by Jake MacCallum
80% of journalists plop cold bland facts on your doorstep like a sack of potatoes. Potential for poutine and shepherd’s pie? You bet. But hardly anyone applies the effort and creativity it takes to add a little spice and get cooking, so we are left with the same old flavour. Imagine a restaurant offering one menu item for 50 years and hoping everyone will like it, forever. Where flavour is sacrificed in the name of consistency and impartiality, taste buds go numb, expectations drop, and people forget what good food tastes like. And it goes beyond the kitchen; it goes beyond journalism.
In school I have witnessed far too much beating around the bush—this cowardly “I see both sides!†state of detachment that, while simulating objectivity, is really just underdisciplined, impersonal thinking. If everyone tried to be the mediator of the roundtable, no one would say what’s actually on their mind. No real progress would be made.
So, here’s my mission. I want to shake up your basic meat-n-badaydas journalism into something with flavour and substance by inviting our writers to break convention and give their honest, humbly human opinion, and, equally so, by giving our readers a full license to criticize (because that’s what it means to live in a democracy, after all).
With our first paper issue since 2008, The Cadre is finally emerging from the dark ages. We will now publish more firsthand narratives, opinion pieces, satire, poems, and essays, and worry less about meeting standards of objectivity. The Cadre provides anyone with something to say the opportunity to share it with the world by submitting a proposal to cadreeditor@gmail.com.
You can’t be everything to everyone, so be something to someone. Or else…
To avoid criticism: say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
– Elbert Hubbard