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April 15, 2009

So long, and thanks for all the links

By John McGrath



Well, the launch party was a blast but it means it's that time of the year again. This little blog is calling it a season and going on hiatus until the fall of 2009. The Spring issue of the RRJ should be hitting newsstands soon, so that and the Summer issue will have to tide you over until the blog goes active again.

That's assuming, of course, that there's still a journalism left to review. If current trends continue, it's quite possible that by September the profession will have become something more like this:



Have a great summer everyone.

Posted by RRJ at 03:51 PM | | Comments (0)

April 14, 2009

The Willie Sutton Priniciple

By John McGrath

I must be missing something, right? I read this entire, admittedly data-rich, blog post and come away with a big fat WTF? The argument seems to be that Google owes the newspapers money, but if there's a principle more advanced than a) Google has money; b) the newspaper want money, I can't find it.

Oh, and it turns out that Google controls less news traffic than Yahoo, or even the NYTimes.

I find the idea that Google owes people money for doing them the favour of aggregating their content and making it more accessible to the average Internet user quite mystifying. But then, I never got used to insane monopoly profits as the owner of a newspaper.

(via @mathewi on Twitter)

Posted by RRJ at 03:04 PM | | Comments (0)

Come celebrate the RRJ's launch tonight!

By John McGrath

The RRJ launch party is tonight! Come by and see the new Spring issue, and meet young go-getters dying to get in to the exciting and totally not dying journalism industry!

Invite here.

Posted by RRJ at 11:17 AM | | Comments (0)

April 13, 2009

Hmmm

By John McGrath

Boy, I wonder what that's all about?

Posted by RRJ at 11:51 AM | | Comments (0)

The Ides of April

By Jacqueline Nelson

As CanWest's April 15th cut-off date to make their $30.4-million interest payment to bondholders approaches, Astral Media has announced a second quarter profit of almost $29 million. Ian Greenberg, president and CEO of Astral Media accounts for this success by saying that "the strength and resilience of these second-quarter results are another illustration of the importance of having a diversified and balanced revenue mix under challenging economic conditions."

Behold, a potential bidder in its prosperous habitat! Now if only Astral would stop sending me French job postings for air traffic controllers in Yellowknife.

Posted by RRJ at 08:48 AM | | Comments (0)

April 10, 2009

Probably something men shouldn't get used to

By Molly Doyle

The Globe and Mail calls it a "he-cession." Women are becoming the breadwinners and men are staying home taking care of kids, cleaning the house, and cooking for the family. The recession isn't just affecting jobs for us in the media world, it's affecting men and women everywhere, to the point where men are the ones telling women to take their shoes off because they just washed the floor. According to an article in the Globe, men have lost nearly 180,000 jobs across Canada, increasing the male unemployment rate to 7.5 per cent. Although women ended up losing 15,000 jobs in March, they're able to maintain most of their jobs, while the men experience the downfall. This could be quite a change in the homes of many couples. Although they're worried about bringing home enough money to survive, this time it's the women who are keeping their families afloat.

Posted by RRJ at 11:04 AM | | Comments (0)

The McGrath Plan

By John McGrath

John Morton takes up space in the American Journalism Review and makes me consider changing my given name to avoid embarassment:
Therefore, I propose what I immodestly call "The Morton Plan" for saving newspapers. I call on all you publishers to decide individually (to ward off the antitrust folks) to charge for Internet access to your newspaper content: Offer your readers the choice of getting their paper online, with the advantages of expanded information and search capabilities, or in print for the same price. A modest premium would give them both. Charge advertisers the same for online or print space, based on print's current cost-per-thousand for advertising.

Decide, individually, that you will make these changes on July 4, 2009, a fitting day for a nation founded on the belief that a free press is necessary for government to function properly. If the Feds come complaining about a conspiracy, tell them: "I didn't conspire with anybody. Morton made me do it."
I propose a counter-plan: stop listening to people trying to hoodwink and bamboozle you in to believing that this will work. It won't. Believe it or not, newspapers aren't in the position of simply dictating prices to advertisers, nor will readers repay a huge price increase with loyalty.

I started out blogging for the RRJ hoping that the newspaper industry would avoid the traps that the music industry went through during the late 1990s and early 2000s. It seems that hope was in vain. The newspaper industry is deep in the "if we clap hard enough, Tinkerbell will be okay!" phase, and sadly eminent voices are busy spouting lunacy.

