Monthly Archives: November 2007

| Media, Opinion, Video

We can’t trust citizen journalists

Via J-Source, Paul Berton of the London Free Press asks “Can we trust citizen journalists?”

His question is based on the amateur video of Robert Dziekanski being Tasered in the Vancouver airport. He would later die from the hit, raising questions about the safety of Taser use.

The video is certainly a great example of the kinds of things citizen journalism can accomplish, and how the ubiquity of video-capturing devices is changing what it means to be an eyewitness.

But my answer to the question of “can we trust citizen journalists” is still “No.”

My reasoning is simple: The trust you can place in journalism is no more than the trust you can place in the journalist behind it. With big media, journalists stand behind their stories, the media outlets stand behind their journalists, and the big media corporations stand behind their local outlets. It’s not perfect, but there’s a chain of accountability.

With citizen journalists, unless you know them, you have no clue about their motives, their ethics, their biases or anything else. They’re unknowns. The only basis for your trust is on the content itself and the plausibility of it. If it looks like it’s real, then it probably is. And with video, it’s almost always real.

But not always. Take this video of comedian Pauly Shore being punched out by a heckler at a comedy club. A fantastic example of citizen journalism, which got a lot of play online. The only problem is it was faked (see the making of). These “citizen journalists” were in on it, and went along with the gag. They can do that because they have no journalistic reputations to uphold, no employers enforcing ethics codes, and no one to answer to but themselves.

Citizen journalism can be useful if it’s corroborated. In this case, the RCMP confirmed the tape was athentic. Same deal with the SQ and their agents provocateurs.

That doesn’t mean so-called “citizen journalists” can’t build their own media and develop trust over time. Media gain trust through their reputations, and they’re motivated to follow ethical guidelines, be honest and not burn their readers. The trust can never be 100%, but it’s much higher than what some random person uploads to YouTube or writes unsourced on Wikipedia.

Citizen journalists are a wonderful source of original ideas and evidence. But they can’t be inherently trusted. Trust is earned, not given away. Nobody gets a free ride.

| Business, Montreal, Technology

Kanuk not above outright spam

In my ongoing fight against spam, I tend to give local businesses a bit of slack when it comes to netiquette. They’re small and inexperienced, so you might forgive them for minor glitches.

But spam is still spam. Last week I received this email message from Montreal-based Kanuk, maker of those winter coats you’ll all be buying in the coming weeks. Since they have a privacy policy which implies they only send email messages to people who opt in, I have to call them on a violation.

Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:37:55 -0500
From: Kanuk <info@kanuk.com>
Subject: Rappel : Solde Kanuk directement à la manufacture, jusqu’à lundi

Le grand solde Kanuk bat son plein jusqu’à lundi 12 novembre.
C’est le meilleur moment pour choisir votre manteau chaud Kanuk.
Chez Kanuk, au 485, rue Rachel Est à Montréal.
http://www.kanuk.com

Deux étages de soldes vous attendent à l’atelier-magasin Kanuk au
485, rue Rachel Est à Montréal, dès 8h00 tous les jours
pendant le Solde d’entrepôt Kanuk.

Au plaisir,

Daniel Poirier,
au nom de l’équipe Kanuk

As usual, I’ve sent them an email and will update if and when they respond.

The email was sent through Canadian B2B Internet service provider Radiant, which should also have better measures to prevent such things.

| Media

Kicking a reporter out: Good for journalism?

Québec solidaire kicked out a Canoe reporter from a Quebec City meeting on Sunday. The reason was simple: the reporter was replacing locked-out Journal de Québec workers, and because QS is all crazy-leftist and such, they’re not about to accept a scab.

But is that an acceptable reason for kicking a journalist out of an open political meeting? Where do you draw the line between legitimate interference and scary Stephen Harper-style cherrypicking of reporters?

| Business, Media

CanWest continues to spread

Despite cuts at their newspapers, CanWest has plenty of money to buy up media properties. Today it added six new community publications in the Windsor area, bringing its total up to 30.

CanWest, the largest newspaper publisher in Canada, called the acquisition “yet another example of CanWest’s commitment to developing strong community voices across this country.”

Also today, CRTC hearings into CanWest’s bid to take over Alliance Atlantis are being held.

| Business, Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion, Video

Pay me, dammit

There’s an interview on YouTube with Harlan Ellison that really struck a chord with me. In it, he rants about how Warner Bros. wanted to use an interview with him on a DVD but didn’t want to pay him for it. He talks about how outrageous it is that this is now accepted practice, and how amateurs seeking a big break are willing to whore themselves out for nothing.

I’ll admit to being somewhat of a hypocrite on this issue. On one hand, I want to be paid for my work (because I need to eat). On the other, most of that work is based on interviews I do with people, and I don’t pay any of them for their time or thoughts.

Suckers.

| Montreal, Pop quiz

Montreal Geography Trivia No. 2

It’s well known that many of Montreal’s streets are split in two by a highway or railway or giant buildings. In many of these cases, the two unconnected streets are on the same “axis” and so keep the same name.

But this street is ridiculous, being split into eight unconnected pieces, all with the same name. The number gets larger if you include intersections that are offset slightly, looking like a pair of Ts more than a four-way cross.

