Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - Marc Weisblott: Toronto Mike'd #173

Episode Date: May 11, 2016

Mike chats with Marc Weisblott about his years on the bleeding edge of online journalism, his Toronto email newsletter Twelve Thirty Six and a wide assortment of Toronto-centric tidbits.

Welcome to episode 173 of Toronto Mic'd, a weekly podcast about anything and everything. Proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, a local independent brewery producing fresh craft beer. I'm Mike from TorontoMic.com and joining me this week is Mark Weisblot from the email newsletter 1236. And you've already cracked open Great Lakes beer. I drink about three beers a year. This might be a good afternoon to drink them all. Which one did you crack open? What's it called?

Pompous Ass English Ale. So I'll have to live up to this standard as I sit here today on the podcast. And because I've been today on the podcast. And because I've been listening to your podcast all along, I think I can get a few things out of the way. The things that people talk about every time they come here, right? It's like two minutes about what a great setup you have here, Mike. Three or four minutes about how far out of the way your house is and who would want to live around here. And then what, six or seven minutes

of going over all the guests that you've had before and what my relationship is to them? That's right. There's always the callbacks for sure. That's right. And I don't have to spend any time on this episode telling you to get on the mic and all that crap because you know you're right on that freaking mic.

It's great. Doing my best. You know, you're doing great that freaking mic. It's great. Doing my best. No, you're doing great. Hey, so it's a pleasure to have you, and it's a pleasure to meet you because I've been corresponding with you via digital channels for a long, long time. I think it took me, what, two or three years to accept your invitation. I know. I didn't take it personally.

So I did extend this invitation a long time ago and got kind of blown off. And I'm like, okay, well, if at scroll, as I referred to you as back then, if he doesn't want to come on my show, I can't make him. But here you are. That's an honor.

We made it. We did it. Also, I saw you tweeted a picture of the Rogue Byway. So that was fantastic. And I saw it's for sale. did you know about this is this a 1236 scoop that i broke on twitter they had a sign out front that i tweeted that said closing soon or something and they had like sales and i tweeted about it being uh you know hey it's leaving we're losing our rogue byway and then somebody said hey that's a scam they've been doing that for years claiming they're shutting down just to sell things and then i'm like oh i got fooled but you in your picture it shows for sale signs from a real real estate agent which is which is a scoop as far as tourist

attractions go here at islington and lakeshore i think the rogue byway is is pretty much all you got no that's it i think that that in the tnt uh which is fantastic too come on down and enjoy it while it lasts hey i searched my gmail today i wanted to search for your name and uh because the nice thing about gmail is i don't delete any gmails and i think i got gmail when it was launched in 2004 so i i decided to search for your name and the very first exchange i saw was actually uh 11th, 2004 at 1.17 PM. And I was telling you basically what I dug about the Better Living Center, which is one of the projects we'll discuss later.

But here's a quick quote. So this is the email I wrote you. We're going back 12 years now. And I think I wrote this. I copied and pasted it. I think there's a definite void and your site may help fill it there's a sad lack of good blogs about our fair city I've lived in Toronto my entire life and I love it here but when it comes to the web we're subpar GTA bloggers never met expectations and it is now just embarrassing our community journal this is a live journal that's

how old this email is is better but still amateur but still amateur hour. Toronto can do better. And then I put four exclamation marks on there. Oh, what was I doing at the time? Really just trying to show what was possible as far as doing a local Toronto website. Called it betterlivingcenter.ca. I think at the time there was a notion to have an esoteric URL. So I thought of the Better Living Center at the CNE. There was a reference that people from Toronto would understand. Today, that would be a little bit of a mouthful, and it may be hard to relate. But I wasn't thinking in terms of marketing so much as trying to get a job doing this online journalism somewhere. A few ventures had fallen through, opportunities that had come and gone, and I had no other choice back then but to try and show what

I could do on my own, try and get on the radar with the right people. Well, we're going to dive in there for sure. But regarding blogs, I wrote that in 2004, which is like, I guess that's like the heyday for the blog, 2004. Yeah, I think so. We went through some different phases there over a period of years. The blogging era, a lot of it was ignited by 9-11, if you recall, there were a lot of people that turned to using the blogging platform to express their anxiety and frustration with what was happening in the world. The war bloggers were out there in full force, and it really ignited this new kind of media. But for a number of years, no one was really quite sure what to do with it. There was this idea of using it as a personal journal to rant about your own life and experiences.

And then some of that turned a little nasty over the years. We got into the idea of having online comments and people fighting with each other all the time. online comments and people fighting with each other all the time. It really was the early days going to where we are now, which is maybe not quite finished making this transformation. Well, the blogs, I mean, I keep reading, I've been reading things for like five, six years that blogs are dead. This is what I read. Twitter's killed the blog or Facebook's killed the blog. And when I look at Toronto now and I think of, you know, blogs, I think they're really just consortium, like professional enterprises like BlogTO or Torontoist. Those are kind of your blogs. And in some ways, Reddit is like the new blog where, you know, the common man can have a voice and there's commenting and, you know, there's a

subreddit for Toronto, which I pop in and check out at least once a day. I'll pop in there and see what's going on. Is the blog dead? Is there hope for the blog? Well, you're talking about a time when it really was a dark wilderness that we were walking through, not knowing what would happen next. The media experts would always try to convince you that where things were at at any given moment was the state of the art, and we're fixed in this position, and this is how it's going to be. And then something new comes along and completely throws it off course. So I think that's the experience we've had between 2004 and now. And my little blog, which according to our correspondence in 2004, you were reading.

So my little blog's been going on since 2002. Well, you were coming at it also from a bit of a different angle. There was some kind of blogging scene in Toronto. I couldn't really make much sense of it. I was interested in conservative, libertarian politics and reading people that were writing from that perspective. A few of those showed up in Toronto. Not very many, though.

And we were still at a point where the major publishers had no idea what to do online. Newspapers, magazines, they had websites, but they didn't really do anything. They didn't know why they were doing them. thing. They didn't know why they were doing them. In 2016, I don't know how many have really figured it out. There's a lot of flailing around and trying to find the formula. We're getting to the point here where social media rules everything. So much hysteria in the last few months about Facebook becoming this behemoth and wanting to be the portal for everything that happens online. And the major publishers out there are really freaking out. What are we supposed to do now? How are we going to turn this into money?

I'm going to take you all the way back to CIUT in just a second. But first, that beer in front of you that you've already dove into, you're enjoying, that's your fourth beer of the calendar year. No, no, it might be the first. That's the first of the calendar. You know, I'm not a big beer guy myself. So I know, you know,

a lot of people are like, they drink beer on the regular. They don't go a week without beer. I can easily go, you know, a couple of months without a sip of beer. It happens. But that beer you're drinking now is a very good beer and you're taking as much as you can carry on the the bus you're gonna you're gonna get you can have that winter ale you can have the the pack of beer there from great lakes it's all yours i'm gonna try to drink it all while i'm here go ahead no that'd be great and for anyone who wants to crowdfund toronto mic'd please visit patreon.com slash toronto mic or click over click the big orange button that's on torontomic.com and please give

what you uh you can if it's a dollar a month i'm happy if you want to do more than that i'm even happier so please help crowdfund toronto mic'd and help me buy this equipment and keep it going. And now we are going back to CIUT. Tell me about how you basically, you were on the radio there when you were in high school. Yeah, I called up this University of Toronto Community Radio Station in the first couple weeks of its existence on FM. I had some awareness of the fact that they were looking for volunteers. They were open to anyone with ideas.

