One of the great things — and I'm not being ironic, here: I really do mean great — about the papers I work for now is that, most of the time, my e-mail address or Twitter handle is published at the bottom of the stories or columns I write. It's great because readers like to write me about what I've written, especially if I manage to write in a way that gets them engaged in an issue. Sometimes they write to tell me I'm an absolute idiot. Most do that in a relatively polite way. The handful that feel compelled to insult me I blame on being raised without a national daycare plan. Sometimes, readers write to tell you what a good job you're doing. But most of the time, you get some new information. You get the experience and knowledge that the reader has added to whatever it was you were able to dig up about a given story. I think readers that respond to their favourite journals and journalists get better journals and journalists.
And, of course, an e-mail message doesn't take long to compose. A blog post like this one is a quick way to unburden yourself of a few thoughts on the world.
And, nowadays, we have Twitter. Not many of my readers respond to what I've written on Twitter — they seem to prefer slightly longer missives than the 140-character bursts you get on Twitter — but one particular reader of The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the National Post and the Montreal Gazette has taken to Twitter to respond to pieces he's seen (or, in one case hasn't seen) in those papers. That would be Guy Giorno who, until last week, was the chief of staff to the Prime Minister of Canada.
Giorno's predecessor, Ian Brodie, was fond of talking to reporters while in office (to his great credit, I might add) and, even after leaving office might send long e-mails with thoughts about a reporter's work or the general state of politics. I'm certain his correspondents were better reporters and able to provide their readers with more substantive information because of that relationship.
Not Giorno, though. Now there may be one but I do not know of any reporter in the Parliamentary Press Gallery who had any kind of meaningful conversation or source-reporter relationship with him over the two years of his tenure. He was old-school and left the whole “talking-to-reporters” thing to the professional communicators he had hired, led, at first, by Kory Teneycke and now by Dimitri Soudas. But Giorno has been keeping tabs on those reporters! I am told by Conservative political aides he would spend substantial parts of the chief of staff's day researching and compiling point-by-point rebuttals of columns that he didn't like.
Unleashed as he is now from the PMO, he apparently no longer has the time for day-long research and composition and, instead, has quickly taken to Twitter when he reads something that strikes him the wrong way. For example, this morning he tweets to tell us what he thinks of the latest column from L. Ian MacDonald, a former Mulroney speechwriter who now edits Policy Options magazine and contributes columns to Sun Media and PostMedia papers. “Drivel from pompous, little man,” Giorno concludes apparently because he disagrees with MacDonald who told his readers this morning that, in his opinion, “the Giorno PMO was a hunkered-down and narrowly focused operation. In substantial terms, it was consumed by tactics, to the detriment of strategy.” To which I say: We're all entitled to our opinions but I wish Giorno had called me, MacDonald or any PPG journalist at any point during his time to explain how MacDonald's conclusion, shared, I must say, by so many across all professions and political lines in the national capital, could be so wrong.
Giorno, at this writing, has tweeted precisely nine times, seven of which are about the press. He challenges John Ibbitson, the Ottawa bureau chief of The Globe and Mail, to produce what he thought was a threatened indictment of Harper's political season:
Where's Globe&Mail opus “Stephen Harper's Autumn”? @johnibbitson touted big essay on Autumnus Horribilis of PM (and me). Instead we did well
He takes on the left-leaning and, therefore, Harper-hating Toronto Star:
TorStar boasts of fewer corrections each year-but Press Council has found Star just avoids correcting its errors
@ TorStar ripped off “public editor” title from NY Times but refuses to follow times in making role independent of management.
@ Boasting of fewer corrections is a joke. Star simply avoids correcting. Press Council upheld my complaint.
[He then helpfully tweeted the link to the Ontario Press Council's decision about the complaint — resolved more than five years ago, I should add — but which apparently has been burning a Twitter hole in Giorno's pocket.]
And he still bears a grudge against Don Martin, now the host for CTV's Power Play but at the time of the offense to Giorno, a columnist for the National Post and Calgary Herald:
@ Still trying to justify your false, market-moving story on potash? Pathetic, Don. Just apologise and move on.
Some on Twitter, apparently, have tried to take Giorno on but those thinking of doing so are warned by Giorno himself to mind their p's and q's in any criticism:
Left already unhappy with my tweeting. Critics might have credibility if they knew how to spell (“jurk” not a word) and used real names.
@ – Why not improve your grammar before you try to lecture me? Start by distinguishing “then” from “than.”
All of which is to say: Giorno has instantly become a must-read among Ottawa's twittering class! And I suspect if he'd like to extend his thoughts about his time in the PMO to, say, 600 words a week, we'd likely be only too pleased to put them in our papers — with his e-mail address and Twitter handle at the bottom.
