Hobby And Pro Journalists: What Is The Relationship?

How about: they steal our stuff and give no credit?

A Quick Note On The Death Of Journalism, Or: Would You Like Fries With That, Sir?

These lines from the Toronto Sun Family Blog caught my eyes the other day:

The 21st century hasn't been easy on Canadian freelancers, with mass layoffs flooding the market and citizen "journalists" willing to work for free

I am not one of those people who feel that blogging, or "tweeting", or all such similar nonsense has altered the practice of journalism that terribly much. The great changes--basically: newspapers turning into a combination of website and video-clip repository and firing everyone connected with the creation of the old paper product--would have happened with or without Blogger or Wordpress. However, one definite effect is the one noted above: blogging has rapidly decreased the monetary value associated with word-smithing.

Take The National Post, for example, which makes extensive use of unpaid bloggers to maintain fresh content on its website. Baglow (Dr. Dawg) always writes eloquently; Beardsley is a solid Tory who nevertheless refuses to partake of the koolaid; and, seriously, is MacNair any crappier than Gunter or Kay? Certainly, NP readers consume their words as they consume the words of the paid pros, and can't seem to tell the difference.

An economist friend said it best as we were perusing some statistics related to the business. "Wow!" he said, "You can actually watch their market value declining!" That will be blogging's legacy: the death of the paid opinionizer. Which may be a good thing.

More T.O. Garbage Woes

Another free daily, starting September 8th.

Interesting to see, though, who the names behind it are. Recent MSM castoffs? It will be distributed in the afternoon-evening, and from the sounds of it, will be geared to people planning an evening on the town.

The Canadian Association of Journalists Attempts Journalism, Fails

Their Statement:

Canada's human rights commissions, federal and provincial, for their efforts to censor speech that merely 'offends.' Given enormous powers by the state, even to issue gag orders for life, human rights commissions and tribunals are not bound to give an accused the same rights they'd get in a court of law. The accuser has their case paid for by the state, while the defendant must pay out of pocket, even when the charges are absurd.

A Pertinant Fact:

Prince George, B.C. – A Prince George man has had his human rights complaint against the Treasure Cove Casino, its owner, some employees and the BC Lottery Corporation, dismissed. Glenn Miller has also been ordered to pay $1,000 each to; Mr. John Major, Steve Leach and Treasure Cove Supply Limited.

Moderation Is Coming

Rob Granatstein, the Toronto Sun's editor, Twittered this on Friday:

"Heading to an Ontario Press Council meeting. Should the press council have rules about online commenting on stories?"

Having viewed a wide variety of racist, libelous and downright guttural comments on media articles and, in YouTube's case, videos, host moderation is much needed across the board.Who is accountable for libel, slander and hate messages in the online abyss?

Well, if you're the website for a major newspaper the answer to this last question is "You are!", so I wouldn't be at all surprised if enhanced policing of comments doesn't come into effect within the next year or so, whether the mechanism is a press council or something else. At the very least, a paper's comments section should be swept every couple of hours for libellous material.

He Assed Away

The National Post screws up a correction.

h/t (very cool site)

Sorry Bloggers, It Isn't You Killing The Newspapers

The main cause of the demise of newspapers, according to Wolff, is the arrival of CraigsList and other sites like it. In a debate with the CraigsList's Craig Newmark, he argued that classified adds are what 'supported newspapers for 100 years' and now with CraigsList, which he says is more efficient and free, newspapers are losing their auto, real estate, job and other service advertisements to the web. This accusation is definitely not new and has been discessed [sic] for years since CraigsList started in 1995.

And I would also agree that bloggers cannot ever replace the news-gathering function of professional reporters.

No, what bloggers can do is battle it out in the ruins after Journageddon with the professional pundit class. After all, quality-wise there is a definite over-lap between the top tier of bloggers and the lower rung of columnists. In fact, I suspect you could create a computer program that replicated the ink emissions from Quebecor's (T.O. Sun) stable of scribblers.

And, remember, we bloggers are already used to working for free.

So, if you earn your meals by cranking out your "views" on this or that issue, there's going to be alot of Kraft dinner in your future.

Bourque Finds One!

Headline on Bourque:

ANALYST STILL SEES VALUE IN CANWEST

He's, like, a stealth analyst.

On Publishing Crap

From Crooked Timber:

The absolute refusal of the Post to take a position on the truth or falsity of what it publishes (along with the continued scandal of anonymous sourcing) leads me to a steadily more negative view of the question of whether we actually need newspapers and whether we should regret their seemingly inexorable decline. The standard claim is that without reporters, we in the blogosphere would have no material to work on. But Will’s recycling of long-refuted Internet factoids (something very common among rightwing pundits in particular) shows that, in important respects, the opposite is true.

