Mathew Ingram, a man with a gentle personal style despite the nagging thorn he refuses to remove from his own side, takes my esteemed colleague to task using the hot new cyberbullying medium, the Twit: “[W]hat kind of dramatic changes have you made at a large traditional media entity recently? Feel free to post a full or partial list.”
Well, here’s what Globe and Mail “communities editor” Ingram has managed:
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Add a buzzword from 2006 – “Start the conversation” – to the footer of most articles posted on the Globe’s garish, anger-red Web site.
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Publish false information that Steve Jobs had had a heart attack. He learned this “news” over his BlackBerry, but failed to use its Web, text-messaging, and telephone features to verify it before publication.
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And, as we’ve seen, harass his critics. (His colleague Andrew Gorham [Who dat? – Ed.] goes one worse.) At the very least, Ingram and Gorham are using Twitter for the purpose to which it is best suited. Ingram has used it to insult me, too.
Meanwhile, he laughs all the way to the bank: Ingram maintains a crushing and irredeemable conflict of interest as co-owner of a technology conference, which, in any rationally managed journalistic operation, should preclude him from covering that same beat.