And they had a whole structure in place. And it was tied to the fact that they had a 15,000-watt FM license. This was a big deal. You had CKLN from Ryerson. I think they had 250 watts. So here was a station that was coming along doing this free-form, experimental, alternative campus community radio, and they had a whole bunch of employees and all these ideals in place, inviting people who wanted to come in, talk about ideas, and volunteer. And within a matter of months, the entire thing imploded. The station manager disappeared in the middle of the night. They had to lay off all these people. And all their dreams of having this

infrastructure were in complete disarray. So I was hanging around there, was in high school at the time, and opportunity knocked and I could basically do whatever I wanted at this radio station. Did you bump into Mike Wilner back then? He was on CIUT. A few years later, I knew Mike from before. He's the one guest you've had on here, I think, who I knew from childhood. And the one guest I have that never complains about my geographic location. He quite loves it. He's like a Southwest guy, and it's a short jaunt for him. He'll be on again when the Blue Jays magic number is down to single digits.

And all, I will only know that the magic number is down to single digits from listening to the Toronto Mike podcast because it's, that stuff is completely

off my radar. So is it all off your radar? Because right, you know, the Raptors have game five of the second round tonight at eight o'clock. Well, I realize that.

So you're aware, you just, your interest level is such that you'll look at the final score maybe and kind of go, oh, that's interesting. Everything I know from sports media is from listening to this podcast. Sometimes I worry I go too heavy on sports media. And then I realize, why am I worrying? Like, this is your passion project. Just have people on you're interested in who gives a shit. Well, look, I mean, when we're into playoffs in Toronto, it's pretty much unavoidable. If you're interested in who gives a shit well look i mean uh uh when we're we're into uh

playoffs in toronto it's it's pretty much unavoidable if you're on twitter uh constant refresh uh the suspense is happening there this uh who was it actually it was it was mike wilner's brother who uh tweeted this is a real tweet so toronto had a very important game for uh the raptors in miami everyone's buzzing about this in Toronto. You know, this is a huge game. And he tweeted, is there any sports bars in the city where I can see the Kentucky Derby? This was the question, okay? And it was the same time as the Raptors game four. And I just thought that was a cute tweet. Like, that's an interesting tweet. I didn't know if he got any replies, but I would love to know which sports bar slapped. I mean, the Kentucky Derby is fantastic. I watched that Kentucky Derby,

but the city was all about the Raptors and Norm Wilner was looking for the Kentucky Derby, had no interest in the Raptor game. There's always a TV in the corner that no one's looking at in a sports bar, isn't there? So yeah, going back to when I was in high school and hanging around this radio station in this old brick house, 91 St. George Street. That was really my entry point for being in the media and being the media. The whole idea that everything that went on there was within my control, my domain, and here was a chance to broadcast and be a part of something, find my own tribe in this environment. But it was so different from commercial radio and even any kind of commercial sensibilities were looked down upon.

But I had bigger ideas, bigger plans. I was always interested in the mainstream. I was going to ask, like if you're doing the CIUT radio thing, did you ever consider, you know, a career in the mainstream. I was going to ask, like, if you're doing the CIUT radio thing, did you ever consider, you know, a career in the mainstream media? I mean, having a, you know, I don't know, a real, like a radio gig on an actual terrestrial commercial station. See, the thing is, it was so abstract back then. And the more that I did radio on that level, the more interested I became in the dynamics of radio. So I listened to everything at the time, much to the chagrin of a lot of the other people around the station who were like five or ten years

older than me, and maybe they saw it as some weird precocious thing. Here's this teenager, he doesn't understand, he doesn't have any taste. So the more I did radio on that level, the more fascinating the machinery became to me. And through that, I think, gained this interest in pop culture neurosurgery and really looking at the underside of everything, figuring out who's behind the curtain, who's making this happen, who's telling the truth, and who's lying to us. And that's really been a theme of a lot of what I've done. And that's why I've always had a keen interest in what you've been doing. And this is no bullshit. I've been following what you've been doing online, you know, like I said, for 12 years at least, and always interested. You're one of the very few

voices that seems to cover what's happening in the city in a manner that you just described so eloquently. And so, yeah, it's manner that you just described so eloquently. And so, yeah, it's great that you've been doing that. And yet, doing it for 12 years has also required having about 12 different jobs. Yes, well, you know, here, so let's start. Is radiodigest.com, is that sort of, is that the website that sort of got you kicked off in this direction? Yeah, that was what I was doing. I answered an ad from a website based in San Francisco. They seem to have a bit of money from the dot-com boom.

And it was someone's notion at the time that they would cover what was happening on the radio dial in every city in North America. They would have a columnist who would tell you what was going on in that market. So I had a number of years behind me with iWeekly where I mostly covered music, but primarily celebrities that happened to have recording contracts. That was sort of my beat, really, just looking at it from that perspective of famous people with record deals. That's who I interviewed, reviewed, and wrote about.

This Radio Digest thing was in 1999. I was trying to find a way into internet journalism. Now, I don't know, Mike, do you remember what internet journalism was in 1996, 7, 8, 9? Yeah, I think there was a lot of Yahoo stuff and there was a lot of MySpace stuff. Is that right? No, this was well before MySpace.

Homepages, GeoCities, was that the big thing? I mean, Suck.com, do you remember reading that? That was sort of a seminal outlet for snarkiness. That's really where it took root. You had some personal websites out there. But for the most part, I think there was just the idea that there were opportunities to do content. That's really when you first heard that word, right? Content is king. And as all these portals sprouted up everywhere from AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, what were all the search engines out there?

You'd also have websites like beer.com that would start up. It's like, we have the.com, we have the address, what are we going to do with it? And there were opportunities to do writing and just fill the websites with stuff. Some of them were retailers. That's when Amazon was getting started, of course. I remember applying for a job with the Chapters bookstore website in Toronto. Nothing really became of that, but just the idea that you would go through piles of books

and write descriptions of them, and somehow that would turn into money. There was a lot of that going on. You would hear that people had jobs like a news editor, a sports editor, entertainment editor at different websites. But I'm not quite sure what they were doing. It was maybe some wire copy or some basic outlines of what was happening. Maybe they looked at the newspaper and summarized what was going on in there.

Not a lot of opportunities, though, to use a voice online. So when this website had an opening looking for somebody to write rants about what was happening on the radio, well, what greater opportunity would there be than that to really just monitor what was going on over the air. Write whatever I felt like writing, whatever people were talking about, whatever news was happening. And as you know from doing this podcast, if you want to poke the egos who will respond to what you're doing, go directly to the radio industry. You know what? I was just thinking, I wish RadioDigest.com, I wish it was around today covering Toronto. There's no one covering

Toronto radio. Do you really need to, though? This was also before there was a lot of streaming and the opportunity to tune in stations from other cities. And the podcasts

and all that. Yeah, no podcasts. Things were very limited, very narrow. This was 1999, 2000. Really, the last hurrah to being limited to this narrow universe of stations that were locally available and having nowhere else to go, nowhere else to turn.

So I think what they were talking about on AM, what songs they were playing on FM, who was being hired and fired and going where, that was really something that you could focus on without much distraction. And through that, I gained this reputation and this readership, and I think as well, recognizing that what I could put online would be seen as having authority, give me a sense of power, and that it mattered to people what I thought about things for the first time. So it was a terrific experience for that reason, but it really represents a media world that's

long gone now. Let me run down a list of some of the things that you worked on over the past 15 years here. And we already mentioned off the top, we talked a bit about Better Living Center. And you mentioned you were writing for iWeekly. But here's a couple of things that maybe some people forgot you had a part of

or look back fondly on. Like, for example, and this will be out of order, so I apologize, but 50 Most Toronto. Oh, yeah, that was some idea that came and went. Where did you find that? I think that was also from looking around for something to do online. That's when the notion of crowdsourcing an idea came up.

