The big link for today is (like many of the ones below) from Rue Frontenac, the website put out by locked-out Journal workers. One of the pieces put up Thursday goes through editions of the Journal over the past week and points out some of the errors in the paper. (It didn’t take me long to find one myself – the Sunday paper’s inside index of columnists had the wrong page number for Benoit Aubin.)
Most of the errors are fairly small (misspelling hockey players’ names), some are a bit more severe (getting a hockey player’s team wrong), and some are just grammatical nitpicking. What is clear, though, is that they spent a lot of time going through the paper in order to catalog and report on these flaws. I guess they have a lot of free time on their hands now.
One of their criticisms, of the use of the phrase “setting a new record” (as if one could set a record without it being new) made me smile because it’s something that I’ve done a few times in headlines and has been marked in red ink by fellow editors more than once.
The rest
- Patrick Lagacé, who was impatient about Rue Frontenac launching, is now praising it.
- Rue Frontenac got a visit from Pizza Hut.
- Raymond Gravel becomes the latest freelance columnist to refuse to contribute to a locked-out Journal. Steve Proulx updates the running list (with odds on remaining undeclared columnists)
- In a move that surprised no one, the FTQ labour union federation kicked out a 24 Heures journalist from a press conference.
- The STIJM puts up a list of the contract disputes and their demands.
- Raymond Viger says the Journal, made up of mostly wire stories, has no soul.
Last week I got a consumer survey in the mail, inviting me to fill it out and win crazy prizes. I actually started filling it out until I noticed it was asking me information that went way beyond what I’m prepared to divulge.
I did notice it had a section on what newspaper you read. But something didn’t seem right.
Notice something missing?
There was an irritating mistake in the Journal a few days ago.
There was a feature story about some kid afflicted with an unusual disease.
The problem was that in the third paragraph, there was a reference to “la maladie” — although the story had not yet gotten around to telling us exactly what “maladie” this was.
(It’s true that there was a sidebar, which might have told the reader what illness it was, but it is, after all, the tendency of most readers to read the main story — the one with the big headline — before the sidebar.)