Category Archives: Navel-gazing

| Media, Navel-gazing, On the Net

How to piss off a blogger 101

  1. Setup a website that purports to be some sort of independent news source.
  2. Take a blog post and put it on your website without asking permission. At the end of the post, include a plea for money.
  3. When the blogger you just stole from err, politely requests that the post be taken down, respond by replacing his byline with your own, removing the link to the blog in question and keeping the plagiarized content pretending it’s your own.

There you go folks. Getting on my shit list in three easy steps.

So to be clear: “The Canadian National Newspaper”, a.k.a. AgoraCosmopolitan.com knowingly plagiarizes content.

UPDATE (Dec. 1): It goes without saying that I’m not the only one they’ve ripped off.

| Blogosphere, Media, Montreal, Navel-gazing, Opinion

Free speech isn’t a right on blogs, it’s a privilege

There’s a minor crisis happening in the Quebec blogosphere over Richard Martineau’s blog. He and Canoe are being sued for $200,000 over allegedly libelous comments made by visitors to his blog about lawyer Susan Corriveau.

The concern is over what impact that might have on comment policies at mainstream media sites. Traditional media (especially local empires in Quebec) are still trying to figure out what to do with this whole Internet thing, and are entirely clueless about the implications of user-generated content. They think forcing users to click a button that says “I agree not to post libel” is enough to protect them from liability.

Coincidentally, an earlier post this week by La Presse star blogger Patrick Lagacé mentions that he’s asking for tougher moderation of user comments to get rid of the junk and even cap the length of some discussions.

Ironically, both Martineau’s blog and Lagacé’s blog require user registration before people can make comments. This stands in contrast to websites like The Gazette’s which removed the login requirement to encourage more comments. (Then again, even The Gazette is starting to move back — their only popular blog, Habs Inside/Out, has changed its policy to require moderation of anonymous comments.)

As any forum gets more popular, it starts to see problems it couldn’t predict. Spam is the first to show up, in the form of junk sent by computer to advertise some money-making venture. That can be solved by installing a spam filter, requiring registration or manually moderating comments (or a combination of these).

But then comes the problem of real people posting unwanted things. Libel, flame wars, factual mistakes, personal attacks, trolling, copyrighted works, personal information, pornographic images, off-topic comments, the list goes on. The worst ones will get deleted outright. Border cases might get a polite warning from the blogger or moderator.

For some reason, there’s the implication that the goal is to have unedited, unrestricted, free communication in the comments section of blog posts. This innocent-until-proven-guilty mentality means that a lot of useless, mean or uninteresting comments get attached to blogs, comments that are of no use to anyone and are a waste of time and space.

Little by little, big bloggers are starting to restrict that freedom and filter out the noise.

Good.

I moderate comments on this blog. I don’t require user registration (because I know how annoying it is), and I tend to let most non-spam through. But nobody but me has the right to say what is published here. I have deleted plenty of personal attacks, unhelpful garbage, trolling comments and other junk that doesn’t belong here, and I will continue to do so. At the end of the day, I’m responsible for all the content published here, and it’s my ass in the courtroom if anything crosses the line.

I welcome criticism (in fact, some of my best comments are those who reject my entire hypothesis and ridicule my interpretation of the facts), but you have to show your work. Comments like “you suck” and “you’re gay” have no place here or on any other blog.

| Business, Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion, Video

Pay me, dammit

There’s an interview on YouTube with Harlan Ellison that really struck a chord with me. In it, he rants about how Warner Bros. wanted to use an interview with him on a DVD but didn’t want to pay him for it. He talks about how outrageous it is that this is now accepted practice, and how amateurs seeking a big break are willing to whore themselves out for nothing.

I’ll admit to being somewhat of a hypocrite on this issue. On one hand, I want to be paid for my work (because I need to eat). On the other, most of that work is based on interviews I do with people, and I don’t pay any of them for their time or thoughts.

Suckers.

| Blogosphere, Montreal, My articles

TWIM: Anglos, poutine and a gypsy

This week’s blog is Gypsy Bandito (and the Magic Flying Media Machine) by CT Moore, a social media marketing and other buzzwords-type person. His posts mainly take the form of videos of him thinking out loud while walking down the street, holding a video camera at his face. Others might think him insane, but we know better. (UPDATE: He just resigned from his job… so repeat previous sentence.)

This week’s Justify Your Existence is Gary Shapiro, a spokesperson for the Office québécois de la langue anglaise, the anglo rights group that is fighting for bilingual commercial signs. They launched last week and got quite a bit of media attention. They also ran this ad in the Suburban and Gazette on Wednesday:

OQLA: Help save the English language

My first question to Shapiro: “Is this a joke?” didn’t go over well. Though the name is a parody of the OQLF, the issues the group raises are apparently very serious.

