the digital quill

This is a short audio piece with Concordia urban planning professor John Zacharias about the ups and downs of Cite Multimedia.

Listen to CiteM.

The Script for CiteM

NATURAL SOUND.

JG: Your standing at the corner of Wellington and King, the heart of the Cite Multimedia.

Its lunch time, the birds are out, few other people are.

Built at the intersection of Old Montreal, the Financial District and the St. Henri borough, the Cite was supposed to build a new hub for the information economy in Montreal. Well, that was the plan in 1998. The reality in 2010 has been quite different.

JZ: This Cite Multimedia has been quite successful in terms of the total investments that have happened there and the fact that it has really become multipurpose, so that their is housing going in along with the housing activities. However, some really big players escaped and they are nowhere to be seen near the Cite Multimedia.

JG: According to Concordia urban planning professor John Zacharias, the biggest those escapees was the game studio Ubisoft.

Although the city of Montreal and province of Quebec sold the Cite where business could be close to each other and meet, this, according to Zacharias, wasn’t enough for the 2000-strong works of Ubisoft Montreal.

JZ: Some of these large companies don’t need the kind of face-to-face interaction that goes on down there and I gather that their is a lot of face-to-face interaction down there.

NATURAL SOUND.

JG: This is the scene outside of Ubisoft Montreal’s building, lots of meetings are going on. Just few of them with other businessmen.

But with the Cite hovering at a 60 per cent vacancy rate, what’s in its future?

JZ: Some of this is branding space and saying this is where are software activities are, its very top-down and it seems to me that we gave up on—I’ll tell you what I think. I think the city needs to create more multipurpose areas that aren’t branded and let what happens, happen.

Its on days like this that I wonder, “Why did I choose journalism as my path in life?”

It seems that every truism I built over the past three years about Journalism has fallen since January. First: paywalls don’t work. On Jan. 26 I wrote about how, in fact, they do. 0-1 Second: layout will save print editions. 0-1 On Jan. 12 I discovered that flashy Blogozines are snappier, more informative and funner to read. 0-2 Now I have found number three, and its a bombshell: writing won’t save us.

Just the other day I convinced a friend to stay in journalism because, I cleared my throat and balanced on the balls of my feet, “there will always be work for someone with good writing, it sets us apart.” Wrong, wrote Robert Niles, in his piece “Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists.” Niles’ argument is based on one main point, people are writing more than ever. I never saw my father write anywhere than his checkbook until about a year ago when he took up on the game of hunt-and-peck typing on his laptop. He is not alone. With people writing texts, emails, instant messages, blogs, etc., writing has now become a tool of the masses.

In the future, when journalists are writing for a new hyperliterate population—where “going to school to major in writing and shooting stories will become like going to school to learn breathing. What’s the point? It’s a ubiquitous activity that everyone learns on his or her own long before college,” wrote Niles—will be a real challenge. The line between citizen and journalist is already fuzzy enough, will it exist at all when everyone is walking around with writing skills, a high quality camera/video and a means of publication? My guess is yes, but the size of the journalistic corp. will be tiny.

I would argue that the writing Niles is predicting isn’t very good writing—SMS pigeon and email text is embarrassing, not the stuff that can be printed. But the numbers of people who are printable will be much increased, I agree. This all seems to add more power to the revolution that is gripping journalism. Niles argues that the stenographic model of journalism must die, no complaints here, I’ll donate a plank of wood or two if you need. But that’s what sets a writer apart from someone who is writing: a writer hates being a stenographer.

One of Niles’ most interesting propositions is that the skill set taught to journalists—move beyond the inverted pyramid and 35-word led guys—must be shaken up and it must start in j-school. Journalists must be taught analytical skills (tell all those hyperliterate people how to think, they are too busy to do so themselves), must be more creative (able to shoot photos and write colour), and must be able to tear apart a balance sheet (statistics and math, still considered the weakest point of incoming j-schoolers). As Niles’ admits, this would mean a lot less candidates making it pass the application process and into the country’s j-schools. I could tell you about my feels about j-schools and how they prepare students—I’ve met them from every j-school in the country—but thats another 1,000 words.

The reason for it made sense. The city of Montreal and province of Quebec would encourage the “new economy” of well-paying, high-technology jobs by providing shining new glass and steel complexes where those jobs could be established and flourish.