Some parts go through affluent areas filled with detached houses with swimming pools. Others are row houses squeezed together. Still others go through industrial areas with no trees in sight.

What is this street’s name?

UPDATE: The answer is Ontario St., though give yourself a point anyway if you answered Jeanne-Mance St., which was the original basis for this question, but has one fewer split in it.

| Humour, Video

Bowser and Blue: YouTube stars?

In researching my article on poutine, I found myself singing Bowser and Blue‘s “The Night they Invented Poutine” in my head a lot. I even ended up quoting it in the article.

With B&B on the brain, I started looking around the intertubes, and noticed that Ricky Blue has taken to uploading videos of the pair performing their songs. Most of the videos have an amateurish YouTube-like quality (which fits in well), shot at home with the aging performers straining to see the notes and lyrics through their old-guy eyesight. And the quality is pretty bad compared to what you’d get on a DVD of a big performance, but the funny is still there. One video even elicited a response asking whose song they were performing.

There are also some videos from Just for Laughs and other appearances.

None of the videos has gotten more than 5,000 views, which shows that they’ve stayed under the radar so far.

This can go on no longer. So I present my favourite from this selection of Bowser and Blue home videos:

Continue reading →

| Business, Opinion, Web design

Rogers not above outright spam

Going through my spam folder again today, I noticed an email from Rogers, my wireless provider. It was a promotional message (as opposed to the one I get every month telling me my bill is ready) announcing, and I kid you not folks, that they redesigned their website.

Rogers spam

(Email sent Nov. 13, 2007. Click to embiggen)

Since I’m not a fan of spam, especially from large companies that should know better like Chapters/Indigo and CIBC (the latter — a bank — has still not responded to my request for an explanation beyond assigning it a support ticket number), I couldn’t let this one go without mentioning it as well.

The big difference here is that I am a Rogers customer, so they didn’t harvest my email or take it from an old form gathering dust in their basement. But I call it spam because I never asked for it and it’s purely promotional in nature.

Also problematic:

  • The email is not personalized, even with my name, violating one of Rogers’s own anti-fraud policies. Further complicating matters is that I’m invited to click on image links that bring me to addresses that start with http://mailtrack.rnm.ca… (which redirects me to a Rogers website).
  • The message is HTML only, with no plain-text version
  • Clicking on links to visit the “new” Rogers.com brings me to this horribly-designed web page which asks me to choose my province (and language). Don’t they already know this information? They provide me wireless service after all.
  • Like a lot of these messages I see, there’s a tiny link at the bottom for people who want to “opt-out of future email communications” (which I can assume implies I never opted-in in the first place). That link brings me to a login page. Once I login, I’m brought to the standard homepage with no clue given on where I should go to opt out of emails. I’ve looked around for about 10 minutes now and still haven’t found it.
  • I’ve had to login three times browsing the site. And now they’ve just suspended my account for 24 hours because the password I used 5 minutes ago is no longer the right one. Oh wait, it hasn’t. My previous login is now still valid. Top-notch security there, Rogers.
  • There’s no difference between the “new” Rogers website and the old one, except for a few trivial changes. It looks exactly the same. The entire purpose of the email is put into question.

I’ve filled out an “abuse” form and emailed the sender of the email message asking for an explanation of how I got this email. I’ll update if I get one.

| TV

My Olbermann fetish

I admit it, I watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann. In fact, it’s probably the thing I watch most on MSNBC (which isn’t saying much), tuning in occasionally when there’s nothing better on TV.

I first started noticing the show for its special comments, scathing, well-written burn jobs on the Bush administration, that appear occasionally at the end of his show and get huge play online.

But the rest of his show stands in stark contrast. His criticisms are petty, his sarcasm isn’t anywhere near as funny as he thinks it is, his segments are filled with celebrity gossip and fluff, and his ego means he doesn’t realize he’s just as bad as those people he criticizes, particularly Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.

A prime example of this happened on Friday’s show, when Olbermann went on one of his many diatribes against O’Reilly, wasting his time picking on the most petty of O’Reilly’s mistakes. (Olbermann and O’Reilly take jabs at each other because they compete directly with each other and have a long-standing feud. Amazingly, they even spar over minute details of their own ratings demographics, an issue only they could possibly care about.)

Olbermann criticized O’Reilly for saying that the Book of Revelation was written 5,000 years ago. Of course, because it’s part of the New Testament, that’s obviously not true. Olbermann explained this by saying that Jesus Christ (whose life preceded the Book of Revelation) died 2007 years ago, and he is the basis for the calendar we now use.

Of course, in criticizing this irrelevant detail, Olbermann himself got Biblical history wrong. The calendar is based on the date of Jesus’s birth, not his death, which came at about 33 A.D. (Of course, whether he was born 2007 years ago or 2013 years ago or at some other time near those dates is still a matter for debate.)

No doubt O’Reilly will pounce on that fact on his show Monday, causing Olbermann to respond in kind, and the cycle will continue.

It’s an unintentionally hilarious journalistic trainwreck, and I can’t help but check in on it every now and then.