This weekend, the Chronicle launched its much-touted (by itself) online-only weekend edition, which seeks to continue the age-old tradition of … whatever it is the West Island Chronicle is known for.
I don’t notice anything particularly new with this weekend edition, but perhaps it’s new for people used to getting a physical paper at home every week. It seems to be filled mainly with pixellated non-expert columnists talking about gaming, parenting, sales, exercise and … miscellaneous, I guess.
Cyberpresse editors are really excited about this new widget they’ve launched. There are versions for Windows XP, Apple Dashboard and Google Desktop. I tried the Dashboard version and I was rather disappointed:
I know all the know-it-alls are saying widgets are the future of media online, but I don’t think this is quite what they had in mind.
This is 90s-era Pointcast technology, with a mindset to match.
Dear La Presse,
Maybe you should get out of the video business. Your people are great writers, but they’re not equipped to do standups in the street about business stories. It’s just embarrassing.
By all means, put up videos of things that require video to properly understand. But if the video is a talking head surrounded by B-roll, why bother?
(I’d provide a link, but Cyberpresse seems to have something against people linking to its videos)
La Presse unveiled its Beijing Olympics blog, noting that it’s sending a team of reporters, including columnist Pierre Foglia, to China next month. (Ten years ago, a newspaper sending reporters to the Olympics wouldn’t be news, but with the industry suffocating and cutting back, every plane ticket and hotel room has to be justified as a Newspaper Reporting Event.)
The Star, meanwhile, is putting links to its Olympics website on every page, including a logo next to its flag. Sadly, the website from Canada’s largest newspaper has about the same design finesse you’d expect from a YMCA bulletin board.
The Gazette’s Dave Stubbs, meanwhile, is still milking the Chinese news sources for weird stories relating to the Games on his Five-Ring Circus blog, which contrasts with Canwest’s matter-of-fact topic page.
The Globe and Mail hilariously has its Olympics coverage in a section called “Others“. Their Olympics blog is better, at least, though I’m not sure what “Wb” stands for in the URL.
The best Canadian Olympics news website unsurprisingly goes to the CBC, which not only has a general Olympics website, but has separate related sites for each major sport at the Games, each filled with stories. These will be the last Olympics the CBC has broadcast rights for.
And for completeness sake, Quebecor’s Canoe portal has yawnable websites in French and English for the Games with stories from its newspapers and wire services.
But even that’s better than CTV’s Olympics website, which doesn’t exist. (CTV has rights to 2010 and beyond, so you’d think they’d take advantage of the opportunity to get some practice online)
So you have a cloned credit card, free to spend hundreds of dollars on all the sweet merch you can get your hands on.
And you spend it on … bus tickets?
Media around the world (including The Gazette) got pwned by a photo that turns out was badly doctored by the Iranian government. The image shows four missiles firing when in fact there were only three.
USA Today is already moving to the analysis phase, asking: “Who can you trust?” The problem of doctored news photos is hardly new, as shown in this Chicago Tribune gallery, though in most cases it’s the photographer who is the one at fault.
One thing that the fakes shown in the Tribune gallery have in common is that they were all discovered after the fact because they were such obvious fakes. It forces you to wonder how many subtle fakes, done by the same people who alter celebrity photos for magazine covers, are still out there having never been discovered.
But even if a state-of-the-art auditing system was put in place to make sure that news agency photographers never even touched Photoshop, that still wouldn’t have prevented this problem. The photo in question was taken from a website and presented as-is. Captions (including the one The Gazette used) identified the photo as having originated at the Iran Revolutionary Guard website, but the fact that the news agencies feel betrayed suggests that they all took the photo at face value.
Was that wrong? Did the media err here? Did they implicitly trust that the photo showed something accurately? Did republishing it imply vouching for its integrity?
(This isn’t just a problem with photos. Non-political stories from China’s Xinhua news agency get copied by other agencies all the time, almost always with a mention that Xinhua is controlled by the government, in a take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt way that they wouldn’t say about, say, the CBC. But headlines over those stories don’t suggest any question as to their authenticity.)