(UPDATE: The West Island Chronicle does an informal survey of large stores and shopping malls to see what languages their signs are in. TVA also has a video report on the group, with the journalist talking to the OQLF, Mouvement Montréal Français, Gilles Proulx and just about every pundit he could talk to except Shapiro or another member of his group — no mention is made of an attempt to contact the OQLA to have them explain themselves.)

Finally, there’s also a Bluffer’s Guide on the history of Poutine. It may or may not have turned 50 this year, depending on whose story you believe. While the media tout the story of Fernand Lachance inventing it in Warwick in 1957, one restaurant proclaims it was the birthplace of the dish.

| Media, Navel-gazing

Honesty is the best journalistic policy

La Presse’s Paul Journet has a story on a journalist for TVA, Karine Champagne, whose three sons attend École Horizon-Soleil. That’s where a 12-year-old boy with a congenital heart defect died after being shoved on the schoolyard by an 11-year-old girl.

Champagne acted first as a mother, giving interviews to journalists complaining about the school’s response to the incident. The next day, she talked about the incident on TV as a journalist.

The article presents this as a journalistic faux-pas, but I’m not so sure. Is it wrong for a journalist to report on something merely because they’ve expressed an opinion about it?

It’s an issue I’m wrestling with, as I both comment on and write about stories that interest me. I try to keep an open mind, I welcome opposing viewpoints, and I like to learn new things. I believe in respecting conflicts of interest (so, for example, I won’t write about a family member’s business without disclosing the relationship), but does having an opinion represent a conflict in itself?

A Wired article explores journalists who blog, and a key sentence in it struck with me:

Reporters are people, too (really), and just because they express opinions doesn’t mean their reporting should be dismissed out of hand, as long as they arrive at their conclusions honestly, through rigorous reporting.

Honesty is something I think has been forgotten in all the talk of journalistic ethics. It means a lot of things:

  • Explaining how you come to your opinions instead of hiding them
  • Being honest to yourself by accepting the fact that you might be wrong
  • Not pledging allegiance to any one group or cause, surrendering your objectivity to the whims of their leaders
  • Not being afraid to disclose things about you that may affect how your reporting is perceived
  • Being self-critical, and being able to admit to yourself when your objectivity has been too tarnished by personal involvement in an issue that you can’t tackle it fairly as a journalist
  • Not being afraid to bite the hand that feeds you (a rule broken by many journalists who keep quiet about their employers for fear of being fired)
  • Allowing people who disagree with you to speak for themselves

I’m sure there are others.

I’m not one of those “objectivity doesn’t exist so don’t bother” people. I believe in fairness, and in not allowing your opinions to interfere with your journalism when you write about an issue. I believe in asking questions to learn instead of talking to people you already agree with. But I also believe that people can only believe what you tell them when they can trust you. And in order for them to trust you, you have to be honest.

The most important thing you have to be honest about as a journalist is how you think.

But enough of me. What do you think? Am I completely wrong about this?

| Navel-gazing, Public transit, West Island

Hindsight is 470/20

The West Island Chronicle looks at the new extended service on the 470 Express Pierrefonds, which you’ll recall had weekday daytime service added to it a couple of weeks ago.

Based on conversations with users, the article concludes that the extended service is popular, but people are annoyed with the fact that there’s no service after 7pm or on weekends. They’re also having trouble with connections, missing the bus by a few minutes:

“Anyone who has university courses until 7pm or right after has to take two buses to get home, it’s really annoying,” she said.

…

Another point of contention seems to be that the bus’ arrival and departure times at the Fairview shopping centre, which is the West Island’s largest bus terminal, do not line up conveniently with those of other buses leaving Fairview.

David Chernofsky, a Dollard des Ormeaux resident, said that he had to wait 15 to 20 minutes on average for the next 208 bus when exiting the 470 at Fairview.

Really? If only someone predicted exactly that before the service started…

That’s great news, unless you plan on staying downtown past 7 p.m. or want to go downtown on the weekend. And really, how many kids in the West Island would want to do that?

Another problem is with the schedule. About half the people who use the bus (based on my oh-so-scientific anecdotal guesstimation) use it solely for its metro shuttle part, and use another bus to get between home and Fairview. Most of those buses run every half hour on the half-hour, so they’re timed to arrive at the terminus and drop off their arriving passengers a few minutes before the half-hour mark.

Thing is, all but two of the eastbound departures from Fairview take place six minutes before the half-hour mark, about the same time as these buses are arriving. It’s a schedule that seems almost designed to make people miss connections from about a dozen different bus routes, and I can’t seem to find any reason why the schedule as a whole can’t be delayed by six minutes to make the transfers easier.

I-told-you-so’s aside, it’s good the STM is recognizing this so quickly. Expect more evening departures and schedule realignments. The STM will be meeting with West Island mayors today to discuss bus service further.

| Business, Montreal, My articles

TWIM: Kids, money

Bryce Durafourt

This week, I talked with Bryce Durafourt (above), who’s running in the school board elections for the English Montreal School Board in TMR/Saint-Laurent. He’s 20, a McGill microbiology student, curler, and ran for city councillor the 2005 municipal election in Saint-Laurent, only to come dead-last as the only independent candidate.