So I put together this notion that we were going to find the 50 most fascinating eccentrics in the history of the city, and that people would vote, and we'd write entries, and that somehow this would become like a proto-Wikipedia of Toronto weirdness,

but it never got off the ground, so I'm surprised. And that was like a response to CBC did their 50 songs or whatever they were doing on CBC. A Greatest Canadian, I think. Yeah, from that, that was an early attempt to see if there was a way that we could write a history of the city that wouldn't really work in a print publication or a book,

but do it as an online project. But that definitely... I never did it. I have crack researchers, man. Nothing eludes us here. Nothing escapes my crack research staff. Well, don't forget, there was not a lot of information online compared to today. I mean, there were topics and people and subjects that you'd want to learn about, and there was no real way to find them. They couldn't be Googled. Paved.ca, which I read, I read everything on paved.ca, that was like a Toronto Star-funded initiative, right? Yeah. After a few months of trying to figure out a way to do this and get paid for it, the Toronto Star came calling and actually offered me some money.

And what we came up with was a Toronto Star-funded version of a local blog. At the time, the Star was shackled to this print model. In fact, through the Newspaper Guild, they actually weren't allowed to do very much online. Can you imagine that this happened in your lifetime? Yeah, I had no idea. This is about 10 years ago. So we kind of hatched this idea of doing something that could be realized through the side door. paved. It would be a different brand. I wouldn't be under the thumb of the Toronto Star, but they would link to it. And it was up to me to find the angle and the audience.

And somehow I would bring these bloggers into the fold of the Toronto Star. I think that was the agenda, pretty much. The idea of a newspaper website was still so unformed compared to what it is now. If you remember at the time, Toronto Star, other publishers, they would not post articles during the day. You got the entire newspaper uploaded at five or 6 in the morning. This continued until around 2008, 2009, somewhere like that. So what was happening on the internet with these bloggers was like a whole different universe.

And still at the time, at newspapers all over the place, there was the idea that blogging would be a different genre. It would appeal to a different kind of reader. It was very much about let's go blogging. Let's do something that takes us to places that we could never go. Let's get wild off here on the cyberspace frontier. And that was really still the predominant thinking there, 2005, 2006. The problem was that just linking to this website on the Star homepage was pretty worthless, and

they didn't see the numbers maybe that they were expecting. But the truth is that here was the Toronto Star developing what today we'd see as a social media brand. A different kind of audience and demographic. Tor Star could have had one of those for an investment of, I don't know, $35,000, $40,000, whatever they paid me for the time that I was doing it, and they called it off. They canceled it. This thing could have been a contender.

It could have meant something. Could have been somebody. But Twitter was just being invented during that time, and YouTube had started, but there wasn't much going on there. Facebook was just a Harvard thing, and there was never really the idea that Facebook would turn into this behemoth for finding out about the news, right? I mean, it was all about personal status updates and photos and indulgences. If we could have seen that coming, it might still be happening today. But back then, it was blogging as a different beast, a different genre,

things that they should be written in a different way. I don't know. Mike, what was your impression at the time when I was doing this? Yeah, that was just like Better Living Center, which by the way, did Better Living Center come before Pave.ca? Yeah, the Better Living Center site was like a— That was an independent venture, right? It was a demo to get a job that did not exist at the time. I talked to some other publishers.

Saturday Night Magazine, if you remember, when that was still around, I almost got something going over there. In the interim, I'd done a website for the Iceberg internet radio website. Marsden was working on that. Yeah, David Marsden was there, so I can say that I worked with him a little bit. There was an adult alternative radio channel online. It was called Red Seat, sponsored by Du Maurier Cigarettes. And this was a backhanded way to advertise tobacco when you could still do that. So for a few months on there, I also wrote a blog, newsletter, this whole idea that if you had an online radio

stream without a host, that you would have some text to accompany it, talk about what was happening in music, pop culture, explain what was going on with the channel. But this is also prehistoric compared to where things are at now. And it seemed like a lot of work. You know, you're going to set up this online stream for radio. Yeah. And years later, we tried to bring it to standard broadcasting or maybe launch it on our own. But too many cooks, really, I think from this perspective, because you realize that this stuff costs a lot of money to run. You need a lot of people.

You can't do it in the lean and mean way that you and I are making media today. Right. Well, Torstar, at least they had the initiative to throw some actual dollars at something like Pave.ca. Yeah, I mean, by their standards, it was not a lot of dollars. They were making a lot of money back then. The print newspaper was still a very legitimate thing. There were still advertisers back then.

Well, there were people that were prophesying about the end of print, and by 2035, the last newspaper is going to roll off the presses. It's going to happen a lot sooner than that, the way we're going. There was not a whole lot of vision there, and I didn't know what to say. It was like, well, I've set up this blog. I'm getting some people to look at it. What more do you want? The reality is, even now, these things do take time to build up an audience and a following, but back then, no one envisioned that digital journalism would be the primary delivery system for what they were putting out there.

So the Globe and Mail, they also brought you on. You ran their campaign bubble blog. Is that what it was called? Yeah. So the Toronto Star thing fell apart, and I got a call from the Globe and Mail to bring my act over there for the 2006 municipal election. I don't know if anybody read it, but from the perspective of the Globe and Mail, this was pretty out there to do this rogue campaign coverage based on whatever I felt like. And because I had that experience, I can say that about a lot of my experiences, I have this memory frozen in time before Twitter, before YouTube, before Facebook. Here was an election campaign happening in Toronto.

It wasn't really much of an election at all. David Miller kind of just had a landslide win over Jane Pitfield. Do you remember this election? I do, I do, yeah. It really wasn't remembered as far as the history of Toronto elections go. Kind of set the stage for what happened four years later with Rob Ford because of the complacency that was going on with David Miller, downtown elitism, the garbage strike, everything else that followed during that term that, right? Nothing done on the run. No reporting

from sitting in the audience of a debate. This is all ancient history now. And I'm glad that I had that experience at the time because it could never happen again to work on that kind of slow pace of writing, more like a novelist than a blogger. At that time, a computer was like a typewriter. You were tethered. You had to go home and crank that out. We forget that before Wi-Fi was pervasive and we all could hotspot from our phones or use our smartphones or whatever. Yeah, you literally had a desktop in your house, and that's where everything, all my blogs are published

from that computer in my living room. But not only that, I was going to cover these election campaign events, debates. I was the only journalist there sometimes. Today you would be competing against a whole army of tweeters. You would have to find a right angle, interesting quip, something unique to say. And by the time you published your report,

maybe no one would be interested anymore. Maybe there'd be nothing that anyone would want to read, even though there are different audiences out there. Not everyone's following on social media, but at the time it was still a matter of, yeah, going home, sitting at your box in the basement, and just pounding out a bunch of words, hitting publish and hoping for the best. Right. Hey, what did you do for Yahoo?

Oh, yeah, a few years later, I always wanted to work for one of these big portals. Here we were talking about the late 20th century and the dominance that they had, but not really knowing how I could ever find a way in. Yahoo, which has gone through however many incarnations at this point, might be on the verge of immolation here. I don't know. Have you read the latest on Yahoo? You know, I'm down. Yahoo was like Google before Google. I had my first, you know, what do you call non-university related email address was a Yahoo address, which I still use today. But I'm down to one Yahoo service. And it's amazing because everything was Yahoo for years until kind of Google stole some of the thunder, a lot of the thunder.

But I'm down to Flickr. I still use it daily, and it's owned and operated by Yahoo, and that's the only time my Yahoo login that I created at University of Toronto back in like 1995 or 6 or whatever is in use. So yeah, I'm down to one Yahoo service. And Flickr was really a pioneer as far as social networking goes, because it had all this functionality to find other people and tag your photos and correspond. And that interface, man, that interface, and we called it Ajax back then. Now it's just the web, I guess. But it was like, you mean I can reload stuff on the page without a complete page F5 refresh?

