By Rachelle Stein-Wotten “Fort McMurray, city of excess,” says the voice-over in the trailer for Fort McMoney. The documentary video game, produced by the National Film Board and the Montreal-based game developer TOXA, allows users to take control of the boomtown, and determine the virtual fate of the oilsands. Combining real footage and interviews with […]
McLuhan saw this coming
By Dave Brindle Lost in all of the hum online about Egypt and the CRTC was that 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marshall McLuhan. He was right. When I tweeted that, my friend Rod Mickleburgh of The Globe and Mail shot back: @davebrindleshow mcluhan was certainly right when he gave my […]
Stelmach resignation leaves old-school media in the dust
By Brian Brennan Can the mainstream print media successfully reinvent itself to become as relevant to news consumers in the digital age as it used to be back in the days when readers looked to their morning newspapers for authoritative coverage of the previous day’s events? The question arises in the wake of Tuesday’s surprise […]
Sorry, Rupert, I already have Twitter
By Frank Moher The Times shut down its old website on Tuesday and started directing all traffic to two new ones: thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk. These are the ones that they propose, at sometime in the indeterminate future, to start charging for. I was interested to see how Rupert Murdoch, wily media titan that he is, […]
Citizen Kos
By Frank Moher 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 […]
Newspapers: no going back
By Frank Moher 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 […]
@H1N1
By Frank Moher By guest blogger Dave Carpenter Word 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. […]
The CRTC’s meddling ways
By Frank Moher 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 […]
A Frank appreciation
By Frank Moher 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 […]
Tweeting Gustav
By Frank Moher 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 […]
