I am incredibly proud to share this.
After recording many hours of interviews and tapes, then spending even more hours cutting those interviews down into individual segments to air on the show, then a few more hours stitching those segments into a whole, I have put together what is the final edition of my first series for CBC. You can stream it below, or download it to your computer or directly in iTunes.
All told, this is an hour-and-a-half worth of stories from a neighbourhood that by more than one measure is among the worst in British Columbia. Here’s the write-up:
“The VLA neighbourhood in Prince George is named after the Veterans’ Land Act, and was created as a place for soldiers returning from World War II to make their homes. Today, it has a reputation for crime, gangs, and poverty.
“It has some of the highest crimes rates in the city dubbed “Canada’s Most Dangerous” three years in a row.
“It has some of the poorest families in Prince George, and a decade ago was found to be the worst in the province for healthy child development.
“The Fraser Institute consistently ranks schools in the VLA near the bottom of its school report.
“Average home prices are less than half than in other neighbourhoods in the city.
“It also home to many innovative social programs, creative people, and community-minded citizens who are proud to call it home.”
The challenge I felt throughout this whole process was balancing those two sides. I didn’t want to downplay the very real problems faced by the neighbourhood, but I didn’t want to ignore the fact that lots of people absolutely loved the area and had no more complaints about it than anyone in any neighbourhood. Listening to this whole thing, I think both sides are represented.
I have many more thoughts on this that I’ll probably write up in the future, but I don’t want to put a whole bunch of things here that will cause you to prejudge the podcast one way or the other. So for now I’ll just say thank-you to everyone who helped me with this, from my colleagues who contributed ideas and stories to this series, to the people who let me into their lives for a little while to try to represent the neighbourhood, to the people who’ve contacted me to say they’ve listened to all or part of this already and enjoyed it.
And it’s clichéd, but a special thank-you to my wife who put up with a month of me spending a long day working on this, only to come home and continue to think about edits and making her listen to several versions of the same story with only subtle differences so I could figure out which version of a sentence worked best and whether a musical cue should start now, or two seconds later. She was very tolerant, and her feedback was central to many aspects of the final version.
And now it’s done. I’m relieved, and excited for the next big thing. This was exhausting but also energizing to do, and I’m happy it’s out there in the world.
download mp3 | open in iTunes
If you care about radio as an artform, you should read Stan Alcorn’s “Why Audio Never Goes Viral.” I’ve read it about four times already, and plan on doing so again- it is a thoughtful, insightful story about exactly what its title promises. After reading it- here’s the link again– feel free to come back here for my thoughts on the subject.
Back? Here we go.
1. We aren’t conditioned to think of the world in terms of audio
We just aren’t.
Three years ago I wrote a post asking why there was no Instagram or YouTube for capturing and sharing audio. My belief was and continues to be as follows: there is no pre-internet analogue for sharing pure audio experiences. As I wrote:
“Why record the audio of a birthday party when you could snap some photos or combine the audio-visual experience by bringing out the camcorder? Pure audio has largely been irrelevant in the daily sharing of our lives, both before and since the internet.”
This continues to hold true. Soundcloud, which at the time seemed to be trying to change that, has become mostly about music with a bit of podcasting thrown in– professional or semi-professional audio performers using it to showcase their work, not amateurs sharing aural experiences with friends and family.
Cameras taught us to share the world visually. Video cameras gave us the ability to share the world visually and aurally. If we want to capture a single, unchanged moment, we go for the camera (or camera app). If we want to capture sound, why not use the video camera (app)– it gets you both. People generally have no use for pure audio, or at least don’t think they do.
2. Sharing audio is expensive
If I want to share photos I have Twitter, Instagram/Facebook, Flickr and probably more. If I want to share a video, I have YouTube and Vimeo. If I want to share audio I have Soundcloud. Of all those services, Soundcloud is the only one with major storage limits on free accounts.
Facebook has never hidden my old photos until I pay a fee. I could put hours of video on YouTube and never pay a dime. Flickr used to give you unlimited storage for $30 a year, and now it’s 2 TB for free. But if I want to share more than two hours of audio on Soundcloud, I have to be ready to pay $30 a year- or $100/year if I want to share more than four.
This is not a criticism of Soundcloud- they have a business model and every right to it. But the fact remains that this sort of limitation is going to inhibit people’s interest in sharing audio using their platform.
