Finally, a Fundraiser Worth Supporting

My Ink story this week is about Windows 7. You can find it at jschool.ca. There's not much more to say about it really, so instead I'm going to talk about Desert Bus for Hope.

Desert Bus is probably the cruelest, most boring video game ever made. It was created by (now) Two and a Half Men producer Eddie Gorodetsky, and comedy-magician duo Penn and Teller in 1995 for a compilation of scam games that was never officially released. It's overly realistic nature was a satirical response to controvercies surrounding violent video games at the time.

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45 miles per hour. It takes 8 hours of continuous play to complete, since the game can't be paused.

The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other traffic on the road. It veers to the right slightly, so it's impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road, it will stall and be towed all the way back to the start, also in real time.

If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson for another point. It's a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends. Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance holds out. Some have earned as many as 99 points, (the maxumum allowable by the game,) which would take over 41 days of continuous play to accomplish.

In 2007, Victoria-based online sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun started a marathon session of the game called Desert Bus for Hope to raise money for worldwide children's hospital toy drives. Their team played the game continuously in turns. More donations meant more hours of gameplay added to the marathon.

November 20th marks the third year of the event. Last year's marathon lasted over 5 days and raised over $70 thousand.

Watch and donate here. And spread the love.

The Problem of Streeters

It's high time we acknowledge what is considered to be a necessary evil in journalism: streeters.

For those outside the news industry, "streeters" is the mildly pejorative term for "people on the street". The idea is that a journalist should go out and ask "average Joe citizen" what he or she thinks on a current issue. This opinion is then reduced to a sound byte and inserted into a news story or sidebar, often alongside the opinions of a number of other streeters. When a news story is comprised entirely of streeters, the piece itself is called a streeter.

Questions for streeters range from hard to soft news; from "should the government pull out of Afghanistan" to "how about this weather we're having". These stories can be used to gauge reaction to an event, survey public opinion, or to fill space as the case may be.

The vast majority of my journalist peers despise doing streeter stories, as do I. It can be hard to convince people walking the sidewalks to take time out of their day and talk, on the record, about a topic they may have little knowledge of or interest in. The possibility of being on the 6:00 news only sometimes outweighs a person's fear of looking like an idiot.

What this means for the journalist is an hour or two of rejection from complete strangers. Understandably, this makes these stories a giant pain in the ass to do.

I vividly remember standing next to a building in downtown Saskatoon with a microphone, asking passers-by what they thought about H1N1. Looking around, I noticed a few homeless people on either side of me asking for spare change.

The parallel was a bit chilling.

I can see why editors like sending reporters to get streeters; it's a reliable, simple, and easy way to fill gaps in content, especially on a slow news day.

But as a news follower, I tend to see streeter content as lazy, pointless journalism. What do I care what Anne the laundromat attendant thinks about health care? Who is she, and why is her opinion valuable? Since when is coffee row an authority on anything?

But streeters aren't just problematic at a content level. There are ethical considerations here that need to be acknowledged. First of all, the notion of streeters implies the existence of the "average person". I have yet to meet this "average person" in my time as a reporter, but if I do, I have a feeling that he or she would be very boring.

Beyond that, what are journalists actually doing when they ask a streeter for an opinion? They are choosing somebody, at random, to speak on behalf of everybody else.

This, to put it simply, is not fair.

It's not fair to that individual, it's not fair to everybody else, and it's not fair to the journalist who's recording device has suddenly become the infallible wand of public opinion.

So, by way of a conclusion, I'll put in a request to editors and news directors everywhere: please... no more streeters. These stories are nothing but a crutch for when the idea well runs dry. I know coming up with actual story ideas is tough. Really tough.

But with a little more effort, we can make journalism everywhere a little stronger.