The Prime of Leonard Brody

Image by: Robert Kenney

A superficial scan of the homepage of Vancouver-based NowPublic reveals an architecture much like any other media site. There’s a front page with all the top stories and separate sections for local and world news, culture, sports, business and style. But look a little closer and it soon becomes apparent how different NowPublic is. First, there’s the predominance of social media tools. Where traditional news sites struggle to incorporate videos, comments, ratings of contributors and blogs into their daily grind, on NowPublic social media is the message. A story about the late-night feud between Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno is told via an animated video sourced from YouTube. Readers get to vote on which developing story deserves to be on the home­page, while commentary on a story regularly runs longer than the piece itself. Where a picture, or video, can tell a thousand words, it usually does.

Then there’s the actual content. The quality of writing, if truth be told, is spotty: articles and headlines are rife with bad grammar, typos and the sort of awkward sentence formulations familiar to any Grade 9 English teacher. News, while unfailingly timely, originates from an eclectic mix of sources, including amateur reporters, the New York Times and National Enquirer. Equally eclectic is the type of story that makes it into the news lineup. On one day, the main story will be a heart-wrenching account of the Haitian earthquake disaster. Reading it, you can almost smell the newsroom sweat and coffee breath of the writer who cobbled it together at white-hot speed. Further inside, however, you find a video of television star Jennifer Love Hewitt giggling that she likes to bejewel her “precious lady” parts in a process called “vajazzling.”

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  • Leonard Brody, 
  • tony wanless, 
  • Digital, 
  • Entrepreneurship, 
  • People