Tag Archives: The Gazette

| Navel-gazing, Opinion

Good designers think outside the court

Gazette sports section, Monday, July 7

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.

| Media, Opinion, TV

Gazette’s thinner TV Times

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).

| Navel-gazing

Sports by Fagstein

If you notice something wrong about today’s sports section, feel free to blame it on me. Yesterday was my first shift in the big chair in sports (editor Stu Cowan is on a well-deserved vacation). It’s the most stressful job at the paper, especially on the weekends, because it involves filling eight blank pages of stories and photos from dozens of different sports, and half of the stuff arrives close to deadline.

Mind you, the job was made a bit easier this week since most of the stuff happened in the afternoon, including the Great Victory of Spain.

Incidentally, today’s Driving pages are also my creation, having been put together last week.

| Media, Opinion, Slow News Day

Far from black and white

Richard Martineau goes on one of his usual rants, this time about what he considers racism.

The first part of his rant is against a lame This Hour Has 22 Minutes sketch that makes fun of Quebecers. Since Martin Patriquin already has a response to that one, I won’t bother here.

The second part attacks my newspaper for the most curious of reasons:

On faisait un appel à tous pour savoir si une famille du West Island pouvait accueillir une petite fille de 13 ans un week-end par mois, histoire de laisser sa mère souffler un peu.

«La jeune fille est très active, elle garde sa chambre propre et respecte les règlements de la maison, pouvait-on lire. Idéalement, la famille d’accueil serait noire…»

Imaginez comment The Gazette réagirait si le Journal se mettait à la recherche d’une famille d’accueil BLANCHE pour une jeune fille. On crierait au racisme !

The Gazette has regular columns in its arts and life section which profile kids looking for foster homes and organizations in need of volunteers. It’s about a step and a half below actually rescuing orphans from a burning building.

But Martineau takes issue with the fact that it’s suggested a black kid would ideally (but necessarily) best be placed with a black family.

To answer his straw-man hypothetical, if the Journal was trying more to place troubled children with foster parents, I would certainly welcome it. And if an ad requested white parents, I’d probably be more confused than offended. Statistically there are always more black kids in these situations and fewer black parents in a position to adopt.

But even if I grant that this is racism at its core, is this really the biggest injustice he could find?

The Gazette can be criticized for a lot of things (ask me, I’ll write you up a list), but in 1,000 years this would not have stricken me as one of them.

| Business, Media

Rates matter

The Gazette finally has its advertising rates posted online. If you check out its rate card (PDF) and do the math, a full-page ad (10 columns by 292 agate lines) will set you back about $10,000. If you want a colour full-page ad at the back of a section on a Saturday, that number is closer to $20,000.

Or, if you’re interested in online, rates are $15-30 CPM for the website, and the ad spots on HabsInsideOut.com are $750 a month each.

Or if you really want to throw your money away … why not just give it to me? I’ll totally whore myself out to your product.

| Media, Web design

No regrets

The Gazette has taken the leap, putting its heart and reputation on the line in the name of accuracy, and setup a corrections page on its website. It becomes only the second Canwest daily after the National Post to do so. It’s also the first Montreal daily to have a visible, dedicated page for people to find corrections.

Craig Silverman, who has been pushing for such pages on newspaper websites for quite a while on his Regret the Error blog, celebrates by using one of The Gazette’s corrections against it.

| Business, Media

Gazette call centre gets pink slip

The notice from the union was in my mailbox when I came in today: The Gazette and its workers union, the Montreal Newspaper Guild, have reached an agreement concerning workers in the Reader Sales and Service department whose jobs are being outsourced to a Canwest call centre in Winnipeg.

The deal essentially turns the layoffs into forced buyouts, with a deal similar to what many in the editorial department took in January. It comes after the union lost a bid to merge the RSS bargaining unit with the editorial and advertising ones, which would have leveraged the power of the latter to save the former.

It’s sad that the jobs are going, and that people calling about their morning paper are going to speak to a minimum-wage call centre guy on the night shift in Winnipeg than someone in the Gazette building who knows about the paper and the city and actually cares about readers.

| Media

More comics

In response to a Gazette reader’s survey about possibly removing a page from the weekend colour comics:

If you drop anymore comics I’ll be forced to take drastic action. Drop the lonley hearts carp (sic) at the bottom and put in MORE COMICS. The Gazette has the best comics page in Canada. Keep it that way. More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics More comics. I like them.

| Navel-gazing

Thomas McEntee

One of the quirks working at The Gazette involves the obituaries section.

Despite the paper’s best efforts, it still becomes difficult to get people to plan their deaths in advance. And so, seven days a week, people collect paid obituary notices and compile them for the next day’s paper. And the space they’re given to fill is usually larger than the amount of obituaries they have.

So at about 8pm every night, the news desk gets a call from the obituaries people telling us how much extra space there is. Sometimes there’s none, sometimes it’s a column, a few columns, a full page, or a full page and more.

