In our Politics section right now you’ll find Alison@Creekside‘s response to MP Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 132, which asks Parliament to examine the definition of a human being under Canadian law. Alison doesn’t like his initiative, to say the least. I don’t think I like it either — it seems like a weaselly way to get at what Woodworth really wants to do, which is to re-introduce an abortion law in Canada. But I don’t agree with Alison either. I think we should have an abortion law in Canada. Something like the laws that resulted from Roe v. Wade in the States would do. And no, I don’t think the fact that I’m male renders my opinion meaningless.

We pick up a lot of Alison’s posts from her Creekside blog, because she lets us and she’s a superb writer. Most of the time I read her to find out what I’m thinking. I wasn’t going to publish her post on Woodworth, though — not because I disagree with it, but because I didn’t read it until a few days after the event that precipitated it, and we try to keep things timely around here. However, then a scrap broke out on a site called Progressive Bloggers, which aggregates the feeds of various writers who think they fit that description.

Among these are Canadian Soapbox, The Scott Ross, Fern Hill at Dammit Janet! and Dave at The Galloping Beaver. When the former two published posts sympathetic to Woodworth and his motion (here and here), Fern Hill threatened, via twitter, to “organize a strike by actual progressive bloggers until mysogynists are booted,” and Dave delivered an ultimatum: “The moderators of Progressive Bloggers have 48 hours to respond . . . . They will censure those who believe a ‘debate’ on the rights of women is acceptable and they will do it on the front page of Progressive Bloggers.”

Well, that’s a bit too Maoist for my tastes. Just as Fern Hill and Dave believe absolutely in a woman’s right to control her body, I believe absolutely (or next-to) in the right to free speech, and that’s “free” as in “not subject to re-education or pillorying in the town square.” But to even have to say so, much less make the argument, seems to me so banal, so “Seriously? We’re even talking about this?” (which, again, I understand is exactly how Fern and Dave feel about the matter of choice), that I find it less irksome to simply publish Alison’s piece, even if I am late in doing so, and say, See? That’s how it’s done.

Of course, we aren’t a site calling ourselves “Progressive Blogger,” so I understand the semantic argument, which is what much of the furor seems to boil down to: who does and doesn’t get to wear the appellation. Backofthebook.ca tends to lean left, despite the fact that its editor/publisher is a mysogynistic theocrat-in-disguise (or so I expect I’ll be told), and we are certainly currently dedicated to afflicting the Harper government (including Mr. Woodworth, whenever one of our writers, or you, wish to do so — that’s the comments section down below). But what we really are is a magazine that values good writing, and argument. I have asked various right-wing types to write for us, and the only reason they don’t appear here is that, so far, they haven’t taken me up on the offer. If they did, I wouldn’t anticipate our left-wing types fleeing for the hills. If they did, it would be just as well.

Which is to say we are a magazine, not a silo. The Progressive Blogger affair demonstrates the disadvantage of the latter, whether they aggregate opinion from the left or, as in the case of Blogging Tories, the right. Eventually, the echo chamber becomes deafening.

The Toronto Star just announced that you can’t trust a thing you read on their website — although that’s not quite the way they phrased it. Canada’s largest daily has joined forces with TheMarkNews.com, one of those free blogger sites, to acquire a small army of unpaid “community correspondents” to cover Ontario’s October 6 election.

A measure of how far removed newspapers are from the media of even 20 years ago can be seen in the badly written ad riddled with grammatical errors. They tell us correspondents will be expected to “use a variety of mediums with an emphasis on video and photos,” which left me wondering how anyone in the professional media doesn’t know that mediums are found only at psychic fairs and clothing stores.

But the breakdown in basic literacy skills is probably of little concern except to reporters from an era when they taught us to dread an editor bellowing across a newsroom: “Rupp! How the hell do you spell separate?” Far more disturbing is seeing the biggest (and many journos would argue the best) newspaper in Canada admit that it is planning to deploy lobbyists and political shills where once they fielded journalists.

