Keynote preview: Jan Wong
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January 15, 2010 8:19 PM
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Jan Wong will do anything to get a story.
“I've done news stories like smuggling box cutters onto Air Canada,” she said. “I've done undercover investigative pieces where I've written about minimum wage, but I don't just write about minimum wage, I go all the way. I get the job. I move into a low-rent basement. I move my kids with me.”
Wong has a colourful bio: She spent 1988-94 working as a foreign correspondent in Bejing, and covered the massacre at Tiananmen Square. She has worked for The Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. For five years, she wrote a popular column called “Lunch with Jan Wong” in The Globe and Mail where she interviewed celebrities. She has published four books, with a fifth to be released this year.
But, she may be best known for the controversies two of her stories caused in 2006.
In the article “Get under the desk,” she suggested the three post-secondary shootings in Quebec may have been linked to alienation caused by language laws, causing an uproar from readers. In her “Maid for a Month” series, she described the private lives of her clients, and they sued.
Was it worth it?
She sighed as she answered: “Yes; it's not worth it to do this job unless you do your best. . . . You will get attacked, you will get all kinds of flak, but you're not in this to be popular. You're in this to do the best stories you can do, the most truthful stories that you can do. That's the reward — that you're trying to be an important part of a democracy.”
But doing whatever it takes to get the most truthful story isn't easy. Wong insisted that whether the piece is investigative or fluff, you have to push for it at every step: push your editors for more time, push your sources for information, and push yourself out of your comfort zone.
“It's a muscle that you have to exercise, and I think everyone can learn to do this, so it's not an innate kind of attribute. I think it's something any reporter — any student reporter — can learn.”
Strikes me the dumbest thing that family in the Maid for a Month story did was to sue.
Nobody would have known who they were if they hadn't.
And a lawyer helped them do it.