These are grim days for Halifax journalists. After The Daily News shut down last year, other media cut their reporting staffs to the bone. Yet, on Monday, August 31, CBC is launching a brand new, expanded 90-minute supper-hour show. Please don’t break out the champagne. Not if you care about local news. As I point […]
Media
Posted inFood + Drink
Liz Feltham finally blows her deep cover
Restaurant reviewers like to be anonymous. It’s their thing. But even for a reviewer, Liz Feltham guarded her anonymity to legendary lengths. When Liz started writing for The Coast in 2001, little did I guess it would be eight years before I’d meet her face-to-face. I hired her as an untested reviewer based exclusively on […]
Posted inLifestyle
Province delays watershed suicide report
What’s the best way to reduce the number of suicides? Before answering that question, we first need to know who’s committing suicide, and how. That’s the philosophy behind the Profile of Suicide Injury Report, a celebrated and ground-breaking approach to suicide prevention in Nova Scotia. There’s only one problem: the government hasn’t released the report. […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
No local news is bad news
When I was young and easy under the apple boughs, I sang out merrily, “Chase away the blues with the local news.” In those carefree days before internet and email, I frolicked in the cellphone and Blackberry-free air. Dad chased his blues by poring over the gloriously Liberal Chronicle. Our neighbour cheerfully devoured the competing […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Rodney MacDonald’s scrummy politics
Scrums—those huddles of microphone-thrusting reporters that you see on the news every night knotted like a rat-king around politicians or other high-profile news-makers—are all about control. When Rodney MacDonald’s gang of election-prepping Tories decided January 29 to shift weekly cabinet scrums from a hallway into the legislature’s shiny new media room—where they stuck the premier […]
