Language Engineer

Protection likely for Bethany Hope Centre #OTTpoli #hintonburg

2012-01-12T14:21:00.000-05:00

It looks as though city staff will recommend heritage designation for parts of the Bethany Hope Centre and the report could make its way to city council faster than previously thought.

The centre is located at 1140 Wellington Street West and has received some attention over the past year as a potential site for the Hintonburg Hub.

Kitchissippi councillor Katherine Hobbs provided a heads up to community members of the designation recommendation. She said the intention is to include the 1924 portions of the building and front lawn under the designation. A later addition at the back of the building and the rear yard would not be included in the designation.

The councillor's media coordinator said the report is not yet finalized.

The report will be made public January 26, 2012 and will likely go through the advisory committee, planning committee and to council in February.

Just a little UPDATE. For more, see the previous post.

What happens to the Bethany Hope Centre now?

2012-01-09T10:30:00.003-05:00

The Salvation Army property on Wellington West is so closely associated with the Hintonburg Hub plan that for at least 12 hours after I broke news of a new potential location for the Hub, on OpenFile Ottawa, a picture of the Bethany Hope Centre accompanied the story. Funny.

Condos seem obvious. It's a huge property, on a trendy main street with a recently renovated streetscape, but several factors could make the property less attractive to developers.

HERITAGE DESIGNATION

The Bethany Hope Centre building may be eligible for heritage designation. A report on the potential heritage status of the centre will likely go before the Ottawa Built Heritage Advisory Committee as early as February and could move on to Planning Committee and City Council by March or April. A heritage designation, if it comes, could limit the kinds of changes a potential developer could make to the building and/or the property. Good news if you like heritage. Bummer if you want to develop.

HEIGHT LIMIT

There is also a limit on the height of any potential building on the site to a maximum of 6 storeys or 20 meters. The Salvation Army has filed an appeal with the Ontario Municipal Board with a prehearing currently scheduled for late January. Prior to the adoption of Wellington West Community Design Plan there had been no height restriction on the property. The Salvation Army wants that height limit overturned.

SOIL CONTAMINATION AND EASEMENT

Soil contamination is also a potential issue. Hintonburg historian Linda Hoad has, apparently, found that an adjoining property at the corner of Rosemont and Welington Ave West had been a gas station beginning in the 1930s. Hoad had also discovered a storm sewer easement at the rear of the property. Although it's not clear whether that sewer, which dates back to 1910, is still used by the city.

Taken together, it makes you wonder if the price ($3-million to $4-million) that the hub partners were being asked to pay wasn’t a little high.

Jay Baltz has wrote about the importance of the building and surrounds (as well as some of these issues) for Spacing Ottawa in the spring. It still makes interesting reading.

Unfortunately, the next step for Bethany Hope probably won’t get the same kind of attention if the Hub really has moved on.

Mapping Food Availability

2012-01-05T10:30:00.001-05:00

The plan was to map food availability, specifically how far folks must travel to get the everyday essentials like milk, eggs and bread.

We all know smaller supermarkets and corner grocery stores are closing to be replace by much larger and centralized superstores, which leaves many of us traveling (usually by car) to keep ourselves supplied, but it's really hard to capture that trend which really plays out at the neighbourhood level. That was the idea: Big map + local detail = big picture. Or something like that. This map has some problems, but I'm tossing it out there as an experiment of interest.

The map is based on 2006 business information from Statistics Canada which makes use of the North American Industry Classification System. Most of the markers indicate businesses with the NAICS classification number 445110. It's supposed to be supermarkets and other grocery stores, but NOT convenience stores. Here's the NAICS description:

This industry comprises establishments generally known as supermarkets and grocery stores primarily engaged in retailing a general line of food, such as canned and frozen foods; fresh fruits and vegetables; and fresh and prepared meats, fish, and poultry. Included in this industry are delicatessen-type establishments primarily engaged in retailing a general line of food.

If you click on the map you'll notice many corner grocery stores that I think are much closer to convenience stores fall under this classification. Some of the information is also badly out of date. In the Hintonburg neighbourhood, for example, I can see four small grocery and delis that no longer exist (Market 168, Kardish, Nesrallah's M&M Supermarket, Royal Food Market). On the other hand, it does (somewhat) illustrate the decline in corner grocery stores and the consolidation of larger supermarkets, which is why I was interested in mapping the data in the first place.

If I have time, I may go through the 300 or so entries and classify them as supermarkets, grocery stores or delis.

Meanwhile, please let me know if anything jumps out at you from the map. I'm still not sure exactly what (if anything) I will do with this one.

Mapping Defibrillators

2011-12-19T14:08:00.000-05:00

Further to the previous post, here is a much simpler map, which shows public access defibrillators broken down by City Ward.

Yup, them lovely hues each correspond with the total AEDs (automated external defibrillator) per ward:

7 to 12 RED
12 to 17 ORANGE
17 to 22 GREEN
22 to 28 LIGHT BLUE
28 to 33 BLUE
33 to 38 YELLOW (none in this range)
38 to 43 PURPLE
43 to 48 VIOLET

I've also included an estimate per capita (just to keep things in perspective). Defibrillators in police cruisers, fire vehicles and ambulances mean the levels in any one ward can change minute to minute. See the previous post for deets on those totals.

Does Ottawa have enough public access defibrillators?

2011-12-18T11:30:00.000-05:00

PHOTO: debaird via flickr

Public defibrillators have been getting some good press lately. That’s because three people were revived from cardiac arrest within a week in November thanks to the heart shocking devices—and the bystanders or professionals able to use them.

But as recently as April 2011, CTV reported that Ottawa paramedics wanted to see more of them around the city.
That followed the death of a 38-year-old man who had been playing ball hockey in a community gymnasium on Maitland Avenue that does not have a defibrillator.
That prompted OpenFile to ask what other parts of the Ottawa might not have the potentially life-saving paddles.

