How a tightly paywalled, social-media-ignoring, anti-copy-paste, gossipy news site became a dominant force in Nova Scotia

Every morning, the business and political elite in the biggest province on Canada’s East Coast turns to an unlikely source of information about their own world.

Among all the online news organizations trying to find a way to profitability, consider AllNovaScotia.com, which has just celebrated 10 years online and now challenges its historic print rival for the attention of the province’s leaders.

It’s done that by not following the rules: It has a nearly impenetrable paywall, no social media presence, no multimedia, and only rare use of links. It doesn’t cover crime and barely covers sports and entertainment.

It is astounding that AllNS has succeeded so throughly while flouting so many Internet conventions—astounding, and often irritating. I wish it were less paywalled and more open to the sociable aspects of the web that seem to me enlivening and enriching. But this is a position publisher David Bentley and his editor-daughter Caroline Woods view with ill-disguised contempt.

it’s hard to argue with the results. AllNovaScotia doesn’t prove that other models can’t work on the internet, but it affirms something at least as ennobling: that there can be a profitable market for dogged, meaty reporting.

Commenter Gavin Anderegg shares my irritation at the deliberate impediments to sharing, but adds:

I was missing the point while focusing the platform. This site wasn’t for me. Sure they could fix these issues (and probably should), but all everyone else cared about was the content. And for such an aged looking site that doesn’t care about social media, AllNovaScotia beats Twitter to the punch when delivering certain types of local news.

After a while I started to understand: people are willing to pay read well written, properly investigated, and timely content. This is especially true when you can identify a niche group and write specifically for them.

Content comes first at AllNovaScotia. That’s the key.

The 1,700-word piece is written by King’s journalism professor Tim Currie and [disclosure] briefly quotes Contrarian.

To this we respond:

Dear Marilla:

You walk into a room
With a piece of paper in your hand.
You see somebody naked,
And you say, “Who is that man.”
You try so hard,
But you just don’t understand.
Do you, Mrs. Stephenson?

With apologies to Robert Allen Zimmerman.

Cartoonist Bruce MacKinnon, on the other hand, gets it right.

[I]f the events of November 11 hadn’t happened, I’m not sure how much longer the gathering would’ve lasted. At the November 9 general assembly, tensions were high. The camp’s reputation for accepting anyone, giving them shelter, food and a makeshift community was attracting more people who needed help than people who were able to offer it. People who are homeless used the facilities at the camp: the medical supplies, the food, the kitchen, the common “hang-out” area. People are homeless in Canada for many reasons, but there is usually an addiction in their past or present, or a mental health issue. Homeless youth are usually fleeing the addictions or abuse in whatever house they escaped from.

This community of needy people became a sometimes violent place. There were clashes. The healthiest residents, from luckier backgrounds, who were there because of strong political convictions, were being attacked, a lot of times by the residents of the camp who were frequently in need of help. Either the healthy help-givers were not helping the help-needers enough, or they had made some mistakes that tend to happen when you’re overworked and only human. On Tuesday night, many Occupiers had been sick, throwing up in their tents. Sanitation had become an issue. Too many people eating, not enough people doing dishes, or not doing them well enough. Some people had been threatened, verbally or with weapons, and due to weariness some key political organizers had taken to spending more time away from the camp than at it.

In effect, Utopia was already being saddled with the ‘problem people’ our general society has major challenges assimilating. They had to host the rejects we sweep under the rug into jails, homeless shelters and the foster system all over the country.

and

That retreat away from the square and to the park had already affected the morale of the camp in more ways than was acknowledged to the press. The space was bigger, and camp had been allowed to spread out more. Divisions that already existed were allowed to geographically materialize. The centre of camp life was the paved square at the head of the park, facing the busiest pedestrian corner in the city. The living quarters of the Occupy camp sprawled South, down a narrow and long green space bordered by a much quieter street, residential towers, and a hospital. The deeper into the camp you went, the further away from the public. That’s where kids went to do drugs, and where it felt a little dangerous walking past sunset.

Predictably, many OccupyNS critics took this honest reporting to mean Horne supported the eviction, which she obviously did not. But she had the gumption to report problems on the side of the issue that drew her sympathies, and for that, good on her. The Chronicle-Herald and others could learn from this example of integrity.