So I asked him: What’s up with that?

Also this week (though not online) is an explainer about the status of the Canadian dollar, which is constantly hitting new highs compared to the U.S. dollar. It also mentions the situation in Zimbabwe, home of the least-valued currency in the world and one of the worst examples of hyperinflation since the 1940s.

| Montreal, My articles

TWIM: Compost, sex shops and other things dirty

This week in the paper features a short story about people buying sexy Halloween costumes at sex shops instead of prefab Chinese plastic ones at Wal-Mart. After striking out at a few places (mostly because I stupidly tried researching this on a Sunday afternoon), I found a young lady at Il Bolero getting fitted for a costume. Surprisingly, she was very cooperative with my incessant questioning despite being half-naked standing on a small table. (Then again, considering the photos I’ve found of her on Facebook, I guess modesty isn’t an issue!)

Also this week is a Bluffer’s Guide on composting, which was prompted by the mayor’s request for $1 billion to create a curbside organic waste collection program (among other initiatives).

UPDATE (Oct. 30): The Globe and Mail, always one step ahead of the curve, discusses some girls who are bucking the trend by going less sexy and more fabric-y.

| Montreal, My articles

Making the case for a quieter Toupin Blvd.

This week I spoke with Nicolas Stone, a resident of Cartierville three houses away from Toupin Blvd., who is one of many in that area opposed to a northern extension of Cavendish Blvd. The plan would connect Cavendish, through a new development in Bois Franc, to Henri-Bourassa Blvd. at Toupin Blvd.

Toupin Blvd. … not so whiny

The residents (whom I dubbed “concerned citizens” as you see above) oppose it for the obvious reason that it would turn Toupin Blvd. into a throughway (even though there’s nothing beyond the neighbourhood — the closest bridges to Laval are at Marcel-Laurin to the east and Highway 13 to the west).

Stone (a husband with three hyperactive toddlers I found after he made a comment on this blog) makes a compelling case. His concerns mainly revolve around philosophical objections to creating more roads and encouraging single-passenger traffic. He takes public transit to work and used to bike everywhere.

He was a good sport about the interview, even when I flat-out accused him of being part of the problem by contributing to urban sprawl.

| My articles, Navel-gazing, TV

Couch potato journalism

So The Gazette has been running this Made For TV series since Saturday, with five of their writers describing what they watched on TV for a week.

We’ll set aside the inherent valuelessness of such fluff journotainment. What really sucks about Made For TV is the writing. Today, for example, they have this unknown freelance hack talk about watching Family Guy and the Discovery channel while surfing the net on his laptop. I’m sure this guy thinks he’s very funny. A look at his TV-watching diary shows he has plenty of free time being a couch-potato loser to cultivate that wit, watching Star Trek reruns until 3 a.m.

I for one have never heard of this guy before, though he seems to think he’s hot stuff talking about himself on his blog. What do I care what he’s watching on TV? Should I be pitying him? It’s just so sad.

But man is he really hot.

Continue reading →

| 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.

| My articles

HPV vaccine, warts and all

This week I give you a Bluffer’s Guide on the HPV vaccine, which the Quebec government announced this week will be given to girls age 9 to 26.

Some resources with more information:

My take: There are some legitimate concerns about safety (no long-term studies, wasn’t tested thoroughly on young girls), but until we find evidence of some harm this could cause (which I find unlikely), I agree with the immunization plan.

That’s not to say that Merck, which sells Gardasil at a rate that makes it the most expensive vaccine ever, isn’t pushing this hard with a lot of self-interest and stands to make billions. But that’s capitalism.

| 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.

| Montreal, My articles, Technology

TWIM: Parking and Wi-Fi

This week on This Week in Me:

I speak to Ville-Marie’s Jacques-Alain Lavallée about how complicated on-street parking restriction signs are in Montreal. I’d been bounced around through about four or five people talking about this subject, but settled on the borough since boroughs set the policies for on-street parking. He notes that a lot of the restrictions come by request from residents and businesses who want space for deliveries, diplomatic vehicles, etc.

Perhaps the only controversial statement was his answer to why the signs are unilingual French:

The city of Montreal is a French organization. The signs are pretty visual and easy to understand, but as a French organization, the law allows us to have a French-only policy. All the signage on autoroutes is French (except on bridges, which are federal jurisdiction).

I’m sure that’ll satisfy the tourists who are trying to figure out what “MAR-JEU” means.

Also this week, I have a bluffer’s guide on the health risks involved with Wi-Fi. (No link because it’s not online — Page B5 of Saturday’s paper). I’ll post it in a week when the copyright clears, but in a nutshell there’s no proof that electromagnetic radiation causes cancer. The only thing it can do to human tissue is heat it up a bit. Whether that may cause long-term health effects is up for debate, but I find it unlikely to have a statistically significant impact.