Entries Tagged 'Letter' ↓

Mysterious warehouse raided earlier this month on Kahnawake Mohawk reserve turns out to be more than a Hell’s Angels-related drug transit point — it’s also a source of energy drink distribution, mixed martial arts production, and a glossy Montreal pop culture periodical called Naked Eye. A screaming match was apparently a required negotiation tactic for contributors to successfully get paid over the past two years.  Comments on the Masthead Online story provide the real kicker: far as anyone could tell, the current editor-in-chief, Victoria Hill, was not a real person.

Declining ad revenues blamed for the suspension of freebie print magazines FQ, SIR and Inside Entertainment; the fact that Kontent Publishing perfected a business model in the shallowest end of the content pool motivates owner Geoffrey Dawe to semi-optimistically offer his glossy assets for sale. For who needs to worry about writing when it comes to slick superficiality? Mastheads were filled with the closest thing to celebrity names they could find: “guest editors” of the latest SIR were the guys who own Roots, supervised by non-fictional editor-in-chief Jeanne Beker.

Stealthily proceeding this week, the Entertainment Master Class — a four-part global cirriculum that started in May with a week of sessions dedicated to comedy shows in Lucerne, Switzerland, and will proceed to fall seminars about game, factual, and reality shows. Toronto is the spot for a module about “event show formats”: evidently, that incorporates a lesson or two about internet fame, as Pop 17 vlogger Sarah Austin tweeted as much. (Also on the trainer list: Ze Frank.) Most daunting is the participation fee: 4,000 euros for five days, with a small discount for all four weeks.

“Sex, Drugs & Acrobats” headline in Maclean’s leads to a demand for an apology and retraction from Cirque de Soleil, reinforcing the cultural influence of waiting-room reading material, expressing “shock and profound disappointment that such a respected and well-established magazine … would make use of the cover page of its June 15, 2009, issue to promote a book through a sensationalistic photo montage and a vulgar title giving a false, unjust and defamatory image of the company.” But of course they had to do that — the actual story package between the covers was way too boring.

Who wouldn’t want to work with MySpace Canada? Reports of worldwide layoffs at what might turn out to be Rupert Murdoch’s least successful folly are countered by a steady stream of press releases anouncing partnerships: this week, sponsorship of a free NXNE concert at Yonge-Dundas square headlined by the Black Lips. Based on the blather, MySpace are about diversifying the music scene, and helping homeless kids. Earlier this year, MySpace Canada was variously about online classifieds! and Stephen Harper meeting Barack Obama! and Kate Moss‘ boyfriend, and etc. etc.

CRTC WON’T REGULATE THE INTERNET — except that’s not even what they set out to do in the first place. Disappointed are the likes of ACTRA, CFTPA and the WGC — basically, all the groups looking out for mediamakers — as the exemption keeps money in the pockets of internet service providers. instead of forcing broadcasters to do something novel with their websites. “Deregulate traditional media” instead, proclaims former CRTC chairperson Françoise Bertrand in the Financial Post, because the creativity has gotta spawn from somewhere, and musty old business models won’t help. Canadian liberty lovers still can’t watch squat on Hulu, not to mention other geo-blocked video content sources, because the law still hasn’t defined the lines while beleaguered broadcasters with domestic rights will remain as sluggish as they want. Starting next week, a series of SaveOurNet.ca town halls across the country where some usual suspects will gripe about too little broadband and too much throttling, thanks to too big control and too small minds — and then what?

CANWEST ANNOUNCE NEW FALL LINEUPS even though the company will have restructured by then. Global Television sustains its tradition of a brand identity shaped by American imports: The Simpsons and, more recently, three shows from Seth MacFarlane provide a convenient way of projecting that the shows also belong to them — easier to play that game with a few cartoons. Thirty years after losing their grip on SCTV, though, Global got nowhere launching an animated Bob & Doug; next for a fall slot is Producing Parker, which seems like a way-late knock-off of The Critic about an Oprah-style host, originally designed for doomed over-the-air Canadian iteration of E! Plodding forward, though, is the TVtropolis channel — subsidized by cable subscriber fees — which will presumably inherit the E! idea. TVtropolis, after all, is fulfilling its original CanCon quota with two new talky shows about American television: TV With TV’s Jonathan Torrens, and Killer Comebacks. Meanwhile, proof that this history is about to fold up forever are the best Global could buy and sell as 10 p.m. weeknight shows: 90210 and Melrose Place. The ghosts of Aaron Spelling, grist for the fifth-rate CW Network, passed off as marquee fodder on a station built on the foundation of reruns of The Love Boat.

