Yet Another Montreal “First Annual” on Facebook: the First Annual Zombie Walk. Scheduled for Saturday, October 27 at a place to be determined.
The organizer says the walk is meant to draw attention to global warming, which makes absolutely no sense. Nevertheless, it should be fun.
A few months ago, The Gazette asked some of its readers about the stock listings in its business section. Every Saturday, it takes three whole broadsheet pages to list everything in the Toronto Stock Exchange, as well as important stocks in the NYSE and NASDAQ, currency markets and a bunch of other stuff. Tuesday to Friday, it’s just the highlights on a single page.
Expectedly, most of the respondents said they have little to no interest in the listings, printed in an impossibly-too-small-to-read font. Anyone with enough interest in daily stocks is going to go online to search for that information anyway.
As a result, starting next Saturday, the Saturday listings will be the same as the Tuesday to Friday ones, consisting of a single page.
This just plain makes sense. Newspapers need to maintain commonly used reference information like movie listings, but stock prices that are obsolete mere hours after they’re printed are kind of a waste of paper. And these two full pages can be better used producing editorial material.
One criticism however is in The Gazette’s note to readers, which points them to the Financial Post’s website (which doesn’t make it obvious where I can get individual stock information). I realize everyone knows that CanWest owns both papers, but would it have been really hard to create a page on the Gazette’s site for stock listing information? It’s just a matter of changing the logo at the top.
Remember Epifora, the “controversial speech” Montreal web provider which hosted
a pedophilia website?
They’re shutting down, effective October 1. Apparently because of the financial burden of losing its pedophile clientele to Sweden.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t shed any tears.
Here’s one I missed: Cable bills will be going up next year after the CRTC added a new required service (meaning all cable and satellite providers are required to carry it on all packages): The Accessible Channel.
The channel (according to its application) is basically supposed to be an all-day described video service, which would be an improvement over the current spotty DV which will be on maybe one show a day.
It makes sense, I suppose (though saying I don’t support it would no doubt brand me as evil, as would making smart-ass comments like “why is this a TV channel instead of a radio station?”). I certainly won’t mind paying the extra $0.20 a month for it, as long as that money goes toward making more shows accessible to the blind.
One criticism though: “Accessible Channel”? That sounds like programming for people in wheelchairs. Why not “Described Video Channel” or something more precise?
UPDATE (Sept. 23): Accessibility writer Joe Clark files an appeal of the decision which makes some very thoughtful points about ghettoization of blind viewers and passing the buck on a serious problem. Instead, he recommends that all broadcasters be required to provide descriptive audio service like they’re required to provide closed-captioning.
Speaking of wire services, Google News, which used to be an aggregator of news content with links to full articles on their original sites (and for some reason annoyed content owners who I guess don’t want traffic from the biggest website on Earth), has come to an agreement with Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Canadian Press and the U.K. Press Association to host wire stories on its site (as evidenced by that CP story hosted on Google).
The result of this is that when you see mention of “Canadian Press” or “Associated Press” in Google News results, that link will take you on a page at Google instead of some cheap generic small-market U.S. network TV affiliate who just republish unaltered wire copy online.
What it doesn’t mean is that you will be able to directly scroll the wires on Google. You still have to go through the Google News homepage. Fortunately there are other places that give you almost-direct access to unedited CP wire copy.
It probably won’t mean a huge deal, but you’ll note that wire copy on Google is much simpler and less ad-riddled than the places you’ll usually find it, which I think will lead to more people linking to stories off Google when given the choice.
Montreal’s bid to host the World Science Fiction Convention has beat rival Kansas City, and Montreal will be the host of WorldCon 2009, after delegates in Japan voted overwhelmingly in favour of our dear city.
Just to give you an idea of how big this is, the bid process began in 2004 at the local ConCept convention. That’s a five-year process between idea and implementation. This is the Olympics of science fiction.
The convention will take place in early August, 2009 at the Palais des Congres.
Not everyone’s crazy about coming to Canada, but our novelty just sucks people in. Even Toronto people.
Apparently Concordia has backtracked from its plan to begin charging students for access to its wireless network. The decision apparently came right from the top, which is a much-needed PR boost for president Claude Lajeunesse (though why he had to wait for student outrage to decide that wireless access is an “essential service” is beyond me).
So students will save a few bucks each year, which they will no doubt be giving to their student union so they can continue needlessly suing other student unions over petty student politics.
There’s an interesting trend happening in the news media. As wire services become ubiquitous, providing almost all the content for crappy, journalist-free newspapers like Metro, major news organizations are beginning to realize that they need to provide good, original content to distinguish themselves from these free alternatives. Otherwise, why would people buy their paper or visit their website when they can get the same wire story from another source?
Earlier this summer, CanWest completed its pullout of Canadian Press, the only nationwide news service in Canada. The decision cut CP’s budget by 9 per cent, and had some people crying that the sky was going to fall.
Although we’re only a couple of months into it, that looks unlikely. CP’s reliance on the big papers was already much lower than it had been previously, thanks to these free papers and other organizations like radio stations who are too cheap to have a news staff of their own. They’re also expanding their online presence, providing things like those Flash-based election tickers. (It’ll be interesting to see how CanWest papers handle general elections where the CP wire is of critical importance.)
I’ve heard a lot of people criticize the move, both inside and outside affected newsrooms, because it limits access to news from small regions, and because other outlets will run news they don’t have access to.
But I see it as a good thing. CanWest used some of the money they saved from dumping CP (though very little compared to how much they’re pocketing for shareholders) to expand its CanWest News Service, which before this summer was basically just the newsrooms of CanWest papers and a few reporters scattered in places like Ottawa, New York and Washington D.C. Now instead of one news service, we have two competing ones, and more journalists covering news.
In a similar vein, as of today CNN is no longer a client of Reuters news service. (If your first reaction to that news was “CNN was using Reuters?”, you’re not alone.) Instead, the news channel and Internet news giant will be boosting its own news-gathering, while still using Associated Press copy. That’s probably just some marketing speak and the investments will be trivial, especially when you consider that they were just looking for a better deal, but it’s better than nothing.
Wire services are very important, because they allow small news organizations to get news from far-away places, and provides an alternative to, say, expanding the White House Press Briefing Room to the size of a small stadium.
But in the Internet age, where a story carried by a wire service can be read from hundreds of different websites, news media have to provide strong original reporting to send eyes their way.
It’s vain, self-serving, greedy and transparent, but it’s good for journalism.
UPDATE (Sept. 11): CNN dumping Reuters comes back to bite them in the ass when they couldn’t run the Bin Laden video that Reuters had gained access to and started distributing. I wonder if Reuters paid Bin Laden royalties?
Here I was about to complain that nobody listed my blog in their top 5 for Blog Day (not to be confused with Blog Action Day, which is an entirely different pointless exercise), but then I see Laurent has my back. So now I can feel a sense of empty vanity as I constantly recheck my traffic statistics to see if this endorsement has sent a mob my way.
I’m not one to list my favourite blogs. I have the major local news blogs in my blogroll here, hundreds of local blogs in my feeds, and I’ve profiled quite a few for the paper.
So if you want your blog mentioned here, well, I have a comments section, so mention it yourself. Unless of course your blog sucks, in which case don’t mention it.
This week’s blog is controleman, who at 19 is I believe the youngest blogger I’ve profiled so far. He’s an urban explorer, which is cool, and he has me on his blogroll, which is cooler.
Not that putting me on your blogroll will in any way influence whether or not I profile your blog. That would just be unethical.