If you’re a billion-dollar public broadcaster, you may be slow to adopt new technologies, or simply slow to accept reality. You may be overrun with managers, half of whom are elderly, inept, or both, yet also strangely unable to manage. As a result, you may be asleep at the wheel as “the media landscape” changes around you. You may ignore the rise of Weblogs entirely until it is almost too late, at which point you hire a nice guy you can keep on a short leash without even using a collar. You certainly are not responsible and forward-thinking enough to write and distribute your own blogging policy.

So your bloggers, even the anonymous ones, have no choice but to do it for you. Behold the CBC Blogging Manifesto.

It’s the result of a lot of work by many bloggers (not really including me), and I reproduce it here in case the host site has an unfortunate Jimmy Hoffa–style accident.

1. Use common sense and don’t do anything stupid. Blog to make the CBC better, not to kill it. There are plenty of others who want to do that for us.
2. Ad hominem attacks should be avoided but disagreeing is expected.
3. Be brave. Be honest and tell it straight. Talk about new ideas and revive some old ones. Don’t be afraid to challenge the “experts,” and certainly not the anonymous ones.
4. Use audio, video and images fearlessly, but responsibly. Use judgement if asked to take it down.
5. Acknowledge and link to your sources. If it is a rumour, say so. If your co-worker says something you’d like blog, ask them first. If it was another website, link to it. Do your research. Be fair. Get it right. And change it if it is wrong.
6. Blog wherever and whenever you want, but don’t let it detract from your job.
7. Eschew advertising. Plugging the CBC, yourself, and your work is cool. Banner ads are tacky.
8. During the next strike or lockout, you may feel urged to ignore any or all of these guidelines. Do so at your own risk, knowing that your words can harm yourself, others, and the CBC itself.

We already know of one CBC captioner who blogs. What happens now?

Another in a series of postings on CBC captioning (also see the separate page on the topic)

Dedicated readers – surely the only kind I have – will of course recall my references to a blog (short for “Web log,” a form of online journal or diary) written by an heterosexualist captioner at CBC. Readers will have wondered why I didn’t simply link to it. First, it was a skill-testing question: Would readers be smart enough to look somewhere else? Second, I didn’t want to spook the author. Now, though, I no longer particularly care if I spook him, particularly given his recent postings.

Who am I talking about? Step right up, “Nugget,” author of Dignan and Anthony. [continue with: Golden Nugget →]

I have never read a book by Edmund White. The innumerable interviews I have read over many years left me with the impression that he is a dirty old man, a quintessential troll, the kind of character Hollinghurst comes up with that makes gay sex seem evil. He is an exemplar of that strange species, the tawdry gay intellectual. (Is anything worse? “Here, I can eroticize it for you.”)

Obviously, then, I am reading his autobiography, which makes him seem like all of the above and a total fuckup to boot. What a mess. Of course some of it can be attributed to the 1950s and the closet. Of course it can. And some people never get better. But how many of those people become novelists, essayists, biographers, founders of important health charities, and ultra-long-term AIDS survivors?

The book is marred by myriad spelling errors (to cite one that is well suited to a victim of Freudian analysis, “vice” instead of “vise”) and by imposed anglicisms (not only does it use single quotation marks, phrases are metaphorically said to be uttered inside or between “inverted commas”). Nonetheless one reads the following gloss on the trite scaremongering about the Internet vs. books (p. 242):

I had a small but faithful readership, and I had always placed the overall longevity of my talent, such as it was, above the success of any one book. Perhaps I was the last writer to care about posterity; believing that there would be readers in the future had become an act of blind faith. Of course people would always read things (captions, E-mails), but would they want to read long imaginative or confessional works written by writers in the past, even the recent past?

Yes, they will want to read such things, along with captions and E-mails. Yes, some of us care about posterity for more than just books. And yes, he really meant captions.

I was gonna say it’s reminiscent of such unpleasant typefaces as Weidemann, but I checked and that isn’t the unpleasant typeface it’s reminiscent of.

Additionally, a preposition is not to be used to end a sentence with.

Does anyone remember Epson dot-matrix printers and the cursive typefaces they could hack together? Is it even possible to make a printout of such a thing anymore?

Another in a series of postings on CBC captioning (also see the separate page on the topic)

An enduring example of CBC stubbornness is its ridiculous and legally untenable overuse of scrollup captioning for fictional narrative programming, like dramas and comedies. [continue with: CBC grudge match: Godzilla vs. Doctor Who →]

There is, in fact, no “strip” between Yonge and Grosvenor to “run.” The two streets intersect. (And hats off to you if you are one of the few Torontonians who can pronounce “Grosvenor.”)

Another in a series of postings on CBC captioning (also see the separate page on the topic)

As I have suggested in recent weeks, CBC employees and managers should be blogging as often as is done at, say, Microsoft, Sun, or some other technology companies. (At the moment, CBC blogs about as readily as secrecy fetishists like Apple and Google.) CBC is the public broadcaster and it’s got a lot to say. I had given some examples of blog-compatible CBC departments – namely engineering and, of course, captioning.

Captioning is an object lesson in how a corporation can completely fail to get its own point across. CBC cannot even manage the task of maintaining a puny, stilted, defensive, self-serving, lampoonable, ancien-régime corporate Web page on the topic. (I did a lot of looking. There is a page on its Intranet.)

But we’re expanding beyond static Web pages, aren’t we? By refusing to blog about captioning, CBC allows somebody else to set the agenda – me. The only public discussion of CBC captioning comes from me and people linking to me, whether they be employees, supporters, or detractors of CBC.

(There are two tiny exceptions. A CBC captioner runs a blog; while it surely the most boring in Canada, it still reveals a lot about the sixth-floor captioning department. CBC produced a third-rate report on French-language captioning that I methodically dissected.)

Pretty much every deaf person is online. Alphanumeric pagers and instant messaging have nearly destroyed the need to use TTYs to communicate. Just like hearing people, the first place deaf people go to find information is the Web. Anyone who wants information about CBC captioning finds me first. Not only do I set the agenda, I own it. I am the agenda. [continue with: In which I set the agenda →]

Disqualified: Dykes, trannies, bisexualists, and certain type designers without blogs.

1. Chris Glass
2. Patric(k) King (q.v.)
3. Dan Rhatigan

And that is it. We suck.