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Well this is fun. From jail, Conrad Black writes a scathing review of Michael Wolff's biography of Rupert Murdoch:

Wolff …. tells us that “two thirds of [Murdoch's] mind” is on newspapers; that Harold Evans, whom he fired as editor of The Times of London, was “really angry at himself”; and that Murdoch, with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, was one of the world “value triumvirate” of the '80s. That honor usually goes to Pope John Paul II. These assertions, and many like them, are bunk.

Black and Murdoch were, you may remember, the generals commanding, respectively, The Daily Telegraph and the Times of London when those two titles engaged in a fierce war for circulation and readership, a war which, most analysts (and Black) will tell you was won by the Lord of Crossharbour.

… [Wolff] should be, but in this case isn't, aware that Dow Jones, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are immune to hostile takeovers because of a two-tiered share voting structure; that it is not the case that media companies were not “respectable on military-industrial-complex-biased Wall Street” (where did Wolff unearth that canard?); that the London Sun did not owe its 4 million daily circulation almost entirely to coverage of Princess Diana; that it is not true that “Murdoch knew beans about television” after he had been in the business for 30 years; and that he knew nothing of satellite telecasting either, even after he had made billions in that business . . .

…In style and organization, this is an irritating book. …If sentences containing “iconic,” transformative,” “ridiculous,” “being and nothingness,” “fragile construct,” and suspended endings (“well…”) were omitted, the book would be at least 20 pages shorter. If Wolff must use French words and phrases, he should at least know their meanings and genders. There is not and never has been a “haute monde.” There are too many sentences without verbs, too many stubby sentences that sound like a parody of Hemingway in Green Hills of Africa. While I have no objection to coarse language, over-frequent and unnecessary use of it is self-indulgent and grating.

Wolff reponds to this, his first “jailhouse book review”.

This is a new sort of Web journalism: dramatically discredited people reinvented as Web opinionists—Slate just hired Eliot Spitzer in this vein—who will work for free. (Tina Brown herself, dramatically discredited in her own way, is using the Web for a similar type of reinvention—though she, presumably, is not working for free.) … The fact, for instance, that Conrad Black is both a subject of my book and a convicted felon (i.e. he’s lied about the very issues I’m discussing) might ordinarily make him a suspect reviewer. But his true function on the Web is not to review, but to be outlandish, part of a new freak show. Black and Spitzer, and, in a way, Tina herself, are not so much to be taken seriously but to be taken as novelty acts. It’s a laughing-at-them thing . . .

I worked for Conrad Black as part of the inaugural staff of National Post and met Murdoch a few months after it launched. Murdoch asked after Conrad and was quite interested to hear how the Post was doing. I've never met Michael Wolff though I loved Burn Rate, his terrifically bitchy Vanity Fair pieces, and think he'd be a fun guy to have dinner with when I'm next in New York.

For those who want a quick summary of Black V. Wolff, Alison Flood writes it all up for The Guardian.

I love a good list and, with the approach of the last day of 2008, there are plenty to peruse, what with everyone busy drawing up lists of the best and worst of the year, lists of things to do next year, and lists of things to buy.

My list fetish began early, probably while I was collecting O-Pee-Chee hockey cards as a 7-year-old. I would sort and categorize the cards based on a player's team, his position, his rookie status, left-hand shots vs right-hand shots — you name it — and then I would draw up a list of what I had or needed. This was an immense help as I waded into the school yard with my tradeable “got its” looking for my list of “need its.”

Somewhere in my late teens, I developed a habit for book lists — lists of Great Books or Books Every Educated Person Ought to Have Read and so on. Probably the first such list I came across was when I was in my final year of high school and was casting about for a university. In doing so, I ran across the list of books first-year undergrads must read in the Foundation Year at the University of King's College, Halifax. I didn't go to King's College — I went to Guelph — but I made a list of the books they were reading in Halifax so that I might work through them and, I hoped, sound as well-read as those folks.

