Earth faces sixth extinction-level event, scientists say, while the mass media, as we know it, faces its first, according to the fossil record compiled by today’s advertisers and readers/viewers

A research article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science last June 19 by scientists Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer from Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities in the United States suggests that the world has begun a sixth extinction-level event, this one driven primarily by humankind. Mind you Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, should have had us pretty much extinct by now anyway, had it come to pass, so who knows?

Meanwhile, as scientists pronounce on the likelihood of a sixth mass extinction for the Earth  – to wit, the Holocene extinction, advertisers and readers are delivering a similar message, or so it seems, to what’s left of the incredibly shrinking mass media manufacturers, which are in some ways today’s equivalent to yesterday’s buggy whip, typewriter and video store retailers. Blockbuster, we hardly knew you.

As for so-called “digital disruption,” well, it’s not just digital disrupting the heirs of Gutenberg these days, and it’s no longer just a disruption. Can you say ad blockers and mobile platform-of-the day?

Back around the dawn of the 21st century, when newspapers still had a few new millennium choices or even just good bets that might have ensured their survival on some sizeable scale, there was talk about the theory of disruptive innovation invented by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School.

The “innovator’s dilemma” for print media newspapers was the difficult choice they faced sometime between the mid-1990s and the 2000 Millennium (it really was in retrospect, with the benefit now of uncorrected 20/20 hindsight, a much narrower window of about five years, give or take, than publishers realized before they were left behind forever) in choosing between trying to hold onto readers in their existing market by doing the same thing a bit better (the Glacier Media-owned Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, for instance, went online with the same content only slightly repackaged from their print editions in June 2009, about a dozen or more years after most larger Canadian daily newspapers did pretty much the same thing) or capturing new markets by embracing and adapting to new technologies and adopting new business models.

Where are we today, 16 years post-millennium?

Consider these three exhibits, if you will.

Exhibit 1: Jeff Gaulin graduated from journalism school at the University of Western Ontario in 1995. He started Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board that same year as an online employment service to help his classmates find work after graduation. His job board quickly became the go-to online job board for new journalism graduates across Canada looking for their first job and to a lesser but not insignificant extent also became an important resource for even experienced journalists looking to switch jobs. I landed four newspaper jobs off it myself in a six-year period between 2001 and 2007.

Before Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board came on the scene, aspiring journalism job applicants, believe it or not, often sent out resumes hit-or-miss over the transom in 9 x 12 brown envelopes, which also contained their “clips.” As terribly inefficient and labour intensive as that was, it actually worked. At least sometimes. I landed at least a couple of my early daily newspaper jobs in the 1980s that way.

I also interviewed a fair number of job candidates between 2004 and 2013, as a result of Jeff’s job board, and was involved in hiring a number of them as reporters. As recently as several years ago, it wasn’t unusual to see 60 to 70 print jobs advertised on any given day, although the number fluctuated, and dropped briefly but dramatically in 2008-09, during the Great Recession, before rebounding.

As of noon today, there were just eight print media jobs from coast-to-coast listed on Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board. Eight. And if you think things might be better on the digital side in Jeff’s “new media” section, think again. It has four – half as many – jobs advertised as the “print” section.

Exhibit 2? RBC Dominion Securities just cut its price target on Postmedia Network Canada Corp., publisher of the National Post and proprietor of Canada’s largest newspaper chain and various digital media properties, to zero from $0.50.

Zero. As in zero-sum game.

Exhibit 3:

Mass extinction, niche survival.

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Louis Riel: 21st century hero to the Métis of Manitoba; Rogers Hometown Hockey tour set to roll into Thompson, Manitoba’s hockey hotbed

Louis Riel, the Métis leader hanged for high treason on Nov. 16, 1885 at Regina, was the driving force behind Manitoba becoming Canada’s fifth province and is thought of by many as to be the “Father of Manitoba,” the only Canadian province born in blood. Does that history matter today and what legacy has it left Manitobans? “Welcome to Winnipeg: Where Canada’s racism problem is at its worst,” Maclean’s, Canada’s national magazine, headlined its lead story Jan. 22.

Not all Manitobans, of course, share that view of Riel as victim of colonial racism by any means. But history has a way of refining our judgments and dampening or softening excessive passions. Thus, the 19th century’s traitor can be reasonably seen as the 21st century’s hero as we take a longer and more inclusive view of our collective history.