“This policy, we were told, would revitalize whole urban sections and create a high level of synergies between businesses in the same field,” wrote Michel Kelly-Gagnon for the Montreal Economic Institute. “No other government in Quebec has ever tried to tie taxation and the geographic concentration of industry together.”

The thinking was solid. Geographical concentration of industry is a natural urban phenomenon in cities around the world—look at New York’s diamond district or Hollywood—where business cluster close to each other to more easily share ideas and cut down on transaction costs.

However, without looking at results anywhere else in the world or undertaking a study of what businesses were looking for in Montreal, the government dove in—first with the Cité du commerce électronique de Montreal and later with the Cité Multimédia.

The results were nothing short of a disaster according to the MEI.

“There is nothing to let us believe that these ‘industrial cities’ will ever be profitable for Quebec’s taxpayers or would ever function as an effective tool of industrial development,” Kelly-Gagnon continued. “The main victim of this program, ironically, will be the government of Quebec itself.”

Completed in 2003, the two tower Cité du commerce électronique—originally planned for six towers and the destruction of the historic Guaranteed Pure Milk Company office and its famous milk bottle—was built in downtown Montreal’s west end: Rene Levesque Boulevard and Lucien L’Allier street.

The Cité first made the news when the Parti Québécois government of Bernard Landry forced emerging tech businesses to move to the new building to be eligible for provincial tax credits.

“The owners of several old buildings at affordable rents suffered the full repercussions of this policy,” wrote Kelly-Gagnon. “Many young companies, who do not have many resources, occupy such old buildings and contribute to their renewal. The also revitalize the surrounding neighbourhoods.

“Unfortunately, subsidies [for the Cité] have caused a drain. The creation of the Cité has also led to the postponement of several construction projects for office buildings in other areas of the city that cannot compete with subsidized rents,” Kelly-Gagnon continued.

As a government-subsidized glass office tower, the Cité has been a success. However that is not why the building was erected. It was built to boost the city’s tech industry and bring about a transformation of the downtown’s bruised west end. In that role, it has failed.

What the city of Montreal slowly learned was that emerging tech businesses don’t seek to establish themselves in conformist glass towers, they are bastions of creativity and often seek like-minded individuals.

Ubisoft Montreal, one of North America’s largest video game studios, choose in 1997 that the two planned Cités were not where it wanted to be, instead the studio moved its operation to St-Laurent Boulevard in the Mile-End neighbourhood of Montreal. In a restored red brick building at the intersection with St-Viateur Street West, the 1,400 person studio is an anchor of the local community.

“The Montreal studio is surprisingly open, airy and bright, with the internal design making the most of the building’s architecture, featuring exposed beams, brick, and, by necessity, realms of data cables webbing the ceiling in remarkable order,” wrote Mathew Kumar in a feature with Gamasutra.

Even if the Ubisoft studio were to disappear, the Mile-End neighbourhood is resilient enough to deflect the impact. Within a short walk of the studio are island-wide staples like St-Viateur Bagel, Café Olympico and a dozen thriving local businesses.

Despite its failure to attract Ubisoft to the Cité du commerce électronique de Montreal, the city and province embarked on a grander program of what could be termed urban Astroturf: the Cité Multimédia.

“Since the mid-nineties, Montréal’s southern gate has experienced a renaissance starting with the dot-com boom resulting in the conversion of many of the old industrial spaces into lofts, studios and offices for high-tech companies,” wrote Owen Rose in Urbanphoto in 2007.

In an area known as the Faubourg des Récollets, the city of Montreal embarked on an ambitious eight-stage program to gentrify the entire neighbourhood. Aimed at gathering high tech firms that were scattered across the island, the Cité Multimédia has become a destination for lawyers and notaries, the only people able to afford the area’s artificially high rents.

Now under development for over a decade, the Cité Multimédia’s website is still under construction—a telling sign of the entire project. With a 60 per cent vacancy rate, the project’s success is not assured. If companies that are slowly heading towards a natural concentration cannot be convinced to move to where the city wants them, Cité Multimédia could very well fail like Cité du commerce électronique before it.