More importantly as far as political and business news goes, there is almost always someone with an interest in having any given story published. If newspapers are unwilling to take a stand on which stories are true or false, their only function is that of gatekeeper – determining which stories see the light of day and which do not. The potential for corruption in this role is clear, and the reality was obvious particularly in relation to the Iraq war.

In other words, what difference does it make if newspapers have the power to actually go find news, to determine truth or falsity, if all they plan to do with these powers is pump out the same old horseshit?

As an aside, I believe that a Ontario Press Council complaint was once filed against an Ottawa Citizen reporter for recycling some old denialist chest-nuts, though I haven't been able to find the relevant material at their site. In any case, if newspapers are not willing to correct factual errors in science pieces, then perhaps there is indeed no hope for them.

What City Is This?

We have egg on our face over yesterday's front page about new 'street eats' in the city. Our graphic contained numerous errors, including misspelling Eglinton Ave. We apologize to our readers and cartographers everywhere.

Rumor has it The Sun has farmed out its front page.

Edmonton Sun Snuffs Neil Waugh

Neil Waugh, a high-profile Edmonton Sun political columnist, and 19 other colleagues were pink slipped today, TSF sources report.

But as long as the Wunderbabe's still working, who cares?

Don't Use The National Post For Anything But Fish Wrap

Put aside the content for a moment, this is supposed to be a message from the Leader of the Opposition, who may become PM someday:So far so good: no misspellings in the title, which believe it or not is not a slam dunk in the NP. But then, about 30 lines in,Bung Job! Or, put it another way: either Iggy's a moron, or somebody on the NP editorial staff is. I know where I'm placing my bets.

And then, a little later...Iggy apparently breaks into free verse!

Seriously, if you wrote this stuff up in grade school you'd get flunked, and 30 seconds worth of proof-reading could have fixed everything. What are they thinking over there? "Six days, and darkness, sweet darkness, shall claim us all!"

Quebecor Pulls More Perqs

Wow! Talk about cheap bastards:

Toronto Sun sources say all of the water coolers at 333 will soon be removed, leaving staff to drink tap water or their own bottled water.

Quebecor's penny-pinching is now a theatre of the absurd.

Apparently, this move will effect all of Quebecor. From the comments:

The water cooler thing must be chain-wide as the Edmonton Sun is losing its coolers as well.

What next? Pay toilets for staff? Stay tuned.

Don't Look To The Music Industry

...for solutions to the newspaper industry's problems. A nifty discussion between Wells & Coyne re the troubles faced by CanWest and others. About half-way in, Coyne suggests that they look to the music business for a way out: invent some kind of nifty new way to read the news (like an IPOD), and move towards micro-payments (like the various on-line music services).

Well, lots of things to argue with here. For one thing, $1 a download is hardly "micro-payment" given the fact that you're buying a product with degraded sound (MP3 and other similar file types sound OK over headphones; you lose the bass when played over a real sound system).

But the larger point is that these new technologies helped stabilize an industry that was in decline on the upside of a business cycle. Now that times are tough, expect a bloodbath. The RIAA is hemorrhaging staff as struggling record companies withdraw support for a business strategy that involves suing your customers.

You can't learn to swim by watching a drowning man, in other words.

Incidentally, its interesting to point out that the P2P movement was in part at least an explicit attempt to, in the words of FreeNet creator Ian Clarke, implement "online socialism". Like many socialist endeavours, FreeNet didn't work very well and Clarke had to renounce these sentiments when he got older and found a real job, but the various Gnutella knockoffs inspired by Julien Frankel's original have done more to change the business landscape of the planet than Karl Marx ever did.

PS. Doesn't Coyne look better in casual wear? He should ditch the suits that make him look like an undertaker.

The Death Of The Opinion Columnist

Teeing off on George "He isn't even phoning it in" Will's recent column on global warming, which reiterated 17 year ago talking points, John Quiggin tells how the Internet has made obsolete the journalistic practice of recycling old columns:

Moreover, the switch from newsprint to digital publication has changed things in a couple of important ways. On the one hand, self-plagiarism is now much easier to detect. Anyone with Google can check you it. On the other hand, the justification for repetition is much more limited. When yesterdays brilliant insights lined today’s bird cage, you could be forgiven for repeating them a few months later, for readers who might have missed them the first time. But now that every column is preserved for ever, there’s much less need. And when your column consists largely of a string of tattered talking points that anyone who wants to can already find on the Internet, it has very little justification for existing.

