Just learned that MédiaMatinQuébec, the free paper being run by locked-out workers at the Journal de Québec, has launched its website at MediaMatinQuebec.com.
And it’s already more impressive than any other Quebec media website. It’s fast, lean and easy-to-navigate.
You know, the more this conflict goes on, the more I think these workers should forget about the Journal and turn MédiaMatin into a business. Sell some more ads, rent a small office building and this could really be something.
ABC premiered its new show iCaught tonight (hope iCaught Data Management Services doesn’t sue). It’s their YouTube clip show, in a sea of upcoming YouTube clip shows that seek to cheaply license popular clips owned by people who have no idea of their actual worth. The show’s reason for watching it instead of, say, just checking out YouTube’s most popular videos directly? They give “the story behind the videos,” which apparently means having a couple of talking heads say how cool it is and the creators say how they didn’t expect it to become this popular.
And isn’t that worth sitting through all those commercials?
Here’s a roundup of the videos they showed for their premiere:
In case it’s not clear enough how little money they put into this show, it’s hosted by a nobody standing in front of a white screen. It has no sets, and its stories are setup like back-to-back two-minute TV news reports, which just serves to remind us that the networks aren’t spending their budgets reporting on, you know, news.
To recap:
In other words, it’s a complete and utter joke. Any guesses on how long it’ll keep going?
Dammit! The Serbian’s mission wasn’t supposed to be successful. It didn’t even last 24 hours!
Still, I blame Chloe. How could she leave him out there all alone like that?
(Am I watching too much 24?)
Montreal web-media darling Casey McKinnon has an opinion in the Guardian (yeah, that Guardian) about mainstream media trying to screw over independent web producers. With all sorts of TV shows popping up that are basically just collections of popular YouTube videos, it’s rather a propos.
Of course, it’s not just web video producers that are being screwed over. Newspapers are screwing freelancers and bloggers, new media is screwing over other new media, and all media are hopping on this “crowdsourcing” bandwagon, trying to save money by getting other people to work for them for free. Then they slap their own copyright notice on it as a crystal clear “fuck you” to the community that helps build them.
That won’t change until everyone starts seriously demanding more than just seeing their creation on television.
Drew Curtis of FARK.com, in his book about the news media, outlines some of the largest clichés about stories that get covered by the media. One of those is “missing white chick.” There are thousands of people missing in this world, and most of them are forgotten. If you’re, say, an aboriginal prostitute in B.C., it’ll take dozens of disappearances before anyone in the media takes notice.
But if you’re a cute, white pre-teen from a middle-class family, you’ll get all the coverage you could dream of.
That’s been the case for nine-year-old Cédrika Provencher of Trois-Rivières. She disappeared last week under suspicious circumstances, and the police and her family are using the media to try to get some leads. The media, of course, has eaten it all up. Her name is popping up everywhere, her story has appeared in over a hundred news outlets, and everyone in this province knows who she is.
The inevitable conclusion to this kind of exposure has already reared its ugly head. Police tip lines are being flooded with bogus tips. One woman called from Abitibi to say that she saw a black-and-white dog (the girl was last seen looking for a black-and-white dog, though she doesn’t have any pets). The fact that the police needed to clarify that “we’re searching for the girl, not the dog” says a lot.
I don’t mean to sound like a heartless asshole or anything, but I find it very unlikely that any meaningful tips will come from the public in Toronto, Winnipeg or Edmonton.
And if the media really does care so much about finding missing people, why aren’t they talking about Marie-Pier Cardinal?
Never heard of her? I don’t blame you. She’s a 16-year-old girl who went missing on July 11 in Montreal. There have been no news stories about her, no national campaign to find her, and no distraught grandmothers looking for her.
Why? Is it because she’s too old? Did she not disappear from the right family? Is she not cute enough? Are those looking for her not sending out enough press releases?
Why is it that she and the dozens of other people and kids still missing aren’t having stories written about them?
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.
Why is CTV’s Annie DeMelt reporting live from a downtown Montreal street about a collision that happened last night on Highway 20 near Quebec City?
I know news stations, and CTV Montreal in particular, have this thing about needing reporters to report LIVE, even if it’s just giving the first sentence of their edited news package from the newsroom. It’s a pointless gimmick that just wastes everyone’s time.
But even then, don’t use it for everything. I know CTV’s viewers want to see as much of Annie DeMelt as possible, but it’s just distracting.
It’s a headline that’s used a lot. I’m guilty too. When someone uses it in a quote, it’s very powerful.
But it’s also very common. Everyone seems to think they’re going to die when in an extremely dangerous situation. A terrorist attack. A plane crash. A serious illness lost in the jungle. An assault. Jail in a foreign country. So many news stories use the exact quote as a headline.
I just saw it again on CNN in reference to the Minnesota bridge collapse. Fortunately I can’t find any online news stories that use it as a headline.
I think the quote deserves a retirement. Find something more original to quote.
The CRTC has ordered Alliance Atlantis-owned History Television to stop running CSI: New York on its cable channel because, well, CSI: New York has nothing to do with history.
The company’s argument — and I’ll try not to laugh as I write this — is that CSI: New York deals with a “post-9/11 environment” and since 9/11 is history, this makes sense somehow.
