It takes a team

On Thursday morning, a small group of us at The Citizen stood together quietly with our heads bowed. It was 11:33 a.m. Exactly one week earlier, at 2:33 in the afternoon in Annapolis, Md., a man shot and killed five employees at the Capital Gazette newspaper.

Journalist organizations across North America asked newsrooms everywhere to pause Thursday to mourn our fallen colleagues.

Life goes on, of course, even at the Capital Gazette. Just hours after the attack, Chase Cook, one of their reporters, channeled his anger and grief on Twitter: “I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.”

And they did.

Their front page had stories and photographs of their murdered colleagues. Their opinion page was left blank except for a brief, heartbreaking message: “Today, we are speechless.”

It was only a small group of us at The Citizen who paid tribute Thursday morning because the rest were out in the community doing their jobs. Reporters were out, one covering the sentencing of the men found guilty in the death of Jordan McLeod and others interviewing subjects for upcoming features. The photographer had driven out to Stone Creek to get photographs updating the massive highway upgrade that’s nearly finished. Sales reps were out making calls on clients.

As always, we are a team at The Citizen and the last two weeks have provided great examples of that, which you should know about.

The series of editorials about wages among the senior management at the City of Prince George were produced with the invaluable assistance of Kandie Aitken, The Citizen’s traffic clerk (she books the ads and organizes what the print edition will look like before turning it over to the editors to fill the spaces around the ads).

After the first editorial appeared last week, chronicling how the wages for the city manager and her executive team have seen double digit-increases since 2014, Kandie asked where the data came from.

When she was informed those numbers are inside reports posted online, she got busy, adding research assistant to her job description. Last Friday’s editorial comparing rates of pay and wage increases between Prince George and Kamloops (since both cities were flooded with evacuees from last summer’s Cariboo wildfires) was largely due to Kandie’s dogged mining of the State- ments of Financial Information from both cities in 2016 and 2017.

She continued conducting comparative analysis of other levels of government in the region this week and the results of her determination to learn more about public sector wages (including her discovery of a government bureaucrat who received more than $100,000 in overtime wages handling the evacuees of the Cariboo wildfires) will appear next week.

Advertising sales representative Michelle Sandu sits a short distance from Kandie’s desk.

Michelle is the youngest Citizen employee at the moment but she’s also contributing outside of her general duties. Newspapers have had to devote time and energy to engage audiences and retain business through social media. It’s not easy, however, for an aging staff that only knows Facebook.

At a gathering of Glacier Media editors last Friday in Vancouver, Glacier’s social media expert Katie Mercer singled out The Citizen for its excellent work on Instagram.

But except for photographer Brent Braaten (who has his own private account to share personal favourites and keep tabs on the work of the world’s best news photographers), not one member of the newsroom uses Instagram or knows much about it. Michelle is a whiz at it, however, using the platform to engage younger residents who don’t read newspapers but still care about receiving reliable, accurate news about their community.

Still with Brent, he’s been known to – between photography assignments – drop off newspapers at the homes of subscribers that missed their morning paper because their carrier was ill.

And the other day, two handwritten letters to the editor arrived. Sometimes these letters don’t appear for a week or two or even longer because someone has to take the time to sit and type out the letter. On Thursday afternoon, Grace Flack put up her hand to help. She’s won both provincial and national awards in the newspaper industry for advertising graphic design excellence.

That didn’t stop her from chipping in, doing a job clearly beneath her talents.

A couple of hours earlier, she was standing with the rest of her Citizen family, silently recognizing the victims of the Capital Gazette tragedy.

Chillingly, the moment of silence in The Citizen office was broken by the urgent wail of an emergency vehicle siren.

The sound got louder as it approached Third Avenue.

Then the phone rang.

And we all went back to work.

— Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout

As always, we are a team at The Citizen and the last two weeks have provided great examples of that, which you should know about.