As head of the online department at Box TV (Channel 4/Bauer Media), I oversaw the launch and updates of 4music.com and its mobile site. I also launched our presences on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the editorial side of 4Music's YouTube channel. In addition to overseeing the day-to-day editorial upkeep of the daily entertainment news site, I also managed relationships and outreach to PRs, record labels, film companies and brand partners like Apple, Spotify, KFC and Everything Everywhere.
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Taylor Swift is exactly how you imagine she'd be: really friendly. She looks just as great in person as she does in magazines, her blonde curls highlighting her striking eyes. As soon as I meet her at the fancy hotel she's staying in, she gets up from a regal chair and dainty cup of herbal tea and says, "I like your glasses, those are awesome! Do you have bad eyes or do you wear them for style?" With tremendous success comes a price, but Zadie Smith is realistic about paying it
She’s 30 years old, has already published three international bestsellers, taught a class at Harvard and wants you to know that it’s not “a race to the finish line of death”. Zadie Smith is poised, sharp and conventionally beautiful with a simultaneously soft and angular face. She wears a brown headscarf, a brown trench and a wooden bracelet. She tells the crowd at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA) that she doesn’t like to be a young celebrity (in her native England, Smith is followed and photographed like a certified famous person) and likes America because, “Nobody bothered me in America, that was nice. America is too big a country for writers, they have actors.” Fame has definitely changed Smith’s life – she says that instead of living most of her life, she was reading. And reading and reading. “If I had to make a choice between reading and writing, I would give up writing,” Smith says, “it would be a desperate life to not read at all.” Smith spends a good amount of time on book tours, travelling around the world. Though she says, as soon as she gets anywhere, she makes sure to make it as much like her native North London, England as possible – and sets up her hotel room so that she can immediately settle in to start reading. At a reading at the IFOA, Smith’s reads with three other young notable authors, one of which is her husband Nick Laird. Her performance receives the most applause out of her group, though Laird comes considerably close. He is known to be a bit sensitive about his wife’s fame, especially uncomfortable when people refer to him as “Mr. Zadie Smith” – it happens. After the reading, as Smith attends to a line-up of tens of people clutching her books and waiting for autographs, Laird waits at the bar. Geoffrey Taylor, IFOA director, swears that Smith wasn’t given any special consideration. Smith did go on last, but he says, “We just used alphabetical order.” As an afterthought, he mentions, “Sometimes we do reverse chronological order if we need to, though.” Smith’s career started when she was still studying at the University of Cambridge. She wrote White Teeth (2000), her first book, while in her early twenties (it came out when she was 25). After graduating, her sophomore attempt, The Autograph Man (2002) was met with less acclaim than White Teeth, but it still ended up in the hands of readers across the world. After that, Smith took a fellowship at Harvard, where she taught, worked on a non-fiction book on writing, and got working on her latest book, On Beauty, which she is now promoting after it was released in September. The day after reading to an audience of pleased fans, Smith appears at an interview with Rebecca Caldwell, again at the IFOA. Not surprisingly, On Beauty deals with American academia and its nuances. The main characters in On Beauty are of mixed decent, a constant quality of all Smith’s books. The reading was met with a great response and her fans are still enthusiastic. “I wanted to write about how it feels to be taught,” Smith tells the IFOA audience. She mentions that although she doesn’t feel much for the characters she’s written after she finishes a book, she identifies with Kiki, one of On Beauty’s main characters. “Kiki is the only character that I could talk about – I can sort of imagine what happens to her after the book ends.” The audience at the interview is almost as diverse as one of Smith’s novels – people of all races show up, as well as a good mix of young, old and in between. Smith, unlike the other authors she read with the night before, did not speak before or after her reading. She simply stepped to the podium, read her bit and hurried offstage when she was done. The author is known for hating to be in the public eye and hating to speak with reporters. When Caldwell asks her about her reluctance to speak to the press, Smith says, “I would never stand by anything I say in an interview, I only stand by my fiction. If anyone wants, they can come up here and do my interview for me.” Smith makes earnest jokes and handles the questions asked of her frankly. One man in his fifties sticks his hand up right away when the audience is given the chance to ask questions. “I notice that you’re quite attractive,” he says to a sea of giggles, “I wonder, would your books be any different if you were frumpy?” “I have to inform you,” Smith starts sharply, “that in 2000 I was 80 pounds heavier. I was very frumpy. So they wouldn’t be different. You know, Paul Auster is a good-looking man – would you ask him these questions?” Her answer is met with much applause. Zadie Smith read at the International Festival of Authors. For future readings and schedules, visit http://www.readings.org. Originally appeared on bravo.ca Mary Lou Finlay and CBC have broken up and made up more times than she can recount. Still, she "couldn't imagine leaving." Then again, you never know
