Monthly Archives: July 2007
What’s the opposite of d’oh?
Yeah, I know this is stupid PR-driven non-news advertising crap, but go Vermont! And nice video. Maybe I’ll come visit someday.
Harry who?
Hey, did you know there’s a new Harry Potter book coming out? There’s only been about 12,000 news stories in the past week about it. Why is The Man trying to suppress this earth-shattering news story?
Or more non-sarcastically, WHO THE F&#K CARES?
OK, a new book is being released. And it’s Harry Potter, which is a very popular series. And it’s the last one of the series. This deserves some news coverage. Maybe even a story on the front page of the arts section one day.
But a 14-day Harry Potter Countdown? With stupid trivia like this? On A3? Does the Vancouver Province have nothing better to do with its time than put this together? And do the other papers have no better wire stories to feature? Zimbabwe’s populace is going to starve to death (that gets a 50-word brief in the world section), but gosh darnit, we have to talk about the hype over whether a fictional character is going to die in a book.
Scoble has (some) scruples (UPDATED: Is Scoble noble?)
Casey McKinnon, my future wife the co-host of Galacticast (which promises to have a new show some time in the next eon) is speaking out about being burned by PodTech.
It’s a good lesson for techy startup companies who think that because they’re cool they don’t have to treat people with the same professionalism that other companies do.
Ripping off a photographer is a prime example. I’ve heard countless stories of small magazines asking for people to provide high-quality content free in exchange for only the “publicity” they would get from having their name beside it, and perhaps one day getting a few dollars.
Not having enough money to properly get your startup off the ground is one thing. But PodTech isn’t poor, it’s just lazy.
UPDATE: Credit where it’s due. Scoble has responded both here and on Casey’s post. It doesn’t negate the criticisms, but it mitigates them somewhat. Hopefully PodTech’s act will improve as a result.
It’s supply and demand, stupid
Every time gasoline prices rise by one per cent or more, we get the SUV-driving public’s arms up in the air complaining, and opportunistic politicians climbing over themselves to do something about it.
So I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the Quebec government is considering price caps on gasoline prices. Sure, artificially limiting the price of gas will only encourage consumption and that can only be bad for the environment, but then the gas-guzzling public doesn’t care about the environment when maintaining it inconveniences them.
This news is especially funny considering what’s going on in Zimbabwe. There, ruling moron Robert Mugabe, trying to control his country’s 9,000 per cent inflation due to his idiotic economic policies, has simply decreed that the price of everything in his country be cut in half.
As anyone with half a brain will tell you, when you force someone to sell stuff at less than they bought it for, they’ll stop selling it. So now gas stations are dry as the country continues its economic freefall.
Hopefully at some point the Quebec government will learn that copying Zimbabwean economic policy is an idiotic thing to do. Even if that means it’ll please the idiots.
Not a victory for smokers’ rights
Sandra-Ann Fowler, the tenant who took her landlord to the Régie du logement over her right to smoke in her apartment (and therefore subject her landlord’s family to traces of second-hand smoke) has won her case.
CTV’s Brian Britt calls it a “victory for smokers’ rights advocates”, and a spokesperson for a smokers’ rights group seems to back him up.
Unfortunately, this simply isn’t true. The ruling stated that because a ban on smoking was not in the lease, Fowler has the right to smoke, even though the application form said smokers were not allowed.
In fact, the ruling apparently suggested that bans on smoking are in fact legal if they are in the lease.
I’d hardly call that a victory. She got off on a technicality, that’s all.
Bureaucracy killed the Journal’s website
Ever wonder why the Journal de Montréal doesn’t have a real website? Legal reasons, apparently.
Apparently the Journal’s union contract has some vague language about the use of its members’ work on the Internet. It states that the Journal’s parent organization can use the content online, provided certain silly requirements are met (the Journal’s logo has to appear, and people can’t be assigned exclusively online unless they’re given a new job title or something).
An extra sentence added later says that the employer should negotiate before starting a new website.
The union tried to sue, claiming Quebecor broke the agreement by setting up this kinda-website without talking to them first.
The judge saw right through their flimsy argument, referring the case to union arbitration.
Hopefully that will talk some sense into both sides. This is a really stupid reason for the Journal not to have a true web presence for itself.
Da train! Da train!
The Gazette’s Linda Gyulai has an article about some railway buffs criticizing Montreal’s plan for commuter rail service, specifically the route of the Train de l’Est (stupidly running from Terrebonne east to Repentigny instead of running west through Laval, using existing tracks, to the de la Concorde metro station) and the apparent abandoning of the plan to use the Doney Spur, which splits from the Deux-Montagnes train line near Highway 13 and runs between Hymus and the 40 west to Stillview.
One important correction to the story: It mentions the building of a Home Depot west of St. John’s Blvd on top of old Doney Spur right-of-way. In fact, it’s east of St. John’s, which mean any rail link to Fairview (which would still have to cross Highway 40 somehow) would have to run through, under or around this new hardware store.