So this first list of books I wanted to read got started, I suppose, some time in 1981 or 1982.

Now, more than 25 years later, that original list has grown and, in fact, has become two lists: One for fiction works I want to read and one for non-fiction works. Oddly enough, each has roughly the same number of titles — Just over 2,300. Now, if I won the lottery today and could devote myself entirely to reading the 5,000 or so books on my list, and I managed to read (a very ambitious) six a week, I would make it through my list in about 16 years.

Titles move around on that list, percolating to the top, based on a highly personalized point system. The point system started out when I came across my second list of great books and had to contend with the problem of merging my first King's College list with this second list. Should I arrange my reading order in the order in which the works were published? The current King's list is ordered that way. But what to do with titles that appeared on both the King's List and this second list of great books? Shouldn't the fact that they appeared on two great books list mean that they were, erm, Greater and should be read first? I chose the second system and decided upon some arbitrary award — allotting ten points or something for each title that appeared on both lists. Then I ran across more lists of great books and more points were awarded.

Those in academia at the time will remember that there was a great debate about the “Canon” in the 1980s all across the humanities. The Great Books on everyone's list (King's included at the time) tended to be written by white men from the cultural capitals of Western civilization. And so the idea and theory of a “canon” came under attack from post-colonialists, feminists, post-structuralists, modernists, and many others — some of whom generated their own anti-canon list providing me with more and varied books for my lists. For a still relevant review of the whole canon debate, I would recommend Paul Lauter's Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) which takes a critical look at the institutional practices in American post-secondary institutions with an eye towards how decisions are made about which books will be part of which course curriculum. It is not an insignificant issue. But I digress …

So I now had a rudimentary ranking system and, as I was an early experimenter on computers in the 1980s — anyone remember VisiCalc running on on IBM AT? — I had a machine and software that could sort, rank, and maintain my list. And that, of course, led to a more sophisticated ranking system. I incorporated weekly bestseller lists — allotting 100 points to the title at the top of the top ten list and 10 points for the item at the bottom of the list. If a friend recommended a book, that book got 10 points. If I read a book by Author A, then all of Author A's other books on the list got points based on this formula: (Number of Pages in Book Just Finished/2). If another work was mentioned, footnoted, or in the bibliography, then it got a point. If a book won a major prize – a Giller or a Booker or you-name-it — then it got an exceptional point total of 500 or so. Upon an author's death, every work on my list by that author gets 500 points. That last rule of mine has, this week, propelled two of Harold Pinter's works to the number one and two position on my fiction list, just ahead of some works by Arthur C. Clarke, whose works vaulted upward upon his death in March of 2008.

At every year-end, I now do a rebalancing, awarding points to titles based on the number of years they have been on my list. My lists has five fields: Author, Title, Current Point Total, Publishing Information, and Date Added to List, allowing me to easily sort or find based on any of those variables. Rebalancing in this way helps bring titles that have been hanging around on my list closer to the top. For what's it's worth, Michel Leiris' Manhood , Aristotle's Metaphysics , James Frazer's The Golden Bough are the 'oldest' titles on my NF list, each one added on Dec. 31, 1985. Metaphysics and The Golden Bough are on plenty of Great Books list but the Leiris title made it on the list after I'd read Susan Sontag's collection of essays, Against Interpretation. She had an essay in that collection on Manhood and I thought it would be an interesting read. Manhood, 23 years after making it on my list, is now right up there and will likely finally get read over the next week or so.

