David Akin

I've been a print reporter for most of my career and have been doing TV for only the last 18 months or so. One of the biggest challenges for TV -- and I don't think print folks realize this -- is trying to find people through whom you can illustrate a trend. For example, today's Daily from Statistics Canada talks about the food spending habits of Canadians. One nugget a print reporter would latch on to might be "Single men are most likely to eat out in restaurants." But if you wanted to do that in a TV report, you need to go find a single guy while he's on his way to a restaurant. Then you talk to him about why he goes restaurants and use his story as the springboard into the nugget: "Statscan says men like Joe Smith -- young and single -- eat out more than any other group." You can imagine that it's tough to find Joe Smith or others like him when you've only got a few hours of deadline . . . [More later, back to real work for a minute]

I'm going to try to keep a running diary of what I'm reading, updated every Sunday night. Things with bookmarks in them right now include: J.S. Mill's On Liberty ; Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon;
Timothy Findley's Headhunter; and Po Bronson's The Nudist on the Late
Shift