What I Wrote and What I Wish I Wrote in 2016
This year has been a painful one. Donald Trump was elected president. Britain voted to leave the European Union. Gord Downie has terminal brain cancer.
It’s also been a tough year for journalism. As print advertising revenue continues to decline, more printing presses have closed and according to the Canadian Media Guild, we have lost 16,500 journalism jobs since 2008. Some reporters go on to start new publications, but they’re the exceptions. We have fewer people covering local governments, fewer people keeping an eye on companies and the courts, and fewer original stories. The same thing has been happening in the United States, and I predict that the trends happening there — the rise of fake news and a growing disdain for the “media elite” — will come to Canada too.
Journalists made mistakes during their coverage of the U.S. election campaign. But you can’t say they didn’t call out the candidates’ false claims. The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale found that Donald Trump lied 560 times. PolitiFact (a fact-checker run by the Tampa Bay Times) fact-checked Trump more than 300 times, finding that 70 percent of his claims were false. (Hillary Clinton’s falsehood percentage was about 26%, by the way). Did truth matter to voters? If not, what’s the point being a journalist? These sure are troubled times.
Continuing in last year’s tradition, I’m sharing some of my favourite stories from 2016. Some have my byline, but most come from my version of what Bloomberg Businessweek calls their “jealousy list.” As we approach the holiday season, I hope we all have more time to read deeply and consider subscribing to the media outlets we most value. Good journalism takes time and money.
This year, my second in Edmonton, I worked on finding stories that no one else was reporting. Some of the stories I’m most proud of include a feature on girls who play for their all-boys football teams, a story about the revival of the long-struggling chapel in the West Edmonton Mall, and one about students who are trying to improve climate change education. I wrote about people who fled to Edmonton from the wildfire in Fort McMurray and the people here who rushed to their assistance. I’ve also been writing a monthly column and the occasional feature for Canadian Running magazine on topics like course certification, run-commuting, prize money inequity and cheating. To read the column, I’m afraid you’ll have to subscribe to the magazine!
And now for my jealousy list:
“The Most Exclusive Restaurant in America,” Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker
In this story, Nick Paumgarten profiles Damon Baehrel, whose restaurant is reportedly booked through 2025 and relies almost exclusively on ingredients the chef grows in his backyard in upstate New York. The descriptions of food here are exquisite. (The guy spends years making his own flour from acorn and cedar, for goodness sake.) But the story’s unbelievable, in a bad way. Paumgarten realizes that the chef’s garden hardly seems big enough to provide for so many guests. Cheese experts say it would be highly unlikely that he could make three dozen cheeses without a standard curdling enzyme. Baehrel refuses to disclose his suppliers and Paumgarten keeps coming across things that don’t quite check out. This story fascinated me because it explores our culture’s obsession with eating local. One man’s creative quest to become fully self-sufficient is tied up with mystery and potentially deception.
“The Phenom,” Michael Zokolove, The New York Times Magazine
I am a sucker for a good sports story. This one explains, in great detail and with stunning photographs, why Katie Ledecky is such a badass swimmer. In this profile we feel the force of a woman who is working as hard as she can to push the limits of her body, and to hell with corporate sponsorships and boys who can’t keep up. Here’s what a male teammate has to say about training with her:
“She is no easy task to beat in practice, even as a male,” he said. “I didn’t get broken by her, so I’m happy with that… I saw her break a lot of guys in practice. … What I mean is if we’re doing a 3K threshold she’ll just start beating you every single hundred, and slowly but surely you get broken like you do in a long race, like a mile. Your morale goes down pretty quickly when you get broken by a female in practice. I saw a couple of guys have to get yanked out of workout because they got beat by her.”
When the journalist asked Ledecky about this, the swimmer claimed she hadn’t noticed. “I was probably just concentrating on doing my own work,” she said. Beyonce couldn’t have said it better.
“How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News,” Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, BuzzFeed News
This one is for the folks who still think BuzzFeed publishes nothing but viral videos and cat listicles. BuzzFeed understands — better than a lot of traditional publications do — how the Internet and social media work. In this jaw-dropping story, Canadian journalist Craig Silverman and contributor Lawrence Alexander tell the story of how teenagers profited by publishing fake, pro-Trump news stories. They traced more than 100 pro-Trump sites to a town in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. This story helped revive an important conversation about news literacy and the market for fake news. Obama has talked about this story “obsessively.” For a similar, more in-depth feature on people doing this in North America, read this piece by Terrence McCoy.
“Her Loss” by Lindy West, The New York Times
The U.S. election results led to an outpouring of emotions, in America and beyond. This op-ed, which was likely written very quickly, captures sadness and loss from a female perspective. On Nov. 9, when a group of reporters in my newsroom huddled in front of a TV to watch Hillary Clinton speak, I noticed that only the women among us had tears in our eyes.
