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.)