By John McGrath

Rem Rieder has a piece in the American Journalism Review responding to all those who have attacked the media's coverage of the recent Presidential campaign. So to Mark Halperin, who recently charged that the media's coverage of the election was "disgusting" and the worst since the Iraq War (!), this one's for you. Try not to slip with all that blood on the floor:

Not that Obama got a pass. It's hard to remember, but for months no one gave him a shot; the media consensus was that Hillary was a slam dunk for the nomination. At one point during the primary season, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright got so much time on cable you'd have thought he was a missing blonde in Aruba. When Clinton was cleaning Obama's clock in the second half of the primary season, much was written about Obama's inability to "close the deal" and his difficulty winning votes in blue-collar America.

And after the Republican National Convention, at the height of Sarahmania -- speaking of the swooning media -- the narrative was that the selection of Sarah Palin was a stroke of genius and that Obama had lost the Big Mo...

"Citizen Kane" no doubt got much more positive coverage than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua." My beloved Phillies got plenty of good ink when they won the World Series this year. All the years they failed to qualify for the playoffs, not so much.

The truth is, the Obama campaign was well-organized, disciplined, virtually error-free. Obama was an inspiring candidate to many, a dazzling public speaker with an inspiring storyline.

The McCain campaign, in contrast, was a train wreck...

Some of this is arguable, I suppose. Who, after all, gets to decide what constitutes an error-free campaign? In any case, I doubt Rieder will convince those who, like Halperin, insist that the bias was palpable. While I don't doubt that many journalists were, in fact, caught up in the history of the moment, that's not because they're biased. It's because the moment was historic. Nobody was treating Obama with kid's gloves, least of all during the primary. If McCain's campaign couldn't get the press to focus on Rezko/Ayers/Wright, it's not because they were biased, it's because by the time of the general election, they weren't news anymore. Which, unless I miss my guess, is why we're all here right?

Posted by RRJ at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By John McGrath

Politico fesses up to messing up. Good to see: climate skepticism is so 1994.

Here's where we slipped: The headline overstated what was in the story. That's a chronic problem in the industry that might have been mitigated if the article had plainly stated its narrow intent, which it didn't. It also should have included the challenges to the cited scientific data.

Politico could have moved up the quotes from global warming advocates to provide a more balanced tone to the piece -- although it's not like a reader had to plow through dozens of inches to get to them.

To boot, they run a story titled "Scientists: Earth is still heating up". Thanks for the update, folks.

Posted by RRJ at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Carolyn Morris

Nevermind all those journalists who screamed bloody murder in the Levant/Steyn cases on how hate speech laws interfere with freedom of expression for material published in a newspaper and a magazine... now students at Queen's University are being monitored when they talk in the halls.

"The Kingston university has hired student facilitators to step in when they overhear homophobic slurs, remarks bashing women or racially tinged insults, along with an array of other language that could be deemed offensive."

Um, Big Brother? Hello.

Posted by RRJ at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

By John McGrath

This month, Toronto Life has a cover story that has revived the controversy over the death of Aqsa Parvez. Margaret Wente comes to TL's defense, claiming that the phrase honour killing is accurate, not racist. I agree, but that's not the only problem with the article.

The problem, for me, is that the article is much better and bigger than simply talking about the issue of an alleged "honour killing". Indeed, the article does such a good job giving us a view of Aqsa Parvez' life that when we briefly talk about her murder, the accusation of an honour killing seems less like an exploration of the tension between immigrant parents and their children, and more like a hit-and-run.

The other problem is that Aqsa Parvez almost certainly isn't Toronto's first honour killing, something that I think deserves a bit of thought. 5 minutes with Lexis-Nexis provides us with, for example, the story of Kalaranie Thambu Kesavan, who was beaten to death by her husband in their Scarborough apartment in February 2001. Kalaranie's husband discovered she had been seen outside of their home with a male, platonic friend of hers. After beating her to death, he threw her body off their balcony in an attempt to conceal her killing as a suicide. He pled guilty to the charge of second-degree murder in 2002. Kalaranie was 31 years old when she died.

