Tag Archive for News

Quitters aren’t heroes

August 10, 2010 News commentary 5 comments

Update: Gawker reporters there is no Jenny. My original post remains below.

It’s been quite a week for dramatic exits when it comes to quitting your job.

First, JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater decided he had enough after being hit on the head with some luggage and being yelled at by passengers. He quit his job by yelling obscenities over the airplane intercom, followed by deploying the plane’s emergency slide, grabbing a beer and taking off.

And became an Internet hero.

Then on Tuesday, “girl quit” and “dry erase” became two of Twitter’s top-trending topics thanks to the girl who allegedly quit her job via messages written on a dry erase board about her boss which she allegedly emailed to the entire company (I saw alleged, because this is the Internet, so you never know).

And now she has been crowned the Internet’s latest hero.

In the span of 24 hours, the discussion has gone beyond whether the flight attendant was right to quit the way he did (the Star‘s Jim Byers argues that airline passengers are too entitled nowadays). Instead, what we should be discussing is whether either of these “heroes” should have done what they did.

Resignation letters are so 2009.

When Conan O’Brien decided to leave the Tonight Show instead of have it pushed back, he went on a parade of anti-NBC comments for his final shows. The network ignored it, and Conan was a hero to the common man.

But everyone seemed to remember that “normal” people shouldn’t do such things when it comes to leaving their jobs. For one, a lot of industries are small nowadays and word gets around. And you never know when you might need a reference from that horrendous employer you trash-talked before.

Which brings us to the great Quit-gate of 2010.

Why are these people heroes? Slater took a beer from the plane and took off driving. Which is a crime. (Slater was later arrested for criminal mischief and reckless endangerment). As for Dry Erase Girl? We don’t even know her name — so at least she’s being smart about that but her pictures are all over the Internet, and the Internet never forgets.

Behaviour like this should not be rewarded. We should not be commenting about how great these people are because of these Internet memes. The flight attendant will likely never work in the airline industry again (even if he wanted to). Both him and Dry Erase Girl will have to overcome being these Internet memes when it comes to getting a new job.

Sure, we all want to stick it to the man. And so when we see someone else do it, we’re automatically in their camp. But there are limits when it comes to real life.

What both of these cases illustrate is just how selfish the human race has become. Am I defending the actions of the airline passengers that contributed to Slater’s tantrum? Not totally, but I’d be willing to wager the one who hit him in the head with their luggage didn’t mean to. And the ones who yelled at him are also illustrating how selfish we are as a society nowadays.

As for Dry Erase Girl? Work is called work for a reason. If she felt she was being sexually harassed at work for the way she looked, then there are avenues for that. Making a jackass of your boss to the world wide web is crossing a line and is (almost) no better than what he (allegedly) did to her.

So let’s nip this in the bud before it really gets ridiculous. End the quitting memes. Please. My Twitter feed appreciates it.

(Photo courtesy of Sighthound on Flickr. See more of his photos in his photostream.)

A step in the right direction

July 26, 2010 News commentary 4 comments

On Monday, the Ontario government made a fantastic step at trying to break the habit of drinking and driving.

Basically, no matter what your license status (whether it be G1, G2 or a full G), if you are under the age of 21, you are not allowed to have any alcohol in your system at all or you could face a license suspension. Previously, it was just the G license holders who could have the legal amount of alcohol in their system.

From the Toronto Star:

Under Ontario’s graduated licensing system, all drivers are currently allowed to have small amounts of alcohol in their blood once they have earned a full “G” license.

But starting Sunday, drivers aged 21 and under who have been drinking will automatically lose their licenses for 24 hours and could face a fine up to $500 and have their license suspended for 30 days.

Anyone caught breaking the rule three times will have their license cancelled.

I applaud these rules. And think with this legislation, the government could even push forward even more and attempt to increase the amount of people who cannot drive with alcohol in their system.

Considering kids could not drink and drive with the way the Ontario licensing system was, this should not hamper them at all. If anything, being unable to drive with alcohol in my system for the four years I had my G1 and G2 got me into the habit of not getting behind the wheel after I had a drink.

Even today, I will have just one drink if I know I have to drive. My life is more important than a glass of booze.