So there's my obsession and my hobby. A gi-normous highly personalized and idiosyncratic book list. And just so I might look back in a year's time and see what was at the top of that list, here's the top ten from each list as those lists stood at the end of 2008:

Non-Fiction:

1. Hurtig, Mel The Betrayal of Canada
2. Grant, George Lament For A Nation
3. Sokolsky, Joel J. Defending Canada
4. Canada Massey Report on Canadian Culture
5. Atwood, Margaret Survival (read once already, but due for a re-read)
6. Leiris, Michel Manhood
7. Aristotle Metaphysics
8. Fraser, James The Golden Bough
9. Buruma, Ian Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters, and Other Japanese Culture Heroes
10. Goyder, John Essentials of Canadian Society

Fiction:

1. Pinter, Harold The Dumb Waiter
2. Pinter, Harold The Birthday Party
3. Clarke, Arthur Childhood's End
4. Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice
5. Blais, Marie Claire La Belle Bete
6. Naipaul, V.S. A Bend in the River
7. Mailer, Norman The White Negro
8. Pinter, Harold Betrayal
9. MacLennan, Hugh Two Solitudes
10. MacLennan, Hugh The Watch That Ends the Night

Avery Shenfeld is a senior economist at CIBC Capital Markets and most mornings sends out a note in good, old plain economic-ese to explain away the latest bit of data that has come across his desktop. Not so today. Today, Avery throws off those prose shackles and drops the following delightful bon-bon in our morning e-mail:

The Cat in the Hat

By Avery Shenfeld

The sun did not shine

All our stocks had gone down

So Sally and I

Could just sit there and frown

We’d dumped corporate bonds

And our equities too

But with bills yielding zero

Didn’t know what to do

“Have no fear, have no fear,” said the Cat in the Hat

“Go invest, go and lend, do not sit there and carp

Sure there’s rain in the forecast, a slump and all that

But you can play here quite dry being under my TARP”

But Sally and I we remained very wary

After Lehman’s demise made even banks all too scary

And it was all too odd that the man sent to save them

Had a name that said he just preferred to Cash-Carry

Then our fish said “Look, Look”

And our fish shook with fear

“You’d better start saving, a recession is near

Oh the things it will bump

Oh the things it will hit

I do not like it

Not one little bit”

Then the cat ran out

And then fast as a fox

The Cat in the Hat

Came back in with a box

Said the Cat

“In this box are two things

I will show to you now

You will like these two things”

Said the Cat with a bow

“This first thing, Thing One

Is a printing machine

It prints money to play with

It’s Ben’s little dream

If you’ve lost too much money, then borrow and spend

The Ben’s Fed’ral Reserve is quite ready to lend

He will charge you no interest, trade good bonds for bad

Help pay off your mortgage, so you don’t look so sad.

I call this Thing Two the John Maynard Keynes

It takes trillions of dollars and spends when it rains

On sewers and bridges and other fine toys

And even a bonus for car sector boys”

Then the Keynes ran upstairs

Where he met our mouse Stephen

Who initially said he would try to get even

“I’ll match his spending with cuts” he told all in the House

But soon that thing Keynes had control of our mouse

Then those things ran about

With big bumps, jumps and kicks

As our house filled with money

And with mortar and bricks

And those things from the box

They did bump up our stocks

Then the Cat picked up

All the things that were down

He picked up our funds rate

He picked up our rebate

He picked up the prices for gas in the town.

And he put them away

Then he said “that is that”

And then he was gone

With a tip of his hat

Less than a month after publishing its 'quarterly' forecasts for gross domestic product in Canada, the federal finance department has new numbers out. The big change: While Finance was predicting the Canadian economy would grow by 0.3 per cent in 2009, it is now predicting that whatever we've got now, it'll e 0.4 per cent smaller at the end of 2009. What does that mean? Well, one per cent of GDP represents about $16 billion in economic activity.Here's some details I received from the Department of Finance this morning — breaking down their estimates by quarter (chart on the left). In the Economic and Fiscal Statement, the forecast was for growth to resume in the quarter beginning in April. That would mean that governments just had to get over a three-month hump before things would pick up again.Now Finance says growth will not resume until the quarter beginning in July, a much longer period for governments to now plan for.We will not, incidentally, get the numbers on GDP for the quarter that ends this month until March 2, 2009.Here's the new quarter by quarter GDP forecast:

