Results tagged “torontostar”

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."

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.

The Toronto Star is repenting. On Tuesday, they published "Toronto making me mad as hell" by Vinay Menon, one of the most head-shakingly bad excuses for an article we've ever read in a major daily. To wit:

On the same night that their magazine counterparts were feeding on a chocolate fountain at the Carlu, the scrappy newspapermen and women of Toronto's major dailies were knocking back bottles of Molson and rocking out at the Opera House: Newzapalooza V, the city's fifth annual Battle of the Media Bands, went down last Friday, raising close to eight thousand dollars for the Children's Aid Foundation. And far from strumming as Rome burns, the event served—intentionally or not—as a defiant celebration of the romantically proletarian spirit that somehow still manages to underpin the culture of the broadsheets.

No statistics have ever been made public about the number of deaths and injuries caused by the swift, sudden attack of colossal bellboys bearing large stacks of classifieds that descended upon downtown Toronto during the spring of 1936. Urban legend has it that the attack was an extreme ploy launched by the Toronto Star in its circulation war with the number two paper in the city, the Telegram, that was intended to bury "the old lady of Melinda Street" in a mound of newsprint.

There has been a huge kerfuffle across the blogosphere in the past week, and at the centre of it one can find none other than the Toronto Star's very own Antonia Zerbisias. We've called out the Zerb before (back when her blog kind of sucked, but we're glad to report it's gotten a lot better since then), but this time is special.

Today is a dark day: the fake Rosie DiManno Twitter account (@RosieDiManno) is no more. Star cohort Antonia Zerbisias figured out its lack of verisimilitude a while ago, though those who didn't would be forgiven; DiManno, after all, is pretty much always verging on unintended self-parody anyway. Still, the Star's worst writer seemingly wasn't the reason that the joke died over the weekend—her bosses were. The Star's Marissa Nelson, the senior editor of digital news, publically called out the account as fake on Friday, calling it "fake / squatter" and asking the Twitter gods to "plz remove immediately."

It's an interesting experiment: ditch twenty wallets around town—filled with cards, personal information, sentimental items, and a bit of money—and see how many come back intact. That's what the Star did, with impressive results: fifteen have been returned so far, with the paper in the midst of tracking down the people who've called to say they found two others. (There's even a pretty heartwarming Google Map featuring each location's story.) But the funny part? One of the Star's drop locations was "the public reception area of The Globe and Mail." And while the wallet did make its way back to the Star, it "was missing the cash," and "a Globe spokesperson said last night the person who picked up the wallet found no money in it 'and we have it on video surveillance.'" Mystery!

Both the Globe and Star picked up and ran with yesterday's story about Virgin Radio's subway suicide ad; here's the Star's article, and here's the Globe's. From them, we learn that Astral Media Radio programming director Pat Holliday, upon seeing early mock-ups of the ads, said that "we were all laughing like crazy because we just thought they were so funny"; that TTC Chair Adam Giambrone is saying the TTC should review its policies for commercial still photography; and that the Star somehow managed to completely avoid mentioning either Torontoist or writer Jonathan Goldsbie in their article, saying instead that "The Toronto Public Space Committee," which Goldsbie is a member of but wasn't acting on behalf of, "didn't find the poster so amusing and alerted TTC chair Adam Giambrone, who agreed they were 'in poor taste'." And, oh yeah—the Globe helpfully restated one of the most important parts of our story yesterday, one of the biggest reasons the ads were so dubious: "Astral [Media], which holds the city's massive street furniture contract and administers all advertising on transit shelters, also owns Virgin Radio." Whoopsy daisy.

For a week now, someone's been pretending to be Rosie DiManno on Twitter. With tweets like "i'm having a other joss stone moment. What streak should I put in my luscious mane next? coitus interruptus male member pink?"; her latest, "is looking to hire an intern to help consolidate the venom drenched hate mail her columns keep receiving"; and our favourite, "@petermansbridge next time try not to cut such a wide swath with your penis" (cf. this, and note that Mansbridge's Twitter account was also fake), it was always pretty obvious that twitter.com/RosieDiManno was not, in fact, Rosie DiManno. But last night Star co-worker and legitimately excellent writer Antonia Zerbisias stepped in to confirm the account's fakery. Still, we had no idea: DiManno and Zerbisias are actually friends? This truly is opposite world.

The Toronto Star's RSS feed, pictured above, displays only excerpts of the articles it links to—one sentence, maybe two, no author, and a headline. But every so often, it's remarkably easy to tell who wrote which article. Can you guess, for instance, which of the stories from this morning's paper was written by Rosie DiManno? Would it help if we told you that the full-length article (in which, big hint, the word death is italicized), there is an entire paragraph handed over to this sentence: "He cut a wide swath with his penis"?

Every single one of the 107,000 copies of Now Magazine published each week is read by (on average) three different people. Sure, PMB, whatever you say. Perhaps that's not surprising when your annual studies—used to determine readership numbers and thus a year's worth of ad rates—are based largely on how recognizable a publication's logo is [PDF].

