MediaScout & Maisonneuve: a mystery
Today in the email, another edition of MediaScout, the news digest prepared daily by Maisonneuve magazine in Montreal, containing another brilliant precis (by Daniel Casey) of the so-called news of the day. The topic is the Montebello Summit as covered (or not covered, or covered up) in what MediaScout calls the Big Seven (Globe & Mail, National Post, La Presse, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star, CBC TV News and CTV News). As is often the case, the report today in MediaScout is much better written and more to the point than any of the accounts that it summarizes. The question is: how does Maisonneuve, a literary quarterly with the limited resources of a “cultural” magazine, continue to produce such a high quality news publication? And who are these people, the writers of MediaScout: Daniel Casey, Daniel Tencer, Jordan Himelfarb, Valeries Howes, Claire Ward? We imagine them locked in an attic somewhere in Montreal, speed-reading the news and then writing about it in well-formed sentences, all before dawn—how much black coffee does it take? Since signing on for MediaScout a couple of years ago, I haven’t paid for a single newspaper. (Out west of course we supplement MediaScout with the excellent online coverage at The Tyee.)
Labels: maisonneuve, mediascout, osborne, the tyee
posted by Stephen Osborne at
3:22 pm
2 Comments:
Insight into a couple of those talents: Jordan Himelfarb (note the correct spelling) is, among other things, a music blogger—he's one of the founders of the essential saidthegramophone.com. I think he's MediaScout's best pure writer. He worked with Valerie Howes, Maisonneuve's managing and online editor, at Ukula, a little independent magazine out of Montreal. Howes used to be an editor there. Ukula attracts a lot of talented people, but it doesn't seem to keep them long, presumably because they don't pay contributors or staff.
I think Ukula is out of Toronto and while they can not/ do not pay anyone they did manage to scrape together the capital to open a store on the College St. strip.
Take it from me, the Mediascout writers and editors work hard for some great results.
It started with Phillip Todd and has continued in his absence (he left Maisonneuve in December of last year).
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