February 2012
4 posts
How the Ottawa Citizen engaged in online snooping
1.
Bad journalism happens all the time and you’d be hard pressed to find a working journalist who hasn’t been guilty of it at some point. We’re lucky, though, that most journalists are dedicated to improving themselves. Most of us hate to make mistakes, but are equally disturbed by one that goes uncorrected. One bad story does not make a bad journalist. At least I hope so,...
“The Target philosophy towards expecting parents is similar to the first date...”
– How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did - Forbes (via felixsalmon)
“One last thing from that Accorsi scouting report. Something about guts. Manning...”
– From Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback, about Eli Manning and toughness
“Predictably, Williams’s self-defense took the form of asserting that Eliot’s...”
– William Carlos Williams on T.S. Eliot.
January 2012
2 posts
“That’s the fundamental problem of economics. We’d like to be...”
– Robert Shiller, on economics and the housing bubble
“I’ll give everyone a tip here: retirement is for young people, not older people....”
– New York Times interview with Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United
December 2011
1 post
New journalism and the unmitigated shitshow
Recently, I read The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, a fantastic book about the ‘new journalism’ that burst into being in the sixties, practised by writers like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Michael Herr and many others. They were writing for magazines like Esquire and New York Magazine, covering Vietnam war protests, the war itself and American culture from a whole new...
November 2011
2 posts
“First, if you look around the world you see that the big determining factor for...”
– Krugman on the Eurozone crisis
“News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read....”
– Evelyn Waugh
October 2011
9 posts
Counting on new media
Sometimes we get a stark reminder of how the world has changed for newspaper reporters and columnists.
This week in Edmonton, city council held public hearings about an impending decision on a downtown arena. Council held a vote on the deal the next day, ultimately choosing to approve the project.
This would be a busy week in any newsroom, as the hearings allowed nearly 100 people to voice their...
“I’m just as willing to take a smack at the federal Tories as anyone else, but I...”
– Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman on the disputed $92 million worth of federal funding for the Royal Alberta Museum
“Yet there’s something strange about the backseat status often given to foreign...”
– David Remnick
“But other aides publicly accused the Texas governor of acting like a bully at...”
– New York Times piece on the pre-existing acrimony between Romney and Perry
“So, as unsexy as it sounds, the best way to protest successfully, in New York or...”
– Good piece at Slate about the first amendment.
The "tax on voting"
After all, it’s not like you hand over a loonie and change to the returning officer when casting your ballot. Under the current formula, it is the total number of votes cast for a registered political party that determines how much money it receives.
I’m a little mystified by the outrage in this CBC blog post about a government press release on the voter subsidy. Too often,...
“My response is to note what the Obama administration seems leery of saying out...”
– Andrew Sullivan on the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki
“Most of the data in government hands should be public by default, unless there...”
– Alberta Premier-designate Alison Redford. I hereby devote my journalistic career to reminding her of this statement.
September 2011
13 posts
“The players have been told countless times about how their play affects the...”
– Fantastic piece on the Buffalo Bills at Yahoo! Sports
2 tags
“And yet we have a guy who has two cracked ribs, a punctured lung, and...”
– Boomer Esiason on Tony Romo and his decision to play with cracked ribs and a punctured lung
“How does a man explain a black eye or an assault conviction to his confused...”
– Todd Babiak of the Edmonton Journal on bullying, at all ages
The helicopter call
As a biography-junkie, one of my favourite things is discovering competing perspectives on the same event in history. The best examples of this are when the event involves only two people. You know each person walked away with a completely different take on what they’d just seen. I wonder how often this happens in every day life?
My favourite example of this happened in 1960, after John F....
“You might think that having an “insurmountable” lead in a race is a...”
– Graham Thomson on the Alberta PC leadership race in the Edmonton Journal
“About three-quarters of the energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions from washing...”
– Cold-Water Detergents Get a Chilly Reception - NYTimes.com (via felixsalmon)
“In that way it’s telling that long before they began sparring over Social...”
– Great piece on Rick Perry and the “culture war” at the New Republic
Bureaucracy might not be to blame for FOIP...
A week ago, CBC broke the news that Alberta PC leadership candidate Ted Morton used an alias for email correspondence while he was a minister. It looks like Morton used the false name - made up of his actual first and middle names - to avoid FOIP requests for his emails.
