The way ahead for journalism

In the tumult and reinvention of journalism, there are moments when the way ahead becomes clearer.
One of those moments occurred Tuesday.
Kris Doubledee, a Winnipeg Transit driver, stopped his bus during the morning rush hour, got off and gave his shoes to a barefoot man on the street.
Denise Campbell, a passenger on the bus, emailed her work colleagues about this striking act of generosity.
One of those colleagues was Noah Erenberg, convener of the Community News Commons, a citizen journalism site.
He agreed with Campbell that this was a wonderful story about our community. Erenberg suggested a couple of editing changes and posted the story for the world to read.
Simply by telling her story Campbell became a citizen journalist.
Almost instantly, mainstream journalists phoned and emailed Campbell. Few of them credited the news commons in their reports.
Then, a couple of hours later, the Winnipeg Free Press laid off seven reporters and editors.
They were the youngest people in its roughly 100-person newsroom, the most energetic, the most engaged in social media.
They were also the most recently hired, and so they lost their well-paying jobs under the ironclad last-in, first-out rule in the collective agreement between the company and the union.
The Free Press newsroom just got older and less new-media-savvy.
It hurts to write this, because I have friends who remain in that newsroom who will have to work harder to fill the spaces between the dwindling ads.
I also have friends among the people who were dumped.
Five of those seven are graduates of the Creative Communications program at Red River College, where I teach journalism.
It hurts as well because the Free Press fired me, too.
Sixteen years later I remember how that felt, although I didn’t express my feelings as publicly or nearly as eloquently as Melissa Martin is doing.
None of this is to blame the current Free Press managers.
As the human resources message-bearer told the departing journalists, it’s not personal.
Nor is the newspaper completely stuck in the past. It is one of the primary partners of the Community News Commons, along with the Winnipeg Public Library and Red River College.
The Free Press also deserves credit for paying its reporters to cover City Hall, the courts, the legislature and other news sources, seldom receiving credit from people who reuse its information on Twitter.
But something became a lot clearer on Tuesday.
A modest citizen-journalism site broke a story that resonated widely, using simple media tools.
A big newspaper dumped its people who were the best motivated and equipped to use those tools.
Bottom line?
The work of some of my students will continue to appear in the Free Press. Mine too, I hope.
But we’ll be on the Community News Commons as well.
So will a lot of other citizens who see it as the way ahead for journalism.

Slutty hippies and other bloggers

The Metro, Winnipeg’s free daily newspaper, is featuring two Creative Communications students’ blogs each week.

The paper, part of a large international publishing company, wants to showcase fresh young voices. Student bloggers get a new outlet they can highlight on their resumes and work portfolios.

Elisha Dacey, the newspaper’s editor, runs the newsroom, writes and edits stories, takes pictures and posts all this online. Oh yeah, she also writes a blog. And that’s just her professional life.

Here are her requirements for Red River Rants:

The RRC blog on Metro would be updated twice weekly, probably Tuesday and Friday. The instructors would pick the best two from recent student blogs. The definition of "best" will be left up to the instructors.
The blog can be about any LOCAL topic. It can be serious or funny or informative or any combination thereof. It can be about something that affects the blogger personally or an opinion piece on something happening in Winnipeg. A poem. A story. A Haiku. Whatever.

For this semester I'm choosing the blog posts.

The first one I selected was Be polite, you slutty hippie by Larissa Peck. It’s a clearly written personal story about bicycle safety, a topic a lot of Winnipeggers are talking about.

Besides, I’m a sucker for a grabby headline.

The second was Chalk 4 Peace by Erika Miller, a story of personal discovery, with a nice range of photos.

Peck and Miller are first-year students.

By Monday each week I will look at all new blog posts written by first- and second-year students and select two for publication on the Metro site.

Looking for blog-writing tips? Check out PR instructor Melanie Lee Lockhart’s blog.

And keep up (if you can) with CreComm’s most prolific blogger, Ad instructor Kenton Larsen.

Twitter? What Twitter?

When it comes to Canadian election strategy, Twitter is nowhere – at least in the Sept. 4 Fort Whyte byelection for the Manitoba legislature.

By the time the polls closed, the four candidates with Twitter accounts had tweeted a total of 61 times.

Make that three candidates. The Twitter account of the winner, Progressive Conservative Brian Pallister, has been inactive since July 9.

