By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 15, 2014
Alberta isn’t normally considered a destination this time of year. If you don’t understand what I mean and are spoiled by the warm weather we’ve been having, just look at an Edmonton weather report to see what I mean — but to some Cascade staff last week, it was. Why? A little thing called Nash 76.
Nash is the annual national conference hosted by Canadian University Press (CUP), a cross-country coalition of over 50 student papers. Some of them are autonomous, separate from their student unions and universities like we are, and others are not. Some are small, with only three students on staff, and some are bigger, with dozens of regular contributors and large offices. Perhaps the only thing we seem to have in common is passion for what we spend most of our time doing — putting together a newspaper.
We spent five days in Edmonton; three of those days were jam-packed with sessions held by writers of all shapes and sizes: professional journalists, reporters, editors, and reviewers.
In short, we spent three days cramming information into our brains, stealing it from presenters and other papers alike.
Some of the tips and tricks are only useful in this office; you may, for instance, notice a slightly different headline layout this week, which our production team introduced after a critique with a Globe and Mail staffer, Jason Chiu.
Mark Coatney, senior vice-president for Al Jazeera, taught us that one of the hardest and most necessary things in life is to speak up when you don’t get a concept — to say, “I don’t understand what you’re saying. Can you explain it again, or in a different way?” This applies to every reporter at The Cascade in the middle of an interview, be it with a SUS employee explaining political process or a professor explaining their research. It’s a reminder to ask questions about what goes on around every student, both in class and everyday life, and to ask questions about the answers you receive.
Omar Mouallem, an Edmonton freelancer, ran an instructional session on how to pitch a story. He encouraged us to look past a topic and find the story, another piece of advice that holds as true for completing assignments or picking a thesis as it does for convincing an editor to take a chance on you. Who or what is challenged by the notion you hope to present? Where is the human story in what you hope to write? You have to know how you’ll connect to your audience before you can ever connect with an editor, or professor, or the employer you hope to convince to take a chance on you.
Ezra Levant was by far the most controversial speaker, and the very last keynote speaker of the conference. Levant is a talk show host on Sun TV, as well as a columnist and past magazine editor who has been sued for libel. He has a reputation, in short, as a shit-disturber, an overblown internet troll and a rude, argumentative pundit.
Tension was palpable in the room. Before ever arriving, Levant provoked criticism from two CUP member papers, The Link and The Charlatan. These editorials questioned why CUP would spend $2000 to bring Levant to the conference.
This question loomed large during the keynote; Levant spent his first 20 minutes defending his right to speak, championed hate as the most humanizing and normative emotion, and talked over more than a few of the students who stood up to ask him questions during the Q&A period.
I have a problem with Levant; he is a trained lawyer and an articulate, shrewd businessman, and yet was also one of the most rude, self-righteous, and disrespectful people I have ever had to listen to. He stated his opinions as fact, which every person has the right to do, but tore down any others who didn’t reach his exact standards and share the same views.
On the other hand, I can also thank him for teaching perhaps the best lesson of the weekend; that every person has a duty not to be an asshole. This is something that became abundantly clear during Levant’s keynote: despite his education, experience, and obvious intelligence, he was an asshole. He made no bones about it; he bragged about it, and spoke at length about the wondrous right of free speech that allowed him to say or print practically anything he wanted.
But I learned that while anyone has the right to be an asshole, that doesn’t mean they should be.
We are more than the legal and social rules we follow; we are the impressions we make on other people, and everything our actions encourage others to become.
I came to this conclusion as I watched a ballroom of student journalists become more and more agitated, and watched in disbelief as all parties were reduced to shouting and personal attacks. The disrespect spewed forth on both sides, and at that moment no one was better than anyone else — not exactly the moral high ground presented in The Link and The Charlatan editorials.
So maybe there was one thing Levant got right—hate might just be the most human emotion, something normal that we all share. But building on that, we all share the ability to be assholes — and the duty to at least try to be better than that.
