Some doubt it was ever cool or influential. Joe Clark, a journalist with an outspoken disdain for Spacing, posted on his blog that “[t]he existence of Rob Ford as a credible candidate for mayor further demonstrates that Spacers™ [a term Clark coined]… have not budged the meter one notch.”
“Who reads Spacing magazine? Not opponents of bike lanes and car-free days,” says Clark.
The foregoing is my first and surely last quote in Ryerson Review of Journalism, in this case within Samantha Edwards’s piece on Spacing (Summer 2011).
An outright loathing for journalism education is as easy to muster as the same for a chartered bank or a municipal transit system. (Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen make a good living off it.) I kept my mouth shut when the new captain of the Titanic, Ivor Shapiro, got up at the launch party last night and, in one of the least euphonic English-language accents on earth, thanked us for coming. Sinecurists like him can afford, literally and figuratively, to grin unconvincingly as waves lap around their knees. Anyway, speak for yourself, I thought: I’m there to support the kids and their magazine.
I did try to mingle. Guess how fucking well that went. In a room that’s 80% female I don’t have a lot of places to go, which I suppose explains the zinger I got from one fellow who is now back in town. I thought I could have a reasonable chat with the magazine’s art director. At first, yes, but then, straight out of grade school, he turned around and ratted me out to the teacher (Tim Falconer, the kind of instructor RyeHigh hires after a quick chat). Here’s to you, Levi Nicholson, unregistered graphic designer. You’ve got a great future ahead of you in a peevish, niggardly, dishevelled town like this. You fit right in.
Waiting for the streetcar on a shabby stretch of Queen St. is, I found out again, just the right setting to reflect on every other disastrous journalism gathering (actually, not just journalism), and to imagine how one’s tormentors will have a good laugh from their Piano cubicle or the Twitters.
My philosophy of loathing the war but supporting the troops isn’t working out, I see now that all of you have gleefully pounded it into me.
Any of these new journalism graduates gonna get jobs? Most of those I talked to don’t think so. Tell me, then, what the real problem is.