Monthly Archives: December 2007

| Media, Montreal, Opinion

Transcontinental to talk about their black friends more

Transcontinental’s Serge Lemieux: Cultural communities Yay!!!!!111

Transcontinental, which owns 61 community weeklies in Quebec (22 of them on the island of Montreal), has decided to reverse its position banning brown people from its papers.

At least, that’s the best I could figure out from this editorial, which is running in all of Transcontinental’s newspapers this week. In it, the general manager of Transcontinental Newspaper Group, Serge Lemieux, has finally clued in to the idea that covering community issues involves covering cultural communities as well. Apparently it took the Bouchard-Taylor Commission into reasonable accommodation for him to figure this out.

The article doesn’t mention exactly what they’re going to do, only that they’ll be “celebrating cultural diversity.” In fact, it goes into more detail about what they’re not going to do, specifically that they won’t be publishing articles in “all the world’s languages” because they find it “undesirable” to do so. Instead, they’ll publish articles “exclusively in French or English (as the case may be)” (French versions of this editorial don’t mention articles in English).

We’ll see what they have in mind.

Speaking of nonsensical Serge Lemieux columns, this one, which in the same breath blames the media for oversensationalizing the issue of reasonable accommodation and says the commission looking into the issue has been a good idea, is also appearing in Transcontinental papers this week.

Ironically, both these articles serve to remind us, in case we didn’t know already, how little local journalism actually comes out of Transcontinental weeklies. A large amount of content is syndicated across many papers, their websites are identical and even most of their logos have the same design elements. All that’s left are some fluff stories about aging grandmothers, rewritten press releases about local events, and a couple of local issue stories written by overworked, underpaid journalists.

But I guess “celebrating cultural communities” will fix that.

| Business, Montreal

BMO Concordia University

Concordia University is the proud recipient of a new $2.5 million … let’s call it a donation from the Bank of Montreal

In exchange for this generous offering, Concordia will name a 300-seat theatre in its new business building the BMO Amphitheatre, and it will start a BMO Lecture Series, bringing in important people to talk about business and social responsibility.

The donation was the work of L. Jacques Menard, who is a big honcho at BMO and a member of Concordia’s Board of Governors. (It also serves to remind us why big corporate honchos sit on the board in the first place.)

To give a bit of perspective to the donation, the John Molson School of Business itself was given the name after a $10 million donation from the Molson family, while Molson Inc. head Eric Molson was the university’s chancellor.

With that in mind, it seems Concordia wins the cost-benefit game here.

| Montreal, Opinion, TV

New Fox 44 newscast still has kinks to iron out

Tonight was the premiere of WFFF Fox 44‘s ingeniously-named 10pm local newscast “Fox 44 News at Ten.”

Before today, the Burlington/Plattsburgh/other small Vermont/upstate New York towns nobody’s ever heard of market (ranked 92nd in the U.S.) had only two local newscasts, despite its five network stations (six if you count PBS twice):

The premiere was preceded with what I’d like to say was great fanfare, but was really just a brief by Associated Press and a story in the Burlington Free Press. I didn’t even hear about it until I noticed it was on.

The format is pretty basic. Two anchors, one male (Greg Navarro) one female (Lauren Maloney), a weatherman (Jason Caterina) whose accuracy has to be constantly reaffirmed through mentions of SkyTracker technology, and a sports guy (Kristian Read) who talks about local minor sports leagues and some major-league stuff out of Boston.

The newscast’s set is just as generic. The same red, blue, white and black colours of Fox News, graphics with blurred swooshes and 3D lines and all sorts of unnecessary noise. The set itself consists mainly of large flat-panel HDTV monitors that the anchors stand in front of.

The only particularly interesting thing about the show is the use of high-definition (WFFF-44 is available in HD on channel 43 over the air, or Videotron Illico channel 654). Anchor segments and even most (but not all) locally-produced reports are in HD format. (To demonstrate how much this matters to them above everything else, take a drink every time this story mentions that the program is in HD.)

The station hired 22 people to prepare the newscast, which is three less than what WVNY fired when it cancelled theirs.

The Free Press story notes that they’ve been preparing for the newscast for a month, even doing rehearsals. So when it came to actually airing the newscast, it should have been down to a science, right?

Wrong.

The premiere half-hour broadcast was riddled with technical glitches and timing flubs. Some of these are to be expected from a team that was just built from scratch, but the sheer number was kind of embarrassing, considering how important first impressions are. (My favourite was a reporter introducing a local business story by saying “It’s retail central in downtown Berlin.”)

