Totally rude, totally annoying, totally what I’m doing right now.

But wait!

I have some big news that I’ll be sharing here later this week. News that’s only a little bit about me. It’s really about online news and journalism in Canada — and something new that’s coming along very soon.

I know, the only thing more annoying than someone blogging about some silly award is them doing that and then teasing you with something that they’ll blog about a few days later.

But apart from that, I’m pretty pleased to share that my column for Columbia Journalism Review is a finalist for a Mirror Award for “Best Commentary—Digital Media.” Here are the four columns that were submitted:

• “Violating the ‘Contract of Correction’“
• “Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong“
• “The New Great American Pastime“
• “Speed Demons“

My fellow finalists are Matthew Pressman (Vanity Fair) and Eric Alterman (Center for American Progress). Here’s their excellent work:

• Eric Alterman (Center for American Progress)
  • “Think Again: Remember Real Journalism“
  • “Think Again: Mice, Playing: The Decline of Skeptical Journalism“
  • “Think Again: The End of Local Reporting?“
  • “Think Again: Conflicts of Interest by the Wealthy and for the Wealthy“
• Matthew Pressman (Vanity Fair)
  • “Why Time and Newsweek Will Never Be The Economist“
  • “Media Darwinism: Which Sites Will Survive?“
  • “A Media Guy Asks: Why Do They Hate Us?“
  • “Is Fox Business Network a Lost Cause?“

The awards will be handed out in New York on June 10 at a luncheon hosted by Katie Couric. At The Plaza Hotel. Seriously. Now can you forgive me for posting about this?

All the vacation you want – paradise or purgatory?

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Craig Silverman

Earlier this week, Steve Swasey returned from a two-week vacation that saw him, his wife and four kids snorkel in Honduras and climb ancient ruins in Guatemala. Most people would have had to check with their employer in order to book a vacation during the peak holiday season, and two weeks would eat up a decent chunk of their vacation time.

Mr. Swasey, however, is an executive with Netflix the U.S. movie-rental company, where there’s no such thing as vacation days. The company offers “unlimited vacation” to its roughly 500 salaried employees.

“We have a high-performance culture,” says Mr. Swasey, Netflix’s vice-president of communications. “You’ve got to perform and do the job, so we give employees a lot of freedom and responsibility.”

Vacation days were once used to judge the relative generosity of a company. Now, organizations like Netflix view the act of awarding time off based on seniority as an outdated practice that harks back to an era of paternalistic, staid corporations like, say, IBM.

Indeed, Big Blue once did enforce office hours and track vacation time. But starting in the 1990s, it began loosening its necktie. Today, the company has a worldwide policy that proscribes the tracking of vacation days. Want time off? Let your manager know. No need to file a formal request or check how many days you’ve already taken. It’s enough to make the Man in The Grey Flannel Suit weep into his after-work gimlet.

“Employees within IBM Canada are given guidelines that they get three weeks of vacation when they start,” says Joanne Moore, the company’s employee-benefits manager. “That’s the guideline. But there is no policing, and employees are empowered to take vacation when they want.”

Both Netflix and IBM view their vacation policies as a reflection of company values and culture. The careers section of Netflix’s website lists seven reasons to work there: No. 5 is Rules Annoy Us.

“Rules creep into most companies as they try to prevent errors by less-than-stellar employees,” the video company says. “But rules also inhibit creativity and entrepreneurship, leading to a lack of innovation. Over time, this drives a company to being less fun and less successful.”

IBM Canada views its policy as a way to empower employees. “Allowing employees to decide when or where to work, in addition to when they take their vacation is part of that,” Ms. Moore says.

The message seems to be that if you love and value your employees, set them free. Let them work from home, don’t demand they keep traditional hours and stop telling them when they can and can’t take time off.

This philosophy was outlined in a recent book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. Formerly human-resources managers at Best Buy, where they implemented what they call a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), they now help other companies implement the system. “ROWE means each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as their work gets done,” Ms. Thompson says. “That means 8-to-5 holds no meaning any more. I can do my work from wherever I need to, whenever I need to.”

Best Buy began adopting ROWE in 2003, and today employees at its U.S. headquarters are free to take time off when needed, as long as they fulfill their duties.

Best Buy Canada implemented parts of the ROWE system, but does not currently offer unlimited paid time off. “I’m not sure that our [program] is quite as sophisticated, and theirs has been in play longer,” says Colin Picard, a human-resources adviser for the company. “Right now, our employees are allowed up to two days per week where they can work from home.”

The move toward a less-rigid work environment goes with the emergence of technologies that enable workers to untether themselves from a cubicle. (Think of the new Cisco Systems TV ads, featuring Juno star Ellen Page, that celebrate video conferencing.)

