The following memo went out this afternoon from Alphonse Ouimet:

From now on writers with editing privileges will have them removed.

This means that from today, you will not be able to edit anyone’s posts but your own, and no comments but those on your posts.

Look, this has nothing to do with your editing, this is a flattening out of the editorial hierarchy. Previously there were a few people who were writer/editors, a few who were just writers, and it wasn’t always clear who was what and who could do what, and how were they chosen anyway?

So from now on, you will concentrate on writing, and I’ll take on this editor role myself.

When this site switched from Blogger to WordPress and onto its own domain, I asked for and got the right to edit everybody’s posts. I’ve used it daily – for the sole purpose of improving HTML and fixing copy errors. As I’ve explained before, until today every post in the new WordPress Tea Makers has had good code and edited copy.

I have no knowledge of any other contributor’s ever touching anybody’s work. Hence, “writers with editing privileges” really just meant me and Ouimet in practice.

I hunt down and delete personal attacks and a few other kinds of comments. (A comment that seemed legally defamatory bit the dust recently, for example.)

The only contributor who has ever rewritten another contributor’s work is Alphonse Ouimet, who, not coincidentally, has waged a guerrilla war behind the scenes to permit any and all comments. Alphonse Ouimet has never, at any time, acknowledged that the comment section is healthier now, or even that HTML and basic spelling are better.

So the contributor who barely contributes anything, thinks even the most poisonous and hurtful comments are permissible, and rewriters other writers’ work has now cemented editorial power in their own cloister. The only editor who can’t be trusted will now “take on [the] editor role.”

This is another way of saying you can make any comments you want and your crap HTML and shitty spelling are permitted.

What’s really been happening is that Alphonse Ouimet and I have been at loggerheads for weeks about these very topics. Ouimet barely contributes anything and let all sorts of shit fester for years, and now has turned the screws for a final time.

Funny, I never would have imagined this site had enough of a budget to hire Frank Magid. What makes you think I wouldn’t report what you’re doing, Ouimet?

“The large glass tabletop, set in the antiseptic, brightly-lit blue, white and red set, made it look like a perfume counter at the Bay or a really cool Shoppers Drug Mart.”

– Bill Brioux on The National’s new set

Or motion-graphics designer.

So. CBC NN. Like every other alteration, large or small, that CBC has dared to make, CBC NN obviously represents a death knell for CBC journalistic ethics and standards, CBC journalism, and the CBC. But how does it look?

They’ve certainly put some money into advertising – more than two full pages in the paper today.

There’s a different screen layout, but FF DIN is still the font for body copy. (Yeah, not Frutiger. That’s what’s all over the walls of Fort Dork.) DIN has a long history and this version is a successful revival by Albert-Jan Pool.

The new display face is Stag by Christian Schwartz, a wunderkind who has been publishing typefaces since he was 14. It’s in the slabserif family, which, like sansserifs, are quite hard to distinguish. (Stag kind of looks like Stymie, Rockwell, Serifa, and Icône the way DIN kind of looks like Geneva, Univers, and VAG Rounded.)

I find motion and broadcast graphics fascinating, but it is almost impossible to learn about them without taking a course or actually working in the field. Like other disciplines of screen design, you absolutely cannot sequester yourself in a garret and do some book-learning. Almost the only way to discuss motion graphics is sitting next to a designer with video running on the appropriate hardware, which is a thicket of trouble in itself.

Motion graphics is the sort of thing that lends itself to a monthly pub night where designers show off their work on laptops – and later, once they’re a bit lubricated, bitch about their competitors’ work.

Invitation: I’d like to interview CBC graphic designers. Or you can write a guest post – or illustrate one. Up to you.

(Photos.)

Surely the Sean Avery of CBC News, or at least the Henrik Lundkvist?

(Via)

“Like the new format of Newsworld. But as long as that Grey Power ad, the most irritating commercial on TV, continues to run incessantly, I’m tuning out.”

– Maxracer on
Biggest change in history of CBC News
(comment unlinkable)

Also: She knows Peter Berlin.