News headlines have been awash today with claims that French President Emmanuel Macron “granted” citizenship to the migrant from Mali who miraculously saved a baby from falling four storeys by climbing from balcony to balcony and rescuing the child.

News services from BBC to The Daily Beast to the Evening Standard to CNN all reported that Mamoudou Gassama will be made a French citizen, as conferred by Macron on May 28.

But, like a lot of reporting on migration and citizenship, the details show another story, French journalist Agnes Poirier told me via Twitter.

“First, he [Gassama] will be given legal papers of residency which he didn’t have, and then he may apply to French citizenship which will be granted,” Poirier said.

It sounds like I’m splitting hairs, but the difference between this, and the automatic ‘conferring of citizenship’ is important.

First, too many of us tend to assume that heads of state – whether it be the French president or the U.S. one – have these kinds of sweeping powers, to be able to grant citizenship on a whim much like a king would do. (But that’s another issue altogether).

Second, people know so little of what a migration/immigration/naturalization process actually looks like.

This is where the teaching component of journalism is important. Many people will never move to another country.

What they know of immigration procedures is limited and all too often is seen through the filter of politicians. And many politicians who focus on immigration aren’t keen to represent the process as it actually is, but will highlight abuses, overstate trends, and sometimes outright lie.

This is where it’s critical for journalists to understand immigration terms and explain them clearly to their readers.

There is a difference between getting the legal right to stay in a country – whether it’s called a ‘green card,’ ‘permanent residency,’ or ‘indefinite leave to remain’ – and securing ‘citizenship.’

In a world where migration and immigration is a major flashpoint in political debates, it’s necessary to have an informed electorate who can confidently say they have more than a cursory comprehension of the system.

Am I an expert on French immigration and naturalization? No. But I’ve recently gone through the French immigration process myself to get a residence permit. I’ve gone through the UK immigration process. I’ve gone through the Canadian process, several times. And I’ve researched dozens more, due to possible moves due to new jobs.

So I can tell you, terminology matters. It’s the difference between a two-year stay and indefinite leave. It’s the difference between being able to reside only, and being able to reside AND work without constantly worrying about immigration officials knocking on your door. It’s the difference between being able to reside in-country for an unspecified amount of time, and being able to vote in elections.

Words matter. And news stories on migration and immigration need to reflect that. 

This week, it was reported that the party currently leading the polls ahead of the Quebec provincial October election is advocating the expulsion of immigrants who fail to assimilate, which will be judged in part on their knowledge of French.

Let me tell you a story about three French-speaking newcomers to Quebec who had difficulty ‘assimilating.’ 

My husband was raised in francophone northern Ontario, attended a French school for most of his K-12 education, and spoke French at home with his father. He was the Managing Director of a Montreal-based firm, operating solely in French. And yet, when it came time to switch his out-of-province driver’s license for a Quebec one, he was met with nothing but resistance.

Finally, in desperation, he pleaded to the clerk, using all the québecois he had, to accept his documentation and transfer the license. It was only when he spoke this way that his request was granted. He still bristles about this encounter.

Though I didn’t grow up in a French-speaking home, my French background was extensive: five years in school, a French minor in college, multiple visits to France to brush up my vocabulary, translating and writing about news in North Africa for work. But given my husband’s experience, I didn’t feel comfortable conducting official business in the language.

I tried to sign up for a library card at la Grande Bibliotheque, in English. The clerk spent 15 minutes poring over my documentation, finally honing in on a reason to deny me a card. She found it: in one of the documents, my first name was misspelled by one letter. I protested in French, but to no avail. The damage had been done, and the decision had been made.

I would never attempt to sign up for a library card again.

One of my husband’s former employees was a Moroccan immigrant, who had flawless French and technical expertise to boot. But, while working in the Gaspé peninsula, he was repeatedly made to feel like an ‘other,’ culminating in one woman furiously stopping him in the grocery store and demanding that he return to his country.

We all spoke French fluidly. We all had trouble assimilating. Knowledge of the French language is not the issue.

Integration works two ways. Immigrants have to be willing and make the effort to accept their new culture and adopt new ways of living. But communities also have to be willing to accept these new faces, these new accents, and welcome those who have newly arrived. In our experiences, the latter part is where the compact breaks down.

