Monthly Archives: June 2007

| Media, TV

Global: Still with its head in the clouds

Global National’s Kevin Newman is moving. Starting next year he’ll be taking his weekday newscast from Vancouver to Ottawa as part of the CanWest news centre there.

As part of the launch of their fall TV schedule, CanWest had “reporter” Martha Worboy rewrite this press release into this “article”. It’s a one-source story (Newman), but I suppose I can’t blame her. I mean, it’s not like there were any people representing dissenting opinions easily available for her to interview.

Oh wait, there were. Both the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star noticed the giant protest outside, where people like Gordon Pinsent and Colin Mochrie were complaining about Global’s (and other private broadcasters’) pathetic failure at promoting Canadian-produced television. I guess Worboy didn’t have the space to talk about that while reciting Newman’s CV.

| Business

Consumer reporting: finally

The Gazette’s Roberto Rocha (who is now giving free publicity to reviewing gadgets sent to him) made a vague statement about getting people involved in his reporting. Apparently the result is a new consumer rights segment called “Your Call Is Important To Us”.

It’s about time the Gazette gets back to reporting on customer service disasters. For that at least they deserve credit.

But his description of its innovativeness has me worried:

We say it’s innovative because it breaks the traditional paradigm of reporting. Rather than it being an in-house production of a reporter’s own research, it invites readers to take part in its creation.

His next paragraph basically sums up what this means:

We want you to help us write this series.

Perhaps I missed something in reading the blog post, but I don’t see anything innovative here. People providing newspapers with stories about how they got screwed over by The Man is hardly new. In fact, it’s how this stuff has been done for decades. There’s nothing “wiki” about it.

Unless the plan involves readers editing the stories collaboratively, I think it comes down to someone either misunderstanding what wiki is all about or overhyping a simple newspaper series by employing Web 2.0 buzzwords.

We’ll see which when the series is launched on Saturday.

| Business, Media

Newspapers are a sinking ship – and have only themselves to blame

Peter Hadekel has an article last week (I’m catching up on my paper-reading) about how Osprey Media’s purchase by Quebecor is good news for newspapers.

I have to disagree. Not because I think it’s a bad sign, but rather because of news like this: Large increases in online ad revenue far from offsets gigantic drops in print advertising.

Now I’m not going to pretend like newspapers are going to cease to exist. They still serve a useful function. We still have print advertising in this world, and there’s really no more convenient way to get news while commuting to work than bringing the paper with you.

But that doesn’t mean these papers are going to remain the news powerhouses they are now, to say nothing of returning to the days when they were actually important in our lives.

The reason is partly to do with new technology, 24-hour TV news, and the Internet. But just as important are the huge cutbacks to news gathering that make readers wonder what it is exactly they’re paying for.

Among the bone-headed ideas that for some reason newspaper publishers think aren’t alienating their readers:

  • Increased use of wire copy in an age where just about any wire service story can be accessed for free online. National, international, entertainment and business coverage is becoming saturated with AP, Reuters, Bloomberg and AFP copy, and the pool of local reporters is shrinking. Papers lose their individual voice, and there’s nothing interesting in these pages you can’t just as easily learn from watching the hourly news update on CNN.
  • Giving lip-service to online properties.
    • Stories that aren’t subscriber-locked are hidden behind a massively-complicated navigation system, and surrounded by ads to the point where you can barely find them. As a result, bloggers and others who share stories with their friends link directly to “printer-friendly” versions, thereby robbing companies of online ad revenue.
    • Online classified sites all suck hard compared to Craigslist (some even arrogantly ask for money to have your ad included in their database).
    • Nobody seems to know how to do online multimedia properly. They send their reporters untrained with a video camera to shoot pointless, uninteresting video which they throw up unedited just so they can pat themselves on the back and say they’re clued in to the online world. The web infrastructure used with these photo galleries, audio slideshows and video clips provide no means to link to them directly and therefore no way for people to point them out to friends.
    • Stories posted online contain no clickable links whatsoever, and related stories aren’t linked to each other. Formatting issues like accents and soft returns are left unfixed, and anything with even the slightest bit of unusual formatting in the print edition looks like an unreadable mess online.
  • Infotainment, like reporting the previous night’s American Idol results (as if anyone who cared enough about the show would not have either watched it or gotten the news elsewhere), is on the rise at the expense of real journalism.
  • Elimination of foreign bureaus means many international issues are covered with fewer and fewer voices, with no analysis of what these events mean for you.
  • Shrinking newspaper space means more stories are covered in 50-word briefs, and the one thing newspapers provide that TV and radio don’t — detail — is lost.
  • Copy editing positions are being eliminated, resulting in glaring mistakes in newspaper copy and a lessening of newspapers’ reputations.
  • Opinion pieces are written up by old conservative economists and political has-beens instead of fresh-faced thinkers with bold new ideas.
  • An increased reliance on freelance writers means more interesting stories, but only of the sort that can be put together in a day. Stories that take longer to create, including those of beat writers, are left on the back burner to rot.
  • Papers spend millions on marketing campaigns and TV ads instead of improving quality.
  • Media convergence has meant a decrease in critical reporting of related media. Reporters and editors are either afraid to criticize their corporate bosses or are told outright not to say things that would make the company look bad. Newspapers write articles about TV shows for networks owned by their parent company. Readers see right through these things, and lose trust in their journalists.
| Fun, Media, Montreal

So there were these naked cyclists

Coolopolis has the photo goodness. Flickr has some from the rest of the world.

