A privileged witness to history

Dawna Friesen (left) talks journalism

with student Emily Baron Cadloff

 (John Pura, Red River College)

Journalists are privileged observers of troubling events, an Emmy award winner told students at Red River College on Nov. 20, 2009.

Reporting from the Gaza Strip and Iraq reminded Dawna Friesen, London correspondent for NBC News, just how privileged reporters are. As she was covering stories in those violent areas, citizens would beg her to help them leave, she said.

Friesen, a graduate of the Creative Communications program, was honoured by the college as a distinguished alumna. 

Before the alumni dinner, Friesen recounted highlights of her career and dropped some nuggets of advice for current students in the program.

Double-check your work, she said -- especially when you are taking information from unverified sources such as Twitter. Postings on social media from people on the scene provided vital information during recent post-election unrest in Iran, whose government severely restricted reporting and even arrested and tortured journalists.

Friesen's bottom line on her job as an international television journalist? "It's not a glamorous life."

She told a vivid story about getting sick after eating lousy food in one unpleasant corner of the world.

But it's worth it Friesen said.

"You're witnessing history."

Horizontally bisected eyelids

Screw good writing.

Here's some bad stuff.

My nomination for the dubious title of worst-written book set in Winnipeg – in the 21st century, anyway: Langside, self-published in 2006 by prolific Vancouver punk Chris Walter.

Check out Page 22 for the comma-free musings of Walter’s lovelorn protagonist Sky:

“But of all the features that captivated him it was Cindy’s eyelids that made his heart burst with desire. Her heavy lids made her appear as if she had just woken from a long and restful sleep. Bisected horizontally with a gentle crease the lids covered her beautiful brown eyes like a curtain of the most delicate material known to man.”

Walter vomits his creations on the world through GoFuckYerself Press.

Hey, you! Got a better nomination?

A literal flood of information

This blog usually discusses a metaphorical flood of information.

Here's a literal one.

In March 2009 a helicopter carrying workers to an offshore oil rig crashed off Newfoundland. Robert Decker was seriously injured but survived. Seventeen others died.

Now Decker describes the crash to a public inquiry.

Can you imagine dealing with the flood of information created by a helicopter crash in the frigid North Atlantic Ocean?

I can't.

A flimsy raft on the information tsunami

Why would anyone not want to get vaccinated against the H1N1 flu?

This, after all, appears to be the pandemic that we have been warned about for several years. It's serious stuff. On Oct. 26, 2009 it killed a 13-year-old boy in the Toronto area.

Agencies such as the Public Health Agency of Canada are providing a flood of information about H1N1 and recommending that people use the free vaccine.

Thousands of Canadians are listening and lining up to receive it. In some cities, lineups are so long that supplies of the vaccine are running out temporarily.

I think using the vaccine is a great idea. The bottom line is: The consequences of not protecting yourself could be fatal.

This week I tried and failed to make that point with an intelligent, well educated 30-something. It was if he was indifferent to that tsunami of medical and scientific information.

I realized that this threat is not real for him. Like most of his friends and relatives, he has had the enormously good fortune of growing up in a healthy, prosperous and peaceful society with free universal health care where young people just do not die of the flu.

His personal experience tells him that he is, if not invulnerable, at least safe from the flu.

But personal experience is a flimsy raft in which to try to ride this tsunami.

Warning! F-word used here

Don't use the F-word, I tell my students. It's tacky and it's wrong. But some of them just can't quit. They've been doing it far too long.

You know the four-letter F-word: free.

Free as in the internet is free, information is free, butterflies are free ... oops. That was a movie.

Sure, the internet is free, as long as you don't count your monthly cable fee. Yes, information is free if you value the time you spend searching for it at zero. Butterflies? Who knows?

But we love the F-word, don't we? Especially in Winnipeg, the capital of cheap.

"Everyone hates paying for books," asserts Carson Jerema, a former student-newspaper editor, in a column Oct. 19, 2009 in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Apparently retailing behemoths Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target agree. They have started a price war on a handful of hardcover books by big-name authors such as John Grisham and Sarah Palin. These authors' latest tomes are selling for about $9, a discount of about 70 per cent from the usual $25 or $30.

Palin's book is still overpriced.

But hate paying for books? Not me. I probably drop a thousand dollars a year in my favourite local independent bookstore.

Love to tell you more, but I gotta go. Time to hit Wal-Mart for some almost-F*** weekend reading.

Where's the remote for my book?

Should books come with a remote control that makes them beep when you are looking for them, like a cordless phone?

How about an in-book device that looks up words you don't understand or displays reviews and discussion about what you are reading?

These thoughts are provoked by the Oct. 14, 2009 edition of Room for Debate, a New York Times online feature on the topic "Does the Brain Like E-Books?"

David Gelernter suggests that these or similar tasks "would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding." Even if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, he notes, "I've still got a book."

This is not to attack e-books, Kindle, or any device yet to be invented, as the lawyers say. The more media that promote reading, the better -- even if, like the Kindle, they are not officially available in Canada, where I live. But it does highlight the adaptability of the seemingly simple but actually highly refined technology of the book.

Sandra Aamodt, another participant in the debate, says the usefulness of a computer for serious reading depends largely on "the user's strength of character." By this she means the reader's ability to avoid distractions such as checking email or a favourite blog.

I like her argument. It suggests that I am a character of great strength, sternly avoiding distractions every day as I read my books.

Not that Kindle users are bad people.

A killer hangover from corporate Kool-Aid

Still believe that corporate media convergence can work?

You're living in the past. The latest exposure of last decade's "solution" as a nostrum is the fate of CanWest Global Communications Corp. This once but not future owner of a worldwide batch of broadcasting and print media outlets has filed for bankruptcy protection and is restructuring.

This is one of corporations that preached the gospel of convergence: believe that you can cross-promote your media outlets, sell advertising hand over fist, and thou shalt be saved. 

Didn't quite work that way, especially when acquiring many of those properties at the peak of the market created so much debt that CanWest could not even make the interest payments.

Now, six years after the death of Canwest founder Izzy Asper, his son Leonard is overseeing the death of the dream. "Leonard drank deep of the convergence Kool-Aid," David Olive writes in the Toronto Star.

Check out Canadian journalist and media professor Chris Waddell's thoughtful comments in an interactive forum on Oct. 8 about what this means for audiences, employees and aspiring journalists.