What can be done to improve this situation? The very least political parties should do is to stop harping about immigrants who don’t assimilate, which only encourages voters to see immigrants as a problem and not as an opportunity to present Quebec as a vibrant, inclusive society.

Quebec politicians can be leaders in creating a space where French-speaking individuals can excel, no matter their race, origin, or accent. They should take this opportunity, instead of pandering to a part of the electorate who define a ‘Québécois’ as someone whose French is as pure as lamb’s wool.

​As for us, we’re in the process of moving to Paris. So far, nobody has had any trouble understanding our French.

I thought I’d give it a try.

I had loved working as a journalist. Loved it, even loved hating it when the pressure got up, when the sources were elusive, when one stupid typo wrecked your whole story.

But I was living in Canada (Montreal) at the time, and it was hard to ignore the constant layoffs, shutdowns, and general sense of desperation among journalists about job security and availability. The knocks just kept coming.

My own situation was precarious in its own right. My job was not under threat. But my legal residence in Canada was…what’s a nice way to put this….not so much legal.

We needed to leave, to live in a place where we both had (up-to-date) visas. So we packed up and moved to the UK.
Still smarting from the Neverending Canadian Journalism Implosion, I thought, this would be a really good time to try this second career in communications. Everyone swears that going from journalism to comms is a breeze, a natural fit, an opportunity to still use your skills even if you’re no longer a journalist.

So I gave it a try. First at a Big Four firm, then at a smaller membership organisation. (I’m going to be vague about specifics there. If you’re that interested, it’s not hard to find.)

I hated it. I hated every single second of it. I didn’t want to hate it. But boy oh boy did I ever.

Here’s what I found:

They don’t know what they want. Both times, they were positively giddy in the interview at the prospect of having an actual journalist on staff who could help them understand what media was interested in, and how they could position themselves better.

Fast forward to the reality I found: They resisted change. They didn’t see the point in making anything more media-friendly. I can’t tell you how many times I said, ‘This is what I would be interested in, as a journalist’, only to be roundly ignored. Organisational change is glacial, in some cases. And it’s a lot easier to disregard a new recruit’s advice, than to actually do the hard work to implement those changes.

They don’t know how to use your skills.  They think they know exactly how they would use a writer or an editor. The idea of having one on staff is intoxicating. But unless there are very clear plans in the organisation’s yearly/quarterly/monthly work outlines for written documents, they’re not going to find the opportunity to create that space. If you’re lucky, being entrepreneurial and volunteering to do this will work well. In my case, there were too many other priorities to even find the time to work on the idea.

They don’t know anything about communications.  This was one of the bigger shocks. I knew that moving into a new field would require a lot of on-the-job learning, no matter how close people say journalism is to communications. It’s still an entirely separate discipline, and I was really looking forward to learning the ins and outs, the basic tenets of the profession, and the ways different organisations applied them.

The reality, it seems, is that there are a lot of people just ‘winging’ it in comms, who come by their comms jobs having done zero actual communications work but have other attributes – familiarity with the organisation’s field, good relations with key stakeholders, etc.

Word to the wise: If your Director of Communications ever says, ‘I’m not a comms person,’ run like hell.

But if you are lucky enough to be working with actual comms professionals, you can learn a lot from them. I had some top-notch colleagues who, in addition to being caustically funny, were also pretty solid in their jobs, and from them I did learn a bunch.

Workloads are very, very different This doesn’t apply to comms departments specifically, but to the departments outside of comms. In comms, we were run ragged, expected by the rest of the organisation to do a boatload of everything. But outside of comms, it was a very different pace and a very different set of expectations from anything I saw when I was in journalism.

When people have no requirements to produce regular output, or when output is defined very, very fuzzily, it can make your head spin. At least, mine did. Even more so when people in those departments complained they had too much work to do.

Maybe I didn’t fully understand what it was they did, or how challenging it was.

Maybe.

I’m sceptical.

If the work is not fulfilling, you’ll miss journalism. A lot. If you find something you can really sink your teeth into, then that’s thrilling. You have a reason to go to work and a reason to roll up your sleeves. If it’s not, it’s can feel like drudgery, and can make you look back with severely pinkified lenses at your old life and career. I suppose this is true of most situations. I just didn’t anticipate feeling it so acutely while in comms.

There is a gender difference. I know, I know. You all think I’m an angry, out-of-control feminist. I’m comfortable with it.