As image editing software becomes more widespread and easy to use, more fake images will emerge and they will be harder to spot. Relying on someone noticing the atrocious Photoshop skills and ridiculously bad use of the clone tool hardly sounds like an appropriate way to ensure editorial integrity.
And what about those images that skirt the line between ethical and not? What about handouts from auto manufacturers, that are used without question even though they’ve obviously been severely altered in Photoshop to make them (and the backgrounds they’re set in) look as smooth and appealing as possible? What about movie stills that have been airbrushed to death? Or should they get less scrutiny because they’re not news photos?
Someone needs to have a debate here, and fast.
UPDATE (July 13): Lots and lots of people are having crazy Photoshop fun with this photo on the Flickr.
UPDATE (July 14): Regret the Error is, of course, all over this with correction highlights.
The Gazette’s suburban reporter David Johnston has a piece on Média Sud, a “hyperlocal” (i.e. local) news website setup by community newspaper PointSud and community radio station 103.3FM that covers the south shore.
The article mainly focuses on an apparent controversy: the fact that Média Sud works off government grants while its competition (community newspapers run by megacorporations Transcontinental and Quebecor or by Les Hebdos Montérégiens) pay their own expenses.
In addition to being unfair to the competition (you’ll note it’s that competition that’s pointing this out), they also argue that it puts them in a conflict of interest: How can you criticize a government that’s paying your bills?
Of course, as the article points out, the corporate-owned weeklies also get assistance from the government in the form of postal rebates, not to mention all those ads for council meetings and whatnot.
Instead, the real threat is that Média Sud is run by motivated people who aren’t beholden to the megacorporations. Their goal is to present news, not suck up to the boss in the hope of getting a promotion to senior vice-president. And because what they have online isn’t crap, browsers are going to start flocking to them.
Sorry guys, that’s the thing about the Internet: You can’t just keep shovelling crap into people’s faces and expect them to take it forever.
But let’s get back to that government subsidy thing, because that still kind of bothers me.
I’ve always dreamed about creating my own little media empire, expanding Fagstein WorldMedia Ltd. into a true independent source for regional news. I’ve considered the costs of running a one-man newsgathering operation, and whether advertising alone would cover that with enough left over to pay me a proper salary.
But I’d never considered the idea of asking the government to just pay me outright.
I’m not a conservative wacko or anything, but when I hear that government grants pay the entire minimum-wage salaries of private employees (whose employers top them up to the tune of about $2 or $3 an hour), I’m shocked. Is this what we spend our tax money on? Does the media really need this much help to survive? Or is this just handouts for the sake of handouts?
Here’s hoping Média Sud grows up into a real local news source and grows out of its need for government funding.
My newspaper employs an entire department of people whose sole function is to make it look nice. Mainly, they focus their efforts on the front page of the paper, meticulously adjusting every headline, deck, skybox, label, photo and other element to make it most appealing to people passing by with a dollar to spare for the guy running the news stand. But they also design important internal pages, and usually have a hand in cover pages for feature sections.
Sports doesn’t usually get that kind of treatment because of how last-minute it is. Aside from the web pointers above the banner, the rest of the page is designed by the editor in charge, and usually consist of a large photo, a main story, a smaller story or column along the side and a feature with a small photo at the bottom.
But on Sunday, with one major story dominating the sports news, I had a problem in the section’s design. The photo I wanted to use, of tennis player Rafael Nadal collapsed on his back in exhaustion and celebration of having just won his first Wimbledon title and unseating five-time champion Roger Federer, was horizontal (mainly because Nadal was horizontal at the time), and the layout was vertical (since the paper is a broadsheet and it was the only story going on the page).
So I turned to the design desk for help, gave the design editor on duty a headline and she went to work. The page shown above is what came back, and is much better than anything I could have come up with on my own. The photo turned out very grainy (due to the fact that there was almost no light at Wimbledon when the game finally ended), but the message got across loud and clear.
And that’s what good design is all about.
