5 office drones are tired of using their brains and just want to have fun.

"I never go to YouTube to find the most popular videos," Lagacé says. About 8 in 10 come either from aggregator blogs he visits frequently (particularly MetaFilter and Jason Kottke).

For Lagacé, blogging these finds is just a way of making use of time he'd already be spending on the Internet looking at stuff he'd find.

Every post contains a visual element, either a photo or a video (and half the time it has little to do with what is being written, other than having some keyword in common - being funny is more important than being accurate when it comes to file art). It's one of those things that print editors learned long ago: People notice words when there are pretty photos around them.

But as fun as it is, Lagacé's blog also flexes the mental muscles. "I started writing better because of the blog," he says. "Before the blog, I was writing 3-4 times a week. With the blog, I'm writing 3-4 times a day."

Lagacé points to 2006 as being his best year at the Journal de Montréal. That's when "I really started to become comfortable with my own prose. Part of it had to do with the blog," which he began with Canoë in late 2005.

As time goes on, the blog evolves. Recently, he's started responding directly to readers' comments with blog posts. Because of the sheer volume of comments on his blog posts, conversation becomes very difficult. It's too much for one person to even moderate all the comments that come in, much less respond to them. But Lagacé wants to improve interaction with readers, because he knows that without them he's worthless.

Follow the traffic

Lagacé used to post on weekends, but the traffic isn't there, he says. Nobody visits his blog on weekends.

Nobody is a relative term for a blog that gets a gajillion page views a month. I'd kill for just the 4-5am crowd on Tuesdays. But statistics show that traffic peaks during weekday mornings and is lowest on the weekends.

Not that Lagacé cares about statistics. Unlike me, he doesn't obsess over the numbers. He knows he's the most read blog on Cyberpresse. He knows the traffic dips on weekends. But he doesn't know which posts are more popular, nor does he know the difference between a page view and a unique visitor. And he doesn't really care.

Although part of me finds it incredible that a journalist would be willfully ignorant of such data, another part realizes it's probably for the best. I've seen journalists who get access to statistics pages for their blogs suddenly start thinking differently. They see that a post they wrote on Michael Jackson or Twilight or porn or Angelina Jolie (or all of the above) gets a jump in traffic, and suddenly they're more inclined to write about these topics. It could be that this extra traffic is junk - spambots, for example, trained to seek out popular topics - but it doesn't matter. They want to become popular, and unfortunately that doesn't always mean better.

Être aimé

"On ne fait pas ça pour être aimé," Lagacé said at that panel discussion at McGill. I found that statement really funny. He's the most popular blogger in Quebec, and every young aspiring journalist student wants to be him. (Older journalists aspire to be - or do - Pierre Foglia, ahem.)

The reason he's so admired is because of that attitude. He's cool because he doesn't try to be popular. He has his enemies (Claude Dubois isn't particularly fond of him right now because of this), but everyone enjoys his putdowns until they're the victim.

It's like they're trying really hard to be as gay-looking as possible. (Télé-Québec photo)

Let's be Franc

The hardest people to interview for Les Francs-Tireurs are foreigners. They don't know the show, they don't know its style. They don't know to expect the interviewer to be aggressive, to tell them they're full of shit. Most Quebecers have seen the show (or at least know its hosts) and know what to expect.

Like most edited television shows, it can take a while between shooting and airing. "We have shot stuff in September that hasn't been broadcast yet," Lagacé says. "We have been shooting in the past month stuff that won't be broadcast until January or February." The only constant is the introductions, which are shot on Mondays, two days before the show airs on Télé-Québec.

Interviews usually last about an hour and a half. Usually they involve two cameras, one on the interviewee and one either on the interviewer or showing both to capture the questions. Sometimes a third camera is setup by the producer and left to run unmanned. From there, editors will cut the interview down to the best 20-25 minutes. Two long segments (one with Lagacé, one with Martineau) and a few short segments are put together to form a 45-minute episode.

Lagacé says he tries not to interfere in the production process. Sure, he may think a different part of an interview should have been aired, but he's not in the editing booth when the show is cut and the hard decisions are made. So long as he doesn't participate in the process, he doesn't have the right to be a backseat driver. So when the producers say he has to interview Louise Harel at the corner of Peel and Ste. Catherine because they like the way it looks, that's where he's going to do it.

