During the Montreal-Boston series, The Gazette and the Boston Globe would exchange columns from Dave Stubbs and Kevin Paul Dumont, respectively. Now that we’ve said na-na-na-na-hey-hey-hey-goodbye to Boston, the paper is continuing the tradition with Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Phil Sheridan, giving a Philly perspective on the series.
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
The Gazette’s Andrew Phillips asks on his blog about whether errors — factual, style, grammatical, spelling — are more prevalent in the paper now than they used to be. He points to a blog post at The Guardian, which argues that spelling particularly was much worse back in the days before spellcheck and desktop publishing.
I can’t really offer an opinion on whether the quality has gone up or down over the long term, since (a) I’m only in my 20s and (b) I work as a copy editor and my opinion is necessarily biased.
But as a copy editor, I’ll note that, unfortunately, proofreading is the least important of our functions. Pages must be laid out, headlines, decks, cutlines and other “display type” must be written, and photos must be inserted. But if the page is mostly wire copy (which has been thoroughly edited by the wire service), sometimes it might get typeset (at least for the first edition) without getting properly proofread. An editor might ask another to just look at headlines and large type because there’s no time for a full readthrough (this is especially true in sports, where a game will finish at 10pm, the article has to be written by 10:20pm and the page must be typeset by 10:40pm, a seemingly impossible task that’s done on a near-daily basis).
With the recent round of buyouts cutting staff in every section, one of the copy editing positions eliminated was specifically responsible for checking pages for obvious mistakes before they were typeset. Now that job falls on the editor who laid out the page, or the managing night editor. And it works, most of the time.
Was that a mistake? Should a dedicated proofreader be hired? Should there be more copy editors to double-check each other’s work? And if so, what positions should be cut to make room in the budget for new staff?
Or, put another way, would you be willing to pay a dollar or two more a month for your subscription if it meant half the number of typos you see now?
Toronto Star owner TorStar has announced it is cutting 160 jobs (of which 122 are apparently voluntary buyouts) most of which involve its Internet operation including 10 people at a redundant Internet division. No word on what they plan to replace it with, though I imagine they’ll try replacing it with outsourced work that involve either non-journalist Internet professionals or non-unionized cheap labour.
Buried in that story is an announcement from The Gazette’s union, the Montreal Newspaper Guild (of which I am a member), which says the paper is gutting its Reader Sales and Service department (the people who deal with subscriptions), replacing 46 union jobs by centralizing operations chain-wide in Winnipeg. The union is fighting the move, which it says violates a clause in the collective agreement that prohibits outsourcing jobs.
I don’t envy Andrew Phillips’s job. As editor-in-chief of the Gazette, his involves lots of paperwork, employee management and dealing with various crises. More importantly, though, he’s a public face of the paper, which means he has to respond to everyone’s complaints. And those complaints can get very heated.
On Friday, Andrew (yeah, we call him by his first name, he’s cool like that) stepped into the ultimate torture chamber for a Gazette editor: Tommy Shnurm… Schumra… Tommy’s morning show on CJAD. If you’ve never listened to that station, just imagine all the grumpy old people you know. They’ve all lived here for decades, read the Gazette every day, want those kids off their lawn and think everything was better before. And Andrew Phillips took their questions.
Here’s a quick summary of what was said:
The summary of that last part might not be word-for-word accurate, but it’s the gist of the conversation.
More questions? Ask Andrew directly on his blog.
This morning The Gazette introduced its new Viewpoints web page, which includes some not-good-enough-for-the-paper web-exclusive opinion pieces (the first an anti-tuition rant from McGill student union types) and a link to Editor-in-Chief Andrew Phillips’s Ask the Editor blog (which now has real posts).
The paper devotes its entire op/ed page today to a massive guide to the website, for those readers too Internet illiterate to navigate a web page properly.
The web page still needs a bit of work (some links aren’t working yet and I caught a lorem ipsum on one page), but it’s a step in the right direction.
One less sexy change which readers will appreciate is a new layout for the editorials and letters page. The change is simple: instead of putting the Aislin cartoon above the letters, it will go above the editorials. That will mean letters take up a full half of the page, and there will be two editorials a day instead of three (a number I always thought to be a bit too much if you want to make profound statements with each one). The immediate result of this is that the paper will be able to print longer letters (take, for example, this one) instead of hacking everyone’s arguments down to bite-size 35-word paragraphs.