The point of this example isn't to transfer the dubious title of "Canada's First Honour Killing(tm)" from a Pakistani-Canadian Muslim to a Tamil-Canadian Hindu. The point is to add complexity to journalism's natural tendency to simplify. Consider that Christians outnumber Muslims and Hindus in Canada by factors of 38:1 and 77:1, respectively, and you've got to figure that for every Aqsa Parvez and every Kalaranie Kesavan there are quite a few more unnoticed Jane Does out there who have been killed by their husbands, fathers, or brothers for some delusional transgression. Why we're only calling the young Muslim girl's death an honour killing is an exercise left up to the reader.

Posted by RRJ at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By John McGrath

So the new media -- in this case, Politico -- can be just as bone-headedly stupid when it comes to covering climate change as the old media.

Can anyone here tell me when we'll stop seeing this kind of awful, awful work?

Posted by RRJ at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Lora Grady

Advertising Age recently posted a column by Simon Dumenco questioning whether or not the American magazine industry still cares about publishing. Dumenco states that recently-folded magazines like Cottage Living went under as a result of "half-hearted attempts at transitioning brands from print to web."

While it's true that web publishing is a must for magazines these days, Dumenco doesn't seem to get that in order for a magazine to invest in its online properties, it has to borrow from revenue generated by its print publication. If that revenue isn't there, how is a magazine to survive, even just online? Yes, the future of magazines lies in the Internet - but in case you haven't noticed, there's not much revenue being generated from online advertising yet (see my previous post).

For some publications, an online focus today makes much more sense than others. PC Magazine made a smart decision in discontinuing its print product and dedicating its resources to an online-only presence, because their readers are already avid users of the Web. But it isn't such a simple solution for a mag like Cottage Living. I find it very hard to picture my poor 72-year-old grandmother trying to figure out how to even turn on a computer, let alone surf the web for the latest in cottage country.

Posted by RRJ at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Andrew Sullivan, Baron Black of Crossharbour PC, OC, KCSG, has decided that prison isn't for him, or most of his roomies for that matter:

I write to you from a US federal prison. It is far from a country club or even a regimental health spa. I work quite hard but fulfillingly, teaching English and the history of the United States to some of my co-residents. There is practically unlimited access to e-mails and the media and plenty of time for visitors....

The US is now a carceral state that imprisons eight to 12 times more people (2.5m) per capita than the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Japan. US justice has become a command economy based on the avarice of private prison companies, a gigantic prison service industry and politically influential correctional officers' unions that agitate for an unlimited increase in the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences. The entire "war on drugs", by contrast, is a classic illustration of supply-side economics: a trillion taxpayers' dollars squandered and 1m small fry imprisoned at a cost of $50 billion a year; as supply of and demand for illegal drugs have increased, prices have fallen and product quality has improved.

It's amazing how clearly the injustice of the system can be seen when it's a wealthy white man being locked up. For once.

In related news, check out Dafna Linzer's piece in ProPublica about candidates for last-minute pardons from the Bush Administration. Note the absence of Black's name.

Posted by RRJ at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Are laid-off journalists willing to - gasp! - blog if you give them a free account? Given the extent to which "bloggers" and "the Internet"* have become boogeymen in some newsrooms, I'm skeptical. But Anil Dash says his inbox runneth over with applications...

On Monday morning, he had roughly 50 e-mail applications in his inbox, and they have continued to pour in, totaling nearly 300 so far. "It was a bit of a surprise how quickly word got out," Mr. Dash said. "This has struck a nerve."

I would actually be shocked to see journalists take this offer. There's been nothing stopping them from using other free or very-cheap blogging tools before this. Why would you take it now, really? Believe me when I say the pay is worse than your last job.

* Seriously, journalists: stop yelling about/attributing stuff to amorphous unidentified "bloggers" or "the Internet". It's about as honest as Fox News' tactic of leading an accusation with "some people say..."

Posted by RRJ at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By Jacqueline Nelson

I get it. Business magazines are for boys. Boys who, apparently, not only have impotence issues but also short term memory loss. At least, that's what can be gathered from the December 8 issue of Canadian Business that arrived in my mailbox.

This current issue of CB is sporting one of those snappy flaps that folds over half the cover. It looks like part of the cover, but it has a big, juicy ad on it. This particular one is a 7.5 x 5 cm white box with a sky blue Viagra pill practically popping off the page. "Talk to your doctor," it advises. If you lift the faux-cover flap to see the actual cover, the back is another, bigger ad for the same miracle pill.