When there’s a full page free, the ideal situation involves giving it to the section that precedes it, usually either business or sports. This is why you’ll sometimes see a full page of business news in Monday’s Your Business section just before the obits. But the news usually comes too late for the section editor to re-engineer the section to accomodate.

When that happens, and when there’s space on a page shared by paid obituaries, we run editorial ones. These are usually pieces from the New York Times or Washington Post about obscure musicians or scientists we’ve never heard of. Occasionally, though, we get a famous death or a locally-produced obit.

On Thursday night, I got approached by Alan Hustak, aka “Dr. Death.” He writes most of the Gazette’s obits, and had just written a medium-sized piece on Thomas McEntee, an Irish Catholic priest with a strong attachment to Griffintown. I was editing the World section at the time, and it’s usually that person’s responsibility to fill the obit pages when they come in.

When news came down of the space to fill, I had a full page plus a column. Hustak’s piece could have been crammed into that column with a small picture, but I decided to see if I could make it fill a full page.

Fortunately, Father McEntee has had his name in the paper quite a few times. He had this thing for a 19th-century woman named Mary Gallagher who would haunt Griffintown every seven years and look for her decapitated head. A story about that campaign led to plenty of pictures taken by staff photographers a few years ago.

I took one of those pictures and had it fill almost the entire page above the fold. Below, I had the article, which was still way too short to fill the space without it looking weird.

Rather than give up, or find some other obit to fill the space, I went through the archives. I found a profile on him that had been done in 1991, and cut out some information about his background and education. Combined with an old picture that Hustak had found, I made a fast-facts infobox. On the other side of the article, I put another infobox, which I filled with part of an old story by Hustak about Mary Gallagher.

A little bit of playing around to make everything line up, a pullquote to fill some space, and voila: A full-page obituary for a local priest, put together on deadline.

The online versions don’t do justice to the layout, but here they are anyway:

As for the other column, as I looked for something to fill it, news was just breaking that Harvey Korman had died. The decision was simple.

| Media, Navel-gazing

Intern season at the Gazette

This week is New Intern week at work, when the newsroom is swarmed by snot-nosed idiot kids eager young journalists beginning their careers with a summer stint at the paper, replacing the veterans who get to use their vacation time. There are four reporting interns, a copy editing intern (who started two weeks ago), an online intern, a photo intern and a design intern (the latter two will start within the next few weeks).

The reporters get the most attention though. In only a few days they’ve all already gotten their first bylines, in stories published in Wednesday and Thursday editions (UPDATE: I’ve added more features they’ve gotten in through the weekend):

The reporting and editing interns almost always come from Carleton and Concordia universities, due to the requirements that they know something about Montreal and they be able to converse in French. No exceptions here.

Place your bets now on which one of these will move on to reporting for Maclean’s/Globe and Mail/Time Magazine/New York Times, which will spend the rest of their lives in community newspaper obscurity, and which will eventually decide that PR/NGO work/selling crack is more rewarding and pays better.

| Media, Opinion

Judging the Gazette scoop

On Wednesday, Alain Dubuc took the Gazette Bouchard-Taylor scoop as an excuse to philosophize about the nature of pre-emptive document leaks and ask whether they’re good for society:

Cette question est la suivante: en quoi le public est-il mieux servi quand un média rend publique une information quelques heures ou quelques jours avant qu’elle ne soit diffusée de toute façon?

He argues in La Presse that the Bouchard-Taylor leak was a bad one, because it emphasized things that were not core to the report (like having francophones learn more English). He thinks whoever leaked it did so to embarrass or usurp the commission.

I’m thinking Alain Dubuc hasn’t seen The West Wing. (You can get it weekdays on CLT, though that channel isn’t useful for anything else sadly.) There, he’d learn that leaks are commonplace in government just before a big announcement in order to “soften up the ground” and prepare people.

Some of my colleagues have suggested that leaking to the anglo paper was a calculated effort to do just that, knowing it would pounce on the controversial aspects (especially about language) and that the report itself would seem tame by comparison. (I haven’t talked to Jeff Heinrich because he’s too cool for me and I doubt he’d leak through this blog something he wouldn’t say in the paper)

So was the scoop wrong? Inaccurate? Misleading? Some people think so.

I’m not in a position to judge, both because I work for The Gazette and because I haven’t had time to read the report in its entirety.

But La Presse’s André Pratte has read the report, and he thinks my paper did a good job.

UPDATE (May 24): EiC Andrew Phillips cites Pratte’s blog post in saying the paper didn’t have a nefarious agenda.

| Media

Stage 2: Anger

The media’s feelings toward The Gazette have started to move from Stage 1, denial (“if what The Gazette says is true”) to their predictable second stage, anger:

The bargaining stage seems to have failed, with the government saying it will only release the report on Thursday (though it was initially to be made public on Friday). The depression stage will continue until then, as the media have to continually attribute all their information to a competing newspaper.

That just leaves acceptance.