And there really is no alternative to the quick audio share. I’m a fan of Mixcloud for full-length podcasts and mixtapes, but again we’re in the world of professionals and semi-professionals here. Not some guy with an iPhone recording the sound of his kid’s soccer game to share with the rest of his family. Tumblr has an audio option, but you’re limited to one mp3 upload a day (no such limitations on photos).
Where else do you even share audio that isn’t professionally produced? I have no idea.
Update: I have since re-discovered Audiboo, which seems to be filling the niche of short audio shares– it’s free for an unlimited number of posts, up to the three minutes in length.
3. There are too many competing platforms (or at least not one centralized platform)
OK, so regular people don’t capture and share audio. But what about us outliers– the people who practice the ancient art of producing stories made purely out of sound?
Well, hopefully we’re employed somewhere. In which case, we are probably uploading our work to our company’s platform. Which means the CBC Radio Player or the BBC iPlayer or the NPR Media Player or… you get the idea.
When I log into YouTube I get the latest sketches from Conan O’Brien bumping up against Jian Ghomeshi’s interview with Neil Young, Nardwuar taking on Chance the Rapper, Ted Talks, sports highlights, and whatever random videos are popular today.
My point is this: when it comes to video, content creators- even professional ones- are not hiding their work inside walled gardens. They are putting it out into the world of YouTube where you and I can easily browse work from all over the place and share our favourites, making it- well, viral.
Where can I do this for audio? Well, see points one and two. We’re kind of in a chicken-and-an-egg scenario here, but I suspect it would serve audio makers of all kinds to band together to create some sort of global platform. A CBC/BBC/PRX/NPR-hybrid if you will, only way more embeddable and cross-platform.
4. Audio makers don’t always make it easy to share their work.
I’ll defer to Dan Misener on this front:
“The existing embedded CBC audio players are terrible. I’d embed one here, but I don’t want to put you through that. How terrible are these players? Let me count the ways…
Also:
“‘Fast forward to 10:34 or ‘Skip ahead to 23:30’ is a terrible user experience.”
Essentially:
“Public broadcasters can’t realistically expect listeners to share and spread radio stories if the experience of doing so is absolultely miserable.”
While we’re here, I’ll suggest you read Dan’s whole piece, as well.
5. Audio makers don’t share their work
This point is made in Alcorn’s article:
“Compared to other media, even young, tech-savvy audiophiles are less likely to share audio on a weekly basis, and when they do, they’re more likely to use email instead of social media.”
I work in radio. I am Facebook friends and Twitter followers with plenty of other people who work in radio. And yet I rarely see audio being shared around. Again, maybe because there’s not an established platform for doing so, but still… if even the people who like audio so much they’ve made a career of it aren’t going to evangalize for their work, why would anyone else?
I truly love audio as a story-telling platform. I believe that the aural divorced from the visual can provide a less-biased, more personal understanding of a person or issue- more intimate than television, print, or GIF.
I don’t think the quest for “virality” should be the end-all and be-all, but I don’t think it should be ignored, either. After all, trying to be viral is simply trying to be heard- if you are telling a story you believe is important, why wouldn’t you want it to be shared and spread?
So how do we do that? These are my hunches.
1. Experiment with platforms
Maybe Mixcloud should be used to share short stories, it’s just that no one’s doing it. Instagram was supposed to be about tracking drinks and Twitter wasn’t conceived of as a place for breaking news- but users affected what the sites became simply by using them. Find ways to upload and share your audio somewhere- anywhere- and see what works for you.
2. Don’t be afraid to get a little visual
Stories with compelling pictures are more likely to be clicked on when they come up in social media feeds. Print understands this, so they create at least one good visual to go along with their longform stories. Do the same: it lets people have some idea of what the story is about before they hit “play.”
3. Write better
If you make radio, you know a lot of it is about writing. You need to create promos and introductions that are ear-catching and compel the listener to stick around. Apply those same skills to your headlines, descriptions, and Tweets when posting your audio to the web.
4. Maybe the YouTube for audio is YouTube
I’ve been holding YouTube up as an example for audio, but the underlying problem is that there is no YouTube for audio. Except maybe there is.
In the music world we have countless streaming services: Rdio, Spotify, Pandora, etc. They are all eclipsed by YouTube.
I read something somewhere about how a song on YouTube with some terrible clipart slideshow is still going to be played way more times than it is on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify, Pandora and Rdio combined, and it’s probably true.