It was all like, you mean it's going back to the server and talking to the server and bringing me new stuff without reloading the page? At the time and that's basically the beauty of google maps which was kind of coming out shortly thereafter at the time that interface was blowing my mind that flicker interface and i've sworn by that tool if you will that web uh you know uh tool since yeah since 2000 and i don't know six or five or whatever it was when i signed up you remember delicious that was another one yes that's right that's right there were everything yeah and i remember like there was a bunch of things like delicious dig which is still around in some form but dig and delicious and uh what's the something oh my goodness the name is eluding me right now because i still get traffic because i check my referral logs once in a while and i still get

traffic from this similar to delicious. It's like a link sharing type thing. And it's two words, and it starts with S. Stumble upon. Stumble upon. Thank you. Sometimes, I don't know if you get this, sometimes I can see it in my head, and I have to try to read it in my head in order to remember the name. Stumble upon is what I'm going for there.

Yeah. Yeah. One of any number of services that was touted as the future of journalism. Get in on this thing and you won't believe the traffic that you'll see as a result. So the history of Yahoo, which is well documented, took a different turn around 2010 when they recognized that they had this huge audience out there. When they recognized that they had this huge audience out there, the best way I saw it described lately was a crappy homepage for the Midwest. That's the characterization of Yahoo. But they started to get into doing original content and unique stories in the context of blogging. They started with sports.

Then they moved into news. And they hired a bunch of all-star journalists in the United States. One of them was John Cook from Gawker. If you remember, he's the one that broke the Rob Ford crack video story. And names that you may or may not recognize, but I knew who they were. They were all being wooed by Yahoo to come up with their own stories, their own spin on what was happening in the news. So I approached the Canadian office, realizing that they might bring this type of writing to Canada, or they might want to,

and I lucked out. They proposed it, and they hired me to be the one running it. So I started this thing for Yahoo. My articles were featured on the Yahoo homepage. No one told me how many people were reading except for early on. They mentioned maybe confidentially, I think, a story got 300,000 views. So this was magic in the world where it was all about getting the clickbait and eyeballs onto the page. No one had ever done this better than me. I showed that I had some knack for finding these original stories. So I tried it for a while.

The most depressing thing about being involved with Yahoo, the comment section, which is the ultimate gutter of comment sections. I remember somebody made a quip, it might have been a gawker or somewhere, about how maybe the U.S. federal government should fund Yahoo like they do the prison system, so that you have a place where all these degenerates can hang out together. Like Australia. Yeah, stay off the rest of the internet, like a penal colony for online commenters. Segregate the idiots. That's a great idea, actually. But really what I wanted to know how to do

was to write for a mass audience, to take the ideas that I had, bring them out of that zone of eccentricity, and translate them to something that would reach that crappy homepage for the Midwest audience, or whatever the Canadian equivalent is. So a great learning experience, and one that taught me how to write a lot more succinctly than I had the opportunity to learn before. I have memories just flooding back to me now where I would phone a phone number. I would call a number because I remember the phone would be answered with that guy going, Yahoo!

You remember this guy? I don't know. You called for what? Information about how to use the internet? No, I would call this number. And I don't know if I had a code or what, but it would read to me my emails. So I could be mobile and get on any phone and have my emails read to me by Yahoo.

I don't know how long this service lasted, but this is back before I switched to Gmail, and my primary address was a Yahoo address. So for a long time, I remember I'd call a number. It would read to me my emails. I did blogging on the phone as well at one point. It was something called Alternaline, and the late Don Burns was behind it. What he had going was a rave hotline for Toronto, and they had a certain audience that was calling to find out where the

raves were happening. Yeah, Dr. Trance. And you would never know where the rave was happening until the last minute. So they had a phone line that you were supposed to call to find out about raves. So they had this technology in place, and Don, some of his colleagues on this, decided that they were going to try and use it to do other topics, other content with other personalities, people who were in radio, people who wanted to be in radio. It was called Alternaline, if you can believe this. And they had an ad running weekly in NOW Magazine, so it got a bit of an audience with that.

A few of those CFNY refugees were involved as well. So for 10 minutes a week, I think, I would sketch out this rant about what was happening in TV and radio and the media. That's cool, man. I would read it into the phone. And as far as I know, some people were listening, but I only did it for about three months.

Again, this is so prehistoric compared to where we're at now. One of my great regrets is I never got Don Burns on the podcast. So yeah, that's just too bad. I wanted to talk to him about the Dr. Trance stuff, but I had a lot of CFNY stuff I needed to talk about. He was a natural future guest for Toronto Mic'd, and it's just too bad we lost him so young. Yeah, and not only that, I think he was someone who was recognized as this big mainstream voice, but he always worked the fringes. I mean, the fact that he would give someone like me an opportunity at 22 or 23 years old to just vent into the telephone. But I don't know what the business model was there. Do you remember the Toronto Star also had its own phone line, Star Phone?

100% absolutely called for sports scores. So back in the day, before the internet, I remember as a young man, I'm going to put this in the maybe late 80s, early 90s, definitely late 80s, I think, I would call Star Phone first, get the scores. Yeah, the future belonged to voicemail. And you had all these different systems. There was telepersonals. That was also a big deal based in Toronto. That's now Lava Life. Is that even still around? I think so. Radio stations, TV

stations, they would have their own phone lines, right? It was all about press here and press three for this and press four for that. And before we had computers in front of our faces, this is what we had to rely on. One of the more recent, I don't know how recent it is, you'll tell me, but I remember reading you on Canada.com for quite a long time. I was subscribed to that one. Another attempt to try and bring my routine into a more mainstream framework. This was with Post Media, the beleaguered newspaper behemoth that everybody loves to dump on. And in 2012, looking for a new gig, they needed people in a hurry to help keep this old-school portal, Canada.com, alive.

They rebooted it. It was on a WordPress platform. It looked really futurist compared to what a lot of post media was dealing with at the time. These creaky old content management systems. This was by far the snazziest looking thing that they'd come up with in some time. And I had yet to have the opportunity in all those years to work in an office. It just never came up. The idea that I would go to another location that wasn't Starbucks to create content and post it online. create content and post it online. This was the first time that it became realistic here in Toronto. The only catch was I had to go to the corner of Dawn Mills and York Mills in order to do it.

Now, I grew up in the area, so I was familiar with it. There was kind of an air of nostalgia. I was retracing my steps from junior high, except going in the opposite direction on the TTC. And we would sit in a room in this building, which was falling apart. They were trying to get rid of it to help pay down the debt at the company. And the only instructions that we received were just to figure out what to put on the website. Whatever's going to get traffic, whatever we can do, go and do it. And from that instruction, or lack thereof, we had some fun. Me and some other like-minded people, mostly younger than me by a considerable margin, we just hung out all day and shouted at each other

about what we were reading on Twitter and tried to turn it into articles for the web with the expectation that they'd hit Google News, Twitter, Facebook. The magic of clickbait would happen and we would save post media. And of course, it didn't work out that way. It sounds glorious, though.

I mean, if you have to have a gig, if you have to go to an office, because I'm at a point now where I don't know if I can even go back to an office and actually go back to an actual cubicle culture and tether myself. I don't know if I can do that, but that's another story for another podcast. But it sounds like if you're going to do that, that's a pretty fun environment. Yeah, but at the same time, even just three or four years ago, we were dealing with factors that nobody cares about anymore. There was still this idea that the homepage was important. The placement of stories at the Canada.com address had some significance to it. address had some significance to it. There was this idea that if you wrote the headline the right way, put in the right terms for search engines, you would land a bunch of traffic, the magic would happen. And also, I think we were still deep into this idea of clickbait

and hot takes, and that everything that happened needed a different spin. And if you could find a unique way of framing the latest debacle involving Rob Ford, that somehow a herd of people would rush to the site and, I don't know, money would come pouring out of the slot machine, and we would all be champions for that. But so much has happened between then and now. They went to a four-platform strategy at PostMedia. They were going to do a tablet magazine that came out every night. They had this idea for an app that would have a different spin on the stories aimed at a younger audience. Over time, a lot of that stuff died out because I think there was some recognition

that their forte was in putting the print newspaper together and everything would be secondary. That goes against what all the think fluencers were talking about three, four, five years ago. But there's still money to be made in newspapers if you know who their audience is. So since then, they've really focused on trying to exploit the attention that they have by putting up the National Post, Toronto Sun, newspapers everywhere. I don't know what's going to happen with the company. Nobody does. But Canada.com, as a separate brand with a sensibility and ideology, that really wasn't meant to be anything in the end.

