It’s a tough job, and, apparently, nobody wants to do it. Despite extending the deadline for nominations, seems nobody is interested in becoming the new president of the CMG’s Freelance Branch.
     The office has been vacant for a few weeks, after past president Don Genova left to travel outside of Canada. Genova is a food columnist.
     ”I think the thing this showed us is we need to work on succession planning,” CMG staff representative Keith Maskell told InsideTheCBC.com. “We got caught a little flat-footed this time so we weren’t able to do all the searching and grooming that we’d have normally done.”
     While the freelance branch is meant to represent all Canadian media freelancers, its largest group of members comes from within the CBC. More than 1,700 people have contributed freelance work to CBC in 2006. Maskell says the branch is keen to assist others. “We wanted to make sure that freelance issues both at the CBC and beyond become a political reality…. We want to find ways to get collective bargaining rights for all freelance content creators.”
     In the absence of an elected president, the role will be filled until December 2007 by Amy Jo Ehman who left the CBC in 2000 to freelance. Maskell says help is still needed for committee work and interested parties can reach him at keith@cmg.ca.

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	Freelancing, Labour/CBC Unions	Posted at 2:11 pm (14 Nov 2006)

Passing this along for those contract/temporary people not on the CBC’s various electronic messaging systems:

In accordance with the current CBC/CMG Collective Agreement, all eligible temporary and contract employees receive a payment in lieu of pension equal to the Corporation’s contribution to the pension plan for full-time permanent employees. The purpose of the in lieu of pension payment is to provide these employees with an equivalent amount of money to invest in their own RRSP or to use in a way that is of benefit to them.
     Effective August 7, 2006, the ‘in lieu of pension’ payment will be adjusted to 10.15 per cent. Affected employees will see this change on the pay date of August 31, 2006.
     Should you require additional information, please contact your local Human Resources department.

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	Financial, Freelancing	Posted at 10:00 am (15 Aug 2006)

Staying focused isn’t always the easiest thing to do, especially if you are one of the many journalists or associate producers who are grouped together in a series of VFPs.
     We stop and start. Throw out drafts. Get frustrated. And wish we could just lock ourselves in a dark room for a half-hour with no distractions and… just… write. Well, life isn’t fair, but I did find a great little article called How to Concentrate on Writing that has some good tips. Among the suggestions:

• Switch off email. Or… disable all the notifications that tell me I have new mail.

• Isolate myself. I use Bose noise-cancelling headphones but don’t plug them into anything. The silence really is golden.
• Get up early. 6am is the most productive time of day for writing. No distractions. It also feels more virtuous than staying up late with work.
• Chunking. Setting a timer or alarm clock for 15, 20, 30, 50 minutes and doing nothing but writing until it goes off and then taking a break seems like a good way to make progress.
• S**tty first draft. Splitting the work into distinct writing and editing phases breaks the job down nicely and it takes off some of the pressure to ‘get it right first time’.

Personally, I know I’d work a hell of a lot harder if the CBC were to install these in all our workstations. Click. Yum. Click. Yum.

Bad Language blog

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	Freelancing, News & Journalism	Posted at 3:06 pm (06 Jul 2006)