A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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 r...

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 re...

Red Umbrella March - courtesy of Peers Victoria This piece of mine started as a total rant that I imagined going on my blog or perhaps a BC newspaper. But for various reasons I ended up sending it to the editor of JSource, the website for the Canadian Journalism Project . And here it is , hot off the press today, rewritten into less rant-like style but better because of it. *** The Edmonton Journal ran a  series on sex trafficking  in March. At least, that’s what the headlines said, even though none of the sex workers in the piece were actually being trafficked and nobody was charged with trafficking. Some might say those two details kind of cancel out the premise of the series. But I’ve been taking in news coverage of sex work for a long time, and dressing up a story to look like something that it isn’t is tragically common. It’s as if all the usual journalistic instincts to present a fair story and get the facts go out the window when somebody says “sex traffi...

The tragic suicide by car of a 24-year-old on the Pat Bay Highway on Sunday takes me back to another similar suicide back in 2000 that I wrote about for the Times Colonist.  There's a whole other set of victims when people kill themselves in the manner that these two young men did, 19 years apart. Whoever is in the vehicle when a person randomly picks a moment to step into the road and be killed is almost certainly going to be haunted forever by that stranger's decision. Here's my column on Ian Davidson's suicide on the Malahat in 2000, and a wish that ICBC does not play rough with the people involved in Sunday's tragedy like it did with the Coopsie family 19 years ago.  *** Jody Paterson column in TC, January 2000 Davidson settled on death a long time ago. The only question was who would be the killer. It turned out to be the Coopsie family, picked randomly from among the many travellers making their way north on the Malahat on that sunny af...

Reading this piece  on rising greenhouse gas emissions in today's Guardian reminded me of those old movie scenes where some character gives another one a good slap to snap them out of whatever foolish thinking they're engaging in. In this case, the crazy thinking would involve anything to do with believing that the world is actually jumping on the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. Nope. Energy use last year grew at its fastest pace of the decade. It was a "golden year" for gas, with consumption up 10 per cent in the US alone. That increase alone is equivalent to the UK's entire consumption of gas in a year. I hate to be Nelly Negative, but this does more or less reaffirm my belief in humanity's ability to respond to a life-threatening - all life, everywhere - crisis. Unlike those apocalyptic Hollywood movies where citizens dig deep into untapped reserves of strength, ingenuity and hope to save the planet, I have long suspected that in fact we'd a...