Among some of the problems:

  • Dead air (shots would continue far longer than they were supposed to with no audio)
  • Sound cut-outs (one report was almost unintelligible)
  • Video cut-outs
  • Mid-sentence sound level changes
  • Overlapping audio feeds
  • Control room orders making it to air
  • Static image where video (of something else) should be
  • Jumping the gun on timing between segments
  • Music being played over anchors’ voices

These things are all forgivable and will no doubt get better as the show matures (though I’d argue that trying to run a local newscast with only 22 people is part of the problem). What annoyed me most though is how the anchors handled the situation. Rather than acknowledge their technical clutziness and relax, having some fun at their own expense, they put on fake smiles, telling bad pre-written fake-ad-libbed jokes. Hopefully it was just first-show jitters and that too will improve.

At the very least, the anchors have to start developing personalities. Maloney in particular has the same annoying mannerisms that other anchors feel makes them somehow communicate better: A head tilt any time she speaks, asudden lateral head-movement mid-sentence, followed by a nod at the end, as if to reaffirm what she just said. Words are overemphasized, and she has the same tone and expression for every kind of story, which sucks when she’s reporting on bad news or fatal accidents because her expression includes a slight smirk.

Editorially, the show was entirely forgettable. News stories focused on the fact that snow fell today, and that Christmas is coming up, and then a bunch of briefs. That’s all I can remember. No investigative journalism, no in-depth reports. Nothing that would make me want to watch this show on a regular basis, much less a compelling reason to switch from WCAX or WPTZ.

The team clearly hope that smoke and mirrors are going to get them viewers. Everything is either “team coverage” or “continuing coverage” (and includes the time-wasting giant graphic to remind you about that), which is kind of laughable considering how woefully understaffed they are.

They’re going to have to do better than a cookie-cutter format in HD if they want to be successful.

Fox 44 News at Ten airs at 10pm daily on WFFF Fox 44.

UPDATE (Dec. 4): The second episode was a bit better technically. Still some video and audio problems and still plenty of timing issues (a segment starting up half a second before the previous one has finished).

A couple of additional things I noticed this time around:

  1. They have segments that include video from across the country (I imagine from other Fox affiliates and Fox News). For some reason a lot of these are police videos.
  2. Republican presidential candidates are really milking this show, trying to get into the heads of New Hampshire primary voters.

UPDATE (Dec. 12): Vermont’s Seven Days has a short interview with General Manager Bill Sally and News Director Kathleen Harrington.

| Media

Toronto Sun on media errors

Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski has a column (via Regret the Error and Toronto Sun Family) about errors in newspapers. He starts off talking about an error in the Toronto Star and then talks about some of his own. (Funny how media outlets have no problem talking about direct competitors by name when they’re pointing out their flaws.)

I suppose we can’t say he’s hypocritical, since he does self-criticize, but the Star has an online corrections page, while the Sun does not. And my experience with Sun papers have mostly involved hilarious headline mistakes and errors they made about me. Neither of these have since been corrected (at least not online).

Then again, as the Sun Family blog points out, the Star this week also admitted to plagiarizing the Sun.

| Blogosphere, Media, Opinion

Was Paul Pritchard a freelance journalist?

Via J-Source comes this blog post from Frank Moher complaining that the big TV outlets paid big money to Paul Pritchard, the guy who shot the video of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski being Tasered at the Vancouver airport. Dziekanski later died from injuries he sustained during the incident, and that has prompted an investigation into Taser use by police.

Normally, paying for news is outright prohibited by journalistic ethics codes. The reason is simple: It encourages people to make news for profit rather than report on events for altruistic reasons.

The media’s response is that Pritchard was a freelance journalist, who sold his footage just like any freelance reporter would sell a story to a newspaper or magazine. He wasn’t directly involved in the incident, and he had no ulterior motive other than to expose what happened.

The ever-growing field of freelance journalism, where regular people are contracted and paid for individual stories rather than employed as a part-time or full-time journalist, provides for a certain loophole in these areas. Instead of paying a source for an interview, you can pay a “contributor” to discuss a topic with a news anchor, or pay a “columnist” for insights into insider politics or whatever else they might specialize in.

