the beginning and the end

CalgaryHerald.com

The election may be over, but that means a new beginning for Calgary under a new mayor and council (well, sort of new). Here’s the unofficial list of new city council members. (Thanks DJ Kelly).

Mayor - Naheed Nenshi
Ward 1 – Dale Hodges
Ward 2 – Gord Lowe
Ward 3 – Jim Stevenson
Ward 4 - Gael Macleod
Ward 5 – Ray Jones
Ward 6 - Richard Pootmans
Ward 7 – Druh Farrell
Ward 8 – John Mar
Ward 9 - Gian-Carlo Carra
Ward 10 – Andre Chabot
Ward 11 – Brian Pincott
Ward 12 - Shane Keating
Ward 13 – Diane Colley-Urquhart
Ward 14 - Peter Demong

At least for me, the mindset is “It’s over!” which means I do not have to do any more campaign interviews. It’s been quite an amazing experience helping provide coverage for the election. I have learned so much invaluable information about Calgary, city council, writing, blogging, interviews, social media, politics, policy and campaigning it’s unbelievable. I am so thankful for the opportunities CJSW, CalgaryPolitics and the Gauntlet provided me this year. Everyone at all 3 of those establishments seriously work their butts off for little or – more often – no pay. And for what end? A 53% voter turnout. Bad ass. That’s a 20% increase from 33% in 2007. Congrats to everyone I’ve worked with, specifically Joe Burima at CJSW, Kim Nursall from the Gauntlet and everyone at CalgaryPolitics.com. It’s been quite the ride…but I am glad it’s over!

What’s in store now? Well, watching to see what happens! And there’s still a lot of work to be done for the Features section of the Gauntlet, finding new ways to make our radio show super rad, and actually doing homework. I’d like to attend a city council meeting at some point as well. And read comic books. (I’m in the middle of reading Y: The Last Man and it’s rad.)

CalgaryPolitics.com isn’t going anywhere either! I don’t know what my future involvement looks like…I’m not sure how cut out I am for the pundit thing. I find I am more comfortable reporting than being a talking head. We will see!

Also, thank you to my readers, however many of you are out there =) I’m glad ya’ll have stuck with me and enjoy reading! For the record, I’ve made it into Round 2 of the Canadian Blog Awards! I’m in 4th place, so I’ll let you know when you can vote in Round 2; I’d really love to see a Top 3 finish! I know we can do it!

CalgaryPolitics.com, The Enlighted Savage and Calgary Rants are all nominated  for best political blog as well and Calgary Politics is in the lead! Please check out all those sites and consider supporting them!

Okay, I’m done now.

cjsw’s 2010 civic election coverage!!

HOLY. So basically CJSW 90.9FM is super rad. We’ve launched our civic election coverage featuring over 80 interviews and forum recordings and honestly, it blows my mind. Back in August when we started sending out e-mails I honesty had no idea how it would turn out and how many interviews we’d really be able to do – there were so many candidates! Click the image to check it out!

Each interview had to be booked (and then re-booked, as the case was at times), conducted, edited and uploaded. We also needed a rad website to showcase all our interviews and Aendrew and Reid nailed it. In short, we had about 25 volunteers who put this all together for your benefit. Twenty five volunteers, two months, and over eighty interviews. I’m insanely proud of it. Kudos to Joe Burima, CJSW’s News Director, who works like a madman 24/7 and makes the world a better place.

Anyways, listen to the interviews, subscribe to the podcast and take our interviews on the go. Be informed. AND VOTE. Don’t let all our hard work go to waste. Kudos to all the candidates who were willing to talk to us as well! It’s hard work campaigning.

Wow. Just wow. I’m so impressed with everyone. CJSW rocks.

cross posted at calgarypolitics.com

back to school

I don’t really know what to write here anymore. It seems a bit aimless. It used to be a book blog, but then I started taking English in university and the last thing I wanted to do was write more about books in my free time. Then I wrote about writing for the Gauntlet and working for CJSW, but now I do that so often I kind of don’t want to write about that in my spare time either. This might continue be an aimless blog for now, occasionally talking about books, dresses, school, work or whatever suits my fancy.