Real GDP Forecast
08Q4	-1.9
09Q1	-1.7
09Q2	-0.5
09Q3	1.7
09Q4	2.2

Weather Channel Accused of Pro-Weather Bias
An ancient cabal of weather fanatics operating outside any government, sometimes known as the Cloud Elders, sometimes called The Knights Doppler …

The Royal Bank this morning issued updated forecasts for provincial economies and the news is not good:

The persistence of the financial market maelstrom means that the economic downturn will undoubtedly be more severe than we previously thought, with the United States now in the throes of a fairly deep recession and Canada no longer able to avoid a short period of contraction. This bleaker context will have widespread negative implications for provincial economies.

Here's RBC's predictions for percentage growth of provincial gross domestic product — the sum of all economic activity in a province — for 2008 and 2009, ranked from best to worst.

1. Saskatchewan: 3.5 / 2.8
2. Alberta: 1.5 / 2.1
3. Manitoba: 2.5 / 1.9
4. New Brunswick: 1.6 / 1.2
5. Nova Scotia: 1.2 / 0.8
6. British Columbia: 0.8 / 0.6
7. Prince Edward Island: 1.5 / 0.5
8. Quebec: 0.6 / 0.0
9. CANADA: 0.6 / 0.0
10. Newfoundland and Labrador: 0.0 / -0.5
11. Ontario: -0.2 / -1.4

CBC in PEI is reporting:

[The government of Prince Edward Island] is defending its right to publish mortgage information online in the wake of a complaint filed with P.E.I.'s privacy commissioner alleging that posting such details on the internet is an invasion of privacy.

The government is fighting a complaint objecting to the kind of information available on Geolinc, an online database run by the province's taxation department, although just last week it moved to restrict the way Islanders can search information on another of its sites, the online corporate registry.

For a $25 registration fee on Geolinc anyone can have access to property assessments, tax information, deeds and mapping information for any parcel of land on P.E.I. Last year, an Islander complained to the privacy commissioner the database provided access to sensitive information, including mortgage account numbers and balances.

[Read the rest of the story]

Technorati Tags: data, privacy

The Bank of Canada today released its semi-annual Financial System Review or FSR [PDF} In it, the Bank warned that if times get tough, people will lose their jobs and when people lose their jobs, they'll have a hard time making their mortgage payments. Of course, you probably didn't the Bank of Canada to figure that one out for you but that's what they “warned” today.

Now some news organizations took that warning today and ran with it, blaring headlines that might make one think that a wave of mortgage defaults was not only imminent but unavoidable. In fact, as the bank notes, just one of every 250 mortgages is in arrears in Canada right now (arrears is still a long way from default) and that's much better than the average since 1997.

In fact, the big news, it seems to me, from the Bank was its assessment that by-and-large Canadian households are holding up very nicely, thank you, in this economic storm. Now remember, this is an economic storm that our prime minister two weeks ago said was as dangerous as anything we've seen since 1929. And yet, the Bank says, right there in black-and-white, that, so far as the average Canadian household goes, “the overall situation remains relatively positive.” Now that's news!

The Bank also notes that the national debt-service ratio — the ratio that essentially measures our ability to pay — is near historical lows which means, to use the Bank's phrase, “households can comfortably manage their financial obligations.” Now the Bank doesn't say this directly but I'll be happy to make the leap: Canada's consumers have plenty of room to take on more debt by buying more stuff which would, on its own, help stimulate the economy. Plus we'd all end up with lots of neat new stuff.

In any event, while the Bank worries we're all going to hell in a handbasket — and many journalists took that to mean that we actually are going to hell in a handbasket — it's pretty clear that it is the Bank of Canada's considered opinion that the Canadian consumer is a long, long, way from booking that ride. I've bolded the key phrases that support that view in this passage, taken from pp. 21-22 of the today's FSR:

The June FSR noted that the financial position of the Canadian household sector remained sound. Developments since then suggest some deterioration, but the overall situation remains relatively positive.

