If you haven’t already, you should check out Phil Carpenter’s video from Rwanda, where he travelled for the month of May as part of a program to teach locals about multimedia journalism.
Climbing a Thousand Hills from Phil Carpenter on Vimeo.
It goes with a feature in Saturday’s paper about how the country is recovering 15 years after a devastating genocide. You can read his dispatches from Rwanda, with more photos, on the Gazette’s photography blog The Lens.
I’m working mornings the next couple of days, which means when I’m not working I’m either asleep or in a semi-comatose state, so to make up for the lack of posts here’s some reading material from the Ryerson Review of Journalism’s spring 2009 issue:
The most interesting one is Lora Grady’s piece on the battle of Canadian news websites (I was interviewed for this piece though I’m not mentioned in the online version, still it stands as the only time I’ve ever been contacted by a fact-checker). The piece is spot-on on a lot of things, such as the fact that CBC.ca got a head start on its online operation and until recently handled elections (or at least election results) a lot better than the private sites. It also points out that sites like the Globe and Mail have played catchup and have a lot more long features and just-for-web multimedia content. And yet, there’s a bitterness over the fact that CBC.ca gets more traffic than those private sites.
Also:
Happy Canada Day, folks.
Paul (Paul Reiser) and Jamie (Helen Hunt) finish ... uhh ... making lasagna, in the pilot of Mad About You.
Global TV’s website, which many people still don’t know streams videos of hit TV shows that the network has rights to (like House and 24) has opened up a “classics” section where you can see some selected episodes of some ancient TV series.
The complete list so far (links to Wikipedia articles for reference):
Some of you might note that Mad About You, Just Shoot Me! and Married… With Children are staples of Canwest’s TVtropolis retro TV channel. The Facts of Life, Good Times, Maude and Who’s the Boss? are aired on Canwest’s Déjà View super-retro channel.
So far it’s just a smattering of about a dozen episodes from each of the series, but the collection will grow from there. The number of series will probably also expand as Canwest negotiates streaming rights for the shows out of the money they could be spending on bonuses for young sarcastic copy editors at their metro newspapers…
We’re doomed. (via Le Monde Selon Jay)
Mike Ward thinks someone at the cable networks should be in charge of watching repeats before they’re aired, to prevent airing, say, a show about a little kid getting a photo shoot done with an accused kiddy porn peddler.
Montreal Home magazine's Stephanie Whittaker (left) and Leah Lipkowitz. (CTV)
CFCF interviewed Montreal Home publisher Leah Lipkowitz and editor-in-chief Stephanie Whittaker (the latter you might recognize as a freelancer for many publications including The Gazette). The first question from Mutsumi Takahashi is (paraphrased) Are you insane starting up a new magazine in this economy?
Judging from the website, they’re not giving anything away for free.
CBC media ownership network map
The CBC has played with cool new technology from IBM to create a network map of media ownership in Canada as part of a special section dealing with the future of television.
While it does look cool, it’s not particularly useful for understanding media ownership. For one, large corporations are represented by tiny dots, and the network looks a lot more incestuous than it should because of things like CPAC (which is financed by all Canadian cable and satellite providers) and other joint ownership situations.
That data behind it, however, are publicly available and can be used to create other visualizations. Making the size of the dots proportional to gross yearly revenue might make it more interesting.
On Monday, TQS came out with its newest far-fetched idea: Call-TV, a daily 90-minute show in which people call in to win prizes. The reviews were unanimously unpleasant: Ridiculous. Tedious and repetitive. So bad it’s good. Frustrating. Worse than the Monsieur Showbiz reruns it replaced.
Oh, and it forgets how many Os are in Toronto.
In the current pathetic state of the mouton noir, it’s nice to see them go back to their roots as a low-budget network that’s willing to try anything and look pathetic doing it. I might even think of applauding it if it had been an original TQS idea instead of an Austrian creation (the show is even filmed in Vienna).
But there’s another thing that bugs me about it: you have to pay to take part. An entry fee of $1 per call or text to have a chance to win a prize (the show doesn’t take the first caller, but waits for a bunch of people to call in and then picks one at random).
Marketing contests and prize draws operating in Quebec and elsewhere are usually very careful about giving a “no purchase necessary” option in order to stay legal. Usually this involves sending a postcard or self-addressed stamped envelope, which nobody does because that costs money too. But for Call-TV, there is no option that forgoes payment. And since there is an element of pure chance involved, this should technically qualify as a lottery, no?
In the UK, the Call TV format was investigated to see if it qualified as gambling. The report didn’t make a conclusion, arguing that it was up to the courts to decide if this qualifies. (Even if it had reached that conclusion officially, the difference in laws means you couldn’t make the same conclusion in Quebec.)
Whether or not it successfully exploits a loophole in Quebec’s gambling law, or is even sanctioned by the government, it just rubs me the wrong way. It’s like a slot machine you can play at home. Is that really what you want in television?
At least, at $1 a call, compulsive gamblers can’t lose their life savings in 90 minutes.
UPDATE (June 9): La Presse’s Hugo Dumas did some calling to various government regulatory bodies (CRTC, Loto-Québec, Régie des alcools, courses et jeux, CBSC, Department of National Defence) and got responses ranging from “our lawyers are looking into it” to “technically it’s not our department”.
(via Lagacé). Though I really have to disagree for their selection from Die Hard.
Canadian Press has launched an iPhone application where – for $3 a year – you can get access to breaking news from the CP newswire, CTVglobemedia (The Globe and Mail), Transcontinental (some Atlantic papers), Torstar (Toronto Star, Hamilton Spectator) and FP Newspapers (Winnipeg Free Press).
In other words, major publishers except Canwest, Quebecor or the CBC.
The application is basically the same as the CP’s mobile-enabled website, except with GPS functionality added, according to the press release.
Since the only local Montreal news it has right now is from CFCF, I don’t see much advantage to GPSness.
Besides, even if this is successful it’s just going to steal traffic away from CP member sites, and $3 a year isn’t about to pay for a nationwide team of journalists.
Let’s just assume I’m missing something here, some key that actually turns this into a revenue source for CP or its members.
The Weather Network has launched Twitter feeds to alert people to important weather information. It makes perfect sense, except there’s one feed per province. Quebec’s feed has alerts from Gatineau to Rivière du Loup. But I don’t care about the weather in these places. I care about the weather in Montreal.
The Weather Network should split these feeds (especially Quebec, Ontario and B.C.) into more, smaller regional versions.
There’s no way I can make this better than it already is. (via @mediabeat)
It occured to me I’ve never actually heard Maxime Bernier speak in English before (my attention must have been focused elsewhere). Now the new Conservative minister of nothing is putting it in practice with a new blog.
Don’t expect him to be too honest or outrageous though, the Tories don’t like honesty on their members’ blogs.
The Justiciers masqués took a bunch of hit songs and translated them word for word into French. “Quand on comprend les paroles, c’est moins bon,” they say.
Is there something inherently appealing about songs in languages you don’t understand, is music magic lost in translation, or are these songs just written badly to begin with?
Discuss.
I don’t know why all the journalism awards are handed out about this time. They should be handed out in late December when there’s no other news.
In any case, the Canadian Association of Journalists gave out its annual awards on Saturday, a day after the National Newspaper Awards. In both cases, neither the list of nominees nor the list of winners included any links to original content, which for the most part is still online. So once again, as a public service, I bring them to you below:
The big headline-making prize is the Code of Silence award, given to a government department that is an enemy of transparency (usually in a high-profile case). This year it was the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, for that whole listeriosis thing.
The national journalist association also bestowed its President’s Award to the unsung hero: media lawyers, who are working hard to make information free.