“Community correspondents will receive no monetary compensation for their work. The value is being able to shape the debate and broadcast your ideas to the Toronto Star and The Mark’s national audiences,” the ad’s FAQ tells, without a hint of irony.

I guess we’ll have to edit Samuel Johnson’s famous line — no man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money — to say “nobody but a shill . . .”

Shills are exactly what the Star will be promoting under a banner that once explicitly stood for good journalism, due to the Atkinson Principles. When TorStar bought the paper that published the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan from the estate of publisher Joseph Atkinson in 1958, the deal came with strings attached. The new corporate owners had to continue to treat the paper as a public trust delivering journalism “conducted for the benefit of the public in the continued frank and full dissemination of news and opinions.”

I see no mention of the Atkinson Principles in the community correspondents ad. But the FAQ offers a hilariously ignorant definition of conflict of interest that makes it clear political operatives will be a big part of the “overwhelming number of applications expected.”

“A conflict of interest is defined as a formal or informal affiliation with any political party or interest group with a stake in the election. Conflicts do not disqualify candidates, but they need to be declared in order to maintain the credibility of the project.”

Uh, no. As any journalist can tell you, a conflict of interest is defined as serving two masters simultaneously. A conflict is often determined by who is paying for the service. And make no mistake, all bloggers are paid — just not by the sites running them.

Platforms like The Mark or The Huffington Post collect the copy of people who are paid to write promotional columns for a product or a cause. It’s a form public relations – copy written for self-serving reasons, rather than to inform readers. Some naïve would-be writers think they’re building a career by contributing free pieces to The Mark or HuffPo, but most readers know these sites are just publicity. Which isn’t a criticism: promotional sites have their uses. As journalism disappears, stories of genuine public interest have been ignored, and sites like The Mark provide a place for academics to advertise their books or charities to promote their beliefs.

But it’s not journalism, which is defined by journalists as newsgathering done on behalf of the public. Newspapers attract readers and lay claim to all sorts of privileges, including access to government, because they serve citizens. That’s the product they sell: independent information for participants in a democracy. Or rather, that’s the product they used to sell.

Apparently, the Star thinks there’s more money to be made in running online propaganda. For their sake I hope so, because they just devalued their newspaper by making it obvious they no longer adhere to the Atkinson Principles, or even have enough respect for their readers to bother using the words right.

Seems that editors get a lot of negative criticism for some reason — perhaps for assuming authority even over experts by virtue of nothing more than having a lot of time to spend contributing their unpaid labour. This allows them to roost upon pages, reverting the edits of others who think they know better. The audacity of people who are under the strange impression that anyone can just change pages with impunity! Poor editors! No wonder they need our love.

The feature hasn’t been rolled out yet, but even if it was available, I know of one editor who wouldn’t be getting any love from me. On this, American Independence Day, I found myself, a Canadian who celebrated Canadian independence by attending a Canada Day parade in Canmore, wondering how many other countries celebrate independence in July. Wikipedia to the rescue!

Or not. Canada isn’t listed. Nor some other countries. The answer to this seeming omission is to be found on the discussion page. Apparently, to be included, a country’s independence must satisfy a strict set of criteria:

(1) must be a celebration; (2) must be annual; and (3) must commemorate the day on which a country assumed independent statehood. The national holidays of Canada, Australia, and NZ do not meet that third criterion, because the days they respectively celebrate as a national holiday commemorate the day of becoming dominions.

Reminds me of an episode of Futurama where resident bureaucrat Hermes Conrad scores a point over another bureaucrat who didn’t stamp a form the correct number of times. The senior bureaucrat praises him, saying ” Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct — the best kind of correct. I hereby promote you to grade 37.”

Perhaps instead of this WikiLove nonsense, Wikipedia could institute a similar system of bureaucratic grades allowing editors to rise by defending the integrity of the rules above and beyond all reason. And heaven forbid that the criteria for inclusion should be modified to admit major nation states such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

Many, many criticisms have been leveled against Wikipedia, from lack of expertise, to copyright infringement, to its anarchic nature (as though that were a bad thing), but the criticism which is most important and which comes up repeatedly on Slashdot whenever a Wikipedia related story is posted has to do with the defacto ownership of pages by editors who routinely delete edits by others, not because they’re vandalism or off topic or whatever, but because the editor personally disagrees with them. The comments under the recent Slashdot posting regarding WikiLove are typical — the highest rated mostly address rogue editing, rather than the subject of the story.

