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.

Living and dying for journalism

For their first blogging assignment, the Journalism majors in Creative Communications are asking: What is journalism?

To take only two examples of their thoughtful answers:

“Journalism isn’t chained to a format.  It will always be helping people make sense of their world,” says Erica Johnson.

“Journalism is getting your hands dirty. Journalism is accuracy, accountability and a desire to share information,” is part of Dani Finch’s inclusive definition.

But this topic is important not only to students doing an assignment.

Jeff Jarvis in his blog BuzzMachine asks the same question, with some not-so-different answers, but interesting new examples.

Meanwhile, two journalists have been found slain in Mexico City. Their deaths follow a pattern of violence by organized criminals, The Guardian reports.

And in Russia, a former police colonel has finally been charged in the notorious 2006 murder of the investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya.

So, while we debate “What is journalism?” let’s remember the journalists Ana Marcela Yarce Viveros, Rocio González Trapaga and Anna Politkovskaya.

These three women answered the question with their lives.

Licensing journalists? Non, merci

The Quebec government’s proposal to regulate journalists is a bad idea.

Christine St. Pierre, the province’s communications minister, is inviting comments on a proposal, based on the Rapport Payette, that would discriminate between journalists whom she and her fellow Liberals deem legitimate and others, such as mere bloggers.

No, thank you.

There are already laws to control damage caused by any news medium, principally the law of defamation. Penalties are quite stiff in Canada – as I hope some irresponsible bloggers will discover.

A defining strength of journalism is that it does not kowtow to governments or special interests. Journalists are responsible to their audiences, which are not shy about criticizing any online, published, or broadcast work.

Just look at user-generated content such as the comment sections of any news medium.

Governments do not shrink from making such criticisms, either. That’s fine.

But they should not control who writes what.

Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms says,

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication …

What could be clearer than that?

“Everyone” includes bloggers, tweeters and users of other media.

Of course, Section 33 of the Charter allows governments to override these rights for five years at a time.

Quebec has employed this “notwithstanding clause” to justify controlling commercial communication, with the province’s French-language sign law. 

Fortunately, controlling online publication is much more difficult than controlling physical signs on buildings.

One of the wonderful aspects of social media and other “new media” is that they are difficult for anyone to control.

Dictators in the Arab world are learning this lesson the hard way.

Quebec should not emulate them.

Shiny new students and instructors

I’m looking forward to the new Creative Communications semester, which begins on Aug. 29 with a bunch of shiny new instructors.

Joanne Kelly will be my new colleague in the Journalism part of the program. One of our innovations will be an e-textbook for first-year students, consisting of five chapters of The New Journalist: Roles, Skills and Critical Thinking from Edmond Montgomery Publications. Yes, it’s Canadian.

The projected price is under $30, less than half the price of the entire dead-tree text – which we would not use completely, anyway.

In late September students will watch Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times, at Cinematheque.

I’ve seen it, and it’s well worth watching.

A bit of journalistic history, a bit of social media, and the beautiful new Times building, all seen though the eyes of a former crack addict, now a Times reporter.

Afterward, students will be able to discuss how Watergate and the Pentagon Papers relate to WikiLeaks and Twitter.

Also this year, the Manitoba election on Oct. 4 will generate a couple of assignments and will give me an opportunity to rail against the lack of civics lessons in Manitoba’s public schools and universities.

No worries, though: the CreComm curriculum will make up for it.

Other highlights include the city council and Remembrance Day assignments, back by popular demand.

And that’s just Journalism, one of seven required courses.

In co-operation with Advertising, Public Relations and Creative Writing instructors, some of them shiny and some slightly shopworn (but we’re all good friends; really!), the J instructors will work with the first-year students on their weekly blogs.

Students and instructors will also use Twitter and LinkedIn social media.

It will be a busy year – two years actually, for the whole program.

Abandon your lives, all ye who enter here!