Thank you, Sam Katz

Say what you want about Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz.

You could say, for example, he is tainted by the scandal of the fire hall contracts that went to local developer Shindico Realty.

You could say he looks foolish – at best – for waffling on what he knew, and when, about the recent resignation of his close friend Phil Sheegl as the city’s chief administrative officer.

But you can’t say he runs and hides.

Katz routinely responds to questions from the professional news media, which is part of his job.

But he does more.

Yesterday, as he has done annually for nearly a decade, Katz stood outside his office and took questions from more than 70 first-year Creative Communications students after a city council meeting.

He doesn’t have to do that.

Students and instructors appreciate the mayor’s willingness to talk to us and thus to help teach good journalistic practices.

Thank you, Mayor Katz.

A fight to the death

The Trib, a recent documentary by Winnipeg filmmaker Paula Kelly, recounts the energetic life and brutal death of a Canadian newspaper.

By 1980, after 90 years of battling, the Winnipeg Tribune was drawing even in circulation with the market-leading Winnipeg Free Press.

That’s when Southam, the Trib's corporate owner, killed the paper.

WTF?

In a way, Kelly said in a conversation after an Oct. 3 screening at Cinematheque, the paper was a victim of its success.

Southam claimed it couldn’t afford new presses to print more copies.

Of course, it was coincidence that Thomson killed the Ottawa Journal the same day, coincidence that these corporate killings gave each newspaper chain a monopoly in a major city.

The details of this protracted battle between two major news media fascinated my second-year Red River College Journalism students.

Danielle Da Silva blogged:

Even the daily news world of Winnipeg was an esteemed, although cut throat, business. Forever the underdog, the Winnipeg Tribune battled inch over inch against the Winnipeg Free Press for hundreds of thousands of readers.

Coincidentally (really!), I have just read a story in which newspaper competition in early 20th century Toronto probably determined the outcome of a sensational murder trial.

The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial That Shocked a Country by Charlotte Gray bursts with details of racism and class divisions in Toronto the Good – and the desperate competition among six daily newspapers.

The Evening Telegram, popularly known as the Tely, took the side of Carrie Davies, the maid who admitted killing Bert Massey because she feared he would sexually assault her again.

The Daily Star favoured the master and his plutocratic family.

This advocacy was not confined to sober editorials. On the news pages, editors refused to allow facts to get in the way of good stories that supported the correct analysis.

Gray writes:

In this fevered battle to entertain, the Carrie Davies case was irresistible to penny-press editors looking for sensational headlines. Stories of assaults on young women always increased circulation, and how many Toronto citizens could walk past a newsboy who yelled, “Massey Murder”?

Well, I can’t walk past, either.

Journalism majors, prepare to study a real newspaper war.

Why should I care?

The new crop of blogs by Red River College Creative Communications students is random and rich.

The students employ words, photos, videos and sometimes audio to bare their thoughts and feelings.

Especially words.

Each week during the semester I suggest two blog posts to Winnipeg Metro for publication as Red River Rants.

Good on Elisha Dacey, the newspaper’s managing editor, for giving the students’ work wider exposure.

To give Dacey the variety of compelling and energetic blog posts that she has requested, I look over the 75 first-year students’ posts each week.

I look for writing that makes me care.

Among the wide range of topics about which students have made me care are self-hairstyling, poutine, waking up happy and Disney.

Among the topics about which these bloggers have not made me care are their opinions about music or the Winnipeg Jets.

Now, I too hold deeply felt opinions about music and the Jets. I just don’t think a lot of other people care about my views on these subjects.

There’s the challenge: Why should I care about your opinions?

And by “I” I mean anyone other than the writer.

Make other people care and you are a good writer. Don’t, and you aren’t.

One more thing: Spellcheck and proofreading.

Every week several blog posts grab me, and I would love to see them in Red River Rants.

But I can’t select work that contains mistakes. They make the writer, and by extension the Creative Communications program and the college, look dumb.

A couple of the mistakes that made me reject interesting posts this week are misuse of its and it’s, and improper use of your and you’re.

Now that I care about.

Important if true

Some large U.S. news media appear to have learned nothing from the lies spread by professional journalists after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Five months ago, several allegedly reputable news media reported the name of a person police were seeking.

They got the name wrong, though.

This morning, several large broadcast news organizations reported the name of someone who shot several people at the Navy Yard in Washington.

Then they withdrew the report. The name, apparently, was wrong.

Online, though, is forever. Both names are still widely available, and likely will be indefinitely.