It took years for the music industry to come to grips with the idea that abusing your customer base wasn't a winning strategy. How long will allegedly observant journalists take?

ALSO: See this example of thoughtful, measured response from the AP that in no way made them look like a bunch of simians.

Posted by RRJ at 10:46 AM | | Comments (0)

April 09, 2009

Who says Canadian radio isn't exciting?

By Morgan Passi

Look out Joaquin Phoenix, there's a new crazy in town. Yesterday on Q, Billy Bob Thornton [in studio with his band The Boxmasters] space-cadetted through an interview with Jian Ghomeshi. The National Post covered the initial awkwardness nicely, but it isn't until later that the perils of celebrity journalism become especially evident.
JG: ...You didn't love music when you were a kid?

BBT: (Struggles) I, I subscribed to a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland which the publisher was a guy... who passed away recently.

JG: (Pause) Hmm. Do you remember what you were listening to, musically, when you were a kid?

BBT: They had a contest, where you could build your own model ... And I actually did enter it once, I didn't win anything, but I didn't win anything, but I gave it a shot. But it was pretty--it was a big deal for us kids in those days.

JG: And uh, where's the music, where's the music fit into that?

BBT: Music? No, it was a monster magazine.

JG: Right, right. But I'm, but given that you seem to be quite passionate about music, I was wondering about your--

BBT: Would you say that to Tom Petty?

JG: Would I say that he's passionate about music?

BBT: Yeah.

JG: Yeah.

BBT: Really? (Pause) Would you explain why it's not a hobby?

JG: Would I explain why it's not a hobby? Are you reacting to the fact that I said--

BBT: I am, yeah, I am. Since you're instructed not to talk about shit like that. Yeah I am reacting to that. Yeah.

JG: (clears throat) I wasn't instructed to, uh, I'm instructed--I'm not really instructed. You guys are here as a band, you're performing. But I-

BBT: Well the producer is instructed-

JG: Right. But, but...

BBT: -somewhere along the way.

JG: Because I mentioned you were an actor? And a screenwriter?

BBT: First of all that wasn't supposed to be mentioned either. You know, but--

JG: But that's just giving context, right? I mean, I'm happy to interview you guys as a band, but you know, for the listeners, we're giving context for who you are. That's part of your trajectory, isn't it?

BBT: Not really, no.

JG: It's not? You, you, you would prefer me to only do this interview, not mentioning at all, just to clarify, not at all that you've ever done anything in terms of acting, screenwriting...

BBT: That's correct.

JG: Okay, but you know, people are listening across the country and across North America and they might think that's odd that I wouldn't mention anything to do with your past.

BBT: Well I think it's odd you have to smoke outside a white stripe outside.
Eventually Ghomeshi calls a truce and after some chit chat, he asks the band what song they're going to play. Thorton says the guys are going to play an instrumental version of one of their songs.
JG: You're not going to play?

BBT: Um, well, I'm a drummer.

JG: And you don't have your drums here.

BBT: No, we don't cart those around at 6 o'clock in the morning.

Posted by RRJ at 04:00 PM | | Comments (0)

April 08, 2009

Some inside basbeball

By John McGrath

Congratulations to Kevin Connolly for making the shortlist for the Griffin prize in poetry. When he wasn't doing poet things earlier this year, he was helping the RRJ put out its Spring 2009 issue as an outside reader.

Nicely done, Kevin!

Posted by RRJ at 09:18 PM | | Comments (0)

Oh, Snap

By John McGrath

In a Washington Post article about the rapidly-disappearing Arctic sea ice that certain columnists would have you believe isn't there, Julie Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan write:
"We're seeing an ice cover that's younger and that's thinner as we head into summer," Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said in a telephone news conference. "It's been a pretty sharp decline."

The new evidence -- including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s -- contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979. [my emphasis.]
I simply can't imagine this happens very frequently -- a major newspaper smacking around one of its star columnists in the news pages. But with Will insisting on repeating his falsehoods, there's little else for the news staff to do if they want to preserve the reputation of the Paper of Woodward and Bernstein(tm).

Well done, Eilperin and Sheridan.