Up here in Thompson we apparently don’t have a race problem, although a regular-season hockey game last Sunday between the Thompson King Miner Midget “AA” and the Norway House North Stars was ended by officials with Thompson leading 4-2 with 8:53 left in the second period when the North Stars, who had already had a player and coach ejected, left the ice following an altercation between their goaltender and a Thompson player at the same time that a scuffle erupted in the stands, soon leading to a parade of RCMP officers in their cruisers escorting players from both teams safely out of the C.A. Nesbitt Arena at the Thompson Regional Community Centre (TRCC), after racial slurs may or may not have been uttered whiles moms and dads scrapped in the stands with their counterparts from the opposing team. Older guys in Thompson remembered decades ago similar incidents where they said they had to be escorted out of places like Norway House or Cross Lake in similar circumstances. Seventeen-year-old King Miner right winger Lucas Hanlon apparently self-identified himself as Métis to the Winnipeg-based Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN) in making two points: he didn’t think the Feb, 8 fracas in Thompson was about race, and, in any event, there are a lot of aboriginal players on the Thompson team.

Thompson is atop of the midget AA league standings, with a 13-4-3 record for 29 points, the same as the second-place The Pas Huskies, who have played one more game than Thompson. The King Miner’s next scheduled game is tomorrow when they are due to play the Split Lake Eagles in Split Lake.

 “I am a Metis player myself,” Hanlon reportedly told APTN “We have a lot of aboriginal players on our team,” he said. “We have just as many people with aboriginal roots in our community as anywhere else.”

Hanlon said he didn’t hear any racial taunts hurled at the Norway House players. He said the Norway House fans called him “white trash.” He said racial slurs are hurled by both sides during games. “You get kind of used it from playing against those teams for so long. It happens both ways. I personally don’t because I come from both backgrounds,” he said.

A player for the Norway House North Stars team and two parents told APTN National News Feb. 10 that some “Thompson fans hurled racial epitaphs at the Norway House team.” They also said one player was confronted by three Thompson fans, two men and a woman, who used racial slurs, and claimed one Norway House player had his helmet cracked by a slash to the head.

Hanlon told APTN he “didn’t see anyone get slashed in the head with enough force to crack a helmet: that’s reassuring. However, he was very likely on to something – something that really matters to Thompson residents, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, when Hanlon said many in the “Thompson hockey community are now worried the planned Rogers Hometown Hockey tour stop scheduled for the community on March 7 and 8 may be scuttled because of the bad press stemming from the weekend’s incident.” It was announced last September that Ron MacLean, who has played straight man to Don Cherry on Coach’s Corner for years, will be here in 3½  weeks as part of the Rogers Hometown Hockey Tour, presented by Dodge and Scotiabank, for a weekend of hockey festivities and to host a pre-game show followed by a viewing party for a March 8 Calgary Flames-Ottawa Senators game that will be broadcast across the country.

The tour, which began last Oct. 11-12 in London, Ont., is criss-crossing Canada, stopping in Manitoba three times – it was in Selkirk for its second broadcast and in Brandon last Nov. 30 – before making the late-season trip to Thompson.

Other activities leading up to the weekend-capping broadcast will include meet-and-greet sessions with NHL alumni and local hockey heroes, a Hockey Night in Canada viewing party, a KidZone with hockey-themed activities, skills and drills competitions and live performances by local musicians, as well as ticket and merchandise giveaways.

MacLean will host a half-hour pre-game show live from the Sportsnet Mobile Studio in Thompson prior to the broadcast, and will also make appearances in intermission and post-game shows. Included on the broadcast will be interviews with local guests and grassroots hockey stories.

Should Thompson residents be worried about bad press press from the Thompson King Miner Midget “AA” and Norway House North Stars game Feb. 8 jinxing the arrival of the Rogers Hometown Hockey tour March 7? Probably not, even given the fact there are a couple of inconvenient stories from APTN now circulating on television and online, including, “Manitoba RCMP escorted First Nation hockey team from rink after game took racial turn” at http://aptn.ca/news/2015/02/10/manitoba-rcmp-escorted-first-nation-hockey-team-rink-game-took-racial-turn/ and “Metis player disputes race played role in Manitoba hockey fracas” at http://aptn.ca/news/2015/02/11/metis-player-disputes-race-played-role-thompson-man-hockey-fracas/

But long before APTN broke its two stories, Tuesday, 48 hours after the game was over, there already had been hundreds of comments and a number of photos on the emerging story on social media, mainly Facebook, by Sunday at 7 p.m., just hours after the melee at the hockey game. “Facebook,” as former Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News columnist Donna Wilson, who is now the general manager of Thompson’s Quality Inn & Suites on Moak Crescent, but who also still writes for the paper occasionally, has observed many times since 2010, “is how Thompson gets its news.”

