Which is why you can now buy a day and a night with me here in Marseille! In an effort to raise money for its various projects, Ode is running a silent auction through the 32 auctions online platform. There are a host of wonderful things to buy, everything from stand-up paddling adventures in California to hotel stays in Thailand to a manuscript consultation by the aforementioned James Geary. When asked to donate something, I decided to offer one of my most precious belongings: my deep deep love for the city of Marseille. If you win my package, I will pick you up at the train station or airport, let you stay in my guest apartment, and give you an intensely wonderful tour of Marseille and its Provençal surroundings. What’s more, you will be my guest for a spectacular bouillabaisse dinner at one of the most scenic restaurants on earth. And, perhaps best of all, it’s for a good cause so there should be absolutely no guilt about enjoying this decadent experience! You get a completely awesome day and night with me while supporting an important independent magazine and its mission of hope and optimism. So, get in there before the virtual auctioneer bangs his virtual gavel!

More than a dozen schools in France are competing this year, including teams from Rennes, Nantes, and Lyon. According to the inside buzz,  it looks like our major competition is a university in Strasbourg.

Thus far the Marseille IEJ students have been outstanding: the content of the magazine is superb and they sold so many advertisements that our dossier got bumped up to 24 pages. However, there is one last criterium: sales. L’Express measures local sales the week of the special dossier and we are judged on how many extra copies are sold in the region that week.

So, if you happen to be near Marseille this week, buy a copy of L’Express. In fact, buy three and give two away as gifts.

Adrian has been working with the English firm Investing for Good to create the Methodology for Impact Analysis and Assessment or the MIAA. (I tried to convince him this Marseille anthem should be the official theme song for the project, but was gently rebuffed.) The basic idea is to grade social purpose organizations such as homeless shelters or green energy companies or fair trade quinoa farms so that ethical investors and governments can direct money to the organizations that are the most efficient at what they do. Which would mean, we would all get more goodness for the same amount of money.

The fruit of this labor is The Good Analyst, available as either a proper book or a free PDF download or ebook from the Investing for Good website. Its goal is to give government and investment analysts a took kit to properly assess social purpose organizations and direct their funds to the most proficient among them. As Adrian writes, A good analyst is one who analyses social and environmental good, as well as one who does so skillfully. But there is a third meaning too, as like a good Samaritan or a good witch, a good analyst can be a force for good, with a moral power and a social impact all of their own.

This book is not only a fascinating exploration of the abstract notion of measuring goodness, it is also a tremendously important and relevant social project. At a time when the world economy teeters and nations are forced to reduce discretionary spending, using Adrian’s methodology to make money work more efficiently in the social sector might be the only way to maintain the programs and services that are so essential to our democracies.

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However, there is also reason for exuberant optimism. New technology – from affordable Internet sites to cheap digital video to accessible podcasting platforms – means students now have media creation and distribution tools at their disposal that were once the exclusive domain of large companies. With a little verve and a lot of hard work, a student can make a name for themselves today in a way simply wasn’t imaginable when I was in journalism school two decades ago.

Just look at these sites created by my students as either online magazines or as a showcase for their work:

Le Big 5

ByBoby

V.O.S.T. Magazine

Le Big 5 was created by a group of second-year students during the two week winter vacation, if you can believe it. It makes me wonder what my cohort of J-school friends – Colin Freeze, Dave Ebner, Mike Mainville, Mark MacKinnon, Drew Edwards, et alia – would have done if we had this technology at our disposal. (Perhaps sullied our reputations to the point that we’d never have gotten our feet inside the door of a major newspaper?)

Ultimately, this is what I tell my students: if they’re looking to become a ‘journaliste fonctionnaire’ – that is, get a salaried position with benefits right out of J-school – then their prospects are dim indeed. But, if they view this profession as a creative endeavour and are willing to sacrifice financial security and leisure time, they can control their own destiny and make a profound and meaningful impact.

