So who’s the new Features editor?…

Someone has pointed out to me that Perrin Valli, who wrote the letter addressed to me in Monday’s letter column, had written a feature piece in the Green Issue, that it was actually pretty good and he is set to be one of the better writers in The Daily next year …

OK … In retrospect, I’m not sure Valli understood what I was asking for in the sense of professionalism. (For a start, I meant things like telling the students before they go to vote that the Features editor they’ve been paying who has been involved in a big controversy — a controversy which has bigger implications because of how the other editors handled it — is no longer the Features editor.) It’s worth mentioning that Valli’s Features piece and his news article are good, and his earlier letter even has a both-sides balance, while backing a principle of conscientiousness. Why not make Valli the new Features editor? I half-jokingly suggested the guy from CKUT before, but of the writers that are not editors, Valli or Ebbels (the younger, not the current Coordinating News editor) would seem like good possibilities. Why have another person who is considered an ideologue?

Max Reed on CKUT: publishing would be tough if there was only ad revenue, editing might be tough if there were opt-outs

I found the audio link on the SAVE THE DAILY Facebook group. I respect Reed’s work in student government. I’d trust him and Daniel Langer more the others on the DPS Board to see the need for reforms of editorial policies.

Reed makes a fair point about what might happen if The Daily could only rely on advertising revenues. The “advertising market is volatile,” he says, and could change with an economic slowdown. The Daily has to project its budget for the year and keep paying its fulltime staff. (Yes, but let’s be honest, they don’t necessarily have to give the editors stipends, when the editors weren’t paid even when The Daily actually came out daily. It’s still a resume-builder.)

But then Reed really falters, with all sorts of pauses, when he talks about how The Daily’s autonomy would be threatened if there were opt-outs. Check out the interview around 8 min, 20 sec in. He eventually sputters out that if a group didn’t like their coverage of an issue they could organize for more opt-outs.

I agree, if we must set aside the question of the willpower of the editorial staff in a given year, we could say the unpredictability of available funding might impinge on the newspaper’s autonomy. However, the opposite situation, where the students have no voice in how much they give a newspaper that might take them for granted, is not more desirable, more democratic, or more free.

The “non-hierarchal” ideal of The Daily inherently contradicts complete autonomy from the student body. It’s understandable why Max Reed was having difficulty balancing those principles when he discussed a potential effect of opt-outs. I’m not saying his interview was obscurantist at all; it was fine. But there are plenty of potential compromises that Max Reed might be able to recognize after the referendum. For example …

What about giving the students the right to hold a referendum on temporarily docking the obligatory fees for The Daily by $1 or the right to hold a referendum on making only $1 (of the $5 semester fee) opt-outable for the individual student? The Daily used to be an independent newspaper with accountability to the students written into the Constitution, but since the 1986 referendum, the Constitution doesn’t let students bring anything to a referendum. That’s contrary to the “non-hierarchal,” egalitarian structure The Daily says it should have.

There are ways to make the Daily more accountable to the students, to give students more rights over their fees, and keep the amount of revenue predictable enough for the editors to feel free to exercise their consciences when editing.

What to title this post … it has to do with puppies …

I got an email from the SPCA foster program today that says,

Foster parents for dogs wanted: Our inspection service recently seized a puppy mill. The dogs that are in good health are going to the adoption department but many of them are in too bad shape for that. We need to place them in temporary foster homes as soon as possible because once those ones will be out, we will bring back other dogs from the same place that are waiting for us to be saved. We need a fast answer from you all foster parents to save those who are still waiting for our help. Please forward this message to all the people you know!! Moreover, we have about 10 dogs that have kennel cough to place… Spare them from staying in a cage longer by visiting us today! [...] We would like to remind you that we provide food to start and that we have a vet you can see for 5$ [if necessary, and the SPCA pays for any medication] .

I put their blog in the blogroll, where you can see some of the pictures of the adult dogs they have waiting for foster care right now. Some of them are just too thin; some have something like the flu.

