It's almost done!

After six months of writing, my book about the uncertain future of Powerview-Pine Falls, Manitoba is in its final proofreading and production stage. It's off to the printer tomorrow! Stay tuned for more updates on where you can pick up a copy.

So you wanna be a TV reporter?

I just spent the last three weeks working as an intern at Shaw TV. The first week I shadowed reporters, picked their brains and sought out whatever advice I could wrap my brain around before week two. Week two and three immersed me into the Shaw TV newsroom. And by immersed I mean sucked me in, shook me up and spit me back out – a good thing of course. Here’s what I learnt by the end.

1. Coming up with stories for TV isn’t a walk in the park. Bottom line: no visuals no story.
2. Speaking of visuals, there’s a difference between still, abstract shots that sort of get the point across and moving, concrete shots that dictate what you’re going to say. You want to find a story with the latter.
3. Getting the scoop on a good story requires you to get out, talk to people, meet people, observe your surroundings and question them. Ask yourself: was there anything unusual about what a person said? About what I saw? Follow-up, look into what you found out. Analyze everything!
4. Shooting the story is where the pressure sets in and you only have one chance. First things first, when you arrive observe your surroundings. Talk to people, get the story, find out how everything is going to play out if it’s an event or photo-op. Tell your cameraperson what’s happening and what you need out of the shoot. Go in with an idea of what your story is and who you want to talk to, but be flexible, sometimes the best story unfolds while you’re there. Observe, analyze, observe, analyze, repeat, repeat, repeat. Craft your story while you’re there because your standup is coming and you don’t want to waste it.
5. Doing a standup isn’t just your chance to show off on camera…not that I ever thought it was; I just never understood why reporters had to do them. Turns out they’re pretty useful – do a standup when you either need to show your viewers something or when you need to talk about something you can’t show with pictures, like statistical data.
6. Sweating yet? Things aren’t going to slow down. Before you leave your shoot ask yourself: did my interviews cover the basics of the story? The who, what, when, where, why. Did my interview questions generate emotional responses? Do you know how your subject will be impacted by the news? How they feel about it? What they would like to see happen and why? Does your standup provide information? Can it be said in a voiceover? Probably? Reshoot it. Then brief your cameraperson on what your story is looking like so far – will they have enough shots to cover your angle? Is there anything specific you envision absolutely needing from them? Ask and get it. Okay, now you can go. …God, I’m sweating writing this.
7. Writing the script should be easy by now because you know what you want to say. But double check a few things before you send your script to be vetted. Does the story begin with a memorable visual? As in, is it well shot? Will it grab the mom changing her baby’s diapers attention? Does it set up the rest of the story? Are you writing in and out of your clips? This one, I found tricky. It doesn’t mean summing up what everyone has to say about your news story before you go into a clip with them saying the same thing. It means providing viewers with small bits on information your viewer couldn’t look up on google while linking the last clip to the next one. Joanne Kelly gave me some good advice on how to do this when she told me to literally take the viewer on the journey I went on. Make them feel like they were right there alongside you uncovering the story. Telling a story isn’t just about providing the viewer with a piece of news and reiterating it over and over again in different ways for a minute and a half. Also, keep one thought to a sentence.
8. Analyzing what you’ve done is hard and by the end you’re exhausted. A lot of the time I felt like I was crossing my fingers and hoping for the best by the end. I knew what I was supposed to have done, I just told you everything. But being able to read over your own work critically is difficult so I don’t know if I learnt a great approach to being able to do this other than asking myself all the things I just told you. But the best piece of advice I found myself taking into every shoot was from Kim Babij. She told me the reporter is getting access to information the viewers aren’t. This means, you’re the one asking the questions only your interview subject can answer. It means you’re the one pulling out all the details viewers won’t necessarily think of and providing those details in your story later. It means knowing more about the story than you can tell in a minute and a half. It’s the reporter’s job to collect this information and craft it in a way that’s descriptive, interesting, easy to follow and worth watching. Otherwise, she said, what’s the point of having a reporter?
9. Screwing up is inevitable. Even the pro’s do it…or so I’m told. Swallow your pride, make the call and fix the mistake. Sending a shitty story to air will prove to be more embarrassing in the end. Having said that, don’t get cozy with screw ups, once you hit the big time you really will only have one shot and likely less time.