(Full disclosure: I’m a copy editor at The Gazette, but I didn’t edit the op/ed pages, so don’t blame me if you found a typo there or you think your letter was badly edited)
WestIslandGazette.com, The Gazette’s “hyper-local” website serving West Island and western off-island communities, officially launches today. Page A2 in today’s paper has an article from editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips discussing the new site.
The site is pretty well unchanged since last time I mentioned it, except it has fewer bugs and more updated stories. (No changes based on Craig Silverman’s comments, for example.)
Phillips’s article also mentions upcoming changes to the editorial page, which will reduce space given to editorials and increase space given to letters to the editor (a change I think most people will welcome). There will also be more web-only opinion content, and Phillips’s blog, which I mentioned last week. The changes all go live on Monday.
Andrew Phillips, The Gazette’s editor-in-chief, is kicking the tires on a new blog in which he’ll discuss the behind-the-scenes inner workings of the newspaper and cry over wax poetically about the current status of the newspaper industry. Look for real posts at Ask the Editor starting soon.
What would you like to hear from the editor-in-chief of a major metropolitan daily newspaper?
It’s that time of year again when the National Newspaper Awards sends out a press release with a list of nominees, and each newspaper writes about what they’ve been nominated for.
The Globe and Mail far and away leads the pack with 15 nominations in various categories (including a sweep of the international reporting category), more than the entire Canwest chain combined. Following it is the Toronto Star with 8 nominations, La Presse and the Citizen with 6 each, and then the leftovers.
The Toronto National Post has only two nominations.
Here’s how Montreal did:
Also of local note, Globe photographer Charla Jones, nominated in the Feature Photography category for photos she took of Leonard Cohen in Montreal as part of this audio slideshow.
I’m still waiting for my NNA for my tireless reporting about local activities and blogs.
I was sworn to secrecy, but Roberto let the cat out of the bag so he can take the flack if it’s still supposed to be a secret.
The Gazette has been working on a West Island portal (called “West Island +” though its address is westislandgazette.com), a mix of newspaper stories and user-submitted content that pretty much fits that “hyper-local” mold that everyone’s talking about these days.
Its key feature is that stories are categorized based on location, allowing you to search for all things that take place in Pierrefonds (for example). The locations fall pretty well along the same borders as the former municipalities (though the 40 people who live in Ile Dorval might get ticked off at being lumped in with the bigger city). It also includes Ile Perrot and Vaudreuil-Dorion/St. Lazare/Hudson, which are also included in the Gazette’s West Island delivery area.
The site is still not quite ready for its official launch, which is expected later this month.
Thoughts?
I think there are a lot of good things about it, and a lot that can be improved (it’s a bit wide for me, forcing a horizontal scroll bar for those dozen or so pixels off the side).
The big question, of course, is whether user-generated content will turn this into the online destination for thousands of West Islanders, or whether the signal-to-noise ratio will be too low for people to wade through it all.
There’s only one way to find out.
UPDATE: Craig Silverman, a freelancer and blogger, takes issue with the terms of service, which he accuses of “bad faith” because it demands you waive moral rights (i.e. the right not to have your work distorted to say the opposite of what you mean, or the right to not have your name and image used to endorse a product without your permission), it demands free reign to publish and sell your content to others (“in perpetuity throughout the world”) and it demands that you waive the right to sue them for defamation or anything else no matter what they do to you.
It’s the kind of clauses you’ll find on just about any big corporate website, whose administrators throw it on there without thinking about it (or even probably reading it). But that doesn’t make it right.
The Journal de Montréal’s Benoît Aubin took a shot at my dear Gazette last week for its big feature taste test between Hamilton and Montreal bagels. (Via Steve Proulx)
The Gazette, you’ll recall, had taken the Journal to task for its “exposé” on businesses that dare to hire anglophones, calling it bad journalism. (I still think the fast food thing was worse.)
Needless to say, the dual-blind taste tests (which involved flying bagels from one city to the other to maintain freshness) ended in Montreal’s favour, and the city is now 3-0 in Gazette bagel taste tests. Hamilton is licking its wounds, or at least it will be once its Chamber of Commerce CEO realizes that coming in second in a two-man race isn’t “like getting the silver medal in the Olympics.”
Of course, I might point out that this had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with naming. But trademark lawyer battles aren’t as interesting as blind taste tests I guess.
So now you can sleep tight, confident in the fact that the best place to get a Montreal-style bagel is Montreal.
Now what about this “Montreal-style” steak spice mix?
Oh, and if you’re captivated by pointless newspaper gimmicks like I am, be sure to check out the most boring video ever made, featuring the Hamilton Spectator’s taste test and some bad pronunciations of “assuage” and “St. Viateur”.