Besides, he says, "a lot of talented people are working hard to make you look intelligent." It's best to just let them do their job.

Many of the guests on Les Francs-Tireurs are known to the population. They could be politicians, celebrities, people in the news. Others aren't known, but offer an interesting perspective. What's key is that "you've got to have something weird," Lagacé says. "You've got to have something to say." Nobody's going to come on Les Francs-Tireurs and talk for 20-25 minutes about their latest album or movie, no matter how famous that person might be.

And what if there simply isn't enough to fill those 20-25 minutes? It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

He wouldn't let me name the interviewee, other than to say it was a politician. They sat down, but the interview was "boring as hell." Lagacé's still not sure if they're going to use it before the end of the season.

Despite the editing, people don't get mad after they've been on the show. "We don't screw people with the final cut," Lagacé says, adding that they never run out of guests.

There was one notable exception, though. Michelle Courchesne, the minister of education, came on the show in 2007 but accused the producers of manipulative editing, taking her out of context in the final product. Outraged, they posted the entire interview online.

TV star

"Celebrity, I frowned upon when I was younger," the ever humble Lagacé says as he checks his hair in the mirror for the 20th time."I had a lot of contempt for TV. ... I still do sometimes." But "it opens doors that I did not think could be opened. Now I take it, because I'm older."

Still, he admits, it's a "tiny celebrity. You're on TV, people do a double take. I didn't know how to cope with that."

Being recognized has its disadvantages too. "I can't do undercover stuff," he says. "I had an appointment with an osteopath, and the woman thought I was doing an undercover thing."

Sometimes Patrick Lagacé just needs to see a doctor.

Forced to choose between the two jobs (it's fun putting people in gun-to-your-head hypothetical scenarios, no?), Lagacé leans toward print. "I'd probably give up TV," he says, "because I'm probably better at writing."

And he wouldn't have to worry about grooming himself so much. Those columnist photos only need to be taken once.

Joyeux drille

I don't remember how I first got hooked on Patrick Lagacé. It certainly wasn't his column. I don't read newspapers that aren't (a) free and/or (b) anglophone. And it wasn't Les Francs-Tireurs, either. I watched a lot less franco TV back then than I do now (something I've been working to fix since then). It could be because it was the most popular blog, and it was on everyone's blogroll.

And, of course, he likes me. I'm not quite sure why. Other journalists read my blog, simply because I talk about their industry (an industry that is ironic in that it's about the distribution of information but is also incredibly secretive when looking at itself in an unflattering corporate light). But he seems to like it more than most.

Maybe it's a personal fault, but I get excited when people say nice things about me online, and that excitement is proportional to the popularity of the speaker. Patrick has praised me a few times, usually referring to me as the best media blogger in Quebec, which is pretty high praise form someone who used to edit Quebec's magazine for journalists. Every link from his blog sends thousands of readers to mine, leaving a noticeable spike in my statistics and reminding me that I ain't all that. Mere presence in his blogroll, along with dozens of other bloggers he considers his favourites, makes his blog one of my top sources of incoming links (besides search engines, Twitter and RSS feeds).

Though, of course, it's more important he be judged on the quality of what he does than the quantity of eyeballs it attracts, part of me feels the market has spoken and if he's so well read, it's because he must be the best. The fact that he has great taste in blogs only reinforces that notion.

Lagacé freely admits that backing from a major newspaper helped him get that audience, both at Canoë and Cyberpresse. He wouldn't be where he is if not for La Presse (and always being a click away from Cyberpresse's homepage). But it takes more than having a cyberpresse.ca address, of course. Just ask Yves "can't get no respect" Boisvert.

Want him? Bid!

For the third year in a row (perhaps it was longer than that, but the Fagstein universe begins in 2007), Patrick Lagacé is participating in a fundraiser with his La Presse colleagues. He's already sold his soul to the devil, but he's willing to rent his body and mind for a day to the highest bidder.

