Review: Times plagiarist neither damned nor redeemed by new doc
“Why did you do it?” It’s a fitting opening to a documentary about a plagiarist, considering it’s usually the first question asked of people like Jayson Blair—who, as a reporter for The New York Times, plagiarized or fabricated more than 30 articles. The scandal, known as the “Blair Affair,” is the subject of Samantha […]
Friday Funny: someone built a website to prove that clickbait headlines are ruining journalism. You won’t believe what happened next.
If anybody needs us, we’ll be in the corner, laughing to fight back the tears. Bless you, Headlines Against Humanity. Thanks for the hours of mildly depressing entertainment. Remember to follow the Review and its masthead on Twitter. Email the blog editor here.
Kamloops—pop. 85,000—loses its only daily paper
The decline and fall of local newspapers continued earlier this week as Glacier Media Inc. announced that it is closing The Kamloops Daily News after 80 years in print. While the last year has seen the death of several free large-market dailies and small-market community papers, John Hinds of Newspapers Canada* told The Vancouver Sun […]
Friday Funny: the tastiest headline of 2013
Just like how movie studios release their Oscar bait in December, it seems the last few weeks of the year have yielded a disproportionate amount of funny corrections, headlines or tweets. Craig Silverman’s year-end round-up is as good as always, but he may have published it too early. He missed, among other things, this correction […]
Conrad Black vs. Rob Ford: no surprises
Around 8:58 Monday night, thousands of Torontonians discovered whether Vision TV is included in their cable packages. That was probably the only new thing they learned that hour. In a 15-minute interview with media baron Conrad Black on The Zoomer, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford boasted about saving taxpayers’ money (again), crowned himself the best mayor […]
To Snow Fall or not to Snow Fall: the ongoing debate over ‘the future of journalism
A conversation on Twitter (Dec. 15, 2013) about use of the technique often called parallax scrolling, which got lots of journalism people excited a year ago when The New York Times published a story titled “Snow Fall.”
Smartphones haven’t changed the rules of photojournalism
In 2012, American photojournalist Ben Lowy made history. His photograph of waves from Hurricane Sandy breaking in New York City made the cover of Time magazine; it was taken with an iPhone. Lowy has taken his iPhone to other locales as well: he documented the Libyan conflict and also captured images in Kabul, Afghanistan for […]
Mandela: covering the death of a giant
It’s an unfortunate truism that terrible events beget excellent journalism, and the death of Nelson Mandela is no different. Journalists have had ample time to prepare coverage for his passing, and it shows. Here is our selection of some of the best Canadian coverage of Mandela’s life and legacy: Months ago, when Mandela’s health was […]
Newsweek rises from the dead, kind of, maybe”
Newsweek lied to us. Less than a year ago, the magazine said: It turns out the magazine’s new owners—after the death of NewsBeast, which we still can’t believe once seemed like a good idea—have different ideas. In the new year, they’re going to bring the 80-year-old magazine out for another shot at print. Editor Jim […]
CBC’s NSA story: who redacts the redacters?
Last week, we wrote about redactions in freedom of information requests, but how do news outlets decide what of their own material to black out? Christopher Parsons, for one, can’t figure that out. Parsons, a postdoctoral fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs who is studying “how privacy (particularly informational privacy, expressive privacy and […]
