Category Archives: Blogosphere

| Blogosphere, Media

When should business trump journalism?

Perhaps it’s unfair to prey on the defenceless student media, but there’s an issue brewing behind the scenes that’s just so interesting on a larger scale.

The Link and The Concordian, the two student-run newspapers at Concordia University, are mortal enemies and they are fiercely competitive (after a few years of one paper being clearly superior to the other). They compete over design, contributors, editors, money and anything else they can think of.

I bring it up because it makes me wonder what rules should exist in general for journalists when it comes to their competition. Some media flat-out refuse to refer to direct competitors by name, unless it’s to report bad news about them. Many have rules restricting staff (and in some cases even freelancers) from contributing to competing media. And, of course, there’s the whole problem of when media outlets report on themselves.

Blogs, for the most part, take a completely different position. They welcome competition, link to their posts, hang out together and exchange tips. The idea there is that becoming part of a community helps everyone in it.

Who’s right? Is the cooperation among blogs simply because they’re such small enterprises and they’re trying to get noticed? When big blogs become large, mainstream, corporate-owned companies instead of some guys in a basement, will they too try to actively shut out their competition?

At what point do we have to stop being journalists and start being businesspeople?

(Note: This post was edited at the request of The Link, who wish to keep their dirty laundry in their own hamper. The main point still stands.) 

| Blogosphere, Media

DOA on permanent hiatus

Dominic Arpin is no more.

Despite promising in July, when he left journalism to create this new show Vlog, that his blog would continu despite the career change, he’s come to realize, only a month after the show’s launch, that he doesn’t have enough time to keep it updated and he’s calling it quits.

Put aside for a moment his broken promise, as well as how much these kinds of posts annoy me. I think it’s a mistake.

Arpin’s blog is one of the most popular in this city, perhaps second only to Patrick Lagacé, who mourns his friend’s passing. Other media outlets would kill for blogs with that kind of traffic (especially since most media have no idea what blogs are for or how to make money off of them).

Vlog, though promising, is entirely untested. It’s only been a month, and the show is still working to build an audience. (And their website is still unworkable, its developpers having ignored all of my suggestions to fix it.)

Here’s hoping that the Domster reconsiders, like so many other bloggers have before.

| Blogosphere, Slow News Day

Don’t blame anglos for mocking Marois’s English

Apparently Pauline Marois has finally become sick and tired of people mocking her inability to speak in English during press conferences.

As I scoured the Internet for examples of this mockage, I noticed something peculiar: the ones doing the mocking are francophones.

It looks like it started earlier this month with a small TQS piece which included some clips of embarrassing stumbles. From there, it was linked to from Patrick Lagacé’s high-traffic blog and from there to a few lower-traffic anti-PQ and anti-Pauline blogs. The next week, the clip made an appearance on Jeff Fillion’s radio show, which had tackled the issue previously a couple of times.

A couple of English blogs also picked up the story, but somehow I don’t think those are the ones she’s complaining about.

Frankly, I’ve always been surprised that even those separatist leaders who are fluent in Shakespeare’s language bother to use it in front of the media, considering their positions on French being the one and only language to use in this province (an idea she brought back into the spotlight this week with proposed changes to immigration laws). If they’re so stubborn about other languages being used on commercial signs, why are they trying so hard to cater to a public that will never vote for them using a language they want all but outlawed?

Or perhaps a more interesting question is why it’s the francophones who are mocking her inability to speak English. Or why she cares.

| Blogosphere, Montreal, My articles, TV

TWIM: Racial profiling, dream listener and dancing!

This week was a productive one here at Fagstein WorldMedia Ltd., so much so that I’m three days behind on reading my newspapers. Here’s what’s in Saturday’s paper from yours truly:

No racial profiling here

First up is an interview with Paul Chablo, the communications director at the Montreal police department. He’s the first anglophone to hold the job and has been trying to reach out to anglophone media. He’s also a really nice, charismatic fellow.