But that's not all. There are two more full-page ads for Viagra (both exactly the same: an enormous blue pill on a page urging you to "talk to your doctor") sprinkled in the fairly thin book.

Now, Magazines Canada has a rule [PDF] about ads on the cover: "No advertisement may be promoted on the cover of the magazine or included in the editorial table of contents, unless it involves an editorially directed contest, promotion or sponsored one-off editorial extra." But technically, even though it looks like it, the flap isn't actually the cover. Sneaky.

I'm not rushing out to cancel my subscription by any means -- I love the magazine -- but I'm guessing that men who need Viagra do not want to be reminded of it four times while they are either leisure reading or trying to work. I'm also generally annoyed by ads on the cover of magazines -- no matter how clever the staff are at dancing around the rules.

I will concede that with Wish and Gardening Life announcing their imminent closure, maybe I should just pop one and be grateful that the magazines I read have found water wings to keep them afloat during this time of "economic hardship".

Posted by RRJ at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Lora Grady

With nothing else to do on a Sunday night, I ended up watching Dragon's Den on CBC for the first time this week. Despite the cheesy cave-like set and Arlene Dickinson's hair, I found myself getting a good laugh out of some of the ridiculous proposals -- especially one from the London, Ontario-based duo representing LondonTopic.ca.

Editor Ross McDermott was asking the fierce five for $150,000 in investment towards his news site. When the former London Free Press reporter revealed the site had only pulled in $30,000 from advertising revenue over a two-year period, all five Dragons pulled out immediately. I felt a bit sorry for the guy -- he must have been really nervous and wasn't thinking properly -- until I visited the site and saw this:

I'm no Dragon, and I don't have a grey streak in my hair, but this spiel certainly turned me off. And judging by the Letters to the Editor page, I'm not the only one. The pitch comes off resembling something more like a Saturday Night Live skit than a serious business proposal. Note to McDermott: you're selling valuable ad space, not used cars.

Posted by RRJ at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Daniel Kaszor

I was going to write this blog entry on the passing of Studs Terkel (though you really should listen to last week's episode of This American Life and hear some great stuff from Terkel), but the surprise collapse of U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Thursday night drew my attention away.

What caught me was not the specifics of the event, but that Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo -- one of the best political blogs in the US -- seems to be consistently updating with the most up to date information about the story in progress.

I won't comment on the actually collapse of Mukasey (I'm sure any info that I have will be out of date by the time this gets posted), but on Marshall's speed at reporting the news. He wasn't just recapping other news sources; he was on top of the news with his own original reporting.

One of the main reasons people state for the longevity of newspapers is that online sources get most of their content culled from traditional media. However, with more Josh Marshalls in the world this argument may not hold up for much longer.

Posted by RRJ at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By Greg Harris

The Grey Cup, which takes place on Sunday, November 23rd, is Canadian Football's biggest event, and draws more media coverage than any other game during the Canadian Football League season.  While not comparable to the Super Bowl -- where reporters have famously asked such stupid questions as "How long have you been a black quarterback?" and "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"--the Grey Cup manages to capture the Canadian public's attention for at least a day, and as much as a week for us CFL die-hards.

As the CFL Editor for MOP Squad Sports, I have been following the Grey Cup coverage quite closely. I've also been posting as many Canadian Press wire stories as I can find about my hometown Calgary Stampeders, who will be representing the Western Division in the big game.  Today was the official news conference where coaches from both teams met with the media, and in his coverage of the event, CP writer Dan Ralph had this to say:

But if there's a knock against Hufnagel it's that he doesn't possess the gift of the gab. It's not that he doesn't make himself accessible or is difficult to work with, actually, quite the opposite. However, in his dealings with reporters Hufnagel comes off being very vanilla - or plain - and seems to be either reluctant or uncomfortable with revealing a side of his personality."

This struck me as an odd thing for a reporter to write in a story for a wire service. But as I continued to read Ralph's article,I came across an exchange where Stampeders head coach John Hufnagel rebuked a reporter's question about letting his players have sex before the Grey Cup. "What's your name?" Hufnagel asked the reporter asking the question. "I'm too busy."

