Things we saw: Road trip in Eastern Europe

Town square at Piatra Neamt, Romania

Loved, loved, loved our three-week road trip through Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria in May and June. I came home with hundreds of photos, but also a bunch of video clips that I had no real plan for but we collected anyway. Glad we did, because the resulting half-hour video really captures the trip beautifully. A lot of the shots are out the front window of the car as we drove along, and captured the scenes that really call up memories of a place but often don't make it into your photo gallery.

We used Google Maps to guide us. Mostly it was just plain wonderful to have that service, because otherwise we would have been constantly lost. (We learned right at the start of our trip that Priority 1 upon arriving in any country was to get a local SIM card in our phones.) But it also took us on some of the strangest routes - often not the big freeways, which I was grateful for, but sometimes true backwaters that looked like they weren't even real roads.  And every now and then on a big freeway, we lost serious time when Googleova couldn't figure out what to do about a detour or major construction at an interchange, and sent us down the wrong road with no way to fix the error until the next exit - which in some cases was 30 kilometres down the road.

This video is recommended viewing for anyone who loves road trips but hasn't been on one for far too long, for no particular reason but just because they kind of forgot how much they love them. Watching this made me want to get back on the road all over again.

Journalism 101: Winning awards is one thing, consistent and solid local coverage is something else

Advice to Phillip Crawley, or any other boss poised to cut $10 million in salaries, none of which involves their own job: Don't try to dress that up as a positive thing.

 Yes, the Globe and Mail's reporting staff of 250 does seem unbelievably luxurious in the eyes of any other slashed-to-bits Canadian newsroom. And yes, I'm sure those who remain after this latest round of cuts announced this week will still do their best to maintain quality journalism.

But Crawley - G&M publisher - came across as tone-deaf, insensitive and pretty damn unaware of newsroom realities in the J-Source story about the coming cuts at Canada's national newspaper. Defending the cuts, he chose to cite the recent National Newspaper Awards win of the St. Catherines Standard with a skeletal staff of five reporters (down from 49 after years of cuts) as an example of how quality reporting doesn't require quantity.

Here's the thing: Sure, a newsroom with almost nobody left to do reporting might still be able to win a National Newspaper Award once in a while. But can it cover the non-award-worthy daily grind of local news that readers actually care about? Not a chance.

I only have to reflect back on my own time as managing editor of the Victoria Times Colonist in the mid-1990s, presiding over a newsroom staff still large enough that we were able to cover all the regular council meetings of Greater Victoria's 13 municipalities, and even keep an eye on the three school boards in the region. Oh, those were the days.

Nobody wins national awards for the quotidian coverage of council and school board. But those kinds of stories are the lifeblood of a good local newspaper. Those are the stories that keep councils mindful of their actions, citizens aware of what their municipalities are up to, and maintain a general sense of news coverage that stays on top of the local scene.

What is being lost in the ongoing cuts to mainstream media is average "beat" reporting. It's the kind of reporting that keeps politicians on track and citizens in the loop. It's the unremarkable yet critically important foundation to democracy. And nobody has been able to figure out how to make it happen in the new age of digital media that no one wants to pay for.

What to do? Worry, I'd say. Subscribe to the daily newspapers that matter to you, though subscription costs seem very much out of whack with the sad-looking products that pass for daily newspapers these days. And I'm sure you'll have noticed already that local news coverage is a shadow of its former self compared to what it was back in what I now think of as the golden era (though cuts were already happening even 20 years ago), because it's the coverage that costs the most.

Do send donations to the digital news sources that you rely on, because quality journalism simply can't exist without somebody paying. The Tyee online newspaper fundraises to hire reporters for specific local issues - better than nothing for sure, but not able to sustain a fleet of reporters grinding it out on the unsexy but essential coverage of daily life in our communities.

So ignore guys like Crawley when they tell you that a $10 million cut in newsroom staffing isn't going to hurt the quality of journalism. He's wrong.