I was the “guy” you all groaned at last night at RyeHigh’s “What’s Next for News?” presentation – the one you had to download a PDF to find out about. (Tomorrow’s journalism today: News delivered in a file your browser can’t read.)

The technology journalist who passes for an éminence grise in this country, Mathew Ingram, again failed to disclose his mile-wide conflict of interest as, dressed in his Sunday-best sweatshirt, he “moderated” a panel consisting of international megastars Clay Shirky and Andrew Keen.

I adore Shirky. I’ve read everything he’s written. (And he looks as nice in person as he does in photographs; the ears are actually the best feature. He’s solidly packed into a shorter frame than I expected, and that blue-grey colour palette rather suits him.) I understand where Keen is coming from (I’ve read his books), and he has offered me a bit of help from time to time. So I was predisposed to like our invited guests.

You were too. That’s why they were invited. They’re “Internet personalities.”

But if the ostensible topic is the future of journalism, this isn’t about personalities. Shirky would be the first to tell you it’s about structure. Structurally, there is something offensively colonial about asking an American and a Brit to teach us how to dig ourselves out of a Canadian hole.

A kind of Toby Young effect

I was first in line at the mike for Q&A (at about 16:00 in the resulting video). I asked a fact-checking question first: Andrew, do you have American citizenship? After a great deal of peeved murmuring from stage and audience, Keen took it upon himself to haul out his burgundy U.K. passport. Fine: If we’re here at Ryerson University, I asked, what are we telling journalism students when we import an American and a Brit to lecture us on how to fix our newspapers?

I’d only been up there a minute and the crowd was already against me. Shirky looked insulted and objected to the word “lecture.” I withdrew that and replaced it with “inform.” Shirky replied that national variation will shrink rather than grow, which is another way of saying everybody will naturally do what Americans do. (Surely that is always the way.)

Keen at least reacted to the structural theme of the question, wondering why so much of our online mediascape is dictated by a small elite (in Northern California).

Ingram weakly protested that he was Canadian and I told him he didn’t matter here, which he didn’t. Who is the Canadian Clay Shirky, Keen asked? Don Tapscott was the first name to come up. A plausible choice, I said, but you two and Tapscott benefit from a power law. You’re already popular, so you get more popular. And you’re the ones with the book deals. I knew Shirky would respond well to one of his buzzwords, and he took time out from resentfully staring at the floor to agree with me.

It’s obvious to you I was out of line asking that question

I would expect a reaction like that from conflict-aversive starfuckers, as nearly everyone in the Toronto media could be described. You’re so steeped in Americana that of course you consider Clay Shirky one of your own. He’s an American who became famous in America, and that automatically gives him credibility here. Keen is British and gained fame in the United States; the same applies. You aren’t famous in Canada till you’re famous somewhere else. You don’t even have to be Canadian to be famous here for being famous somewhere else.

You don’t want to accept that Canada is a sovereign nation that might actually need to solve its own problems its own way. (Want a real example of a digital economy? Try Finland or Estonia, not America or Britain.) You still haven’t gotten past the bright, shining lie we heard so often in the sales pitch for the Free Trade Agreement – “Canada is too small a market.” (Too small for what? Implicitly, for anything.)

Canada is a nation of 32 million people occupying a greater land mass than any other country save one. Canada is not “small,” unless you believe nothing counts unless it happens within the boundaries of our former colonists. (You may not know that Americans colonized Canada. They did; they gave you the language you speak.)

You aren’t consistent about this, of course. Your exercise in consensus permits a few complaints around the edges, which in turn are also an exercise in consensus.

• You think Canada has way shittier and more expensive cellphone service than other civilized countries. (Paraphrased: “Rogers makes my iPhone suck.”) A gripe like that is technical, not cultural.

• You want made-in-Canada copyright law (i.e., you want whatever Michael Geist tells you we need), but everything you talk about in that regard has its basis in U.S. law. You want U.S. fair use in the guise of “enhanced fair dealing.” (You want it so badly you ignore the evidence [PDF] it won’t work here.) Most of all, you want Canada to avoid anything that reeks of the DMCA. (You know what the DMCA is even though it doesn’t apply to you.)