TALKING ABOUT THE FUTURE OF everything seems the order of the month — because who’s in the mood to do any actual work? Masthead Online heeded the Mags University conference, with a  keynote from Jim Louderback, editor-in-chief of PC Magazine — at least until it went web-only: “Sometimes, you just have to give it up.” But did you know The Magazine, a Toronto-based title for tweens, has a 24-hour phone line? — which, allegedly, gets enough action for the staff to periodically sit around and listen. Needless to say, activity at the annual Internet Week New York — co-sponsored by their Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting — generates a higher calibre of takeaways, and voyeuristic TwitPics. Nobody was quite clear about what gossip-in-chief Bonnie Fuller was doing on an all-star Future of Media panel; so far, the only sign of her startup is a Twitter feed of celeb tabloid items told 140 characters at a time — of course, it only takes 3-4 tweets to tell each one. Seated alongside the brains behind Craigslist, Gawker, Twitter and WSJ.com for an hour, all Fuller was really doing was trying to figure out the future of herself, seeking a rationale for ideas that are likely still a bit too abstract. Hey, it’s a feeling we relate to — ex-Star editorial directors … they’re just like us!

PLAGIARISM IN CONFERENCE BOARD REPORT on the digital economy sends Michael Geist into hyperdrive as, of course, the think-tank were setting out to state a case against file-swapping; Jesse Brown follows up with TVO podcast baiting of board boss Anne Golden — O’Reilly Factor pitbull skills squandered on a trifle.

WALL STREET JOURNAL CANADIAN CORRESPONDENT Phred Dvorak will be filling a three-year vacancy at the paper: “Her short piece on Canada bestowing citizenship to unsuspecting Americans remains one of the best read stories of the year” and! She once wrote two distinct theses on the cartoon character Sailor Moon.

CANADIAN JOURNALISM FOUNDATION AWARDS GALA paying tribute to native son Morley Safer, on the occassion of his 40 years with 60 Minutes, but the list of local boldfaces “expected to attend” the awards gala have generally been around as long — or at least it seems that way. (Mitigating exception: er, Robert Fulford’s daughter.)

THE BURTON CUMMINGS TWITTER FEED catches on like wildfire, as he dutifully ignores any replies suggesting maybe best to tone down the ALL CAPS format for his retrospective outbursts, but not without gratitude for this new cult following: “MY TEAM CONCURS THAT I’VE INDEED LEARNED JUST ENOUGH TO BE ANNOYING.”

A ‘TOP TORONTO TWEETS’ LIST published online by The Globe and Mail proves uselessly flattering to those featured on it, especially after being augmented by reader suggestions, then one commenter notes that all “reader” suggestions appear to be PR people and their friends from the Toronto tweet clique — but it was all spin from the start, see?

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.

GOING INSIDE INSIDE THE CBC would have been an unsavory task at the best of times, as the concept of an “official blog of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation” was the by-product of mid-decade expectations that no longer exist, if they did to begin with. How many extra layers of communication could a content provider need? As many as there are unemployed content providers, maybe? Five years ago, it was presumed that the best way for media to deal with external criticism was to hire their own blogging ombud: most significantly CBS News, battered from “Rathergate,” launched Public Eye in September 2005 — closed 28 months later due to “lack of a sustainable business model.” Well, the CBC has no such concerns … er, right? Tod Maffin, a radio freelancer who rallied CBC employees to upload rogue web content in their locked-out late-summer of 2005, managed to sell management on the idea of being their transparency overlord a few months later — and The Man was not going to tell him what to write! (That is, except when tips on ad-blocking were involved!) But why would Maffin bite the hands he was so desperate to have feed him? Just over two years of generally benign rewrites of CBC news releases turned out to be enough, and he backed away from Inside the CBC for a confusing set of reasons. The site was resurrected in the hands of an associate of The Hour, Paul McGrath, who has no apparent idea about anything — yet someone pays him to semi-consciously feed the “official” blog with tangential bits of, what? For today’s most desired dirt, a list of CBC staffers who will lose their jobs, look no further than the personal blog of Tod Maffin. The homepage of Inside the CBC, by contrast, offers a copy-and-paste of a Canadian Media Guild e-mail (oh so insidery!), a regurgitated bit about Jimmy Kimmel’s presentation at the ABC upfronts (oh so CBC!) and a picture — proudly swiped from the Facebook account of someone else with the surname McGrath — of Being Erica starlet Erin Karpluk signing autographs in the CBC atrium (wait, is that a third nipple?).