On that note of the Post Media and Toronto Sun merger there, I had Steve Simmons in here recently, and he talked about making the physical move from the Toronto Sun office there. I had Steve Simmons in here recently, and he talked about the physical move from the Toronto Sun office, where he had been for like 30 plus years or whatever, to the National Post office, and just what it's like making that change. So what do you think about what's going to happen to us as absorbers of news with the post-media sun merger? I don't think anybody working there knows either. They don't seem to. On the outside, it's kind of funny. You go into

work and the whole company may go bankrupt any moment now. Everything's going to fall apart. I can say firsthand from experience, it's kind of tiring. You really lose your will to live after a certain number of months going to work in an environment where nobody knows what they're doing. And nobody is even pretending that they know what they're doing. They learn their lesson from that period, I think, because I see the National Post coming out every day and even rebooting, and they're hiring new people there recently. Okay, because I know you're not a sports guy, but of course you are aware that they let go all their sports people. I had one on this show, David Alter.

He covered hockey for the National Post, and he and I read Eric Corrine, who was going to be on the show, but didn't want to make the trek that you made, so good on you for doing that. But, and it's funny, you mentioned York Mills and Don Mills, and I'm thinking that must be how you feel about here, because unless I'm going to the Science Center, which is about once a year, I bring the kids to the Science Center, I'm nowhere near the place. It just sounds awfully north and awfully east to me, but I digress. So the Sport National Post, I think all the sports guys, I think, all of them might have been chopped up. Well, there was a lot of duplication going on, not just within individual companies, but just different outlets in general, all leaping on the same stories, the same material. We would put a story together at Canada.com, and like three minutes later, it would be on Huffington Post Canada.

Like, they just rip it off. They take what we had found and packaged and assembled, and they made it their own. Now, it wasn't ours to begin with anyway. It was something we found on Twitter or Reddit or something like that. So I don't think you could really claim that there was any kind of plagiarism involved. But would they attribute? Because this is my pet peeve. Periodically, somebody will rip, like, I always think of the, I don't know why I'm laughing.

I'm thinking of that KFC Tim Hortons photo I took. Do you remember this? And I would start seeing it everywhere. And no one was pointing, it was my photo. It's not like they went and took their own photo. But I know the photo I took. And my photo, sometimes my headline often you know pretty much what i was talking about the tim hortons kfc which you know if you don't know

what that is search my blog toronto mike.com you'll find it but i just know what attribution just just link back and say you know from toronto mike's blog yeah but is anybody really going to click the link anyway i don't know but at least there's some there's still got to be some seo benefit in the google algorithm because of the LinkedIn something. And does that really matter anymore? That's a good question. That's what you're here for. But at the same time, look, and it's still reflected in what I'm doing today.

A lot of this is just sitting at the computer, scrolling on the iPhone, looking for WhatsApp, trying to find that found moment, right? That unpredictable, unexpected thing that's worth amplifying and somehow twisting into something of my own voice. Your own voice. I want to talk about at 1236, because every single weekday at 1236 p.m., I get an email from, I get an email, and it's an email. It's like, who was it? Retro Ontario was in here and he was telling me TV is the new TV. Like, and it's like email is the new email, if you will. So I get an email and it's, I always enjoy your, what you, what basically your, your spin on things and the topics that you pick up because it'll be the stuff I'm interested in too. Like, uh, be it about, uh about Doug Ford or be it about Drake or whatever.

It's a must-read for me. I read it every day after my bike ride. Going back to when I was working on RadioDigest.com, one of the things I learned way back when was a lot of people will get excited to see something show up online. I was told that people would be on the phone with one another. They were refreshing, refreshing, refreshing this website. As soon as my column showed up online, they hung up the phone. I got to read this thing. So creating that immediacy

at a specific time, the element of surprise, that's what I'm trying to create here. You'll have to tell me if I've been doing a good job. You open the email every day because you don't know what's going to be in there. It's like a journalism pinata, right? Who knows what topics are going to be covered? Who knows what you're going to learn that you didn't know before? And, of course, vanity is always a part of it as well, whether it's other journalists, people in marketing, PR, different industries. They want to see if they've gotten on the radar.

And I like it. Just, I don't, you know, I am a busy guy. I miss some things. And then I know if I can, if I read your newsletter every day after my bike ride, I didn't realize, you know, this store was closing. You know, I didn't realize there's a rogue byway. Like, isn't it in Lake Shore? Is that going to be in tomorrow's issue?'s a rogue byway at Islington and Lake. Sure, is that going to be in tomorrow's issue? Does the rogue byway make the list? I don't think I'm going to be able to avoid it at this point, but there's a wider audience out

there as well. And these are the people who are not on Twitter all day. These are the folks who only have so much time to scroll through Facebook and see what's happening there. So by consolidating what I'm seeing online as someone who's always looking around, I can reach a different demographic, not necessarily media junkies, but people that are curious, that have real jobs and real lives. And the indication is that I'm reaching them as well.

So who, I want to know, like I know there's an affiliation with St. Joseph Media and Toronto Life. Like, tell me how that relationship is all, how that works. This 1236 thing was the result of me proposing it to Ken Hunt, who's the publisher of Toronto Life magazine. He had some success with Torontoist running that website, and that led him to his current position there, St. Joseph. And he was open to ideas about different things that they could do with digital journalism there. This email newsletter business had gained some traction. The Skim is a newsletter that got a whole bunch of venture capital. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. Kind of aimed at a younger female demographic. It's not very deep,

but it seems to have connected with the right people. Either that or it's just another Ponzi scheme here in the world of content where they've got investment money that they're burning. One day it will go away forever. Another email newsletter was called Today in Tabs. Did you ever read that one? Nope. It was pretty dense, and it was aimed at an insidery journalist audience. And it was this one guy, Rusty Foster. He was going through all the hot takes of the day

and arguments that people were having on Twitter, meltdowns. His rhetoric was a little bit predictable, progressive left-wing attitude that played to the audience that he knew was going to read this thing. So stylistically, ideologically speaking, I don't have much in common with it. ideologically speaking, I don't have much in common with it. But as far as the style, this whole idea of embedding tweets into an email and encouraging people to click away from the newsletter, I caught wind of it through him that this could really be something. So I adopted some of those aesthetics as well. So with all this activity happening, also recognizing that the platforms are taking over the media, engulfing everything, right? I mean, how can you create a media outlet that you have some dominance over, that you control the distribution? Email.

Yes. That's the way to do it. I'm not beholden to Facebook. I've got people reading who would never click on anything that I wrote, ever. They would never see it. They would never know where to go. This way it's being pushed directly to them

in their inbox. So they're taking it in. They know what I'm up to. They're absorbing it. They know it's going to be there at a specific point in time, and I'm not reliant on Facebook, Google, Twitter, anything like that to get this summary out. So that's a big part of it as well.

