Welcome to the 12th episode of Reporters Shop Talk, I am Stu Campaigne, a reporter with BayToday, as always, with my colleague Dave Dave.
Today, we're going to take kind of a deep dive into the history of not just social media, but even the internet and how it relates to the way we do our jobs as journalists.
Of course, you have a few years more experience than I do, and a lot of it will rely on your recollections of things. But one of the first things I want to start with was how do you remember approaching the Internet age with journalism?
What was the first thing that stood out to you that made you think this is going to be a big deal?
Dave: Well, interestingly enough, in 1989, I was working for a brief while in White Rock, B.C., and I was covering at my first real newspaper job at Peace Arch News, I was covering business, council and health. And, there is a provincial nursing strike. There are major development issues, the city and businesses knocking heads. Well, one of the councillors invited me over to his place to show me this neat interweb thing. It was all the universities connected. That's how it kind of really started. And he was really big on this. And he was working with a business to show me the stuff that I was looking at it. And I'm thinking, hmm, this is interesting. It's going to be a lot better than telephone tag trying to get a hold of people.
Stu: I started out I had a Commodore 64 and my dad bought one of the first Apple Macs in 1983.
Something we talk about is the turnaround on a story, the time you have, when it's printed, compared to the model we use now online.
Also, for updating stories, obviously, a print product means putting out a whole new edition, whereas now we get to just, you know, just put our cursor in the box and change whatever's been written. In a way, you can almost rewrite history. It's probably not ethically acceptable. But so, you know, again, I haven't worked in the business for that long and I don't know any other way, although I'm familiar with print, mostly from your stories. Can you think of a big story where, you know, you probably had to wait a day to update it? Do you think of anything like that in your experience?
Dave: Well, yeah. Every time I made a big mistake in a story.
Stu: We make mistakes now. But it's like we have our own White-Out. Right?
Dave: I wrote a column once. It started like a blog and it was on a councillor who had made a donation to the Conservative Party.
And I had sort of done the research, I thought I was exposing them, as he had switched allegiances and parties. And I had posted the column that was going to go into the paper in two days. But I was writing a blog, so it was kind of like a rough draft.
That guy I was writing about called me and said, “Dave, I understand what you're trying to do, but you said I donated $50,000 instead of five hundred.
Stu: So, was that your typing error? Was that how it got formatted?
Dave: That was on the online, so we saw it on the website and I was able to fix it on the website and then fix it before it got into print.
This was kind of a bit of a reverse example of a time when the digital saved me from putting something in print that I couldn't have taken back.
Stu: Yeah, well, it gave you an opportunity to fix it both ways, but you could have only got one maybe.
Dave: Here's the thing is, I was able to fix it within an hour of it being online. So if, for example, it was something that where I was going to get sued for libel, it was mitigated by the time that was actually online. It’s harder in print, you can’t fix something. You make mistakes and print like you're just not going to be able to fix that.
Stu: What were some of the typical times of day that were important in the print world?
Dave: Well, I joined the Nugget right as they were switching over to an evening print run.
So there wasn't a morning deadline. At one time, the editors and reporters would be getting up to do the final page stories and doing them first thing in the morning before 7. And then, it was run off shortly after. And those were distributed throughout the day.
But then because of economics and whatnot, they switched to printing later and it became older news, you know, compared to what we do today in a digital world.
Stu: You said a bunch of terms there that people would not be familiar with, like deadlines and sports sections. But, coverage of local sports is almost non-existent in some markets.
Dave: There's a good reason for that: social media.
All the teams, all the leagues already have everything they want published. And anything that got into print was just eye candy and after the fact. But nobody was dependent any more because of the internet on the newspaper or even radio or anybody else to get their scores, they just have to go straight to the team or the league’s website.
And it's all there, which I think is part of the downfall of the OHL.
Stu: Meaning there are no people, they don't follow the games?
Dave: I think people follow it without going to the games.
Stu: OK. I wasn't looking at it that way. Yeah, it's interesting. In another, you know, all these neat kind of milestones in your career where you were around for things that really changed the industry and even just the general, the world. But one of the ones you were kind of there for was the end of the sports coverage for the Nugget.
