Have no fear, the age of the anti-blogger has arrived

Column for publication in The Kamloops Daily News, Saturday, Aug. 30, 2008

Move over, Barry Baker, Chad Moats, Gregg Drinnan and Brian Alexander. Eat your heart out, Arjun Singh. There’s a new blogger in town, and it is me.

Say it ain’t so. After spending more time than necessary to trash bloggers during the past few months, is there nothing left but to become one, to slide ignominiously into the dark side?

Apparently. I may as well confess to checking out a selection of local blogs on almost a daily basis. Some are a waste of time, but there are exceptions, such as Barry Baker’s well-informed and thoughtful Right Up Your Alley. (If Baker is not careful, he’s in danger of giving blogging a good name.) And I often check in with Singh’s Your Kamloops.

Blogging does provide an interesting source of gossip, churlish character assassination and, occasionally, insight into what makes our community go. My understanding of the term blogger is that it defines one who has nothing of value to say, has no inclination toward even the most elementary research, but has an overwhelming compulsion to tell the world what he or she thinks about everything.

Sounds good to me.

Blogging has its good points. Murphy Kennedy met Chad Moats that way, and Moats is now Kennedy’s campaign manager.

Down at Cowboy Coffee the other day, I heard Arjun Singh described as an anti-councillor. I like that description. He probably would, too. Therefore, I am the anti-blogger. I blog, but I refuse to be a blogger.

What if Betty just said no to Tory trashmail?

It’s getting so I’m afraid to look in the mailbox — you never know what you’ll find in there.

Last night, on my way home, I approached our rural mailbox with trepidation. My fears were not unfounded, for, among the bills and new-credit-card offers and assorted other propaganda was — you guessed it — mail from Betty.

This stuff is worse than being flamed with an unwelcome blog post. Another in her series of one-sheet election blasts, paid for by you and me, it was headlined Helping Seniors. If 10,000 of these things are mailed out at a shot, why have I received four of them? There must be other deserving constituents.

Anyway, like the ones on crime, drugs and the environment, this one extolls the policies of the Conservative government. Interestingly, it doesn’t directly trash the Liberal record on same (as the others have done), so I guess the former government must have done alright on this score.

Now here’s the thing. Betty Hinton is going to retire at the end of her current term, ie. whenever a writ is dropped for the next election. Her time in office has been marked for her singularly dogged adherence to the party line. Tories good, everyone else bad.

But she has nothing to lose by being candid about this outrageous waste of taxpayers’ money. She could gain herself a lot of credit if she just said, “No, I don’t believe these particular brochures are a good use of taxpayers’ money and I am no longer going to distribute them.” She doesn’t even have to say they’re a waste of money, just that she’s not going to be part of it.

Former Conservative MP Don Cameron was in the other day, and I asked him what he thought. Cameron, a man of high integrity, and still a loyal Conservative, said the mailouts are “a waste of money.” But if Betty doesn’t wish to go that far, fine.

Then listen to what former Senator Len Marchand, named the Greatest Kamloopsian not long ago, had to say about the role of politicians. Way back when he was still an MP himself, Len told me in an interview, “I am not a robot.”

He was saying that a politician is elected to do the best he or she can based on his/her principles and beliefs. An MP is not there to blindly carry out the wishes of constituents on any particular issue, nor to meekly accept each and every thing the party preaches as the Gospel. In other words, people are born with brains, and they should use them to think and to question.

So, Betty could actually say no.

Foul-mouthed blogger takes run at council seat

Kevin Skrepnek stood on the pier at Riverside Park today, hoping the rain would hold off as he announced his intention to try for a seat on City council in November’s civic election.

He wants, he told a baker’s dozen young supporters and media, to become a voice of “cooperation, consensus and common sense” on council.

Skrepnek should, at least, bring some zest into the campaign, though he promised not to repeat “previous transgressions.”

Oh, yes, about those transgressions. His main contribution to politics to date has been the hijacking of federal NDP candidate Michael Crawford’s name in an  Internet domain registration a year and a half ago (this was while working as a constituency assistant for MP Betty Hinton). When he faced some heat over the prank, he conveniently left town for a couple of weeks.

So far he appears to be running his campaign through Facebook, and he’s certainly no stranger to blogging, either. He’s the guy, remember, who used his blog to call Liberal MP Carolynn Parish “a heartless bitch,” to tell political consultant Warren Kinsella to “shut the f— up,” and to refer to himself as “the baddest mother f—– of all time,” not to mention “the best looking.” Plus a few other choice words, and proudly published a picture of himself taken at a Tory convention after too much time at the bar.

But that, the 21-year-old said today, was when “I was young.” He was, he explained, only 17 when he tied one on at the convention, and acknowledged his blog language of the past is not appropriate for someone who hopes to gain the confidence of voters.

All in all, based on his press conference at least, Skrepnek handles himself well. Youthful indiscretions aside, he has some of the natural-born politician in him. He was light on issues, but made his first promise: to flesh out his platform during the campaign.

One wonders, of course, just how he’ll manage his transformation from foul-mouthed blogger to a voice of cooperation on City council. He intends to launch a brand new blog very soon, so maybe that will provide some clues.

Is this a great media town, or what?

What might be a first appears in today’s edition of The Daily News — a story about a couple of pictures in our competitor’s newspaper. The name of that competitor is Kamloops This Week. There, I’ve said it.

The Kamloops media have long had a fetish of refusing to name any of their competitors. It’s silly, really, based on some odd idea that if you mention one of the other guys, everybody will stop reading or listening to you, and go to the other product.

