Monthly Archives: February 2009

| Media

Journal Daily Digest: Leak documents, get sued

Journal de Montréal picket photo

Steve Proulx, who like me has been following the Journal de Montréal lockout closely, is being sued by the paper, apparently for a document he posted to his blog (later deleted) from the STIJM union which was critical of Journal management. (UPDATE: A Facebook group has been setup to support Steve)

Hugo Dumas reveals this in a column which also says the union at TVA is complaining that content its journalists provide to the business network Canal Argent is being used in the Journal and they’re acting as de facto scabs.

Meanwhile

| Media, Technology

Is CBC moderating comments enough?

Aboriginal leaders in Manitoba are apparently upset with comment moderation on the CBC’s website, which they say let through a bunch of racist comments on stories about native communities.

CBC moderates comments on news stories, but they’re fairly liberal about it, leaving in many which come close to the line.

Also of note here is that CBC outsources comment moderation to an outfit called ICUC, which moderates many Canadian media websites. It’s unclear if they let the comments through or if it was done by CBC staff, but (The Globe says ICUC does handle moderation services.) This underscores the fact that those moderating comments need to have very good training in laws concerning libel and hate speech.

UPDATE: The Globe and Mail explores the issue, with some examples of offending comments. CBC News also covers it, with quotes from management saying they’re taking a look at the issue, and there’s a post at Inside the CBC as well.

| Media, Technology

National Post apologizes for reporter’s Twitter tantrum

Some people see Twitter as a form of instant messaging. But those people can quickly forget that what you say on Twitter is just as public (if not moreso) than what you post on Facebook.

National Post technology reporter David George-Cosh learned that the hard way today when an expletive-filled argument he had with a source on Twitter was publicized (and republicized and republicized), making him (and the paper) look pretty bad.

The result, mere hours later, was an apology posted to the Post’s Editors blog (which doesn’t name the reporter it’s apologizing for, nor the person it’s apologizing to, nor the nature of the conduct, but who needs specifics for these things?). (Via Regret the Error)

Reporters are human, and like everyone else they’ll have off days and they’ll get into arguments. But when they happen online, those arguments can easily become public, and this is probably not the last time we’ll see apologies for personal conduct of people associated with media.

In this case, the reporter’s actions were in a professional capacity (which makes it the paper’s problem), but I wonder when the time will come where reporters, columnists and other public figures associated with a publication’s brand will have clauses in their contracts about what they can post to their Facebook profiles, personal blogs or other public and semi-public forums online.

UPDATE: April Dunford, the victim of the tirade, has similar thoughts on her blog.

UPDATE (Feb. 12): More reaction from Roberto Rocha and a let’s-attack-the-victim post from ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio (which gets its basic premise wrong). Additional commentary from Mathew Ingram and the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond.

UPDATE (May 25): Three months later, George-Cosh writes about the “incident” on his blog, saying he’s learned some hard lessons, though he still makes excuses for his behaviour.

| Media

Journal Daily Digest: What do managers do, anyway?

Journal: PKP = Detruire

Not much going on, though we might get some news in a few hours as there’s another general assembly today.

Rue Frontenac, remembering that it’s primarily a pressure tactic and union vehicle, takes some jabs at the Journal. One article asks whether managers are really needed in the production of a newspaper since all of them seem to be doing reporting now.

Elsewhere:

| Navel-gazing, Opinion, Technology

10 reasons why Twitter still sucks

I’ve never been a fan of Twitter. Looking at people’s status updates (or “tweets”, as its members have been told to refer to them), all I saw were a bunch of @ signs and TinyURL addresses. There seemed to be very little that was actually there.

But new media experts around the globe were embracing it. Some people who had been star bloggers a few years ago had all but abandoned them in favour of this new service. They heralded it as some holy grail of journalism (a suggestion I’ve already attacked head-on), as the best way to get breaking news and as being better than blogs.

