Monthly Archives: January 2008

| Media, Montreal, Opinion, Slow News Day

The boring bagel brouhaha

Everyone’s gotten into a tiff over Hamilton (a small Ontario town, I think Sheila Copps came from there) selling what they call a “Montreal-style bagel.” Problem is it’s not a Montreal-style bagel. It’s got an icing sugar coating, which Montreal bagels don’t have.

Seeing an opportunity to make themselves relevant to the world, the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce has proposed a blind taste test so that we can tell which is the better bagel. The Gazette has accepted the challenge, confident that Montreal bagels will prevail.

There’s three problems with this:

  1. We’ve been through this before. A year ago, The Gazette and the Toronto National Post had a blind taste test of bagels by their staffers. Montreal won, and the Post ate crow. Why do we need to repeat this experiment with a lesser city?
  2. The entire point of the controversy was not, as in the Toronto case, that the other city claimed their bagels were better than ours. The problem is that they’re labelling something a “Montreal-style bagel” when it’s not. Call it a “Hamilton-style bagel” and the controversy is over. Everyone will accept its inferiority.
  3. How do you do a blind taste test for this? One is coated with sugar, the other is not. Even the most undeveloped tastebuds will quickly tell the difference and be able to detect which group the bagel belongs to. And if the Hamilton bagels are stripped of their sugar coating, then we forget the fact that the sugar icing is the point of the controversy in the first place.
  4. Bagels are meant to be served fresh. There’s simply no logical way to do blind taste tests of fresh bagels from two different cities simultaneously. The best they could do is set themselves up in Toronto or Kingston and have bagels rushed down on trains or planes. They’d still be a few hours old at that point. Of course, they’re not going to go that far for a friendly experiment like this, so either one set of bagels is going to be fresher than the other, or everyone is going to be eating stale bagels.

Why are we wasting the time of so many journalists repeating something we’ve already done, that has no journalistic value and above all doesn’t make any sense?

UPDATE: On Sunday, the paper prints this article, which is a cut-and-paste (typos and all) of this discussion forum, complete with thoughtless opinion from whoever had a minute of free time that day and wanted to rant.

| Media

Quebec Press Council wants to know what’s wrong with the media

Jealous, I would guess, of the immense success of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation (and how it neatly solved the problem of cultural differences), the Quebec Press Council has announced it is going on a Quebec-wide tour of the regions to get people’s opinions on the state of the news media in Quebec.

The consultation document (PDF, surprisingly an English version was available) suggests the main points are the usual media hot-button issues: media consolidation, the quality of local news reporting, and what’s up with this whole “Internet” thing.

They stop in Montreal March 27. (Full schedule PDF)

Rather than wait until they’re finished, I’ll save them some time and go straight to the conclusions:

  • Big media doesn’t cover local issues in the regions and all the news comes from Montreal
  • Too many media outlets are owned by too few companies
  • TV news doesn’t do journalism well
  • Radio doesn’t do journalism at all
  • We need to save TQS
  • We need to get rid of TQS
  • Big media have an irrational bias against Israel and in favour of Palestinian homicide bombers
  • Big media have an irrational bias against Palestine and in favour of the murderous Israeli military occupation
  • Big media refuse to expose the truth about (insert nonsense conspiracy theory here)
  • The media are too sensationa… hey did you hear about that story in the Journal?
  • The news is filled with fluff. Journalists don’t focus on important issues like … umm … I don’t know, I spend most of my time on TMZ.com
  • The paper didn’t print my 45,000-word letter to the editor explaining the sociological implications of fonts used on instruction manual cover pages in South Africa
  • Only bloggers provide accurate news coverage
  • Bloggers are stupid and incoherent
| Blogosphere, TV

Local bloggers on Test the Nation

Test the Nation

Bored? CBC’s latest rendition of Test The Nation just finished on TV (though you can take the test online). Among the six teams fighting it out in studio were “bloggers” (Here are their mugshots). The team includes some well-known Montrealers:

Nulman has guaranteed that the blogger group will be victorious over celebrity look-alikes, cab drivers, backpackers, chefs and flight crews. Can they pull it off? Considering how skewed the questions are toward technology trivia (there’s even an entire section on it), I wouldn’t be surprised…

UPDATE: 26 questions in, and the bloggers are leading.

UPDATE: Nulman breathes a sigh of relief, as the bloggers easily take the competition with an average score of 50/60. Highest is Rick Spence at 57. I scored a still-respectable 47.

UPDATE: The CBC actually does a pretty darn decent job rounding up the post-test blogger reaction. They also put up some fun statistical stuff (StatsCan they are not), which shows that meateaters scored better than vegetarians, heavy Internet users scored more than light Internet users, and that Quebec outscored every other province (HA! Suck it Alberta!). The best: Nunavut. The worst: PEI.

| Media, Opinion

It’s time to re-think anonymous sources

Anonymous sources are important tools for journalists. They can provide information that changes the course of history (insert obligatory Deep Throat reference here), usually in the form of an insider whose conscience gets the better of them.

