Most of my phone calls home involve me describing what life’s like here, what I do, what makes Whitehorse different from Ottawa. My work is covering the city beat here, so most of my day is spent filling my office corner up with such thoughts,sticky notes and interviews.
Time to time, I know I have to look beyond the mountains that form walls around this city, and see what else is going on in this big, wide world of ours. I owe it to myself (curiosity! Cool random facts!), my job (perspective! ideas!) and my responsibility as an able-minded citizen in a large-scale capitalist democracy who believes you use it or lose it. (I apply that adage to my mind, in this case)
Today I checked out my fave news site, BBC Front Page. It’s my fave because the news isn’t always politics, and it doesn’t act like Africa is one solid place that creates war-ish headlines once in awhile like SOME news outlets seem to think. As high and mighty as that sounds, I realize today I am no better.
There are stories with which I am not familiar in the slightest. I try and connect headlines to generalized social histories I learned in high school (so, does this Gaza Strip-Egypt thing have to do with the agreement after W.W.II? Still? Oh, OK). I try even harder to read the detail and absorb it all. Half because one day I want to go on Jeopardy and kick butt and know everything, and half because I want to retain knowledge about the world like my Dad, who I’m pretty sure DOES know everything.
It was always so easy to ask him things like, “So, what’s the Mulroney-Schreiber affair?” and have him answer in plain language in five minutes and have me understand enough to follow the news while forming opinions for imaginary, sophisticated cocktail party conversations I imagine myself having.
“So, this business in Kenya is quite something isn’t it?”
Real me: “Yeah ... it is? It’s a real...bummer?”
News-smart knowing me: “A travesty, but a pattern likely to repeat itself in the postcolonial aftermath plaguing Africa until its governments can stop relying on foreign arms and financial support and become self-educated and functioning, not to mention relapse from the AIDS devastation.”
I remember when I traveled to Greece, when the BBC was THE news source, and I was in awe over what got covered outside of Canada. For the first time, there was daily coverage on African countries’ politics, arts, health and business, beyond the Sudanese war headlines I was used to seeing, with declining frequency. It made me realize that just because Canada has news outlets, that doesn’t mean that I as a Canadian have to rely solely on what those sources tell me. And thus I began learning the value of perspective.
I also like to look at what BBC News has to say about Canada, which stories are worthy of spreading to people in Turkey, or Germany.
So today, while I may open the web site and not have the slightest as to what half the headlines are talking about, I take the opportunity to read them and learn them. If not for the ability to take advantage of such a resource and better myself, than for the betterment of my journalism, where my job is telling people what’s happening with some degree of authority. Any lower level of social awareness, and I’d feel like a fraud.
Today I challenge you to read one international news story and see if it doesn’t brighten your eyes, make you feel smart, to give you something of substance to discuss beyond the hideous outfit you think your coworker is wearing.

Labels: journalism

There’s the saying that there are little miracles all around you, the question is whether or not you notice them.
Have you heard that?
Being all pro-carpe diem and stuff, I’ve always tried to notice such things. I often find them on my lunchtime sun runs along the half-frozen Yukon River, or in the genuine, warm husband hugs, and more often these days, in delicious food. (Christmas baking done right is certainly a little miracle)
In my job I get to neet different people all the time and learn about something different every day. This variety totally helps me to recognize what’s special, beautiful and a little miracle in its own way. That way I don’t have to rely on saying babies, sun rises, rainbows are the only miraces I see. Plus, those things get a little less miracle-y after a while. I have to find new thigns to keep my miracle list spicy and interesting.
Speaking of spices...add garlic to my little miracle list. Mmm mm I could put that on near anything, I tell you.
Today’s little miracle came in the form of a fiftysomething dude I interviewed a while back.
I had talked with him about his crazy drug past for a feature series I was writing on the world of drug addiction. This guy was my main character, so to speak, and he willingly let me in to his colourful past. We had sat in a coffee shop while he poured out some of his darkest secrets. I was a stranger with a pen and a paper pad and he really didn’t have to do that. I was incredibly grateful he did, and with such honesty.
The paper published my series and I didn’t get much feedback from anyone, but that’s the norm in this town. I was a little worried I hadn’t heard from this man, though. I had changed his name and some identifying detaisl, but still, I was worried he’d hated it and more importantly me, for exposing such truths.
He called me and we set up a lunch coffee date at the same place, so he could tell me what he thought of the story. He also said he had something for me and let me know he was very impressed, so I went to the coffee house without nerves or jitters.
I’m scared I’m going to cry writing this. Crap, I’m at work and they’ll all think I’m nuts.
This man told me what a wonderful job I’d done. He went into y story layout and organization telling me why he thought it worked. He told me some of the things I wrote were really hard for him to read, and he was surprised at how much he had told me.
“I want you to know you did a really good job, and I think it’ll really help people understand what it is we go through,” he said. That was exactly what I was trying to do, without exploiting his or anyone else’s stories, and without dramatizing the struggle addicts and their overseeing mentors go through.
“You’re very good,” he said. He presented me with a copy of his favourite bok, one he said got him through some tough times. I remember “The Four Agreement” by Don Miguel Ruiz froom I think Oprah’s book list and then I just never got around to reading it. I currently am almost done “Love in the Time of Cholera” and have two more waiting, but this man’s super kind gesture puts “Agreements” in the next slot.
I’ve always thought books were among the best kind of gifts one can give. I started that with my sister, but grew a bit discouraged as the copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird” with little notes all through it and “The Lovely Bnes” sit untouched in her room.
That he would give me that book after already giving me so much, treating me with honest conversation and insight into higher understanding, that is my little mriacle of today.
That and husband hugs, those never get boring or repetitive.

