David Akin’s On The Hill

I work at some big-time, big-city capital-m Media outlets but I started out at the twice-a-week Orangeville Banner and worked my way from there to one small daily to another. When I was at the Banner, I'd have given my eye teeth to be on staff at the Globe and Mail but, now that I am, I'm glad no one was around to take those eye teeth and that I got a chance to live and work and write about all the communities that I lived in.
Now, over on the listserv for the Canadian Association of Journallists , we're talking about commmunity newspapers. Community newspapers are, by and large, the weekly or, at least, non-daily newspapers that often serve as the paper of record in smaller communities.
Tina Kennedy is a writer at the South Peace News of High Prairie, Alberta, a weekly with a circulation of about 2,000 copies. High Prairie is way the hell up there, from my vantage point here in southern Ontario, a town of about 3,000 people halfway between Edmonton and the Northwest Territories. Tina's paper is an award-winner and here's what she had to say about working on titles like hers (this has been lightly edited from her original post):

From Upper Armpit Alberta, . . .
The pay is shite, the hours are worse. But there's something at community newspapers that draw many of us here: the communities and their issues.
I happen to work in a very busy area that leaves me less time for actually writing something than I care for. But it's so bloody dynamic that I get amazed when I read dailies and realize just how much they miss.
There's so little connection between community newspapers and dailies. Instead of the regurgitated national stories–with a different spin–we often get things as they're breaking.
For instance, this little town stood up to the Alberta government and the feds. Told both of them that they weren't paying their policing bill any more and they could stuff it. It was a successful effort to get someone to pay attention to the funding formula for policing. Did the dailies in Alberta pick it up? Nope. Now today the budget will bring with it a new funding formula for towns with populations under 5,000.
There's no doubt that reporters working in a daily medium are far removed from those working in community newspapers or magazines.
…in all honesty, I don't know that I'd ever go to a daily. I like wearing my jeans to work. I like knowing that Lyle at the arena doesn't care who I am and has no problem sitting down to have a coffee with me and letting me in on the recent budget cuts to a local sawmill.

To which I said:

Hurrah for Tina!
Great post. All the things Tina just enumerated — having a connection to a community you can really get your arms around and writing stuff that has an immediate (and, one hopes, positive) impact on your neighbors — are what makes newspapering a lot of fun at the same time that it teaches you a whole lot about how the world actually works.
At CTV, and before that at the Post, we often get very bright interns from journalism schools, many with multiple degrees beyond what they were studying for in journalism. Invariably, we end up in a discussion about the value of j-school and how it can help get you a job. My advice has always been and will always be that, while what you learn at j-school might help, it will help far more if you sign up to cover library board meetings or a rural police force for a community paper. Go do that for a year and you'll find out fast what your interests are; what your strengths and weaknesses as a reporter are; and, most importantly, that the way you go about collecting news, assembling interviews, and crafting a story is never the way it was described in your class or in your textbook.
Now, I don't want to make it sound like commmunity newspapering is journalism heaven because there are some crushingly dull days on the job and the pay, as Tina mentioned, is crap and you never have enough time/resources/support, plus you have to take your own pictures.
But if I didn't have to worry about the bills, I'd just as soon go back to the Orillia Packet & Times — not a community newspaper but close, a daily with a circulation of 11,000 — where, as the city hall reporter, I'd spend hot summer nights hiding out in the cool basement of the Stephen Leacock Museum there with the museum curator, some town councillors, and some buddies, gossiping and playing snooker on Leacock's pool table, and toasting his ghost with cheap Scotch.

I asked gas station owners, petroleum industry associations, economists, analysts, and as many consumers as I could find but no one could provide with a satisfactory answer about why gas prices in my market — the Toronto area — or in Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg, and other major Canadian cities are bouncing around with such big swings. Gas in Toronto was 70.9 cents a litre Monday at lunch. Tuesday at lunch it was at 80 cents. In Winnipeg, one consumer said she bought gas Monday for 64 cents a litre and on Tuesday it had popped to 78 cents a litre.
Meanwhile, the in the U.S., gas prices are hitting record-highs — the average tracked by the American Automobile Association came in at over $1.73 a gallon yesterday — and some commentators are warning it could go to $3 (U.S.) a gallon.
All of this prompted a piece I did last night for CTV's national newscast. You'll have click on the “Related Video” link on the right of the story at that site to watch the piece.

Here, in all its glory, is a good example of the dopey pitches reporters too often get. (Thank goodness they come now by e-mail
and not by telephone!)
The pitcher here is a fellow named Jamie Adams. I've never heard of him before and it seems obvious he's never heard of me. Nonetheless, he earnestly believes books on Cisco networking technology “would make a great blog”.
You can vote on this issue over there to the right using the handy-dandy blogpolling feature
First, Jamie apparently has no idea what a blog is. I don't care who you are but books on networking technology never make good blog.

Second: He's clearly never spent any time at this blog for if he did he would quickly learn that the content he is pitching is entirely
inappropriate. Nonetheless, Mr. Adams is likely able to say to his bosses that he dutifully e-mailed this pitch to x number of tech
journalists, fulfilling his daily quota of meaningless bumpf.