Last year, The Daily had an article on how they were about to gas kittens for lack of space, and it moved me to go to the SPCA to foster some, as I heard it did for other people as well.

No transparency before the referendum: Features editor Martin Lukacs is now EX-features editor Martin Lukacs

[Story in progress -- what is now posted has been confirmed by a reliable source who got it from Lukacs himself . "Resigned, fired: same thing," he notes.]

… and The Daily didn’t want to tell us, not in a note in the newspaper, not in the masthead of the newspaper (where they instead listed a character from a pay cable show), not on their new blog — which they say will provide

extra background and information on how and why we do what we do. Also, editors will post their thoughts about current issues on campus [...] such as the current referendum on The Daily’s existence

– and not in a column by the Coordinating Editor or one by the Public Editor, although they both promised to reassess the plagiarism allegations against Lukacs when the SPJ Ethics Committee updated their opinions. Those updated opinions were officially in over reading week.

The students are members of the Daily Publications Society and have a right to know whether they have a Features editor, and if not, why not. It doesn’t matter how close the referendum is. [Board member Sarah Colgrove erased the question when I asked her on Facebook wall whether her previous statement on the wall indicated that Lukacs was gone.] Let the students vote YES after they have full information from (in the words of the YES Committee) “a press you can trust [,] regardless of your political views.” That’s the purpose of a free press in a democracy.

I wrote in the last post:

hopefully, someone won’t have to tell these people who assure us they’re responsible journalists, who are so focused on their serious public task and obligation of honesty to readers, that telling students their only Features editor is a character from a premium cable TV show is fucking amazing.

Well, Daily guys and gals, listen up: it’s fucking amazing, a new level of crime against transparency.

… That said, the work in the art
supplement was very nice.

[UPDATE, 3/16/08 : There is currently no Features editor listed on the online masthead, and another character from the TV show The Wire, "Omar Little," is listed as the Features editor in the .pdf issue of the newspaper. ]

important events missing from the timeline printed today

For 1995, The Daily says,

The pages of the McGill Daily français are filled with debate on that year’s Quebec sovereignty referendum.

But the timeline in this Reporter article about a reunion of Daily editors says:

1995
Another campus referendum. Although more students vote to cut off the Daily’s funding than vote to maintain it, the Daily survives, thanks to the number of “no opinion” votes.

And there’s no mention of 1986. The Gazette’s timeline says

A referendum in 1986 ousted the Daily’s editorial board. (Only 2,804 students voted.) Since few others seemed interested in putting out the paper, the original staff was soon back at their posts.

The Daily subsequently modified their Constitution and took away the students’ right to bring to vote referenda about The Daily, including funding. The current Coordinating Editor Drew Nelles told The Montreal Gazette and The Mirror that we still had that right, without correcting the mistake for McGill students, who were about to vote.

Features editor Martin Lukacs is gone? And he may have been replaced by a character from The Wire?!

It looks like it. Was there supposed to be a noble gesture before the referendum (resignation would have been noble before the plagiarism flap) or did his colleagues finally want him gone after being involved in The Daily’s 4 biggest debacles this year? There was no Features section in the last issue (and the online version just re-posted the Feature piece from Concordia’s The Link that The Daily used in the last print issue), although Lukacs was then listed as its editor.

“James McNulty” is listed as the Features editor on page 18 of Monday’s issue, which we can already see as a PDF file on The Daily’s website. His name doesn’t show up in The Daily archives at all. Did he work at another paper? But his last name doesn’t show up when you Google any spelling variation with McGill or Montreal and look at any link related to media or activism …

If there wasn’t a change, why is there a different name? And if there has been a change, how come radio silence before the referendum?

