Now its writers write articles about how they went to the movies. Apparently Canada’s National Newspaper thinks getting to the point is overrated. Or, for that matter, making one.
But don’t take my word for it. Other people dislike Leah McLaren even more.
For those of you who wonder whether the new “Globe Life” section of the Globe and Mail is having a detrimental effect on the quality of its journalism, I give you this:
So people are using the informal greeting “hey” a lot.
Thank you Globe. I didn’t know that.
I’d love to write more about what’s going on in the world today, but there’s really nothing out there, as you can tell from a Page One story about how women like to buy shoes.
Remember when Le Devoir was banninated from a Police concert because they wouldn’t play ball with promoters? (And other Montreal media stayed mostly silent on the subject?)
Well, in the continuing saga of mainstream publications whining about the crappy treatment they receive when trying to treat concerts as news, some members of the media are saying they weren’t given enough time to shoot photos during the Beyoncé concert this week.
Maybe newspapers should consider not going to big-time Bell Centre concerts altogether. I, for one, don’t care what the song order and costume choices were for some big-time musician’s sold-out show that I couldn’t see if I wanted to.
At least one Pincourt resident is complaining that a ban on outdoor watering, put in place because of demand might exceed supply during the hot summer months, is literally going to turn her lawn into a desert.
Cry me a bloody river.
There are plenty of things people can do to help the environment. Drive less, use less electricity, recycle more. Wasting less potable water is on this list. It costs energy to purify water for drinking, and there’s not much fresh water left in this world.
On the other hand, we need to water our lawns. I mean, it’s not like they water themselves, right? It’s not like some mystical, magical force somehow causes water to spontaneously fall from the sky in large quantities every few days.
Oh wait, THERE IS!
It’s called rain. And if it’s not enough to keep your lawn green and healthy, then there’s something wrong with your lawn, and it doesn’t belong in this environment. Do something green for a change and don’t waste so much energy trying to override nature.
The Gazette has a story that both points out how the media has been bothering everyone who could possibly have been connected to Autumn Kelly’s childhood in Pointe-Claire and proceeds to bother everyone who could possibly have been connected to Autumn Kelly’s childhood in Pointe-Claire.
Bravo.
Not news: Municipal party encourages supporters to write letters to newspapers, call in to talk radio and campaign for them.
News: Municipal party encourages supporters to write letters to newspapers, call in talk radio and write blog posts to campaign for them.
Yes folks, mayor Gérald Tremblay and his ilk are using the power of their crappy website to harness the power of ordinary Montrealers with absolutely nothing to do. They’re encouraging people to blog about them to tell everyone how rad they are. Like that Robert-Bourassa Avenue idea. How great was that?
I might have more respect for the move if the website wasn’t so badly designed. Of the major issues I outlined two and a half months ago when the website launched, they’ve only fixed about half of them. The easier half. And the fact that the website is ungooglable is a funny afterthought by comparison.
Since nobody’s taken the bait yet, let me be the first blogger to talk about Mayor Tremblay and his brilliant administration that’s in touch with the people. And add a </sarcasm> tag after it.
The Gazette has an editorial today about the Beaver survey and it notes that — gasp — online polls shouldn’t be taken too seriously:
Talk-shows hosts, bloggers, columnists, pundits and letter-writers have all had fun with that online poll, organized by the august historical magazine The Beaver, in which respondents named Pierre Trudeau “the worst Canadian.”
…
It’s all good fun, we suppose, but it should also be a reminder online polls of this sort are not worth the paper they aren’t printed on.
I looked up the story, and most of the bloggers I’ve found saw right through the lame, transparent attempt to get free publicity. The paragraph leaves out the paper itself in those it names as having “had fun”. After all, it put the non-story on its front page Tuesday morning, one day after the Beaver issued a press release about it. (Little tip folks: Get something on Canada Newswire that’s not business-related and some paper somewhere will rewrite it into a story to fill space. Don’t bother trying to support your outrageous claims with facts, nobody cares about those.)
The editorial makes a couple of points: that online reader surveys shouldn’t be taken at face value (duh), and that “participatory journalism” has its problems:
Reader-participation journalism, a clear trend in print as well as online, has many virtues and can be a valuable tool.
But without the constraints of rigorous sample-selection techniques and careful choice of questions, the findings of some such processes are not only laughable, as with the Trudeau choice, but they can also be potentially dangerously misleading.
Just in case it wasn’t clear yet that mainstream media has no clue what participatory journalism is, here we go.
At the risk of repeating myself, the following things are NOT participatory journalism:
Many of these things are good ideas, but they’re not participatory journalism.
Sorry, mainstream media, but you got suckered in by a press release about an outrageous unscientific survey. Don’t blame it on bloggers and new forms of journalism that are entirely irrelevant here.
So let me get this straight: La Presse needs five journalists to figure out that lots of pedestrians jaywalk at Peel and St. Catherine. Aside from the unscientificness of cherrypicking one of the most jaywalked intersections in Montreal, it just seems like a pretty big waste of time.
940 News’s Ken Connors talked this morning about the good ol’ days, when children ate lead-encrusted dirt, played with fire, sniffed spraycan propellant and shot each other with BB guns. And somehow they’re still around to whine about all the safety measures society has put in place for children.
Well, there’s a few things wrong with that argument. First of all, we can’t talk to all the people that died from those things since they’re, well, dead. Just because all the people we find now survived those days doesn’t mean the survival rate was 100%.