Of course the very fact that we write on computers--that the "rough draft" as an actual physical document scratched up with red pen marks and then re-typed entirely using a manual/electric typewriter--doesn't really exist anymore, changes things too. I am old enough to remember the agony involved in discovering a typo in the last two lines of something that required the whole page be recopied.

In short, the process of composition has been accelerated by the existence of the PC and the word-check program, which really ought to free up the journalistic mind to think more, and think more deeply, about the content of their writing.

Or they can use these technological efficiencies to hack out the same old crap and hit the bar 2 hours earlier.

Sun Staffers Lose Their Perks

From the Sun Family blog:

Sun Media employees who took advantage of free home delivery have been told that little bonus has been axed.

Instead, employees will be given free access to the e-edition of their newspaper.

From the comments:

At my unnamed Sun, when we asked for complimentary home delivery for newsroom staffers, we were told there are plenty of free copies in the newsroom. Back to rowing your slave ship and don't worry about reading!

Meanwhile, Paul Wells insists that the far right ideology behind CanWest's newspapers has nothing to do with their precipitous decline. As evidence, he cites the sorry state of a bunch of American publications, which seems of dubious relevance. Sure times are tough all over, but in Canada the further Right your newspaper, the further down the toilet its likely to have slid.

You listening, Kenneth Whyte?

CanWest Headlines NOT The Dumbest?

The Toronto Sun Family Blog has a few even dumber.

To The Right And Down The Tubes?

The Toronto Star is hiring an old Conrad Black crony, Michael Cooke:

Chicago Tribune media writer Phil Rosenthal reported on his blog yesterday that Cooke has resigned from the Chicago Sun-Times to rejoin his former colleague John Cruickshank, who is publisher of the Toronto Star.

Former Hollinger Inc. chief operating officer David Radler, who was recently released from jail, lured Cruickshank from the Globe and Mail to become the Vancouver Sun’s editor in the mid-1990s.
Radler, a former business partner of Conrad Black, also appointed Cooke as editor of the Province in the 1990s.

In the 1990s, the Province, a Vancouver tabloid, took an abrupt turn to the right under Cooke’s leadership.

The paper dumped its left-wing voices and populated the editorial page with a bunch of right wingers. Cooke also gave prominent coverage to the Fraser Institute's right-wing "research" reports.

Because, clearly, pandering to Canada's right-wing fringe has worked so well for so many other publications.

Journalists: Soft On Duff

While not surprising Duffy has an opinion (though you don’t see the other newly-appointed former journalist senator Pamela Wallin making crass comments,), I’m disappointed he isn’t being treated like any other authority figure by his media brethren. I’d bet if he weren’t a former member of the press, his colleagues would have ripped him apart on him until we were sick of hearing about it.

Duffy’s likely retained some protection under the unwritten code where journalists, even the retired, compete and criticize each other, but always defend each other for missteps that don’t result in blackening the industry. While a nice protection, it’s not right to extend it to Duffy strictly because of who he was while Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz was severely criticized for his ‘death by a thousand cold cuts’ remarks during the listeriosis outbreak in September. Neither remark had class and the media should treat these men equally for not having the better sense to keep their mouths shut, the right to fair comment aside.

It takes a mere letter writer to apply the appropriate spanking. Although Rex Murphy pondering whether there should be a "cover charge" for attending a Mike Duffy speech was not bad either.

No Standards Please, We're Journalists

Some unsurprising (negative) reactions to the OHRC's advocating a mandatory national press council.

Look, when a journo tells you that doom will follow if his profession is regulated, don't think of some hero out there protecting society from tyranny. I mean, maybe that applied in the old days, right?

These days, think of a pressure group like herring fishermen trouping to Ottawa when the feds attempt to limit their catch, and arguing that as go herring fishermen, so goes the world, and claiming societal collapse will follow if they can't fish for herring as free as their conscience commands them.

Press councils are an extremely weak vehicle and, I am told, never particularly eager to punish one of their own in the 1st place(the OPC adjudicates, on average, a little more than one complaint per month). This even though the punishment amounts to little more than a "naming and shaming" of the offending paper/journalist. Still, I imagine the profession's response to this initiative will undoubtedly be a knee-jerk rejection, and a to-the-barricades defense of their right to print crap without any sort of restriction.

(PS. Interesting that this should be the one recommendation from the Moon report that seems to have any chance of being enacted. Perhaps we owe Steyn and Levant some thanks after all.)