By Luc Rinaldi & Abigale Subdhan 

In May 1976, three Mounties walked into Peter Worthington’s glass-walled Toronto Sun office with a search warrant. They wanted a leaked RCMP letter that contained information about Canadians charged with espionage and treason, which the Sun editor had recently mentioned in a column. He refused to hand it over. When they pleaded for a hint, Worthington replied, “Sorry, fellas, you’re on your own on this one.”

Over the next five hours, camera crews and Sun reporters—some sporting pre-emptive “Free Peter Worthington” T-shirts—watched as the Mounties searched the boss’s office. After looking through piles of books and filing cabinets, behind pictures and under rugs, the officers found the letter—in the top drawer of the desk.

Worthington’s refusal to co-operate shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The hard-nosed Sun co-founder, who died last May of a staph infection, was a staunch advocate for free expression, which showed in his gutsy, conservative journalism. Over roughly four decades as a columnist, he was fiercely opinionated and unfailingly controversial. “There was no grey. There was no mush,” says Rob Granatstein, a former Sun reporter and editor. “There was Peter telling you what he thought. Period.”

Unlike many of the columnists who came after him, whose branding depends on sensationalistic, knee-jerk panache, Worthington backed his views with hard facts and the experience he’d gained travelling the world, first as a soldier and then, for 15 years, as a foreign correspondent for the now-defunct Toronto Telegram. He brought knowledge—colleagues considered him the pre-Internet Wikipedia—where many of today’s right-wing op-ed writers offer reflexive anger; he earned a loyal following for his intelligent analysis, while contemporary pundits lure readers with outrageous claims that ignite the Twitterverse. Although he certainly inspired many of today’s Canadian conservative columnists, they’ve yet to live up to the standard he set.

***

Peter John Vickers Worthington was born in 1927, at Fort Osborne Barracks in Winnipeg. The son of a polished Quaker mother, and a father who was a major-general in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, he had a nomadic childhood, roving between different army camps. Early on, he took to mischief—the morning after a New Year’s Eve party, a four-year-old Worthington drained leftover bottles before wandering into the canteen and defiantly chugging a glass of beer—and to opinion. “[My father] tried to instil in us a feeling of independence and self-sufficiency,” he wrote in his 1984 memoir, Looking for Trouble, “and both my sister and I were encouraged to have opinions about whatever was being discussed at the table.”

Worthington followed in his father’s military footsteps. Rejected by the merchant navy at 15, he became the Royal Canadian Navy’s youngest sub-lieutenant three years later. He fought in the Korean War, interrupting an arts degree at the University of British Columbia that he would complete eight years after enrolling.

He then went on to study journalism at Carleton College, which later became Carleton University, on veteran credits. “The part of him that loved reporting was the same part of him that loved being a soldier,” says Worthington’s stepdaughter, Huffington Post contributing editor Danielle Crittenden. “It allowed him to go out and see not just areas of combat, but world situations that fascinated him. And he could be there on the spot to witness it.”

Worthington soon became a night reporter at the Telegram, a feisty afternoon broadsheet, where he earned $60 a week. Though he thought his military background would make him well-suited to international reporting, his editors refused his requests to cover the 1956 Suez Crisis. So he paid his own way and filed stories for the Tely free of charge, which led to a post as a foreign correspondent.

In his first years reporting abroad, Worthington began his trips by writing features, detailing interactions with locals and brushes with authorities, while learning the area’s politics and culture. He took risks (like venturing into a notoriously dangerous casbah in northern Africa), offered personal observations (writing “I saw” or “I was at the scene when”) and made stories relevant to Canadian audiences. An extreme example: while covering the Algerian War of Independence in 1962, he wrote, “If Toronto was Algiers—what would life be like? . . . At noon a car cruises slowly along Bloor Street between Yonge and Spadina, machine-gunning people as it goes. Six people lie dead on the sidewalk in a space of 10 minutes.”

