Screengrab of the purported National Magazine Award nominee list, as it appeared on its website this morning.

The media industry went on high alert this morning, as excited writers and editors started tweeting exclamations of joy and gratitude, happy to learn that they had been nominated for Canada’s National Magazine Awards. First given out in 1977, the awards are distributed by the National Magazine Awards Foundation (NMAF), and are the most sought-after official prize for magazine publishers in Canada. (Full disclosure: Torontoist submitted entries this year; last year we won a silver prize for Best Cross-Platform Package and were a finalist for Website of the Year.)
Unfortunately, it turns out the list was a mistake.

The excitement this morning was mixed with considerable confusion, as nobody had been expecting to hear about the NMA shortlist for several more weeks: according to the timeline posted on the NMA website, the nominees were to be announced on May 2. For a time, most people just assumed that the list had been released early.
Quickly though, things began to look a little stickier. For starters, the NMAF itself hadn’t offiicially announced that the nominee list was out: no statement on its website, no press release, no tweets. Moreover, the list was incomplete—while the awards in the written categories were listed, the visual and online awards categories were conspicuously absent, as were nominees for the most-sought after award: Magazine of the Year. And then, the list disappeared from the NMA website. (It had never appeared on the front page, but when the list was live it was hosted, or appeared to be hosted, on the organization’s website, not a third-party site.)
The NMAF now has a statement up on its homepage about the incident, which reads in full:

It has come to our attention that a list of the nominees for the 2010 National Magazine Awards has been circulating on the internet. Unfortunately, this list is counterfeit. In most categories the NMAF has yet to tabulate final results from judges’ voting. We are looking into the matter and will release the official list of nominees as scheduled on May 2nd, 2011.
The submissions process for the 34th annual National Magazine Awards is now closed. Nominations will be announced by May 2, 2011. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to have the full list of nominees emailed to you. Winners will be announced at the 34th National Magazine Awards gala on June 10, 2011 in Toronto. Gold awards carry a cash prize of $1000; Silver awards $500.

The origin of the mistake remains obscure. Described in the above statement as a “counterfeit,” the list did clearly seem to come from within the NMAF: in addition to being hosted on their website, the list included links to nicely formatted PDFs of every single nominee, and gives every appearance of being an internal page that got let out into the world accidentally. The NMAF first described the incident as a “leak” but then immediately backtracked and said that it wasn’t a leak since no official nominee list exists yet.
We spoke with Julia De Laurentiis Johnson, communications manager for the NMAF, and asked her about the use of the term “counterfeit” in their statement—specifically, whether the NMAF has any indication than a third party might have in fact been responsible for the creation of today’s list. She told us that “we’re still looking into that particular point,” and went on to say “we have no leads” and that the organization was considering all options in trying to get to the bottom of things. They are currently working with their developer to isolate a list of possible causes.
The full list of “nominees,” as it appeared this morning:

UPDATE, April 6, 4:49 PM: The NMA website has been updated with a much more detailed account of what went wrong today. It reads:

How did this morning’s inaccurate nominee list get created and released? The NMAF and our web developers have spent the day figuring this out, and here’s what appears to have happened.
Last year, the NMAF created a page called the 2010 Nominees Report to provide not only a list of nominees but also links to all nominated work. The NMAF’s computer system, including the submission, judging and reporting functions used to manage the Awards, all require a manual update each year to put last year’s information into an archive, and to open a new set of information for the new year. This usually happens after the judging is complete, in preparation for the public announcement of the current year’s nominees. This process has not yet been done by NMAF staff or by its web provider for any of the 2011 nomination/winner reports. However, unbeknownst to NMAF staff, the Nominees Report –in unusual fashion—was configured to automatically changeover to the new year and dynamically generate a new report without a manual update.
The live link to the 2010 Nominees Report was removed from public view (toggled “off” in the system and links on www.magazine-awards.com content removed) in July 2010. Today, as everyone knows, a “live link” was uncovered and featured a list of 2011 NMA nominees.
So how did this happen? Our web provider informed us that the “off” toggle malfunctioned (it has since been fixed). It appears that someone who had bookmarked last year’s report clicked on the report link, and that triggered the system to automatically update the report, pulling from unverified, unchecked data elsewhere in the system. The list generated by the system has –until today—not been seen or vetted by NMAF staff and is very much incomplete and subject to change.
To reiterate what we said earlier, the judging is not final and the NMAF has not yet created its own nominees’ lists for ANY of the categories for this year’s awards. We sincerely regret the excitement and confusion this may have caused among members of the magazine community.