Some kids that just turned 19 and hold their full G license will no doubt the angry about this move, but to the kids just getting their licenses today or currently holding a G1 or G2, the new law makes no difference. And that’s where the strength in this law is: Introduce it to the young drivers who don’t know any better, and haven’t formed bad habits. Bad habits are what kill people on the road.

If the government continues their crackdown on drinking and driving, Monday’s ban could be the start of a further ban. Whether an outright ban of drinking and driving for all drivers will come to fruition or even be possible remains to be seen.

But at least for today, the Ontario government has done something right.

Photo courtesy of jburns00 on Flickr. You can see more of his photos here.

Why Jarvis St. losing a lane is a good thing

July 19, 2010 News commentary, Politics 19 comments

Drivers will never see an X or a green arrow on Jarvis' centre lane again.

Big news out of Toronto.

OK, not really big news per say, but because it affects drivers, it’s become big news.

Jarvis St., which once had five lanes (the middle lane flipped back and forth to a north or south lane depending on the time of day), is now down to four. The middle lane has been closed and by the end of the month, bike lanes will be painted on each side of the road.

You’d think the city decided to remove the street with the reaction the missing lane got on Monday (the first workday without those precious arrows giving traffic a bit of relief). From the Toronto Star:

“Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb,” said a woman in a champagne-coloured Maxima.

“Give us back our middle lane!” called out a man with a moustache in a silver VW as he zoomed south.

Really people, what is the big deal?

Toronto drivers seem to have such a sense of entitlement to them, don’t they? (Full disclosure, I own a car and do drive — to get out of the city to work. I tend to take transit to get around the city).

Take away a roadway of theirs to those dreaded bicyclists and you never hear the end of it, do you?

Yes, driving in Toronto is a pain. Driving in any city with a population of over 2 million people is bound to be one. And yes, Jarvis serves (served?) a great purpose. I used it all the time when I lived at Mt. Pleasant and Eglinton and my boyfriend at Jarvis and Queen.

During the day, Yonge St., Avenue Rd. and other north-south arteries can be clogged with cars, pedestrians and bikes. If you hit Jarvis at the right time, you could get from midtown to downtown in no time.

And that’s what Toronto drivers are angry about.

They’re missing a few key points here though.

The first is that bikes have a right to be on the road. And in Toronto, they often are forgotten about — or ignored all together. Bike riders deserve better than they’ve been getting in this city.

Before the Jarvis St. change, riders there would often be squeezing between parked cars and traffic. I can only imagine how scared bike riders were — as I driver, I was terrified driving alongside a bicyclist on Jarvis.

Bikes have a right to be on the road. And if they want — they can take up a whole lane of traffic. So drivers, it could be a lot worse for you.

By putting in bike lanes, the city is actually doing you a favour. At least this way, everyone gets room.

It's no longer all white lines across Jarvis St. — the centre lane now has two solid yellow lines painted across it to remind drivers they can't use it anymore.

But what really seems to piss off Jarvis drivers more than the installation of the bike lanes is how heavy and congested Jarvis is going to become now that it’s only four lanes instead of five.

Talking to the Toronto Star last week, Toronto mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi said he would take bike lanes off Jarvis if he’s elected: “The math doesn’t work. There are almost 30,000 cars a day that use Jarvis, rain or shine, winter or summer,” he said.

Sure, that’s likely true (just like it’s also likely true Rossi has just lost the bike vote). And no doubt, now with the fifth lane option gone, many of those cars are going to find an alternate route because Jarvis will be too heavy.

And once that happens, we’ll be back to the flow that was Jarvis with the fifth lane.

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m willing to wager that the city will also remove parking from Jarvis during rush hour so both north- and southbound traffic get two lanes to drive in. And that’s typically what driving in the third lane was — since cars were allowed to park on the direction that had the middle lane.

And really, if you’re that peeved about losing your precious fifth lane, there’s another solution: Stop driving in the city. Take transit. Or better yet, ride your bike.

After all, I hear they’re installing a new bike lane over on Jarvis.

(All pictures courtesy of Neal Jennings, AKA Sweet Ones, on Flickr. Check out some more of his great shots on his Flickr stream here).