The silly-bugger game is most obvious when it comes to title sponsors. The Daily News Boogie is seldom or never referred to by that name in “the other paper,” as an example. The name becomes Boogie the Bridge. Until recently, it was the same with local radio stations, but we’re gradually coming to understand how immature we’ve been over the years. If a business is community minded enough to sponsor a charity or event, I figure it deserves some credit for that.

Radio NL and the Broadcast Centre stations now typically use the proper names of media-sponsored events. For example, each year when we sponsor and host The Daily News Regional CanWest Spelling Bee, they not only call it by the proper name but quite often interview Daily News staff about the event. When venerable TV7 news director Doug Collins won a lifetime achievement award a few months ago, we did a story on it. We did the same when Radio NL’s Jim Harrison won a coveted Webster Award.

Which brings us back to today’s story about those photos in Kamloops This Week. They caught one-time mayoral candidate and former RCMP constable Pete Backus in an altercation with a man in a wheelchair. The involvement of a prominent citizen in a wrestling match with a disabled man is news, so when we did our story it would have been incomplete if we didn’t mention the KTW pix.

Media can easily get into a mode where “we’re the good guys and the other guy is evil.” Kamloops is wonderfully served by media, and we all do some excellent work on a given day. Don’t get me wrong; I sincerely believe The Daily News is by far the best newspaper in town. Our stories are better, our pictures are better. We print twice as many local stories and twice as many letters to the editor (I know, because we keep track) plus a pretty good overview of the region, the country and the world via our wire services.

Our product stands on its own. We’re not going to go out of our way to publicize the competition, but neither are we going to pretend they don’t exist. When we in the media, instead of just focussing on doing the best possible job we can, get so insecure as to think we must try to erase others in the field as if we were doctoring a picture on a computer screen, we look a little pathetic.

Rules on MP mailouts in drastic need of tightening up

Armchair Mayor column for publication in The Kamloops Daily News, Saturday, Aug. 23

When Betty Hinton’s first election flyer arrived in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago, I wondered if she was in too much of a hurry to do her regular householder.

But when another arrived, and another, it was obvious something was up. Turns out they’re boilerplate stuff, as many MPs’ mailouts are, but these are more blatantly partisan that most (admittedly, Hinton isn’t running again, but the Tories sure are).

The folded one-sheeters boast about the Conservative government’s record on a few choice issues.

For example, one of them is headlined Time to Clear the Air, and inside says “Breathe a little easier. The Conservative Government is acting to improve Canada’s air quality.”

How? The Tories are cracking down on smog, car exhaust and “turning the corner on greenhouse gas emissions.”

But it’s not just about the Tories. It’s about those awful Liberals who, “for more than a decade . . . spun the same old rhetoric and the same old excuses.”

Well, constituents, rhetoric is “not good enough” for Canadians, and the government either. Apparently, the Conservatives have never indulged in rhetoric. In fact, the leaflet says so.

Who cares who gets the story first?

I am reminded once again today that we in the media care a lot more about who’s first off the mark with a story than our readers/viewers do. I was listening to CBC radio news at lunch time and on comes Kelowna broadcaster Mohini Singh (who arguably has the most unpleasant voice delivery in all of radio) with a story about David Caza.

Caza, of course, is the convicted pedophile who has been resident in Kamloops for the past three years. Our headline story today was about Caza being banned by a judge from the TRU campus. We filed our story with the Canadian Press, of which we are a member.

CBC, which likes to give the impression it gathers news itself rather than simply reporting what others write, had no obvious way to get at the story, since it doesn’t have a local reporter and, therefore, was not represented in court during the Caza case.

Undeterred, Singh simply called TRU public info man Josh Keller and got him to comment, then infilled the rest of the story from the CP version.

This sort of thing is an everyday occurrence in the world of the mainstream media, and is a source of mild annoyance for some reporters and editors. You will frequently hear terms such as “in an NL exclusive,” or “so-and-so told the Daily Blurb.” This is a signal to you that some reporter was on his/her toes and got the story before other media.

But, media audiences don’t seem to much care who wins the race, as long as they are properly informed of what’s going on. It doesn’t matter much who gets the credit. As for those of us who crank out the news day after day, well, leave us the momentary pleasure of being first.

WILL THE REAL NANCY BEPPLE PLEASE STAND UP? Ubiquitous City council candidate Nancy Bepple was at the front counter earlier today to see about a new “mugshot” of herself to run with news stories, since the one we have on file is a couple of years old.

Welcome to my blog

Bloggers. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t erase ‘em.

I’ve had a few verbal run-ins with bloggers the past few months, and quite enjoy poking a few sticks at them in my column in The Daily News. That might not stop any time soon, but I figure the best way to figure out what blogging is all about is to try it myself.

I have several areas of interest, so I will comment on three main categories: civic issues, the newspaper industry, and politics. In all three, I will draw on my combined experience in newspapers and in civic politics.

In the third category, I’ll tell some stories about my experience as the mayor of Kamloops from 1999 to 2005. The purpose — to inform people through real-life incidents about how municipal councils work, especially in Kamloops.

Oh, by the way, comments will be most welcome, but not anonymous comments. I put my name to my personal opinions; I think others should do the same.

So, welcome to the Armchair Mayor’s blog.

Mel.

City all abuzz about new hotel

Saturday, Aug. 9, 2008

The buzz this week has been all about the city’s newest hotel. Not a Hilton, not a Ramada, but a Sandman.

A Sandman? You mean like those pull-off-the-road-and-get-a-quick-night’s-sleep-before-moving-on type of hotels?

Not at all. We’re talking Signature Sandman, a recently launched brand for Northland Properties, the company started by Bob Gaglardi and now run by his son, Tom.

Indeed, questions swirl around this new hotel. Is it too small? What will it look like? What amenities will it include?