Carpenters have a saying: Measure twice, cut once.

The journalistic equivalent is: Get it first, but first get it right.

In the immediate aftermath of a bombing or a mass shooting, nobody knows what is happening.

Journalists need to gather as much information as they can safely, and report damning information such as names with great care and only after confirmation.

Over time, the organizations that demonstrate responsible reporting should benefit from the resulting public trust.

That probably means being able to charge a premium for their information.

The sloppy ones should ‘fess up and take as their mission statement a traditional newspaper headline for unconfirmed reports, demonstrated a century and a half ago in the New York Times:

“Important if true.”

Optimistic Journalism students

The second-year students in the Red River College Creative Communications Journalism major are a bunch of optimists.

For their first blog posts of this semester I assigned them to write about the business of journalism, specifically the jobs available.

Their responses, which are linked on the right side of this page, are almost unanimously upbeat.

They do not subscribe to the journalism-is-dead school of thought that is so difficult to avoid, especially online.

They clearly see themselves finding paid employment in the field.  

Their writing can be testy, as is Meg Crane’s blog:

"But isn't that a dying profession?" is the response I most hate to hear (and most often get) from people I tell I'm majoring in journalism.

First of all, journalism isn't really a profession...

Second, this isn't the case at all and I'm getting a little tired of defending my career choice.

Crane is not just talking. She is editor-in-chief of The Projector, the college’s student newspaper. This year The Projector plans to publish more material than ever online.

Nearly all of last year’s Journalism majors are already working in the business – from Toronto to northern British Columbia.

Some even got jobs in Winnipeg!

Just as important, most of the young people laid off in 2012 by the Winnipeg Free Press are back working in the field, some of them right back at the paper.

So this year’s CreComm J majors have cause for optimism.

‘My assignment has a sunburn’

Last week I participated in a panel discussion aimed at introducing new instructors to Red River College.

These instructors are experts in their fields, from engineering to a variety of social services. But they are new to teaching.

As panelists shared some of our experiences, I mentioned a couple of the stupid things I did as a rookie instructor.

Thrust into teaching, fresh from a rather cutthroat corner of the corporate world, I did not understand that students are not employees.

I provided harsh feedback on assignments, judging them by unfairly high standards unfamiliar to the students.

One of my favourite written comments was “HUH?”

One day, as I handed back marked work in a class, a student jumped up and lamented, “My assignment has a sunburn!” When she waved her paper, all I could see was my comments in red ink.

Talk about “the awkward moment when.”

I realized how intimidating my comments were, and how unfair.

So I changed my evil ways. Well, some of them.

These days I mark in pencil, and I save “HUH?” for the play of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Toronto Blue Jays.

Ezra Levant is right for once

A Sun Media columnist has finally written a piece I agree with.

The headline “Hey hey, ho! ho! They don’t know” on Ezra Levant’s recent column may not scan, but as an attack on journalists it makes some sense.

Levant, who makes his living excoriating those who do not agree with his far-right point of view, here criticizes journalists for simplistic coverage of protest rallies.

He writes that he attended a recent rally of about 50 people in Hamilton protesting against the proposed reversal of the direction in which a Canadian pipeline carries crude oil.

His analysis of the usual news coverage of such events is, unfortunately, accurate:

The quick and easy formula for reporters is to make a rough estimate of how many protesters attend, take some pictures of the most colourful signs and costumes, get a bumper-sticker-deep slogan quote from a spokesman, and you’re done.

Levant says he could have accomplished that in five minutes, but he stayed for two hours, interviewing the participants and learning that their knowledge of the proposal was indeed sketchy.

Then he Googled the names of half a dozen protesters and learned that – shock! horror! three of them were from London (Ontario, presumably) and another “was from out of town too.”

So far, this is solid reporting. Levant, though, can’t leave it there.

But it got darker. Because the more I looked, the more I realized these protesters were not just idealistic young people trying to heal the world. They were dominated by an inner circle of hard-core anarchists.

He does not report that these anarchists attended the protest, so readers cannot assess how they exercised this dominance.

But Levant is right on his main point: Lazy journalism, driven by unforgiving deadlines, presents incomplete and misleading versions of even simple events such as a protest rally.

The more a viewer or reader knows about an issue, the less satisfactory he or she finds this sort of coverage.

The solution? Journalists should stop covering protests unless they can explain the issues involved in a bit of detail.

Yes, stop covering most protests. After a few outraged phone calls to assignment editors, the protesters may just wither away.

Not so, of course, Ezra Levant.