“They’re probably worried about losing their jobs”

The life of a magazine editor in Canada.

More than two decades later, the magazine industry has been radically transformed. Canada’s major magazines are now owned by corporations, whose primary focus is not magazines, often public companies beholden to the bottom line and shareholders. It’s not just about producing “beautiful” magazines anymore, either. The rise of the internet has led to pressure to build robust websites, often maintained by magazine staffers now burdened with extra responsibilities, but without compensation for their heavier workload. Editorial positions are dwindling as roles are consolidated. Management blames the decline in ad revenue, but when the economy recovers, few believe that jobs will return or pay will increase.

Conrad Black granted bail

Media types ponder how best to cover this story.

Seth designs new cover for Canadian Notes & Queries

Lovely. See also the Seth CNQ comic.

“At first I wasn’t sure,” writes Seth in an e-mail to The Afterword. “It’s a lot of work to redesign a magazine and I was pretty busy. But it was really something that sounded like a challenge. And it couldn’t have been more ‘up my alley.’ I love Canadiana of all sorts and I particularly loved the absolutely stiffness and dullness of the magazine’s title – I mean, you just couldn’t have a more quintessentially Canadian masthead title than Canadian Notes and Queries. If you made it up, no one would believe it.  In a way, the name of the magazine hides the fact that it is a very smart and entertaining read – not stuffy at all. I figured I could do something amusing but elegant with the magazine to draw attention to that fact – perhaps  poke some fun at it’s purcieved stuffiness while at the same time pointing out what a marvelous magazine of criticism it is by giving the interior a look of class and austerity, but still showing off some charm and sense of humour about the whole thing. “

Canadian Press restructures

And so the media shakeup in Canada continues.

The Canadian Press has struck a tentative deal to restructure its operations, ending its 93-year history as a not-for-profit industry co-operative and proposing to move forward under private ownership.

Canwest to become Postmedia

No, really.

In conversation with Sook-Yin Lee

Torontoist features Sook-Yin Lee, host of Definitely Not the Opera and an actor and musician, in the latest instalment of I Want Your Job. Also, Jian Ghomeshi of Q sits down to talk with her about her new film, Year of the Carnivore.

Here’s the trailer for the film:

Crazy from the heat roundup

I go away to Toronto for a few days, and the world goes crazy. Crazier? Here’s a quick roundup of the hot stories from the last few days:

• David Davidar, the head of Penguin Canada, steps down as a former Penguin editor sues him for sexual harassment. This is about the only time a publishing story hits the front page of the Star.
• Canada is apparently getting a homegrown version of Fox News. Because that kind of thing has been so good for political and cultural discourse in the U.S.
• 2010 Atlantic Canada Reads is on! Love the logo.
• Vincenzo Natali, the director of Splice and Cube, is on board to direct the film adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Which will now be an alternate history.
• Marc Emery put in solitary confinement for podcasting while in U.S. prison.

Is the CBC beyond repair?

Usually, when you ask that question it’s already too late.

Endless meetings and committees were scheduled, and it appeared that one major influence on what Stursberg did came from representatives of Frank N. Magid Associates, an American media consulting firm known for its “if it bleeds, it leads” mandate that found an ear at CBC around 2005 and has seen its influence grow since. The Magid approach emphasized crime, weather and traffic. Newscasts were to carry more stories with shorter run times, or stories cut up into segments scattered across the program, to keep viewers engaged.

Ian Morrison, spokesman for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, says Magid’s reputation for “promoting sizzle rather than steak” doesn’t jibe with the ideals of a public broadcaster. “In the mainstream of the Western democratic tradition, public broadcasting has a distinctive something. It’s not something that follows, apes or mimics the private sector. It’s something that goes into more depth, covers things longer, tries to get behind the news to explain what’s going on and not chase fire trucks, sensationalizing, using news as entertainment, shock. Magid’s reputation is moving it in that direction and that is consistent with the current CBC management’s preoccupation with audience numbers and stylistically copying things that happen in the private sector in this country, and particularly in the United States.”

NOW Magazine launches iPad edition

An app is also apparently on the way for those who can’t resist the lure of the shiny new iPad. So so shiny….

OpenFile: It’s all about the community

UPDATE: Here’s the second part of the interview.

MediaStyle has a Q&A with Craig Silverman of the new Toronto news site OpenFile.

What’s the elevator pitch for OpenFile?

The short version is that it’s a collaborative local news site.

Collaborative meaning that anybody from the community in Toronto–maybe they’re seeing something happening on their street and they’re wondering, “why are all these trees being cut down?”–they can go to the site, open what we call a File, and say, “there are trees being cut down all over the street, I’m wondering ‘why?’”

And if we at OpenFile, the editors, look at that and say “this is a good story”, we assign it to a reporter.

Sounds good so far. So how are they going to make money?

