Spectator

July 2008 Archive

Notice to “Spectator” readers

Posted on July 23, 2008 by

Thank you for your support for Douglas Bell’s “Spectator” and “The Trial of Conrad Black” blogs. As this part of our site is no longer active, Toronto Life is now turning off the commenting tool and moving the blog content to an archive.

Thanks again for your support.

So Long. Farewell. Auf wiedersehen. Goodbye.

Posted on July 4, 2008 by

This is my last post for Spectator, as I am moving onward and upward, or backward and downward, depending on your point of view. I’ve gotten a real kick out of the past 16 months, first blogging about the Conrad Black trial, then more broadly on whatever it was I’ve spent the past five months mouthing off about.

Magazine maven Bonnie Fuller poised to market her toughest brand yet: Herself

Posted on July 3, 2008 by

The gap between Canada Day and the star-spangled Fourth is a good time to reflect on the differences, similarities and absurdities that define the decidedly imbalanced relation between our “two great nations.” (My colleague Andrew Clark, The Guardian’s man in New York, full of ill-informed good cheer, saluted our national day thusly: “Happy St. Canada’s Day. Hope the turkey and cheesy fries go down well.”) And while I’m sure it was inadvertent, The New York Times did devote rather a lot of space—the lead feature in last Sunday’s business section—to one of our own: the inevitable Bonnie Fuller. The writer was David Carr, the Times’s go-to guy on the media biz, who contends that Fuller—whose peripatetic risings and fallings in the New York magazine world are the stuff of endless clucking—is to our celebutante-inebriated culture as Einstein was to quantum theory. (That’s a, er, rough analogy, but you get my drift.) To wit: “Through nearly two decades of vision and relentlessness, Ms. Fuller created a way of objectifying the A- and B-list that turned celebrities into not only our ‘friends,’ but also American royals, unelected gods who walk among us.”

John Macfarlane grabs The Walrus’s tiller

Posted on July 2, 2008 by

Take this with however big a grain of salt as you like. John Macfarlane, the man who hired me to write this blog and who used to edit Toronto Life, is taking over as co-publisher and part-time editor of The Walrus magazine on an interim basis. As I’ve suggested here before, The Walrus is a decidedly good thing. Thousands of Canadian magazine readers were cut adrift when Saturday Night went under, and they washed up on Ken Alexander’s shores. That said, though, the fact remains that the editorial and managerial life of The Walrus has been somewhat, how to say, stormy under his regime. Macfarlane will bring a steady hand to the tiller while the magazine rides out its co-founder’s departure and the current economic unpleasantness. A smart move all the way around.

Received wisdom not yet in place for the Internet

Posted on July 2, 2008 by

Lately, I spent some time talking to a guy whose job it is to advise another guy (one with more money) exactly what the future holds for the media. In that kind of job, it’s important to have forceful, reasoned views that point the way to concrete action. Why else would the latter pay the former to tell him what to do with his money? As required, the former went out and did scads of research into the future of the Internet—most importantly how to “monetize” content, which is the question pretty much everyone’s asking at the moment. At one point, he patted a stack of papers in front of him and announced that research shows people don’t want to watch TV on the Internet; they want to watch TV on their TVs. He said this in an effort to buttress his argument that people don’t “migrate” from one media to another (radio to TV, TV to the Internet, the Internet to another solar system, etc., etc.). Why then is The New York Times reporting that Google—one of the experts on how to monetize the Web—has just signed a deal with the creator of the cartoon Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane, to provide Web-only distribution for original material?