For frustrated editors

Reached your politeness limit as an editor?

Wish you had a tool to express your frustration with the flabby and the mundane?

Here you go.

Courtesy of Armin Wiebe, who has polished a few nuggets in his time.

Ambassador Gary Doer, streaming Nov. 1

Gary Doer, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, will speak to Red River College Creative Communications students at 10 a.m. Central Time tomorrow.

Join us by viewing the live stream of this event.

Please note that this is a Flash-based stream and is not viewable on Apple portable devices such as iPod, iPad or iPhone.

Thanks to John Pura for setting up the streaming.

Lindsey Wiebe, the future of journalism

Following up on last week’s refreshingly retro journalism ideas from a couple of veterans, here are a handful of future-oriented suggestions from a younger member of the tribe.

Lindsey Wiebe, the energetic and readable social media reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press – “the least defined job I’ve ever had” – offered them to Creative Communications students on Oct. 20.

Wiebe, who graduated from CreComm in 2004, backed up her recommendations with her experiences in the unpredictable but rewarding field of journalism.

Do things that don’t seem like what you are supposed to do.

In 2009, a year of layoffs at most news media and closings at some, Wiebe wrangled a nine-month leave of absence from the Free Press, and moved to France.

Smart move: the newspaper saved her salary for almost a year, and then was able to take her back.

Get a wide skill set; learn anything you can.

Next week Wiebe is scheduled to manage the Free Press apps.

Pitch stories your employer isn’t doing.

Wiebe created a niche covering the environmental issues the Free Press hadn’t found a way to handle. She even got to eat local Manitoba food for a month and write about it. In November. Hmm … perhaps not her best choice.

But all this self-invention brings another benefit: confidence about the future.

Wiebe says she doesn’t know if her job will exist two years from now. But, she says, “I’m OK with that.”

Refreshingly retro journalism ideas

Creative Communications students at Red River College received great advice this week from two prominent Winnipeg journalists.

On Oct. 13 Margo Goodhand, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press – “We’re not a newspaper; we’re a news company” – told the students that journalism is “a calling.”

Sometimes that calling means publishing “boring stories that we think are worthwhile,” she smiled.

An example is the Free Press Democracy Project that aimed to involve citizens in the recent civic, federal and Manitoba elections.

She jokingly took credit for a one-percentage-point increase in voter turnout in the provincial election, while turnout has declined in other provinces.

On the other hand, some tales are “talkers:” stories that people feel compelled to talk about, Goodhand said.

This week the Free Press broke a good example of a talker: Nick Martin’s story of the Roman Catholic school that gave its students community service credits for participating in anti-abortion vigils.

On Oct. 14 Alex Freedman, the CBC’s I-Team reporter in Winnipeg, conducted a spirited exchange with students about his career and the CBC’s journalistic standards.

Freedman moved to Winnipeg from Montreal so he could work on the CBC’s investigative team.

He showed several of his stories, including one about the city of Winnipeg wasting thousands of dollars on unused sandbags during the spring flooding.

Don’t think you’re smarter than the people you interview, he warned. Learn everything you can about your topic before conducting interviews.

Freedman’s bottom line, especially for broadcast journalists: Don’t be a diva.

Let the story be the star.

‘As true as I could make it’

The star of the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times is the newspaper, or perhaps its gleaming, heavily mortgaged building, which appears in nearly every shot.

But a strong supporting player is David Carr, the newspaper’s unorthodox media columnist.

The film details Carr’s work on a long feature about the culture of sexual harassment and general machismo that new owners of the Chicago Tribune forced on the storied but debt-laden company. Heads rolled in Chicago after the story appeared.

For a longer, more intimate and even more disturbing read, check out The Night of the Gun, Carr’s 2008 memoir of three decades of sex, drugs and more drugs.

Carr’s friend wanted him to go to rehab and he said “Yes, yes, yes” – four times, in fact.

Then, for some reason that even he is not clear on, he went straight.

Always a hard-working journalist, at least when he wasn’t out of his mind, Carr began working on his biggest story – his own life.

Because he couldn’t remember much, “I decided to fact-check my life using the prosaic tools of journalism.”

He interviewed old lovers, friends and enemies, and he searched court documents and medical records.

The result is a book “as true as I could make it.”

Not a bad mission statement for journalists.

The college students are all right

“Inside the entitlement generation,” blares the headline on Margaret Wente’s column in The Globe and Mail.

It’s an old song: Post-secondary students think they know it all. They are lazy and dumb because they have never had to work for anything.

The sky is falling!

Wente bases her familiar complaint on comments by Ken C. Coates, co-author with Bill Morrison of Campus Confidential: 100 Startling Things You Didn’t Know About Canadian Universities. Coates is a history professor at the University of Waterloo.

Full disclosure: I have not read the book.

I have, though, listened to an interview with Coates on the University of Waterloo website. Employers complain that university grads are “overly coddled and protected,” he says.

The problem is that “Our students are trained to do what they want to do, not what they have to do.”

I often hear similar complaints about other post-secondary institutions: Students want high grades but won’t show up for class. They demand the right to hand in assignment when they feel like it rather that at the deadline.

But nil desperandum.

It certainly ain’t so in the Creative Communications program at Red River College, where I teach journalism.

Students must show up on time for every class. They must turn in assignments on time, not a minute late, or receive a failing grade. They must spell all names right or receive a failing grade.

Those are the standards that employers demand that instructors uphold. We agree with them, and students do, too.

Then, because they meet those and many other standards, in two years they are entitled to serious consideration for a decent job.

That’s real entitlement.

Sympathy for the mogul

In the spirit of Thin Air, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that runs next week, please allow me to introduce a wonderful author. He’s a man of former wealth and current fame.

Or reintroduce: A Matter of Principle is Conrad Black’s fifth book, the second instalment of his autobiography. Black has published over 3,500 pages between hard covers, and many more in essays, letters and legal writs.

He's Canadian, too – or he was, until he renounced his citizenship to sit in the British House of Lords.

Twenty years ago Black was the boss of Hollinger, one of the world’s largest newspaper groups. Today he’s in a Florida prison, convicted of defrauding investors.

Reading his latest opus to review it for the Winnipeg Free Press, I find myself again loving the writing but not the writer.

One of the most seductive elements of Black’s writing is its vitriol.

“Raising children is a good formation for dealing with editors and journalists. They are fiendishly clever at promising compliance with the wishes of the owner, appearing to give superficial adherence while in fact continuing in their exceptionable practices.”

When shareholder groups began to sniff around the corporate payments that have sent him to jail, Black sought support from associates who, he claims to believe, had approved them.

“I encountered a pandemic of amnesia.”

Come for the schadenfreude, stay for the literature.

A Matter of Principle: It’s a helluva book.