#firstworldproblems

1. Black Friday lineups

2. Ikea traffic jams

3. Hot dog crust stuffed pizza or bacon sundae?

4. Big Gulp or Red Bull?

5. “I used to dig Picasso/ Then the big Tech giant came along/ And turned him into wallpaper.” Neil Young, Driftin’ Back.

Winnipeg Metro: Small, with big plans

Two weeks ago Paul Samyn, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, told Creative Communications students, “Don’t ask me where the newsroom is going to be in 12 months.”

His caution is probably commendable, given that the business in which he has been newly promoted is going through dramatic changes.

Contrast it, though, with the confident one-word assertion today to those same students by Elisha Dacey, editor of Winnipeg Metro.

When I asked what her paper will be like in a year, she said, “Bigger.”

Dacey hopes to increase her full-time reporting staff by 50 per cent next year.

OK, that means growing to three reporters from two.

But it’s still growth, a feature unfortunately absent from many news media business plans these days.

Dacey and Alison Zulyniak, the paper’s advertising sales manager, gave an upbeat presentation about Winnipeg’s year-and-a-half-old newspaper.

Metro Canada, of which Winnipeg Metro is a part, is 90 per cent owned by Torstar Corp., the parent company of the Toronto Star. Stockholm-based Metro International, which originated the international chain, owns 10 per cent.

Key to the success of the Metro papers, in addition to free distribution of the print edition, is small, low-cost staff, lots of short stories, and bright pictures and ads, all designed to appeal to free-spending but time-short 18- to 34-year-olds.

Oh, and the editor writes a ton of stories and takes pictures. “This is the best job I’ve literally ever had,” Dacey said.

Next year we’ll invite her and her colleague Zulyniak back to tell us how much bigger Winnipeg Metro has become.

Je me souviens: Corruption in Quebec

The Charbonneau inquiry into political corruption in La Belle Province is creating terrific theatre.

Day after day it hears testimony about payoffs to politicians and bureaucrats for construction contracts.

Now the mayor of Montreal is taking a few days off after the inquiry heard testimony that he ignored illegal fundraising in his political party.

Infuriating? Perhaps, but not surprising.

Corruption in Quebec has long been an open secret.

You can read a riveting account of this rotten state of affairs in Mafia Inc.: The Long, Bloody Reign of Canada’s Sicilian Clan by journalists André Cedilot and André Noel.

You can also read my 2011 review of the book in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Technology in education

Red River College requires its instructors to take the10-course Certificate in Adult Education.

The course I am taking for  four hours each Thursday night is Introduction to Technology in Education.

It showers us with new technology and invites us to consider which technology could help our students and us.

We reflect on our use of technology in teaching.

Rather than being an early adopter of new technology, I watch my colleagues' adventures on the leading edge or way out on the bleeding edge (hello, Kenton Larsen). I prefer to husband my technology-learning resources, because I have seen too many world-beating, must-have technologies flame out in a few months.

The technology I like makes my teaching more effective or my life more enjoyable.

So I blog and I use Twitter. I use an iPod Touch to check email and Twitter, when I am in range of the college's wifi.

I have a cell phone -- and a land line.

But I don't feel the need to walk down the street, buds in my ears, listening to music or talking to someone.

I already have enough music in my head.

ATriple-E Winnipeg Free Press

E-journalism, enterprise and engagement will form the core of the Winnipeg Free Press, its new editor said today.

Paul Samyn, who took over the top job in September, told Red River College Creative Communications students that the paper is changing the structure of its newsroom to reflect how its readers live.

One consequence is that, although he knows what he wants the paper to be like in six months, “don’t ask me where the newsroom is going to be in 12 months.”

The three E’s? No, this is not the Triple- E Senate – elected, effective and equal – of 1980s Canadian constitutional debates. (What happened to that, anyway? Our Senate is still none of those things.)

E-journalism is online content, more of it with more diversity in material and style, content that people will pay for.

Enterprise: “stuff that people can’t get anywhere else.” Samyn cited today’s Free Press/ Probe Research poll on attitudes to Manitoba politicians. He also mentioned Gordon Sinclair Jr.’s column and the weekly entertainment and listings planned for the broadsheet replacement for Uptown starting next Thursday.