Bloggers vs. Journos — is that debate not dead yet?

July 13, 2010 Media 10 comments

A post by Lauren O’Neil on the Toronto Star Interns blog got me thinking.

She writes about the seeing the destruction of the G20 occurring on telelvision and, thinking this was her big break, she went running to Queen St., camera in hand. Only to find throngs of “regular” people doing the same:

Hustling my way over to the Queen and Spadina, I couldn’t help but imagine myself scoring some outstanding protest footage. What a treat, my first summer as a working journalist in the big city and all hell breaks loose! I was psyched thinking that just maybe, if I got there early enough and played my cards right, I’d be able to blend right in with the crowd and get some wild exclusive videos.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with this thought.

I could go on for hours about the throngs of digi-cam wielding soccer dads and iPhone photographer hipsters flooding the city’s core, but I’ll let my video footage speak for itself.

Notice, if you will, that the number of gawkers (myself being one of them) outnumber the actual protesters and rabble-rousing “anarchists” by at least 8 to 1, on average.

Then she gets to the heart of her post: Citizen journo vs. “real” journo. And why the citizen will never truly measure up:

Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that while, yes, anybody can go through the motions of reporting, not everybody can be a reporter.

Your chiropractor’s secretary can tweet photos from the scene of a crime with her Blackberry along with hundreds of other bystanders. She can even take some fabulous high-quality photos with her brand new Canon Digital Rebel T1i. But she doesn’t have the years of experience, training and raw talent that someone who does this for a living does.

Likewise, anybody can express their opinions in a letter to the editor, on a blog, a tweet or a good ol’ fashioned handmade zine. It may be well articulated, but it’s still rare to find a citizen-journo with as much impact behind their words as a an experienced veteran journalist.

No amount of fancy equipment or technical prowess can replace a well trained reporter who understands the importance of truth, fairness, accuracy, balance and all of those other things they teach us to value both in j-school and in the newsroom.

O’Neil has taken a lot of heat for her comments on Twitter (and in the first comment on the blog post), but she’s spot on as far as I am concerned (what’s funny about the negativity surrounding this piece is that O’Neil was a blogger long before she was a journalist at the Star — so then which came first, the chicken or the egg?).

One Twitter user even went as far to say she was just towing the line of Toronto Star editor-in-chief Michael Cooke based on his recent comments about bloggers vs. journalists at the latest CJF awards gala (@matttbastard mistakenly ID’ed Star publisher John Cruickshank as the one who made the remarks).

And while I may not totally agree with Cooke, I am sick of this debate of bloggers vs. journalists or citizen journalists vs journalists.

I’d like to know in what other career people would consider themselves “citizen” versions of? Because I can’t think of any. The example I throw back to when it comes to this debate is: Should I call myself a doctor because I know first aid? No.

So why should someone consider themselves a journalist because they blog?

Journalism, like being a doctor or a teacher or a pilot, is a career path. It takes training and experience — it’s not some guy on his computer, or someone taking photos on Queen St. as stores are trashed.

Journalism is about much more than the breaking news that ordinary people can capture nowadays. And not everyone can do it.

As O’Neil says, what really separates journalism from the blogging pack is the analysis, the objectivity and the resources. It’s too soon to tell how powerful citizen journalists may become as everyone becomes an eyewitness to events.

And yes, the gathering and delivery of the news may have to change in order to adapt to this, but there is still a place for “real” journalism — and it is different from the citizen journalism that also exists.

(FYI I am not labelling all blogs/websites as non-journalism — look at Torontoist, blogTO and OpenFile as examples of blogs which are news outlets much as the Toronto Star, National Post or Globe and Mail are).

This whole discussion makes me wonder why everyone thinks they can be a journalist but no one hijacks another profession. Does the public really think that little of us that they think a monkey can do our job?

If only our job was as simple as the outside world thinks it is. There’s much more to putting words on a page than you imagine.

Twitter — the CNN of the future?

July 11, 2010 Media One comment

I finally got around to reading Antonia Zerbisias’ piece in Sunday’s Toronto Star about the role Twitter played in the G20 summit coverage — and the role she expected it to play for the media in the future.