Of course, this won’t work for every kind of job. Netflix employees who are paid an hourly wage to stuff and mail DVDs to subscribers aren’t covered by the unlimited-vacation policy. Nor are the workers putting in shifts at IBM’s manufacturing plant in Quebec, or employees at Best Buy’s actual retail stores all over the United States.

Ms. Thompson says change is slow in coming because organizations still focus on hours worked, rather than results. She calls vacation “an old benefit,” explaining: “It’s outdated in a sense that there’s a belief that we all need to put in our 40 hours every week and we earn vacation.”

She adds, “It’s also outdated in terms of the belief that that we all want to separate work from personal time. Today, with people so connected all the time, there’s a belief that it’s bad to be on vacation and check e-mail.”

The view that people shouldn’t worry about separating work and personal lives runs counter to the advice of nearly every workplace and stress expert. But Ms. Thompson argues that the issue is control, and the need to give more of it to employees so they can manage life on their terms.

“There is a belief that we need boundaries,” she says. “If you think about the old workplace, yeah, we needed them because you were forced to come in every day and stay until 5. … But when you give people autonomy and control over their lives, that whole idea of separation changes – so that now I decide when I’m going to separate.”

Already, in fact, many workers in Canada don’t use the vacation days they have. A 2009 Harris/Decima survey commissioned by Expedia.ca found that 24 per cent of employed Canadians don’t use all of their vacation days. (The average Canadian worker receives 18.7 of them a year.) The survey also found that 30 per cent of Canadians “feel guilty about taking time off work.”

“We have a hard enough time taking vacation when it’s given,” says Beverly Beuermann-King, a stress and wellness expert based in Ontario. “If it’s left up to us to decide, then sometimes external pressures and fears may get in the way.

“Especially over last year, people were afraid to take time off because they were worried about layoffs or other issues.”

Mr. Swasey of Netflix says he wasn’t afraid to head to Central America for his holiday, though he did take his BlackBerry with him. “I checked it two or three times a week and loved it,” he says. “I knew exactly what was going on at work, and yet I didn’t feel like I was intruded upon in my vacation. I was able to log in on my own time.”

But Ms. Beuermann-King argues people should think about the reasons why they’re checking in with the office on vacation. “If you feel like you have to check – that you will miss out or that people will think you are slacking off – then that’s where there is a real issue,” she says. “You’re not really taking a vacation. You’re just not physically there.”

Indeed, one reason companies give for adopting unlimited vacation policies, or the ROWE system, is that they increase productivity. At Best Buy in the U.S., productivity went up by 35 per cent. So does that mean workers take less vacation when given the “unlimited” option?

“I have no idea,” Mr. Swasey says. (IBM Canada also doesn’t have that data to share.) “There’s no tracking, no record, no accounting. Take what you want or what you need. No one abuses the policy because we’ve got adults doing adult behaviour.”

Ms. Thompson and her colleague have spoken with Canadian companies, but as of now there isn’t an official ROWE company in the country. If a recent experience is any indication, it may take a while: She and her co-author were booked to speak in Toronto at a recent conference, but their appearance was cancelled.

“When the people that run the conference learned about what ROWE is, they wouldn’t let us come and speak because they didn’t want their people to start an uprising.”

I’ve been boxing for close to three years now. I’ve had three exhibition fights at my gym, the Blue Cat Boxing Club, and next Friday, November 20, I will have my first competitive match. It’s against a fighter from another club in the Montreal area. All I know is he weighs 190 pounds (I’m walking around at about 185 right now), and that we’re supposedly at the same level. We won’t know that for sure until the bell rings. Why not come and see what happens?

There will be about 10 other fights that night, and it promises to be a really fun event. Here’s the info (contact me to purchase an advance ticket — they’re cheaper):

Friday, November 20, 2009, 8 p.m.
435 Beaubien O. 4th floor
$15 in advance/$20 at the door

And, yes, that photo is of me in the ring. I’m the dude who looks like he’s getting hit with a body shot.

Hey, shit happens.

For Writer’s Digest, I wrote an essay about my experience correcting errors in my book, Regret The Error. It’s somewhat similar to the monologue I did for Definitely Not The Opera recently. One difference is that my WD piece offers advice to writers about preventing errors. And it includes an image of the accuracy checklist I produced earlier this year.

As for Reader’s Digest, the current issue in Canada includes a lengthy excerpt from the Mafiaboy book. And Michael “Mafiaboy” Calce is on the cover. We’re really thrilled about his.

Next month, newspapers all over the United States will begin sharing sports stories online and in print as part of an initiative that sprung from the Associated Press Sports Editors. Then, early next year, the Washington Post and Bloomberg with unveil a new co-branded business section on the paper’s website that will offer content from both organizations.

