The Sparks'

I'm working on a story. 

It has a lot of roots in a lot of places, but among them: racist Nova Scotia, patriarchy in black culture, the solitude of childhood, the power of music. 

And the systemic failure of our "civilized" institutions.

I'll try to get http://bethanyhorne.com up and running to contain it.

Timeline of G20 ISU media highlights

Comment on the blog entry if you want to add something—this is definitely not comprehensive, just my first attempt to collect relevant links.

The timeline is meant to examine how the PR campaign of the police forces perhaps changed over time, and how parallels from definitive moments can be drawn to protest policing (and protest policing PR) in other cities, post-9/11.

G20: The Protests, the Police and the Media on Dipity.

Getting ready to cover the G20

This is the "Protest Tip Sheet" Toronto Star reporters covering the G20 were given:

First off, this is NOT a tip sheet on how to cover a protest. That’s between you and your editors. This tip sheet is about how to get through a protest with minimal pain or injury, culled together by J-- R--- and S--- L--- at the Toronto Star from experiences at WTO protests in Seattle, FTAA in Quebec City, IMF and World Bank in Washington, the OAS in Windsor and attendance at the protester’s own training camps.

·       Get a gas mask. Old army surplus gas masks may offer some relief from tear gas, but filter canisters have a limited shelf life. Check expiry dates. Keep the mask concealed until needed. People may want to take it from you, and they won’t ask politely.

·       Keep a bandana soaked in vinegar in a Ziploc bag with you at all times. If your gas mask is stolen, or you don’t have it with you, it will be a backup. Place the bandana over your nose and mouth.

·       If you are stationed at an active fence demonstration, consider a helmet. Hardcore protesters throw rocks. Again, keep the helmet concealed until needed.

·       Ear protection. The sound cannons are new, so the best advice we can offer at this point is get good ear protection, from ear plugs to construction-grade ear covers. The closer you intend to get, the better protection you'll need.

·       Water bottle with a spray top. Not just for drinking. If you are gassed, and it gets in your eyes, spraying with water is the only cure. Aim for the corner of your eye by your nose. Water should flush around your eye and clear out the gas. Better yet, get someone else to do it. Not surprisingly, the protesters tend to be good at this.

·       How you dress is important. If you look like a protester, you are more likely to be treated as one by riot police. If you don’t dress like one, more militant protesters may surmise that you are a member of the main stream media or police and target you. In Quebec, hardcore guys threw paint-filled balloons at media. It was Barney purple, and very difficult to remove. So, try to strike a balance in how you look.

·       No natural fibres. Tear gas sticks to natural fibres, so wear nylon, polyester, etc. The last thing you want is to take that stink home, and we don’t want it here. Consider a change of clothes for going home.

·       Hide press credentials until you need them. Protesters often don’t like the “corporate media.” That said, riot police in the heat of the moment may not care if you are press, even if you happen to be Lloyd Robertson.

·       Food and caffeine. Carry with you. If the protests get bad, shops will close and you will have a tough time staying fed and caffeinated without leaving the story. High-energy power bars are good.

·       Know where you are and how to get out fast. Police in the past have fired waves of tear gas, at varying distances, all at once. This can cause great panic amongst less hardcore protesters and cause a stampede.

·       Rubber bullets, at close range, will break bones.

·       Don’t pick up a detonated tear gas canister with bare hands. They are hot. Very hot. If you must, kick it away.

·       Concussion grenades. These are loud bangs that will make you think a gun has gone off right beside you. They are meant to disorient, and they do. They are also hot, so don’t touch.

·       Tasers. Given the bad press for Tasers, we may not see much of them here, but they were used in Quebec City to break up protesters who sat down in the road and refused to move.

·       If you get enough of a snoot full of tear gas, you will find yourself on your hands and knees, leaking big time from eyes, nose and mouth. It will be very hard to breath. This is normal. You will be disoriented, but try not to panic, find relative shelter, if you can, and ride it out. You’ll feel like you’re dying but you’ll live. Flush your eyes.

·       If at all possible, pair yourself with another journalist and watch each other’s back.

·       If you are carrying electronics, beware of water canons. A waterproof bag is a good idea.

