Category Archives: journalism

Is a ratings system for journalists a workable idea?

Posted by on | journalism

We live in an age of ratings systems. On any given day, many of us interact with any number of schemes that involve the rating of movies and restaurants, Uber drivers and Air BnB owners, online retail transactions from Amazon to Ebay, and professional service providers including doctors and professors. Sometimes we are the ones being rated, sometimes we are the ones doing the rating, but more often we use the crowdsourced ratings to guide our behaviour and our choices. Some of these systems are better than others, but for better and for worse they have become part of our social infrastructure.

So it was interesting last week to see what happened after Elon Musk took to Twitter to suggest that he was going to start a ratings system for journalism:

“Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication.

… Continue reading

A tale of two Trust Projects

Posted by on | journalism

Once a year at the Citizen, usually on a Sunday, we’d let readers into the newsroom. It was part of the citywide Open Doors programme, and we would strongarm a few editors and junior reporters into working a weekend shift that involved giving a gaggle of news fiends (well, mostly retirees and maybe some parents dragging their kids) a quick tour of the newsroom and the presses and a spiel about how they do their job, how the front page of the paper comes together, and so on. I always dreaded it, but when I did it, I always had fun. People were genuinely interested in this sort of stuff, and it is always fun to talk about how the news gets made.

I should have taken a lesson from these things, but I didn’t. One of the bigger regrets I have from my time as an editor at the Ottawa Citizen was that I didn’t make more of an effort to build trust with readers.… Continue reading

On Trump, the apocalypse, and missing the forest for the Tweets

Posted by on | culture, economy, journalism, philosophy, Uncategorized

At the beginning of every apocalyptic thriller there’s always a scene where the hero is getting ready for work, feeding the kids breakfast, dealing with a dog that has barfed in the living room, and generally dealing with the million minor stresses of every day life. 

Meanwhile, on the TV or radio in the background the news is cycling through the usual mundanities of petty crime and traffic and local weather, except thrown into the mix there are always a handful of Easter eggs: warnings of nuclear sabre-rattling by jumped-up third-world dictators; quirky reports of bizarre weather patterns in Europe; a fun little hit about a couple from the midwest who swore they saw an alien spacecraft collecting samples in a field behind their house.

These scenes play a key role in setting up the narrative, in three ways. First, they establish the family ties that will provide the emotional basis for the film.… Continue reading

Dan Drezner on the Ideas Industry

Posted by on | academia, journalism, public policy

drezner

I had the privilege last night of seeing Dan Drezner give the inaugural Barton Lecture at Carleton’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs in Ottawa. His lecture was a condensed version of the argument of his book The Ideas Industry, and while I’ve read the book, the talk was useful. It’s often interesting to see people give book talks, since you get a better sense of what they think their book is about.

Drezner begins with a paradox: Everyone laments the decline of the public intellectual in our civic discourse, and yet, via outlets such as TED and related Big Ideas type lecture series’, the demand for ideas has never been greater. Drezner squares this by distinguishing two types of ideas industry labourer: Public Intellectuals and Thought Leaders. They break down as follows:

thought ledrs

What Drezner argues, in a nutshell, is that public intellectuals have been largely eclipsed by thought leaders, so that people like Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria now dominate.… Continue reading

First do no harm: Why Melanie Joly was right to stay out of the news biz

Posted by on | journalism, politics

The “Creative Canada” policy framework announced last week by Melanie Joly seems to have left no one happy, but the reaction in the news media and its interested observers has been most interesting. Despite the fact that Joly declined the invitation to empty a few wheelbarrows full of cash onto the doorstep of suffering Canadian news organizations, opinion was soon sharply split between those who saw hope that she was planning to do so by stealth, and those who feared she was planning to do so by stealth.

For the most part, these responses have been little more than occasions to grind well-worn axes, and it’s not worth going over them here. But for background reading, if you are interested:

McMaster commmuications prof Sara Bannerman arguing in The Conversation that the government is ignoring the crisis in Canadian journalism.