ATTENTION ATTENDEES OF BOOKCAMPTORONTO: This may not come as a big surprise, but somebody is hoping to sell you nothing, under the guise of selling you something. And why shouldn’t they? The traditional trade show it spawned to replace, BookExpo Canada, was a big-money event — killed because publishers complained they weren’t getting any returns on their investment in this climate. So, instead, a free conversational event with a free lunch — but, as the official Wiki points out, no projectors or microphones at the dreary University of Toronto iSchool — becomes the perfect place to ponder an industry where no one knows the future. The sessions look interesting enough, and even if the chances of anyone saying anything original are remote, it doesn’t cost $479. Still, hearing Montreal-based co-organizer Hugh McGuire discuss the frustration of putting BookCamp together via a podcast called Media Hacks, gives the whole undertaking the taint of social media experts using this event to pounce on a few bewildered businesses. “Publishers by and large,” he says, “have really ceded the online space to people who aren’t them.” Moreover, both McGuire and co-organizer Mitch Joel were bemused at how the publishing industry types didn’t understand the nuances of an “un-conference” where the participants were expected to hash out the panel discussions ahead of time. This level of volunteer input would be expected because it’s free, right? Yet they fail to process that the hot air of Web 2.0 meetups may not actually translate amongst the earnestly literate types trying to stick up for print. The message sent is that actual outsider insight — the wisdom that has propelled a billion existential tweets — has a premium attached, just take my business card, I’ll call you. Good intentions notwithstanding, these guys know that nothing sells like the smell of fear: e-book piracy being the latest threat. What we’re seeing is a more humble feel-good version of the get-rich-quick scheme because, hey, who doesn’t want to get paid these days? After all, preying upon the creative passions that led someone to want to work in an industry as introverted as publishing will expend far less snake oil than some no-money-down real estate scam.

THE TROUBLE WITH REFUTING GAWKER at this stage is that anyone driven to complain is operating on a second-hand sense that the site has always been the agenda-spewing work of some ominiscient MQanhattan media meanies, when publisher Nick Denton has actually spent the past 18 months trying to reinvent his brainchild as a populist round-the-clock national opinionated pop culture news service. Today, the characters behind the keyboard are pretty much unknown to readers old and new — a tactical response to all of that oversharing exhibitionism, which drove Gawker’s original iteration off a cliff. Snark for its own sake had one last rusty moment this week with a 5:31 a.m. post, “Meet Michaelle Jean, the Sarah Palin of Canada,” hazily posted by overnight temp “The Cajun Boy.” Whatever he read wrong about the seal heart-eating Governor-General, though, was good enough for Canada’s national newsmagazine senior writer Anne Kingston to fill her quota of online indignation, acting all huffy over a bad joke headline on the ever-reaching Macleans.ca. Which brought to mind a better Gawker headline of late, “Canada Mistakes Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld for Person of Influence,” following the fleeting March flap where the 3 a.m. host of Red Eye snickered at the news of the Canadian military seeking a rest in Afghanistan — pretty scandalous stuff if you didn’t know it was a determinedly dopey show hosted by a former editor of Maxim. Looks like they punked the media north of the border again, though: Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham, the bald, bleeding, boisterous frontman of Fucked Up appeared on CBC Radio One’s show Q — and because, thanks to Billy Bob Thornton, we all know Jian Ghomeshi never interviews anyone without “context,” the appearance hinged on the fact that Abraham not only appeared as a guest on Red Eye twice this year, he has an open invitation to appear again. Then, needing some filler for the Canadian Press, the radio chat gets spun into “Pink Eyes takes wisdom to Fox News” — which is basically old news, but hey! Such ephemeral details get blown out of proportion because CBC, CP, Maclean’s, etc. staffers can’t grasp being part of anything better, even as they feign superiority. But these American tails will never be too long to wag their dogs.

NO “GREAT MOVIES” FOR FUTURE CITYTV means Canadian filmmakers are fuming over a lost opportunity to get paid to showcase their wares, despite promises to the contrary, putting owner Rogers in a worse light than the CTV “Save Local” schtick their cable guys oppose.

EXCLAIM! Q&A WITH BUCK 65 is technically about music, but also explains an intriguing personality in a broader context, even though he claims to think of his soon-expanding CBC Radio 2 afternoon drive gig as “something I do on the side.”

REX REED TRASHES BRUCE McDONALD flick Pontypool: “Like most Canadian movies … it has no tension, meter or structure, and is utterly pointless. Worse, as the vandalism, looting, mass panic and chewing of human livers spreads across Canada, the movie never shows anything it describes.”

PORN AND PRE-SCHOOL REQUIRES CAPTIONING as the CRTC denied an application by Videotron to avoid fulfilling their responsibilities surrounding all video-on-demand programming — literacy cited as reason for the kidstuff; the “adult” rationale is a little less explicit.

THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM SUMMIT at Centennial College today has generated some Twitter chat, but what’s left to say? (”[S]mug, smarmy, and offering very little new insights” — @jessehirsh) Here, we’d rather do than talk, so add this feed and/or exclusive tweets at @mediabeat.