Although Ralph doesn't identify the reporter who asked the question, I can recall a CP story from last year's game asking the same thing. In fact, I was even able to find it on MOP Squad. It seems to me that Ralph didn't appreciate Hufnagel's reaction to his question, and decided to lash out at him in a wire story sent to news organizations across the country.  While dealing with the media is part of a professional coach's job, it does not affect his coaching ability on the field. Reporters from the sports arena and beyond have asked questions that didn't sit well with their subjects at one point or another.  I know I have.  But in writing for The Canadian Press, Ralph's editorial comments about Hufnagel based on his response to the sex question were definitely out of place.

Posted by RRJ at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By John McGrath

The reason I read blogs: Atrios gave this video clip from MSNBC the headline "Slaughterhouse Live".

I believe it's possible Sarah Palin isn't actually the governor of Alaska at all, but is in fact an advanced form of postmodern performance art.

Posted by RRJ at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Heather Li

Caught wind from a Canadian Magazines blog post that Canadian Business Press (a lobbying group for trade publications) bought the name rights to Magazines University and its associated web property from North Island Publishing Ltd., owner of Masthead that announced its closing late last month. No word yet on whether Masthead, The Magazine About Magazines, has been sold to another publishing house.

This is an interesting turn of events. Mags U is a trade show and professional-development conference that was launched by Masthead in 1992. If you read the article I wrote for RRJ.ca about Masthead's demise, you'll find there are questions about whether Masthead had to close because of a PD-conference competition by one of its former partners, Magazines Canada. CBP saving Mags U means the competition between the two will burn on for at least one more year.

CBP and Rogers Media are not mentioned in my article. But in my research, I did find out that Rogers Media trade publications broke away from CBP and joined with Magazines Canada to participate in its conference, named MagNet. Twelve consumer titles and 28 business media titles are members of Magazines Canada. I also found out that the year MagNet launched, 2007, Rogers greatly discouraged its employees from attending Mags U.

I wonder how Magazines Canada and Rogers are taking the news...

Posted by RRJ at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By John McGrath

PC Magazine to close down print publication, go online-only. Those shiny boxes we all have on our desks betray even the friendliest journalists.

Posted by RRJ at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By John McGrath

Paul Farhi wrote this mock (but not mocking) memo to Jim Romenesko about the surge in newspaper sales after the election of Barack Obama:

Oh, we had so many beautiful years together. Sometimes I made you mad. Often, I moved you. But we always made up.

And then a few years ago you rewarded my loyalty by straying. You went elsewhere. You sought the company of others who, you thought, gave you something that I could not. Fickle and faithless, you went looking for something faster, newer and younger.

Oh, You.

I wondered, incessantly, had I failed you? Was it me?

And then one day this week, You wanted me again. Hungrily. Desperately. You searched everywhere for me. You lined up outside my door, stood in the rain and cold, on the chance that I would be available to You again.

Like any journalist I sympathize, but the sick part of this story is that the obvious conclusion to the jump in sales after Obama's election is that customers aren't buying newspapers for the news anymore -- they're buying them as souvenirs. That means that far from being an indicator of a newspaper resurgence, what we're seeing is just one more signpost on the road to irrelevancy.

On a similarly unpleasant note, Mother Jones has a great photo essay of the dying newsroom at the San Jose Mercury News.

Photo by macieklew used with Creative Commons license.

Posted by RRJ at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By John McGrath

One of Jon Stewart's favourite bits is to clip together all of the times pundits on the various networks have gotten things egregiously wrong. Hey, we all guess wrong once in a while. The problem with some pundits is that they're always wrong, and never seem to face any kind of professional consequence for it. On that note, Paul Wells reacts to speculation of Bill Kristol's future in the op-ed pages of the New York Times:

...what's wrong with Kristol is not that he's conservative. I know no serious commentator who questions the wisdom of keeping a conservative columnist spot at the Times, after William Safire spent 30 years making that spot one of the most important in American journalism. I know of nobody who's suggesting that Kristol be replaced with a liberal.

The problem with Kristol is that he's a dire writer who was wrong at every turn this year; that he made big obvious factual mistakes all the time; that his prose is appalling; that he self-evidently couldn't be arsed to do a serious job with the amazing gift he'd been given. He is an embarrassment, least of all to himself, and most of all to Arthur Sulzberger, who personally selected one of the worst columnists in his newspaper's modern history.

