Star intern named Loyalist College photographer of the year

                                                                 Galit Rodan

By Jenni Dunning

Suffering from a ‘Bambi’ complex, the last thing Galit Rodan wanted to see was a dead deer.

So naturally, she saw four.

The carcasses hung upside-down at the farmhouse of a family of hunting enthusiasts she was set to interview for a story that day.

Instead of bolting, the photojournalist – who is joining the Star as a radio room reporter later this month – pulled out her camera and started shooting.

Two nearby cows stared wide-eyed at the carcasses, as Rodan snapped their terrified photographs.

It was one of the 28-year-old’s first photojournalism assignments – and the scared cows make it one of her favourites of her career so far.

“The cow in the back totally makes the photo for me, but she’s far off and pretty small ... so it’s not in my portfolio,” she said. “But it’s still a ‘cult favourite.’”

Rodan, a self-proclaimed photography addict, won the Loyalist College photographer of the year award last week. She credits her hard work and passion for the win. 

The award is based on overall work from entries made throughout the year.

“I shot often, not just for assignments, and tried to cover diverse subject matter. I got lucky with some great subjects and always tried to make my own luck,” said Rodan, a second-year Loyalist photojournalism student.

Yannick Tona was just four years old when the Rwandan genocide began in 1994. He has since dedicated himself to raising awareness about the Rwandan genocide and to eliminating hatred and advocating for human rights through organizations such as Aegis Students Rwanda. (Galit Rodan)

Editors and photojournalists, including the Star’s Steve Russell, judge the entrants’ work. Along with the title of year’s best photographer, winners get a camera vest or bag and a $120 gift card for Henry’s camera store.

Rodin took an unconventional step as a photojournalist by accepting a job in the Star’s radio room. She will not leave the newsroom – spending entire shifts in one room to write about breaking news.

“I will be developing a news gathering skill set that I haven’t really had the opportunity to work on yet ... making myself a more well-rounded photojournalist,” she said.

“I love telling stories and I think I can only benefit by working on my ability to do so in a number of different media. I think the Star will be a great place for me to grow.”


A protester is run over by a group of mounted police who were using their horses to help riot police clear a dwindling crowd out of Queen's Park. (Galit Rodan)

FAST FACTS: Galit Rodan

• Favourite photographer: Eugene Richards
• Place she learned to use a DSLR: Africa
• Hometown: Born in Montreal, grew up in Toronto, lives in Kingston
• Other education: Religious studies B.A. from Queen’s University
• Languages: Fluent in Hebrew
• A word on photography: “There are no limits on what you can capture and where you can take it. I also love how it’s brought me into the lives of other people.”

Kiteboarders on Lake Ontario take advantage of warm weather and strong winds on Oct. 8, 2010, as windmills on Wolfe Island loom in the background. (Galit Rodan)

Jenni Dunning is a web editor in the one-year intern program at the Star. Follow her on Twitter.

Those darn kids and their democratic rights

By Fabiola Carletti

"Are you all students?" said the blond woman with the clipboard, gawking at us as we waited in line.

 

On April 22nd, my peers and I were among the first citizens to show up outside St. Anselm's Anglican Church, the advanced polling site for Vancouver Quadra.

"Well," said the organizer in a huff, "this may take a while. You're an anomaly."
We furrowed our brows but nodded politely. The wait, the registration, the whole - uh, you know - democratic process was perfectly fine by us. We didn't just take a wrong turn on our way to the campus pub.

The woman walked in and out of the church, reminding us a few more times that this voting thing can take a while. She shooed us away from the door so that "the voters" would be able to get in and out. (Don't mind us obstacles!) She walked alongside us and checked our identification, making small comments that implied there might be a problem with this document or that oath.

I looked around for the hidden camera. Surely, this was some sort of joke. We were a group of young voters, not mutant octopi wearing top hats.

Although the woman eventually settled down and even smiled at us, I couldn't help but think of Rick Mercer's now-infamous rant.

“If you're between the ages of 18 and 25, and you want to scare the hell out of the people who run the country, do the unexpected, take 20 minutes out of your day and do what young people all over the world are dying to do -- Vote!"

  

Inside the church, another woman pulled a bit of a John Baird when I mentioned the concept of a vote mob - a contingent of young people who get together for a non-partisan celebration of our right and intention to vote. 

Vote mobs have been sprouting up on campuses across Canada. Young people have unfurled banners with messages like: "surprise! we're voting" or "apathy is too mainstream for me" or "impress us."

Many of the vote mob videos feature students running through campus with signs that showcase their issues, which include everything from climate change and queer rights to pension plans and arts & culture funding. Oh, yeah, affordable tuition is in there too -- but we're not one trick ponies.

