Nick's Café Canadien

A few days ago, Jim Hill published a piece stirring up some rumblings of Disney reassessing traditional animation. Apparently, the box-office underperformance of the last few all-CG smash-hits-to-be from various studios is getting the Mouse House in a sweat – which is without question a good thing, because it’s about time someone realized that the post-Lion King fall of 2D and rise of CG had very little to do with one medium supplanting another, and more to do with the quality of the stories involved. (Then the diverging momenta were only kept on course by marketing practices, like Warner’s appalling mismarketing of traditional animation’s last stand, The Iron Giant.)

The bottom line is that you can’t drive a film with technology alone, and even mainstream audiences are beginning to realize it. Pixar continues to churn out hit after hit because their projects are propelled by creative artists, particularly those with a 2D background (as was the case with Brad Bird’s core team in The Incredibles), who understand that their technique is a means of signification and not an end. The best films have a vision that challenges and steers the market; they don’t come about because somebody is trying to game the market and predict where the money lies. Boardroom decisions and filmmaking make for an unhappy partnership. It says something that the animated films I am most interested in seeing this year, aside from the one I’m going to mention in a paragraph’s time, are both done in Claymation.

Is anybody of those in my readership well versed in children’s and young adult fiction familiar with the novels of Diana Wynne Jones? One of them, Howl’s Moving Castle, was the subject of a recent Hayao Miyazaki film that is being brought over to North America in June. Word is that it will see both a subtitled and dubbed release, which is welcome news. I passed on Spirited Away in theatres because of the lack of a subtitled release, which was a painful waiting game for one of the very best movies I’ve seen this decade.

I hear that dubbed Miyazaki releases are not half bad, given how John Lasseter supervised the one for Spirited Away and Pete Docter is doing the same for Howl’s Moving Castle; as directors of stellar animated films themselves who revere the work of Studio Ghibli, I’m sure they have no tolerance for subpar quality. Still, I avoid watching dubs whenever possible as a matter of principle.

Could you imagine watching a film like Downfall with the voices dubbed over? (That’s a hint to watch Downfall, by the way – it’s magnificent.) So much of Bruno Ganz’s outstandingly, terrifyingly mad performance as Adolf Hitler is how his voice distorts and projects the coarse, glottal utterances of the German language. It’s irreplaceable, and one instance of many where that is the case.

Now, my opposition is not to the idea of recording voices off the set and layering them over pre-existing footage – that would be silly, since so much film dialogue is done in ADR. Aunt Beru and Darth Vader had separate voice actors in Star Wars, as did most of the supporting Italian cast in just about every Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. Almost all musicals have separate vocal tracks, sometimes with different actors entirely – Natalie Wood did not sing her part in West Side Story, nor did Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady or Minnie Driver in The Phantom of the Opera.

But the use of language in those films preserves a sense of internal consistency; you couldn’t have The Good, the Bad the Ugly with both English and Italian, and subtitles translating the Italian. You can have entire foreign films in their original language instead of recording translated lines with out-of-character unsynchronized voices. Dubbing dumbs down the work and dilutes it. Given how that possibility is available, why throw it away? I do not find that animation merits an exception just because the mouth movements are abstracted and synchronization is less of an issue.

Film is thankfully returning to equilibrium after the growing pains of a new technology fetish, and it is marked by a revaluation of aesthetic integrity. Unfortunately, video games are not quite there yet, and most of the recent history of video gaming is a history of technology fetishism and oneupmanship. Of the major players, Nintendo is the only one actively resisting the trend, which is one of many reasons they receive my continued support. I do not simply refer to experimental interfaces like blowing clouds away on the Nintendo DS or controlling Donkey Kong with a pair of bongo drums, but to their first-party software’s refusal to play ball with the trend towards photorealism.

Bringing it back to the subtitling issue, some criticize Nintendo for its continued resistance to voice acting, aside from a few abortive stabs at it like the horrid opening cutscene to Super Mario Sunshine. There is a major fallacy in the logic of some of those who think adopting voice acting is inherently immersive, and that is the assumption that the delivery of a story by way of text boxes is a relic of the technical limitations of an age gone by. It isn’t.

