Leslie Young

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It has been about six months since my last post.

And honestly, I am sorry.

I am sorry not so much because I feel an obligation to this blog - far from it. (Clearly.)

More, I am sorry because I feel that I need to keep my hand in on the writing side of things. At the moment, I write greens. This is a marginally technical term, so I will explain.

A green is a script, more or less, for a live interview that a host of a radio or television program might conduct during their program. It consists of an introduction that explains the basic story that is to be discussed and ideally teases the reader into sticking around for the interview. It sets the stage for the interview that is to come. Then, it normally lists between five and seven questions that the host will ask the guest. Finally, it includes a detailed background that is meant to give the host all the information he or she needs to understand in order to do the interview.

That’s right, these things aren’t ad-libbed.

Precise attention must be paid to the ordering of questions, the facts laid out in the introduction, and a good teaser/promo must be written to induce people to stick around.

Green-writing is a specific skill. The best greens are both clever and informative, without giving the story away. Unexpected twists of language are encouraged, as are humour and brevity.

It teaches you to write a story in a few words. This is an important skill in all types of journalism. But by its nature a green is an incomplete story - it is written in such a way as to induce the guest into explaining the rest of the story. The guest is more interesting than the host reading a script.

I am trying to figure out how to apply those radio-writing skills to narrative writing. It’s tough. This is why I feel I need practice.

I mean, could the disjointed nature of this post lead to any other conclusion? Look for more - hopefully more straightforward - posts in the near future.

At approximately 12:30 PM Friday, the UBC bus loop was closed due to a “police incident”. Police and UBC security have closed off the area to buses and students and sealed the area with yellow police tape.

A suspicious item was found on a bus, said Randy Schmidt, UBC Associate Director of Public Affairs. He could not give further information on the nature of the incident.

Officers at the scene would not say what kind of incident occurred, only identifying it as a “police incident.”

“Can’t say anything about it now, but you’ll hear about it,” said a UBC Security officer.

Transit officials warned that they did not know exactly how long the bus loop would be closed, hinting that it could be for up to several hours. Most buses are still running and have been rerouted to Wesbrook Mall and University Boulevard, where students can catch the 99.

The smaller trolley bus loop nearby is unaffected.

“Occasionally these kinds of things happen at exam time, so I don’t know if there’s a link,” said Schmidt.

UPDATE at 2:30 PM: The Vancouver Sun reports that things are back to normal.

Vancouver Sun story

For inspiration for a website I’m working on, I went looking for good examples of web reporting on international issues. I was trying to find news organizations that used the web to advance the story in some way: not just republishing what their main outlet already did, and ideally using the multimedia flexibility and/or interactivity of the web in an interesting and informative way.

I ended up being disappointed. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places, but as far as I can tell, no one is doing innovative things online with their international coverage. The Washington Post for example is generally known as a leader when it comes to online storytelling. Sadly, their international coverage is sometimes flashy, but often shallow. One exception is a recent package on Uganda that includes lots of video interviews that provide a helpful introduction to the conflict. On the other end, the BBC and New York Times have solid coverage, but tend to just post some text and maybe a bit of video, even for features.

Surprisingly, some of the best examples of online reporting on international issues come from the New York Times’ blog, The Lede. A recent entry on Afghan TV stars becoming illegal immigrants to the US is a really nice treatment of a fairly simple but quirky news story.

Here’s why:

• Links. They link to everything that might be relevant to the story, and not only that, they link to things that will actually further your understanding if you click on them, or at least be interesting.
• Relevant video. The videos posted add to your understanding of the story. The text describes how a young Afghan reality show contestant danced and pushed back her veil during a song. You can watch that video right there. Same with the TV interviews that are mentioned throughout the article.
• Content and writing. The story is well-researched and engaging. There probably isn’t a ton of original reporting in it (like most blogs) but it quotes from multiple sources and gives you the option of finding out more if you want to.The writing is fun without taking the subject lightly and it keeps you interested.

If this kind of treatment was taken off the blog pages and put into at least some of the Times’ actual stories, coupled with original reporting, you would have quite an excellent international news site.

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What is journalism school good for?

