I’ve been thinking about time more than usual this year. I’ve witnessed my niece go from speaking full sentences to full run-on paragraphs and I realize that in the time she’s learned how language works I’ve been sitting at the same desk. Not that I’m complaining about the desk- it’s a nice one- it’s just that things change differently for you as you get older.
Case in point: we just realized that this is the sixth Christmas in our house. That means that for the majority of the time my wife and I have known each other, we’ve owned a home together. It feels far more recent. This is an interesting exercise to do: where have you spent most of your life? Who have you known for more than half of it? It puts things in perspective.
Google, Facebook and other social networks are trying to automate my year in review. They aren’t doing a very good job, because I don’t always share the most important moments in my life with social networks. The things that shape me aren’t generally captured in photos, but in growth and experience.
On a professional level, the big moment came in January. I spent weeks putting together a special hour-long series on the VLA neighbourhood, colloquially known as “the hood” in Prince George. It was by far the biggest project I’ve ever taken on and I spent nights wracked with self-doubt over how long a pause should last in an interview I was editing. When you start working in journalism you become aware of the editorial control you have over how your audience perceives reality. Breaths and stutters might be just breaths and stutters or they might add resonance and emotion to the words someone is saying. I was a bundle of nerves but now that it’s out in the world I’m incredibly proud to have done it.
In the summer I was given the chance to go to Toronto for some professional development and my wife wisely suggested we seize the chance to visit one of our top-three destinations and spent a week visiting Montreal and Quebec City. It was indulgent and unplanned and full of moments that we’ll remember and treasure. The lesson I took from the whole thing was be willing to indulge in experience even if you haven’t budgeted for it, and budget for the occasional unplanned experience.
Shortly after our return, my grandma Kurjata passed away. Most of the extended family gathered in Dawson Creek to see her off: 101 of us, by the last count. As I wrote at the time, when I was a kid I didn’t think much of these large family gatherings at Christmas or weddings. Today, I see how special it is my grandma and grandpa managed to raise fifteen kids who still wanted to see each other in their adult years. A lot of patience would have been involved… and a lot of love.
During my formative years, every grandkid would get a Christmas gift from grandma: socks and a bit of money. When you’re young the money’s the exciting part, but today I have no memory of what I spent it on. I remember the socks, though. I also remember the hand-addressed cards I would get on my birthday, and I think about the fact that my grandma did that for fifty, sixty, seventy people as time went on. I have a hard time remembering to get birthday cards for about a dozen people in my life. But she took the time to show she cared about each of us individually.
All three of these things comes back to time. The time you spend on things you care about, the time you have left to cross things off your bucket list, the time you take to show people you care. I’m not very good at time management, but I’m hoping I’ll enter 2015 with a better idea of how to spend it wisely.
Look, a lot of bad stuff happened in 2014. We should never be complacent with the status quo or accept things that could be better. But it’s worth looking at the big picture from time to time and make an empirical assessment about how the human race is doing.
To that end, here’s Ramez Naam on growing acceptance for gay marriage, the rise of solar power, and the decline in child poverty, among other things.
And here’s Steven Pinker and Adam Mack on the decline of homicide rates, violence against women and children, mass killings, and war.
Pinker and Mack include plenty of commentary in their piece on how news reporting does not do a good job reflecting the world as it actually is.
“News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news.”
A point that’s been made before but worth making again and again and again.
So here’s to 2014 – one of the best years in human history, and the hope that 2015 will be even better.
I’ve been writing about Serial and what it means for audio on here quite a bit. I sent out a little Twitter essay yesterday that’s a pretty good summary, so I thought I’d put it here, too.