Zerbisias rehashed how many people got their news on the protests and arrests of that weekend from journalists on Twitter — she named TVO’s Steve Paikin and her own newspaper’s team of reporters live tweeting from every corner of this city (or so it seemed).

Long after the network crews had packed up, hours after reporters had filed their stories, Twitter was there, providing real-time news plus links to videos from the protest frontlines.

While news channels — which would later boast of capturing huge numbers of eyeballs — endlessly looped that afternoon’s footage of burning police cars, the news had moved on, to The Esplanade and, later still, to the east end detention centre where yet another group of protesters was encircled and rounded up in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

All of it was available via an iPhone webcast, distributed via Twitter, viewed by hundreds.

All of this is no doubt true. But the G20 protests are not the first time Twitter has been used by journalists in order to get information out to the masses as soon as possible:

She notes how ahead of the game reporters on Twitter were compared to their instudio counterparts.

According to Hirsh, newspapers such as the Star, which had reporters tweeting from the streets and feeding a live blog of events, were way ahead of the game.

“There was a clear contrast between journalists who were using Twitter and journalists who weren’t,” says Hirsh, who comments on media for the CBC. “Journalists giving on-the-ground reports were far more accurate than those in newsrooms like (Peter) Mansbridge or Ann Rohmer. They thought they were doing value-added voiceover, but they really weren’t tied in to what was really happening.”

Well, the anchorperson has never been the one who’s been on-the-ball of all that was happening out in the field — the expert in the breaking news story for television news has always been the field reporter — the one who’s there. Twitter got updates out to people faster than waiting 20 minutes to go back to someone on the streets.

That’s where CP24 failed for its coverage — I wanted to hear less from Rohmer and Stephanie Smyth — and more from the reporters on the street. Better yet, CP24 was basically the epicenter of the destruction during Saturday’s riots and Sunday’s standoff — get a reporter out of that building and on to the street!

Later in her story, Zerbisias pretty much declares TV news dead, and Twitter the new king:

The revolution won’t be televised. It may be tweeted.

“The story is still being written,” says (Concordia University anthropology professor Maximilian) Forte.

Yes, journalists should be on Twitter, it’s a great tool to use for a huge story (like the G20 protests). It gets news out to the masses like nothing before it, but here’s where Zerbisias is missing a big chunk of a point:

Those thousands of new Twitter followers journalists like Paikin gained during the protests will likely stop following them, or start to ignore their tweets, now that the protests are done and the G20 is over.

Because unlike traditional media, whether that be TV or newspapers, Twitter has no loyalty whatsoever — once a person has no use to you anymore, why would you continue to follow them? I know this because I use Twitter (some may claim I live on it). For example, now that the free agent frenzy in the NHL is done, I’m not too sure how much longer I’m going to follow McKenzie — I just don’t care about NHL signings anymore.

On top of that, news was never meant to be delivered in 140 character pieces. Breaking news? Yes. But real, indepth pieces? No. And if every reporter were to live-tweet every story they covered, then what would be the point about reading the newspaper the next day? For that matter, why even bother to read it on the web later for free?

The way Twitter was used during the G20 was a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of use. It doesn’t happen every day. Reporters have to walk a fine line in order to maintain their followers’ interest in their Twitter feed and their respective stories (Sun Media’s David Akin and CTV’s Richard Madan are two great examples). Spamming your users with excruciating detail (“Calling so-and-so for comment now;” “On the phone now;” “Writing lede now;” etc.)

I’m speaking about this as a Twitter user, but also as someone who live-tweeted something myself. I covered the York University stuff just after I started on Twitter. My followers skyrocketed. But after the legislation passed and the TAs went back to work, those vested in the York U story stopped following me.

Yes, Twitter must be used by journalists. And those who use it well will see a spike in followers and interest to their feed (and please, if you have a Twitter feed and are a journalist, try to have a blog too, and answer your readers when they @ reply you, otherwise it looks like you don’t really believe in the social part of the social media concept).

But social media is not the future. News in 140 characters is not news, it’s just a ticker item on the bottom of a 24-hour news television station.

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