Author: taudette

In Montreal last week, I watched, on the edge of my seat, as Alberta changed over its government for the first time in over four decades. I exchanged text messages with friends still living in the province, watched live coverage online past Alberta’s midnight and my 2 a.m., plugged into Facebook and Twitter, and read every morsel of news about every riding that I could find. I missed being a reporter, of course — and I have greedily gobbled up so many excellent pieces of analysis over the last few days, some of which I offer links to below — but more, I was sad to have missed being in Alberta on such a historic day.*

I also thought back to last year, when I was invited to participate in a Petrocultures 2014 panel, hosted by McGill University’s Institute for the Study of Canada, discussing whether ours is a “petro-democracy,” or a democracy too influenced by the oil industry. You can watch the video from this panel here, but as a former political and environment reporter, and now as someone whose research is dedicated to better understanding the entanglements and responsibilities presented by the province’s oil sands, my answer was pretty straightforward:

Yes, Alberta’s is a petro-democracy.

And, no, Alberta’s is not a petro-democracy.

The latter answer seems particularly, starkly, correct a week after Albertans woke to their new government. Yet the term “petro-democracy” deserves continued attention, as it serves no one to believe that its markers and implications only affect governments and people “elsewhere,” or on the right. The term matters because it insists we draw our eye to how governments work when oil, international industry interests, domestic and foreign labour, land claims, and the environment are in the mix.

Claims of petro-democracy are critical, suggesting both an absence or failure of democratic processes and an over-arching over-reliance on the oil industry as an economic engine. Boiled down to an “oil-impedes-democracy claim” (Ross, 2001, p. 325), petro-states are typically characterized by three “effects:”

• the “‘rentier effect,’ which suggests that resource-rich governments use low tax rules and patronage to relieve pressures for greater accountability” (Ibid., pp. 327-328);
• the “‘repression effect,’ which argues that resource wealth retards democratization by enabling governments to boost their funding for internal security” (Ibid., p. 328);
• and the “‘modernization effect,’ which holds that growth based on the export of oil and minerals fails to bring about the social and cultural changes that tend to produce democratic government” (Ibid., p. 328).

I would argue it is easy to read such a list for the answer you want to find. Read the list as a recipe for how authoritarian governments work elsewhere; Ethical Oil, as a book and movement, consistently testifies to Canada’s liberal democracy as standing alone among, or remarkably contrasting, the governments of most other oil-producing states. Or, drawing on Andrew Nikiforuk‘s work — as Meenal Shrivastava and Lorna Stefanick (2012) have — read it as a recipe for how Alberta came to have a 44-year-old government, the “distinction of having the lowest provincial voter turnout in the country,” a “role in preventing Canada from meeting its climate-change goals,” and a heavy hand in allowing more temporary foreign workers to support the growing bitumen extraction industry (p. 9).

But we can’t stop at either of these readings. Both allow a potential narrative of placing petro-democracies in other spaces or other times; both skirt how government works now or here, how the conflicting interests of oil and citizenship must constantly be navigated. Settling upon petro-democracy as a marker of another government (whether that of a previous regime or a foreign regime) invites a kind of disinterest in questioning how things work, or even an apathy with regard to bothering to weigh in to make change. It also elides attention to cultures of resistance and self-determination that have flourished in Alberta despite the province’s growing reliance on bitumen extraction.

One example that I discussed last year is the Pembina Institute. It is a strange place to begin thinking through cultures of resistance, as the Pembina Institute does not in any way describe itself as anti-oil sands. The consistency with which the national environmental think tank illuminates concerns and solutions has won it great attention and respect, and it is a go-to for journalists seeking measured rebuttals, critiques, or nuance of government or industry policies and plans. But consider its roots: the Pembina Institute was launched in 1985 in the small oil town of Drayton Valley, Alberta, as a response by local residents to a sour gas blowout that killed two people and prompted, for those residents, a need for further investigation and research into the environmental impacts sour gas pollution and other kinds of energy-related pollution produced (Pembina Institute, n.d.).

Greenpeace’s campaigns in Alberta, on the other hand, have consistently, performatively, illuminated environmental concerns in a decidedly anti-tar sands fashion, drawing international and local attention to the heart of Alberta’s bitumen extraction sites — including, but not limited to, this 2008 speech jam and this 2009 site blockade. There are those who dismiss these moments as stunts, and there is a measure of truth to this — they are indeed carefully constructed and camera ready. But political speeches, rallies, press conferences, press releases, etc. are all also carefully constructed in order to dispatch clear messages to mass audiences. Negotiating the limits of media coverage in order to re-orient the agenda is political and it is necessary. Also, it is worth noting that somehow, as Alberta neared this year’s provincial election, the Edmonton Journal named Greenpeace campaigner Mike Hudema among the city’s top movers and shakers, bucking the notion that stunts are worthy of little attention, and instead recognizing a decade’s efforts as necessary and agenda-defining.

And then there is Fort Chipewyan, where First Peoples downstream of the tar sands have pursued court cases to curb further development while maintaining a constant and varied media presence that reminds Canadians of the potential health implications of ongoing extraction. In recent years the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation has also capitalized upon the nature of celebrity-driven media culture to secure a prominent place on the national agenda, drawing the likes of James Cameron, Neil Young, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Leonardo DiCaprio to the region and its efforts.

