Interview with Dylan Robertson, Ottawa Correspondent
Dylan Robertson is the Ottawa correspondent for the Winnipeg FreePress. He has also written for the Toronto Star and the Calgary Herald. Some responses have been edited for clarity.
How did you get into journalism?
It was the newsletter in high school that i was interested in because there was this girl who was in the newsletter who kept on bragging about it, and I guess it was out of jealously or a vanity project. I wrote a simple book review for it, saw my name in print, and it was just a cool feeling that people might actually read what you put out into the world. There was a program through the Catholic newspaper in Canada called the You Speak News, which was for high school and university-age people who are Catholic, and you would write about things going on in your church or a column you had been reflecting on in the news, or religious lives, and that kind of was the same thing. It was cool to see my name in print, and I thought that it was something that I was good at, just writing and just being nosy. I always liked to approach people because I was always curious about things, and how people see the world, and what they’re interested in, so that was kind of a start. From that, I enrolled in the general writing program, and I got heavily involved with the student newspaper, which was in a way, more worthwhile, because we had deadlines, a paper to put , and it was all hand out on deck. I got to meet interesting people through the paper, and got make choices about what should go in the paper. You know, you still get that in the general program, but it’s much slower because it starts with a general “How do we think about journalism?”, which was also very helpful, but the school newspaper was sort of like a crash-course into journalism.
How do you go about writing and researching for articles?
It kind of depends on what the actual topic is, but I typically start with archives, especially when I’m writing in a publication. I currently work for the Winnipeg Free Press, which is a big newspaper in Winnipeg as the Ottawa correspondent. Often times, I’m not familiar with the topics that I’m writing about because I’m not from Winnipeg, the city, or Manitoba, the province. When I hear about something, like a member of Parliament raising a certain issue, I usually search that exact term. For example, there’s this highway project in Winnipeg that has been an issue for a while, or a national park that they tried to get contracting for, I’ll take that, search it in the archives; we have access to a database called Proquest, which has all the Canadian newspapers. I try to find out who has written about it in the past, who was contracted, etc. I think everybody starts with a Google search, everyone starts with Wikipedia, which I think is a pretty good start because they do have the original sources at the bottom. Of course, you always have to take the description at the top with a grain of salt because people can get things wrong, or manipulate it, etc., but the footnotes at the bottom can lead you to who started a certain program, when did it come about, what’s the website, etc. which I think is a good launch pad into the research process. I try to get people on the phone pretty quickly. It’s more of interviewing, than research, but you get a better sense of what people are interested in or if they really know what they are talking about. You can always prepare an email, but on the phone, you typically get a real impression from someone. Often times, it’s good to ask those people if there are other people I should contact or anything else I should read about.
What about procrastinating/ losing focus?
Um, that’s a big one. I find that it’s good to be accountable. I’m not in the newsroom, I’m in Ottawa and everyone else is in Winnipeg, and they have meetings 3–4 times a day, that is based on a daily schedule. I have someone that I’m supposed to report to for the meetings, and I know that they always have the 1:30 meeting. I need to know what direction my story is going in by the 1:30 meeting, which serves as an external motivator because I know that I can’t procrastinate, because I have to have something to bring forward. I find that often, it just helps to have a whiteboard or a notebook where I can just write things down that I don’t have to think about because it helps me externalize what I need to do. If there’s a story idea, or something that I should follow up on, it can be pretty easy to get overwhelmed in whatever the assignment of the day is.
Deadlines are often a huge motivator, but it’s sort of a double-edged sword because I do often have daily deadlines and I know that I have to deliver something, but when it’s a longer-term project, I totally get that. I set up a bunch of reminders on my iPhone to follow-up with people. I usually do them at random times, such as after a meeting, I’ll set up a time on a random date to follow-up on the story. Procrastinating, often time, I think is related to emotional energy. If you have a story that you’re working on for so long, that you found to be really important or really difficult, it’s hard to motivate yourself when you think of it as this big thing due. You could think that this is going to take long to do, or if an interview was really long, it may take long to transcribe it, which makes you want to procrastinate.
