Sensitive Documents - Citizen Special

I have an op-ed piece in today's Ottawa Citizen titled "Why We Find Sensitive Documents Abandoned on Street Corners," which is about the case of Environment Canada documents turning up on a street corner last week and being turned over to the CBC.  Having spent time working in the bureaucracy in records management, some of those records sensitive, I have a fair bit of insight into this kind of an issue, so I was quick to find a home for this piece.  Never having written an op-ed for the Citizen before, it was a bit of a gamble as they seemed to prefer the submission to be done on spec, meaning that I would write it and there is no guarantee they'd buy it.  Fortunately, the deputy editorial pages editor liked what he saw, and picked it up.

The op-ed can be found in today's Citizen on page A15, or online here.

Sneak Peak - October's Outlooks

Today I interviewed both an actor and a writer for my piece in the October issue of Outlooks.  I was quite looking forward to this as I really enjoyed the show in its first season, and I was not only happy to hear that they're coming back for a second season, but knew that I had to get an interview with them once I found out.  In fact, the actor in question called me during a break in shooting today.  I'm still waiting to hear back from another of the writers to round out the piece, but I'm happy that it all went forward without a hitch.

(By the way, the actor might also just make the cover that month, which would be very cool.)

Upgrade!

After many years of using my trusty tape recorder (actually, this is my second identical model), I finally took the plunge and upgraded to a digital model this weekend. The last straw was in trying to transcribe interviews for my last article, using a brand new tape, when I had audio bleeding in from the second side into the first, making a portion of the interview unintelligible.  (Fortunately, that interview was winding down and I didn't really lose anything in the bleed before it carried on to the next interview). That, and while it was great for doing phone interviews, doing them in person meant that the noise of the motor was becoming more intrusive on the tape as time went on.  So it was time to go.

I'm still playing with the new digital one, but so far so good. I know I should have been on this particular bandwagon for a while now, but I'm rarely, if ever, an "early adopter" of new technology, and I hadn't been too thrilled with the quality of the digital sound until recently. That my old computer couldn't have handled the files was another consideration, but that problem has since been solved. I'm quite looking forward to really trying out this new recorder in the days and weeks ahead.