Media rant #1 - Macleans gets it wrong · Thursday October 11, 2007 by colin newell
I subscribe to Macleans magazine in Canada – more out of patriotic duty than anything else.
And in the last year or so, Macleans appears to have descended from the ranks of respectable magazine to rag status — at least in my eyes.
I did an interview a couple of weeks ago for Macleans – on the topic of Panama La Hacienda Esmeralda
For me, this is a largely good news story; North American market discovers a great coffee and is willing to pay handsomely for it — and I mean Handsomely! Result: Children get fed, hospital gets built, doctor comes to town, school is full… cue the lights.
The coffee itself is wonderful – often described as more tea-like than coffee like. It has sold via internet auction on a program called The Cup of Excellence. So I talked and talked about it to the Macleans writer pointing out the marvelous benefits to the community that grows this wonderful coffee.
One of my more salient points was how the coffee community, in Canada generally, is a familial like organization that breeds trust as opposed to deception – the writer asking me: “Is there any deception going on with this wonderfully expensive coffee?”
Huh? What? Deception? Heck no. It is a positive message with a positive outcome sister!
The community in Panama now has a medical clinic, a school and hope for the future.
Trust Macleans magazine to strip all this away and cheapen it — making it all about rich Canadians buying expensive coffee —read, us! A few quotes:
Toronto residents have long been accustomed to emptying their wallets for a gourmet meal or fine glass of wine. But is Canada’s most expensive city ready for the $15 cup of coffee? Matthew Lee thinks so. Lee, 29, recently opened Manic Coffee, a café on the bustling outskirts of Toronto’s Little Italy. To celebrate, on Oct. 19 he’ll begin offering up a limited amount of Esmeralda Special — a heady Panamanian brew that’s brought the coffee-drinking world to its knees.
Within the coffee community, Esmeralda backlash has begun. “It is out of control, in my opinion,” says Mark Prince of coffeegeek.com.
He suspects some retailers have been “less than crystal” about whether their coffee is auction-lot or not
Prince himself bought three half-pound bags he believed to be auction-lot Esmeralda, only to find he’d been duped. The Story
Huh? This is about us now is it?
No. It is about the farmers and their families… their children – or it should be.
Yes. I know what you are thinking. This is sour-grapes on my part from not being included in this piece.
Maybe in part. The Panama La Hacienda Esmerelda is a good news message and Macleans has missed the point entirely and made it laugh worthy.
Nice work?
Not.
Comment [1]
Save the World buy a cosy · Tuesday October 9, 2007 by colin newell
Ever notice that while you are driving hundreds of miles from civilization that there is coffee detritus everywhere you go? I mean, why did I see a paper coffee cup wrapper out on a rural highway miles from anywhere?
Fact is, people pitch waste from their cars because they are lazy and need a great big wake up call. Hello – the World around you is not your personal dumping ground – that is what your house or apartment is for.
Here is the solution – invest a few coins in a re-usable and environmentally friendly coffee cozy cup wrapper.
Stop with the pollution. Stop with the corporate shill. Do the planet a favor and buy one of my friends hand knitted coffee cozies.
Please.
Comment [2]
Coffee rant #1 - Get out of your car! · Friday October 5, 2007 by colin newell
Coffee on the run took on new meaning for a local Starbucks when a thief ran off with the store’s drive-through speaker box.
The speaker box – stolen sometime after midnight Sunday and early Monday from the cafe on Douglas Street across from Mayfair Shopping Center – was dismantled, and its insides stolen, leaving stranded customers in a caffeine valley.
Reacting in typical corporate fashion to the crisis of inconvenience, Starbucks Coffee, rather than lever java drinkers out of their idling vehicles, sent servers, armed with headsets and blanket – outdoors to take orders in person.
Barista Peter Gatt, 19, did his eight-hour shift on Thursday, repeating orders through his headset to staff inside.
“It’s been really, really awful,” Gatt said. “It’s a pain with the rain, even with the umbrella.”
In the day of no request being too small or big, customers ordered the usual array of coffees, to caramel macchiatos to extra-hot half-caf no-fat no-foam lattes with cinnamon.
Begging the question folks – Is it too much to ask to get your big fat tush out of your polluting car into a cafe for 7 minutes?
Comment [3]
The fraud of HD (High-definition) radio · Monday September 17, 2007 by colin newell
I have been a radio kind of guy for years. Versus a television kind of guy that is.
My first transistor radio was pressed into my young hands in the mid-sixties. Yes, folks – I am that old. And that is OK.
Within a few years it was not enough that I owned a variety of radios – I was building them too. At 13 years of age, I built a multi-band shortwave radio from a kit.
I do have a fondness for AM Radio however. For those who have forgotten it, AM radio is that muffled old style of radio from 540 to 1600 (now 1700khz) that carried your early rock & roll music (for those of you over 30 [or 40!] that can remember such a thing.)
There was always something comforting about tuning across an old radio dial at night never quite sure what you were going to hear; the swish of static, the heterodyne of mixing stations, the clear channel trans-continental stations that used to be king.
Times have obviously changed. Media has been concentrated and centralized. Regional and local voices have faded… but not entirely. It is as if there are corporate forces at work to take away individuality and freedom… of choice. Just the other morning I was turning across a portion of the dial and I was hearing the same program every 10khz (in radio world, an individual channel)
Coast to coast AM as it is called is a program on a chain of broadcasters (I think owned by Clear Channel). It sounds to me like a faceless and homogeneous drone of, well, nothing of merit.
Fast forward to 2007. For the last couple of years (in the U.S.A.) a corporation called Ibiquity has been pushing High Definition radio – or HD for short. HD AM and HD FM.
High definition AM. Isn’t that a natural oxymoron?
Anyway. Long story short. AM HD is a hybrid of technologies. Standard old analog AM transmitting techniques exist alongside digital sub-carriers. Problem is, the standard channel separation of 10khz on the AM band becomes unworkable with this format. A station running AM-HD on, say, 810 khz generates interference from 790khz to 830khz! In days of old, interference was limited to about 5 to 7 khz from the center channel, not 25khz!
What this means for smaller stations (in the U.S.) is that their reach or range is diminished by co-channel interference.
If you are a Canadian or Mexican border station trying to serve a rural market, your signal could be crushed or diminished by the U.S. based noise makers. Acceptable? I think not.
What to do?
If you are an American who enjoys long distance or rural AM reception and are getting buzzed make sure you write the station and any stations that are getting slammed.
If you are in Canada, send an e-mail to Industry Canada or the CRTC. Trust me, they do listen.
You will hear more from me on this issue.
It is about radio sovereignty. It is about freedom of choice. It is about a free and accessible media. Radio is one of the last free domains of expression that is open to anyone. Do not let a single corporation take that away.
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