This map was made with data provided by the City of Ottawa. The location of each AED—automated external defibrillator—is marked with a red dot.

Generally, the map shows a lower density of AEDs in the rural parts of the city and a higher density in the suburban and urban parts. Some neighbourhoods, such as Bel Air Heights, Champlain Park and Riverside South, are notable exceptions.

This chart shows the number of AEDs per 1000 people in each ward (based on the city's population estimates):

This chart shows the number of AEDs per square kilometre:

Bay, Somerset and Alta Vista wards have the highest density of AEDs per person with 1.05 per 1000 people each. In Somerset, however, there are six AEDs per square kilometer. Alta Vista has only two, by comparison.

Gloucester-South Nepean has the lowest number of AEDs per person at 0.18 per 1000.
West-Carleton (0.01 per sq km), Osgoode (0.02 per sq km), Rideau-Goulbourn (0.02 per sq km) and Cumberland (0.03 per sq km) have the lowest number by area, but come in much higher when the number is calculated per person. West-Carleton, for example, has a surprising 0.44 AEDs per person.

CITY OF OTTAWA FIGURES

Number of defibrillators: 572 
Number in marked police cars: 138 
Number in fire service pumper trucks: 77 
Number in schools: 53 
Number in libraries: 26

MUCH OF THIS POST WAS FIRST PUBLISHED BY OPENFILE OTTAWA

Mapping murder

2011-12-15T10:30:00.001-05:00

I put together this map in light of the recent warning by Ottawa Police of "a pattern" in the homicides of city prostitutes.

It marks locations associated with unsolved homicides involving known or suspected sex workers. I've also includes basic details gleaned from newspaper reports at the time.

CBC has reported that Ottawa Police are also looking at the 2008 murder of Pamela Kosmack. I've included the her murder for that reason. Kosmack was not believed to be a sex worker.

I've also included the 2006 murder of Kelly Morrisseau and the 1984 murder of Jane Louise Sutherland. Both women were aboriginal. Both cases remain unsolved. Neither has been included in the most recent media coverage. In those cases the homicides were discovered in Gatineau and were investigated by Gatineau Police.

Nosey neighbour

2011-11-24T14:47:00.000-05:00

Yes, I am going a little map crazy this week. This one is more of a nosey neighbour piece that I tossed together because the City of Ottawa makes the information available in an easily mapped format through its Open Data site .

It shows building, demolition and pool enclosure permits issued in October of 2011. I’ve marked pools (blue), demolitions (red) and construction in (green). Each dot represents a separate address several of which may fall under a single permit number.

Who hasn’t walked by a construction site and wondered just what the heck was being built in there? Well, now ya know.

The City of Ottawa posts the information monthly and maintains the data for a 12 month period.

Click on the dots to see nifty attributes such as:

Contractor - Name of the contractor who is performing the work listed within the description of the permit

Building Type - The type of building or structure being constructed, renovated, or demolished

Municipality - Former municipality within Ottawa

Description - Description of the work to be completed

D.U. - Number of dwelling units created or lost as a result of the construction or demolition work

Value - The calculated value of the construction or demolition work taking place

Square Footage - The total gross area of work in square feet of the construction or demolition project

The city also posts this amusing, to me, note about the data and the tendency to identify property owners who may be doing work on their own home and whose privacy should be protected under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

In cases where the contractor is also the property owner, the City of Ottawa is unable to disclose this information due to MFIPPA, therefore the phrase "***CONTRACTOR***" is used.

I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that publishing that note and using the term [all caps] CONTRACTOR (which does appear in that data column in many cases) would tend to identify the property owners.

The reach of the OMB in Ottawa

2011-11-22T15:08:00.001-05:00

I've been doing a fair bit of thinking about the Ontario Municpal Board in recent weeks. That's partly because I've been following a few cases and because of the move in Toronto to take back some of the OMB's authority.

So I've been cruising through the 294 open or recently closed Ottawa cases listed on the OMB website and that got me wondering if a map wouldn't help visualize the actual reach of the OMB in Ottawa and its potential impact on planning and development.

So ta-da here is a quick and dirty version of the 200 or so cases that include one or more specific addresses:

If you click on the markers you'll notice I've included OMB case numbers. The status of the case is available here for the truly curious. You'll need to copy and paste the case number.

This is how it looks filtered for open cases:

There are 53 mapped cases. Keep in mind these only represent cases that concern one or more specific street addresses. There are many more challenges to bylaws, the Official Plan and so on that aren't connected to specific addresses (and are more significant in many ways).

Here is the same map filtered for recent cases that are closed (a "recent" case may go back several years):

The OMB really does touch almost every part of the city.

THANK YOU TO OPENFILE OTTAWA WHO WERE KIND ENOUGH TO PURCHASE AND REPOST THIS BLOG ENTRY HERE.

OpenFile Comes to Ottawa

2011-11-11T14:51:00.000-05:00

A little more than a year ago, Nick Taylor-Vaisey sent me an email. “OpenFile comes to Ottawa” was the subject line. I didn’t know Nick, at the time, and the name OpenFile meant even less to me.

It was a concise email. It described OpenFile as “a collaborative news outlet that launched earliet this year in Toronto” and went on to invite me to meet with Nick and possibly come on board as OpenFile expanded to Ottawa. His pitch – that OpenFile was “a sort of marriage between citizen journalism and professional journalism” where story ideas would come directly from the community – appealed to me. I read the message. Then I ignored it.

Why would a journo with experience in public broadcasting and a hard-on for community reporting ignore a message like that? Easy. I thought I had heard it all before. As a freelancer, with some decent experience, I get emails much like Nick’s fairly often. They usually describe some intriguing and innovative online platform for journalism – investigative, long-form, public (take your pick) – and go on to explain why I should get involved. Of course, I’ll have to work for little or no money, the pitch continues, and that, frankly, is where I lose interest. I’d love to help, but I can’t afford to do it for nothing or next-to.

