Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Chicago Sun-Times decides to stop debasing itself

Congratulations from the bottom of my ink-stained heart to the Chicago Sun-Times, which this week announced it will stop endorsing candidates during elections

Here's hoping this outbreak of common sense spreads faster than bed bugs because I suspect election endorsements are the single most foolish things newspapers do. Here I'll lay out five reasons why and then suggest a much better system.

I would love to hear some arguments from people who disagree with me on this. Clearly a lot do because over 700 publications made endorsements in the last United States election, which I find inscrutable and weird.

Why printing an election endorsement is insane:

1) It debases - Though endorsements are written by an editor or at most an editorial board, they reflect on the whole paper. The New York Times endorses Obama, The New York Post endorses McCain, etc. All the work your reporters went through to maintain their independence and impartiality? Gone, to the public eye. The institution itself is now formally in the camp of a political party, which is exactly where it ought not be.

2) It lingers - Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner continually ridicules the Globe and Mail every time the Harper government makes an inept fiscal move. And why shouldn't he? The Globe endorsed Harper for his fiscal chops in 2011. If his government fails and turns our economy into pudding, the Globe will have been wrong. The paper's reputation is now tied to the actions of a politician. Worse, criticizing the government's economic plans will now strike many readers as hypocrisy.

3) It's arrogant - As the Sun Times points out, newspaper endorsements don't have much impact. Of course they don't. Most voters have made up their minds by the time endorsements come out in the last days before an election. And even if you are undecided, who wants to be told how you should act? Especially by the profession most people rank somewhere between used car salesman and date rapist. Any first-year psych student can tell you this is not how the human brain works.

4) It's alienating (and probably bad for business) - So you're a newspaper and you endorse candidate X. Those who support him/her/it will probably nod smugly, maybe tweet it, then stop caring. But boy, are people who back candidate Y going to be pissed. They'll tear into your logic. They'll accuse you of being a conservative/liberal shill, and maybe they'll stop subscribing to a paper so clearly in the bag for that asshole candidate X. Congrats, you've lost all credibility with half your readers. Was that really worth it?

5) It's Archaic - We've supposedly evolved past the age when newspapers were openly partisan. That dark age was decades ago (or, alternately, a half-dozen time zones away in the U.K.). Most newspapers now look down their noses at the Sun chains of the world that don't even feign balance. So how can newspapers claim to be modern champions of objective scrutiny while they're still clinging to the one act that most defined the days of biased, agenda journalism? I'll say this for the Sun papers, at least they accept who they are and don't try to dress it up.

Ok, so the counter-argument to all this is that editorial writers sometimes do have intelligent, thoughtful arguments for why one candidate is the best choice. Why should they silence themselves on such a critical issue for some ideal of impartiality that most people don't buy anyway?

Here's what you do instead: be humble, be personal, and be careful.

Don't hide behind the banner of the paper. Have the writer or editorial board put their name(s) on the piece. Then, don't tell people how to vote. Instead, tell them how you will be voting and explain why as best you can. Keep in mind that every political platform benefits some people more than others. Look beyond your own situation and write persuasively about which platform will help the greatest number of people. Avoid talking points used by the parties.

Andrew Coyne of MacLeans PostMedia provided an elegant example of just this kind of thing last year.

It's that easy. And in this digital age, as an industry struggling with the issue of printing words on paper and handing them out individually, we should really jump at the easy solutions when we can.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Happy Trails

Best retirement wishes to my boss Dan Leger, who revealed today he was stepping down as director of news content for the Chronicle Herald after something like 35 years in the business. Dan will continue to write a weekly column for the paper when he's not pursuing his twin hobbies of sailing and fighting crime.

Dan was an incredibly supportive boss though he clearly was prone to some mental gaffes as he hired me and all. To mark his retirement I thought I'd relay this anecdote about him even though I wasn't there to witness it and for all I know it's apocryphal (again, Dan hired me even *after reading this blog.* What a guy.)

Once upon a time there was a Chronicle Herald columnist named Peter Duffy who wrote about Coronation Street and gas being too expensive and shit like that. As a young reporter working for the rival newspaper I was pretty sure he was the worst writer in the province, but lordy did some people ever love him. He was apparently the highest-read columnist in Nova Scotia, which I blame on grandmothers.