As a foreign correspondent, he covered everything from the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet to riots in Belgium, from the Vietnam War to kidnappings in Zambia. He was the only Canadian journalist to witness the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy’s assassin, on November 24, 1963. (“Oswald . . . suddenly came through the doors,” he wrote in the next day’s Tely. “He looked into my eyes briefly but intently. He was white-faced, tight-lipped and held his head high and defiantly.”) Andy Donato, a Sun cartoonist and Worthington’s friend of 50 years, says, “I can’t name a country in the world that he hadn’t visited at some point.”

***

When the Tely folded in 1971, Worthington co-founded the Sun with general manager Don Hunt and publisher Doug Creighton. As editor, Worthington could usually be found chatting with Donato, gossiping with the women operating the switchboard (“They worshipped him,” says Crittenden) or, most likely, sitting at his desk writing. He could churn out a column in 20 minutes, filing seven a week—12 if you really needed them—according to Granatstein, who adds, “He drew on his experiences, and nobody had the experiences Peter Worthington had.”

Whatever the topic, the columns had a common thread. “Peter was always a defender of conservatism,” says Sun columnist Joe Warmington. “He was a defender of the unpopular.” He trod familiar right-wing ground—standing up for the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Don Cherry, criticizing the CBC and Jack Layton—with uncommon critical intellect. When questioning the true value of arts grants in a May 1977 Sun column, he referenced their 14th-century origins and failed Soviet counterparts, and was more concerned with creating better art than saving taxpayers money: “As a national make-work scheme for needy artists, Canada Council may be an answer. But it doesn’t—almost can’t, by the very nature of its being—contribute to excellence in ‘art.’” Lamenting the United Nations’s hypocrisy and inefficiency, he offered globe-spanning examples of slavery left unchecked to back his protests. On abortion legalization in 1988 (surefire fodder for a controversial columnist), Worthington asked, “Why are there so many men in the ranks of the anti-abortion movement? . . . I would trust female attitudes toward it more than male.”

He drew criticism for his stance on homosexuality while he was Sun editor—in 1981, he threatened to publish the names of gay men found in future bathhouse raids—but his views on the issue seemed to evolve over time: in a 2012 Sun column, he wrote, “I suspect most people (like me) don’t give a damn who marries whom.”

And when he tackled politics, no party was sacred: the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney—a politician who “wants popularity more than realistic solutions,” he wrote in the mid-1980s—was as common a target as Trudeau (first father, then son).

His avid readership was another constant. “If we had stopped running Worthington, we would have had a revolt on our hands,” says Granatstein, the Sun’s editorial page editor from 2006 to 2011. “I’m surprised readers didn’t complain after he died that we weren’t running him.”

Worthington had an on-again, off-again relationship with the paper. He resigned several times on principle—over advertising qualms, the paper’s mayoral backing, its sale to Maclean Hunter—before being fired in 1984 for publicly criticizing the Sun chain’s news coverage. “The Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail are going to inform people as to what’s happening far more than any of the Suns,” he said in a book tour interview. “If I was in Edmonton, I’d read theJournal if I only had one newspaper, no question.”

He bounced between a handful of publications before ending up back at the paper he helped launch. “[Firing him] was one of those things that really didn’t mean shit,” says Christie Blatchford, a former Sun reporter and long-time friend of Worthington’s. “Peter never really left the place.”

***

In 1982, during one of his breaks from the Sun, Worthington ran as an independent in Toronto’s federal Broadview-Greenwood riding. But he didn’t campaign with the same audacity he brought to writing. “He was the worst campaigner,” remembers Crittenden. “He hated asking people to do things for him.” She canvassed while Worthington waited uneasily near the street. “Sometimes I’d have to go down the walk and trudge him along up to the door.”

Worthington narrowly lost the race to the riding’s NDP candidate, which was perhaps for the best; colleagues say he wasn’t restrained enough for party politics. A politician “is someone who is circumspect, who watches every word, who hesitates to speak his mind,” says conservative journalist and analyst David Frum, Crittenden’s husband. “In that sense, Peter was a very impolitic person.”