Alberta is home to persistent examples of environmental advocacy and indigenous resistance that ought to serve as inspirations, and ought not be overlooked going forward. One might conservatively (ahem) guess that the work of these communities and organizations will continue, and this work will continue to invite consideration, engagement, and responsibility. As governance changes in Alberta, holding onto questions about petro-democracy may well continue to be quite useful.

Further links and readings

Karen Kleiss’s solid analysis, “How the Alberta Progressive Conservative dynasty fell”

Meenal Shrivastava’s and Lorna Stefanick’s pre-election blog post, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, could the Tories really fall?” discusses how petro-states invite voter apathy, but invites the question: when oil prices plunge, is apathy finally dispatched?

Rachel Notley’s victory speech, and Dean Bennett‘s story for the Canadian Press, “Rachel Notley says it hit her a week before election that she’d be premier”

“Premier-designate Rachel Notley tells energy industry it’ll be ‘A-OK'”

“Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation response to NDP Majority Victory in Alberta”

Greenpeace’s response to the NDP win, entitled, “A Historic Day for Alberta and the Power of the People”

It is a bit bold to plug my former colleagues and journalism mentors, but the Edmonton Journal‘s election-centered politics podcast, most everything Graham Thomson has written in the last six months, and Paula Simons’s pitch-perfect Twitter presence.

— Trish

---

* The NDP win this week was history-making for its dispatching of the Progressive Conservative government, though I personally always feel a little uneasy when I say things like “made history” or “legendary.”

I also can’t help comparing the government change to what has been written about the PC party’s entry into the history books decades ago, and wondering what culture shift Rachel Notley’s win will come to represent for those who look back. In his 2009 book, Ralph Could Have Been A Superstar: Tales of the Klein Era, Rich Vivone paints an evocative picture of the culture change Peter Lougheed represented when he put an end to 36 years of Social Credit government in 1971. The study in contrasts between the So-Cred era, marked by a “pervasive religious moralism,” and the Lougheed era, which “promise[d] to lead Alberta into the 20th century” (p. 68), begins thus:

I arrived in Edmonton for the first time on a Sunday afternoon in the September of 1964, stepping off the train at the CPR station on the northwest corner of 109th Street and Jasper Avenue, a kid from small town Ontario hungry for the freedom of a strange city and excitement of university life […]

I had been warned not to expect much, since Alberta was Canada’s Bible Belt and if I didn’t listen to the Back to the Bible Hour on Sunday mornings, I would be doomed. I hoped it was a joke. […]

The Lord’s Day Act ruled. The province shut down on Sunday. Jasper Avenue, the centre of the city, was dead quiet the day I arrived. No restaurant open for breakfast, no newspaper to find a place to live, no movie theatre to kill an afternoon. […]

Bars were separated into two sections: Men’s and Ladies & Escorts; a man traveling alone couldn’t go into the women’s side unless the bartender could be convinced that a lady was expecting him. Restaurants that served liquor were heavily regulated and provincial government inspectors prowled the bars at night to enforce severe liquor laws. Stores were closed by 6 p.m. on weekdays. Students at the University of Alberta behaved themselves. The activist 60s hadn’t arrived.

The Bible Belt was alive and thriving. (Vivone, 2009, pp. 67-68)

---

Sources

Pembina Institute (n.d.). About Pembina. http://www.pembina.org/about/about-pembina

Ross, Michael L. (2001). Does oil hinder democracy? World Politics 53: 325-61.

Shrivastava, Meenal and Lorna Stefanick (2012). Do oil and democracy only clash in the Global South?: Petro Politics in Alberta, Canada. New Global Studies 6(1): Article 5.

Vivone, Rich (2009). Ralph Could Have Been A Superstar: Tales of the Klein Era. Kingston, Ont.: Patricia Publishing Inc.

A piece I co-authored with Dr. William J. Buxton appears in an issue of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies dedicated to “Theory in a Cold Climate.”

The whole issue is not open access, though Dr. Peter C. van Wyck’s editor’s introduction — which gives a lovely sense of what drove the issue’s production, and how the pieces included come together — is easily available here.

Further links and readings:

Our (2014) article, Compiling knowledge, enacting space, binding time: Innis’s Canadian North (1928-1944)

Harold Innis and the North, edited by Dr. Buxton (2013)

Dr. van Wyck’s reflections upon a journey north, accompanied by Harold Innis’s journals: An emphatic geography: Notes on the ethical itinerary of landscape (2008)

Dr. Sherrill Grace’s key text, Canada and the Idea of North (2007)

Next weekend, graduate students in the Joint PhD in Communication Studies program — which brings together Concordia University, Université du Québec à Montréal, and Université de Montréal — are hosting our biennial conference. We are welcoming Dr. Bart Cammaerts from the London School of Economics and Political Science as a keynote speaker on Feb. 20, hosting two keynote roundtable panels and a second keynote lecture on Feb. 21 by Dr. François Yelle from Université de Sherbrooke, and we will have presentations from graduate students from all three programs as well as from Simon Fraser, Trois-Rivieres, Ryerson, and York universities.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to review this book for The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment and Culture in Canada. In a nutshell, I strongly recommend it for anyone who wishes to get better acquainted with the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project, and anyone who already knows about the project but wishes to know more about potentially affected communities along British Columbia’s Pacific coast.