1. I think Serial and shows like it are a step towards the Netflix-ization of audio https://andrewkurjata.ca/blog/2014/11/21/podcasts-arent-back-a-new-type-of-podcast-has-arrived/
2. “podcasts” as a form have been doing just fine, as Marco Arment http://www.marco.org/2014/11/16/why-podcasts-are-suddenly-back and Jesse Thorn point out http://hotpod.audio/2014/12/12/christ-this-again-or-the-skewed-reporting-of-podcasts-in-the-wider-media-a-qa-with-maximum-funs-jesse-thorn/
3. But what’s new is the high-quality production of Serial. This isn’t two people and a mic. This is archival tape, field sounds, etc.
4. Like @nwquah, this is the sort of audio I love: HBO-quality storytelling, not blog-level. http://hotpod.audio/2014/12/19/podcasts-shouldnt-aspire-to-be-the-next-blogging-platform-it-should-be-the-next-next-hbo/
5. The problem is, people too often confuse podcast the media form with podcast the genre. They are not the same…
6. Just as Breaking Bad and E-Talk Daily are not the same just because they both appear on TV, podcasts are wildly different
7. And, for that matter, so is audio. I tried to capture that here…. http://andrewkurjata.ca/blog/2014/12/20/podcasts-shouldnt-aspire-to-be-the-next-blogging-platform-it-should-be-the-next-hbo/
8. Fortunately, @robmcmyers did a much better job here in describing the power of tape http://www.anxiousmachine.com/blog/2014/12/18/serial-and-the-triumph-of-tape
9. On Serial: “The story was compelling because if felt so immediate, so real. Tape was what made it real.” http://www.anxiousmachine.com/blog/2014/12/18/serial-and-the-triumph-of-tape
10. On audio’s strength: “Tape bridges the divide, capturing reality without distorting it too much” http://www.anxiousmachine.com/blog/2014/12/18/serial-and-the-triumph-of-tape
11. So that’s what I hope about @Serial: that it hit a critical mass of people that now understand the power and the beauty of audio.
12. … not true-crime. Not “on-demand” listening. But well-produced, audio storytelling. That would be a big win for the whole industry.
I’ve finished listening to Serial now, and am onto the Serial thinkpieces (you can find most of the worthwhile ones via Nick Quah’s Hotpod Newsletter, editions 1-12).
Most are full of praise, but there is a fair share of criticism, as well. After reading a few critical pieces, I felt prompted to Tweet this:
A lot of Serial criticisms seem to boil down to journalists who don’t want the public to know journalism is practiced by normal people.
— Andrew Kurjata (@akurjata) December 22, 2014
At the risk of creating straw-men, I’m going to divide the issues people have with Serial into four main themes.
My issue with these arguments isn’t so much that they aren’t valid, but that it’s unfair to lob them against Serial without simultaneously making the charge against virtually all forms of journalism.
1. Serial is voyeuristic, because it took an old case about people’s personal grief and reopened it for the entertainment of others
Let’s take point one: how many newscasts, newspaper headlines, and Tweets do you read in any given day that are about someone’s personal grief? Two die in car crash. Murder victim’s family begs for information. Those aren’t fake people dealing with those things- they are literally people who just lost someone in their lives. And we blast that information out, reporters ask for quotes, video cameras are on the scene.
Journalism is inherently voyeuristic: it’s the act of reporting the facts of other people’s lives for others to consume. The standard line is that it’s ok so long as what’s reported is for the public good.
Unfortunately, what’s in the public good is not written in stone. Is it in the public good to know what political leaders say in private conversation? Is it in the public good to know whether celebrities are engaged in borderline legal activity? Is in the public good to find out whether a man whose been in prison for the last fifteen years was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit? I’d argue that if we use your average news cycle as a standard, Serial had more potential to be in the public good than much of what’s out there.
Which brings us to criticism two:
2. Serial is irresponsible, because it reported in realtime, rather than doing all the research and then presenting a finished package
I’ve got to say I find this one the most bizarre. Most journalism is presented in realtime. When media outlets started covering Ferguson, they didn’t know whether the army would be called in, what eyewitnesses would say, whether the case would go to trial. They just started reporting on what was happening and then when new developments opened up, they reported on those as well.