New Democrat Brandy Schmidt, who finished a distant third, led all tweeters with 43 entries.

Second-place Liberal Bob Axworthy tweeted seven times.

Donnie Benham of the Greens tweeted 11 times on his way to fourth place.

Legal difficulties prevented the fifth candidate, an independent, from using online resources.

My journalism students covering the contest tweeted more often that that at #fortwhytecc in the 90 minutes after the polls closed. But that was their assignment.

Yes, this was a byelection, held in the closing days of summer – two strikes against voter interest.

But you might think the candidates, while sweating their way through traditional canvassing at all those closed doors, would try to add a little social media to their campaign mix.

Perhaps it’s not that simple. Twitter looks breezy, but using it effectively takes time.

After I tweeted about how infrequently the candidates were tweeting, Benham tweeted in reply on Sept. 1:

“I'm trying Dunk! But some of us have day jobs. :-P”

I think the Greens could have benefited from a dose of social media. Benham proposed the only new idea of the campaign: members of the legislature who resign before their term expires should pay back the government part of their pensions.

Such a law would have caught Pallister and Hugh McFadyen, the former MLA for the area, who resigned in the middle of previous terms.

That kind of idea should appeal to new, young voters, who are likely to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

Hey, Fort Whyte winner and losers: There’s no need to wait a couple of years for the next election to get tweeting.

Out of this world

One of the powers that makes humans unique among species on Earth is our ability to leave it and return.

The human who epitomized that super-power was Neil Armstrong, who has died at 82.

Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, was the first man to walk on the moon.

On July 20, 1969, he told us, “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

When I look at the moon, I think of Neil Armstrong.

Telling stories

Some of my summer reading has involved journalistic topics. So call me predictable.

Highlights:

Yours In Truth: A Personal Portraitof Ben Bradlee by Jeff Himmelman performs a difficult task well: portraying the larger-than-life executive editor of the Washington Post, who was memorably played by Jason Robards in the 1976 movie All the President’s Men.

Bradlee is a hero to many journalists for his role in the newspaper’s unveiling of the Watergate scandal, which forced U.S. President Richard Nixon to resign in 1974.

Highlights of this warts-and-all bio are the photos of brief, punchy letters and memos from Bradlee to friends and foes. The title comes from one of those.

Himmelman claims he wanted to call the book “Dear Asshole,” from another Bradlee letter.

Yours In Truth also contains a vivid portrayal of Katharine Graham, Bradlee’s boss and one of strongest female characters in American journalism.

The news hook in the book is Bradlee’s comment that “there’s a residual fear in my soul” that some of the paper’s references to Deep Throat, its source, were not completely true.

 But you don’t need to know anything about Watergate to enjoy this fast-paced, entertaining read.

Somewhat more ponderous is Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, a doorstopper at 819 pages.

It’s an anecdote-stuffed examination of the life of Walter Cronkite, perhaps the last of the old-time, authoritative television news anchors. Cronkite defined avuncular on CBS News, emphasizing American and international politics and space exploration.

He followed a traditional career in journalism, from newspapers to a wire service to television, emphasizing fact-checking and seeing things for himself.

From the Second World War to the moon landing and political assassinations, Cronkite delivered the nightly final word on “the news” into the 1980s.

There won’t be any more Cronkites. Today’s instant information and multimedia universe leave no room for final words.

Cronkite’s nemesis was Dan Rather, a brash Texan and CBS co-worker who was apparently a little less scrupulous about fact-checking.

His memoir, Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News, with Digby Diehl, is on my fall reading list.

For fun reading I highly recommend The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee, a hilarious satirical novel set in Britain in 1997, at the dawn of the Internet.

Newspaper hacks sense something is changing in their competitive but tightly knit world. But as they swill their nightly drinks at the bar while plotting their quasi-legal exploits, they scorn the new technology.

There’s a shadow of Rupert Murdoch here: the protagonist steals a fistful of unopened letters addressed to an interview subject, and then reflects that lifting more letters would have made her appear more professional to her bosses.

Speaking of the Dirty Digger, Dial M for Murdoch by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman eviscerates Murdoch.

Watson, a U.K. member of Parliament, was one of the many targets of unsavoury investigations by Murdoch journalists. In a way, the book is a continuation of Watson’s aggressive grilling of Rupert Murdoch and his son James at a parliamentary hearing that revealed astonishing details of phone hacking and bribery by Murdochs’ journalists, and a massive international cover-up by their executives.