You can download my full review here.

Other relevant links:

Enbridge’s proposed plan

An FAQ about the project from the Council of Canadians, with further links to petitions and efforts against the pipeline

The Joint Environmental Assessment Agency-National Energy Board’s final report on the project, and 209 conditions that need to be met

News coverage of the Canadian government’s approval

An account of legal challenges published by West Coast Environmental Law

An excerpt from The Oil Man and the Sea

In response to the introduction of Quebec’s Charter of Quebec Values in 2013, I teamed up with my colleagues in the doctoral program, Mariam Esseghaier and Marie-Eve Lefebvre, to produce and develop a 50-minute web-based documentary called,  “Tout Cela Est… : Communicating the Charter of Quebec Values / Communiquer la Charte des valeurs québécoises.”

Here is the first of the five sections:

You’ll find the rest of the documentary and details about the people who participated in it and helped us make it happen by clicking through to our website, Charter Flight Productions. As well, we will be screening the whole documentary at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont. this May during the Canadian Communication Association’s annual conference.

Since our documentary was first released there has been a provincial election that ushered in a different government than the one that introduced Bill 60, which was never passed. Local media, including the CBC, maintain ongoing coverage of the Charter as people in Quebec continue to grapple with its ramifications. As I say in the documentary, we didn’t know precisely how the issue would unfold, however:

“We really focused on a cross-section of members of the Communication Studies Department; we looked to professors, we looked to students, and so what you will see is people who come at this from a range of different research perspectives, asking questions about the Charter and more importantly asking questions about the discourses around the Charter. … [At] this exact time we can say that it is creating discourses across the province and across the country that have consequences, and it’s these consequences that we have tried to unpack and we have tried to contribute questions to.”

How do we negotiate difference in travel writing?

How might colonial, or historic, encounters and expectations affect travel writing today?

These are questions I began working through as a newspaper reporter writing about travel experiences, then as a student of postcolonial theory, media, communications, and development. And, this fall, after nearly two months discussing travel writing in a classroom setting, these are questions I continue to struggle with.

Perhaps, on the surface, travel writing appears trivial. An excellent vehicle for selling advertisements in newspapers and magazines, excellent material for letting one’s imagination wander while on a plane, planning a trip, or over coffee on a Saturday morning. But I hold that travel writing is not at all trivial; in some ways it better frames our perceptions of the world — rich in exoticism, possibilities of encounter, and of course adventure — than any news story of faraway tragedy or disaster. More, good travel writing, vivid travel advertising, even memorable fictional films or novels, stick with us. They become cultural markers grounding our expectations of place, and they invite us to meet people we hope will fulfill our expectations. (Consider, as an example, this compelling tourism video for South Africa.)

In his critical assessment of travel writing, Carl Thompson (2011) writes, “If all travel involves an encounter between self and other that is brought about by movement through space, all travel writing is at some level a record or product of this encounter, and of the negotiation between similarity and difference that it entailed” (10).

This encounter urges us to define difference – to explain what makes another culture or another place different, but it assumes there is a “we,” an audience with shared experiences and shared cultural markers who will be able to recognize these differences.

Here lays a danger of a negative othering, wherein “one culture depicts another culture as not only different but also inferior to itself” (Thompson 2011: 132-133). This can also be called “orientalism,” a term coined by Edward Said (2003 [1978]) to define a “rationalization of colonial rule” (p. 39) premised on the stories we tell ourselves about other places, which draw upon, for evidence, more stories we tell ourselves about other places. “Every writer on the Orient … assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge on the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies” (Said: 20). This geographical Orient doesn’t exist – it is essentially everywhere that is not Europe, or North America, although the boundaries can be pushed and pulled.

As an example of how our difference-making or identifying in travel writing might be less a series of new observations than a repetition of expectations, consider Edith Wharton’s (1919) In Morocco, wherein she writes, “Everything that the reader of the Arabian Nights expects to find is here” (quoted in Edwards 2001: 104). Her description, of Morocco as “‘remote,’ ‘exotic,’ and ‘untouched’ by the European tourist industry” (Edwards: 104) thus finds its rhythm by drawing upon shared, historic, folk stories.

There are better critiques of this work out there than I could offer, and one of them is from Justin D. Edwards (2001), who writes in his book, Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840-1930: “…such discourses freeze Morocco in the past and frame North Africa as a space that does not change” (111).

How does a cultural refusal to acknowledge change contribute to potential power imbalances? Because travel writing, or travel promotion, or the travel industry itself do not float outside economic structures. “Our” selection of vacation spots has local economic impacts; the rewards of increased tourism are sought by countries and communities, fostering the promotion of what John Urry (1998 [1990]) calls the “tourist gaze.” 

