Will Kinchlea has gone National.
Interviewed about the Maclean’s Surveys over at http://www.canadianchristianity.com.
No big deal.
Article here.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on February 20, 2009 at 4:40 pm, filed under School and tagged Canada, Culture, Maclean's, School, Tyndale. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
What to do with traditional journalism.
So I’ve been hearing non-stop that Newspapers and Magazines are dying at a fantastic rate, despite having a higher readership among readers, especially young adults, than ever. The problem is that the internet is serving the content, which is then aggregated and served ad-revenue-free to readers. No revenue means no more quality journalism, and all your journalistic needs will be found through cell-phone captures and amateur bloggers. With the change of the medium, the message seems to have been released into the territory of ‘free.’ This is bad, not because blogging journalists are bad – they serve their grassroots purpose, most notably to serve up the important issues to the journalists and to keep them honest, but because journalistic expertise is at stake.
Not everyone is a coherent writer, let alone a good one. Not everyone knows how to get to the story, let alone the story behind the story. Not everyone has the desire to research issue to which they are writing, let alone research an issue or a problem for longer than a google search. Journalism has been around since the reign of Julius Caesar (the Acta Diurna); should a profession that has served the masses for over 2000 years go to the wayside because we don’t feel like paying for it anymore?
Sadly, as much as we’d love to have all free content all the time, we have to pay our journalists. They are various models we could go with on this one: micro-payments on articles (lame) premium content (better), or (as suggested by Jon Stewart) aggregator licensing (best). I’m sure there are others, but I hope that whatever model is used, that it is used to save this industry.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on February 16, 2009 at 10:16 am, filed under Internet and tagged Internet, journalism, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
The True Meaning of Family Day.
During the war of 1812, The McKenzie family (comprising of Tobias and Elsie, the parents, their alcoholic son, Stephen, and their comely daughter, Margaret, and whose future successors were the famous McKenzie Brothers of International fame, fictiously played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) were commissioned by the government of Upper Canada to infiltrate the American battalions and scour for information concerning battle plans.
While Tobias and Elsie acquired most of their information through games of chance and thievery, Margaret McKenzie acquired the bulk of the information gathered by the family through flirtation and the subsequent blackmail of American officers. Stephen, however, rarely contributed to the family business, and merely participated in, and won, numerous drinking competitions with the Americans, due to their weak beer.
While the information gathered by the McKenzie Family was crucial to nearly all Canadian victories, their crowning acheivement was when Stephen and Margaret had teamed up to inebriate Americans and then place them in compromising situations, to be used for blackmail against their wives. They had done this in Queenston, Upper Canada, in June, 1813, when they found out that the Americans were going to stage a surprise attack against Lt. Fitzgibbon at Beaver Dams. Heroically, the entire family jumped into a canoe and rowed all the way to Beaver Dams, where they told Fitzgibbon the Americans’ plans. Unfortunately for the McKenzies, while they were the first to arrive with the information, Chocolatier Laura Secord also came with the identical information, whose sweet truffles left a much sweeter memory for Fitzgibbon, who gave Secord the credit.
Unofficially, the government of Upper Canada made the third february of every year “McKenzie Family Day.” nearly 200 years later, the Ontario government recognized the holiday and made it statuatory for all employers who felt like following it. Unfortunately, the name McKenzie had been lost to the annals of time and bureaucracy, leaving only our time-honoured “Family Day.”
*UPDATE* Apparently there are those out there who don’t know enough Canadian history to know this is fake. So officially, I made this all up. Capiche?
WK
This entry was written by , posted on February 15, 2009 at 11:48 pm, filed under Humour and tagged Canada, Family Day, History, Holiday, Laura Secord, McKenzie, Ontario. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
A Pretty Lady
It’s clear that I have a God that loves me dearly.
I know this because he brought me her:
The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh!”
- Adam’s first words seeing Eve
WK
This entry was written by , posted on February 13, 2009 at 11:28 pm, filed under Life and tagged Life, Love, Wife, Will Kinchlea. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
My School is, apparently, awesome.
Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s premiere weekly magazine, does two university surveys annually. One, the NSSE, is a pretty exclusive one that Tyndale isn’t in (yet), but the other, the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC), is all about student satisfaction. Here’s the deal:
CUSC results - Tyndale
Tyndale tops the list. Oh yeah. Expensive private school with small classes rule. For more chart-topping results, check out Maclean’s other CUSC results here. This bodes well for my little academic burgh.
Take that Public Universities!
This entry was written by , posted on February 6, 2009 at 1:33 pm, filed under School and tagged CUSC, Internet, Maclean's, Tyndale, Tyndale University College. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.