RCMP also seized video of the game from veteran Thompson Shaw TV producer Paul Andersen, who tweeted in his own inimitable style, “19 years of broadcasting hockey games, I have never had my footage become ‘exhibit c’ in the court of law,#norwayhousevsthompson.”

Louis Riel Day falls this year next Monday on Feb. 16. In 2008, the NDP provincial government invited Manitoba schoolchildren to name the province’s newest statutory holiday, commencing on the third Monday in February in 2009, and 114 schools responded with suggestions: of that number a dozen suggested Louis Riel Day or some close variation.

Other suggestions included Neil Young Day, Family Get Together Day, February Fun Day, (The) Polar Pause, Duff Roblin Day (Duff’s Day), Our Parents Need a Break Day and Magical Manitoba Monday.

Riel was born at Red River Settlement on Oct. 22, 1844 and educated at St Boniface. A Roman Catholic, he studied for the priesthood at the Collège de Montréal. In 1865 he studied law with Rodolphe Laflamme, and he is believed to have worked briefly in Chicago and Saint Paul before returning to St Boniface in 1868.

Without re-telling the entire history of the Red River Rebellion, or Red River Resistance, as it is also known, here or the North-West Rebellion in Saskatchewan 15 years later, the abridged version is that in 1869, the federal government, anticipating the transfer of Red River and the North-West from the Hudson’s Bay Company to their jurisdiction, appointed William McDougall as lieutenant-governor of the new territory and sent survey crews to Red River.

The Métis, worried about the implications of the transfer and wary of Anglo-Protestant immigrants from Ontario, organized a “National Committee” of which Riel was secretary. The committee halted the surveys and prevented McDougall from entering Red River. On Nov 2, 1869, Fort Garry was seized by the committee, which invited the people of Red River, however, both English and French- speaking, to appoint delegates.

When armed resistance, led by John Christian Schultz and John Stoughton Dennis followed, the federal government postponed the transfer planned for Dec. 1, 1869. Riel issued a “Declaration of the People of Rupert’s Land and the Northwest” and on Dec. 23, 1869 became head of the “provisional government” of Red River.

Meanwhile, a force of some of those who had escaped from Riel’s men earlier, mustered by Schultz and surveyor Thomas Scott, a Protestant Presbyterian Ontario Orangeman, gathered at Portage la Prairie, but were quickly rounded up by the Métis, who imprisoned them again at Fort Garry. Riel appointed a military tribunal, presided over by his associate, Ambroise Dydine Lépine, of St. Vital, to try Scott for treason. Scott was convicted, sentenced to death and executed by a firing squad in the courtyard of Fort Garry on March 4, 1870.

In Ontario, it was Riel, however, who was widely denounced as Scott’s “murderer” and a reward of $5,000 was offered for his arrest. In Québec he was regarded as a hero, a defender of the Roman Catholic faith and French culture in Manitoba.

Anxious to avoid a volatile political confrontation between Ontario Protestants and Quebec Catholics, never mind Manitoba’s Métis, Conservative Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald tried to persuade Riel, who had gone into voluntary exile in the United States, to remain there, even providing him with funds.

Instead, encouraged by supporters, Riel entered federal politics and won a seat in a byelection in October, 1873 and was re-elected in the general election of February 1874 and re-elected for a third time in the Provencher constituency in a September 1874 byelection. He was expelled from the House of Commons before taking his seat. Riel and Lépine were convicted of murdering Scott in October 1874 and sentenced to death, but Governor General Lord Dufferin commuted the sentences in January 1875 to two years imprisonment. A month later, Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberal government granted amnesty for Riel and Lepine, on the condition that both remain in exile for five years.

Early in 1885, then living in present day Saskatchewan, Riel seized the parish church at Batoche, armed his men, and formed a provisional government and demanded the surrender of Fort Carlton. The North-West Rebellion lasted from March 26 to May 12 before Riel surrendered at the Battle of Batoche and on July 6, 1885, he was charged with high treason.