Communications prof, Marc Edge, arguing in Policy Options that Joly was right to do so.… Continue reading

Reality starts to bite at the Globe and Mail

Posted by on | journalism, public policy

The Globe and Mail has announced some fairly serious changes in the last week, and it’s hard not to see them as part of a much larger strategic shift at the paper. If so, it’s been a long time coming: compared to the big strategic bets at Postmedia and at the Star (and at La Presse as well, in Quebec), the Globe has had a quieter time of it. There have been layoffs and cuts, and obvious changes to the product but on the for-profit media side, the Globe and Mail seems to have been more insulated than anyone else to the wrenching transformation and revenue decline affecting the news biz.

The changes at the Globe include the cancellation of the print edition in the Atlantic region (so no paper Globe east of Quebec); the cutting of standalone arts, sports, and life sections during the week (so going to basically a two-section paper focused on news and business); and the end of two long-time (and quite popular) columnists, Leah McLaren and Tabatha Southey.… Continue reading

What the failure of Star Touch teaches us about a media bailout

Posted by on | journalism, politics

The Toronto Star announced yesterday that it was shuttering its flagship Star Touch tablet app, laying off 30 employees and eating something north of $20 million in investment costs.

This comes a week after a group called “News Media Canada” — basically a legacy news media lobbying group — pitched the feds on a plan for the government to give the industry $350 million in support that would include funding 35 per cent of newsroom costs.

Clearly, the failure of Star Touch proves the need for the bailout money, yes?

Actually, no, it proves the exact opposite. Star Touch is exactly why the feds need to leave the news business to its death throes.

Some quick background: Star Touch was an attempt to recreate the walled garden of print in a digital format, to provide a closed environment where readers would come and stick around, paging through the heavily designed and curated app.… Continue reading

*All The President’s Men* for the Trump era

Posted by on | journalism, politics, United States

If you’re looking for guidance on the current media-political climate in the United States, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of All The President’s Men, the book-length account of the Watergate investigation by Woodward and Bernstein. This is one of those I-can’t-believe-I-haven’t-read-it-sooner books, something I really should have been handed the day I walked into the newsroom at the Ottawa Citizen almost a decade ago. (The movie is great too, but it only covers the period from the break-in until Nixon’s re-election in ‘72, so it misses what is arguably the most interesting stuff. It’s also a bit jarring to read the book knowing that Deep Throat was Mark Felt, the #2 at the FBI at the time.)

Aside from its value as analogue journalism-porn (See also: Spotlight) in many ways, it will make you feel better about what’s going on now. History doesn’t repeat itself but it definitely rhymes: America has seen shit-show presidencies before and survived.… Continue reading

Why Facebook is the Devil: Platforms, publishing, and the public good

Posted by on | journalism

Prologue

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace — John Perry Barlow, 1996

I.

You all know the line about generals always preparing to fight the last war. News media execs, and many academics and media critics, on the other hand, have spent the better part of the last two decades fighting the current war while trying to figure out a way of getting everyone to agree to return to the terms of the old. That is, a good decade after it became clear that the math for digital publishing was never going to work, there are still a lot of publishers, aided by a sizeable scholarly industry, who are devoted to finding some way of rolling back the clock on the business model.… Continue reading

Why it is a problem when journalists jump into politics

Posted by on | journalism, politics

When columnist Michael Den Tandt announced this week that he was joining the PMO, just a a few weeks after he resigned as a political columnist for Postmedia, there was a fair amount of chatter in the usual places about the bad optics of the move, what we could conclude about his work and about the profession as a whole, and whether, in this economy, this is the sort of thing we should have any scruples about.

Some throat clearing:

a) I worked at Postmedia with Den Tandt, and though I never met him we did have a few exchanges. I thought he was a very strong columnist, and think his departure from Postmedia is a loss for the company and the profession.

b) This is a bigger issue than Den Tandt regardless. Lots of journalists have jumped to the Liberals, just as a lot jumped to the Tories when they were in power. … Continue reading