About

I started the Conserving Memory site (16 October 2008) to log and preserve a timeline of public news information about the deeds and direction of Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada. I hope to maintain an archive in critical blog format of public memory that can be reviewed for context as new events unfold. I believe this will help improve awareness of the strategies and perspectives of those carrying-out the Conservative Party’s agenda.

My name is Joshua Chalifour and I’ve made this a public site hoping it will not only be useful but to get feedback and ideas from the critical attention of others. I also write on some other sites like pundit.ca and phydeau.org (more info at my Google profile).

Prior to the election in October 2008 I got frustrated with the fact that our newspapers (on many occasions) lack a memory of their past reporting. When journalists wrote about a new Harper/Conservative scandal they’d typically neglect to link it to past history, even recently passed history. Perhaps this is because as a newspaper, the job is to report the news. But newspapers go beyond that scope with editorials and other features. Simply reporting the news is fine but I think there also needs to be space inline with the reports that conveys a more wholistic report.

Couldn’t a journalist digging up new information put effort into critically synthesizing events and reporting in the scope of a more intelligent context? Is this entirely left to the domain of bloggers, magazine writers, and pundits? I feel like the availability of content to do this has been mostly neglected so far. It may be a function of time. A reporter needs to report the current events quickly, while the other types of writers have different types of deadlines. Nevertheless there ought to be easy ways for news agencies to quickly pull up prior information directly related to the story at hand. I wish there were more analyses and historical context added to most news articles.

Consider, most newspapers maintain some semblance of their reporting history online. A simple hyperlink for context would do in many cases and it’d be a way that newspapers could better address their online audience with an advantage many other media sources do not share.

Here’s an example. In the days just prior to the 2008 election, many newspapers published information about how Harper blamed the other parties for making parliament dysfunctional and thus nothing could be accomplished. That was the reason for getting it dissolved. But for all the newspaper articles about the Conservatives’ claims that parliament wasn’t functioning, very few referred back to the context of their previous reports on the scandalous 200 page book the Conservatives distributed to their members about how to disrupt and stall parliament. To me, this reveals a lack of service from the newspaper reporting within the context of the public memory.

I’m suggesting a simple idea. It’s little more than a timeline sort of archive presented through a typical blog interface. One could argue that all this context, if published on the Web already, can simply be found through a search engine. But that itself is a problem because it requires each person to put together his or her own context of news for every new event that gets reported. While I’d commend people doing that, I don’t believe it removes the onus of synthesizing such a context from journalists and news agencies as they report new events, they ought to be professionals in this regard.

In addition, the problem with just relying on searching is that online sources have little reliability in terms of persistence. Some sites remove their news after a period of time, others go out of business, others change their links or are unsearchable. There’s nothing wrong with that but it makes Web sites an unreliable source for persistent information. Newspapers could take advantage of this lack to improve their online business models but by-and-large they don’t seem to realize that.

What I’m doing here cannot necessarily solve the unreliability aspect but since I hope to archive sources under the auspices of fair dealing and maintain this Web site for the sake of criticism and research, and not as any sort of business endeavour, perhaps I can mitigate some of the problems I mentioned. The public can assist with the analyses in collaborative way.

This idea could be expanded to an infinite number of other subjects but for now, I’m focusing on Harper’s Conservative Party. I tend to disagree with their approaches on many issues but find it difficult to articulate how, without a good context of public memory.