by Nicolle Weeks It's a crisp and sunny Sunday afternoon and I'm standing inside the sparse lobby at the University of Toronto's Innis College. I'm looking for Mary Lou Finlay in a crowd of about 30 people. I don't see the face I've memorized from a small, frosted picture on CBC's website. But I do hear a familiar voice — that low and throaty voice — booming in the hall. Eventually, Finlay materializes from behind a large brick column. With her grey hair set in curls and wire-rimmed glasses resting on her nose, she looks nothing like her website picture. But she sounds everything like the voice of As It Happens, the CBC current-affairs radio program she's hosted for the past seven-and-a-half years. Finlay shouldn't be that hard to pick out in a crowd. Over the past 30 years, she has hosted a number of TV programs — from her first national job in the 1970s at CBC's afternoon lifestyle show, Take 30, to The Journal, the network's pioneering television current-affairs program that she co-anchored with Barbara Frum in its early years. She also spent three years at CTV's Live It Up! in the late 1970s and has a long history as host on CBC radio. Along the way, she's earned a reputation as one of Canada's most talented interviewers. With a resume like that, I'd think her face would be more familiar, like Frum's or Peter Gzowski's. But Finlay never took her turn in the limelight, partly because she has deliberately kept a low profile and rarely given interviews. Being Canadian and a journalist makes her more of pseudo-celebrity than the real deal — a point she herself is quick to raise. To read the rest of the article, go to: rrj.ca Vice founder Gavin McInnes on his notorious do's and don'ts and more
by Nicolle Weeks To look at him, you wouldn't know Gavin McInnes is the wealthy head of a "multinational brand." You might mistake him for an average thirtysomething, though — one whose earlier indiscretions are responsible for a few too many trips to the tattoo parlour. Last year, at a book reading in Chicago, he appeared on stage wearing only what looked to be shit-stained tighty whities and, later, a cartoonish turban and Osama bin Laden T-shirt. McInnes was in Chicago to promote Dos and Don'ts, a collection he wrote over the 10 years Vice magazine has been in existence. Vice, a magazine that started in Montreal as a free newsletter called Voice, was originally funded by a Quebec make work program for welfare recipients. Now, ten years later, it's a successful international giveaway magazine based in New York, running everything from fashion boutiques to a record company. Vice is supposed to be subversive and, above all, anti-boomer. As McInnes put it in an interview with the CBC last year, boomers "made us leave our homeland." It is Vice's nature to be controversial — without it, the magazine couldn't survive. Though McInnes, and co-founders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, are often criticized by leftists, conservatives, and hipster New Yorkers, the consensus is that Vice gives an accurate account of counterculture. But it's not necessarily the kind of counterculture many people are familiar with. In August 2003, McInnes wrote a column in The American Conservative, a magazine run by Pat Buchanan. In the magazine, he called young people a bunch of knee-jerk liberals (a phrase McInnes and his cronies use often) who'll believe anyone with dark skin over anyone with light skin. He laments the liberal views of most of the people who pick up his magazine, saying they're "brainwashed by communist propaganda." "The AmCon article was about jolting our readers out of their blind obsession with everything left," McInnes wrote me in an email sent from his Costa Rica home. "The right has a lot of valuable lessons that we can glean." The New York Times wasn't impressed by McInnes's gleanings. It labelled him a white supremacist (he tells me, "I'm proud of being white, but I'm not a white supremacist"). Critics of the magazine loudly denounced Vice and its sardonic wit. Readers started questioning the scathing comments about the homeless, blacks, women, and others in the Dos and Don'ts section of Vice, which McInnes regularly authors. Everyone is fair game in Dos and Don'ts. One blurb underneath a group of boys giving the finger reads: "Look at these fucking douchebags. What are they, Armenian Ginos? Fuckin' grown men who want you to know that status is about holding large bottles of expensive vodka that they won't actually drink, dressing like Lil' Bow Wow if he was a Mediterranean homo and telling society to fuck off. They look like Ali G teenagers in a line up of rape