The college of allergic knowledge

Allergic Living magazine's fall issue features the travails and surprises in store for students going off to college and taking their allergies with them.

Star PM debuts

The Toronto Star's mini-paper Star PM debuted this afternoon, with few surprises. It comes as an 8-page 8.5 x 11 printable pdf and free subscribers can opt for additional sports, people, lifestyle and "youth culture" pages, for a total of 12. No one knows yet how popular it will be, or whether it is one more marker on the road to the end of paid newspapers. But one question that has been raised:

Is the ratebase doomed?

“The rate base is really just an anachronism,” said Rebecca McPheters, who is president of McPheters & Co., a consulting and research firm. “The value to the advertiser is not the number of copies or how they are paid for or distributed, but rather who reads it and who buys the advertiser’s product. It would be a very brave thing for Time to do and would be an exciting development for the

"Sock puppet" incident embarrasses The New Republic, loses blogger his job

Lee Siegel, a senior editor at The New Republic (partly owned by the Aspers) and creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for TNR.com, was suspended indefinitely from the magazine and his blog was shut down after revelations that he was involved in anonymously attacking readers who criticized his posts. This, according to a story in the New York Times."...a reader accused him of using a “sock

Esprit de Corps editor says defence minister was way off base

Scott Taylor, the editor-in-chief of the iconoclastic military magazine Esprit de Corps, has taken a strip off the Canadian defence minister, Gordon O'Connor for remarks he made last week to Canadian troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan. O'Connor justified the mission to Afghanistan and lit into the media for emphasizing casulaties and combat rather than reconstruction activities. Taylor, who wrote

Macleans slaps back

Well, Maclean's came out swinging this week in reaction to news that more than 20 Canadian universities (about one-fifth) have made statements saying they would no longer cooperate with the long-time universities issue. (Earlier posts can be found here and here.)The "letter from the editors" (which may be taken as the views of the Editor & Publisher, Ken Whyte) published in this week's magazine,

Onward and upward into the new year

One year ago, this little blog had fewer than 1,000 unique visitors a month. Now, it has more than 6,000. (OK, so it's no YouTube, but our subject is relatively narrow; country- and trade- specific.) Some visitors are tire-kickers, just passing through, but many of you come here regularly, for which we're very grateful. The visits, the passalongs to friends and colleagues, the click-throughs to