Other voices are joining the conversation, creating videos for just about every disposition. Raffi, a singer-songwriter we grew up listening to, tells us that we are "grown up Belugas" now, and we should vote for the Canada we want to see. Mr. Lahey from the Trailer Park Boys mocks us, saying us "shit weasels" and "dick weeds" will probably stay home (just a bit of reverse psychology, followed by alcoholic bribes). The largely youth-run Leadnow.ca has a website dedicated to engaging an informed and respectful electorate. In their declaration for change, they state:

It's time to move beyond today's political division and short-term thinking, and get to work on the shared challenges of our time.

But alongside the playful and positive encouragement, there's also resistance and condescension.

 

Michael Taube, columnist and former speech writer for Stephen Harper, seems to think it's appropriate to call us circus clowns and holy terrors. In his article "Vote Mob Mentality" he argues that we should stay home, lest we jeopardize the prospect of a stable Conservative majority. He goes on to say:

Voting participation is way down in this country; in 2008, it hit a record low of 58.8 per cent. If more people, and especially more young people, were willing to vote on a more regular basis, the numbers would surely go up. But if vote mobs are ever considered to be a viable method of increasing political participation, I would much rather keep the numbers as low as they are.

Uh - what? What does Mr. Taube have against the joys of collective citizenship?

Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but: (1) not all older folk favour the incumbent, and they're not all well-informed and mature. (2) There are many extremely articulate and thoughtful youth -- including the diplomatic Awish Aslam -- and not all the young voters* go for "fringe parties."

(*A note on that last link: its conclusion is based on a larger poll of 1000 Canadians, but does not indicate how many of them were young. Seems far too small a sample-within-a-sample to warrant such a bold headline.)

Anyway, despite the condescension at the polls that day, I had a great time with my peers.

We had respectful discussions about the kind of country we want to live in, and pass on to the "darn kids" of tomorrow.

Personally, I think everyone needs to remember that all Canadians -- regardless of age, gender, income, political stripe, etc -- are worth more than the sum of their votes.

Our destiny as a nation is a shared one. It's time we started acting like it.

In the meantime, all we're askin,' is for a little respect ...

Watch all the vote mob videos here.
Or check out some of my favourites below:

 

  

  

 

Fabiola Carletti is a former Toronto Star radio room reporter and a graduate student at the UBC School of Journalism. Her digital footprints are all over the internet, but you can learn more about her by reading her blog, or chasing her around on twitter. 

Photo Credit: My lovely "votingent," friends who joined me at the polls on April 22nd. Shot on my iPhone.

 

 

From a single tweet . . .

By Sarah Millar

As they say, the times, they are a-changin'.

It used to be that as journalists, people would have to feed us information, make us privvy to something we didn't know. Sure, journalists still had to come up with story ideas and find stories on their own, but more often than not, journalists were given information — or pieces of information — and they had to follow up.

Nowadays, we live in an era of Facebook, Twitter and blogging where information is everywhere. It could be argued that nowadays we are inundated with information — there's so much of it coming at us at once. And, while social media can pose problems at times, it can also be a great place to find story ideas.

Sometimes as a journalist, you have to seek those ideas out by combing through the social web. But other times, the stories fall into your lap by happenstance.

For me, this could not have been more evident than this week when I broke a story because I follow John Stamos on Twitter. (Yes, I freely, and publicly, am admitting: I follow John Stamos on Twitter, but that's another blog post for another day.)

It was Monday and, as it always was, my Twitter feed was running in the background as I did my daily duties. I glanced at the pop ups when I could. But there was one tweet that caught my eye and I read it right away. It was a retweet from Stamos' account: some girl wanted tickets to his show this week in Niagara Falls. Stamos told her he'd give her two.

I read it a couple of times and at first came away with what a lucky girl this Natalie Léger was. But then my journalistic skills kicked in.

"I wonder who this girl is," I thought.

I clicked on her account, bringing up her profile. As it turns out, she goes to Ryerson.

Suddenly, this was no longer a decent deed done by a cool celebrity, this was a potential story.

I quickly informed my editor, who gave me the go ahead to write it. I contacted Léger via Facebook and Twitter, we set up an interview for that afternoon. Then I quickly tracked down Stamos' publicist to confirm what I was reading.

By 4 p.m., the story was posted on the website and the coolest thing happened: I got to watch as a story that I found — that I broke — made its way through the social web. And it was fascinating.

What really interests me about this story is how 10 years ago, Léger (or someone in the know) would have contacted the Star about her story. There's even a chance that no one would have contacted the press, and Léger would have gone to the concert as if it were just another show.

But instead, because of one single tweet, the Star contacted her (the first in a long line of media requests she got because of the Star's story).

So while many working journalists use Twitter and Facebook to find sources for stories they are already working on, sometimes stories can be found on social media in a way you never expected or anticipated.

And sometimes those stories come when you follow John Stamos on Twitter.

(Photo: John Stamos poses with Natalie Léger, who got to meet the Star after he saw a tweet of hers on Twitter earlier this week. Photo courtesy of Natalie Léger)

Sarah Millar is a web editor in the one-year intern program at the Star. You can usually find her tweeting up a storm.