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 […]
online media
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 […]
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 […]
@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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Lockdown
By Frank Moher The recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in favour of Vancouver broadcaster Rafe Mair was a big step forward for Canadian journalists and their readers. Mair had been sued by a “Christian-values advocate” who thought he’d defamed her, but the Court ruled 9-0 that “an overly solicitous regard for personal reputation” should […]
Headlines we wish we’d never read
Yes, you read that right. MSNBC regards its country’s debate as to what constitutes torture — which I thought had been resolved in Geneva a few decades back — as cause for a bad bit of frat-boy humour. And this is the States’ supposedly leftish cable network.