I came across an interesting article in the Toronto Star that had this to say:

Journalism schools don’t train students just for journalism jobs any more than political science departments train students just to be politicians. In journalism school, students learn how to spot the key data and arguments of any issue; how to analyze that information and how to write clearly and concisely. Journalism graduates also gain precious knowledge about one of society’s most powerful forces – media.

This is undoubtedly true. I did my undergrad at Carleton, which has a large journalism program. I wasn’t in journalism, but I knew enough people who were to see a bit about where they hoped to be.

Many originally entered the program thinking that they wanted to be journalists someday. Many of these people were turned off by the brutal first year or two, and decided to switch out to another major. Maybe this is becuase of the way the program is set up at Carleton - popular opinion suggests that the first year is meant to cull all the undesirables from the pack, and part of it is certainly the normal major-switching that most people do in their undergrads.

I think this changes in a graduate school of journalism. The people there really do want to be reporters, for the most part. Not all want to do daily news, but they all want to be involved in media. Everyone came from a very different background, but they all have similar goals.

And good for them (us). It’s a rough job market, but like that same article suggests, “there seems to be a hunger to get out there, get it figured out, get it done.” Darn right.

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I’ve been watching the coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising over the last week, and I have some thoughts:

The difficulty in covering a 50-year anniversary of a conflict is in saying something new. Most of the stories I’ve read had a “same-old, same-old” quality to them, in that every story said how nothing has changed. Some stories focused on individuals, recounting the tale of how one Tibetan refugee was forced to flee his home. Others focused on the passionately angry speech the Dalai Lama gave to mark the anniversary. One or two stories talked a bit about the political situation. Few knit all of these together.

One of the things that has been highlighted in our class, and recently in ethics class, is how complex foreign wars, occupations and other such things can be. We have highlighted how every person involved has a motive for speaking to the journalist in question. I am not an expert on Tibet – I wonder how much of the story I am missing. I doubt too many people go looking for a whole stack of articles covering the same recent anniversary, as I just did, to see differences in the coverage.

The overall narrative seems too simple to me. When I see that kind of narrative, I wonder how much of a story journalists already had in mind when they went to Dharamsala this week. Did reporters go in with pre-conceived notions of what they were looking for? It seems too easy: a big speech, a story of a refugee who fled Tibet decades ago, angry Chinese government spokespeople.

I have only seen one forward-looking piece of journalism on this issue, an article by Mark Mackinnon in March 7th’s Globe and Mail. It doesn’t come to a positive conclusion on the future of Tibet, but it does closely examine the issues and personalities involved. I think that on issues of long-standing conflict like this, it is important to have articles that examine the future, instead of focusing on the stalemate. This is both what grabs the reader and what moves the issue forward. Asking what will happen to Tibet when the Dalai Lama dies is a very valid question.

This sort of analysis grabs the reader because it deviates from the accepted and by now, overused narrative of “Poor Tibetans oppressed by the Chinese government.” Unfortunately, this basic story has not changed in fifty years. As such, I think audiences may have become used to it and consequently uninterested. Asking questions about events that might change the flow of the story, now that’s interesting. It opens whole new debates, and hopefully, moves the issue forward in people’s minds.
There are too many articles about long conflicts that seem virtually identical to the articles written twenty years before. This is part of the nature of the conflict, but journalists could be doing more to seek out creative ideas and angles that have not been retread every few weeks for the last few decades. This keeps the story interesting and fresh, and I think, better serves the public both at home and in the country where the story takes place by presenting new ways of framing an issue.

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• CBC tribute gallery to photographer Tom Hanson. Proves that photographing politicians doesn’t have to be boring.
• No more sunny days on Sesame Street.
• Ever wanted to be Daft Punk? Now you can.
• Stewart vs. Cramer: The results are in. (though not on video, yet. Will watch rerun before class tomorrow.)

As you can see, this is nowhere near my word count goal. It was this or nothing really. Half a freebie’s deduction?

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Why should anyone care what George Clooney has to say about Darfur?

A piece in the New York Times recently poked fun at that question. It starts like this:

“I was going to begin this column with a 13-year-old Chadian boy crippled by a bullet in his left knee, but my hunch is that you might be more interested in hearing about another person on the river bank beside the boy: George Clooney.”

