Tag Archives: The Gazette

| Media

More changes at The Gazette

You might think that my coming back to work there would be the biggest news at The Gazette this week, and it is, but there are a few other things happening too as the paper changes, shifts its focus from print to online, and manages with the impact of losing over a dozen staff to buyouts.

Among changes that directly affect readers:

An updated list of departing and status-changing columnists appears below. The latest edition is Gaetan Charlebois, whose final Chaud Show column was last weekend.

Continue reading →

| Navel-gazing

My new job

A few weeks ago, I got an email from my old boss at The Gazette, asking if I’d be interested in filling in for a few weeks on the copy desk. Two of their copy editors just had a baby and are on parental leave. So I accepted a part-time contract until the end of March, which will see me writing headlines, editing copy and doing layout a couple of days a week. It will also see me having a real go-to-the-office job for the first time in over a year.

Sunday evening was my first shift, on the sports desk (if you noticed any errors in Monday’s sports section, feel free to blame me). Because I had worked as a copy editor there before, I didn’t need any training. But in the year I’ve been gone, they’ve replaced their computers (they now have awesome PowerMac G5 machines with two flat-panel monitors), redistributed tasks, dropped a major wire service, and put a much heavier focus on online tie-ins.

But as much as the job provides me a way to reconnect with old coworkers and bring in a bit more money, it also presents an unavoidable conflict of interest when it comes to my blog. Though I have always tried to be fair in my criticisms of local media (including The Gazette), I can’t ignore the conflict inherent in writing about one’s employer.

I intend to keep blogging about local media issues (on my own time), but so long as I’m employed I’ll keep from writing opinions about The Gazette and Canwest, positive or negative. Instead, I’ll bring the news to you and let you form your own opinions.

I also won’t be writing about company secrets or office gossip here (mostly to avoid people having to say “please don’t write this on your blog” after every sentence). Any behind-the-scenes stories will be relatively tame, like gloating about the pun-tastic headlines I come up with.

Just to be clear, this is my decision and in no way even suggested by The Gazette or Canwest. In fact, despite knowing about my blog (and visiting it regularly), The Gazette has never attempted to complain or interfere with my blogging, even when I’ve been critical of the paper. The only time it became an issue (when a source refused to talk to me because I’d made sarcastic comments in a post), the paper actually came to my defence.

So in the interests of full disclosure, that’s what’s going on.

| Fun, Media

Newspaper puzzles are taken very seriously

One of the things that surprised me talking to people about newspapers is how many of them see the crossword as its most important part. Take out the news, sports, classified, even the front page flag and they’ll live with it. But touch their New York Times crossword and there’s hell to pay.

The Gazette is considering adding Deducto to its puzzles page. Deducto is a symbol-based deductive reasoning puzzle much like Sudoku, but its rules make little sense and there’s no challenge to it.

Initial response from select readers about the idea has so far been skewed negative. They’re happy with their crossword (or their Sudoku), and this puzzle’s instructions seem too complicated and uninteresting to bother learning.

Feel free to make your jokes here: Gazette readers can’t do deductive reasoning; Gazette readers can’t read; Gazette readers are allergic to new ideas.

Would you like to see this game added to your newspaper? It’s a moot point with me since I get my paper electronically and I’m not about to write on my screen.

UPDATE (March 25): The Gazette has apparently scrapped the idea after receiving a very unenthusiastic response (PDF).

| Media, Montreal

7,000 words and still the story is unfinished

J-Source has a short article by The Gazette’s Sue Montgomery about the story she wrote on Dawson College shooter Kimveer Gill. Despite it weighing in at 7,000 words and being nominated for an award, she considers it incomplete. Gill’s father and brothers wouldn’t speak to her (only his mother did), and the coroner hasn’t released its report about Gill’s death, which would have answered some lingering questions about how exactly he died:

Gill’s mother says her son had a bullet wound on his arm (where the police shot him) and one in the back of his head, leading her to suspect the police may have killed him. The police say Gill shot himself by placing a gun to his chin, yet Parvinder Gill says his face was intact when they prepared him for burial. What really happened? Why can we not see the surveillance camera tapes from inside the school that day? And why, if it was a crime scene, did the police drag Gill’s body outside to lie in the rain?

| Media, Opinion

Newspaper editors can never please everyone

I love it when the radical pundits of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict complain to the news media about their coverage.