Riel was convicted, and the federal cabinet, with Macdonald again as prime minister, declined to commute the death sentence imposed by Lt.-Col. Hugh Richardson, a stipendiary magistrate of the Saskatchewan District of the North-West Territories. Riel’s body was sent to St Boniface and interred in the cemetery in front of the cathedral.

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Canada’s ‘other’ national spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment, used its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo for HTTP metadata monitoring and collection from ‘Free File Upload’ (FFU) file-sharing sites in a covert behaviour-based target discovery project codenamed LEVITATION

News today that Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) used its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo through its CSE Web Operations Centre (CWOC) to track 10 to 15 million user uploads and downloads daily and analyze the records in its needle-in-a-haystack effort to stumble upon extremist plots and suspects, and has been monitoring and collecting HTTP metadata for 102 known “Free File Upload” (FFU) file-sharing sites, commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files, is well … not so surprising. Canada is a  partner in the so-called “Five Eyes” electronics communications intelligence partnership, which also includes the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

The three FFU file-sharing sites specifically named are RapidShare, SendSpace, and the defunct MegaUpload – based on a 21-slide CSE Microsoft PowerPoint tradecraft presentation in 2012 compiled by a three-member Canadian team and shared with its Five Eyes partners titled, “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis.” CSE said in the presentation three years ago they “only care about the 2,200 URLs [Uniform Resource Locators] that point to documents of interest,” citing the example of a SendSpace file titled, “How to make a gas bomb.” CSE said they were “finding about 350 interesting download events per month” back then. Levitation is the codename also for the larger Communications Security Establishment covert behaviour-based target discovery project, as well as the presentation.

The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” CSE presentation comes from the cache of Edward Snowden. The 31-year-old American computer specialist, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, who had lived in Kunia, Hawaii, went AWOL almost three years ago, eventually landing in Moscow, and since June 2013 has disclosed more than 200,000 classified documents to the press, a fraction of the cache of  about 1.7 million NSA intelligence files he downloaded, and the biggest theft of U.S. secrets in history, the Pentagon said in January 2014.

Branded as either a patriot or traitor, largely depending on the politics of whoever is doing the branding, Snowden faces criminal prosecution in the United States and was granted temporary asylum in August 2013 in Russia.

The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” story was reported collaboratively today by reporter Ryan Gallagher and co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald of First Look Media’s The Intercept, an online publication created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar last February, and Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira and Dave Seglins of CBC News. The Intercept lists its short-term mission as providing “a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.”

A series of exposés, based on Snowden’s  leaks, began being published in June 2013, revealing Internet surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora, as well as the interception of telephone metadata from U.S. allies, including Canada, around the world. The Canadian government was alleged to have engaged in economic espionage involving Brazil’s Ministério de Minas e Energia.

Snowden’s release of National Security Agency (NSA) material was called in 2013 the most significant leak in U.S. history by American defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who knows the territory well enough, one supposes, having himself leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which were published by the paper beginning in June 1971.

Only a small percentage of the documents purloined by Snowden have been published to date. Since 2013, Snowden has been what Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks were to 2010. As is the case now with Snowden, at the same time stolen classified material was published by WikiLeaks, it was also being published collaboratively across various portals and platforms in three of the world’s most prestigious daily newspapers – the New York Times in the United States, the Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany.

On July 25, 2010, Assange’s WikiLeaks, a non-profit Swedish website started in December 2006, posted an unprecedented 91,731 mostly classified documents, the so-called “War Logs,” and most with a middling “secret” clearance level – from United States military databanks relating to the war in Afghanistan – on the Internet.

The documents made it possible to compare the mainly dismal frontline reality on the battlefield with the political propaganda coming from the higher-ups.

While some – including Assange – compared the War Logs to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the War Logs and Pentagon Papers were different in kind, as Ellsberg noted himself in interviews in July 2010.

“There is a very real drama because of the size of the release and it’s an important step, but these are low-level field reports while the Pentagon Papers were a high-level analysis about the origins of the war,” Ellsberg said. “Still, it’s a very important moment because this is a war that is taking place right now and what WikiLeaks has done could change how people think about it.”