Luckily (for me) Nick emailed again and luckily (for me) I was intrigued enough to take a closer look at the OpenFile site for Toronto. That’s when I signed on. And I was thrilled to be part of the Ottawa launch. Now, I haven’t made a heap of money freelancing for OpenFile over the past year, but I think I've been compensated fairly. And, more importantly, I've also had the opportunity to be part of a very cool journalism experiment.

There have been some glitches along the way. No doubt. For example, I scored a heck of a scoop when I stumbled upon the fact that Toronto mayor Rob Ford had exaggerated his academic (and football) experience at Carleton University. That garnered some attention in the Toronto Star and at J-Source. Nice splash for a new online upstart. Too bad a computer error in the posting date made it look like the Toronto Star had our scoop. Fail. (David Rider, Urban Affairs Bureau Chief at the Star, was good enough to credit OpenFile Ottawa, at least.)

In general, however, freelancing for OpenFile has been a blast! I've had the chance to publish some really cool things like this funky little map that shows the location of licensed childcare providers across Ottawa and the age of children accepted into care. It hasn't made a big media splash, but many parents have thanked me for putting the map together. That's because it highlights, among other things, just how hard it is to find licensed care for kids younger than 18MO in Ottawa and added some real local context to the daycare debate that was part of the 2011 Federal Election. Score one for the public sphere. Yeah! Can you tell I’m proud?

I've reporter plenty of other stories for OpenFile over the past year. Some of them were better than others, but all of them were stories that just wouldn’t otherwise have been told. OpenFile has grown plenty in that time as well. I hope that continues. Welcome to Ottawa OpenFile. Congrats on a successful first year. Pleasure to know you.

Terrorism debate

2011-09-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

I needed to add this screen capture from Michael Mulley's fantastic site. It charts the number of times the word terrorist has been used in the HoC since 1994. Click to enlarge.

Memories of September 11

2011-09-11T13:55:00.000-04:00

In September of 2001, I had just started work as the editorial pages editor at the Varsity, the University of Toronto student newspaper. I had recently abandoned my plans for graduate studies at the school and turned down an offer to study journalism at Ryerson. I was determined to break into a journalism career the old fashion way, through hard work and determination. The job at the Varsity was my first salaried gig but I was also freelancing for a start up mag, called Digital Journal, and a handful of others. But it wasn’t enough to cover rent in downtown Toronto. So two days a week I was also delivering the Varsity downtown and on the universities two satellite campuses in Scarborough and Mississauga.

A coworker and I were in the delivery van when we heard the news. We had been listening to a call in show on the campus radio station. A frantic listener called in to say that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. We didn’t think much of it at the time. For some reason I pictured a small plane hitting the tower. More and more people started to call in with more details. That’s when we switched to the CBC news. I remember the guy in the van with me wondering aloud what the Americans would do in response. “What are they gonna do now,” he’d ask? He asked that same question over and over in a half dozen different ways. I just sat there. Driving. Listening.

We kept on delivering the newspapers, but it was hard to imagine that anyone was going to read them. I remember dropping bundles of newspapers into racks and thinking that nearly the same number would be there when I returned in a few days with the next issue (it came out twice a week). For some reason I was really focused on the effort that we had put into that newspaper and the fact that it had been wasted. It seems so silly in retrospect.

I didn’t actually see the images of the towers falling until I was returning the van several hours later. The rental agency was at a shopping mall and I saw the reruns on the big screen at a cell phone store. A huge crowd had gathered around the screen, but I felt like I was the only person watching it for the first time.

At the time, I was very focused on the anti-globalization movement. The protests the previous spring in Quebec City had made quite an impression and, at the time, it really felt as though major changes were a foot. But that protest, and the discontent that had given rise to it, suddenly seemed so complicated in the wake of September 11. In fact, one of the first issues I had to deal with as an editor were complaints about an anti-globalization essay we published in the issue I had been delivering. In the original piece –written before September 11 – an activist named Alex Kerner had said that we needed to “turn the campus into a war zone against corporate rule.” It was an innocent enough statement, for the time, and would have received no attention if not for the events of that day.

For some reason this also struck me. All of the issues that had been with us before September 11th were still with us, but they would be viewed through a different filter.

Money making tips from experienced bloggers

2011-03-28T10:01:00.000-04:00

This is a quick and dirty summary of the seminar on blog monetization I organized on behalf of the Ottawa chapter of the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC).

THE SPEAKERS

Andrea Tomkins has been blogging since 1999 at her site A Peek Inside the Fishbowl.

“I'm a bit of a dinosaur. Blogging wasn't a word when I started,” she jokes.

Tomkins started out blogging about her experiences as a young mom: “diapers, feeding, that kind of thing.” Her blog now covers travel, food, the arts and municipal affairs. She describes it as her “whiteboard, water cooler, and journal... all rolled into one.”

Twitter count: 2500 followers
Blog visits per month: 35,000 to 40,000

Annie Urban is a web strategy consultant who works with the federal government. She had a lot of theoretical knowledge about social media and search engine optimization (SEO) that she hoped to put into practice when she launched her site PhD in Parenting. She chose parenting as a topic because she's also the mother of two small children.

“I grabbed that and ran with it,” Urban explains.

Twitter count: 55,000
Blog visits per month: 60,000 to 75,000

ADVICE FOR NEW BLOGGERS

Both agree that Blogger or Wordpress are the best platforms for beginners. Urban points out that the hosted version of Wordpress doesn't allow you to add your own ads. “If you want to do that,” she says, “You definitely want to use Blogger.”

HOW OFTEN TO UPDATE

Tomkins says she treats her blog like an online portfolio (she's a freelance writer and photographer) so she is very concerned about the quality of each post. Her advice is to make sure each post is exceptional. She recommends picking a certain day to update so that readers know when to expect a post. She also suggests you choose a topic that you are passionate about to ensure that you won't lose interest.

