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 tugboat Kathleen Turecamo rescues people from Lower Manhattan (Penn Maritime photo)

The second article Escape from the 91st Floor followed an interview with Claire McIntyre – a staffer with the American Bureau of Shipping – and described her dramatic escape from the north tower of the World Trade Centre.

Both articles were printed in Seattle-based Marine Digest magazine, a magazine I edited at one time, which has since changed its name to Cargo Business News. The articles can also be found here.

Related 9/11 boat rescue links:

* List of 9/11 Rescue Boats

* Moran Crews Cited for 9/11 Evacuation Endeavors (Sep. 2005)

*Who Was in Charge of the Massive Evacuation of Lower Manhattan By Water Transport on 9/11? (Sep.2002)

© Alison Bate, 2011

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 breaking windows.

It was June 14, 1994, and as assistant design editor, I was responsible for laying out the front page and selecting and editing the pictures the photographers brought back. We were still using negatives, then, of course, peering over them carefully with a loupe, selecting the sharpest and the best.

As the night wore on, we stripped apart the front page and inside pages to add more and more dramatic photos of the rioters and the riot police. We worked flat out until 1:30 a.m., doing a triple chaser for the paper.

Media photographers and broadcasters were really the only ones at the riot scene in 1994 and our negatives showed people climbing lampposts, wrecking and looting stores, and assaulting police officers.

That night, we didn’t really have time to analyze the reasons for the riot, or even the consequences of having captured evidence of people committing crimes.

But the next day, I remember how protective we felt about the negatives, and how we even considered hiding them. In our department, we didn’t want to hand them over to the police. We were worried that it would turn our photographers into targets for criminals in the future and also wanted to protect the civil liberties of those photographed, even those committing crimes. That time, the riot police seemed to have charged in aggressively, as well, and we didn’t quite trust the police not to massage their own role in the riot.

I’m sure there was also a less appealing competitive ego aspect to it too: they were OUR negatives.

Of course, the police did come calling, demanding that The Vancouver Sun hand over negatives from that night. “Not without a court order,” our managing editor at the time said, and we were all pleased.

The police came back with signed bits of paper, and the negatives were dutifully handed over in the end. I felt indignant and uncomfortable at the time, and had a good rant. “So much for media freedom. Is this a police state we’re living in? How dare they? “ etc., etc.

Seventeen years later, we have another riot but this time everyone is falling over themselves to name and shame the culprits. The Province even ran pages of pictures of the culprits, the police phone number and a story: “Do the right thing and report the rioters.

I’m not quite sure why I feel so uncomfortable about all this naming and shaming. Maybe it’s because it feels hypocritical, and maybe it’s because I feel there should be a healthy distance between the police and its citizens.

My second thought is that very few of those doing the naming and shaming are 100 per cent innocent themselves. And that includes myself.

I happened to be biking back through the downtown after teaching near Terminal and Main last Wednesday, shortly after the game finished. Police had closed my usual route over the Dunsmuir viaduct, so I went along Pender and cut up Homer to find my bus stop.

“Don’t go that way, there’s tear gas,” one of the bystanders told me. I headed up to Granville anyway and walked along to The Bay, surrounded by the crowds and looking at the huge black spire of smoke from burning cars in amazement.

It was very different seeing a riot live, and not via a negative loupe while inspecting negatives safely inside the Vancouver Sun building. But you know what? As riots go, it was a pretty tame event compared with the Brixton riots in London, which I covered as a journalist in the 1980s. I didn’t really feel threatened for my safety last week, and just gave a wide berth to any idiots looking for trouble.

Around each small group of troublemakers, a huge crowd had developed, enjoying excellent free theatre. Virtually everyone was taking photos and videos and these are the photos being used now to name and shame the culprits. These same people chose to stay and watch.

I walked with my bike down to Dunsmuir again to avoid the crowds. And one block away from the rioting, everything was peaceful. So I know that anyone who wanted to escape the rioting, could do so easily.