Well, the comment by user rbrausse is an exception: “I don’t get the idea behind such features – where are dislike, -1, WikiHate?”

Good point, rbrausse. When the WikiLove interface pops up, you can choose an image such as a kitten or bottle of beer to go with your message. If there was a WikiHate interface, I think the exclusion of Canada Day would warrant a pile of poo.

As though the tenterhooks weren’t tight enough for Harry Potter 7.2: The One Where It Actually Ends, the Rowling megalith taunted its fans last week with the mysterious offer of . . . Pottermore.

Pottermore, the powers promised, was a Thing That Was Not A Book But Was Still Very Great And Seekrit. Said powers gave the masses about a week to stew and ponder before revealing the actual Pottermore, a sort of interactive online game wherein players are sorted by the Sorting Hat and chased by Dementors or whatever. Also, the books are joining the rest of 2011 and being released as ebooks. So, that’s neat.

Pottermore’s eventual manifestation is less interesting, however, than the anticipatory buzz. In the pre-online days, if you’d heard Something New And Seeekritive was coming out, you and your buddies would come up with a few half-baked theories about Harry Potter Action Figures, and then you would chase a hoop with a stick down to the swimming hole. Your speculative powers were limited to your social circle and the spare time and concern therein.

The intarweb accrues that spare time and multiplies it a squillion-fold. No sooner had Pottermore graced the interwaves than people began hollering out ideas. It’s a theme park! It’s an MMORPG! A Harry Potter Cast World Tour! A remake of all the movies where they LITERALLY LEAVE NOTHING OUT so the movies are, like, two weeks long. AN ACTUAL WIZARDING SCHOOL. Interest was, as they say, piqued.

And Pottermore is actually kind of a rad thing, if you’re into the Potterverse. It may even be as cool as any of the best ideas that were shouted into the inter-ether. But it isn’t cooler than all those things combined, which would be the only way to blow anyone’s mind after a week of rampant speculation unhampered by budgetary or practical concerns (the potential non-existence of magic, e.g.). Imaginations ran wild and they ran everywhere, whereas the real Pottermore could only ever go in one or two directions without becoming an unwieldy mess.

Ultimately fans will be delighted because more HP is still more HP, even if it isn’t a world tour. But this same phenomenon is what killed the finale of “Lost” (okay, well, that and it being a sort of shitty finale). Years of speculation had raised expectations too high while simultaneously killing off the element of surprise. Literally anything they did would have been predicted on someone’s blog somewhere and come off as an obvious choice.

Buzz is an unwieldy beast, and as much as it generates interest it can result in disappointment with the final product. The blurb for Chris Cleave’s 2008 novel, Little Bee, ran along the lines of “we can’t tell you anything about this plot and shit, because that would RUIN IT, and once you read it and haaaaave to tell your friends, don’t tell THEM either unless you are a Ruinous Bastard.” This vague and enticing lure drove expectations for what is just a Very Good Book About Suffering But With No Twists Or Surprises Necessitating Such Seekretive Marketing to unachievable heights, which the book couldn’t possibly hit.

The week of hallucinatory speculations for Pottermore likely won’t dent its popularity in the long run, and it’s near enough to the best, realistic guesses to soothe the savage muggles. But in some lonely basement at least one HP superfan is legitimately disappointed that it isn’t a wizarding school.

PARIS – It is a curious thing, to host the lions of the digital world in a series of tents in a public park. But that is what French President Nicolas Sarkozy did this week in Paris, for the so-called eG8 forum, a prelude to the G8 forum 173 km to the north-west, in Deauville. The police were out in full force along rue Rivoli, the hectic thoroughfare adjoining les Jardins de Tuilleries, as one might expect for an event commingling billionaires and high-level politicians. I watched a motorcyclist inadvertently bombard a roped-off side street, defended by a cordon of police, and thought he was lucky to escape with his life, as opposed to the scolding he got.

