Harvard's prestigious Nieman Foundation for Journalism has cast its discerning eye on a Nova Scotia online journal that succeeds while disdaining all the internet rules: 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...

24 January, 2012

Friends and admirers gathered in the Midtown Tavern's antiseptic new digs Thursday evening to honor journalist-businessman David Bentley's 50 years of afflicting the comfortable. Among the crowd were foot-soldiers of the late, lamented Halifax Daily News (née: Bedford-Sackville News), the once salacious Frank magazine, and the meaty, fact-packed AllNovaScotia.com, which today ranks Nova Scotia's premier newsgathering organization. As Frank might put it,  all three began life as Bentley organs. In 1974, Bentley, his wife, and two partners founded the weekly B-S News, modeling it after the sordid tabloids of his native England. Five years later, he took the enormous gamble of moving the paper downtown, transforming it into...

30 July, 2010

Two weeks ago, AllNovaScotia.com, the excellent online journal run by daughter-father team Caroline Wood and David Bentley, ran the latest in a series of occasional pieces by Larry Hughes, a computer engineering coordinator at Dalhousie University. Hughes is something of an energy policy gadfly. He expects energy will soon be in short supply globally, so he places a lot of emphasis on energy security, by which he appears to mean energy produced within Nova Scotia. Nevertheless, Hughes opposes Nova Scotia Power's plan to mix wood waste with coal to burn in its thermal generating plants. His piece, in the August 25 edition...

10 September, 2009