So anyways, I spent the past 48 hours writing about people who are significantly better at blogging than I am. I think the article itself turned out well, but the aesthetics aren’t the best. I got 3.5 pages with absolutely no ads, which 2,300 words did not fill very well, I found out – not even when you add four large illustrations and four very large pull quotes. And dorky subtitles. Oy. But I think the article itself turned out okay. We stayed up till 6:30am last night working on the paper! I think we had 48 pages in total, so that’s quite a jump from over the summer when we had 8-12 pages.

My title is very assertive and it kind of scared me, but I think it works and I stand by it. I’ll link to it once it goes on the website. Isaac, our web guy, is probably still sleeping right now. I’m surprised I’m not still sleeping right now.

I haven’t uploaded the podcast of our show from last week…it’s been busy. Anyways, I have a sweet interview with DJ Kelly that I’ll play tomorrow, and our entertainment editor Andy will also be on the show! Yay! Listen to CJSW 90.9fm tomorrow at 11:30am.

Also, I need to stop apologizing on-air when I make mistakes. So henceforth, I will not apologize, but just roll with it.

coordination

I am not known for my organizational skills, yet somehow I have been put in charge of booking interviews with all aldermanic and mayoral candidates. It’s really exciting, actually. I’m kind of behind the scenes making things happen and it’s really rewarding. I’m also doing a lot of the aldermanic interviews myself, but the mayoral ones will be on the Thursday morning shows with Ola and Greg.

The interviews themselves are going okay. Each aldermanic candidate is asked basically the same questions, so it’s not too complicated. I just need to work more on sounding like I’m not reading a script. I’ll have a lot of opportunities to practice, I guess. Three interviews tomorrow and at least 8 next week. So by next Friday I’ll have done about 20 interviews.

The crazy thing is, that’s nowhere close to the amount of aldermanic interviews we need to get them all. After next week we’ll be approaching half.

Next week is my last week at CJSW! Ahhhh!

Anyways, listen to CJSW 90.9FM at 8:30 am tomorrow morning for our first mayoral interview with Paul Hughes! Here’s the schedule (so far) for our Thursday morning interviews.

July 19 – Paul Hughes
July 26 – Naheed Nenshi
Sep 2 – Alnoor Kassam
Sep 9 – Craig Burrows
Sep 16 – Bob Hawkesworth
Sep 23 – unconfirmed
Sep 30 – Ric McIver

We’re going to have to put more candidates on some different shows because we’ve run out of Thursdays before October 18th, as you can see.

Anyways, that’s what I’ve been doing. And reading Green Arrow comics. I bought Sounds of Violence the other day and read my brother’s copy of Archer’s Quest. So good! So amazingly good. Just adapt these into movies, please.

dr. elizabeth cannon

I meant to write a post about how Dr. Elizabeth Cannon came on Narrowcasted News, but then I got distracted (for the entire weekend). Now I’m tired, so I’ll just write a brief one. Anyways, it was pretty fun, and NUTV filmed it, so apparently I’ll be on TV at some point.  That’s pretty sweet for loyal Shaw cable viewers. She was super nice and we gave her a bag of swag from the Gauntlet, NUTV and CJSW afterward. I meant to give it to her on-air, but, like a fool, I forgot and had to go chasing after her. Yup. I am very well-put-together sometimes.

So the interview went pretty smoothly even though our interview went for 20 minutes instead of 15. Brent was on a roll and I didn’t feel like cutting him off. I hope that was ok. Anyways, check it out on the podcast! Yay! I’ll post the NUTV link whenever that goes up too.

Random: How do they find people to talk to for the Faces of the U of C section of the website? (My favorite? Alex.) These people are just so stoked for life to be at the University of Calgary. It made me think…Why am I going to the U of C? I didn’t apply anywhere else. It was easier to get to on transit. Can’t afford to study abroad. And there was just something about the word ‘university’ that had romantic connotations in my mind, so that kept me away from Mount Royal or SAIT. There isn’t much romance at the U of C, though, not gonna lie…although maybe once I’m here longer I’ll appreciate it more. I just wish our buildings weren’t all built in the 60′s.

Random: Did you know Karl Rove has a summer book club? He also is following me on Twitter. He follows everyone. What a pal. Anyways.

well then

Should I write some more poetry or another post about positive body images? What is this, the Lilith Fair? Yeesh.