How do we separate the ethical from the unethical payola? And which side does Paul Pritchard fall on?

| Media, Opinion

There’s no such thing as a journalist

Radio-Canada’s Philippe Schnobb has a post about citizen journalism, in which he waxes rhetorically about whether “citizen journalists” can be trusted. It’s similar in scope to my recent post about the subject, but I think both are missing an important point that’s always bugged me when talking about journalism theory:

There’s no such thing as a journalist.

Unlike other professions, journalism has no certification board, no test to pass, no government regulation. There’s nothing to separate journalists from regular people in the law.

Certainly there are professional journalists, who make their living (or a large portion thereof) performing journalism (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), usually for a big media outlet. But there are also unprofessional journalists, amateur journalists, part-time journalists. Anyone can be a journalist just by telling a story to another person. And professional journalists can easily become non-journalists, by telling lies, introducing bias or keeping the truth from themselves.

There’s no such thing as a journalist, only people who do journalism.

I prefer to think of journalism as a verb rather than a personal attribute. You might not be a gossiper, but you can spread gossip. You might not be a snow-clearer, but you can clear snow.

When it comes down to it, the only differences between the guy on the news and you is psychological conditioning. They have the big media backing, the access to the airwaves, the professional training, the well-coiffed hair. Politicians pick up the phone when they call. Businesses respond to them when they run exposés. But they don’t have to (and, in fact, many times they don’t.)

So if there’s no real difference between professional journalists and regular people, why can’t we trust citizen journalists?

Because trust is earned, not given away. And even professional journalists (for the most part) can be trusted only so much as they’ve earned that trust.

Because trust translates into good PR and ratings (and really that’s the only reason), big media do their best to give the appearance of trustworthiness. They become members of organizations like the Quebec Press Council, they publish codes of ethics, they apologize for mistakes, they fire plagiarizers and liars, and they impose their own rules on their journalists to ensure that what they produce can be trusted.

Not all big media are successful at that. We have tabloid newspapers, the Fox News Channel, Rush Limbaugh and others who aren’t deserving of our trust. And thanks to media consolidation we have media companies where one outlet produces a one-sided piece glorifying another. There are advertorials, sneaky PR campaigns, rewritten press releases and a bunch of other trust-eroding developments in the media that are rightfully causing us to question them.

This is not to say, of course, that new media outlets are inherently not to be trusted. In fact, many of them are more deserving of our trust than traditional media, especially in niche areas where their journalists are more specialized and know what they’re talking about. I certainly trust Michael Geist to deliver copyright law-related news better than any major newspaper in Canada (even those that run his columns). He’s earned that trust through his reputation.

That reputation takes a long time to build, and it’s at zero when it comes to the anonymous or mostly-anonymous contributions of some forms of citizen journalism.

Elsewhere in the Quebec blogosphere:

| Blogosphere, Navel-gazing

On being a B-list blogebrity

Navel-gaze with me for a moment.

B-listI checked my Technorati rating yesterday and noticed that I’m above the 100 authority level for the first time (111, exactly half that of my hero Patrick Lagacé). That level, according to this hyper-scientific calculation system, makes me a B-list blogebrity.

That sounds cool and all, but I’m still ranked 58,325, and I don’t think B-list celebrities have 58,325 people more important than them.

What gets me more is the words used to describe this blog in the local blogosphere, where I imagine the name carries a bit more weight because I focus on local issues. Small things like saying “un site plus connu” or “un influent blogueur” boost my ego enough to almost forget about the fact that I’m not paid a penny to do this (yet).

Of course, quite a bit of my Technorati rating comes from automated spam blogs that link to whichever of my posts contain their magic keyword, hoping for trackbacks that’ll send eyeballs to their ad-ridden sites.

Going through my logs, it seems apparent that I have some regular readers. About 50 or so subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed through Google Reader, Netvibes, Bloglines or other similar services, and more visit the site the old-fashioned way, through bookmarks, memorizing the URL or Googling “fagstein”. Many others get here through search engine searches for things that nobody else has written about. The rest are Google’s indexing bot.

So to you human readers I say thank you for reading. If I can’t have modest riches, at least I can have modest fame.

I expect the red carpet treatment at Yulblog this week. (Even though I’ll probably be at Pecha Kucha instead)

Now back to your regularly-scheduled blogging. (This week’s geography trivia question is still open, with an added hint.)

| Montreal, Pop quiz

Montreal Geography Trivia No. 4

What do the following names have in common:

  • Ste. Catherine
  • Ontario
  • Dorchester
  • René Lévesque
  • De la Gauchetière

that they do not have in common with the following:

  • De Maisonneuve
  • St. Jacques
  • St. Antoine
  • Viger
  • Hochelaga

(In other words, what statement can you make about Group A that you can’t make about Group B?)

