Category Archives: Navel-gazing

| Navel-gazing, Radio

Geeking out with Macadam tribus

Samurai Swords game at Geek Montreal's GeekOut

Samurai Swords game at Geek Montreal's GeekOut

Last month, as a small group of local geeks gathered at Burritoville for Geek Montreal’s kinda-monthly GeekOut, we were joined by a journalist from Radio-Canada, Stéphane Leclair, who wanted to do a story about the group for Radio-Canada’s Macadam tribus. The story was broadcast the next week and is available online here.

It includes a few short quotes from yours truly. (My interview was awful and I didn’t have anything interesting to say, so there’s a lot more from other attendees. Leclair also used a lot of editing to make us seem more interesting than we really were.)

For those interested, Al Kratina also talked a bit about Geek Montreal for The Gazette last year.

Sadly, Macadam tribus was one of the victims of CBC/RadCan’s 800 job cuts, and will disappear from the airwaves on June 20. That decision can be read between the lines of a piece on the disappearance of live overnight programming on radio, which aired this week.

| Media, Navel-gazing

Andrew Phillips to leave The Gazette

Gazette editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips in a 2005 photo by Richard Arless.

Gazette editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips in a 2005 photo by Richard Arless.

Today was a strange one at the office, and not only because I was sitting at a desk in the Business section. On one hand, some employees were celebrating their induction into the Quarter Century Club (25 years of service). On the other, it was the last day of a colleague on the copy desk who is now enjoying his retirement.

But while we saw those two things coming, we didn’t anticipate an email saying that the paper would be losing its editor-in-chief.

Andrew Phillips, who was named to the top editorial position in October 2004, began his career here 35 years ago as a summer intern before moving on to Macleans magazine and the Victoria Times-Colonist.

The soft-spoken Phillips wouldn’t comment on why he’s leaving or what’s next in store for him, beyond saying that “it’s time to move on.”

It would be irresponsible of me to hypothesize, therefore I’m going to guess his departure is part of a massive government conspiracy and Phillips is sacrificing his career as part of a convoluted plan to help Jack Bauer stop a bionuclear attack on Canadian soil.

But seriously, as a journalist himself, Phillips always fought for the newsroom, pushing for more investigative journalism and finding ways to protect it from the inevitable budget cuts. He may not have always succeeded, but he always tried. For that, the newsroom will surely miss him.

Publisher Alan Allnutt, who was Phillips’s boss at the Times-Colonist and brought him along to the Gazette, had nothing but praise for his colleague today:

I have spent much of the last eight years working in close partnership with Andrew at two newspapers and I have nothing but great admiration for his intelligence, his principles and his journalistic talent.

In an email to staff today (republished here with his permission) Phillips himself wrote:

I’ve been associated with this paper all my adult life; it was 35 years ago that I first stepped foot into the ancient newsroom at 1000 St. Antoine as a summer student. It’s been a tremendous privilege to occupy the editor’s chair for the past few years, and to see how this newsroom has risen to the challenge of dealing with particularly tumultuous times in our industry. We’ve accomplished a lot over the past 4 1/2 years – remaking the paper and making the move to online. I’m proud to have worked with all of you, and grateful for the opportunity to get to know you on a personal level.

Phillips’s last day is May 8. Managing Editor Raymond Brassard takes over in the interim.

UPDATE: CBC has a brief about Phillips. Kirk Lapointe also writes about his departure.

| Media, Navel-gazing

Meet the new guy

There was a major reorganization of office space at work, so I was already a bit disoriented, but I could have sworn I saw a reporter I’d never seen before. Who was this guy? Was he hiding at a corner desk and I just never noticed him for a year and a half? Had he just come back from leave of some sort? Had he just been hired?

I learned later that none of these things are true. He’s an intern, spending a few weeks at the paper writing freelance stories.

His name is Alex Leduc. He’s on Twitter and everything.

His first story, about non-Habs fans in Montreal, came out on Wednesday.

Now he’s working on chasing the Google Street View car. Which leads to the same question you ask of every dog who chases a car: what do you do when you catch it?