If you look at a recent game like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, a very text-heavy title, the use of text boxes in speech bubbles was an integral part of the storybook aesthetic. It was used to simulate ambient background speech, rapid-fire speech you can hardly pick up, angry speech in shaky bold letters, and a myriad of other effects. Saying that video games are inherently better off with voices is like saying that just because comic books can come with bundled audio tracks, they should abandon their distinct use of stylized onomatopoeic lettering and panel-to-panel dialogue balloon trickery.

There have been games with impressive voice acting of cinematic quality that one would not want to do without – the Tim Schafer classic Grim Fandango comes to mind, as do the recent Knights of the Old Republic titles. They are not by themselves a valid argument that all games should necessarily be cinematic, as attested to by the success of video game titles that opt for harnessing current-generation technology and techniques such as cel-shading to move towards cartoon visuals – Paper Mario being one, The Wind Waker and Viewtiful Joe being others of note. If we can accept that visuals need not move towards realism, we can accept that dialogue-by-text is here to stay.

Which begs the question of oddities like the next Zelda game, which clearly has graphics that return to the pseudo-real and look really good in doing so, but is reportedly still avoiding voice acting. This decision has come under fire from the usual suspects like Matt Casamassina of IGN, who says, “This new game promises to be so epic on so many levels. It’s a shame to see Nintendo skimping on production values where voice work is concerned… I’m not even suggesting that Link needs to talk. He can remain a mute, for all I care. But the story would flow better if the characters he encountered used speech.”

My response to that is this: production values be damned – it’s not a limitation, it’s a valid artistic decision. The thing about abstraction is that it presents some degree of universal interpretability along the spectrum between the designer’s and player’s imaginations. Games, by the very nature of being interactive, should involve both elements. As for this franchise in particular, the last thing I want to see and hear is a Zelda adventure with hokey American accents like the television episodes that aired with The Super Mario Bros. Super Show back in the day. (Excuuuuuse me, princess.)

Addendum to the previous entry: I have since purchased tickets for the first show of Revenge of the Sith at South Edmonton Common, marked 12:01am on the morning of Thursday, 19 May.

Join me, and together we can rule the cinema as father and son.

You know, over six years ago I swore that at around this precise moment – this month of April, 2005 – I would be in a tent on some Californian pavement, preferably the one outside Mann’s Chinese, like one of these guys – armed with Jedi robes, plastic lightsabres and absolutely no concept of personal hygiene. It is with profound disappointment that I have come to terms with the fact that I am not there, nor will I be there, nor will I ever in my life get another opportunity to tent for a new Star Wars movie.

But not all is lost. As I did in Calgary at Famous Players Coliseum in 1999 and Cineplex Odeon Sunridge Spectrum in 2002, this year I plan to be at the midnight screening of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith on the night of 18 May at the biggest and best moviehouse within reach. This effectively boils down to two choices, and it is a decision that needs to be made quickly.

SilverCity West Edmonton Mall – The biggest strike against this theatre is that as with all Famous Players screens, tickets do not go on sale until a week before the big show. I watched Episode I under similar conditions at what was then the biggest Famous Players in Calgary, and opening-night tickets drew a three-day line. The risk of not getting tickets is one I am reluctant to take, as that sort of line is just not possible for me this year. However, everything else speaks in its favour – it’s easy to get to (for both the show and the ticket purchase), it’s surrounded by other shops and fast-food establishments to draw your attention while somebody else in your party holds your spot, and if the weather is bad it probably won’t matter, as at least some of the line will trickle indoors. There’s also a certain prestige factor associated with this particular multiplex, one of the biggest box-office leaders on the continent.

