Interview With Allen Abel

1. Can you briefly define your job to me? Most of my TV work now is as a documentary writer or "doc doctor" -- I get called in by producers, networks, and directors when they have a script that needs re-jigging, or writing from pictures, or re-writing following the screening of a rough cut. I've done more than five hundred docs of various lengths and used to be an on-camera reporter, foreign correspondent and host, mostly when I was based in Toronto. Currently, I'm doing more print than TV as I write a syndicated "Postcard From Washington" column every week for a chain of major Canadian papers.

2. How did you get started in the business? I was a small-town sportswriter at first, moved from Albany NY to Toronto when the Blue Jays were founded in 1977, covered sports up there and then was a correspondent in China. A network TV producer liked my writing and asked me to join his show ("The Journal" on CBC) as an on-camera reporter. There were a lot of former print journalists on the program so I fit in. I had no previous TV experience of any kind. I was at CBC for 20 years and since then many of my writing jobs have come from former colleagues. Virtually everything I've done has been through personal connections. That's probably true of most people in this business.

3. How do you tell someone over you (your boss) that you can't accomplish an assigned task? One of my rules has always been "If you don't get the story, for God's sake get something." As a columnist, it's easier to make something out of nothing; it's harder in TV. Good planning, research and pre-production greatly minimizes the number of times you come back empty-handed. I could tell you a long story about lighting our own forest fire in the Brazilian Amazon after 4 weeks in the field not finding any fires, but I wont. ;-)

4. Do you have any advice for a media student starting out? Find the smallest possible outlet that lets you do the most possible jobs and maybe you'll turn out to be good at one of them. Media are very different from when I started; today, everyone with a cellphone camera is a "documentary journalist." I always say that writing is easy; it's writing for money that's hard. I never had any interest in doing this as a hobby. It was always a serious job, even when I was covering high school football. So I'd say be serious about it, pound on doors and prove how good you are.