So a few weeks ago, I setup a Twitter account. I did what I was supposed to do, follow some friends and start posting updates. Few of them would be considered really interesting. Anything important went on the blog, where I have more readership.

Before long I started getting messages that people were following me. A lot of people I don’t know. They probably found me through mutual Twitter friends, since I hadn’t posted my Twitter account here until now (mind you, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out). Unlike blog readership, which I’m sure includes hundreds of people I’ve never met, Twitter seems more personal. I get a message whenever one clicks on the “follow” button, and I see an image of that person’s face with a list of their updates.

I installed one of those Twitter programs (I settled on TwitterFox, which I’m not entirely crazy about but will do for now) to facilitate the Twittering, and I setup my cellphone so I could send Twitter updates by text message (unfortunately the reverse isn’t true, so I can’t read other people’s Twitter messages through my cellphone).

Anyway, you’re here to read about why I don’t like it, despite having used it for a month. I’ll give it to you in point form:

  1. The signal-to-noise ratio. When people talk about all the great information available on Twitter, they’re right. But the problem is that all this great information is buried under piles of @ replies, links, corrections, jokes and pointless trivia. It varies depending on the user, but the way Twitter is setup seems to encourage the noise rather than discourage it.
  2. Technical limitations. This is the other biggie, and it goes beyond the 140-character limit, though that’s certainly a big part of it. The biggest annoyance is links. Because most URLs won’t fit in the 140-character limit, various URL shortening services like TinyURL are used. The problem is that this obscures the actual URL. (Some Twitter clients will decode such URLs, but it would be easier if such a thing were handled internally.) Twitter RSS feeds leave a lot to be desired (clickable links would help), and some simple features like “retweeting” need to be done manually or through some third-party application. I realize that text messages are the reason for the 140-character limit, but how much of Twitter’s traffic comes from cellphones?
  3. Single point of failure. Though I haven’t yet experienced the Fail Whale, I expect it will come up soon. Twitter hasn’t yet found a way of making money (though they’re working on it), and the fact that it’s a privately-run service means if anything happens to Twitter’s servers, everyone is cut off. There is an open-source competition in Laconi.ca/Identi.ca (an Evan Prodromou project), but like the old instant messaging wars, it’s not about what service is better, it’s about what service your friends use. Laconi.ca is planning Twitter integration, which might help that, but until then you need to use both services unless you want to be disconnected.
  4. Microblogging vs. instant messaging. This is largely a cultural thing, which means it could change. But the impression I get from looking at Twitter posts is that it’s more of an open chat than it is about open blogging. Lots of replies (many consisting only of useless things like “:)”) or other messages that are more about conversation than information.
  5. Unwritten rules. I’ve seen this previously for blogs as well, with self-appointed community leaders dictating rules for how others should use a medium. Even though we’re not sure how Twitter should be used, there’s no end to the number of etiquette rules. You can’t update too much. You have to follow others. You can’t follow too many people if not enough people are following you.
  6. Duplication. If it’s on Twitter and it’s big, someone (either the twitterer or a follower) will put it on a blog anyway.
  7. Constant plugging. Some Twitter accounts are setup to automatically read from an RSS feed, post the first 100 or so characters and include a TinyURL link. I could just add that feed to my Google Reader and save a bunch of steps. In other cases it’s not automated, but bloggers will point out every time they post something new to their blog. It’s redundant and annoying.
  8. Time wasting. You’re in the middle of a blog post or reading something and bam, there’s another Twitter message to read. You’re interrupted by someone pointing out something they saw on the Internet that was funny. Did you really need this in real-time? You get back to what you were doing and bam another Twitter message. Very little of what gets posted on Twitter needs to be read immediately, and yet that’s the way it is. It’s a distraction and it wastes time.
  9. @ replies and #hashtags look ugly. Sure, you can turn @replies off when they’re not directed at you (or your friends), but then you risk losing important information that’s passed that way.
  10. No privacy. Even if their updates are public, you can’t follow someone without them knowing unless you do so by manually checking their page or putting their RSS feed in your feed reader. In fact, everyone knows who everyone else follows. Perhaps this is a feature, but it doesn’t make much sense for me. Twitter makes no distinction between types of followers, and I don’t want people thinking I’m friends with people and groups I just want to keep tabs on.

