real-life kernel to what will surely become an urban legend in the Montreal Gazette today. It’s about a guy who returned a defective Visor back-up module to Bureau en Gros (that would be Staples to non-Montrealers) – only to have a friend call him up and let him know that he’d been reading the guy’s diary in the store a minute ago. The story’s been going around Montreal for a couple of days now – I know a couple of journalists who were approached with the story, and the guy whose life was on display is a friend of a friend. Anyhow – each time I’ve heard it the story has mutated a little bit. It’s only a matter of time until we start hearing that the Visor had nuclear secrets on it or something like that.
I’m sure that
Ms. Batista is a fine journalist and all, but this article on Hotmail in Wired News is, well, not news in any way that I can figure. When exactly has Hotmail not been flaky as hell? What is Wired being reduced to?
I don’t know if
it’s just me or what, but I seem to hear of or be in the midst of a ton of “small world” situations. But there was one just now that’s pretty weird. Every morning I listen to Daybreak on CBC radio. The regular host is on vacation this week, so a guy named Peter Downey is sitting in. The top story this morning is about a Montreal journalist named Katya who was injured in Lebanon earlier today. So Peter Downey intros the story – they called her for an interview – and it turns out he was her instructor at J-School last year at Concordia University.
The use of freelancers’
material on the web (and in other electronic media) without additional payment has been a huge issue in Montreal for some time, but hasn’t received a whole lot of coverage. Editor and Publisher Online reports today that Freelancers are picketing the Boston Globe, and I’m sure similar things have happened throughout North America. The newspaper business, in my experience, is playing hardball on this one – at least that was the case here. It’s interesting in the context of the Napster debate, because it shows the differences between how copyrights are handled. Freelance journalists generally only sell a license for first publication, but newspapers want to extend that (thus cutting into potential sales to other papers) without additional payment. In the music biz, the record company buys the copyright itself, so presumably any additional revenue stream won’t make a difference in the amount they pay the artists. That should be an issue but it isn’t.
