Week one--Where did it go?

I can't believe it's already Friday! I guess that's the great part about production day being Tuesday, you're so busy on Monday and Tuesday that they just fly by, and then you're halfway through the week and starting the next paper. I'm starting to get settled in a bit, I can now check my messages on my phone, and I think I'm starting to grasp what interests our readers.

School taught me to be a dabbler of news, consume a lot of it on all sorts of subjects and regions but not in much depth. Now, I've got to start going really in depth on regional issues that I must admit I know little to nothing about--and that sort of knowledge takes more than a week to accumulate. Though, I must say, I think I'm off to an OK start.

This week made me think a lot about bias and politics. The owners of the paper are Helen and Allan, and Allan is running federally in the next election for the Conservatives. He's only involved in the business and advertising aspects of the paper as a result, not the editorial decisions. Despite this, the paper still is considered by some a Tory rag. So, we go out of our way to cover other candidates and parties, to the point of downplaying Allan. He announced his candicacy just before I joined the paper. All the other papers did interviews, big photos, but we just put a tiny box announcing it. And, when the election comes, he'll probably receive less coverage than the other candidates from us.

I guess that's the problem with bias. Bias doesn't actually have to exist, it just has to be perceived. I never really considered it in this way, that in trying to avoid appearing biased the paper actually finds itself biased in the other direction.