Modest Accomplishments

I like these things

You know those websites that your fingers automatically crawl to when you approach a computer with no clear directive in mind but amusement? These are mine. 

Slate Magazine - General interest magazine. Come for the Dear Prudence, stay for the everything else. 

Hark, A Vagrant! – My favourite comic strip. History, especially Canadian history, made clever and hilarious by the fantastic Kate Beaton. 

Feministing - Feminist news and analysis. 

The Hairpin – I’m so glad I found this site. Humour, creative how-to’s, and so many advice columns! I love advice columns.

Junior Pigeon – The sporadically updated home of fun projects with my partner in mischief, Vincenzo Ravina.

Vincenzo Ravina Dot Com – Vincenzo’s website

VLTs: Nova Scotia’s Million Dollar Gamble

My investigative workshop in j-school did a collaborative story on VLT gambling in Nova Scotia. It was a messy, frustrating process at times, but the end result was the coolest, most important thing I was involved with at King’s. My job was to track down people who had been affected by gambling, and go around the province interviewing them. The story won the Canadian Association of Journalists Student Award of Excellence. 

You can see the website the workshop put together here. A version of the story was also published as “Terminal Disease”  in The Coast, Halifax’s weekly paper in April 2010.

Minas Basin: Taking leadership role in global carbon credits

Published in the Nova Scotia Business Journal, March 2011, which you can see here. 

Protecting the environment and increasing revenue can seem like opposing goals, but one Nova Scotia paper company is achieving both at the same time. Minas Basin Pulp and Power sells carbon credits to buyers across North America, making money and helping other groups reach their carbon-reduction goals.

 In a regulated carbon market such as Europe, companies must reduce their greenhouse emissions by certain amounts. They make reductions themselves, or pay another company to reduce emissions on their behalf. Every metric ton of carbon dioxide or an equivalent amount of other greenhouse gas that isn’t released equals one carbon credit.

 Canada doesn’t have a regulated carbon market yet, so Minas Basin trades in a voluntary North American market and sells all the carbon credits it generates.

 “The voluntary market exists when individuals or companies want to reduce their own carbon footprint, just to sleep better at night, or for companies that want to offer carbon-neutral products”, says Aaron Long, manager of energy resources for Minas Basin.

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African Nova Scotian organizations take lead role in tourism development

This was my first story for the Nova Scotia Business Journal in January 2011. You can see the full edition here.

Black cultural groups are gaining a competitive edge in time for the summer tourism season. The Black Business Initiative (BBI), along with provincial partners, has launched the Cultural Tourism Project, a program that will help African Nova Scotian organizations promote themselves as tourist attractions, creating jobs and expanding their reach. 

Tracey Thomas, the senior policy analyst for the Office of African Nova Scotian Affairs, says the province wants to do more to include the founding cultures of Nova Scotia, including African Nova Scotians, in its tourism strategy.  

“The African Nova Scotian community is rallying together and analyzing how it can take the organizations it has and make more of a meaningful contribution,” she says. 

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Adrian Fish: A Buddhist of the Next Generation

This is a profile I did during my internship at Shambhala Sun magazine in 2010. You can see the post on their SunSpace blog here.

The current issue of the Shambhala Sun offers a look at young Buddhists and the issues, styles, and passions they’re bringing to their spiritual practice.

Here, Laura MacKenzie introduces us to Adrian Fish, a young Buddhist photographer. While working on a photography project, Adrian Fish says, he is in a state of tension. If he’s satisfied with the result, the tension releases. “And that’s an uncomfortable feeling,” he says, “this state of not having tension.”

“On the one hand,” Fish says, “we think we don’t want challenge, but when we don’t have that challenge we feel very agitated and upset, and we usually create some challenge for ourselves.”

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Lives Lived: Margaret Vickery

Published in the 2010 edition of Tidings, the University of King’s College magazine. You can see the entire edition here.

 Friends, family and former colleagues remember Margaret Catherine Vickery as an outgoing, nurturing woman, and a central character at the University of King’s College.

  Vickery worked at King’s from 1979 to 1996 as a switchboard operator and secretary for the Bursar, Donald Fry. 

 Angus Johnston, who taught at King’s from 1977 to 2009, remembers Vickery’s small office as a crowded hub where faculty would gather for coffee and conversation in the mornings.

 “She was Grand Central Station,” he says. “It was like overseeing a family, more than simply doing a secretarial or administrative job.”

 Vickery died on January 16, 2010. She was 78 years old.

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LIBEL THAW

This was my honours project in the last year of my journalism degree. It was published in the King’s Journalism Review in the fall of 2009.

You can read it in the KJR here. 

Truth can be hard to prove in court. A new defence could help journalists fight defamation suits if they prove they did everything they could to get it right.

In 1994, Harvey Cashore helped break one of the biggest political stories in recent Canadian history, the tale of the German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber and his controversial dealings with former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

A year later, the producer with CBC television’s the fifth estate was pulled off the story. Schreiber had launched a $35 million defamation suit, and lobbyist Frank Moores had sued for $15 million.

It would be four years before Cashore could dig into the tangled tale once more and even longer before the program would do another segment on the issue.

It wasn’t for lack of evidence.

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An Introduction

Hello there. I’ve owned this domain since I was at journalism school, and a prof instructed us all to go buy our names as domains, because eventually, we would need them. I never did much with mine, but today, I wake like the Kraken! I’ll be putting up some stories that I’ve done, and hopefully posting more. Recipes, or essays, or comics, or photos! Who can say? How very exciting. 

Today I visited with the lovely @sugarskull33 and made a marinade for chicken.

RT @alythomson: Looking to speak with someone who has experienced damage to their home after a storm. Juan, White Juan, whatever. Retwee …