Welcome to Reporters Shop Talk Episode Eight. My name is Stu Campaigne, reporter with BayToday, along with my colleague Dave Dale. We have covered some interesting topics over the last couple of months and we realized talking the other day that we hadn't really gotten into why we do this. I think every journalist probably has that one “Aha!" moment maybe in their life when they realize that's what they wanted to do. And I'm just wondering what yours was?
Dave: I think it started when I was reading Jack London books when I was a kid and I realized that telling stories about the adventures of your life and having adventures to tell stories about is kind of what I was interested in. I just wanted to be a storyteller and I liked reading this stuff. And it was all about adventures.
Stu: How does that translate, do you think, to what you do say 40 or 50 years down the line? What is it what do you take from those things as a boy reading those stories that you do or think now on a daily basis?
Dave: Well, just the fact that anything I end up doing ends up being adventurous somehow. So I see the adventure in everything, and I appreciate that. And it kind of gives me a chance to feel and see and have all those senses working so that I can have something to write about.
For example, for one of my first adventures as a journalist, I was working at Canadore College, I think it was about 1987 or thereabouts, and there was a helicopter program at Canadore and one of their helicopters crashed. So they were looking for somebody to go up with another one of the helicopters with the instructor pilot in it to take photos of the crash site. And it was the first time I was ever in a helicopter and it was funny … the realization as we're flying toward the site and looking at the crashed helicopter and I'm thinking, “Oh my God, did the same people that took care of that one take care of this one?” So, you know, being at a helicopter crash site for your first photo assignment was pretty cool.
Stu: That is a good one. I was thinking along the same lines…I got to go up in a plane, so very similar to yours. I guess maybe the elevation makes you remember it better or whatever.
I was in a plane over Trout Lake, a small kind of lake, not a big lake like Nipissing here. But I grew up around Trout Lake, so it was really interesting to see it from different vantage points. And until you get up there a good, you know, 500 meters or even a kilometre up in the air and look down at places you've known your whole life, and you can see kind of the topography of the area where it's deep and where it's not. And it was just really cool. I didn't even want to come down at all. And this was with a group you're familiar with the BAYSAR group, which does like a search and rescue thing with their, you know, private planes and a really worthy cause. And they've located people lost in the lakes and the bush and whatnot. But it was this guy, Stan French, that brought me up there. And it was very, very interesting. I'd love to go up and do it again.
Dave: Well, that's the great thing about journalism, is it gives you a different perspective on life.
Stu: That's right. Yes. You know, journalism doesn't pay overly well, you know. But we do get to do a lot of cool things. I think about the perks over the years that, you know, if you really love something like Battalion hockey, you can go watch 40 games a year and cover it and watch the games for free. And that's you know, it's not a huge financial perk. But if it's something you're interested in, it gives you something to look forward to every week when you've got a couple of games to cover or something like that. Is that something you could agree with?
Dave: Oh, yeah, for sure. I think in anything you do, you got to look at the spin-off perks that make up for not being paid millions of dollars. Right. So you have to enrich your life with the extras that come with whatever you do.
Stu: Right. Absolutely
Dave: I was thinking about what we're talking about here and it was interesting when you were talking about different perspectives and I was thinking about how being a journalist allows you to see life through other people's eyes as well, right. So not only does it give you a new perspective to look at, you can look through other people's perspective by telling their stories through their eyes.
Stu: That's true, that's a good way of looking at it, too, and I think in a way, that's partially why I started doing this. I've had some mild success as I grew into an adult writing fiction and different, you know, doing journalism. But that's not the way I do it today. You know, covering restaurant openings and reviewing movies and things like that. So it was more public service things, what we would call fluff pieces.
But getting back to, you know, perspectives, I think what really got me into mainstream journalism was what you're saying, giving people a voice and or the opportunity. But a great story to tell, an important story at or whatever the case is, and by listening to them and breaking down a half-hour conversation into, you know, a thousand words or less on a computer screen, that's a skill to me. There's no doubt about that. But to understand the part of the story that needs to be told is part of the skill, too.
And I think that's what happened, I realized I could do that.
I think that's what attracted me more than just wanting to cover hockey games and doing movie reviews and just kind of, not that I wasn't taking it seriously, but it wasn't a job. It was just more something I did for fun. It was when I got to start telling people's stories, whether good or bad. But I really started to, you know, pursue this as a career. Well, that's my story.
Dave: Yeah, well, that's cool. Like, we all do it for a reason. And hopefully, you know, you enrich yourself on that journey. It's funny, I like the complexity of journalism and making decisions about who to interview and how to present somebody's story or a story or the issue.
