Having a Grinchy Christmas

I just found out there's a major daily newspaper in Canada offering its summer interns $500 a week, with no benefits (which is normal for a summer internship). That would be a $26,000 annual salary if it were to run all year. The cost of living in that city does not support this measly salary. You could make that working two days a week in an entry level producing job at the CBC. Or in three days of paid-per-word freelancing for a newspaper.

Another newspaper that usually relies heavily on its interns has decided to cut its program entirely for this year. Another did interviews, and then put the successful candidates on a waiting list while they figure out how many positions they have money for.

Here's the thing. Interns produce way more copy than lifers at the paper. One editor I talked to was shocked at how many articles a year his interns put out. This is not the way to cut costs, unless you figure the assignment editors will quit in frustration and then you can save on their salaries too. These internships are incredibly important for the students who get them, but I would argue they're equally important to the news organizations who have pages or air time to fill.

$500 a week. Does anyone else have stories like this?

Vote!

Tis the season to vote on the year's best and worst lists. If you're interested in Canadian journalism, check out this one.

I think Graeme Smith is a good pick - he's been working his tail off in Afghanistan for about three years now, and does excellent reporting out of there. He broke the Afghan detainee story that helped set the agenda on Parliament Hill for over a year, between the original story and the follow-ups with the military police complaints commission. He also put together, along with his local fixer, this incredible series that gave readers insight into why people join the Taliban. He doesn't make judgments through his reporting, but goes about it with curiosity to provide readers with enough information that they can make their own judgments. And he's...the same age as me. Nothing like a little perspective to show you how much you could have accomplished.

Any of those journalists would be good choices - I'll always have a warm place in my heart for Ken Whyte for revamping my beloved Maclean's - but Graeme Smith deserves this.

The early bird

Blurg. I was at work at 5am today for an ungodly shift that isn't even the earliest one possible. It didn't end up being as bad as I'd feared, but there was lots of noise in and around my building last night and I didn't really sleep longer than a couple of hours without waking up. We have this problem where the snow removal vehicles that head down the major artery on which we live park outside our building while they clear this section of the neighbourhood. I don't even know how much they clear before moving on, just that it takes way longer than it would if they were doing only our corner. So we get a giant diesel truck rumbling, plus the plow-type truck that backs up (with that annoying high-pitched beeping) to dump the snow into the back of the first truck. It was terrible last year with Ottawa's near-record snowfall, and I can now predict pretty accurately what amount of snow leads to that noise at 2am (not that I expect them to be out during the day, but can't they start at 11pm? Instead of 1am?).

I did get out my microphone to record the sound, but by the time I convinced myself it could be weeks before I have the chance to record it again, the trucks had started to move off. I managed to catch the sound of the truck rumbling by though. It's so bad that if it happens while we're watching tv, we can't hear the sound. If it happens again tonight (which looks like, judging by the snowbanks that are still hanging around), I'll post the sound here. I don't think people believe me about how bad it is.

Back at it tomorrow. The shift is quite fun, so I'm looking forward to having a few more days to get to know it. Part of what I enjoy about freelancing is that I get to play with different forms of media.

And your (somewhat) daily dose of media study...Chris Waddell from Carleton University was on CBC Radio's All In a Day to talk about the death of newspapers. I thought one of the interesting points he made is that people still read newspapers, but they mainly do it online and nobody will pay for online content, so that's part of what's wrong with the model. I'll update with the link if it goes online.

The sound of music

I spent a very cold December night in an Ottawa church, where I witnessed something amazing.

People in Ottawa. Clapping and dancing. At some times, even singing.

In Ottawa.

At a concert.

In Ottawa.

Seriously. Ottawa!

I have never, ever seen anything like it. I took my mom-in-law to the Soweto Gospel Choir concert and it was fabulous. It took people a little while to warm up - there were small pockets of hipsters dancing at first, and mostly in the standing-room-only sections, and everyone around me turned to look the first time I whooped in appreciation. But by the end of the first half, people were clapping and grooving in their pews, and whistling and yelling. By the time they closed the show with Oh Happy Day*, it was like nothing I've seen in almost a decade here. I still can't get over it. The entire church (it was at Dominion-Chalmers) was rocking. There wasn't a single person sitting down. Maybe that's what Ottawa needs - a gospel choir.

