Which brings me back to the Ryerson Review's two recent issues. We don't really have anything else quite like them in Canada any more. Writing a media column in a mainstream publication is now officially a dangerous, even foolhardy occupation. (The voice of experience wrote that last sentence -- I have visible scar tissue to prove it.) Hell, just trying to produce one of those little newspaper-ombudsman columns is risky enough, and they are meant only for window-dressing.

But these articles from Ryerson, mostly written by students under professorial guidance, tackle difficult subjects head on. Of course there are infelicities and submerged prejudices here and there, but the broad thrust is impressive. The level of fact-checking seems very high and the stylistic flourishes often surprising in their effectiveness.

A few years ago, the world of intelligent and intelligible Canadian magazines looked set for oblivion. Perhaps it is merely coincidence, but today Saturday Night is reviving wonderfully, the Walrus continues to surprise, and terrific smaller publications such as Geist on the West Coast, Border Crossings out of Winnipeg and Maisonneuve from Montreal seem to be surviving against all odds. The new issues from Ryerson seem emblematic of this new optimism.

Woohoo!

Just finished reading the May/June issue of Backbone, Canada's Business, Technology, and Lifestyle magazine that falls out of my Globe every once in a while. This issue's theme - blogs. In his article, To blog or not to blog, Don Tapscott writes on the importance of blogs on the corporate level, while Toronto blogger Mark Evans writes Make a killing on the stock market...and feel good about it. But it's clear from the first page that editor Peter Wolchak isn't the biggest blog fan.

As for blogs, I realize it's an unpopular opinion but I simply don't understand the fascination. With specific exceptions - such as the U.S. blogger who sidestepped the Gomery inquiry's gag order - I can't see devoting regular chunks of time to someone's opinion on current events or movie stars or even politics. That's why we have magazines and newspapers.

Great article on Wired today about my favourite topic. Adam L. Penenberg, assistant prof at NYU, cites a Carnegie study that found, surprise surprise, that 18-34 year olds like getting their news on the web rather than newspapers. Forty-four per cent of Americans in that age range read news online, while only 19 per cent read the papers.

"Ultimately," Penenberg says, "the printed word will die off. Not tomorrow or the next day, but in the coming decades. It's inevitable since it will be more cost-effective (not to mention better for the environment) to distribute news over the web and via cell phones and PDAs than by printing it on paper and relying on trucks to deliver it to newsstands and subscribers' doorsteps."

Still, he says, newspapers are not dying. The most popular sites on the Internet are NBC/MSNBC, Yahoo News, CNN, BBC, Google News, The Drudge Report, USA Today, ABC, Reuters and Forbes.

"People haven't been abandoning newspapers (and magazines)," Penenberg continues. "They have been abandoning the print medium."

I'm 25 years old and read the best of both worlds. I read the Globe and the Star, all the while surfing the web for additional tidbits of info. Funny - whereas I don't often read the editorial pages, I love reading the opinions of bloggers on the very same issues that arise in print. It's not that I don't find the columnists trustworthy - I do. I simply like the informality and candor that blogs offer. But that's just me.

Read more on how the Edmonton Journal is making news accessible to young adults in Look Who's Reading Now from the Ryerson Review.

Samantha Israel (of Blog on Blog) has a pretty damn solid article on this whole "online journalism" thing in the spring edition of the Ryerson Review of Journalism. While she does delve into many of the key blog-related issues of the day, I think the article works best as a sort of primer. To that end, it provides the uninitiated with the only fact they really need to know about online journalism (one that's almost universally overlooked): it's regular journalism, only it's online. Some of it's really good, and a lot of it's crap - just like at your grandfather's old-timey newsstand. Memo to these people who keep complaining about lax editing on the weblogs: have a gander up the Calgary Sun's frock and get back to me.

why, you may ask? my favourite reason:

"I'd also like to start expanding some of the ideas I get into full-fledged articles, essays and stories, rather than prematurely ejaculating them onto my blog."

happy birthday buddy. can we still be friends?