This weekend, I did a story about an ice fisherman tourist in the middle of a pandemic. And I admit I knew he was going to get vilified and I was scared he was going to get lynched online, really, no matter how I presented it.
But I didn't want to be the judge and jury and present it like, ‘Oh, look, this tourist was here and he shouldn't have been because all these people say so.’ I wanted to present his story the best I could through his eyes because that was the only chance he was going to get, right. Like he had already posted a video online and it was public. So I wasn't really...I just didn't want, in this instance, based on my experience with these things, I didn't want to be the judge and jury on the story and have the headline about how people reacted. And I wanted people to see his story and then have a chance to react to it, which was kind of interesting psychology and there was a lot of reaction to it. I think it's got more than three thousand shares now.
Stu: Yeah, it's definitely one of your more intriguing ones. I like the way you did it. I saw it yesterday. OK, so it's been only a day and a bit.
So when I read it the first time I kind of knew what you were doing. And I was interested in it because the obvious thing for a journalist would be to say this guy is not from town, let's just bury them, you know, and not saying this is right, but this is what happens a lot. And people just kind of, much like you did, you know, you knew what the public response was probably going to be. You didn't feed into it, did not purposely anyway. I mean, you kind of put it out there for people to make their own minds up, which I think is the way to go. But I know lots of people that work in this industry that would have just gone right to. 'What is this guy doing here?' To me, that's the low hanging fruit of the story. I mean, obviously, people are going to be upset that he's here. But, yeah, the way you did it was very artful. And I really learn a lot from the way you present things. Most of the time, I guess we'll say, well, we don't always make the right calls. Right. But I mean, this one was, I wrote it in our little group chat. I said, 'This is going to be huge.' I wrote that yesterday morning.
But after I read it, I could just tell it was going to explode. I know, I've been out in the community. I know what the temperature is of the people. And everyone's really on edge because of the pandemic. And having this, it's a perfect villain when the world needs a villain. What you did so interesting is you didn't have to tell anyone that he was the villain. You let them decide. And not that he was actually the villain. I'm just using that…I think it depends on your point of view. But yeah, you let people decide, even though even if deep down, that's how you felt about the whole situation that never entered into your writing. Yeah. And the way, you know, the way it was presented, I think it takes people a long time to learn that skill where you can completely dislike someone and still present their story properly.
Dave: Well, one of the things I was thinking about when I did that. And, you know, I admit the headline was somewhat baited with the word tourist in it. But that's why I knew it would get more traction other than just a fishing story. But that was the only real bait I put on there. But I wanted that guy to get treated fairly in the reporting and not to be burned by the fact that I called them up and got information from him.
And I didn't want him to go away from that journalistic experience, feeling like he was thrown to the wolves. He knew there was going to be quite a bit of reaction to it. He understands the situation he is in, but he thanked me for being fair and telling the story well and giving it a chance because, you know, in a year or so he won't be looking at the comments. People will be looking at the story and it was more about fishing.
Yeah, I love ice fishing stories, by the way.
I got a story to tell. It was an adventure. I was going onto Callander Bay with my car for a fishing story. I think it was well into January, there's lots of ice, I thought, but maybe it was a little bit milder than I thought. I drove up on this one line of huts and there is this tent set up and it was a big tent, a lot of people. And so I was going to drive up to it. I knew there would be tourists more likely. So I wanted to talk to them. As I drove up to the hut, the wave of water caused by me driving across the bay towards them came up through all the holes in the tent and flooded them out.
They came scurrying out like groundhogs that are being drowned out of their holes. I pushed the water right up to two feet, covered everything in the tent.
When the guys came out and waved me away and told me to get out of there, I did. I just sort of rolled my window back up and kept driving. I didn't tell them I was a reporter, but then I came back two hours later and I went to the tent flap and put my head in and said, ‘Oh, jeez, it looks like I made it really wet in here. I introduced myself, apologized for flooding them out. And by then they had cooled down and they invited me in. I'm sure they offered me a beer. I'm not sure I took it.
But as I'm sitting there, they pull up a keeper walleye. Right. So I got a good photo of it. Good comments, stories and everything was cool, but it was a real adventure, sort of dealing with a sort of a misstep on my part.
What I did was, I did a real gut check and went back and I got rewarded for it. I could have just left and never went to them. I could have gone elsewhere. Right. But I really thought sometimes you have to do that gut check because it's not easy sometimes facing people that you've pissed off.
Right. So I forced myself to because I think they were owed an apology.
