Inside the messy collapse of the Washington Post
Print staffers grouse about the quality of the website. “Why does our homepage look so crappy and cheesy?” one reporter says. “Why is it not as nice as the Times’s page?” Others complain that Web producers don’t appreciate the Post’s august traditions.
EU secretly demands that Canada make copyright more draconian
The document states that the trade negotiations are a “unique opportunity [for Canada] to upgrade its [Intellectual Property Rights] regime despite local anti-IPR lobbying.” It includes an assessment of recent copyright reform efforts, noting that two bills have died due to “political instability.” The document adds that the copyright reform process was revived in 2009 with the national copyright consultation, but notes dismissively it may have been a “tactic to confuse.”
(Michael Geist)
Weird and fascinating. [ Via ]
Christy posted this article about the history of the Toronto Transit Commission typeface and the TTC’s tossing of a proud heritage.
Compare and contrast it to Transport for London’s reverence of the Johnston Font, which remains consistent on busses, rail, boats, taxis, and tube. This is a nice history.
When should editors "unpublish" online news reports?
Kathy English, the public editor of the Toronto Star, has written a policy guide on when to erase a story from the Internet.
There is a strong reluctance by journalists to remove published content from websites. As one editor said, “Unpublishing is a word that doesn’t accurately reflect what people are asking. They’re asking us to censor or rewrite history.”
Did you ever think that it was unfair that, especially in gentrifying neighbourhoods, people could move in and then start insisting that noisy pubs, which had existed for years, or shops of an adult nature should move, even if they have been there first.
You can thank Dr Octavius Sturges of 85 Wimpole, London, for this. In 1879 he sued his neighbour, a baker named Bridgman.
As part of his business activity, for more than 20 years, the confectioner used two large mortar and pestles. The noise and vibration hadn’t seemed to the physician to be a nuisance until he built a consulting room at the end of his garden, against the wall of the confectioner’s kitchen, in which the mortars and pestles operated. Dr Sturges sought an injunction to stop the noise and won. The court decided that the confectioner, Bridgman, could not claim that long usage of the equipment had established a right to make such a noise.
It’s still the controlling precedent, 130 years later.
I first encountered Hunter S. Thompson as a teenager when I purchased a used copy of Hell’s Angels from a fundraiser in Scottsdale Mall (Delta, BC).
Thompson didn’t go undercover or infiltrate the Angels, he merely befriended them and spent a year or so living with them. The resulting book was extraordinary.
Just today, I learnt that the book was the result of a pitch to Thompson by an editor at Random House who had read his article in The Nation. Here is that 1965 article.
The difference between the Hell’s Angels in the paper and the Hell’s Angels for real is enough to make a man wonder what newsprint is for. It also raises a question as to who are the real hell’s angels.
Another Nickel In the Machine has a cracking story on author Colin Wilson, Britain’s first celebrity existentialist intellectual.
One of RFD’s biggest hits is a Larry King Live copy called RFD TV Live. Instead of Tyra Banks or Bono, executives from John Deere show up to chat about their new tractor line.
I’ve never seen this network – but I like the idea. It’s been a long time since television was created to serve a community rather than a psychographic.
Design Observer has a nice story on how the clock on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cover came about.