Also, allotting enough time to do the tasks that you have at hand really helps. When I’m done calling people, that’s when I have a lot of free time to work on something. I’ll type up the transcripts of the calls, and then I’ll work until my phone rings again. I think that a big part of time management, it’s not really procrastinating, but it can be useful to know when someone is saying something interesting. My recorder has a button that puts into a file, when someone says something really interesting. While I’m doing the interview, I’ll have a stopwatch and use the button, so then when I have a 35-minute interview, I know that I need 26 minutes of it instead. Then, when they’re speaking, I record their ideas every two minutes, which makes it easier to break down. When I first started out, I would transcribe the whole interview, only to use one line, so it took me a while to find a more efficient way.
What is your favorite article that you have written? Or is there a certain type of article that you enjoy writing more? Why?
The one that I remember the most because it was weird is that there was this cow in Alberta, which is north of Montana, where the cow died, and it’s not clear as to whether the cow exploded or if it had an amputation by some Satanic cult. I was working in Calgary in the Calgary Herald, and someone called up and said “This really weird thing has happened in Dogtown, Alberta,” which I thought was not a real place, but I looked it up, found out it was around half an hour from the city, I drove down there, asked around, found the farm. This woman had saw her cow in the field not moving, and it was dead, but it was missing part of it’s intestines. Like it’s udders were gone, and there was no blood, but the police investigated it and thought it was a methane issue, as in the cow ate a herb, but the herb got bigger and the stomach exploded, but the farmer wondered where did the organ go after because it’s stomach was missing. There were all these conspiracy theories online about Satanic cults that do these weird rituals where they cut these cows open, and take parts of the cow, and then there are people who think that aliens actually do this cows. It was just such a weird story because this very nice, eager, and sincere farm lady was so puzzled as to what happened to her cow, and we couldn’t even use the photos because they were too graphic. It kind of illustrated what a really story is and how weird the world can be, but you can have fun with it and drive down to a farm, and learn about a cow that exploded.
A more serious answer, is that the stories that matter to me are the ones that involve holding the government accountable for their actions. Often times, people get overlooked, sometimes they live in a part of the country that didn’t vote for the government, they don’t have a lot of power, or there is an underlying mistake in the bureaucracy. A project that I’m looking at right now about First Nation people that live on reserves in Canada and the federal government is supposed to provide day care for the children on those reserves. The federal government has not changed funding for the program in twenty years. The day care is getting smaller and smaller, because the cost is going up, but there’s also a baby boom within the First Nation people. You have more kids , less day care spots, and there’s no private market solution to this either, so people are un-enrolling out of college, which is really crazy when you have a baby boom, there are more young people, and you’re trying to get more people to work and out of poverty, and this program is just putting them back in this cycle. The program is designed in a way that the number of unemployed spots they have for moms is based off of need, whereas the number of spots in day care is based off of a number calculated in 1995. People are losing enrollment in day care, so they drop out of college to get a spot in day care, since there is preference for unemployed or non-college educated households. It’s a complicated issue, but these are people who would not have any real political power, and it’s really important that their story is heard because there are many notions about First Nations people in Canada in that they are all welfare thieves, that they are all lazy, that they are all alcoholics, etc. It’s important to get these people to trust you to tell their story accurately because they are on the short end of the stick. They gave me more time with this story because there are many underlying issues that needed to be addressed first because we needed to get into “Why did this happen?”, “How it is affecting people?”, “What does it look like?”, and “How many people are affected by the issue?”
Favorite book?
I read a lot of magazines, newspapers, and articles online, but honestly, the books that I’ve read are mainly graphic novels. I think Louis Riel by Chester Brown is my favorite. Louis Riel is a historical figure from the Manitoba/Winnipeg area, and he led this rebellion with the Méthis people, who are mostly descendants of First Nations women and European men who were there in the first raid back in the 1800s. He led this rebellion that gained attention from the Canadian government. He was schizophrenic, who would have visions, and see apparitions of God, but he heavily impacted Canadian history, and he’s such an interesting, bizarre character. He goes from being this regular guy living in a settlement, as Canada did not really exist back then except for Toronto and Montreal, and they get attacked by “the outside”, forcing them to join Canada, which then causes Riel to lead this rebellion. It’s a crazy story and the way it is told in the book is really interesting because you really get a sense of what life was like in the 1800s, which made it really immersive. It gives a good sense of how this complex character existed, and how people perceived him, and how this rebellion impacts politics in the prairies of Canada. It was kind of like journalism, except it was on a completely different medium that did such a good job at explaining what happened, what it might have looked like, and how people might have felt about it.
