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

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

From a September 9 Facebook post by David Rodenhiser, marquee columnist for the Halifax Daily News until its demise in 2008, now toiling for Nova Scotia Power's communications group. In the Obituaries section of the Chronicle-Herald there are notices for no fewer than six veterans of the Second World War: Joseph “Bunny” McLaughlin, army, who brought home a war bride in 1946 Jaleel “John” Laba, army, who later owned and operated Laba’s Discount on Gottingen Street for many years Stanley Cairns, merchant mariner George Haliburton, army Adele Healy, RCAF secretary Walter Shaw, army, wounded in Germany in 1945 There’s also an obituary for Cecile d’Entremont, who passed away...

11 September, 2013

Perhaps you have seen this speech Kevin Spacey gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival last month. It's been making the rounds on tech and entertainment sites, and has more than a million views. But if not, please take four minutes for the pithiest explanation I've heard of the disruption that has upended the television and motion picture industries. [Video link] A few excerpts: The success of the Netflix model—releasing the entire season of House of Cards at once—proves one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom...

08 September, 2013

Please read journalist Peter Maass's spellbinding account of how reporter/polemicist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras collaborated in bringing to light NSA leaker Edward J. Snowden's disclosures about massive illegal spying by the US Government. Seriously, if you read nothing else this week, do read this richly detailed, 10,000-word account of how Snowden made contact with Poitras, how Poitras roped Greenwald into the project, and how they communicate privately when all three are targeted by the most sophisticated electronic spying in the world. It reads alternately like a novel, a spy thriller, a quirky travelog, and most importantly, like detailed expose of...

14 August, 2013

The tagline at the top of this blog, which many readers will recognize as a phrase from the 1967 Beatles song, A Day in the Life, was also the name of a column I wrote for the Boston Globe, where I worked from 1968 to 1970. It was my first job in journalism. The Globe was the most progressive big city daily in the United States, the only one to favour unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam.  It was also a great place to work. In an era of political and cultural tumult, the paper's managers reached out to rebellious young readers in a concerted...

12 August, 2013

After months of counting tiny beans, Nova Scotia's politician-despising, publicity-loving, limelight-hogging Auditor General has grudgingly conceded what everyone knows: MLA Michel Sampson Samson lives in Arichat and fully qualifies for reimbursement of necessary Halifax expenses. [See: news release. Full report (pdf)] Then, predictably, Lapointe found a mean-spirited technicality on which he could deny Samson those legitimate expenses. Samson's Halifax residence doesn't qualify because it's a "house" not an "apartment." What tendentious pettifoggery! The campaign to deprive this elected MLA of the tools needed to do his job effectively was cooked up by a not very discerning CBC reporter, who couldn't distinguish legitimate living...

02 August, 2013
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