Here is an exchange I had on CAJ-L with Ryerson j-prof John Miller, an extension of my earlier post, On timidity and being a team player.
A couple things.
Kim Bolan and William Marsden are experienced, highly skilled journalists who work for papers where very strong union locals exist.
So if John was expecting them to be fired outright for popping off at a CAJ session, I think that would be unlikely. I suspect the management of those papers would have found themselves in a major battle.
Now, a reporter without that same star power at a non-unionized paper? The outcome might well be different.
The editors John listed no doubt have many fine qualities. I found a speech that Reynolds gave on the craft of writing (CAJ national, 1989?) to be quite inspirational.
Other than Burnside -- who was one of a number of senior people at the Ottawa Citizen to leave when Hollinger started running the show; she wasn't quiet about her distaste for that company's style -- I don't remember coming across their public utterances on some of the issues raised in this thread.
Could John please post a few?
Bill Doskoch
On vacation
http://billdoskoch.blogware
> From: "John Miller" <jmiller@ryerson.ca>
> Date: 2004/12/16 Thu AM 11:08:05 EST
> To: "Bill Doskoch" <bill.doskoch@sympatico.ca>,
> <caj-list@eagle.ca>
>
> Thanks to Bill for some good examples of people who were shafted because they were seen to be square pegs in the corporate world of media. But there are examples on the other side, too. At the last CAJ conference in Ottawa, there was a very interesting panel on the CanWest controversy. It included Ray Heard, who politely asked if he could video the panel for posterity, and surprisingly the moderator agreed, perhaps not knowing that Heard, a media consultant, was working for the Aspers. A couple of courageous CanWest journalists, Kim Bolan and William Marsden, said some critical things from the audience. Heard at one point said to Marsden, "That's a very courageous thing for you to say."
> A few days later Marsden was given a letter of reprimand by the Gazette, even though he was on leave at the time, and Bolan was called in and asked to explain her comments by the editor of the Sun. It was Big Brother in spades, but so far as I know, neither of them suffered any serious consequences.
> I'm not minimizing the natural pressure journalists feel to toe the company line and get ahead, but I do believe a lot of that is self-imposed. There are enough examples of people who have spoken their minds and engaged in independent thinking getting into positions of some power in newsrooms (Nick Hirst, Jim Jennings, Neil Reynolds, Sharon Burnside, to name a few).