By MARTY WOLK
(Marty Wolk writes monthly columns about his experiences as SABEW president)
May 2014
Even though SABEW has “American” in our name, we have increasingly global ambitions, and that starts at our front doorstep with our friends in Canada.
From my own front doorstep in Seattle, the northern border is less than three hours away, so on a rainy Friday last week I hopped in my car and drove to beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, for the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
For the past three years, SABEW’s board and staff have been working with a small group of dedicated business journalists in Canada to put on a series of events at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management including full-day workshops in 2012 and 2013.
This year, we teamed up with CAJ to put on two panels at the conference in Vancouver, beginning with “Everything You Know About Being a Business Reporter is Wrong,” led by Becky Bisbee, business editor of the Seattle Times. Becky offered a great introduction to business reporting, stressing that journalists with a background in news or sports can easily learn what it takes to cover business and financial news, giving them a valuable new set of career skills.
We also presented a great session with Iain Marlow of the Globe and Mail, who spent several years covering BlackBerry almost exclusively for the newspaper before moving to Vancouver to take on the Asia-Pacific Rim beat. Iain explained how he gave his career a turbo boost by taking time off (with the blessing of his employer) for a short-term assignment in Ghana with Journalists for Human Rights (http://www.jhr.ca/en/), a Toronto-based group.
The CAJ conference was an eye-opener, exposing me to issues that rarely hit the headlines south of the border, including a controversial pipeline across British Columbia proposed by Enbridge, the subject of a protest rally just a few blocks from the conference Saturday. (That pipeline also sparked an extremely heated debate in the hotel bar Saturday night between a local journalist and a media relations representative of an Alberta oil company who attended the conference.)
Issues affecting Canada’s First Nations people were prominent at the conference, which featured among its speakers two tribal grand chiefs, an Inuit reporter for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and a filmmaker chronicling the impact of a massive liquefied natural gas development being planned in remote northern British Columbia.
The conference was CAJ’s first in Vancouver since 2009, and Hugo Rodrigues, president of the group, said the event was a success. About 150 people attended, which was a decent turnout considering the conference was far from the country’s media center of Toronto.
So why Canada? That was a question I got more than once from people I met at the conference. The answer is that there seems to be a demand for the services we offer, and support for our mission of promoting ethics and excellence in business journalism. Our Canada events have been well-attended, and many of our US events are easily accessible to our northern friends and colleagues, including our upcoming fall conference in New York and our April 2015 annual conference in Chicago.
Canada is a relatively small but interesting media market, dominated by just a few companies and featuring some interesting story lines, including the energy boom in Canada’s West. Bloomberg recently hired a former Globe and Mail editor in chief as its Canadian editor-at-large, and the Wall Street Journal rehired the Globe and Mail’s managing editor to be its Canada bureau chief. Thomson Reuters, of course, has deep Canadian roots.
Our first international chapter, SABEW Canada, is in its formative stages, led by Bryan Borzykowski, a Toronto-based freelancer, along with Huffington Post business reporter Sunny Freeman, and Dawn Calleja and Claire Neary of the Globe and Mail. Thanks also to SABEW Vice President David Milstead, a Globe and Mail columnist who helped arrange our involvement with the CAJ conference.
I’m also pleased to announce that we’re in the final stages of planning a new Best in Business Canada contest that will recognize the best business journalism done in a variety of categories, including investigative reporting and feature writing. Stay tuned for details on the contest, which will cover work published in 2014. Updates on our Canadian efforts can be found on Twitter @sabewCDA, and watch for a new Web page in coming months.
As I mentioned, SABEW has international ambitions, and they hardly end at the Canadian border. Your SABEW board recently established the Global Economic Reporting Initiative, which is largely aimed at providing relevant training in less-developed countries. A committee led by Lisa Gibbs is developing programs for what we already fondly term GERI. (I pronounce it “Jerry.”)
If you are interested in more details, or want to get more involved in SABEW, you can track me down via email, at martywolk@ gmail.com.
