18 Jan Jan Wong says Globe fired her
The byline Jan Wong makes some wince a little. And likely, an equal number dive eagerly into everything she writes. And, for better or worse she inspired a whole new generation of journalists this past weekend.
Very few others practice her "How far do you go to get a story? As far as it takes" style-of-journalism and none since Mordecai Richler with the ability to rouse such strong reactions in people.
Wong gave an emotional keynote at the Canadian University Press national conference this past Friday night. This is a roundup of the best reporting I could find about her speech.
The Innovation in College Media blog provides the basic structure of the keynote speech - including all ten of Wong’s rules “for getting the story” with their comprehensive written notes here: “Her talk was about 10 rules for getting the story, but she also talked about her battle with depression. It was a powerful presentation…”
Ashleigh Mattern provides a good overview of Wong’s career in the official CUP conference newsletter. But, I found it strange that the CUP conference newsletter report on the speech had no mention of the news Wong had handed them. So here it is:
Jan Wong, it seems recently freed of any restrictions on speaking about matters surrounding her departure of the Globe, confided in the large group of student journalists that she was fired while on leave for depression. Here is how some in the audience reported the Wong keynote via Twitter:
And here is an embed of the aggregate opinion/tweets of folks talk about Jan Wong on the conference hash tag #nash72:
And, a final reflection on the Wong speech from student journalist and blogger Karen Ho from her post “High on hope (and other legal things)”
“I can still fight for a place in the world’s media landscape. Jan Wong and Ing Wong-Ward’s presence were especially helpful in showing me how other Chinese-Canadian women journalists can be incredibly successful while at the same time kicking down expectations and escaping from the cultural expectations of our parents.”
Photo credit from Andrew Louis, (@hyfen on Twitter) who also blogged his amusing observations about my hometown, Edmonton.
And we see yet again the complete inadequacy of Twits to cover an actual lecture. Why are you buying into this failure, Ian? Aggregating multiple half-assed and threadbare sources into one blog post does not magically cause a full account of the event to come into existence.
Because idiot Twits think Twits work for everything, I venture there is no record whatsoever of this lecture, not even an audio recording. There are just a few sentences here and there from people who think the universe can be dissolved into tiny molecules.