The world is an increasingly hostile place for journalists. Freedom House released Freedom of the Press 2008: A Global Survey of Media Independence in advance of World Press Freedom Day on May 3. Release materials– including country scores, draft reports, the overview essay, and the methodology– are now available. The survey, released annually since 1980,…
Nominations this year from the National Magazine Awards Foundation are led by the Walrus followed by Toronto Life, Maclean’s, Report on Business, L’actualité, and explore. Finalists for Magazine of the Year are L’actualité, Maisonneuve and Toronto Life. Charles Oberdorf received what the foundation calls its “most prestigious individual prize since its inception in 1990, The…
Reports the New York Times: With print revenue down and online revenue growing, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions. That day has arrived in Madison, Wis. On Saturday, The Capital Times, the city’s fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist…
The April edition of Policy Options has an interesting piece by SFU communications researcher Catherine Murray, about Canada’s ethnic media. Murray discusses in part, the emergence of “multiple solitudes.” From the introduction: Do Canada’s ethnic media serve an integrative role? How can communication policy improve the integration process? Catherine Murray reports on a study of…
Elizabeth Edwards, whose husband John Edwards was a contender in the U.S. Democratic primaries for the presidential election, assesses the state of American journalism and finds it wanting. But much more interesting than Edwards’s critical conclusions — which have been reached by many others, and almost universally ignored by the public — is that on…
Globe and Mail reporter Jane Armstrong was arrested, fined and then expelled from Chechnya “on the grounds that she did not have proper accreditation,” said Reporters Without Borders. Noted a release from the press-rights organization, “Armstrong had accreditation to work in Chechnya, including in areas where counter-terrorist operations are carried out, but the police demanded…
The Magpie, the quirky east-side magazine store that became a sort-of Vancouver institution, is closing. A couple of excerpts from a piece in the Vancouver Sun that captures some of the Magpie’s flavour: “There aren’t many bookstores that can claim, in their day, to have founded a republic and established themselves as the de facto…
An influential civil liberties group has slammed CanWest Global, the giant media company fond of using the law to squelch criticism of itself, for an attempt to “to silence satirical criticism and constrain fair comment,” “corporate bullying” and a lack of “good humour and sober second thought.” CanWest is suing The Tyee, an independent online…
“Canadian media give inordinate coverage to health care issues and largely ignore the ‘non-medical’ determinants of health … This coverage is at odds with our research which shows that Canadians see homelessness as an urgent social and health issue,” writes Dr. Jim Frankish in the online journal The Tyee. (Frankish is an academic at the…
As details emerge in the story of Allan Schoenborn, a suspect in the slaying of his three children in Merritt, B.C., the initial coverage of the case looks more and more bizarre. Reporters from throughout Canada and internationally have converged on the small town — as is usual with an emotional and hot story. But…