But what I’ve found is that employers and bosses look at men and women in the workplace very differently. Sure, you might have an enlightened boss/workplace. But unconscious bias is a thing.

That means that the skills a former journalist has – writing, editing, social media – are seen very differently depending on gender. If you’re a man, those attributes are seen as ‘hard’ skills, critical to business and to a project’s success.

If you’re a woman, those skills are definitely lumped in the ‘soft’ category, as in ‘oh isn’t this nice that she dabbles in writing.’ So even if you have an advanced degree in journalism and 10 years’ reporting experience, if they need a writer, they’ll go and hire a (male) temp.

Yup. No kidding.

Now, the caveats. I’m only talking about two experiences that I had of working in comms. Maybe a third experience would give me a different view. I hope it would. Two experiences are not sufficient to support a widespread generalisation. So, go into comms if you think that could work for you. All I’m saying is, it didn’t work for me. If nothing else, reading this will help you make a more informed decision.

What’s next for me? A new city, in a new country (I’ve been dropping some pretty heavy hints on Twitter, so no points for guessing.) I’m in the beginning stages of putting together a website for a news venture I’m launching. It might sink, it might swim. It might ruin me even more than my student loans have already done.

But I miss journalism, so I’m going back.

Stay tuned!

I was a journalist for over ten years, covering a wide variety of topics for numerous publications, most recently focusing on energy and mining for S&P Global Market Intelligence and Mining Magazine.

I’ve now moved into another sector, after conceding that the constant job cuts and low pay in the field was just too stressful to handle. Though I loved every minute (well, nearly) of being a journalist, holding my breath every week and waiting for the job-guillotine to put an end to my position became harder and harder.

Following the advice (and the footsteps) of many a former journalist, I looked for other industries which could use my ‘communications expertise’ and ‘writing skills’.

What I’ve found has been enormously frustrating – and a lot of it is due to a fundamental lack of understanding as to what journalists actually do.

Without exception, everyone that I’ve talked to assumes that the bulk of journalists’ work comes down to one thing: writing. They then take that assumption to assume: 1) we’re very good at writing, 2) we love to write, 3) whatever we do next, it must include a lot of writing.

I can’t speak for other journalists, but in my case, it’s hard to imagine them being any more wrong.

True, most journalists are fairly decent writers. We need to be, to convey a point clearly in a small amount of text. Add onto that the often complex subject we’re writing about, which we have just learned about ourselves, and we have to be very good at how we use our words.

Very few journalists I know enjoy the writing process. It’s torturous. We only do it because we have to.

Furthermore, ‘writing’ accounted for maybe 5% of my overall job as a journalist.

I don’t know why people assume that journalists just sit down at a desk, raise their fingers above a keyboard, and let the words flow. That’s not at all what the process looks like.

Being a journalist is easily 85% to 90% research – which comes in a lot of forms. First, we have to find a story that needs more attention. For my most recent beat (mining in Canada), that meant looking through countless company press releases, Twitter feeds, and local publications detailing what new laws were being debated, voted on, or contested, keeping up to speed on new mines, knowing when funding was being pulled from a project, and why, as well as knowing the political climate in over a dozen jurisdictions.

To give an example: the last story I wrote for S&P Global Market Intelligence was about the suicide crisis in the northern Ontario town of Attawapiskat, and whether an unfair deal with a diamond miner may have contributed to this outbreak.

I chose to do the story because the Attawapiskat suicide crisis was major news, with every news outlet covering it. Missing from almost all that coverage? The role of a diamond mining company operating near the town, and whether that company had reneged on its agreements to provide jobs, opportunities and development for indigenous residents of the isolated town.

Before I spoke to anyone, I first had to dig in and do reams of research. I investigated what the indigenous population had said in the past about their dealings with the mining firm, as well as any documents the firm made available on the nature of its agreement with the local community. I looked into what mining associations and Aboriginal groups said about the town and the mining industry,  and read many reports from Canadian think tanks about Aboriginal-resource company relations and how it had changed over the last 20 years.
Armed with that information, I then hit the phones.

I called everyone – the mining company, the local governance association, a Canada-wide group representing Aboriginals in their dealings with the natural resource industry, firms which advised Aboriginal groups on how to negotiate effectively with resource firms, and law firms specialising in representing Aboriginal claims to resource companies (and the diamond mining company, which wasn’t talking). Each interview took a few hours to set up, involved at least 1 hour on the phone. Following this, after each interview, I double-checked my notes, doing what I could to ensure I transcribed the quote correctly, and followed up with the source if my notes were unclear at any point.

