Until Wednesday's incident, a Canadian journalist hasn't been injured in a conflict zone since 2002, when the Toronto Star's Kathleen Kenna got seriously wounded by a grenade attack.

But that risk is there. For journalists and news organizations alike, the issue is one of weighing the risk versus the importance of the story.

   more »

The Supreme Court of Canada has declined to hear an appeal of Ontario's anti-squeegee law, an artifact of the Harris era.

However, that didn't stop industrious squeegee-ers from plying their trade at some major intersections in west downtown Toronto this afternoon.

They seem to be going with smaller squeegees with short handles while wearing fairly roomy shirts. That way, if they notice the cops, they tuck the squeegee in the back of their pants and put the shirt over top.

Unfortunately for them, they still pretty much look like squeegee-ers. :)

Riding the streetcar today east on College St., I noticed signs of life at the late, lamented N-Blox condo site.

Behold its successor project: Cube lofts!

Here's an image of the original project:

To my layman's eye, the original is the more eye-catching design. However, even if I had had the $800,000 for an entry-level condo there (about $727 per square foot), I could have bought a very nice house in a funky area (I don't consider Davisville "funky" :) ).

If one went further east to the Europa Condos project at Palmerston and College, the condos there were in the $400 per square foot range, based on the bachelor's units they're still trying to flog.

But whenever I go by that building, I'm left thinking it did nothing architecturally uplifting for the neighbourhood. The project looks like an office building without the character, which amuses me considering the website bumpf says how romantic the neighbourhood is. :)

Now we have a second project to the west that will undoubtedly be more affordable than N-Blox, but to me, doesn't have any excitement to it. However, if people aren't willing to pay the premium to be part of an exciting development, that leaves pedestrian as the fallback option, doesn't it?

Anyways, kudos to the ears of the anonymous commenter from Aug. 5 who said: "I heard a rumour that there will be a re-launch with a more sellable product."

Update

An entry-level suite is $280,000. The top price is $1.3 million..

This is a very savvy online marketing effort:

Update

Some people didn't get it.

Radio Canada's Patrice Roy tells his fellow reporters in Kandahar what happened when the LAV-III in which he was riding got hit by a roadside bomb on Wednesday. Two Canadian soldiers died plus an Afghan interpreter. R-C cameraman Charles Dubois was injured, as was another Canadian soldier.

   more »

Here's part one of the Beeb feature, and here's part two.

I found this to be an eye-opening quote from one sex ed opponent:

The right-wing Hindu organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) blames "a Western mindset behind the move".

"We run about 26,000 schools across the country. Our teachers have studied the curriculum and they find it obscene and objectionable," RSS spokesman Ram Madhav told the BBC.

"The whole curriculum is designed to suit the lifestyle in Western countries, where there is a general free atmosphere. In our country we live with families."

Mr Madhav says: "Giving sex education on the pretext that India has a large number of Aids patients is illogical."

Avert.org has stats on HIV/AIDS in India.

More information here about the media and the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China.

PS

Great minds think alike. Roughly 18 hours later, but alike. :)

Two Canadian soldiers are dead, as is an Afghan intepreter, following an IED blast in Zhari district of Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

Another Canadian soldier was injured. Charles Dubois, a Radio Canada cameraman, suffered serious injuries to his leg, and reporter Patrice Roy is suffering from shock but not otherwise physically injured.

Since this is a media-centric blog, I'll focus on the journalists.

   more »

A report by the CIA's inspector-general has unkind things to say about how the CIA handled al Qaeda in both the years and the months leading up to 9/11.

   more »

From the NYT:

Ever since Google bought YouTube last November, it has avoided cluttering the site and the video clips themselves with ads, for fear of alienating its audience.

The strategy helped cement YouTube’s position as the largest video Web site but didn’t do much to justify YouTube’s $1.65 billion price tag.

Now Google believes it finally has found the formula to cash in on YouTube’s potential as a magnet for online video advertising and keep its audience loyal at the same time.

   more »

The Globe and Mail's Marina Jimenez on being a new mom and a foreign correspondent working in war zones.

CJR Daily has an item about a study by Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy called Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet.

Here's one finding (from the report's executive summary):

The websites of national “brand-name” newspapers are growing, whereas those of many local papers are not. The sites of national “brand-name” television networks are also experiencing increased traffic, as are those of local television and radio stations. However, sites connected to traditional news organizations are growing more slowly than those of the major nontraditional news disseminators, including aggregators, bloggers, and search engines and service providers.

The study looked at eight prominent blogs. CJR said the only clearly right-wing one amongst the bunch was Little Green Footballs. Those blogs showed only six per cent growth. National newspaper websites went up 10 per cent, and national broadcast sites went up 30 per cent. Aggregators like Digg and Topix showed "explosive" growth, but those are very new forms and so they started with a base of almost nothing.

