Results tagged “media”

One diplomat and three journalists convened at Innis Town Hall at the University of Toronto last night, for a discussion called "News Blackouts Save Lives." Organized by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, the question up for debate was an ethical one: should news outlets report on international kidnapping cases, knowing that such reports could potentially put the prisoner in more danger? In other words, is a story worth a life?

For you cave dwellers, 26-year-old Toronto "blogebrity" (who even says that?) Lauren White has been running her widely read personal blog since "before you even knew how to attach a photo in email" (says her Twitter). From the time she was seventeen, she's been amassing a mega intense army of followers—and just as intense army of haters—by chronicling the minutiae of her everyday life like it was her job. For those who follow along, it's easy to feel like her biographer with all the needless details you absorb (didja know she’s related to Jack Kerouac?) and all the scene-y events you notice her at (where you pretend not to recognize her then check her blog the next day to see if you were in any of her photos). For others, it’s impossible to pinpoint the blog's appeal, aside from the voyeurism it provides with little to no censorship. But love or hate her, when was the last time you broke up with your boyfriend only to have it covered by everyone from Eye Weekly (Kate Carraway, natch) to the Globe and Mail (with mandatory quote from subculture profiteer Hal Niedzviecki)? That's the bizarro situation Raymi has found herself in (culminating in the Globe writer writing about it again to fend off threats of flaming dog shit from her loyal kingdom). Rather than us add to the weird discourse about someone so "uninteresting" that everyone keeps fricking writing about her, we thought we'd let her respond.

We understand why you'd be confused about that, "lguy." Fred Armisen is in fact offensive, but that is mostly because he sucks so very, very badly.

Disney's live-action tween projects, like High School Musical and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, are some of the most lucrative entertainment franchises in recent history. Kids get to nurse their meaningless prepubescent crushes, while parents are comforted by Disney's squeaky clean role models—and as Miley Cyrus and Vanessa Hudgens found out, straying from their chaste likenesses can be a career-limiting game of PR brinkmanship.

Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. In the press release issued by the union in the wake of the announcement, union chief Maureen Dawson explained that "Journalism is a collaborative effort, the product of a team of reporters, photographers and editors working in concert to produce the kind of activist agenda that has served Star readers and our community so well for so long...To remove a critical element of that work is to shortchange everyone who depends on it."

CanWest has successfully transferred the Post to another part of its company, out of bankruptcy protection and into where the rest of the company's papers are, according to the CBC—which means that, for now, it's still safe. Deep breaths.

According to a court filing made by CanWest Global Communications, the National Post is in immediate danger of being shut down. Creditors are running out of patience with the money-losing paper and will cease underwriting its operations after October 30. A potential stay of execution may come if CanWest can successfully transfer the Post to another holding corporation, which it is currently attempting to do.

For the second year in a row, readers of the alt-weekly that we have never written anything critical about, not even once, have voted Torontoist Toronto's Best Blog. Aw shucks, NOW readers, thanks. We accept.

Wanted: a good home for a down-on-its-luck newspaper box for a defunct newspaper. It's been living on the streets for five months and deserves to reside inside a warm house with a loving family during the coming winter.

One month ago, we reported on Toronto Life Square's quiet transformation into 10 Dundas East, the result of the magazine's struggle to get their name removed from the flailing project that dominates the northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas. Digital signage around the building was being changed (to a much worse design), though "Toronto Life Square" signs still lingered—as the name did on the building's website.

In 1993, CPG (Community Programs Group) began publishing The New Jr. Jays Magazine, an eclectic mix of baseball, sci-fi, health and safety tips, and overt product placement. The magazine was designed to develop the Jays’ younger fan base, and featured comics, baseball articles, interviews with fans and players, and movie, book, and video game reviews. For only five dollars a year, Jr. Jays club members received four issues, a personalized membership card, and several Topps baseball cards. In the words of Ed Conroy, the publisher of The Magazine, a monthly magazine for kids, and a former Jr. Jays writer, "You couldn’t make something like this today."

In an ad for a recycling campaign, it seems appropriate, clever even, to recycle elements of an old image. But when the ad is for Belgian beer, and the logo belongs to someone else, it doesn't make much sense—particularly when the designer fails to ask permission for its use.

If there's one thing people agree about, it's that they hate politicians a lot more than they hate prostitutes. Everything else is up for grabs.

David Miller's announcement on September 25 that he would not seek re-election took many by surprise—including, no doubt, those at Toronto Life. With the big expanse of time between the time articles for the magazine are finalized and the time the completed publication is actually distributed (a delay typical of monthly magazines), the November issue is only now beginning to land in the mailboxes of subscribers. Somewhat awkwardly, it features a full-page look at how Miller stacks up against six possible competitors in the mayoralty race he took himself out of three weeks ago, complete with each one's odds of winning against Miller. And we quote: "A lot of people think David Miller stinks, and not just because of the 39-day garbage strike. But do any of the other likely candidates have what it takes to knock out Toronto's top dog?" The answer: yes, all of them. But only because he knocked himself out first.