The truth is, I am envious of my students because this is an exhilarating time for a young person to enter the field. But, I admit, as a 40-year-old man with two children, this modern journalism world makes me shudder because under no circumstances would I be willing to make the family sacrifices required to forge a name for myself in today’s media market.

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What more can you ask of life? George Whitman was a great man and lived a great life. I am better for having known him. Thank you, George.

George Whitman, December 12, 1913 – December 14, 2011.

The Folio awards, which give Eddies for editorial content and Ozzies for graphic design, are the largest and most all-encompassing magazine awards in the United States. Big names participate and this year magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Utne Reader, and Playboy all won gold medals. However, to be absolutely honest, this remains the second-tier magazine award ceremony in the United States, as the National Magazine Awards curated by the American Society of Magazine Editors are by far the most prestigious. Personally, I liken it to the difference between winning the Champions League and the Europa League. Not that this diminishes my pleasure. As the players of Atlético Madrid can attest, all victories are to be savored.

Of course, I would be utterly remiss if I didn’t say that the only reason this gold medal came about was the brilliance of my editor James Geary. It is he, with his ever-curious mind, who assigns my subjects and gives me incredible leeway in my handling of them. James is also among the world’s leading authorities on both aphorisms and metaphors, so give his website a visit or, even better, buy his astoundingly interesting book I is the Other.

Needless to say, if you haven’t yet read the article, please do. You can find it *here*.

And now, I sit back and await gilded trinkets.

You can learn more about the edition *here*.

So, under this new philosophy, this fan strike seems both ridiculous and counter-productive to me. It’s like your children start having trouble at school and you decide to stop talking to them to teach them a lesson. Wouldn’t it be better to invest more love and energy? To sit down with them, encourage them, urge them to keep their head high during this dark period? And shouldn’t that be our approach with our sports teams? Instead of booing or wearing paper bags on heads or refusing to applaud, shouldn’t we cheer all the louder during the bad times, in hopes of propelling the team out of the muck?

Now, as readers of this space know, I spent three years of my life working on When the Guillotine Fell, a book that examined both the last execution in France and the history of the death penalty. In fact, I was so caught up in the subject that I also translated Robert Badinter’s L’Abolition, a memoir of his fight to abolish the death penalty.

As part of the anniversary brouhaha, I’ve had a few calls from journalists. Notably, I appeared on camera in a documentary about the Hamida Djandoubi case that was put together by Kilaohm Productions and will be broadcast on October 9th on the Planet Justice channel.

Now, there’s a curious story behind this documentary. The author, Jean-Yves Le Naour, ended up writing a quickie book (six weeks!) about the case in order to capitalize on the media frenzy that he anticipated would accompany the anniversary. And, sure enough, he got a fair amount of press out of it, press that might have otherwise gone to me. Was I perturbed? Not really. I went to the plate with this book in 2008 and my performance greatly resembled that of the Boston Red Sox this past September. I’ve put my ambitions to bed with this book.

Besides, I did get one really juicy hit. VSD (for Vendredi, Samedi, Dimanche) is a juicy glossy tabloid, kind of a low-market Paris-Match. And they proclaimed my book the ‘reference’ on the case. A little tabloid love goes a long way.

(If you want to read the article, click on the image and then click again to get a decent font size.)

To be honest, all though I am tremendously pleased and all affirmation does the creative soul good, I find the whole thing rather curious. On one hand, the awards do attract big name competitors: Playboy, People, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly are among the magazines short-listed for various prizes. Yet in my category – Single Article, News/Commentary – the other finalists are city magazines from Newark, New Jersey and Dallas, Texas.

This seems odd. Shouldn’t all American magazine awards, especially the essay categories, be dominated by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, GQ, and the rest of the pantheon? Where are the big players? Or is this like the Carling Cup in English football, a secondary competition that titans like Chelsea and Manchester United tend to neglect? I know, I know, gift horses and mouthes. But if anybody knows the real story behind these awards, drop me a line.

(If you haven’t read the essay, click on the cover below … )