Two years ago, I pointed to an admiring account of Nova Scotia's unorthodox online business and politics journal, AllNovaScotia.com, on the website of Harvard's prestigious Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Halifax freelancer Tim Currie described how a "tightly paywalled, social-media-ignoring, anti-copy-paste, gossipy news site became a dominant force in Nova Scotia." Last month, Kelly Toughill, director of the King's Journalism School in Halifax, fleshed out the story in an 18-page "case study" submitted to the equally prestigious Columbia University School of Journalism. From the abstract: This case tells the story of a small, online publication in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which has confounded the...

21 January, 2014

[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

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

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald and AllNovaScotia.com, ranking arbiters of mainstream opinion in Nova Scotia, lent editorial support Monday to Mayor Peter Kelly's forcible police removal of peaceful Occupy Nova Scotia protesters. 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),...

15 November, 2011

A recent story by Andrew MacDonald in the online journal AllNovaScotia.com included the following sentence: 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...

12 November, 2011

[Updated below] Our friends at AllNovaScotia (subscription required) appear to have been punk'd by [restaurateur] singing investor Denis Ryan and Halifax folksinger-comedian Tony Quinn in a YouTube spoof of a profane Irish expat turning the air blue-green with outrage over the Emerald Isle's financial travails. The NSFW clip identifies Quinn as a reporter for "the Financial News," which morphs to "the Financial Times" in the AllNS piece. As alert Contrarian reader DR points out, however, the clip does not turn up on any site calling itself  'Financial News,' and the reporter definitely doesn’t say, 'Financial Times.' Also, the 'reporter' looks and sounds remarkably like...

10 December, 2010

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

A friend asked recently why I had not written about the MLA expenses flap, and I confessed that I have trouble summoning much outrage over the issue. While I admire Brian Flinn's dogged pursuit of the facts in AllNovaScotia.com, I fear that the public and the media are almost as much to blame for the problem as our lawmakers. The public nurses an attitude of begrudgery toward politicians, and the media fans these embers at every opportunity. This is not our most attractive quality, and it makes it almost impossible for MLAs — who by definition must set their own salaries...

15 February, 2010
What's up with AllNovaScotia's curious blind spot for Cape Breton Regional Municipality Mayor John Morgan? Like many others, AllNS's editorialists took umbrage when the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society charged lawyer Morgan with professional misconduct for accusing Supreme Justice John Murphy, and Nova Scotia judges in general, of political bias in the performance of their duties. An AllNS editorial argued that it was dangerous and wrong to muzzle political speech by a politician who also happens to be a lawyer. So far, so reasonable. The odd thing is that the usually reliable news service seems to be letting its editorial passion slop over into its news columns. AllNS news stories have persistently misrepresented the comments that got Morgan in trouble. Instead of quoting or characterizing Morgan's original words, AllNS quotes only the sanitized version Morgan came up with after he got in hot water. The background is here, but in short, Morgan pretends he merely said Nova Scotia judges were not tree-shakers; in reality, he went on for paragraphs alleging political bias by the judge who first rejected his grandstanding constitutional claim for higher equalization payments — a lawsuit that was ultimately rejected by every judge who reviewed it, up to and including the Supreme Court of Canada.
13 February, 2010

This promises to be a continuing Contrarian topic, but I will flag it briefly: NB Power's apparently imminent sale to Hydro Quebec represents a tectonic shift in Nova Scotia's energy options. I mention this because, as is typical, the national news media seem to view the story as just another installment in Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams's (to them) clownish battles with central Canada. Such a view is as witless as it is patronizing. The sale poses huge problems for Nova Scotia and PEI, as well as Newfoundland. If Quebec can use its windfall profits from Joey Smallwood's disastrous 1969 deal on Upper...

27 October, 2009
Show more
Loading...