I suppose part of the reason people might expect Serial to be wrapped up ahead of time is that the case is fifteen years old so, presumably, all of this research could have been done first without having to wait for new information to come forward. But I also think that’s unfair.
I can easily imagine a “normal” treatment of this story. A newspaper headline says “15 years on, questions still linger in murder case”. The basics of the story would have been there: the disappearance, the body, Syed’s ongoing insistence that he’s innocent. The whole thing could have been wrapped up in a package in a few days. And we would never hear about the reporter making a new discovery because we would never hear from the reporter on the case again- they’re onto the next thing.
Koenig and her team spent a full year on this story. In doing so, they unravelled many more threads and communicated a much deeper understanding than the one-off article would have. That it wasn’t all wrapped up nicely is, I think, a lot more honest about the way the world works, and it allowed them to be more thorough than 99% of the journalism out there.
3. Lots of other important things happen. Why spend so much time on this one case?
I’ve seen this more than once- the question of what is so significant about this case that it deserves so much digging, so much research, so much attention. Koenig herself addresses this question in episode one:
“If you’re wondering why I went so nuts on this story versus some other murder case, the best I can explain is this is the one that came to me. It wasn’t halfway across the world or even next door. It came right to my lap. And if I could help get to the bottom of it, shouldn’t I try?”
I doubt there’s a journalist alive who hasn’t had someone question why they are wasting their audience’s time with some story or another. Some people hate hearing about politics. Others don’t get why you would cover anything- anything- except climate change.
The fact of the matter is there isn’t some universal hierarchy of importance out there. We can’t say empirically, “ok, yeah, there’s not enough beds in the homeless shelter down the street, but that is less important than the fact that women are being murdered at higher rates than men which is in itself less relevant than the latest international trade discussions.” There are a lot of important stories, and they are important to different people for different reasons, and unimportant to other people for other reasons.
Why do you spend your time one way when there are any number of other ways you could be spending it? Why do you donate to this charity instead of that one? It’s the same limitation faced by journalists choosing stories, especially when you’re choosing one story to focus on for a twelve episode podcast: you’re going to have to do it at the expense of something else.
And there’s a nice segue-way into criticism four:
4. Serial isn’t journalism, or is shoddy journalism, because Sarah Koenig put herself and her doubts at the center of the story
I’ll admit it isn’t standard for a reporter to publicly share her process- the false trails, the doubts, the back-and-forth about whether you’re doing the right thing. But I’d also warn you against a journalist who doesn’t have these moments of doubt. No one is completely unbiased, and the best defence against letting your biases affect your reporting is to be aware of them, and to challenge them. It’s the same with knowledge: the wisest thing you can do is admit your ignorance.
Would I want this style of reporting to leak into every piece of news I read or heard? No, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with opening the curtain on the sausage factory of how journalism works once in a while, either. We’re certainly happy to pull up the curtains on other professions, why not our own?
* * *
Like other journalists, the Serial team dealt with the real world. In the real world, memories are faulty, lies can be told, biases are inherent, doubts are cast, and mistakes are made. What made them unique is that they admitted those rules apply to journalists, as well.
Matt Gemmell:
“Even a year ago, I obsessively checked my follower count on Twitter, and my site’s visitor stats. I looked through my referrers daily. That’s a path to unhappiness. You notice when people inevitably unfollow, and you see which articles are of niche rather than widespread interest. It gets you down, particularly because the niche-interest personal pieces are often the ones that matter to you the most, as their author.”
From time to time I’ve toyed with the idea of making this a more focused site, one that is about something that could develop a specific audience.
The temptation used to be greatest when I’d write something with mass appeal. The visitor and new Twitter follower counts would go through the roof and I’d try to follow-up with something that would be equally interesting.
The problem with that is there’s no point, really. I’m not doing this for a living. I don’t sell ads. I write and I tweet because I find utility in it for myself. When others do, it’s gratifying, but chasing an audience would dilute the point of this, which is having a place for me to think out loud about whatever I want.