But the digs thrown up for the conference were decidedly déclassé. Were the usual likely venues in Paris all booked-up? Or was Sarkozy signalling to the mostly American attendees – the likes of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and John Perry Barlow, formerly lyricist for the Grateful Dead and more recently co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — that they oughtn’t get all up in that – that he and the other real world leaders would decide how the internet should be developed, while the digirati need only learn their place as electronic street performers?

In any event, Canada was as absent from the conference as you might expect. The subject was intellectual property, and, while we produce our fair share, we are not in any significant way a player in its distribution — not like the Americans and the Europeans (represented on the dais by Bertelsmann and Universal Music France). So there’s no point in feeling snubbed; we aren’t important enough to be snubbed.

But our lack of profile and influence in l’age d’internet doesn’t bode well for our economic fortunes in a world where silicon is increasingly the international currency. The lack of Canadian start-ups that might turn into players, the failing fortunes of our one major hardware manufacturer, RIM, and the Conservative government’s disinterest in creativity, the driving force behind all the achievements and innovations in technology represented onstage at the eG8, suggest we will remain largely hewers of wood, drawers of water, and processors of tar sands.

By the way, Parisian police apparently dealt with protests with a novel approach: simply not tolerating protests. Students of irony will note that this takes some of the power out of the G8 leaders’ endorsement of the “Arab Spring,” comprised as it is of nothing but protests. Meantime, a few thousand dissidents were tolerated last week in the city of Le Havre, across the river from Deauville. There, when property violence broke out, of the same sort seen along Yonge Street during the G20 last year, the protestors took care of it.

Nice job. Note to Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair: That’s how it’s done.

By Mark Evans

In 2011, less is going to be more . . . and that’s a good thing.

It’s a decision that comes on the heels of a happily hectic 2010 in which my business surged ahead, and a number of other projects (including the mesh conference) consumed time. It was a great year but it felt like a hurricane, leaving me with the feeling that things could be better organized, more efficient, and more productive.

So less in 2011 means:

1. Less time online. Given how much time I do spend online, less will still be a lot. Nevertheless, this means being online not because I should or it’s convenient but because there’s something to do. It means using the time I now devote to fooling around online to instead read a book or a newspaper, play a game, or call a friend.

2. Less time on the iPhone. I love smartphones but they’re starting to rule us rather than us ruling them. We have become compulsive-obsessive about checking our smartphones all the day. How many times do you think people check for e-mail a day? I’d say at least 25. Our smartphones have killed our time to think and take a mental break because they give us something to “do” when there is a break in the action.

3. Fewer apps. I’m an app-aholic, always looking for the new and shiny application that will do things differently or better. It’s fun to check out new toys but it also means spending less time with the apps I have and that help me get my work done. For me, these include WordPress, DropBox, Freshbooks, Skype, Google Docs, Bit.ly,and Manymoon. While it’s great to discover a gem that not a lot of people are using, it also takes time.

4. Less time in the in-box. People may say e-mail is dying but not for me. The amount of time I spend in my in-box is terrifying. That said, most of it is work related. It’s managing projects, reaching out and talking with clients, responding to inquiries, and doing stuff like mesh. Still, I’m in the in-box most of the day as opposed to checking several times a day. We all tend to forget that e-mail isn’t going to disappear if it’s not checked hourly. At the same time, not checking and responding to e-mail may re-set expectations about quickly someone should respond to an e-mail.

5. Less social media. Now, here’s the elephant in the room. For me, social media is mostly a professional and brand building vehicle. They are tools I use to establish a stronger digital presence, consume valuable information and, as important, drink the digital Kool-Aid. After all, it is difficult to be a digital marketing and social media strategist if you’re not using and experimenting with the tools.