A political life could also have robbed Worthington of his reputation as a newsroom prankster. At the Sun, he would often call his assistant, Christina Blizzard, from elsewhere in the building, with thick foreign accents. “It only became a problem,” she says, “when I would hear from legitimate callers who I thought were Peter.”

Back in the Tely days, Donato arranged to have the cover of The Naked Gourmet—a cookbook Worthington wrote with journalist and cartoonist Ben Wicks in 1970 that featured recipes they had picked up reporting in Africa—airbrushed to show them in the nude. “An artist painted in male genitalia,” says Donato. “He painted Ben resembling a donkey and Peter a little cherub.” Donato hung a proof of the retouched photo in the newsroom. Initially, Worthington went ballistic—he thought it was going to be the actual cover—but laughed when Donato explained the joke. Worthington later got his revenge by surprising Donato with a banana cream pie to the face.

“I used to joke that when my mother remarried, I didn’t just get a new father, I got a new younger brother,” says Crittenden, whose mother, Yvonne, married Worthington in 1970. “He was spiritually about seven years old—maybe 10.” He was always home for dinner, after which he never failed to play baseball on the street or shinny with teenagers at the local rink. “Pete was nothing if not playful,” says Frum. “There was nothing that would make him happier than a fistful of jelly beans and a BB gun, and nothing more horrifying than a black-tie dinner with three different wines.” As a prominent journalist, he would often have to attend those types of functions—but, Frum says, “Never very happily.”

Worthington was also an animal lover. His family joked that it was a greater privilege to be one of his dogs than one of his three children or six grandkids. He was “insane” for Jack Russell terriers; they fit his personality perfectly, says Blatchford. “If Peter was a dog, he would be a Jack Russell: small, wiry, tenacious, fucking ferocious and just a formidable opponent.”

***

On a cold night in the fall of 2003, a 77-year-old Worthington bounced along an Afghan mountain road, riding in the open roof hatch of a light armoured vehicle. The oldest journalist on site with the military in Afghanistan, he offered a signature mix of hard news and colourful description. He gave context for the reader, explaining what the Afghan elections meant for politics back home. “It was an arduous physical journey,” says friend and Postmedia international affairs columnist Matthew Fisher. “Peter handled himself well, of course.”

More than 20 years earlier, Worthington had faced danger with a similarly cool attitude. In 1978, sitting at his Sun desk working on a column, his chest began to hurt. He was having a heart attack.

He casually broke the news to his assistant and headed to the hospital. Later, he had a triple-bypass operation, but was playing tennis three weeks after that; in three months, he was hang-gliding. Crittenden says, “He’d been this sort of superman until he was 82.”

In his final years, though, it became difficult for him to walk. He had to stop every few feet to rest. “He just paused and chatted and pretended that he didn’t notice,” Crittenden says. “But he really hated it.”

Worthington was 86 when he died. His obituary, published the next day in the Sun, had an unusual byline—he’d written it himself: “If you are reading this, I am dead. How’s that for a lead? Guarantees you read on, at least for a bit.”

After his column appeared, someone stuck a giant “-30-” sign on his office door.

By Luc Rinaldi

There was more booze on that bar’s back wall than I’ll drink in my entire life. Yet I sat on a stool, staring at 400 bottles of alcohol, as the bartender pointed out the most popular spirits, showed off several different types of glasses and compared brandies to bitters (like I knew the difference).

The subsequent feature I co-wrote for The Grid—“94 Excuses to Drink”—had to have been my most ironic story ever. After all, to my friends, I’m the one who doesn’t drink, the sober guy at parties, forever the designated driver. So I cheered, but mostly laughed, when the piece won a silver National Magazine Award. It was as if one ofCosmopolitan’s “99 mind-blowing sex positions” packages had won a Pulitzer—and the writer was a virgin.