Urry’s tourist gaze is a construction of authenticity and differentiation that can be consumed (3, 11-12); tourism literature and promotion invites a focus on a “division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary” (p. 11) that is built upon a sense of “anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy” (p. 3).

As travellers, when we adopt this gaze, we come to appreciate not only what we have actually experienced on our journeys, but what we feel like we should experience – the camel-back ride, the gelato Julia Roberts ate on a bench in Italy, perhaps the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel…

“What people ‘gaze upon’ are ideal representations of the view in question that they internalize from postcards and guidebooks (and increasingly from TV programmes).” (Urry, 1998 [1990], p. 86)

To what extent, then, as Urry argues, do the objects of tourism – including people – get framed as both exotic and culturally static or homogenous by the tourist’s gaze? What pressures arise in this gap between the imagined and the real? What challenges for organizations and people in the Global South to develop local tourism by meeting expectations for cultural or environmental preservation, despite or alongside pressures to develop other sectors of local economies?

Last of all, what are the ethical responsibilities of travel journalists in a cosmopolitan — and connected — media space? How does finding difference and constructing exotic tales from travel experiences echo in a media landscape that can be tapped not just by readers of the local newspaper but by audiences all over the world change these stories and their meanings?

Cited references

Edwards, J. (2001). Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840-1930. Hanover and London: University Press of New England.

Said, E. (2003 [1978]). Orientalism. London: Penguin Group.

Thompson, C. (2011). Travel Writing. New York: Routledge.

Urry, J. (1998 [1990]). The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Further reading

Cornelissen, S. (2004). ‘It’s Africa’s Turn!’ The narratives and limitations surrounding the Moroccan and South African bids for the 2006 and 2010 FIFA finals. Third World Quarterly, 25(7), 1293-1309.

Goldstone, P. (2001). Making the World Safe for Tourism. Dexter, MI: Thomson-Shore.

Hall, S. (1997). The spectacle of the other. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (pp. 223-290). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Jaakson, R. (2004). Globalisation and neocolonialist tourism. In M. C. Hall & H. Tucker, Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested discourses, identities and representations (pp. 169-183). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Mignolo, W. (2010). Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality. In W. Mignolo & A. Escobar, Globalization and the Decolonial Option (pp. 302-368). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Robinson, M. & Picard, D. (2006). Tourism, Culture and Sustainable Development. UNESCO, Division of cultural policies and intercultural dialogue, Culture and development section. Nîmes: Société Édition Provence.

Shome, R. & Hegde, R. (2002). Postcolonial approaches to communication: Charting the terrain, engaging the intersections. Communication Theory, 12(3), 249-270.

Telfer, D. & Sharpley, R. (2008). Tourism and Development in the Developing World. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Yan, G., & Santos, C. (2009). ‘China, Forever’ Tourism Discourse and Self-Orientalism. Annals of Tourism Research, 36(2), 295-315.

 

So, my new year was ushered in with the arrival of my first-ever book review, published in Alberta Views, a Calgary-based magazine billing itself as about and for Albertans. I reviewed Andrew Nikiforuk’s latest book, The Energy of Slaves, last fall — you can catch the drift of my opinion here, or if you’re in Alberta, pick up Alberta Views at newsstands.

Anyway readers, I wish you and yours all the best for 2013, whether it be a year of travel and awesomeness or finally dedicating yourself to yoga or giving up some bad habit. Or school. Best of luck if you are also back in school this January 🙂

In my last two posts, I discussed how my last major project for The Journal — “How safe are our pipelines?; Government, industry keep records of spills, but measuring risk is difficult,” in The Edmonton Journal, 7 July 2012, C1 — came together. First, I examined the writing of the lede and nut graph, then I offered a snapshot of how to get hard facts together, with a heavy emphasis on interviews and record-keeping.

Today, I am breaking out direct quotes from the story in order to discuss how I found interview subjects.

Before doing so, however, I would like to offer two basic guidelines for carrying out journalistic interviews:

1. Know what you need to ask, and know the answers you expect to receive.
2. Allow yourself to be surprised by the interview, and follow the conversation.

Perhaps these guidelines seem contradictory — how can you know what you want to hear while allowing yourself to be surprised?

The first guideline speaks to planning your interview. Before you pick up the phone — whether to carry out a telephone interview, or to set up an in-person meeting — you should know who you want to speak to and why. What will this person tell you that your story needs? What holes in the narrative can this person fill? What would the reader want to know if they had the opportunity to interview the same person?

One of my former colleagues — a hard-nosed investigative reporter — drew up a detailed list of questions before every interview. This script might even include an introduction, so the reporter could later be absolutely certain he had made clear to the interviewee who he worked for, what story he was writing, and where the information he learned would land. Particularly in investigative journalism, there is no room for generalities — it is unfair to your source, your readers and possibly to yourself to leave someone with the wrong idea as to what you meant to ask.

I tend — with a few exceptions — not to write out a script. Instead, I draw up a list of key topics that have to be covered, and I try to tick them off as I and the interview subject go through them. I leave room to add more topics as the interview goes on — items that pop into my head, or items they bring up that I want to keep track of. I always keep notes, whether or not I am recording an interview. If I am recording, I keep track of the time stamps on my recorder alongside my notes so I can return to a quote later for clarification. If I am not recording, I may repeat a direct quote back to the interview source either to ensure I got it right, or to let them expand on what they were saying.