One time the Herald ran a front-page story with a necessary and relevant quote that contained swearing; I can't remember the details. Duffy - ever the champion of mindless political correctness - penned a column harshly criticizing his own paper for printing cuss words and not treating their audience like five-year-olds as any decent, family newspaper should.

Duffy apparently walked into work the next day with this coy, canary-chomping grin expecting his boss, Dan, to be all offended and mad. When Dan didn't say anything Duffy flat-out asked him. Dan shrugged him off by saying "Peter, I'll defend your right to print whatever insipid thing you choose."

Here we see a great example of the old adage: "If you don't agree with freedom of speech for those you suspect to be borderline mentally incompetent then you don't believe in it at all." Happy retirement, Dan. I know you'll enjoy it.

Oh, and what ever happened to Peter Duffy? Don't worry, after he retired from the paper Mayor Peter Kelly went on to hire him as his speechwriter so now the taxpayers pay his salary! What a world! And just because I can never resist a chance to repost this, here's a link to Duffy's two most infamous columns wherein he claims, in all seriousness, to have been anally raped by a ghost.


Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Top 5 Halifax Media Stories of the Year (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1.

2) Openfile opens, files


Forget print and television. You know what's not dying? The internet! A new news website opened in Halifax last year and it caused the biggest stir by a non-porn site in some time.

Openfile's approach to news can perhaps best be described as hippie-populist. It's very much about sharing, being innovative (stories are suggested by readers) and giving the people what they want. And twitter. It's edited by former Frankland cull victim Neal Ozano while recent King's grad Bethany Horne serves as news curator.

As a reporter, Openfile has been fun to watch. Halifax has an insular journalism community and several statements from Horne in particular have left other reporters in the city blinking with astonishment. She seemed to say stealing quotes and facts was ok. She chastised media for printing a mugshot of a guy, who happened to be wanted for shooting someone, because the photo was taken when the guy was 17. Even though the guy was now 18. And a judge approved the whole thing. And he was on the lam for shooting someone.

But easily taking the cake was when she claimed allNovaScotia.com is not news but merely information because people have to pay to read it. I'm not even going to touch this one other than to note a colleague's observation that by this standard Watergate wouldn't have qualified as journalism.

More notably, there have been some very public arguments when other reporters accused Openfile of getting facts wrong and relying too much on twitter and reporting from other outlets.

So yes, sales of popcorn have been skyrocketing since Openfile came to Halifax. But bizarre editorial stances and a few factual fuck-ups aside, Openfile has done some good work. They've put out interesting stories topped off by extensive coverage of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children.

Personally, I have my disagreements with the Openfile approach. I think beat reporting is journalism's best asset, while Openfile in many ways is the opposite model. But I've got to admit, they're filling some of that void between reporters and readers that often gets overlooked. A simple story idea like "who is the Utility and Review Board anyway?" is likely helpful to a lot of people but mostly wouldn't occur to reporters who deal with the board daily.

Openfile also pays well, which is great for the freelancers in town. The site still has that post-coital glow of startup financing (TD Bank is their founding sponsor) and I don't know if it will be viable after they've smoked the cigarette down to the butt. But as a proponent of more media I'd like to see them stick around and improve. Also, their website is pretty.

1) The Chronicle Herald vs. allNovaScotia.com: a war of words

This is easily the most personally awkward item for me as I owe both sides a debt of gratitude, but 2011 was the year the Chronicle Herald and allNovaScotia.com went to war.

It arguably started early on when allNS editor Kevin Cox retired and Herald business reporter Judy Myrden jumped over to replace him. A few months later I left allNS to take over the Herald's Ottawa bureau.

Sometime around mid-year the Herald management decided allNS had gotten too big and needed to be taken on. The paper surprisingly hired four new business reporters and started a free email newsletter called the Business Insider specifically designed to take on allNS. Meanwhile allNS hired more reporters of its own.

Then late in the year allNovaScotia cut off all Chronicle Herald employees from its site. I'm still not sure exactly what triggered that.

