Recently I’ve spent a lot of time covering the flooding situation devastating the ranches that lie along the shores of Lake Manitoba, and the style in which I wrote a story last week might interest those of you who have some interest in where stories come from and why they’re written in the way they are. This story broke from the normal manner in which I write news stories.
(This post is more about how reporters and editors make decisions than about the flooding issue itself. To read more about the flooding issue, click on these links: A century of farming and ranching being destroyed by flooding;Â Manitoba couple sees dreams washed away;Â Manitoba ranchers skeptical about flood management plan;Â Producers scramble as flood wipes out pastures;Â Manitoba government answers questions about flood concerns; )
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First some background: For a century the ranches along the lake were viable, carefully stewarding a unique ecosystem of native prairie pastures and hay fields along the lake’s edge that were far richer than those on the thin Interlake land a few kilometres away from the sprawling water body. A high water table fed pastures from beneath the surface and four generations of ranching families raised cattle on the same land.
Flooding and high water levels have occurred since the early 2000s, when the Portage Diversion – channelling water north from the Assiniboine river – began regularly pumping large amounts of water up into the lake. Water began inundating pastures and tearing away at shorelines, with wind spreading the water far beyond the regular edge of the lake. Then the massive 2011 Assiniboine flood occurred, and this summer again water was turned north along the diversion and dumped into Lake Manitoba, damaging and drowning thousands of acres of pasture again. (The provincial government has denied that its frequent and aggressive use of the diversion has substantially affected water levels, saying that water from the south would have flooded north anyway and eventually reached the lake.)
I’ve spoken and visited recently with a number of informed ranchers in the area, and they’ve wondered whether or not the province’s proposed new outflow channels would end the constant flooding they have faced and have had to live with. Some of these have worked on committees and planning groups that have dealt with the intricacies of the flooding issue, so my understanding of the finer points of their concerns is limited. But after talking to enough of them, I was able to melt down the main points of concern into a handful of question that I hoped, if answered directly, would at least clear up their confusion about what the government truly hoped to achieve, and what it was not offering to do.
I then passed the questions on to a government official who had offered to forward them to the Infrastructure and Transportation department’s engineers for detailed answers that dealt with the ranchers’ specific concerns, which were beyond the level of detail politicians could usefully speak about. (I covered the government announcement and rancher reaction here.)
I wasn’t that hopeful of getting clear answers, from long experience with governments in four provinces and from dealing with three federal governments. Too often I’ve received jello-like answers that wobble and wiggle and are so insubstantial as to be translucent, providing little that is concrete. But I thought I’d email-in these hastily scribbled questions and see if my cynicism would be validated.
Pleasantly for me, it was not. The answers I got back struck me with their directness, with their clear answers on a complex situation, and in the honest approach they took to the questions I had posed. To me, they made crystal clear what the government believes it can do with the channels, what it believes they will not do, and with how the department views its responsibility towards farmland.
The ranchers won’t like these answers, because the answers – to me at least – seem to say: 1) the channels will only mitigate the highest water levels in flood years, rather than prevent them from occurring, and are designed to be most effective only at levels after much farmland has already been flooded; 2) the province is not directly attempting to end pasture and hay land flooding and doesn’t consider prevention of farmland flooding to be a provincial responsibility; 3) ranchers around the lake will not be able to assume their recent problems will go away once the new channel is in operation.
Whether one likes the answers or not, I thought they were remarkably clear, and I found myself worrying about how to sum them up simply in a way that would make the situation as clear to affected readers as it now was to me. The government had been remarkably clear and honest and I didn’t want to re-muddy the waters.
I realized I wanted the government’s words to run unchanged, not rewritten or paraphrased, because of their clarity and directness. And I thought the reader would benefit most from simply seeing the actual question asked and actual response received. So that’s why I wrote the story in Q and A form, which is a form I almost never use. Sometimes unadorned questions and answers are better than telling a story. (The Q and A story is here.)
I didn’t want to cut any words from my questions or the government’s answers, but as always in newspapers, there’s just not enough space to lay out all the words you want and still run a big graphic (there was one with this), a headline and a photograph. So I went back and forth with my news editor and graphics editor figuring out how to cut as little as possible, and in the end we slashed my intro down to two sentences from about ten, cut off half of one question, and cut two or three sentences from one answer – marked by an ellipsis – and reduced the size of the photograph by a centimetre or so. What remains are some Qs from me and some As from the government.
So there you have it, dear reader: the tortuous path down which this story trod to become the rather simple-seeming Q and A you had in front of you in last week’s issue.
