Chris's Broadcast Writing Blog

 Field trip!

This week we covered the Occupy Toronto movement. Not surprisingly, there were some interesting smells in the park: the smell of people living there in tents for weeks, smoke from the ‘sacred fire’, and dare I say, marijuana.

There were also some interesting people: the man sitting at a table singing what seemed to be ‘Amazing Grace’, the man with a maple leaf painted on his face, and a barefooted man walking around the park with two dogs.

As expected, the people were more than willing to talk to us. Part of the problem was to get our clip and leave because these people are passionate, and will talk to you about how they feel and their cause all day, but it’s a lot of footage you won’t end up using. Most questions morphed into talking about their reasons for protesting.

If anyone had a preconceived idea that the protesters would be difficult to deal with, my experiences would definitely disagree. As long as you showed the protesters respect, they’d respect you right back. I even talked with them about getting footage from them of a protester being arrested, and they were more than willing, but couldn’t give it to me until 6:00, which was too late.

All in all, it was a good experience and it was fun to report under pressure.