Here’s a bonus for you: A YouTube video of rail buff Avrom Shtern asking Pierrefonds/Roxboro mayor Monique Worth about the Doney Spur in March, and having her give the kind of non-answer that you’d expect to find in a first-chapter exercise of Politics For Dummies.
Looking for me? I’m hiding in the dark
No blog this week from me. Instead, Gazette intern and guest blogospherophile Jasmin Legatos has a profile of MTL Street. Don’t worry, I’ve got some more in the pipeline.
For those of you who desperately need a Fagstein Fix (and really, who doesn’t?), you can find me a couple of pages down as I present a Bluffer’s Guide to the new NASA Beyond Einstein program.
Funny story about that piece: Editor Peter Cooney (also the paper’s soccer blogger) called me up on Thursday and asked me to put together a Bluffer’s Guide for him. I’ve developed a reputation as someone who can be counted on to file last-minute, due to a combination of my lust for money and having no life. He suggested one about NASA, and I agreed, and started putting one together.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t listening properly, and wrote about the wrong mission. Instead of Einstein probes and dark matter, I wrote about the Dawn mission, exploring the two largest asteroids in the asteroid belt.
Oops.
I ended up getting a call at 9:30 Friday morning. Fortunately I didn’t have anything to do (except sleep) that morning, so I put together the one you see here.
Let that be a lesson folks: NASA’s up to a lot of stuff, and you shouldn’t get your deep space probe missions confused.
A new Montreal news source?
There’s some buzz going around about a new super-secret startup called YulNews. The details are, of course, sketchy, but common sense suggests it might be a user-generated news site.
If that’s the case, I’d have to say I’m a bit skepitcal. In the big picture, sites like NowPublic.com are still trying to find their sea legs. Nothing has really reached the critical mass necessary for another Wikipedia. Instead, we get stories that link to or generously quote mainstream news stories, stories written about the website itself, or “call to action” stories about someone’s injustice that his friend wrote about.
Wikipedia is great, but it’s not an original source for news. Wikinews, its open news sister site, is still not at the level it needs to be to be trusted as a news source.
Citizen media are useful for things. They can provide unfiltered eyewitness testimony, they can write interesting opinions, or they can get insider information. But we still need professional journalists, the people who are paid to spend an entire day in a courtroom, who can file a story in a half hour, who have the time and expertise to bring the news out.
So is this going to be a place where ordinary Montrealers can share information about what’s going on in their city that the mainstream media isn’t talking about, or is it going to end up like a substandard version of Montreal City Weblog? Or something else entirely?
We’ll see.
Bad driving, meet bad ad placement
Dangerous driving is the topic du jour in today’s letters section. One picks up on something I completely missed in Friday’s paper:
This article (whose deck says “Panel blames ‘fast car’ ads”) is paired with this ad, which says in absolutely atrocious grammar: “Action speaks louder than words” and “1-100km in 4.7 sec top speed: 240km over 1G of lateral force. Toyota powertrain.” I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but I think it’s talking about how fast the car goes (or more accurately, how fast it accelerates).
The letter shoots the letter by blaming The Gazette for running it. In fact, it’s the car companies who should be shot for encouraging dangerous driving.
And whoever wrote that ad should be fired.
Just because you’re famous doesn’t mean you’re interesting
We have a new magazine in town: Montreal Centre-Ville. Produced by Quebecor (and we all know how much respect they have for the art of journalism), it’s a bilingual magazine about downtown.
Its inaugural issue has some pieces by well-known Montrealers like Dennis Trudeau and Melissa Auf der Maur. But what they say isn’t really interesting. There’s no new insight into the city (certainly not for anyone who lives here already).
I’m all for having new original media in this town, but I’ve seen better stuff out of a Transcontinental-owned community weekly.
It’s not just sports, Jack
Jack Todd has a column in the Sunday Sports section about how our national sports networks, while covering the U20 World Cup, baseball, NHL free agency, Wimbledon tennis, PGA golf, CFL football, auto racing, and all the other major sports going on this summer, are missing something important: Water polo in Montreal.
It’s not just water polo, he continues. The networks aren’t covering amateur sports at all, really, preferring to sign up to simulcast an American feed rather than spend money sending their own reporters and camera crew to events happening here.
While I agree with the sentiment (and more on that below), I should probably add that frankly, I’ve always found it odd how few television channels are devoted to sports. Here, we have TSN, Rogers Sportsnet (with its four regional channels) and The Score showing general sports for 24 hours a day. Considering how many sports they should be covering, that doesn’t seem like enough. It’s not even enough to show all the baseball games that play on a given regular season night. So why don’t we have more channels? They could be owned by the same network, just show different sports.