South Edmonton Common – As part of the Cineplex Odeon chain, tickets for the opening show here are available right now, so you can see the urgency of this predicament. Given the architecture of the cinema, which is identical to Sunridge Spectrum three hours to the south, the line will almost certainly be outdoors – a good thing, weather permitting, because of the spaciousness in general, the furious lightsabre duels with total strangers and the stunned looks from passersby who just don’t get it. Two problems, though: first, the cinema stands tall in barren pavement in the middle of nowhere, a fair walk from anything to see, do or eat. Second, it’s an incredible pain to get to by public transit from the University area. (Ask me about Sin City sometime.) Now, I’m not so presumptuous as to use my blog to wink at people to offer me rides and stand in line for me at six in the morning so I don’t have to skip a whole day of work, but you get the picture.

Finally, I am aware that both of these theatres will likely offer four or five post-midnight screenings at once, including shows labeled for 12:02am, 12:05am, et cetera. These are unacceptable. Traditionally, We of the First Line have looked upon Those of the Second Line with earned derision, and had the battle scars inflicted from the scramble for midnight-show tickets to justify it. It may not be a very practical distinction, but I value my pride, thank you very much.

So – and here’s where you, my readership, enters the fray – what works for you guys? I’d love to see you at the ritual – er, I mean, movie.

Here’s a predictive reference for those of you who have never done this before. For a city like Edmonton, here’s what I predict: the first party in line for the midnight show will arrive either the night of the 17th or by 6am the next morning – perhaps before that if they were already in line for tickets a week before, but they won’t be significantly joined. You can expect thirty to fifty people by noon, which will balloon threefold as most of them are holding spots for others. Arriving at 6pm will put you at about the hundredth spot, which may double by the time you are let in to grab your seats, typically between 7pm and 8pm. (For a party of greater than two to four, don’t expect decent seats if you don’t have a representative firmly in line hours before then.) Arriving after 10pm, less than two hours in advance, is not recommended – that’s when gaps fill in and the ushers start scrunching people together, and saving seats is damn near impossible.

So, any recommendations?

Continued exploration of the processes and methodologies of the pseudo-managerial practice euphemistically (and misleadingly) known as “software engineering” has led me to believe that the Golgafrinchan hypothesis – that we are, in fact, descended from useless middlemen with a committee fetish mercifully expelled from their distant planet of origin – is probably on the ball.

It floors me that an artificial semantic construction based on an elaborate canon of Confucian thou-shalts has been exalted to the status of accredited classroom instruction in universities, institutions founded on the trivium and quadrivium and a yearning for knowledge – not the sort of tribalized disciplinary wisdom that McLuhan calls know-how, which properly belongs in technical institutes and on-the-job training, or better yet, shot into outer space.

But give it a clever name with an air of professionalism and conflate it with just the right things, and it stands reified as the norm for both eager, ill-informed freshmen (tragically unaware that software engineering as taught is neither engineering nor science, computing or otherwise) and their future employers. Equilibrium is restored for all but the displaced, and olympian mountainfuls of source code wind up looking pretty. Yippie-ki-yay.

My regular readership is in all likelihood aware that I spend an arguably unhealthy proportion of my time feeding my nostalgic interest in video game music. It is with much pleasure that I encountered a video of an a cappella choir’s live performance of several signature tunes from the 8-bit era – yes, including thematically relevant stage choreography. Now I know what an abstract interpretive human rendition of falling Tetris blocks looks like.

There is often some measure of debate on whether or not the music to Tetris should properly be considered a video game tune, as it pertains to what is by convention admissible on remix and arrangement communities like VGMix. There is no doubt that it is through the classic puzzle game that the Russian folk song “Korobeiniki” (“The Peddler”) has seen the most widespread exposure in the Western world, but many are unaware of its roots. For those interested, I would advise a look at some traditional Russian folk dance videos, specifically this one.