Posted by RRJ at 03:46 PM | | Comments (0)

AP is going to misappropriate your ass

By Daniel Kaszor

On Monday AP announced an aggressive effort to "fight Web news piracy." As Ars Technica points out they aren't just going after copyright violators, but also people who are "misappropriating" their news.
In 1918, the AP was involved in a case called International News Service v. Associated Press. Like current competitor All Headline, INS didn't actually copy AP's stories. Instead, they'd snatch AP's hot wartime scoops off the wire, have a hired hack rewrite the story in his own words, and put out their own version of the breaking news without having to bear all the overhead (not to mention the considerable risk) of sending trained reporters to a war zone. It wasn't quite copyright infringement, but it sufficiently offended the justices' sense of fair play that they developed the doctrine of "misappropriation" to cover the immediate copying and dissemination of "hot news" by commercial competitors of a news organization. If such "free riding" were allowed, the judges reasoned, the parasites would always be able to undersell their hosts, to the detriment of journalism in the long run.
This means, of course, that you can't even paraphrase an AP story on, say, Twitter. Absolute craziness.

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

I called it

By Christal Gardiola

In February I wrote about the bizarre yet growing shoegate trend of journalists as well as other civilians throwing their footwear at political leaders. And yesterday, my observation was reaffirmed. AP reported that Sikh journalist Jarnail Singh hurled his shoe at India's Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram. Singh missed his target and was then taken into police custody. The Sikh journalist explained what prompted his actions: "I just wanted to ask him how justice will be done, but he was not interested in answering the questions."

Posted by RRJ at 09:10 AM | | Comments (0)

April 07, 2009

Tyra Banks: Journalist?

By Daniel Kaszor

Many of you may not have caught it, but Bristol Palin's baby-daddy Levi Johnson went on the Tyra Banks Show yesterday. Gawker has captured most of the salient moments right here.

The thing that surprised me about this clip was how Banks, whose number one marketable talent seems to be acting crazy, was pressing Johnson for answers on several subjects and actually getting them. For example: when he said that the couple always had safe sex Banks pressed him and he changed his story to safe sex -- "most of the time." And she got the Johnson family to admit that they were thinking of suing for custody of the baby Tripp.

This is a fairly important interview as it will likely be used as fodder against Sarah Palin if she makes a run at the Republican nomination in 2012. How the heck did it end up on the Tyra Banks Show?

Posted by RRJ at 02:24 PM | | Comments (0)

Seriously, this time

By John McGrath

If I can be allowed a brief post to expand on my rant of yesterday (and I can because I'm the blog editor, hah!) but with a bit more substance, and perhaps a bit less sarcasm, I think it's worth spelling out a bit more clearly why I think any effort to cartel-ize news is bound to fail.

1) We don't control a scarce resource. It's relatively easy to control a small number of oil wells, so OPEC exists. But information wants to be free (as the computer nerds say) and while there was a time when the number of people who had access to broadcasting facilities was small, that day is past us now. News can be made and distributed cheap. There are so many good things about this that we could blog about nothing but that -- and some people do -- but our predicament is like the farmer selling cheap staples in the modern era: bad for the farmer, maybe, but good for people who eat.

2) The incentive to defect increases as the cartel grows. Anybody who's studied the Prisoner's Dilemma knows what defection means -- when two people try to make a bargain, there are always incentives to betray, or defect. Any attempt to artificially restrict the scope of news on the Internet faces the same problem, and he problem gets worse for the cartel as it grows: the news outlets who defect will capture larger shares of web traffic and ad revenue.

3) It's been tried before, and failed. During the dawn of radio, members of CP in Canada and AP in the US tried to restrict the use of their news on radio stations. This fight went on for years, and the newspapers lost, for both of the reasons above. There were plenty of alternatives to the cooperatives, and they were happy to sell to the radio stations. There's simply no way to monopolize news in the way that some newspaper owners would clearly prefer.

Posted by RRJ at 11:29 AM | | Comments (0)

April 06, 2009

Seriously?

By John McGrath

DoaM.jpg

Oh lord in heaven.
The under-the-radar discussions include a sit-down among several CEOs -- held quite separately from the convention under the guidance of a lawyer to ensure the talks don't stray into inappropriate territory-- that would be similar to a confab where many of the same leaders discussed the industry's challenges in January, 2007. Despite the deterioration of the newspaper business in the intervening time, no similar session has been held since then.