Anyways, I’m co-editing this year’s frosh supplement for the Gauntlet (with the ever-talented Remi Watts), which is gonna be hella awesome but also hella busy. It’ll be a crash course on InDesign, the program we use to layout the paper. I haven’t had much time to practice at the Gauntlet this summer cause of my job at CJSW, so frosh will be good to prepare for features editor in the fall. Eek.

This summer is going so fast. Seriously.

Also, I’m really excited for Narrowcasted News next week, we’ve got a preeetty sweet guest coming on. We’ll announce it on this week’s show, so tune in on Friday to find out! I’ll also play my interview with musician Jordan Klassen on this week’s show, so huzzah!

Another cool thing, the Globe and Mail picked up a story we did on the show and in the paper about Dino sprinter Sam Effah. Holllaaa!

I’ve also updated my blogroll. It’s now better categorized. Be sure to check out Calgary Politics because it’s pretty much one of the raddest endeavors I know of. Basically, five bloggers hope to provide coverage of Calgary’s civic election all by themselves. Hello??? Awesome!? Also, I like the word ‘endeavor.’

Continuing on with the erratic ADD theme of this post, I found something special for you. It’s comedian Jim Norton and Brooke Shields emulating his bad posture. I had to go through Jim’s old tweets (not for the faint of heart) to get these, as they were posted last summer.

I am standing like this and Brooke Shields just asked me, “How do you get your body to do that?” I am a truly mopey asshole.

Brooke Shields standing behind yours truly, mocking my slug-like posture.

I would entertain more deprecating humor about myself, but as I am flawless I lack material.

-

Oh, wait.

That’s a lie. I forgot for a second that images of me like this exist.

narrowcasted news is now a podcast!

Now if you miss us on Fridays you can subscribe on iTunes! And you’re not going to want to miss us, because this week Brent and I will be talking to U of C Dino Sam Effah. He’s a sprinter who recently won gold at the North America, Central America and Caribbean under-23 championships (NACAC) after sprinting 100 metres in 10.06 seconds! That’s half a second away from Usain Bolt’s 100m world record. He’s fast . #understatement

So I’m super excited to talk to him =) That’ll be fun. And don’t tell anybody but I’ve actually never done a sports interview before! Can’t be that hard, right? We’ll find out I guess.

the first show!

The first episode of Narrowcasted News aired on Friday! I think it went rather well and it was a lot of fun! Now we get to do it again this week and the week after and the week after…haha, wait, what did we get ourselves into?

You can listen to the first episode here. I’m trying to come up with somewhere we can put all our episodes online…I think podcasting might be the simplest way.

Other than a few bumps, like me not turning my mic on, it went pretty smoothly. We crammed a lot of content into one episode and pulled it off, surprisingly. Here are some notes I took.

- Play intro music louder (courtesy of the talented Bryan Leedham. It’s still a work in progress, but I think it’s cool to have our own sound. I like how it’s not super serious like a stereotypical news show.)

- People don’t know what the “SU” is, specify the University of Calgary Students’ Union before the interview.

- Introduce Hardave’s position, VP external

- I sound like I’m reading a script in Brandon’s interview. I mean, I am, but it shouldn’t sound like it.

- Talk directly into the mic/ turn mic on, lol.

- Too much silence in between clips.

We were also rushing through a lot of it, but that couldn’t be helped this week because we had a lot of content. Normally we plan to have one main interview or two shorter ones, but this week we already interviewed Brandon and then the news with the Students’ Union’s secondary suite proposal came up and we figured we should talk to Hardave as well. Hopefully next week it won’t be so rushed, but it’s always good to have too much content instead of too little.

Also, the show would be a lot more boring without Brent. “Here’s the recipe for the marshmallow yum yums!” It was so hard not to laugh =P

And as fun as it is, I really hope volunteers decide to help us out with the show in the fall. Some segments are pretty simple to do.  Any takers?

That’s about it for now. Hope you listen next week to Narrowcasted News, Fridays at 11:30am on CJSW 90.9 FM!

sled island’s free song downloads

Seriously? Excellent. Check it out here. There’s apparently over 175 free songs to download.

Woodhands did a cover of I Kissed a Girl and I liked it. I basically love anything they do. They just yell and stuff and it’s great. (I know, my way with words is unrivaled.)