The second guideline — to allow yourself to be surprised — encourages active listening and, arguably, allows the reporter to be fair to the interview subject. The only agenda a reporter should have going into an interview is getting the story right — not proving one party is right over another party, not nailing someone for once and for all.

Listening carefully to a source means querying their reasoning, allowing yourself to learn something new, and following a conversation you didn’t necessarily expect to have. It does not mean being taken off-course entirely — the reporter should remain in charge of the interview — but it allows room to learn that what you thought was a story may not be the story you expected.

The interviews

After tracking down hard facts for the pipeline story, the facts and figures needed to be brought to life for the reader.

Beat reporters are consistently in danger of speaking to the same people, over and over again. The goal here was to speak to a variety of people from all sides of the debate.

Although energy and environment ministers Ken Hughes and Diana McQueen (respectively) appear first in the story, they were among my final interviews.

Here are examples of what they said:

“We have a very safe system in Alberta, one of the most tightly regulated systems in the country for pipelines,” Energy Minister Ken Hughes says. But, he adds, “It’s actually quite difficult to get some of the information, and so one of the things that we’re going to be doing is actually seeing if we can’t make this more easily available to people.” …
McQueen says they are open to finding a process for “making sure that the information is transparent and easily accessible for people,” making recommendations with respect to water safety, and evaluating penalties to companies.

In this case I did prepare for the interview by drawing up a short list of questions — I wanted to ensure I hit on all the topics that would ultimately be written about in the final story.

As well, this organization helped me be absolutely clear as to what was asked and what was answered:

Asked about big-picture data that would explain the environmental effects of spills, McQueen said there are processes in place to handle each break, its cleanup and the protection of nearby residents.

Next, I quoted another traditional source — an environmental activist who had, days before, sent the newspaper a press release about “a group of landowners, environmental groups and others” who wanted a review of the pipeline system. This was the result of our telephone conversation:

“What we really need is a full review of how the system’s doing,” says Chelsea Flook, director of the Prairie chapter of the environmental group Sierra Club. …
“It’s difficult when the ERCB doesn’t want to release data on the pipelines itself,” Flook says. “Why don’t they want to tell us what’s going on?”

My telephone interview with Spruce Grove Mayor Stuart Houston was the result of asking the Capital Region Board for a map of pipelines in the area:

In the Edmonton region – a hub for oil lines coming into and out of refineries – pipeline committee chairman Stuart Houston, the mayor of Spruce Grove, says pipelines are safer than tankers or trains.
“I think there’s a science to it,” he says, when asked whether the region has statistics on safety or spills specific to the capital region. “I believe it has been demonstrated to be the safest, for the volume of oil that’s moved in the world.” …
“There have been a couple of pipeline ruptures. I mean, that is going to happen with pipelines,” Houston says. “We never like to hear it, but we still believe it’s the safest way to transport. We hear about ruptures and stuff, but the biggest factor is mitigating the impact of that spill and then having the persons responsible clean up.”

My phone interview with Sean Kheraj, an environmental historian at York University in Toronto, was the result of coming across his blog. He had written about questions he had about the reported rate of failure along the pipelines, and that blog post was first noticed by a columnist at the Vancouver Sun. My editor pointed out the column, I read the post, and I connected with Sean:

“The communities in British Columbia that are coming forward and talking about whether or not they want to have pipelines like the Northern Gateway project run through their communities are engaged in an exercise of risk assessment,” …
“One of the problems is the information is conveyed in such a way that I think it obscures the ability for a community to accurately evaluate what the risk is.” 

Finding a landowner to speak to about pipelines should be a simple process in Alberta. Throw a stone anywhere near Fort Saskatchewan, for example, and it’s landed near a pipeline.

My colleague Gemma Karstens-Smith helped me out on this front — we set out county maps from the area, and she cross-referenced the names of landowners to an online phone book, then began cold-calling people. But not all landowners want to talk about pipeline issues — some simply don’t have any, and others are still negotiating with companies.
 
In hindsight, an alternative way for us to have found people may well have been to mine the fully public database of lawsuits currently underway in Alberta between landowners and pipeline companies.

Using maps and a phone book instead, Gemma found a great story in Sherri Prodaniuk:

Away from government and industry reports, on land northeast of Edmonton, pipeline encroachment has prevented Sherri Prodaniuk from building anew on her family’s grain farm.
How deeply a pipeline is buried, the width of a company’s right-of-way, and whether the company approves a potential project can all determine whether a landowner can make changes to affected land. …
Like most landowners in Alberta, according to a 2011 Ipsos-Reid poll commissioned by the National Energy Board, Prodaniuk is fairly confident in the safety of her backyard pipeline. What bothers her is the lack of “democratic process,” or her inability to ultimately refuse the line.
“You would hope that the proper measures were put into place for lines not to leak on your property,” Prodaniuk says, suggesting landowners ought to receive more money, perhaps an annual payment, because they live with the possibility of the infrastructure failing.
“There are some lines that break and, yes, they do contaminate the soil. … It happens. I wish it wouldn’t happen.”