If this is true, then it’s a sad day for humankind.

If it’s true, then the media has made it happen by constantly interviewing celebrities about their pet projects.

These celebrities are not experts, and they have their own motives for becoming involved in a story like this. These motivations can vary from a practical assessment that it might further their career to a genuine personal interest in what is going on. I think some of them probably genuinely want to help. Those who actually do help, I find, are the people less likely to issue press releases and be in the spotlight for their actions. The argument, as I understand it, is that given their celebrity status, their involvement can shine a spotlight on the issue.

I don’t think this is true. As soon as a celebrity becomes involved, the story becomes about the celebrity. Whatever issue they’re talking about becomes a secondary concern.

And frankly, I don’t care what George Clooney thinks about anything except maybe the movie business. The problem is that as soon as he touches the Darfur issue, every headline suddenly becomes, “George Clooney Urges Action on Darfur”.

This is mostly the news media’s fault. If we didn’t care so much about what George Clooney had to say, then we would stop talking to him. We would look for someone who is actually affected by the conflict, or an expert in international law, or a political figure, or really almost anyone else who could talk in a compelling way about what’s actually going on. It’s a result of laziness that we don’t. Oh, and it sells papers.

What does George Clooney add to the story? Almost nothing. His continued presence in media reports demonstrates that we have run out of new things to report on in these conflicts. It demonstrates contempt for our audience – in that we assume that the only way people will care about an issue is if a celebrity is attached to it. It shows that we aren’t willing to spend the time or money to find real people with real stories in these situations. Finally, it shows that we ourselves don’t care about the real story. We’re happy to talk about George instead.

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Missed last night’s post. Was marking papers.
Sigh.

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I’ve recently done some international reporting, and I think I’ve developed a taste for it. Now, I’m trying to figure out how to work it into my immediate career goals.

First things first: there may be a problem with the above sentence. Perhaps it shouldn’t be in my *immediate* career goals. But then again, I do know people who actually did start out their careers in a foreign country.

Aside from that quibble, the next problem is a practical one: should I choose a place to go based on where I would actually like to go, or do I choose a place based on a complex theory of where is on the radar these days, whether there are enough people currently covering it, whether there is a domestic news agency that can give me some steady work, and so on.

Logic would dictate the second option. But, what is all that worth if it’s a place I don’t have any interest in going to? How then do I make that choice?

Then there’s the bigger question: freelance and hope for the best or find a job back home and pitch foreign stories? Can you combine the two, by getting a publication to agree to publish your work or at least to look at it? I hope so.

I must say, this is not the article I planned to do tonight, but it’s where my mind is right now. As I write, I have wiki country guides open in other browser tabs and I can’t stop clicking back and forth.

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Today I heard that 24 Hours Vancouver is laying off six of its employees. I’m told by a friend of mine that this is pretty well their entire newsroom staff in the city.

This is really too bad. Funny, here I thought free commuter papers were the enemy. Didn’t they spell the end of quality journalism a few years ago? Of course, that was before a few of them that were even more thinly-disguised as advertising vehicles than usual went under.

24 Hours’ Vancouver edition was the rare exception. Unlike the Ottawa edition, which since I’m from Ottawa I was familiar with, the Vancouver paper sent real reporters to real local news events and had actual original reporting. The Ottawa paper relies largely on wire stories. I guess that’s the fate of the Vancouver edition too. Sure, they had wire stories for their national and international coverage, but they were definitely on top of things locally.

I’ve always wondered about the business models of such endeavours. Since they’re free newspapers, they are crammed with ads. Did people suddenly stop buying ad space? As a frequent bus rider, as far as I can tell, there is no shortage of readers. Paper boxes at bus stops are often empty and papers are regularly left sitting on an empty seat, waiting for the next commuter.

My guess (and it doesn’t take a genius to guess this) is that their parent corporations have judged these newspapers to be expendable. They are not prestigious titles and they are not the flagship publications of any media corporation that I know of. Therefore, as companies circle the wagons, they cut the humble commuter daily.

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