Month: October 2004

CBC's Inside Media program this week looks at blogging and political journalism. I'll be participating in that program as a panelist. The other panelists include the National Post's Andrew Coyne and Ana Marie Cox, the blogger behind Wonkette.
Inside Media normally airs on CBC Newsworld tonight at 7:30 pm, Saturday at 3:30 pm and again at 11:30 pm, and on Sundays at 2:30 am and again 6:30 pm (all times local, I assume). The Inside Media site suggest the first airing of the panel I'm on will be on Saturday. Our panel will look primarly at the way blogs are affecting political discourse in the United States and, even more specifically, how they're affecting the U.S. presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, Dave Sifry, the guy behind Technorati, has a report on The State of the Blogosphere at his site and, in his latest post on this subject, he looks at Big Media vs. Blogs.

I'm taking part today in a panel discussion at the annual conference of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada. I'm the only journalist on the panel. Other panelists include the lawyer who represented Monsanto in a controversial case in which the company sued a Saskatchewan farmer and one of the lawyers responsible for protecting Microsoft's trademarks and IP. I've put my presentation notes online, but here's some excerpts:
“…just as with any relationship, trust is at the heart of a good source-reporter relationship. Those of you who deal with reporters regularly already know this. You need to trust that, if we put you into a story, we won’t, first of all, misrepresent your views or, worse, get them wrong. You need to trust us that we won’t make you look silly. This is particularly important, of course, in TV news, where we’re going to see what you look like in addition to hearing what you have to say. On our side of the ledger, we need to trust our sources to be credible, to know that they won’t make us look silly.
Trust is crucial, of course, for that most essential of conversations – the off-the-record chat. You should be aware and, being lawyers, I suspect many of you are, that there is no such thing as off-the-record. Everything you say to a reporter is on the record. I’m under no legal or any obligation to not report anything and everything you say to me even if I’ve promised not to quote you. Of course, in practice, reporters routinely honour requests from sources that they not be quoted or identified in the interests of preserving a relationship a reporter has with a source. But still, particularly when you’re talking to a reporter for the first time, this is an important thing to remember: It’s all on the record no matter what the reporter promises …
The ultimate goal for reporters in establishing relationships when there is no story at hand is to be able to turn to you when we need your for a quote either on the courthouse steps or on the phone as a guide to a case that’s happening elsewhere. Every reporter will go about this differently and it will depend on the personality of the reporter and their interest in IP issues as it affects their work. But I think all reporters who try to build relationships are trying to assess credibility and reliability. Part of that means getting a sense of what motivates a lawyer. There are many lawyers who are crusaders, for example, and it’s important I get a sense of their agendas before I plop them into a story. Others may be more interested in a building a solid client list for their firm and that may colour their ability or willingness to a credible source.
Whatever it is: I can’t stress enough how valuable this idea of relationship-building is. Those reporters that take the time to work on building relationships are going to be better reporters. They’re going to get the jump on their competition; they’re going to have fresh and interesting angles to their stories. They’re going to get tips and scoops ahead of the pack.

I'm heading west bright and early in the morning to the only part of Canada where they're cheering every time the price of oil hits a new high. That's right, I'm Alberta-bound. I'll be flying into Calgary Wednesday morning and then driving up to beautiful Banff where I've been asked to participate in a panel discussion during the annual conference for the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada.
My job will be to explain to a bunch of smart lawyers why on earth they should talk to reporters and why reporters would want to talk to them.
My stay in Banff, however, will be all too brief. I should be back in Ontario by the end of the week.

Eric Hellweg, writing at Technology Review's blog talks about voice-spam, spam that is apparently affecting VoIP users. He calls it SPIT, an apt acronym for Spam over Internet Telephony. He also calls for governments to squelch SPIT before it grows. It's a good idea and I wouldn't mind exploring the problem of SPIT. Have been hit by some SPIT? If so, I'd love to hear from you, either at this blog or directly. You can e-mail or phone. All my contact data is always here.

Did a fair bit of re-arranging in the garden today. To start with, took out the glorious white Cosmos in the front garden. It was doing tremendously well but it was the wrong plant for that location. Also scooped up the wave petunias that were growing near the lilies. They looked they had pretty much seen their best days. I then dug out that giant iris that I'd though was a lily. I've no idea what cultivar it is other than the fact that it is yellow. I took it in the back, broke it up into at least a dozen chunks and planted them. For many of these re-plantings I put a root starting cube at the bottom of the hole but also mixed in some blood meal. The irises were planted along the north fence; at the foot of the honeysuckle, and along the west fence. I hope they grow somehow somewhere.
Next up was some moving around. Moved the purple coneflowers from their near-the-barbeque position to further back in the garden between the burning bush and the cedar tree. Then I moved some of the shasta daisies. One clump in the barbeque garden was moved up to to where the rhodendron used to be. Another clump. by the dogwood on the west side, was moved a few feet left.
I also dug up the coneflowers and divided them.
Then I put some new bulbs in. First, some white tulips to the west of the birch tree; some aneomones and aliums to the east of the birch tree and in and around the lobster trap.
I think I should put manure or some compost on this whole area in the fall.

