We’re Back
Ralph Lucas – Founder & Publisher
(June 9, 2024 – Toronto, ON) Plans for a new Northernstars.ca website began a little more than two years ago as we approached our 25th anniversary. Those plans were first delayed by a lack of funding and then things went seriously awry when we suffered a massive, malicious hack attack earlier this year. It was so serious and potentially dangerous to our site visitors that our only option was to shut down the website.
Thanks to a grant from Telefilm, we were able to rebuild and continue to promote Canadian screen productions and the people behind and in front of the cameras.
Your new Northernstars.ca has some substantial changes. Most notably, no advertising. That makes our survival more precarious, but it gives us a website free of ads that, in my opinion, hurt the website more than it helped.
We relaunched knowing there is still a lot of work to be done. There are some minor things here and there that we can improve on over the next several weeks. For example:
– During our time offline, careers changed and new credits will need to be added.
– We might have missed a movie that belongs in our Now Playing or Coming Soon sections.
– If you can’t find information about film festivals, that’s something we’re still working on.
– An earlier encounter with hackers forced us to drop our Canadian Movie Trivia feature that had been a part of Northernstars™ for almost two decades. We will be introducing a new trivia game in the next few days.
– Birthdays, once prominent on every page now occupy just one page, but we will be adding a link so that you can reach Today’s Birthdays, and Trivia, from any page.
– Our video interviews on Northernstars.TV and film trailer archive on Vimeo are now accessible with links at the bottom of every page.
-We have been trying to restart our on-camera interview series since the decline of COVID but work on the website took precedence. We hope to start adding new interviews later this summer.
Most importantly, if there is something you don’t like, some feature you’d like to see, or you want to comment on the changes, one way or the other, please contact us at admin@northernstars.ca. Every message will be read.
And…thanks for being here. There’s simply no point doing this without you
Ralph Lucas is a former broadcast executive and award-winning director in high-end corporate video production. The founder and publisher of Northernstars.ca, online since 1998, he began writing about film and reviewing movies while in radio in Montreal in the mid-1970s.
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