Every Christmas since 1993, British Television's Channel 4 asks a noteworthy figure to record an "alternative" to starchy pieties of Her Majesty's annual Christmas message to her subjects. This year, Channel 4 tapped whistleblower Edward Snowden. From his temporary asylum in Russia, Snowden sounded a pithy, 1 minute, 43 second, warning about the dangers of government spying: A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves — an unrecorded, unanalysed thought...

28 December, 2013

On Wednesday I noted a typographical error that caused a local journal some embarrassment, only to acknowledge I was no one to talk, given the rising frequency of self- and auto-correct-induced typos that fill my keyboarding day. (See: Report a Tpyo button, above.) Naturally, other journalists quickly jumped into the fray. Dan Bedell, the most meticulous copy editor I ever encountered, toiled for many years at the Canadian Press Bureau in Halifax. [caption id="attachment_13142" align="alignright" width="160"] Bedell[/caption] I hope the Chronicle Herald crew takes the award in stride and draws comfort from knowing it serves to remind all wordsmiths there should never be...

21 December, 2013

That's not my headline. It's the hed on the New York Times' hilarious obituary of the founder of Screw magazine. Long before the internet brought newspapers to their knees, the industry suffered plenty of self-inflicted damage. Among the unnecessary wounds I would place the decision by big newspaper chains to turn obituaries into paid advertisements. The result has been a stream of unctuous prose authored by funeral directors and family members rendered inarticulate by grief. One of the glories of the New York Times is the standard it continues to uphold in this magnificent genre. Witness today's delicious piece on Goldstein: Mr. Goldstein did...

19 December, 2013

The Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism school respected in the industry for promoting  "the kind of journalism that enables us to participate fully and effectively in our democracy," has issued its annual awards for best and worst media errors and corrections of the year. Nova Scotia did not escape the list. The Halifax Chronicle-Herald won Typo of the Year for this published account of its own success at the Atlantic Journalism Awards: "It’s always notable when a paper misspells its own name," the Poynter judges said. "It’s even more notable when a paper misspells its own name in an article celebrating recent awards...

18 December, 2013

On Monday, Contrarian voiced skepticism about a Digby couple's claim that wind turbines had decimated their their emu flock. Andy MacCallum, vice president of developments for Natural Forces Technologies Inc., a company that helps develop small wind projects in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and British Columbia, responds: I worked on a wind farm in Western Australia a few years ago called Emu Downs Wind Farm. An emu farmer was the major landowner for the project. The emus loved the turbines, and would gather at the turbine bases as they provided shelter from the wind. This is, of course, merely an anecdote, just as...

22 November, 2013

I see by the CBC that Nova Scotia Power wind turbines have laid waste to a Digby Neck emu farm, decimating a family's livelihood in the process. Twenty of Debi and Davey VanTassel's 27 emus succumbed to the lethal noise produced by NS Power's murderous machines in the three years since they began slicing the salt air over Digby. Or maybe it was 30 of their 38 birds—the CBC story gives both sets of figures. In any case, the emus were as hapless as they were flightless, no match for the death-dealing, green-power monsters. How do we know this? Because Debi Van Tassel, voice choked...

18 November, 2013

As recounted here last August, John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, bought another great Boston institution, the Boston Globe, for just $70 million. That's $1.13 billion less than the New York Times paid for it 20 years ago. The Times retained the paper's $110 million in pension liabilities, so you could say the price was negative $40 million. So grim are the economics of newspapering in the 21st Century, lots of industry watchers thought Henry was nuts. Late last month, he took to the paper's editorial page to explain what motivated him. I have been asked repeatedly in recent weeks why...

12 November, 2013

“Life is like a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along,” wrote E.M. Forster, in Room With A View. I don't know much about life, but getting fired, unexpectedly, publicly, certainly feels like that. Having gone through it, I'm always interested to see how others handle the experience. Hours after Rogers Media sacked him and 10 other News Radio 95.7 staffers, right-wing talk radio host Jordi Morgan posted "A note to Maritime Morning listeners" on his Facebook Page. As you may have heard I will no longer be hosting Maritime Morning on News...

06 November, 2013

A trio of Nova Scotia environmental organizations — the Nova Scotia Fracking Resource and Action Coalition, the Council of Canadians, and Sierra Club Atlantic — scored a public relations coup yesterday when local news organizations reported that "Nova Scotians overwhelmingly support a continued ban on fracking" in a poll commissioned by the group. A news release said the poll, conducted by Abacus Data, a respected Ottawa-based polling firm: ...

24 October, 2013

Gottingen Street, Halifax, NS. This is part of an interesting project by masters students at King's Journalism School. It includes 21 Moments that Shaped Gottigen Street, a slide show featuring crucial moments in the city's 250-year history (many of them new to me), and a thoughtful piece on the cultural tensions arising as the street undergoes gentrification (about which, more here). The ground keeps shifting under journalism and journalists. This puts J-schools are under pressure to equip students with skills for an industry whose future no one can foresee with clarity—or unbridled optimism. This Gottigen Street project strikes me as a good...

23 October, 2013