Posted by RRJ at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Claudia Calabro

Last Wednesday, several breaking stories were reported on the same morning: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were over, the US PATRIOT Act had been repealed, and Congress had passed a maximum wage law (15 times the minimum wage and no higher!). The only paper to cover these momentous advances in American domestic and foreign policies was The New York Times. The New York Times Yes Men edition, that is.

Volunteers stood outside of subway stations and newspaper wickets in New York City as well as other large American cities, handing out free copies of The New York Times Special Edition that contained a blazing headline declaring "IRAQ WAR ENDS". New Yorkers, both the gullible and those hip to the scam, seemed elated at the news. Later on in the day the Yes Men, a political performance art collective, issued a statement saying they were behind the stunt. After six months of fundraising and elaborate planning, 1.2 million papers had been published at six different presses. Since the prank produced a tangible, tactile product, perhaps it will go down in history as one of the more famous pranks that the Yes Men has committed since their stunts began gaining wider media coverage several years ago.

Though Igor Vamos and Jacques Servin, two founding members of the Yes Men, have been busy pulling satirical pranks in one way or another since the mid-nineties, the most famous of the Yes Men's acts took place in 2004. One Yes Man disguised as a Dow Chemical Company spokesperson appeared on BBC World News upon the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster and proclaimed that the company had decided to take full responsibility for the tragedy. Not only that, but the company would also embark on a $12 billion plan to compensate the surviving victims. The real Dow Chemical Company later had to admit that they were not in fact planning to do either such thing. It was then that the Yes Men emerged as a powerful yet invisible force, able to creep unnoticed onto the world's stage and metaphorically pie well-deserving baddies right in the face before leaping into the crowd, pulling off their fake moustaches, and becoming faceless once more.

The Yes Men's socially-conscious merrymaking is a refreshing approach to "culture-jamming", which is the act of physically altering traditionally inaccessible outlets like billboards, for example, to scramble or reverse the messages they quite literally support. The term was popularized by cultural critic Mark Dery in the early 1990s but has since been slowly taken over by the increasingly negative, irrelevant, zombie of the activist print world: Adbusters magazine. Rather than selling the idea of anti-corporate pranking to an already captivated audience like Adbusters does, the Yes Men commit pranks that pretend that we live in a better world than we do, in order to expose those in power for their failings and shame them into trying harder to be better.

At least one worker at the Times seemed to miss the point and view Wednesday's prank as targeting the paper, ("We've been all over the Bush administration since day one!" an exasperated fellow whinesin this clip that chronicles reactions to the paper.) However, in the Times' own blog post about the incident, one media expert even goes as far as saying that the Times should be flattered at the decision to be included in the prank.

The Yes Men weren't skewering the Times, they were merely using its esteemed place in society to make a point. Just as the Dow stunt used the BBC as a platform to embarrass the chemical company into admitting that they weren't going to do a damn thing about the mess their then-recently-acquired holding had made, the Yes Men used the Times as a platform to force us into wondering why the real American government hasn't yet ended the war in Iraq. The Yes Men were simply shooting the message, not the messenger. Lucky for President-Elect Obama, the fake paper is dated July 4, 2009, so there's still time to legitimize such a far-fetched dream.

Though it's been seven days since the fake Times hit the streets, plenty of copies are up for grabs on ebay - as long as you're willing to pay upwards of $50 USD. Those of us who are saving our pennies for the impending recession can view the fake copy at www.nytimes-se.com.

Posted by RRJ at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've never understood the obsession about "not negotiating with terrorists/criminals/evildoers/etc." The reality is, and has always been, that police and other law enforcement always negotiate with criminals in order to ensure the safe release of hostages when they think it's possible to do so. This is, in my books, neither good nor bad, it just is. But some reporters seem to think that the possible release of two senior Taliban prisoners to secure CBC reporter Melissa Fung's release constitutes "bend[ing] our principles nakedly in a way that we once saw as shameful."

Look, I'd prefer we never have to negotiate with kidnappers and criminals either. But then, I'd really prefer that people never be kidnapped in the first place. The reality is -- and this goes double in a place like Afghanistan -- there's only so much we can do. Stamping our feet and bemoaning the things we need to do to bring people home safe seems rather beside the point.