UPDATE (May 10): Here’s another story about an anti-capitalist protest. He had a third about hard-core Impact fans, but it’s unfortunately not online.

| Navel-gazing, Web design

My first real website

The Link's website in summer 2002

The Link's website in summer 2002

For some reason that completely eludes me now, I took a trip through the Wayback Machine this week to visit my first big website. It was for The Link, the better of Concordia University’s two student newspapers (at least while I worked there). And sadly, it’s a website that no longer exists except in the form of a few snapshots in the Internet Archive.

Taking us back to 2001

Having been appointed to the position of webmaster for a newspaper that didn’t have a website, it became pretty clear what my first job would be. During the summer of 2001 I embarked on a project to create a server and install a content management system on it that would be suitable for newspaper articles.

The first part wasn’t too complicated: a generic desktop server with Slackware Linux installed on it, a few tweaks, and the server was up.

The CMS was a different story. This was two years before WordPress. Months before the first MovableType. After minutes of searching, I figured my best option would be to use Slashcode, the Perl-based engine behind the popular Slashdot. (Hey, remember Slashdot? Apparently it’s still there.)

In hindsight, it was a horrible mistake. At the time (and I suspect this is still the case) it was an awful, inelegant piece of hacked-together software, built from scratch to support Slashdot and awkwardly patched with new features. That meant changing things very difficult.

Among the annoyances that only grew over time:

  • Accounts had to be created for each author. Every time a new person contributed or even just wrote a letter to the editor, an account had to be created. A few years in, the “author” drop-down menu had over a hundred names in it.
  • No concept of “issues” to tie together articles of a certain date. Instead of showing all the articles for a particular issue, it would be programmed to show the latest X number of articles.
  • An impossible-to-understand caching system that required all sorts of manual resets in order to do something simple like change the background colour on the main page. This is combined with a background daemon that had the habit of turning itself off.
  • A database that tended to get corrupted causing everything to go bad.
  • Hard-coded or semi-hard-coded constants and variables, such as a “security level” that was in the form of an integer instead of a list of capabilities.
  • No built-in way of handling photos or their captions.

But for its faults, the system also had many useful features, some of which were ahead of their time:

  • Threaded comments, comment rating and group moderation (being Concordia at a time of relative political chaos, these got a lot of use)
  • Integrated RSS, including the ability to pull RSS headlines from other sites
  • Form keys to prevent spamming and double comments
  • “Boxes” (what WordPress calls “widgets) that provide for various functions and bonus content in the sidebar

For about five years, the website ran on Slash, frustrating webmaster after webmaster, until a database crash in the summer of 2006 forced them to switch to a new system. By then, thankfully, technology had progressed to the point where more elegant solutions were available.

Still, it’s a shame the archives have disappeared.

You can see what the website looked like a few months after launch in 2001, a few months later after a redesign, and in 2004 before I ended my tenure as an editor.

| Media, Navel-gazing

Note to self: write novel, become awesome

The Financial Times has an interview with Miguel Syjuco, one of the many young people who joined The Gazette for a summer and then left for greener pastures (becoming an award-winning novelist). There he talks about the various cities he’s lived in and what makes them cool. (via mtlweblog)

The Gazette also interviewed Syjuco this week, about the book that earned him a Man Asian Literary Prize award. The National Post interviewed Syjuco in November, back when he won the award.

Syjuco takes part in a panel at the Blue Metropolis festival this week. Details are at the end of the Gazette story.

(Hey Miguel, you don’t per chance need an agent, do you?)

| 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.

| Navel-gazing

The April fish

April Fool’s Day is truly a holiday for me.

Tuesday night, after getting home from a long day exploring suburbia on an expiring multi-zone transit pass, I hunkered down until 6am writing stories to be published later that morning. The idea was to fool without causing any panic or long-lasting effects.