If that holds for music, why not for other audio? Why not take that one nice picture you found in step three, put it and your mp3 in Windows Movie Maker or iMovie and upload your work to YouTube where all the users already are?
A case in point: I recently made a terrible, terrible slideshow to go with a radio piece I produced. It took me maybe half-an-hour. I posted it the same places I post all my work and less than a week later, it has more than two-thousand views.
To put that in context, my single most popular Soundcloud upload has 68 streams, and on Mixcloud I have a story that made national headlines with 19 listens. Both of those are after months of being in existence. I like the story I put on YouTube, but it is not 100 times better than my other work. It just has that many more people who have listened to it.
YouTube is understandable, sharable, and massive. Maybe we don’t need to re-invent the wheel.
5. Believe in audio
If we are making audio, we should believe in its viability, and believe that non-radio people would be interested in hearing the things you are hearing and making you go “wow”. It isn’t TV without the budget or print without the stickiness- it is its own unique medium, and the internet is allowing it to be transformed from something ephemeral to something with more permanence. Stories that would have once disappeared the instant they were broadcast can be uploaded, embedded, and spread. Embrace it.
I’ve spent the last two days editing stories for a series I’m working on called “At Home in the Hood.” It focuses on stories about Prince George’s VLA neighbourhood, sometimes referred to as “the hood” of the city. It has high rates of poverty, crime, and other problems compared not just to the rest of the city, but the rest of the province.
This is the neighbourhood people are told to avoid when they are looking for a home in Prince George which is, by some measures Canada’s Most Dangerous City.
I want the series to provide that context, but more importantly I want it to have personal stories that give people some concept of what life is like in the VLA. I want it to be macro, but I want it to be micro.
I am going to fail.
I have spent the last few months collecting story ideas, conducting interviews and going through archives. So have other people on my team. Until this week, this hasn’t been an all day every day type of thing. More like a little bits here and there type of thing. But enough to know we’re only scratching the surface.
There are people I want to interview that I’m not going to get to interview. There are sounds I want to gather that aren’t going to be gathered. Important viewpoints that won’t be shared.
And that’s just the stuff I don’t have. With the stuff I do have, there are cuts to be made. I have to take hour-long interviews and condense them to six minutes. All sorts of anecdotes and emotions go out with that. You do your best to get to their core, but you’re still making choices about what that core is.
It’s interesting once you start putting together stories, you begin to realize how the order you put the words in can affect the overall tone. The same two paragraphs or sentences in a different order hit an entirely different emotional chord. The question of how you want to order things becomes a philosophical one- you can use just facts and still manipulate things.
Heck, I’m sitting there in some stories debating whether to leave in a long pause or shorten it by a couple of seconds to move things along quicker. Breaths and stutters might be just breaths and stutters… or they might add resonance and emotion to the words someone is saying.
So I’m making all these editorial choices about what stays and what goes. And that’s the problem. If you start with a goal of capturing everything, the instance you start removing bits you’ve already failed.
So I’m doing my best to live up to my original goals. I’m happy with what I’ve got so far, but I’m really not sure of how it’s all going to fit together. I’m convinced there’s going to be some important bit of information or interview that shouldn’t have been cut or was never conducted in the first place.
It might be good. I hope it’s good.
But I am definitely going to fail.
Eight days ago I decided I was going to write 500 words a day, every day. I’ll be honest: I didn’t think I’d make it a week. I did think I’d make it a few days, and that would be something.
As it stands, I actually have written 500 or more words every single day for nine days, including this one. A good number of those words have been half-formed thoughts and gobbledygook.
And that’s OK. The goal is to write 500 words, not 500 excellent words. As it stands, the gobbledygook has resulted in several publishable pieces of writing (so long as we’re able to use “put it on my blog” as the standard for “publishable”).
What’s interesting about this is half the time I didn’t think what I was writing would lead to anything fully-formed. In fact, this very post started as me just writing free-form nonsense before it coalesced into a subject.
I find that fascinating because it says something about how you accomplish goals. Again, not a new or original piece of advice, but one that I am learning the value of and is worth repeating.
The trick is to set tangible targets.
If I were to set a goal of “do good writing” that would be all fine, but it really doesn’t say anything. It just sort of assumes you can write well, and all you need to do is decide to start doing so.
Which is true, in a way, but there are other things you have to do first. Like write more. So maybe you could say “write more” and that is your goal.