These are just two of the next-generation content-sharing initiatives being pursued by news organizations. The first generation of sharing agreements saw stories swapped by papers in Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, New York and New Jersey among other places. (Read this previous MediaShift article about the Ohio News Organization [OHNO].) These agreements focused on print editions, and involved little or no revenue sharing. Content-sharing is now moving into its next phase by bringing stories online and looking at ways to share revenue.

This spirit of cooperation is largely driven by the fact that newspapers have fewer reporters in the newsroom, which means they produce less content. So they are teaming up with once-hated competitors, striking alliances with strategic content partners, and looking at ways to share their content online, while still reaping the resulting clicks and ad revenue. In the process, some long-held taboos of the news business are falling by the wayside…

Late last month, an ad for a new job appeared on the Guardian’s careers website. The position for “General Manager – Guardian Club” was notable because it signaled an important initiative at the paper in the form of a new entity, the Guardian Club.

“The club will make our most committed readers/users feel they are genuinely part of our organization and reward their loyalty,” the ad read. “The General Manager has the unique opportunity to set the direction, create the club and then deliver on that ambition.”

Just over a week earlier, the New York Times announced a club of its own, the New York Times Wine Club. It promised to provide “readers and other wine enthusiasts with distinctive wines from many top regions around the world.” And by the end of August, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette unveiled a new membership offering in the form of PG+, a paid online service that promised to offer subscribers access to “interactive features and exclusive content” in addition to “access to special Post-Gazette events” and discounts.

These new memberships and clubs, which focus on offering services to readers that are largely different than a pay wall, are a byproduct of declining advertising revenues. As a result of that lost income, news organizations are looking at new ways of generating revenue from readers. The Washington Post has PostPoints, a reader rewards program that offers special benefits to subscribers and online readers…

All of the details are in the press release below. Disclosure: as a board member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, I was involved in the drafting of the release.

You can also go here to see a list of Transcontinental publications. Please spread the word.

Canadian writers unite in opposition to Transcontinental Media

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Toronto – September 30, 2009) In an unprecedented coalition, more than a dozen Canadian writers’ organizations are calling on the thousands of writers they represent to not write for any publications owned by Transcontinental Media, effective immediately. This act of protest is directed at the company’s new contract for freelance contributors, which these groups, including the Professional Writers Association of Canada and the Canadian Writers Group, believe to be abusive of writers’ rights.

Earlier this summer, Transcontinental Media began sending a new freelance contract – which it calls a “Master Author Agreement” – to the many writers who contribute to its stable of publications, including Canadian Living, More, Elle Canada, Homemakers, and Vancouver Magazine. When this Master Author Agreement was unveiled, respected magazine industry consultant D.B. Scott referred to it as a “take it or leave it” rights grab that, “in effect, indentures the writer and their work to Transcon.”

In mid-June, Derek Finkle, of the Canadian Writers Group, and David Johnston, executive director of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, sent a letter to Jacqueline Howe, Transcontinental Media’s group publisher and vice president for English Canada, requesting a meeting to discuss their concerns about the new Master Author Agreement. This letter was co-signed by many provincial and national organizations, including the following:

• Canadian Freelance Union

• Canadian Writers Group

• The Cooke Agency

• Federation of BC Writers

• Professional Writers Association of Canada

• Quebec Writers Federation

• Westwood Creative Artists

• Writers Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador

• The Writers’ Union of Canada

On July 16, Finkle and Johnston, along with their legal counsel, Iain MacKinnon, met with Howe and Pierre Marcoux, Transcontinental Media’s senior vice president of the business and consumer solutions group. Finkle and Johnston raised four primary concerns:

1. Transcontinental’s new contract was muddying the copyright waters. The Master Author

Agreement grants copyright of each work to the author but then undercuts this copyright by licensing the following extraordinary rights: “The ongoing non-exclusive right to do in respect of the Work any other act that is subject to copyright protection under the Canadian Copyright Act (including, without limitation, the right to produce and reproduce, translate, develop ancillary products, perform in public, adapt and communicate the Work, in any form or medium) as well as to authorize others to do so on behalf of or in association with the Publisher.”

2. The agreement is permanent. Once signed, it covers all future work for Transcontinental publications.

3. Transcontinental has no intention of compensating freelancers for the many additional uses of their work. In essence, the company wants to continue paying what it’s been paying for decades for basic first publication rights but now get unlimited rights to writers’ work.

4. The Master Agreement is one-sided. It makes no mention of payment terms, kill fees, provisions for libel suits, and other important issues that are part of any balanced contributor’s agreement.

On September 1, Marcoux stated that Transcontinental does not intend to make any changes to the contract at the present time. This was in spite of the concerns voiced by just about every writers group, association, federation, agency, and union in the country.