One final note: I'd wager there's never been a point in history where acceding to a kidnapper's demands, or even a terrorist's, was simply out of the question. The CBC famously read out the FLQ's manifesto during the October Crisis. Hell, the Lindbergh's tried to negotiate the release of their baby. We don't like it, but we do it, and we don't gain anything by pretending we don't.

Posted by RRJ at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By Kate Grainger

After Obama's win was announced Tuesday night ABC reporter Steve Osunsami got a little choked up on air.

This display of emotion was nothing out of the ordinary for the night. In fact there was footage of celebrations all over the world with people crying and cheering and just celebrating what they hope will be a new America. Some killjoys think there's a problem with Osunsami's display of emotion. He's a journalist. A journalist, in many people's opinion, is supposed to remain objective in everything that they report on. They're supposed to tell us the facts and not let their opinions and biases cloud their report.

I can't imagine how a journalist is supposed to suppress something that pours out of them so naturally. If they are so strongly affected by an event they are reporting on they can't help but express how they're feeling. Barbara Walters argued in favour of Osunsami, saying that he only broke down after the announcement; therefore he wasn't trying to persuade the viewers into voting a certain way it was a raw emotion that he couldn't hide. "This was a man who felt something deeply that night and yes he was a journalist but he also was a person. And I think to say 'oh well he shouldn't have done it,' is just absurd," said Walters on the Nov. 6 edition of The View.

This wasn't the first case of a journalist showing emotion on air, and I would bet that it won't be the last either.

Posted by RRJ at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Andrew Wallace

With U.S. presidential election looming on the horizon, Slate media critic Jack Shafer recently pointed out that the liberal press corps is setting itself up for a bad case of performance anxiety.

If Obama wins, these scribes know that they'll be facing the toughest assignment of their careers. They've all oversubscribed to the notion that Obama's candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering, so they can't file garden-variety pieces about the "winds of change" blowing through Washington. They're convinced that not only the whole world will be reading but that historians will be drawing on their words. Will what I write be worthy of this moment in time? they're asking themselves. It's a perfect prescription for performance anxiety.

Shafer lumps a venerable bunch of high-profile writers into this group, poking fun at the likes of the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, The New York Times' Nicholas D. Kristof and Slate's own Jacob Weisberg. He derives the most pleasure from Newsweek's Jonathan Alter though, whom he labels the head cheerleader for Team Obama. Shafer claims Alter has an "erection of the heart" when it comes to Obama, importing Lester Bangs' amusing description of his response to the first time he saw Elvis live in concert.

Of course, Shafer's column is mostly just tongue-in-cheek ribbing (the article is titled "Countdown to the Obama Rapture"). Yet he does have a point. Chances are, the commentariat won't feel any performance anxiety; but their post-election coverage may very well end up being anti-climactic.

Photo by sdaw56 used with Creative Commons license.

Posted by RRJ at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've said before that my favourite form of political journalism is the morning-after-recriminations kind. It's cruel and unusual but kind of fun to watch a losing side tear itself apart for a while. With that in mind, you should all take a peek at Newsweek's excellent series on the just-concluded American Presidential campaign.

Among the highlights are that Gov. Sarah Palin spent even more on clothes than the campaign has previously admitted, that Sen. John McCain rarely spoke with her during the campaign, and that every once in a while, Barack Obama does in fact drop the F-bomb. (In this case, while describing his experience in early debates.)

There's much, much more there for people to chew on, and I'd reccomend checking out the story online. I will actually be buying the issue to get the whole story at once.

It might seem like kicking someone when they're down, but this Fox News video has been passed around quite a bit lately, and I think I'd be remiss if I didn't at least bring it to people's attention:

Posted by RRJ at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Heather Li has a new article for the Ryerson Review of Journalism online about Masthead magazine's sad demise:

On Thursday October 23, Doug Bennet, publisher of Masthead, asked editor Marco Ursi, to meet him in the lunchroom. He told Ursi that, after 21 years in print, the November/December 2008 issue of the magazine would be its last.

"Oh fuck," said Ursi, who had been editor for just over a year.