But do you know what “more” is? How are you measuring that? I know if I had said “write more” I wouldn’t have had any real sense of what that would look like— I’ve never paid attention to daily word counts prior to this.
But with “500 words a day” I know whether or not I am hitting my targets. I’m writing this in Draft where I can see the little word counter going up and up and up (101 words left by the end of this sentence).
And that’s all I’m worried about: hitting 500 words each da. Once I do it, I’ve accomplished my goal, and I win. Then I do it the next day and win again. The byproduct is I get blog posts, my writing improves, and- hopefully- I wind up with more pieces of writing I am proud of.
It’s sort of like my other major goal – “get in better shape.” Means very little. So I’ve broken it down into chunks- a mini-workout every morning, go to the gym or equivilent five times a week, stretch on a daily basis. It’s not “getting into shape” over the course of the year, it’s doing achievable things on each and every day. The end result is, hopefully, I’m in better shape, but that’s not how the goal is defined.
I’m not sure this works for everyone, but I’ve discovered it works for me. All I’m really doing is tricking myself into thinking big goals are actually a whole bunch of small ones – but then, maybe they are.
Today is the ninth annual International Soufflé Day. I’m not normally one to mark made-up days, but this one has a soft spot for me.
Four years ago I had just started at CBC on a trial basis. I had virtually no experience. It was a big chance to prove that I could bring something to the table.
One of the most important assets in any sort of newsroom is story ideas. Particularly original ones that aren’t just going to be found all over the place.
Fortunately for me, someone on Facebook (remember this was four years ago— Facebook was still fairly new) had invited me to something called “International Soufflé Day.” It was a movement started by Vanessa Keitha in Prince George, who had decided that as a way to combat January doldrums she would start inviting people over for soufflé. It would be someone new each year, and the hope was that people who had attended previous sessions would host their own soufflé dinners.
2010 was year five, and I pitched it as a story. It got picked up for a small, two-minute segment, which was a big deal to me. I interviewed Vanessa and had to cut up the tape. I remember Chris Walker sitting down to show me how I could take my own voice out and use some French background music to make the whole thing more interesting.
(I was going to embed the track here but Soundcloud is having trouble right now, so here’s the webcache)
I thought it was a pretty big deal to have a story picked up for a regional morning show, but then my producer showed me how I could submit the piece to syndication. In doing this, you give the tape out to shows across the country to use if they want to.
What really surprised me is that they did. The tape was played on the east coast, the prairies- all over the place. Again, this was my first piece in my first week at any radio station- I was pretty dang excited.
It’s a small story, the sort that I toss out on a regular basis now, but I feel like International Soufflé Day helped push me over the top in my bid to get more work at CBC. I’m not sure what I would have pitched if it hadn’t been for that Facebook invite, so the timing was fortunate. It’s just one of those little moments that stands out for me.
So if you’re trying to think of something for dinner tonight, join the movement: try a soufflé.
The New York Times, 1924. Images via 99% Invisible
A father and two children, aged three and six, are all dead. They were killed on Highway 16 west of Prince George on Wednesday. They are the sixth, seventh, and eighth people to die on that highway in eleven days.
I’m trying to imagine any other activity that could claim eight lives in just over a week without there being some sort of public outcry, moratorium, or investigation. As a society, I feel like we’ve become so used to the idea of people dying in car accidents that we don’t really think about it.
In fact, that’s the standard for downplaying the dangers of something. “More people die in car accidents than doing x” is supposed to provide some sort of reassurance that an activity is safe, or at least safe enough. We all drive, right? How dangerous can it be?
There’s an excellent episode of 99% Invisible called “The Modern Moloch.” Moloch was an ancient god that some parents apparently sacrificed their children to. In 1923, deaths of children from cars were such a concern that a newspaper cartoon compared the car to Moloch, hence the title.
The whole episode is a fascinating look at how society hasn’t always been so accepting of death by automobile.
“Pedestrian deaths were considered public tragedies. Cities held parades and built monuments in memory of children who had been struck and killed by cars. Mothers of children killed in the streets were given a special white star to honor their loss.”
Imagine that. When a fatal collission happens now there’s private mourning, but publicly most accidents are sort of shrugged off. We note vehicle deaths but they don’t get nearly the sort of treatment they received a century ago. They are almost routine. Something to be expected.