The whole thing reminded me a little of the Rwandan dancers I had been lucky to see - twice - when I was in Kigali (we stumbled onto a national competition when we were looking for a market). The dance styles are different, and I have to say I prefer the Rwandan style (skip to 3:45 where it really gets going). Seeing the performers tonight also reminded me of the incredible sense of masculinity the male Rwandan dancers give off while they're performing. Every dance looked to me like the opening scene of a mating ritual. I've never seen anything like that either, and especially not in sleepy Ottawa.

*Or, if you prefer...**
**Okay, I may have linked to that to enable me to link to this too - because everyone needs a little Whoopi, minus the Elisabeth.

Come. On.

As someone who covered the federal election six days a week this fall (let me tell you, it felt like eight), I can't recall precisely how many times I heard Stephen Harper say something along the lines of "friends, he will take us back into a dark time of deficit," followed by the sound of boos from all of the Conservative supporters at whatever rally or speech he happened to be gracing. Suffice it to say it was in every stump speech he gave. He slammed Stephane Dion over and over on the deficit issue.

So I find this frustrating. Not because I'm a Liberal - I'm a free agent, party-wise - but because dishonesty and hypocrisy really, really bother me. It's not even like the Conservatives can blame the Liberals for hiding the numbers - the Tories were in power, and they knew exactly how much money was in Canada's savings account, and they had projections from the department of finance.

I don't know enough about finance and economics to know whether deficit-spending is a good or bad thing. But. Come. On. You can't grind a guy into the ground on an issue you know you're going to have to reverse yourself on later. This is exactly the type of politics the Reform party was founded to end, wasn't it? I know they're now the New Conservative Party, but their leader is a former Reformer. Way to forget your roots.

Most people dislike bullies. If the Opposition gets its collective shit together, there could be a real battle next time around.

anniversary

I realized last night that freelancing and I have my passed our two-month anniversary. And we're still madly in love with each other. You know what I don't miss at all? My blackberry. I was convinced I would have a hard time parting with it, but I realized last night that I haven't even thought of it in about six weeks. I sort of forgot that I had had one for a full year. Text messaging pretty much takes care of whatever I needed the berry for before.

In other news, I've been testing out a new medium this week. I think it's good for the brain to keep switching back and forth between media - there are variations in style - but I'm writing a print article right now and I keep reading my article aloud when I try to edit it. Like, without even thinking about it. I just start going over it and my lips start moving and I'm reading it like a script.* I'll have to watch that if I ever get back to an actual print newsroom.

*You non-journos should know that a broadcast newsroom near deadline always has a bunch of people in cubicles talking to themselves as they read their own scripts. Your ear will pick up phrases that don't work when your eyes won't. It doesn't happen nearly as much in print because consumers are reading it to themselves too - but in radio or tv they're hearing it, so you have to hear it first to make sure it works.

Media mayhem

Okay, maybe not mayhem. But alliterative headlines are always good.

News today that the only major media company in Canada currently hiring journos is now cutting 600 jobs:

CRAFT-Sun-Media-Cuts, NewsAlert
NewsAlert
INDEX:Advisories
HL:Canadian Press NewsAlert
THE CANADIAN PRESS
TORONTO -- Newspaper publisher Sun Media to cut 600 jobs in
Western Canada, Ontario and Quebec.

A later story mentioned something about focusing on digital media, which this posting seems to be about, so maybe it'll survive.