That’s pretty much the limit of permitted disagreement. Even daring to point out that a city this size has too many technology conferences isn’t permitted. What you very much do not want is a forceful break from consensus. You won’t even tolerate disagreement on details.

You especially don’t want to hear any disagreement from me. Being older than you, and having been online for nearly 20 years, gives me expertise and authority you very much don’t want to hear about. You certainly don’t want me to act like I have expertise and authority, though it’s fine if foreign nationals do. You believe the worst man to voice disagreement is the man who’s probably right.

Hence, no, of course you couldn’t possibly tolerate any suggestion that we aren’t as good as real cities, like New York and London, or real countries, like America and Britain. (We import their “Internet personalities” and put them onstage.) You’re so defensive you don’t even see I am not making that suggestion.

I insist merely that Canada is a country separate from the United States and the United Kingdom. We need our own solutions to our own problems. Only a special kind of cultural sellout would object to that sentiment. You are that kind of sellout. Put that in your Twitpic and smoke it.

What’s next for news? Well, “the future in our industry” appears to centre around the Globe and Mail’s fabulous colour printing presses.

Lousy subway maps have become a cause célèbre in the last month. It’s so easy to get upset about them. Sort of like how easy it is to get upset about individual homeless people rather than a fundamental problem like poverty. TTC is certainly impoverished when it comes to design, which, I again insist, is viewed as too girly and faggy for rough, tough mechanical engineers and bus drivers.

I submitted the following to last week’s Commission meeting, where it was summarily ignored. The more evidence of their own failings you show these people, the angrier they get.

In the last week, new local maps at subway stations have received unremitting bad press. TTC “announced,” via private E-mails to Steve Munro and Spacing Wire, that the new maps would be replaced.

You already had a cartographer on staff – didn’t you?

As late as 2004, TTC had its own cartographer, Graeme Parry. Yet in the Toronto Star (2009.09.22), Adam Giambrone claims “there is no one who oversees map creation.”

That article, incidentally, essentially plagiarized Steve Munro’s blog post.

You have no designers on staff…

TTC’s culture of tacky has prevented the Commission from hiring actual graphic designers – and, apparently, cartographers. Few, if any, designers, and certainly no registered graphic designers, would tolerate an all-Windows workplace where every decision is furiously disputed by engineers, and former bus drivers promoted up the ladder, who have a sense of entitlement.

…yet you do everything in-house

You have no design staff, but lots of architects and draftsmen. They know how to execute a few kinds of drawings. They think their cherished software packages, like CorelDraw, are suited to every task. They may know how to drive a car, but they couldn’t build one; these architects and draftsmen can produce a drawing, but that doesn’t make them graphic designers.

Literacy is not a job requirement

What are dismissed as “typos” in the failed maps are actually evidence of poor reading and writing skills. People see right through their own errors, but the fact that nobody has copy-editing or writing qualifications inside TTC means nobody proofs each other’s work – or if they do, they make the same mistakes.

Errors are not the only issue.
Even the font is wrong

TTC prides itself on using fake fonts that came free with its cherished CorelDraw. Subway maps cannot even manage to use fake Helvetica, TTC’s “standard”; instead they use that reviled Microsoft clone of Helvetica, Arial. Neither font works well for maps due to confusable characters, among other reasons.

You’ll use this as evidence that things are improving

Whenever any complaint is levelled against TTC surface operations, the claimed reason for the problem is always, without exception, “traffic congestion.” In the same vein, years of concrete evidence that TTC’s entire practice of signage is seriously broken have been met with the insistence that the actual problem is “handmade signs.” That problem was said to be remedied last year, which does not explain the continued use of handwritten signs. (I see them every week.)

Subway maps will now take on the role handwritten signs used to have: TTC will pretend the entire problem of signage was just a problem of bad maps that has been rectified by a promise to fix them.

Adam Giambrone has no qualifications to vet a map

In the Star article, Adam Giambrone states “I’ll see the maps before they go up.” As he is not a qualified writer, editor, or graphic designer and also not a qualified cartographer, all this will mean is that new error-strewn maps will come with the seal of approval of the TTC chair. This is at least consistent with Chair Giambrone’s explicit program of destroying TTC heritage and defending his staff to the utmost.

---

Whenever outsiders prove something’s wrong, TTC angrily insists it knows best. I suspect this is the core problem. It won’t be fixed in our lifetimes.

