Monthly Archives: April 2009

| Media, Opinion

Still working on “hyperlocal”

The New York Times, which from what I understand is some sort of newspaper, has an article about “hyperlocal” news sites, and the startups behind them that are trying to reinvent local news.

From what I can see, most of these sites come in one of the following categories:

  • Turnkey “insert town name here” sites with computer-generated statistical data (crime maps are a common example), crowdsourced DIY journalism and aggregation of links to traditional media and local blogs
  • Foundation-supported small journalism outlets with actual hired journalists, mixed in with some community activity and link aggregation.

The latter version I can respect, even though such a funding formula isn’t sustainable in the long term. Some of the projects starting up are small but interesting and show a lot of promise.

It’s the first version that annoys me, the sites like EveryBlock and Placeblogger. While I’m sure their hearts are in the right place, they represent a philosophy that journalism isn’t something you pay for, but rather something a computer can just compile and some CEO can suck the profits from. (I’ll note that this is the philosophy behind a lot of automatically-generated spam sites, and they have about the same rate of success.)

Some of the most telling lines of the piece are near the end:

One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content. The information on many of these sites can still appear woefully incomplete. Crime reports on EveryBlock, for example, are short on details of what happened. Links to professionally written news articles on Outside.in are mixed with trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts.

That raises the question of what these hyperlocal sites will do if newspapers, a main source of credible information, go out of business. “They rely on pulling data from other sources, so they really can’t function if news organizations disappear,” said Steve Outing, who writes about online media for Editor & Publisher Online.

But many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content.

“In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock.

In other words, when they can’t live off the backs of dying newspapers, they’ll profit off the backs of bloggers (who themselves had profited off the backs of the dying newspapers).

This is why I dislike the term “hyperlocal”. It seems so parasitic in nature. Some computer-generated information, like crime maps, are great ideas. Tagging stories with computer-readable location information is also a good idea. And I’m not against content aggregation. But these should be combined with quality original content – the work of skilled journalists – to create a website that can truly be a local destination for news. These strategies should complement the work of journalists, not replace them.

Otherwise, why would I go to a blog that has links to stories in the local paper when I can just go to that paper’s website directly and leave out the middleman?

| Montreal, Pop quiz

Montreal Geography Trivia No. 32

For those wondering, I’ve updated last week’s question with its answer. This one should be a bit easier for you Google Maps cheaters:

Montreal Geography Trivia No. 32

What is this street?

UPDATE: This one was solved in minutes by Tim below. It is, indeed, Thimens Blvd. in St. Laurent, looking north from Poirier to where the street develops a huge median for no apparent reason. Other than high-tension power lines, this stretch of land spanning five long blocks serves no purpose.

The image is taken from this video, one of many that chronicles the view from a window of a plane landing at Trudeau Airport.

| Navel-gazing, Video

My 10 seconds of kinda-fame

Last month I got a visit from Concordia journalism student and real-media freelancer Dominique Jarry-Shore, who wanted to interview me for a TV piece on the future of the media.

The interview (which wasn’t very long) mostly ended up on the editing room floor, leaving a 10-second sound bite and some B-roll. (I don’t feel too bad, The Monitor’s Toula Foscolos got six seconds.) The entire 22-minute news broadcast is here, but you can skip to 7:30 to see just her report, or 8:52 if you just want to see me.

The piece is preceded by another interviewing CBC’s Geeta Nadkarni (and more importantly, her cats) about the corporation’s cuts. She blames the government for not supporting private broadcasting enough.

If you haven’t seen the TV shows produced by Concordia’s journalism department, they’re worth a look. You can see a food-themed show or one centred around a Mythbusters parody.

Not the slickest productions (certainly better than it was in my day), but the stories are real, and in many cases you won’t find them anywhere else.

| Media, Slow News Day, Video, Web design

Cyberpresse is hit-and-miss for video

We’re in the middle of a revolution in the newspaper industry, and even though I’m caught up in the middle of it, it’s kind of fun to watch everyone try to muddle their way through.

Photographers are learning how to shoot and edit video. Reporters are learning how to blog. Editors are learning how to link. And managers are desperately trying to come up with new ideas that will help save their industry and their jobs.

At Cyberpresse, they’re pumping out videos. Newspapers are jumping on the multimedia train, creating videos, audio slideshows, photo galleries, podcasts and other things they couldn’t do on paper.

Part of me doesn’t quite understand why newspapers are trying to compete with television and radio on their own turf. TV has been producing three-minute packages much longer than newspapers have, and it shows.

On the other hand, some videos I’ve seen demonstrate that newspapers are capable of reaching a level of depth you won’t get on television outside of PBS or the occasional NFB documentary.

Cyberpresse and its producing partner Top Multimédias offer some good examples for newspaper videos, but unfortunately a lot of examples of what not to do.

