Spent yesterday running all over town on various news stories. Hit pot activist Mark Emery’s bail hearing in the morning, and the Vancouver airport in the afternoon. (To see how travellers were feeling about the grounded flights to Toronto. Guess what? They were annoyed.)

It’s always annoying to spend a lot of time researching something and working on it, only to have it appear as a teeny 100 word piece – a definite draw back to working at a short-format publication that has little respect for good storytelling.

That said, yesterday was a good day. A story I’ve been working on for months (literally) finally got published. It was originally titled Chlamydia Nation. One of the organizations I interviewed – Options for Sexual Health (formerly Planned Parenthood) – actually called me to say how happy they were with the piece and to ask if they could republish it on their website. So that was kind of nice.

In other journalism-work-related news, last week’s books column is done, and new music pieces are up as well. The Turin Brakes piece was originally much longer. And the band gave a really great interview. But ads trump editorial, so it had to be cut at the last minute. Sucks. They’re a good band. And they’re REALLY nice guys too.

That’s all for now,
Jen

P.S. What’s up with the word proactive? Wasn’t the word active enough?

P.S. 2018-05-21: As I said in the postscript I added to my first post, at this point in 2005, I was working at a commuter daily print publication and writing and publishing up to five pieces each and every weekday. Sometimes these pieces were rewrites of wire stories, and sometimes they were supposed to be mere listings, with a little added flavour. Most often, however, I was expected to produce original pieces with original reporting. Pitching, writing, and most-importantly, researching and reporting, for so many pieces every day had me working at a frantic, unsustainable pace. I was also producing a weekly book column, and had to read a shitload to keep up with that. I was often on conference calls at 6 am (because I worked from Vancouver, from home, though I was told to say that I was in a “satellite office”, but most of the staff of Dose worked in Toronto, and we were forced to accommodate a Toronto schedule), so I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep. It was awful, but at every turn I had people telling me how “lucky” I was, and higher-ups at Dose telling me how “grateful” I should be. I think you can feel my resentment beginning to fester in the above post, but it was years before I truly realized what an exploitative and hostile work environment I’d become accustomed to.