In 2007, Lagacé came in dead last, well behind winner Pierre Foglia. In 2008, with no Foglia in the picture, he did a slightly better 7th. This year, Foglia is back and is already a runaway leader with a couple of days left to go.

This prompts me to begin an Anyone But Foglia campaign.

Lagacé is the preferred choice, of course. But don't count out Marie-Christine Blais (currently in last place), Paul Journet or Yves Boisvert, other lesser-known stars who are badly trailing in the money game. It doesn't matter who you bid on, as long as it's not Foglia.

His prize isn't even that good. They're offering to let you bike with him in the slush during spring. What kind of a ridiculous prize is that? Sounds more like punishment to me.

With Journet, there's a round of golf involved. With Boisvert, a run and lunch. With Blais, a show, and with Lagacé, you get to follow him around for a day while he does his thing. All better prizes than getting your pants dirty with Foglia (and not in that good way).

Cyberpresse has details of the 10 prizes up for grabs. The donation page and running count is here. The auction ends on Thursday, Dec. 10. at 4pm.

La Clique du Plateau and Le Devoir's Stéphane Baillargeon seem to think pretending that columnists are superstars is silly. But Fagstein readers know better. And the thousands of dollars rolling in speak for themselves, no?

Still, I suppose we could give mention to the guignolée put together by Radio-Canada, which is less about journalistes-vedettes and more about, you know, prizes. It also ends Thursday.

UPDATE (Dec. 10): It seems I have no pull. Foglia came in first ($5,050), Lagacé was 7th again ($2,050), beating out Yves Boisvert by $50. Dead last was Paul Journet at $1,050.

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Even though I'm a life-long Montrealer, I see where they're coming from.

And I point at least one finger at the media.

When Global Television's CKMI-TV regional station in Quebec City officially became a Montreal station on Sept. 1, I understood the reasoning (mainly to gain access to local advertising, but also to acknowledge the de facto change to a Montreal station), but I was also a bit disappointed.

At its peak, Global Quebec had an active Quebec City station and a bureau in the Eastern Townships. The only other anglophone television stations in Quebec were both local stations based in Montreal (with at most a reporter at the National Assembly). I had wondered if, instead of focusing on its largest cities, Global could set itself apart from the other two by being a truly regional network, by covering the far-away communities ignored buy CTV and CBC. It would, effectively, be the local station for anglos in Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières, Gaspé, and even some places in the Montreal metropolitan area that the city's reporters hesitate to venture to.

But the economics of that proposition apparently don't hold. It's expensive to cover such a large area, and the anglophone population outside Montreal is simply too small and too widespread to be able to create that critical mass of loyal viewership.

Instead, Global concluded that it would be better as the #3 station in Montreal than the #1 station elsewhere in Quebec.

(Of course, this logic applies only to local programming, of which CKMI and CBC's CBMT produce a pathetic 7.5 hours a week. The rest would have no difference in content or reach if the station were based in Montreal or St-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!)

And today in Montreal...

It's easy to get local news as a Montrealer. Three nightly TV newscasts in English, two in French (not counting what's on TQS V). An all-news French radio station, and news/talk radio stations in both languages. Six daily newspapers, of which two are free. And, of course, blogs and online sources such as this one.

But it goes farther than that. Two all-news TV channels, Radio-Canada's RDI and Quebecor's LCN, are headquartered here. LCN is often on the TV in the newsroom because it's essentially become a Montreal local all-news channel.

If I wanted to, say, get a story about a local event in Quebec City told by local English media, I'd have to scratch my head a bit figuring out where to go. CBC has an English radio station there, but it doesn't even have a website (it piggybacks off CBC Montreal, and calls itself the Quebec Community Network). My other option is the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, a weekly community newspaper.

In other cities in Quebec, the options for local news - in either language - become even bleaker than that. The Sherbrooke Record is the only English daily outside of Montreal. Outside of some low-budget community initiatives, there are no English news media and few French media. And much of that media contains news from the big-budget corporate headquarters of Montreal in between the bits of local flavour. Like Toronto is the media capital of Canada, Montreal is the media capital of Quebec.