·       Have a pencil stowed away. In the event you and your notepad take an unexpected shower, you can still write with that. Those big, thick pencils meant for kindergarten classes are best, since the leads don’t break as easily.

Sensitivity to gas increases as the protest goes on. Tear gas can be like bee stings – it gets worse with each hit, so stick closer to these tips as the protest wears on.

You will need a shower after a day of being gassed. Remember, that the gas will cling to your hair (it’s a natural fibre), so the first thing to do in the shower is hold your head back and stick your face into the shower.

Otherwise, the gas in your hair will go straight for your eyes.

Be careful, and alert, and you’ll be okay.

If you are going to the protests next weekend and want to meet a real life Star reporter, to maybe get your picture with them or something, I have created the following professional-grade sketch of one, so you can more easily identify them in the flesh. Keep in mind, his bandana baggie and camera are stashed in his back pockets:

The reporter might also look like this:

Internship report 2/4

Week Two (May 17 to 21)  I had my act together more often, I would say. I borrowed a cell phone: a key reportorial instrument. I was promoted temporarily to a desk. I ate better, and at more body-appropriate intervals.

     Tuesday and Wednesday were my busiest days so far. As a result, and surprisingly at times, they were quite fun.

     On Tuesday, I woke up to see the story I was going to be working on that day on the cover of the GTA section of the Toronto Star.

     “Damn,” I thought. 

     One aspect of OpenFile that is constantly pointed out by the skeptics as a possible weakness of the model is the open pitching process. Story ideas aren’t secret. They are public, advertised as “open files” in a prominent banner on the front page. The openness is designed to collect public input on whether a story is worth assigning to a reporter. But even after they are assigned, the files stay in the top banner, continuing to tempt readers from other news outlets to take the story idea and develop it for their own pages. This was the pitch to OpenFile:

“Years ago, I wrote a blog post about the Joy Oil Station building restoration efforts. Fast-forward several years, and while appearing to be fully restored, they remain unused and inaccessible to the public. What is the official plan for these restored architectural relics at Lake Shore & Windermere? When will they open?”

   The last time the Star covered the Joy station story was in 2007, around the same time the blog post referred to in the pitch was published. Although the Toronto Star knew the story of the relocation and restoration of the Joy Oil building, I didn’t see why they would cover it now, a week after it appeared as a pitch on OpenFile, unless the open pitch prompted them to do a follow-up. When I saw that Star headline, I thought they’d scooped my news out from under me the day I was getting ready to publish it.

     Fortunately for me, they didn’t do much other than re-visit their old story (which far from answered the question posed in the pitch on OpenFile). The restored building façade featured prominently in the Star story art, but their source at the city didn’t know much about the future of the building. I had different sources, and they were able to tell me a little more. When I published later that day, what I was able to write had more information about how the Joy Oil building was included in development plans for the lakeshore area. My story is here. 

     But I don’t think the fact that I had better sources made mine a better story. I actually think that the open pitch process made the OpenFile version a better story. The background narrative was richer. Somebody (Jerrold Litwinenko, former blogTO editor) was publicly interested in this building. His curiosity germinated in other readers’ minds, while they, too, waited to see what the pitch would produce. Jerrold publicized his curiosity about this building on his personal Twitter feed and in other online and non-online areas of his life, I’m sure. His curiosity was mirrored. A week after his query, both the Toronto Star and OpenFile had answers to his question, and the questions of other people interested in his pitch. It all added up, and on OpenFile, it added up more completely. The Toronto Star article that day did not have a comments section. It did not have links to complete the narrative. It didn’t even have all the information a reporter could have gathered. But OpenFile linked to the Toronto Star, and to Jerrold’s old blog post, and to other relevant pages.

     So, it was a good day. The next day, my assignment was very different. I didn’t expect to break any news, that day. I covered the grand opening of the newest public washroom in Toronto. It was a media circus. Mayor David Miller cut the ribbon. In days leading up to the high-tech washroom inauguration, city PR people had been very tight-lipped about the details, and their strategy worked. The Mayor said later he hadn’t seen so many media people at one of his press conferences since he announced a budget surplus in March.