I wonder if this makes people feel safer when they get into cars themselves? I know I don’t always get behind the wheel thinking about how I’m now in control of something that could easily and accidentally become a fatal weapon. And yet thousands of people in Canada alone are killed or seriously injured in accidents every year.
I remember after a heavy snowfall this past December, RCMP were asking people not to drive unless they absolutely had to. There were still lots of people attempting to get out on the road despite the dangerous conditions and reports that even tow trucks and police cars were going into ditches. I wondered what it would take to get those people to stop driving, just for the day. I mean, I get it— there’s jobs, groceries, errands. But we allow for sick days, partially to help prevent the spread of disease. Would it not be acceptable to take time off when the police are quite literally telling you not to drive because it’s not safe? Or at least find some other way to get from A to B?
There are obviously huge benefits that come out of cars and trucks delivering people and supplies over great distances in short periods of time. I’m not denying that. But just because there are benefits, it doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences.
The families of eight people are grappling with those consequences right now.
Yesterday I released an audio trailer for “At Home in the Hood: Stories from Prince George’s VLA Neighbourhood.” It’s a small radio series I’m doing within my regular job at Daybreak North. It’s the first series I’ve ever done, and I’m pretty nervous about it.
What is the VLA? VLA stands for “Veteran’s Land Act”, a government policy that created the community as a low-cost place for soldiers who served in World War II to own homes. But over the past half-century demographic changes gave way and increasingly, the area is called “the hood.”
The rates of poverty, crime, and social problems in the VLA are among the worst or the worst in the province. There have been shootings. Over half of the people released from the local jail wind up living here. There are a lot of welfare cheques delivered.
At the same time, there’s a lot of positive work being done. It’s one of the few neighbourhoods I’ve been to that actually feels like a neighbourhood. Since less people have cars, there’s more walking- and more getting to know other people. There are programs and volunteers working to make improvements, and succeeding.
Once our team came up with the idea of running a series to capture a sense of life inside the VLA, I jumped at the chance to take the lead, and have been working on it off the side of my desk since.
I’ve collected many, many story ideas and hours of raw tape that capture bits and pieces of everything happening in the VLA. Now I have just a couple of weeks to try and hone it down to something that makes sense and does justice to the people whose lives I’m attempting to represent.
I know at best I’ll only get a small slice, and I’m trying to manage my own expectations. In my head I have an idea of what I want everything to sound like. But I also know I’ve never produced a full series before, and I’ll probably fall short. But hopefully I get at least partway there and am able to try again.
If you’re in Prince George, there’s a live event on January 24 to go with the series that will hopefully spark discussion about the divide between the VLA and the rest of the city, and how to bridge that. Details are on the website and Facebook. Series starts January 20.
– – –
By the way, this post came out of my challenge to write 500 words a day. It’s been changed from the original version, but it may be interesting to compare if you’re interested in doing something similar.
It’s been a bad winter for small, fuel-efficient vehicles.
Today’s 500 words: I don’t have the right mindset to go to Mars.
I’m pretty bad at coming up with New Year’s resolutions. Part of it is the timing of the whole thing: you’re so busy with Christmas and then bam!— you’re supposed to have re-evaluated your entire life. So New Year’s Eve comes along and someone asks about resolutions and I haven’t even considered them.
But that doesn’t matter. One thing I’ve realized, even if I haven’t fully put it into practice, is that the important thing with any change is to start now. This is not new or groundbreaking advice, I realize, but it took years of hearing it for it to sink in for me. Now that I’m converted I’m going to keep spreading the word.
If you decide you’re going to wait for optimal conditions to start doing something, odds are you aren’t going to start doing it. For example, I’ve had the vague notion that I would “get in better shape” for quite a while now. I never really acted on this conviction, though. I would have a false start here and there, and then let my routine slip. I would give myself excuses– I’m too tired, too busy, etc. But the fact is I’m rarely dealing with circumstances that are incredibly out of the ordinary. If I want to form a lifelong habit, it’s going to have to be something that fits into my life– which is now, which means I should start now, because these are the circumstances I’m going to be in for the forseeable future.
Missing New Year’s is another perfect excuse. “Oh, gee, it would have been great to have that resolution starting January 1, but I didn’t think of it. Going to have to wait for some other milestone.” That thought has slipped into my head at least a dozen times over the past few days as I hear about other people’s goals and changes.