They liked where I was coming from at St. Joseph. It gave me this opportunity to essentially set up my own publication with the provision that I would run the entire thing by myself from an editorial perspective. So I've got some help with Toronto Life as far as copy editing and distribution strategy, figuring out the structure, product management. That's a more recent idea of a job description. So that goes on, figuring out how to shape this, but also the luxury of being able to develop it and find the audience, see what works, what doesn't work. So we're one year into doing this now and ready to make it work. But you really need that year. You can't just look at the statistics or the feedback from a few weeks

and treat that like a metric of anything. So I'm glad to be working with the right people who understand this to some extent and giving me the rope to figure out what it can be. And can it be more than just an email newsletter? And anyone can subscribe to this email newsletter at 1236.com. No, it's 1236.ca. Right.

But good try. I took a shot at that one. 1236.ca. And by the way, you tweet at 1236, but you used to tweet all the time as at scroll. So you've moved over. I don't see any at scroll tweets anymore. I'm just curious. It's a matter of focusing, man.

How many different online personalities can I assume at once? My personal brand is intertwined with 1236 now. I'm perfectly content with that. I think it reigns me in and keeps me focused. Here we are talking about the history of blogging and the whole idea that if you had a website and you could do anything you wanted on it, you could rant about what was happening in the news. You could go on a tirade about somebody who was cruel to you back in junior high school. You could go in any direction you wanted to. You could start fights. You could stoke debate.

And I think after a number of years, I found my comfort zone in terms of what I want to do, how I want to present myself. And at this point, what's going on with 1236 is a distillation of what I'm doing online all day, all the time. For a lot of other things I'm doing, the Internet is not invited. the internet is not invited. You know, Toronto Life, which is great publication, but today I was a little pissed at them on Twitter because they've tweeted a link about a couple that was looking to buy an affordable home in Mimico, okay? And I'm interested because I can throw a rock and hit Mimico,

but I see the three homes they looked at, two of them are in New Toronto, and one of them is in Long Branch, and none of the three are in Mimico. These downtown rubes, man. They come out here and they think they own the place. Get your Mimico, New Toronto and Long Branch borders right. Do you mind if I pepper you with some topics that come up frequently on your newsletter that I'm interested in real quick? We can do a quick shot on each one here.

I can't believe this chat, which I feel like we just did an intro. We're already at 58 minutes. Do you believe that? It's hard to believe. And I'm only into the first beer, Mike. What's happened here? You've got me talking too much.

I got a couple of negative comments after my KJ interview. KJ, who I don't think anyone knows, is Chris James from CFTR. I feel like this is a bigger issue than people are making it out to be. But somebody said, I talked too much about myself during the KJ interview. Did you listen to the KJ interview? I love the KJ interview, and I've been listening to KJ on the radio in Toronto as long as you have. Look, I admire the fact that you're willing to let people give their feedback to

everything you do here. I don't know if I could handle it on the level that you get it. Because this is episode 173. Yeah, the beer guys are great, but they're not paying my mortgage. So you get free beer and they help me buy some of this equipment, but there's no gas money there. So you get free beer and they help me buy some of this equipment, but there's no gas money there. And I do all this. I do it all. I spend the time. I invite the guests.

I try to create some content people are interested in. So it's tough when you get criticized because you're like, it's a free podcast. It's not my full-time job. It's a passion project. I enjoy doing it. Maybe if you want to crap on the podcast, maybe just write me an email or something. Put it out there on the public site so everybody can see that you were disappointed by the kj interview because i talked too much about myself oh i'm gonna tell you to to moderate the hell out of any comments that this podcast gets here today yeah that's right anything that goes

on here today please don't leave any unkind comments but But yeah, KJ, I mean, what's the guy's job? It's to hit the post on a bunch of old songs on the radio. And he does it exceptionally well. What else do you want from the guy? He doesn't owe you anything. That's right. Hey, so good job helping my friend Retro Ontario, who's Ed Conroy, find the original Catch the Taste ad with Roberto Alomar. Good job.

It was like manna from heaven. I get this tweet from an account. It was Roberto Alomar, like an underscore between the names. And it was a link to a YouTube video. I'm not sure if it was unlisted or private or whatever. But the inference there was, I think you've been looking for these. The link was in there. And I had the sense that this was some sort of inside job,

that it wasn't going to be there for very long. So I sent the message to Retro Ontario, the bat signal, you better download this, because it's not going to be there for very long. And it all disappeared, vanished. The Twitter, the YouTube, everything. You're right, you're right, because I did post after the fact,

I tried to go to this Roberto underscore Alomar Twitter user. It's gone i'm like it's like deep throat you know it's like follow the money yeah we've we've got friends in in higher places than we realize and uh the the whole idea that there was an original catch the taste commercial yeah that uh retro ontario was never never able to find like like uh with this millions of hours of scanning through VHS tapes, that he even remembered it was fascinating to me. So I kept mentioning it. I kept bringing it up. It was high on his list of most wanted.

It was the holy grail of Toronto TV commercials from the 1990s. He owes us both because the same week almost, he was trying to find out who composed the Magic Shadows theme song on TV Ontario. And thanks to a tweet I sent, I got him an answer pretty quick. So he owes us each, I would say a beer, but I'll take care of the beer. He can buy me a coffee. Well, the nostalgia for Toronto media, which you've delightfully covered here a couple of times with Ed Conroy, we realize that there are tens of thousands of people who remember this stuff. I think a lot of them don't even realize how deep the history goes, right?

You were growing up in this 30-channel universe. You only had so many options in front of you. And so a lot of things in this monoculture were burned in our brains. Look at the nostalgia out there for the early days of so many things, much music, CFNY, 1050 Chum. A lot of this stuff, when you listen to it, look at it in retrospect, it wasn't very good. Some of it was,. A lot of this stuff, when you listen to it, look at it, in retrospect, it wasn't very good. Some of it was, but a lot of crap. What is it? Don Draper's quote about nostalgia.

But it's his, Teddy, his Greek friend about nostalgia. I can't remember. That was, I don't know if you watched Mad Men, but it was the carousel. He was launching the ad for the, it's one of my favorite clips of all time, actually, the Kodak carousel. And he was talking about nostalgia. It's a potent, I think is what he called it. It's a potent drug, nostalgia.

And also the fact that we're here talking as Gen Xers. We've got one foot in the old media and one foot in the new, really, right? We're like a linchpin. We're the linchpin between the old guys who, you know, are trying to, and the millennials, like we're the linchpin between the old guys who are trying to—and the millennials. We're the linchpin. And I don't really think that anybody wants us around all that much. But at the same time, it provides some perspective. So when I put the 1236 newsletter together, I'm always looking for those tidbits of history. Unfortunately, a lot of those are death notices and references to unfortunate incidents,

things that happen to be in the news based on what happened in the past. But then once in a while, you'll get something like Alfie Zappacosta reminiscing about the original Pizza Nova jingle. Speaking of KJ, that was like a 97.3 clip, right? That was a Boom 97.3 clip. Is that right? Yeah, and it's been on the air all this time. It will probably outlive Zappa Costa himself. So I think that resonates with a certain kind of audience that may not represent a huge percentage of the population, but the readers that I have, I'd like to think some of them know where I'm coming from, and appreciate that. Here's

something that I can put in a newsletter that you wouldn't write an entire article about necessarily. You wouldn't really get any benefit out of turning it into a piece of clickbait or rambling on about its relevance. The story can be told sometimes in two or three sentences, and I've been doing a lot of that. You mentioned Much Music, and you've alluded a few times to Bell selling Much. Do we still think that's happening? Bell selling Much? I got a reliable rumor which was denied by all parties involved. They've got coming up their annual Much Music Video Awards, and they've rebranded it. It's called the iHeartRadio Canada Much Music Video Awards. What's going on there? Are you telling me that's going to be the name going forward of this award show, which

is aimed at what, tweenagers? I mean, anyone old enough to vote isn't watching this thing. So they've linked up there with iHeartRadio. It's this over-leveraged company that used to be Clear Channel, creating an affiliate in Canada. And they'll be launching online radio. So that's why they're getting the name out there. And they're trying to match it with what's going on at MuchMusic. and they're trying to match it with what's going on at MuchMusic.