Because this story was about spills, not just regulation, we revisited “one of the province’s largest oil spills in decades, a 2011 leak of 28,000 barrels (4.5 million litres) from the Plains Midstream-owned Rainbow Lake pipeline near Peace River.” This resulted in an interview with Plains Midstream’s Stephen Bart as opposed to the site visit we hoped for:

“We’ve contoured all the lands, reseeded, so we’re just keeping an eye on it,” Bart says, adding most of the work was done by December. Of water samples, he says, “It was perfectly clean when we left in December and we just want to keep an eye and make sure nothing was missed. So it’s really just monitoring and letting nature take its course from that point on.”
Although Plains Midstream makes no failure statistics available, Bart says, “Pipeline operations (have) by far the best safety record from a transportation perspective. Plains, relative to the industry, compares very favourably there as well.”

We also tried to focus on the solution side of the equation — what is being done to stop leaks from happening? Business reporter Lewis Kelly met with an Edmonton businessman focused on exactly this question:

“As things get worse and you get more failures, then people will say, ‘Hmm, maybe we should do more,’ ” says Adrian Banica, chief executive of Synodon, an Edmonton company that has harnessed science used in the space sector to monitor pipelines for spills.
In practice, for customers like Encana, ConocoPhillips, Atco or Nova Chemicals, Synodon has mounted sensors to aircraft that hover 300 metres off the ground to capture snapshots of how pipelines are faring.

I called the University of Alberta, looking for researchers who are working on this, as well (I also hoped for a photograph of a corroding pipe, which was not possible in a nanotechnology lab):

Government penalties aside, a leak is revenue lost, says Walied Moussa, a University of Alberta engineering professor. Money alone would make early detection of leaks or strains on the system imperative. …
Moussa and a team of scientists have produced a sensory chip smaller than a pinky fingertip – seven millimetres by seven millimetres – that can be built into a membrane that would encase new pipelines. Hundreds or thousands of sensors could be set into the membrane, to speak to a wireless communication device that would alert pipeline engineers of any strains or abnormalities in the system.
The technology could detect a leak the moment it happened, anywhere in the pipe. Sometimes the source of the leak is “like a pinhole” and can take a long time to discover.
“By the time you discover that, there is huge contamination that took place,” Moussa says. “If we can monitor where that leak took place immediately, then we can save significant amount of not just resources, but actually we can reduce contamination and clean up much easier.”

Next up:

In my next blog post, I will discuss finishing-touch writing elements including the “kicker.” I welcome any and all comments, from questions to recommendations on how you would have done it differently. Cheers!

I have rarely been interested in questions about what makes professional journalists different from bloggers. At heart, I find the debate definitively boring: Some professional journalists make excellent, entertaining bloggers; Some bloggers undertake original reportage that contributes a great deal to public discussion.

If I were to try to differentiate, then, I would start with original reportage and transparency. Media organizations have resources — both monetary and human — that support full-time jobs dedicated to finding new information and asking people questions, allowing for original reporting. Professional journalists also have experience in finding information and, again, a support system in place for long institutional memory. In terms of transparency, reporters do (or should) consistently self-identify as people who will be making public whatever they learn, they explain where their information came from, and they (should) reach to tell all sides of a story as best they can.

Bloggers can also do all this, though. A lone blogger might depend on crowd-sourcing to find a support system and long institutional memory. Practice makes for experience. And bloggers can offer a different kind of transparency — hopefully in doing any original reportage they self-identify as people who will make information public, but in addition they can publish at length about how they found information.

So, to discuss original reportage and in the name of transparency, in this blog post I’ve pulled out some of the hard numbers used in my last major project for The Journal, published as, “How safe are our pipelines?; Government, industry keep records of spills, but measuring risk is difficult,” in The Edmonton Journal, 7 July 2012, C1. Like yesterday’s post, this is an explanation of how a lengthy feature works — in this case, drawing on traditional and non-traditional sources to track facts and figures.

Delving into such a topic as Alberta’s pipeline system demanded extensive, organized record-keeping. My record-keeping is most often focused on not losing anything: I keep a single file folder filled with hand-written notes and printed-out reports; I back up word documents on my computer and e-mail copies to myself from a work account to a personal account; I save much of what I write and most electronic documents I come across on a USB stick as well as on my desktop.

Over the course of this project I discovered a great alternative record-keeping practice, though! My colleague Lewis Kelly writes his first drafts in a word document with footnotes. This is brilliant — ask him about any specific fact in his story, and he has clearly noted where it came from, when and where the interview took place, etc.

Ask me about a specific fact in my story and I will spend five minutes scrambling through notebooks and searching my e-mail archive.

Hard facts

From my story:

The Energy Resources Conservation Board reports a current rate of failure per thousand kilometres of pipeline as 1.5, down from 2.2 in 2006.
Altogether there are nearly 400,000 kilometres of pipelines, including those that move gas, oil, water or other products.