It seemed to work. I got a few emails, particularly about my secret metro tunnel story, which seemed to be the big hit of the morning. Though I really spent most of my time on “Fagstein ME!” and its associated comment form (thank your lucky stars I confined that design to a separate page and didn’t put animated GIFs all over the blog). Interesting tidbit: the posts from that page were all taken from tweets of people who follow me on the Twitter.

The posts served their purposes: they fooled a few gullible people (whose names I will keep to myself for now), and they brought a smile or two to the faces of those who got them. And nobody died or anything.

And, of course, I scored the jackpot of having a Patrick Lagacé post all about me and how awesome I am, as well as some mentions in lesser media.

The first year of this blog, the April 1st post was a very believable one about having gotten arrested during a rather extreme scavenger hunt (so much so that the organizer emailed me to apologize). Last year I sold out by joining PayPerPost and hawking products for pennies.

Now I’m being asked how I’ll top this next year.

Good question.

| Media, Navel-gazing

All shelters look alike

It happens to every journalist, some of us more often than others: you get something wrong. Not just getting it wrong, but getting it wrong enough to prompt an angry phone call and a correction.

In the Monday Calendar which came out this week (I do the weekly calendar on A2 on Mondays), I mentioned a fundraising campaign that the Welcome Hall Mission is doing on Wednesday where volunteers will ask for donations in the metro.

Except the Welcome Hall Mission has no such campaign. It’s Accueil Bonneau that’s doing that.

You might think it’s a small error, that won’t make much of a difference to anyone, and that’s perfectly understandable (Welcome Hall Mission is Mission Bon Accueil in French), but as a journalist there are no small errors (or, more honestly, an error isn’t small if it needs a correction).

On the plus side, this personal disgrace embarrassing error of mine gives me an excuse to point out that the Gazette is making an effort to correct articles online when an error is pointed out. My calendar for this week includes a note at the top in correctionese pointing out the mistake.

Doing this isn’t always as simple as it seems. There might be multiple copies of an offending article, for example. Or the correction might not get passed on to the online desk. But it’s necessary (if only to placate Craig Silverman), so everyone has to make an effort to do it.

| Blogosphere, Navel-gazing, Photos

My photo on a T-shirt

Dominic Arpin on a T-shirt (Bombe.tv)

Dominic Arpin on a T-shirt (Bombe.tv)

I was just reading a post on Dominic Arpin’s blog about how he noticed a picture of himself in a video on Bombe.tv (click on “Les infos”). It’s silly, but we bloggers are a vain group sometimes, we love talking about how other people are talking about us.

It’s cute, a picture of Arpin being made into a T-shirt. But something seemed familiar about the picture. It looked similar to one I’d taken of him at a YULblog meet last year.

The original photo from my blog

The original photo from my blog

In fact, it’s the same photo, apparently taken through a Google Image search. Needless to say, they’ll be hearing from my lawyers soon.

Oh wait, I don’t have any lawyers.

Well that’s ok. My outrage is tongue-in-cheek anyway. People can do what they want with my stuff for personal use (you know, build a shrine to me or something). So long as they’re not selling them I’m OK with it. But would some credit have hurt? At the very least they could have asked me for a high-resolution version instead of taking the 450-pixel wide one on my blog.

I could have even given them the non-cropped version:

The Dominic Arpin original

The Dominic Arpin original

Of course, it’s really Arpin that makes the photo with his adorable little smile there.

Maybe I should make some T-shirts out of it. I could make a career out of printing T-shirts of Quebec blogger celebrities.

| Montreal, Navel-gazing

The block that time forgot

Funny story: I was walking along Ste. Catherine St. W. with a friend from out of town yesterday after having seen this Slumdog Millionnaire movie that everyone’s talking about (and now I know why). As we walked by the boarded one-block slum between Lambert-Closse and Chomedey, I described the old Seville Theatre as “the block that time forgot” and how the fact that it’s dead space has put an economic damper on the block and its surroundings.

As we get to the corner of Chomedey, I spot Gazette reporter Jan Ravensbergen and photographer Pierre Obendrauf. Turns out they’re doing a story about how the Seville Theatre building is going to be torn down for a development project.