But of course, as any good Gen Xer will tell you, MuchMusic isn't what it used to be. None of these channels are. And Bell has a lot of these assets that they're not doing much with. MuchMusic is one of them. MTV Canada is another. So yes, I believe that if they have a buyer, they are entertaining the opportunities ahead. What's the deal with Frank D'Angelo? It's one of my favorite discussion points, and I know this is starring in, did the soundtrack, written, directed, the whole thing, if you want it to be seen by the biggest hipsters in America, where else would you book it but the Williamsburg Cinema?

And this Frank D'Angelo, who has been such a ubiquitous presence on our media landscape here. He's ready for the big time, and he's going to bring his movie to where the snarkiest movie critics around will be able to see it for themselves. I have an insatiable appetite for all things Frank D'Angelo. I look for reviews of these movies, and the snarkier, the better. And every once in a while, somebody will say, why don't you invite Frank D'Angelo on your podcast? To be honest with you, I've never done it because I'm afraid of too much contact with Frank D'Angelo.

It just frightens me, this world of his. On the advice of my attorney, I would like to say that Frank D'Angelo is the greatest auteur that this city has ever produced. That's great. Gallery of Mall, by the way, you write about that sometimes. I worked there for five whole years. I worked in the Gallery of Mall because I was working at the Food City there,

and then actually, and also after it turned into a price chopper. I don't know what it is today, probably Fresh Co., I think. Yeah, such an enigma, this Galleria Mall. This whole idea that the mall would continue there all these years while a whole bunch of gentrifiers were moving in around it. And the locals who were so fond of this place, sitting on the benches all day long, watching the World Cup in the lounge that they set up there. watching the World Cup in the lounge that they set up there. So they're doing some kind of art gallery show there this coming weekend. And you've got to wonder if the people that actually use them all recognize that they're being treated like outsider art.

Here we've got these old European working class residents, the ones who haven't yet cashed out on their million dollar piles that they bought for $10,000 40, 50 years ago. And, you know, people sort of poking at them, treating them like animals in this zoo. I don't know if that's going to be able to continue much longer, but it's not happening anyway because they've got big plans to overhaul the site there, renovate it. Based on the renderings, it looks quite promising. And I don't imagine these bigger retailers are going anywhere. I mean, FreshCo, Price Chopper, that's owned by Sobeys, right? There's Rexall, Pharma Plus there. Bice Chopper, that's owned by Sobeys, right?

There's a Rexall, Pharma Plus there. These are big companies with millions and billions of dollars at their disposal, but they never invested anything into the mall. No. I have memories of getting a peanut butter bagel from the place where you got the coffee in the middle of the mall. I would go there and get my peanut butter bagel. So there's my Galleria Mall memories. Podcasting. We're on a podcast right now.

But my question to you is, where are the great Canadian podcasts? What are the great Canadian podcasts that you listen to? I've got hundreds of podcast subscriptions happening. Naturally, I'm not listening to them all. I'm looking at the descriptions, wondering what's going on with them. I don't know. Are there any other podcasts around

that are doing anything comparable to what you're doing here? Just hanging out, having a chat, drinking beer? No, you know, and I'm naturally interested in the podcasting world because I helped Humble and Fred start their podcast, and then I helped Todd Shapiro start his podcast, and of course I have my own podcast.

This is episode 173. The one I do listen periodically. If I want to listen to a couple of buds just shoot the shit or whatever, I will tune into the Taggart and Torrens one. I know Alan Cross, of course, had one with Michael, a guy from Report on Business Television. Oh, he hates me. Michael Hainsworth. one. I know Alan Cross, of course, had one with Michael guy from Report on Business Television. Oh, he hates me. Michael Hainsworth. He hates you?

What's wrong with this guy? But I know that one's dead now, so it takes some glee there that that's gone. And I listened to a podcast on CBC called Podcast Playlist, in which they play parts of good parts of different podcasts so we

can hear what's out there. It seems to me there's a lack of great Canadian podcasts. Well, you're also referring to CBC shows which have the other platform as well. Yeah, it's not really fair. When you mention podcasts on that level, I'm not thinking of ones that are satellite radios. You're right, you're right. Don't count Q or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

Count the podcast only. Yeah, like the Taggart and Torrance, for example. Okay, well, of course, we've got Jesse Brown, the nation's only media critic, who started up Canada Land. And he's a rich man now, right? Because he had some share in the, what were they called?

Snip Bits? Co-founder of Bitstrips. And then they started the Bitmoji app and Snapchat bought them for a reported $100 million, but nothing has ever been confirmed. Oh, interesting. Yeah canada land he's got canada land and and a lot of what i'm doing uh overlaps with jesse but he's not he is not much of a media consumer you know when you i don't know how often you listen to his show at the beginning i listened quite a bit and then i stopped listening because because it just wasn't doing it for me, and I only have so many hours I can commit to these podcasts. I like his sinister anarchist side when that comes out.

I've always enjoyed that. But his idea of what the media is, it's fairly narrow. It's mostly about the CBC, newspaper columnists. That's the perspective that he has on it. There's so much more going on. and commercial radio stations and email newsletters. So I don't hear that same level of media literacy from Canada land as maybe I'd like based on what he bills it to be. At the same time, it's very much about him. He's doing much better in his crowdfunding than I'm doing in mine, by the way. Well, and today through the culmination of the Gian Gomeschi courtroom saga, he had a big role, supporting role to play in that as well. So I'm sure Jesse is focused on that one.

Another company called Pacific Content is launching, starting up within Canada. Their first projects have been these branded podcasts. So you've got a Shopify podcast, a Slack podcast. Would you listen to those? See, I don't want those. I'm so sensitive to inherent bias in everything I consume. I don't think I would ever

subscribe and download and listen to a podcast, like a Shopify podcast. Well, the idea there is the companies are producing a podcast rather than sponsoring somebody else's podcast. So if you find an angle that caters to the audience for the product, then it makes it worth their time, at least to try to create a podcast that's synonymous with the company. Ideally, what happens in a situation like this is those opportunities pay the bills, and then other creative levels can be reached that aren't as immediately profitable. But that's the case at every company.

I think just sitting around drinking beer, ranting about the state of the media. Shooting the shit. Yeah, that might remain a bit of a niche product. Sorry, Mike. All mine, all mine. Hey, I got a sponsor, okay? That's one more than I anticipated having,

so that's great. Do you listen to any terrestrial radio anymore? Sometimes? Not too much? I habitually have News Talk 1010 on, as I have for years, like my entire life. I think because just as

background, something on the clock radio, it's a comforting thing to have there. If anything's going on, I'll hear about it. So that has remained my default radio station. But look how hesitant I was. I know. I'm going to remind you, this is an audio podcast. You're going to have to speak. But yeah. The world of terrestrial commercial radio has not changed very much since I was doing those online columns about it 16 or 17

years ago. It's a lot of the same cast of characters. So there's something to be said about that consistency. I very much enjoy the radio culture, where it originated from. At the same time, I think everybody recognizes that the business has changed. Everybody comes in here and tells you as much. And when I was growing up in Toronto, though, that was really the main engine for me. That's where everything was happening. To me, that was like the pinnacle of creativity was on the radio. You feel the same way as far as I can tell. That's where everything was happening.