Meanwhile, as this news starts hitting the funny pages elsewhere, The Gazette has put PDFs of its partial drafts online (margin notes, reporters’ food stains and all): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Expect analyses tomorrow of anything the paper has missed or gotten wrong.

UPDATE: Jim Duff has some thoughts on this as well.

| In the news, Media

The reasonable accommodation debate begins again

The Gazette’s Jeff Heinrich today has an OMGEXCLUSIVE!!!!11 on the salient facts that will make their way into the Bouchard-Taylor Commission report. It’s in a bunch of parts:

  • The main story, which boils down the conclusions to: learn about immigrants (especially Muslims) and be nice to them; and learn more English
  • A list of common fallacies in arguments against accommodation
  • A sidebar on the need to learn more English, which will no doubt be interpreted not as “we need to be more multilingual like world-leading countries” but as “we need to surrender to the unilingual anglos who will enslave us”
  • Some comments from members of the commission not named Bouchard or Taylor
  • Criticisms from UQAM prof and commission adviser Jacques Beauchemin, calling the report a “whitewash”

There’s also a piece noting that Taylor has been named one of the world’s top 100 public thinkers, an editorial praising the commissioners, a soundoff forum for people’s comments, and a post-publication reaction story from the premier (he’s not saying anything) and others, including Mouvement Montréal français (I won’t spoil the surprise)

I don’t know how Heinrich obtained the parts of the report he bases his stories on (maybe he found them in a cab?), but I’m sure plenty of ink will be spilled noting that it was the anglo paper that got the scoop on a commission report that says we should learn English.

Meanwhile, my bosses are (insert disgusting metaphor for happiness here) that the competition is all over talking about their scoop (it was even in Le Monde!). Patrick Lagacé blogs about it (and the comments give a pretty good idea of why this commission was needed in the first place). Maisonneuve also has (coincidentally) a story about the commission from yesterday.

My take

Anyone who expected the commission report to magically solve the issue is clearly fooling themselves. It simply won’t do that. So then the question becomes what we spent all that money on. Was it just a chance for people from the régions to vent about immigrants they’ve never met? Or was it something to clearly define what the issues are so we can slowly work through them? Either way, expect a lot of people to be angry.

And anger is what the commission brought out more than anything else. It made racism, xenophobia and all sorts of discrimination acceptable and normal by allowing people a forum to express it.

As the Habs riot showed us, crowds are like children. Without proper discipline, they revert to the intelligence of an infant.

This problem isn’t unique to Quebec. The U.S. has the same issue with immigration: the media and politicians practice open discrimination, and that makes it acceptable for everyone else to do the same.

One of the knee-jerk reactions we’ve already seen is that francophones are the ones expected to do the accommodating while anglos don’t have to change. I don’t think that’s the point. Anglos already have to learn French here, otherwise they won’t get jobs in public service (outside of Fairview anyway). Statistics show that those who are bilingual make far more than their unilingual counterparts, anglo or franco. So the solution is to make sure both language groups get education in both languages, no?

I think there’s an even more fundamental issue that wasn’t explored here, and one that would have pissed francophone activists off more than anything else: Is it still in our best interest as a world society to preserve minority languages? So many conflicts can be boiled down to communication difficulties, and so many of those can be boiled down to translation problems. What would be so bad if the entire world spoke just one language, whether it be English, French, Latin, Esperanto or Mandarin?

And what about the media?

The commission thinks it went a bit far, and the media will no doubt disagree. I think the real answer (as always) lies somewhere in between. The media (especially tabloids like the Journal) overhyped the issue, which is a large reason why people who have no real connection with immigrants became so frightened. On the other hand, the media only serve to reflect society, and there was clearly some latent xenophobia there to exploit.

| Media

Globe, La Presse dominate National Newspaper Awards

(The title of this post is coincidentally the same as the CBC.ca story)

The National Newspaper Awards (or Concours Canadien de journalisme) were handed out this week. I mentioned the finalists in March.

The big winner was the Globe and Mail, which won six first-place prizes (they were nominated 15 times, including a sweep of one category), and they’re very proud of themselves. Also posting a strong showing was La Presse, who won in five of the six categories it was nominated in. Again, lots of pride.

The biggest disappointment goes to the Toronto Star, who won only two categories despite eight nominations (though two were for the same category). But hey, they’re still proud of themselves too.

As for my beloved paper, it was shut out, winning in neither of the two categories it was nominated in. In fact, the entire chain combined picked up only three awards (two for the Ottawa Citizen, one for the National Post). Still it does a valiant effort covering the situation in its Canwest News Service story. You’ll notice it mentions the Globe and La Presse in the final paragraph.

Newspapers? Self-obsessed? Nevah!

In related news, The Gazette’s Words Matter campaign has won even more kudos, this time from the International Newspaper Marketing Association, which apparently exists. You can see a video of the TV spot on the website if you haven’t seen it ad nauseam already — ironically it makes you watch an ad before you get to the actual ad. You can also see a photo gallery of the “On Thin Ice” gimmick of a block of melting ice on a downtown street.

As for me, I’m still waiting for my awards.