They were asked if they feel a moral obligation to blog for the sake of advertisers.

“Sometimes I really don't feel like blogging and I don't,” says Tomkins, although she adds that she might post a picture of a cute puppy if she feels there's a big gap.

“I have a number in mind for the type of traffic I want,” Urban says. When she sees traffic dip she will sometimes find a post from her archive and post it on Twitter and on Facebook.

Tomkins also mentions that inviting guest bloggers to post to your site can be a great way to fill a void. There's also potential for cross promotion and shared readership as the guest blogger will likely bring some of their audience to your site and vice versa.

TYPES OF ADVERTISING

The three kinds of blog advertising are ad networks, affiliates, and hosting your own. Each has its own advantages.

NETWORKS

Urban explains that ad networks are companies that find ads for you and take a large cut of the profit. The company does much of the technical work so that you don't have to worry about maintaining or updating the ads. She says networks can be great for beginners who don't have technical knowledge, lack a direct connection with advertisers or have a low volume of traffic on their site.

The disadvantages are that you don't have a lot of control over what ads are posted to your site or how much money you make.

“I used to be on a blog network called BlogHer and they tend to sell more ads up to the Christmas season,” Urban says. “I would get $100 in the months before Christmas. January would come and I would get $25. There was no regularity for me and no control.”

(BlogHer works with male and female bloggers)

Urban says she also didn't feel she had a lot of control over who was advertising with her. She had the option of opting out of certain kinds of ads. Over time she got the sense that the ads she was opting out of were some of the prime advertisers with the network and she quit.

Urban explains that some networks pay based on pageviews while some only pay when someone clicks on the ad. She, and Tomkins, recommend the pageviews ad.

AFFILIATES

She also mentions affiliate ads, of which Amazon.com or Amazon.ca are the most common. With affiliate ads, bloggers receive a small commission when someone navigates from the blog to the Amazon site and makes a purchase.

DIY

Tomkins describes herself as a “design junky” and “control freak” who always designed and sold her own ads. Her first advertisers was a candy store in her neighbourhood that she and her children like.

“I emailed her and said 'we really like you,'” she explains.

She says it took her a long time to figure out how much to charge, but she eventually guessed based on the price of a half-page ad in her community newspaper. She started charging $50 per month for 140x140 pixel ad. (She now charges $175 for a three month term).

Both recommend preparing a rate card for potential advertisers. Urban only provides her rates directly to clients.

MEASURING TRAFFIC

Urban also recommends a number of analytic tools for measuring blog stats:

Google Analytics (very robust)
Wordpress Stats (nice dashboard)
Stat Counter (allows you to see how someone has navigated through your site)
Chart Beat (live update - great if you can spend your day reader tracking)
Post Rank (how influential your blog is)

Of course, they covered much, much more than this... see you there next time.

The seminar was held 26 March 2011 in the Auditorium of the Ottawa Public Library Main Branch.

A peek inside the blogging seminar

2011-03-22T14:08:00.000-04:00

Tune in to CHUO 89.1 Wednesday at 5:05pm for a taste of the PWAC blogging seminar coming up on Saturday.

Andrea Tomkins of A Peek Inside the Fishbowl will be speaking with Mitchell Caplan about blog monetization.

Holy Mackrael: J-Schooler breaks Oda story

2011-03-01T13:42:00.000-05:00

It's always wonderful to see stories like this one about Carleton masters student Kim Mackrael and her role in the the Bev Oda "not" controversy. Mackrael filed the original access to information request that lead to the story. Kudos to her.

But I can't help wondering whether it isn't ALSO a sign that fewer professional journalist are making the requests that lead to this kind of story.

The wealthy blogger UPDATE

2011-02-22T10:00:00.007-05:00

Here's a little more detail on the blogging seminar I've organized for PWAC Ottawa. We've recruited a wonderful selection of talented bloggers from the area. They'll be sharing tips on monetizing a blog.

Andrea Tomkins is a freelance writer and photographer who has been blogging since 1999. She is passionate about social media, the arts, healthy living, family travel, good food, and sharing the best of Ottawa for parents and kids. Her blog – a peek inside the fishbowl - is her whiteboard, water cooler, and journal ... all rolled into one.

Andrea has been selling ads on her blog since 2008. While ad sales have generated a new income for her family, her blog has lead to many other interesting opportunities as well.

Shannon McKarney is a transplanted Nova Scotian living in Ottawa who still has ability to dismember a lobster with her bare hands. She worked in high tech for a decade and a half before deciding that diapers, tea parties and writing in her pyjamas were far more glamorous. She’s been blogging since 2000, and while that early blog has mercifully disappeared from the internet, you can still find her writing about parenting and life at zchamu.com, saving the world at ecochick.ca and care2.com, and snarking sports at Draft Day Suit. Shannon has spoken about blogging and social media at the Vancouver Women In Film Festival, at Blissdom Canada, and will be speaking next at the Mom 2.0 Summit in New Orleans in April.

Annie Urban has been blogging at PhD in Parenting since 2008. She is a web analytics geek and has moved through several approaches to ethical monetization on her blog. Ask her about how to find and pitch advertisers that are a good fit with your audience and morals and when to say "thanks, but no thanks" to an offer.

It happens Saturday, March 26, 1-3pm at the Ottawa Public Library Main Branch Auditorium, 120 Metcalfe Street. Visit the PWAC Ottawa for full details.

Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau

2011-02-21T10:00:00.001-05:00

It is a long bus ride through farm land. Smoke ribbons coil over the fields. It's hard to tell what is burning. The homes are raw brick or concrete block. Gobs of mortar ooze from between the blocks. There is no veneer. Closer to the former extermination camp, it is wooded. The trees are evenly spaced. There is no undergrowth, just a layer of leaves.

