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.

Six-year grammar war ends

Grammatical sanctity has been restored at the Red River College Exchange District Campus, Morley Walker reports in the Winnipeg Free Press.

The donor plaque in the campus library now sports proper English, he says.

So who is the long-secret "grammatically stern Red River insider" who tipped Walker to the impropriety?

It is I.

Investing time in Open Secrets

Red River College journalism students are demonstrating the importance of original work.

For the last three months the students in my second-year Creative Communications journalism major have used Manitoba’s freedom-of-information legislation to dig out untold stories. Open Secrets, the Winnipeg Free Press calls the resulting stories that it is publishing.

Some of the information is striking, such as the fact that Manitoba’s task force on missing women does not officially exist.

Other topics include the scarcity of complaints to the government body that regulates bar bouncers despite a string of serious incidents and even death at Winnipeg bars – and the shocking lack of training required to become a bouncer.

This is the second year I have run this assignment, and again I am impressed by the quality of the students’ work.

They pulled this off while doing a multitude of other assignments for me, including interviewing voters and candidates for cbcnews.ca, profiling notable people for the official history of Red River College, to be published in the fall of 2011, and spending full days on such assignments as covering trials at the Law Courts.

Oh yes, they were also taking half a dozen other courses that require a ton of time and effort.

I hear that one or two of them are even trying to have private lives.

Their achievements prove that blending a longer-term view of journalism with the minute-to-minute demands of daily news pays off. Their success is a rebuke to those professional news media that live for the moment, never creating anything genuinely new.

Newspaper chains and private broadcasters, are you listening?

If all you offer your audience is routine coverage of public events such as car crashes and press conferences, nobody needs you any more.

Breaking news is becoming a commodity. Anyone can blog, post videos to YouTube, and report on Twitter.

But your salvation could lie in creating unique content, as these students have done.

Thanks to the Free Press, particularly the two journalists who made this project happen.

Mary Agnes Welch helped the students refine their information requests and pursue the stories that resulted. Wendy Sawatzky worked with them to create material that helped tell the stories online.

Watch for more unique work from these students in 2011.

PR: Good; Journalism: We’ll see

The Winnipeg Police Service and the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs did a very smart thing today. Most importantly, they did it together.

They appeared on the same stage – the media room at police headquarters – to discuss a difficult case.

Evan Maud, a 20-year-old Aboriginal man, told reporters on Dec. 8 that he was grabbed by two police officers on Dec. 3 and left outside the city without a coat in -20 weather.

News media across Canada jumped on the story of the alleged “starlight tour.”

That term was made famous by some unfortunate actions by police in Saskatchewan. A public inquiry there into the death of Neil Stonechild found the credibility of some police officers was lacking.

But that was Saskatoon 20 years ago. This is Winnipeg today.

Today the chiefs of the Winnipeg police and Manitoba’s Aboriginal people co-operated in the announcement that Maud has been charged with public mischief for making a false report.

Like anyone in Canada who is accused of a crime, Maud is innocent until proven guilty.

The participation of Manitoba Grand Chief Ron Evans beside Police Chief Keith McCaskill signals a welcome retreat from the knee-jerk cop-bashing that has sometimes accompanied allegations of police misconduct in Manitoba.

Dare we hope for more public co-operation between these two leaders and their constituencies?

Congratulations to these two and to their public-relations advisers.

Now it’s the duty of journalists to give this event as much publicity as they gave the original story.

Truth in obituaries

The growth of online obituaries and related material such as Facebook memorials is breathing new life into the hoary tradition of obituary writing.

The traditional newspaper obit is highly formatted: After a brave battle with Disease X, Person Y passed away peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones …

Then come the dates, birth and marriage prominent among them. Those dates are more likely to be true than most of the other stuff.

But now the traditional taboos – suicide, unpopular diseases such as AIDS, even a prickly personality – are themselves dying.

On Dec. 4, 2010 The Globe and Mail published a wonderful example of the new, more honest obit writing about Christopher “Dexter” Bates, who died of cancer at 44.

He was not one to suffer fools ­ and he saw them everywhere ­ but people gravitated to Chris and he made lifelong friends. He could be thin-skinned, but he was hardheaded too, and he never heard a piece of advice he couldn't ignore. Twenty-odd years of addiction took a heavy toll on his health and many of his personal relationships, but his extraordinary intelligence, charm, and dry humour will be greatly missed by those who knew and loved him.

So when you are asked to help compose an obit, as eventually you are almost certain to be, write honestly.

You can help write the obituary of dishonest obituaries.

It's over

One of the wonderful things about Hiroshima by John Hersey is its ending. Actually, both its endings.

Hersey's 1946 book about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 concludes by quoting an essay by 10-year-old Toshio Nakamura, who survived the attack that killed something like 100,000 people.

The next day Toshio and two friends went looking for their mothers.

"But Kikuki's mother was wounded and Murakami's mother, alas, was dead."

Try forgetting that line, or the story that it wraps up.

Forty years later Hersey published a new chapter following up on the lives of the six people he originally interviewed.

It closes by reporting on Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who is over 70.

"He was slowing down a bit. His memory, like the world's, was getting spotty."

Three words, "like the world's," move the story back into its historical context and into our lives.

The book is over but the story isn't.