Also both companies had devils of a time trying to launch new websites and spent much of the year cursing the tech gods.

For readers, I believe this rivalry is one of the best things to happen to the Halifax media scene in ages. Since the Daily News shut down in February of 2008 there's been no big head-to-head showdown in the print market. Competition makes everyone better and sure enough, both sides are stepping up their game to provide better coverage.

(For a cautionary tale on monopolies and lack of competition see: Brunswick, New.)

In fact, take a look at the overall Halifax news scene between print/online - The Chronicle Herald, allNovaScotia.com, The Coast, Metro, Openfile, Frank, the Transcontinental weeklies, a few magazines - and broadcast - CTV, CBC radio/tv, Global, News 95.7.

Yes, it's far from perfect and as someone who watches the news closely I spend a lot of time griping. But I also see an impressively vibrant media scene that would be the envy of places like St. John's or (ugh) Moncton.

Look at the small cities all across Canada. Literally nowhere else do you see the mix of an independent daily newspaper, a well-staffed business news website, a weekly that takes on investigative projects, a Metro paper with strong local personalities and hell, rarest of all, a Frank Magazine.

Halifax is an interesting corner of the earth to report on (it helps that half of our politicians are insane or illiterate) and a great place to work. Here's to hoping we're not all laid off in 2012.

Monday, January 9, 2012

Top 5 Halifax Media Stories of the Year (Part 1)

People don't write about the Halifax media scene much. It's probably for the very good reason that no one cares. But 2011 was an eventful year for all of us who have secret Joseph Howe tattoos and meet at the clubhouse on Wednesdays.

Please join me and my friend Mr. Wiser's as we run down the top five storylines involving Halifax media in the past year.

5) Global's comeback... any minute now

2011 was supposed to be the year Global re-emerged from years of wandering in the wilderness. A half-decade ago Global's then-owner Canwest moved production to Alberta and cut a bunch of jobs. Ratings plummeted.

Since then, the Nova Scotia news scene has been pretty consistent. CTV dominates with a roughly 70% share of the 6 o'clock market. CBC is still well behind but has been steadily chipping away at CTV's lead and currently sits at around 27%. Global has languished at about, let me do the math quickly... 3%.

(Note: I wrote this passage early yesterday evening. A few hours later the latest edition of allNovaScotia.com came out with some updated numbers, which basically show these trends continuing.)

Then things started to change in Fall of 2010 when anchor Tarek Hagamad pulled a Kai Nagata, decided he couldn't work for corporate media anymore and quit his job on short notice. Like, really short notice. As in his boss Allan Rowe had to rush in to read the the 11:00 news.

In 2012 Global bounced back by hiring veteran CTV newsman Ron Kronstein. The station was sold to Shaw, which ended years of labour uncertainty by finalizing a long-awaited new contract with the union.

Shaw talked a big game. It spruced up the website. It was going to start a new morning show to take on CTV's breakfast television. It was going to pump money into ad campaigns claiming its reporters are 50% sexier than the competition (or at least that's what I'd do). It was going to be a contender.

But then things kind of stalled. The morning show launch was pushed to 2012, so we'll have to sit back and see if the station's multi-year comeback comes to fruition. But so far this year they've bought a new property on Gottingen Street and will move to central Halifax from godforsaken Burnside.

Also they were the first local station to invest in HD equipment so you can see your local news anchor in high definition, if you're into that sort of thing.

4) Stan Kutcher takes on the Coast and everyone's sorry

When Liberal hopeful Stan Kutcher took on the NDP's Megan Leslie for the federal seat of Halifax in the spring he highlighted his career as a child psychologist.

But that wasn't good enough for The Coast news editor Tim Bousquet, hater of children. Bousquet wrote a story pointing out Kutcher was one of the authors in the infamous Paxil 329 study. I say infamous because the study was revealed to have exaggerated the benefits and downplayed the potentially harmful effects of Paxil, a child antidepressant from GlaxoSmithKline

After the Coast story was published things started to get weird. Someone from Kutcher's camp went on Anonymous message boards and claimed Scientologists were smearing Kutcher to keep him from getting elected. Now, Scientologists have waged a war against pharmaceuticals and done shady things to silence people (to say the very least). But neither Bousquet or Alison Bass, who wrote the book on Paxil 329 called Side Effects, are members of that cult. Bousquet's crazy, but not that crazy.

