Mediabeat letter 003

ONE YEAR AFTER TORONTO LIFE‘S abruptly halted attempt to turn their service journalism website into a place for arch media and politics blogging, they cracked the code of how to get the necessary web buzz — interview every socialite in town about where she got her ditzy dress. Just make sure the team of fact checkers steer clear of the content. Deena Pantalone, a “developer” — even if her only development was that Audrey Hepburn-in-Sabrina hairstyle — who lives in Vaughan, knew nobody in the 905 would recognize her frock as not being “a really old vintage dress I’ve had lying around the house for years.” But they get the internet downtown now. The first comment on the Toronto’s Best Dressed item pointed out it was actually from a Parkdale boutique, Champagne and Cupcakes. But arguably also to blame was part-time blogger Courtney Shea, approaching her subject on the grounds of being a “recessionista,” because not even socialites want to be captured online nowadays bragging about money. The tackiness of the Q&A itself was addressed in the raging comment thread; National Post society photog Amoryn Engel apparently piped in to call it a “witch hunt”; and the ensuing apology to designer proprietor Caroline Lim — by Deena, with her mother by her side — was front page fodder for the Toronto Star. Now, as the shame fades, a scandalous starlet is born! (Shinan Govani made a point of tweeting that, before this, even he’d never heard of her.)

THE GLOBE AND MAIL GOES HYPERLOCAL by debuting a new Toronto hub — and while a condescending accommodation of links to Torontoist is a perfect example of doing things on the cheap, the only substantive questions in a nihilistic chat with section editor Kelly Grant wondered why the frontline staffers are all so white. Grant’s response: “We search far and wide for the best reporters and columnists, no matter their skin colour or where they were born.” Then she got pulled aside by senior editors for a “quick chat on a future story” — only to return to deal with some grousing about how the Globe is ignoring the rest of the country with this initiative. Based on the trickle of other comments, however, it seems those readers who most vociferously object to the newspaper’s online makeover are most appreciative of a young female editor’s mug shot. Meanwhile, the self-induced reassignment of City Hall columnist John Barber — a beloved analyst of the David Miller renaissance era shuffled to the national publishing and architecture beats — is getting a more qualitative backlash, given the choice of internal replacement: Marcus Gee, heckled for the neo-con reputation preceding him, will now opine on topics like noise on Ossington and deposits on plastic bags. But does an outlet re-positioning itself as a national authority need to bother with a specific city? Paul Wells, holding forth in Maclean’s, figures no distraction has been too peripheral for the Globe.

TORONTO’S FIRST PRO TWITTERING JOB is technically an internship, but there are two of them, and TweetBucks chief Chris Sukornyk doesn’t seem to want to burn anybody out: 20 per cent personal time! $50 Starbucks card each month! Apprentice-inspired social media contests to win a Macbook! (Presumably, the latter will provide grist for their compulsive tweeting.) And, after it’s all done, there might be an opportunity — venture capitalists willing — to work full-time for Chango, a company dedicated to the web’s most cryptic growth industry — shortening URLs for fun, and profit through affiliate programs. The first take on TechCrunch suggested that the more you send people to content through these bannered links, the more you’re likely to be seen as some kind of spammer, as the micropayment opportunitism resembles the kind of intrusive banners provided a decade ago as a trade-off for “free internet for life!” (Litigation over those continues to drag through the Supreme Court.) Sukornyk waded into the backlash on TechCrunch to put it this way: “Every medium that exists based around free content (TV, blogs, radio) must strike a balance between monetization and their production values,” he wrote. “Personally, I love to follow people that generate great content about a niche. They spend hours digging up relevant information that I simply don’t have time for and I don’t have any problem whatsoever if they happen to make some money for doing this.”

NEW TELEVISION FALL SEASON LINEUPS announced by Citytv (doing Moses Znaimer’s legacy proud with The Jay Leno Show) and CTV (including two-hour movie Degrassi Goes to Hollywood) and there might be more reflection on all this later once Global announce theirs — but also quite probably not.

CTV’s 100,000 ‘EXPRESSIONS OF SUPPORT’ for the “Save Local” campaign actually breaks down like this: 30,000 attended the national open houses; 50,000 signed petitions online; 25,000 wrote to Heritage Minister James Moore saying they’ll pay more for cable to keep traditional newscasts over the air.

THE CANADIAN CIGARETTE ADVERTISING REVIVAL probably kept the printing presses rolling at a few alt-weeklies over the past 18 months — much to the chagrin of ex-alt-weekly writer Warren Kinsella — but a new bill introduced in Parliament suggests that will soon be the end of that. (But what of e-cigarettes?)

CLUSTERFUCK NATION‘S JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER is the Richard Florida of corroded-rust-belt America — complete with praise for Canada: “The farm houses were freshly painted and the grounds generally not strewn with the sort of dingy plastic effluvia Americans like to deploy around their dwellings to give the impression of plentitude.”

THE CRANKY COPYRIGHT BOOK is a new print-bound project from Joe Clark, taking on the increasingly interminable trinity of Cory Doctorow, Michael Geist and Lawrence Lessig on issues of Creative Commons, etc., while incorporating arguments on related talking points from typeface design to Perez Hilton.

More letter later this week — for now, subscribe to Mediabeat.ca here and/or the real-time handmade stream @mediabeat.