And if that wasn't depressing enough, this came out this morning too:

URGENT-Detroit-Newspapers,
INDEX:Business, International, Labour, Media
Union: Detroit papers plan job cuts, less delivery
DETROIT - A union official says Detroit's newspapers plan to cut nine per cent of their work force and offer fewer days of home delivery at a time of slumping revenue industry-wide.
Teamsters' Local 372 secretary-treasurer Ron Renaud says it's unclear where the cuts will fall at the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News.
Renaud says the Free Press will be delivered Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays starting in March, while The News will be delivered Thursdays and Fridays.
He says the papers still will be printed and sold at newsstands and readers also will be able to get the papers in a digital edition.
The News doesn't publish a Sunday paper.
The Detroit Media Partnership runs the business operations of the papers. It plans a news conference later Tuesday to announce changes.
(The Associated Press)
10:10ET 16-12-08

I can't see this doing anything but hurting the papers. Subscriptions will automatically have to be limited to two- or three-days a week, presumably cutting subscription revenue in half. But what are readers doing for their papers on the non-delivery days? Walking to the newsstand...or reading it for free online? Even worse, switching off the paper entirely and watching tv instead, or reading a couple of articles online and moving onto other websites? I guess the reasoning would be to try to get people subscribing to the digital edition. I just don't see market share increasing in a scenario that encourages readers to go to the web.

Could be worse

I have had A DAY. Ugh. Briefly, I slept terribly, got up early and got to an office for the first time in a while (that wasn't bad at all, other than my case of nerves). But it sort of went downhill from there, culminating in me booking a bad guest (which, really, probably makes the host's day worse than mine), then coming home to my tax re-assessment (upwards) and dropping a box of pasta all over the kitchen floor. ARGH.

But it could be worse. I have a cat, who is forced to give me affection in return for food, a glass of wine, and an invitation to go to a friend's place tonight.

"Le Chat," I said to the cat. "Meow" she said, (which probably means "why haven't you fed me yet!?!" but which I took to be an expectant "yes, human goddess who I love and respect?"). "Le Chat, here's to us, and to the day improving." Then she looked at me and blinked. Yes, it could always be worse.

Getting adjusted

Today was a little bit harder than yesterday. Another set of soldiers killed, at a time when the Taliban usually scale down their activity. Then a rocket attack on the base, which I have known for years to be relatively common, but which was amplified a bit by a frantic call from my mother-in-law, who is learning all this about Afghanistan at once.

We also had our first phone call from Kandahar, alerting me to the fact that I'm wound tighter than I thought. I managed to play it cool all through the first few days, including reassuring the M-I-L that all of this is normal and nothing to worry about. The thing is that it DOES worry me that we are still seeing major IED explosions and casualties, on top of news all summer and fall that the amount of ISAF-controlled land around Kandahar is shrinking. I mean, take this for what it's worth - simply my impressions from working in and watching the news. I have no expertise in military operations, insurgencies or international affairs, so for all I know it's better than it was at this time last year. But that's not what I have been hearing since last winter. Anyway.

I have played it cool since S left, right up until he called tonight. Then I lost it. The call was frustrating, with a time lag between when one person speaks and the other person hears it, plus the general "what are you doing tomorrow?" and "I can't tell you that" response. Now I'm feeling the pressure in my shoulders and wondering how long I've been hunched up like a stress case.

There's more to write but life goes on - I am working in a new newsroom tomorrow and more than a little freaked about it. Thank God for good friends who talk me off metaphorical ledges. There are many who have sincerely offered 24-7 support, and they will be the ones who keep me in the right headspace.

It begins

The man left recently for his tour of journo duty in Afghanistan. He will be happy to hear the first thing I did upon returning from the airport was wash the dishes. It's not a chore to which I gravitate naturally.

I am in much better spirits than I expected, and even his mom was tear-free at the airport. I think it's one of those things we were dreading far more than necessary - really, it's hard to miss him when he hasn't been away that long, so the goodbye wasn't bad at all. The sad will hit later, probably mid-way through the seven-week assignment.

We took care of the serious stuff, like him leaving me a list of passwords (including his facebook password - in case of bad things happening, I will control photo distribution, thank you very much). It's sort of morbid but has to be done. He also gave me orders not to do interviews if something happens. Our careers have at least given us an idea of what to expect in the worst-case scenario.

Anyway. Right now I'm focusing on how exciting this is, and how awesome he is to be 26 and reporting from a war zone. He's quite the guy.