Gates of Auschwitz

Impressions of the camp: It seems oddly familiar. Maybe it is the films and archival photographs? I think I am being clever and mention, to my wife, a small detail about the camp that is not mentioned in the documentary film that all visitors to the museum watch. My wife is puzzled. Later, I realize I am mistaken. I am embarassed. What can I possibly know about this horrifying place?

Wire fencing at Auschwitz

Impression two: Human warmth. Our tour guide explains that plains "the function" of Zyklon B - the pellets of cyanide used to kill victims in the gas chambers. The tin of chemicals is emptied into the false showers. Up to 2000 people are crowded into the room. It is their body heat that triggers the gas.

Impression three: Hair. Mounds and mounds of preserved human hair. My wife begins to cry.

Impression four: Standing cells. You find them in the Auschwitz cell block, where victims awaited execution by shooting. They are narrow stalls with knee-high doors. Prisoners crawled in. When your inside, there is not enough space to raise your arms. There are four cells at various heights. I stand in the smallest of these and feel dizzy. I can hardly breathe. I leave quickly. It is torturous to even imagine standing here in the darkness for hours.

Impression five: Birkenau. It's size is overwhelming. I never imagined it could possibly be that large.

End of the rails at Birkenau

A campaign is underway to maintain the Auschwitz Memorial as an important link with the past.

Lynnwood Project: How I stumbled upon the trailer park

2011-02-17T10:00:00.002-05:00

I first heard about Lynnwood when I was working as a regional reporter with the CBC in Ottawa.

Dark clouds over Lynnwood PHOTO BY Mark Totti

At the time, I was working on a follow up story on residents of a trailer park in Bells Corners. They were at risk of losing their homes. As in many trailer parks, residents of Bellwood owned their modular units but only rented the land that the units were sitting on. This Ottawa Citizen article does a good job of explaining the dilemma.

At the time, a resident of that community, Annie Coghlan, was organizing a community association for the park in Bells Corners to help block sale of the land, which would have made way for a the new development.

Given the circumstances, I was surprised to learn she was keen to talk about somebody else's problems.

“You think we have it rough,” she said, as we chatted on the phone, “You should check out this park called Lynnwood.”

Faucet PHOTO BY Mark Totti

She went on to describe one or two of the stories that are often repeated about Lynnwood:
That the water is undrinkable, that it corrodes faucets and hot water tanks, and that the water may be causing an unusual amount of kidney disease in the community.

Dramatic and demonstrable problems linked to the essentials of life and, possibly, causing illness? What reporter wouldn't take an interest?

The wealthy bloggers

2011-02-14T10:00:00.013-05:00

I've organized yet another seminar for the Ottawa Chapter of the Professional Writers Association of Canada. This one is on monetizing your blogs.

A group of fine Ottawa bloggers will be sharing their insights and taking questions. They include Andrea Tomkins from a peek inside the fishbowl, Shannon McKarney from ecochick and Annie Urban from PhD in Parenting.

It happens Saturday, March 26, 1-3pm at the Ottawa Public Library Main Branch Auditorium, 120 Metcalfe Street. Visit the PWAC Ottawa for full details.

Lynnwood Project: Origins

2011-02-08T09:13:00.000-05:00

Any place people have made their home is sure to have some kind of founding myth. Lynnwood is no different.

If you ask around in this small mobile home community, in Ottawa’s rural East-end, you are almost certain to hear the name Ronnie Prophet. People say the country music star from Hawkesbury founded the park with money from his 1970s television program, The Ronnie Prophet Show. That was he before decamping for the United States.

View Larger Map

You can see why people might believe it too. Betty Prophet still lives in a farmhouse that borders on the property and the trailer park itself is built on the 66 acres of farmland from which that house was originally subdivided.

But the story isn’t quite right. Ask around a bit more and you’re likely to hear about Ronnie’s second cousin Orval Prophet, a country music star in his own right. Orval recorded on Decca Records in the 50s and was, apparently, the second Canadian (after Hank Snow) to record in Nashville. He stayed in Canada.

Longtime residents of Lynnwood describe him as the hands-on owner who would often be seen mowing lawns or tending flowerbeds. A few can even point out the dilapidated, baby-blue trailer where Orval once lived.

That story is much closer to the truth. Betty Prophet explains that her husband, Lynn Prophet, and two colleagues founded the park in 1969. She says it grew out of her husband’s business, Henry Armstrong Construction.

“There used to be an office near where the mobile home park is. My husband ran that,” Betty Prophet explains. “Orval (his brother) lived in the park. He lived in the park and he worked in the park, but he wasn’t actually part of the park.”

At Library and Archives Canada, I had stumbled across an aerial photograph of a place called "Lynnwood Village." It was taken by the photographer Ted Grant. Betty says that photograph used to hang in the park office.

After her husband died, in 1980, Betty and her son took over the park and ran it for seven or eight years. It was sold and became Lynnwood Mobile Homes LTD. Then it became Lynnwood Gardens, when it was sold again some years later.

Today, Lynnwood is known mostly as a place with undrinkable tap water. That’s thanks, at least partly, to the fact that E.coli bacteria was discovered in the park’s wells in May 2000, around the same time as the
Walkerton tragedy. Although, since then the park has also received media attention from time to time sin thanks to heavy mineral contamination.

Betty Prophet hates the attention.

“It’s terrible. They always say that they've had problems like this forever,” Betty says, pointing out that there was never E.coli contamination when she and her son ran the park.

She has a point. Nearly everyone describes it as a place that has struggled with tainted water for more than 30 years.

This is the first of a series of notebook entries I hope to post on my Lynnwood research. Up next: how I stumbled upon the park and a day in court.

Control freak

2011-02-07T10:47:00.000-05:00

I've been reading, and very much enjoying, Lawrence Martin's Harperland: The Politics of Control but still can't help the feeling that 70 to 80 percent of a columnist's job is catching up folks who weren't paying attention. It's very much worth reading even if there's nothing all that new in the book. Basically, you learn that Harper is a mayor control freak with a serious hate-on for the/some media.