So now that I’d done research and interviews, you’d think I would be done. But I wasn’t.

Because what I found from the interviews was another question that needed to be investigated. The mining company may or may not have negotiated in good faith and followed through on what it promised for the community, but nearly everyone I spoke to pointed to the unbalanced nature of negotiations between companies, who had access to the best and savviest lawyers, and Aboriginal groups, who were often very new to the process and were unable to negotiate in the same capacity.

Which meant I had to do more research, about negotiations this time, and then, another round of interviews – this time digging up who the best people were to talk to about negotiations, barriers to fair talks, and legal and political measures which helped or hindered this process.

Interviews are also laden with challenges – everyone has their pressure points, biases, and areas they’re not comfortable talking about. Sometimes you can get away with not touching on these areas, and get the information you need. Other times, you have to find a way to negotiate those potholes in such a way that you don’t piss off your source TOO much and still get the information you need.

This whole process took the better part of two weeks – and I hadn’t even touched the writing part yet.
In the end, I spent about 3 hours pulling together my notes, my outlines, and the transcribed interviews into (what I hope) was a cohesive, coherent and balanced piece on existing challenges facing Aboriginal communities in securing a fair deal with resource companies developing deposits on Aboriginal land.

And very little of that time was spent ‘writing’. By far, the biggest part of “writing” this article was the research that went into it. You can spend all the time you have writing, but if you haven’t dug up the relevant facts, if you haven’t spoken to the people who know the most about the issue, you’re not doing journalism. You’re writing an opinion piece, with no new information for the reader whatsoever,

​RESEARCH is what journalists do. The rest of it is just window dressing.

​

I love reporting – but sometimes, when you’re under the weather with the worst sinus infection you’ve had (in a few months, anyway), that makes it hard.

But I pulled it together and didn’t have an utterly useless week, thankfully.

This past week, I wrote about how the SEC finally released its ‘Publish What You Pay’ requirements as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, to increase transparency as to what extractive companies pay foreign governments. Payments include taxes, royalties, and such, but don’t include benevolent CSR contributions such as the construction of hospitals or schools.

Interestingly – both lawyers I spoke with emphasized that governments, and not mining, oil, and gas firms, are what’s actually under scrutiny. The PWYP regulations are designed to clarify what governments actually receive in return for allowing resource projects to go forward – and what they do with the money afterwards. Anyway, check out the piece here.

Closer to home in Canada, the National Aboriginal Economic Development Board released a report urging a new model to developing resource projects in Canada’s northern territories (Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut), also including Quebec’s Nunavik region and Labrador’s Nunatsiavut region. They make a convincing case that old economic models of infrastructure development don’t work in the North, and make a few suggestions. Read that here.

On the reading front, I started Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I’ve read little of Steinem’s stuff….and never watched any of her talks….despite being an outspoken, avowed feminist. She writes like a dream, by the way.

On the cooking front, I tackled my first gosht karahi dish, and it was amazing. This was the recipe I used: http://savorthebest.com/chicken-karahi/ It tastes great, even though I didn’t use the chili peppers (husband has a bit of a sensitivity to extreme spiciness, so I tried to temper it a bit.)

In late November, I headed to the theatres like all self-respecting journalists to see Spotlight. I had watched the trailer over and over from the summer onwards, and counted down the days until it opened.

(True to form, it took me about two weeks to actually see it once it did open, but that's another story.)

I loved it. I really did. But for the first 10 minutes, I had to battle with myself, as I felt rising waves of anger with every opening shot of the Boston Globe newsroom, awash with men.

Awash. So few females in sight.

I had expected to feel rage when I watched this movie. I spent the year following the breaking of this story raging against the Church. I did not anticipate being consumed, in the first five minutes of the film, with rage about gender inequality in my chosen professional field. 

I recognize that the movie probably showed a true-to-form depiction of what the BG newsroom looked like. But I was still angry. Because all the undergrad journalism courses I had taken were heavily female. Because my editorial staff, when I was editor-in-chief of my college paper, was heavily female. Because my master's journalism program in London was predominated by females. And yet - females were an endangered species in this newsroom.