I’ve written my share of service journalism since then. I’ve felt qualified for some of it: concert guides and open-mic-night picks made sense for me, a choirboy turned wannabe singer-songwriter. Others, not so much: it was strange recommending kid-friendly summer activities to parents as a childless 20-year-old, or taste-testing treats for a Toronto International Film Festival guide (can anyone really be an authority on popcorn?).

Service journalism, perhaps more so than any other kind, demands a writer with expertise in the relevant field, something I often felt I lacked. I didn’t want my writing relegated to a bit-part in the substance-free nonsense that saturates grocery store newsstands: the arbitrary fall fashions, the recipes no one will ever make and all those bogus ways to shed pounds. But service journalism isn’t all bad news. When done properly, it helps readers save time and money and reminds writers like me that even a sober journalist—there is such a thing!—can teach readers how to make a killer cocktail. Research is all that separates an amateur from an expert.

Ask Denise Balkissoon. Last year, the freelancer and former Toronto Life service editor won an NMA for her how-to guide to buying a condo, published in The Grid. She wasn’t always a real estate buff. “It was something I had to research because I bought a place,” she says. “I couldn’t find what I wanted to read. There wasn’t anything to teach me.” Balkissoon, who now often writes about real estate, says a good service feature can take just as much time and research as a non-service piece. “It’s not groundbreaking investigative journalism, but it’s helpful.”

That’s a good way to describe Ray Ford’s May 2012 Cottage Life story, “Eek! A mouse!” The award-winning guide may not be hard-hitting reportage, but it helps readers keep the mice away. It’s also an enjoyable read. “I don’t really think of myself as a service writer,” says Ford, who approaches service like any piece of narrative journalism. “I look for anecdotes, characters, sometimes even dialogue.” Despite writing service pieces for Cottage Life, he’s not a cottage owner. He compensates by doing more interviews and by fact-checking himself. When I tell him about my anxieties writing service stories on topics I hardly understand, he laughs and says, “You can’t win. Even if you think you’re an expert and have legitimate credentials, someone else is going to disagree with you.”

Maybe I can’t win, and maybe that’s a good thing. The uneasiness I feel writing service pieces is inevitable, like my anxieties about botching a fact or missing an important detail in any other story. It’s what forces me to research—to be a good journalist. And if I ever start to lose that, that’s probably a sign I should write about something else. Just as long as it’s not for Cosmo.

Luc Rinaldi tells the story of how he lost his faith while reporting for Catholic news outlets.

By Luc Rinaldi

I don’t have a story.

That’s my first thought as I emerge from a downtown subway station on an overcast October afternoon in 2011. I’m on assignment to cover a pro-life rally for The Catholic Register, a Toronto-based religious weekly, but the small turnout—two dozen picketers line the sidewalk—hardly constitutes news. As I approach and read their homemade signs (“Abortion is a right not a luxury”), I realize these are the wrong protestors. I’m here to cover a rally—but not this one.

I cross the street. Here are the chosen people. Hundreds of them crowd a makeshift stage, mouths covered with red tape, “Defund abortion” signs hoisted high in the air. A band of twentysomethings happily plays Coldplay and Mumford & Sons covers. I snap a few photos and listen to speeches. As the rally ends, the protestors make a cross of flowers on the cobblestone path. The images, the rhetoric, the joyous mood: it’s all familiar fare for me, a lifelong Catholic and pro-lifer.

My story, published the following week, quoted only pro-lifers and reported statistics from a poll, issued by the rally’s organizers, that I never corroborated. For three years, I wrote for the Register, which is owned by the Archdiocese of Toronto. I covered an anti-abortion march on Parliament Hill. I went looking for blood when an online pro-life outlet accused Free the Children founders Craig and Marc Kielburger of supporting abortion. I wrote about a cross-country right-to-life tour, wearing one of its shirts—“PRO LIFE” in thick black letters across my chest—as I marched along Toronto’s Queen Street. When a middle-aged couple drove by, shaking their heads and giving me the finger, I felt only mildly offended. I’m not really a part of this, I thought to myself. I’m just a journalist.