What this all means is that when people outside Montreal turn on their TVs, turn on their radios, open their newspapers or go on the Internet, they're bombarded with news from Montreal, while in many cases their local news consists of gallery openings, petty crimes in police blotters, and grandmas turning 100.

One city down, 1109 to go

The big news in Montreal this week is the release of an auditor's report into a water meter contract, which led to its cancellation. That whole ordeal might not have come to light had it not been for local media and reporters like La Presse's André Noël and (I'd say especially, but perhaps that would be biased) The Gazette's Linda Gyulai (I give her the plug here because I gave her a length for her story last night and she astonishingly filed to exactly that length). Gyulai is a dedicated city hall reporter who doesn't have to spend (much) time chasing ambulances and rewriting press releases. She can focus strictly on her beat and spend days reading massive reports and digging for information.

With the exceptions of Le Soleil and the Journal de Québec in Quebec City (both of which still contain quite a bit of Montreal-produced news), few other newspapers in Quebec have such resources (and TV and radio certainly don't).

I wonder about those cities that don't have such a strong watchdog press. As I told CJAD's Ric Peterson the other day: who's watching Beaconsfield City Hall? Or Repentigny City Hall? Or St. Jerome City Hall? How many skeletons do they have in their closets because the media there consist of no-budget community papers that get all their news from press releases, or big Montreal media that swoop into town for a day or two when something big catches their attention?

Lagacé thinks the Rest of Quebec should get over its inferiority complex in constantly comparing itself to Montreal. I agree. But he should also acknowledge that he and the rest of the Montreal media are part of the problem.

UPDATE: Similar thoughts from Matthieu Dugal: "nos médias sont tiers-mondistes"

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Patrick Lagacé (top), Patrick Lagacé (right) and Patrick Lagacé (bottom)

HE'S MULTIPLYING! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

It's good that Cyberpresse always has extra images of Patrick Lagacé around, just in case you forget what he looks like.

UPDATE: It seems some people have had enough.

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The link of the day comes from this morning's Le Devoir, in which media reporter Paul Cauchon does an analysis of the Journal situation, the freelance columnist problem and the role of unions in media. It's a bit opinionative (and, since it's in Le Devoir, that opinion is left-of-centre), but worth a look.

Tout le monde won't shut up

Patrick Lagacé and Bernard Landry were on Tout le monde en parle last night, and both answered questions about the Journal. Landry recently quit his column (with a lame excuse) and Lagacé had to answer for his boyfriend Richard Martineau, who just won't quit. Rue Frontenac was watching and has the play-by-play. As does Richard Therrien.

On the other channel (with twice the audience), TVA had the premiere of Star Académie, and Journal workers were picketing outside giving out flyers to audience members. (The Clique du Plateau wonders if Rue Frontenac's critique of the show would have been as critical if it had appeared in the Journal)

In other news

• Joseph Facal writes a comments-disabled post on his blog explaining his decision not to leave his Journal de Montréal column. He says he wants to be neutral, but also comments that globalization (read: outsourcing) is here and there's nothing the union can do about it. He also says people who write about this conflict in the media and on blogs have biases and should be read skeptically.
• Marie-Julie Gagnon says there's good news for freelancers at TVA Publications, Quebecor's magazine publishing arm. They're pulling back on those abusive freelance contracts and allowing people to contribute (for the time being at least) without signing them.
• Lagacé gives a thumbs-up to RueFrontenac.com and its reporting quality (again). He'd been a bit impatient before they first launched.
• A locked-out journalist writes about a call he got from the Journal offering him a subscription to the newspaper for $3 a week. His subscription was cancelled when he was locked out.

Meanwhile, a journalist at Transcontinental in Quebec City has gotten her job back after she was fired last year, coincidentally (or not) as she was organizing a union for their community weeklies in the area.

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Patrick Lagacé, the teen heartthrob who came in dead last in 2007, is hoping his blogfame can catapult him back into contention.

I'm putting my money (well, not literally, I must remain loyal to the Christmas Fund and I don't have thousands of dollars to throw away) on Marie-Claude Lortie, the foodie who is also the only woman available for bids, and perhaps not coincidentally is leading the bids at $2,000.