This actually got turned into two stories for today’s paper: one about the development project itself and another about local reaction to it.

The project would require the tearing down of a once architecturally significant building façade. But even the architects and heritage activists admit there’s nothing worth saving anymore.

| Navel-gazing

Quchjaj qoSlIj!

Yesterday was February 12, the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the -1th birthday of the 2010 Olympics, and the second birthday of this blog (the day I turned in my soul and embraced arrogance and sarcasm).

Today is February 13, Friday the 13th, 1234567890 Day, and my birthday.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, the 150th birthday of the state of Oregon, and the 20th anniversary of the Salman Rushdie fatwa.

So much to celebrate. Go ahead, have some cake.

| Navel-gazing, Opinion, Technology

10 reasons why Twitter still sucks

I’ve never been a fan of Twitter. Looking at people’s status updates (or “tweets”, as its members have been told to refer to them), all I saw were a bunch of @ signs and TinyURL addresses. There seemed to be very little that was actually there.

But new media experts around the globe were embracing it. Some people who had been star bloggers a few years ago had all but abandoned them in favour of this new service. They heralded it as some holy grail of journalism (a suggestion I’ve already attacked head-on), as the best way to get breaking news and as being better than blogs.

So a few weeks ago, I setup a Twitter account. I did what I was supposed to do, follow some friends and start posting updates. Few of them would be considered really interesting. Anything important went on the blog, where I have more readership.

Before long I started getting messages that people were following me. A lot of people I don’t know. They probably found me through mutual Twitter friends, since I hadn’t posted my Twitter account here until now (mind you, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out). Unlike blog readership, which I’m sure includes hundreds of people I’ve never met, Twitter seems more personal. I get a message whenever one clicks on the “follow” button, and I see an image of that person’s face with a list of their updates.

I installed one of those Twitter programs (I settled on TwitterFox, which I’m not entirely crazy about but will do for now) to facilitate the Twittering, and I setup my cellphone so I could send Twitter updates by text message (unfortunately the reverse isn’t true, so I can’t read other people’s Twitter messages through my cellphone).

Anyway, you’re here to read about why I don’t like it, despite having used it for a month. I’ll give it to you in point form:

  1. The signal-to-noise ratio. When people talk about all the great information available on Twitter, they’re right. But the problem is that all this great information is buried under piles of @ replies, links, corrections, jokes and pointless trivia. It varies depending on the user, but the way Twitter is setup seems to encourage the noise rather than discourage it.
  2. Technical limitations. This is the other biggie, and it goes beyond the 140-character limit, though that’s certainly a big part of it. The biggest annoyance is links. Because most URLs won’t fit in the 140-character limit, various URL shortening services like TinyURL are used. The problem is that this obscures the actual URL. (Some Twitter clients will decode such URLs, but it would be easier if such a thing were handled internally.) Twitter RSS feeds leave a lot to be desired (clickable links would help), and some simple features like “retweeting” need to be done manually or through some third-party application. I realize that text messages are the reason for the 140-character limit, but how much of Twitter’s traffic comes from cellphones?
  3. Single point of failure. Though I haven’t yet experienced the Fail Whale, I expect it will come up soon. Twitter hasn’t yet found a way of making money (though they’re working on it), and the fact that it’s a privately-run service means if anything happens to Twitter’s servers, everyone is cut off. There is an open-source competition in Laconi.ca/Identi.ca (an Evan Prodromou project), but like the old instant messaging wars, it’s not about what service is better, it’s about what service your friends use. Laconi.ca is planning Twitter integration, which might help that, but until then you need to use both services unless you want to be disconnected.
  4. Microblogging vs. instant messaging. This is largely a cultural thing, which means it could change. But the impression I get from looking at Twitter posts is that it’s more of an open chat than it is about open blogging. Lots of replies (many consisting only of useless things like “:)”) or other messages that are more about conversation than information.
  5. Unwritten rules. I’ve seen this previously for blogs as well, with self-appointed community leaders dictating rules for how others should use a medium. Even though we’re not sure how Twitter should be used, there’s no end to the number of etiquette rules. You can’t update too much. You have to follow others. You can’t follow too many people if not enough people are following you.
  6. Duplication. If it’s on Twitter and it’s big, someone (either the twitterer or a follower) will put it on a blog anyway.
  7. Constant plugging. Some Twitter accounts are setup to automatically read from an RSS feed, post the first 100 or so characters and include a TinyURL link. I could just add that feed to my Google Reader and save a bunch of steps. In other cases it’s not automated, but bloggers will point out every time they post something new to their blog. It’s redundant and annoying.
  8. Time wasting. You’re in the middle of a blog post or reading something and bam, there’s another Twitter message to read. You’re interrupted by someone pointing out something they saw on the Internet that was funny. Did you really need this in real-time? You get back to what you were doing and bam another Twitter message. Very little of what gets posted on Twitter needs to be read immediately, and yet that’s the way it is. It’s a distraction and it wastes time.
  9. @ replies and #hashtags look ugly. Sure, you can turn @replies off when they’re not directed at you (or your friends), but then you risk losing important information that’s passed that way.
  10. No privacy. Even if their updates are public, you can’t follow someone without them knowing unless you do so by manually checking their page or putting their RSS feed in your feed reader. In fact, everyone knows who everyone else follows. Perhaps this is a feature, but it doesn’t make much sense for me. Twitter makes no distinction between types of followers, and I don’t want people thinking I’m friends with people and groups I just want to keep tabs on.

