S-COLUMN

Centretown News is a biweekly community newspaper with a circulation of around 17, 000 in Ottawa's Centretown neighborhood.

What makes Centretown News unique is that it is produced and published exclusively by Carleton University's school of journalism through a couple of courses available to third and fourth year students, as well the department's handful of master's students.

Under the watchful eye of our professor and publisher Klaus Pohle, we the students are the editors, reporters and photographers of the paper. It's also our responsibility to lay-out the pages and solicit advertising.

For the first two issues of the paper this semester, I took on the post of sports editor. Curling seems to be the go-to game when it comes to Centretown's small sporting scene. Some of the best curlers in the country hail from the two curling clubs in the area, the Ottawa Curling Club and the Rideau Curling Club. 

In addition to ensuring that my reporters are doing their job, part of my duty as editor is to write a column for my section for each issue. I had a crack at writing a column during my stint at the Golf Digest Middle East last summer, and had it published in the September issue of the magazine. (Click here to check it out)

But much to the amusement of my colleagues at Centretown News,  I chose to write my first column on the state of cricket in Canada.

Over the last few years, the sport of cricket has seen as an explosive rise in Canada. In my column I argue that more needs to be done to accommodate the game here in Canada, starting with creating more places for people to play the game.   

You can read my column on cricket in Canada here - 'Cricket in Canada needs a shot in the arm.'

My column for the second issue was on Ottawa's new professional basketball team, the Ottawa SkyHawks. Now in the middle of their inaugural season, the franchise is struggling both on the court and off it. Currently they play at the 20,000 capacity Canadian Tire Centre in Kanata, a venue which even the city's NHL team rarely sells out.

In my column I put forth the proposition that in order to create a fan-base, the team needs to play their home games at a venue, or venues, closer to town and not way out in the suburbs of Kanata (which is a 20 minute drive from downtown).

You can read my column on the SkyHawks here - 'Ottawa SkyHawks need to come to town.'

You're probably wondering what the title ('S-Column') of this blog post is all about. S-Column was the slug for both my columns. A slug is a brief name given to every story by the editor and its purpose is to makes things easier when its time to edit stories and paginate the paper.

'S' stands for sports. 'N' would stand for news, and 'A' for an arts story. The word after describes the story in one word. For example a story on the Rideau Curling Club could be slugged 'S-Curling.' A news story on a man with a tail, like this one, could be called 'N-Tail.'