Newspapers and reporters have their detractors. Eighteenth century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a renowned pessimist, had this to say about them: “The newspaper is the second hand in the clock of history; and it is not only made of baser metal than those which point to the minute and hour, but it seldom goes right….
“Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism it to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein they are like little dogs; if anything stirs, they immediately set up a shrill bark.”
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But newspapers and a free press also have champions. To borrow Schopenhauer’s canine metaphor, newspapers are the watchdogs on events and reporters are often the bloodhounds and the terriers that sniff out facts and drag them into the light.
Using just these tactics, the dogs in the Western Producer kennel won some writing and photography awards recently from the American Agricultural Editors Association. Thus it is my pleasant duty to bark about them.
Barry Wilson won first place in the economics and management category for a series he wrote last spring, The Perfect Storm, which examined prairie farm economics.
A writing team including Ian Bell, Karen Briere, Brian Cross, Barbara Duckworth, Adrian Ewins, Mary MacArthur, Sean Pratt, Michael Raine, Ed White and Barry Wilson won second place in the team writing category for a package published on the one-year anniversary of the BSE crisis.
Raine won first place in photo of the year and first place in feature photo with the same intriguing shot – a view of striking workers at the Port of Vancouver.
He also won third place in the feature photo category and third in the pictorial category.
Other photographers in our midst – the seeing eye dogs, if you will – were award winners too. Mary MacArthur won second in the feature photo category, second in pictorial and third in the portrait category.
Barbara Duckworth won third in the nuts and bolts category.
As well, five honourable mentions in various photo categories were earned; four by Raine and one by Karen Briere.
Contest judges found something amusing about one more writing entry, submitted by yours truly, because they awarded me first place in the humorous article category.
I don’t know what kind of journalistic dog makes people laugh but such a treat is good encouragement to keep on barking.
