Leslie Young

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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

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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Web journalism is a very different beast than print or broadcast. To do it well, you have to put yourself into a totally different mindset.

I’m currently working on a companion website for a documentary project we are doing in class. The goal is to have a website that adds to the story told in the documentary. It will do this by fleshing out certain areas that were touched on in the doc, and ideally bringing some context to the whole issue.

The website is a way that many people, importantly including most of the people we spoke with in the countries we visited, will access the story. It is an opportunity to reach a different audience than a television show would. So, it is very important that the website be a quality product. For this reason, I’m trying really hard.

There are challenges though. It is difficult to plan for website features that complement but don’t repeat what is said in the documentary when we don’t yet know what the documentary will say. Naturally, we have some ideas and I can work off basic storyboards, but this makes things a little more complicated.

Getting my head around the expanded possibilities a website offers for storytelling is difficult. When you set out to do a TV piece, you know what’s involved. You need to take your video camera and record sequences, interviews, b-roll and so on. You know that in the end, you will tie these pieces together into a short piece of video.

With the web, there is no set framework or even conventions to fall back on when you decide how to tell your story. With a few elements I proposed, we actually have the material to tell the story in a few different ways. We can do it either by photos or through a short video clip. So, you have to make a call on how to do it. Not that options are bad, indeed for some elements I wish we had more options, but it complicates things.

I think our website will turn out great though. We have awesome material with lots of potential and we’ve got a great team. I’m really happy to get to work on this project.

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The most amazing thing about social media is its speed. There’s no way that traditional media can keep up with how fast information on a major event now pours onto the Internet. All they can do is sift through it all and try to make sense of what’s going on.

This was driven home to me last Friday as I watched some student presentations in the class I currently TA. These presentations discussed the role of new media in the coverage of some recent disasters, such as the London bombings and Hurricane Katrina. The amount of media uploaded by individuals in both cases was astounding. There were videos, photos, text and sound from tons of eyewitnesses - ordinary people, not professional journalists. Not only that, but it came in so quickly.

Case in point - one of the groups showed this video during their presentation. It demonstrates how the Wikipedia article on the July 7, 2005 London bombings was updated, revised and added to by Wikipedia’s users, over a 24-hour period.

I found this astounding. Why can’t news media harness something like that? Think of how it could be used!

I guess the obvious question is that if Wikipedia already does it, why should the media duplicate it? We need to think in terms of any added value that reporters and an editorial staff could bring. Certainly, we could contribute to the wiki. Could we also verify? If you look at something like this as a source of tips, I think it’s entirely within the realm of possibility.

Need to think about this one more. Thoughts?

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The Globe and Mail has named Vancouver Quadra one of the 45 battleground ridings that can change the country.

So get out and vote, UBC! Students need to make themselves heard this election.

UBC area voting stations will be at:
*    Place Vanier
*    Walter Gage Residences
*    Acadia Park Commons Block
*    Old Barn Community Centre
*    UBC Golf Club

So my old professor Michael Byers plans to run for the NDP in Vancouver-Centre.

I can’t say I’m surprised. It was no secret at UBC that he was planning to run for something… although the rumour at the time was that he was going Liberal. And, at that time six months ago, I wondered why not NDP. I guess I was proven right in the end.

It seems everybody on the Maclean’s blogs has something to say about this event. So does the Vancouver Sun, unflattering as that article is. The part that interests me is that he decided Stephane Dion’s “Green Shift” wasn’t any good and he preferred the NDP’s environmental plan. Dion must have better marketing, because I don’t remember what the NDP’s environmental strategy is, other than that it’s not (NOT!) the same as the Liberals’.

Still, I’m not sure why Byers doesn’t like Dion’s plan. It seems fairly consistent with his lectures on environmental issues in class. It’s also fairly consistent with the problem he posed to the class: how to ethically dispose of an SUV his family won in a grocery store contest. He didn’t want to drive such an environmentally-damaging car, but nor did he want to sell it, because that would mean somebody else would drive the gas-guzzler all over Vancouver. I don’t know what they finally ended up doing.

His lectures on environmental problems or on many international issues were quite good though, and the support he gave to his students was admirable. Like any good politician, he knew everybody, and would frequently enlist his contacts to help out on student projects.

Anyhow, Prof. Byers, should you ever read this, feel free to comment or drop me an email. I’d love to know why you think Layton’s strategy is better than Dion’s. And what you did with that car.