WRITING for Dose | 2018: So as mentioned in previous posts, I was recruited internally from the Vancouver Sun to work at Dose in late 2004. The job started in early 2005. Basically, while I was busy languishing away at the photo desk of the Sun, and writing stories on the side, I was told that Canwest was launching a “youth magazine” and that I should send some writing samples and apply for a full-time writing gig. I did. I was hired. It was all very exciting at the time.

What a sweet summer child I was.

I was told I’d work from a “satellite office” (otherwise known as my apartment), and that I’d be expected to produce around five stories every day, but that I shouldn’t worry, because some of these would be short (think 100-word movie reviews) and others would be simple rewrites/edits of wire stories (this may become important to know later), and all would be arts/entertainment-based. Unfortunately, once things got rolling, I was told that I’d been “mistaken” about getting to write entertainment pieces, and that I would, in fact, have to write a significant amount of hard and local news.

Great. Just what I’d signed up for!

Turns out, writing for Dose sucks (or sucked, and likely still does).

Over the course of my time at Dose, I produced more than a hundred short news pieces (and additional hundreds of other various pieces). I’m not going to include the news pieces on the site for the most part, because the subjects are boring and the writing is bad. Shown below are a handful of examples of the sort of news pieces I’m talking about. I had to write at least a couple of these yellow nightmares approximately every day. The specific ones shown below are from Dose‘s first week in print.

I was also assigned a lot of stories I had absolutely no interest in that weren’t news. For example, I was told to find a 17 year old kid, about to graduate from high school, and ask him if we at Dose could “follow” him for the next … 16 years.

16 FUCKING YEARS.

Because working with self-important, idiotic, totally unequipped bros is fun.

Dose had just launched, and the senior editors (all late-20s/early 30-something dudes) seriously asked me to do this. I had to pitch this to a kid. The idea that Dose would still be publishing in print in 16 years was beyond idiotic, but since the  absurd assignment came from the douchey bro higher ups (one, a high school drop out with an advertising background, but no journalism experience; another the son of a senior Canwest employee in Alberta; a third the child of a former owner of the Toronto Blue Jays with no legitimate journalism or writing credentials to speak of, etc. etc. ETC.), I couldn’t exactly refuse. The boys club that made up Dose‘s initial Senior Editorial staff was staggeringly obnoxious, but not to be defied.

My Dose business card, 2005.

Anyway, I tried to talk my way out of this horrific assignment, and failed. It was implied that refusal would be akin to ungratefulness and would put my job in jeopardy. So I asked around my friend circle until I found someone with a younger brother willing to participate. The kid didn’t take it at all seriously (and why should he have?). It was incredibly embarrassing. I’ve included my first piece on him below, as well, for posterity’s sake, but like the shitty news pieces, I won’t chronicle them on the website.

Because they suck.

Writing for Dose sucked, and a fair bit of the writing I produced at the time sucked too.

So all this is just to say that while I wrote something like 300 print pieces for Dose during my time there, many many fewer are worth republishing here on my site, so I’ll be pretty selective in the coming days as I upload only the pieces that are slightly-less-embarrassing than most. (You couldn’t pay me to re-read a lot of this stuff, let alone re-type it. Sorry.)

It’s a low bar, I know.

Look, I was now a “professional journalist”. Card-carrying (card shown above, by the way.) But I was also still a baby in a lot of ways. I knew nothing. And it showed.

Select “news” stories in Dose, by Jen Selk, April 2005.

The first piece I was forced to do on a kid named Mark Giammarino, for which I apologize profusely.