It’s amazing how every time there’s a clip like the aforementioned choir performance that spreads memetically over the Web, people swell with nostalgia and perhaps recollect other gems they’ve found – most often the orchestrated medley from Super Mario Bros. from Orchestral Game Concert that is commonly misattributed to the Boston Pops – yet they have nary a clue how big a video game music community is out there, constantly taking the bleeps and bloops of yore and endowing them with near-professional quality across all musical styles. I think there’s a huge audience out there for game remixes that remains untapped, simply because the publicity for these independent niche-genre covers relies almost entirely on word-of-mouth.

I now turn my attention to written media and two posthumous literary treasure troves of note. The first is Runny Babbit, a billy sook by Shel Silverstein – essentially, a book of never-before-published spoonerisms by the master himself. If you grew up on his work, you would understand the warmth of this assurance that his death six years ago was, indeed, not where the sidewalk ends. The second is an archaeological breakthrough that has unlocked an archive of classical texts too unbelievable in scope for words… my words, anyhow. I’ll let this article do the talking.

Speaking of archaeology, I got around to catching the Matthew McConaughey-starring film of Clive Cussler’s novel Sahara. It’s good, clean popcorn fun once it gets past the awkward beginning, albeit nothing special. Intriguingly, one of the things holding it back is that it plays it too safe and doesn’t quite capture the extent of Cussler’s outrageous strokes of revisionist history, which elevate the Dirk Pitt stories to an almost unimpeachably ridiculous degree of escapism (and which, I might add, he pulls off a lot more successfully than the likes of Dan Brown). Although my recollection of the novel is rustier than a decommissioned ironclad – the one time I read it was several years ago – I do recall much of it focusing on a delightfully far-fetched premise involving Abraham Lincoln and a well-placed doppelganger, which was omitted in the adaptation and, to my surprise, somewhat missed.

As far as prospects for a Dirk Pitt film franchise go, it’s hard to say; let’s not forget that Dr. No sucked, but that didn’t stop Bond. And Sahara is far from terrible – it’s more of a one-time pleasure not quite guilty enough to harp on, aside from a number of pesky annoyances. The best compliment that I can offer the movie is this: at least it buries Raise the Titanic! for good.

This morning I acquired a print edition of the first issue of Blood Ink, a new U of A student literary journal captained by editor Elliot Kerr. It is noteworthy, to say the least, that someone took the time to produce something that was sorely lacking on this campus – an outlet for creative writing that will actually be read. One newspaper contest a year just didn’t cut the proverbial it, so here’s another penknife to finish the job.

The copy I have in my hand consists of a sturdy 28 pages, notwithstanding an unfortunate binding error that duplicated the table of contents. The layout is minimalist: reasonably narrow margins frame black-on-white text typeset in old reliable Garamond, with flexible typographical provisions made for the kind of poets who like dabbling in concrete.

As for the featured compositions themselves, some of them are rather good, though I can’t say I’ve ever had a discerning eye for poetry (with my ocular acuity for short fiction only marginally better). There is a complete online reproduction of the Spring 2005 issue on the Blood Ink website, currently located at Kerr’s student webspace. Go take a look.

The next issue is due out in the Fall, and submissions are still welcome; the guideline to live by is “anything cool, 3000 words or less.” What is not said on the website is that the publication is also in need of assistance from the business and distribution end of things. Right now it looks like a bit of a one-man affair, but an impressive one, and not the sort of one-man affair I want to see slink off into a corner and never deliver a promised second issue – not that it’s ever happened.

As one may assert from the title of this post, the big ticket tonight has to do with newspaper reform. However, I am loath to succumb to the impatience of modern audiences and would like to allow a completely unrelated issue to take the stage before I proceed to introduce the headliner.

So scroll ahead if you must, but in keeping with the interdisciplinary (some might flatteringly say omnidisciplinary) coverage of this modest publication, I am going to “geek out” about the latest Viewtiful Joe games on the horizon, if one would pardon the crude but accurate vernacular.

As I have often remarked, Capcom’s Viewtiful Joe is probably my favourite new property from any video game developer in the past five years, even after only two not-dissimilar single-player beat-em-ups. The DS game, Scratch! Viewtiful Joe is not particularly cause for controversy – aside from a surprising preservation of artistic fidelity given that the DS is a substantially lower-end system than the Cube, all it is known to offer is a new touchscreen-activated power, VFX Split.

