Ten Great Songs 2009 #4: All the Money I Had is Gone

Michelle Lang was the agriculture reporter when I started at the Leader-Post in 2001. My job was mainly to sort the mail, archive each day's edition, and tame the wild fax machine. It was the closest thing to an adult job I've ever had. I held on to it far longer than I should have because I was afraid that that was as good as I was going to get in this world. And also because they let me write CD reviews and interview Bruce McCulloch and Bob Newhart and Charley Pride.

By the time I started at the L-P, I'd been writing consistently for about four years for the student press, alt-weeklies, and the odd not-quite-glossy music mag. Among the amateurs and the activists, I thought I was pretty hot stuff. I was quickly humbled at my leftover desk on the edge of a real newsroom, watching real journalists do real journalism every day. I spent the next five years wallowing in a wounded sense of inadequacy that mostly manifested itself in self-sabotage.

Early days, before I resigned myself to a lifetime of fax wrangling, it felt like my lowly position might be a springboard to better things. During that first year or so, some reporters would ask me to help search the archives (before the archives went digital). One day Michelle stopped by my desk and said she'd heard I had the best French in the newsroom.

"That's not saying much," I said. I'd helped translate some French documents once.

Well, Michelle explained, of course I'd heard that such-and-such federal agriculture program was falling apart and the provincial Ag Dept. was publicly considering pulling out or going ahead anyway or something. She knew that Manitoba had already bailed and had heard that Quebec might be too. Trouble was, her French wasn't good enough that she could call up the Quebec Agriculture Ministry to confirm. Would I, could I?

So, with my horribly out of practice French and extremely limited knowledge of agricultural issues, I dialled up the Quebec Ministry of Agriculture. "Etes-vous...?"

I made a transcript and translated it and left it on Michelle's desk. The Quebec Ministry was weighing their options and promised to act in the best interest of their producers. When Michelle got back to the newsroom, she thanked me for my help. It felt great to be challenged and to come through on it. Good work is its own reward, I figured.

The following morning, I immediately opened the paper to the Ag section to see how much ink my little adventure had generated. The Quebec Ministry of Agriculture featured in one tangential sentence in the article, which was mainly about how Saskatchewan farmers were dealing with the mess. At the bottom of the the article, in italics, read: with files from Emmet Matheson.

Damn. I doubt Michelle realized how much that acknowledgement meant to me. For her, the whole thing was routine: you follow through on stories and you give proper credit. That's just good journalism, that's just being a decent human being.

I think everyone who worked at the Leader-Post back then would agree that working there became a little less fun and interesting after Michelle left for the Calgary Herald.

Michelle Lang, along with four Canadian Forces soldiers, died yesterday in Afghanistan when the vehicle they were traveling in hit an improvised explosive device.

mp3: "All the Money I Had is Gone" by the Deep Dark Woods

Frank Black Francis is the A.J. Liebling of Rock

"The only way to write is well," A.J. Liebling says, "and how you do it is your own damn business."
Okay, A.J., fair enough. But how do you account for Jana Pruden's column in the Leader-Post? I knew Jana when I was at the L-P, and I've known her husband Evan since I was in high school. They are both smart, hip, funny, even sassy. They are both very nice people. So why does Jana's column in general, and her most recent one specifically, bug me so much?
Because it's not smart, it's not hip, it's not funny and it's not sassy. In fact, it reminds me of Peggy Hill's Musings columns from Mike Judge's King of the Hill, only those were actually funny.

When Pruden took over the general interest column from disgraced retiree Bob Hughes, it seemed as though the paper was finally starting to pay attention to the 20-55 age group that has rarely seen itself in the Regina daily. Finally would come a fresh voice from someone engaged with urban life, someone who valued art and culture at least as much as football, someone with something different to say. Instead, we got Bob Hughes in a skirt. Well, the most benign form of Bob Hughes in a skirt. I haven't read all of her columns, but I doubt that Pruden has attacked organized labour with the reckless meanspiritedness that Hughes embarrassed himself with. But Pruden definitely carries on Hughes's legacy of joyless solipsism, stories about cats and uninspired boasts about not understanding what's the big fuss about current trends. Pruden's latest col overdoses on puns as she states and restates her love of shoes. Why am I reading this?

I continue to read, I guess, because I know Jana Pruden to be capable of fine writing. You can see it in her court reporting. You know it if you've ever had a conversation with her. So why is she punching below her weight class with these asinine columns, wasting primo real estate with sad, Diagnosis Murder-style pap like "after some serious sole-searching" or "invariably, I flip-flop" when there's a readership starving for interesting commentary?

 

mp3: "The Man Who Was Too Loud" by Frank Black & the Catholics
mp3: "Rat's Ass" by Danny Barnes

The real reason newspapers are failing

You call this a scoop? Back in my day, you had to jump out a window to secure an exclusive rescue/interview or turn the Earth backward on its own axis to qualify as a scoop. I guess times really are hard.



mp3: "Hard Times" by Baby Huey

Dear Newspapers, Be Better Please

I still buy the newspaper. On Saturday. What can I say, I like the idea of the Weekend Review section, I get excited by the heading Issues & Ideas, I look forward to the book reviews. I like the readers' letters, which, unlike readers' comments on newspaper websites, are generally worth a damn, even if they're often just as bogglingly boneheaded.
Which is not to say that newspapers never let me down. They do. Frequently. Yesterday's featured Issues & Ideas essay was from lifestyles columnist Shelley Fralic, sort of the Bob Hughes of the Lower Mainland, and warned us that we'll miss newspapers when they're gone.

Where, for instance, will Canucks fans find in-depth daily coverage of their beloved team -- the locker room perspective, the game analysis, the stats upon which hockey pools are won and lost?
It won't be from radio, which can air a game, but already rips and reads much of its content from newspapers.
It won't be from television, which can broadcast a game, but can offer little
beyond 30-second news clips.
And if you think that bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers and fan sites will provide the quality of sports reporting you now get from this newspaper, coverage you've enjoyed these past 40 years in hockey-mad Vancouver, you're dreaming.

Really? Is that the best you've got? Cuz the broadcast media and the Internet have been kicking newspaper ass in sports coverage for years. The Internet might as well have been invented for fantasy sports leagues (the jock version of D&D) and hockey pools. It will even do the hard math for you! When was the last time a newspaper did your math? Also, the Sun's sister paper, the Province, is generally regarded as most sports-friendly.
Fralic goes on to blame newspapers' woes on free online content, rather than, y'know, 30 years of corporate greed, convergence, monopolies and mismanagement. Newspapers have survived and even prospered in the face of far more radical societal changes brought on by radio and television. It's not the Internet that's killing newspapers, it's newspapers.
The last few decades have seen newsroom staffs cut in half several times over, inevitably leading to reduced coverage of local issues. In its place, we got more wire copy, more celebrity gossip, more rewritten press releases, more of what one of my former newspaper colleagues sneeringly calls bumf, short for bum fodder.
Sadly, newspapers either don't have the will or the capital to put up a decent struggle anymore. I love the newspapers, and I hope to see them back on their feet someday. In the meantime, wouldn't it be great if they decided to go out with their heads held high? With a little class? If they decided to be truly papers of news. Be papers of depth. Be papers of investigation. Papers of questions and answers. Papers of consequence. Papers of integrity. Papers worthy of our esteem. Be good, be better.
Speaking of good and better, I saw my dissimilar doppelganger again the other day. Lee Henderson was at my favourite coffee/book shop Friday afternoon. As was I. Once again, I didn't introduce myself, for a variety of reasons. Mainly, because I have to to finish reading his novel, The Man Game. I was about two-thirds through it when my new roommate showed up and completely disrupted my habits. I want to finish the book before I speak to him. I think that's really the decent thing to do. Also, I probably suffer all kinds of social anxieties that make me a terrible person to know. I only even brought it up because yesterday Henderson was announced as the winner of the Ethel Wilson Prize at the BC Book Awards. The prize money will buy him, if he so desires, 1,000 Americanos at the coffee/book shop. Congratulations.

mp3: "Don't Talk In Your Sleep" by Magik Markers

Print's charming

If you needed any proof that newspapers as we know and love 'em have entered their End of Days, it might be from a question posed a last week's WonderCon comic book convention in San Francisco. "Will The Daily Planet face a collapse like every other American newspaper?" a fan asked of writer James Robinson at a panel.
Robinson, who writes a rather lacklustre Superman comic, replied with non-committal reference to Morgan Edge, a toady of the extra-dimensional despot Darkseid. In the Superman comics of the 1970s, Edge's Galaxy Broadcasting System bought out the Daily Planet and summarily gutted it to enhance their broadcast media division. Most notoriously, Edge poached mild-mannered Clark Kent from the Planet newsroom and set him up as the anchor of WGBS's nightly newscast.
It might be interesting to see how the collapse of print media is portrayed in the Superman universe, but can we trust a print media outlet like DC Comics to have any perspective on it? At this point, I'm more likely to watch the Fables of Print's End Times on Ugly Betty.

Reliable sources tell me, howev, that the finest pre-mortem on the cadaver-in-waiting is Season Five of The Wire, but damnit, we found another glimmer of hope for the old broad(sheet). Anyway, I'm nowhere near Season Five, just getting settled into Season Two, thanks. Yes, I watch TV at a slower-than-normal pace, but that's the beauty of the 21st Century. You can do things faster, but you can also do things more slowly.

It wasn't blogs that killed print, though, bunk. There's not as much useful and meaningful knowledge in ten thousand blogs, be they Huffington Post or the Longmont Urban Hens Coalition, as there is in the front section of any daily broadsheet. Don't point your finger at the blogs. It was Craigslist, yo. Slam dunk. Y'see, there used to be these dense, fine-print pages in the back of the paper. Places where people used cute and clever language to sell Adult Services in such a way that everyone knew what was for sale, yet neither the newspaper nor the local morality squad seemed to care. Places where people looked when they lost their glasses at the Northwest Leisure Centre. Places where the people told each other stories: Wedding dress, only worn twice. $50 obo. Or, Will pay cash for lawnmower and someone to push it by end of weekend. That kind of thing. People used to pay for the privelige of selling their own and buying someone else's junk. It used to mean something. If you wanted to get rid of your ski boots in July, you had to think about. You had to write a letter, or at least make a phone call. You had to get someone else involved. You had to be a committed seller. These days, jeez. There's a million pieces of crap for sale on the Internet, and if you actually want to do someone the solid of buying their three-drawer Creamsicle orange dresser for $45, you've gotta spend a week emailing and calling them before they agree to sell it to you. And it's lucky for you that your parents raised you to be a halfway decent person who calls ahead before showing up on someone's door to pick up the piece of furniture, because in the three hours between agreeing to sell you the item and the agreed-upon-by-both-parties-time of pick-up, the lousy zeke has up and sold it to someone else. Without so much of a solid as calling to let you know.

Speaking of solids, Gentleman Reg's new album is called Jet Black. Reg's first couple of albums came out on the lovely and missed Three Gut label. Three Gut was home to some of the early 00s' finest Canadian music like Royal City, Jim Guthrie and Cuff the Duke. I reviewed Reg's debut, Make Me Pretty, for No Depression back in the day when No Depression was a print mag and I was a guy who wrote for print money.

mp3: "You Can't Get It Back" by Gentleman Reg

Yeah but we're gonna chicken out, cuz we don't like to fight...

I can't believe I got up at 6 a.m. (PST) for this. When Harper walked out of Rideau Hall with his prorogation, I let out a pre-emptive yawn the size of Meech Lake.
Short term, well, good for Harper. Long term, what's the strategy? He's burnt his bridges with the Liberals and NDP, and he's done even worse with the Bloc, which otherwise would be his only chance of getting a budget passed.

The highlight of the morning, though, was Don Newman talking to John Baird, Minister of Transport in the House of Commons. Baird laid out a bunch of the typical "separatist coalition" party line, and Newman called him on it every time, saying Baird either hadn't read or hadn't understood the coalition accord. Baird continued saying blatantly unfactual things, and Newman called him on it every time. Even the Newsworld anchors seemed unsettled at how many bald-face untruths came out of Baird's mouth. It was nice to see the media holding politicians accountable for what they say. Feels like it's been a while.

mp3: "Rats' Revenge, Part 2" by the Rats

(CanWest) Global un-Warming

CanWest Global announced Wednesday they'll be cutting 560 jobs, or 5% of their workforce. Some of the finest people I know work for CanWest, and I hope they're okay.
Further says the CP, "The company will also cut the physical size of some newspapers to reduce costs and focus efforts on expanding digital media operations."
That sounds dismal and calls to mind CanWest's failed Dose commuter tabloid, the horridness of commuter tabloids in general, and usually awful programming on so-called specialty cable.
Commuter tabloids are generally barely worth what you pay for them, unless it's raining and you need something to put between your dry pants and a wet bench on the bus. And don't get me started on their columnists--all of them--but, hey, I like to imagine that since they write for a publication that's handed out for free, the columnists are probably writing on a volunteer-basis, and so I try to cut them a bit of slack.
CanWest has never really had a good grasp on what makes a good newspaper, though the full blame for the National Post can't really be laid entirely at their feet. What people want in a local newspaper, meanwhile, seems so obvious: quality local content. And yet that's what always seems to go on the chopping block whenever convergence rears its head. There are hundreds of places to get national and international news, but there will always be demand for a good local daily newspaper--even in the digital age. With the whole planet at our fingertips online, communities need to know about and see themselves that much more.
Case in point: the two federal elections this fall. Okay, fair enough, the US election was genuinely exciting and historic on a number of levels. But I was appalled at how little heat the Canadian election generated (and obviously, that was part of Harper's gameplan in calling the vote amid the billion-dollar fervour of the US campaign) among Canadians. This shit matters. A lot more than Tina Fey in a bad blazer. But the media seemed just as disinterested in the Canadian election as, well, the nearly 41% of Canadians who didn't even bother voting.

mp3: "Folksong Oblivion" by the Phantom Band