A letter last week in the Gazette complains about a headline used on a story about two Israelis and two Palestinians dying: “Two Israelis, two Palestinians killed in West Bank clash.” You’ll note the article was published more than three weeks before the letter from Mike Fegelman of Honest Reporting Canada, an organization whose name sounds like they value fairness, but concentrates its efforts solely on trying to influence news coverage to make it more favourable to Israel.

The complaint in this particular case was that the headline did not make clear that the Palestinians instigated the attack and were killed in self-defence by the Israeli soldiers.

The idea that headlines should tell the whole story is a common complaint against newspapers. But headlines can’t tell the whole story by virtue of the lack of space available. If they could tell the whole story, there wouldn’t be articles underneath them.

But still, how about I suggest a headline The Gazette should have used for this brief article:

Two hero Israeli soldiers massacred by evil satanic terrorist Palestinian homicide killers in unprovoked cowardly attack, return fire in self-defence before tragically succumbing to their injuries; attackers also die in the fighting, ridding the world of two useless pieces of enemy scum

Now, that headline is a bit longer than the previous one, but it would more honestly tell the story, no?

Screw the court of law

The other complaint about The Gazette’s editing comes from both Honest Reporting and The Suburban, “Quebec’s largest English newspaper” (huh?). Both take issue with the paper’s removal of the adjective “terrorist” to describe attacks in a CanWest News Service news article.

The reason this “heavy-handed editing” (the removal of two words) happened is obvious: Despite its very public support of Israel, CanWest secretly employs Palestinian terrorist-sympathizing editors at The Gazette, who sneak into articles and try their best to skew the news against Israel.

The alternative explanation, that describing something as “terrorist” is a moral judgment and not a journalistic one (and if all Palestinian attacks are somehow by definition terrorist attacks, why do we need to add the word in the first place?) is too ludicrous to consider.

What gets me most about this argument is that it’s entirely academic in nature. Nobody seriously suggests that Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians are not terrorist in nature. Whether or not you believe the attacks are justified, or whether new Israeli settlements are justified, the nature of the attacks are very clear. It’s like arguing over whether we should call it murder when we say that a man shot his wife.

But the fact that people get so worked up over the use or non-use of a single word shows just how seriously people take this conflict and its most important front: the battle for public opinion.

| Media, Montreal, Opinion, Slow News Day

The boring bagel brouhaha

Everyone’s gotten into a tiff over Hamilton (a small Ontario town, I think Sheila Copps came from there) selling what they call a “Montreal-style bagel.” Problem is it’s not a Montreal-style bagel. It’s got an icing sugar coating, which Montreal bagels don’t have.

Seeing an opportunity to make themselves relevant to the world, the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce has proposed a blind taste test so that we can tell which is the better bagel. The Gazette has accepted the challenge, confident that Montreal bagels will prevail.

There’s three problems with this:

  1. We’ve been through this before. A year ago, The Gazette and the Toronto National Post had a blind taste test of bagels by their staffers. Montreal won, and the Post ate crow. Why do we need to repeat this experiment with a lesser city?
  2. The entire point of the controversy was not, as in the Toronto case, that the other city claimed their bagels were better than ours. The problem is that they’re labelling something a “Montreal-style bagel” when it’s not. Call it a “Hamilton-style bagel” and the controversy is over. Everyone will accept its inferiority.
  3. How do you do a blind taste test for this? One is coated with sugar, the other is not. Even the most undeveloped tastebuds will quickly tell the difference and be able to detect which group the bagel belongs to. And if the Hamilton bagels are stripped of their sugar coating, then we forget the fact that the sugar icing is the point of the controversy in the first place.
  4. Bagels are meant to be served fresh. There’s simply no logical way to do blind taste tests of fresh bagels from two different cities simultaneously. The best they could do is set themselves up in Toronto or Kingston and have bagels rushed down on trains or planes. They’d still be a few hours old at that point. Of course, they’re not going to go that far for a friendly experiment like this, so either one set of bagels is going to be fresher than the other, or everyone is going to be eating stale bagels.

Why are we wasting the time of so many journalists repeating something we’ve already done, that has no journalistic value and above all doesn’t make any sense?