So far as I can tell, I'm about as patient as they come when it comes to public relations types fumbling their way towards some kind of
meaningful relationship with me but this is the kind of mindless pitch that gives the profession the reputation it would like to avoid.

From: “Adams, Jamie”

Date: March 22, 2004 10:01:39 AM EST

To: “Adams, Jamie”

Subject: Cisco Press for your tech. blog

Hello,

I'm writing to inquire about how we could work together to add information about Cisco Press titles on your tech blog? Cisco Press has a wide variety of networking technology titles that may appeal to your readers in categories like routing/switching, security, IP Communications, optical, and more!

Cisco Press, www.ciscopress.com, is the only authorized publisher of Cisco networking technology and certification self-study books for Cisco
Systems. Our titles would make a great blog on self-study books available to help professionals stay on top of their game, or for those interested in pursuing Cisco certification -Cisco Press has the only authorized materials available.

We recently launched a new series called the Network Business Series which your readers may also be interested in:

*The Case for Virtual Business Processes ISBN: 1-58720-087-2 COMING SOON!
Power-up your Small-Medium Business Network: A Guide to Enabling Network Technologies ISBN:1-58705-135-4

Taking Charge of Your VoIP Project ISBN: 1-58720-092-9

IP Telephony Unveiled ISBN: 1-58720-075-9

Planet Broadband ISBN: 1-58720-090-2

I could provide you with chapter excerpts of our titles in PDF form so that the readers can download a sample chapter from your site as a way to bring readers to your blog. Let me know your thoughts on ways to collaborate.

Thanks,

Jamie

>> ————————————

Jamie Adams

Publicist, Cisco Press

Pearson Technology Group

jamie.adams@ciscopress.com

800 E. 96th Street, Third Floor

Indianapolis, IN 46240

tel: (317) 428-3012

fax: (317) 428-3121

www.ciscopress.com

———————————–

Cisco Press, a partnership between Cisco Systems and the Pearson Education division of Pearson plc, is the official publisher of Cisco networking technology and Cisco certification self-study materials.

> ****************************************************************************

This email may contain confidential material. If you were not an intended recipient, please notify the sender and delete all copies. We may monitor email to and from our network.

Intel Corp. will begin doing what
its competitor Advanced Micro Devices
Inc. did more than two years ago and stop referring to its chips by the clock speed of that
chip. Instead, Intel will name its chip kind of like car makers
like Mercedes-Benz or BMW. Just as Mercedes has S-class cars or BMW has
300-series cars, Intel is going to market its processors as 300-series,
500-series or 700-series processors. The higher the number within each
series, the better the chip, better in this case meaning full of more
features and not necessarily faster.
Clock speed, it seems to me, has always been overrated. I remember a Walt Mossberg from a couple of years
back in which he said that for most users, a computer with a
microprocessor clock speed of 500 megahertz was plenty enough to do
e-mail, some Web surfing and some word processing. I'd say he's still
right. Certainly, you don't need a chip running at 2 gigahertz to do
most computing tasks.
If you're buying a PC, I say skimp on the processor speed but spend as
much as you can on memory — try to get a a gigabyte or more — and
perhaps spend a little extra on a better video card so your screen will
draw images and multimedia stuff faster.
In fact, if it's multimedia that you're interested in, Apple's products seem to do a much
better job when it comes to content creation and content display.

The Chicago Tribune reports that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation of monies received by Conrad Black and David Radler while they were running Hollinger International Inc. of Toronto.
Investigators are trying to determine whether the two engaged “in the pilfering of corporate assets,” the unidentified source told the Trib's reporters.
Black and Radler are the guys I used to work for. They were the controlling shareholders behind Southam Inc. when I worked for The Hamilton Spectator and, later, they were the ones behind the National Post, where I was part of the inaugural staff.

A photo blog is part of this blog. I've dubbed it 'B-roll” and you can access it by clicking on that title in the category area to the left of this message. Over the last couple of days, though, I've been fiddling with setting up a new category and trying to see if I could restrict access to that category to a set of predefined users. In fiddling about with that process, I ended up trashing all the photos in the “b-roll” Blog. I'll be slowly re-building that over the next few days.

The nominees for National Newspaper Awards were announced yesterday. The Globe and the Mail and The Toronto Star lead the way with 13 and 12 nominations respectively.
No doubt there's a story in the paper that landed on your doorstep this morning but here's a the press release from the Canadian Newspaper Association with a list of all the nominees.
The winners will be announced in Vancouver on June 5.

There's something wrong with some 60-gigabyte Hitachi hard drives that shipped with IBM ThinkPads recently. IBM has posted an upgrade that fixes this problem and, to make sure the importance of this update is not lost on any users, IBM is describing the upgrade as mandatory.

My friend Mark Evans has a blog (Thanks to Michael OCC for pointing this out). Mark writes about telecom and other technology issues for the National Post. We've been on opposite sides of the so-called Toronto newspaper wars since their inception. I was at the Post when it launched and he was one of tech reporters at the Globe. Mark took a break from reporting after the Globe to try his hand at a software start-up. How did that go? Well, put it this way: He's back to writing and he's rich with experience. But while he was out doing the start-up, I joined the Globe. Mark is now over at the Post.
Mark's a smart guy and his blog looks promising.