Far more interesting as blog-fodder is the GameCube title, Viewtiful Joe: VFX Battle, a multiplayer fighting game featuring the four playable characters from the first game (Joe, Silvia, Alastor and Captain Blue) as well as two more from the Japanese cartoon series, Blue Jr. and Sprocket. Two big questions spring to mind faster than you can say “Henshin!” The first is how the time-warping VFX powers Slow and Mach Speed, which lie at the heart of the VJ experience, can be successfully integrated and synchronized in a game where there is more than one player in control.

The second matter, one that elicits even more incredulity, has to do with the character selection. Frankly, if this is the extent of it, I’m not impressed. I’ve dreamed of the possibility of a VJ fighting game, but there’s no point of having one unless you get to play as the bosses. Who doesn’t want to see Hulk Davidson butt heads with Dinosaur Sergeant Big John, or witness Fire Leo take on Frost Tiger in a titanic clash of the elements? I can see why one would avoid this for the sake of balance – the ferocity of the boss characters would have to be taken down several notches – but without them, such a game will not be much more than a standard fighting game with abilities of temporal manipulation that may or may not work.

Capcom has a real gem in their lineup with the Viewtiful Joe brand, and they would be unwise to milk it until its teats run cold and dry, already a fait accompli with the Mega Man franchise and the long-dead Street Fighter series.

Speaking of milking things dry, it is at this point that I would like to segue to a preliminary discussion of what, if anything, is wrong with The Gateway – and, if we accept the premise that something is indeed in error, how to fix it. It is unlikely that this will be my last post on the subject, but I have learnt that it is almost without fail a mistake to promise a future dissertation on anything.

There is a general vibe around campus that the Opinion section of everyone’s favourite independent student publication has made a habitual practice out of rolling in incrementally voluminous congelations of poo-poo. Several private discussions on the matter have convinced me that this is not limited to the demographic that frequents the University of Alberta blog circuit or the Students’ Union Webboard, the latter of which has produced several extended bitch-sessions about this very problem, most notably this one.

I will begin with an admission that I am not an impartial player, hence why I abstained from commenting until the publication was done for the academic year. In the past three years, I have made sparing contributions to the newspaper – not enough to be recognized by all but the most observant volunteers, but sufficient to be considered a Gateway staffer over a contiguous timeframe that persists to this day. Two of those three years included pieces in the Opinion section of which I am not especially proud, not because they contributed to the spiralling juvenility of certain articles, but because they did nothing to stall that downhill momentum.

However, I can attest that as a writer, both Adam Rozenhart and David Berry were pleasant to work with, and almost without fail printed my submissions largely unmolested. I do fear that they were equally easygoing with other writers, though, as a lot of pieces that made their way into the paper should probably have been rejected outright for the sake of quality control.

There are two spheres of operation that have their own shares of responsibility: the volunteer base that writes the articles, and the editorial staff that prints them. I do not believe that it is purely an editorial problem, nor do I believe that removing the paper’s dedicated student funding is something that should even come into consideration. The content of the publication is, after all, entirely volunteer-driven. If the volunteer pool is on the muddy side, there’s very little that can be done aside from recruiting better volunteers in greater quantities. It actually does boil down to a problem of quantity, because good writers show restraint (realizing that only so many hot-button issues inspire good writing), and cannot be counted upon to fill space.

I do not believe that “Why don’t you go write for it if you think you could do so much better?” is an adequate response to a disgruntled readership. “Write a damn letter” is a negligible improvement at most. Not everybody knows how to write, but a hell of a lot of people who can’t write worth a damn can still recognize talentless composition when they see it as readers. It is contingent on a writer to ensure that inflamed responses dispute an article’s substantive matter, not its lack thereof.

Here, then, is my advice to current and prospective Gateway Opinion contributors.