But we weren’t talking about him. Instead, the interview is about the police’s response to allegations of racial profiling. It was prompted by allegations from Kamrol Joseph, a 25-year-old black man who was questioned by police after stepping into the street to hail a cab in Cote-Saint-Luc last month. He refused to provide ID and was arrested so he could be ticketed. He was released after his identity was established, with a ticket for jaywalking. He went to the press.

Chablo says this wasn’t a case of racial profiling, and that Joseph only told the officers he was trying to hail a cab after he was arrested. Instead of targetting a black man in an affluent neighbourhood, they were responding to a man in the street sticking his hand out, thinking he was gesturing at police to get their attention.

Believe it or not, that’s the explanation. There were some other insightful comments he gave during the interview:

  • No Montreal police officer has ever been found guilty of racial profiling. There are about 20 complaints per year, but they’re all either shown to be unfounded or inconclusive.
  • A case that went in front of the ethics committee involving Gemma Raeburn, a woman who got a visit from police after neighbours mistook two black men helping her clean her garage for burglars, also wasn’t racial profiling, even though the officers who responded were sanctioned. The police ethics committee ruled against the officers and imposed short suspensions for the comments made to Raeburn, which included “bullets don’t see colour” and “why don’t you go back to your country?” Though the comments were racist, the committee said, the initial reason for the intervention was apparently considered justified from the police’s perspective.
  • In addition to lots of training of new recruits, the police are outreaching to the community, employing the services of Community Contact editor Egbert Gaye as a mediator. (Despite an email asking me to verify, some well-meaning copy editor changed his email address to a grammatically correct but factually incorrect spelling. It’s comtact@bellnet.ca)
  • In all cases where a complaint is brought against officers, the department likes to have sit-down meetings with the citizens and officers involved to solve the matter informally. And such meetings often work, giving people a chance to vent and clear up misunderstandings. A lot of these complaints, Chablo says, come from people who think they’ve been singled out for minor offenses, only to later learn that dozens of other people were ticketed for the same offense on the same day.

UPDATE (Oct. 23): Gemma Raeburn has a response opinion in Saturday’s paper, which takes issue with the “criminal profiling” vs. “racial profiling” comments Chablo made about her case. Some of her outrage I feel might have been my fault, as she understood from my article that Chablo supported the officers in this case. To be clear, he didn’t condone the racist remarks (and freely labelled them as such). His point was simply that this wasn’t “racial profiling” because the police were acting based on a phone call.

I dreamt I read this weird blog

This week’s blog is dream listener, a blog about the hand-painted cardboard signs being posted around the city by its author. It’s a project that started last November and runs for a year, with the author (who wants to remain anonymous due to her quasi-legal activities) writing about her dreams. An audiobook of the project is being released next Friday, with all proceeds going to the St. James Drop-in Centre.

So You Think You Can Pun?

Finally, an explainer about U.S. TV series (mostly reality shows) having their formats licensed to Canadian companies who create Canadian versions and sell them to the CRTC as Canadian content. It was based, of course, on this blog post where I wonder what this is doing to Canadian television. That, in turn, was based on news that CTV has secured the rights to make So You Think You Can Dance Canada. Apparently the Idol franchise is worth more than $2 billion.

| Blogosphere, In the news, Montreal, My articles

TWIM: Spacing Montreal and Princess Di

This week’s blog is Spacing Montreal, which quietly started this summer and formally launched last month. Since then it has quickly become one of my favourite blogs about the city (even earning a coveted spot on my Montreal blogroll). It has posts in both languages, good stories paired with good photos, and it sticks to its theme. If you haven’t already, you should definitely check it out.

Also this week from me in the paper (but not online) is an explainer on the Princess Di inquiry going on in Britain. You can read all about the circumstances of her death (including two investigations from two different countries both concluding there was no supersecret government conspiracy) in this Wikipedia article. Say what you want about Europe’s better ideas on governing, but at least our inquiries are about government conspiracies that actually happened.

| Blogosphere, Business, On the Net, Technology

Is Techmeme a splog?

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments of a post at the Instigator Blog (or as I like to call it, Yoskoblog) about a new website called Social Rank which is launching dozens and eventually hundreds of niche blog aggregator websites.

