Around the Bay 30k Race

Meg "leads" the pack around km 5

After four months of training in all weather, the race day has come. Meg was acting cool, but it was obvious that she was excited. Her eyes glow and she can't stop smiling when she's excited about something. She had all rights to be--this was a 30 kms race, her longest one by far.

We won't go into details about the race, let's just say that it was well organized and well ran. The weather gods were smiling on us, the rain stopped early in the morning and we had fresh and sunny day to enjoy.

Waiting for start

There were many memorable moments, and we even managed to catch some on camera. We crossed the finish line holding hands and smiling in 3 hrs 6 min and 2 sec.

As soon as we got home Meg asked me to register us for Goodlife Toronto half marathon in May. She's hooked on running!

Before the start

Zoran around km 5

Meg approaching the bridge

This guy must have wished that helicopter could fly

Meg in hands of Grim Reaper who always waits after the last killer hill, on km 27

Can you tell we loved it?

Meg's pic of the bling. Nice!

How the media got broken and how we may (try to) fix it

A lament of a journalist by heart and by trade
From the days of early gatherings around the fire with fellow tribesmen, one of the most important aspect of tribal life was--sharing news. Whether the news was about sightings of new herds of animals, which would ensure the tribe's survival through the winter, or about the movement of a hostile tribe, sharing news and being informed increased chances for survival.
Of course, we've come a long way from the time of tribal gathering (or we like to think we did), and many things have changed: nowadays the news travels the speed of light, and it can be consumed in many ways. What hasn't changed is that being in possession of a crucial information can still mean survival--political, existential or business survival. What I'm trying to say is--news still matters, probably just as much as before.
Except now in place of a lone messenger, or a group of scouts hunters or warriors, we created the whole media industry. For a while the media people were proud of what they do, followed the code of conduct in which they were supposed to fact-check the information before presenting it to the public, and always kept in mind that the only purpose the media exists is to keep the public informed. Noble idea, right?
So, how did it all got broken? There were several factors, the way I see it. First, the rapid growth of advertising in the media, the money it brought and the influence that comes with it. Where the early newspapers and magazines could survive off subscription and street sales, the lure of money from advertising became too hard to resist. Slowly, printed media switched onto advertising as the main source of income. It was great, they could afford to grow beyond their needs and the golden era of journalism ensued. The reporters travelled the world around many times, stayed in expensive hotels and hired transport to wherever they needed to go. It was good for the news business - the coverage was great from the trustworthy source. The downside was the rise of a star-reporters whose personality threatened to become larger than news they were supposed to report. As their fame grew, they moved to become columnists or hosts of news shows, but that's probably a whole separate topic. Let us go back to the state of the media.

The advance in technology started saturating the advertising market - advertiser spread from print only to the radio, television, and--yes, the Internet, when it came around. At the same time, the ownership of the media outlets changed from journalists who cared about the news to moneymakers who cared about the profit. What we have now is comparable to what had happened with financial sector--the media companies have marketing/sales/advertising teams which are much larger than the editorial teams. What that tells me is that the owners care only HOW to sell, and not WHAT to sell.
With the internet offering advertising targeted narrowly to intended audience, and the public changing from buying their news in print--and the television is slowly feeling the public increasingly reluctant to pay for what it has to offer--to getting it elsewhere, mostly online and for free, print media soon followed by electronic media found itself unable to sustain their large operations.
I know this all was long and yawn-inducing, but it explains what happened next and why we stopped trusting the media to deliver credible news. So--cash strapped media companies increasingly rely on wire agencies to provide the news from the distance. Everybody is covering only their own backyard. The reporters are reporting second-hand from their desks, instead of traveling as before to the scene where the news happened.
The wire agencies on whom we rely to get the news from afar, are also trying to reduce costs. They stopped sending their tried and proven staff reporters on assignments and hire (much cheaper) local freelancers instead. The problem with it is that locals are, by the nature of things, more involved in their local political situation and as such less neutral in their reporting. In plain talk: they tend to take sides and present their preferred side of the story.
To make matters worse, with advance of smart phones and rise of "citizen journalism," everybody is blogging and "reporting" on their own, there's so much not-so-credible information that it's next to impossible to weed out the false from true news. In the newsrooms, the staff is reduced to bare minimum, and the decimated leftover journalists have less and less time to fact-check the reports form the field. Still, the pressure to compete with the web, where speed is everything and 100% accuracy is unimportant, sends the media companies ever more often to report first and fact-check later. We all know the result--growing number of false news is being reported by once-credible news sources, then rebuked. The casualty is our trust in the media.
I know this is very simplified version of a hugely complex problem, but I think I got it right in a nutshell. Here are my thoughts as to what could be done to fix all this.
The main problem is the race for profit. If that's taken out of equation, all that's left to strive for is prestige. And that can be achieved only with high-quality work. Simple, right? The media should go non-profit. It should be financed by independent funds, sheltered from political influence and completely transparent in its finances. How to shelter the funds I haven't quite figure out, except maybe to suggest some international control over it. There would be no advertising, because it wouldn't be needed. Its sole purpose would be to provide credible and accurate information to the public. That way we'd also rid ourselves of the so-called "advertorials"--advertising made to look like editorial news content. And--better yet--there would be no political attack ads.
Imagine if you could tune into a news channel / web site / newspaper and know that all you're getting is a 100% fact-checked news, without bull***? For a journalist it's a dream, maybe unachievable, but worth dreaming.
I'd like to hear what you think about all this. Leave the comments if you like.