In other news I finally ordered An Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. I’ve been meaning to get it for like…3 years now, haha. I should get it next week, I hope. It’s basically about the blurred line between amateur and professional media as a result of the intarwebs. I am working on a documentary about blogging in Canada and I would love to interview him. He’s not from Canada, but he’s pretty much a god in the blogosphere. I loved their podcasts…but now they stopped doing that and are doing more video with Pajamas TV. Eh.

Also, I ordered The Bible of Unspeakable Truths by Greg Gutfeld. He’s a hero as well. He is the host of the insanity fest known as Red Eye.

Yay books! I have been reading the God Who is There by Francis Schaeffer for over a month now…I’ve been really busy, I guess. It’s really good so far though. I like Francis Schaeffer – he just dishes it out. I like my theology with a side of hotsauce, not sugar coated. That’s a quotable quote right there. Savor it.

news team go!

Week 1 of super awesome job was super awesome. I actually spent most of the week learning how to do Joe’s job because as of yesterday, he is on vacation – meaning I am in charge of CJSW spoken word/news for two weeks.

“Welcome to your new job, Emily, now do mine for two weeks!”

No problem, guys! I got this!

There are 7 other summer staff as well and so far they’re all really great. I definitely look forward to summer staff soirees.

So what did I do last week?

Produced CJSW Presents, a weekly show Thursdays at 8pm. Basically we’ll record a lecture or something and air it. Last week we aired a panel discussion about the relationship between military and the media…except it was pretty long, so I had to edit it down to an hour and keep the best parts. I seriously hope you all listened because it was actually so interesting. We’ll have it on the website as a podcast soon so I’d recommend checking it out, especially if you’re considering journalism.

great jaaerrrb

Today I embark on a new challenging but kick-ass journey – I start my first day as CJSW’s spoken word/new media coordinator for the summer. This is pretty much my first “real” job as a journalist as I don’t start my Gauntlet editorial position until September. I’m super excited. You have no idea. You don’t even know. Youdon’tevenknow! Or maybe you do. I hope you do.

What will I be doing? I will be working on lots of news stories, managing the Facebook and Twitter accounts and finding other ways to make CJSW’s spoken word accessible on the internet. And probably getting everybody coffee. Picking up Joe’s dry cleaning. You know.

So basically, if you don’t already, you should start listening to CJSW, specifically in the mornings because that’s when a lot of spoken word/news content is aired. And occasionally, you’ll hear my sultry radio voice. Because it is indeed sultry. News never sounded so good, you’ll say.

Um, yup so 90.9 fm on the radio dial or listen live on the internet – and check out the newsroom because we put a lot of our news stories on the web now for your listening pleasure. I’ll be in charge of the web content this summer so expect me to push CJSW’s website a lot. Don’t fight it. Just accept it. You will love it.

I know I said I’d write about a comic book soon, but blogiraptor has read V for Vendetta like 8 times so I’m trying to persuade him to write a post about it =P Hopefully he’ll do that soon and I can direct you there for comic book goodness.

sometimes i do radio stuff

Because I am really bored of studying mythology right now we will look back into the dusty archives of my life a few months ago. Man, do I look like a geek in this picture.

I got involved with the Gauntlet‘s radio show on CJSW, Off the Page, back in January. It was definitely a lot of fun even though I had no idea what I was doing. It was canceled in March, but I’m glad I was able to help out before it went under. It became really hard to keep up as the semester continued, as Brent and I were the only ones from the Gauntlet who knew how to edit audio using LogicPro (and I just barely knew what I was doing). So considering that it was just the two of us, we tried our best, but you can definitely tell students put it together, lol.

I always thought I would love to host my own radio or TV show – and I still do – but I would almost prefer to produce it instead, if that ever happened, and let someone else take the limelight. I just don’t feel comfortable with the attention and pressure of having to say something funny or smart all the time. Thank God for editing, but sometimes even that can’t save you. Well, yes it can. You just have to be really good at editing. But editing is a bitch, so it’s better to get it right the first time.

Anyways, I thought it would be a good idea to interview everybody during production night just for fun. This was actually the first production night I’d been to and didn’t know anyone at all. It’s kind of funny remembering that I was just meeting these people for the first time here but now I know them all a lot better. It was slightly awkward but still fun making this episode =)

So behold, Off the Page from January 26, 2010.