Hickman, a British journalist, steers this account more in the direction of impartiality.

Several of the characters in this book have been charged with criminal offences, and they may well be headed to prison, following the tracks of Conrad Black, a former Canadian.

That one-time press baron has released a “fully updated” edition of A Matter of Principle, his version of his losing battle with the United States legal system. It was a victory, not a defeat, Black insists.

The updating consists mainly of 16 pages detailing the end of his 42-month sentence in Florida prisons for fraud and obstruction of justice.

Black reports that his last day in custody “began in a foreign, tropical prison cell with the ear-shattering pre-dawn wailings of an ostensibly female African-American correctional officer.”

There is also a new four-page attack on Murdoch. No honour among pirates, apparently.

A Matter of Principle and The Spoiler probably will send you to the dictionary a few times: a delightful bonus.

University or college? Try both

A Winnipeg Free Press article yesterday has sparked a vigorous debate.

Got the degree … Now what? by Sarah Petz features five graduates from Winnipeg’s three universities and one from Red River College.  Check out the comments section under the story.

The burden of Petz’s piece is that many university graduates are learning that their education does not translate into an immediate job.

I didn’t think that was news, but I guess it is, at least once a year at convocation season.

On the other hand, Pamela Wankling, the RRC grad– from the Creative Communications program, in which I teach journalism – is already working in her field of public relations.

That’s not news, either. Thirty-five of the approximately 70 CreComm students who will receive their diplomas next week (that’s half of them, or 50 per cent, for the math-challenged) are already working in their fields. Many are employed in Manitoba, while others have landed jobs in Ontario and Alberta.

Based on the market demand, instructors are confident that many of these students’ fellow grads will be working in their fields soon.

I can’t resist an aside. To those people who have been announcing that journalism is dead: Think again.

Graduating CreComm journalism majors are grabbing jobs in television, radio, newspapers and online, in traditional companies and in brand-new ones.

That means a college diploma is “better” or more valuable than a university degree, right?

Not really. They’re different creatures.

A university education encourages critical thinking and broadened interests. A college diploma builds job-specific skills. Together they make an ideal combination.

Want a job in journalism or in almost any other field? Get a university degree. Then come to college.

I’m an Ally for LGBTT*

This week I became an official ally of gay people.

With about two dozen colleagues from Red River College (all but three were women … hmmm) I spent a day with Brad Tyler-West, a healthy-sexuality educator from Winnipeg’s other RRC, the Rainbow Resource Centre.

Brad took us through a quick history of the oppression and liberation of gay people.

He provided definitions, including distinctions between gender, gender identity and gender expression.

So what on earth is LGBTT*? Well, it stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and two-spirit people.

The asterisk denotes people elsewhere on the spectrum of sexual orientation. That means all of us.

Most compellingly, Brad laid out his history of growing up gay and repressed in Australia, then coming out in Winnipeg. He has a 20-year-old daughter (no, she is not adopted).

My colleagues and I made commitments to challenge homophobia. We promise to be safe persons and to provide safe spaces for people to discuss sexual orientation or gender identity issues.

To proclaim our orientation, we post rainbow Ally cards in our work spaces. On the first day of each of my courses I will explain this commitment to my students.

None of this is difficult for me. I am not converting to anything or from anything.

I have seen the barriers placed in the way of the gay men and lesbians in my family and among friends, and I want to help remove those barriers.

Besides, there is a strong connection to the gay community among Creative Communications students and graduates.

Just check the official Pride Winnipeg Festival Guide. The editor, Scott Carman, and all three listed contributors, Braden Alexander, Brenlee Coates and Chad Smith, are grads of our program.

The guide is packed with interesting photos, stories and ads, including a map of the world that highlights lesbian and gay rights.

Want to feel your skin crawl? Check out the five countries in red that mandate the death penalty for same-sex acts.

Or consider the good burghers of North Carolina, who have just approved a state constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage and civil unions.

Canada, of course, is a world leader in acceptance of gay rights.

Or so it seemed until a couple of weeks ago, when Raymond Taavel, a former chair of Gay Pride events in Halifax and an editor for Wayves magazine, was beaten to death by a man who used homophobic slurs, according to witnesses.

So we have a way to go.

But U.S. President Barack Obama declared his support today for gay marriage.

So it’s looking good for the Allies.