Plus, if I only wrote about what got the most visitors, it would just be a whole bunch of posts like this.
Great write-up by Robert McGinley Myers on the strength of audio:
“This is the power of tape, and I’d argue it’s a power tape has over any other form of journalism. Print can’t convey the full texture of emotion in a conversation, and film often shines too bright a light to get into these private moments of our lives. Tape bridges the divide, capturing reality without distorting it too much, and remaining sharable in its original, organic form.”
It’s tough for me to not just quote the whole piece because it so perfectly captures some of what I’ve been trying to express.
Nick Quah:
“I want, or would like, more Serials, more… Breaking Bads, more True Detectives, more Scandals, and more Game of Throneses in my headphones. In my eardrums. In my head.
“In my opinion, that’s the real North Star here. Podcasts shouldn’t aspire to be the next blogging platform, vis a vis Odeo. It should be the next-next HBO.”
I understand what Nick is saying- he wants high-quality, well-produced podcasts. So do I. But podcasts are just a media form, not a platform or producer. Just as video is used by YouTube and HBO, podcasts can be used by the low end and the high.
I think what we need to do is stop lumping all podcasts together. They are wildly different in scope, subject, and production. Four guys having an unedited conversation about movies for two hours is not the same as a skilled interviewer talking to someone for an hour, and that in itself is wildly different from a production like Serial. Categorizing them as a single genre and tier is like telling someone who enjoyed Breaking Bad to check out E-Talk Daily because it comes from that box in the living room, too.
That’s why some people are saying podcasts are having a renaissance while others are saying, no, they’ve been doing just fine, thanks. Both sides are correct. Podcasts, as a form of storing and delivering content, have been humming along just fine. The new thing is podcasts like Serial, StartUp, and the Radiotopia network- high-quality, well-produced, podcast-first storytelling: the HBO-quality content.
As I’ve said before, podcasts aren’t back, a new type of podcast has arrived.
Update: Robert McGinley Myers has an excellent piece on this that you should read.
I am reading a series of back-and-forths between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait on the subject of race relations in the United States, as well as this accompanying thread over on the Dish.
Within that thread, I took note of a reader comment:
“Coates actually says this: ‘I insist that racism is our heritage, that Thomas Jefferson’s genius is no more important than his plundering of the body of Sally Hemmings, that George Washington’s abdication is no more significant than his wild pursuit of Oney Judge.’
“The difference between the two seems pretty obvious to me. Coates isn’t saying that Washington was nothing more than a slaveholder. He’s saying that being a slaveholder isn’t cancelled out by his role as president. He’s saying the two things are inseparable, in the face of lots of people who try to separate the historical greatness of the Founding Fathers from their faults.”
That is the point I was trying to make in this post, and something I don’t think we talk about enough. The heroes of history had their strengths, but they had their share of weaknesses, with differing degrees of terrible actions to go alongside them. That’s true in Canada, as it is elsewhere.
People pine for the days when John A. Macdonald could build a national railway, conveniently ignoring the head tax and dangerous conditions forced upon Chinese workers to get it done and policy of starving Aboriginal people who might get in the way.
Does all this negate the fact he founded the country and built the railway? No. Nor does the fact that he founded the country and built the railway negate the fact that he did some pretty awful things. It’s all connected.
People will sometimes dismiss these criticisms by saying it’s easy to judge the the past with perfect hindsight. And that’s true. But if we’re going to invoke the past as justification for our present actions, I’d rather we do it with 20-20 vision rather than through rose-coloured glasses.
As we go into the Christmas break, the big news is that the provincial government has announced the creation of the biggest public infrastructure project in British Columbia history: the Site C dam.
Before we go further, let me be clear: what I am about to say is not an argument for or against the building of this or any other project. It’s simply an observation about the narratives surrounding the decision to build it.
The government says the dam is a necessary investment to provide clean, reliable power for the province. Opponents, who include residents whose homes will be lost and First Nations whose traditional territory will be flooded, say the loss of land is too great and alternatives should be investigated.