So here’s my resolution: to make resolutions whenever I want, and to start them immediately. Here’s another resolution, and an example: yesterday, I saw that MG Siegler had decided to start writing more regularly, and in the tradition of Hemingway, will be doing so in the form of 500 words a day.
I’ve been thinking about giving myself a writing goal, as well, just to prompt myself into getting words onto paper (haha jk I don’t know how to use anything but keyboards). I’ll often find I have all these ideas but I don’t feel like I have the time to get them out. Then, when I finally throw something out there it’s like I’ve become mentally unblocked and I want to keep going. So I figure a goal of 500 a day is something to shoot for. I would have loved to start on January 1 but I didn’t so I’m starting now, on January 4– a day of no significance.
Sometimes these 500 words will turn into proper blog posts, or be edited to be proper blog posts. Probably a few I’ll keep to myself. But mostly I’m going to stick them on Tumblr where I don’t feel much pressure to create fully formed thoughts.
I see I’m at over 500 now (see, self? surprisingly easy!), so here’s a few other goals:
And that’s where I’ll leave it today. Now that I’m mentally unblocked, there’s lots more I’d like to start writing about right away, but another great piece of Hemingway advice cautions me:
“You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.”
Until tomorrow.
Mixcloud | Tumblr | Soundcloud| Download
I’ve never stuck with a single format for my year-end music lists. Some years it’s been songs, others albums. This year I couldn’t decide, so I went with twenty musical things. In most cases this is an album, but there are singles, or a few songs that stand out from the rest of an album, and even a genre. Which is which is clarified in each write-up.
There was a lot of good music this year, and I could easily make this 100+ entries. But that would mean something like seven hours of listening, and it’s not likely anyone is going to do that. I’m hoping that with a mix of just over an hour, you’ll be more willing to have a listen to my absolute favourites.
By the way, you may notice that for something called “Almost Mainstream”, this year’s list is pretty mainstream. I noticed that, too. In fact, I haven’t put together an episode of Almost Mainstream since August because I haven’t been sure of the point of it.
When I started, I said Almost Mainstream would be to explore “things that are almost big, things that should be big, or things that would be big if we lived in some sort of alternate universe.” In 2013 it kind of feels like that universe exists. Ten years ago groups like Tegan and Sara and Arcade Fire were these oddball underground acts, now they are a couple of the most high-profile in the industry. Even someone like Lorde, who seems like she should be this undiscovered gem, goes from a Soundcloud profile to arguably the biggest artist of the year in a number of months. And if all I’m doing is pointing people to music that is already near-ubiquitous, why make the effort?
But in putting together this compilation, I found there were still plenty of musicians I think should be getting more attention. Yes, I have Tegan and Sara, Drake, Haim, Kanye West, Mariah Carey and Lorde, but I also have Palma Violets, Rhye, Fake Shark – Real Zombie! and the most unjustly unheard of group of all, Ghostkeeper.
More importantly, if I were to expand this list to my 40 favourites there’s not a lot of other mainstream artists you’d find. Instead you’d get Imaginary Cities and Shad and Two Hours Traffic and Wildlife and Gold & Youth and all sorts of other great things. So yes, some of the music that I think is the absolute best is getting the attention it deserves but bubbling just below that is music that I think is far more worthy of your time than what you’ll find surrounding Lorde on the charts.
So that’s what I’m going to keep on doing with Almost Mainstream– play the best music I can find, regardless of its popularity. Here’s what I found in 2013. Have a listen, and if you like what you hear, stick around.
Read more →
As much as Facebook would like to automate my year in review, I’m not sure a few photos I found online really constitutes the best I had to offer in 2013 (though I do enjoy the fact that “After years of clinical trials and peer-reviewed studies, scientists have conclusively proven that there ain’t no party like an S Club party” was such a popular status).
So instead, here are some of the things I created this year that I am most proud of/seemed to have the most resonance. No algorithm, only my own sense of what it means to me and meant to other people.
I’m not winning anymore
Written for my birthday, a reflection on shifting from preparing for the rest of your life to actually trying to live it.
Darkness
Most of my writing is pretty clinical, rarely approaching anything close to “poetic”. This still falls far short, but it comes closer.
Shut up and say something
Written for myself more than anyone else, this questions why we add new creations to an already noisy world. The feedback I received was very gratifying, and makes me realize I’m not alone.