Massively spoiled

We did Christmas yesterday because S is leaving so soon for the badlands. I got him a Patrick Roy Habs jersey, and he got me every make-up lover's dream.

I have often gazed at this on the Sephora website, wondering at its sheer luxury and decadence. I never even asked for it as a gift because it is just so much. And now it's mine!



That's the eyeshadow layer. S said it's every shade Sephora makes. But wait...



It's folds out to show the blush/bronzer/brush layer. And there's even more!



Oh yeah. That's the stuff. Another layer of lipglosses and lipsticks. It's a thing of beauty, isn't it?

Fridays are supposed to be fun

See, this is why people don't watch the news.

I'm so sorry for the families involved in these stories.

Impressions on impending doom

Thoughts on tonight...

1. Best line of the night goes to...Kady O'Malley. It really does look like dementors are about to swarm Parliament Hill behind Mansbridge's head.

2. Dion, despite being 20 minutes late with tape delivery, is out of focus and he's not framed properly, both with too much room to his left and too much space above his head. And I think the white balance is off (all the white stuff in the shot looks yellow). It looks like he had a high school class shoot his address. Seriously, it looks terrible.

3. At 7:31, CBC stays with Dion, CTV goes to...eTalk Daily. Well, networks do have schedules, you know. NewsNet either didn't get the tape or doesn't pick up the feed, however they arranged to do this. They replay Harper's speech and then their anchor takes over the interviewing of talking heads. UPDATE: CBC, as the pool network, didn't switch the feed to be carried to all the networks. That, and the explanation for why Dion's tape was late, here.

I heard a lot during the election campaign about how poorly-run Dion's communications were. His head guy, for example, didn't watch the evening news. The fact that they can't even meet the most basic requirement of being on time is a huge deal. There has been no other time this year that he had access to this many eyeballs, with both cable and main nets ready to air his message. This is a big thing to screw up. And he ends up looking like an amateur.

It's not eavesdropping when you're invited into the conversation

This has been...puzzling (?) me all day. Pierre Poilievre did a radio interview this morning where he insisted that Gerry Ritz was the victim of someone eavesdropping on a private conversation, when the Tory who recorded the NDP caucus call yesterday was a whistleblower.

Let's see...whoever leaked the story about Ritz making listeriosis jokes was a staffer on a daily briefing call. There were 30 scientists and communications staffers involved in those calls. That doesn't sound like eavesdropping on a private call to me. Also, aren't whistleblowers generally less powerful than the person on whom they blow the whistle? Or maybe it's the reverse - that whistles are blown on those in power. Either way, I don't think either example fits.

Everybody loves a makeover

Thank God. CanWest has finally applied the National Post's beautiful web design to the rest of the chain.

It's so much prettier and easy to read. Remember the old messy version, with a single tiny picture per page? That was all part of a template. Ugh. This one is MUCH better.

City council

Well, as long as we have our priorities straight.

No, really, I'm SO glad council took the time to debate swans. Very productive.

Is this because of the labour action?

Seriously, mail carrier, what did I ever do to you?
Yes, we live in an apartment, with an apartment-size mailbox. Yes, there was a magazine in there too. But really? Rather than putting them inside the rolled up magazine, you jam them on top, crumpling them all up? This isn't the first time our mail has arrived with mail carrier-induced creases, but it's definitely the worst.

If this is because of the ongoing labour action, this is a crappy way of getting your point across.

My other obsession

My friends and family know that besides being a little interested in journalism and news, I am pretty keen on 24. I remember thinking when it started, "a show with Kiefer Sutherland? Who cares about that Julia Roberts dumpee?" Twelve hours into the first season, I started watching. I have rarely missed an episode since, six seasons in.

They tried something new tonight with a two-hour movie. This episode is supposed to catch us up on what Jack's been doing since the end of the last season (a VERY long 18 months or so ago, thanks to a little impaired driving-induced jail time for my friend Kiefer, but only a year in tv time). It's also supposed to take us up to the beginning of the new season. The movie was just as riveting as a regular episode of 24, and it was great that they got to do something different and set the movie in Africa, without the issue of having to get Jack back to America in real time.