Remember your audience. Shortly after I took a jab at his presidential endorsement in my SU elections postmortem, Ross Prusakowski posted this response:

I think that very few people outside my immediate circle of acquaintances actually read my articles and that regular students don’t at all, mainly because my articles are so SU focused. I don’t think I had any effect on the election and I still think (and will until it’s proven otherwise) that I’m writing mainly for my own amusement and that of the SU involved folk out there. Besides, I don’t believe the Gateway is as powerful a medium as some people like to believe it is in creating caring among students.

Take a packed LRT at around tea-time on a delivery day and you’ll see everyone with a Gateway open. Sit in on a bored classroom with an unobservant lecturer and the effect is similar. It’s true that the undergraduate voting population at the U of A hovers around a relatively impressive, but concretely meagre 20%. I’d place Gateway penetration at something closer to 70%, even if most of its readership picks one up only to skim the headlines and a few choice inset quotations. It amounts to a virtual monopoly on the flow of information fed to students in the thousands. A writer who forgets this is an irresponsible writer.

It doesn’t even matter if students can recognize for themselves that something is puerile and ill-researched; what matters is the lack of a comparably vocal alternative. That should by itself act as an impetus to produce better writing and not waste valuable time and paper.

Stop trying to be funny if you are decidedly unfunny. This is Opinion, not Open Mic Night. If you are going to defend colonialism and support a grand Canadian imperial manifest destiny – in my mind, an entirely defensible task with plenty of historical justification going for it – capitalize on the fact that valid arguments exist, instead of spouting lines out of some asynchronous dub over a stock laugh-track that sum up to a whole lot of nothing. Some writers can fire off one-liners without them being at the expense of actually making a point; observably, some can’t.

Swearing a lot and pulling colloquial interjections out of your ass don’t make you funny. They make you look stupid. (It is incumbent on the editors to not put up with so much of this, but I’ll get to that in a few paragraphs.)

For goodness’ sake, show some restraint. It’s one thing to write a piece because you feel passionate about it. It’s another to write a passion piece when countless others more qualified and more passionate than yourself have already dealt with the issue at length, and the scope of the entire controversy is out of your league.

The old saying goes that if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I disagree, but I propose this alternative mantra: if you have nothing new to add, don’t say anything at all. Usually, whatever it is you are adding probably isn’t very nice, but that’s okay. Nicholas Tam trumps Conventional Wisdom.

At the editorial level, I propose the following solutions:

Allocate fewer pages to Opinion. Former Editor-in-Chief Chris Boutet offers some hopeful sentiments, which I echo here (emphasis mine):

Obviously, I can’t speak for the paper since I’m no longer involved there, but having run it last year, I imagine the problem with the Opinion section is that the Gateway’s page counts have been pretty steep lately, and when there’s not much happening in the way of sports, news, A&E etc., the Opinion section is the most easily inflated to compensate, which leads to flabby, bloated, centreless sections full of fairly mediocre content. My understanding is that Kaszor has acknowledged this problem and plans to find a way to tighten up the section next year so it only needs to print its best, rather than the majority, of its submissions. But I worry this will remain a problem as long as this many ads are getting sold and the page counts remain this high. Because, contrary to popular belief, there really isn’t that much newsworthy happening on campus on any given day.

Dispense with the platitudes. Repeated flagellations of recently deceased equines should go straight in the bin. This can’t be done if Opinion has too many pages to fill and nobody to fill them except hack writers who exhibit neither restraint nor the sense of perspective to know when an issue is too far out of their league to bite off, much less chew. It will follow from the other remedy just mentioned. Don’t just revise or return for revision – go ahead and reject. The section needs its corset tightened.

Establish a norm of professionalism as it applies to content. The Gateway needs to deal with its latent identity crisis, one that is manifest in the Opinion section moreso than any other. The dichotomy that I speak of is how the paper’s layout, organizational structure, clout and copy-editing rigour strive towards such professional standards, yet in terms of actual content, it exhibits such a desire to be hip, edgy and alternative. One of the undesirable products of the latter is the lax acceptance of casual, conversational rhetoric in order to amplify that homegrown student vibe. I say, do away with it.