UPDATE: No correct answer yet, so I’ve added a hint: Sherbrooke and Notre-Dame could be placed in either category, depending on how you phrase the answer.

UPDATE 2: Still nothing but frustrated guessers, so here’s the latest hint: This question is related to Montreal Geography Trivia Question No. 2.

UPDATE (Dec. 7): It took four days, but we finally have a correct answer: The first five names are the names of streets in Montreal-East and Pointe-aux-Trembles that are unconnected with their downtown namesakes. The second list is names that are not of streets in the east end, and Sherbrooke and Notre-Dame are contiguous all the way downtown.

Map of Montreal-East/Pointe-aux-Trembles

The assumption you were all making was that you knew which streets I was talking about.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

On the importance of online copy-editing

Came upon this article at Macleans.ca about online gambling in Kahnawake, and noticed what appeared to be a strange typo in the headline:

Maclean’s encoding error

As of this writing, it’s still not corrected, which I guess means that nobody at Maclean’s checks articles once they’ve gone online.

Here’s how the end of that headline appears in the HTML code:

Even if it means starting a fight.

So it’s not my browser. It explicitly says “lowercase i with umlaut, mathematical negation symbol, and non-existent character with code #129.” My browser just did what it was told.

But why did this happen? For that we have to delve into two technical subjects I’ll do my best to explain: Unicode and ligatures.

Continue reading →

| Business, Media, Montreal, Opinion

Québec à la une: An advertorial in three parts

I was tuning into TVA this evening to catch the series finale of Vlog, when I stumbled on a documentary about the Journal de Montréal called Québec à la une.

The documentary is an interesting look at the history of the newspaper known for its attention-whoring headlines, spending its first episode concentrating on the October Crisis that brought it into the mainstream and launched its Sunday edition.

But I can’t get over the fact that this is airing on TVA, which is owned by the same company that owns the Journal. In fact, Quebecor is run by Pierre-Karl Péladeau, and his father Pierre Péladeau is the guy getting a posthumous public blowjob in this rather one-sided documentary. (No mention of the Philadelphia Journal here.)

The appearance of the younger Péladeau on screen after the end of the documentary talking about how great Quebecor and the Journal de Montréal are sealed the deal. I’m still not sure if that was a paid advertisement or part of the documentary. Of course it doesn’t matter, because Péladeau would have just been paying himself.

It’s unfortunate, because a look at the big Montreal newspaper upheavals of the 1960s and 70s makes for interesting storytelling.

Québec à la une airs Tuesday, Dec. 4 and 11 at 9pm on TVA. The show is also available for free for Videotron Illico digital TV subscribers on its video-on-demand service (Channel 900, under “TV on demand” -> “TVA on demand”).

| In the news

Labeaume wins Quebec City mayor’s race

Despite her YouTube prowess, Ann Bourget lost the Quebec City mayor’s race today to a 60% landslide by “local businessman” Régis Labeaume, who apparently doesn’t have a website.

UPDATE: Apparently he does have a website, but it’s completely hidden from Google, which is odd because it’s very well designed, with YouTube videos of his own, and regular campaign communiqués (sadly in PDF format, as if people are going to print them out and post them) about issues, like this one vowing to use his political influence to keep Quebec media local in the wake of recent job cuts and the ongoing labour dispute at the Journal de Québec.

We’ll see how well he does on that promise.

| Humour, Video

Cherry Chocolate Rain

Good God.

Tay Zonday has gone mainstream:

Cherry Chocolate Rain (via Transmission Marketing)It’s cute, but the fact that the original song “Chocolate Rain” was about how racism still permeates society, having its remix/sequel video done throwing money around, surrounded by gangsta rappers and video skanks and shelling a soft drink… I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be ironic.

Good for Tay Zonday for capitalizing on his immense success. As for Dr. Pepper’s marketing department…

UPDATE: I got an email from a company whose job it is to search the Internet for Tay Zonday blog posts, pointing out another version of the song promoting Comedy Central’s Last Laugh ’07 tonight, singing about celebrity gossip (is that worse than a soft drink?). No word on when The Comedy Network will air the program in Canada.