I enjoyed the episode for a couple of reasons. On top of being set in a fictional region in South Africa, which allowed the show to tackle the issue of child soldiers, the episode was positively brimming with Canadians. It was actually quite surprising - CP has an article that touches on it, but leaves out a few of the main players. My carefully observed list:

Kiefer, obviously. Shhh. Yes, he's Canadian. His grandfather was Tommy Douglas. That gives him and his offspring more than enough cred to be considered Canadian through another two or three generations.
Kris Lemche, aka Cute Guy God, who I didn't realize was Canadian until seeing his IMDB bio just now.
That hot chic from Young People Fucking (I swear she's gorgeous. I don't know what's up with these IDMB photos tonight...everyone looks terrible)
Gil Bellows, who hasn't looked good since Ally McBeal, but for whom IMDB does fine (there's no rhyme or reason to these photos)
And never least of all...
Colm Feore...the man who played Trudeau to excellent effect. And who also appears to have been born in America, but has lived here for 40 years, performs at Stratford and speaks French. So he is also ours.

Anyway, I'm jazzed. I can't wait for the new season. Especially after seeing the commercials for it, which focused entirely on the re-appearance of my second-favourite 24 character, who has been dead for three seasons but through the magic of being a friend of Jack Bauer's appears to be alive. This is going to be the best season ever.

The waiting game

My husband is leaving for Afghanistan in about three weeks.

This makes me jealous and worried at the same time. When we were in journalism school, we both dreamed of one day reporting from a war zone. We didn't think either of us would be far enough advanced in our careers in time to cover the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. But he's a pretty impressive guy. There was a relatively last-minute opening - to fill the not-so-coveted Christmas slot - and he jumped at it, with my full support.

A friend who works with non-journalists told us once that her co-workers thought only the worst, most disliked reporters were sent to Afghanistan. She had to explain that no, this really is a posting people sign up for, with waiting lists and everything. They even try to go multiple times.

S recently returned from his hostile environment training. A group of Royal Marines takes a group of journalists (or aid workers, or whoever) out to a forest and teaches them war-time first aid - what to do if you come across someone with their guts hanging out of their abdomen, how to tie a tourniquet, what kind of bleeding is the worst kind - along with survival tactics like how to spot a booby-trap and how to react in a hostage-taking. He said until then he had been thinking about the trip in the abstract, but this made it real.

The main message seemed to be to plan ahead - know what you'll do if your car breaks down (it's not like you can go to the nearest house and expect help, or even a safe haven). Know what you'll do if the car you're traveling in hits someone. Know what you'll do if you're kidnapped and see or hear your colleagues being mistreated. Eliminate that ten seconds you spend to come up with a plan, and you're that much farther ahead.

I write all this knowing that 5,000 families go through this each year - my rough calculation of our 2,500-person deployment, on six-month tours of duty - and knowing that as an embedded journalist, my husband will be protected by them. He won't be on the front lines, and if he goes out on an operation or a patrol, he won't be the first guy down the path or into the compound. He will ride in one of the last vehicles in the convoy, making his LAV-3 less likely to drive over an improvised explosive device (IED). We'll be apart for less than two months. And only three Canadian journalists have been seriously injured or endangered since the Canadian forces went into Afghanistan in 2002 - compared to the 97 soldiers killed and hundreds seriously injured.

So while covering a war is necessary to any company's news coverage, and dangerous for the reporters who go, I'll never forget that there are people who face worse dangers. As we weigh the measures S is taking to stay safe, it just reminds me that he'll be safer because of the people who surround him.

More cuts

This is a bit late, but I guess it didn't seem like news in a way - the way the economy is going, media companies are bound to have cutbacks. What did strike me as important is that CTV seems to have so much money (enough to buy the hockey song, to win the bid to carry the Olympics, and to fly all the local anchors in and throw a massive party for their 50th anniversary) that I thought it would be a while before they talked cutbacks. And I worried very briefly for my friends in my old workplace, although as soon as I thought about it for five minutes it seemed impossible to cut any of their jobs - it's so bare bones as it is. I'm sure people in other newsrooms at other companies would say the same thing though.