For example, an article in The Link this week, which talks to an anonymous member of Concordia University’s Board of Governors about events that happened in closed-door meetings. Because the source is violating a trust in publicizing such information, there’s a legitimate reason to keep that source’s identity secret. And because the issue of Concordia’s president is an important one in the university community, the issue is of sufficient importance to base an article mainly on the information provided by such a source.

But anonymity can also be used for less altruistic purposes, like politicians smearing mud about their opponents while staying squeaky clean. (Henry Kissinger was notorious for this)

This week, journalists from La Presse were ordered by a judge to divulge the sources of information about Adil Charkaoui. Charkaoui, living under a “security certificate” which allows the government to restrict freedoms without presenting any evidence to the accused, is suing the government and trying to get all the information about him released. He says this information is entirely false.

The use of anonymous sources has become more prevalent in reporting. The phrase “spoke on condition his name not be used” is all over the place, many times for information that doesn’t advance the course of the story at all. A reporter writing about an untimely death goes to the home and finds nobody there. He then goes to the neighbour’s place, and gets a quote or two on condition of anonymity. The quote is the same generic “he was always a good kid” stuff that everyone says, but this particular source just isn’t crazy about having his name in the paper. Is anonymity really necessary in this case?

In recent years, newspapers have started implementing rules about anonymous sources, the most visible being that articles must state the reason a source has been left anonymous. Unfortunately, in most cases that explanation turns out to be “spoke on condition his name not be used” or “spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject” or something similar.

It’s time to start re-thinking how we use anonymous sources, understanding that they diminish our credibility, especially when it’s later discovered the source was wrong or outright lied. I wouldn’t go so far as to ban them outright, as some news organizations have done, but I would make sure certain rules are enforced (and most of these are enforced by professional news agencies):

  • Make every effort to get sources to go on the record with information. “This is off the record” isn’t a one-way conversation, it has to be an agreement with the reporter, and it should be done for a compelling reason.
  • Provide information about the source (like “senior White House aide”) so we know where they’re coming from.
  • Investigate the reliability of the source. Refuse to publish information anonymously from sources whose reliability is doubtful or who are clearly attempting to manipulate the media. Do not accept blind anonymous information (documents left in a paper bag) unless that information is verified.
  • Investigate the reliability of the information. Require corroboration for all anonymous material. Do not print anonymous rumours, no matter how many anonymous sources it comes from. Do not agree to anonymity when the information is self-serving.
  • Verify all anonymously-obtained documents through an official source. They can be faked.
  • Disclose the identity of all anonymous sources to an editor (this helps avoid fabrications). Require editor approval before an anonymous source is used.
  • Provide information about the source’s agenda if relevant (and the reason a source comes forward anonymously is always relevant). If information about a Liberal MP comes from a Conservative one, this should be noted (and be subjected to even greater scrutiny).
  • Verify the information provided using official, reliable sources. Avoid relying on the anonymous source if the information can be obtained elsewhere. (Even if this is done, note that it originally came from an anonymous source.)
  • Include why the source requested anonymity (and make sure it’s a damn good reason).
  • Do not provide anonymous sources for opinion or conjecture.
  • Avoid quoting anonymous sources directly. Don’t quote an anonymous source just because the quote is interesting.
  • Make the agreement contingent on the information being accurate. If it’s determined that the information was knowingly inaccurate or that the source was otherwise dishonest, identify the source and do not use again.
  • Do not write stories based on stories from other news agencies that quote anonymous sources. Especially if those sources include celebrity gossip websites or supermarket tabloids.
  • But most of all: Use anonymous sources only when the information provided is vital to the story.

We have reputations to uphold. Anonymous sources are exceptions to the rule that should be used only when absolutely necessary. They’re not a loophole to be exploited when someone’s uncomfortable or a journalist is lazy.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

Good riddance, vaporware column

The Gazette has dropped Mark Stachiew’s Canwest-syndicated NETworthy column, which every week lists a bunch of websites to visit. His last column was this past Monday. It’s one in a sea of columnists who are either leaving outright (Matt Radz, Lisa Fitterman) or who are leaving the paper as employees and sticking around freelance (Jack Todd, Mary Lamey).

In Stachiew’s case, I’ll say: Good riddance.

Stachiew himself seems like a nice guy, but the column is pure shite. Rather than focus on interesting websites that provide useful information, it’s filled with laughably forgettable single-function dot-com websites that sound like they were brought back in time from TechCrunch deadpool posts from six months in the future: meeting schedulers, CV or invoice templates, task managers, bookmark replacements or highly-focuses social networking sites (“It’s like Facebook for X” always prompts me to ask: Why not just use Facebook then?)

