• J-Source

    Reporters investigate paedophiles, called “stool pigeons”

    “A French documentary sparked a media ethics controversy on Tuesday after journalists handed over the names of 22 suspected paedophiles to police in Canada and France,” reported Agence France-Presse.  “Reporters from the Capa agency used the Internet to get in touch with people in France and Canada who allegedly professed an interest in child pornography…

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    Nellie Bly need not apply

    This week J-Source did a double take on sexist language in the media. A review of past posts suggests that how female politicians are treated in the news may be related to how female staffers are treated in the newsroom. From editorial masts to op-ed pages, women are greatly under-represented, although they form the majority…

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    Pullman’s defence of free speech

    Gotta love Philip Pullman: “It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended.”

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    Sniffy content?

    You’d be an April fool to turn up your nose at the Vancouver Sun‘s “innovative “four-dimensional” newspaper technology project, the first of its kind in the world.” The paper announced that the project would start July 1, with “a daily list of scratch-and-sniff content in each section of the paper” to rival 3-D movies like…

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    Is the National Post misogynist?

    The National Post has drawn criticism for its portrayal of women, and so-called women’s issues. J-Source isn’t the place to discuss those issues, but journalists might ask why the mainstream newspaper’s owner, now in bankruptcy protection, tolerates an editorial position that alienates 51 per cent of its potential subscribers or advertisers.

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    Long news

    Kirk Citron: “In the long run, some stories are going to matter more than others.”

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    Hot spotlight on weathermen and women

    Meteorologists — whose faces are on television as weather forecasters — have become the target of climate change activists because so many in the U.S.  are climate-chance skeptics, reported the New York Times. More than a quarter of American weathercasters surveyed by researchers agreed with the statement “Global warming is a scam.” “What we’ve recognized…

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    A capital where freedom’s in short supply

    by Lawrence Martin (This column originally appeared in The Globe and Mail and is reproduced by permission of the author.) It’s always great fun to see conservatives getting all worked up about freedom of speech, as they did over the dust-up between Ann Coulter and the University of Ottawa. The dragon lady, of course, was…

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    Hope for the international beat?

    In recent years J-Source has covered the retreat of foreign reporting, including the closure of the Globe and Mail’s Moscow bureau, the loss of some leading CBC foreign correspondents.  Internationally, we lost the Far Eastern Economic Review and there was a sharp downturn in U.S. international reporting. But is there new hope for the international…

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    Al Jazeera in Canada – “Turning the World Back On”

    Al Jazeera English will be on the air in Canada within six weeks, and not a moment too soon to spur a Canadian revival in international reporting, according to AJE managing director Tony Burman, who said North America’s foreign news corps fell victim to budget cuts during a crucial period of world history, leaving citizens…