So did the local media cover it? Naked people biking to protest against global warming on F1 weekend? You better believe they’re on it.

The bike ride came hours after yet another cyclist collided with an automobile in the city. Not that the city is dangerous for bike riders or anything.

And a note to CTV’s Cindy Sherwin: Try not to say “cyclists were wearing helmets” over B-roll showing a bunch of helmet-less cyclists.

| Humour, On the Net, Video

Those kids and their video cameras

Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan, the couple behind the geek-comedy web show Galacticast, have started up a new venture with their company 8-bit Brownies called A Comicbook Orange (sigh). As you might guess, it is a weekly comic-book review series. Its first episode gives you an idea of what it’s going to be like: a mix of B-roll and voice-over that unfortunately looks and sounds like just about every other TV review show out there, mixed in with the fun cheesy-FX sci-fi comedy that have made them the most famous Montreal-based sci-fi sketch comedy web video show in the world.

I met Rudy and Casey for Galacticast’s 1-year anniversary a couple of weeks ago, where they promised a “big announcement” coming soon. I thought NBC picked them up for a short summer run, but I guess this’ll have to do.

While I was at their exclusive VIP party (oh yeah baby, I’ve got it made!), I had a chat with Mommy McKinnon, and after some small-talk about the weather (Casey, why did you leave me in your living room with your mother?), I asked her the only question that came to mind: What does she think of her daughter going all crazy with the Internet stuff instead of, you know, making money?

“She’ll always be my baby,” Mom said. (Awwww…) Though Mom, as a non-sci-fi fan, doesn’t get 90% of Galacticast’s jokes, she watches it every week and fully supports Casey’s endeavour. Which is good, because if I threw away a good job to do this for a living, my mother would think I’m nuts.

Speaking of Galacticast, they’ve upgraded their equipment. A new wireless clip-on microphone will hopefully solve the dreadful echo that has been distracting from the quality of the show a bit, and they’ve hooked themselves up with an HD camera (like the one that filmed this episode).

The show itself has come a long way since I interviewed them back in December, and even longer since the show began. The scripts are tighter, the special effects are less cheesy and the production is more professional (though, without any crew whatsoever, it’s pretty impressive that they manage to do anything on a weekly basis). And when you’re taking on things like LOST, the Muppets, Star Trek’s mirror universe and Super Mario Bros., how could it be the coolest thing in the world?

| Montreal

I voted for it by voting against it

There’s an error that many people make in describing the 2004 municipal demerger referendums that led to the agglomotatorship we now live in. The Gazette’s Linda Gyulai, municipal affairs reporter, (who’s the sweetest person in the world) becomes my unfortunate victim in this example:

While Tremblay had hoped for unanimous support for his plan, it fell short by three votes. The foes included two councillors from Anjou borough, which narrowly voted to stay in Montreal in a 2004 demerger referendum. (Emphasis mine)

The borough did no such thing. The vote was 7808-5883 in favour of reconstituting itself as a municipality. That’s 57% yes. But because of the insane requirement that “Yes” voters represent 35% of all registered voters wasn’t met, the referendum was considered a failure.

They didn’t vote to stay, they simply didn’t vote enough to leave.

| Fun, Montreal

Ride without the seat (updated)

Apparently Montreal is participating in the World Naked Bike Ride this Saturday. 1 p.m. at Wilfrid-Laurier Park at Laurier and Brébeuf.

So if you see people riding naked through the Plateau, they’re not crazy, they’re just … actually, yeah, they’re crazy. But crazy as a group.

Too crazy for Canoe’s Claudine Potvin.

UPDATE: If that’s too much for you, consider taking your family to Saint-Eustache on Sunday.

| Montreal

Ben’s is dead. Long live Ben’s?

Taking “a day late and a dollar short” to its extreme, there’s plans for a protest next week to keep the Ben’s deli building out of the hands of developers.

Now, you might say “but the building isn’t architecturally interesting at all”, and you would be right. It was only built 50 years ago. You also might note the minor details that the restaurant closed months ago, the building has already been sold, and nobody cared about it when it was in business.

I went to Ben’s once in my life. I went in with a friend, looking to get some breakfast. We left 20 minutes later, still hungry, because nobody came to take our order.

Good riddance.