There’s no news like old news
I know the Olympics are so…passé… But I had made a few notes and forgot to post them.
Olympic wrap-up…with a total of 24 medals, we ended up in third place (after Germany — 29 — and just after U.S.A. — 25). This blew away our previous best-ever of 17 medals (Salt Lake City, 2002). Considering that Canada has about 32.5 million people, Germany has 82.5 million and the mighty U.S. of Eh has 300 million, I’d say that’s pretty impressive! If we work it out by population, we earned a medal for every 1.4 million people, Germany won one for every 2.8 million, and America won one for every 12 million. (Let’s conveniently avoid mentioning that fourth-place Austria won one medal for every 340,000 people — including crazy roadblock-smashing coaches — and sixth-place Norway won one for every 240,000 people…)
CBC web coverage — is it possible for news be delivered too fast? Yes. Quality versus speed — who do you think will win that Olympic race? I was reading this article as the closing ceremonies ended on Sunday afternoon. The article looks fine now, but at the time it had a “poetic” mixture of present and past tense, alternating paragraphs. It was particularly confused-sounding.
I was about to grab some funny examples from the page but…as I was highlighting, in Big Brother fashion the page refreshed itself and some of the “errors” were erased before I could grab them. I was literally watching the page being written (or edited) before my eyes. As far as “real-time” print news goes, I think I prefer the blog style, where posts have timestamps and have less tendency to be edited once they’re posted. They did this for the opening ceremonies and it was rather entertaining, like sitting in the living room with someone who was making “wry observations” as the show was going on. Actually, they did the same for the closing.
Okay, no more Olympics stuff for a few years. Well, at least a few days…