English language: 0 - Toronto Star: 1

The Toronto Star today ran a story - online, anyway - about how the children's singer/champion Raffi Cavoukian has started a Twitter campaign to "mute Don Cherry." Raffi encouraged his followers to mute their TVs during last Saturday's Leafs-Canucks game when the "Coach's Corner" segment aired during the first intermission of "Hockey Night in Canada." Cherry is a former NHL coach and flamboyant, loud-mouthed broadcaster, who likes the physicality of the game - including fighting and head shots.



Raffi, a children's advocate who was recognized by the Canadian Paediatric Society in 2010 when the organization made him an honourary member, told the Toronto Star: “For years I’ve been watching him [Cherry] get louder and louder. He sounds and acts like a bully. That’s not fun and it’s not a good example for the kids who are watching. In this day and age of all the hockey violence, we should be putting a stop to this.... I have nothing against the man personally. I’m just saying his act is uncivil and doesn’t belong on our public broadcaster.”

("Hockey Night in Canada" airs every Saturday on CBC TV.)

Good on Raffi! Boo, Don Cherry!

And boo on the Toronto Star. The first story I referenced at the top of this post was nothing more than a series of tweets between Raffi and his followers, and a Toronto Star poll. Okay, I guess. As a sidebar anyway.

But the "byline" read "storified by the Toronto Star."




WHAT? It reminds me of one of my favourite comic strips - "Get Fuzzy," which features Bucky Katt, a perpetually apoplectic Siamese who regularly murders logic as well the English language. One of my favourite Buckyisms is "You can wordify anything if you just verb it." And that's what the Toronto Star has done.

Calgary Herald

These figures—from the cast of characters of newspaper newsrooms of old (i.e., even before I started my career)—were cast from the originals on the Calgary Herald Building that was demolished in 1972.

This trio is now located on the Alberta Hotel building on Stephen Avenue, but originally the Southams (then owners of the Herald) commissioned Royal Doulton in the U.K. to design and make 44 figures and masks for the exterior of the newspaper building.

According to information on a Calgary Public Library website, the gargoyles were the work of sculptor Mark Villars Marshall (1879 - 1912), who died shortly after the gargoyles were installed in 1912. Marshall had been a stone carver working on Victorian Gothic Revival churches before he went to work at Royal Doulton's Lambeth Studios in the late 1870s.

At the time of demolition, the Herald building was known as the Greyhound Building, and the gargoyles were scattered, including to other buildings including the Calgary Convention Centre and the University of Calgary.

Maclean-Hunter Ltd. (RIP)

These aren't from a newspaper office, but from the building that used to be the head office of Maclean-Hunter Ltd. on University Avenue here in Toronto. It was built in 1961 for MH which published Maclean’s and Chatelaine magazines as well as a large stable of trade publications.

Maclean-Hunter had been on this site long before that — the company, including its printing plant, had been on the corner of University and Dundas since 1911. The printing plant moved — when? — to Yonge Street and Highway 401, and later to Aurora, Ont.; Maclean-Hunter moved to College Park (the former Eaton's College Street store) in 1983, and ceased to exist when it was bought by Rogers Communications Inc. in 1995. Rogers now publishes Maclean's, Chatelaine and a much smaller (and shrinking) stable of trade and professional publications (including the Medical Post, where I do my Day Job).

So this building was never actually a newspaper office, but it was the hub of a considerable proportion of Canadian periodical publishing. As I describe in Faces on Places, it features an incised naked woman floating in front of a long ribbon on one side of a building, and a naked man floating and holding a ribbon on the other.

When she won the commission for “exterior decorations” on the new MH building, Elizabeth Wyn Wood apparently thought the company had something more sculptural in mind.

“Symptomatic of the diminishing role and significance of sculptural decoration in modern Canadian architecture, Maclean officials agreed to only two simplified entrance panels on ‘Communications,’” said Victoria Baker in her examination of Wood’s life and work.

“Wood interpreted this theme in the form of female and male nude figures symbolizing ‘Sending’ [above] and ‘Receiving,’ [below] respectively.”

Chicago Tribune

I'm still experiencing re-entry to the Day Job, after four weeks off, so forgive me (again) if I don't expound on the future of publishing just yet. However, I wanted to continue the series of newspaper office faces. These two are from Tribune Tower in Chicago.

"Souvenir of Tribune Tower," an undated booklet (looks as though it might be from the 1920s or 1930s) that gives the story of the building and the newspaper (and that I scored on eBay earlier this year), also describes the sculptures in and on the building.

It says that the "whispering man" (above) typifies "insidious rumour," while the "shouting man" (below) is the "spirit of open rumour or news."

Hmmm ... not sure I ever thought of news as "open rumour."

San Antonio Express-News

This is the second in a series of pictures of sculpture on old newspaper buildings. This is the San Antonio Express-News building. While a star marks Iowa City on the map on the former Iowa City Press-Citizen building, one of the figures here is merely pointing to San Antonio's location on this map. (See detail below, and click for larger)

The frieze, titled "Enlightening of the Press" and designed by sculptor Pompeo Coppini, allegorically describes the mission of a newspaper. The globe is connected to phone and telegraph wires representing news being communicated around the world. The six figures surrounding the globe represent Labour, Education, Knowledge (he's the one whose finger points to Texas on the globe), Enlightenment, Truth and Justice.

I'm still on vacation, so speculation on the future of journalism in general or newspapers in particular will have to wait for another day. It's too damned hot for serious thinking anyway.

Iowa City Press-Citizen

I'm just back from four days in Iowa City at my sister's wedding. I took more than 340 pictures at the wedding, rehearsal dinner, reception, visit to the county recorder's office, etc., so forgive me if I post some pictures I took from 2002. (That was the year she moved to the Midwest. She had fibromyalgia or something like it at the time and wasn't able to drive. So being the outstanding big sister that I am, I drove her (and her two cats and dog) from Blacksburg, Va., where she had been a math professor at Virginia Tech, to Iowa City where she was about to become a student again, in the University of Iowa's creative non-fiction programme. Yay me! I deserve a medal but will get one only if I bestow it upon myself.)

I shot these pictures on that trip — the sculptures on the former Iowa City Press-Citizen building, which include methods of newsgathering (above; there's a star on the map of the U.S. where Iowa City is), and these symbols of what goes on in Iowa City and environs:


This time I had other things to do in Iowa City than to contemplate the future of newspapers in particular and journalism in general, but as I post pictures of the sculpture on the buildings of other cities' current (and defunct) newspapers, I may do some musing on those subjects as well.

Newspapers on the web...in 1981

Way back in 1981, this report appeared on KRON-TV News in San Francisco. This not-young man who OWNED A HOME COMPUTER had dispensed with reading his daily newspapers on paper in favour of reading them online. It took only two hours to download the paper using his Radio Shack computer and acoustic coupler. "We're not in it to make money," says the editor from the San Francisco Examiner, and 30 years later, newspaper publishers still haven't figured out how to make their websites pay.
"Engineers now predict that the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer," says KRON reporter Steve Newman, "but that's a few years off."