[I guess I also learned that he coaches his cabinet like school children before Question Period, that all ministers must vet public events -- down to preferred media quote -- through the PMO (which must be a serious pain) and about Elizabeth May's allegation that Harper cheated during the 2008 debates -- but I'm probably one of them folks who needed some remedial catching up.]

But it's quite a stark picture when you cram all that stuff that people already know -- or maybe should know -- about Stephen Harper into a book that weighs 1lbs 3oz (yes I did plunk it on a scale).

The virtues of the book -- that the sources are largely former Harper insiders, that Martin appears sympathetic of Harper's motivations -- have been covered in reviews (such as this one.) And I agree: the damning evidence comes from Harper's buddies and, somewhat disconcertingly, Martin really seems to have drunk the Koolaid.
What's missing, it appears to me, is how the coaching and info management has impacted ministerial morale, particularly in a minority. I'm not sure I would enjoy having Harper the big brother looking over my shoulder on everything. Is there buy-in? Are they happy to enjoy a tenuous hold on power or while the whole thing unravel if Harper stumbles in the slightest? Probably a whole other book, right?

Politics and privacy

2010-12-23T21:10:00.002-05:00

In April of 2010 the Toronto Star published a profile of then mayoral candidate Rob Ford. It was an excellent snapshot of the candidate’s hazy and tumultuous life in and out of municipal politics. Linda Diebel was the reporter. Among the “muddy” details, Diebel notes that Ford played centre for Carleton University’s now defunct football team and left the school two-credits short of a degree.

It is among the few straightforward statements in the article and a fact that has been widely repeated; in the Globe and Mail, on the CBC, and elsewhere. The trouble is, that statement is false, as I reported here. Rob Ford attended Carleton for only one school year and, although he did make the cut for the Carleton Ravens, he probably never left the bench.

It’s not that Ford, whose enthusiasm for the game is well known, was a bad football player. He was just a little undersize, at the time, and there were three CFL caliber players on the roster ahead of him. It’s not that Diebel is a sloppy reporter, either. She did her best to confirm the facts, but ran foul of Carleton’s privacy policy – a policy that doesn’t allow the release of personal information, such as educational history, without consent.

Graduates have an incentive to give consent for a prospective employer to view their record. But candidates for public office don’t necessarily have the same incentive. Ford, for example, refused to provide that kind of consent when I confronted him about the apparent discrepancy between his academic record and his claims about it.

“I don't give any consent for anything and I'm not going to start now," Ford said.

One might imagine that the real issue is provincial privacy legislation. Educational institutions, like Carleton University, became subject to privacy legislation in Ontario in 2006. But a spokesperson for the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario says it remains a “gray area.” The office hasn’t received any formal complaints related to journalists confirming academic credentials and that means the Commissioner hasn’t developed any guidelines on the issue.

In fact what journalists actually face is a patchwork of institutional privacy policies. For example, I was told that Carleton University would not "confirm or deny" that Rob Ford had graduated, even though it was a matter of public record that he had not graduated. Meanwhile York University appeared to have no qualms about confirming Ford's later academic history for this follow-up article in the Toronto Star.

York confirmed that Ford took six continuing education courses between 1990 and 1991. The university said he completed “some, but not all” of the first-year courses, which included political science, urban studies, geography, economics and history.

York University did not immediately respond to a request to clarify their reasons for releasing the information. Like Carleton, York's privacy policy appears to define academic history as personal information.

And so, one presumes, Ford could complain that York had been too forthcoming while journalists could complain that Carleton had been too tight-lipped... and only then could we expect any clarity and consistency.

File under 'Isn't that something?'

2010-11-18T14:30:00.004-05:00

Apparently it is illegal to rollerblade or skateboard on roads and sidewalks in the City of Ottawa.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, councillor-elect Scott Moffatt muses tax savings via scant snow fall:

To keep taxes down, I've recommended no snow this year! RT @MathieuFleury: I'm waiting for the #snow to fall from the sky #hurryupalready

I believe the record dump in 2007/2008 revealed that wishing for little snow is, in fact, city policy. Keep the dream alive.

Local politics in the twitosphere

2010-11-17T14:00:00.000-05:00

It seems what politicians DON’T do is still as important as what they DO – more so with social media, where citizen-reporting feeds into an accelerated news cycle.

Yesterday, councilor-elect in Ottawa’s Kitchissippi Ward sparked something of a flame-out on Twitter when she didn’t attend a planning and environment committee meeting where a controversial development proposal in her ward was to be discussed.

Katherine Hobbs was elected in October and won’t be sworn-in until December.

“Not spotted yet. More important things to do?” @Denvan tweeted at 10:05 November 16. (See the full thread at #ashcroftconvent.)

Discussion spilled over to Facebook, where residents posted to Hobb’s election profile. And Hobb’s, apparently, responded:

Councillor Leadman has been working on this issue for many months, and has continued her involvement at the various meetings in the community this month. If she had invited me to attend with her during this period prior to ...Dec. 1, I would have gladly done that. However failing the Councillor's invitation I did not want to show a lack of respect for her work by inserting myself at this juncture. I do understand the gravity of the concerns, and will keep apprised of the outcome of all meetings so I am able to continue the work with the members of the community on this issue as soon as I am in a legal position to do so on Dec. 1. It was not my intention to show any disrespect for the community's concerns by not attending today, and I will be reading the detailed minutes which contain all the comments from the meeting.

On issue: It was a public meeting, other councilors-elect attended, and the current councillor would have appreciated the company (this email would suggest).

Regardless: It is fascinating to watch a ward-level controversy, such as this, play out instantaneously.