This is my second nod to The Globe and Mail, perhaps because I get the paper delivered I might be a bit of a fan boy—in reality I think I’m a harsh critic of  the often rushed product they put out—but The Globe’s web feature on Canada’s 2010 Federal Budget deserves some attention. However, CNN’s emerging series, The Stimulus Project, deserves an honorable mention and perhaps future treatment. Two other pieces by The New York Times, Women at War and Toxic Waters also show the wealth of information and interactivity that proper online journalism is capable of.

The federal budget tabled by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on March 4 is expected to set the fiscal tone in Ottawa for the next half decade, as the country attempts to dig itself out of deficit. On the following day The Globe ran a short two page feature and an additional news story—by comparison La Presse’s coverage ran nearly 12 pages—however its online content forgives its flimsy paper coverage.

From a well teased landing page, The Globe’s standard online style works well to entice readers to keep heading down the page—the online content was also teased in the paper, a bonus. The page’s first package links to a hard news story, an analysis, a human interest story and a copy of Flaherty’s speech. Heading down the page, nearly 23 stories ranging from hard news, to opinions to features covers nearly every conceivable angle that a budget could be covered from.

Interactive timeline: teased in the paper’s print version—obviously an editor played with this an saw how cool it was—The Globe’s 10-year timeline, from 2000 to 2011, allows people to drag a slider and see two doughnut graphs (representing that year’s spending and revenue) change correspondingly. The major sources of each chunk of the doughnut graph can then be taken out to examine more closely. A written overview and highlight of each year’s budget is also presented. The interactive timeline could provide hours of entertainment, literally for a public policy geek like me. People might be surprised to see the evolution of surpluses and deficits, or the growth of government spending: from $158 to $280 billion in a decade!

A humanizing story, Canadians speak on taxes, deficits and the budget, looks at the budget’s impact on the lives of four people. The piece is fun and well written, however its layout is limited by the size of screens. “I’m kind of conservative-minded. I think it’s more important to cut the deficit. You can’t run an economy where the deficit is growing. You live within your means, and you get used to it,” from Edmonton, Akinwunmi Ige. The PM could not have said it better himelf.

As with many of the online features available, the stumbling block is that most of the content is shovelware. Stories need to be digested and laid out better with a web platform in mind, more stories like the interactive feature are required and less like the four person view on the deficit. This feature’s two videos and half a dozen commentary pieces are getting closer to what the internet needs. Score: 4/5.

I have spent most of my past posts looking into the future of print journalism—the death of the newspaper being a daily obsession of the media—but what of the broadcast media? While the press is responsible for much of the daily news that informs people of the goings on in society, the broadcast media—more TV than radio—can provide the images and documentaries that sway public opinion and colour in the world for entire nations.

But in the Internet Age, where cameras are cheap and bandwidth is cheaper, anyone can pick up a camera and make a documentary. Or at least that is the fear. TV news broadcasts have suffered nearly as badly as newspapers have among the young—for a generation used to up-to-the-second Twitter feeds, streams and Torrents, the idea of waiting until 11 pm is not only foreign, it is insane.

According to The New York Times, broadcast news is at a crossroads with ABC news preparing itself to lose a quarter of its newsroom within the next month or two. Put simply, ad revenue is down and ABC is in a lot of trouble—NBC and CBS aren’t doing much better, and if the CBC shakeup in Canada is any indication, ratings are hurting as much north of the border as they are south of it.

In a bid to save itself, ABC News has released a plan for its digital future. Unlike the current broadcast setup where a truck transports a reporter, a producer, a cameraman and any other members of the crew to a scene to report the news, ABC is taking a page out of university papers/blogs and is reducing news down to teams of one and two who use a small hand held camera and laptops. The Los Angeles Times described the package that these new teams would produce as, “Stories shot with hand-held digital cameras often have a personal, rough-hewn quality familiar to a generation raised on amateur Web videos, and can lack the polished production values that mark network news.”

It is that point that is worrying some journalists. By trading in producers and the current set up where reporters can concentrate on asking the right questions and taking in the scene, they will now need to be the producer and in many cases the sound man, the camera man, the driver, the local fixer and the journalist. The question is: will the money saved make up for the loss of quality.