…

In fact, “James McNulty” is a character on the TV show The Wire … I hope this name isn’t a reference to there being no Features editor at this time, just the Canadian University Press’ news wire (which Martin Lukacs seemed to have used a bit too liberally to deserve his stipend)? If so, The Daily has to get its head out of its ass before the referendum and start treating students with respect. I wouldn’t put it past them, but hopefully, someone won’t have to tell these people who assure us they’re responsible journalists, who are so focused on their serious public task and obligation of honesty to readers, that telling students their only Features editor is a character from a premium cable TV show is fucking amazing.

But is Lukacs still around, and “James McNulty” just a joke, an irresponsible one, given that SPJ-on-plagiarism question is still open? Are the other editors just letting off steam at Lukacs for his use of items published elsewhere, such as through the CUP news wire?

_______

UPDATE: The story from [DPS Board member and Daily news contributor] Sarah Colgrove, via the SAVE THE DAILY Facebook group, is that it was indeed a joke:

there was no features editor on friday. james mcnulty is a guy on the wire – it’s a joke.

Colgrove avoids saying why that character, i.e., whether the punchline has to do with Lukacs’ use of the CUP wire, etc. … But does she mean by “no Features editor on Friday” because Lukacs no longer has the position or because no one worked on the Feature’s piece put into the newspaper on Friday?

In either case, there hasn’t been work on a Features piece in two issues — the one prepared on Wednesday had no Features section, when Lukacs was still listed as editor, and the one prepared on Friday by Queer McGill Colgrove says had no editor. And they have NEVER taken out an editor’s name in the masthead because a section was empty or he/she was on vacation … What is going on exactly?

_________

[UPDATE/CORRECTION?, 3/12/08 : Someone says in a weird counter-blog to The Daily Watch (!) that there have been examples of taking people out of the masthead because a section was empty or he/she was on vacation. I've been looking at the mastheads this year, and I didn't notice it but maybe that's true. Also, perhaps the online mastheads basically stayed the same when the print versions changed. The thing is, the examples this blogger gives seem to mention the name of the would-be editor somewhere in the masthead; they don't take his or her name out.

The masthead thing was just a clue I thought I saw that indicated the situation that Lukacs is gone. The latest is that Lukacs is gone, at least according to the man himself, which answers the question in this post. If he likes, Lukacs can now write a counter-blog to The Daily Watch without journalistic complications. But based on his approach to online sources in several situations, he should probably watch out that he always uses proper attribution standards. Whoever is doing the counter-blog isn't off to a good start. Parodies don't copy multiple whole sentences.

Any current Daily staff member shouldn't be having a counter-blog, because of number of reasons involving journalistic integrity and accountability. One of the entries on this counter-blog contains some blatant libel and personal insults unrelated to my blog or blogging! (If they don't care about what their parents would say, they should least care about what Michael Bregman or any of the CUP lawyers would say.) If any Daily staffer wants a forum in order to counter my blog directly and ASAP, they have one. They can use one of their own blogs on The Daily's new website.

N.B. Writing this blog, I haven't blasted any Daily staff member for things not relating to their writing in The Daily, their editorial decisions for The Daily or their decisions as official representatives of The Daily. Perhaps I could take these insults on the counter-blog as an indirect complement of my blog. Similarly, unlike this counter-blog, I don't think I've offered the alternatives of a Daily contributor being either "mentally disturbed" or lazy. I did say this letter writer might be delusional, in his ideological bias, and I think it's obvious why. Lazy or dishonest was an Either-Or that I have offered on occasion for Martin Lukacs. And it ended up being not far off from the alternatives the SPJ Ethics Committee had for that one situation. ]

Someone depends on The Daily a little too much …

Monday’s issue is online before the print version comes out. That seems like a good thing to do with the new website.

So for Monday, a Daily contributor named Perrin Valli wrote me a letter in response to my letter that was printed in The Daily on Thursday. All the text of my letter was intact after I modified it to meet specifications — good job, Daily. There was no note for disclosure that Perrin Valli is a contributor to The Daily, not just a fan — bad job, Daily.

