It’s not a battle you see often. The New York Times’ single Canadian correspondent, versus the Globe and Mail’s army of bureau reporters scattered around this country. Plus, the Globe and Mail is a Canadian paper, so it knows more about Canada than those Yankees, right?
Wrong.
Yesterday, the British Columbia government pledged to protect 5 million acres of coastal rain forest in a complete reversal of previous policy. It’s a wonderful step forward and you would expect the Globe to send a reporter to the actual forest to report. It’s not far for the Vancouver bureau. Instead, the paper opted for a CP wire story from Vancouver, complete with a press conference quote and what I assume is a phone interview with a Sierra Club spokesperson.
The NYT, on the other hand, sent Clifford Kraus to Hartley Bay, British Columbia, to report on the announcement. In fact, Kraus was able to report on the announcement in today’s paper, while the Globe will have to wait until tomorrow, as the CP story came out after the announcement.
The Globe wire copy just covers the news. The NYT story gives background on Native logging rights, logging in British Columbia and how the new deal breaks new ground in how governments are balancing the rights of Native Canadians, logging companies and the preservation of nature. The Globe story simply doesn’t.
It’s one thing to use wire copy for an international story. But to not report on events in your own country as well as a paper from the United States is shameful.
Jacques, that CP story looks like it was posted this afternoon. It’s probably just a breaking news update. But it isn’t the first time the Globe has covered the proposed announcement. Take a look at this and this from the Globe’s B.C. edition.
Also Jacques, be careful. Hartley Bay is not at all close to Vancouver. It’s an isolated community up the coast, closer to Prince Rupert.
Kudos to the Times for sending someone, but you have to be careful about overstating your criticisms. If Phronetic is right, we can’t base our critiques of the papers by what they run on their websites.
Yea mon, I just checked. The print edition today had a full story from Mark Hume.
My bad – the old Globe and Mail site would send me all the print stories along with the online editions. If it was an Insider story, I would get the lead, but then be asked to pay for the rest of the story.
The new Globe site doesn’t do this for me – and I probably should not have assumed that it did. When I searched the site for “BC rain forests” I didn’t get any stories and assumed – wrongly – that this meant that none had been published.
Apologies to the Globe.
Though, after reading Mark Hume’s stories and Clifford Kraus’, the NYT still does a better job at covering the story – in one article – than the three Hume pieces and the CP story combined. That, however, is probably more a criticism of Mark Hume than it is a criticism of the Globe and Mail as a paper.
’tis a poor craftsman who blames his tools, young grasshopper.
But yea, the redesigned Globe website has pissed me off too. I think it’s less attractive and I’m still trying to navigate my way around and find the features I’m used to using.
In the future, this link is a good resource for finding what’s in today’s paper:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/frontpage/
Oh, and the Post ran an Agence France-Presse story for this. So your argument was not only valid but creepily clairvoyant as you called it a day in advance with only the pesky detail of the newspaper wrong.
Does that mean that I can use strikethrough on my previous post and save face? No?