Money, of course, is the answer, which is sad. And unfortunately it’s also the reason we’re not going to have major networks covering unpopular amateur sport until a fundamental shift happens in the sports media industry.
Of course, this problem, of Canadian cable channels repackaging American content instead of producing their own, is hardly new. Unlike broadcast channels, which have more stringent CRTC guidelines about locally-produced and Canadian-produced content, cable specialty channels don’t have to produce much of their own, and depending on how they’re licensed, don’t have to carry much Canadian content.
I would suggest regulation as a potential solution to that problem, but digital TV regulations in Canada are already far too complicated. Besides, many channels are meeting their CanCon requirements by playing reruns of 80s CBC shows or crappy CTV ripoffs of popular U.S. programs. And they’re meeting their original programming requirements (assuming there are any) with “news” shows, produced on a shoestring budget, effectively giving up on that timeslot and waiting until they can throw up another CSI rerun and soak up the ad money.
We have to vote ourselves, with our wallets. Channels that regurgitate crap and expect us to take it will see themselves disappear from my channel lineup. Spike TV is already on the chopping block. Star Trek was the only thing on there I watched, and they’ve removed DS9 from their lineup. Global-owned Mystery Channel is also going once I’ve caught up on my weekend House reruns. SUN TV (holy crap what an awful excuse for a channel) is going, since the only thing I’ve ever watched on there was Scrubs. G4TechTV Canada is headed out the door, Beat The Geeks notwithstanding.
This is the YouTube age. Making original television should be much easier than it was four decades ago. Television series make it to DVD within months. Why don’t we have more original programming?
Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out what to replace these channels with. Those same regulations prevent my cable company from treating all channels equally, and prevent me from selecting what I want à la carte.
Shame.
Hi, I’m from the RCMP. Mind if I cop a feel?
I went down to the fireworks competition yesterday to see Mexico’s entry. Last time, I viewed the display from an asphalt parking lot at the foot of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge. This time, I was going to go on the bridge itself, as so many other people seemed to be doing.
Once again, the crowds were massive. It was a worst-case scenario, with a U20 World Cup game just ending at the Olympic Stadium, the Carifiesta, Jazz Festival, Gay Village street festival and Saturday night summer party people all clogging the metro. Adding the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of fireworks viewers made it trying to get down there.
As I walked up to the bridge, I noticed RCMP vehicles parked at the end. The bridge is federally-owned because of some obscure bureaucratic reason that probably made sense decades ago, so the RCMP has jurisdiction here.
The problem was, they weren’t just blocking traffic. They were searching people. Looking in bags, padding the baggy pants. The usual half-assed bomb-searching stuff.
Now, I’m not the kind of gun-toting anarchist who thinks that we shouldn’t have police and that The Man is trying to oppress us. But something kinda pisses me off about a police searching people on a public road.
Is it the fact that it’s a federal bridge the reason? Or does closing it to traffic make it no longer public space? What law exactly gives police the right to search people walking on a public bridge?
(I might also point out that it’s obvious to anyone who has seen the Jacques-Cartier Bridge that the amount of explosives it would take to bring it down is far more than would fit into a knapsack, and if it’s the crowds that I was targetting, I could simply set one off in the metro, causing far more damage in a confined space.)
The display was nice (except for a technical difficulty which led to a five-minute delay just after it got started), with a good big-bang finish. But watching it from the bridge is excruciating. Three sets of bars were between me and the fireworks (had I been smart and early enough to go on the passenger walkway instead of the roadway, it would have been only one, but what’s the point of stopping traffic if everyone’s going to do that?).
Next time, I’m going to watch it again from the ground. No obstructions, and no violations of my civil rights.
Though it is kinda fun to walk across that giant bridge in the middle of the road with thousands of people and no cars.
MédiaMatinQuébec hits two million
MédiaMatinQuébec, which has been produced by the workers of the Journal de Québec daily since the lock-out/strike started in April, has handed out its two-millionth copy.
The post contains an article which, though clearly one-sided (Quebecor wants to make as much money as possible — duh), has some insightful criticism of the way they’re gutting regional journalism when, if they really want to compete, they should be doing the opposite.
I’m tempted to compare this labour disruption, now in its third month, to the labour disruption that eventually led to the powerhouse Montreal Star in the 1970s. But the ubiquity of wire services makes me reconsider that conclusion. There are free newspapers out there like 24 Heures and Metro with no or little original reporting. But people still gobble them up.
Maybe that’s the future of media here. Big newspapers that photocopy New York Times features and briefs from Associated Press, and small community weeklies that produce fluff pieces by underpaid young journalists about that 100-year-old grandma and her war stories.
The way things are going, it’s hard not to be cynical.
UPDATE: For those of you curious, here’s a PDF version of a recent issue of the paper. Apparently they’re soon going to be going online. Which sounds great except that this is an unsustainable strike paper with no advertising or subscription revenue and far more staff than it needs.