Was Valli’s letter solicited or prompted by any of the editors? If so, that’s unethical. [Someone pointed out to me that it's over the 300-word limit. My letter didn't get that special dispensation. I was later allowed to exceed the limit when I later added a line about being for a YES vote. ]

Anyway, until his concluding remarks, I don’t have much to say in response to Valli’s letter beyond saying that it misses the whole point of starting the blog. There is no alternative voice on the content of the newspaper unless it comes from “the outside.” The Tribune can’t directly comment on The Daily, it’s sort of an understanding they have. A Daily news contributor can’t be writing Hyde Parks whenever his/her editors are being unethical or ridiculously irresponsible. [In fact, Martin Lukacs asked me to write a Feature piece and I said no because it would be a conflict of interest. He actually didn't understand why ... ]

I’ll address the closing lines of Valli’s email:

Besides disagreeing with you over the quality of writing and production of The Daily, one further issue I take is that as a student, you choose to spend your free time deliberately and falsely interpreting what’s written, nitpicking or searching for errors to fulfill some backwards agenda of proving The Daily to be run by incompetent evil-spreading punks, all the while thinking this will somehow result in positive self-promotion.

He doesn’t seem aware of the emphasis on detail that the Ethics Committee of the Society of Professional Journalists had when it gave advice to The Daily, or the emphasis on detail in the advice of the current editor at Macleans and former CUP president Erin Millar. Valli’s eyes probably glazed over, if he read Montreal journalist Craig Silverman of regrettheerror.com talk about a “passion for accuracy.” Isn’t part of The McGill Daily’s argument for the YES vote that it is supposed to be a “training ground for the next generation of journalists”?

As for my blog being a tool of “self-promotion” … I don’t know what kind of self-promotion he might be talking about. I didn’t even have my name on the blog — it’s a blog about a school paper: wonderful — and it was only after the Trib said that they had to print my name to do the their story that I acquiesced.

As for the characterization of “deliberately and falsely interpreting” and “nitpicking,” obviously I disagree. If Valli thinks pointing out the errors in the Rachel-Corrie-and-Anne-Frank-are-soul-sisters cover story represent “nitpicking,” then — besides being on on an entirely different page than any working newspaper editor or ombudsperson — he’s more apathetic than he would like to believe himself to be.

For me, reading The Daily isn’t about reading as professional a publication as possible,

Clearly, I’m not asking for “as professional a publication as possible”! — only a student publication that, with its editorial policies, has passable professionalism compared to some good university newspapers. That’s what I said in the letter. That’s what my list of suggested reforms for the newspaper conveys.

… Is this what Mr. Valli meant by “deliberately and falsely interpreting what’s written,” the blanket accusation he threw at me that was more like a smoke bomb to throw in front of his readers?

it’s about connecting with my school community, understanding what my peers are passionate about,

I hope when he said “peers” he meant something broader than the GRASPé crowd, which The Daily sends reporters to follow around with a notepad. Because them we can just call up. They’re not inaccessible; they’re desperately accessible. The beauty of them is that you know what they’re passionate about before anyone can publish a news story on the subject.

what events are going on in and around campus,

Does he read The McGill Tribune for campus events too?

what can be done to fix the world, etc. I think you’ve missed the value of The Daily entirely, and for that I feel sorry for you.

Sheesh, he must really love The Daily. They should send him a free subscription when he graduates, because based on his letter, he might die without it, or at least be lacking in moral guidance when it comes to “fixing the world.” The problem is that “fixing the world” for The Daily means having solutions that are independent from changing facts; you never see their solutions budge an inch. They come pre-fab, like when one of their news editors cares about what protesters say about a hearing related to immigration but ignores the comments of the immigrants 30 meters away.

The list of reforms that is in the blog is meant to lessen some ethical problems, and perhaps even some ideological ossification. If The Daily enacts anything like those reforms in the next couple years, I hope Mr. Valli will not come to like his favorite newspaper any less.