In exchange for providing these ridiculously trivial services, the websites try to get you to pay for them after using them for free, through the clichéd limited-time-free-trial, free-for-non-commercial-use or pay-for-advanced-features methods.

It’s clear from the columns that they’re written based not on thorough searches for interesting new websites, but on a random handful of press releases picked out of the inbox from companies who spend more on marketing than creating a product people will be interested in. Some websites are featured in this column before they’re even launched, or are based on the hope that user-generated content will eventually make it worth visiting.

There’s a hunger out there for lists of interesting websites to visit. That’s why people visit Digg or Fark. But these websites are not interesting, and unless the focus of the column changes it’s not good enough to put in a newspaper.

So ends my rant.

| Media, Opinion, Web design

LCN/Canoe needs to learn HTML 2.0

One of the recurring elements of my criticisms of big media websites is that you have to learn Web 1.0 before you try at Web 2.0. Uploaded stories from newspapers still don’t have clickable links, URLs are way too long, related stories aren’t linked to each other, etc.

Another example of this comes courtesy of Quebecor’s Canoe.ca website, which is presenting a “survey” with Quebecor-owned TVA/LCN, Quebecor-owned Journal de Montréal and Corus-owned Énergie 98.5 FM. The survey asks people questions in order to track down differences between Baby Boomers and younger generations (or more precisely, find out what the generations think of each other). Certainly no surprise for the Journal, which prefers to create divisive scandals rather than report on news that’s already out there.

But the version of the survey published online is ludicrously low-tech. Rather than have visitors fill out a web form (a technology that we’ve only had for about 12 years), it presents the options in barely-formatted paragraphs and then asks readers to cut and paste their answers into an email (that they format themselves).

How about I save everyone some time: Young people think Baby Boomers are old, boring, intolerant, stubborn and out of touch. Baby Boomers think young people are impulsive, irresponsible, weird, stupid and disrespectful.

Now where’s my Pulitzer?

UPDATE (Jan. 20): The first results are in, and ranking of priorities shows no real difference between the age groups (though I’m sure they’ll try to find one). Continuing the we-don’t-know-this-technology-stuff motif, the full results are a PDF focument of a scan of what looks like a bad photocopy of a fax of printed sheets of computer-generated charts. Have these people never heard of email?

| In the news, Montreal, My articles, Public transit

TWIM: Kenya and bus schedules

This week’s Bluffer’s Guide concerns the unstable political situation in Kenya, which has already claimed hundreds of lives in a country that was supposed to be one of Africa’s democratic leaders. Worth taking a look in case you feel bad knowing more about the status of Jamie Lynn Spears’s pregnancy than about the difference between Kenya and Rwanda. For more, check out the excellent special sections from The Guardian and BBC News.

This week’s Justify Your Existence concerns the STM’s bus service improvements I mentioned a week and a half ago. Asked why three buses (18 Beaubien, 24 Sherbrooke and 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu) had reductions in service (primarily on the weekend) when they were announcing service improvements, the response was that these are normal seasonal variations in service for these lines. The STM changes schedules four times a year, and compared to the winter schedule of January-March 2007, there are no reductions in service:

At each schedule change, we look at the weekend offering, and we adjust based on customer demand. The 24 line, for example, mostly serves business workers, so fewer people take it during the weekend. There will be about 14 hours less service on the weekend for those three lines, but we’re adding over 115 hours of service to those lines during the week.

| Media

Toronto Star reaches tentative agreement

Toronto Star: No strike

The Toronto Star has reached a tentative agreement with its union after days of round-the-clock talks that went 14 hours into we-can-call-a-strike-at-any-time territory, and three days after the union’s members voted near-unanimously in favour of a strike.

No details are being released about the agreement, which must still be ratified by the union’s members. But a notice from the union suggests that a decent compromise has been reached, phasing out Sunday pay bonuses, increasing wages 2% each year and no changes to the overtime pay formula.

UPDATE (Jan. 25): The agreement has been ratified by union members, making it official. There will be no work disruption at the Star for at least another three years.

| Media, Opinion, Technology, Video

“Fair use” is not a loophole

I hear (via Ingram) about Yet Another Popular Video Clip Show being launched by Digg and Revision3: The Digg Reel.Like TVA’s Vlog (which I wrote about last week in The Gazette), which was the focus of my piece last week, The Digg Reel relies strictly on the Fair Use exception to copyright law, and shows “short” clips of videos with “analysis.” In fact, one of the videos is a clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and bizarrely credited to the Huffington Post.