Secondly, life expectancy at birth has increased by about a decade over the past 50 years. Part of that is due to new medicine and treatments, but increased safety can’t be discounted as a part of it as well.
Finally, if you want to go back to the good ol’ days with none of society’s current overprotections, you’re welcome to emigrate to a developing country and eat their lead-encrusted dirt.
That said, some points are worth considering. It’s becoming common knowledge that the increase in allergies today is due in part to the sterile lifestyle of some children who aren’t exposed to small amounts of toxins at an early age. And the drop in outdoor play activities (has this really occurred among children?) is making us fatter and lazier.
I think we can find some middle ground between sterility and Darwinism.
So Mike Boone had his wireless problems solved. (I guess it wasn’t his laptop after all) As you might expect, he got the gold-plated service after news of his problems with Sympatico hit the news stands. A personal call from the vice-president of customer relations (after numerous calls to regular tech support got him nowhere), no-questions-asked delivery of a new modem, and when that didn’t work, same-day on-site tech support.
When was the last time you called Bell and the guy said “Hold on, I’ll be right over”?
Naturally, the guy was clueless about Macs (been there). But the problem was solved.
To Boone’s credit, of course, he freely admits the obvious: that he got special treatment because he’s a newspaper columnist. And he’s going to use the regular-people method next time, to show he’s still Mikey from the Block and hasn’t sold out to The Man.
Why is “someone expresses opinion about recent events on Facebook” always considered news? Yeah, there are Facebook groups (actually I found only one that has more than a few members) denouncing the rumoured Immigration Canada decision to discourage the traditional Sikh family names Singh and Kaur for new immigrants (a decision which the government clarified later wasn’t actually the case). But there are more members in the group demanding that the Spice Girls do a show in Montreal.
When was the last time a paper petition with 500 signatures got this much attention?
Let’s give a round of applause to Montrealer Allan Wills. He’s managed to exploit two vulnerabilities of the media: their desperation for stories in the summer and their cluelessness about the Internet, to grab his 15 minutes by the gonads. A long package on yesterday’s CTV News, and a Page A3 article in this morning’s Gazette.
His story, basically, is that he put up a website (actually a blog) asking for a wife, and this not-unattractive British girl answered him. Now they’re dating.
Yeah, stop the presses.
Now, if I were a cynic, I might point out that they’re not married, and the focus of the blog has changed from finding a wife to finding an “ultimate date”, and that finding dates online is nothing new (in fact, there’s an entire bloody industry for it), and that quitting your job to go searching for dates is kind of a boneheaded thing to do.
But instead, I will applaud Mr. Wills’s media savvy, wringing his 15 minutes from an uninteresting story about a waste of his time.
(I will also applaud him for his babe of a girlfriend. And with an accent to boot!)
UPDATE July 31: A spot on Canada AM, just in case there were doubts about the non-newsiness. And check out the Daily Mail article on him for more, including pictures of his other hot dates (a redhead!).
The Gazette released the results of their West Island icon poll today. The story attached to the results online mentions concerns some people had about the northern half being completely left out, and reporter Max Harrold, to his credit, takes full responsibility. (Of course, had nominations been open to the public this might have been avoided, and the story that made the paper doesn’t talk about this.)
Old Pointe Claire (or the Pointe Claire Village) won with about 1/4 of the vote, narrowly beating Hudson Village (which, as I and Kate McDonnell pointed out, isn’t even on the West Island).
Le Devoir is whining this morning about not being given free tickets to see The Police.
The article, which makes both Le Devoir and Gillett Entertainment Group look kind of petty, goes over Gillett’s excuses for denying them passes:
Excuse #1: They don’t have enough tickets to give away to “all the media”. Le Devoir sees right through this bull, noting that their photographer (also refused access) doesn’t take up a seat, and the rest of the media didn’t seem to have any problems getting as many tickets as they needed.
Excuse #2: Le Devoir doesn’t have a high enough circulation to make it worthwhile. Also BS. The paper’s circulation is in the six digits and rising, which clearly makes it a powerhouse worthy of the same treatment as the other newspapers and other media.
Excuse #3: Le Devoir doesn’t list when tickets for concerts go on sale. Or, to quote Gillett’s flak: “The other papers are easier to do business with.” This sounds more plausible. Le Devoir is a small paper (small as in size, not circulation or importance), and probably doesn’t have the space nor the lack of shame to give concert promoters free ad space.
Thankfully, Le Devoir isn’t taking this blackmail lying down. If staying independent means they can’t go to the Police concert, they’re not going to the Police concert.
And what do they lose, anyway? I don’t care about what Le Devoir thinks about a concert the day after, and anyone who likes The Police that much was probably at the concert and doesn’t need to read about it the next day.
Maybe, instead of sending journalists to see musicians everyone’s already familiar with, they can find some new people to talk about. It’s not like our city is lacking in talent.
UPDATE: Not a peep from the media concerning Le Devoir’s shunning. So much for media solidarity. The Gazette, the Journal and La Presse all had plenty of coverage of the concert (kinda pointless since nobody who doesn’t already have tickets can see it now), and none made mention of their colleague’s foible (OK, it got one mention — see Kate’s comment below). I guess this is what the mainstream media has come to. Since, when referring to each other’s scoops, they use terms like “a Montreal newspaper” (what are we, idiots?), I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
UPDATE 2: “Vive le Devoir libre!”