In the world of Christian journalism, the Register, launched in 1893, is a relative success story. Under current editor Jim O’Leary, a journalist with 22 years of experience writing and editing for Sun Media, it was chosen by the Catholic Press Association as the best national Catholic newspaper in Canada and the United States for 2012. Still, its content is confined by the magisterium of the Church—in other words, it won’t run articles or views contrary to Catholic teaching, which explains my abortion coverage. If Catholics want the other side of the story, they won’t find it in the Register.

They aren’t the only ones. Corporate communications and PR are replacing critical reporting on issues that matter to Christians. As religious institutions shrink and weekly service attendance dwindles—roughly one-fifth of Canadians attend a service every week, compared to nearly one-third in 1985—communications directors and church executives are suddenly filling editorial positions that journalists held for decades. Many publications are shutting down entirely. Christian newspapers and magazines, traditionally watchdogs of the faith, are increasingly becoming tools of proselytization, preaching instead of reporting.

***

In early 2014, the Edmonton-based Western Catholic Reporter underwent the most drastic change it’s experienced in its 50-year history. The archdiocese replaced $750,000 of the paper’s budget, which was drawn from local parishes’ service collections, with a $350,000 grant. Whereas 32,000 parishioners once received the paper free, the Reporter now sells subscriptions. Even with up to 200 new subscriptions every week, circulation has fallen to about 7,000. As a result, the paper, weekly since 1965, comes out twice a month. The paper’s editorial staff became a branch of the archdiocese’s communications department. Editor Glen Argan, who once reported to a 10-member board of directors, now answers to the director of communications.

The Reporter reads much like the Register. The two have similar mandates, share content and subscribe to the same Catholic news wire, and both feature a mix of news and opinion pieces. Like the Register, the Reporter tends to toe the denominational line. For example, in the latter’s December 2, 2013, issue, five out of 21 stories are about the Vatican: the pope’s message on women in the Church, the pope’s vision for evangelization, the pope hugging a man with a disfiguring disease and so on. None features a dissenting voice.

In the short term, Argan, who has edited the Reporter for more than half of its existence, is hopeful the changes won’t affect the content. He’s less optimistic about the future. “To talk about the journalistic integrity of the Western Catholic Reporter may be a moot point,” he says. “It’s hard to say that there will even be a newspaper here 10 years from now.”

If the Reporter folds, it won’t be the first to do so. Since 2006, Montreal’s English-language Catholic Times; the east coast’s Atlantic Catholic; the contrarian, Toronto-based Catholic New Times; and BC Christian News have gone under. South of the border, at least another half-dozen outlets have met the same fate.

The situation is scarcely less bleak among the survivors, who face the ruinous combination of a dying print journalism industry and fading religious affiliation. In September 2013, the Associated Church Press issued a formal statement warning that, among Christian publications still in print, professional journalism and editorial freedom are being sidelined by public relations, promotion and fundraising. Winnipeg-based monthly Mennonite Brethren Herald is a prime example: founded 52 years ago with a team of young Mennonites at its helm, the magazine had a rebellious streak, drawing the ire of Church leaders. Now, the Herald’s editor is also the denomination’s interim communications director, and the magazine runs official Church press releases on its website. The bishop’s office in Vancouver, meanwhile, has asked The B.C. Catholic to avoid certain stories. And the paper’s editor, Malin Jordan, says self-censorship among writers has created a “culture of protection.” The Reporter may still be alive, but its recent makeover reflects a wider trend among Christian publications. In October 2013, when it published an editorial headlined “WCR still has lots of life in it,” the desperation was palpable.

***

Inside St. Chad’s Anglican Church, Archdeacon Paul Feheley hurries toward the altar, cutting through a silent Sunday congregation of 30. Dressed in robes, he hooks around the pews at the front of the church—a homey wooden hall tinted with stained-glass light—and takes a seat at the organ. His hands glide over the keys as he belts out the opening hymn. Throughout the service, Feheley rushes gracefully between altar and organ, piano and pulpit, pew and punchline. When a baby begins to cry, he jokes: “He hasn’t even heard the sermon yet.”

