Category Archives: On the Net

| Video

How to win Eurovision

  1. Get a pretty person to sing a happy love song in English. Bonus points for constant smiling and similarity to Sanjaya
  2. Have dancers in the background, wearing black, do lots of crouching and jumping
  3. Use tall, pretty, female backup singers
  4. Involve string instruments, especially violins and/or cellos
  5. Include lots of sound that clearly does not come from any instrument on stage
  6. Exploit screens, fireworks and coloured lights in the background

Am I the only one to have expected a bit more from a pan-European talent competition?

| Media, Video

Journal Weeklyish Digest: Péladeau speaks

Today was the annual general meeting of Quebecor shareholders, so Pierre-Karl Péladeau had to come out of his cave and answer questions about how he does business. Lesaffaires.com has video highlights of Péladeau’s press conference.

When asked about the Journal de Montréal lockout, Péladeau’s minions at Quebecor gave the usual response about how the unions don’t understand the seriousness of the financial situation the company is under thanks to the various economic crises it faces (which is forcing it to consider shutting down newspapers).

Of course, that’s not stopping Quebecor from wanting to buy the Canadiens.

Needless to say, locked-out Journal workers were protesting outside,

30 ways to lead your lockout

The Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec magazine Le Trente explores the Journal lockout in its April issue, with an article by Hugo Joncas that talks a bit about the months leading up to the Jan. 24 lockout. It’s mostly union accusations, since the Journal and Quebecor aren’t talking, but it’s clear that Quebecor was planning for a lockout for a long time. Among the things that happened, the Journal:

  • Hired more managers, ensuring most of them were journalists
  • Started up new columns by freelancers who could still write in the event of a lockout
  • Created Agence QMI, a wire service the allows Quebecor-owned media outlets to share stories
  • Setup a system so page layout could be outsourced to another company under Quebecor control (it’s believed this is on the floor above the Toronto Sun newsroom)

Another piece by Florent Daudens looks at Rue Frontenac, the centre piece of the union’s pressure tactics.

Carbo (the other one) soldiers on

Claudette Carnonneau, the head of CSN who is suing the Journal de Montréal over a misquote related to the Caisse de dépôt, isn’t dropping her case. She’s seeking $250,000 in compensation from the newspaper.

Big advertisers fleeing

The Institut de coopération pour l’éducation des adultes pulled a lucrative ad contract from the Journal because of the conflict (as it did last year for the Journal de Québec) and spent more money having their speecial section printed as part of La Presse.

Similarly, the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste has moved a contract to print Fête nationale schedules from the Journal to Transcontinental-owned Metro.

Neither of these are surprising (both had previously expressed support for locked-out workers), but it highlights some of the advertising pain the Journal is facing. The question is whether the money they save from salaries offsets the loss of ads.

Having to pay a $10,000 fine (for a story that appeared years before the lockout started) doesn’t help either.

In other news

And at Le Réveil…

Not much, other than getting some moral support during the fête des travailleurs.

| Blogosphere, Montreal, On the Net

Our honoured mothers

Sunday’s Gazette, in honour of mother’s day (Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!), features an article about Montreal’s mommy-bloggers, including of course the Mère Indigne. The article comes with a giant picture of Caroline Allard and kids, as well as a sidebar focusing on Quebec’s most famous mommyblogger.

I wrote about Allard and Mère Indigne in 2007 when her first book came out. The article isn’t online, but I just posted it here, along with questions I asked her back then via email. She screwed me over saddened her readers back then by announcing she was putting her blog on hiatus. Of course, like a bad drug she couldn’t stop with the blogging, posting stuff to a second blog. And she wrote another book. And created a web series for Radio-Canada.

All while raising two children.

Susan Semenak’s article also discusses other Quebec mommybloggers, whom we honour on this day:

| Montreal, Radio, Video

Victoria Bridge: The 8th Wonder

From the National Film Board’s archives, a cute little 1987 film by Michel Choquette about the history of the Victoria Bridge, starring the voices of Terry DiMonte and Patti Lorange on a pretend radio show for a fictional Montreal station.

And as a special related bonus, the 1972 Barrie Howells film Trafficopter, which follows CJAD traffic reporter Len Rowcliffe high above the city.

There, isn’t it good to learn something?

| Humour, TV, Video

Auto-Tune the News

Here’s one that’s been making its way around the viral Internet (especially since a mention on Boing-Boing): Auto-Tune the News. It’s pretty much that: taking stuff from TV and applying Auto-Tune to it to make it sing. Add a bit of remixing and editing and you got yourself some music videos.

Other speeches that sound better with Auto-Tune:

| Montreal, On the Net, Opinion, Web design

Tourism Montreal up for Webby Award

I’ve never really been a fan of the Webby Awards, the anual awards for Web design. It’s not that they charge hundreds of dollars for entries (and then more hundreds to actually attend the ceremony) or because that source of income encourages them to inflate the number of winners, but for the simple fact that the judges for these awards always prefer style (or should I say “Flash”?) over substance.

Looking at the list of nominees, it seems clear that Flash-heavy multimedia ad campaign sites are held in higher regard than genuinely useful boring HTML. The famous websites and bloggers get their nods, of course (assuming they’re willing to pay or their fame is high enough that the Webbys think they’ll add prestige and eyeballs to the event), but everything else seems to be judged on looks alone. In fact, many entries don’t even link to the websites themselves but to special awards pages that explain how awesome the Web campaign is instead of just pointing people to the sites and having them figure it out themselves.

That is reflected in the nominees with Canadian connections. Officially there are 13 Canadian nominees, making Canada the fourth-most nominated country behind the U.S., U.K. and New Zealand, and just ahead of Australia (notice a trend there, perhaps having to do with the primary language of these countries?) Metro has links to them. But nationality is judged by the organization which created the site, not the site itself, so there are actually others.

Here are the Canadian website nominees I’ve found:

  • Tourism Montreal, by local outfit Sid Lee, in the tourism category. Best known for its slick (and expensive) Montreal in two minutes video, it also has an event search that warns you not to use the basic functions of your browser.
  • Adidas 60 years of soles and stripes, another Sid Lee joint, in the fashion category. Appears to redirect to another Adidas site. In any case, it’s a flashy site for a company whose business model relies on being lashy and cool.
  • Visual Dictionary (Merriam-Webster) from Montreal-based QA International, in the education category. A quality nominee that’s both good-looking and useful.
  • Smartset’s Fashion at Play, by Toronto-based Taxi, in the animation/motion graphics category. A completely useless site, it encourages people to spin boxes around to reveal new outfits, and then plays a video. That “unlocks” access to a downloadable ZIP file which contains a desktop background, ringtone and video, all of which are connected to the campaign and aren’t interesting at all. And when you unlock everything … nothing happens. Fantastic. But hey, the boxes spin.
  • 1000 Awesome Things, a Toronto-based one-person blog about things that are awesome, in the personal/culture blog category. (Hear an interview with its creator with Terry DiMonte on Q107)
  • Kaboose, a Toronto-based parenting site, in the family/parenting category. No complaints here.

I should also point out that the Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog, a very simple idea simply produced, is also nominated.

There are also nominees in advertising, video and “mobile” categories, but I don’t care about those (except to note that my favourite remix of all time is nominated as a viral video). Here are the Canadians:

Interactive ad campaigns

  • Russian Dolls
  • Nokia Accessories Portfolio Video
  • The Big Wild Email
  • Let’s Change Insurance – Aviva Banners
  • Coffee Cup

    • Online videos

  • Follow Your INSTINCT (2 nominations: Best Editing et Best Sound Design)
  • The Curse of Degrassi
    • | 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.