Former CNN Anchor Moves to The Onion

In yet another sign that the line between real news and fake news is getting thinner, one of CNN’s main anchors during the 1980s and 1990s, Bobbie Battista, has taken a step through the looking glass and can now be seen anchoring reports online for ONN, The Onion News Network.

It’s not April 1, YET.

Good luck to all

JFW

The result, the little paper that started beside a car wash on King Street now can’t find its way around Hog Town.

From the Sun equivalent of Teamakers, the Sun Family blog
The Toronto Sun’s embarrassing front page “eats” street map packaged in London, Ontario, prompted this brief correction in today’s paper:

The Front Page

“OOPS!
We have egg on our face over yesterday’s front page about new “street eats” in the city. Our graphic contained numerous errors, including misspelling Eglinton Ave. We apologize to our readers and cartographers everywhere.”

Can we suggest out-of-towners working on future Toronto projects be sent Toronto street guides?

Unfortunately, there is a plague of beancounters affecting everyone.

That’s the kind of support for the Canadian Forces those neo-cons and CBC haters who want to shut down the CBC will get if we go.

As Shirky says:

The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.

You can find the complete post here. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

This excerpt sounds just like the CBC:

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

And

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie

A couple of comments from J. Frank

Shirky says:

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.

That’s right, most newspapers didn’t see the Internet coming. The employees of CBC did, creating their own program websites before management knew what was happening. Then the mid-90s version of the CBC did get in early and the Corp was there years before CTV, ABC, CBS, Global and the majority of Canadian newspapers.

Then the top levels at CBC decided it had to “manage” the web. So it hired outsiders and appointed them as senior managers who, rather than listening to the employees who knew what they were doing, those senior managers went to conferences and meetings where they talked to all those clueless media managers from the newspapers and late comers, who didn’t know html from a haddock, and came up with policies which crippled CBC online for years, making it just the same as everyone else.

We have to heed Shirky’s warning:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

And (with my emphasis)

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

For years, from the 1960s to the election of Brian Mulroney, both the CBC and CTV were innovative organizations, trying things that no one else would. (Global, which the Conservatives are going to bail out, of course, was sitting on its ass taking profitable feeds from LA).

In this crisis, dynamic, well-funded and properly managed public broadcasting could be one way of strengthening journalism. Unfortunately, in this country, we have currently have a federal government who is bleeding the CBC to death (as well as pure science and the arts and the environment) in the name of libertarianism.

So if there is an innovation that changes journalism, the chances that it will happen again in this country are slim to none. Or if it does come in this country, you can be sure that the Harper government wouldn’t want to fund it, and the Americans, or the Chinese or Indians or the British will.

What does that mean to us? We are living in the age of uncertainty. We are on ship that has lost its foremast, and the main mast is barely holding against the hurricane force winds. The captain can’t navigate. There’s an iceberg ahead. Are there enough lifeboats? And if we get in the lifeboats, land and a safe harbour is far far away.

It is interesting to note that Shirky is basing some of his ideas on new interest in Gutenberg.
And the Star had its own take on Gutenberg at this link.

(Wikipedia now says scholars are disputing whether that right was widespread but there is some evidence it existed.)

Now in the 21st century, whether it is AIG, Merrill Lynch, Nortel or the CBC, there is now the droit de boni, the right to a bonus.

I mean if you watched the AIG hearings, read the wire story on the Nortel bankruptcy bonuses or read the quote from CBC spokesperson Marco Dube in the Toronto Star, the word from the PR spinners, the dinosaur business columnists at the ROB, and the execs themselves, is universal. “Don’t you get it? Executives have an irrevocable right to a bonus” …just like a medieval baron had the right to take the virginity of the peasant girls (and probably the boys too, though history likely covered that up).

Dube told the Star, “We have to recognize that our senior management provides an important role in programming … on all platforms.”

How does the Vice President of Real Estate contribute to programming?

There are a lot fewer people putting on more and more programming, that means that ordinary working stiffs at the CBC and Radio Canada are likely working five times as hard as they did 20 years ago, producing five times as much programming.
(Think of news integration where everyone has to file for all three platforms, radio, TV and online.)

Now they’re going to get rid of the boomers with this so-called “generous” early retirement. They’ll probably lay off the talented young “echo” generation because of lack of seniority. So for Gen X and Gen Y, be careful what you wish for. The devastation won’t create more opportunity. It just means that you’ll be stuck in the office working ten times as hard rather than five times as hard, and the only time you’ll get out of the office is when you stagger to the subway (in Toronto and Montreal) or take a cab home elsewhere, as you’ll be too tired to drive.

After all, PR spinners all say these are performance or productivity bonuses.

The people who really deserve bonuses are those who have been really productive: the ordinary CBC employees. Instead they’re going to go (at a 50 % discount) to more and more managers going to more and more meetings, while everyone else does the work.

But that’s not how the system works at CBC or elsewhere, droit de seigneur, droit de boni rules and everyone else gets screwed.

Lawyers for Nortel Networks Corp. are to appear in court on Friday to ask for approval of a controversial US$23-million bonus plan for its top executives that the company says is needed to boost falling morale at the company.…

Earlier this month, courts in Canada and the United States gave the green light to US$22 million in payments to about 900 key engineers and other professionals at the telecommunications equipment giant, about five per cent of its workforce.

A Nortel spokesman said… “Losing key staff members often affects a company’s ability to operate efficiently and hinders product development.”

So it’s now universal, the more you fail, the more you’re paid– if you’re an executive whether it’s CBC or Nortel.

Happy Holidays Happy New Year – JFW

The following is a joint communiqué issued today by CBC/Radio-Canada and the Canadian Media Guild (CMG).

December 13, 2008 – The Canadian Media Guild and the CBC/Radio-Canada have signed a tentative agreement on a deal that will take the parties to 2014. The five-year pact is scheduled to come into effect on January 1, 2009 and is subject to ratification. It replaces a collective agreement that was set to expire in March of next year.

The agreement calls for wage increases of 1.5% in each year and is tied to Treasury Board levels. It has a wage re-opener at the beginning of the third year. There is a commitment that in the event the Treasury Board rate is increased during the life of the agreement that increase will be passed on to members of the bargaining unit.

The deal also sees improvements in maternity/paternity benefits, temporary upgrades, bereavement leave and benefits in the event of a downsizing.

In the coming days more details will be provided as well as plans for ratification meetings and vote.

The deal is being unanimously recommended for acceptance.

Marc-Philippe Laurin
CBC branch president
Canadian Media Guild

and

George C.B. Smith
Senior vice-president
Corporate priorities and implementation
CBC/Radio-Canada