Books: Not just for old people any more

With our focus on the instant communication that ensures we can receive Charlie Sheen’s latest thoughts even before he thinks them, it’s good to remember the power of books.

In the last couple of weeks Creative Communications students are demonstrating their achievements in creating books and commenting on other writers’ books.

All this while tweeting, blogging, creating ePubs and engaging in all sorts of other online activities.

Recent highlights:

Second-year student Yvonne Raymond has self-published Lockout, a memoir of growing up in the boom-and-bust town of Pine Falls, Manitoba. Her book launch jammed the restaurant at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg, she has had to order a second printing to handle the demand, and the Pine Falls public library wants her to hold another launch in the town.

She also runs a website where readers can comment on the book and on life in Pine Falls.

Not bad for a student who was told by a scornful representative of Tembec, the company that shut down the Pine Falls mill, that she would never publish a book.

Last weekend I attended another jammed launch for another student’s self-published book: Pieces by Amanda Hope.

Pieces is a novel based on the life of Hope’s great-aunt, a tale jammed with incident and character.

Both these books required more than a year of interviewing, planning, writing and rewriting. Then there was some more rewriting. Did I mention the rewriting?

Students are also studying two books by Winnipeg writers.

The second-year Journalism majors are investigating Winnipeg’s Great War: A City Comes of Age by Jim Blanchard. You can read their comments in the blogs listed on the right side of this page.

First-year students are reading To the Grave: Inside A Spectacular RCMP Sting by Mike McIntyre. This week they are doing group presentations in class on the book, particularly on what journalists can learn from reading it.

Blanchard and McIntyre have come in and spoken to the students about their work.

Interestingly, McIntyre is a prolific multimedia guy. As @mikeoncrime he tweets vigorously about crime, the justice system and his son’s hockey team.

Books: Still a part of your nutritious information meal.

Let’s mock crazy people

HA HA! LOOKIT THE REE-TARD!

I shouted that lots of times when I was a kid.

Anyone who acted “weird” was a target for my friends and me, anyone who looked as if they had some kind of mental disability or mental illness.

Not to join in the taunting was to become a ree-tard yourself.

I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m sorry I did.

Aren’t we shouting the same thing today at Charlie Sheen?

We put him on display on television, in social media, in all the other media.

Why not? Look at the crazy shit he’s spouting!

Well, that crazy shit might just be an indication that something is not right with Charlie Sheen. Surely we can agree at least that he is not acting in his own best interests.

Yes, he is appearing in public voluntarily. And yes, he is an actor who makes his living by portraying fantasy worlds.

But shouldn’t we feel just a little bit guilty about putting his irrational behaviour on gleeful display?

No?

OK.

All together now:

HA HA! LOOKIT THE REE-TARD!

Reporter does right thing, admits mistake

Good work today by Winnipeg Sun courts reporter Dean Pritchard.

He adds a correction to his recap of the city’s best-read story that is not about Lady Gaga – the trial and conviction of Mark Grant for the 1984 murder of Candace Derksen.

On a different note, I have to confess a mea culpa. In an earlier story I wrote that Mark Grant slumped his head on a table and weeped following a marathon interrogation with police.

Gobsmacked prosecutors later told me Grant shed no tears.

“Sleeping maybe, not weeping,” Crown attorney Brian Bell said.

Reporters don’t like admitting their mistakes but I thought I should set the record straight.

Pritchard gets it right. Admitting a mistake in a timely manner is important to maintaining a journalist’s credibility – his or her brand and, in this case, the brand of his employer.

If only politicians who lie to Parliament felt the same way.

Dean Pritchard’s brand is much stronger today than, oh, how about Bev Oda’s?

How should journalists cover suicide?

Yes, I’m the journalism instructor who made his students talk and write about suicide on Valentine’s Day.

Why not? An important element of love is wanting to protect our loved ones from harming themselves.

There is a journalistic taboo against covering suicide, based on the idea of contagion: reporting about suicide creates more suicides.

Last year the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority invited my students and me to attend a seminar on the topic. It turned out to be a wonderful learning experience, and the students wrote some very informative and readable stories about suicide.

The Canadian Psychiatric Association has published a list of media guidelines on reporting suicide, based on several studies.

Information that should be reported, it says, includes alternatives to suicide and warnings of suicidal behavior. These clearly are sensible suggestions.

More open to dispute and judgment, perhaps, are some of the points that the psychiatrists recommend not reporting, including details of the method of suicide and “simplistic reasons for the suicide.”

Andre Picard, a respected medical journalist at The Globe and Mail, disagrees with many of these suggestions.

This year the students had a vigorous discussion with three representatives of the health field, including one of the authors of the guidelines.

The outcome? I think we agreed to disagree – a little.

No student – no responsible journalist – wants to encourage anyone to kill himself or herself. And the guidelines are a great conversation-starter on a topic that intimidates many people.