Back on Granville, the bus stops had incredible line-ups, so I gave up waiting for a bus and biked over to West Vancouver, passing numerous couples and groups of friends doing the same thing, all wearing hockey sweaters and enjoying the end of the day. By the time I arrived in West Vancouver, it was as though nothing had happened, apart from the crowded buses.

Overall, the riot was a spectacle, and I enjoyed being at the scene of live news, at the centre of things. I always do. I’d like to think I’m 100 per cent innocent of causing trouble that night, but maybe it’s more like 90 or 95 per cent. I understand the allure of being in a crowd and if I’d been younger, I might have stayed to watch longer and take some stunning photos, too. As it was, I felt simply sad at what was happening to my city.

And that brings me to my third point: I think one of the reasons why most of us feel so sad about the riot is that it broke the unspoken contract between the city, the police and ourselves. The contract that says we’ll let you have fun if you behave yourself. The Vancouver police and other agencies handled the Olympic crowds so well, and were models of restraint this time around, and we didn’t fulfil our end of the bargain.

The bottom line is, we can’t be trusted to do the right thing.

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 on different ads and experiment with what works,” she says.

Sylvia Taylor, executive director of the Federation of BC Writers, helps writers with their manuscripts and told me: “My authors all give me different nicknames: one calls me ‘The Literary Midwife’ and another calls me ‘Metaphora Editrix.’ ”.

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 five-minute switch, according to WordPress. Yeah, right.

The whole process, by now about 80 per cent complete, took me back to the early web days, when I put up and ran a nonprofit website for 18 months. Using wordpress.com I didn’t have to ftp anything, or dig around with code in the servers.

This week, I’ve had to relearn more than I ever wanted to about WebFTP, domain mapping, changing cache settings . . . and little things such as getting WP-stats to work on WordPress.org are ridiculously time-consuming.

Time for a walk on the beach in the rain.

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 offering basic features for free, but charging a premium for extra features.

Manfield, managing editor at Orato.com, also gave a great workshop on Writing for the Web on Sunday. She teaches web writing for Simon Fraser University’s Writing and Publishing Program, and managed to pack an incredible amount of useful information into a short time.

Panelist and avid blogger Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen suggested that chasing trends is a mistake, and that keeping to the faithful “write what you know” and choosing evergreen content or reference material that never goes out of date is more important online.

She also discussed Long Tails, a phrase made popular by Wired editor Chris Anderson to describe how low-demand niche products can collectively make up a market share that equals or exceeds high-demand products — if the distribution channel is large enough.

Other online writing tips:

Avoid puns and wordplay
“If you rely on search engines for your web traffic, you cannot use wordplay. The title and subject must be in your face,” said Jill Browne, an editor and writer for the online magazine Suite101.com.
Instead of “Four-man rock team triumphs”, use “Men’s curling team wins.”

Write short pieces
“Cut in half the amount you would usually write,” said Amanda Daniell, an animal activist who uses blogs, Facebook, Twitter and a Jimdo website. Write 400-600 words maximum per page.

Blogger or WordPress?
Panelists had differing opinions:
“I like blogger, because it’s so simple,” said Amanda Daniell.

However, Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen said she prefers WordPress.org, as she can use Google AdSense and Amazon.com ads to bring in revenue to her four blogs.

I like the free hosting and wide range of templates provided by WordPress.com, but must admit I haven’t tried Blogger.

Making money from your blogs
“It’s a long haul. It takes a long time to earn $50/day,” said Laurie. The good news is that stories you wrote a year or several years ago can still generate income. “It’s like compound interest,” she explained.

Writing online compared with print
“Transitioning online can be a problem for many writers,” said Lisa Manfield. She noted that people read very differently online. They:

* Scan
* Search for very specific information
* Are incredibly impatient
* To increase readership, use key words in titles

Inbound links are important
These are now the currency of the web, panelists agreed.