Apparently the first casualty is the planned coverage for the APEC summit. They won't be sending a reporter anymore, and may be leaning on the Canadian Press to lend a hand with tv hits. They will also have a Globe and Mail reporter there (update: the Globe reporter stayed home too), so they have a couple of options. But it means viewers will now get the same coverage from multiple sources.

Next up for media cuts: CBC execs have been told not to fly to Paris so often.

90s night

Who would have thought an innocently-overheard snippet of music during a hockey game would inspire the two of us to spend part of our evening youtube-ing and wikipedia-ing early 90s culture?

Try a few of these on for a walk down junior-high memory lane.

I think I'm scaring S because I still know a lot of the words to these. How much do I want Dance Mix '92 right now?

What have I missed? Put your links in the comments!

And now the downside to being a reporter...

This is Scott Taylor, publisher of Esprit de Corps magazine, notorious un-embedded journo, and former Iraqi insurgent kidnap victim, to Macleans.ca

Q: There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the media would have stayed silent for a non-journalist. Was there something specific about this case that justified the blackout, or is there a double-standard at work in the way the media reports?

A: It usually isn’t the media that gets alerted first. There’ve been cases in Iraq where Canadians, or Iraqi-Canadians, have been taken, [such as] the woman who was released shortly after I was taken and had gotten out. [The government] had known about her. They were quietly negotiating for her release, and because she wasn’t a journalist, the media wasn’t aware of it. The fact is [in Fung’s case], it’s CBC, and you know someone’s gone off the radar screen. It becomes their own dilemma. Then [the government has] to say, look, we’ll do everything we can, but we need you guys to remain quiet. Whereas if it’s a private citizen [and] a ransom note [is] delivered to the family, you can just advise them and say, “look, we don’t want the media involved.” And in most cases they’ll say, “okay, if it’s going to mean increasing the chances of them being released.” In this case, it was just that rare occasion where there was no choice; the media found out before foreign affairs.

Love what you do; do what you love

I realized just now, as I sat here working, how much I love my job. I'm technically off the clock (though, as a freelancer, I was able to knock off early, knowing I could come back to it at my leisure) but I enjoy writing so much that it doesn't feel like work. Reporting is the hard(er) stuff: researching a new topic almost every day, phoning or otherwise approaching total strangers, coming up with good questions and interviewing(that's not to say it isn't fun - just that it's a harder kind of fun). But the writing - that's the easy stuff. There are always tricky parts where you need to do a bit of finessing, but generally, when the rest of the work has been done properly, the writing is easy.

I just came off a year where I rarely enjoyed what I was doing. I loathed every moment I was expected to be available on e-mail outside of my facetime at the office. And I miss parts of getting out and going to an office, but I have found that I got so used to the stress of the last job that I now enjoy the complete absence of it. I will be walking down the street and realize I have little to no stress, and have not thought about anything ulcer-inducing in the past week, two weeks, whatever. For now, freelancing is grand.

Watch this

Go here and watch the Mellissa Fung interview. And wonder at her tranquility and bravery.

Having read a little and heard a little about her, I was surprised that people wondered whether she would return to reporting. Of course she would! The kind of reporter who heads to a war zone isn't the kind of reporter who leaps into PR after a bad experience. The kind of reporter who heads to a war zone - which, by the way, is not only a voluntary but a coveted assignment - that kind of reporter has it in her bones. The question for me, answered here close to the end of the interview, was never whether she would return to reporting, but whether she would return to Afghanistan. Two very different questions.

Next to go: ink and paper

Well, this is never good.

It's a big number of cuts. Huge, in fact. Two things jumped out at me.

1) MORE buyouts? Seriously? I guess there could be people who are still there because they didn't get bought out a year ago. Rumour had it that the Edmonton Journal had so many people jump at the buyouts that they couldn't accommodate them all. I'm sure they weren't the only ones. But still. I know of a couple of newsrooms that got rid of a lot of people and haven't replaced anywhere near the capacity they had before.