UPDATE: Lagacé came in 7th out of 10, Lortie 2nd, just behind Alexandre Vigneault. $16,706 total. Though, as dead-last loser Yves Boisvert points out, he doesn't have a blog he can use to drum up votes.

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I've always wanted an ampersand and semicolon in my name.

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From my Google Reader feed

The video in question, whose short version has gone uberviral, is a bit less about language and a bit more about left vs. right, but it still paints the Conservatives with a big caricature brush that I think will be dismissed as unrealistic, just as the language confusion is being dismissed, since the Conservative heritage minister is a francophone from Quebec City.

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The first thing you notice, as you do with all these new news websites, is that it goes on forever. You see, some web marketing genius decreed that users no longer care about vertical scrolling (which is true) and some web designer at an important media outlet decided this meant the homepage should be infinitely long vertically. And now everyone is mindlessly copying each other with these layouts that have no structure and look absolutely haphazard as far as placement of stories on the homepage:

Cyberpresse homepage goes on and on and on and on and on...

Still with me? Good. Since the page is so freaking long, I had to shrink it down considerably, so let's take a zoomed-in look here:

Top of the Cyberpresse homepage

It's a very boring, unoriginal layout. Some account-specific links at the top, then a horizontal bar for links to individual sections. Oh wait, it's actually two horizontal bars. One is for sections, the other is for "websites" that Cyberpresse owns for sections special enough to get their own domain. If you're not familiar with that system, you'll probably get confused here and have to read the entire thing a couple of times to figure out which link is the best one to click on. Below that are main stories on the left, a search box on the right and some editor's picks. Looks OK so far.

Middle part of Cyberpresse homepage

Here's the meat below. It goes on like this for about four or five screens worth, and they're all basically the same. Can you tell the logic behind what goes in which columns?

If you answered anything coherent to that question, then you're wrong. The first column has sections like news and business, except for fluff sections like home, auto, environment, movies that are in the second column, except for arts, technology and lifestyles which are back in the first column.

Oh, and they have names like "Automobile" and "Maison" even though their names are "Mon Volant" and "Mon Toit" elsewhere. Whatever, consistency is for losers.

The third column at least has some consistency. It's where all the interactive stuff goes. The polls, the "most emailed stories," the user-generated content, etc. In fact, you're encouraged to submit your own content (click on "Soumettre une nouvelle," a page I can't link to directly), which requires you fill out a form and agree to an 800-word terms of service (which I also can't link to directly) with gems like these:

• Lorsque vous soumettez Votre contenu à Cyberpresse, vous concédez à Cyberpresse une licence mondiale illimitée, irrévocable, non exclusive, perpétuelle et à titre gratuit : i) d’utilisation, de reproduction, de stockage, d’adaptation, de traduction, de modification, de création d’œuvres dérivés, de transmission, de distribution, d’exécution publique ou de mise à la disposition du public de Votre contenu à quelque fin; et ii) de concession en sous licence à des tiers du droit illimité d’exercer l’un ou l’autre des droits précités. Outre la concession de la licence susmentionnée, par les présentes, vous i) convenez de renoncer à l’ensemble des droits moraux dans Votre contenu en faveur de Cyberpresse; ii) reconnaissez et convenez que Cyberpresse ne saurait être tenue responsable de quelque perte, endommagement ou corruption de Votre Contenu; et iii) reconnaissez et convenez que Votre Contenu sera considéré comme non confidentiel.
• Vous devez être âgés de 14 ans ou plus afin de pouvoir soumettre Votre Contenu à Cyberpresse.
• Les Règles de Contributions des Utilisateurs peuvent être modifiées en tout temps par Cyberpresse à son entière discrétion.
• Vous vous engagez à coopérer avec nous dans la contestation de toute réclamation.

Well, when you put it that way...

One thing the website emphasizes is its Dossiers, in which stories on a single topic are packaged together, like the U.S. presidential election. Organizing stories by topic instead of more broadly by section is something you'd think media web types would have concluded long ago was boneheadedly obvious, but the news sites are only now really picking up on that. And there are plenty of important, recent topics that don't have their own pages yet and really should.

