There’s an idiom in journalism: the goat must be fed.

The proverbial goat has changed over the years. It used to be the next day’s paper. Then it was the 24-hour news cycle. Then the 12-hour news cycle. Then it was websites.

Those pages, those hours, those constantly refreshing sites — they all must be fed. The goat can never go hungry because a fed goat is a fed public. But then suddenly there were so many goats, with ever-bigger appetites, and keeping them fed became impossible.

So it’s not entirely surprising to me, as someone whose two decades in journalism has overlapped with the advent of blogs, the boom and bust of digital media, multiple “pivots to video” and the credo “do more with less,” that AI has become an appealing tool to “feed the goat.”

The unemployment rate is increasing across Canada. Which should mean there are more people looking for work, but if you ask most employers, it certainly does not feel easier to find the right person.

In fact, it is appears to be harder for both sides. Many organizations are posting fewer roles, taking longer to make decisions and being more cautious overall, yet they are still struggling to make hires. At the same time, candidates are applying to more jobs than ever and feeling increasingly frustrated by a lack of response.

So what is going on?

Recent data paints a clear picture. Hiring activity has cooled slightly as organizations respond to economic uncertainty, with many choosing to maintain current staffing levels rather than expand aggressively. At the same time, unemployment has ticked up and more candidates have re-entered the job market, increasing competition for available roles.

We are living through a time where global issues seem to be dominating our consciousness — the war (is it a war, or is it just one man’s folly?) in Iran, the wonder of the Artemis II mission.

My own relationship with news sometimes feels like a constant need to know how to prepare for the Next Thing. So hardwired am I for disaster that I felt the need to warn my children of the possibility of failure while we watched the peak of science, human ambition and curiosity flame into the sky and then into the blackness of space, deepening the knowledge and potential of humanity in real time. This may have been a bit of lingering trauma from a childhood vacation when I watched an unmanned rocket launch in Florida just months after the Challenger space shuttle disaster. The rocket was promptly struck by lightning and exploded across the sky. “These things sometimes blow up,” I told my kids.

So it’s understandable if, like me, in the unending barrage of existential crises emanating from these pages and your social media feeds, and the propensity for things to go wrong these days, you may have missed a very important story out of Calgary this week.

So I will fill you in: In a calculated and strategic effort, the University of Calgary has broken a Guinness world record for the most people dressed as dinosaurs at one time. Now, lest you think this is minor news, I would encourage you to read the article and note the deliberateness with which this record was achieved, down to learning from the failed attempts of the dinosaur capital of Canada, Drumheller, Alta.