I thought I was depressed; turns out I'm only introverted

The Quiet Power of Introverts

This is going to be personal, to a point. But, bear with me, it will make sense at the end.

Have you ever come across someone shamelessly boasting about his talents and experience? Some people are so good at it, they climb the ladder based on nothing else but self-promotion. All you need to do is have boundless self-confidence and enough yapping talent to convince the others around you, especially those higher up the food chain, that you are what you say you are. 

I was brought up in a society and environment where the saying goes "self-promotion is worthless" (loosely translated), meaning one is supposed to show his true worth with his work, not his words. True to the old wisdom, I found my niche and built my reputation without having to advertise it. But then I moved to Canada. With about 15 years experience as photojournalist, I thought it'd be easy to find work. Yet, on my first job in Calgary, an editor told me that I should be more assertive, that I'm too quiet. And I tried. I competed with lesser photographers, who were more verbal. While I could outdo them with work, they've always outdone me in the newsroom. They moved up, I stayed put. Imagine the hit my self-confidence took!

For a long while I thought I was discriminated against as an immigrant. I thought the Canadian-born were getting the chance, while I, a foreigner, will always stay on the sidelines. Typical immigrant's story, right? I thought so too, until a few weeks ago, when I started reading a book that turned this whole perception upside down. It's called "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" by Susan Cain. 

Did you know that one third of the global population are introverts? That is not a derogative - it's a personality trade. They (we!) are people highly sensitive to the outside stimuli and overstimulation; the ones who prefer peace and quiet over loud and busy; the ones who'd rather have a serious conversation with one person, than entertain a crowd with small talk and trivial jokes. There are whole civilizations based on preferences toward introverts or extroverts. Asian society, at least until recent wave of westernization, valued quiet thoughtful types, who were considered wise and studious. Western Europe and North America are the kingdoms of extroverts - the outspoken, the loud, the good presenters, the self-promoters. They are the risk takers, the leaders, and sometimes the troublemakers. The introverts in the West are the thinkers, the creators. Some famous introverts are Steve Wozniak, who started the whole personal computer revolution from the quiet of his solitary home workroom, Eleanor Roosevelt, a U.S. humanitarian and diplomat who had to fight her shyness to do her work, Albert Einstein who preferred his formulas to his peers.

The book is full of scientific and scholarly studies explaining why is it so that I hate confrontations of any kind, that I'm so distracted by the din of the open office space, its constant buzz and rings of telephones, to the point that it cuts my productivity by half. It also explains how some of my colleagues blabbered their way to promotions and why it worked in the environment which values extroverts and considers quiet types backward, less intelligent and slow. 

So, if you find it difficult to talk loud at a party, to hold empty conversations, and prefer to be on your own reading a book, or with one good friend talking about the essence of life - don't worry, you're not depressed, neither are you dumb or weird. Welcome to my third of the world's best - the creative, the inventors, the artists, the thinkers! Without us, conversation would be a shouting contest, with the loudest ideas prevailing. Without us, our extroverted friends would be deprived of the sound advice; the books would be fewer, the innovation slower; the world would be more chaotic. We are the quiet power behind the noise.