Despite all this, I’m not dismissing the concept of microblogging. Laconi.ca solves many of the technical problems (which suggests that Twitter can solve them too), and others can be fixed over time with culture change.

Despite its failings, people still use Twitter and (like Facebook) it’s a source that journalists have to mine for information. It involves filtering out a lot of noise, but there are nuggets of gold inside. So whether I like it or not I’ll still have to keep using it. Unlike David Akin, who is de-twittering, I still think there’s information that can be delivered using this medium.

But I won’t be using it any time soon to disseminate any important information. Follow me if you want, but you’re not going to see much quality. Anything I have to say, even briefly, of any substance will just be said here. There’s no minimum length for my blog posts.

| Montreal

$25,000 bribe? Gotta be Concordia

The student papers at Concordia (The Link, The Concordian) are leading with an incredible story based on an affidavit from the head of the Quebec Student Health Alliance (ASEQ) accusing former Concordia Student Union vice-president Steven Rosenshein of asking for a $25,000 bribe (to finance an upcoming student election campaign) for his company to remain the CSU’s health and dental plan insurance broker.

To be clear, the Concordia Student Union denies the claim and Rosenshein denies it as well.

Editor’s note: I’ve trimmed this post significantly from an earlier version after being contacted in June 2018 by Rosenshein, who disputed several facts. Rather than spend time re-reporting the story, I’ll simply refer you to the other stories written about it for details. Rosenshein notes that he sued ASEQ over the accusation, demanding $130,000. He says the lawsuit ended in a settlement but declined to specify.

| Radio, TV

CRTC Roudup: Conventional TV hurting

The CRTC today issued a release announcing its findings on the financial situation of private conventional television broadcasters.

In it, a few things that strike me right off: First of all, despite all the whining and complaining, conventional over-the-air television broadcasters like CTV and Global are still making money, albeit much less than they used to. Total profits for 2008 were $8 million, compared to hundreds of millions for the years before.

Though revenue was down from last year, the main reason for the financial shortfall is an increase in expenses, and the main increase there, which ate up half of their profits over the last year, is an increase in foreign (read: American) programming expenses:

Investments in Canadian programming remained essentially unchanged at $619.6 million, of which $146 million was paid to independent producers. However, private broadcasters spent $775.2 million on foreign programming in 2008, up 7.4% from $721.9 million in 2007.

In other words, the reason CTV, Global, CITY et al aren’t making as much money as before isn’t because they can’t afford to fund daily newscasts, it’s because they’re running themselves into the poor house bidding for the Canadian broadcast rights for House and Grey’s Anatomy.

It boggles the mind that Canadian broadcasters spend more money securing rights to U.S. content than they do creating their own Canadian content (in fact, if you exclude news from the equation, it becomes a ratio of more than 2:1).

The full analysis with tables and stuff (PDF) is worth taking a look at. It breaks down the numbers by region, and shows that profit in Quebec, for example, bucked the trend and actually increased slightly in 2008. This despite (or because of) the fact that Quebec’s private broadcasters spend more money to create their own (primarily francophone) content.

Taking that Canadian-to-U.S. content ratio again and excluding Quebec, it rises to 60:40 in favour of importing U.S. programming. Exclude news again, and you find out that non-Quebec TV broadcasters spend 80% of their non-news programming budgets  on importing American programming, and only 20% on creating Canadian content (that includes quasi-news programming like “other information” and “human interest”).

Perhaps we may have located the source of the problem here?