The seven March 2011 editions of Post City Magazine.

Reading a home is something of an art form. Keith Matthews (not his real name) gestures at a large brick home on a snowy North Toronto street with the blinds pulled partially back. “You can tell no one’s in there,” he says. “You see the living room on the right-hand side, the kitchen area on this side. They do have the laundry going, so they’re going to be back soon. You can see the exhaust on the side. That’s their laundry.” He points to the side door, which is obscured from view by a row of cedar trees, as his likely point of entry.

So begins the cover story of Post City Magazine‘s March issue. The article appears in the North Toronto edition of the magazine—which publishes seven different editions every month, each based in a different part of the city—and is titled “Break-In All the Rules: Confessions of a Rosedale Burglar.”
Unless you live around the north part of Bayview. There the article is titled “Break-In All the Rules: Confessions of a Bayview Burglar.” In Thornhill it’s “Confessions of a Thornhill Burglar” and in the opening sentence, Keith Matthews is gesturing “at a large brick home on a snowy Thornhill street.” In the Forest Hill edition he’s on a Forest Hill street, and in North York it’s a North York street.
This burglar gets around.

The article, it turns out, is the cover story of all seven March 2011 editions of Post City, and seems identical in every respect—except for the pesky question of just where in Toronto Matthews is speaking from. The house in front of which he is standing is described precisely the same way across the board: in each version of the article the living room is on the right-hand side, the laundry is going, and the home’s side door is obscured by what sounds like the same row of cedar trees. Even though the house is supposed to be in six different places.
All told, Matthews stands—or at least is described as standing—in front of six houses, on six different snowy streets: Forest Hill, North Toronto, North York, Richmond Hill, Thornhill, and the generic “snowy neighbourhood street” (which is cited in the Midtown and Bayview editions). The title changes a full seven times, with the subject being described as a “Forest Hill Burglar,” “Thornhill Burglar,” and so on, all the way down the list.

Post City describes its slate of magazines as “unique, high-quality publications, that report on the news, people and lifestyles of Toronto’s most affluent neighbourhoods.”
Apparently there are more similarities between those neighbourhoods than you might have guessed.
When the repetition of the story, with one vital fact (fact?) apparently customized to create local appeal, was discovered observers (especially other journalists) were immediately appalled. Though the editions are known for sharing materials—and there is nothing wrong with doing so—(giving the appearance that you are) materially altering a factual element in a story to make it suit your audience is an entirely different matter.
Though Post City editor Ron Johnston was unable to answer our questions, early this afternoon a note of apology was appended to the foot of the online version of the article. In full, it reads:

In our March cover story, Break-In All the Rules, Post City Magazine acknowledges the writer and the burglar did visit several specific streets in each of the seven neighbourhoods. The burglar in question did commit several robberies in all of these areas. While correct in our North Toronto, Village, Midtown and Bayview editions, Post City Magazines made the mistake of presenting this same street in the North York, Thornhill and Richmond Hill print editions. This error was made during production and we regret it.
However, lessons learned from the investigation are valid lessons right across the city regardless of where one lives. The story is no less important and timely for our readers and homeowners across Toronto.

We are heartened that Post City seems to realize that something has gone amiss, though arguably the apology doesn’t really get to the core of the matter. It isn’t just a question of having visited streets in each neighbourhood: a specific house is mentioned, and described as being on every single one of those many streets. Perhaps this mistake resulted from a conscious decision, to “personalize” the story and intentionally make readers—no matter where they were—identify with it more strongly. Perhaps there is a more innocuous explanation. The apology does not, with its mention of making the mistake “during production,” make that clear.
Oh, and the house? Based on the above note, it seems to be in “Forest Hill,” which may or may not be considered part of “North Toronto”—apparently the titular description in both those editions (which have different distribution areas) is correct.

Photo by David Topping/Torontoist.

