Apr
5
A few items of interest as we head toward Easter:
- Fare Thee Well North Country: Last U.S. paper to close Canadian bureau. There possibilities come to mind: 1) nothing happens here; 2) it wouldn’t matter if anything did; or 3) the whole concept of foreign bureaus is fast becoming a relic in a wired/wireless, media-rich world.
- Fired journalists fire up their own news site. Used to be you worried about fired folk taking their chops to the competition. Now, they can just as easily become the competition.
- Myths of media convergences’ difficulty debunked. At Editor’s Weblog, some calming words about the move to the new mediascape. The main message: it doesn’t have to be complicated.
- Press shuts down blogger. Interesting fight going on in which a blogger claims to have been escorted from Canadian parliament at the request of the Press Gallery. If you’re interested, read the comments as well (if you can wade through the outpouring of “Liberal media bastards” crap to get to the good stuff.)
The Taylor story is not a case of the allegedly elitist, insecure press shutting down some courageous blogger. Stephen Taylor is first and foremost a Tory partisan who uses a weblog to spread The Party Line. He was accredited as an MP’s assistant but tried to play “journalist,” a term I use in the loosest possible sense here, and get the same access as legitimate, accredited media.
Quite apart from whether you consider partisan hacks to be legitimate members of the media (I have trouble with the idea — scrappy outsiders doing journalism are one thing, but party insiders playing journo are another), he misrepresented himself to get accredited.
The only comment worth reading in that thread is from Montreal Gazette reporter Elizabeth Thompson, who sets the record straight, only to be drowned out by the tinfoil-hat brigade.