Household credit has continued to increase at a strong pace recently (11 per cent year-over-year in September 2008). With the more moderate growth in disposable income, the debt-to-income ratio rose further in the second quarter of 2008 to 137 per cent. Still, household debt remains lower as a share of disposable income than is the case in the United States and the United Kingdom. Reflecting lower effective borrowing rates for households, the debt-service ratio (DSR) has edged lower from 8.0 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 7.5 per cent in the second quarter of 2008. This is below the historical average of 9.2 per cent, suggesting that, at the aggregate level, households can comfortably manage their financial obligations.

The debt-to-asset ratio rose to 17.8 per cent in the first half of 2008, its highest level since 1991. After increasing strongly over the preceding five years, household real net worth has remained roughly unchanged since the onset of the turmoil in financial markets and has likely declined in the second half of this year, following the sharp drops in global equity markets, together with declining Canadian house prices. In the near term, asset values are unlikely to provide much support to the financial situation of Canadian households.

Indicators of household financial stress also suggest some slight deterioration in the financial position of households in the first half of 2008. After having been stable at historically low levels for the past three and a half years, the proportion of mortgages in arrears rose to 0.26 per cent in the second quarter of 2008 but remains below the average level since 1997 of 0.38 per cent. Personal bankruptcies are also slightly higher than they were in 2007, although they remain well below the peak reached in the late 1990s.

Overall, despite a modest deterioration, the financial position of the Canadian household sector remains relatively positive. On the other hand, rising debt levels mean that more Canadian households are becoming vulnerable to negative economic shocks at a time when the economy is expected to slow, raising the risk that the incidence of financial stress among households may increase. This bears close monitoring, given the deteriorating economic outlook.

Forrester Research has a new report out in which it asks what I'll call “information consumers” whether they tend to trust information based on the environment in which they find it.

Happily — for those of us in the news business — newspapers ranked very high on the 'trust factor'. I think smart media company managers recognize the value that trust has for their brands in the face of ever-increasing information choices that consumers have and will tend to nurture and protect that trust.

Mind you, less than a majority of Forrester's survey respondents said they trust the information in print newspapers.

Newspapers ranked highest among all mass media.

The most trustworthy source, according to Forrester was “Email from people you know” with 77 per cent ranking this source as 'trustworthy', followed by “Consumer product ratings/reviews” (60%), “Portals/search engines” (50%), the offline Yellow Pages (48%) and then print newspapers (46%)

Forrester maintains a 'panel' of several thousand people that it routinely surveys on a variety of technology and media issues. No data is presented in the report, however, on the size of the panel for this survey. (I used to rely a lot on Forrester's work when I was a tech reporter and they had, at that time, a pretty good reputation for solid research.)

For the trust question, Forrester asked its panel to rank, from 1 to 5, how much they trusted information from a variety of sources. The percentages above and below reflect the number of people who scored the given medium a 4 or a 5.

Corporate blogs ranked at the bottom on the trust scale with just 16 % saying they trust them. Personal blogs (but surely not this one!) ranked third lowest at 18%.

Results for the mass media:

• Print newspapers: 46%
• Radio: 39%
• TV: 38%

I really hope this doesn't happen …

The 1970s ushered in the era of the one-newspaper city as afternoon papers withered and died in a numbing succession through every downturn well into the 1980s.

Now, as we enter the end of the 21st century’s first decade, we could see the era of the no-newspaper city, according to Fitch Ratings.

[Fitch] is out with a gloomy prediction about the near future of media and entertainment – and it sees newspapers as the medium least like to weather a global recession that’s going to turn “severe” in 2009 with an advertising climate even more harsh than the industry’s painful experience during 2001-02.

“Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010,” the Chicago-based credit ratings firm said in a report on the outlook for U.S. media and entertainment.