We bring home two JHM awards
While you were busy crying over your first week of classes, The Concordian’s staff was busy off in Toronto attending the Canadian University Press’ 78th national conference, otherwise known as NASH. This meant we were hurtled through four days of intensive workshops, lectures, talks, roundtables, and classes. And wow, did we learn and do a lot.
During Saturday’s JHM awards we competed with papers across the nation and took home two awards. Our head copy editor Nathalie Laflamme won the best feature writing award with her story about “Helping student veterans succeed and survive,” and our photo editor Andrej Ivanov won best photo of the year with “Student protests turn violent,” for the second year in a row. This is The Concordian’s third year in a row winning best photo of the year at the JHM awards, previously awarded to our former photo editor Keith Race. Ivanov was also one of the three finalists for the student photojournalist of the year.
Sunday’s plenary saw CUP figuratively burnt down and then rebuilt. The entire current board was fired and a new board hired, with our news editor Gregory Todaro elected as Quebec’s regional representative for CUP.
We’re back in the office today producing the first issue of 2016 and bursting with new ideas, energy, and directions that we want to take the paper. Your paper, essentially. But hoarding all of these new ideas to ourselves would be unfair, so we want to invite you to come join us in our office at Loyola on Jan. 15 at 2 p.m. for our NASH 78 debrief.
If you can not make it to our (rad as hell) office however, here is a super quick breakdown of what we did and learned over in Toronto.
Words are powerful, use the right ones
“Indigenous” is a term generally prefered over “aboriginal,” which is prefered over “native.” Always ask a source what pronoun or adjective they would prefer however, which should be a general rule of thumb for all sources.
Don’t no harm
Marginalized communities never belong to the place that marginalizes them. It is wrong to say, “Canada’s Indigenous population,” and should instead be written as, “The Indigenous people of Canada.”
Online safety for all
Feministfrequency.com is an invaluable source for female reporters to ensure online safety which all reporters and women on the internet in general should know about.
Dealing with trolls
If people on the internet are being abusive or inappropriate ever, they have voided all of their rights for your professional response. Troll them right on back or ignore them, or delete their comments, throw your laptop in the river and set the river on fire. Better yet, throw their flaming laptop in the river.
Get perspective
Journalism sometimes requires reporters to cover heavy stories or be heavily critiqued. Befriend people outside of the journalism field to vent about your job, because they will either be an accountant and super sympathetic, or will be a trauma nurse and give you perspective when they explain how a patient literally died in their arms that day.
Tell a story
Video stories should be told similar to any other kind of story. Remember that outline your English grade-school teachers made you do, with the intro, context, rising action, climax, and resolution? Or was that sex-ed? If you want to tell a video story break it down into these five crucial elements and you’ll have a solid story-telling technique, er’time.
Get good at one thing
If you want to be a successful reporter, or person in general, find something you really love and get really good at it. This extends beyond the journalism realm because, if you were an accountant and specialized in municipal tax anomalies, that is just something else to pad your resume with when applying for jobs. So go out and tweet about hot dogs, specialize in German Christian metal origins, and be able to calculate percentages in your head without a calculator.
We also ate some hotdogs, drank some Ottawa wine, got a private tour of City Hall with Toronto mayor John Tory, and met some awesome working journalists.
See you Friday for some stories, snacks, new ideas, and possibly an overhaul of our paper.