Manzine, “A PUBLICATION ABOUT THE MALE PHENOMENON,” is now on its second issue. It is coedited by former coeditors of legitimate men’s magazines, but has resisted being contaminated by their themes.

• “I find the cheaper crumpets taste much better than the more expensive alternatives” – letter from Simon

• It is for every Man to decide where he stands on the issue of GRAVY BOATS

  (I am pro-)

• “I like Santa Monica because it’s got a big British population too. We go and watch the football and rugby” – but apparently not the rugby – “and get a Sunday lunch at the Britannia Pub. Walking in there is just like walking into a pub in Pontypridd” – “Lost Prophets guitarist Mike Lewis”

• “And jump in you must. Dipping your toe into water below 15° C is asking for trouble. Some people – and I watch them in amazement – climb slowly down the ladder off the jetty, immersing themselves inch by inch” – David Baker, “I’ve Got Chills. They’re Multiplyin’ ”

• “Few things will make you feel more like a man than answering the door covered in flour after knocking out six large loaves” – Damion Lorentzen-White (no relation), “Bread Is My Shed” (but see below)

• “To my dismay, nobody was in this amazing little treasure trove – no shop attendant, no customers, just me and my lady. Not what you’d expect in a shop full of such valuable attire. Ten minutes later a burly, suave-looking fellow dressed in an understated British country style walked in with a big smile and said, ‘Having fun? Oh, I really like your coat. Make sure you try everything on and don’t worry about hanging it back up. I’ll be outside if you need me’ ” – “Dapper chap Leo Walton appreciates the cut at Hornets in Kensington”

• About the creative potential of the GARAGE, the intriguing psychological SPACE often enjoyed by men. Against SHEDDISM in all its forms

• Q. Is it uncool to wear those Orlebar Brown/Monocle limited-edition shorts?

  A. NOT REALLY. But it would help if you live in Zurich.

• How to play Phil Collins numbers, “Beautiful,” “Layla,” “Invisible Touch,” “The Way It Is,” “Mamma Mia,” “I Could Be So Good for You” (what?), “Take On Me,” and “Alone” on a £199 synthesizer with motion-sensitive keys

• At Sharps Barbers, “[i]t all happens while you’re seated in a Belmont barber’s chair, which is a vintage but modern classic…. The Belmont goes for about £5,000 to £6,000 new, or less if reupholstered”

• The International Space Station

  Monstrous money-wasting carbuncle, or a vital scientific flagpole out there in the Final Frontier?

  “So let’s stop this idiotic pursuit of needing to touch God’s face with our own hands and let the robots do the hard work, taking pictures along the way”

• “My particular favourite is John Baskerville, the designer, artist and inventor…. It’s a shame that Birmingham doesn’t celebrate his life and work more emphatically. I am currently leading a campaign (now consisting of as many as four people) to persuade the city to use his fonts for all its publications, designs, and utterances”

• Page 28 is to be skipped

Marco’s list:

• Deployment of HR acronyms
• Mastery of brain-teasers
• Understanding of combinatorics
• 20 years of PHP
• 15 years’ administration of CentOS
• A great GPA in college
• Viable logistical plan for relocating a volcano using every gas station in Los Angeles
• J2EE

A skill you don’t need that Marco did not mention:

1. Ability to create valid, semantic HTML

This week, the Royal Bank took over the cover of one of those free papers that litter the subway. It wrapped the cover of the Star and bought an inside display ad in the same issue.

And in two of those three cases, they spelled “practise” wrong.

To recap:

• Practice and licence are nouns.
• Practise and license are verbs.
• A minority of writers ignore this distinction. A smaller minority uses practise for both, an American practice.
• The headlines and body copy are not egregiously misspelled (they didn’t write “practize”), but their usage is wrong nonetheless.

“Practice online investing” is a verb phrase, hence uses the wrong spelling. I reported this to the Royal Bank. I had to threaten to list them as having refused to respond before they actually did.

Suzanne Willers wrote back to say “The Canadian Oxford Dictionary deems it acceptable to use the words ‘practice’ and ‘practise’ interchangeably.” Except of course it doesn’t: The first spelling listed is the correct or majority usage, while other spellings are variants. It says so right there on p. xiii of the 2004 Second Edition: “Any variant spellings or forms are given at the main headword in bold type in brackets before the definition…. The main headword represents the most common form in Canadian usage.”