2) This graph:

On the publishing side, CanWest said it was making the cuts through restructuring the community newspaper group, streamlining production and reducing web operations of certain newspapers. The publications were not named.

Community papers aren't exactly known for being overstaffed. They're a great place to work in part because you do everything - reporting, layout, shooting photos, online...But it's because they're such barebones shops. It'll be interesting to see if they eliminate or merge papers in B.C., where they have quite a large chain of community papers.

The story I saw on CBC tv mentioned on-air jobs being cut, which immediately made me think of my old boss. The place where I used to work lost a lot of people to Global News, especially to on-air positions, and my old boss made a habit of pointing out how poorly CanWest's shares were doing. At one point, when Global announced a spate of new foreign bureaux, he even said that he wouldn't recommend working for them, since they could shut down at any moment and leave you stranded in Beijing. Anyway, as the CBC online version makes clear, the on-air job cuts will be at E! and not at Global.

Either way, yikes.

Protecting our own

Before we knew there would be a happy ending to Mellissa Fung's kidnapping, journalists were debating how we would look for conspiring to keep it from being published. If it were a diplomat or a civilian, would we have upheld a four-week publication ban? If it were a politician? A soldier? I argued that first, it's inside baseball and the general public won't think twice about it, and second, it's hard to say we wouldn't have done it for anyone else, since it's such a rare situation.

Today's Globe and Mail devotes two pages to covering Fung's release, including a lengthy article on the debate within the newsrooms. (As an aside, there are days I flip through the front section without reading anything more than the ledes, but today's paper is a good read - both Stephanie Nolen's piece on Stephen Lewis' work in Zimbabwe and the Fung coverage deserve to be read in full).

This kind of debate is hard to settle, if only because we would need to encounter another situation almost exactly like it in order to decide it. These cases are always weighed on their own merits, and even another journalist's kidnapping could be played out differently, nevermind a kidnapping involving a diplomat or civilian.

The Globe article points to an example I had been using this weekend - James Loney's 2006 kidnapping in Iraq. While the kidnapping was reported, all the coverage I read and watched avoided mentioning he is gay. That was to protect him from possible punishment from his fundamentalist kidnappers. His husband stayed out of the spotlight at a time when loved ones were speaking about him and the other kidnap victims, only emerging once Loney was safe. The Globe and Mail also points out that it respected a 24-hour embargo on reporting the kidnapping when it first happened.

Some people have pointed to Amanda Lindhout's kidnapping in Somalia as an example of what happens when you don't work for a place as powerful as the CBC. Lindhout is a freelancer without an organization behind her to ask that nobody report on the case, and her story has been on tv and in the papers. I'm not familiar with her situation but it's likely there was no appeal to keep it quiet when she disappeared. Plus, she was kidnapped with an Australian photographer, and any time citizens from more than one country are involved, the story is harder to suppress (Loney was kidnapped along with other aid workers from England and America). Fung was alone with her Afghan fixer and driver, and her story didn't make it much beyond the Afghan media until she was rescued.

Finally, both the CBC and the Canadian Press have quoted their handbooks, which guide ethics discussions on news coverage. Both handbooks tell journalists not to risk lives over a story.

This is a healthy debate to have, and will be a serious consideration for all newsrooms the next time they're asked to keep a life-or-death situation under wraps. Hopefully it'll be a long time before this debate moves from a philosophical one to a practical one.

Another shot

I'm going to try out this blogging thing again and see how it works out. I have more time to focus on building good posts and doing some writing, and there are some more interesting things going on in my life right now, so with any luck it'll last a big longer than the last one.
My goal is to write a bit about media ethics and topics in the industry, and to post about what life is like as my husband prepares to go to Afghanistan. It's going to be nothing like what it's like for military families who know they're facing the front lines, but I hope it'll be a bit of a peek into something that most families with loved ones in Afghanistan don't talk about publicly. It will also, of course, be a place where I debate with myself, as any good Libra does on a regular basis.
Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome.