Angie

I was in a pub near Portabello Road a few years ago, and went to the bar to order some food. I noticed that the girl serving me had a North American accent, so the standard conversation ensued: Canadian or American? Whereabouts in Canada? Oh, me too, I'm from Caledon. "Oh, Caledon, I went to Mayfield," she said. It was that kind of fun conversation where you're getting nearer and nearer to the "Oh what a small world!" point. I smiled. "Do you know Angie Zardo?"

Her face lit up. "I love Angie Zardo! We had a drama class together once in grade nine!"

And that's how it always was with Angie. Across oceans and years, everyone who ever met her remembered her and loved her. Whether you had known her all your life or just for a few months years and years ago, she stuck with you. You remembered that she was always smiling, always laughing, always up for anything. And you remembered that she genuinely loved you too, that when she asked how you were, she really wanted to know, that she would remember all of the little things you told her.

Ang was the happiest person I've ever known. She didn't wallow in the things that could make other people miserable; she just changed them. Aside from when she lost her mum five years ago, I don't have a single memory of her where she wasn't smiling and laughing. And she never minded laughing at herself: she was one of the most beautiful people you could ever meet, but somehow it was nearly impossible to get a good photo of her; she never seemed to know any of the words to her favourite songs, but loved singing them at the top of her lungs anyway; and when it came to catching up and swapping stories, well, the more embarrassing, the better.

She was an amazing friend, who would do anything for you and make any new people you brought along feel welcome and like they'd known her forever. She was always moving, always wanting to take on the next challenge, always ready to make life better for herself and everyone around her. You could go months without speaking and then pick up one day right where you left off, spending mere seconds on the boring pleasantries before diving right in to the good stuff; she always wanted to really know about your life, your family, you.

I haven't had the chance to speak to Ang regularly since I've been in London and she's been in New York. You always think there's loads of time, if we don't manage to Skype this weekend, surely we'll get there some day. But even though she wasn't a fixture of my daily life, the world feels obviously emptier without her here. It seems so clear to me that I wonder how this whole island full of people who've never met her can possibly be going about their days, not realising that something is missing.

Ang will always be there. Every time I sit chatting in someone's kitchen with a cup of tea, every time Mr Jones comes on my iPod, every time someone mentions New York. She was never the kind of person you could shake or forget, nor the kind you'd ever want to.

Miss you so much Ang. xoxo

Not sure how you feel about KONY 2012?

A cross post from Facebook...
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If you have Facebook or Twitter and have been online in the past two days, then chances are you know about KONY 2012. Most probably you saw a few friends sharing the Invisible Children video, and perhaps you even shared it yourself after watching it. This isn't wrong. It was a moving video and it's very, very easy to hit share and feel like you've done a bit of good.

After that, you probably started to see people posting criticisms of the video, particularly of the charity, as well as others criticising the general 'slacktivist' approach of re-posting or retweeting something and feeling like you'd contributed to a cause. Others would have countered this with the fact that at least people are raising awareness, better than nothing, etc etc. And in the end, you, like me, may be a bit confused about whether, in the end, this is a good or bad thing.

What I've realised by reading debates on various friends' walls is that it doesn't really matter. The discussions that need to be had aren't about whether the video is a good or bad, but have to do with why it was so effective, why people have reacted the way they have, and where we can go from there. Here are some thoughts:

What do you know about the ICC?
If you've been spreading the word that Kony is the ICC's most wanted man, have you delved any further? Do you know, for example, that the US (along with Israel and Sudan) have effectively backed out of the ICC and are no longer considered a state party to it? This means that if Kony turned up on US soil, the US wouldn't be obligated to arrest him. If you're American, are you comfortable with this?

Do you know any of the other people or cases that are being investigated by the ICC? Do you know why Sudanese President Omar al Bashir has been indicted, or that Saif Gaddafi is supposed to be transfered there? Do you know that they're about to announce their first verdict next week, in a case related to atrocities in the DRC? Do you need someone to make a video about Thomas Lubanga's crimes to be bothered to find out?

Why is this the first you've heard of it?
The whole point of the video is to raise awareness of Kony's existence to the vast majority of the population who don't know he exists. If you're one of those people, think about why that is. This has been happening for the better part of 20 years. The vast majority of my FB friends are around my age, which means six years ago, when we were 19 or so, you should have become aware of the nightwalkers phenomenon when it featured briefly but prominently in international press. Nightwalkers was the name given to Ugandan kids who walked miles every night to sleep in protected buildings in big cities so that they wouldn't be abducted or killed by Kony and the LRA.

If you missed that then, think of what you're missing now. Do you live in a bubble populated mostly by celeb news and Twitter updates, where the only way anything like this can turn up is if a video goes viral? Now you're aware of Kony, but are you aware of exactly what's going on in Syria? A lot of people jumped on the Egypt bandwagon the day Mubarak stepped down. Do you know or care that Egypt's so called revolutionary democracy is actually still controlled by the military?

When you were in college or university, how many of you took classes where you would learn about situations like this? How many people instead took "History of Alcohol" or some other joke class because they didn't really want to be challenged? Now that you're out of university, what can you do to educate yourself more, or to help younger generations steer themselves toward choices that might mean that they don't hear about atrocities 20 years after they begin, and can take action because they have researched it and want to, not because a video or a wristband told them to?

If you're a teacher...
I know a lot of you are. I don't know what grades you teach or subjects or anything. But if they're of an appropriate age, can you use this to teach your kids about what's happening? About how to think critically when they're confronted with something like this, or about how to make sure that if they want to give to charity they know what they're contributing to? Can you teach them about something else that's happening right now in the world? If you can't, because it doesn't fit in the curriculum, then maybe we need to have a look at why that is.

I don't have any answers, really. All I know is that people seem to want to talk about this right now, and we should capitalise on that to foster broader discussions beyond KONY 2012. Talking about Joseph Kony will not get him arrested; but it can help to educate ourselves and other people about so many other issues, if we're willing to look at why this has exploded the way it has and to seriously look at ourselves and see whether we want to do anything about it or whether we really just wanted to be the first of our friends to hit share.

On the media 'getting maler'

GOOD Lifestyle Editor Amanda Hess' blog post Boys Will Hire Boys: The Media Is Male and Getting Maler is doing the rounds this morning, and since I haven't posted in about five months but do actually have some thoughts on this, I figured why not.


My j-school graduating class was made up overwhelmingly of women. Hess' post says 73% of journalism and mass communications grads are female; while, four years later, I can't remember the exact numbers for my class, I'd say 73% sounds about right, if not actually a bit lower, for my class.


But the first stat I take issue with is this: "Women's representation in sports news hasn't budged since 2008 (just 11 percent of editors, 10 percent of columnists, and 7 percent of reporters are women)." Of all of the women in my graduating class, I knew of one who had any interest in sports reporting (though it wasn't her primary goal), and she had a very successful internship and later job doing ice hockey player interviews for a big station. While I'm absolutely sure there are women out there who want to become sports reporters and are held back by the fact that they're female and are thus assumed to know less than their male counterparts, I also think it's ridiculous to pretend like we should expect gender parity in sports reporting. The vast majority of female journalists are not trying to become sports reporters, and it's right that the makeup of that particular part of the industry should reflect that. Yes, we should work toward ensuring that women who do want to get into sports reporting have the opportunities and are not turned away simply because they're women, but misleading, pearl-clutching statistics implying it should be 50/50 are not really the way to go.


As to the main issue of a male-dominated industry perpetuating itself by mostly hiring males, I think it's worth delving a bit deeper into the statistics. While I'm sure the "male workforces mean male networks and male job candidates and male hiring metrics and stories about men" dynamic that Hess cites does indeed account for some of the problem, I'm not sure it's all there is to it.


Yes, 73% of graduates are female now, but this hasn't always been the case. This suggests that perhaps a skewed male-female ratio is to be expected in upper management positions, where the people with the most experience may be more likely to be male, because 30 years ago when they got into the industry, they weren't in the minority. The Women's Media Center report says the percentage of women in newspaper jobs has increased from 37% in 1999 and 2010 to 40.5% in 2011, suggesting that new hires at newspapers are more likely to be female. Again, considering that women haven't always been the 73% majority, it makes sense that women should start to make gains in hiring, until at some point there should be parity and then probably tip over into female majorities as considerably less men are graduating from journalism and communications courses and applying for jobs.


As well, the report says, "Women journalism and mass communication graduates have consistently had slightly higher (2-6%) full-time employment rates than their male counterparts. Becker et al. (2010) attribute this to women being more likely to specialize in advertising and public relations, which offer more full-time jobs than other occupations in the field." This means that the 73% statistic is actually quite misleading in terms of trying to figure out how the representation of women in newsrooms should be working out. Of those 73% of female graduates, how many are actually trying to move into news journalism and how many are specialising in PR and advertising, where they are more likely to find jobs?


I've had a bit of personal experience in hiring (generally) new graduates for an entry-level online news-related role. While my office has fashion and entertainment arms that are dominated by women, I am the only woman on our (admittedly small) news team. While the vast majority of applicants for our team are women, reflecting the fact that there are more female graduates, the majority of people I shortlisted and interviewed were male. This is because, for the most part, men's job applications tended to come across as being more interested in hard news, politics, and the other issues listed in the job ad, while women's applications tended to focus on social affairs, feature writing, and entertainment interests. And while there is all kinds of debate as to why this might be the case, the fact remains that when it comes to hiring decisions, for me, in both cases, the best person for the job was a man. Obviously this is simply one or two instances out of thousands worldwide, but I can't help but wonder to what extent my experience is representative of those hiring elsewhere in the news industry.


The report also says 40% of the television labour force are women, including 56.8% of news anchors. "While women are the minority for 10 of 18 positions, they represent about half of assistant news directors and assignment editors, and the majority for six key positions, including executive producers, producers, news reporters, writers, anchors, and assistants. Women are most underrepresented among news photographers, sports anchors, and sports reporters." Female prominence or parity in key positions in TV suggests that women in TV are not subject to the "chronic underrepresentation" that Hess discusses for other mediums.


Hess cites the fact that women are the subject of only 24% of news stories, but doesn't mention the reasoning cited in the report as given by the NPR Ombudsman: "Admittedly, the relative lack of female voices reflects the broader world. The fact remains that even in the fifth decade after the feminist revolution, men are still largely in charge in government at all levels, in corporations and nearly all other aspects of society. That means, by default, there are going to be more male than female news sources." While media could definitely do better to seek out female commentators on issues, the issue of who makes news is a larger societal problem and not simply down to underrepresentation in media.

There are absolutely issues in the Women's Media Center report that need to be addressed. But I don't think it's particularly helpful for a blogpost to go viral that uses misleading simplifications of statistics and doesn't seem to advocate delving any deeper into the problems and looking for solutions, but says, "About half the time, we should be hiring the best woman for the job. If we don't, we're part of the problem. So hire women. Write about them. Give them lines. Invite them onto your shows. Just do it, and don't stop." as if it's as simple as that.

The Evening Standard on Alex Crawford

Just a quick note to draw your attention to this article on Sky superstar Alex Crawford, which was featured in a two page spread in last night's Evening Standard.

I found it infuriating. (Okay, that's probably a bit of an overstatement. I was highly annoyed.) Two pages on the woman who entered Tripoli with the rebels and probably 80% of it is about...her kids. And the fact that she's a woman.

Viv Groskop writes:

At the Edinburgh Television Festival last month Crawford complained that it was "insulting and very, very sexist" to be asked how she raised her children. Today she is less bullish. The woman thing irritates her but she understands it too. She recognises that people see it as unusual that she has chosen to live her life this way, even though that's an incredibly sexist assumption.

As if this article - focusing on Crawford's children, what it's like to be away from them, how her husband has to stay at home - is any different. Crawford's had incredible experiences as a foreign corrsepondent and, as the article touches on, had a really hard time getting to where she is.

How can it possibly be that out of her whole life, the most interesting thing to feature on two pages of a daily newspaper is how she deals with being away from her kids? Groskop's article reduces Crawford basically to just a mother who happens to have a job which is a bit time consuming and often takes her away from home. For all it really matters to the piece, she could be a business executive, an athlete, a cabinet minister, and nothing about the article would really fundamentally change.

It would be infinitely better to read two pages about the experience Crawford had in Libya, and to look more in depth at how she became a foreign correspondent at the age of 43, then to mention those facts in passing. What should be an incidental fact - that she has four children - becomes the central fact of her existence. Groskop calls Crawford's views on being a working parent 'refreshing', but there is nothing refreshing or new about this inane focus on how successful women deal with their families. Frankly, I don't care.

Johann Hari: The Indy basically says 'meh'

The Johann Hari saga at the Independent has come to a sort of sputtering, unsatisfying end. Hari's issued an apology in which he repeats his earlier admission that it was wrong of him to take quotes from other sources and pass them off as words said to him in interviews. This time, the admission comes without the attempt at justification which coloured his original apology, and instead with the concession that it was 'arrogant and stupid' of him not to have asked older, more experienced colleagues for their opinion on his unorthodox method. Hari's apology also includes an admission that he did in fact edit Wikipedia articles under the name of David Rose, making his more favourable and adding false, insulting 'facts' to the pages of people with whom he'd argued.

The actions taken to rectify the situation: Hari's returned his Orwell prize, which he admits isn't that big of a deal since rumour has it they were going to strip him of it anyway; he's taken an unpaid leave of absence from the Indy; and he's going to study journalism, to learn all of the things I guess people thought he picked up somewhere but never did. When he returns to writing, his articles will all be footnoted and accompanied by audio recordings of his interviews so people can check his work.

I think Hari's done pretty much everything he can aside from actually resigning from the Indy, which is what I had expected. He's admitted to the things he's been accused of doing wrong, he's acknowledged the way he would be treating someone he didn't like who had done the same things, he's returned his prize, he's gone off to get proper professional training, and he's agreed to a level of disclosure upon his return that is presumably unprecedented for a mainstream journalist. As someone who greatly admired Hari before this all happened, I don't think I'll ever read his stuff again and think of it highly, but I think he's handled this fairly well. Except that I really think he should have just admitted to it all off the bat and resigned, gone to journalism school, and seen if anyone would hire his new, improved self. But I mean, barring that, I guess this is the next best thing.

Unfortunately, the Independent comes out of this affair looking ridiculous, with its credibility in tatters. The Indy currently has no plans to release the report of its investigation in to Hari, saying it's 'private'. This means that any criticisms or revelations about the Indy's editorial practices, ie how this could possibly have been allowed to happen and what will be done in the future to sort that out, who is responsible, etc, are not going to be made public. The Indy's request that the Orwell Prize committee hold off on their announcement (to reportedly strip Hari of the prize) until they were done their investigation just allowed Hari to beat them to it, making the loss of the prize look like his gracious concession instead of a disgrace. The two-month long investigation into facts that were proven by bloggers in the space of a day or two and which one would think were admitted to by Hari pretty early on, just looks sluggish, reactive and desperate to buy time to figure out how to protect Hari and themselves.

I said I assumed Hari would resign - I assumed that he would resign to save both parties from having to say they sacked him, but that they would sack him if he didn't choose to resign. But no. Hari will be welcomed back in 2012 with a watchful eye (well, maybe, who knows since the Indy aren't saying!) and a pat on the head for his journalism degree. Despite admitting to repeatedly breaching two very serious rules (of journalism, of ethics, of basic decency and common sense, take your pick) and destroying the trust readers had in him, Hari will return to a prominent position at the Indy that most young journalists could only dream of; he won't, I imagine, be hired on as a local London news reporter who has to work his way up to the op-ed pages. He'll probably even be able to spin this whole thing and his subsequent foray into j-school (rumoured to be at Columbia) into a good couple of first articles.

In short, a year or so from now, the only people who will really remember will be the people that didn't like Hari in the first place. He'll gain new readers who aren't familiar with his past indiscretions. He'll be without his Orwell prize but will be relieved to have salvaged his job and, let's be honest, his reputation among those in the mainstream media who were never really willing to admit that he did very much wrong in the first place. The Independent has failed miserably in creating real consequences, either for Hari or for itself, and I for one will avoid reading it in the future as a result.

No News is Good News?

Well. I had been doing pretty well with posting fairly regularly up until the last two months. For a few weeks I was too busy with work and some family stuff to form a coherent opinion on anything, and then for a few weeks I was on holiday and had absolutely no clue what was going on in the world.

It's an odd feeling, being out of the news loop. My last few days in the UK before I headed home were consumed with trying to find the latest news on the London riots, but by the time I was home I had no real desire to follow up. When I was in Canada, I didn't feel adequately submerged in either Canadian or UK news. When NDP leader Jack Layton died, everyone was talking about his last news conference and how frail he looked. But I hadn't seen it, and indeed hadn't paid much attention to Layton since the election, so I didn't feel as connected to the story as everyone else seemed to be.

Equally, I had no real idea what was going on in the UK. Being on holiday, I was more scanning the front page of the BBC News website before starting my day than really poring over the news as I usually do. I was pretty much off Twitter, a regular source of comments and links that indicate what the big story of the day might be. And that was when I was in the civilised world, not at my grandparents' in rural Quebec, where the lack of a computer let alone an internet connection and the recent closure of the only deppanneur in walking distance meant I spent my days blissfully ignorant of anything that wasn't a canoe or a quad bike.

When I got back to London, I tried to catch up on what was going on. What were the big stories that happened between August 10 and August 30? Okay, things seemed to have progressed in Libya, check. There were rumblings of this Nadine Dorries abortion debate, so I was a bit behind on that one. Hurricane in the US. What else? Hmm, well...nothing earth-shattering then, I guess?

It was a nice reminder that sometimes in the little bubbles we build for ourselves - you know, following a bunch of people on Twitter who all talk about the same things, constantly refreshing news pages, having 24-hour news channels on every minute of the day - stories tend to get a bit over-hyped. Sometimes the big news of the day really isn't that big - we'll spend much of the day talking about it, tweeting about it, blogging about it, battling opinions on it...and then forget about it a few days later.

The abortion debate, for example. For days it's all anyone could write about, until eventually the coverage reached the kind of hysterical fever pitch point where you have to sit down and go, really, are we still talking about this? How many times and in how many fora can the same points be made over and over and over, with one side having absolutely no hope of budging the other? If there had been any real chance that the amendment would be passed, that would have been one thing. There would have been some real purpose in getting all worked up, in making sure that everyone's opinions were heard, in lobbying MPs, etc etc etc. But it was never going to come even close to passing, and everyone knew that. The final vote was 368 to 118.

I'm not saying it's pointless to debate anything that we know isn't going to come to pass, but I think that with the combination of the 24 hour news cycle and the blogosphere, where everyone is competing to make sure everyone else knows what they think and knows that they knew some scrap of information first, stories can just get massively blown out of proportion if there's not much else to talk about. And they can keep running for days. With the amendment not even close to passing, the whole thing will now fade away. The big story about that bill will always be the changes to the NHS that some people see as privatisation, and the yet-to-be-seen results of those changes. People will remember the debate as a footnote, another mad Dorries moment and not much else.

So I think I might go into a self-imposed news exile more often, especially when things seem to be getting out of hand with a story that doesn't really seem to be that big of a deal. If I can limit wanting to scream at my computer/TV/newspaper in exasperation to just once or twice a day, it can only be beneficial to my sanity.

Phone Hacking and the Future of Newspapers

Well. I feel like I probably should have written something about this whole phone hacking business a lot sooner, but I had kind of been waiting for it to settle down for a second first to allow for some perspective and clear facts. But with new allegations surfacing and executives resigning and being arrested on a daily basis (including Rebekah Brooks as of about three hours ago), we seem to be a long way away at the moment.

So far, then. I think 'appalled by hacking into phones of families of dead/missing people' goes without saying, so I'm not going to dwell on that. But there's been a lot of moralising about phone hacking/blagging full stop, and that's been a bit of a joke. While of course there are people who care about it as purely a privacy and/or legal issue, the vast majority of outraged people are outraged because of who the victims were. People were interested, but not especially angry, when they thought the News of the World had been hacking celebrities' voicemails. Much of the ill-sentiment back in January seemed to be aimed at Andy Coulson, then David Cameron's director of communications, and at least part of that was more about politics than anything. I mean, the general feeling just seemed to be that the people responsible had either gone to jail or lost their jobs, the victims were going to be getting compensation to the tune of £100,000, and NOTW apologised. Fine.

The interesting thing about the past couple of weeks is that the new allegations have brought the scandal to a whole other level. The old allegations didn't seem to threaten the BSkyB deal in the least, and the idea that the NOTW would be shut down was beyond imagination. The practices aren't new, but, for the most part, the victims are, and that's part of the difference (the other part being that it appears those old practices were far more widespread than initially believed). And it's not necessarily that there are so many victims, but the stories that were sought. No one can condone illegal activities used to get 'juicy' stories of grieving family members.

But there seems to be a grey area where these same activities don't seem to be so reprehensible if the stories are a bit more in the public interest. The tip of that is the somewhat 'meh' reaction to celebrities being hacked - the idea that the stories generated would just be bits of entertainment gossip, nothing too harmful, and certainly no dead children involved. Going deeper, there don't seem to be that many people fixated on Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband's director of communications, in quite the same was as they were/are on Andy Coulson. That's not to say there's no interest - there is, both among those with a political agenda and those who simply say fair is fair, if Miliband's going to criticise Cameron over Coulson then he should have to explain Baldwin. And it was brought up in the House of Commons by Jeremy Hunt. But that allegation has so far not exactly scandalised the public in the way the NOTW allegations have.

And why not? Well, for one thing, Lord Ashcroft doesn't exactly elicit the same kind of sympathy as Milly Dowler's family does. For another, people don't seem to be especially bothered by the idea of looking into political donations and tax revenues for someone who's been accused of illegality on both counts. I somehow doubt we'd hear the same kind of moralising on phone hacking and blagging if those practices turned up a story that was actually in the public interest. For example, though the information for the MPs expenses scandal was probably illegally obtained, the public (and indeed politicians) were not particularly bothered by the ethics of that fact. So it's worth everyone examining whether they actually think certain practices are wrong, or if they only think they're unethical when they're carried out against certain kinds of people.

So what happens now? The full process of a police investigation, subsequent prosecutions (if any) and parliamentary and public inquiries is likely to take the better part of two years. And what will the UK media landscape look like at that point? Will there be tighter regulation? What will the relationship between politicians and press and police and press look like? What will the Sunday tabloid market look like? Will tabloid readers still expect the same kind of stories and information? Will anything really fundamentally change?

One idea that's been floating around (apologies for that picture of Ed Miliband - what were they thinking?), though it's too early to tell whether it'll amount to anything, is the possibility of changing media ownership laws. This isn't specifically about Rupert Murdoch (or, at any rate, it shouldn't be). Concentration of media ownership should always be a concern in terms of hurting freedom of the press by limiting the diversity of information available and giving too much power to one person or company.

One problem with more stringent regulations, though, is that newspapers are increasingly not profitable. For example: in 2010, News International-owned The Times reported pre-tax losses of £45m, and in 2009 News Corp. announced that its newspaper revenues were down 97%. But News Corp. can afford to continue running their papers at a loss (while making cuts and introducing paywalls to try to offset some of those losses) because their other operations (TV, specifically) are so profitable.

So if we want to regulate and limit media ownership, how picky can be about what prospective owners already own? When the NOTW was abruptly closed down, there was speculation that Murdoch was ridding himself of the paper in order to quash some concerns about media plurality around the BSkyB deal (which had not yet unravelled). Assuming newspapers continue to lose money (and the loss of advertising revenue and competition from online news mean that trend is almost certainly irreversible), if new regulations mean owners have to choose between profitable TV stations or tabloids and loss-making broadsheets, how long will those newspapers survive?