Cyberpresse's launch article also mentions a more powerful (i.e. less crappy) search engine that better finds what you're looking for. I typed in "Patrick Lagacé" and was pleasantly surprised to see a photo, biography and even email link. Except nowhere do I find a link to his blog. I tried again with "Patrick Lagacé blogue" and the response was "Aucun résultat." Bravo.

Putting in other search terms for important stories of the past few weeks, I become even less impressed with the search engine.

The blogs also got a redesign. The authors' pictures are moved to the side, leaving a big space for "le blogue de X"in stylized letters. (Though it seems poor Sophie Cousineau and Nelson Dumais got left behind.) These designs range from the obvious clichés to the we-don't-know-who-this-is-or-what-she-writes-about generic.

Finally, there's the RSS page, which has lots more feeds for specific topics. This is good, though the wording on many of these feeds is strange and confusing (what does "ctrl::dossiers cbp" mean?). I managed to decode a few of them which have been added to my Google Reader.

And now, the really bad intro videos

Patrick Lagacé gives us a tour of Cyberpresse

Oh, and I just noticed there's a video tour of the new website (honestly folks, if you have to give a video demonstration of how your website works so people understand it, then you didn't design it properly in the first place). I say "just noticed" because the article announcing the new website has no link to the videos nor does it even mention them.

The videos star some tech dude or blogger I've never heard of. His intro video is unintentionally hilarious, as he invites people to see another video "en cliquant ici" (clicking on the video per his instruction does nothing), and then sits there and does nothing but stare at the computer screen for a minute and a half while we make up our minds.

Lagacé does his best blogger imitation on camera

In fact, it goes on for so long that he twice looks off camera wondering if he can stop yet:

Lagacé telepathically pleads with the director for permission to leave

The content of the video is basically him repeating the same thing that was in the introductory article, although he strokes his ego by using himself as a search example. Even though he got the same result I did (i.e. a picture of himself but no link to his blog), he pretends that it works.

Other than all that the site is great. I mean, it's got gradients and JavaScript-controlled content tabs, so how could it not be?

P.S. WTF?

UPDATE: Michel Dumais has a positive review of the new Cyberpresse. Steph looks at it from a Web 2.0 perspective.

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Patrick Lagacé's Facebook friends (names blurred to protect the innocent)

Someone's been busy on Facebook.

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"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.)

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Look out, ladies. Patrick Lagacé is prettying himself up to be on the teevee.

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On a slightly more serious note, an analysis of Toronto media coverage of its susprise breaking news. Toronto media were caught especially off-guard because the incident happened in the middle of the night on a weekend, when few (if any) people are on the job.

Montreal's media got lucky, in that the riots started before midnight, before newspapers were put to bed and everyone went home for the night. In addition, the top story was about the police shooting that prompted the riot, so newspapers (like mine) could combine the two together and not have to rip apart their front pages.

La Presse has the best roundup of the action (including a column by Patrick Lagacé, who was on the scene and has some stories to tell about it), as well as the best photos from photographer David Boily. LCN was on the scene live with its helicopter coverage, and though suffering from the usual breaking-news confusion saying-stuff-off-the-top-of-your-ass time-filler, was enough to keep us journalists glued to the set. (LCN/TVA reporters, meanwhile, repeatedly ignored police demands to retreat to a safe area once shots had been fired, making the anchor's half-transparent "are you ok?" clichés seem almost silly.)

The best anglo coverage came, of course, from Canadian Press, whose reporter Andy Blatchford (a former classmate of mine) had a story filled with quotes.

Unfortunately, most of the other media are playing catch-up today, and you'll see more photos of day-after busted up businesses than the riots themselves.

As for blog and "new media" coverage, it was pretty well nonexistent. Some posts with "this is bad" comments, but no citizen journalists stepping up and doing a proper reporting job.

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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.

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Here's a few of my reasons:

1. Julie Couillard.
2. Because politics here is never boring.
3. Because we have a government that's progressive yet democratic.
4. Because we have a population that is actually bilingual, and doesn't just pretend to be for show.
5. Because we had a massively controversial independence vote that was decided almost within the margin of error, but it wasn't followed by a civil war.
6. Because the single biggest and most violent political crisis in our history produced a single fatality.
7. Because of Les Francs-Tireurs and Patrick Lagacé's hair.
8. Because Québécois French is so funny-sounding.
9. Because the Canadiens are not so much a hockey team as a shared religion.
10. Because of all the pretty girls I'm going to see today on the way to work.