An interesting thing I learned while interning at CBC Radio was that today’s young adults are willing to accept sound quality that is less than half as good as their parents. Where reporters once lugged heavy equipment into the field to get the best broadcast quality, many are now scaling their efforts back. Used to cellphones, illegal MP3s and Torrents, young people simply don’t notice when sound quality is low. Used to homemade web videos, they might not notice when the quality of their broadcast news also falls. The line between high-quality television and Youtube will never be as clear again.

To further my planned v. unplanned project for Montreal, discussed in story post 1 below, I have compiled a dozen people or documents I want to consult.

Secondary Sources—pure digested data:

1/ Owen Roses’s post in urbanphoto about the emerging Cite Multimedia—a massive city-supported gentrification scheme in what was once the Faubourg des Récollets.
2/ Canadian Architect’s piece, Strategic Urbanism, that raves about the success of Cite Multimedia and raves that the vacancy rate will fall—seven years later it hasn’t.
3/ The Montreal Economic Institute’s piece, Les cités industrielles, une politique discutable, looking at the reasoning behind Cite Multimedia and Cite du commerce électronique.

Primary Sources—data without the digestion:

4/ The Cite du commerce électronique’s website.
5/ An interview with Ubisoft Montreal’s Yannis Mallat.
6/ Groupe Cardinal Hardy’s website on Cite Multimedia—this is the firm responsible for the project.

Interview Sources—gabbin’ & talk

7/ John Norquist, the president and CEO for the Congress on New Urbanism—always good for a comment in the past, I would talk over the phone about the ideas that guided the development of Cite Multimedia and the success of the Ubi Soft Montreal office.
8/John Zacharias, Concordia’s expert on walkable urban areas, Mr. Zacharias has yet to be contacted, but I would like to walk with him through the three target areas and record his reactions.
9/ Christopher De Wolf, a Spacing Montreal and urbanphoto contributor/editor who has had a keen eye towards the three areas—not yet contacted, I expect a sit down interview or walk.

Mystery Sources—who might they be?

10/ Someone from Groupe Cardinal Hardy—they can give me the inside on what they were thinking during the project’s planning phase.
11/ A streeter, does the common person notice or care about the type of city around them?
12/ Soneone from the city of Montreal—probably Darren Beker—who can run me through the city’s thinking on all matters planned v. unplanned.

I delivered a Pecha Kucha on my final project, a comparison of Montreal’s planned and unplanned cityscape, on Feb. 16—the presentation is available on slideshare. This is the gist of what I had to say:

If Montreal is going to thrive and meet its goal of being a cultural metropolis by 2017, it will need to realize what it is doing wrong with its cityscape, namely trying to segment and micromanage the city’s growth through a series of designated “cité” and “quartier.”

Look at the Cité du commerce électronique built near Concordia’s downtown campus. The city of Montreal attempted to attract high-tech businesses by building a complex of six glass towers (only two were completed). When many high-tech businesses refused to move into the drab and isolated buildings, the city and the province fought with them, threatening to hold back tax incentives—a great way to encourage the high-tech sector has always been to punish it. What happened? Ubisoft moved into the Mile End and the rest of the city’s high-tech sector followed it into the city’s trendy neighbourhoods.

Why the Mile End? Well, my guess is coffee. Ubisoft needs to hold meetings with ads people and hold staff meetings outside the office, at the Cité it would be surrounded with Cafe Depot and Starbuck’s full of Concordia students. In the Mile End it can walk to blocks to Cafe Olympico, a wonderful cafe. The Mile End is trendy for Ubisoft for the same reason it is trendy for everyone else, its a great place to work, live and play.

Montreal did not learn from the Cité disaster and moved into project two: Cité Multimédia—look at Chris DeWolf’s post at Urbanphoto to understand the neighbourhood. Cité Multimédia is a government supported plan to hyper-gentrify an area to bring in entertainment and new media jobs. What they are trying to do is build a Mile End in the South of the city. Its astroturf. An entire neighbourhood that reeks of being a fake. Instead of catering to new media entrepreneurs, who can’t afford the high rents and wouldn’t want to work there anyways, Cité Multimédia is home to vacant offices, notaries and lawyers.

Don’t get me started on Quartier Concordia, Quartier des Spectacles, Quartier Bonaventure, Quartier International, Quartier du Musée and the Cité du Havre. Montreal has a problem.