It didn't matter. Ever looking for an excuse to rage, Anonymous members sprang to Kutcher's defence. The Coast claims its website was attacked, though some Anonymous members accused the weekly of crying wolf.

In the end the Coast was sunk not by Anonymous, but by a single word. Bousquet's story quoted Bass on how the study authors hid that some teens became suicidal on Paxil and had to withdraw from the study. Bass said “They essentially distorted the outcome measures, and essentially lied.” Kutcher threatened to sue.

Now lying is a tricky concept to prove legally. The Coast went to their lawyer (why the story wasn't vetted beforehand is beyond me), who told them he could defend 99% of the story, but proving the lying part... well, imagine trying to explain the complexities of medical science ethics to a jury of your peers.

Not wanting to risk it, Coast owners ended up printing a groveling apology. "The Coast retracts those statements and without reservation, apologizes to Dr. Kutcher for having published them. We recognize that Stan Kutcher is the federal Liberal candidate in Halifax and we sincerely regret having published those statements during the campaign," it read in part.

The apology came at a particularly bad time for the Coast, as it had just apologized to pollster Don Mills months earlier for a blog headline insinuating he was "push polling". Kutcher sent out a jubilant news release claiming complete vindication and spent the final days of the campaign dodging any further questions about the Paxil study.

He was then crushed on election day by Megan Leslie.

3) The collapse and decline of Frank Magazine, in that order

By a mile, no news outlet had as crazy a year as Frank Magazine. More like 15 months really as it was fall of 2010 when Frank stalwart Cliff Boutilier (a.k.a. A. Frank Grunt) left and owner John Williams sold the gossip mag to Cape Breton rich guy Parker Rudderham.

Rudderham hired several new reporters and moved out of the legendarily gross Frank bunker for a new waterfront office. Things looked bright for the 25-year-old publication. Then early in the year editor Andrew Douglas wrote a column from the point of view of sexist boor Eddie Cornwallis, named after the controversial scalp collector who founded Halifax.

There was a tense staff meeting. One reporter was fired. Another resigned immediately after. The remaining two reporters walked out and when they returned the next day they were told they were being let go for insubordination. The entire Frank newsroom was cleared out.

(Note: At this point I should say that I know all of the ex-Frank employers personally. For that matter, I know almost everyone mentioned in this piece to some degree. Halifax is a small media circle)

Frank rebuilt with a stable of new employees. They may all be quite bright, but with so many new writers and not enough experienced hands to guide them, Frank started reading at times like a high school newspaper. There was more and more snark (and lots of naval gazing) but less actual information. And why exactly are people picking up Frank but for the dirt?

To be fair, a rocky patch was inevitable. But then there were some truly baffling editorial decisions. If you haven't read Frank in a while, picture this: it's now on glossy paper and features restaurant reviews. Not funny, sarcastic restaurant reviews. Straight-up restaurant reviews. In Frank Magazine. No word on when horoscopes will be introduced.

Frank used to be the scrappy, self-deprecating organ that took the pompous class down a notch. In contrast, a recent story gushed about owner Parker Rudderham donating a chunk of money at some event. It ended - honest - by detailing the long applause he got.

Moreover, Rudderham has been quick to bully reporters or former employees who talk about him by sending out threatening legal letters. This from the supposed defender of freedom of speech and pushing boundaries. In fact you should probably read the rest of this piece quickly as I'll likely get a cease and desist order soon.

For better or worse, Frank hadn't changed much over the past quarter century. In some ways it probably needed to. The old Frank is now gone and the question is whether the new Frank will find its niche.

Rudderham apparently told staff he was willing to lose $300,000 on the venture in year one (it was profitable at the time of sale, though with a smaller staff). As a longtime reader, I honestly hope Frank is sucessful. Because if not, even rich guys only want to support money-losing ventures for so long.

Jump to part 2 here.