UPDATE: On Sunday, the paper prints this article, which is a cut-and-paste (typos and all) of this discussion forum, complete with thoughtless opinion from whoever had a minute of free time that day and wanted to rant.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

Good riddance, vaporware column

The Gazette has dropped Mark Stachiew’s Canwest-syndicated NETworthy column, which every week lists a bunch of websites to visit. His last column was this past Monday. It’s one in a sea of columnists who are either leaving outright (Matt Radz, Lisa Fitterman) or who are leaving the paper as employees and sticking around freelance (Jack Todd, Mary Lamey).

In Stachiew’s case, I’ll say: Good riddance.

Stachiew himself seems like a nice guy, but the column is pure shite. Rather than focus on interesting websites that provide useful information, it’s filled with laughably forgettable single-function dot-com websites that sound like they were brought back in time from TechCrunch deadpool posts from six months in the future: meeting schedulers, CV or invoice templates, task managers, bookmark replacements or highly-focuses social networking sites (“It’s like Facebook for X” always prompts me to ask: Why not just use Facebook then?)

In exchange for providing these ridiculously trivial services, the websites try to get you to pay for them after using them for free, through the clichéd limited-time-free-trial, free-for-non-commercial-use or pay-for-advanced-features methods.

It’s clear from the columns that they’re written based not on thorough searches for interesting new websites, but on a random handful of press releases picked out of the inbox from companies who spend more on marketing than creating a product people will be interested in. Some websites are featured in this column before they’re even launched, or are based on the hope that user-generated content will eventually make it worth visiting.

There’s a hunger out there for lists of interesting websites to visit. That’s why people visit Digg or Fark. But these websites are not interesting, and unless the focus of the column changes it’s not good enough to put in a newspaper.

So ends my rant.

| Media, My articles, Video

Should letters to the editor be paid for?

Thursday’s Gazette features some letters to the business editor responding to last week’s inaugural Business Observer section, and particularly my opinion piece about independent video producers being exploited by big media.

One of those letters asks an interesting question (which I jokingly alluded to last week): Should letter writers be paid for their opinions?

You are asking us for our opinion on using Web content with no payment to the producer. Well, how about you guys at the Gazette? Why don’t you pay the author when you publish his opinion, or even a letter to the editor? Writing something for publication doesn’t exactly take only a few minutes of his time. An opinion piece, or letter to the editor can take the author hours of his time.

So let’s be upright about this. When The Gazette (or any publication) publishes anything, there should be automatic payment for the author.

Martin Plant, Montreal

At some point, we have to have a discussion as a society over what line exists between freelance journalism (which should be paid for) and reader interaction (which shouldn’t).

| Media, Opinion

Who mourns for Todd?

Jack Todd 1994-2008

Friday was Jack Todd’s last day at The Gazette as an employee. You’ll recall he took a buyout earlier and is leaving his full-time job to pursue fiction writing. His last act writing this column looking back on his 14 years as a columnist. It talks about his love for the Expos (and his heartbreak at their downfall), his love for boxing, his time at the Olympics, a couple of throw-away references to the Habs (perhaps ironic that the greatest team in hockey didn’t win the Stanley Cup once during Todd’s time here), and his greatest hero Clara Hughes. It ends thusly:

Regrets? Of course I have them. By the dozen. Lost friendships, times when I was too harsh, times when I used bad judgment, times when I should have thought longer and harder about a column.

But I can say with complete honesty that I have always called ’em as I saw ’em: I never backed down out of fear, I never wrote a single line I didn’t believe at the time – and I never tried deliberately to create controversy, although heaven knows, it seemed to follow me around.

Now I’m out of here, although I will be back in a different guise at some point in the future. I will leave you with the words from Ezra Pound’s 81st canto: “What thou lovest well remains,/the rest is dross.”

Peace.

And so it ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. No mention elsewhere in the paper that one of its most recognizable faces was leaving. No note from the publisher, no Aislin cartoon, no big goodbye ad from the marketing department. No notes of support from fellow columnists. Nothing.

Nothing except a single letter, printed in Friday’s paper, urging him to reconsider.

His colleagues at other media have similarly been silent, with the exception of La Presse’s Réjean Tremblay, who says despite their differences he really respects Todd.

I never met Jack Todd personally (sports writers don’t spend a lot of time at the office), though I’ve talked plenty with his son who’s a stand-up (and stand-up-tall) guy. I’ve never much been a fan of the grammatically-challenged MMQB columns. And his occasional comments about U.S. politics (even though I agree with him for the most part there) could have used a bit more thought and a bit less emotion.