No new publication can really be built on the back of a few blog posts — but, we’ve gotta start somewhere, and there’s not much point these days to doing it in secret.

The first stage was a Twitter feed, simulcast at this address via the daily Beatstream. Not perfect, but getting there.

Now, for the next few weeks, behold a steady flow of Mediabeat newsletters recapping the chatter.

Watch! as this feature potentially evolves into the link-based portion of a Toronto-based publication dedicated to the areas spelled out in the acronym: Business, Entertainment, Arts and Technology.

(And, even if the name changes, the same obsessions still apply.)

STACKED HOUSE AT GLOBE AND MAIL: New editor-in-chief John Stackhouse was suddenly bumped up from Report on Business section on Monday to replace outgoing Edward Greenspon — days after a video where Greenspon presented himself as guru behind the stubborn new Globe and Mail website, and a final Ed’s note column where he trumpeted the virtues of Roy McGregor’s conversational web feature the veteran columnist insisted on branding a “clog.” A clog! Any outside fascination with the turnover can be credited to those weekly Page 2 papermaking columns where Greenspon reminded readers just how much the Globe love themselves. Heeding an unhealthy amount of attention to the proceedings: Paul Wells of Maclean’s, who remixed the interchangable-jargon-filled lede-burying memo from publisher Phil Crawley, then sliced it down to a tweet — whilst wondering whether the goal is to turn a newspaper into “a moving headline crawl at the bottom of a fast-food restaurant’s digital menu.” Twitter chat suggested Crawley pushed Greenspon off the job due to resistance to newsroom cuts (@davidakin) and, later that same day, “huge laughs” at nervous reaction to developments (@andrewGorham).

CORPORATE SCAM GETS NEW NAME: “Save Local”! Nobody in the media game whose job doesn’t depend on it is buying the argument that conventional network television stations deserve even a few extra cents per month from each cable subscriber to subsidize their homegrown newscasts. And it doesn’t help CTV’s local operations that they’re forced to find ways to solicit affection for something few viewers could ever be bothered to think about, even if they have passively watched for decades. Worse still, the attempts by subscriber-subsidized cable channels — the newly-realigned CP24 and newly-renamed CTV News Channel to shed light on this dilemma — especially when those regional and national news stations have done little to merit loyal viewers. But an avalanche of video reports from Saturday’s open house events have been posted online (and, for balance, an actual detractor) including appearances from politicians who ain’t going to say a word against the continued platform for their constituents — even if they don’t take sides on the regulatory lobbying process at the core of the campaign. Like with most television news websites, however, perusing that propaganda is a hassle — why can’t these stations figure out how to make reporters and their reporting as accessible and contextual as a video blog?

WALRUS SEEKS SUBSCRIBERS, MONEY, PURPOSE: Here’s the problem with the appeal on the part of The Walrus to get beyond the point where, in the widely transmitted words of co-publisher Shelley Ambrose, they are “literally clinging to the ice floe”: the magazine looks and feels like something whose time has passed.  But who doesn’t love old things designed to make you feel smarter? Going in six years from an idiosyncratic Harper’s wannabe funded by family foundations — leading to initial boasts about how contributors would finally be remunerated beyond buck-a-word purgatory — to 60,000 subscribers ain’t too shabby, either. But the too-precious musty intellectual slant seems determined to distance itself from water-cooler worthiness — let alone the online equivalent. Could it be that the Deep Annex clique behind the scenes were worn down by 30 years of trying to make something commercially viable out of Saturday Night? That’s ancient history, too. Here’s the thing: a new quarterly event at the Drake Hotel, the Walrus Underground, kicks off with a revue of personalities and perspectives perfectly suited for a zeitgeist publication aimed at aging Gen Xers. They can’t argue that The Walrus itself has a disposition they desire.

LAUREN CONRAD COMES TO TORONTO in preparation for a post-Hills life where there will be no such thing as an After Show, but she gets her novel published, and you can’t.

CANADA’S OWN HUFFINGTON POST, SORTA profiled in the weekend Globe and Mail, although the only glaring parallel is perhaps that opinion contributors to The Mark won’t be paid.

PEPSI DEBUNKS THREAT OF GLOBALIZATION by revealing its new Obama-era lower-case look in Canada some seven months after its “refresh” was initially revealed stateside.

THE MOLLY MAID CLEANING HANDBOOK is possibly the most useful brand extension imaginable; ghostwriting presumably not work of belaguered “maid for a month” Jan Wong.

TORONTO DEMOCAMP 20 RECAP seems to yet again reinforce the detachment pro geeks have from popular culture — let’s see if we can narrow that gap with this thing called @mediabeat.