What would Jesus do (if he were on a website and it had ads)?

By Eric Pettifor
J.D. Frazer’s book Money for Content and Your Clicks for Free is more interesting for the insight it provides into the business side of the online comic strip User Friendly than as a putative how-to book. (Frazer has written User Friendly under the pen name Illiad since 1997.) As a how-to book, its [...]

Another “national” publishing award

By Frank Moher
A number of years ago I proposed a story to Saturday Night magazine on the journalist Barry Broadfoot, veteran western Canadian newspaperman and pioneer in Canada of oral histories (Ten Lost Years, Six War Years), who had a new book coming out. Over the phone, I extolled his virtues to my editor in [...]

What I’ve learned as an online publisher

By Frank Moher
backofthebook.ca turned three a few weeks ago. We launched on October 16, 2006, and I would have marked the occasion back then, but I’ve been busy piecing our archives back together after our recent redesign. I’m almost done; I’ve got the photos loading in on old stories again, and pretty soon all the [...]

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 also [...]

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 as Editor [...]

Not so fast, Google

By Brian Brennan
The CBC called. Would I like to go on the radio and talk to Donna about the Google book settlement? Hey people, you’re talking to an Irishman here. Of course, I would like to go on the radio and talk about the Google book settlement. I would like to go on the radio [...]

@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.
Exhibit A: The US [...]

Top 10 web searches of 2008

By Frank Moher
We’re a bit sniffy about top 10 lists at backofthebook.ca, for the reasons outlined here, but we’re very big on checking our web stats. Or at least I am, in my capacity as publisher/editor/chief lackey. Now you may suppose web stats — that is, the numbers showing how many visitors a site has, [...]

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 but [...]

Mallick vs. Palin. Or is that Feylin?

By Frank Moher
It’s hard not to sympathize with the Yanks who are upset with Heather Mallick. The former Globe and Mailer, now writing for cbc.ca, is so resolutely humourless, even when she’s trying to be funny, and so intransigently snooty (she wears white pearls in her website photo, for cripe’s sake), that I too feel, [...]

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