But while a lot of people don’t like him (even if they’ve never met him), everyone knows who he is. Nobody ignores him. I, for one, would rather the former fate than the latter.

Besides, Todd is an excellent writer when he wants to be. I’m hopeful the weekly Monday sports column he’ll be writing as a freelancer will bring the better writer out of him.

Perhaps that’s partly why there isn’t much ceremony. He’s not really leaving, he’s just cutting down his hours.

Still, this post is much cooler if we pretend he’s gone forever, so let’s do that.

I will leave you with a link to a story that is iconic of Todd’s career and of those who oppose him: A Patrick Lagacé column (back when he was still at the Journal) printed side-by-side in English and French, explaining how Todd mistranslated one of his earlier columns in a column Todd wrote in The Gazette.

Mistranslating a text in your second language is one thing. Having Patrick Lagacé fill an entire page in a competing publication printing two copies of an article in which he criticizes you for mistranslating a single sentence? That takes talent.

| Business, Navel-gazing

Gazette launches Business Observer tomorrow

The Gazette tomorrow launches a new feature page in its business section called FP Comment Business Observer, a weekly page on Thursdays that will focus on commentary and analysis about the business world.

It will include articles from Gazette staff (including a column by tech columnist Roberto Rocha), academics and businesspeople, as well as some freelance writers like myself:

Business Observer preview

Always fun to get my name in the paper.

The first article by me to appear will deal with independent web video producers and the mainstream media (particularly television) producers who wish to exploit them.

Stay tuned.

| Montreal

Jack Todd among columnists leaving The Gazette

You might remember when The Gazette announced it was cutting staff through attrition — offering buyouts to seasoned full-time editorial staff to reduce it by about 20 people. The good news is that the generous offer worked, and enough people took advantage of it that there won’t be any layoffs.

The bad news is that the paper is losing a lot of seasoned staff, including some well-known columnists.

Jack Todd is the most visible of those names. He writes his goodbye column in the New Year’s Eve edition of his rapid-fire-judgment and grammatically-challenged Monday Morning Quarterback column. He’ll be leaving on Jan. 11 to “concentrate on writing fiction.” Though he won’t be a full-time staffer anymore, he’s expected to stick around doing freelance, and will start a “very different and more serious Monday sports column.”

Other columnists departing the paper within the next few weeks include:

  • Julian Armstrong, food editor
  • Lisa Fitterman, lifestyles columnist (a coincidental departure — she’s been freelance since taking an earlier buyout years ago) also put out a goodbye column this week
  • Mary Lamey, business writer and Homefront columnist
  • Donna Nebenzahl, lifestyles writer and Working columnist
  • Matt Radz, theatre critic

The paper is also losing copy editors, writers, support staff and section managers. It’s unclear how many of them will continue writing freelance and how many will cut ties completely. But at least they all left of their own accord.

| In the news, Media, Montreal

Gazette reporters look back

Nudged deep within hundreds of other 2007 look-backs that are starting to make us go crazy wondering if this forgettable year will ever end are a series of short stories by Gazette reporters about some of the stories they’ve covered this year. Most of them are of the “it’s such an emotional issue it’s hard to stay objective” style, but there are some interesting ones too that I’ll outline in bold below.

They’re posted online in three parts.

Part 1

  • Peggy Curran aboard the CCGS Amundsen: Being objective is hard when you’re living with the people you’re writing about for 10 days in the arctic.
  • Jeff Heinrich at the reasonable accommodation hearings: An anti-semite refuses to give his name to the Jewish anglo reporter. Except Heinrich isn’t Jewish.

Part 2

  • Sue Montgomery on the trial and sentencing of the murderer of gas station attendant Brigitte Serre: How on Earth do you stab someone 72 times and not feel remorse?
  • Michelle Lalonde on asbestos in Thetford Mines: Residents and workers accept health risks inherent in asbestos mining as an occupational hazard.
  • William Marsden on the de la Concorde overpass collapse: I was right, the transport department was wrong about a telltale visible crack which should have warned engineers about an imminent collapse.
  • René Bruemmer on the life of fire victim Joe B.G.: Not every fatality is an anonymous nobody. Asking a simple question can sometimes prompt a long and interesting story.
  • Linda Gyulai on the City of Montreal’s cellphone recycling program: Not every story comes with a press release. Even the ones that make people look good.
  • David Johnston on a story about drug addicts: Sometimes the more interesting story isn’t the one that fits the article.

Part 3