In counter to these arguments, supporters of the project point to the importance of “vision” from leaders, and the “visionaries” of the past who took on similarly large projects. The case study in visionary leaders is W.A.C Bennett, the B.C. premier responsible for the damming of other rivers back in the mid-twentieth century. Writing in support of Site C, former MLA Kevin Falcon opens with a quote from the Lieutenant-Governor at the opening of the W.A.C. Bennet dam:
“It may be apparent to everyone that harnessing of the Peace River promises great benefits for the people of British Columbia, but this was not always so. There were some who expressed concern when the project was launched. Despite this criticism, one man stood above all others in his faith in the future of the province.”
There is a distinct sense of nostalgia in much of the talk around Bennett’s time: a time, presumably, when leaders got things done instead of having to wring their hands over opposition. Over in the Globe and Mail, Gary Mason characterizes this version of the past thusly:
“Building dams in B.C. used to be a relatively straight-forward procedure. Governments did not need to worry about constitutional challenges to their authority. Or spend years trying to broker deals that would make those affected by the project happy.
“It was an era that some recall fondly as the good old days.”
But this is only one version of history. The mid-twentieth century wasn’t the good old days for everyone. Yes, government could build major projects without court fights, but that’s because the 1940s and 50s was a time when the notion of First Nations rights were all but non-existent. It was a time when over 1,000 children were starved in residential schools for the sake of “science”.
So noticeably absent from the talk of Bennett’s visionary dams are things like the forced relocation of the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation, who lost their homes and way of life and were moved to an isolated reserve and only recently received any form of compensation.
Here’s the story of another dam built in the “good old days“:
“When the Kenney Dam opened in 1954, it turned the Nechako River into an enormous reservoir, flooding a significant part of the Dakelh territories. The Cheslatta people were displaced ‘with little or no warning, [they were] forced to flee the rising waters and watch[ed] as their community’s hunting grounds, trap lines, and burial sites disappear[ed].’
This is not the distant past. Remains from the burial ground still occasionally wash up in these waters, an ongoing reminder of the utter lack of respect and attention given to an entire community of people whose existence is an inconvenient footnote in the visionary, province-building narrative of the past.
a cross in Cheslatta Lake
Look, it’s complicated. I recognize that British Columbia as we know it may not exist without these projects, that we all use energy produced by these projects, and that we need energy to come from somewhere in the future. Some people say a new dam is necessary, others don’t. That’s not what this post is about.
My point is this: in having these discussions, it’s important to remember the past is not as clean as the simplified “grand vision” narrative would have you believe. It’s messy and uncomfortable. There were very real negative consequences for real people, and just as the energy from these dams is still flowing, so too is economic and social fallout for the people they displaced. The legacy cuts both ways. And we need to look at history holistically- the good and the bad- when using its example to make plans for the future.
One of the trending topics on Twitter right now is #2014In5Words. My choice:
“In Case You Missed It”.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, ICYMI is primarily found as a prefix to a Tweet or Facebook post. It’s used when someone is re-posting something they shared earlier- the acknowledgement that yes, you may have seen this before, but I’m posting it again in case you missed it.
#ICYMI: Time is finite, the void is nigh.
— Andrew Kurjata (@akurjata) December 19, 2014
#ICYMI: on your deathbed you won’t regret not clicking on that link about the latest business news
— Andrew Kurjata (@akurjata) December 19, 2014
#ICYMI: 2014
— Andrew Kurjata (@akurjata) December 19, 2014
I think of ICYMI as the flipside of another term created by social media: FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. Just as FOMO describes the anxiety people have that they’ll miss someone else’s awesome thing, ICYMI comes from the fear that other people will miss our awesome thing.
Once upon a time I would write a blog post like this one and just assume people would see it. They had bookmark bars or RSS readers that they used to catch up on stories from a few people they were interested in. Maybe they’d come every day, maybe every week, but they’d come without me having to work too hard for their attention.