This data came directly from an ERCB spokesman over the course of a handful of e-mails. Generally, interviews are best done on the phone or in person, so you can talk through your questions, look for clarifications, and ensure both parties understand each other clearly.

In some cases, however, when you are looking for very technical information, it can be easier to write out a series of questions and e-mail them, after you have spoken to the right person to ensure the e-mail is going to the right place. I don’t often recommend it, but this did work very well in this case, and made for a clear paper trail I could follow later.

The board defines “failure” as anything that stops the pipeline’s flow, from a leak or rupture to a hit that damages the pipeline or its coating but doesn’t necessarily cause a spill.
Full pipeline ruptures – defined as “the instantaneous tearing or fracturing of the pipeline material, immediately impairing the operation of the pipeline” – are also on a relative downswing: The most recent numbers indicate there were just 18 ruptures in 2010 compared with 39 in 2008 and 23 in 2007.

This information all came from the ERCB’s annual reports; experts in the field will have read these reports for themselves, of course, but most readers will not. The reporter’s job in this case is to relay the information in a more clear fashion than would be available in technical reports people find online.

As well, all these facts and figures ultimately act as backbone not only to the published nut graph(s), but should explain the opinions and comments throughout the story from people who are both happy and unhappy with the pipeline system.

The province does not keep a single list or map of pipeline leaks. Annual reports from the ERCB outline the causes of failures but provide no breakdown of costs to clean up leaks or the impacts on water, land or wildlife. …
While Alberta Environment keeps track of serious environmental incidents on paper, there is no database or report that breaks pipeline ruptures out from other environmental disasters.
The province would have to go through mountains of paperwork to find out how many bodies of water are affected by pipeline spills in a year, or how many animals died after running into leaked oil.

We know all this because I asked many times, of both the energy and environment departments, of the ERCB, and of the ministers themselves. I went through annual reports, budgets for both departments, and the ERCB’s website, just in case there was information out there we could use to dig deeper.

Journalists are never really experts in their fields, even if they are beat reporters. Nonetheless, learning and using the specific terms for information you are asking about — and knowing where this information should be found, and in what format — helps the communications people you are speaking with relay your questions.

No other jurisdiction measures ruptures, spills or other line problems the same way, making a comparison between Alberta’s pipeline safety record and that of other jurisdictions in North America virtually impossible.

This fact came as a result of a lengthy telephone interview with an ERCB spokeswoman, but demanded some frame of reference:

For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation simply reports the overall number of pipeline spills per year, how much liquid has been spilled, the reported cause and cost of damages. Its data are broken down by state and can be downloaded for analysis.

This story was also an example of how good record-keeping for past projects can lay the groundwork for future projects:

Problems with the reporting of Alberta’s pipeline information are also reflected in a 2011 provincial report from Alberta Innovates. Ahead of U.S. hearings into TransCanada’s proposal to build the $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline to the Gulf Coast, the report’s authors wrote: “It is recommended that better statistics be provided as an improved presentation of the integrity of the Alberta pipeline system and to facilitate continuous monitoring of the performance of (diluted bitumen) pipelines.”

I first found this Alberta Innovates report in December, 2011, when I was writing about the Northern Gateway pipeline project for a series of stories. I spent days on the joint National Energy Board-Environmental Protection Agency panel’s website for Gateway hearing documents, and this report was among the submissions. I printed it out at the time and kept it in a file dedicated to the Gateway hearings. Later, when I began research for the pipeline project, I went through the Gateway hearings file for any reports, interview subjects, or other documents that I could revisit.

Still, to date, large-scale spills rarely seem to take place in people’s backyards or on the waterways they use. For example, a 5,000 barrel sweet crude spill into muskeg 20 kilometres southeast of Rainbow Lake in May got far less media attention than the recent Sundre-area spill of 3,000 barrels of oil. …
Gleniffer Lake, which was closed immediately after the June 8 spill for cleanup, was not reopened to the public until June 28. Shoreline cleanup along the Red Deer River continues.

This data came, primarily, from our own and the Calgary Herald’s newspaper archives.

At one point in the process of my reporting, I flirted with the idea of creating a spreadsheet of all spills as reported in the Journal and Herald, going back about a decade. This would have been seriously time-consuming, however, and we would have run into some trouble with how spills are reported — some are reported in litres, others in barrels, and some reports are corrected multiple times. As well, not all spills receive the same media attention as others, information about others is not known publicly until some time has passed, and media outlets do not always cover the details of clean-up.

Next up:

In the days ahead, I’ll be continuing to review this feature, looking specifically at how interviews were done, and discussing writing elements such as the “kicker” and the sidebar. I welcome any and all comments, from questions to recommendations on how you would have done it differently — thanks for reading!

With a great deal of excitement and no small amount of fear, I’ve left The Journal to pursue a PhD in communications at Concordia University. And so this blog will likely turn more to questions of representation, analysis of journalism, interesting articles I come across and — forgive me now — how my own research rolls out.