The good news is it’s really not that scary once you start to get the hang of it. By the end of my three week work placement I found myself feeling much more confident going out on shoots and writing scripts. While I’m still not an expert, the lightbulb is beginning to flicker.

Things I've been noticing lately

1. Guys referring to their girlfriends as objects by calling them ‘my girl’ or ‘the girl’.
2. Hot 103’s Steve Adams has an incredibly well prepared show.
3. My ipod says it’s last week.
4. Pho No. 1 is the most underrated Vietnamese restaurant in the city.
5. I don’t think people really taste their food – as in I don’t think many explore the flavours they’re chewing.
6. There are way too many ‘new fiction’ and ‘new non-fiction’ books on the McNally Robinson bookshelves to go through.
7. An apple at 7-Eleven is almost $2.
8. This blog is an example of faulty parallelism.
9. After three weeks of driving to work, I miss taking the stinky city bus.
10. It’s cold outside.

Profiling a champion

Follow this link (http://vimeo.com/17717287) to see a video Jeremie Wookey and I made for our broadcast journalism class. It's a profile on a young and accomplished highland dancer named Colleen McGregor. Enjoy!

Remarkable journalism: John Hersey's Hiroshima

Hiroshima: the first city in the world to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb and a book by John Hersey. Unlike the city, the book was never destroyed. But both have only rebuilt themselves since the event – the city, literally and the book in numbers of copies.

Hiroshima is the largest Japanese city in the Chugoku region, the largest island of Japan. On August 6, 1945 the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb on the city. It killed 80,000 people almost instantly.

John Hersey was assigned to report on what happened. Rather than telling the story of crushed buildings, he told the stories of six lucky survivors’s crushed lives.

The intention was to print the 36,000 word article in four instalments in The New Yorker, but once the story was written no one wanted to break the piece up. It was kept a secret from New Yorker employees and on August 31, 1946, John Hersey’s Hiroshima filled the magazine.

The article was a hit. Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, said he’d never felt so satisfied with a publication after Hiroshima was printed. Copies sold out on newsstands and were being scalped for $15 to $20 – the magazine cost 15 cents. Apparently Albert Einstein even tried to order 1,000 copies – that never happened. And ABC radio dedicated four half-hour long programs to reading the story on-air.

The sensation was so huge, the article was eventually printed as a book and has been continuously reprinted since.

And for good reason – I think. The story is especially effective for two reasons: (1) Hersey’s dry, reportorial style of journalism lets the subjects’s stories write themselves. We don’t need his opinion. And (2) Hiroshima tells the stories of human beings, not buildings, not war politics. This allows readers to connect with the narratives. It’s an emotional ‘real person’ story. Everyone can relate to a struggle, therefore, everyone can read Hersey’s article and grasp, at least a portion of, the magnitude of the situation those six survivors went through – this instead of trying to relate to some political figure’s decision to drop the bomb.

I wonder, however, if pictures were missing from the book. On the one hand, they’d provide readers answers to their burning questions of what many scenarios and people looked like. What did these people look like? Hersey never really describes anyone. But on the other hand, the fact that Hersey focuses on presenting facts allows readers to imagine. The lack of pictures force readers to over-exaggerate the devastation, an effect that I think was intended and necessary, because adding pictures would mean filling in a part of the mystery for readers. Keeping this away from them makes them feel vulnerable when it comes to the possibilities of how things could’ve looked. This vulnerable feeling is essential if readers want to even begin to understand how these people might’ve felt.

At least that’s how I felt as I read the book.

Another thing that resonated with me is how Hersey never put himself into the story. He just presented other people’s information and facts surrounding the bombing. Hersey never had to try and make the story emotional because he let it be emotional. By this I mean, rather than trying to show readers where they should feel emotion, he just presented the information and let them decide the emotional parts – and there were many.

I think this is a technique that a journalist can try and mock as much as possible.

But at the same time, I question this idea because there are many other journalistic pieces where a journalist puts themselves in the story. For example the documentary film: Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire. Dallaire, even though he’s not a journalist by profession plays the role of one throughout the 1994 Rwandan genocide to try and bring international attention to the issue in attempt to help stop it. While Dallaire told the stories of others, he also told his own. His story evoked a lot of emotion as well.

