When it came time before fourth year, my eligibility for the editorship of the Ryerson Review of Journalism was in the air because of my concurrent editor’s position at McClung’s. Until that point, I don’t think anyone had ever run a student publication in addition to running the RRJ masthead, because of the amount of work it involved. But she vouched for me, a tardy, narcoleptic girl who slouched in the back row, and for that I’m really thankful, because I’d likely be on a radically different career path and in a less stable job if it wasn’t for her seal of approval.

I last saw her at the National Magazine Awards last year, when she received a much-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. Got a couple words in with her outside the bathroom, while I sat on a couch stuffing my face (so elegant!) with mini slider burgers. By that point she was bald-headed and walked with some difficulty, but she seemed genuinely thrilled to be there, not just to accept her own award, but to see that her past students (self included) and many colleagues had been nominated. When she accepted her award later that night, she read from her prepared speech too fast, and flapped her hands, and was self-deprecating as she accepted her award on behalf of all the copy editors and fact-checkers in the industry.

I don’t do much copy editing or fact-checking these days, but her little “Are you checking sure?” voice always comes to me instinctually. Her brilliant blog chronicling her treatment (her cancer reappeared around the same time my dad was going through his treatment) was immensely comforting and helpful to see how it was from a patient’s perspective. Maybe that’s why I got so teary when a friend called me when the news: my dad’s cancer is in remission, which makes it all the more difficult to understand the random nature of the disease… who it takes, who it spares.

There been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

The third season of TV series Mad Men premiered this Sunday; in it, the staff at ad agency Sterling Cooper is jettisoned into 1963.

Oh, what a year it turns out to be: Housewives awaken from domestic stupor when The Feminine Mystique is published; Camelot tumbles; Beatles fans let out hormonal squeals; singer Sam Cooke writes his iconic song “A Change is Gonna Come,” about simmering racial tension in the South.

Mad Men, a show its creator Matthew Weiner has said is feminist, signals the third season’s tone in the opening minutes, when Sterling Cooper’s lone male secretary mutters, “This place is a gynocracy.”

Though Manhattan was a man’s world, the woman’s life is well-explored: they’re passed over for jobs; pre-marital sex makes them “strumpets”; men rape them; they consider abortions.

Consider Christina Hendricks’ account of how viewers reacted to her character Joan’s rape: “People say things like, ‘Well, you know that episode where Joan sort of got raped?’ Or they say rape and use quotation marks with their fingers … It illustrates how similar people are today, because we’re still questioning whether it’s a rape.”

I’ve heard viewers, male and female, fawn about the secretive Don Draper, but even the intelligent ones are in awe of this lying, cheating ass. Truly, inexplicably, women are drawn to his misogyny, and men want to be that.

I chuckled when Joan shows the new-girl secretary Peggy to her typewriter. “It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use,” she assures her.

Mad Men was set in a world on the cusp of change, edging its way to free love, desegregation and violent war — but they clung, and still we cling, to antiquated notions.

Every generation has its revolution, and ours is now. I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it is. It’s Afghanistan, where a law was passed that allows men to starve their wives for denying them sex. It’s Carleton University allegedly accusing one of its female students of “asking for” a sex assault by working late at night in a secluded lab. It’s women being interrogated before receiving birth control, the morning-after pill or an abortion.

Mad Men is a mirror, and if we look into it, we will see that our turmoil is as it always has been.

Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society. It requires a willful abstinence from convenience and plenty, a core promise of the modern world. Our bountiful era is predicated on the division of labor: We don’t sew our own clothes, we don’t build our own houses—and we certainly don’t farm—because we’re too busy doing whatever it is we do for everyone else.

—”My Empire of Dirt” in New York magazine

[Linda] Hirshman’s thumbnail review of recent feminist history [in Get to Work ... And Get a Life, Before It's Too Late] makes for prickly, entertaining reading. “Just over thirty years ago,” she rails, “the feminist movement turned from Betty Friedan, the big-nosed, razor-tongued moralist,” to Gloria Steinem. Not only did the honey-tressed blonde clearly have a smaller nose, as Hirshman implies, but “Gloria was nicer than Betty.” The pliant undercover Bunny shepherded in a “useless choice feminism” of soft convictions and “I gotta be me” moral relativism. Hirshman quotes Sex and the City’s hapless Charlotte, who, when given flak for quitting her job to please her smug first husband, can only wail plaintively, “I choose my choice! I choose my choice!”

[Deletia]

In fact, Hirshman insists, the problem starts well before motherhood. it begins when young women enter college and violate Hirshman’s No. 1 rule of female emancipation: “Don’t study art.”

Why aren’t the women who are outnumbering men in undergraduate institutions leading the information economy? “Because they’re dabbling,” she snaps. Here’s yet another Problem That Has a Name: Frida Kahlo.

