tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-359066812024-02-20T18:17:15.670-08:00Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-20949558199832705312009-06-30T15:54:00.000-07:002009-07-10T16:20:21.010-07:00

You might suppose that as the editor of an online magazine, I'm glad to see the collapse of the old-school, dead-tree print guys. You might suppose wrong. I say that partly because I still write for what we used to quaintly refer to as "the papers" (ask an anthropologist near you), but also because, when I look around at their would-be online successors, I don't see a worthy among them. It's not

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-410654777967511582009-05-30T16:56:00.000-07:002009-05-31T00:39:00.821-07:00

We are beginning to see the outlines of the newspaper industry's survival strategy, and it's going to be this: since what we've been doing doesn't work anymore, let's go backwards and try something else that didn't work. Namely, charging for online content.The signs are everywhere. When John Stackhouse succeeded Edward Greenspon as Editor of The Globe and Mail last week, he advised readers that

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-29601646472673538002009-05-06T03:09:00.000-07:002009-05-08T01:42:14.990-07:00

By guest blogger Dave CarpenterWord of the swine flu's global reach travels so quickly across the web, it's enough to leave the pandemic-aspiring virus itself a little green with envy. Yet our shiny, digital message machine becomes a double-edge sword when enlisted as weaponry against the outbreak.To wit, the Twit.Exhibit A: The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is using Twitter

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-87069855497089230872009-04-13T17:01:00.001-07:002009-09-07T16:57:01.405-07:00

It takes a village to rehabilitate a criminal, and I'm afraid we've all been failing Conrad Black. His chief enabler is The National Post, for which I have been known to write myself. The Post has given Prisoner #18330-424 a column, thus allowing him to maintain the delusion that he remains a man of position, and to reiterate his belief that he has done nothing wrong. I doubt that many of his

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-80393935761047476152009-03-12T04:42:00.001-07:002009-03-15T06:35:26.109-07:00

When it comes to Canadian deaths in Afghanistan, our media's sentimentality knows no bounds. Each time a soldier dies, we are assured that the young person -- for they are almost always young persons -- loved animals, or to make people laugh, or, in the case of 22-year old Marc Diab, killed by a roadside bomb on March 8th, ">that he wanted to make a difference in peoples' lives. Inevitably, the

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-11570651520901059592009-02-27T23:47:00.000-08:002009-02-28T16:26:08.346-08:00

I like a good government intervention as much as the next failed banker, but the current CRTC meddling with the internet should send chills down the spine of anyone who uses the instrument -- like, say, you.The commissioners are looking into the question of whether or not internet service providers should have to pay into a fund for the creation of Canadian content. This, of course, would be an

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-42500263438488205672009-02-06T02:54:00.000-08:002009-02-07T12:15:16.915-08:00

One of the mixed pleasures of a writer's vocation is afternoon television. With the advent of notebook computers, one can sit on the couch and do all manner of quotidian things -- like writing blog posts -- while CNN and NewsNet and A&E dance across the flatscreen.Of particularly morbid interest of late is Canadian cable television -- channels such as Showcase and BookTelevision and G4TechTV.

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-67690310080689907112008-12-29T23:11:00.000-08:002008-12-30T01:31:42.629-08:00

We're a bit sniffy about top 10 lists at backofthebook.ca, for the reasons outlined here, but we're very big on checking our web stats. Or at least I am, in my capacity as publisher/editor/chief lackey. Now you may suppose web stats -- that is, the numbers showing how many visitors a site has, how many pages they view, etc. -- are about as exciting as Stephen Harper's hair. And you would be right

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-28510341759441557242008-12-18T03:43:00.000-08:002008-12-24T16:50:13.860-08:00

Note the quid pro quo built into The Globe and Mail's editorial on the subject of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who showed off his footwear to President Bush. "Mr. Zaidi gained his privileged access to Mr. Bush on the strength of his accreditation as a journalist," intones the Globe. " . . . . The price for this access was a duty to treat Mr. Bush, as with any other news subject, fairly

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-78763953356695022522008-12-08T23:01:00.000-08:002008-12-09T19:10:54.468-08:00

Your feckless Media blogger has been off cheating with his other mistress -- theatre, of all things -- which is why this section has been quiet as a dying newsroom lately. While I was away, Canada lost one of its few genuine sources of shit-disturbance, Frank magazine. Its folding was duly reported but went curiously unremarked upon, as if the pundits it had routinely skewered knew that, if they

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-27417787825154446482008-10-16T23:52:00.000-07:002009-08-17T02:18:06.168-07:00

The various human rights commissions that rejected the complaint against Maclean's magazine -- most recently the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal -- were right to do so, of course. Members of the Canadian Islamic Congress had charged Maclean's with inciting hatred and contempt towards Muslims when it published an excerpt from Mark Steyn's America Alone, in which he advanced various xenophobic warnings

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-66166840833301431592008-09-22T04:41:00.000-07:002008-09-22T15:27:31.983-07:00

It's hard not to sympathize with the Yanks who are upset with Heather Mallick. The former Globe and Mailer, now writing for cbc.ca, is so resolutely humourless, even when she's trying to be funny, and so intransigently snooty (she wears white pearls in her website photo, for cripe's sake), that I too feel, when I read her, that I have been sent to the principal's office. So it's not surprising

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-15454104217348898872008-09-03T03:10:00.000-07:002008-09-04T11:21:31.396-07:00

