Welcome to episode five of Reporters Shop Talk, I’m Stu Campaigne a reporter for BayToday here with Dave Dale, a long time reporter, and a bit of a sage to me.
Stu: Today, we're going to talk about how being a journalist, you might have an idea of what's going to happen at seven o'clock in the morning, but things can certainly change quickly.
Dave: Oh, yeah, that's the basic premise of being a reporter, is that you can plan your day, but the day is going to plan you.
Stu: We've been talking about this, we're throwing some topics around, you know, and we've really enjoyed doing these podcast episodes so far. But, you know, we're starting to get into comparing things to what's going on in our careers currently where we've looked back quite a bit to get a lot of insight on some different topics, photography and recording interviews, for just two of them that I can think of. But today we're talking about things that have happened recently.
A recent, you know, really well-received article you wrote where, you know, it wasn't really planned that you were going to end up doing it that day. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Dave: Sure. Well, last Wednesday, I was sitting here looking at doing some research on two stories, one had to do with the municipal affairs and believe it was a rezoning that the resident wanted to oppose. And then there was another story I was researching, both of them quite involved. I'm not sure either of them were going to get done that day.
But, when I saw on Facebook, somebody posted something about a deer being rescued on Lake Nosbonsing…I hesitated a little bit because I had some phone calls coming, but I knew for sure that a live deer rescue on the ice was going to be better than anything else I could do. So I eventually I, you know, you got to decide whether to fish or cut bait. So I decided to go fish and I jumped in the car. I was halfway there when I got the phone call back from a lady that lived right on the shoreline and I just missed it. They just finished taking the third deer off the ice. So I had to, weigh the risk and the benefit of going the rest of the way to try to capture some interviews with the people that are still there…if they hung around, or I got a name of somebody I could go to worked halfway there at the TimberMart in Astorville, and she was involved so I knew I could talk to her.
We have a long-standing relationship because our kids played hockey together and I've covered her kids. So we knew each other well. So I knew for sure if she was there, she would help me pull the story together. And that's the way it happened. And it turned out to be a nice little rescue story. And jeez, I think we got 5,000 shares on that one, which was a big one. That's it's big numbers for us. So, yeah, it was it was a nice sort of positive story.
I think everybody was in the mood for something positive because of COVID and all the negativity of budget discussions and municipalities turning themselves inside out.
So it was a well-timed positive story and it was a decision just to go for that instead.
Stu: Yeah, and it was really well done by you.
And a lot of times, the biggest part of the battle is to, you know, kind of ascertain what is news these days. But then, you know, like you were saying, if you're working on two or other things, you've got to prioritize quickly and act sometimes quicker than others. But you did. It looks like you made the right choice in this case.
Dave: Well, tell me about some of your experiences. I know you have them.
Stu: Yeah, for sure. Well, the most recent one I can think of is Friday, this past Friday, Friday morning, there was an overnight fire at the Northgate Shopping Centre in North Bay, which turned out to be an arson or a suspected arson. So this is a little different than your take on it. But for me, I had a whole day planned of things to do. I cover city hall, North Bay. They're right in the midst of budget discussions, kind of getting down towards the end and whittling away at that number. And I had planned Friday to go through, you know, they've been doing three and a half, four-hour meetings some nights.
So what I've been doing is watching as much as I can or try to get at least half watched and getting some sleep and then getting up really early in the morning and watching the rest and then writing my report from that meeting. So Friday morning, it was supposed to be the same thing. I was going to get up early and I was going to get back into the budget stuff. And the first thing I saw when I woke up was this fire call, which we get by email. And it actually had come in at 3:30 in the morning, but I got to it just around six. And there was about five seconds of, oh, my day is going to be shot, but that was it. But there's really no choice when it's something like that. So in the car I go and, you know, you put on the toque and get down to the scene and start collecting information. And that's what we did. So really, I mean, the day I had planned Friday was nothing like what it was planned. So I end up writing the first kind of the initial “at the scene” story.
And then I actually went over and covered MPP Fedeli, who had a presser over at his office. So while they did that, I coordinated with Jeff back at the office and he covered the announcement from the police that they had arrested a suspect. So he covered that. And then by the time I got back to my home office, I had the story from the mall, you know, the people that run the Northgate Shopping Centre that they were going to try to open. So there's another story. So we did three stories back to back within about two or three hours and I covered an event at Fedeli’s office. And the fire story evolved a little bit from there, but not too far. We did find out they wouldn't, in fact, open Friday, but we're planning to Saturday morning. So that's a pretty busy day for me anyways.
Dave: Oh, it’s a good rush, the way you feel energized when that is happening.
Stu: Yeah. I mean, I don't even notice the time go by like it was weird. Around 11 o'clock in the morning I was thinking, wow, when I got out of bed, I've been on kind of cruise control ever since.
