Extra! A newspaper is born!

Check out the homage to Rolling Stone in the logo of this baby newspaper. Photo by John Pura, Red River College

Big-city newspapers may be dying, but some small-town papers are booming.

Selkirk, Manitoba (population 10,000) has sprouted two papers to compete with the weekly Selkirk Journal. All are free distribution, which means that advertising pays the freight.

The recently arrived Selkirk Enterprise contains mostly press releases and "submitted" (free) articles.

Much more interesting is the Selkirk Record, a real weekly paper packed with real community news. Sample headline from Volume 1 Edition 1: "Knife fight behind the Merch".

Publisher Lana Meier and editor Donna Maxwell are refugees from the Journal, which is owned by Sun Media, a Quebecor company. Meier, Maxwell and their band of sisters and brothers plan to start papers in Stonewall (pop. 4,500) and other Manitoba towns.

Good for them.

In addition to new sources of news and advertising in these communities, these new businesses provide jobs and freelancing opportunities for journalists and students.

Most of the news in the Selkirk Record and the Selkirk Journal is written and edited by graduates of the Red River College Creative Communications program. Community papers such as the Journal and its fellow Sun papers have also been reliable sources of work internships.

Perhaps the most interesting area of future competition in Selkirk and Stonewall is online. The new Record has no website yet, preferring to concentrate first on building up its print product -- at least until high-speed Internet service is available in the area.

The Selkirk Journal, though, has begun posting stories to its website several times a day.

Ain't competition great?

CreComm grad is new Global National anchor

Dawna Friesen (left) talks journalism with student Emily Baron Cadloff at Red River College Nov. 20, 2009. Photo by John Pura, RRC

Dawna Friesen, a 1984 Creative Communications graduate, is the new anchor of Global National TV news.

In November 2009 Red River College honoured Friesen as a Distinguished Alum.

Speaking to journalism students that day, Friesen reminded them that journalists are privileged observers to historical events.

Friesen took the classic CreComm route to journalistic prominence: get the diploma, work in a small town, work in a bigger town, work in a bigger job.

That's why instructors tell students not to turn up their noses at Portage la Prairie, or at Brandon, Saskatoon or Thunder Bay. Friesen worked in all those spots.

Print Plus

My colleague Kenton Larsen, who trolls the universe seeking jobs for Creative Communications graduates, says he has hardly ever seen as many opportunities.

That's great.

Yet it's surprising how many job descriptions are very traditional-- those in the journalism field, at least.

Jeff Gaulin's useful website, for example, still lists Print as a major category for journalistic jobs. Why not Print Plus? Dead trees and online, too.

And Interlake Publishing, a long-time source of good starting jobs at Manitoba community newspapers, is looking for a couple of reporters and managing editor. These are fine jobs, certainly worth applying for.

But isn't there an opportunity to expand them?

Interlake could dramatically build its website, emphasizing the community involvement that has traditionally been the strength of community newspapers: not only the important coverage of cops, courts and town council, but also

Your pictures of your kids! Grandma's 99th birthday blog! Little Ernestine's championship soccer season!

CreComm grads have all the journalistic and technical skills to make this happen.

Publishers should consider spending a bit of money on creating compelling local websites before someone else does, and puts their dead-trees newspapers out of business.

No money?

Hey Sun Media, how about diverting the salary of one preacher from your new right-wing TV channel and giving it to your subsidiary Interlake to create some real community journalism?

Little Ernestine's family would love you.

I'm OK, you're cute

John Waters has taught me the essential difference between my students and me.

In a Q&A in the June 28, 2010 Globe and Mail the tasteful filmmaker and author of Role Models confesses that he was angry when he made Pink Flamingos. But he ain't angry any more.

"No, no. An angry 60-year-old is an asshole. An angry 20-year-old is cute."

Thanks, John. I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm stuck in a Starbucks lineup.

Or try to decipher the latest traffic signs at the Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport.

Or remember the name of the airport.

CreComm at the World Cup

Creative Communications student Steven Dreger is at the World Cup in South Africa, working on his Independent Professional Project. It's a video about soccer, naturally.

Also naturally, Steve is writing a blog about his experiences.

Check it out. See how he became a soccer fan --and a follower of the German team -- over bratwurst and potato salad at the age of five.

No breasts please, we're Apple

I love the iPad. From a distance, though, and not nearly as fervently as my colleague Kenton Larsen, who has been blogging about his new baby.

Yes, I have run my fingers over Kenton's baby. It's a beautiful device that displays information and connects its users with all sorts of people and things. No doubt the next iterations will be even more beautiful.

But there is a somewhat sinister side to the iPad, as the New York Times reports on June 14, 2010.

According to the NYT, Apple has refused to approve a new comic version of James Joyce's Ulysses as an iPad app until the authors remove a panel that shows a woman with exposed breasts.

That's 77 years after a U.S. judge ruled that Joyce's book is not obscene, opening the door to its wide distribution.

OK, breasts begone, say the authors, although they say they argued with Apple for a while.

What's sinister about that? Just that these authors see the iPad as so appealing and Apple so powerful that they are willing to make their material conform to the company's inscrutable standards of taste.

I hope nobody -- oh, let's say R. Crumb -- tries to create an app for a comic version of the Book of Genesis. I hear Eve is naked in that one.

80 fact checkers, one magazine

In my Editing Print and Online Media class I challenge students to Spot the Screwup. They find lots of errors online, in dead-tree newspapers and magazines, even printed on the walls of buildings.

Presumably all that material went through an editing process of some kind. Readers don't know what errors were fixed before publication, but we can see the ones that weren't.

Fixing mistakes -- and doing all the other useful things that editors do, such as checking context and tone -- is time-consuming and expensive.

For example, the German magazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror) employs 80 fact-checkers, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.

But some facts are more equal than others, or at least they used to be.

A long comment attached to the CJR article by sociologist and journalist Hersch Fischler highlights the historic role of Der Spiegel fact checkers in digging up dirt on the magazine's political enemies.