Regret the Error wins press criticism award; work for ROB mag earns gold medal
Well, it's been a rewarding few weeks for me. Allow me to take a moment and toot my own horn.
On June 6, I shared a gold medal at the Canadian National Magazine Awards for my work on the Corporate Survival Guide published in Report on Business magazine.The award is shared with Mark Schatzker, Sabitri Ghosh, and Lisa Fielding. Here's the full list of winners. Credit also goes to David Fielding, the editor who oversaw the package of stories.
A week or two before that, I received a call from the National Press Club in Washington. I was told that my book, Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech, had won the 2008 Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism (book) in the Club's annual awards. I had to keep it under my hat until the news went public. That has finally happened, and the announcement is here (and here). It's a great honor. I'm looking forward to traveling to Washington to receive the award at a dinner on July 14.
As a result of these two lovely awards, I've added an awards page to this site. It includes a few other pieces of recognition I've received.
Snippity snap! CJR fires a dart at the Ottawa Citizen
I follow the Columbia Journalism Review's online work via its RSS feed, and the publication rarely reports on happenings north of the U.S. border. Today, however, it posted some Canadian content from the magazine's latest issue.
Unfortunately, one of our largest daily papers -- and the big media company that owns it -- comes off looking pretty backward. CJR haded out one of its negative "Darts" to the Ottawa Citizen after the paper basically ran promotional copy as front page news:
Dart to the Ottawa Citizen for a little Canadian logrolling. When the Canwest media conglomerate launched a proprietary wire service and relocated the anchor of Global National, its nightly news program, to Canada’s capital city, the Citizen flooded the zone. On its front page, the paper ran a serious-faced color photo of the newscaster graced by a ray of light, under the words “Ottawa becomes news capital of Canada.” Of the lead article’s 768 words, more than four hundred were puffy quotes and glosses from Canwest corporate honchos—the CEO and president and the chairman of the board, among others. Inside, the paper recounted the anchor’s premiere day with a “great man”-style tick tock: drinking coffee, doing a publicity interview, buying long underwear. Another article tallied the boldface names that dropped by the premiere party. Online, the articles were paired with extensive photo galleries. And a video interview. Easy to miss in all this glowing coverage was any editorial disclosure—save one slight, circuitous mention tucked at the bottom of a throwaway fact box—that the Citizen, too, is owned by Canwest. Graham Green, the Citizen’s executive editor, declined to comment on the coverage but offered this: “I think the Columbia Journalism Review has lots of things you could be looking at.”
A stellar quote from Green: It's barely grammatical and delightfully hostile. Just the image we want to project to the world.
Welcome
Hey there. Thanks for stopping by. I'm a freelance journalist and author in Montreal, Canada. I serve as an associate editor for PBS MediaShift, a website that reports on trends in new media and journalism. I edit RegretTheError.com and wrote a book of the same name. I'm also the co-author, with Michael Calce, of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It's Still Broken. Both books are listed to the right.
I write weekly columns for Hour and Columbia Journalism Review online, and am a former columnist and blogger for The Globe And Mail. Read my bio by clicking on the "About Me" link above, or check out the "Writing Samples" page to read some of my work. If you're interested in speaking with me about an assignment or project, email me at the address listed below.
Recent Writing/Work