Tag Archives: Sue Montgomery

More video of me (with bonus Midnight Poutine)

I got a visit at the end of January from two Concordia students putting together a package for their TV class about blogging. The result is the video above, which is very brief and probably doesn't give you any insight you didn't already have into me (except the fact that there's an embarrassingly large pile of unread newspapers in my sparsely-decorated living room).

A bit more interesting is that they also visited Midnight Poutine's Jeremy Morris, shadowing him and his new partner as they recorded a podcast (you can listen to that particular podcast here).

If you haven't heard it, Midnight Poutine's Weekend Playlist Podcast is a weekly podcast, about an hour long, that features music from bands performing locally over the coming week (almost always independent bands performing at smaller venues). Not only is it useful in that sense (if you like the music, you can go see the band that week), but it gives people a chance to discover new music they can't hear on commercial radio because they're too busy replaying that Black Eyed Peas song for the 10,000th time.

UPDATE: The team that brought us the video above also had this shortish video interview with The Gazette's Sue Montgomery about her trip to Haiti.

Some Sunday reading on Haiti

It's been almost three weeks since a powerful earthquake struck Haiti, leading to the deaths of over 150,000 people, leaving hundreds of thousands more injured, homeless or without access to the necessities of life.

Despite the various crises affecting the news media, the response has been immense, especially in Montreal, which has a large Haitian community. The major newspaper chains have sent reporters and photographers (and have now sent relief crews to replace those they originally sent), the TV networks have sent correspondents, almost every TV network in Quebec, Canada and the United States has aired a fundraiser for relief efforts, and Haiti coverage continues to dominate the news here. The question of whether it's being covered too much was raised over a week ago.

I admit I was a bit surprised by all this attention. I expected major news organizations to send reporters, but not papers like The Gazette, the Journal de Québec or the Toronto Star. After all, it's not cheap.

But as grateful as I am for all the attention, I've started to zone out with the Haiti coverage. Yes, there are lots of orphans, people are desperate, lots of people died. The anecdotes being told by the reporters are touching, but they kind of blend in after the 100th story or so.

Still, even more than two weeks later, there are still some stories worth reading. Here's a few that have been recommended to me through social media:

  • Sue Montgomery, who left for Haiti shortly after the earthquake for The Gazette, writes about the experience of rushing to a disaster area on short notice. A lot of it is inside journalistic baseball (which makes it perfect for this blog's readers), but it's interesting to read just for the little anecdotes, like running outside half-naked during an aftershock, or paying $6,900 for a helicopter ride from the Dominican Republic.
  • Phil Carpenter, the photographer who was sent with Montgomery, also writes about the experience for J-Source.
  • Montgomery, in turn, recommends this piece by Peggy Curran, about the political history of Haiti and how much of a mess the country was in long before the earthquake hit. It's a good picture of what happened to this country from the time it was discovered by Christopher Columbus to the reign of the Duvaliers.
  • Patrick Lagacé is tired of the bullshit going on in Haiti, from all parties involved. About how Haitians still believe in their country, despite the absolute mess it's in. About how passive they are. About how the international community still clings to the idea that Haiti has some sort of government.
  • In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof isn't anywhere near Haiti. Instead, he's in Congo, where millions have died and gangs of thugs go around killing and raping people, and no one seems to care. He just wishes we paid as much attention to the non-natural disaster there as we did to the earthquake. (He has more on his blog.)

La Presse, Gazette up for National Newspaper Awards

It's that time of year again when the National Newspaper Awards sends out a press release with a list of nominees, and each newspaper writes about what they've been nominated for.

The Globe and Mail far and away leads the pack with 15 nominations in various categories (including a sweep of the international reporting category), more than the entire Canwest chain combined. Following it is the Toronto Star with 8 nominations, La Presse and the Citizen with 6 each, and then the leftovers.

The Toronto National Post has only two nominations.

Here's how Montreal did:

Also of local note, Globe photographer Charla Jones, nominated in the Feature Photography category for photos she took of Leonard Cohen in Montreal as part of this audio slideshow.

I'm still waiting for my NNA for my tireless reporting about local activities and blogs.

7,000 words and still the story is unfinished

J-Source has a short article by The Gazette's Sue Montgomery about the story she wrote on Dawson College shooter Kimveer Gill. Despite it weighing in at 7,000 words and being nominated for an award, she considers it incomplete. Gill's father and brothers wouldn't speak to her (only his mother did), and the coroner hasn't released its report about Gill's death, which would have answered some lingering questions about how exactly he died:

Gill’s mother says her son had a bullet wound on his arm (where the police shot him) and one in the back of his head, leading her to suspect the police may have killed him. The police say Gill shot himself by placing a gun to his chin, yet Parvinder Gill says his face was intact when they prepared him for burial. What really happened? Why can we not see the surveillance camera tapes from inside the school that day? And why, if it was a crime scene, did the police drag Gill’s body outside to lie in the rain?