More on this story at CBC, CP and FP.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long. Quebecor (which owns TVA and Sun TV) is already using this to ask the CRTC to allow broadcasters to force cable companies to give them money (via Branchez-Vous), something the CRTC has already rejected.

More crappy cable channels

The CRTC is hearing applications for new digital specialty TV channels in one giant hearing (which also includes a bunch of radio applications). Among the suggested new channels:

  • The Asian Television Network has applied to create 12 new channels in various categories for news, sports and music programming. The applications are somewhat vague and ask for freedom to take programming from various categories, so there will probably be resistance from the existing players.
  • Current TV has applied for a Canadian version of its cable channel.
  • Some guy in Alberta wants to create The Country Channel, geared toward rural Canadians, which I guess means programming about farming and fishing. Again, some existing broadcasters will probably object to them not being more selective about programming categories.
  • A Toronto company called Ultimate Indie Productions (which seems to have assumed that its application has already been approved) wants to create a channel which features music from emerging Canadian artists (those whose record sales have not hit 80,000 yet), similar (in every way I can see) to a channel that’s already been approved but has not started service yet. It says no more than 65% of its content will be music, so I’m not sure what the rest is supposed to be. It also proposes no limits on feature film programming, which will annoy existing broadcasters. It’s also asking for an HD version of the same channel.

In other news

| Business, Media

Metro expects journalists to work for free

In case you needed more evidence that news organizations are taking advantage of the naiveté of young journalism students to reduce their payroll costs, the Metro newspaper in Toronto has fired its paid staff and replaced them with but are keeping their unpaid interns.

One of these days, newspapers (especially crappy ones like Metro) will lose that prestige that allows them to abuse students who are so desperate to get into their dream career they’ll work for free.

UPDATE (Feb. 11): One of those laid-off journalists writes about his bosses escorting him from the building on his personal blog.

| Montreal, Opinion, Public transit

AMT gives back … with coupons

The AMT today announced that they are going to be compensating users who have been inconvenienced by all the delays caused by train breakdowns and other issues over the past month.

Well, kind of, anyway.

What they’re actually doing is discounting the price of March, April and May TRAM passes for people who take the Deux Montagnes and Dorion/Rigaud lines. (The discounts are steep too, 50% for March, and 25% for the other months – though those are just for Deux Montagnes users.)

And how are they going to determine who uses these lines? Well, the brilliant strategists at the AMT have come up with this:

Un coupon de compensation sera distribué le mercredi 18 février en pointe du matin à l’embarquement dans toutes les gares des lignes Montréal/Deux-Montagnes et Montréal/Dorion-Rigaud.

In other words, they’re handing out coupons to people taking the train the morning of the 18th, and anyone who has the coupon can get the discount (but only if they get their passes at Central Station, Lucien L’Allier station or Vendôme station). There is no way to get the coupon other than using the train during morning rush hour on Feb. 18 (and then you have to repeat the process on March 18 and April 16 for the April and May passes).

UPDATE: The AMT has added Feb. 19 and 20 after complaints from transit users.

I can’t begin to describe how stupid this is. But I’ll take my best shot:

  • Not everyone who was inconvenienced is going to take the train on these days, and are going to get really pissed off that they can’t get a coupon any other way
  • Not everyone taking the train on these mornings will have been inconvenienced by the train breakdowns. And considering that a 50% reduction of the cost of a pass is a huge savings for people living far away (up to $100), some will probably go out of their way to take the morning train that day, making that particular morning commute even more unbearable.
  • This system offers no compensation for those who use tickets instead of a pass, or who don’t plan on using the train in March, April or May.
  • Most importantly, the people who were inconvenienced by the train breakdowns don’t care as much about compensation as they do fixing the problem and getting to work on time. This doesn’t do anything to fix that.

