So this kid Justin Darlington likes to dunk basketballs, and apparently he does it so well he’s getting media attention just being in Montreal. So much in fact that two Montreal newspapers have created videos about him.
So judge for yourself: which of the following does the better job?
Quebec, where for some reason it’s always autumn and always sunset.
I also particularly enjoy how Quebec presents itself in as many languages as possible when it comes to tourists, while simultaneously spending millions of dollars enforcing laws meant to restrict the use of those tourists’ languages or just make them feel unwelcome.
Via Patrick Lagacé, clips of news reports about apparitions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in various inanimate objects.
Most of these are in the form of oddities, those non-news “before we go” or “finally tonight” segments meant to give people a chuckle. So at least the TV news people don’t take them too seriously.
Still, it’s amazing what people can see human faces in.
If you’ll excuse me, I think I see Jesus in that melting snowbank…
Caroline Allard has been busy. The blogueuse-vedette known as the Mère Indigne who turned her blog about parenting into a book was on Tout le monde en parle Sunday night and Christianne Charette Monday morning talking about the sequel to the book and a new online video series on radio-canada.ca that launched Monday night starring Marie-Hélène Thibault. (The fact that these are all part of the Radio-Canada family is a coincidence, I’m sure.)
You can also see a video interview with Allard on the series website, as well as a short piece explaining the series.
Unfortunately, Radio-Canada is using Microsoft Silverlight for its video, which meant I had to install that software and then switch from Firefox to Safari in order to see it. Is Flash-based video still too difficult? Or Quicktime? Or YouTube?
This video, complete with fake old-style-cinema lines, shows a bunch of headlines from francophone Montreal newspapers, without any sound or other commentary. But the message it’s trying to convey comes out pretty clearly.
Rue Frontenac had the news EN PRIMEUR this morning, a result of an ENQUÊTE EXCLUSIF: The Journal de Montréal is subcontracting its subscription marketing to a company that’s not registered and is perhaps not being entirely honest with people. (THE HORROR!) This investigation involved the usual Journal technique of going undercover and exposing all of the inner dealings, then talking to experts about how this might be illegal if anyone cared to prosecute. It caught Lagacé’s attention, at least.
Another gem from the digger-upper of retro Québécois commercials. This one for my newspaper. (Don’t call that number, it’s about 20 years out of date.)
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
The Rocky Mountain News published its final paper this morning. Its owner shut the paper down after no offers were made to buy it. Though the paper’s employees were given less than a day’s notice, they put out a video commemorating the Rocky, which includes interviews with employees. It’s worth a watch despite its repetitive soundtrack.
More coverage from the New York Times and OJR, which seems to think (somewhat naively I think) that someone else could profit off this by starting up a new online-only news source. Poynter also has some analysis of why the paper had to shut down (and couldn’t just go online-only).
What’s truly sad, though, is that this won’t be the last newspaper closing this year. We’ve barely scratched through the tip of the iceberg.
From Andy Riga, a link to this video of a LEGO metro train from a train model expo. Alex, who took the video (and is a transit enthusiast and loyal Fagstein reader), has an album on Flickr filled with LEGO STM buses, LEGO STM trains and LEGO metro stations. Plus those boring old model trains.
Daily Mirror, June 13, 2008
This page from London’s Daily Mirror from last year is getting passed around online as of late. A fellow editor spotted it on LiveJournal. It’s also on Reddit, which pointed directly to an image on Joey deVilla’s blog. Here’s his blog post from June, where the image originates.
The layout of the article here looks funny to me, but that’s because I work for a broadsheet instead of a tabloid. It also shows the problem when editorial and advertising put together parts of a page without seeing what the other is doing until after edition.
Saturday’s Gazette has a feature piece from civic affairs reporter Linda Gyulai on Julie Graff and her Wiki Démocratie party (which, despite its name and look, uses a website that is not a wiki). She wants to become mayor of Quebec City so she can, among other things, use its employees’ pension plan to buy an NHL team and bring it there.
(The story is illustrated in the paper with a photo from Francis Vachon. He has another version of the profile shot on his blog.)
From Elias Toufexis, apparently a local actor, comes this inspired adaptation of a very popular recording.
With the recent comment moderation scandal at the CBC (yeah, I’ll just go ahead and call it a scandal there), some people have asked whether we’re all that interested in hearing uninformed comments from random people attached to news stories.
I’ve argued before that high-traffic websites (like CBC) should be more stringent with moderation, because nobody is going to read through hundreds of comments for the few that are actually worth reading. At the very least, some sort of comment ranking or “featured comments” system should be put in place to make the quality ones stand out.
I also argue against so-called “reverse publishing”, where anonymous or pseudonymous web comments are republished in offline media.
This video, spotted on Nora Young’s Spark blog, is a good (and funny) example of the pointlessness of filling the airwaves with comments from random people who don’t know what they’re talking about. (I could have also posted a video of CNN’s Rick Sanchez reading Twitter comments, but that’s more sad than funny.)
So much has changed in just a few months, eh? Last fall, you avoided talking to U.S. network news anchors. Now you’re sitting down with George Stroumboulopoulos.
(The interview is actually from December, but CBC just uploaded it today to its YouTube channel)
I really can’t not post this video mashup of Jean-Luc Mongrain and Christian Bale (via Lagacé):
And, for the sake of fairness, this parody of Céline Galipeau and Radio-Canada’s Téléjournal (via Arpin):