UPDATE: I see this has officially reached meme status. Which would make it my first meme. And hopefully my last.

UPDATE (June 24): Lagacé's column compiles his readers' responses.

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I've always admired Patrick Lagacé. The way he works hard, the way he does his homework before putting together insightful commentary (instead of knee-jerk reactions), his hair, and the fact he puts me on his blogroll.

But more importantly, I admire the impact he has. Like being able to piss off the entire management team at TVA.

Yesterday, La Presse published a really long letter signed by four executives at TVA which accuses Lagacé of not checking his facts in a recent column about the network burying embarrassing news about itself and friends of owner Quebecor.

As Lagacé mentions at the end of the column, TVA is suing Gesca and Lagacé personally for his previous remarks on this issue.

For the benefit of those who don't want to read the long letter, or whose French is rusty, here's TVA's main points:

1. TVA's news coverage is dictated by TVA, not Quebecor. Quebecor has no control. No control my ass. You don't get to own the media unless you can tell it what to do occasionally. Obviously TVA decides what the day-to-day news is going to be, but don't tell me there isn't some middle manager who knows he's more likely to get a promotion and less likely to be fired if he suppresses bad news and promotes good news. Just look at its collusion cooperation with Quebecor-owned Journal de Montréal or Quebecor-owned Videotron.
2. TVA did, in fact, allow clips critical of TVA to be aired, contrary to Lagacé's insinuations. OK, sure. I'll concede that point, though Lagacé got his information from Le Soleil, which got a quote from TVA saying they can decide what to air and what not to air. But stories can be buried without being totally eliminated. Newspapers do it all the time: putting good news on A1 or A2, while leaving bad news to a brief at the back of the business section.
3. TVA didn't talk about 15 job cuts at TVA Québec because it was a non-story, and it was really four job cuts, and only one in news. As Lagacé mentions, it was still 15 job cuts at a regional station, whether or not some people stayed on part-time in another role.
4. Lagacé made no attempt to contact TVA before his article was published to check these facts. Lagacé says he tried to contact Quebecor but got no response.

Left unmentioned by both parties is that Lagacé used to be part of the Quebecor family when he worked for the Journal and blogged for Canoe. To say there's bad blood between the two might be considered an understatement.

But, of course, Quebecor doesn't control TVA. So this silly conspiracy theory has no basis, right?

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Specifically, it takes issue with an article from Le Soleil's Richard Therrien and a blog post from Patrick Lagacé, both of which suggest that the decision was suspicious (the latter suggests that a friendship between Maxime Bernier and Quebecor's Pierre-Karl Péladeau might have something to do with it).

I honestly have no idea what's going through the minds of people at Quebecor (or just TVA?). Are they suggesting that management was not involved in this decision, and that any statement otherwise libels them somehow? Are we to believe that some non-management person made such a controversial decision on a major news story without discussing it with higher-ups?

And are we just to take it as coincidence that the Journal and TVA, both owned by Quebecor, are the only two news outlets that have kept her name secret?

Seriously, what's their problem?

UPDATE: The Gazette's Liz Thompson is also like: Dude, WTF?

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You could say he's really gone off the deep end.

(Really folks, I'm here all week. Try the veal.)

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No wonder les Francs-Tireurs is seen as a cesspool of homoeroticism.

UPDATE: A source with intimate knowledge of Patrick Lagacé's ballsack tells me he was thinking about me the whole time he shot this wrestling scene with Richard Martineau. That's ... creepy.

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Friday was Jack Todd's last day at The Gazette as an employee. You'll recall he took a buyout earlier and is leaving his full-time job to pursue fiction writing. His last act writing this column looking back on his 14 years as a columnist. It talks about his love for the Expos (and his heartbreak at their downfall), his love for boxing, his time at the Olympics, a couple of throw-away references to the Habs (perhaps ironic that the greatest team in hockey didn't win the Stanley Cup once during Todd's time here), and his greatest hero Clara Hughes. It ends thusly:

Regrets? Of course I have them. By the dozen. Lost friendships, times when I was too harsh, times when I used bad judgment, times when I should have thought longer and harder about a column.