Still, social media is a time-suck. Blogging, my social bread and butter, takes up a lot of time and intellectual energy. I’m not really into Facebook so I’m okay with the little time it does consume. That leaves Twitter, which I love, but probably spend too much time scrolling through looking for gems. If less is truly more, then less time in Twitter is the goal for 2011. I’ll probably create as much content – seven to 10 tweets a day – because it’s how I build digital street cred. It’s the consuming that needs to be addressed.

We’re only into day four of 2011 so the “less is more” theme is a new and fragile concept. That said, I didn’t open my laptop from five p.m. Sunday until Monday morning so maybe it’s taking root!

What about you? Could less be more?

First posted on markevanstech.ca

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, intended to get people to pay for something they’re used to getting for free, and will still be able to get for free from most of his competitors. I imagined lots of rich media, streaming video, real-time interaction with visitors, maybe the kind of collaborative citizen/professional journalism, using Google Wave, that recently won the Seattle Times a Pulitzer. Imagine my surprise, then, when I signed up for the sneak preview a few weeks ago and found this:

A newspaper. Okay, so I wasn’t that surprised. As I’ve already written, the whole notion of charging for newspapers online represents a massive failure of imagination. This just confirmed that the NewsCorp cartel had run out of ideas.

And possibly reporters, too. I happened to be logged-in the night that the Israeli navy was chasing the Rachel Corrie on its voyage towards Gaza. The whole world was watching, to see if there’d be a repeat of the bloody incident of a few days before. Down in the corner, The Times was reporting this:

But as it turned out, it would actually be a good half hour before soldiers boarded the boat. Significantly, Twitter was busy at the same time with the same “news,” but already new reports were beginning to emerge there: the Israelis hadn’t “seized” the boat, but were merely tailing it. So I waited, and sure enough, about 10 minutes later:

The implication seemed unavoidable: The Times was getting its news from Twitter, right along with the rest of us. And for this it wants to charge us?

Sorry, Rupert. I already have Twitter. But good luck with that paywall idea anyway.

As it becomes increasingly clear that the official explanation of 9/11 is insupportable and won’t stand the test of time, I thought it might be apropos to establish a media “Honour” and “Dishonour” roll, recording those news organizations who have or haven’t done their job in reporting the story. The idea here is that, 10 or 15 years from now, when the great majority of people have cottoned-on to the fact that the government lied — just as the great majority now realize that about the Kennedy assassination — we’ll be able to look back and see which of them maintained the best traditions of journalism, and which were compliant or complicit.

This list is pretty much off the top of my head, and certainly subject to change, persuasion, and the wisdom of crowds. In other words, if you have suggestions for additions and subtractions, or moving an organization from one list to the other, let me know via the comments form. Please explain your reasons, and provide links to back them up when you can. Note that organizations can appear on both lists, and that individual columnists are excluded, as an organization may well maintain a columnist it disagrees with. We’re looking for institutional responsibility here. The exception is columnists like Alexander Cockburn, who also have senior editorial responsibility, and thus are the institution, or part of it. Maybe I’ll start a category for just-columnists down the road.

As well, the fact that a newspaper or magazine or network is big and mainstream, and possibly even corporate-owned, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be recognized when it does something right.

“Doing the job” is defined here as not swallowing the government line wholesale, remaining sceptical, reporting new evidence as it emerges, and investigating the facts where warranted. Or at least some of the above. “Dishonour” means credulity in the face of government explanations, ignoring or actively suppressing contrary evidence, deriding debate, failing to correct information that has been proven false, and various other forms of pernicious and/or bush-league behaviour.

So here’s the list for starters:

The 9/11 Media Honour Roll:

A Channel (Victoria, BC)
Report on Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth press conference

The British Broadcasting Corporation
The Power of Nightmares

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The Fifth Estate, “The Unofficial Story”
Sunday Special Edition, “9/11: Facing the Fallout”

Channel One Russia
Showing of documentary Zero, followed by debate

The Copenhagen Post
Article on scientific study of nanothermite found in WTC residue

“Democracy Now!”
9/11 debate (Many Truthers regard Amy Goodman as a “left gatekeeper” — but she did run this debate.)