There’s nothing wrong with the odd contraction for the sake of flow – after all, we’re not talking about academic papers here, and the register should be accessible enough that the average student can read for pleasure and amusement. Nevertheless, all too often, this is taken too far. I’ve already prescribed a volunteer-side fix for this above, but from the editorial side, set an example and iron out such excessive aberrations.

Using four-letter words writing prose, as the song goes, packs a punch until it is relied upon so excessively that its semantic value suffers from hyperinflation. Snip it out from time to time.

I have high hopes for incoming Opinion honcho Tim Peppin – judging from what I’ve seen him write, he strikes a desirable balance in terms of style. If we are lucky as Gateway-funding readers, he will apply the same principles to keep his volunteer staff in line.

As for how to balance professionalism and that edgy student flavour, all it requires is an act of inversion. Right now, the problem is that there are too many people covering issues that are either mainstream and covered better elsewhere, or irrelevant and cared about by none – with the only distinguishing difference being a nauseatingly conversational tone that attempts wisecracks but produces buttcracks. Professionalism should pervade the prose. Being all hip and student-like should come not so much from the style, but from the autonomous selection of issues under scrutiny – topics big enough that a student audience should give a damn, but ill-covered by the mainstream media. Again, this is at least halfway contingent on the contributing writers, but here lies room aplenty for editorial discretion.

Let articles break the word limit where deserved. How do you fill a high page count, yet introduce extended measures of quality control? Simple – go for depth, not breadth. It’s true that writers should be economizing in a way they by and large are not – you know, like, with the occasional gratuitous and dispensable “you know” or “like.” But sometimes, a span of five to six hundred words is not sufficient to develop a compelling argument, even for a contributor who knows how to pack a lot of content into very little space. Depending on the subject, there are situations where length makes for a better and more persuasive piece, one that will not further deter the audience from reading. Raymond Biesinger bent the restriction frequently in his year as Managing Editor – on one occasion, he gave my esteemed compatriot Stephen eight hundred words of breathing room, and to laudable effect.

Good writers can take a relaxed word limit and run with it. Bad writers shouldn’t even get this far, so they aren’t a concern.

There’s one more bone of contention to address in terms of editorial policy, and it comes from pages 11-12 of the Staff Manual:

Credibility is of utmost importance to the Gateway. As a writer you may think you can report objectively, but we are equally concerned with outside perceptions of a conflict of interest. Participation in certain organizations might be seen as a conflict, and the writer might be asked to choose whether they want to be a member of that organization or the Gateway.

Sometimes this might mean as little as having to work with your editor to set out some limitations regarding what you can and cannot write. For example, if you sit on Students’ Council, you will not be able to write any news or opinion stories about the Students’ union. Similarly, if you have a family member in the University administration, you should avoid any stories pertaining to the administration.

Chris Jones voices this criticism:

I think the thing that bugs me most about the Gateway (and it’s been this way for years) is the insistence on separation from bias. I can understand that the staff wants a paper that’s objective and all that good stuff, but there’s an overly-dogmatic adherence to the notion that every single thing must cover both sides equally, and that you can’t possibly have people with attachments to events write about them.

This manifests itself in a number of ways: for instance, the refusal to let SU-involved people write about the SU or University (which means that neither [Chris] Samuel nor I could write what I’d expect would be insightful and critical articles about both). Similarly, the Gateway as it presently stands would never allow an invited op/ed piece, let alone two facing off against each other on a topic of any controversy, which is standard practice at just about every newspaper – even respected ones!

Last year, while I was still serving on Students’ Council, I had an extensive correspondence with then-EIC Chris Boutet about this very matter (albeit one that I have since lost). It is, on the whole, a much bigger fish to fry than the lemon-pepper sole I just butterflied before your very eyes. Let’s leave it for a sequel, shall we?