But I can say with complete honesty that I have always called 'em as I saw 'em: I never backed down out of fear, I never wrote a single line I didn't believe at the time - and I never tried deliberately to create controversy, although heaven knows, it seemed to follow me around.

Now I'm out of here, although I will be back in a different guise at some point in the future. I will leave you with the words from Ezra Pound's 81st canto: "What thou lovest well remains,/the rest is dross."

Peace.

And so it ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. No mention elsewhere in the paper that one of its most recognizable faces was leaving. No note from the publisher, no Aislin cartoon, no big goodbye ad from the marketing department. No notes of support from fellow columnists. Nothing.

Nothing except a single letter, printed in Friday's paper, urging him to reconsider.

His colleagues at other media have similarly been silent, with the exception of La Presse's Réjean Tremblay, who says despite their differences he really respects Todd.

I never met Jack Todd personally (sports writers don't spend a lot of time at the office), though I've talked plenty with his son who's a stand-up (and stand-up-tall) guy. I've never much been a fan of the grammatically-challenged MMQB columns. And his occasional comments about U.S. politics (even though I agree with him for the most part there) could have used a bit more thought and a bit less emotion.

But while a lot of people don't like him (even if they've never met him), everyone knows who he is. Nobody ignores him. I, for one, would rather the former fate than the latter.

Besides, Todd is an excellent writer when he wants to be. I'm hopeful the weekly Monday sports column he'll be writing as a freelancer will bring the better writer out of him.

Perhaps that's partly why there isn't much ceremony. He's not really leaving, he's just cutting down his hours.

Still, this post is much cooler if we pretend he's gone forever, so let's do that.

I will leave you with a link to a story that is iconic of Todd's career and of those who oppose him: A Patrick Lagacé column (back when he was still at the Journal) printed side-by-side in English and French, explaining how Todd mistranslated one of his earlier columns in a column Todd wrote in The Gazette.

Mistranslating a text in your second language is one thing. Having Patrick Lagacé fill an entire page in a competing publication printing two copies of an article in which he criticizes you for mistranslating a single sentence? That takes talent.

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This week Nicolas Cossette of the Montreal Social Media blog put mine in a list of seven important local blogs. It's a very subjective list, and it doesn't include some smaller but very interesting blogs about Montreal, but still yay me.

Included with the entry on me is this statement:

I would say that if (traditional) journalism has difficulties to reach a younger audience, that’s partly because of blogs like his where you can find all the news about the city plus a lot more.

There's this idea a lot of people have that my blog (and/or others) serves as a replacement for newspapers. There's two reasons why I disagree with this:

1. This is not the place to get your news. I see a truckload of interesting news that I don't post about because I have nothing interesting to add. Kate's Montreal City Weblog does a much better job covering the local news, but then it's just news about Montreal. These blogs are great sources of information, but they should be used in tandem with newspapers, not instead of them.
2. The primary sources for information from both my blog and especially Kate's are local newspapers. Without them, we wouldn't know half the stuff we do, and those links we put in our posts to read the full stories would go nowhere. It's amazing how much people forget this sometimes.

Speaking of Kate's blog, every month she's consistently one of my top two referrers (traffic that comes to my blog through links from other websites). The other is Patrick Lagacé. Both have me on their blogrolls and link to me occasionally.

But when Patrick links to my blog in one of his posts, I have to pray my cheap server doesn't fail it dwarfs all my regular traffic with a flood of curious French-speaking people (who apparently all take one look at my blog and close it). So I'm expecting something similar this month as he linked to me in two consecutive posts.

The first calls Fagstein the best media blog in the city (thank you) in an unrelated post about some silly criticism of him. (Despite how vain I am, I've developed a pretty thick skin when it comes to criticism. Most of it is brainless loudmouthing, which should be dismissed. The rest is useful criticism which should be embraced.)

So yeah, I'm awesome.

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