The Herald, in a bracing throwback to its days as the fusty Old Lady of Argyle, approved the eviction in every detail: violence, secrecy, sneakiness, double-dealing, rights-violation, and even Remembrance Day timing. AllNS tried to have it both ways. A commentary* by former-Managing-Editor-turned-United-Church-minister Kevin Cox quibbled with Kelly’s timing and secretive decision-making, but endorsed His Worship’s position that a vague and rarely enforced municipal bylaw should trump Sections 2. (b), (c), and (d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In a letter AllNS published this morning, Halifax Filmmaker John Wesley Chisholm pointed out that Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi had reached the opposite conclusion, “saying the Charter of Rights prevented the city from arbitrarily forcing out the protesters — even if they’re breaking a city bylaw.”

Halifax officials, Chisholm wrote, took a big gamble with taxpayers’ money, risking hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions on a possible court defence of

the notion that these protesters’ use of tents to camp out in a public park was so egregious, so outstandingly shocking to our community’s values, of such a danger to public safety, so offensive to our public interests, that it justified a police action to deny their rights and freedoms to assembly and protest under the federal law on which our civil society is based..

Even by the smug standards of Halifax’s establishment media, this was a shabby performance.

*Access to AllNS is by paid subscription, and its flash-based web structure makes it impossible to post accurate links.

NSP has begun slowly moving its 500 workers out of the Barrington Tower office to a new $54-million HQ on the Halifax waterfront, dubbed the Bennett Bunker for NSP ceo [sic] Rob Bennett [emphasis in the original].

The phrase, “dubbed the Bennett Bunker,” is noteworthy for having been cast in passive voice, a grammatical form journalists often decry as a way for politicians and similar miscreants to evade responsibility for their actions. Who exactly “dubbed” NS Power’s office building “the Bennett Bunker?” Why, AllNovaScotia, that’s who.

It invented the phrase on July 3, 2008, the day conversion of the building (which is actually rebuilt, not new) was announced, and shortly after Bennett assumed the company’s top job. As best I can tell from a Google search, no one other media outlet has ever used it. This failure to gain traction elsewhere hasn’t discouraged AllNovaScotia’s writers, however. The journal has used “Bennett Bunker” in 35 subsequent stories. Wouldn’t the honest thing be to write, “which we at AllNovaScotia.com call the Bennett Bunker?”

The cutesy alliteration hasn’t caught on because it conveys no fresh insight about the building or Bennett’s term as head of NS Power. Writers usually apply “Bunker” metaphorically to the fortified redoubt of an uncommunicative public figure who hides out to avoid critics or public accountability. The record shows that, as chief executives go, Bennett is reasonably forthcoming. He testifies before the Utility and Review Board, makes public appearances, takes questions, speaks to editorial boards, gives interviews, and participates in public engagement sessions.

AllNovaScotia’s use of “Bennett Bunker” is of a piece with the starkly hostile coverage NS Power receives from some of its writers, and from Nova Scotia media in general, who report electricity cost issues as if NS Power were solely responsible for rising world energy prices, ever tighter environmental regulations, and the Buchanan government’s understandable, but now regretted, decision to overcommit to coal generation in the 1980s.

The fact that unhappiness over increasing electricity costs has focused public hostility on NS Power does not relieve journalists of responsibility for reporting the reasons for those cost increases competently, honestly, and evenhandedly. (And, yes, the same could be said of opposition politicians.)

[Disclosure: I have done occasional contract work for NS Power, mostly writing.]

The use of “Minister” by bureaucrats is not deferential. It’s good form used for good reason. The term is a reminder to both parties that they are engaged in a special relationship. It reminds the Minister that she is not merely a politician, but also someone whose job is to direct the civil service in the best interests of the people. It reminds bureaucrats their jobs are to provide their best advice on how the elected government can achieve its policy objectives, whether or not it suits the minister politically, and whether or not it suits the civil service. It’s known as speaking truth to power. The principle is highly valued by good civil servants, but it can be hard to live up to. The use of a seemingly archaic form in addressing elected officials makes it easier by establishing the right context before the conversation begins. Being on first-name basis with a minister is great for a bureaucrat’s ego, but that’s all.