Judging from their first episode, I can’t imagine sitting through it on a regular basis, for the following reasons that seem to be part of some formula for all such shows:

  1. There’s no analysis. It’s just some bimbo giving the title of the clips (she forces herself to use the exact titles as submitted by Diggers, as if that’s somehow important), the number of Diggs (despite the fact that we can see it on screen, and again we don’t care) and a short description of the video, which sounds like it was written by an Academy Award presentation intro writer. Instead of the show’s producers making their own comments, which might be interesting, they just read selected comments attached to the Digg articles (most of which aren’t that interesting).
  2. I hate it when people credit screennames, especially in video. Not only does it sound stupid, but if people aren’t going to give their real names, why should we credit them?
  3. I don’t need help to discover the Daily Show, or TED, or Transformers, or Bill Gates, or Associated Press. I want to discover things I’ve never seen before, obscure web artists with good quality videos. If the show is going to artificially limit itself to only the most popular Digg videos as opposed to, say, exercising any editorial control, then it’s going to be nothing more than a popularity contest (and, eventually, porn).
  4. She’s not funny. Period. Sorry. And the only thing worse than unfunny hosts is unfunny hosts who think they’re hilarious.
  5. The format for this show is mind-numbingly simple, and yet there are mistakes. Videos are credited to the servers they’re found on instead of their creators (Daily Show credited to Huffington Post, Associated Press to Breitbart, others to YouTube). Comments aren’t read properly.

But the most important objection I have to this show is that, like Vlog and all the others, it blatantly tries to profit off other people’s work. Permission is not sought before these videos are aired. No payment goes out to their creators for a license to rebroadcast. Profits from the show aren’t shared.

And in my opinion, that’s copyright infringement. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

According to Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback and his lawyers, it’s fair use (though he’ll gladly take down the Daily Show clip if Viacom asks) because they analyze it and provide short clips.

The problem is that these producers (and, I suspect, their lawyers) aren’t familiar enough with fair use (U.S.) and fair dealing (Canada) copyright exceptions. Yes, news and commentary are covered under these provisions, however they only do so under certain conditions:

  1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature: FAIL. The show is clearly a for-profit venture (even including commercial advertising) whose main selling point is the videos themselves, not analysis of them.
  2. The nature of the copyrighted work: FAIL. There is no overriding public interest in seeing a video of a rabbit opening a letter. There is no reason to believe these videos shouldn’t have copyright protections.
  3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole: FAIL. A 30-second clip from a motion picture or an hour-long TV show is one thing. But a 30-second clip of a 35-second video is a substantial portion and is not covered under fair use.
  4. The effect of the use upon the value of the copyrighted work: FAIL. If I can watch these videos here, there’s no reason to seek them online and buy them or look at the ads whose profits might actually go to the videos’ creators.

There’s this mindset among some producers that there’s a magic 30-second or 45-second rule that simply doesn’t exist in law. That as long as video clips are shorter than this length, that as long as they’re credited, and as long as there’s some random chatter about the videos, that their show is news and the use of videos qualifies as fair use.
It doesn’t.

And even if it did, it’s morally wrong to profit off other peoples’ work like this. Simply offering to remove videos after the fact is both ridiculous (what are they going to do, black out portions of existing episodes?) and shows a blatant lack of respect for people’s rights.

I expect this kind of thing from big media. I don’t expect it from Digg.

(You Digg?)

| Media, My articles, Video

Should letters to the editor be paid for?

Thursday’s Gazette features some letters to the business editor responding to last week’s inaugural Business Observer section, and particularly my opinion piece about independent video producers being exploited by big media.

One of those letters asks an interesting question (which I jokingly alluded to last week): Should letter writers be paid for their opinions?

You are asking us for our opinion on using Web content with no payment to the producer. Well, how about you guys at the Gazette? Why don’t you pay the author when you publish his opinion, or even a letter to the editor? Writing something for publication doesn’t exactly take only a few minutes of his time. An opinion piece, or letter to the editor can take the author hours of his time.

So let’s be upright about this. When The Gazette (or any publication) publishes anything, there should be automatic payment for the author.

Martin Plant, Montreal

At some point, we have to have a discussion as a society over what line exists between freelance journalism (which should be paid for) and reader interaction (which shouldn’t).

| In the news, Montreal, Technology

Kahnawake Gaming Commission on both sides of slaps on the wrist

The Kahnawake Gaming Commission, which takes advantage of lenient gambling rules on the reserve and access to a fat Internet backbone to host a gazillion online casinos, has been blacklisted denied whitelisting in the U.K. for undisclosed reasons. That means their casinos and poker sites (which represent over half of all such sites in the world) won’t be able to advertise there legally. Naturally, the commission isn’t pleased, throwing out some bullshit about indigenous peoples’ rights.

Tristan Péloquin suggests it might have something to do with the Absolute Poker scandal, in which company insiders cheated, checking others’ hidden cards and betting based on that information. The Commission eventually fined the company $500,000 (PDF report) and forced them to pay for surprise audits, among other things. But the commission’s reputation is of an uninterested party sitting on its hands while fraud goes on.