It struck a nerve for me because I’m noticing a lot of automatically-generated “blogs” pinging my posts and upping my Technorati rating. These blogs work by searching the blogosphere for keywords, scraping a quote, adding a link and sending a pingback. The posts are all of the same structure:

[Name (sometimes a random name or literal “unknown”)] wrote an interesting post today about [Title of blog post]. Here’s a quick excerpt: [excerpt from post].

I’m not sure if the business model is to get traffic through pingbacks or if they’re part of some larger splog scheme, but needless to say the pages are filled with Google ads.

I commented that people are going to be turned off by Social Rank’s websites if only because of their similarity to the autoblogs. People want aggregated content, but evaluated in some way by real people (think Fark or Digg).

A couple of bloggers also got pretty pissed because Social Rank was sending them pingbacks, which the website quickly stopped and apologized for.

The other concern is that if these websites become popular, spammers will begin to figure out ways to game the system. I imagine it’ll probably happen accidentally, a side-effect of traditional splogging methods. But once they figure it out, expect it to be exploited.

Ben made an interesting point to my main argument: Is Techmeme a splog? It’s automatically generated, with excerpts from other blogs. It has ads and is trying to make money. But it feels different somehow. It’s like Google News for blogs.

Is there a difference? Is Techmeme bad? Is Social Rank good? What is the real difference between a junk splog and a good automatic aggregation website?

| Blogosphere, Media

Journalist blogs aren’t pointless

Alexandre points out this blog post saying that journalist blogs are pointless, mainly because they can’t offer anything new besides what they write in the paper, and they can’t be free to write whatever they want.

Allow me to disagree. Blogs come in all sorts of different types, but most can be broken down into two broad categories:

  • Personal blogs are focused on the author. They include LiveJournal pages, personal diaries, portfolios or this-is-what-I-found-online aggregators.
  • Subject-based blogs are focused on the subject. Some are group blogs, and most are impersonal.

Most journalist blogs (and, for that matter, this one) fall in between. Like newspaper columnists, they relate personal experiences to professional issues.

But not all journalist blogs are the same. Some have behind-the-stories stories, some are more personal, and some aggregate anything of interest to a particular niche. It’s the latter type that tends to be the most successful, creating a community for people interested in a particular subject. Blogs like Habs Inside/Out make use of journalists’ access to get the kinds of stories no non-journalist blog can provide.

In the end, there’s nothing inherent about blogs by journalists that make them more or less useful than the rest. In either case, interesting, frequently-updated blogs of high-quality will win out.

| Blogosphere, Montreal

YAGB: Fashion shopping blog

Basem Boshra, The Gazette’s new Arts & Life online manager, is very busy these days. He was hired as a copy editor in March after a four-year absence. Now he’s launching blogs like there’s no tomorrow (and posting almost 100 posts to them already) like Inside the Box (TV), Words and Music (music) and Year One (university freshman diary).

The latest is The Constant Shopper with fashion editor Eva Friede. (The fashion section, for the unfamiliar, is those couple of ad-filled pages on Tuesdays that feature photos of must-have garments and accessories on white backgrounds.)

The blog’s inaugural post (actually more like three posts) chronicles, among other things, her search for the perfect watch. She rejects a $5,300 diamond-studded timepiece because it’s “too big”.

This is where Eva and I differ. My watch was bought for $10 at a street sale, complete with fabric/velcro strap. And it has a stopwatch. And I couldn’t be happier (well, except for the fact that I have to press a button to check the date).

(Don’t get the wrong impression, she also shops at Winners. But don’t expect MTL Street here).

| Blogosphere, My articles

Creative Generalist: I still don’t quite get it

This week’s blog is Creative Generalist, which is about … uhh … stuff. … Ideas and stuff. Yeah. It’s kinda philosophical, but the general idea is that you need “generalists” to balance the “specialists” and see the big picture. I think. Steve Hardy, the author who also works for Andy Nulman‘s Airborne Entertainment (I think it’s a requirement that you be hyper-philosophical about marketing to work there) thinks I did a good job, so I guess I did.