Labels: journalism, Whitehorse

So I got an assignment at work to do a story on how more seniors are taking on retail and service jobs in their retirement for various reasons, and my job was to find out why.
Honestly, whenever I see one working in a big box store or some senior is cleaning up spilled orange soda at a fast-food joint, I feel so bad for them, assuming they must be so hard done by financially that they have to take on jobs most of us leave after age 16.
Like seeing cute animals caged in a zoo, taken from their families, and forced to make life more enjoyable for the masses, I feel bad for people’s gramas and grampas when they’re wearing a uniform walking up and down neon-lighted aisles.
Some surveys and interviews and research later, I found that it wasn’t so bad, that while many do work because they need money, some old people just get bored being retired and need something easy to do. I mean, I can see that. My grama volunteers a lot and swims more than most Olympic swimmers, (I’m sure!) because otherwise she would be bored. If someone else’s grama wants to don a blue apron with lots of flare (Office reference!) and direct customers to aisle 23, then so be it, you know, their choice.
This morning I went to our local Wal-Mart, where there are always a great many seniors greeting me as I enter the store, stocking shelves, hanging gigantic oversized beige panties in the underwear section, you know, around.
I had a list of questions that politely asked why they chose to work past retirement, what they used to do, how many grand kids they had, that sort of thing.
The Wal-Mart gods that be told me I needed head office approval, so I couldn’t do my interviews. I took that to mean, “Feel free to pretend to shop and casually strike up conversations about the aging workforce with our older employees on the floor.” So I did.
I found a couple of people, and found a way to see if they were over 60 without asking or assuming they were. I got my story, went to work, typed it up and filed it.
It is Friday and I am looking forward to the weekend. That is when I get to spend schedule-free time with husband and friends, and of course new puppy. That is fun!
I think I’m built for wearing a matching track suit, living in Florida and getting my white hair done at the salon. You will most certainly not see me shying away from the golden years, I can tell you that. Midday golf? Bring it on.

Labels: journalism

Labels: journalism, life on the other side, Whitehorse

I’d mentioned that I’d started a reporting job up here, hadn’t I? Well, day one in the newsroom was quite a shock and I went home disheartened, discouraged and disappointed. My lifelong dreams of saving the world with my journalism, and the culmination of four years getting the degree seemed to be working in a snail’s-paced newsroom where my lead story is about a cat stuck in a tree.
The people here are great, and the newsroom works like most I’ve worked in before. But my discouragement came with the lack of challenge, the lowered expectations and the laissez-faire attitude that has become the paper’s modus operandi.
“I am ready for so much more, and here I am stalled, bored,” I cried to fiancé after my first day. He loved his job, la-dee-da and go figure.
But, never one to give up until at least something better came along, I agreed to give the paper a chance. I have grown more fond of it and have found great joy in covering stories that may not grab national headlines, but that make a difference in the lives of the people that read my work, which has become a great reward I had previously not experienced.
I think Marley’s story best relays my sentiment.
In the middle of a hot, stuffy day when I was feverishly working away on a big story, I got called out to cover a story at the humane society. There, the photographer and I met Marley, a golden lab mix left with three legs after being hit by a car and left to die. Humane society workers estimate he had been roadside for weeks, suffering and starving. When a caring citizen did pick him up and bring him in, the animal shelter got to work organizing the dog’s medical care. When we arrived to do the story, Marley was nursing his fresh amputation wound and building up his strength. He wagged his tail and dog-smiled at us with his big brown eyes.
The shelter had incurred great costs to fund to dog’s operation, and had called the paper to ask the public for help.
I wrote the story, we ran it alongside touching photos of a smiling, three-legged dog and I went home early.
I brought fiancé to the humane society on Saturday to show him the kitty and puppy I had picked out for us while covering Marley’s story. We waited in line for an attendant to show us the animals and I smiled all giddy at the cute critters in the windows. While waiting, curiosity got the best of me and I listened to the people in front of me.
“I am wanting to give some money to help out that poor dog in the paper,” said the lady in front of me wearing a fruit-pattered top and rain boots.
“That story was just so moving, I had to help.”
And my heart melted. I felt like Superman. I hadn’t swooped down to save a damsel in distress, but my words had helped this poor dog with three legs and big smile. I felt so good.
And when I got to the front of the line, I didn’t even tell her I was “the one” who wrote the story. Which is a big step for normally show-offy me.

Labels: journalism, reporting, work