So we’ve got a company that’s richer than God that gets two simple words half-right, and a PR lady with a degree in commerce from Dal (or whatever) lecturing me on how to read a dictionary whose findings I spent two years double-checking. Licence to ill.

One discovers only now a memo from Toronto city councillor Howard Moscoe (PDF) from May 2009 about how City of Toronto computers interfere with writing Canadian.

Every time my spellcheck kicks out a Canadian spelling I feel like I’ve been kicked in my Canadian identity. It’s bad enough when my American spellcheck does it, but it really hurts when it is sanctioned by my municipal government. At present all of our software defaults to American English.

He then complains these defaults never get fixed even after he reports them. Fine.

The colourful, rotund former TTC commissioner then goes on to list a number of particularly troublesome words. But some aren’t really a problem.

• Half the time, Canadian writers use a single consonant in words like barreled and pummeled. The other half of the time, we use a double consonant. Hence those two terms and councillor, equalled, gruelling, labelled, levelled, marvellous, modelling, panelled, ravelled, shrivelled, signalled, spiralled, totalled, travelled, traveller, tunnelled, woollen, and indeed yodelled are just as correct as the other spellings.
  • Jeweller is just as correct as jeweler. (Jewellery, which he doesn’t mention, makes no sense to me, but is the majority usage.)
• “Check” could mean “check” or “cheque,” hence is not always an error. Paycheck surely is, though.
• Manoeuver is wrong in Canadian English, but Moscoe’s preferred maneuver is just as wrong. (It’s one of our trickiest words. Manoeuvre is the closest thing to a “correct” spelling. It produces unpleasant compounds like outmanoeuvred.)
• Saltpetre is a correct spelling that will nonetheless be unrecognizable. It’s a strange name for an archaic and obscure substance.
• Pyjama is not per se a Canadian spelling. I say this in full defiance of the Canadian Oxford’s listing it first. I shall fight you on the beaches on this one, pummelling you with so much titred saltpetre it will leave you yodelling and shrivelled.

When you name your book Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field, isn’t that conceding defeat right there? (Is “the field” really where you’re gonna find “theory”?)

This little book, edited by Helen Armstrong, proves two things the design intelligentsia will go to their graves denying:

1. There really isn’t much in the way of “graphic-design theory.” Graphic design is practical, not artistic.
2. What little theory there is you can barely decipher.

Of note

• I was going to say this was one of those typical “art” books that are nicely designed and typeset yet unreadable, except for this howler on p. 9:

  

  I think kerning the carets was a nice touch. (But what’s the theoretical basis for doing that? Where’s Jeff Keedy when we need him?)

• The book is meant for students and takes a(n) historical approach, presenting essays (with online-only extras) from the early 20th century to present. All the Usual Suspects of graphic-design history are in there, again suggesting a clean linear progression that never actually happened, as Natalia Ilyin has pointed out. The book plays this star card so strongly that the cover shows six (illegible, all-caps) lines of name-dropping. Original hits. Original stars. [continue with: Title as punchline →]

1. Open a new tab or window and you get some old page. It’s always the same page. No amount of deletion, including deletion of every reference to it in every hidden file (twice), solves the problem. Opera just goes and picks a new page to show you every time.
2. Insane caching, to the point where you can never revisit a page without reloading it once it has initially loaded.
3. Text never quite fits in input areas. Good thing we can read the bottom half of a letter better than the top half.
4. Ill-coded but widely-used sites, like public-library catalogues, just don’t work at all for any task that requires JavaScript.
5. Standard Macintosh keystrokes, like Option-Command-F to type in the searchbox, don’t work. That means essentially no Macintosh user can select the searchbox; native keystrokes don’t work and it is functionally impossible to learn the “correct” one. (It’s Command-E.)

Reporting any of these bugs, including the first one, by any method, including filing an actual bug report, does nothing. Among other things, you can never actually read the results of your bug report unless you are an accredited developer, and backchannels elicit zero response.

Incidentally, you have to be fluent in the language of an off-brand nation to do “evangelism” at Opera, unless you’re American. I guess that’s their base.