Rob Cottingham

Category: Media Mix

  • Freelance victory

    Here’s a nice (and rare) victory for folks who make their living stringing words together.

    The Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled in favour of freelancer Heather Robertson, whose Globe and Mail pieces wound up in the paper’s online database.

    The case echoes a U.S. Supreme Court decision (see also this perspective) which found that freelancers retain digital rights to their work after it’s published in a newspaper.

    (Interested in finding out more? Here’s a huge collection of links compiled by freelancer Peter D.A. Warwick.)

  • A toolkit for media skeptics

    If you’re the kind of person who’d like to maintain a healthy skepticism about the news media without crossing the border into they’re-taking-their-orders- directly-from-a-cabal- of-alien-overlords territory, good news.

    The New York Times has come out with an extraordinary
    assessment of its coverage during the run-up to the war in Iraq, and finds itself wanting:

    “Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.”

    A lot of the language in this self-critique is qualified and tentative: new information might well have belonged on A1; claims should have been presented more cautiously; it looks as if the Times was duped. Would that the language in the original stories had been just as nuanced.

    Still, the article is extraordinary coming from a profession that often seems to enjoy scrutinizing politicians far more closely than it would be willing to tolerate itself. And the piece serves as a useful toolbox for anyone who thinks that news coverage, well-intentioned or not, deserves a hard second look.

  • When bad pundits go good

    David Brock, the one-time character assassin for the U.S. far right (and that’s a generous way of putting it compared to his own self-assessment), has resurfaced.

    In his book Blinded by the RightBrock came clean a few years ago about his role in tarring Anita Hill and Bill Clinton.

    Now he has launched Media Matters for America, a site dedicated to debunking conservative misinformation.

    Apart from the handy content, Media Matters is interesting for its measured tone. No overblown sarcasm and prefab outrage here; Brock’s site makes its case carefully and factually.

    It’s a useful lesson for communicators on the left, where hot air is too often seen as the only reliable proof of fire in the belly. This site aims to convince not just the true believers, but the broader public. Check it out.

  • Pinch me

    For Canadian lefties, this has to count as one of the all-time greatest schadenfreude-y highs.

    Far-right newspaper baron Conrad Black has been dumped— sorry, has resigned — as Hollinger International’s CEO.

    It doesn’t end there. David Radler — he of the infamous comment, “I am ultimately the publisher of all these papers, and if editors disagree with us, they should disagree with us when they’re no longer in our employ” — is no longer the company president. And a host of other hangers-on have also vanished from the corporate letterhead.

    The issue, apparently, was $32 million in unauthorized payments to Black, Radler, Hollinger Inc. and two other executives.

    Over the years, Black earned the enmity of just about anyone involved in Canadian politics who didn’t think that Generalissimo Franco got a bad rap. Venemous, vituperative and vindictive, he made himself the poster boy for the right-wing abuse of media power. U.K. journalist and media commentator Roy Gleenslade describes Black as “your typical verbose, bombastic megalomaniac.”

    So seeing him go down is grimly satisfying. But it’s hard not to speculate on whether karma is finished with Lord Black of Crossharbour.

    Remembering his incessant stream of hang-’em-high editorials on crime leads to idle daydreaming: Conrad being perp-walked into the back of a police van (forever after referred to as a Conrad Black Maria). Conrad breaking down in the interrogation room and offering to give up Barbara Amiel in exchange for a reduced sentence (“She’s the real Mister Big! I can give you names, dates, burial sites!”). Conrad’s publishing efforts being reduced to stamping out 10″x6″ license plates.

    Mmm. Schadenfreude. It screws up your karma, but it tastes so damn good…