Over on the listserv for the Canadian Association of Journalists, we're yakking about some ethical issues. Part of that discussion has wheeled on an observation that journalism is a business. Many on that list, it seems, believe that the very problem with journalism today is that it is treated as a business.
John Miller, a former Toronto Star editor and now a professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, wrote:

Joseph Pulitzer made a distinction between those on either side of the traditional “wall” that used to separate the commercial and the journalistic sides of newspapers.
A journalist, he said, was “the lookout on the bridge of the ship of state;” they are there to watch over the welfare of the people who trust them, not to fret over the profits of owners. Pulitzer believed there was a fundamental difference between “real journalists and men (sic) who do a kind of newspaper work that requires neither culture or conviction, but merely business training.”
Such people in the counting rooms were in the “newspaper business.” Reporters and editors were not. They have a higher calling.

I tend to agree with the general point that Miller and Pulitzer are making: That there ought to be something special about the way we go about our job. We must have real and perceived independence from the commercial aspects of our business in order to be effective and, if we have that, that would indeed make journalists special or unique. That would be our “higher calling”.
But by describing our craft in these words I worry that we reinforce perceptions by our viewers and readers that journalists are an elite group out of touch with the concerns and problems of real working men and women, many of whom are on the other side of that wall in the newsroom.
If we want to connect with our readers and viewers we ought not to describe that idea as “a higher calling”, to romanticize it as if what we do is some mysterious rite-filled priestood. Instead, we ought to talk about how we can approach our jobs with a little more humility; with the frank recognition that we have our own ideological and socio-political biases and that we will work to overcome those biases in our reportage; and with a commitment to the idea that we will constantly seek out ways to test our assumptions about the way the world works and, when assumptions fail us, we will report just as aggressively on those changes.

I'm taking a brief one-day break from my business and technology reporting responsibilities Friday to try my hand at co-hosting Canada AM. Regular co-host Seamus O'Regan has the day off and I've been asked to sub in for him. Not sure why but it sounds like a lot of fun so I said yes. Thankfully, the super-skilled and unflappable Beverly Thomson, the other co-host, will be right next to me covering all my gaffes. The show, as you may be aware, airs in the morning across the country on your local CTV station.

Finally — after years of working in the business — I got to do the story every journalist dreams of: The Flying Squirrel Menace. I'm being less than serious, of course, but the story I did for last night's CTV National News[ look for the Video link on the right hand side of this page ] about the Government of Canada's attempts to deport a Northern Flying Squirrel — possibly the most common breed of squirrel in Canada — is a serious one. In fact, it's so serious, the case has top social justice lawyer Clayton Ruby defending the squirrel at the Federal Court of Appeal, the highest federal court in the country. Ruby and the squirrel — a baby squirrel named Sabrina — are in the Court of Appeal because the government lost its case at the Federal Court level when it first tried to force Sabrina out of the country.
My Globe and Mail colleague Colin Frieze broke the story in the paper Wednesday morning and I put the pictures to it that evening.

Queen's University English professor Laura J. Murray weighs in on the copyright debate in Canada with an interesting and provocative piece in First Monday. Here's the abstract (I've added the emphasis):

Canada is at a critical stage in the development of its copyright law: it has not yet ratified the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization “Internet Treaties,” but it is poised to do so. This article analyses the rhetoric of “protection” ubiquitous in Canadian discussions of copyright policy, and identifies among the various uses of the term both a problematic assumption that protection is or should be the primary function of copyright, and overblown claims about copyright’s power to protect Canadian culture and creators. These “common sense” ideas, fostered by rights–holder lobbies, emerge out of a peculiar Canadian history of cultural nationalism(s), but they may not promote the interests of Canadians. Ironically, while professing fear for their cultural sovereignty, and following the paths of their own internal political, bureaucratic, and rhetorical culture, Canadians appear to be constructing a copyright policy in complete harmony with the needs of American and international capital. I explore a proposal to license educational Internet use, endorsed by parliamentary committee, as one example of the relationship between protection rhetoric and policy development. By casting the Internet as more of a threat than an opportunity, copyright policy developers in Canada are gravely misunderstanding and threatening Canadians’ use of this medium. The participation of Canadians in national and global interaction is crucial to the Canadian public interest, and must not be forgotten in the rush to protection. Beyond its analysis of this specific proposal, this paper calls for a copyright policy in line with the Canadian tradition of balancing private and public interests.