Unintended side-effect of the Star's website redesign: when it's overcast, as it was last night, our esteemed CN Tower looks very much like a magical cloud-farting machine. The world's tallest magical cloud-farting machine, thank you very much.

At long last, the Star has a new layout for its website, and it's—large. The site's editorial team describes it as "giv[ing readers] more options for finding the news," and it does indeed do just that in a rather neat way, with three new styles for their home page in addition to Standard View (pictured above): Visual News, with a tile of photos; Timeline View, which shows the most recent stories added; and Grid View, which is a little like Visual News, but with more text than photos. There are slight tweaks throughout, too. Comments are now on separate pages from articles, thank God, and the paper's RSS feeds finally have small thumbnails in many articles.

On Saturday morning, David Dewees killed himself. On October 1, two days before, Toronto Police had charged the Jarvis Collegiate teacher with two counts of invitation to sexual touching and two counts of luring. The police allege that "between July 2008 and July 2009, [Dewees] befriended two boys while working at the Ontario Pioneer Camp in Port Sydney, Ontario," and that "he had inappropriate contact with them over the Internet." (The photo at right, and those charges, are from the police press release.) As is often the case, the accusation made the news, including the Star, which misreported that Dewees was charged with sexual assault of the two boys.

While we here at Torontoist appreciate a bad pun as much as the next conglomerate of web writers collectively writing in the first person plural, said pun was unfortunately the high point of this weekend's internet commentary on David Miller's announcement that he would not run for a third term as mayor.

Being Erica—the new season of which started last night—will soon have a new co-star: the National Post! Yes, even though the parent companies of the show and the paper are each intent on covering the other's financial problems, the Post will (apparently) be playing itself in an upcoming episode, which'll see Erica go to the (real) Post to confront a (fake) Post critic who slams a book that she edits.

What do you get when you put together three four-year-olds, a box of crayons, and a white sheet of paper? The new signage inside of Toronto Life Square.

When voters go to the ballot box in St. Paul’s on Thursday their choices will include the latest in a long line of Toronto Sun columnists who have attempted to parlay their print personas into elected office, usually for parties that have matched the paper’s right-wing tilt.

On Tuesday, Eye published "The new NewMusic?", a fawning article about how MTV, and specifically MTV News, embodies all that was once great but is no longer about MuchMusic and The NewMusic. It's been updated a bit since then, but Google caught it in its original form, and you should go read it right now here [ Google's cached version of the article is now up to date, so you'll have to pretend like the last sentence in the fourth paragraph, in parentheses, isn't there—because it wasn't originally.] Seriously, go. We have a surprise for when you get back.

"Free paper." "Free evening newspaper." "Free daily newspaper." "Zero-zero cents." "Great to read on the subway."

NOW Magazine has just opened up voting for all categories in their annual "Best of Toronto" issuestravaganza. Last year, we somehow won both Best Website and Best Blog. NOW wrote snarky things about us, but they also said that "there is no other blog that cares so much about covering the city"! Thanks NOW!

We sort of agree with Susan G. Cole. There, we said it.

We can all relax. Christmas-themed zombies haven’t risen up to become "exquisite" Mississauga dentists; as it turns out, the amateur colouring job above is actually City Living Magazine’s signature style. We had never heard of City Living before, but it turns out that it might just be Toronto’s best publication.

John Barber has been observing and commenting on City Hall for the Globe and Mail for thirteen years. Those with an interest in our municipal government will have noticed his recent absence from the paper's political pages, most acutely during the rather juicy, comment-worthy last few weeks.

It's not just you, Random Internet Guy.

In September, Toronto will get a new free daily evening newspaper called t.o.night. According to the newer of the two media kits provided to us (one, from this month, by the paper itself; the other, from June, by another source), t.o.night will be "distributed in the downtown core," and will "deliver stories the direct competition [Metro and 24 Hours] does not cover until the next morning, while helping readers plan their evenings," modelled after other evening newspapers worldwide, like the Australian mX. The paper will be filled with content "from newswires combined with unique content from the web." From who on the web? No, no, not us. BlogTO, for one; Tim Shore, BlogTO's publisher, announced the new paper on Monday afternoon, saying that "Not since the rise and fall of Dose has a publication surfaced in the city threatening to shake up the print media landscape."

Eye just beat us to it, but the unfortunate juxtaposition on today's Toronto Sun cover—a huge ad of a shocked-looking Bruno beside the Sun's usual blood and gore headline, this time about a "City councillor's ex-lover" found murdered—is, well, too unfortunate not to post.