In 2014, that version of the internet is gone. More and more news organizations and independent outlets are building their strategies around pushing their content to people on social networks, primarily Facebook but also through Twitter and others. And posting just once isn’t enough. Facebook’s ever-changing algorithm and Twitter’s lightning-fast speed means you have to be strategic: post at the right time, with the right headline, reaching the right people. Screw up and few people will see it and even less will pay attention. In Case You Missed It is a way of hedging your bets.
There is a backlash to all this. The slow web movement, exemplified by the things like email newsletters, ~tilde.club and even a return to personal blogging are all driven in part by the desire for those quieter days when we could hear and be heard without being drowned in a series of quizzes and listicles and photos of puppies.
But the audiences for those quiet parts of the web is low compared to the carnival going on elsewhere. If you have a thought that goes beyond 140 characters, put it in a Twitter essay or screenshort because lord knows no one’s leaving the stream to spend any time digesting what you have to say. And if you’re posting something on Facebook, put as much information as possible in your headline because that’s all most people will read anyways.
At the beginning of this year, I took on my most ambitious creative and journalistic project yet. Hours of interviews, archival tape, stories and sounds, painstakingly edited together over the course of weeks to create a radio series that is probably my proudest professional achievement. When it was all packaged up and ready to be heard, I put it online and then I posted it to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr where it was up against memes and selfies and breaking news. I had no guarantees that even the people who had chosen to follow me on Twitter or were my friends on Facebook would see it because things just go by so fast.
So throughout the year I posted it again. And again. And again.
In case you missed it.
“Said the Gramophone is one of the oldest musicblogs. We try to do just two things, well: finding good songs, and writing about them. We don’t mess about with tour-dates, videos or advertising. We post new songs and old songs, write clumsy dreams of what we hear. If this is your first time here, I hope you’ll bookmark us or subscribe via RSS. You can also follow me on Twitter.
“Of these 100 songs, approximately 63 are fronted by men, 37 by women. 44 acts are mostly American, 37 are Canadian, 10 are British, 2 are French, and there is one Belgian, one Dane, one German, one Ghanaian, one Nigerian, one South African and one Swede. This is the way it worked out; it certainly ain’t perfect.
“My favourite songs of the year do not necessarily speak to my favourite albums of the year. Songs and LPs are entirely different creatures. My favourite albums of 2014 were Andy Stott’s Faith In Strangers, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Arlt & Thomas Bonvalet’s Arlt & Thomas Bonvalet, Nap Eyes’ Whine of the Mystics and Owen Pallett’s In Conflict.
“Some songs that you heard in 2014 may have been omitted from this tally because I heard them before this year, and included them in my Best of 2013.”
Said the Gramophone’s year-end lists are always a good listen and their preceding write-up captures exactly how I feel about year-end best-of lists.
You can listen to all the tracks on the website. I’ve also made playlists on Rdio and bop.fm.
Aaron Sorkin:
“Do the emails contain any information about Sony breaking the law? No. Misleading the public? No. Acting in direct harm to customers, the way the tobacco companies or Enron did? No. Is there even one sentence in one private email that was stolen that even hints at wrongdoing of any kind? Anything that can help, inform or protect anyone?”
On point.
Cyberterrorism expert Peter W. Singer on Sony’s decision to pull The Interview from theatres after vague threats of violence:
“There’s a parallel here to the Boston marathon bombing. I am going to be careful on this. The Boston attacks were real, and people died. This is not in the same category. But, a lot of terrorism analysts have talked about how they shut down the entire city of Boston, which was the wrong message. It sends the message to terrorists elsewhere that if two not-so-well trained guys with a jury-rigged rice cooker bomb can shut down an entire American city, what can we do if we’re good at this?”
I thought I’d do a quick round-up of reaction to the news that former Prince George mayor Shari Green lost the bid to become the next Conservative candidate for Cariboo-Prince George.