It may only last the course of the day, but we thought it couldn't be done: Rosie DiManno has been unseated as the Star's worst writer. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Joe Fiorito.

When it comes to Toronto's neighbourhoods, even well-versed out-of-towners have probably heard of Rosedale, High Park, the Annex, and the Beach. But Amesbury? Alderwood? L'Amoreaux?

Today, the Star announced a few "key changes" "in response to consistent reader feedback," and one of them is a change they should have never had to make in the first place: "Our major features and news profiles focused on Greater Toronto," writes Publisher John Cruickshank, "will now be found in their own section, usually the second section of the paper. Most days, the Greater Toronto section will also contain the daily pages commemorating births, anniversaries, awards and graduations as well as obituaries and death notices." Yes: like in days of yore, the Star once again has a proper, separate, dedicated Toronto section, with a new stated focus on painting "a dynamic portrait of the people and events that are driving our city and regions." Cruickshank even chose an appropriately old-timey metaphor—"we will no longer hide our light under a bushel"—to describe the move back to the future.

Just like blogTO, Torontoist got a tip from one of our readers Thursday morning, alerting us to the imminent disappearance of Toronto Star newspaper boxes around town. And just like the recent spate of National Post newspaper box cutbacks, this had us worried. That newspapers are on their deathbed is a well-worn cliché, promulgated first with the rise of web-based news sites and whose spread accelerated with the economic meltdown that is stripping media outlets of their advertisers. We didn’t want to jump to conclusions, though: the Star is—at least relatively speaking—a strong performer. According to the Newspaper Audience Databank, in 2007 the Toronto Star outperformed all other newspapers in the city: it had 2.1 million weekly readers, compared to 1.2 million for the Toronto Sun, 1 million for The Globe and Mail, and 500,000 for the National Post.

The Star's Rosie DiManno has been covering the first of what will be many trials related to Jane Creba's sad death, and we've been dutifully avoiding reading her coverage so as to preserve our sanity. But DiManno, who usually only breaks laws of good taste and good writing, may have gone against the spirit if not the letter of the...uh, actual law, in yesterday's column. DiManno, writing about one witness—one of the co-accused who will likely be tried later—said that "Because he was only 17 at the time of the Yonge St. shootout, purportedly between two groups of males, the witness can't be identified. Even the sweet-sticky street name by which he was more familiarly known is covered by a publication ban." Tricky! Publication bans under the federal Youth Criminal Justice Act, the Ministry of the Attorney General's website notes, are there to prevent "the name of the young person or any other information that could or would identify the young person as having been dealt with under the Act" from being published—"sweet-sticky street name"s, you'd think, included.

For those into crime maps, however limited they might be, the Star has posted a whole bunch to their excellent Map of the Week blog. Each of the maps breaks down a different set of data—"sexual assault, assault, robbery, breaking and entering, auto theft, and theft over $5,000"—by Toronto Police division, using the cops' own stats from the beginning of this year until August 28. Turns out your car's statistically far safer downtown than in the northeast corner of the city. Your home, not so much.

While BikeShare struggles to re-open its popular program, city hall may beat them to the punch.

Today's Star has a great article about hipsters (thanks Mark Jull for sending it in), which quotes Stillepost, cites Vice's Gavin McInnes, and contests an Adbusters article declaring that "the hipster represents the end of Western civilization." As part of her argument defending those-who-ought-not-be-named, writer Sarah Barmak notes that "the way people communicate deep involvement—in social change, in discourse, in subculture—has gone from being a below-ground, analogue language of worn, spray-painted or stitched symbols to the daylight of blogs, message boards and other digital mouthpieces." So it seems only fitting that, just two days ago, a Craigslist Missed Connection posting popped up addressed to a certain female Star reporter, comparing her to Ninja Turtles reporter April O'Neil. Deep.

It's hard to disagree with the wisdom attributed to New York Sun editor John B. Bogart, that "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."

Every Saturday morning, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

"Hordes of Annex hipsters watched in disbelief last night while police cordoned off the intersection at Bloor St. W. and Brunswick Ave. and questioned witnesses about a shooting that took place at 11 p.m., wounding two young people."

This is how today's AY    R arrived at subscribers' doorsteps.

Poor Acura.

One year ago today, City Council's Executive Committee approved [PDF] the awarding of the street furniture contract—for the purposes of designing, building, owning, and maintaining bus shelters, garbage bins, ad pillars, and more for a period of twenty years in exchange for advertising rights—to Astral Media Outdoor, despite the fact that the company had absolutely no experience with "street furniture" and maintains dozens of illegal billboards in defiance of City Council.

It's 1:45 a.m. now. The TTC strike is done: twelve hours ago, TTC employees were legislated back to work by the provincial government; nine hours ago, TTC service started back up; not too far from now, employees' Monday morning shifts will start as usual, in time to transport the morning rush. But you wouldn't know that from the Star's Strike Watch blog, which the front page of the Star's website still links to, which boasts of having "the latest on the Toronto Transit Commission labour situation," and which hasn't been updated since Sunday morning at 10:30 a.m.