For similar reasons, I cringe when I hear journalists addressing cabinet ministers by their first names. Reporters know they should keep a distance between themselves and the people they are covering. This is especially true in a legislature, where they report on the same cast of characters every day and where, in the long run, chummy relations work to the detriment of good reporting. So, a little formality is useful in this situation, too.

Evan Solomon’s got it right.

I have no problem with civil servants addressing cabinet ministers as ‘Minister.” Bill explains the basis for the convention well, and when I do work for a ministry, i adopt the habit myself. But journalists are a different matter. They do not work for ministers, and they should not don the mannerisms of those who do. It sounds obsequious, and obsequiousness is just as dangerous as chumminess. “Mr. Fast” and “Mr. MacKay” convey the appropriate level of formality and distance, without the odor of grovelling.

At about 14 minutes into the program, Evan Solomon asks International Trade Minister Ed Fast an obvious question about the recent spate of US protectionist measures aimed at Canada:

Why are you being caught off guard by these sudden protectionist measures coming out of the US?

Fast responded with a set of talking points so scripted, you can almost hear him rhyming off the bullets:

• We’re focused on removing trade barriers rather than erecting new ones.
• Canada and the US have a strong, mature, longstanding trade relationship.
• It’s the biggest trade success story in the world.
• And when we see our cousins to the south introducing new barriers to trade, obviously that raises concerns with us.
• That’s why I’ve been engaging with my counterpart in the US, US trade representative Ron Kirk. I’ve spoken to him on a number of occasions. I’ve spoken to his deputy on a number of occasions.
• My colleagues in the house of commons have also been engaging with their counterparts in the house of representatives and the senate.
• We are impressing upon the Americans that trade barriers actually hurt both Canadian businesses and American businesses because out economies and our supply channels are so integrated.

The heavy-handed messaging couldn’t quite obscure one obvious fact: Fast never answered the question. So what did Solomon do? He ignored the omission and moved on to the next question. A better response would have been:

Excuse me but, I didn’t hear why you are being caught off guard by these sudden protectionist measures?

I don’t mean to gang up on Solomon, but I wish he and other press gallery habitues would curb their recent habit of addressing cabinet ministers as “Minister.” We expect this formal obsequiousness from the tribe of ministerial aides who populate The Hill, but when reporters adopt this style, it contributes to the deferential atmosphere that lets responsible cabinet ministers dodge questions and escape obvious follow-ups.

J-school profs will get a bonus from today’s House episode. In the show opener, Solomon questions Defence Minister Peter MacKay about the seemingly endless increases in the cost of those second-hand submarines Canada bought from Britain. Current estimates stand at $1 billion, and could triple before the subs are fully operational. In response, to his credit, MacKay passed up a chance to slang his Liberal predecessors for the buying the subs in the first place, but he couldn’t resist exploiting the recent death of a Canadian soldier for rhetorical effect.

Let’s not forget one important fact, and that is, we have men and women in uniform who literally put their lives on the line in service of Canada to protect our citizens. Men like the gentleman who gave his life, Janick Gilbert, who was a SAR-tech, who gave his life on a rescue mission this week near Hall Bay, Nunavut. These are exceptional citizens, to say the least, and they require extremely sophisticated and, yes, expensive equipment to do that work. When it comes to putting people in harm’s way, but giving them world class protection, and that’s the calculation and that is the measure that we have to make.

This time Solomon did not disappoint:

Well you mentioned, speaking of world class equipment, that the ideal piece of equipment would be a nuclear submarine, not the diesel-electric submarine. Therefore if you want to be committed to the best equipment for the men and women serving, are you considering purchasing nuclear submarines?

MacKay:

No we’re not….We don’t live in an ideal world. My grandmother had a saying that, “If wishes were horses, beggars could ride.” We don’t have unlimited resources and we’re not contemplating nuclear submarines.

Ah, so it turns out that protecting men and women in uniform who “literally put their lives on the line in service of Canada to protect our citizens” is, like everything else in life and government, subject to financial limits and budgetary constraints.