Everything that you needed to know was on these different radio stations. But in passing years, I realized how strange of an interest this is. That generally a lot of people really didn't know a lot about the intricacies of what station was playing what song and who was doing what time slot. But for me, it was really 1050 Chum was where it's at, where it was at to understand how pop culture was shaped

and how it translated to an audience here. And there were a lot of people that used to work there and put this thing together. You had board operators on every shift who were engineering the show. There were a lot of creative people working in the background. And as so many people have come on this podcast to lament, a lot of that manpower just isn't there anymore. And you're left to your own devices working within this rigid style of automation and formatting. And there are some people that are still able to be creative through what they've got. And I think whenever there's a radio gossip story, I tend to acknowledge it with 1236 because for for me, there's a sentimental attachment still going back to childhood.

And they really, it's a niche that needs to be filled here, because if I write, for example, Mad Dog Fired, okay? Mad Dog got fired on, what was it? Virgin 99, 999. And I'll write about that because I, A, I've met Mad Dog, he's been on the podcast, but I always, I'm interested in these things. I'm one of the few people who is maybe, But then I realize the number of people Googling, you know, where's Mad Dog? Was Mad Dog fired? And I can see like this is numbers. I can see people through Google visiting that page and I can see the comments piling up. There really does seem to be a void of mainstream media writing about radio. I don't think any of them are writing about radio anymore. Or not a lot of attention paid to mainstream media in general

because it's driven by money and the products. And bias is so, and I don't know if the, I always wondered, does the average Joe understand that the reason Bell's The Social has the guy on talking about Crave TV is because they're trying to sell another, I always wondered, does the average Joe realize that this,

this interview is really an ad for another Bell product? Like the whole Rogers Bell. And then I guess you can kind of throw chorus in there now. It's a, there's so much inherent bias. I just, I just, you know,

it's like reading your Rogers. People talk about, you know, some controversial Blue Jays decision. And it's like, you can't read it without being aware that they get checks from the same company. And I'm all over the place there. I'm sorry. If you've got these companies

behind you, everybody knows who Ben Mulroney is. And I like Ben, by the way. You've met Ben? No, I've never met Ben. I've met him on Twitter. I've never said an ill word about Ben Mulroney. I just don't have much interest in that whole Entertainment Tonight style. Well, he might get another job this fall.

Canada AM. That was the rumor that I reported via Frank Magazine. However reliable that might be. Ben Mulroney is the best darn Ben Mulroney he can be. So I give credit to Ben Mulroney for filling the role, playing the role. Ben Mulroney is the best darn Ben Mulroney he can be. So I give credit to Ben Mulroney for filling the role, playing the role of Ben Mulroney better than anybody else. One day we'll have a political debate and it'll be Ben Mulroney there for the Conservative Party and Justin Trudeau for the Liberals. Probably, maybe, we'll see. Although he claims I have no

interest, so I'm just throwing that out there for fun. I'm interested in being dialed in. What's happening in the news? You know, where the action is going on any given day. I don't have any specific biases in that respect. If it's worth my curiosity, I'll pay attention to it. Just want to point out today, Drake's one dance hit number one

on the Billboard Hot 100. It's Drake's very first number one as a primary artist, I guess we call that, as opposed to a featured artist. Yeah, two number one hits with Rihanna, What's My Name, and then Work more recently. But Drake wanted to hit number one on his birthday in October with Hotline Bling.

He was blocked from the top because Apple Music had the exclusive on his video and those numbers weren't counted in the Hot 100. Right. So he missed out on his number one. And here we are in May, and Drake is number one Hot 100 artist for the first time, and he has 19 other songs on the chart.

You can tell I'm really into this stuff. No, I know. I'm interested too. Somebody, I think it was you who pointed out how long until we get the Drake is bigger than the Beatles type, you know, clickbait headlines, even though it's completely an unfair comparison. But they really ruined the Billboard chart. They modified all the rules to try and accommodate online streaming. And so the numbers you get and the chart is not really comparable to the way that it used to be when it was all about

putting out one single at a time right so to turn the fact that drake has 20 singles on the hot 100 20 of the hot 100 is drake yeah and 12 of them i think are beyonce right because i think her whole album i think she set some record for most female artist appearances at once or something. All 12 of her Lemonade songs, I think, were in the top 100. I think. From a nostalgia perspective, I think the Hot 100 and these charts still carry a lot of weight. But the reality is that we listen to music and consume media in so many different ways now. Can you really quantify it

with statistics? Drake has the number one hit in America for the first time on the Hot 100, but he's had the number one on other charts too. So what the relevance is this to most people? I'm not quite sure. I don't know either, except just before

you arrived, I did post my every time a Canadianadian goes to number one i post an entry like okay now the number whatever is that 45 or whatever is the number now of canadian songs that have hit number one and if you look at it it's very recent heavy if you will like the whole weekend bieber drake explosion over the last few years as we canadians and gta can GTA Canadians primarily have been interviewed. What's that? Uh, reggae style band that had the number one recently to, uh,

magic, magic, rude. My daughter sang ad nauseum, the nickelback of reggae. Right, right. Um,

yeah. Shout out to snow too, who, uh, had that post first. And by the way, complete tangent, but maestro fresh West and I did touch base this past week and he's still excited about coming on toronto mic but i and and i had a conversation

with kish on via twitter this week kish of course had uh order from chaos in the early very very early 90s if you're talking about toronto rap before drake you gotta point out kish he's now in la as a voiceover guy and all of this is to say that Canadians have done very, very well dominating the Hot 100 the past, I don't know, 18 months or whatever. Look how far we've come. The idea that someone like Kish would be a celebrity within Toronto, have nothing to show for it, right? But now he's doing voice work for video games, Right. But now he's doing voice work for video games. Yes.

Has a whole other lucrative career all his own. So many different micro celebrities. This is what I was talking about with one of my previous projects that didn't really come together. But, you know, Toronto has been a breeding ground for so many people that are recognized and famous in this eccentric, specific toronto way it's a pretty cool city and i'm biased i was born here it's not like i migrated here because i was drawn to it i was just kind of born into it like that line from bane and batman uh but um last thing i actually could talk to you for another couple of hours but i actually have to wrap this up but are you familiar with the work of marty york who i would say marty but my T's are D's on this podcast, but you already know that. Marty York wrote for the Globe for a long time, and now he's involved in a bunch of other projects.

And he's a controversial figure on Twitter because he, and you're not a sports guy, but if you read his tweets, he's basically just trying to aggravate and get some response from Toronto sports fans by saying things like Jose Bautista sucks, Raptors have no chance, anything that would just piss off a Toronto sports fan. Well, I think that you

need to be contrarian to get that level of attention. It seems to have worked on the internet for the last 20 or 25 years. And he's joining a long line of individuals trying to provoke. I guess he'll come in here and try it as well. Right. I bring him up because I think he is my next guest, Marty York. And then speaking of terrestrial radio and speaking of, you mentioned Chum AM, but if you go back to Chum FM, I've had Roger Ashby on the show,

and Marilyn Dennis, I got to decline politely. I'll call it that. But Ingrid Schumacher is coming on after Marty York. So Ingrid Schumacher, for those who don't know, has been on that station since the late 70s. That's a long run. Yeah, and Chum was a family-owned company owned by the Waters family.

And they had the 1331 Yonge Street, you know, magical-looking building from the outside. And Chum FM, they retained this sensibility for so many years. So here they are, part of the big Bell behemoth, and you've got a few people still hanging on to their old jobs so i look forward to hearing about what that's like thank you and it's complete pleasure to finally after all these years of correspondence to finally meet you so thank you for coming by never read the comments that's great advice and that brings us to the end of our 170... What number is this? I should know this. I should have it in my notes.

173rd. 173rd episode of Toronto Mic'd. I am... I should know where I am. I'm on Twitter at Toronto Mic'd. Mark Weisblot is at 1236 See you all next week I wanna take a streetcar

downtown Read Andrew Miller and wander around And drink some Guinness from a tin Cause my UI check has just come in Ah, where you been?