Though the results aren’t being released officially, 250 News is reporting Green in last place with just 419 votes, coming behind the newcomer Nick Fedorkiw and well behind the thousand-plus votes given to winner Todd Doherty.
It’s a far cry from when she was first elected to council back in 2008, coming second to only perennial favourite Brian Skakun.
So what went wrong?
Over at 250 News, Ben Meisner points to the way her team handled her Conservative nomination process:
“From the taking over of the executive within the Riding Association, to the manner which the nomination process was handled, it became apparent that each turn in the road would become more difficult for Green to navigate.”
At the Free Press, Victor Bowman agrees:
“The mini-coup in taking over the constituency executive was not the best move. It lit the fire of resentment, which smoldered throughout the pre-vote period.”
Over at the Prince George Citizen, Neil Godbout goes back even further, placing the blame on how she conducted herself at city hall. But he starts with a clarification:
“What follows is not an attack on Shari Green the person but a condemnation of Shari Green the politician. One of the reasons that distinction needs to be made clear is that Green never seemed to grasp the distinction between the two. To disagree with her politically was, more often than not, interpreted as a personal attack and she never seemed to forgive or forget the slights, real or imagined, large or small.”
He then delves into a seven-year-history of takeovers, freeze-outs, and refusing to talk to certain members of the media.
It may seem harsh, but let’s not forget it was less than a year ago that Green was apparently emailing citizens upset about snow removal with implications that the union might be at fault- all following a series of cuts and in the midst of the most heated contract negotiations with city staff in recent history. And her response when the Free Press asked her about this email?
“Green’s office told the Free Press that the mayor was too busy to grant an interview to confirm whether the e-mail was from her, but Green supplied the newspaper with the following e-mail response:
“‘During heated and lengthy contract negotiations, sometimes unions do what they can to disrupt the employer, and that should be no surprise to anyone in this case,’ Green said in her e-mail to the Free Press.
Mere weeks later it would be revealed that mismanagement and poor planning were largely to blame. An apology was not forthcoming.
I’ve no doubt Green did many things right. I even wrote about it on occasion. And let’s never forget that being a politician of any stripe is an exceedingly tough job. But you don’t go from mayor to third place without making a few missteps. And so with that in mind, Godbout’s assessment is worth considering:
“Her short political career is a parable of how not to succeed in politics.”
We’ll see who learns from it.
Ad nauseam
twitter
tumblr
linkedin
facebook
flickr
medium
instagram
google +
foursquare
quora
pinboard
* Views expressed in this blog are my personal opinion, and do not reflect the views of any of my
employers,
clients,
or pets.
Full Disclaimer→
Original content is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.
For more information visit https://andrewkurjata.ca/copyright.
Powered by WordPress using a modified version of the DePo Skinny Theme.
January 2 2015 | ∞
stream | download
In my basement, I have a whole pack of mixtapes I made when I was younger. At first I just recorded stuff off the radio, but when I got older I figured out how to feed the TV audio into our tape machine and was able to get stuff off of MuchMusic, as well.
I would usually divide the tapes up by their source: pop (the top 40 station), rock (the alt station), indie (the Wedge, Going Coastal) and hip-hop (RapCity).
This was a good system for when I could pack all my tapes around, but every once in a while I’d be going somewhere space was limited.
When a trip like that was coming up it was time to make a best of tape: a combination of tracks from across genres, dubbed from my collection into one master mix.
I found the best formats for these mixes were the 90 minute ones – 45 minutes on each side. A good long listen, but not so long that you would never listen to it more than once.
So anyways, here’s what one of those mixtapes would sound like if I were to make it today, using my favourite tracks of 2014 as a start point. Enjoy.
Almost Mainstream: the 2014 Mixtape
Mixcloud | Download | Bop.fm
(please note: I’ve put streams of individual tracks below, but the best way to listen to this is by streaming or downloading the full mix above)
Read more →
Filed under: music | Discussion