Freelancing Seminar

2010-11-08T06:38:00.001-05:00

For the past number of weeks I've been organizing a small freelancing seminar for the Ottawa Chapter of the Professional Writers Association. A number of magazine editors will be chatting about what they look for in a pitch and taking questions from the audience. It happens November 20, 1-3pm at the main branch of the Ottawa Public Library, 120 Metcalfe Street. Please check the PWAC Ottawa site for further deets.

A Twisted Tale

2010-10-19T10:08:00.004-04:00

I have to smile at the cover of the today’s Ottawa Citizen.

The top three quarters are dedicated to the “depraved double life” of Colonel Russell Williams. The title: Twisted Tale Unfolds. A banner boasts of “News, Live Blog Coverage, Background, Photos, Videos” online. It’s all there. And what isn’t there is (virtually) there as well.

In the squishy little remainder of the front page is another story. It’s a story about the Public Health Agency of Canada and an audit that finds the agency is not fully prepared for emergencies that could threaten thousands of Canadians.

Ahhh… the sweet, sweet symmetry.

Write your own obituary on Facebook

2010-04-30T18:00:00.003-04:00

A “pick up” must be one of the most difficult assignment that a journalist can get. That's when someone has died (usually been murdered) and the reporter has to approach family and friends of the deceased person for interviews.

It's basically one of the most awkward social situation imaginable. You are approaching complete strangers to speak with them about something profoundly painful and personal.

Newspaper editors call it a pick up because (at some point in the distant past) it involved a reporter knocking at a family member's door in order to “pick up” a good picture for the front page of following days paper.

I've been done my share. Like this, this and this.

The secret, believe it or not, is a combination of sympathy and insistence. If you aren't decent they won't talk to you. If you accept “no” as an answer you won't get the story (and someone else will). It's tough and it's thankless. People who have devoured your article, who seem to know the intimate details better than you, will inevitably accuse you of exploiting a painful situation.

(Call it self-justification, but I see people's desire to learn more about those who have died in a more favourable light. “...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it to tolls for thee “ as John Donne famously put it.)

So how do you right your own obituary in the age of Facebook?

Simple.

You opt in.

Step 1: Sign up for Facebook
Step 2: Insert personal information (don't leave anything out)
Step 3: Link with as many friends and relatives as possible
Step 4: Make as much of this information public as possible

As a reporter, I've used Facebook as a research tool in a number of ways but it is invaluable for the pick up story. It provides much of a person's biographical information and a list of contacts (friends) who can verify the info. Even if those details aren't public, tribute pages generally spring up within hours of the news of a death spreading amongst friends and family.

Here are just a few examples from my own experiences: example 1, example 2

So, watch what you post.

Images from "Lynnwood"

2010-03-25T09:50:00.005-04:00

I've been quite busy for the last number of months and haven't had time to post. I'll be posting more in the coming weeks, but I wanted to get a few still images from my film Lynnwood up on the blog. Mark Totti did the camera work.

Here goes:

Goliath vs Goliath 2.0

2009-11-11T09:22:00.003-05:00

...that's News Corp. vs. Google, of course.

Obama one year later

2009-10-31T11:28:00.004-04:00

I have to say that I find some of the Obama-election anniversary coverage hard to take. No one, least of all journalists, should be surprised by Obama's cautious and deliberative approach to governing. It fulfills perfectly journalist David Mendell's portrayal in Obama: from Promise to Power (and I doubt Mendell would claim bold originality on that count.)

Here's the snapshot: Obama is a pragamatic-idealist who tends to tackle problems where he feels there is potential for success, and he tends to seek consensus. That's seems to be what he's done, consistently, through his relatively brief political career. However, during the election,lazy journalists (reporting to a lazy public) portrayed the man as an empty-vessel that an eager public could pour their hopes and dreams into. Really? What politician doesn't want to portray themselves as an empty-vessel waiting to be filled with hopes and dreams. Give me a break.

Obama had a well documented track-record as a legislator. He had written and published, what has to be, one of the most unguarded memoirs ever produced by an aspiring American president. One of several books that shot to best-seller status. The dots were there. Few journalists bothered to connect them. But, hey, then what would journalists be writing about now.... Obama one year later: no big surprises, eh?

Michael Moore and the documentary

2009-10-09T22:30:00.007-04:00

I've been working on a short documentary film for the last number of months and it is amazing to me the number of times Michael Moore's name has come up in conversation.

Most people are immediately intrigued when you mention that you are shooting a film. In fact, they are usually much more interested in this then the fact that you have recently had a baby (another little project that's been keeping me occupied for the last number of months.) And eventually these conversations tend to lead to questions of my opinion of Michael Moore and his work.

It's an intriguing and in some ways troubling question. Personally, I am a fan of Michael Moore as a performer. I thought his series TV Nation was very entertaining. And I thought Roger & Me was a wonderful film. But I don't think Michael Moore is a documentary film maker. He's a performance artists, a activist, a satirist and an entertainer. The only thing that his films actually document are his performances and on that level he is not all that different from Tom Green.

The difference is that Moore has clear political and social ideas and goals. Things Tom Green doesn't seem to have, at least not to me.

I think of Moore as a columnist... and a guy who isn't afraid to bend the facts to suit his motives. But for many people Moore's work seems to have become synonymous with the documentary genre and I think that's a problem.

As Barry Hampe points out, in Making Documentary Films and Videos, the academy award winning film Bowling for Columbine tells the viewer little about the roots of the Columbine tragedy and little about gun-culture: "In the film, [Moore] raised some interesting questions about gun deaths in the United States, and then proceeded to stage ambush interview with Dick Clark, Charlton Heston, and a PR person from Kmart, as if these would in some way lead to answers." (p.23, 2nd Edition)

Personally, I think there is a place for movies like Bowling for Columbine (which obviously have an audience) but I would very much prefer if they were called something other than documentaries.