“Everybody loves Frida Kahlo. Half Jewish, half Mexican, tragically injured when young, sexually linked to men and women, abused by a famous genius husband. Oh, and a brilliantly talented painter. If I was a feminazi, the first thing I’d ban would be books about Frida Kahlo. Because Frida Kahlo’s life is not a model for women’s lives. And if you’re not Frida Kahlo and you major in art, you’re going to wind up answering the phones at some gallery in Chelsea, hoping a rich male collector comes to rescue you.”

As Woody Allen’s own Whore of Mesa would sigh and pencil in the margin, “Yes, very true!” And don’t we all know them, those defiant, dreadlocked young lovelies with their useless degrees in studio art, experimental fiction, modern dance, and gender studies, lactose-intolerant and unemployable: “I choose my choice! I choose my choice!”

Ah, shit. I love Sandra Tsing Loh.

Also, after several weeks of nerve-wracking uncertainty (because I am also a compulsive planner that fears uncertainty in life most of all), I’ve taken a part-time-temporary-to-perhaps-become-full-time-permanent job as copy editor with Metro. Ma and Pa would be so proud. It’s casual dress code, the work environment seems pretty laid-back, and I love copy editing — on the other hand the office is at Eglinton/DVP and the hours are extremely prohibitive to the acts of socialization. All in all, though, all employment all the time makes Canice a happy girl.

Today I found out I won third place in the Consumer Magazine: Investigations and Analysis category at the 2008 AEJMC awards for my Review story on Harvey Cashore. It’s nice to know people read my 6,000 word self-indulgent (me, not Harvey) opus on a then-unknown CBC journalist, yeah? Since then he’s been featured on J-Source and what have you, so I like to pretend I had something to do with that.

My summer 2008 issue is finally on stands, so you should all go look for the shiny silver cover with the dog. It’s a good read, I promise — not just my piece but also ones about CBC, politicos, crusaders and anti-zealots, First Nations issues and others that run the whole gamut of Canadian media. You can find the Ryerson Review of Journalism at Indigo/Chapters across Canada and, in the GTA, preferably at indies such as Pages.

Update, 2:33 EST:

Took a look at the full winners’ list. There are some dubious winners, but whatever.

As for mine, they mistakenly credited the story to a Catherine Williams. Somewhere, young Catherine is very happy and confused at this turn of good events.

Here were the judge’s comments:

Depth of detail; excellent quotes and interviews; important topic. Well organized by paragraphs. Would have been improved by following through on promise of deck: “Accused of inventing a scandal” was not really covered in article.

I thought I covered the “inventing the scandal” part pretty well — considering I laid out the period in the mid-90s and the Saturday Night article and all that in great detail for almost a whole section in the last third of the story, with a great many quotes from Harvey and colleagues. I’m glad he commended the structure, which I literally almost killed myself over.

Most importantly, I’m thankful he didn’t blow my cover on the blasé quotes about the state of investigative journalism. I think (though rightfully) journalists will circle the wagons on their profession and livelihood, and I grimaced every time those quotes were left intact in round after round of editing. It’s noble to say that budget cuts are a travesty and an insult to generations of gumshoes past, which of course these seasoned men and women are entitled to, but it’s a fact that the entire industry is grappling with massive economic turmoil. To think otherwise would be a lie. And be thankful you’re not working for the Tribute Company, parent company of the Chicago Tribute and the L.A. Times, which is sinking fast under a $13 billion cargo of debt.

I’m a bit surprised he didn’t catch onto that, all the cheerleading… but then again, if he had we wouldn’t have these out-of-left-field winners…

Also, I’m applying for new jobs. It seems like every job is either an unpaid internship or a mid/senior-level editing position I’m hopelessly unqualified for.

Sophisticated people are honestly trying to do the right thing, in ways official propaganda had not prepared me for. Like England, the United States, Japan, and others before it, China is passing through the environmental-disaster stage of industrialization and beginning to clean up. The difference is that those countries waited until they were rich before they started the process. China is still full of poor people, but for reasons of scale and impact, it cannot postpone cleaning up.

A less-hysterical look at China’s environmental efforts from the always reliable James Fallows. Read it here.

My own experience with my high school’s newspaper was limited — we didn’t have one. The closest facsimile was still a long shot: one self-alienating Gr. 12 weirdo started a photocopied and folded A3-sized arts-and-lit mag called Phantasmagoria, which was later renamed The Lemon because nobody could remember the former, much less pronounce or spell it. I always thought running a school paper might have been my bag, but I was far too anguished with my own teenaged misery to cover epic school events such as the Richmond Hill H.S. Raiders’ junior football matches in rural Ontario or the jazz band.