"Yeah.... Oh fuck," repeated Bennet, the magazine's founding editor and a partner at North Island Publishing Ltd.

Ursi was shocked, but understood the business decision and wasn't really surprised because he knew the magazine struggled financially -- the advertising base, dominated by printing companies, has always been small, and Masthead had only 2,800 subscribers.

But weak revenues and a small circulation may not have been the only reasons behind the closure, as it so often was when Masthead covered the demise of a magazine.

Read Heather's entire article here.

Posted by RRJ at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I'm watching the US election on CNN, and Jessica Yellin appears via hologram -- hologram! -- to converse with Wolf Blitzer. Yellin in Chicago, Blitzer wherever he was.

Best moment: Yellin describing herself as the inheritor of Princess Leia. Sorry, but as a child of Star Wars, that just won CNN my eyes for the evening.

Bruce Sterling (I believe) once said: You live in the future -- catch up!

In truth, it looked kind of cheesy. But election night should be fun as well as civic, right?

Posted by RRJ at 07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Ontario Press Council has decided that the Niagara Falls Review failed to provide fair and full coverage of a pair of sexual abuse trials. Rachel Schug of Niagara Falls complained to the OPC that the Review had reported damning evidence at her husband's trial without similarly reporting evidence of her husband's innocence. (Dana Schug has been acquitted of all charges against him.)

But here's where it gets odd, or at least blog-worthy. The Review offered the following defense of it's slanted reporting:

The Review responded that because criminal trials are becoming longer and more complex, "it would be inappropriate for the Ontario Press Council to hold newspapers to a standard of reporting that would oblige them to attend every day and follow every development over a period of years."

The newspaper also cited the longstanding prohibition against recording devices in courtrooms and lack of timely court transcripts as reasons why higher standards of reporting "are not realistically achievable".

Yes, reporting can be hard work. Yes, covering a criminal trial is time-consuming. But nobody is holding a gun to our heads and making us do this. (Indeed, some days I think my mother would have been much happier if I'd chosen a different line of work...) And reporters know what the standard of conduct is when we sign up for the gig.

Posted by RRJ at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Heather Li

Don Gibb, celebrated his retirement at a dinner at the Delta Chelsea Hotel in downtown Toronto Saturday night after serving 20 years at the London Free Press and another 20 as a Ryerson journalism teacher.

Gibb is notorious for poor Karaoke singing, a bald head, an unhealthy aversion to all technological advancements (including cell phones and debit cards), and never knowing (or wanting) to shut up. But his positive, encouraging energy about the news biz made him beloved by the journalism students he taught, and even the ones he didn't. Ryerson faculty, London neighbours and previous co-workers, and former students made speeches throughout the night to reminisce about and honour Gibb.

In a video tribute, one student talked about how in first-year reporting class, Gibb stressed how important it is to take a 360-look when on the scene for a story. You never know what you may find that could take your everyday article to the next level.

All of us at Ryerson wish Gibb well in this next phase of his life. But none of us really believe him. His last day at Ryerson was August 26th, but he's been routinely showing up at the school since then.

Posted by RRJ at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the November issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan offers an interesting and impassioned defence of blogging. His essay, entitled "Why I Blog" in an homage to George Orwell's famous 1946 treatise "Why I Write," makes a compelling case for the blogosphere's place in the current media landscape and even goes as far as to say that it heralds "a golden age of journalism."

There are a numbers of reasons that Sullivan is so smitten by the blog. He says blogging is to writing "what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud." He praises the blogosphere for its constancy, immediacy and the more intimate connection between the writer, reader and text, calling the relationship one of "friendship."

Although his praise is often inflated and at times even hyperbolic, Sullivan still recognizes the blog's shortcomings. While he says the "relative truth" the blogosphere provides is noteworthy, he admits it also leaves something to be desired:

If all this sounds postmodern, that's because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism; a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.

But this is old hat. What makes Sullvan's essay significant is that he lays out a nice argument for how blogging and traditional reporting can peacefully co-exist. For Sullivan, both ardent blogger and respected journalist, the "triumphant notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious."

The point is to reconcile the two media, not cast them in opposition to one another. Both forms are parties to a greater conversation and Sullivan argues that's a good thing:

The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television's dominance, had seemed on the wane.

Posted by RRJ at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)