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is Canada’s national cryptologic agency with a National Defence Act mandate that includes foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) interception and analysis, including cryptanalysis or codebreaking, of communications and other electronic signals. CSE  is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada under the signals intelligence part of their mandate, but can, if requested, with proper warrants or other lawful authority held by the requesting agency, provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties under what is known as CSE’s “assistance mandate.”

Its new $1.2 billion dollar headquarters at 1929 Ogilvie Rd., completed last July, was dubbed “Camelot” in official Department of National Defence documents and is the most expensive federal building ever constructed in Canada, located next door to the only slightly better known Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which also has its headquarters in Gloucester in east-end Ottawa.

The centrepiece of the new CSE complex on Ogilvie Road is equivalent to a 90-storey skyscraper turned on its side.

The old CSE headquarters was the five-storey Sir Leonard Tilley Building at 719 Heron Rd., near Carleton University, well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” and  located at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, within the boundaries of the federal government’s Confederation Heights campus, in Ottawa. The Sir Leonard Tilley Building was built in 1961 and custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems.

The Communications Security Establishment’s predecessor was the Communications Branch of the National Research Council of Canada (CBNRC), which began work in September 1946. The CBNRC was formed at the end of the Second World War by combining the two wartime cryptologic offices; the civilian Examination Unit (XU) and the military Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), made up by 1945 of what had been the disparate SIGINT collection units of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The Examination Unit  was Canada’s first civilian office that was solely dedicated to the encryption and decryption of communications signals traffic content. Until then, signals intelligence (SIGINT) was entirely within the purview of the military.

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Pinball wizards and tiger tails: Long ago in a place … well, not so far away, kids mailed in box-tops from cereal for cool prizes and cajoled dad to put a ‘tiger in your tank’ with Esso Extra for a prized fake tiger tail to tie to the gas cap when he filled ‘er up

Being a kid was kind of cool even before video games, smartphones and the Internet. Really.

What did we do for fun? Well, we played real coin-operated pinball arcade games with silver-colored steel balls and bumper flippers on the side, racking up points and hopefully lighting up the backbox and ringing some bells in the back of some local mom-and-pop greasy spoon often. D. Gottlieb & Co. of Chicago’s Humpty Dumpty, introduced in 1947, was the first game to add player-controlled bumper flippers. David Gottlieb had founded the company in 1927. The predecessor of all pinball machines is acknowledged to be the 19th century Bagatelle-Table, a sort of hybrid between a “pin table” and pool table, says BMI Gaming of Boca Raton, Florida.  “Players tried to hit balls with cue sticks and get them into pockets or slots surrounded by nails and pins.”

We collected cereal box-tops and with the requisite number sent them into Kellogg or some such cereal manufacturer for the stated prize to claim. Sometimes the prizes even came in the cereal box! The invention of a screw injection molding machine by American inventor James Watson Hendry in 1946 changed the world of cereal box prizes. Thermoplastics could be used to produce toys both more cheaply more rapidly because recycled plastic could be remolded using the process.

In addition, injection molding for plastics required much less cool-down time for the toys, because the plastic is not completely melted before injected into the molds. Hendry also developed the first gas-assisted injection molding process in the 1970s, which allowed for  the production of complex, hollow prizes that cooled quickly. This greatly improved design flexibility as well as the strength and finish of manufactured parts while reducing production time, cost, weight and waste, notes Whaley Products Inc. of Burkburnett, Texas in a website article on the history of injection molding you can read here online, should you be so inclined, at: http://www.injectionmoldingchiller.com/history.html

Cereal manufacturers didn’t have a monopoly on cool prizes by any means. Lots of kids cajoled dad to fill ‘er up with Esso Extra in the 1960s so they could get him to also buy a cute and furry fake tiger tail to append to the gas gap. “Put a tiger in your tank” was a slogan created in 1959 by Emery Smith, a young Chicago copywriter who had been briefed to produce a newspaper ad to boost sales of Esso Extra.  In 1964 the character hit his stride with a campaign developed by New York-based McCann Erickson (now known mainly as McCann). He quickly gave Esso (known mainly by its Exxon brand name in the United States since 1972) a highly recognizable identifiable brand in a market where brand differentiation has never been easy. As Esso sales soared and the advertising became the talk of advertising pros, TIME magazine declared 1964 to be “The Year of the Tiger” on Madison Avenue.

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