Our plan is to do advertising rather than to do a pay wall. If you look at the beta site right now, there is no advertising. Obviously, that’s going to change. But one thing you’re probably not going to see, or ever going to see on the site, are your typical google ads, banners, text ads–that kind of thing. In terms of a sustainable model, if you are only selling those kinds of ads, banners, clicks, and things like that, you’re going to have a hard time supporting real journalism. So there are two things we are going for. Number one, we’re going to be looking at a sponsor model, something along the lines of what you might see at PBS where specific programs are paid for by specific foundations. So we are talking to larger organizations about becoming founding sponsors and offering them exclusive placement and positioning on the site.

The second part is the long term part. We’re geotagging everything that goes on the site. As the site evolves and there is more and more content, and as we see where people are distributed over the city, all of a sudden we can do location-based advertising. We think that advertising is more and more looking towards contextual, looking towards location-based.

This could turn into a valuable site — in all definitions of the word — very quickly.

“I would like to see more artists’ renderings of space fries and laser cars”

Dave Bidini on writing for the National Post.

2. What are you trying to get across in your writing?

I am basically trying to get across that I am not Russell Smith or David Eddie even though I am a white middle-class male who will, occasionally, wear nice shoes and a necktie, though never man-perfume, which I’m told Mr. Smith does. Another thing I am trying to get across is that I am not Roy MacGregor, either (I am actually a lot nicer than Roy MacGregor) even though I like sports and death metal, like Mr. MacGregor does. Oh, and I am also not Margaret Wente. So, Mr. Bilberry, please stop sending emails suggesting that I have fangs, worship the Dark Lord, vote Tory and “probably wear a dress.”

Are the Conservatives targeting the CBC?

The Globe wonders why the government is so preoccupied with Canada’s public broadcaster these days.

On the face of it, the Conservative Party’s current obsession with the CBC borders on buffoonery.

But it isn’t. It can be seen as a goulish attempt to demonize the public broadcaster, to isolate it and, one suspects, an attempt to batter the CBC into compliance. Or one could imagine an even more ominous scenario: the possibility that the current battering is the minority Conservative government’s manner of preparing the public for a major cut to CBC funding and the eventual beleaguerment of the CBC as a fringe broadcaster.

Is the CBC waging a faith war against Conservatives?

Well, I’d argue that lately it’s been waging a culture war against Canadians. Anyhow, the accusations seem to stem from coverage of a new book called The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, which I’m reading right now and I’d recommend so far.

The CBC is fuelling a “faith war” and using its taxpayer-funded position to “foment religious division,” the Prime Minister’s strategists in their latest attack on the public broadcaster.

In a memo to supporters, the backroom operatives note that this is just the next step in the CBC’s “ongoing campaign against the Conservative Party.” At issue is a story about the rise of the right-wing religious groups and their connections to the Stephen Harper’s government that ran on The National last night.

Canwest newspapers sold

UPDATE: Crunching the numbers on the Canwest sale. Good deal or bad?

In a bit of a surprise to most watching the creditor protection proceedings, the Canwest newspaper chain has been bought by a group of unsecured creditors, who apparently plan to offer the papers up in an IPO. National Post head Paul Godfrey is being brought in to run the chain, and the word is all the papers will remain open. Prior to this, the Star seemed to be the front runner for acquiring the chain.

The unsecured creditor group buying the papers is led by West Face Capital Inc. and is made up of the CanWest bondholders who held the company’s unsecured debt. Many of them bought the bonds when the company was struggling in creditor protection and stood to lose their investment if another buyer took control of the assets.

“Let’s spread the wealth around to some other white people”

URNews takes on the Globe’s Africa edition, edited by Bono and the other guy.

The special segment will explore: opportu­nities in agricultural and strip mining practices that are prohibited in the first world; the attraction of a large and extremely low-wage work force bereft of labour standards; the advantages of deal­ing with unpredictable dictatorships; and other specifically regional attractions.

Al Jazeera starts broadcasting in Canada

Just as people stop watching television.

Dave Bidini’s Record of the Month club

Kicks off with Slash!

He’s a bit of a burnt dandelion, our Slash, poofed hair pushed into a Muppetian top hat like the kind they used to glitter and sell at ’70s fairground shows by UFO, Aerosmith and all of the bands that he — and I — would have watched in our now-distant teenage summertimes. There’s the sunglasses, too, as well as a black T-shirt drawn from a hangar that I imagine swinging among hundreds of others in a great walk-in closet like the kind that Imelda Marcos would have built for her shoes.

The Posties offer some advice for writers

Heh.

Letters to the editors

The Ryerson Review of Journalism profiles the editors at the helm of three of Canada’s most important papers: the Globe’s John Stackhouse, the Star’s Michael Cooke and the Post’s Doug Kelly.

Court says no anonymity online

A Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge says you can flame but you can’t hide online. Comment boards everywhere suddenly fall silent.