Bad: Rudy LeCours

Bad: Rudy Le Cours

In the latter category, you’ll find this sleeper from La Presse business columnist Rudy Le Cours. He’s standing in front of a bright window (which is one of the first things you learn in photography school not to do because it makes the subject dark) and for three minutes and 27 seconds talks into the camera about … I think it’s unemployment or something. I had to be resuscitated a few times while watching it and I don’t remember much. There are no graphics, no charts, no pictures, no numbers. Nothing to make it worth setting up the equipment to have this guy speak text into a camera.

This video from Mali Ilse Paquin in Italy is also a head-scratcher. The audio is clearly taken over the phone or a really bad voice recorder. And the video is just a series of pictures. A blog post or story with the pictures attached would have made much more sense.

Good: Marie-Christine Blais

Good: Marie-Christine Blais

On the other hand we have Marie-Christine Blais and her “Week-end chaud” entertainment preview. She too is talking to the camera, but it’s clear she and her camera operator are having fun (something I’ve long argued is sorely lacking in a lot of news media these days). Not only is she adorable, but she piques my interest enough that I’ll click on that play button when her face comes up. The videos also put up web addresses of bands that she mentions (although displaying show times would be useful).

Cyberpresse still has a long way to go. There’s no way to add comments to videos or embed videos on other pages. And there’s no related links on any of the videos like you can find in YouTube video descriptions. All you can do is go to this page and navigate your way through the various videos in a giant Flash application.

Here’s hoping Cyberpresse (and others) move quickly toward having more fun (if not effort) and way less talking heads standing in front of windows.

| Media, Opinion

Officer Anonymous

By law, I am now required to obscure this officer's face in this photo taken from last month's police brutality protest

By law, I am now required to obscure this officer's face in this photo taken from last month's police brutality protest

I have sympathy for Montreal police officers Jean-Loup Lapointe and Stéphanie Pilote. On August 10, 2008, they were patrolling in Montreal North when they spotted some young people engaging in a benign but illegal activity. Doing their duty, they proceeded to arrest one of them, who was breaking a bail condition. The situation quickly got out of control, and fearing for their safety (combined perhaps with inadequate training), they fired at their attackers, mortally wounding one of them, a kid named Fredy Villanueva.

Activists saw this as yet another evil police shooting by bloodthirsty cops. The Villanueva family quickly found that police were more interested in protecting their own than getting answers. And Lapointe and Pilote not only have the death of a young boy on their conscience, but live in fear that they might become the target for revenge because of a situation they never asked to become involved in.

The officers in question took what seemed to me to be a rather odd move in response to this fear: they petitioned the court to issue a publication ban on their names and images, arguing that there were credible threats on their lives and leaving their identities public would make them vulnerable to attack. Perhaps even more shocking, the court agreed and banned publication of their photos (but not their names). Newspapers, TV stations and websites had to scramble to remove the photos from any publicly-accessible archives and add warnings that the photos are not to be published until the ban is lifted.

Even I had to act. The photo above was taken during the police brutality protest last month. One of the protesters took a photo of Lapointe and made a wanted poster which was turned into a picket sign. I’ve deleted the photo from my Flickr collection and obscured his face in this post, because otherwise I could have been found guilty of contempt of court.

I knew about the publication ban because I read the newspaper (and I take a keen interest in media issues). But plenty of others aren’t aware of it yet (or perhaps just choose to ignore it) and so there are still plenty of copies of these photos online. A quick Google search will turn them up pretty quickly, and they’re no doubt part of many photo collections taken from the protest.

This just serves to underscore the absurdity of it all. The photos are already out there, and even the long arm of the law won’t be able to wipe out all traces of them. Those who would do harm to these officers could easily find copies.

More importantly, though, this isn’t about protecting the identity of an underage rape victim, or a police informant, or a child involved in a divorce custody hearing. These are police officers. They have to wear their names on their uniforms when they’re on duty for a reason. They have some expectation of privacy in their private lives, but in a professional capacity they don’t have that freedom.

Again, I have sympathy for the fear Lapointe and Pilote feel. But the threats against them are hardly conclusive, and even if you include the Mafia, premeditated attacks on off-duty police officers are extremely rare here.

I disagree with the decision to impose a publication ban in this case. Of course, in the end it doesn’t matter. The public can live without pictures of these officers for a few months, and anyone who really needs a copy probably already has one.

I can just imagine what will happen if that picket sign makes another appearance at a protest and officers try to arrest the person carrying it for breaking a publication ban.

| Montreal, Radio

Q92 to relaunch Tuesday

Q92

CFQR, aka Q92, is planning a super-secret “all new” relaunch on Tuesday morning at 8:45am.

The station isn’t letting out any information about what exactly will be “all new” – Brian DePoe, who was just hired as program director from Astral’s EZ-Rock station in Toronto, told listeners the station will be offering “more music and more variety” but also more “fun things.”

