Wikipedia is working on a new feature to allow visitors to express appreciation for its poor beleaguered editors by clicking on a Wikilove icon (a heart) and sending a message of appreciation. Seems that editors get a lot of negative criticism for some reason — perhaps for assuming authority even over experts by virtue of […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
We are not The Walrus. (Or Maclean’s. Or, god-save-us, the Western Standard.)
By Frank Moher Does a magazine’s title determine its chances of success? It doesn’t seem to. The Walrus, having weathered that not-paying-freelancers-on-time thing, seems to be doing all right, despite being named . . . The Walrus. And despite being . . . dull. (The Walrus reminds me of nothing so much as The New […]