Twitter is good for networking
“It’s made me a better writer, because it’s forced me to be more specific,” said Laurie.

Laurie has blogged about her own experiences at the festival and includes more useful tips for online writers

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 side, while publications fold with depressing regularity, new ones continue to start up and give you new markets.

2. Specialize. Become an expert on a really obscure subject, and write on it in depth. If you write wishy-washy features with no clear focus, and pitch them to major consumer magazines, your emails will disappear into the ether.

3. If you live in Canada, don’t rely on the Canadian market alone: it’s far too small, and it’s not freelance-friendly. Pitch to U.S. magazines, webzines, online news and feature websites too.. If you live in the U.S., try Canadian markets as well.

4. Better still, pitch internationally. Try British, Japanese, Chinese markets etc.

5. Don’t obsess about having great clips. Most editors don’t care what you did for someone else – they just want to know if you can write something useful for them. Pitch an idea for an event about to happen, that they haven’t covered, but is right for their publication.

6. Most publications want first time rights or first time North American serial rights. If you write a story on your blog or website, that counts as publishing. Only include these stories after they’ve been published somewhere else (and link to them), or if you aren’t intending to make money from them. For example, if you are blogging to promote yourself and your ideas.

7. Write with the reader in mind, not your ego. Timely news stories that keep people up-to-date or give practical information always have a strong market.

8. Freelance for lifestyle reasons: to have more freedom, to be able to work from home or in coffee shops, or to write the stories you want. If you want or need a steady income, get a staff job. You’ll make more money there.

9. Don’t forget to take a vacation. You may think employers/clients won’t like it, but actually, it’s often the opposite. They are impressed that you are making enough money to take a break. And what’s the point of freelancing, if you are chained to your computer? Just make sure to give clear warning of when you will be away, send an email reminder just before you leave town and stack up stories if necessary.

10. Most important of all, write on topics you are passionate about.

“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 Chapel.

McWhirter’s memories as a small boy, seeing oranges for the first time washed up on a beach, set the scene for his poem “Overboard”. While being bitten by a lady bug (“Twice!” he noted indignantly) morphed into “The Rouge and the Black.”

Arts council executive director Jacqueline Massey, making the introductions, quoted one of McWhirter’s previous observations: “A poem is anything you look at twice.”

The Write on Bowen! Festival was the brainchild of Carol Cram and showcased a mixture of island poets, writers, and songwriters.

After a full day of workshops and panels on Saturday, festival goers gathered on Sunday to walk in the Lieben Lands, a legendary writers’ retreat where notables such as Malcolm Lowry, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, and Eric Nicol worked and played.

Opening night was MC’d by the multitalented 17-year-old Calder Stewart. First up was author James Glave, who read an excerpt from his newly published book “Almost Green: How I Built an Eco-Shed, Ditched my SUV, Alienated the In-Laws, and Changed my Life Forever”.

In one section, six terrified males – The Green Team Extreme – try to move The Tankosaurus”, a behemoth rainwater storage tank, into position.

As a last resort, he’s forced to back his golden-pearl premium edition Lexus RX-300 into position to help move the tank and save the day. It seemed serendipitous that the SUV he was trying to ditch should play a leading role, he said. “It was as if the Lexus and I had made our peace.”

Lisa Shatsky read six poems, including “On Not Reading Newspapers” and “Tell Us Something Nice”, dedicating them to Bowen’s beloved Ross Carter, who died June 29 at the age of 79.

Songwriter Julie Vik performed two of her songs, closing with “Shudder”, as an alder tree grasps for life.

Perhaps the spirit of the festival could best be summed up by one of Bernice Lever’s poems, “Going For the Gold”, which she performed Friday night. It notes that sports and science set their benchmarks. . .

“yet in the arts
world-class achievement glows forever:
a shine to spur others
to their own excellence
not to better or to bury others
but to achieve their own brightness”