As a result, these organizations are making an unprecedented stand against Transcontinental’s Master Author Agreement. This coalition has also now grown to include:

• Anne McDermid & Associates

• Association des journalistes indépendants du Québec

• Canadian Authors Association

• Toronto Writers’ Centre

The coalition’s campaign to oppose this contract includes the following:

1. A mass communications effort to inform and encourage writers across the country to not write for Transcontinental publications, an effort that will be monitored by the participating organizations and by writers themselves. The coalition will also assist writers in locating alternative markets for their work.

2. A national petition.

3. Lobbying of the federal ministries of industry and heritage. In addition to funding for the magazine industry, these ministries are currently overseeing changes to Canadian copyright law.

4. A multi-platform campaign to make advertisers in Transcontinental publications aware of the company’s heavy handed attitude towards an important part of the massive cultural sector.

5. A unique and creative mass effort to implore Transcontinental editors to strive for change within their own company.

These actions will be rolled out in the coming weeks to show Transcontinental Media that its publications – and, by extension, its readers and advertisers – will suffer significant consequences by moving forward with this contract.

For more information, contact:

Derek Finkle

Canadian Writers Group

416-469-3333

David Johnston

Executive Director,

Professional Writers Association of Canada

416-504-1645

Mediaville Montreal
Where freelancers go to town!

www.mediaville.ca

Saturday, October 24 2009
11:30 am to 9 p.m.
Best Western Hotel Europa
1240 Drummond Street

Attention writers, editors, publishers, translators, and anyone interested in pursuing a career as an independent media professional: Mediaville Montreal is a professional development and networking event you won’t want to miss!

There will be expert panel discussions on how to build a successful freelance media career and how to develop your freelance business, a workshop on how to sell your services to the federal government, a client-freelancer mixer, and an inter-association networking event. (A list of potential clients attending the event will be provided as they’re confirmed.)

Early-bird discount on tickets until October 10, and space is limited, so register soon!

Tickets available for purchase through TicketPro or our box office. See mediaville.ca for details.

Presented by:
American Medical Writers Association (AMWA), Canada chapter
Association of English-Language Publishers of Quebec (AELAQ)
Editors’ Association of Canada (EAC), Quebec/Atlantic branch
English-Language Arts Network (ELAN)
Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), Quebec chapter
Society for Technical Communication (STC), Montreal chapter

This news won’t have any impact on Regret the Error, and I’ll also continue writing my weekly columns for Columbia Journalism Review and Hour. Among other things, the new gig, which is part-time, will give me an opportunity to expand the media-related topics I write about.

I hope you’ll consider adding MediaShift and Idea Lab to your feeds or your bookmarks if you haven’t already done so.

I start next week.

This recovery process included sleeping for 12 hours last night, which is almost unheard of for me, and spending most of yesterday afternoon and evening lying on a couch and trying to avoid anything resembling work. Last week was the MagNet/PWAC conference, the National Magazine Awards, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. I was involved in some way with each of them. In the end, I finished the week having given out two awards, won two of my own, and connected with editors and freelance writers from all over Canada.

It was a very, very good week. Allow me to share the highlights.

A super “super conference” — For the first time in its more than 30 years of existence, the Professional Writers Association of Canada joined with other organizations for its annual conference. I’m a former Quebec Chapter president of PWAC and currently sit on its board of directors, a volunteer position. This year we teamed up with MagNet, the big magazine conference, the Canadian Authors Association, and Canadian Society of Magazine Editors to create a joint conference. I love my fellow PWACers and it was great for us to be able to mix with other organizations. The result was that Canadian magazine editors and writers (among other industry folks) were together in workshops and at meals. I met several editors and made some good connections.

Giving Out Awards — As PWAC’s Quebec Regional Director, I handed out the award for Regional Volunteer of the Year. Then, the next day, I announced that Jennifer Walker of Best Health magazine was the winner of PWAC’s Editor of the Year Award. That was a lot of fun. Congrats to her and the two Honourable Mentions, Diana Swift of Canadian Health and Ian Johnson of CBCNews.ca.

Taking Home Some Hardware — On Thursday night around 10:30 pm, I found out that Michal Calce and I had won the Arthur Ellis Award for non-fiction crime book of the year. Mike was at the ceremony in Ottawa (I was in Toronto at the conference) and I can honestly say that we are both shocked and thrilled by the win. The other books on the short list were very impressive and I didn’t think we’d win the award. I also didn’t expect the win to generate so much press coverage, which then resulted in a ton of congratulatory emails. Then, on Friday night, I received a Silver Medal at the National Magazine Awards. (Read the winning article here.) The gold in the humour category went to Bruce McCall, who contributes to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair etc. So, uh, pretty good company. And one hell of a good time.

Thanks to PWAC, MagNet, the Crime Writers of Canada, the National Magazine Awards Foundation, Penguin Group (Canada), Maisonneuve magazine, the Transatlantic Literary Agency and the other groups and people that made it possible.