Edmonton Headlines: Thursday, March 16, 2017

It’s budget day! Expect this to dominate the news and social media streams this afternoon and evening. Some things have already been revealed or leaked, including a potential new hospital for Edmonton.

Around the city

Hope Mission’s crisis diversion team is saving the city (and province) lots of money by keeping people out of jail, courts and the hospital. This is the kind of programming that could be expanded to help free up police and medical resources where they’re most needed.

*

The City is actually going to save a historic building!

To be fair, the City owns the building which makes it easier to do. But still, the norm in Edmonton is to tear things down or pack them off to Fort Edmonton Park.

There are some new rules being considered to keep some heritage homes from being demolished once the property changes hands or is being redeveloped. Though, this would only apply to homes already on the City’s heritage inventory or in the application stage.

*

Speaking of homes… Edmonton could be moving to allow home builders to put up a new house with just one parking stall, instead of the currently required two.

Parks and greenspaces are part of how the city will evolve. Even in places that currently have a lot of parks, there can be more to ensure they’re used in the future by as many people as possible.

Edmonton city councillors are also pushing for our city to become a testing ground for self-driving cars.

Copy cat opinions

Well, this is a new one to me. The Edmonton Journal and CBC appear to have both run the same op-ed piece on Alberta’s job market (it might be more fair to say the items are similarly worded/edited, but they have the same topic and authors).

We’ve talked before about how newsrooms can pay for access to The Canadian Press, a newswire service, and end up running the same stories, but the opinion sections tend to be in-house (or at least not duplicates of other newsrooms). CBC, however, has begun to increase its opinion-based offerings, which might be why something like this that used to make it only to a newspaper’s opinion page is popping up in more places.

The same authors also ran an article in the Globe and Mail at the end of 2016 which has a similar focus.

So, cheers to Janet Lane and Christopher Rastrick for landing all the attention their item on job competency is getting. And jeers to the newsrooms all running the same thing.

Indigenous voices

MacEwan University is working on its plans to indigenize education at the school. (This follows on Concordia University making its own strides to better include Indigenous students.)

Speaking of including more voices in the conversation… here’s a tweet all Edmonton newsrooms could print and pin above every desk (we include ourselves in that). Everybody working in journalism needs to constantly be pushing through their privilege – white, male, class, and others – to make sure stories aren’t shutting people out of the discussion or skewing the audience’s view of certain people.

As long as producers, editors, owners of media are white, they will only want to highlight the Indigenous voices that they find comforting.

— FishPhilosopherTodd (@ZoeSTodd) March 13, 2017

Welcome to the Internet

Alberta Views has a new website and you can read full stories on it. Check out this month’s feature on our city newspapers (spoiler alert: things don’t look so good). Now that full stories from Alberta Views are available online, I suspect we’ll see them get mentioned a lot more in social media conversations.

Inclusive winter clothing

The University of Alberta has helped to develop a new line of outdoor winter clothing for people with disabilities.

Civic engagement

A massive overhaul of the Mill Woods Town Centre has an open house today, 4:30 – 8:30 p.m. at the Mill Woods Library.

There’s a public information session about rehabilitation of the Rainbow Valley Access Bridge. It’s at the Royal Gardens Community Hall, 4:30 – 8 p.m.