This leaves me to conclude that there isn’t necessarily a better way to tell a story. But I will say there is a more difficult way: that’s the Hersey way. He wasn’t in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. He took no part in the story other than to be the one to tell it. The amount of research he likely had to go through pulling stories like that from people going through such an emotional and traumatic time is not only amazing – it’s reflective of his journalistic talent.

Also note: I chose to add a picture of two Hiroshima victims. What do you think about including them?

(Photos taken from: amazon.com; hiroshima.com; discoverhiroshima.com)

Long term journalism

Oi. It can be confusing.

Since March 2010, I've been working on a book about the town of Powerview-Pine Falls, Manitoba and the impact the paper mill's closure has had on the community. I began my research and interviews over the summer and came up with a carefully crafted outline in Sept./Oct. based on the information I received from that research and those interviews.

The results were mainly negative in the sense that many were concerned with how the town was going to continue.

However, as I return to the area for more interviews or follow-up interviews, I'm already beginning to notice a change in the way people talk about the area -- they're more positive about their situation and trying to reconstruct a base for a solid town with what they have. Or so it seems.

The confusing part is trying to represent both categories of feelings and knowing I'll likely be experiencing more of this attitude change as I continue. I'm so used to writing quick articles -- the interview happens, people have their opinion, I fire off the story. Done. Now it's all about updating my chapters to how people are feeling now, while still representing how they felt then too...which was only a few months away.

Dealing with the slight attitude changes is something I never expected and a challenge I'm facing.

Stay tuned to see how it all plays out.

Sharing my student wisdom with those who can stand it

I’m the arts editor for the Projector.

With the job comes several challenges. Three repeatedly come to mind, actually.

1. Knowing I’m not an expert editor, but having to act confident about my decisions.
2. Acknowledging and accepting the fact that there are bigger, more popular news sources than mine – this means my story lists must be extra unique to draw attention.
3. Being in charge of the arts sections often means a lot of event coverage – because we print every two weeks the news gets old fast, so it’s a challenge to try and encourage writers to find a broader way to cover an event… sometimes even I’m not sure.

This week I’m working on hiring arts editor interns. They'll run the Projector while second-year CreComms are on workplacement. The task is both exciting, because I get to play a part in scouting new talent, and overwhelming, because who am I to say who's the best? I’m also reminded that I was in their shoes last year – how much could I have possibly learned since then?

A lot actually.

This position made everything my instructors had been telling me over the past year make sense. I realized writing needed to be clear before it could be creative. I also realized no writer is perfect. Something can always be fixed. Editing is like solving a puzzle – the edges are easy, it’s completing the inside that’s tough, and that's when many people give up.

A few things I’ve learnt since working for the Projector is:

• That assuming proper nouns are spelt correctly, no matter how good the writer is, is a bad idea
• That leads and context couldn’t be more essential to a story – a writer who can do both is talented
• That formatting is an annoying thing to have to fix, but an easy thing to fix
• That no matter how hard you try to make submission instructions clear, there’s always going to be someone who gets it wrong – you just have to deal with it
• That the best stories are the hardest to edit but you have to stick with them because there’s going to be something to fix
• That it's always important to double check facts
• That it's important to understand one can never stop editing, but one needs to – it’s important to keep the original story
• That headline writing is so not my thing

When editing, I try and give students feedback as much as possible because I know I always appreciate it when people do it for me. But, while I hope they consider my advice when I'm offering it, I also hope they take it with a grain of salt – it was only a year ago I was in their shoes.

Acting confident is something I continuously work on, so I don’t have a solution for that yet. However, I think I can pull it off in front of student writers; I just have to put up with my brain’s internal arguments later.

The latter two challenges I feel are self-explanatory. Every paper, big or small, deals with competition. Every paper tries to be unique. The only thing that makes me think the Projector has particular challenges is the fact that we have a small distribution and students within the program often say it’s weak.

This is what drives me to try and be extra creative with my story lists...which leads me to my next point: you can only try so hard and then it’s up to someone else.

I hate assigning event coverage stories. I try not to. Either I’ll try and guide the assigned writer into a direction that uses an event to drive a larger story or I’ll say what the larger story could be.

It's not always successful in the end, but I have to trust the writer did their best. The writers also have to trust that I do my best, but my best still isn't perfect. Although I might've learnt the above list of things doesn't mean I'm great at it. Those writing for me and I are all students.

And at the end of the day, all we can do is fake it ‘til we make it.