Journalism

The COVID Alert App and Privacy Panic

Posted on 8 Aug 2020 by Health Journalism Tech
COVID Alert app

We’ve both installed the COVID Alert app, even though it’s not fully functional in our province (so far it’s just Ontario). We can’t report a COVID diagnosis, but we can get notified if someone from Ontario we’ve come into contact with does report a positive COVID test result. Since we live near the Ontario-Quebec border, and sometimes have to cross into Ontario for errands and such, there’s already some value in installing it.

The app is available on the Apple App Store and on Google Play.

It can’t run on older phones (on the Apple side, older than an iPhone 6S or first-gen SE) because of hardware limitations, I believe. It makes use of the Apple/Google API, which has strong privacy protections: the only things it shares with the server or with other phones are anonymous tokens. The privacy protections are such that Michael Geist is comfortable installing it, which is something.

It’s in that context that I have to look really sideways at a CBC article that suggests that some people could be identified by the COVID Alert app.

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Florida Man, Open Government and Rob Ford

Posted on 27 Mar 2019 by Journalism Weird

There’s a reason for the Florida Man meme, and—surprise!—it isn’t because Florida is particularly weird or strange. As the Miami New Times explained in 2015, it’s because open government laws make all records—including the colourful arrest records that are the heart and soul of Florida Man encounters—publicly available.

The Star’s Ed Keenan is jealous: in Canada, this sort of thing is very hard for reporters to extract from government officials. Even if you know the document exists, you aren’t granted access, or if you are it’s heavily redacted. Ironically, one way for Canadian reporters to get the goods is to go to Florida.

When Rob Ford was running for mayor, the mug shot from his long-past Florida DUI arrest appeared in Toronto news outlets, alongside details of how he was alleged to have thrown all the money in his pockets at the feet of an officer and said, “Go ahead, take me to jail.” Toronto reporters just had to call the Miami-Dade police and ask, and all those details and photos were furnished immediately.

The Star’s Jim Rankin remembers an older story about when Norm Gardner, who was then chair of the Toronto police services board, shot a man who was trying to rob his bakery. “We learned he had a permit to carry a concealed handgun,” Rankin recalled. “He also had a permit for the same in Florida. I called Florida up and asked for Norm’s permit and training certificate. A kind clerk promptly faxed me a copy. Imagine that happening in Canada.”

Compare with the Rob Ford crack video: it was released 39 months after its existence was first reported on, and five months after Ford died (see timeline).

‘Colder Than Mars’

Posted on 30 Dec 2017 by Astronomy & Space Journalism Weather & Climate

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

I have a bone to pick with news stories that declare, hyperbolically, whenever a location is in the midst of a deep freeze, that it’s “colder than Mars”—stories like this one from CTV News or this one from The Atlantic.

What exactly do they mean by “colder than Mars”? Mars is a planet—one that, like Earth, has an atmosphere, albeit thin, and weather and seasons. Mars can get as cold as –143°C (–226°F) and as warm as 35°C (95°F) in spots. Mars’s mean temperature is –63°C (–82°F), which is colder than just about any population centre can get (and no, wind chill doesn’t count for this). So that can’t be it. (Besides, comparing a mean temperature to a local temperature would be an apples-to-oranges comparison. Earth’s mean temperature, for the record, is 15°C.)1

It turns out that what reporters really mean is the current temperature at Gale Crater, as measured by the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station on the Curiosity rover. It also turns out that there’s a handy widget that gives the current conditions as measured by REMS. As I write this, the air temperature on Mars is –19°C and the ground temperature is –6°C (the difference is because the air is so thin).

Since it’s –19°C right now where I live, yes, Mars—or at least Gale Crater, which is not the same thing (again: apples to oranges)—is just as cold. But temperatures as high as 20°C (68°F) and as low as –127°C (–197°F) have been recorded at Gale Crater. It’s no trick for a Martian summer to be warmer than a Canadian winter, but even the daytime highs of a Martian winter can be warmer than a Canadian winter. Because the air is so thin, the Martian surface heats quickly when it’s sunny, and the temperature can swing as much as 100 degrees.2

I know that hyperbole is an essential part of talking about how goddamn cold it is out there (see also: using wind chill instead of temperature), but honestly, Mars isn’t a useful point of reference.

Ethics in Opera Reviewing

Posted on 26 May 2016 by Journalism Music

The latest contretemps concerning ethics in reviewing comes not from science fiction or computer games, but opera.

Earlier this month, the National Post pulled their review of a Canadian Opera Company performance of Rossini’s Maometto II after a COC public relations manager, Jennifer Pugsley, wrote the Post to complain about a couple of points in the review. Rather than standing by their reviewer, freelancer Arthur Kapitainis, or making the corrections requested, features producer Dustin Parkes apologized and pulled the review.

Kapitainis quit (inasmuch as a freelancer can do so); his review was reprinted at Musical Toronto before being restored, sans an offending sentence, at its original location.

In the email exchange between Pugsley and Parkes (reprinted here), Parkes noted that performing arts reviews “simply get no attention online, and almost always end up as our poorest performing pieces of digital content.” (He went on to ask about getting tickets. Ahem.)

As for the news coverage of this incident, the Washington Post focuses on the role, and importance, of arts criticism in journalism, whereas  this Maclean’s piece looks at the economics of arts reviews in leaner, meaner times: reviewing the performing arts in mainstream publications has never been viable; it’s just that newspapers used to have money enough to subsidize it.

As I see it, critical integrity is beside the point in cases like these. I suspect that performing arts coverage has always been filed under civic boosterism (the tickets are part and parcel): covering the event, rather than critiquing it, is what’s important. No one, after all, wants to read that the local orchestra can’t play worth a damn—what good would that do?

Jonathan Crowe
Map blogger. Science fiction and fantasy critic and writer. Snake whisperer. Typewriter fiend.

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