More journalists on journalists
By Paul Wells - Friday, July 10, 2009 - 10 Comments
Colleague Anne Kingston’s article on the big changes at the Globe and Mail is here. It has fun gossip. Anne’s piece doesn’t mention, but we have talked about this and it’s such a striking change I’m surprised nobody else has remarked on it, that within days after the new guy Stackhouse took over, the paper’s daily Ottawa file took a marked turn toward serious and often un-sexy questions of policy and governance, and away from the paper’s seven-year fixation on High School Confidential crap. All of which is to say that, while I had no expectations regarding Stackhouse one way or the other, I think that in the early going he has made very encouraging moves.
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As the Globe turns
By Anne Kingston - Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 12 Comments
The Globe and Mail came up with a plan for surviving the newspaper revolution. It didn’t include its editor.
Phillip Crawley is standing in his downtown Toronto office showing off the Globe and Mail of the future, which looks very much like the Globe and Mail of the present—only smaller and somewhat shinier. This is the 18-inch-wide by 21-inch-deep prototype of a new format slated for rollout in the fall of 2010. The Globe’s CEO and publisher is particularly stoked about the new capacity to run colour on coated stock where desired, reflected by the many mocked-up high-end ads, among them a full page for the jeweller Tiffany & Co., whose serene blue background portends a lucrative oasis in the parched advertising landscape. Finally, he says, the Globe will be able to offer advertisers heat-set colour with the timeliness of a daily 24-hour deadline, rather than the weeks required by magazines: “That’s a significant advantage.”So captivated was Crawley by the technology that he signed an 18-year, $1.7-billion printing deal with Transcontinental Inc. in August 2008, minutes before the economic downturn decimated advertising sales and 24-hour news cycles were replaced by Tweets. In the current print media landscape the commitment seems a high-stakes gamble by the self-anointed “Canada’s National Newspaper”—either the 21st-century equivalent of investing in state-of-the-art buggy technology at the turn of the 20th century or a shrewd counterintuitive vision of how people will still want to read news two decades hence.
The news about newspapers of late has been bleak. Earlier this month, the New York Times Co., beset by losses, hired Goldman Sachs to sell the Boston Globe, which it acquired in 1993 for US$1.1 billion. The money-losing San Francisco Chronicle, with whom Transcontinental signed a 15-year printing contract in 2006, is on the brink of being shut down or sold. Respected outlets such as the 146-year-old Seattle Post Intelligencer and 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News have shifted operations completely online. In late May, the Newspaper Association of America gathered top executives in Chicago to share ideas about how to preserve traditions of newsgathering in a digital age. Last week, the association reported that newspapers are increasingly being read online, a platform they have yet to figure out how to monetize: the number of unique visitors to U.S. newspaper websites grew 10 per cent in the first three months of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. (Similar statistics aren’t available for Canadian newspapers but anecdotal reports suggest a similar trend.) Continue…
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Clarity
By Paul Wells - Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 5:12 PM - 15 Comments
Globe editorial employees vote 97% for a mandate to strike.
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Hey look
By Paul Wells - Friday, May 29, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 6 Comments
New Wells column, in which I give the Globe a little tough love.
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The old grey Globe she ain’t what she used to be
By Paul Wells - Friday, May 29, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 43 Comments
Globe publisher Philip Crawley announced this week that editor Ed Greenspon had moved on to ‘new challenges’
“And now,” the editor of the Globe and Mail wrote in that newspaper’s pages a few weeks ago, “our hyper-innovative cartoonist is about to break new ground in partnership with our boundary-busting video-editor-cum-impresario, Jayson Taylor.”This is how you write when you have no ambition except to appear modern. For a writer in the grip of such a frenzy it is no longer enough to innovate, nor even to super-innovate. Ground may be broken but boundaries must be busted. But none of this hyper-busting was boundary-innovative enough. Two weeks later the author of those lines, Ed Greenspon, was an ex-editor-cum-unemployed.
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He buried the lede. Ed Greenspon's for the high jump; Stackhouse is the new Globe editor
By Paul Wells - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 19 Comments
Office email from wordy Globe publisher Phil Crawley:
The need to restructure our business, to meet the challenges of the current economic environment and the rapid changes in media consumption habits, has been our overarching goal during FY09.
As we head towards FY10, that evolutionary process takes a leap forward today with the reorganization of our senior executive team.
Reimagination-inspired teamwork during the last four years has reinforced the value of a more collaborative way of managing our business. By drawing on the collective strengths of the team, we are all better able as individuals to contribute to the success of The Globe and Mail. With that objective in mind, I have reviewed the composition of the Executive Team, and identified priority areas for improvement.
New skills and different styles of leadership are needed to take The Globe and Mail to levels of achievement which meet the ambitions of our shareholders, to cement our standing as the best in Canada at creating high-quality content for consumption on whatever platform is most desirable for our readers, users and advertisers.
We are building on a position of strength not enjoyed by many of our competitors. The executive changes outlined below are intended to ensure that The Globe and Mail is in the prime spot to take advantage of the market opportunities that will arise when the recession eases.
To deliver the required results, I am adding one extra position to the senior team and changing responsibilities and reporting lines in three other parts of the business.
Ed Greenspon, who has been our Editor-in-Chief for almost seven years, is stepping down and is succeeded by John Stackhouse, the Editor of Report on Business since 2004.
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Ignatieff: Fantasia on a theme of anonymity
By Paul Wells - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 8:43 AM - 38 Comments
“…a senior Ignatieff Liberal has called on the new leader to provide substance to the weekend gathering.