CJR's Paul McLeary made the following observation:

Another thing that probably led to the smaller growth percentage among the political blogs--especially the highly partisan ones the study looks at--as compared to big newspapers, is that the sample set has probably come pretty close to maxing out on its potential audience. There are only so many hardcore political junkies out there on either side who want to read what these outlets have to say. It's by definition a niche audience, and as such its growth, if it happens at all, will probably be slower than that of a general-interest newspaper. 

An interesting yarn by Sean Holman's Public Eye. A B.C. reporter and editor are out of a job at Victoria News. The editor, Keith Norbury, got turfed Friday, while reporter Brennan Clarke had resigned a few days earlier.

An advertiser's complaint over a story that talked about someone who saved big bucks buying a luxury car in Portland, Ore. helped trigger the chain of events.

   more »

From the NYT:

Michael K. Deaver, who arranged some of Ronald Reagan’s most memorable photographic backdrops for public consumption and privately gave the president blunt, sometimes contrarian advice, died yesterday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 69.

   more »

From the Aug. 17 Reuters story on Yahoo! News:

An embarrassed Japanese government has cut the subsidy, but a Tokyo TV company said on Friday it would carry on making a striptease news show with sign language for hearing-impaired viewers.

The government made grants totaling 400,000 yen ($3,500) to help cover production of the weekly five-minute program on satellite TV, which features a newsreader who removes her clothes between news items that she delivers in sign language. ..

"Of course we will continue making the program," said Shinichiro Fukuyama, a spokesman for makers Paradise Television. "We weren't doing it for the subsidy, we just wanted to make something viewers would enjoy."

From the NYT:

News coverage of the Iraq war fell sharply in the second quarter of the year, as the news media paid increased attention to the presidential campaign and the immigration debate, according to a detailed analysis to be released today.

The study is done by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

From the NYT:

Coincidence or not? This month, 10 of Time Inc.’s magazines are running articles about New Orleans.

The answer, for the most part, is “not.” The assorted articles were the result of the editor in chief John Huey’s unusual decision to take 12 editors on a two-day tour in May of the struggling city. Mr. Huey, who oversees the content of more than 150 magazines, said he could not recall a similar trip in the past, nor could others who were involved.

Mr. Huey said he did not presume that each editor would come back and assign articles about New Orleans, but once they did, the timing was coordinated ahead of next week’s two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.

“There were no commercial considerations at all,” Mr. Huey said. “It was just a group of some of the biggest, most influential magazines in the country coming all at once.” ...

Mr. Huey said the multimagazine experiment was not intended to build Web traffic or attract advertisers; rather, it was an attempt to put the journalistic weight of 10 big magazines behind a particular topic. “It felt good to flex those muscles all at the same time,” he said.

Most casual magazine readers would not notice the endeavor; its real impact is evident mostly on the Internet. The print editions steer readers to time.com/katrina, an index of stories from each issue.

From the NYT:

Anyone looking for evidence that liberals are funnier than conservatives might be tempted to point to the demise of Fox News Channel’s “1/2 Hour News Hour,” the network’s answer to left-wing news parodies like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central.

Last week, Fox decided not to renew the show, saying it was too expensive to produce. The last episode will air on Sept. 16.

“It’s a financial issue,” said the executive producer, Joel Surnow, best known as the co-creator of Fox’s “24.” “It’s a very expensive show by their standards. It has to make business sense before anything else.” ...

Mr. Surnow warned against using the show’s demise to infer that conservatives are not funny.

“I think there’s room for great satire and great comedy from either side of the aisle,” he said. “Hypocrisy and hysteria are in both camps, and they should always be taken down a notch.”

Columbia University professor Mark Lilla takes a look at the separation of church and state that defines governance in the West -- and why hundreds of millions of people in the Muslim orbit don't see things that way.

   more »

The NYT takes a look at some heavyweight members of corporate America's tweaking of Wikipedia entries, either to make to make themselves look good or a competitor look bad.

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, says the site discourages such “conflict of interest” editing. “We don’t make it an absolute rule,” he said, “but it’s definitely a guideline.”

So what should big companies do if they want something changed?

Mr. Walton said ExxonMobil employees “are not authorized to update Wikipedia with company computers without company endorsement.” The company’s preferred approach, he said, would be to use Wikipedia’s “talk” pages, a forum for discussing Wikipedia entries.

Mr. Wales also said the “talk” pages are where Wikipedia encourages editors with a conflict of interest to suggest revisions.

“If someone sees a simple factual error about their company, we really don’t mind if they go in and edit,” he said. But if a revision is likely to be controversial, he added, “the best thing to do is log in, go to the ‘talk’ page, identify yourself openly, and say, ‘I’m the communications person from such and such company.’ The community responds very well, especially if the person isn’t combative.”

Mike Sitrick, a longtime public relations consultant in Los Angeles, agreed. “I’m a big believer that if you’re going to correct it, correct it with a name,” he said. “Otherwise it hurts your credibility.”

A Norton Internet Security dialogue box just popped up to say, "A recent attempt to attack this computer was blocked."

Great, but wouldn't it also be useful to say: "A recent attempt to attack this computer succeeded. Sorry about that. We'll try harder next time."?