suspects. No wonder we're at war with them." About a month after the AmCon column was printed, McInnes wrote a letter to Gawker.com, a media gossip website that published criticism of Vice. The letter denied the authenticity of the American Conservative letter, stating that it was the fact-checker's fault for not doing enough research: "I did it for a laugh. ?In the AmCon piece I made totally bullshit claims.... Any of these things could have been easily disproven, but everyone from The New York Post to Newsweek ran with them. Shocking really. I guess it's time to switch to a new gag. "?I am sure there will still be some skeptics out there that will ignore the AmCon untruths I just clearly spelled out and will still think I'm just backpedaling [sic]..." When I contacted McInnes, I'd been warned by Dave Fielding, who wrote a feature on Vice for the Ryerson Review of Journalism in 2001, to watch out for being lied to. Obviously, this was a concern, as McInnes's letter to Gawker states, "I've made a full time job out of antagonizing the media." If you look at Vice's recent "Worst Issue Ever," it acerbically pokes fun at North America's preoccupation with celebrity culture. (Some unlucky readers, later called "FUCKING idiots" by Vice editor-in-chief Jesse Pearson, were upset that Vice had sold out.) "I have a lot to say about that [Gawker] letter. I feel kind of bad about it. Truth is, I was scared," says McInnes, "Shane and Suroosh were really pissed at me for talking about white pride to the NYT and I backpedalled." To sum up, McInnes writes about his "new" conservative views, then denies them in a letter sent to a website his readers are likely to read (it's the No. 1 hit when you Google "McInnes"), then tells me he was "scared." McInnes tells me he uses loaded words for comedic purposes: "People say, 'You might write the word nigger but you'd never walk up to a black man and call him that.' True, but I don't walk up to old ladies and scream CUNT in their faces either. It's called swearing — get over it." When I ask him about the gay bashing in Dos and Don'ts, he calls me a "Canadian LUG" (lesbian until graduation). It throws me for a loop and is amusing in a stupid way — which is part of McInnes's appeal. This odd kind of inclusiveness extends to Vice's fashion coverage as well. Looking through back issues, a distinct phenomenon is noticeable: the magazine doesn't use regular models, but rather ethnically diverse, regular-looking, and elderly people. For all the feel-good-about-yourself mumbo jumbo most women's magazines dish out, they generally use stick-thin fashion models of a certain age and, usually, ethnicity. Vice, in its goofy way of mocking political correctness, backhandedly redeems itself in the eyes of conscientious readers by saying, "Hey, we just called you [insert racial slur here], but you're represented in our magazine." Originally, McInnes didn't possess the qualities of the people he lauds in Dos and Don'ts. He stumbled upon this new version of cool — not by dumb luck or a twist of fate ("How did two drunks and a junkie come to own one of the most successful magazines in America," as the Vice founders like to quip) — but through a welfare scam and shrewd business sense. He made some money, bought some hip clothes, "flew some chicks in," and built a moat of coolness around him. Lo and behold! Thus reborn, here was the self-made guy columnists could gush over — in a cerebral, ironic way, of course. Vice doesn't hesitate to post positive commentary about itself from such sources as Nylon, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone — exactly the type of magazines they poke fun at in the "Worst Issue Ever." Being called a LUG might be amusing in a stupid kind of way, but still, it bothers me that McInnes is so quick to resort to gay-bashing humour. He emailed me to explain, saying, "For better or for worse, 'gay' references are an integral part of good comedy." I asked if he uses words like "homo" and "fag" as fallback gags when he can't think of anything clever to write. "The only group that gets shit on is the poor. It's all about class. Not race or sexual preference," McInnes wrote, sending a link to The Redneck Manifesto, a book by Jim Goad, which laments the unfairness that burdens the white lower class. McInnes continues, saying, "All this PC fascism has made it very difficult to do normal, uncensored humor (funny humor). Maybe that's why our writing seems so blatantly racist, homophobic, etc. If this was 1978 we would sound mundane. I kind of like that. "When I said to Bill McGowan, 'There's so much funny and interesting shit out there people are scared to go near it's like our job has become too easy,' he replied with, 'Carpe Diem. It's a great time to be a journalist.'" While McInnes makes some fair points — a lot of liberals admittedly get their information from shallow sources like the internet, most of celebrities are lame and detached from real life, and North America is strangely "politically correct" though it hates on the same people it's out to "protect" — his flippant racism and homophobia doesn't really inspire change. So what's the point? Maybe the point is that there isn't one. Originally published on rrj.ca |
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