Reflections in the Snow-Covered Hills » Blog Archive » ?I felt like a leper walking the streets?

Reflections in the Snow-Covered Hills » Blog Archive » ?I felt like a leper walking the streets?

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"...I don’t normally write about Government of the Northwest Territories policies, but I’m going to make an exception today. It’s not that I don’t care about them; it’s more that they’re usually not particularly relevant to the type of writing I do here.

But Oil Can Boyd’s post caught my eye. Oil Can’s a young blogger who used to work for the local paper. I’m rather fond of the fellow, and I immediately identified with his story about trying to get people to give interesting quotes for a “streeter”, the lowest form of journalism. Streeters suck. Standing on a sidewalk trying to get people to answer a stupid question is just awful. (Using them as any sort of barometer of public opinion is even worse, but for very different reasons.)

I used to try to do them in Inuvik. I was always unsuccessful. Very few people wanted to talk, and those who did never had opinions that made good soundbites. The lesson, if I’d bothered to think about it, would have been that matters of public interest deserved a real hearing and full discussion, not a two-minute roundup of random shoppers’ top-of-mind thoughts. But I never really thought about that; I only knew that nobody wanted to go on tape.

After I moved to Yellowknife, I noticed that people here didn’t want to do streeters any more than folks in Inuvik did. But somehow they’d discovered an excuse that always made the reporters go away. You might want to write this down, in case you want to get rid of pesky reporters in the mall, too:

My boss won’t let me talk to reporters. ..."