The Japan Times
Article on 9/11 Diet member Yukihisa Fujita

KBDI, Colorado Public Television
Showing of 9/11 Press for Truth and 9/11 Blueprint for Truth

KMPH FOX 26 (Fresno, Calif.)
Interview with Richard Gage

La Télé Libre
Interview with Cynthia McKinney and Niels Harrit

Maclean’s
“Hijacking the Truth on 9/11″

RT
Various programs and reports

TV2 News (Denmark)
Interview with Danish Scientist Niels Harrit

Vanity Fair
Article on Loose Change

The Washington Times
“Explosive News”

Zoomer Radio (Toronto)
Interview with author of A Guide to 9/11 Whistleblowers

The 9/11 Media Dishonour Roll:

ABC News
Nightline, “Inside a 9/11 ‘Truther’ Convention”

British Broadcasting Corporation
“9/11: The Conspiracy Files”

Counterpunch
“The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts”

Daily Kos
“The Conspiracists”

The Huffington Post
Editor’s Note

The National Post
“A theory that just won’t die”
From back ofthebook.ca: “On being disappeared by the National Post”
From back ofthebook.ca: “Part II: On being disappeared by the National Post”

Popular Mechanics
“Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report” (Much of the info in this early piece has since been disproven, but PM has never run a correction.)

The Washington Post
“A leading Japanese politician espouses a 9/11 fantasy”

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 advice on how to make money on the web is extremely easy to summarize. It breaks down into two steps:

1. Create some online content, like a web comic, for example, which becomes super popular and gets several thousand visits a day.
2. Monetize it with advertising, merchandising, and sponsorship.

This could be a candidate for Monty Python’s ‘How to do it’ show.

First do something exceptionally challenging which we’ll just gloss over without providing any information with regards to how to achieve it, then apply the following information which will be of limited value until you have completed step one. Of course, if you’re a User Friendly fan, you may enjoy the book simply as a behind-the-scenes look at the business side of a very successful web comic.

On page 150 (original italics), Frazer outlines an informal contract which he imagines exists between himself and visitors to his website. First he lists what he perceives his obligations to be –basically, providing a cartoon a day and behaving ethically –then he lists what the visitors’ obligations are.

• You will respect my intellectual property and acknowledge my sole right to determine how it will be used and distributed.
• You understand that content is not actually “free”; someone had to put their time, money, and/or effort into creating and distributing it.
• You will support me and the other independent creators whose work you enjoy through the purchase of memberships, visiting our advertisers, or even just by spreading the word and letting us know you like what we do.
• You will not use an ad blocker, particularly when you can turn the ads off by buying a membership.
• You will not consume content by Web-scraping or any other unsanctioned means that denies me or any other primary content creator pageviews and, therefore, ad impressions, and, therefore, money to help keep their efforts afloat.
• You understand that you don’t have a right to free content on the Net.
• You will always remain within the boundaries of ethical behavior and will let your conscience be your guide.

I have the feeling he is pushing against a perception on the web, conscious or unconscious, that everything is free. He claims that visitors to his site more-or-less meet his expectations. However, when it comes to advertising, if you have a hugely popular site like User Friendly, you can negotiate favorable terms where you get money for every ad impression regardless of whether or not the ad is clicked on (thus the concern regarding people with ad blockers installed in their browsers) — that’s what step one is all about, creating a hugely popular site.

I look at clicking on ads as a form of tipping. If I like a site, I click an ad. It’s unfortunate that I seem to be amongst the minority who are looking for simple, affordable ways to give back to content creators. I’ve even been known to hit the odd donate button to pass on a buck or two. I’m far from being well off, but the beauty of easy access by masses of people to low-cost content (very low relative to owning a print newspaper or TV station) is that if a significant percentage of people did the same, content creators could be rewarded at very little cost to the individual visitor. Indeed, clicking on an ad only costs a small amount of time.