I followed Hurricane Gustav not on CNN, not on the newspaper websites (and certainly not on the newspapers themselves), but via Twitter. What, you may ask, is Twitter? Twitter is a service that allows you to post messages to the web of up to 140 characters. Initially the idea was to tell the world, or at least anyone who was bothering to follow you, what you were up to at that moment -- kind of

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-18893023722888954392008-07-04T15:27:00.000-07:002008-07-09T14:55:57.608-07:00

The recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in favour of Vancouver broadcaster Rafe Mair was a big step forward for Canadian journalists and their readers. Mair had been sued by a "Christian-values advocate" who thought he'd defamed her, but the Court ruled 9-0 that "an overly solicitous regard for personal reputation" should not "be permitted to 'chill' freewheeling debate on matters of public

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-62798463429346514292008-06-20T16:41:00.000-07:002008-06-26T02:15:19.406-07:00

In my post of a few days ago, I asked some questions of CBC and Maclean's pundit Andrew Coyne, about his answers to a 9/11 Truther after a television taping. I said I'd e-mail him a link to the article (did) and advertise it on a few sites, including his own (did). I think I'll stop waiting for him to reply. He's still welcome to, of course; the Comment link is below. Again, let's give Coyne

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-55388353152932719562008-06-18T00:41:00.000-07:002008-06-22T23:44:07.900-07:00

While researching my next-to-last post (and did you realize that "blogging" and "research" are not necessarily mutually exclusive?), I came across the following video:In it, a very earnest and nervous woman confronts Alan Gregg, Chantal Hébert, and Andrew Coyne after a taping of the CBC political panel "At Issue," with a question about the media's handling of the events of 9/11:"Why has

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-85556290162237507312008-06-07T18:33:00.000-07:002008-06-12T20:08:26.211-07:00

Yes, you read that right. MSNBC regards its country's debate as to what constitutes torture -- which I thought had been resolved in Geneva a few decades back -- as cause for a bad bit of frat-boy humour.And this is the States' supposedly leftish cable network.

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-17650558694351505392008-05-30T02:28:00.000-07:002008-06-12T16:53:06.824-07:00

Calgary Herald columnist Don Martin offered an unfortunate comment during last night's broadcast of "At Issue," The National's equally unfortunate political affairs panel. Discussing the Conservatives' plunging poll numbers, Martin derided the "line of pale male faces, with one exception" on their parliamentary front bench. He was sharing the screen at the time with three other white guys and a

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-71398757319278287522008-05-09T18:48:00.000-07:002008-06-12T16:54:04.891-07:00

By guest blogger Brian BrennanThey're all doing it now but still I have to wonder: Why are Canada's daily newspapers encouraging their opinion columnists to simultaneously blog on the papers' websites? I used to think -- like media observers elsewhere -- that newspaper blogs were meant to be dumping grounds for material the papers could not, or would not, accommodate on the page. Jeez, we can't

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-53755362684037222342008-04-23T18:03:00.000-07:002008-05-05T03:36:51.446-07:00

It's some measure of the maturity of Atom Egoyan's career, if not of Canadian film generally, that news that his new movie Adoration will be premiering at Cannes this year prompts mostly a shrug. Don't they all? By my count, he's been there six times with six films (Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia's Journey, Where the Truth Lies), not to mention the time (times

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-62830582430992107822008-04-05T23:33:00.000-07:002008-04-07T12:59:32.169-07:00

Until I attended the recent CRTC hearing in Vancouver, I had no idea how much time is spent deciding which sort of music serves the greater public good: Triple A, smooth jazz, adult urban, or alternative rock.Or world beat, or indie, or oldies, or R&B, or active AC, or traditional AC, or gospel, or youth contemporary, or modern global music format, or world urban dance music format, or world

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-33866481430341874502008-03-07T17:53:00.000-08:002008-03-07T19:06:22.937-08:00

by guest blogger Sandeep Chauhan"... and all the pieces matter." - Freamon, The WireSunday March 9th marks the end of HBO's The Wire. If you've never heard of The Wire then please do crawl out from under that shady rock and rent or buy season one of what many critics -- yours truly included -- have called the best television show ever. At a casual glance, The Wire looks like any other cop show --

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-76851435663542396192008-02-13T02:26:00.000-08:002008-08-24T16:15:34.834-07:00

Once again, I find myself obliged to apologize for one of my fellow western Canadians. I used to have to do this a lot, back in the days when the Reform Party was still the Reform Party. For instance, you had your Stockwell Day believing the earth is only three weeks old, or whatever it was he believed. Then every once in a while one of its MPs would haul off and slur gays or Indians or whatever,

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-28766799569312357022008-02-02T03:49:00.000-08:002008-02-12T21:29:08.778-08:00

Maybe it's because his guy, Giuliani, was already tanking when this was filmed. (Back in October, in happier days, David Frum had signed on as Giuliani's "senior foreign policy advisor.") Maybe it's because his new book, the optimistically titled Comeback: Conservativism That Can Win Again, hasn't exactly been burning up the bestsellers lists. (As of today, it isn't even on the Times' "Also

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35906681.post-32212478345095526932008-01-16T03:37:00.000-08:002008-01-17T01:24:53.112-08:00

I have lately begun to feel that I am ten again, and living in Edmonton in 1965. In those days, we had two TV stations, CFRN and the local CBC outlet. It was also in that year that I first travelled to California with my family to visit our American cousins. Besides Disneyland, our relatives had colour TV and good shows. Not crappy Canadian shows like "Chez Helene" and "Royalite Windfall," but

Single Lane Medianoreply@blogger.com1