I felt nauseous and furious and depressed. But I told myself, 'Knock it off. You've waited three months to see this movie about the greatest journalistic expose in the past 15 years about your own religion.' Getting pissed off in the opening credits would do nothing but make me hate the whole thing.

So I moved past it. And I loved it. And saw it twice.

Then I decided to watch (via Youtube) a chat held at the 92nd Street Y (in Manhattan), which had nearly all the main actors (with the exception of Rachel McAdams, who was otherwise engaged) and headed by Reel Pieces moderator Annette Insdorf.

I enjoyed it, for the most part. 

Until the last three minutes, when Insdorf turned the discussion to McAdams and the role she played in the movie, and the importance of Sacha Pfeiffer (the BG journalist) in the investigation.

And I was horrified by what came out of their mouths.

Insdorf began: “There is an empathetic presence that her character Sacha brings to the material.”

First off, let me stop her right there. I was hoping for more from a female moderator. I was hoping that this moderator, by dint of being female, understood that these kinds of words sound awfully complimentary, but really just serve to frame women as caretakers whose chief responsibility is making sure that everyone’s feelings are being understood. 

But it continued.

Insdorf:  “It’s not just that these guys [yes, I’m aware that ‘guys’ is non-gender specific, but it sounds an awful lot like she’s talking about the men here] are so good at finally unraveling the details,” she said.

“There are so many moments in the film that she’s [McAdams, as Pfeiffer] talking to the survivors, for example, where a lot of the human cost of what’s at stake here was brought to the surface,” Insdorf added.

Really? That wasn’t my take on McAdam’s role in the film. She wasn’t in the movie as a plot device. Pfeiffer was a full member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team, and not because she was a “good listener” who was emphatic. She tracked down survivors, got details, and found out what really went on. She found one of the priests at the heart of the scandal, and interviewed him. She wasn’t a hand-holder. She wasn’t there accidentally. Give her some credit, FFS.

Also, I got more of a sense of what the victims were going through when I watched Mark Ruffalo, as Michael Rezendes, interview a former heroin addict who had survived abuse and a broken home, and when Ruffalo/Rezendes had a mini-breakdown in the office when publication of the story was delayed. That drove it home for me. Watching McAdams/Pfeiffer didn’t have that effect. It just made me understand how difficult it was was to get to the bottom of what happened.

The panel discussion then took a nosedive when the fantastically awkward (seriously - I never realized how verbally clumsy he is on his own) Michael Keaton had this gem:

Keaton: “And I have to add and I think I speak for all the guys here - it was just a great thing to show up and go, ‘I gotta go through my 15-min crush on Rachel McAdams and then get to work” [laughter from the crowd].

So, not only is Pfeiffer’s role in the investigation minimized, but McAdams’ work is reduced to ‘showing up and looking pretty.’ After 50+ minutes of listening to these men discuss their process, their inspiration, and their method,, this is what we get to hear about McAdam’s work. Sure, she wasn’t there, so she didn’t have that opportunity to discuss that in greater detail. But you would have at least hoped that someone on the team - or barring all else, the moderator - would have given her more props than that. Not so much.

You can see it for yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkm82aeQ53E

It’s all the more infuriating when I think about the many humilities women in the journalism field suffer day in and out. I couldn’t get calls for a job interview until I changed my name from ‘Jaclyn’ to ‘Jax’. Even with that gender-neutral moniker, I’ve had instances when sources for a story pulled out of an interview after finding out I was female. I’ve had a job offer rescinded because the guy couldn’t get over me being a female (his words precisely). As a mining journalist, covering an overwhelmingly male-dominated industry, I’ve had interviewees mock me, tell me ‘my pretty little head’ (I do most of my interviewing over the phone, so that’s not an observation on their part) can’t comprehend the nitty gritty of mining. And so on and so on and so forth. I don't think my experiences are unusual.
I get it. I get that women journos put up with an awful lot of shit (and I’m not even going to get into what we suffer online and on social media platforms).

But here’s the rub: we persevere. And we succeed. And then, we see a Pulitzer Prize-winning female journalist have her contributions to one of the most important, groundbreaking, earth-shattering stories in the past 20 years minimized so effortlessly by this panel, a panel which was comprised solely of the people who made the movie.

​It’s an outrage. I saw it weeks ago, and I’m still furious.