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.