It seems like whenever a story like this breaks, there’s the usual pile on about Canada’s freedom of information...
“I hate to say it. There weren’t e-mails.”
– Alberta PC leadership candidate Rick Orman on FOIP practices for e-mail messages. Orman last served in government 20 years ago.
“QB Cam Newton on WR Steve Smith always being open: “Yeah. One man on him, (it’s)...”
– Carolina Panthers QB Cam Newton on his notoriously surly receiver Steve Smith
“Just as importantly, markets reward expertise handsomely. Unemployment rates...”
– Just a powerhouse of snark from the Economist. These guys are the best at it, no doubt.
August 2011
12 posts
Corporate taxes and marginal personal tax rates
With all the talk of taxation and spending cuts lately, there’s been a trend amongst journalists and pundits to conflate corporate taxes rates and personal tax rates on the rich. It’s assumed that if someone is in favour of lowering corporate tax rates then they must also be against raising taxes on the rich (or, in the U.S., letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire).
I was...
“I’ve been using for four years,” he added. “Last night I went home with money...”
– Great New York Times piece on drug addiction in Afghanistan
“I don’t mind telling you that I could see at that point that he was a much...”
– The final exchange between Stephen Harper and Jack Layton
The Two Bachmanns
Here’s a fawning description of Marcus Bachmann, written by Robert Costa of the National Review:
Indeed, the sight of Marcus Bachmann relaxing, watching his children savor the moment, will stick with me. His wife had more interviews, more events, more everything to come. She had just won a major political victory. But even in the big leagues, it’s the small moments, the light laughter of...
Garfield and Ryan
If the fall TV schedule doesn’t excite you and you’re looking for some intrigue, I’d recommend the Republican primary campaign currently underway. Now that Tim Pawlenty has stepped aside, Rick Perry is front-running and Michele Bachmann has a spot in the top three, there’s no shortage of entertainment.
Establishment Republicans are having trouble finding a palatable...
Odd decision by the CBC
Odd decision by the CBC to part ways with Gilles Duceppe, due to the broadcaster’s on-again/off-again enforcement of the “cooling off” rule.
Less than two days after it was announced that Duceppe would make appearances once a week on a radio program with the French-language CBC, it has been announced that the deal is off.
The former Bloc leader always intended to focus on...
Griffiths and Orman tussle on Twitter
One of the best things about Twitter is, unquestionably, the bizarre dust-ups that happen on a nightly basis. Although it pales in comparison to some more notable argy-bargy incidents, PC leadership candidates Doug Griffiths and Rick Orman dipped their toes in the Twitter-battle water on Monday night. See if you can spot the younger candidate:
@Rick_Orman: 1st home cooked meal in 3 wks. Thanks...
“What Perry doesn’t have, though, is the kind of moderate facade that Americans...”
– Barn-burner of a column from Ross Douthat about the GOP presidential field
“There was plenty of prayer: some of the faithful stood with arms held high in...”
– The Guardian’s report on Rick Perry, pre-presidential announcement.
“The S&P team agreed to reconvene their ratings committee on a conference...”
– Standard and Poor’s does not come off well in this account of the credit downgrade in the Wall Street Journal
“If you think that we really are going to enter a double-dip recession, then...”
– Felix Salmon on plunging markets
“Conservatives complain about excess government spending. Fine. But isn’t the...”
– David Frum has some kind of existential crisis about the great recession
July 2011
14 posts
“As precommitment devices go, however, the debt limit is both too weak and too...”
– James Surowiecki on the debt ceiling
“We are going to show up as the Norway you know,” said foreign minister Jonas...”
– Doug Saunders reporting from Oslo
“Back in 1986, if taxes had been raised every time federal spending had...”
– Connor Friedersdorf on Grover Norquist and “The Pledge”
“Younger riders, who aren’t close friends with the generation who lived...”
– Wall Street Journal piece on the novelty of a French leader in the Tour de France
“All (Murdoch’s) instincts are down-market; he is not only a tabloid...”
– Conrad Black on Rupert Murdoch
“[German] liberties were the privilege of ruling princes or at most of...”
– Dame Veronica Wedgwood, as quoted and discussed by Ta-Nehisi Coates on his blog.