“I cried because I want my daughters to feel that blazing pride, that affirmation of their boundless capacity — not from their husbands, but from their world, from the atmosphere, from inviolable wells of certainty inside themselves. I cried because it’s not fair, and I’m so tired, and every woman I know is so tired. I cried because I don’t even know what it feels like to be taken seriously — not fully, not in that whole, unequivocal, confident way that’s native to handshakes between men. I cried because it does things to you to always come second.”
This article affirmed part of what I was felt on Nov. 9 in an emphatic, poetic way. But it also left me with some hope: “The fact that we lost doesn’t make us wrong; the fact that they don’t believe in us doesn’t make us disappear.”
“Private schools, painful secrets,” the Spotlight team (reporters Jenn Abelson, Bella English, Jonathan Saltzman and Todd Wallack, with editors Scott Allen and Amanda Katz), The Boston Globe
If you saw the movie Spotlight, you’ll have an idea of what the reporting for this piece, which is about sexual abuse and harassment at New England private schools, required. This story also makes great use of multimedia. There are videos with survivors and a drop-down menu you can use to search for data on specific schools.
“Dear readers: Please stop calling us ‘the media.’ There is no such thing.” Paul Farhi, The Washington Post
Paul Farhi captured a sentiment that has frustrated me for a long time. People are fond of blaming “the mainstream media” (MSM) or even “the media” for any problem under the sun. But there’s no such thing. There is no conference where we all gather, no handbook we all consult, no opinion we all share — even within companies and individual newsrooms. That’s why “calling out ‘the media’ makes about as much sense as calling out ‘people.’ Some are fair, some aren’t. But they’re not all the same. It pays to know which is which,” he writes. When we complain about the stories that disappoint us, we should be saying exactly what parts we disagree with, and why. We should be informing reporters of coverage gaps and telling them when we think things aren’t true or fair.
“Wanted: One journalist to write, edit, lay out, and deliver a newspaper,” David Uberti, Columbia Journalism Review
My peers laughed when reading the requirements for this journalism job in Alaska: “As the editor/reporter, you will be be responsible for writing every story, laying out every issue, sending it to the printers and picking it up in Whitehorse, two hours away. You and our business manager are also responsible for distributing the papers throughout town and mailing them to the Lower 48.” Oy! David Uberti, a Columbia Journalism School classmate now working for the Columbia Journalism Review tracked down the woman who took this job and the woman who ran the paper for a year and a half before that. It’s a great example of a valuable “follow-up” story, which journalists rarely get the chance to write these days.
“While Giordano held the paper’s paid summer internship in 2013, she lived in a tiny apartment attached to its newsroom. An old darkroom had been converted into a kitchen. The bathroom showerhead didn’t work at the time, she adds, ‘so I used a big yogurt cup instead.’”
“Love in Translation,” Lauren Collins, The New Yorker
Lauren Collins beautifully describes the joys and frustrations of learning another language. (Some of you might know I have spent the past year learning Norwegian.) I loved the slow pace of this article, and how she expertly balanced scenes from language classes and conversations with her husband with information from linguists and amusing definitions and nuggets from other languages.
“More than any juice cleanse or lottery win or career switch, a foreign language adumbrates a vision of a parallel life. The fantasy is that learning one activates a latent alter ego, righting a linguistic version of having been switched at birth. Could I, would I, become someone else if I spoke French?”
“My Father’s House,” Reggie Ugwu, BuzzFeed News
In this memoir, the author recounts a trip to Nigeria and the symbolism of the house his father had built for the family. It’s a detailed and loving portrait of a family and a father and it’s full of beautiful, rhythmic sentences like this one:
“When I think of my dad walking, I think of his shoulders. They’re broad and slice purposefully through the air on a course just a couple degrees shy of George Jefferson.”
“He Left Me for a Woman Who Uses Two Spaces After a Period,” Anna Drezen, Reductress
Time for some comic relief. Reductress has delightfully filled some of the void left by The Toast, a wonderful and whimsical website that closed on July 1. This article is one of my favourites this year because it entertains and educates. Every time I encounter a person/dinosaur who puts two spaces after a period, I send over this screed.
“We are all authors, our lives are our stories, and each paragraph is a life experience through which we captain ourselves. And now, after eight years of marriage, all his paragraphs will look like loose turds because of all the extraneous spaces because he’s dating a woman who hits the spacebar twice after sentence-closing punctuation. I picture her rubbing one of those stupid, shitty thumbs over his lips the way she runs them unnecessarily over that long, thin key, and it makes me want to give up. How can love exist when it ends? And how can it end at the twitchy hands of a double-spacer?”
As I did last year, I’ll end this rambling mess by tacking on my song and book round-ups from the past year.