    Although the amount of press people there did not encourage me (why bother duplicating all this effort?), it was good experience in terms of observing some Toronto reporters in their natural environment. I tried to calculate how much money was being spent on these people’s salaries for the two hours I was standing there. It seemed like a waste of money. One camera crew, one print reporter, one photographer and one radio reporter could have done the job that needed doing: getting the information and putting it out there. I wish that with these types of spoon-fed stories, we could get away with that, and spend our society's journalistic resources on investigative work. But I digress. 

(though, to further this digression, I share a link my editor tweeted yesterday, containing an argument that small scale, collaborative news projects ARE the future of investigative journalism. So maybe it's all connected)

     My coverage of the loo story didn’t originate with a pitch. Because OpenFile is still in beta, the influx of pitches from regular users doesn’t yet sustain the story-producing capacity of the site. So, reporters and editors create story ideas too, like in a traditional newsroom. This story idea came from my editor, Kathy.

    The timing worked in our favour on this one. Kathy had the idea a week before the press conference, while the PR people were being tight lipped. But we were able to write something that drew on earlier stories from several similar interviews Toronto’s street furniture manager gave in early May to a variety of outlets. So, we had a story the day before the grand opening, hinting that the next day (May 19) would probably be the big day.

     And so, on Wednesday, when I went to the press conference, we already had a file started on the site. By the time I got back to the office after the event, all I had to do was plug in some new info, use the old story as a nut graph, add the photos I took, and the file was ready, and updated, way before many of the other print/online stories were.

    The TV stations had been broadcasting live, even before the first flush, but when TV viewers went to the internet to find more info, OpenFile was best prepared to capture those clicks. Kathy pushed this story on Twitter quite a bit, and it ended up getting three times as many page views as the Joy Oil story.

     So, even though I’m doing the same kind of reporting I would do if I were interning for a newspaper or a radio station, I’m learning different ways to use the internet to build and acknowledge the existing community around a single story.

     I’m also learning about Toronto, as a side-effect. Torontonians are starved for good public washrooms. Torontonians are proud of their neighbourhoods. Torontonian transit drivers won’t stop the streetcar unless you pull the yellow lead, even if you’ve made it abundantly clear you want to get off at this corner, through other cues. I have two more weeks to go. (edit: one and a half) 

     So far, so good. 

My internship report, first of four

I've been extremely lucky to find myself amongst the furor of the first week of OpenFile's live website launch. Up until May 11, OpenFile.ca consisted of a blog with idealistic but vague posts, and links to Facebook and Twitter pages. Things quickly got more interesting when, on my first day in the office, their beta news site went live.

     If you haven't been keeping up with the buzz, you might need to know that OpenFile is the newest guess at what the future of journalism will look like. They are betting that it will look local, with an open and collaborative story development process, and that the stories will be community driven, freelancer-produced and curated by experienced old-media talent.

     So, what sets this start-up apart from all the others who are claiming to have divined the future?

     Well, first of: they pay freelancers really well, and really quickly. As a result, they are building a fan base amongst the unemployed writers, photographers and media people in Toronto (and even some of the employed ones) whom they will need in order to build up the story stable on the site. 

     Secondly, they have some money. And they have enough for three years, apparently.

     But that's not all. Word of OpenFile has spread thanks in part to the brand-value of the people associated with the project. Kathy Vey, the EIC, is a well-known Toronto Star alumnus. Wilf Dinnick was a TV correspondent for all the big North American stations. The only name I knew before applying for the internship, and the most well know in the internet world, in Craig Silverman, whose 2,200 Twitter followers certainly haven't hurt the start-up's efforts to get the word out about themselves. 

     Also, OpenFile have, in a way, combined the buzz concepts of the current online world, and successfully conceptualized how these concepts (open processes, discussion, conversation and crowd-souced information) could fit into a journalistic model. Silverman wrote about how a tipster, a reporter (me) and an editor carried this off in his second blog post after the launch: File Function. 