But first, I wanted to share and take a closer look at my last major project for The Journal — an investigation of Alberta’s pipeline system that was published early last month after weeks of interviews, data mining, and, frankly, finding dead ends. It was actually a pretty challenging piece to write, and if you can track down the original story (published as “How safe are our pipelines?; Government, industry keep records of spills, but measuring risk is difficult,” in The Edmonton Journal, 7 July 2012, C1), you’ll note it was helped along with files from reporter Gemma Karstens-Smith, business reporter Lewis Kelly and provincial affairs reporter Karen Kleiss. You won’t find the names of my editors, all of whom offered amazing advice and recommendations. Nor will you find the names of countless fellow Journal reporters — when you work in a newsroom, you are consistently guided and inspired by your coworkers and their very good questions.

Due to copyright issues, I clearly cannot republish entire articles. What I can do, however, is pull some of the graphs to discuss how I got this piece off the ground, as something of a teaching tool for the future. As such, today and over the next few days, I will be discussing the lede (or introduction), the nut graph (or thesis statement), the reportage (how I found facts and figures), the interviews, the kicker (or conclusion) and, finally, the accompanying sidebar.

When published, this piece was about 4,000 words, run alongside a sidebar, stories from my colleagues and an A1 introduction. Most newspaper articles simply don’t benefit from so much space, even as we get into a digital age of online publication and the freedom to post more onto our websites. Nonetheless, I think there are things to learn from this piece, in terms of how to find information and what to do with it all once you’ve amassed your ridiculously huge file of paperwork, your audio files from interviews, and more maps than you know how to deal with. As well, I think there are criticisms to be made of this work, and look forward to any comments or questions you may have.

The lede

At the end of the day, I spent weeks speaking to government, industry and regulatory board representatives, scientists trying to come up with solutions, and I read countless reports while doing a lot of math.

I did not, however, have a really strong first-person story of a spill, which would offer a more typical beginning to a newspaper story. Reporters usually ease into a big story by connecting readers to someone directly affected by the issue at hand.

This personal story has to be relevant, however — you can’t lead with something you think is interesting that isn’t after all related to the topic at hand. The lede should set the tone for the rest of the story, walking readers directly to the “nut graph.”

Without such a story, I chose — with some difficulty and after taking a few walks to clear my head — to try to hit readers with the very real numbers. How to do it, though? Sometimes we come across numbers too big — for example, a government counting on a deficit budget in the billions of dollars — to picture. Government budget numbers are so much bigger than what we have in our own bank accounts they become unimaginable, and carry little to no weight.

Here is what went to print:

In just 30 days this spring, Alberta pipelines spilled nearly 10,000 barrels of oil, leaking crude and effluent onto privately owned land in northern Alberta and into the waters of a southern Alberta reservoir.
That spillage amounts to 1.5 million litres in three leaks between May 19 and June 18, or the equivalent of 44 large tanker trucks being emptied into the environment.

This lede was the result of time spent Google-converting thousands of oil barrels to Olympic swimming pools and other imaginable volumes. My deskmate Elise Stolte recommended the tanker truck comparison, and I think we can all picture the trucks in our minds, rolling along — or toppled beside — a major highway.

The “nut graph” — or graphs

In print journalism, the “nut graph” clearly sets out what an article is about — it is something like a thesis statement in an academic essay. Its intent is to explain, in one paragraph, why an article matters. In what context does this article live? Why must a reader invest his or her time?

In blog posts dealing with reportage over the next two days, I will discuss the importance of allowing yourself to be surprised by the data you find and the interviews you undertake. But by the time you are finished your research, the nut graph is an opportunity to write with authority.

In my story, the third paragraph was the nut graph:

Industry and government officials insist that overall, Alberta’s pipelines are safe, even as environmental groups call for a review of the system, and people outside the province question the wisdom of two massive pipeline projects proposed to carry bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands to British Columbia’s West Coast and Texas’s Gulf Coast.

I would argue all news stories need a nut graph in the first three to five graphs. A lengthy article demands secondary nut graphs to uphold the structure of the story. This is in part because there are “turns” — people literally have to turn the page, or they scroll down so far on the screen that they may need something of a flag post to remind them where they are in the story. This, again, is not unlike an academic essay, but written in much friendlier language.

Here are a pair of supporting nut graphs that could be found in my story:

Comparative data supporting the safety of Alberta’s pipeline system are hard to come by, however. How does Alberta’s system measure up against others? What is the big-picture environmental impact of spills beyond single incidents? These questions are difficult to answer. …

The problem with information that mystifies the frequency of spills comes when people outside Alberta try to evaluate projects like Enbridge’s Northern Gateway. The $5.5-billion line proposed to carry bitumen to tankers at Kitimat, B.C., has won over Alberta’s industry, as well as city and provincial government leaders, for its promise of $72 billion in revenues over nine years. But in British Columbia, First Nations and other communities worry about threats to the environment, particularly at water crossings throughout northern B.C.
Such groups were quick to jump on the Elk Point spill – the result of a flange gasket failure at the pumping station, and reportedly causing no public health risk – as proof the Northern Gateway plan ought to be binned. …

Next up:

In the days ahead, I’ll be reviewing how I reported this story — specifically, how I found information and how interviews were done — and I will return to writing elements such as the “kicker.”

I welcome any and all comments, from questions to recommendations on how you would have done it differently!