Monday, January 17, 2011

Conversation overheard on a bus

There were four journalism students riding the bus and talking about their classes. Three of them were girls and I'm pretty sure the one boy was wearing mascara. He isn't gay. He is clearly a heterosexual, I suspect maybe even a little too heterosexual from his interactions with the girls. (You can draw whatever good or bad conclusions about the future of journalism you want from that.)

The boy was complaining about having to go to Vanier to take a picture. Vanier, for those who don't know Ottawa, is a section of town that used to be ethnic and poor and is now partly gentrified. It's a neighbourhood where you can walk from a street where all the houses list for between seven hundred thousand to a million and, in the space of a few blocks, be on a street where you can find hookers and drug dealers.

The boy had suggested a generic person on the street picture for his professor and the prof told him that wasn't good enough so now he was having to ride a crosstown bus to take a photograph. At least part of the point of his complaining, as my grandmother used to say, was to brag. He was hoping, and in fact succeeded, in impressing the girls with the fact that he was going to take a man-on-the-street picture in a neighbourhood where the men on the street can be pretty rough characters. He said, "if I don't get shot doing it," in a tone that suggested he wasn't afraid at all. The only thing he was unhappy about, to hear him tell it at least, was having to waste all this time riding on the bus to fulfill what he saw as whim of his professor's.

But, you know, I see the professor's point entirely. The day journalists start thinking that any old person the street shot can be used—and, tragically, lots of them do—is the day they stop doing their job well.

And what a pathetic lack of interest by the kid himself. Think of that neighbourhood. Rich people living in close proximity to the poor and to criminals. Oh, what opportunity a real journalist would see in that.

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