Come on. You know you want to. Decrease worldsuck. Come to Montreal. Please?
Monthly Archives: June 2008
Business isn’t smoking
On Friday night, part of Quebec’s anti-smoking law came into effect, which among other things completely bans smoking in workplaces, outlawing designated smoking rooms.
To which most people responded: “They allowed smoking rooms at work until now?”
Yep. And on Friday night at midnight, those rooms were closed for good, including one at The Gazette, which had its ashtrays removed and “no smoking” signs taped to the tables. It will be converted into a lunchroom.
Now, when copy editors take page proofs to read while having a smoke, they’ll be doing it outside. Which will be fine while the weather is good, but it’ll be torture when winter comes.
Another provision of the law, which will have more of an impact on the rest of the world, requires retailers to hide their cigarettes in a closed cabinet or otherwise out of the view of customers. This is to prevent young’uns from being exposed to them or something, I guess.
That provision reeks of wishy-washy nanny-stateism (either make it legal or don’t), but I don’t smoke so I really don’t care.
As the law came into effect, Couche Tard took the opportunity to remind customers that they still sell cigarettes and to “just ask” for them. (This law is going to cause a lot of uncomfortable and/or confusing conversations, I think). Right next to that ad was another from VizuelMedia, which is using this new law to its advantage and has created a business model that involves creating new cigarette “power walls” and selling ads on them.
And the Mohawks, well they’re just ignoring the law entirely.
Thomas McEntee
One of the quirks working at The Gazette involves the obituaries section.
Despite the paper’s best efforts, it still becomes difficult to get people to plan their deaths in advance. And so, seven days a week, people collect paid obituary notices and compile them for the next day’s paper. And the space they’re given to fill is usually larger than the amount of obituaries they have.
So at about 8pm every night, the news desk gets a call from the obituaries people telling us how much extra space there is. Sometimes there’s none, sometimes it’s a column, a few columns, a full page, or a full page and more.
When there’s a full page free, the ideal situation involves giving it to the section that precedes it, usually either business or sports. This is why you’ll sometimes see a full page of business news in Monday’s Your Business section just before the obits. But the news usually comes too late for the section editor to re-engineer the section to accomodate.
When that happens, and when there’s space on a page shared by paid obituaries, we run editorial ones. These are usually pieces from the New York Times or Washington Post about obscure musicians or scientists we’ve never heard of. Occasionally, though, we get a famous death or a locally-produced obit.
On Thursday night, I got approached by Alan Hustak, aka “Dr. Death.” He writes most of the Gazette’s obits, and had just written a medium-sized piece on Thomas McEntee, an Irish Catholic priest with a strong attachment to Griffintown. I was editing the World section at the time, and it’s usually that person’s responsibility to fill the obit pages when they come in.
When news came down of the space to fill, I had a full page plus a column. Hustak’s piece could have been crammed into that column with a small picture, but I decided to see if I could make it fill a full page.
Fortunately, Father McEntee has had his name in the paper quite a few times. He had this thing for a 19th-century woman named Mary Gallagher who would haunt Griffintown every seven years and look for her decapitated head. A story about that campaign led to plenty of pictures taken by staff photographers a few years ago.
I took one of those pictures and had it fill almost the entire page above the fold. Below, I had the article, which was still way too short to fill the space without it looking weird.
Rather than give up, or find some other obit to fill the space, I went through the archives. I found a profile on him that had been done in 1991, and cut out some information about his background and education. Combined with an old picture that Hustak had found, I made a fast-facts infobox. On the other side of the article, I put another infobox, which I filled with part of an old story by Hustak about Mary Gallagher.
A little bit of playing around to make everything line up, a pullquote to fill some space, and voila: A full-page obituary for a local priest, put together on deadline.
The online versions don’t do justice to the layout, but here they are anyway:
As for the other column, as I looked for something to fill it, news was just breaking that Harvey Korman had died. The decision was simple.
Globe goes free
It is truly the end of an era.
The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, has pulled the plug on its Globe Insider service and unlocked all its columnist pieces for people to read for free. People will no longer be stuck with those “for Globe Insider subscribers only” messages.
Instead of Globe Insider, the paper plans three other ways to make money online:
- An “e-paper” version of the print edition, which I haven’t seen or tested but is probably as annoying to use as the other poor-man’s PDF viewers out there.
- Its Globe Investor Gold service which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with news.
- Access to its archives.
The third one is probably what’s going to annoy people most. The Globe is still restricting access to its archives, and expecting people to pay ridiculous prices like $5 an article or $16 a month to get access to them.
Not aware of this, initial reaction has been a mix of “thank you” and “it’s about time,” with the usual comments about Christie Blatchford thrown in (and one saying The Gazette is better than the Globe).
The decision leaves Le Devoir as the only major Canadian daily that maintains a subscriber wall. How long until it finally crumbles?
AMT ponders trains to Beauharnois, Marieville, St-Jean-sur-Richelieu
LCN has a video report this week, and the Journal de Chambly had an article in April, about the AMT’s dream plans for new commuter trains. The agency is deep in the planning process for the “Train de l’Est” which would run to Repentigny and Mascouche. But they’re also thinking of trains to Beauharnois (through Chateauguay), St-Jean-sur-Richelieu (via the existing Delson/Candiac line) and Marieville (through St-Lambert on the St-Hilaire line).
These other routes are still in the “I have a dream” stage, but they provide some insight into the minds of planners at the AMT.
The matter was also brought up at the National Assembly in April during a meeting of its transportation and environment committee.