Lastly, points to Solomon for knowing how to pronounce the word “nuclear,” unlike the Minister of National Defence.

Whatever the cause, they came ill-prepared to probe the most contentious issue surrounding plans to make Sable Island a national park: the Harper Government’s impulse to promote private sector tourism development on the island. Environment Minister Jim Prentice touched off a furore in January, 2010, when he first announced plans to make Sable a national park or a national wildlife area. As the Halifax Chronicle-Herald reported:

”Sable Island would be well-protected, and it would be an area that we would encourage visitors to come to and they would be well taken care of while they’re there,” he said after a news conference at Citadel Hill in Halifax.

He said he expects private businesses would transport people to the island, about 290 kilometres southeast of Halifax near the edge of the continental shelf

Prentice’s threat to unleash tourism entrepreneurs on Sable has dominated public discussion of the issue ever since, but reporters apparently didn’t bother to google the subject before proceeding to the Citadel today. They didn’t ask a single question about the tourism promotion flap. In fact, they hardly asked any questions about Sable at all. According to one person present, there were “two questions on MV Miner, one on HRM’s proposed stadium, and two or so on Sable.”

“[H]onestly, that’s the first I’ve heard of it,” a reporter confessed.

“Why have you chosen this windmill to tilt,” another asked.

Adventure tourists from the “expedition ship” Polar Star visited Sable in October, 2009, one of four or five such cruise ship visits to the island. (Photo: Zoe Lucas, Sable Island Green Horse Society)

“Tilting at windmills,” of course, is a figure of speech derived from Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, in which Quixote jousts with windmills he imagines to be giants. I assume the reporter used it metaphorically to imply I am attacking imaginary enemies, or fighting futile battles.

The enemy is not imaginary, nor is the battle futile. Moreover, the issue is too important for reporters to arrive at a news conference ill-prepared.

It’s important because Sable is one of the province’s premiere natural landscapes, a category that has steadily dwindled (most recently with the province’s egregious failure to buy Pollet’s Cove when it had the chance). Sable has many remarkable features, including terrain, vegetation, wildlife, and habitat, and a unique location. It is the only island lying roughly 100 miles off the east coast of North America, a vantage offering significant opportunities for scientific research on air quality.

The Sable National Park announcement where no one asked about tourism. (Alex Boutlier photo)

Most people with deep knowledge of Sable recoil at the idea of encouraging private sector tourism promotion because of the damage unrestricted visitation would cause. But people are people, and when they see a gorgeous landscape, the impulse to develop it is hard to resist. The need for constant vigilance in protecting natural treasures is what gave rise to the national park systems in the US and Canada.

Sable is unique in that creating the usual park infrastructure and encouraging normal park tourism would be highly destructive of its many fragile natural elements. I would have preferred a custom-made solution for Sable rather than a National Park. People who take the opposite view worry that a one-off solution would always be vulnerable to change or abandonment in a way that a National Park will not be. I hope they are right. Some people with very deep commitment to Sable — specifically Sable resident Zoe Lucas of the Green Horse society, and Mark Butler of the Ecology Action Centre — hold that view, and I have to concede they may be right.

Still, Prentice’s comments were so reckless and disturbing, they need to be challenged throughout the process.

There was no public consultation before this park decision was made. All consultation came after bureaucrats, meeting privately, chose a park over a national wildlife refuge. That made the post-decision public consultation look like window dressing, but hundreds of Sable lovers weighed in anyway, and they overwhelmingly opposed accelerated tourism development. The hapless bureaucrat who had to report the results of these consultations at a public meeting said the message had come through loud and clear. I hope it will be enough. But with pro-development ideologues running the country, one never knows.

