Goodbye Sparks Street, hello Queen Street: Hill Times Publishing moves to new office digs
OTTAWA—Some problems are good ones—and after outgrowing our single-floor office overlooking Sparks Street, Hill Times Publishing, which now includes The Wire Report, Parliament Now, and The Lobby Monitor, has packed up 25 years of memories and moved into two floors of bigger, brighter new office space on Queen Street, just two blocks from Parliament Hill. The new office […]
Liberal government’s electoral reform survey mocked
The Liberal government’s new survey website, MyDemocracy.ca, was roundly mocked in the MSM and social media, under the Twitter hashtag #rejectedERQs, after being launched last week as a tool to gauge the public’s attitudes on electoral reform. Thousands made fun of the survey. Conservative MP Scott Reid said it felt like “being on a dating […]
After 45 years, veteran Hill journalist Tom Clark signs off
PARLIAMENT HILL—Thanks to a taste for adventure and a thirst for news, veteran newsman Tom Clark has been at the scene for many major events in global history over the last 45 years. But he will be taking his leave of journalism and signing off for the last time on New Year’s Day. “It was a […]
Canada’s affection for Trudeau has just begun
TORONTO—Do journalistic conventions rewire our brains? It’s a serious question. In the fun new sci-fi movie Arrival, the plot posits the theory that language changes the way we think, and not the other way around. The aliens keep telling everyone what they think—kind of like a racist and sexist Donald Trump did, over and over—and […]
Leitch reaches out to those ‘ignored and mocked’ by Liberals, elite
Conservative MP Kellie Leitch’s latest effort to raise funds for her federal Conservative leadership bid invites those feeling “mocked and ignored by the Liberal and media elite” to join what she’s calling the “Revenge of the Comment Section” movement. She said in a Facebook post last week that it’s “clear that my campaign has touched […]
Funding dispute between CBC, private broadcasters based on faulty arguments
TORONTO—The dispute between the CBC and the private broadcasters over the right to collect advertising looks like the fight between tired old dogs around a shrinking bone. Private broadcasters believe their revenue shrinks because of the CBC’s “unfair competition,” being publicly subsidized and, at the same time, selling commercials. The reality is that they lose […]
Veteran Parliament Hill reporters Jason Fekete, Ian MacLeod to leave Citizen
Veteran Parliament Hill scribes Jason Fekete and Ian MacLeod are the latest big-name departures from the Ottawa Citizen. Mr. Fekete announced last week on Twitter that his last day with the paper would be Dec. 9, saying leaving the newsroom was the “toughest decision of my life.” He said he doesn’t know what’s next for him, though appeared […]
Without a compass: politics and information in the social-media age
OTTAWA—How could teenagers in a small town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia have had an impact on the vicious, hard-fought United States election campaign? Easy. Through Facebook. It turns out that teenagers and young men in the town of Veles created more than 100 U.S. political websites designed to bring in ad revenue […]
U.S. media’s failure to defeat Trump shows how journalism has lost its way
TORONTO—Knowlton Nash, the late CBC anchor of the 1980s, in his book Prime Time at Ten, quoted Jody Powell, press secretary to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, describing reporters as people “who watch the battle from afar and when it’s over come down the hills to shoot the wounded.” Not anymore. They are now directly […]
Maclean’s picks Mulcair as top Parliamentarian
While it might not make up for coming in third in last year’s election and then being told by his party that they could do without him as leader, Tom Mulcair might be feeling a little better about life after being named “Parliamentarian of the Year” by Maclean’s last week. While we commend Maclean’s for its pick, […]