Podcast listening up 46%

2009-08-09T08:02:00.003-04:00

Those interested in the future of radio may want to tune-in for this one. The CRTC has compiled some interesting data on audio new media in its annual report on the communications industry, including an apparent 46% increase in podcast listening over the past year. That comes as MP3-player ownership is rising (15%) and music-downloading is declining (11%). Streaming radio is also declining (11%) while conventional radio is holding steady.

Perhaps, most interestingly listeners are not tuning in for podcasts produced by AM/FM broadcasters. These actually make up a declining share of the growth.

My inner municipal-nerd’s dream come true

2009-08-06T11:21:00.002-04:00

Ever since reading this story in the Ottawa Citizen my inner municipal-nerd has dreamed of being the proverbial fly-on-the-wall at a party hosted by the mayor.

The circumstances were quite different, but I finally got my chance last night. Oh, to be nearly on the inside looking out (nearly like those municipal reporters who made or are making the leap to city hall). Perhaps my inner municipal-nerd can die happy now? My new dream.

Ontario’s real energy future

2009-08-06T00:53:00.006-04:00

I think it’s remarkable that every time the Ontario government talks about coal plants that will be “replaced by cleaner generation” by 2014 they show pictures of windmills and solar-panels.

I’ve seen very little mention of the more than 3000 MW worth of new natural-gas plants that have been built or are being built in the province, including Goreway , Greenfield Energy Centre, Greenfield South Power Plant , St. Clair Energy Centre , Portlands Energy Centre and Halton Hills

It really puts in perspective the boast that 1200 MW of wind energy will come online in 2009, don’t you think?

But what does it matter? Most of the many thousands of megawatts of electricity the province needs will actually come from new and refurbished nuclear plants anyhow, right?

Curious “George”

2009-08-04T10:00:00.005-04:00

That’s quite a blooper in this mornings Globe and Mail – at least in the Ottawa/Quebce edition.

In a front-page story,above the fold story, reporter David McDougall makes reference to Transport Minister “George” Baird. I believe his friends call him John, as in the relatively high-profile senior Minister John Baird.

A quick Google search this morning shows the online version has been corrected – although the paraphrased search results still include the “George” reference.

The error appears in the third paragraph of the story. The story concerns Canadian citizen Bashir Makhtal, jailed in Ethiopia.

Access to information request filled eleven months later

2009-08-01T22:34:00.010-04:00

I’ve filed at least a hundred access to information request during my relatively short journalism career. Some have resulted in great stories, many have gone nowhere and a few have been a real pain in the act.

Lengthy delays in my requests to Transport Canada have been a particular problem in the past year, but an experience I had with them this June is, I sincerely hope, exceptional. I opened the fat manilla envelope, the kind access responses usually arrive in, to discover that Transport Canada had finally filled a request that I had filed with them the previous July. I was stunned. Under the Access to Information Act government institutions are obliged to provide access within 30 days. This response had taken more than 300 days. Under section nine of the act government institutions can request an extension to that time limit for a number of defined reasons, but in this case... that just didn’t happen.

What’s especially ironic, from my perspective, is that this request was one of a series I had filed with the department. I had already filed two previous complaints with the Office of the Information Commissioner concerning three previous requests in the series and those complaints had to do with... yup... excessive delays. In all three cases Transport Canada said they needed 180-days (6 months) to fill my request because it involved consultations with other institutions. In all cases the Office of the Information Commissioner found the extensions to be “excessive” and in one case noted “Our investigation also revealed that the consultations were not initiated in a timely fashion.”

I’m pleased to see the Interim Information Commissioner acknowledging the problem.

Good luck with that.

Animal tales I have owned

2009-07-31T19:46:00.008-04:00

I’ve written and produced my share of animal stories over the years, most recently this one for the Ottawa Sun.

I’ve written (or pushed) stories about bats, geese, dogs, pythons, cougars, bears and, evidently, pot-bellied pigs. I even once tried to convince a news director that the good people of Ottawa needed to hear about an elderly ferret that had gone astray in a snowstorm. The news director was concerned the tale wouldn’t have a happy ending. “Isn’t he probably a popsicle by now,” he inquired?

Reporters, editors and producers (publishers too, I guess) are convinced the public has an insatiable appetite for animal tales. During an internship at the Ottawa Citizen in 2004 I was party to a giddily hatched plan to put photos of a dozen or so golden-retriever puppies on the paper’s cover. The mangy animals had recently been liberated from a puppy mill. The mood in the story meeting as the plan took shape? Raw glee.

My personal favourite involves my journalistic brush with a fudge-loving bear. It was a quest; great obstacles were overcome to regain sacred knowledge and return, triumphantly, to share that knowledge with the mortal world. The quest begins on a quiet July evening in the CBC Ottawa newsroom. A television reporter had just returned from a story he was working on about an apparent cougar sighting in Gatineau Park (read on, it is a bear story.) While in Gatineau, a park-ranger told him there had been a bear attack the night before. He probably would have followed up on the bear story homself, but he was close to deadline and so returned to the newsroom. The CBC local evening news ran that single report from the park-ranger as a V/O clip (that’s when the television host introduces a short piece of tape, usually part of an interview. V/O means “voice-over” and distinguishes that item from a “package” or report in which the reporter herself would provide the voice-over.)

I was working as a night reporter in the radio newsroom the same evening. The news director, mentioned above, approached me about following up on the bear story. He told me there was no pressing story to cover that evening and that the morning news-run for radio was jam-packed (morning is the peak radio listening time, so good stories are held for the morning) but joked I could always try to track-down and interview the bear. “Apparently, the attack happened in Chelsea so, if you want, you could drive up to Chelsea and see if you can’t find the person who was attack,” he said. Chelsea is a community spread over a swath of sparsely populated countryside North of Ottawa. He was basically inviting me to take a flyer on a single report and try to cobble some kind of story together. The result is another great moment in animal-themed journalism.

N.B. This happened two-years ago, artistic license has been taken with quotations in this post.