24-hour news is like water, you need to turn it off sometimes
This was also written for me, to try to help me cope with the sense of being completely lost in a stream of noise and information. It also became my first post on Medium, where it was an editor’s pick, and again the positive feedback I got was humbling.
Democracy
I wrote this one after a rather divisive election here in British Columbia. It begins:
“Just a friendly reminder that democracy isn’t simply picking one side to be in charge every four years. It’s a process that happens every day in a variety of forums and ways.”
I was nervous about publishing it, but it was well-received.
Dear William and Kate: A last-minute plea to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to not name the royal baby George
There’s no getting around this: my most popular piece of writing in 2013, possibly my most popular ever. I had people around the world tweeting me once the baby was named, and it even led to me being on national TV. I’d like to take this opportunity to clarfiy that the issues I raised were real– the #princegeorge hashtag remains overwhelmingly talk of the royal baby– but I am far calmer about it than my online personae implies. Comedic effect gone awry, perhaps.
Some thoughts upon attending my ten year high school reunion
Self-explanatory.
Dedicated writing machine
I was surprised at how popular this one was, but then maybe I shouldn’t be. Sometimes it’s nice to unplug and be free of distractions.
How to tie a scarf
I realized I didn’t really know how to tie a scarf. Rather than just asking someone or looking it up, I turned it into a radio story that was broadcast nationally, multiple times.
Talking to Darryl about love
This one was just an unexpected conversation with a person walking down the street that continues to stick with me. How often do you talk to a total stranger about loss and love in the middle of the day?
Juan and the Emu
When we heard there may have been an emu on the loose in northern British Columbia, we knew there was probably a story. When I started to talking to the man who saw the emu, I knew I was sitting on radio gold.
I’ve done a little bit of public speaking before, but mostly just MC-ing or a panel discussion. This year I actually gave sustained talks and challenged myself to do them without writing everything down ahead of time except the main points. One is serious, one is tongue-in-cheek. I have a ways to go, but I like the progress I’ve made.
How to get a journalism job you don’t technically qualify for
SantaLeaks
I like music. Sometimes I make mixtapes. This year I made one documenting music from 1998-2003 and a whole series based on every season of Breaking Bad.
These are also pieces of writings, but also challenges and reminders to myself. Interestingly, all of them are about reducing the amount of things I take on and spending more time relaxing. Progress has been made, but there’s room to grow. Good reminders as 2013 comes to a close and we start this all over again.
My New Year’s Resolution: Quit Stuff. Be Happier.
Time Off in February
Letting go
* * *
It’s easy to get caught up in status updates, Instagram photos, and the feedback loop, and I am as guilty of being sucked into the stream as anyone (probably more than most). But at year’s end it’s the things that actually took some time to craft that stand out the most, and I’m grateful I have the opportunity to do this, no matter how small-scale.
It’s worth saying again and again: the fact that anyone else is paying attention is humbling in and of itself so, as always, thank you. I have a few thoughts percolating in my head that I hope to get down over the break so we can start out strong in 2014. See you then.
At some point I should write a post outling my thoughts on the benefits of Medium, but for now I wrote a post outlining what I think Medium is. I’m linking to it on Medium because it just kind of makes more sense to read it in the context it was written.
Ad nauseam
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February 2 2014 | ∞
I spent part of this morning writing about the series I did portraying life in Prince George’s inner-city VLA neighbourhood. I’m in a celebratory mood. I pulled off a big project and I feel good about it.
As I was writing this, the major developing news story was the fact that actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose. My Twitter feed is full of people mourning the loss of his life.
A week ago, to cap off the end of the series, we held a public forum at the Youth Around Prince George centre. We chose it because it offered a mix of the ability to host the event, and the fact that it is a service centre for at-risk kids, many of whom live in the VLA neighbourhood.
The day of the event, the woman who runs YAP told me not many of the kids who use the centre would be taking part. In fact, she hadn’t seen much of them in a while. It seems one of the regulars, a young man, had recently OD’d and the rest were in mourning, in their own ways. This is something that had happened before- it was to be expected that it would take a while for the kids to get over it.
I’m not disputing the sadness people feel at the death of a well-known actor. I know that celebrities can touch your life and the loss you feel when they’re gone is absolutely legitimate. Hoffman will be celebrated and remembered and mourned for being gone so young, just 46 years old. I have no issue with his death making headlines around the world.
The kid who overdosed in Prince George? I don’t know how old he was. I don’t even know his name.
Not every tragic death gets a headline.
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