Feheley is not only the pastor of the Toronto parish; he’s the organist, preacher and cantor too. He is also principal secretary to the archbishop of the Anglican Church of Canada (ACOC). He’s not someone who needs an extra job. But in January 2013, he got one: interim editor of the Anglican Journal, the largest faith-based newspaper in North America. The 140-year-old monthly, long a self-professed champion of editorial integrity, is the denomination’s paper of record, and once had a reputation for holding the Church to account. ACOC funds the Journal, which has a national circulation of 150,000. But, historically, the relationship between the Church and the Journalhas been strained: ACOC’s national office has fired editors, locked reporters out of meetings and reportedly stopped sharing information with staff because of distrust. “I knew it was a bit of a strange appointment,” says Vianney Carriere, the communications director, who chose Feheley as editor. “It requires a pretty rigorous compartmentalization to keep the roles separate.”

The decision shocked Feheley—and he wasn’t the only one who was surprised. “I was totally and utterly horrified,” says Kristin Jenkins, his predecessor as editor. “It broke the most central rule of the publication. How can somebody linked to the Church’s decision-maker possibly be an arm’s-length editor?” When Jenkins left the paper—she says she was told the Journal would soon fold—the Church avoided the hassle and cost of finding another editor on short notice by appointing Feheley. He earns only a portion of what the average editor would; the extra money is funnelled into the newspaper, ensuring issues are 12 pages instead of the eight-page ones typical at the end of Jenkins’s editorship. The duration of Feheley’s post will depend on how long it takes to hire a replacement, though an editor’s salary is included in the Church’s 2014 budget. “There’s a long line of good journalists who have headed the newspaper,” says Jenkins, adding that readers expect that trend to continue. “Maybe Paul’s appointment is more valuable for the Church, but is it more valuable for readers?”

Some readers don’t think so. In a letter to the editor published in the Journal’s March 2013 issue, Canon Rod Gillis, a retired minister, lambasted the decision and warned of its “implications for editorial independence, conflict of interest and transparency.” Readers like Gillis probably remember the Journal as the newspaper that published supplements such as “Sins of the Fathers,” a 16-page May 2000 investigation into the Church’s involvement in residential schooling and sexual assault. “That was the best piece of journalism I’ve been associated with anywhere,” says former editor David Harris, who commissioned the piece. (He’s worked at the National Post and Halifax’sThe Chronicle Herald; he now edits the independent Presbyterian Record.) By contrast, an eight-page May 2013 Journal supplement, the latest in a series of annual ministry reports that the Church began running in the paper three years ago, contained a glowing profile of Archbishop Frederick Hiltz, Feheley’s boss and friend, and a regular Journal contributor (one line reads: “Archbishop Hiltz has an exhausting job. He pays the price in grey hair and health”).

Jenkins says the Journal has become less news-focused and more pastoral under Feheley’s direction. The October 2013 issue, for example, had four news stories over 12 pages; the rest was homiletic reflection and op-ed, with the first five pages written entirely by clergy. (The October 2012 issue, edited by Jenkins, contained 12 news stories.) That’s not to say Feheley isn’t aware of Church news. In his position as principal secretary to the archbishop, he vets all emails sent to Hiltz. He’s often the first person to know what’s happening in the Church—he just can’t publish it. Last October, Feheley learned of an Iqaluit cathedral’s $3-million debt, but the Journal covered it only after the news went public a week later. Earlier that year, the paper surrendered another scoop, because Feheley wanted to let the diocesan paper in Brandon, Manitoba, break a story about the local bishop’s ordained son’s alleged misuse of a diocesan credit card. The Journal story came a month after Feheley first heard about the supposed $200,000 fraud—which hasn’t been proven in court—and a day after the Winnipeg Free Press and Brandon Sun reported it. It was posted online but never went to print. (According to a 2012 survey, 77 percent of Journal readers never visit the paper’s website.)