Despite all this, I’m not dismissing the concept of microblogging. Laconi.ca solves many of the technical problems (which suggests that Twitter can solve them too), and others can be fixed over time with culture change.

Despite its failings, people still use Twitter and (like Facebook) it’s a source that journalists have to mine for information. It involves filtering out a lot of noise, but there are nuggets of gold inside. So whether I like it or not I’ll still have to keep using it. Unlike David Akin, who is de-twittering, I still think there’s information that can be delivered using this medium.

But I won’t be using it any time soon to disseminate any important information. Follow me if you want, but you’re not going to see much quality. Anything I have to say, even briefly, of any substance will just be said here. There’s no minimum length for my blog posts.

| Media, Navel-gazing

Former Gazette intern makes me look unaccomplished

Heba Aly (slight dramatization)

Heba Aly (slight dramatization)

The way media outlets hire has changed dramatically over the years. Once upon a time, if a newspaper needed a new reporter, you’d just find the kid of a veteran reporter and assume that the journalism gene was passed down through a chromosome. It’s no coincidence that some of the reporters of today share the same family names as the reporters of yesterday.

But recently, as the demand for journalism jobs has far outpaced supply, the media have gotten more picky. The Gazette goes through a process every year where dozens of journalism students go through a screening and interview process, and only a handful of them are hired as summer interns.

Even then, most summer interns don’t last. The employees they replace inevitably come back from summer vacation, maternity leave or wherever else they went, and around September most of the interns either go back to school, move away or look for another job.

For many of those former interns, The Gazette is a footnote in their careers. They move on to the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, or sometimes even greater things.

I was first hired as a Gazette intern in 2005. Along with me, the copy editor, were four reporters. One of them was Heba Aly.

I hadn’t heard much from Heba since she left the Gazette after that internship. But I came across her name in a news article. It seems she’s been expelled from Sudan where she had been working as a reporter, freelancing for outlets like Bloomberg, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Globe and Mail, though mostly she has been filing to the UN humanitarian news service. She’s been touring Africa, going to Senegal, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Ghana, and I’m pretty sure she had a two-week stint reporting from the surface of the moon at one point. She scored a trip there through the Pulitzer Center, after she’d worked for the CBC and Toronto Star. I got this from her biography page.

She has a blog with her dispatches to various news outlets, and a personal blog about what it’s like living in these places.

My CV, meanwhile, reads something like: Gazette copy editor: 2005-2006, 2008-present.

In other words, she’s making me look bad.

This needs to stop.

UPDATE: Aly speaks to Reporters Without Borders about her experience (via J-Source).