“‘Right now, I would like him doing some more on policy,’ the veteran Liberal said. ‘Give yourself a few more clothes on the issues.’
“And another veteran Grit said Mr. Ignatieff simply has to ‘loosen up.’ He’s made inroads over the past two years, but he still comes across as a bit of a snob, the Liberal said.”
— Globe and Mail, today
A third senior Liberal, leaning on his walker because he’s quite senior, said Ignatieff sometimes sings “out of tune.” “It’s OK when he’s singing old show tunes and, you know, ‘Danny Boy’ and whatnot,” the source said, “but after about 10 p.m. he likes to do these duets with Szuszana on songs from Fiddler on the Roof and, you know, dude, I’m gonna need my ears tomorrow, know what I’m saying?”
A junior Liberal, speaking indistinctly through orthodontic braces, said Ignatieff “schometimes makesh fun of the way I talk.” A Liberal with considerable clout in one of the Atlantic provinces who has begun to affect half-moon glasses that he wears way down on his nose said, “Come on, everyone’s gonna know I’m Paul Zed if you attribute the quote like that.”
A source close to Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili said, “Sorry, I think I’m in the wrong story.” Continue…
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Coyne v. Wells on the sorry, sorry state of the media: All the self-pity, and twice the denial!
By Andrew Coyne - Friday, February 27, 2009 at 3:41 PM - 85 Comments
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"Too cold, boring and far away" – Oh, Winnipeg. Will you ever win?
By kadyomalley - Monday, November 17, 2008 at 11:12 AM - 17 Comments
Thanks to Bill Curry, the Globe and Mail is now a contender for this year’s None Dare Call It Boondoggle Award for Coverage of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights:
Canadians, particularly francophones, think Winnipeg is too cold, boring and far away, so they will probably view exhibits at the new $265-million Canadian Museum for Human Rights in the city online rather than in person, according to government research.
The negative view of the Manitoba capital surfaced in small focus group discussions conducted for the federal Department of Canadian Heritage.
“These [French-speaking] participants suggested that the city suffers from negative stereotypes such as: cold, nothing to do, far away, and not interesting to visit,” according to an internal government report in April. “Very few of these participants would put the museum on their list of things to see given the distance.”
Longtime ITQ readers, of course, are already well acquainted with the report in question, which was the subject of a two-part series last August:
So, uh – why are we building it there again? Oh, right. That.
(Still more) Behind the scenes at the museumFun fact: Did you know that, in the 2008-09 Main Estimates for Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights is the one and only “key initiative” listed under Preservation of Canadian Heritage? Take that, canoe museums and digitalization of historical archives! (More fun stuff about the estimates here.)
UPDATE: Just so I don’t get accused of not giving credit where credit is due, this is doubleplus awesome news. Now that’s some impressive Preservation of Canadian Heritage! Big grats and thanks to all of the institutions involved.
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A thought on the now-only-referred-to-as-secret -using-finger-quotes memorandum on food safety
By kadyomalley - Friday, August 22, 2008 at 10:12 AM - 0 Comments
Is the Globe and Mail - or, for that matter, CanWest News – under any legal* obligation that would prevent it from posting the full CFIA document online?
Let’s assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that the government considers this particular document – the letter, and the list of proposals for budget cuts at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency – to be a cabinet confidence, despite the fact that there is no way of knowing whether it actually went to cabinet. Even if it did, documents that would otherwise be made public but are attached to a cabinet confidence are still public; the only thing that needs to be kept secret is the fact that it was part of a submission to cabinet.
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The curse of the Komagata Maru: More on that Unfortunate Event in Surrey
By kadyomalley - Wednesday, August 6, 2008 at 10:33 AM - 0 Comments
Well, huh. How about that? Apparently, my entirely uninformed theorizing on what might have gone so horribly wrong in Surrey last weekend was pretty darned close to what actually took place.
According to the Globe and Mail, at least, which has a fantastic behind-the-scenes piece on the frantic last-minute negotiations between the PM’s office and the organizers of the event — complete with excerpts from the increasingly combative email exchange:
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A word from a cynical critic
By Steve Maich - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at 9:59 AM - 0 Comments
I guess this editorial in today’s Globe and Mail is addressed to people like…
I guess this editorial in today’s Globe and Mail is addressed to people like me – people who just never understand what a great manager Cito Gaston is.
Now look, I’m as happy as anybody to see the Jays playing well. It fills my heart with joy that they’re 6-2 over their last eight. The players seem happier, and looser, and there is suddenly an air of optimism around the team. For all that Gaston deserves credit. But maybe, just maybe, this is the kind of editorial that should have waited until a little later in the season. Gaston has not yet been with this team for two weeks, and despite the recent run, we are left with some rather daunting realities. Continue…
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Information wants to be free
By Paul Wells - Sunday, June 1, 2008 at 7:34 PM - 0 Comments
Or so I’m told. This news comes courtesy of a reader who was kind enough to write in, reminding me that many months ago I predicted something like this would happen, because (a) the New York Times was blowing up TimesSelect; (b) as the National Post eventually figured out, and as we have learned too at Maclean’s, the value of being up in the national conversation is not only superior to the value you can wring from selling subscriptions, it’s not even abstract value: it can be monetized. If I understand what “monetized” means. Although frankly, what are the odds? Anyway, now you can enjoy endless hours of Simpson and Ibbitson. And Blatch. And Wente. And more more more.