Some interesting developments at the CRTC concerning TV specialty channels:
The CRTC held a hearing yesterday on applications for new specialty channels, though no questions were asked and the meeting lasted 10 minutes. The following are being considered:
Expect Diversion and Canada HD to get denied unless they become more specific about their programming, and EqualiTV to explain how it differs from the Accessible Chanel.
Meanwhile, CTV has applied to the CRTC for HD versions of the following cable channels:
*The Discovery Channel already has an HD version, which was approved on a temporary basis before the CRTC had a proper framework for such channels. This application is to have an HD channel under the new framework, which would require 95% of all programming to be the same between the SD and HD versions of the same channel (and the remaining 5% to be all-HD on the HD network).
CTV also wants to expand the programming of two of its channels, ESPN Classic Canada and Book Television, to include “general entertainment and human interest”. They cite as examples profiles of Hall of Fame athletes and Giller Prize awards coverage, respectively. The paranoid part of me thinks the likelihood of anyone complaining of these types of shows is extremely small, and that adding this category may be more about other kinds of shows they’d like to air that have less to do with the channels’ core mission.
Gazette editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips explains the paper’s decision to cut the size of its weekly TV Times insert almost in half, from 36 to 20 pages, on his blog. (This, by the way, is a perfect example of what editors should be doing on their blogs: explaining situations that affect readers honestly and opening a dialogue with them.)
The post is long, with plenty of points about how people on digital cable or satellite use on-screen guides instead of paper ones (this also led to the demise of the paper TV Guide), and the increasing price of paper forced management to make a decision. The newer format eliminates listings between midnight and 9am and cuts most of its “editorial” content (which I’m pretty sure nobody read anyway).
The post even includes the necessary dig at the competition, which doesn’t have nearly as comprehensive TV listings (both weekly and daily schedules).
As the number of channels grows, and the number of people using basic cable or over-the-air reception shrinks, it’s inevitable that some day these TV listings will be eliminated entirely, and demand for a searchable online version grows (much like TV Guide’s online offering, which has unfortunately been assimilated into the Sympatico empire).
The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union has swiftly moved to denounce the 940 News layoffs, only a month after the fact and a week after the station’s new format launched. Specifically, they’re complaining that the change violates the station’s CRTC license, which establishes an all-news format (at least I’m pretty sure it does — I can’t find the conditions of license on the CRTC website).
But if the TQS situation showed us anything, it’s that the CRTC’s programming requirements for station licenses have an unwritten “it’s not making us enough money” exemption. So not only can you slash staff and radically change a format without getting a license amendment, you can do so without consulting the CRTC, and simply ask for a format change after the fact.
Until the CRTC grows some balls, expect more of these kinds of moves: money-losing broadcasters unilaterally switching to cheap, lowest-common-denominator formats and laying off all but a skeleton staff.
The NDP has apparently chosen its candidate for its next most likely by-election pickup in Quebec: the downtown riding of Westmount-Ville-Marie. No, it’s not the guy in the above video (though he sounds like he’d be awesome), it’s CBC Radio Noon host Anne Lagacé Dowson:
(Note: May not be exactly as pictured)
I worked with Anne during my very brief stint at CBC Radio. Considering how incompetent I was, she seemed like a pretty nice person. The fact that she’s running for office under the NDP banner is hardly surprising (though I doubt she and Jack Layton agree on every issue)
Now the NDP seems to think that after their stunning win in Outremont, getting a broadcast journalist on board is the magic ticket to a second win in Quebec.
Unfortunately, it’s no guarantee. Just look at Peter Kent, former Global National anchor who lost for the Conservatives in Toronto (he’s trying his luck again in a much more affluent York riding). And he was at least on TV. (Get Mutsumi Takahashi or Nancy Wood to run and we’ll talk)
Even worse, her opponent is another star candidate (albeit another failed one), former astronaut Marc Garneau.
