A Closer Look

Jody Paterson sees beyond the headlines

The day I ask Jody Paterson for an interview she is (a) taking her University of Victoria students downtown to educate them about street life and (b) getting ready to fly to New York City later that evening.

Her two-prong schedule doesn’t surprise me because Paterson is the sort of person who manages to be fully engaged at a local level without ever becoming stagnant or parochial. When I moved to Victoria 11 years ago and asked about the local journalism scene, Jody Paterson’s name was cited repeatedly. She was, informants said, both smart and principled. Since then, I’ve come to regard her as one of my print-reporter heroes, along with Kit Coleman, June Callwood and Martha Gelhorn. And she’s even more inspiring than those historic icons because she’s still working right here and now.

Next week, Paterson will give the second annual Harvey Stevenson Southam public lecture, in which she will tackle the topic of engaged journalism as a vehicle for building genuine community. Paterson is no fan of the “disinterested observer” stance for journalists. Instead, she thinks they need to engage with issues. To her, that means “caring enough about the community they live in to truly connect to issues and to follow stories all the way through.”

The thinking at the heart of her October 8 lecture is mirrored in the Department of Writing course she’s teaching for UVic this fall, which challenges students to combine a reporter’s objectivity with a social activist’s empathy.

“I’m loving my course!” Paterson told me in an e-mail—when we finally connect—sent while dashing around the Big Apple. “I haven’t taught young people before, and am really enjoying the discussions we’re having in class, particularly around the difference between writing with bias and writing with passion.”

Paterson says she finds the students “open to talking about new ways of writing and relating to the world.”

If you read Paterson’s weekly columns in the Times Colonist or check out her blog (closer-look.blogspot.com), you will know she’s no stranger to passion herself, nor to telling it like it is once her sense of injustice is aroused.

Paterson went to high school in Courtenay and, aside from stints studying and working in Kamloops, she’s built her career on Vancouver Island. After working in Victoria since 1982 as a journalist—both as managing editor and as a reporter at the Times Colonist—Paterson made a big career shift in 2004. She became the executive director for the Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society and helped the non-profit agency expand its programs from one to four, increased the annual budget by $200,000 and doubled the society’s number of individual donors. Then, in August 2007, she needed a new challenge—so she launched her own business, Paterson Communications, in order to more fully use her Mensa-level intellect and her wide-ranging communications skills.

Anyone who has worked as a daily print journalist knows how bludgeoning the routine can be, so Paterson was perhaps due for a shift in focus. In the past year, she’s worked as a researcher for the Mayor’s Task Force on Breaking the Cycle of Homelessness, helped prepare a handbook on sex work and addiction for PEERS, devised communications strategy for the Federation of Child and Family Services and continued to freelance while also teaching continuing education courses at Camosun College. Whatever the role, Paterson remains well-grounded, ever-alert to bafflegab and keen to take an informed stance on community issues. In these days of inflated media celebrities, Paterson’s take on journalism is admirable.

“I see the journalist as the medium—the one who takes in the information, digests and analyses and understands it (reads the reports, interviews the necessary people), and then writes it in a form that the average Joe can not only understand, but act upon as needed,” she says.

“The best journalists have been doing this kind of writing for many years, decades even, so it’s not that the style is new. But I think we’ve slipped into a type of drive-by journalism, in which we’re in, out and onto the next big thing before readers have even begun to understand whatever issue we were busy glossing over the day before.”

And according to Paterson, journalists should return to “being excellent storytellers who bring context, meaning, history and clarity to stories of importance.”

When Paterson surveys her own profession, she finds television news (the very medium where most citizens seek information about the world around them) the worst offender when it comes to “drive-by” coverage: “The headlines fly by, there’s zero context, zero control for the viewer over which stories to take in and which ones to just grit their teeth through, and the next day all the news of the day before is forgotten and we’re off on another trip through shallow waters.”

“I’d like to see print journalism get back to what it’s good at, which is solid next-day reporting that gets under the issues in a meaningful way and gives readers a means to engage with the stories. The nature of drive-by journalism is to create a constant news feed like the scroll at the bottom of CNN, which provides unlimited amounts of quick information but absolutely no context or depth—and no way for readers to know what to do with the news they’ve been given. How do we change things that need to be changed in this world if we never linger long enough to truly understand why?”

Although she founded her own blog, Paterson says the “great papers of the world—the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post” still practice traditional print journalism very well.

“So it isn’t that traditional media is dead, it’s that journalists . . . don’t challenge authority nearly enough. They don’t dig nearly enough. They don’t imagine themselves as the reader, and deliver a story that answers all the questions.”

I fully expect Paterson’s lecture will raise as many questions as it answers. And that’s the way it should be. M

Jody Paterson’s Talking About What Matters: The Promise of Community Media in an Age of Disconnection, will be held Wednesday, October 8, at 7 p.m. in UVic’s David Lam Auditorium. Admission is free.