I should note that I’m not encouraging you to click on ads on this site. No sir, that would be against Google’s policy. I’m not even mentioning the ads on this site, because even calling attention to them is against policy. If you think I’m encouraging you to click this site’s ads, or calling attention to them, then I’m sorry if I’ve somehow led you to this mistaken perception, since I most certainly am not suggesting that it would really help this site and cost you only a small amount of time if you clicked on an ad. And if the site’s proprietor appears to be encouraging you in this recent post, remember, he lives on an island, and I suspect it must be a very sunny one where he has suffered from too much exposure. Pay his ranting no heed, especially if you work for Google.

But with regard to other sites, and speaking very much in general, it would be nice if step one wasn’t creating a hugely popular site where one could make decent money from ad impressions, merchandising (backofthebook.ca toques anyone?), and sponsorship (“backofthebook.ca bloggers endorse [ this space for rent ]!”). Wouldn’t it be nice if producing a great site with interesting articles could be rewarded as well? Again, I’m not talking about any specific site here, but in general, if you like a site, and it’s clearly trying to monetize itself in some way, consider being a sweetheart and playing along. Consuming without giving back makes baby (Jesus|Mohamed|Krishna|Buddha|Moses|Darwin|other) cry.

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 Toronto, who replied, “And he’s a very funny guy, too.”

Really? Funny? There were all sort of things I admired about Broadfoot, but I wasn’t aware of his stand-up routines. Some time later I realized the editor thought I was talking about Dave Broadfoot, the longtime “Royal Canadian Air Farce” mainstay. No wonder they didn’t go for the story.

It was about that time I decided I was tired of trying to get Toronto media types to get a clue about the rest of the country. This may inform my reaction to the recent announcement of the winners of the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, as presented by the trade publication Masthead Online. To wit: that the last thing we need is more awards coming from the centre of the universe, which is, as we all know, Mississauga.

Masthead kindly was in touch with us back when the awards were announced. I e-mailed back to say that we’d probably send in some entries (despite the $50 per entry price tag), if they could tell me that the judges would be drawn from across Canada, and not just Toronto. Awards fests have a funny way of favouring hometown entries, and the only way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to make sure there’s no hometown. I don’t really care about Torontoists giving one another awards and pretending they’re “national” — one gets used to it — but I don’t want to send in multiples of $50 to support it.

I didn’t get an answer, and so we didn’t enter anything. As it turns out, though, my question was apropos. Of the 30 judges over numerous categories, 20 are from Toronto. Another two come from the States. Precisely eight come from what those of us who live there like to mordantly call the “Rest of Canada.”

Now, Masthead may point to the fact that the Vancouver online mag thetyee.ca ended up winning three awards, including Best News and Best Community Feature. Indeed, they did so in the announcement of the winners. So all is well on the national unity front. The fact that the top awards (for best overall magazine website and best overall online-only website), in both the Red (consumer) and Blue (business) categories, went to Toronto publishers simply means that, er, wait, not that these awards are the same as the National Magazine Awards, where Toronto Life and The Walrus always clean up, or that, on the whole, the judges would prefer to give awards to people they’ve actually heard of and perhaps had a beer with on pub night, but because, um, excuse me, I have to go catch my subway now.

Besides the fact that it’s good to be the self-appointed King of All One Surveys, these sorts of awards are a cash cow for those who administer them. The Canadian Online Publishing Awards received over 250 entries; at $50 a pop, that’s over $12,500. That’s not chump change to a magazine that recently had to abandon its print version. And this was Year One; wait until more players, including more of the big ones, get involved. I e-mailed Masthead to ask if those fees are used to pay the judges or, if not, what they go towards. They haven’t got back to me yet, but I’ll let you know if they do (or, of course, they can reply below). But this time I don’t think I’ll hold my breath for an answer.

Meantime, congrats to The Tyee for its win(s). Much deserved. As for the others: dailyxy.com? Seriously? A magazine that features an advice column by the egregious dandy (but rather good novelist) Russell Smith? Where do you get your judges from? Toronto?

Of course, in saying that, I’m exposing my west coast bias. But that’s rather the point, isn’t it?