New website … not bad …

It arrives with a quick covering-up, by way of a Correction appended, of the fact they changed the text in the online version of an article on the old website, which I pointed out two weeks ago. There is no Errata box for the same mistake in the print issue, leading us to think that journalistic accuracy wasn’t their concern as much as trying to reverse some sketchiness that was easily linked to before the referendum.

The Daily’s spiffy new website has 3 blogs. The timing here is suspicious, in particular because one of the blogs has a statement that it’s out to better explain things to students, mentioning the referendum. But actually I think the change in the online edition is very positive, especially the comment boxes beneath the articles, which might increase journalistic accountability. I don’t mind there not being comment boxes beneath the blog posts. The whole thing actually looks quite professional, and hopefully will help motivate next year’s Coordinating Editor to shoot straight.

The Coordinating Editor told the same fiction to The Mirror

According to their blurb/article:

He points out that if ever students have a serious beef with either paper, they can organize a referendum themselves, as they’ve done in the past.

He must be referring to the 1986 referendum where students ousted The Daily’s editors, which moved the newly ex-editors to write the Constitution for The Daily that we have today, so that students couldn’t organize referenda themselves.

Nelles falsely tells The Gazette that McGill students can bring funding The Daily to a vote, without the University’s interference

… and he ends up saying students shouldn’t get a vote on The Daily’s taking money.

[UPDATE 5/16/08: After the mini-controversy about this, including Nelles' threat to sue the McGill Tribune, the Daily decided to reform the Constitution to allow for referenda in situations other than fee increases -- but this was after the last issue for 2007-2008. ]

This is a post I tried to avoid writing. I emailed Drew Nelles, Coordinating Editor of The Daily, asking whether he wanted to correct or clarify anything to McGill students about his remarks to the Montreal Gazette. But there’s no note in today’s issue. It’s scary how glib Nelles is being in The Gazette article, as his comments stray so far from conveying a true situation about funding to the McGill students who are going to read this it. A Board member of the Daily Publication Society has already posted The Gazette article on the “Save The Daily” Facebook group.

Andy Riga, a Concordia alum, writes the story for The Gazette. Riga reports that Nelles

called the new referendum requirement unfair.

“If students really have a problem with the newspaper, there are (already mechanisms) in place that allow them to bring this to referendum,” as some have done in the past, Nelles said.

“It’s a little presumptuous and petty of McGill to force this to happen, rather than trust their own students to do this [decide whether or how to fund The Daily] when they see fit.”

But that is simply untrue. McGill students can never do this, let alone “when they see fit”! The Daily’s Constitution allows us to hold a referendum only on increasing fees; we can’t hold a referendum about decreasing them or making fees opt-outable for each person. We also can’t hold a referendum on making the amount of fees conditional on performance evaluations or the newspaper’s making constructive policy changes.

“Reducing or eliminating membership or fees” is even one of the “inadmissible questions” for students to raise in voting meetings of the Daily Publication Society.

When The Daily wrote their Constitution (around 1987, I think), they just assumed they would establish initial fees, which might go up with increasing costs or services.

This line in the Constitution is the only one that a Board member could try to apply to a fee decrease or making fees optional : “upon adoption by the Board of Directors, changes to the fee structure will be submitted to referendum [through Elections McGill].” But this line comes under the stipulation of “fee increases,” so making it apply to fees in an another way would be completely unorthodox.

The only way it could be applied to decreasing or making fees opt-outable (like they are for QPIRG or CKUT) would be a bizarre situation in which one of the Board members had a crisis of conscience and came to the Board requesting, for example, a slight fee decrease that could be reversed after The Daily met certain benchmarks in performance. Holy hell would result if the Board member requested that this be brought to a referendum, since the only referenda the Constitution explicitly provides for are on the question of fee increases.

Riga probably interviewed Nelles first, since he comes to Deputy Provost Morton Mendelson with a question about The Daily holding its own student referenda, like CKUT and QPIRG have to do, and Mendelson

said students can indeed force referendums on the Daily’s status but such votes are not “active affirmations, and students may not necessarily know that they can do it.”

