Audio Interviews and Transcripts

Interview with Phillippe Bessette
by Simon Bessette

Simon chose to conduct an interview with his brother, Phillippe Bessette. His brother is now nineteen years old and he is attending one of the best school for journalism in the country called “La Cite Collegiale” in Ottawa. It is a French school which focuses on different kind of journalism. He is in his first of a two year program. Before that, he went to school in Montreal in a program that introduced students to the world of journalism. Philippe, like most kids in Canada, played hockey his entire life and learned to love other sports as well. It is important to know that even though Canada and the United States are two different countries, the way people practice journalist is really similar. You can read a part of the interview below in the transcript typed out by the student or listen to the full interview in French in the audio control below.


From 9:00-14:00

SB – Simon Bessette

PB – Phillippe Bessette

PB: So the, when I arrived in the morning around 7am, it’s really simple. I have a class about how to write in a newspaper. It is maybe not the most interesting class because there’s a lot of theory… eehhh after that I have a class called “on air” where we learn how to speak with a microphone on radio. I really love this class because I feel like I’m actually doing something. We also learn how to do the production of a show; we learn how to produce commercials. We also learn how to create some effects that will catch the listener’s attention and how to react to certain commercials. One thing that I like is that we have all the sounds and music on our computers. We have big catalogs of music where we can go pick which is very cool. It’s cool because when we are done working on a commercial, we could very easily hear it on radio; it seems flawless for us. We have the facilities here at the Cite, and they show us that we have the talent and the capacity to do the work. One thing that I also like are the teachers there in Ottawa. They are all professionals and they treat us like future journalists. They don’t treat us like kids, and they really help us to become better every day. I like the fact that I have easy access to the school. I’m staying in the residence, and if I want, I could go at midnight to use the studios to practice some different techniques. We have access to those facilities 24/7. One night this semester I even went with one of my best friends in one of the studios and turned on the Montreal Canadians game and we practiced the play by play and how to pronounce the players’ names the right way. Those are our studios… we do what we want with them. There’s not a lot of students in that program so if you need a studio for x reasons you can have one....Those studios are ours. We have 6 studios, and we are 14 students in the first year of that program, so I really like the fact that we don’t have to fight for a studio.

SB: Good, it’s really good to hear. Listen, you mentioned that you have different classes for different specialities....what are the different types of…journalism that you can practice with your program…. Is there more than one type of journalism that you are interested in or have you already decided the type of journalism that you want to do?

PB: Well, I really want to focus on the animation part of the radio. I want to be the one that will be on air and entertain the people when they come back from work. We learned that they were different phases of journalism. A few years ago the written journalism was very popular, then journalists covering crimes were very popular...we need to know that journalism isn’t a program that is recognized everywhere in the world because journalism isn’t a job that is recognized by all the human rights in all the countries. It’s the reason why back in the days people just wanted to know about crimes and what happened to the criminals....We just have to think about the first television show that we had ten or fifteen years ago. They were all related to crimes; we didn’t have a lot of comedies on TV. Now it is a lot different. We called it the people journalism; everybody can do their own things and talk about what they want….It’s…. Like a journalist gets somewhere the first thing he’s gonna do is to tweet the news first and then think about going on air. The mentality has changed a lot....Journalists don’t even wanna go on air; they just want to tweet the news first. If you’re a journalist today and you don’t tweet or use the social media, you won’t have a job because you will never be the first to get the information out in the world. It’s one of the reasons why newspapers are getting less popular. People don’t want to wait the next day to get the information they need. One thing that I like about radio is the fact that if I have news, I don’t have to wait to get the information out. I just turn the microphone and start talking....It’s just really easy access. There’s no need to bring a camera on site. We just have to start talking so it’s the reason I think that we are faster than the people working on TV. We just have to turn on the special program sound, tananan tanana, and we can start talking about the news. It’s just really fast paced and it’s easy access.