Tim Bousquet, pugnacious news editor of the Halifax news and entertainment weekly, The Coast, responds to Contrarian's chiding of local media for failing to cover issues surrounding The Old Mill's closure. Hardly a week goes by that someone isn't asking me — usually angrily — "Why isn't The Coast covering issue X???" There are a variety of reasons. The Coast — which is basically me, plus whatever freelancers I can lure with a minuscule budget, and the occasional intern — isn't covering an issue. Sometimes the issues are too far afield, out of our distribution area, so aren't a priority. Sometimes other media...

18 July, 2012

Earlier today I criticized several Nova Scotia media outlets — The Chronicle-Herald, The CBC, AllNovaScotia.com — for ignoring The Coast's breathtaking scoop about Mayor Peter Kelly's mishandled duties as executor of a friend's estate. The omission makes them look small. That's nothing compared to the Parliamentary Press Gallery's competition to out @vikileaks30, the anonymous tweeter who exposed details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews' messy divorce. It's increasingly clear that many of the same reporters who are now hellbent to expose @vikileaks30 knew Toews had fathered a child after cheating on his wife for years, but helped him keep that secret. They will...

17 February, 2012

[See update/correction below] The Coast, a Halifax weekly paper, has produced a devastating account of Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly's mishandling of the estate of  a family friend who had named him as executor and sole trustee of her modest fortune. In a prodigious piece of reporting, News Editor Tim Bousquet lays out the complex story in relentless detail, layering  fact upon devastating fact through 5,000 words, illustrated with cancelled cheques and sketchy legal and financial filings. It's too complicated to summarize here, but please read it yourself, especially if you are a resident or voter in HRM. Bousquet's work sometimes suffers from his habit...

17 February, 2012

At the Valley Motel, somewhere east of Manistique, on Michigan's Northern Peninsula, the peripatetic Jane Kansas talked Dave, the proprietor, into a cut rate of $30 for this beauty. Later, Dave and his twin daughters showed up with a dinner of steak, real fries, shrimp, rice, cheese, and olives. "We thought on your walk you might not get many home cooked meals," Dave explained. Before bedtime, the girls returned with a banana and a doughnut for dessert. To the people Jane encounters on her epic walk across the American Midwest, she must seem the oddest of strangers: a short, sunburned woman in late middle age,...

27 July, 2010

The stupidest thing the late, lamented Halifax Daily News ever did was to fire weekly columnist Jane Kansas over sloppy attribution of an Internet joke. Busybodies elevated the offense to plagiarism, requiring capital expiation — the irony of firing Nova Scotia's most original writer for unoriginality lost on all concerned. Currently on Sabbatical from Halifax, Kansas is travelling on foot from Helena, Montana, to Medicine Hat, Alberta (a 543 kilometer side-trek to visit a friend), thence from Western North Dakota to Toronto (which Google maps calculates at 2082.5 km.). Kansas likes a challenge. Along the way, she files occasional dispatches to...

29 May, 2010

Lindsay Brown doesn't like anonymous posting: The good news here is that Halifax media are inadvertently leading the charge against the silly practice of anonymous online commentary. First, in April, The Coast demonstrated that the mere possibility of court action was enough for it to de-cloak its posters. Now, The Chronicle-Herald has shown us that its promise of anonymity depends on who you are. Apparently, the promise is worthless if the Herald thinks it can get a story out of identifying you. They'll even go to the trouble of hunting you down. So, anonymous poster, beware. The Herald has also exposed in a dramatic...

23 May, 2010

An Ontario Divisional Court ruling has thrown the The Coast's craven cave-in to an HRM Fire Service lawsuit into sharp relief—along with an imprudent ruling by Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Heather Robertson. The Chief and Deputy Chief of the fire service asked Robertson to order The Coast to release identifying information about individuals who posted anonymous comments about alleged racism in the fire service on the newspaper's website. The officers said the comments, since removed, defamed them, and they needed the identities of the authors to pursue a suit for defamation. Having lured readers into posting anonymously, the Coast tossed them...

12 May, 2010

Two readers see The Coast's failure to lift a finger in defense of its reader-posters not as an unwelcome blow to free expression but as an overdue comeuppance for the well-known excesses of anonymous Internet posting. Bill Turpin writes: The Coast's greatest failure to its readers was in allowing anonymous posts in the first place. It's The Coast, not Samizdat, and this is Canada, not the former Soviet Union. You're free to write what you want in this country, subject to defamation laws which, while imperfect, are not odious. There is no need to hide behind an alias. But when you do,...

19 April, 2010

The former idealists who built The Coast into a substantial Halifax institution let down their readers and their craft today by failing to contest an order to help identify people who posted controversial opinions on their website. Madam Justice Heather Robertson granted an application by HRM Fire Chief Bill Mosher and Deputy Chief Stephen Thurber, who say the posters made allegations of racism, cronyism and incompetence against them. I want to stress that Contrarian has not read the comments in question, or the article that provoked them, and I have no opinion as to the merits of the dispute. But...

14 April, 2010

Tim Bousquet's rules for using anonymous sources: The information gained through granting anonymity is not otherwise available. Or, put another way, granting anonymity is not a shortcut to doing the hard work of gathering solid information and good reporting. The anonymous source must have something to lose, should anonymity not be given: loss of a job, etc. Using an anonymous source must result in some positive public good. “Spinning” someone’s view is not a positive public good. Bousquet adds: When I was a reporter at a daily in the states, I had a publisher who wouldn't allow me to use anonymous sources at all. At...

03 January, 2010
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