So I emailed Mendelson and asked him whether The Gazette misquoted him, giving him the online link to The Daily’s Constitution and highlighting some relevant parts. Mendelson emailed back:

I was not aware of the specific regulations concerning the possible Daily referenda. The information that you included below supports our view that we wanted students to have a chance to positively affirm or not affirm their support of the Daily. We have also taken the view that a referendum on a fee increase is not the same as an affirmation of the activity.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Why does Nelles risk telling tall tales in not qualifying his words to The Gazette? The Constitution only refers to a “referendum” in the context of a campus-wide vote (done through Elections McGill) related to a fee increase, which is brought to referendum by Board members. The students can’t bring anything to a referendum, least of all whether they should fund The Daily or whether they should fund The Daily at any amount less than $10 per year if The Daily’s performance is lacking.

He says at the end of The Gazette article,

CKUT and the QPIRG have held referendums, with students voting to keep both alive [DW: though with opt-outable fees, unlike The Daily]. The legal clinic will be the subject of a vote when its agreement with McGill expires.

McGill says the four groups will have to hold referendums every five years. Nelles said the Daily hopes to convince the university that “constant reaffirmations” are not necessary.

Does Nelles want students to decide whether The Daily gets money every 10 years, or 20 years? Would such large increments of time be fairer than 5 years? If we go only by Nelles’ comments in The Gazette article, he wants no periodic referendum on this matter, whether it’s 5 years or 25. Nelles does not believe we should ever get to vote whether The Daily automatically takes $10 per student per year (without an opt-out possibility), regardless of how well it performs, how much journalistic accountability it shows, and how much real power students have according to the latest version of its Constitution.

“It’s a little presumptuous and petty of McGill to force this to happen, rather than trust their own students to do this when they see fit” — Nelles could have clarified or reassessed his remarks to The Gazette for McGill students.

There is a serious problem here when the Coordinating Editor of the newspaper thinks he might have to mislead (in not correcting or clarifying) in order to keep his newspaper afloat. He has had the choice to become more forthright as the university’s referendum approached, bringing out some embarrassing problems and unprofessional decisions at The Daily before we had to vote, or risk bullshitting us while being silent about those problems. He’s gone the latter route.

In the last three issues, he has avoided printing the Errata for the latest episode in Martin Lukacs’ severe attribution problems. It seemed to clash with Nelles’ Op-Ed about how seriously The Daily took Lukacs’ use of other authors’ text and that they were taking steps to prevent anything like that from happening again. Of course, he last assured readers (and passed along similar assurances from the Public Editor) that he would reassess the plagiarism allegations in light of the SPJ Ethics Committee opinions on what happened. Nothing’s in the paper today, although the SPJ opinions are now all in, and Nelles and company have had over a week to write an adequate response for printing in order to assure their readers of The Daily’s integrity. Did Nelles believe that a response that adequately defended The Daily was not possible, and it was safer to just flood the readers in a publicity blitz?

Now it seems that he’s trying to use The Gazette to influence the judgment of students. This is ironic, considering how Nelles bashed the Gazette and called it silly names in an Op-Ed he wrote about their columnist Peggy Curran. (That was the Op-Ed when he also memorably told us, “Occasionally, during my darkest hours, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing at The Daily. I wonder if we should maybe give this journalistic-objectivity, fair-and-balanced thing a shot” ).

The funding aspects in the Constitution may show the problems of The Daily are in its core. If it loses the referendum, it will have to appeal to the students with a host of new rights and mechanisms for journalistic accountability. It may have to come to them with a new Constitution. If it wins the referenda, the editors and Board members should turn their backs on what they’ve done this year, and begin taking responsibility anew, and make changes … if The McGill Daily wants to be more than just a Bubble and mutual admiration society for the staff members and their friends.