But reasonable people can disagree about how best to present information about suicide.

The Ottawa Citizen did a commendable job, in my opinion, in a story last year about the suicide of a 17-year-old young man. But the story provides some information that the psychiatrists suggest withholding.

At the suggestion of one of our guests, Stephanie Loewen, the provincial suicide prevention co-ordinator at Manitoba Health, the students are rewriting the story to follow all the guidelines.

Tomorrow we will look at their reworked stories and discuss which versions work better for several audiences: the general readership of a mass-market newspaper, the relatives and friends of the person who killed himself, and people who are risk of death by suicide.

Now, if you are having suicidal thoughts, lots of help is available.

Please check out these links provided by the Canadian Mental Health Association.

Welcome back, Free Press

Welcome back downtown, Winnipeg Free Press.

Twenty years ago the largest media outlet in this part of Canada abandoned downtown Winnipeg.

The delusions of Thomson Corp., its owners, drove the newspaper into a new but sterile and forbidding complex on the edge of an industrial park on Mountain Avenue.

The market is booming, the owners pronounced from Toronto and New York. Let’s buy some big orange presses and shovel tons of fliers into our trucks every day. To hell with downtown and its one-way streets.

And so the Free Press abandoned its once grand building at 300 Carlton St.

By then, 300 Carlton was no palace. Even when I worked there in the 1970s it was dirty and dark, and it usually smelled bad.

But Stanley Knowles, the longtime MP for Winnipeg North Centre, would appear in the newsroom the odd evening, sit down at a empty desk, pound out a press release on an already ancient typewriter, and stroll up to the city desk to drop it off.

Down the hall from the newsroom, Winnipeg’s chess club held meetings and played games. That’s community involvement.

Community involvement on Mountain Avenue? Not so much.

But now, under different owners, the Free Press is taking a baby step back downtown.

Prodded by John White, its online editor, it’s opening a “news café” in the same area where it competed with and vanquished 10 or more papers on newspaper row, beginning in 1882. Today’s announcement says:

The Winnipeg Free Press News Café, which will be located in the Exchange District, is designed to be a community hub where customers can not only grab a bite or have a drink, but will be encouraged to interact and engage with journalists working on site.

The paper’s story doesn’t acknowledge any of its current downtown competitors, but it should.

The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network has its national headquarters on Portage Avenue, the city’s main drag.

CTV has moved downtown to Graham Avenue from almost-suburban Polo Park.

And the CBC building on Portage actually marks the western edge of downtown.

As you drive east on Portage, the welcome appearance of the Corp and the neighbouring University of Winnipeg signals not only the end of a wasteland of dreary shops and apartments but the beginnings of the possibility of a life of the mind.

I guess that’s too much of a burden to lay on this “news café.”

But I plan to drop in. Maybe they’ll have a chessboard set up.

My invalid assumptions

Don’t assume, instructors tell students.

That’s a good rule for this instructor, too. Every day some of my assumptions turn out to be invalid.

Recently, for example, I had a conversation with a university-educated person about a piece of writing that mentioned the name Hansard.

She complained that the item did not give Hansard’s first name.

Not a problem, I thought. Because my ill-spent youth included a few years as a political journalist, I was familiar with Hansard.

It’s the official record of debates in the parliaments and legislatures of countries with a British parliamentary tradition such as Canada.

I assumed that, because I am familiar with Hansard, many other people are. Wrong, and unfair, too.

My conversational partner is a fine person who knows a lot more about many topics than I do. She just hasn’t spent much time reading Hansard.

And I shouldn’t have assumed that she had.

What’s your sign? Wrong!

Ask “What’s your sign?” and you may be expecting to hook up with someone who will make the earth move for you.

Well, silly, the sky has moved.

Not recently, either – over the last 2,200 years. Precession, it’s called. The result is that your sign is likely not what you thought it is.

Here’s how Live Science explained it on Oct. 23, 2007.

Over the past two-and-a-half millennia, this wobble has caused the intersection point between the celestial equator and the ecliptic to move west along the ecliptic by 36 degrees, or almost exactly one-tenth of the way around. This means that the signs have slipped one-tenth—or almost one whole month—of the way around the sky to the west, relative to the stars beyond.

So what’s all the fuss about now?

This is a good time for me to ’fess up to a little trick I once played on horoscope fans.

At The Globe and Mail in the 1980s one of my jobs was to ensure that all regular features in the paper were published on schedule. This included the comics, the bridge column and the horoscope.

All was well until the week when the horoscope did not arrive as scheduled from the United States syndicate that supplied it.

Unwilling to face the wrath of readers denied their morning astrological fix, a group of editors created a simple and elegant solution.

I made up the horoscope entries for a couple of days, until our regular supplier came through.

Number of complaints received?

Zero.