Salon's Andrew Leonard attempts to walk people through the causes of the stock market freakout of recent days (free with a day pass).

Leonard singled out this letter in response:

OK, Andrew, here's my problem about your write-up: you're setting up this opposition between the "real" economy with "real men" and the speculative, derivative economy of finance capital. This opposition between real and unreal is in essence, uncritically Heideggerian. That is, it ascribes a moral valence/superiority to "real" -- real work, real life, real men -- vs. the derivative, speculative, unreal world of global finance. As long as you use these binaries to try to critically explain the movement of capital, you are in fact disarmed. That is, you are postulating that somehow, somewhere, there is a "good" and "real" economic (i.e., capitalist) ethos -- the hardworking, manly one. And that those hedge fund speculators just fuck it up with their greed and their credit swaps. In short, by creating those binaries -- which in and of themselves have a dubious history (hint: it starts with Sorel and Mussolini) -- you are misrecognizing and misrepresenting what is in fact a unified social form -- capitalism. In that sense, you are reiterating the strategic misunderstanding of the reformist left, who still believes that there is a good form of capitalism. Capitalism has become nature -- it is neither good nor bad. It is the Hegelian totality, and therefore knows no outside and -- as a corollary -- cannot be the object of moral judgment. Just like nature, it subjects us to random catastrophic events.

"Cannot be the object of moral judgment?" Oh my! :)

Here's an excerpt of a Globe and Mail story that attempts to humanize this economic debacle. Speaking is Gertrude Barron, who is 77:

Ms. Barron, who is on dialysis, used her home as collateral for a $50,000 (U.S.) loan to pay for mounting medical bills. The initial interest rate was enticingly low. But typical of many subprime loans, the payments shot up after the second year and again this year. Monthly payments of $518 (U.S.) now consume half her meagre fixed income. Unable to pay her taxes, she recently filed for personal bankruptcy. Desperate to renegotiate the loan, she wonders how long she'll be able to keep her home, the value of which sinks ever lower.

“They knew my age and they knew my income,” Ms. Barron said yesterday, stifling tears. “They just took advantage of me.”

The company that holds her mortgage (give it up for Litton Loan Servicing LP!) is refusing to renegotiate.

What does all this have to do with us up here in the GWN?

The ripple effect of Ms. Barron's misfortune and thousands like her has even reached Canada. That's happened for two reasons: First, lending has tightened up around the globe; and second, there is concern that the United States – our key trading partner – may be headed for recession.

“The problem is the domino effect and the spillover,” explained economist Clément Gignac of National Bank Financial in Montreal.

Because so much of Americans' net worth is tied up in their homes, falling real estate prices will curb spending and borrowing in the months ahead, reducing demand for homes, cars and virtually everything else.

“Credit crunches have the potential to have an impact on the real economy, on Main Street,” Mr. Gignac added.

Russia announced Friday it would restore long-range patrols with its strategic bombers, something that hasn't happened since 1992.

Those Russians who would like to hear the BBC's Russian service broadcast on FM? Fuggedaboutit:

The broadcaster's last FM distribution partner in Russia, Bolshoye Radio, said it had been told to remove BBC content or risk being shut down.

Two other Russian FM stations have dropped BBC programming recently.

The BBC's Russian Service can still be heard online and on medium and short wave frequencies in Russia.

Update

Journalist Mark MacKinnon has more on the BBC angle at his blog.

From the AP story on CTV.ca:

Giving its green screen a temporary rest, the Comedy Central series will air "Operation Silent Thunder: `The Daily Show' in Iraq,'' several onsite dispatches filed by Senior War Correspondent Rob Riggle.

Riggle will provide what the network calls "in-depth coverage and insights from the front lines.''

Riggle is a major in the U.S. Marine Corps reserves. I saw him in Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story, and he was very funny as a Corps-inspired paintballer ("when I get out there, I'm 110 per cent; it's just Kill! Kill! Kill!").

But I gotta say, I haven't been overly impressed with his Daily Show work to date. Give me John Oliver, Larry Willmore, Samantha Bee or Aasif Mandvi any time.

A Los Angeles Times editorial knocks Google for allowing those who are being talked about on Google News (more properly, Google's Aggregation of News) to comment on that coverage. To the Times, this shows the difference between what a Google-like entity does and what newspapers and magazines do.

This has one online news critic in-digg-nant (geddit?).

   more »

An amusingly written look at the Bourne Ultimatum by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

   more »

If you guessed the Beeb, you'd be right! Although probably every news organization has had someone do it.

Anyway, Pete Clifton, head of interactive news at the Beeb, holds forth about it at The Editors blog, but in a slightly more strained version of his usual jocular tone.

   more »

From the BBC:

KP Mohan was attacked as he left hospital where he was undergoing treatment after an assault by soldiers in June, the Free Media Movement said.

Sri Lankan authorities are investigating the attack in June.

Media activists say that fighting between the army and the Tamil Tigers has made the country one of the world's most dangerous places for journalists.