     During my first three days there, OpenFile has garnered the coverage they were coveting.  There were upbeat articles about them in some prestigious publications. The Globe and Mail article was the first, and might have prompted many of the others (that's the thing about old media: influence). Every time another article about them broke, the small staff would chatter gayly with each other, levy violent threats in vain at anyone who dared say anything negative, and give each other virtual high-fives in Twitter-land. (edit: it was stimulating event to be around. I wish I had ownership over a new project I was this excited about. Tune back in to my life the the new Dalhousie Gazette gets started in September.)
Here is a round-up of the kudos:

National Post

Globe and Mail

Business News Network (one and two) -- these are good clips to watch if you want to know about how the money aspect works

Nieman Journalism Lab

And more bloggy-type coverage:

Techvibes

Torontoist (which included a very nice photo gallery in which I appear - take it as proof that I'm attending my internship, perhaps)

blogTO

Toronto Life

J-source.ca

Mondoville (who've exhibited a bit of snark and a lot more skepticism than the other sites)

Predictably, a lot of the positive response to OpenFile has come from journalists. Some of the more personal responses, emailed directly to the editorial team instead of expressed publicly on Twitter or Facebook, were unexpected.

But despite all the hype, OpenFile has hurdles to overcome. The Halifax Daily News and the New York Times experimented with the hyper-local model, planting reporters in specific neighbourhoods and attempting to benefit from that involvement with the grassroots community. Their experiments failed. Maybe journalists don't have the most active imagination when it comes to local news. Maybe, like my prof said, there is a problem in "defining news by where it happens instead of what it is."

     I see a possible disconnect between the audience they are ultimately aiming for, and the audience they are currently reaping. They need to have a big number of unique visitors in order to satisfy their funders. They won't get those numbers by leeching from the established Toronto blogs and Twitter feeds, or by attracting only disenfranchised journalists. I don't see how the site can create a comprehensive portrait of all the Toronto  neighbourhoods without some targeted street outreach work promoting their site. 

     Another question I have is: what is their argument that the internet is the best medium for neighbourhood news? Don't people who connect to the internet generally have more education, more money, more options, and thus more of an interest in the things outside their own neighbourhood? And perhaps, is neighbourhood news not best garnered from the neighbourhood itself: the local flyers, the notice boards, the conversations at the grocery store?
     But maybe I'm destined to miss the appeal of hyper-local internet news, because I've never really felt connected to any neighbourhood. It has been 14 years since I have lived in any one house for longer than a year. I use the internet to feel connected to things I can't walk to, or call on the phone. Maybe I spend too much time with the hyper-international? So, I'm not the target audience of hyper-local sites.

       OpenFile's overwhelming strength is that they are taking it slow. They have capital funding for three years: it has taken them less than one to get where they are now. They are smart, well-connected, experienced journalists. They have fully thought-out the project they are working on, but they are not rigid. They expect to morph over the next weeks, in order to keep up with what they will need to become. They are open to suggestions. I think the bookies are still undecided on what will happen to this gamble. 

What I do

FILE FUNCTION: HOW ONE CITIZEN’S CONCERN BECAME A TIP, A FILE AND A STORY 

Don't Panic

I've had to answer this question so many times: What comes next? What degree are you going for? What are you going to do with it? I thought by enrolling in university I would appease all those well-meaning doom-sayers that would leave a few too many seconds of silence after my answer of "I don't know". Apparently, they are not satisfied yet. I wish I could tell them all that I am not worried about what I am going to do. I wish I could stop them when I recognize the look of doubt, and tell them that no matter what happens to me, I am sure it cannot stray far from what I am built for. My life will always be consonant with what my capacities and my needs. I do not distrust my nature and my strength so much that I would compromise certain things, on any path that I choose. So stop making those faces! Stop asking me to scramble for the most possible future. I am not worried, do you really care enough that you are? What have you invested in my life more than I have? Or does the answer of "I don't know" just leave you without a socially prescribed response. If I said something you recognized: "Social Worker, Journalist, Teacher, Mother of 5", you would be able to say "Oh, my cousin did that at UBC and is now the happiest individual in the western hemisphere, according to Newsweek". Well, I'm not going to feel anxious about the future so you can have an easier time conversing with me. I know that those conversation are like games of Jenga... we take turns to make legal moves, removing and dealing with the normal questions and comments by saying them. The person who makes the comment that crumbles the tower loses, there is a moment of silence, a smile, and we turn to the person on our other side and start again. Block of wood #1: "Hi!" #2:"I know you from that wedding 5 years ago" #3:"What are you up to these days!" #4:"Oh yeah, what's next?". Let me just crumble the tower before you get too into it: I don't know, ok? And I don't care to know. So deal with it.