Two articles I wrote shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre have just been reprinted in a 10-year retrospective. The first one, Armada rescues trapped New Yorkers, was based on extensive phone interviews with tugboat owners with Reinauer Transportation and Moran Towing, as well as officials with U.S. Coast Guard Activities...

June 22, 2011 I was working the evening shift at The Vancouver Sun the night the first hockey riot broke out. Depressed about the Canucks losing, we’d just about finished laying out the front page and “put the paper to bed”. Then news came in that a mob was forming at Robson and Thurlow, with drunken fans climbing lampposts and...

I’ve just set up a new blog for the Write On Bowen festival. I’m on the board and also interviewed a couple of the presenters last week. Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen runs six blogs and plays around a lot with different ads on her sites. “It takes a long time to earn money from a blog but it’s easy because it’s so much fun to put...

What an absolute pain! I have to say, don’t make this switch lightly. I wanted to change the look of my website/blog, which I’ve run happily on the free wordpress.com site for the last couple of years. But I wanted a more sophisticated layout. I found a new template I really liked, from Elegant Themes, so decided to switch. A...

By Alison Bate I learned about Freemiums and Long Tails on Saturday while moderating a panel at the Write on Bowen festival on Bowen Island, near Vancouver, B.C. As traditional media outlets struggle to make money on the web, panelist Lisa Manfield said Freemium was one way for companies to adapt. Freemium involves promoting services by...

I joined four other freelancers and publishers on a discussion panel at the Write on Bowen! festival on Bowen Island, B.C. last weekend. Here are some of the tips I gave in a handout afterward: 1. If you freelance full-time, try and have at least three regular clients. That way, when one goes bust, you won’t feel so devastated. On the up...

“I’m one of those people who embellishes everything,” Vancouver Poet Laureate George McWhirter told the first-ever festival for the written arts on Bowen Island this weekend. “I can’t leave anything alone,” he said, before launching into a series of poems on opening night at Cates Hill...