Monthly Archives: April 2008

| Media, Opinion, Sports, West Island

Chronicle just misses the sport

Jealous, I can only surmise, at other news outlets and their blog thingies, the West Island Chronicle has announced the creation of Sportlight (yes, with an “R”), a “blog” about Montreal’s professional sports teams, the Canadiens, Alouettes and Impact. (It’s also available in French as Montréal en sport)

Sadly, despite their claims of being “experienced” and “up-to-the-minute”, they’re clearly neither. The journalists who write these blogs don’t cover these teams regularly (or at all). They’re just guys who watch hockey on TV and think they’re experts about it.

In other words, it’s just like all those other Habs blogs out there. Not worth seeing unless you know the authors personally.

The problem is that David is trying to slay Goliath on Goliath’s terms. The Gazette’s Habs Inside/Out blog takes advantage of the paper’s access to the team and its reporters’ experience to make it a comprehensive resource. Armchair sports analysts can’t compete with that, so why are they?

I noticed the same problem years ago with student media. Instead of concentrating on university sports where they have the access, time and resources to do a good job (and the lack of competition that would make them the best at what they do), some student newspaper writers prefer to rant about the Habs, doing bad imitations of professional sports writers.

There is no limit to sports that local reporters can cover. Junior teams, college teams, high school teams, all get ignored in big media because there are too many of them and they’re not interesting enough.

The ball is in the court of the local papers to write about local teams. Why is it trying to compete on a level it is guaranteed to lose?

Full disclosure: I work at The Gazette (though I don’t do anything on its Habs blog), and I once interned briefly at the Chronicle.

| Montreal, Technology

Porn spam sinks to new low

There are various levels of immorality on the Internet that people with no shame have exploited for their own ends:

  • Spam: The broadcast of messages for a purely commercial purpose
  • Porn: Exploiting our animal desires by peddling pictures of naked women
  • Plagiarism: The appropriation of someone else’s artistic work as your own without permission
  • Tabloidism: The exploitation of catastrophic events to draw attention to yourself

Well now we have all the above rolled into one:

Dawson YouTube spam

Someone has taken a YouTube Dawson College shooting tribute video (one of those lame wire-service-still-photos-combined-with-sad-song montages) and re-uploaded it with an ad for a porn site at the bottom.

The reason? The original video had “college” and “girl” in its description.

Why don’t porn spammers have better quality control?

| TV

Chantal wants her money

TQS Vedette Chantal Lacroix is suing her former employer’s soon-to-be-ex-owner Cogeco for $1,458,078.75, a value that La Presse rounds up to $1.5 million and the Journal rounds down to $1.4 million, but is really neither.

The reason? That’s the money they still owe her according to her contract, she says.

Stars can be so demanding, what with the demanding you pay them what you agreed to pay them. Where will this tyrannical wave of greed stop?

(P.S. Chantal, if you need comfort in your hour few months of need…)

| Media

Liberals sue La Presse, change their minds

A day after seeking a court injunction preventing La Presse from printing a leaked copy of secret Liberal MP candidates in Quebec, the Liberal party has changed its mind, saying it’s not an official list.

La Presse hasn’t released the list yet, though they say it shows the Liberals are far behind in finding candidates for all 75 ridings in the province. The party said previously that 50 candidates were selected and 12 others are waiting for an election call to leave their current jobs and identify themselves.

| In the news, Montreal, Video

CUPFA using YouTube

After six years of failed contract negotiations, CUPFA, the Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association, has instituted “rotating strikes” which sound more like “picketing between classes”. Among their demands are pay equity with full-time teachers (represented by another bargaining unit, CUFA) as well as basic job security, if only so that students don’t see “TBA” listed as their professors for upcoming courses.

Concordia University has declared that the show must go on though they will tolerate CUPFA’s tactics. Students must still complete all work, handing it in to departments directly if necessary.

Part of CUPFA’s tactics include setting up a YouTube channel and posting videos.

Here, head honcho Maria Peluso explains the skinny on CUPFA’s position.

| Media, Montreal, Public transit

Correspondent’s correspondance

The Journal’s Noée Murchison is really stretching for “investigative” stories. In her latest EXCLUSIVE SCANDAL REPORT, she determines that bus drivers don’t always check transfers, and that metro ticket-takers will stand by while people take multiple transfers from the dispenser.

And while I’m here, why does she insist on referring to herself in the third person? Does she think that makes her sound more serious?

(via mtlweblog)

Also: Way to go LCN, way to show your editorial independence by re-reporting a non-story.

| Montreal, Public transit

STM’s April pass is wrong

If you’re a regular transit user in Montreal you’ve noticed that the STM has been using photos of its metro stations as art on its monthly bus/metro passes.

Unfortunately, someone made an oopsie this month. The caption on the April pass says “Station de métro Square-Victoria”, but it’s clearly a photo of the ceiling of Jarry station.

April bus pass

The reason for the error? They forgot to change it from the March pass, which was of the Square Victoria station.

March bus pass

Oops.

| Opinion

Gary’s got you covered!

Even though I have a love life that would make Eliot Spitzer feel bad for me, I always make sure I have some vi@gra and ci@lis at the ready in case the time comes and a wave of ED suddenly strikes.

But those drugs are so expensive. How does a guy get stiff without getting stiffed?

I don’t have those worries anymore, since I found Gary’s Vi@gra and Ci@lis Emporium. There, I can get my pills at prices as low as 2 cents apiece. Sure, they’re not blue or diamond-shaped, they don’t have the logo on them and they taste a lot like chalk, but at 2 cents who cares if you get a dud every once in a while?

And while I’m shopping there, I can get low-priced Rolex watches, Adobe software and all the incest porn I could possibly imagine.

Give them a shot, so they can give you a shot.