So expect a new logo, some new gimmicks, but very little in terms of radical change to the way commercial radio is done in Montreal. This won’t even be as big as the Mix 96/Virgin overhaul.

| Media

Marsden up for Press Freedom Award

Gazette reporter William Marsden, part of a dying breed of journalists who specialize in investigative reporting, has been nominated for a Press Freedom Award for an investigation into Pauline Marois’s Ile Bizard estate, which prompted the PQ leader to sue the paper for $2 million.

Of course, he and others nominated are underdogs compared to Daniel Leblanc, the guy who may end up going to jail for refusing to identify the source of his information on the sponsorship scandal.

UPDATE (May 7): And the winner, of course, is Daniel Leblanc.

| Media, Video

Journal Weekly Digest: An inconvenient truthing


Journal retro from 1994 thanks to ladyjaye27

Hi, remember us?

The STIJM, the union representing Journal de Montréal workers, was busy this week. First they crashed a lecture given by freelance columnist Joseph Facal, accusing the former PQ minister of being a scab in no uncertain terms (especially because he’s now writing two columns a week instead of one). Shockingly, Rue Frontenac was there, admitting that students were not amused, but mitigating that by saying some were on Facebook or browsing other uneducational websites.

Then on Wednesday, they were protesting outside the home of Quebecor CEO Pierre-Karl Péladeau, planting crosses to represent the careers of people PKP wants to fire. Once again, Rue Frontenac was there.

Meanwhile

And at don’t-forget-the-Saguenay, Quebecor says that coverage of the lockout at Le Réveil is biased against the company, with articles about the union encouraging boycotts of the paper. The company is even threatening to pull investments from the region if it feels it’s unwelcome.

| Opinion, TV

Low on cash? Just ask the gummit

The federal government, apparently spooked enough by Canwest and CTVglobemedia’s cries that the mediocalypse is here, is reportedly considering a $150-million fund that would help small-market television stations. This would be in addition to the Local Programming Improvement Fund which has the same goal.

As much as I’m not a fan of consumers paying for local TV stations they already get for free, even that would be preferable to a government bailout with who knows how many strings attached.

| Montreal, Public transit

AMT ends paper tickets on commuter trains

Opus card validator at Central Station

Opus card validator at Central Station

The AMT has issued notices to users of its five commuter train lines that it will be ending the use of paper tickets this month. Saint-Hilaire and Candiac riders get cut off on Friday April 17 and Blainville, Deux-Montagnes and Dorion users get cut off on the 24th.

This move is part of the metropolitan area’s move from paper and magnetic-strip based fare systems to the new Opus smart card, whose long phasing-in process is expected to be complete in June.

As of the dates above:

  • Monthly train-only passes (which are only available for Zones 4-7) will no longer be issued in paper form
  • Ticket machines will no longer issue single-fare paper tickets
  • Six-packs of train tickets in paper format will no longer be sold (even though the vending machines they use to sell them are barely five years old)
  • Paper ticket validation machines will be removed from service

That leaves commuters with three options:

What’s not clear here is what option there is for someone who just wants to take one ride on a train. Unless the Solo card is available in single-use format (which would be a huge waste), tourists who want to explore the city using its public transit system will be forced to purchase an Opus card or get more tickets than they need.

I’m hoping I’m mistaken.

| Montreal, Opinion

Let’s hear from youthy people

The City of Montreal is holding hearings about youth participation in the democratic process, and it wants to hear from young people. It’s not really clear what it wants to hear from young people exactly, but it has something to do with “their capacity to influence the development of their neighbourhood, their involvement in collective actions, and their interest in municipal affairs.”

Being a soulless pit of bureaucracy, it issued a public notice (in PDF format, because young people want to print out everything they read online) inviting people to open forums where all questions have to be pre-approved 30 minutes before the meeting. Those wanting more information can see this page, deep within the city’s vast website (it took me a while to find it even though I knew what I was looking for), which has a bunch of other PDF documents.

I’m just going to go ahead and predict that young people aren’t going to flock to this meeting in large numbers.

For those who do want to go, the first meeting is April 20, 7pm at Verdun city hall (4555 Verdun St., right outside Verdun metro).

| Media

Canwest gets another extension

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: my employer Canwest got another extension on its bank debt deadline. So the waiver on certain borrowing conditions now lasts until April 21. But Canwest still has to make a $30.4-million interest payment by April 15 (the end of a month-long grace period), or bondholders could push the company into bankruptcy.

The Globe piece talks about the war between banks and bondholders (and why the latter might be better off giving Canwest more time), and also speculates (with unnamed sources) about potential sales of newspapers, either individually or as a group. (Anyone want to spend a couple of billion on a mostly-nationwide newspaper chain?)

See you next week.

UPDATE (April 9): $1.4-billion quarterly loss, though most of that is in the form of a non-cash writedown. I hope they don’t take that out of my paycheck.