April 14th, 2008, 11 Comments »
I don’t know why I ever listen to or watch the news. I find it extraordinarily frustrating. I turned on the CBC’s Early Edition this morning and the first three local news stories concerned crime (leading off with the eight-day-old Merritt shooting).
At the moment I’ve got CBC TV news on and they led with two crime stories, followed by a story about automated bathrooms, the weather and finishing up with a piece about a piano prodigy. Is this really what amounts to credible news in this country? Has the CBC lost this much perspective?
And this, keep in mind, is the CBC. They’re the best this nation has to offer in TV and news reporting.
Shame on them for fostering the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality that’s so prevalent in our mainstream media. It’s exploitative and irresponsible. When our state-subsidized media is this lousy with FUD, who have we got left?
And just to clear something up: don’t believe the hype on crime. Canada is a very safe country. Crime rates have been more or less in decline since 1990, and are currently at a 1978 level. Unless you’re a criminal, your risk of experiencing violent crime is extremely small.
Any time you hear the media fostering fear about slavering rapists and murderers at your door, think critically about the news. Who does your fear serve, except advertisers?
11 Comments »
March 7th, 2008, 5 Comments »
This morning I was searching for news reports on the status of Aaron Miller’s shoulder injury (oh, oh, Ohlund). As I usually do, I searched in Google, and went to click the News link to switch from web results to recent news. Before I did, I noticed something new in the search results:
There’s a site-search field underneath the results for Canucks.com. That’s a handy innovation. The subtext is “we’re pretty sure we know where you want to go, but your search was too vague”. How long has this been around?
UPDATE: I note that when I search for “Apple”, I don’t get the search field. Odd. I wonder what Google’s criteria is.
5 Comments »
January 18th, 2008, 1 Comment »
When website managers first discovered RSS, back in 2003 or so, feeds were often published like this:
That’s from the Canucks site. They list these two feeds on their RSS page, with no explanation of what each one contains. Which feed do I want? Is one the subset of another? Does the result of each game qualify as a ‘top story’ or plain old ‘news’?
I was guilty of something similar in 2003, when I still worked for the Man. I don’t think we were very thoughtful about how we split up our news (we had a press release feed and a corporate news feed or some bollocks).
But we’ve had five years to learn, and it’s not brain surgery. Provide one feed with everything in it, and then slice out a few feeds in ways that people might actually want to use them: game highlights, off-ice team news, corporate updates, and so forth.
1 Comment »