AMT’s train solution: Take the bus

Among the other things contained in the announcement, the AMT is reducing the capacity of trains on the Deux Montagnes line during rush hour, going from 10 cars to eight, so that repairs can be made. Since these cars are already overfilled, they’re setting up special buses to shuttle people between train stations and metro stations near the Deux Montagnes line. The STL is also increasing service to bus #26, which goes between the Ste. Dorothée station and Montmorency metro.

Back from the future

Another measure being taken is reversing schedule changes that were made earlier in the year on the Deux Montagnes line. The morning rush hour schedule, which involved more trains departing from Deux Montagnes, will be reverted to the 2008 schedule starting Feb. 16, since the rolling stock will be unable to handle the increased number of passengers and the increased hours of service.

No information available

Finally, the AMT put on its website a page which gives real-time information about train service.

| Blogosphere, Media, Opinion, Technology

Nothing like a blogger popularity contest

This morning on Christiane Charette’s show on Radio-Canada, three stars of the Quebec web were invited to compile a list of the most influential Quebec web celebrities.

Like most ideas, this one was stolen from a similar worldwide list created by Forbes magazine, which put celebrity gossipist Perez Hilton at the top (just to give you an idea of what criteria they use).

All three of them posted to their blogs asking readers to make suggestions: Bruno Guglielminetti, Michelle Blanc and Dominic Arpin. Their posts got a bunch of comments (some of them wanting to plug their own blogs), and also prompted other bloggers to offer their own lists:

But there were also a lot of comments, especially from other bloggers, about how such a list goes against the entire spirit of the web.

Martine Pagé has the best writeup about the problems with this process, so much so that I feel kind of silly going over the same points. Her comments were also echoed by other bloggers.

Like her, I’ll admit that I scanned the lists at least subconsciously to see if I was mentioned. (Blanc said it best: “on se rend vite compte que les listes, on s’en fou, mais qu’il faut être dedans.”) More consciously, though, I wanted to see what kind of people made each list, and what kind of criteria were used to select them. Did the lists include:

  • Anglophones?
  • Professional journalists (like Patrick Lagacé)?
  • People who are active on Twitter/Facebook/etc. but don’t have blogs?
  • People who are active bloggers but not on Twitter/Facebook/etc.?
  • Executives of web companies who don’t do anything personal online?

They seemed to agree that their lists should be confined to those whose popularity stems mainly from the Internet (so no Lagacé). They also included people like Patrick Boivin and Michel Beaudet of Têtes à claques who don’t blog. Blanc explains her reasoning.

The mutually-agreed-upon top 10 are listed on Charette’s site. Guglielminetti and Blanc also provide their top 25 (Arpin says to look at his blogroll). It’s very easy to see the influence of the three on the list: lots of representation from web video producers (five), and tech/social media/marketing bloggers (three). Renart L’éveillé points out that news/opinion/political bloggers are conspicuously absent from these lists (probably because many of them are professional journalists and were excluded for that reason).

As Pagé points out, the same names tend to come up in these kinds of lists. That’s not because these three experts didn’t do their jobs properly and focused on their friends, it’s because that’s the nature of the Web. Your Web is made up of your Facebook friends, who you follow on Twitter, which blogs you read and which YouTube channels you’re subscribed to. There’s an infinite supply out there, and they’re all of different types, so everyone’s web is going to be different, which makes this list all the more silly (in their defence, the panelists are fully aware of how silly this exercise is).

There’s already an outlet for self-obsessed bloggers who want to rank themselves: It’s called Tout le monde en blogue, and it judges strictly by traffic numbers (participating blogs place counters on their pages, which show their ranking to their readers). It’s stupid, it’s vain, it’s shallow and it’s pointless. But at least it’s objective.

Maybe we should leave the lists to them.

UPDATE: More after-the-fact commentary from Yves Williams, Mario Asselin and (briefly) Patrick Tanguay.

UPDATE (Feb. 11): One of my blog’s loyal readers totally blasts me on his for this post for having suggested that I’m above vanity (which I don’t think I’ve done).