In addition to discussing whether and how to charge for the expensively produced content that today is available for free at most newspaper websites, publishers familiar with the agenda for the private session said other topics were:

:: How to recover some of the classified advertising business that has been usurped by Craig's List and others....
Well, I'm sure that one way to increase the public's sympathy with your plight is to all meet in secret and formulate a plan to take more of people's money -- during a recession, no less.

And really, picking a fight with Craigslist? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Geographical monopolies are long gone, and aren't coming back. Trying to bring back the good old days (which were never that good) is a loser's game.

Somebody will have to explain to me -- because I have yet to see it -- how this monopoly could actually work, given that a) participation will certainly be less than 100%, b) non-participators will almost certainly be some of the large news organizations such as CBC in Canada and NPR in the US, and c) the defectors will win a much larger share of Internet traffic by default.

But yeah, I'm sure this is destined for success. Keep doing what you're doing, newspapers.

Image "Death of a Moron" by Alex Clark used with Creative Commons license.

Posted by RRJ at 03:33 PM | | Comments (0)

Media as Curators

By Heather Li

Curating is something I mostly associate with art galleries and museums. But when I saw this article explaining how media can save themselves by becoming curators of news (Huffingtonpost.com is cited as one prime example), it made a lot of sense to me.

However, I think the best curator of news out there right now is Twitter, because you can tailor it so that you're following what you find interesting. And the best users to follow tend to be the ones who "curate" the best articles that are of interest to you, including journalism issues.

Weirdly enough though, it was a food Tweeple I was following (@gastronomer) that led me to the article about media as curators.

Posted by RRJ at 12:01 PM | | Comments (0)

April 03, 2009

I'm sure Canada's New Government will get right on that

By Christal Gardiola

Since CBC announced major cuts last Friday, the Canadian public broadcaster has been getting a lot of attention. On April Fools' Day, the Parliament passed motions vowing to help CBC. The Standing Committee report states:
RECOMMENDATION 4.1 The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage recommends that the Government of Canada commit to stable, multi-year funding for CBC/Radio-Canada, indexed to the cost of living. Funding should be for a period of not less than seven years and be established by means of the proposed memorandum of understanding.

RECOMMENDATION 4.2 The Government of Canada has approved additional one-time funding of $60 million annually since 2002. The Committee recommends that this parliamentary appropriation be permanently added to the Corporation's core funding.
But where there is sympathy, there's also sarcasm. The Star released this cartoon recently to comment on CBC's woes.

Posted by RRJ at 12:27 PM | | Comments (0)

April 02, 2009

"financial geniuses"

By John McGrath

Daniel Gross has a great short piece in Slate about the newspapers that spent the late 1990s making disastrous, objectively stupid business decisions and now cry "Internet" as the source of their troubles.
Let's review. Sun-Times Media is the name given to the company formerly run by convicted felon Conrad Black. Black and his colleague, Publisher David Radler, who confessed to his crimes, improperly took tens of millions of dollars in fees from the company and caused it endless legal heartache. Jeremy L. Halbreich, the interim CEO of the company, blamed the bankruptcy filing on "this deteriorating economic climate, coupled with a significant, pending IRS tax liability dating back to previous management."

The actions of the top executives in other bankrupt newspaper companies were criminal only if you consider gross financial stupidity and recklessness to be jailing offenses. Who loads up newspapers--cyclical companies whose revenues are in secular decline thanks to the disappearance of classified advertisements and the rise of the Internet--with tons of debt at precisely the wrong time? Financial geniuses, that's who.
Very recommended.

Posted by RRJ at 02:29 PM | | Comments (0)

Mark of the Beat

By John McGrath

Something nifty from the National Post: using checker-board barcodes to connect the dead-tree edition of your newspaper to online features via your smartphone.



If the fundamental problem with print journalism is that it's feature-poor relative to the Internet, this is a clever way of making a paper-machine interface. Here's wishing good luck to the Post, and well done in embracing this new technology.

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

April 01, 2009

Embracing new media

By John McGrath

So far, this is the funniest April Fool's joke I've seen today.

Posted by RRJ at 10:55 AM | | Comments (0)