You know, you were there kind of before that, too, but you were there until the end and the older guys.
Dave: I was the last guy standing.
Stu: And, you know, you did a great job. Like you said, everything was shifting to a different model.
I can remember some of the old-timers from the Nugget, Hutchison and those guys, Umphrey, kind of set in their ways and understandably so, you know, not willing to kind of adjust on the fly all that much where I think Ken Pagan didn't really have a choice, maybe when he kind of had to try some different things, as I said.
Dave: Yeah, for sure. There were very limited options. There is less space for local sports. Less time. When I was in that situation, I tried to focus in on the high school sports, because I felt that was the cross-generational market for people … high schools didn't have regular and high-quality sports websites the NDA was hit or miss, depending on whose volunteering, what teacher is doing what. Right. So it was it was actually a market where you could provide news and stuff that they weren't getting elsewhere.
That was my idea instead of doubling down and trying to cover the Battalion, I still had to do that. But I thought the high school sports was the last of the market niches that print could serve.
Stu: Yeah, it's interesting. When Ken was kind of was still involved, he had this interesting way of making mundane sports seem a little more interesting, you know, that he would go and cover anything.
And I think he's told me this before, but, you know, he would go to the Mercantile Men's Hockey League and find a story. So he wasn't necessarily covering, you know, just the NDA football scores. He was trying to make it a little more relatable. I think this is a way to say it and telling stories, which is, you know, similar to what we do.
Dave: The biggest strength of all, for Ken, was that he was in the community playing on one hundred teams in all those sports, like he played on men's baseball team, he played in the Mercantile league. He played on the Thursday night league. He played in another league down in Powassan, he also played in the ball hockey league. And all those sports got coverage because he was there and he knew them. And that's where it should be. He was covering what people were doing, which is the hallmark of community journalism. He covered all the other sports, too, even the ones he didn't play.
So, yeah, he was you know, he was good between him and Jordan Ercit. They were both good in different ways. Those were the last true sports reporters at The Nugget. I don't consider myself a sports reporter.
Stu: Actually, you were a reporter that covered sports. I think it's a different thing.
Is it fair to say you've been a reluctant convert to the online world? Are you just going with the flow, kind of an unwilling player?
Dave: I was the last guy to get a phone. I mean, I never even had a flip phone. I skipped the cell phone. And I didn't get a smartphone until three years ago.
Stu: One of the few options you have, you make the best of it.
Dave: And I actually see some upside to some of the online opportunities for journalism and storytelling.
I think there's some good there, too.
I'm not comfortable with some aspects of it. You know, my opinion on people should have their name on things that they put on a news platform.
I'm not I'm not big on “SlipperySally” getting to say something that's detrimental to somebody else, but they don't have to pay that price of owning it.
There are aspects I don't really think are good, but I like the multimedia aspects of being able to offer people audio clips, video links and as well as the written word plus still photography all in one package. I like that. That's cool. I'm getting into that. Maybe I was slow to convert and unwilling, but I'm seeing potential and enjoyment and fulfillment and being able to do multimedia storytelling.
Stu: I've only really known this way, but I really like that I can post a story and if it changes I can alter the story and let people know I've done that with a disclaimer at the top. But I can also write a second story within ten minutes. There's no deadline, right? There's no need to do something and change it, I can change it kind of on the fly. I really like that about the way we do things. It can be severely abused, let me say that. But if you're doing it the right way to think about something like an armed standoff or an explosion on the highway where, you know, it is really worth getting a story, as things are changing. That's what I like about it.
Dave: Yeah, it does offer that. I kind of would prefer a model where we have a live blogging story on breaking news and then follow that when it's over with a complete story rather than numerous stories.
Stu:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm talking about the same thing for sure. I agree with that. Where we get it up in the same story, that's another way to do it. I'd like to see that.
Dave: I'd be more interested in where reporters add to the story, like entries into a journal of a story, and then at the end, it's put together in a package of more like an essay of the issue that transpired.
Stu: There's something worth looking at.