My closest experience was with yearbook, an operation more akin to one person (in our year, Richard) running the show, and other people just hanging out in the office because that was the cool place to be. Which, I guess, is pretty close to the experience at The Paper. Except nobody looked 22 years old or had clear skin. In short, it was all pretty non-threatening.

In university, I both incurred and inflicted some war wounds, but I managed to come out on top. When the Ryerson Review of Journalism was all said and done this spring, I had a coffee with Tim, my professor, and reflected with perhaps a little too much honesty that I’m only a team player if I get to be the leader. So in that way I relate with The Paper’s editor Amanda.

Anyway, I don’t know if Doyle’s saying that the Globe’s newsroom is also incestuously addled with love affairs and catty women (or just that it’s cutthroat), but I have heard enough things about it from Ryerson professors to know that the few bitches there (Wong, Blatchford, Wente) got all alpha male on each other because they thought that’s what women were supposed to do in an almost entirely male environment.

Journalism 101: Feuds, cliques and bizarre eruptions of egotism
By John Doyle

So it’s Monday morning and I’m all “oh-my-God-what-have-I-done-with-my-life?”

I have devoted my life to writing, specifically in the newspaper racket. How pathetic is that? Newspapers, as you may have heard, are dead or dying. Nobody cares what it says in the paper. If you’re not blogging, you’re nothing.

Yeah right. This newspaper is just dandy, thanks. It’s thriving, and striving as ever to be the best. And as for this blogging thing, well, a lot of bloggers read blogs.

Newspapers are rarely portrayed accurately on TV or in movies. And when they are used as a setting, newspaper writers and editors complain and sneer. The recent and final season of The Wire was partly set in the newsroom of The Baltimore Sun and written by a former Sun journalist. Yet journalists across the United States heaped abuse on it for not being an accurate depiction of working life at a big-city daily.

The truth is that it’s well-nigh impossible to capture life at a newspaper. The non-journalist audience would not accept the rendering of authentic newspaper life as credible. They simply wouldn’t believe it.

The Paper (MTV Canada, 9:30 p.m.) is a fly-on-the-wall series that documents a few months of life among the student staff of The Circuit, the award-winning newspaper at Cypress Bay High School in Weston, Fla. It’s very good, compelling TV. It actually captures a good deal of the weirdness, the good the bad and the ugly of newspaper life. And that’s because it’s set at a high school.

The working life at any newspaper is rather like high school. There’s the good stuff – the thrill of learning things, the camaraderie, the optimism and the celebration of achievement. And there’s the rest of it – feuds, cliques, juvenile aggression, pointless character assassination, bullying and bizarre eruptions of egotism. Or so I’m told, anyway. Here in the TV Cranny, it’s heads-down, get-it-done, be cheerful and polite. Rumours of what is actually going on only reach me months or years later, when I meet people from other newspapers.

The Paper started airing a few weeks ago and the first thing viewers saw and heard was a young woman named Amanda declaring, “Journalists are the most important part of the world. They really are.” It was a good beginning. Then it became clear that Amanda was one of four candidates vying to be the next editor-in-chief of The Circuit. And, because the paper has a tradition of excellence and has won many awards, the top job is important. It could be the first step in a long career in journalism.

Amanda has indeed become editor-in-chief. It was fascinating to watch the scenes immediately following the announcement. Most of her competitors for the job began plotting to undermine her. They talked about her being bossy and on a power trip. They failed to mention that while they were having a wild party, Amanda was at home polishing her application for the job. And yes, she is bossy and confident, but one of her strengths is that she’s a good editor, able to spot grammatical errors and other flaws in the stories about school life that the staff write. As the series has progressed, Amanda’s grip on the paper and the staff has become a drama unto itself. Unnerved at first by the hostility, she tried to be gentle and then realized that her actions only fuelled more resentment. She’s begun to assert herself again.

Most of Amanda’s problems have to do with Giana, an attractive young woman who wanted the editor’s job but failed to put much effort into getting it. Giana is dating Trevor, another member of the staff, and flaunts her relationship constantly. As well, she’ll tell anyone who will listen that Amanda is just horrible. And then there are people who will suck up to Amanda relentlessly, using their connection with her to undermine others. The situations are uncannily akin to the power struggles at many papers. Or so I’m told.

One of the great things about The Paper – apart from its insight into the allure of journalism – is that it acts as a counterpoint to many other reality-TV series about teenagers. These kids are nothing like the self-absorbed twinkies you see on The Hills. They’re engaged by issues other than dating, shopping and partying. And they get their biggest kick from actually getting their newspaper finished, printed and distributed. The Paper makes it clear that newspaper journalism matters. Which it does. The office politics don’t matter. It’s something worth doing with your life.