Torontoist's Metrocide series did some digging on murder and crime stats in Toronto to get to the bottom of whether T.O. is a "safe" city or not. Must read through (and should have posted it last week).
Today, they call out the Toronto Sun for another of its horrible headlines and come up with a fear mongering checklist.
The comments are a good read... mostly.
Daniel Libit of Politico on the relationship between blogs, journalists and audience engagement.
"Behold the Commentocracy, where big ideas and rough remarks sit shoulder to shoulder, altogether transforming the nature of the Web and of journalism...Writers and editors have become obsessed with comment tallies (even if many don’t deign to read the comments themselves), which have become a favored, albeit unreliable, barometer for determining editorial success and tapping into the political zeitgeist."
John Gorenfeld has just published a book on the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, leader of the so-called Moonies (a Messianic cult with Moon as its Messiah that claims to be the a unification of all Christian faiths), publisher of The Washington Times, and very rich man. Lots of people follow this guy, and even more give him money.
More recently, he was crowned King of... something... at U.S. Senate offices by members of the American government, among others.
Gorenfeld broke the story on Salon, and has made a short documentary (approx. 15 minutes) about Moon to promote his book. It's mind blowing. Check it out.
Sorry for the lousy formating.
Online Videos by Veoh.com
NYT - British papers apologize to McCann's for murder allegations.
Adverganza - This ad blog posted what it calls the Iliad of corrections.
An interesting new endeavour that I can't quite get my head around. Webb Alert is a five-minute daily news roundup of Internet/digital matters. Its host, Morgan Webb, is a tech geek goddess worshipped by many for her hosting of X-Play.
I'm not sure how popular it is, but experience with it so far has left me scratching my head. The stories are about a minute long, if not shorter, and summarize stories that can otherwise be found on any tech blog or even in the mainstream media. It's basically a vocalization of links the creators find interesting. They even say so in some of their copy.
Moreover, the broadcast can be embedded on your website. I found it at ArsTechnica.com, where I just finished reading all the stories Webb Alert ran in its broadcast.
There was one "unpaid ad for a blog that I like," during the broadcast, but that was it. If you click on the Advertise With Us link, you get Morgan's bio, which says volumes about where the creators are putting their money in terms of attracting an audience.
What is suspiciously absent from the site is an About Us page. Who's running this operation? Are they billing themselves as a news organization, or an aggregator with a talking head?
I'm looking at this through my media criticism lens (which may be unfair, depending on their intentions), but I find the site wanting. There should be more transparency here, given the precedent set by other of online independent media.
An interesting post from a PR-guy's blog about Google's decision to allow news subjects to comment or respond to news stories about them.
Oh, the possibilities for burned PR folk. Oh the flak that will fly.
Here is Google News Blog's explanation.
Edit, August 8: Here is Ars Technica's post on the subject.
Liberal activists are stepping up their campaign against Fox News Channel by pressuring advertisers not to patronize the network.. Story run on on Marketing's website, fed from AP.
Edit, Aug 1: This is how one AdAge columnist responds to some of MoveOn's tactics. Now that Murdoch has bought the WSJ, they're going to print some false covers with slogan-like headlines to illustrate their point. Ken Wheaton sees it as so much hogwash.
Utterly fascinating.
"More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989. Citizens who call the Internet their primary news source know slightly less than fans of TV and radio news. Hmmm... maybe a little less Perez Hilton and a little more Jim Lehrer."
The questions asked were:
Who is the vice-president?
Who is your state's governor?
Does the US have a trade deficit or surplus?
Which party controls the House of Representatives?
Is the chief justice of the Supreme Court a liberal, moderate, or conservative?
Click through for data charts... one of which is titled Daily Show viewers are more up on current events than Fox News fans.
More BB links:
ABC had, apparently, blown the cover of a U.S. covert operation in Iran. Reaction has been mixed (surprise surprise).
The afore-posted Toronto Life blog focusing on the Conrad Black trial
has an interesting topping its page today. It
concerns The Globe and Mail's coverage through the always- controversial Christie Blatchford.
He then asked me if I’d read Christie’s column. I said I hadn’t. He then read me the last line of the column. Speaking of Conrad Black, Blatchford asks (rhetorically, one suspects), “Is it a criminal offence to be so visibly entitled?” The satirist then suggested that I read the rest of the column and imagine that instead of a description of corporate greed,Blatchford had appended her question to an article about a guy who walks into a Mac’s, points a loaded gun at the owner, spews abuse at him, then steals his money. (Which also happens to be the analogy trotted out by the prosecution in its opening remarks.)
A version of this article about biographer Tom Bower from the Guardian appeared in today's Globe and Mail. It outlines the characteristics of Bower's aggressive style and the response he gets from his subjects/targets. Bower's style is herein called "anti-hagiography."
Bower had indicated that he would not be interviewed for this article, but he ended up telephoning anyway. On balance, he said, he'd rather articles like this one not appear (an obvious hazard is that his enemies, such as Black, might be hungry for anything negative they could find). He added, however, that he welcomed publicity for his books, and he defended himself against charges of premeditated hostility. "Believe me, I don't approach any of these people from a negative point of view," he said. "I'm interested in the use of money to buy influence, and in those people who have the ambition to try to determine the fate of mankind. I find it fascinating - have done ever since childhood, reading books on Bismarck and Disraeli. I've witnessed power, and it's just fascinating." The evidence of lying and corruption, he said, "is always there. It's always there. It's fascinating how these characters just ignore the truth".
During my morning commute, I came across the following in the Metro under the headline "Posters point to passengers." (Emphasis mine)
It's all our fault. According to a new TTC advertising campaign, the causes of subway delays have nothing to do with a lack of investment or poor TTC planning or anything like that. Oh, no.Just to get my two cents out of the way, there's no way I'd mistake this for hard news and wouldn't think the paper was making a broad opinion claim. I do not, however, speak for anyone but myself. I think (and will find out for sure) that the Star has guidelines for marking op-ed as being clearly that. Regardless, they have not done that here.
A poster spotted on the subway yesterday said the top five reasons for subway delays are: blocking doors, holding doors, people getting hurt from not "minding the gap" between platforms and subway cars, pieces of litter that catch fire on the tracks (when's the last time you saw that?) and, finally, passenger illness.
It all makes sense; you shouldn't get sick on the subway because you're only going to slow people down. Instead, folks should be considerate and throw up – or have heart palpitations over the latest fare increase – once they're safely outside the station.
As for the people blocking or holding doors, it appears that has nothing to do with overcrowded trains. No, according to the TTC, it's all our fault.
