This pandemic is bringing us all closer together. But back up a few feet.
We will help each other get through this. But don't ask me to loan you any money.
Coming soon to those waste-of-time photo web sites:
How I shot a wedding while in isolation in my living room
How I shot a corporate annual report in my kitchen while in isolation
How I shot a TV commercial from my front porch with only a cell phone while in isolation
A few vacuous news stories this week: how to decorate your home office; what to wear while working at home; with nail salons closed, how to apply your own nail polish; what music to listen to during isolation.
Toronto is getting about 300 complaints per day of people standing too close together. One person actually complained about police officers standing too close together while they were investigating a crime.
The Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team last week donated 10,000 face masks to hospitals. Why didn't any reporter ask the obvious question: What is a hockey team doing with 10,000 face masks and how many more do they have?
How to sew your own face mask:
1) Buy a sewing machine
2) Find a fabric store that hasn't closed
3) ...
Obviously someone important has been reading this thread because a few days ago the
John Hopkins web site updated its site to include number of cases per 100,000 people ("Incidence Rate").
It now allows Americans to track the virus on a county-by-county basis. By next pandemic, I think we'll be able to track a virus on a street-by-street basis. Maybe with video game graphics. Couple this with Google Maps Streetview . . .
Pandemics are also a good way to learn geography. Before Covid-19, could you locate San Marino or Andorra? These are two of the most infected countries.
I can be just as non-essential as someone who make five times more than me. This means I'm more cost-effective at being non-essential.
If you have time on your hands,
Stats Canada needs you. This may be the only time you'll actually want to do an online survey.
I think it was T.S. Eliot who wrote, "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a virus."
Do you ever get the feeling that politicians and the assorted news media "experts" are just winging it? Granted there's no twenty-first-century history to draw upon and no one remembers anything before that.
With most governments and news media using war references, this brings to mind the famous phrase that "the first casualty of war is truth."
Truth becomes a casualty not automatically but when it is disregarded or ignored by governments and the news media.
Some news outlets today report unchecked pandemic information or they take online information as fact. They copy from other publications.
As a journalist, some of us were taught to "believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see," (a phrase attributed to Edgar Allan Poe). This meant that you should always be skeptical, don't assume anything and always check sources.
Every photographer should know the Harold Evans quote: "The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth."
Every photographer knows that what you crop out of a photo is just as important as what you leave in. But this knowledge hasn't seeped into the non-photo side of journalism.
What you don't report is just as important as what you do. But it seems that some news outlets simply follow the mantra: it can't be wrong
if we all do it. (Photo taken from
this site)
This is how the news media kills the truth. Information and other facts are selectively reported, often out of context and without the needed perspective. The news becomes an accessory to untruth.
Why are sports departments rewriting old sports events as if these sports are happening today? Are writers and readers that lost for ideas of what to do? If that's the best sports can do, why not just layoff the sports dept. and save a few bucks? (Apply for federal wage subsidies, of course).
Since sports reporters are being paid to rewrite old stories, I bet sports photographers are making good money on resales/reuse of their old photos, right?
Newspapers have a prime opportunity right now to re-think, re-jig, re-deploy their business and (re)connect with readers. So far, the best some newspapers can do is unlock a few coronavirus pages.
There is a captive audience right in front of you! Do something! There are only 15 months left in this pandemic.
Put all pandemic information in one section. One section. Stop scattering information all over the place.
Limit what you publish about the pandemic. More is not better, it just adds to the confusion. Be a daily newspaper not a minute-by-minute newspaper. You don't have to compete with 24-hour TV news.
Understand both the value of numbers and the futility of numbers. A principle of tabloid newspapers is/was to always emphasize the numbers. But just as you sometimes can't see the forest for the trees, sometimes you can't see the story for the numbers.
Stop rerunning online stories with just the headline changed (*cough* CBC *cough*).
Stop using misleading, out-of-context, useless stock pictures as "news" photos to show what it's like in a hospital, in a bio lab, in a home office, etc. You're fooling no one but yourselves.
Stop using photos from China, Italy or New York City to illustrate what's happening, or could happen, in Canada.
If a columnist doesn't know or understand science, medicine, technology or healthcare, then don't let them write about it.
Who cares what celebrities are doing?
Report what is happening or has happened. Why waste readers' time and insult their intelligence by reporting what might happen if....
If 10 million people get infected ....
If 20 million people lose their jobs ....
If we hadn't outsourced everything to China .....
What purpose does this serve? How can any of this information be used by readers?
Make readers smarter.
Give them actionable information.
On an unrelated note, why do so many cities now have ground-level, three-metre-tall letters spelling out that city's name? Is this for Instagram selfies? Is this for lost tourists? Is it for satellite images used by map apps?
Why don't cities put up another city's name instead, just to confuse people?
As of March 2020:Canada's population
is 38.0 million. If you click on that link, you watch the population change! On an average day, there are
777 deaths and
1020 live births.
Canada has 31 million people of working age (at least 15 years old). I remember when working age was 18 years old and then it became 16. Now it's 15.
Canada's
labour force is 20.1 million people (the number of civilian, non-institutionalized persons 15 years of age and over who were employed or unemployed.)
Canada has about 18.8 million people who are employed (the number of people who worked for pay or profit, or performed unpaid family work or had a job but were not at work due to own illness or disability, personal or family responsibilities, labour dispute, vacation, or other reason.)
In March 2020, about 3.1 million people said they were affected by
job loss or reduced hours due to the pandemic. (On that web page, select either the "1 month % change" or "Index" tab and then select "Employment persons" or "Actual hours worked at main job" indicators. These have current data).
By April 13, 2020, almost
6 million people applied for financial help.
The point to all these statistics is to show that individual numbers are large but the scale is relatively small, despite what newspaper headlines may suggest. *But* it also shows that it doesn't require much wind speed to push the country, its healthcare system and economy off course. That's what you really need to worry about.
At least the empty trains are still running on time.
(Edit: fixed some typos)