John Miller, before he became a Ryerson j-prof, toiled at 1 Yonge St, home of the (once mighty?) Toronto Star. He's mortified by the paper's apparent plan to outsource its editing and page production work.

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From the Torontoist:

Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. In the press release issued by the union in the wake of the announcement, union chief Maureen Dawson explained that "Journalism is a collaborative effort, the product of a team of reporters, photographers and editors working in concert to produce the kind of activist agenda that has served Star readers and our community so well for so long...To remove a critical element of that work is to shortchange everyone who depends on it."

Now, one (apparent) editor at the Star has decided to show us all the benefits of collaboration. An extensively marked-up copy of Publisher John Cruickshank's internal memo announcing the changes was sent to Torontoist by a self-described "intermediary who was asked to send this for a friend who works at the Star" this morning; it's, allegedly, "the work of a Star editor."

Here's the whole thing:

Jayson Blair, whose fabrications triggered the worst ethics crisis in the history of the New York Times and cost two very senior editors their jobs, will be speaking later today at a journalism ethics conference.

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James Poniewozik makes an argument out of a point that I've long believed; centrism can be a form of bias. It's about coverage of American politics, but ask yourself whether the same effect plays out in this country.

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... Reads Lady Gaga's Poker Face out loud:

And if that's not enough, here's a dose of the real thing: the Lady herself performing Love Game, which includes the following unforgettable verse:

Lets have some fun
this beat is sick
I wanna take a ride
On your disco stick

Globe and Mail corro Doug Saunders, travelling through Romania, found that cab drivers loved that tune (Saunders is doing 20th-anniversary coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall).

When I said in a tweet I could only take 10 seconds of that song, he replied: "10 seconds is all it takes."

This isn't a new story, but this is certainly a poignant photo essay at the BBC website -- a visual record of dead British pubs, as captured by Chris Etchell (seen first on Twitter).

From a posting at the Nieman Lab blog: (seen first on Twitter)

I also asked Schmidt about the concept of a “hyperpersonalized news stream,” coined by Google VP Marissa Mayer to describe a customized flow of information from a broad range of news sources. Does Google have aspirations to build on that concept?

Schmidt: We have about ten news stream ideas, of which hyperpersonalization is one. And, again, I’d rather not talk about specific products or even prioritize them, but I would make the following observation: In five or ten years, what will the primary news reader look like?

Well, that person will be probably on a tablet or a mobile phone, probably the majority of the reading will presumably be online not offline, just because of the scale of it. It’ll be highly personalized, right? So you’ll know who the person is. There’ll be a lot of integration of media — so video, voice, what have you. It’ll be advertising-supported and subscription-supported, so you’ll probably have a mixture. Think of the Kindle as an example. The Kindle is a proto of what this thing could look like. People will carry these things around.

So if you start thinking about that, it becomes pretty obvious what the products need to be: more personalized, much deeper, capable of deeper navigation into a subject. Also, show me the differential. Since you know what you told me yesterday, just tell me what changed today. Don’t repeat everything.

As an aside, I posted the following on Twitter to see what the deep thinkers would say:

Why shouldn't 'hyper-personalized' news be thought of as another form of filter failure?

Alas, no takers.

Peter McNelly, who once toiled in the Corpse's trenches (and had been a CTV News consultant), finds some good things to say about the CBC News redesign.

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How drastic? Publisher John Cruickshank is calling it the biggest restructuring in the company's history. And if some early musings are correct, copy editors could be the big losers.

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That is the premise of a nytimes.com interactive. You plug in a word, select from a menu of them and self-identify as a Republican, Democrat (or neither).

You get to view them by Republican choices (in red), Dems (in blue) or everyone's (in black). A sample image:

To jazz it up a bit more, it would be fun to be able to click on a word and be able to view short (10-15 second) testimonials of those who had entered a given word where they could say why.

From YouTube:

The Telegraph story is here (seen first on Twitter).

The Globe and Mail did a follow-up news story covered the changes at CBC News, but I gotta say that most of the commentary has not been flattering towards the Corpse.

If anyone comes across some commentary that does have a kind word about it, please send me a link, either by email or comment.

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CBC TV's The National did not finish first in its time slot on Monday night. I'll let Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle tell you about one of the shows that got higher ratings.*

* (Ding, ding, Ding! My 6,666th posting!)

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