Two weeks after the Dufferin Underpass opened and left transit riders stranded on Gladstone Avenue, the City has finally seen to the removal of a bus shelter that was serving the 29 Dufferin route—a route that no longer ran along the street.
Removing that shelter, or others like it, isn’t simply a matter of the City sending a crew of workers out; it’s complicated. As Peter Berardi, the project lead with the City’s Public Realm Street Furniture Management program, explained to us, Astral Media—who serve advertising on the shelters and who maintain other street furniture, too—”take direction” from the City, then dispatch their own workers.
Nonetheless, Berardi had told Torontoist last Tuesday that the shelter would be removed “immediately.” It wasn’t, but some work was done to it in the meantime: last Thursday morning, the day after the Globe also wrote about the shelter, which by then was littered with notices that the stop had moved, a six-foot-tall ad for Toronto-based microbrewers Mill Street Brewery (“WHY SETTLE FOR ANYTHING LESS”) had taken the place of a Boom 97.3 ad on the outside of the shelter. At night, the shelter’s ads still glowed until the very end.
We called Berardi last week to ask why a new ad was installed at a defunct transit shelter by the same people who had by then been ordered to remove the whole shelter. We’ve yet to hear back.

The abandoned transit shelter on the east side of Gladstone Avenue, on Saturday morning. Photo by Remi Carreiro/Torontoist.

Dufferin doesn’t jog anymore, and TTC buses that used to worm their way along Gladstone Avenue before continuing north or south on Dufferin now go straight through the brand new underpass. So why is there still a shelter on Gladstone, north of Queen, for a bus stop that doesn’t exist anymore? And—worse—why did it take several days for either the City or the TTC to let anyone at the stop know about it?

When the Dufferin Underpass opened on the afternoon of Thursday, November 18, the small change was a big deal for the 29 Dufferin bus route, often marked by overcrowded buses that arrived two or three at a time at Dufferin Station after long waits. “People told me tonight,” Mayor David Miller happily tweeted hours later, “that riders spontaneously broke into applause when the Dufferin Bus went under the new underpass!”
Less so that same afternoon, a block east.
By the time Andrew McConnachie got off the Queen streetcar to go buy groceries at Price Chopper, Gladstone had seen its very last 29 Dufferin bus. At the bus shelter on Gladstone’s east side, right beside the grocery store, McConnachie says he saw “half a dozen people waiting.” He bought dinner, and then, “when I came back out the crowd had doubled,” he says. “I ended up telling everyone what the situation was and everyone was pretty peeved.” Other than a newly missing TTC bus stop pillar, there was no indication that the stop had moved: inside the shelter and out, there were no signs, no posters, and no one from the TTC there to help.
A day later, on Friday, with the sun setting fast on a frigid November day, Mary-Lu Travassos waited at the shelter for twenty minutes before we spotted her and told her that the stop had moved. She doesn’t take the route too frequently—just a few times a month. Other than through the TTC’s website, there wasn’t any way for her to know that the stop was out of service; there was even a TTC map inside the shelter that showed the 29 Dufferin’s route as hopping over to Gladstone before continuing down Dufferin.
“They don’t care,” she said, resigned, as she walked up Gladstone and rounded the corner towards Dufferin to catch her bus.
For ten minutes, as we watched, people kept coming to the stop and waiting, until someone—either us, or other locals—told them the stop had moved. At night, the problem got worse. Far from looking like it was out of service, the shelter was lit up inside and out by two big, shining poster-sized ads, served by Astral Media, for Boom 97.3 and the Cavalcade of Lights.

The new northbound stop on Dufferin, just outside of the new Dufferin Underpass, on Saturday morning. Photo by Remi Carreiro/Torontoist.