Engagement? That includes events at the Free Press News Café such as a public invitation to meet and chat with Olympic soccer bronze medalist Desiree Scott.

And those recent layoffs of journalists, many of whom had preceded Samyn’s audience as RRC students: the “layoff situation,” in Samyn’s words?

“It forced us to re-examine everything we would do and dragged us into changes we wouldn’t have made before.”

Now Samyn, along with everyone else in Canadian journalism, is watching The Globe and Mail’s paywall experiment that started this week, hoping for a key to unlock the vault of online revenue, the stuff that business proprietors’ dreams are made of.

All this is consistent with much of the commentary at a recent Canadian Journalism Foundation session that Sylvia Stead, the Globe’s public editor, described as “a thought-provoking and positive night for journalists.”

Today Samyn was optimistic about students’ prospects in journalism. Multimedia skills are key, of course – far from the “keyboarding” that he studied in CreComm before graduating in 1988 and landing a job on the Free Press as a business writer.

So what did the students think today?

They asked good questions politely.

One asked how they are supposed to choose a career path if Samyn can’t see a year ahead. He responded that optimism; multiple-platform skills and persistence are the key to success in journalism.

I certainly hope so. That’s what we teach.

Reflection

Don't like the rain and snow today in Southern Manitoba?

Forget them! Live in the past!

I took this photo last Thursday evening, Sept. 27, at the Notre Dame campus of Red River College in Winnipeg.

It was part of an assignment for the Introduction to Technology in Education course I am taking for the Certificate in Adult Education.

Rather outspoken (with help)

Let’s pause for a moment.
We have been struggling to understand the actions of newspaper owners who fire their youngest, most tech-savvy employees while maintaining their costly distribution networks and their expensive presses.
Let’s put that fruitless quest on hold.
Let’s think instead about the aging faces of another declining news medium: network television news – specifically, one of the old lions of U.S. television, a tribe on the verge of extinction.
Dan Rather is speaking to us again.
A couple of weeks ago we left Rather, the formerly famous face of CBS News, in the fairly gentle hands of his predecessor Walter Cronkite.
Now we can assess Rather in his own words, or perhaps in the words of his literary collaborators.
The title page of Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News names the author as Dan Rather with Digby Diehl. The publisher describes Diehl as “one of the most trusted and successful literary collaborators in America.”
Rather takes a step farther in his acknowledgments, crediting Digby and Kay Diehl. “This man-and-wife team were indispensable in helping me get this book down on paper and ready for publishing.”
There’s nothing wrong with collaboration on a book. But perhaps these writers could have involved a copy editor in the process.
The students in my Editing Print and Online Media class spotted three typos in one nine-line passage.
And the usual practice when borrowing a vivid phrase is to credit the author. Recalling meeting the woman who became his wife, Rather says, “She also had a figure that would make a bishop kick out a stained-glass window.” Raymond Chandler wrote that first, I think.
Rather opens the book on a bitter note, reporting his feelings in 2006 after being squeezed out of CBS News, where he had spent his career reporting and anchoring.
“But hey, I said to myself, this is the big time; you’ve been privileged to play the game at the top for a long while. These are the major leagues: Envy, cowardice and betrayal are part of life. Stuff happens, and people will always surprise you; take it for what you can learn from it and take it like a man, like a pro.”
CBS and Rather parted ways very publicly “because I reported a true story,” the newsman asserts. That was “President George W. Bush’s dereliction of duty during Vietnam.”
The story may have been true, but Rather’s rush to get it on the air and the network’s refusal to deal calmly and rationally with criticisms after the broadcast overwhelmed the truth of the report.
Rather blames the corporate owners of CBS for caving in to pressure from the U.S. government and right-wing propagandists.
In our conspiracy-obsessed era, that argument just might fly.
Now 80, Rather professes himself happy and busy reporting for Dan Rather Reports on AXS.tv.
Coming soon: the memoirs of a Canadian television news icon: The Kind of Life It’s Been by Lloyd Robertson of CTV News.