Reporters assigned to this story in future may wish to consult:

• The balanced discussion of the tourism issue on Zoe Lucas’s Green Horse Society website, the definitive source for information about Sable.
• The Hands Off Sable Island Facebook page I started to protest Prentice’s reckless speculation.
• Previous Contrarian posts on the issue here, here, here, and here.
• Park’s Canada’s FAQ page for Sable’s designation as a national park, which includes various tips for would-be Sable tourists.
• The federal-provincial MOU that kicked off Sable’s process leading to Sable’s designation as a national park.
• The official Visitors’ Guide to Sable Island by the Canadian Coast Guard, which currently controls access to the island.
• The report [pdf] of Ottawa’s after-the-fact public “consultation” about Sable’s park designation, in which officials were innundated with pleas to restrict tourism.
• The Nova Scotia Museum’s extensive Sable Island website.
• The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic’s Sable Island website.
• The Coast’s coverage of the Sable Park tourism brouhaha.
• Nature Canada’s comments on the Sable Park tourism brouhaha.
• Incredibly, officials did not release the federal-provincial agreement signed yesterday, but promise to do so soon, at which point I will link to it.
• The original Herald article sparking the issue is no longer archived on line.

A final notes: There is a rational case to be made for limited Sable tourism. Zoe Lucas and others make it eloquently on the Green Horse Society page devoted to the national park designation.

[L]imited tourism has not had a negative impact on the island, and some people feel it has been a positive force. Individuals who have seen Sable first-hand have been able to share with others their enhanced appreciation of the island as well as their understanding of the critical role of the Station. Many have subsequently supported efforts to ensure that year-round environmental stewardship for Sable Island is maintained.

I agree with this, but Prentice was not proposing “limted tourism.” Plenty of people would leap at the chance to open up the island to commercial exploitation. Sable’s fervent cadre of supporters need to guard against that. And senior Halifax reporters need to do their jobs.

[Disclosure, I visited Sable twice as a reporter in the 1980s and 1990s. Both trips included a few hours on the island under the watchful supervision of Zoe Lucas and then-station chief Gerry Forbes.]

“It was the joke among photographers. He was like the nightmare subject,” said San Francisco photographer William Mercer McLeod, who photographed Jobs five times.

In 1986, Fortune magazine hired Doug Menuez to shoot a portrait of Jobs for the magazine’s cover. Menuez wanted to photograph him in the NeXT offices, on a staircase Jobs had commissioned from architect I.M Pei. Jobs arrived, looked over the setup, and leaned into Menuez’s face:

“This is the stupidest fucking idea that I’ve ever seen,” Jobs said.

“Right in my face, like 5 or 6 inches away,” Menuez says. “I felt like I was 10 years old. He went off on a tirade. He said, ‘You just want to sell magazines. ‘And I said, ‘And you want to sell computers.’

At that, Jobs said, ‘OK,’ and sat down.

Menuez concludes, “ I’ve been in war zones, but I like to say that I became a man learning how to stand my ground with Steve.”

When Albert Watson shot Jobs for a Fortune feature on CEOs, he insisted on having three hours to set up. PDN Pulse again:

“We were prepared,” Watson said. “We set up to make [every shoot] as greased lightning fast as possible for the [subject].” Watson had read “a massive amount of stuff” about Jobs to help him conceptualize the shoot, and converse intelligently with Jobs.

When Jobs walked in, his power, charisma, and genius were palpable.

“It was like when Clint Eastwood walks in to the room.”

Jobs didn’t look immediately at Watson, but looked instead at the set-up and then focused on Watson’s 4×5 camera “like it was something dinosauric,” Watson recalls, “and he said, ‘Wow, you’re shooting film.”

“I said, ‘I don’t feel like digital is quite here yet.’ And he said, ‘I agree,’ then he turned and looked at me and said, ‘But we’ll get there.’”

Jobs gave Watson an hour, much more time than he generally allowed for portrait sessions.

“I had wanted to do the shot in a minimalistic way because I knew that was going to suit him very well. He said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said I would like 95 percent, almost 100 percent of eye contact with the camera, and I said, ‘Think about the next project you have on the table,’ and I asked him also to think about instances where people have challenged him.

“If you look at that shot, you can see the intensity. It was my intention that by looking at him, that you knew this guy was smart,”

Apple cleared its home page Thursday to post that photograph, which, Watson heard, Jobs regarded as his his all-time favorite.”

H/T: Ashley Harding

Jon Stewart reveals that Halifax is the real promised land. Best quote:

What’s wrong with you two? You can’t even get along in Nova Scotia. It’s the most polite part of Canada.

Watch it quick before the Comedy Channel yanks it from YouTube.

H/T: Andy Weissman