The riding, which mainly covers Westmount and western downtown (plus a bit of eastern NDG) could be hard to predict, with a mix of rich anglo Westmounters and poor hippie Concordia students. But the federal riding covering Westmount has been Liberal since 1962, and that’s a lot of history to overcome for a party that hasn’t done better than third with 15% of the vote.
Due to a conflict of interest, Lagacé Dowson has taken a leave of absence from CBC Radio, and the latter immediately scrubbed all mention of her from its website.
UPDATE (July 7): It’s “confirmed” apparently (as if there was doubt). Lagacé Dowson is, as usual, humble:
“I am not falling on my sword in Westmount,” she told a handful of supporters. “This liberal tradition isn’t serving us very well, and we don’t like what the Conservatives are doing to us. I am not running to make a good showing; I am running to win. If Barack Obama against all odds can capture the leadership of the Democratic party in the United States, who says a woman can’t capture the hearts and minds of Westmount for the NDP?”
I’m not quite sure how this relates to Barack Obama, nor being a woman (especially since the riding’s former MP, Lucienne Robillard, has two X chromosomes last time I checked), but don’t let that interfere with the historicness.
Meanwhile, the other parties have filled out their candidates. Just to show how confident the Bloc Québécois is at winning a seat in Westmount, they’ve nominated Charles Larivée, who according to Google is the president of the McGill Political Science Students Association.
The Globe and Mail has a regular feature called “Collected Wisdom” by Philip Jackman, in which a bunch of people ask questions and another bunch of people answer them. The questions are those didja-ever-wonder types, like “why aren’t there A and B batteries?” that you’d find the answers to in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader books.
Some other examples:
This column is part of the traditional media’s embracing of News 2.0, interactivity, where the reader/viewer/listener has power. It’s the same reasoning behind republishing anonymous troll comments in newspapers, or those “live” web chats the Globe is so fond of.
The problem is that this goes against the entire point of having a trusted news source. This column seems to pride itself on not doing any fact-checking whatsoever, nor providing credible source material for the answers it gives.
Forget the fact that many questions can be answered by spending about 30 seconds on Wikipedia or doing a Google search. The answers aren’t checked to make sure they’re right. Occasionally it might come from an expert, but the vast majority of the answers have the same authoritative backing as that guy at a bar or your friend Vinny who says he knows everything about everything.
As a result, we get urban legends repeated as truth, multiple (sometimes conflicting) answers to the same question, and corrections.
It would be one thing if these questions, interesting as they are, were answered by experts in those fields (you know, the way all those “ask the experts” columns are done). But why leave fact-gathering (and fact-verifying) to the most untrustworthy source that can possibly be found: some random person you don’t know?
Either it’s a really dumb idea or it’s just plain lazy journalism. Either way it’s not the way to innovate in the face of the Web revolution.
I know this may shock and amaze you, but not everyone agrees that Henry Morgentaler, the father of abortion rights in Canada, should receive the Order of Canada. Many Tories and conservative Liberals are against it.
Of course, they’re not stupid enough to say it’s because they disagree with the guy on abortion rights, something the majority of Canadians support. Instead, they bring up some silliness about how the OOC recipients should be people who “unite” Canadians instead of “dividing” them.
Which would make Pierre Trudeau immediately ineligible.
One of the comments on the Star article suggests that Paul Bernardo should be next in line for the order the way it’s going. I guess he means that Morgentaler is a murderer and that advocating abortion rights is one step from serial killing. The Holocaust can’t be far off.
But then, Bernardo is probably a good bet by the Tories’ definition. After all, we’re all united in our feelings about him.
The Canadian embassy in Washington is apologizing to Impératif français, among others, after it used a photoshopped picture of Samuel de Champlain holding a poutine on invites (now scrubbed of the poutine offensiveness) to Canada Day celebrations. IF reacted to the image with their usual measured response.
Perhaps I missed something in Political Correctness 101, but what’s so offensive about this again? Is it some stereotype that we eat poutine? Is it because the image of Champlain was sullied in some way?
Frankly, I think the fact that Canadian Press had to explain what poutine was is offensive to me.