• J-Source

    Who are you calling sleazy?

    A cover story in Maclean’s entitled, “Lawyers are Rats,” is generating much controversy and attention from Canadian lawyers — which of course is the point of the provocative heading. The story is a full-on attack on the sleazy aspects of the legal profession. The Canadian Bar Association instantly demanded an apology then called the story…

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    Media and Chinese Olympics

    Reporters Without Borders is stepping up its campaign to use China’s 2008 Olympics to draw attention to China’s repression of press rights, with a press conference in Montreal on Monday.

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    Harper and media control

    Canadian Press reports that the RCMP is evicting journalists from a Charlottetown hotel lobby at the request of the Prime Minister’s Office. The federal Conservative party is holding its annual summer caucus at the hotel. Police in plainclothes and the hotel manager “told reporters that the Prime Minister’s Office had requested all media be barred…

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    Annual report on Canadian broadcasting

    The broadcasting industry is continuing to expand and new media are increasingly important to Canadians’ lives, said the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in its annual broadcasting report. Here are the report’s findings:

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    Blogosphere at 10

    In an essay in the Toronto Star, David Eaves and Taylor Owen explore the impact of blogging, which they contend reaches its 10th anniversary this month. “Blogging continues to be misunderstood by both technophiles and technophobes,” they argue, and say blogs will neither replace traditional journalism nor threaten the quality and integrity of journalism –…

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    Helicopter deaths: shame

    The news that four people died when two U.S. news helicopters collided last week was stultifying; the deaths seemed too pointless to even mention here.  Then I read Mark Hamilton’s blog post, and find myself in agreement with his opinion that the helicopter crash is a sign that “somehow journalism has lost its way and…

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    “Citizen Journalist” site lands big financing deal

    NowPublic Technologies Inc. calls itself the world’s largest participatory news network, with 100,000 non-professional contributing reporters from more than 140 countries and 3,600 cities,  and a partnership with Associated Press. Today, the company that began in a Vancouver garage received $10.6-million US in venture-capital financing. It says it aims to become the world’s biggest news…

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    Black was overdone by media, suggests poll

    As a reader, my eyes started glazing over every time there was another headline about Conrad Black, and I turned off the radio or TV when the news turned to him. I’d had about enough, oh, six years ago. Seems that my interest level about the former media tycoon and former Canadian is shared by…

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    Reader’s Digest increasingly ambitious

    Peter Stockland, editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest Canada, is out to rock the boat. A story by Dana Lacey in the latest Ryerson Review of Journalism says the magazine is starting “to get noticed again. Peter’s plan to develop longer, more culturally engaging features, to bring long-form journalism back to the brand made famous by shortening…