For those who missed it, Jack Todd’s first column as a freelancer came out this morning. You’ll recall he left his job as a full-time columnist in January with a sack full of buyout cash.
Now he’ll be writing a weekly column on Mondays, which will be on serious sports issues (compared to his more juvenile Monday Morning Quarterback).
His first such column praises Canadiens GM Bob Gainey over this week’s trade of Cristobal Huet and the non-trade for prize player Marian Hossa.
La Presse: According to Michel Leblanc, an agreement in principle has been reached between the union and employer, which will remove the disparity between newspaper journalists and online journalists, and would bring back the blogs that were suspended in September, including that of Tristan Péloquin (remember him?). No word yet from official sources. Patrick Lagacé confirms, saying there will be a general assembly on March 19 for union members to approve the deal.
Le Journal de Montréal: Steve Proulx quotes Le Trente that a strike (or lockout?) is on the horizon, because the manager-to-employee ratio is high. JdM employees are paid generously (so much so that my colleagues were shocked to hear pay rates for equivalent jobs there), and Quebecor might look toward building on the “success” of the Journal de Québec. (See some analysis by Julien Brault) (UPDATE March 5: Proulx has an update based on statements from some anonymous sources within the Journal)
Le Journal de Québec: Tomorrow, the 10-month-old lockout/strike will set a new record for a labour dispute at a French-language Canadian newspaper, eclipsing the previous record set by Le Soleil in 1977. (The irony, of course, is that the Journal itself owes much of its early success to that very dispute.) Mario Asselin is starting to lose his zeal for the fight.
The Gazette: Also management-heavy in preparation for new contract negotiations this spring, the paper has decided to lay off 46 employees in its Reader Sales and Service department, transferring call centre operations to a centralized centre in Winnipeg as of May 30. The union is fighting the move, calling it a violation of a contract clause against outsourcing. (UPDATE March 5: The layoffs have been put on hold while arbitrators sort out the union issue.)
The so-called Electronic Rights Defence Committee, a group of former Gazette freelance writers, finally had its day in court this week to seek class-action status for a lawsuit against the newspaper over online rights to their content.
The lawsuit, launched in 1997, was actually filed against Southam, which owned The Gazette at the time. That’s how old it is. Besides freely reprinting writers’ stories on the Canada.com website, the lawsuit takes issue with Canwest-owned Infomart, which sells archived articles individually or as a group, without giving a cut to the writer.
Precedent exists in the case, thanks to a woman named Heather Robertson. She sued the Globe and Mail over electronic archival and won a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
The hearing continues today, in Room 16.01 of the Palais de Justice, starting at 9:15am.
For more information, check out the blogs of ERDC members Mary Soderstrom and Jack Ruttan (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3). (UPDATE: And Craig Silverman.)
(Full disclosure: I’m both a freelancer for and an employee of The Gazette currently. I don’t take a position here on the merits of this lawsuit.)
I just learned from Kate that the Irish media is all over the McKibbin’s story.
Now, I don’t want to accuse the Independent and its writer Jerome Reilly of plagiarism, but:
From Reilly’s story at independent.ie on Sunday:
“C’est ridicule, plus que ca, c’est stupide,” said Stephane Lajoie-Plante, who said he was a Quebec nationalist with some Irish ancestry.
“These signs aren’t outside where everyone can see them. They aren’t promoting English. If the Office wants to pick a fight with someone, you don’t pick a fight with the Irish over something as silly as this.”
Michael Kenneally, head of Concordia College Irish studies programme, said the signs were “cultural artifacts that spoke to Irish history”.
“They are in no way a commercial proposition, because they are not specifically selling any of these products,” he added.
From Alan Hustak’s Gazette’s story on Friday:
“C’est ridicule, plus que ça, c’est stupide,” said Stéphane Lajoie-Plante, who said he was a Quebec nationalist with some Irish ancestry.
“These signs aren’t outside where everyone can see them. They aren’t promoting English. If the Office wants to pick a fight with someone, you don’t pick a fight with the Irish over something as silly as this.”
Michael Kenneally, head of Concordia’s Irish studies program, said the signs are “cultural artifacts that speak to Irish history.”
“They are in no way a commercial proposition, because they are not specifically selling any of these products,” he added.
Reilly doesn’t mention The Gazette once in his story as a source.
Got the A8 promo all to myself today. Tomorrow’s paper will have an article about brick-and-mortar businesses who don’t follow netiquette as well as they should, an expansion and analysis based on my “not above outright spam” series.
Tomorrow’s Gazette: You know you want to pick it up now.