When we emailed outgoing TTC Chair Adam Giambrone on Saturday afternoon, he told us that he would see to it that “temporary signage” was created that day, and “more permanent signage” appeared by Monday or Tuesday.
By Saturday night, more than forty-eight hours after the Dufferin bus vanished from Gladstone, someone had made their own temporary signage, and slapped it to the wall of the shelter on a plain 8 1/2″ by 11″ sheet of printer paper: “Dufferin Bus STOP on Dufferin!!! Not here…” Someone else scribbled “THANKS,” and someone else, tinier, “FUCK THE TTC.”
Across the street, at the former southbound stop for the 29 Dufferin, it wasn’t much better. There, an official, generic TTC notice (“This stop is temporarily not in use”) was haphazardly taped to construction hoarding, and the field where the person putting it up was supposed to write the new location of the stop (“BOARD BUS AT:”) was blank; instead, someone had written overtop of that entire sign something that looked like it said “USE New ROADWAY remove to New ROAD WAY.”
“It is primarily the continued presence of a shelter that causes the confusion,” Scott Haskill, a senior planner with the TTC, told Torontoist about the stop on the east side of the street. “With any route change, customer confusion issues can happen. Notices get ripped down, soggy, etc. Even when perfectly posted”—which Haskill acknowledged wasn’t the case here—”some customers will still miss them.”
What happened on Gladstone is that the City (responsible for the shelter) and the TTC (responsible for communicating with riders) failed, together; the City didn’t remove a bus shelter when the buses stopped showing up there, and the TTC didn’t do nearly enough to tell customers about it.

The bus shelter, with new signs from the TTC, as of Tuesday morning. Photos by Harry Choi/Torontoist.

Finally, as of Monday night, the transit shelter—ads still bright—was tiled with a half-dozen 8 1/2″ by 11″ hastily made TTC flyers. Some read “BOARD BUSES ONE BLOCK WEST AT DUFFERIN STREET” with “STOP NOT IN SERVICE” inside a red box, inside a circle; another explains the change in more detail. An official “This stop is temporarily not in use” sign was wrapped around the pole just south of the shelter, with the location of the new stop printed clearly on it, and more of those makeshift flyers wrapped below.
Carla Basso, a Marketing Director with the TTC—it’s the TTC’s Marketing and Customer Service department that’s tasked with things like signs—told Torontoist that “it is unfortunate that the information was not posted earlier.” Basso added that she expects “some customer confusion [will] continue to exist while the City of Toronto shelters are still in place.” She and Scott Haskill both said that TTC staff had been dispatched to the location to tell people about the change.
Peter Berardi, the project lead with the City’s Public Realm Street Furniture Management program, explained that moving or removing the shelter will need to go through Astral, who “take direction from us,” but whose contractors are the ones who actually move or remove the shelter.
As for how long it’d take to remove? “I can’t say,” Berardi told us on Monday. “A week, or two? We’ll try to get to it as fast as possible.” (The next day, Berardi called back to say the shelter would be removed “immediately.”)
Usually this doesn’t happen, Berardi said; the shelter should’ve been gone the same day as the Jog. “It may have just fallen through the cracks.”

Photo from the official Joe Pantalone For Mayor Facebook page.

Three’s a trend! In July, a George Smitherman volunteer caught a Joe Pantalone campaign car parked in a bike lane on Harbord Street. In August, a woman caught a Rob Ford campaign truck parked over a bike lane on Annette Street. And now, someone’s caught a George Smitherman campaign truck stopped in a bike lane on Gerrard Street East and Ontario Street. The photo, taken by a Ryerson student, was posted by Pantalone’s team on Monday afternoon to the candidate’s Facebook page.
Erika Mozes, a spokesperson for the Smitherman campaign, told Torontoist that the driver of the truck was “parked in the lane for less than a minute—they were unloading a few things from the truck, [and] then it was moved.”
When the Pantalone smart car was snapped on Harbord, that defense was more or less the same as what Pantalone spokesperson Mike Smith offered the Sun, telling the paper at the time that the car was only stopped where it was for “thirteen seconds,” and that the Smitherman campaign ‘has nothing better to do than take surreptitious photos of peoples’ parking habits….I don’t know what kind of campaign they are running over there.’” (Ford’s truck, it should be mentioned, was parked where it was for an hour.)
“It is frivolous,” Smith admits to Torontoist now that the roles have reversed, “but it’s also funny.” And, he adds, “it actually gives me some insight into why Smitherman made such a big deal out of the picture: they weren’t upset that we were inconveniencing cyclists…they were apparently upset at it not being done well enough. And here we see an example of how you should do it. You should do it with a really big-ass vehicle, and you should park it there, as opposed to pull it over in the lane, and you should make sure a cyclist is coming.”
Thanks to Justin Stayshyn for the tip.