The CRTC saw right through that, noting that just because an episode or two might have had something to do with 9/11 doesn’t make this a history program. They’ve given the network until Jan. 1 to pull the show.
This isn’t the first time a stretch of the rules has irked the CRTC. Ten years ago, CBC Newsworld began airing episodes of sketch-comedy shows This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Royal Canadian Air Farce, arguing that because the shows dealt with topical, newsworthy topics, they fall within Newsworld’s license. The CRTC disagreed, ordering Newsworld to pull the shows. The CBC then asked nicely for the CRTC to amend Newsworld’s license “slightly” to allow for them, but were rejected.
If Newsworld can’t air fake news, History can’t air cheap CSI reruns. Instead, we’ll just have to settle for watching them on the 17 other cable channels that air them ten times a day.
Today’s Media States the Boneheadedly Obvious Award goes to CBC news, for pointing out that Laval had a bridge collapse, and the Minnesota one makes people from Laval sad.
The Star has an opinion this week on the nature of the blogosphere and its impact on traditional journalism. The conclusion is that the relationship is symbiotic, and they both help each other.
I agree with many of the article’s points (especially that blogging is more like books — anyone can do it and the quality varies widely), but it’s still a bit simplistic. People are separated into two groups: technophiles, who blog, and technophobes, who report for newspapers. There’s an implicit dismissal of those who think they’re in both categories or neither.
The other problem (and this applies to just about anyone who writes in a big-picture way about blogs) is that blogs aren’t clearly defined. Yeah, this is a blog. Is Boing-Boing a blog? Daily Kos? They say they are, so I guess so. What about Fark? Drew Curtis says no. If a newspaper uses WordPress as its content-management system, does that turn it into a blog? What’s the difference? Are web comics blogs? What about photo blogs? Or Web forums?
There’s this implication out there that blogs have changed the nature of journalism and the Internet in a way Web 1.0 didn’t or couldn’t. I disagree. There was plenty of original journalism and criticism of media before Blogspot and WordPress. There’s just more of it now.
High-quality blogs are successful because they’re highly-specialized and they’re written by people who know what they’re talking about. Even newspapers with large staff don’t have enough resources to hire a full-time astronomy reporter or a full-time public transit reporter. So people with interests in these things turn to blogs, which might be written by experts in their spare time or by professionals who get enough traffic to live on.
“Blog” isn’t a magic word. It’s just a form of content delivery. The Internet — which allows people to find exactly what they want fast — is still the problem that’s killing mainstream media. Some are learning how to deal with it, by launching their own blogs about specialized topics. Others still have cluttered homepages and make it impossible to quickly find content they’ve spent a lot of money to buy or produce.
They’ll learn eventually. They must in order to survive.
With news that West Islander Autumn Kelly is going to marry a member of the British Royal Family, the tabloids are all trying to get information about her roots here. Even local blogger Kristian Gravenor is on the case, offering money for photos (and handing out flyers all over Pointe-Claire — an act I tried to explain to him might get him on some enemies lists).
Casey McKinnon, who went to school with Kelly at St. Thomas High, isn’t game. She’s steadfastly refusing to cooperate with the many requests she’s gotten for information.
If your morals aren’t so fortitudon… fortiti… fortati… strong, and you went to St. John Fisher in the 80s, St. Thomas in the early 90s and McGill before 2002, you might be able to score some nice moolah invading some girl’s privacy.
Stop me if you’ve seen this one before:
Everyone needs to just take a deep breath. B’nai Brith criticized Liberal candidate Jocelyn Coulon. Josée Legault came to his defence. It should have ended there.
I was exposed to this same routine many times at Concordia when I ran the student paper there (naturally, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was usually the subject there too). I though that I wouldn’t see that kind of childish back-and-forth when I stepped out into the real world.
I guess I was wrong.
Canoe is on a big hiring spree, putting up two dozen jobs in 24 hours. Everything from customer service agent to managers for entire web properties. If you’re bilingual and have marketing and management experience, this might be your lucky day.
Maybe you can convince them to fix their messy websites.
Montreal is in the news again for being a pedophilia haven. First we had a website hosted here, now another site based on it is promoting an upcoming children’s festival at Maisonneuve Park.
The website, which nobody wants to link to (what are they afraid of exactly? Their readers suddenly turning into pedophiles? Or those who are already pedophiles getting access to like-minded websites?), and I won’t either just to avoid sending traffic their way (if you want to find it, you can do like I did and Google-search the direct quote from it used in the article), defends its stance saying that pedophilia is a “sexual orientation” and not a crime. It’s OK if you’re just looking at girls and fantasizing, as long as you don’t touch them, I guess.
The website has guides that sound a bit like what gay support websites might have looked like 50 years ago if the Internet existed back then. There’s talk about the law, about living with a pedophile, about how pedophilia doesn’t necessarily lead to child molestation, and how to “come out” as a pedophile to your family. Some parts suggest the website is trying to ride the line between legal and illegal, while others make it seem like pedophilia is entirely platonic – and can be satisfied by donating money to UNICEF.
According to the SQ (or “Sret du Qubec” according to the accent-phobic Gazette), the websites aren’t illegal but are pretty close to the line.
Let’s hope that line is bulletproof.