When I first sit down with Feheley at a cafe near the Anglican Church of Canada’s offices in midtown Toronto, he’s quick to acknowledge that his roles conflict. In fact, by the end of his first sentence, he’s already mentioned “editorial independence.” At this point, I’ve heard the term thrown around enough to know that, in the world of religious journalism, it’s relative. Communications workers on a bishop’s leash claim the same sort of integrity as arm’s-length editors. But it’s hard to boast of independence when the subject of most of your stories is the institution that keeps you afloat. (Although there are some non-Christian religious publications in Canada, only a few, such as the Toronto-based Canadian Jewish News, have a large readership or a history of editorial independence.)

Back in St. Chad’s, I drop a toonie into the collection basket. Some part of that will help the Journal survive. The paper—like the Register and others—receives much of its funding through parish collections. At the end of mass, I chat with Feheley at the back of the church. After a short discussion, we discover that we both attended St. Michael’s Choir School, a Roman Catholic boys’ school in downtown Toronto. After graduating, Feheley converted and, 35 years ago, became an Anglican priest. My story is different.

***

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have my neon-green plastic briefcase. It sat in my closet, filled with religious keepsakes: a children’s Old Testament with a cartoon Moses on the cover, a New Testament I received for my First Communion, a build-it-yourself rosary set and dozens of other trinkets. Whenever I received a sacrament, went on a retreat or participated in a church event, I put a token in the briefcase for posterity.

My faith grew stronger in Grade 10, when I participated in a Catholic leadership retreat north of Toronto. Over the next two years, I attended, led and helped found several more retreats in Ontario and the northern U.S. In my final year of high school, I visited classrooms to recite the rosary with students once a month, and I sang and played guitar at school masses. I started volunteering at a church where I helped provide the soundtrack to prayer vigils and Eucharistic adoration. I joined the Register’s youth team and, in the summer before university, worked in the newsroom. I considered the priesthood. The crosses, medallions, rosaries, books, newspapers and pamphlets I collected along the way all wound up in my briefcase.

In my first year of journalism school, I joined the Catholic chaplaincy on campus. Interested in combining my faith with my trade, I wrote a story asking if Ontario’s Catholic school system—in which I’d spent 14 years—should be publicly funded. I set out to prove that it should; I ended up drawing the opposite conclusion. Although my change of heart was about Catholic schools, and not Catholicism itself, the assignment lingered with me, encouraging me to question my faith, the same way I would a story.

That summer, when I returned to the Register, I spent my downtime reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and browsing atheist forums instead of pitching stories. Over the next year, I continued to lead retreats and play music at masses, and I continued to file away the relics of my Catholicism in the green briefcase. But the practice was not about safekeeping anymore—I was hiding the reminders of a faith I no longer kept.

One warm summer night in 2012, I sat in my father’s grey Honda Accord with my closest Catholic friend. “I’m agnostic,” I told him, tears rolling down my cheek. A few weeks later, my family moved out of our house. I left the green briefcase behind.

***

David Wilson’s kids would never be caught darkening the door of a church. In his eight years editing the award-winning United Church Observer, Wilson has tried to make the monthly accessible for believers, and for readers more akin to his children. So far, it’s worked. The magazine, long lauded as a shining example of independent religious journalism, won more awards in 2012 than any other American or Canadian publication in the Associated Church Press, and was crowned best magazine by the Canadian Church Press the same year.

The September 2013 issue illustrates why. Church-centric content, including an in-depth reader survey and a story about the merits of reading the Bible, made up roughly half of the book. Meanwhile, an essay lamented the absence of ethics in the debate around a Toronto casino, while an investigative feature traced diluted bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands to a spill in a small town in Arkansas. It’s not typical church fare—because the Observer is not a typical church organ. Last summer, as other religious outlets gradually lost hold of their journalistic integrity, the magazine created and signed a “covenant”—a contract outlining all aspects of the magazine’s relationship with the Church, enshrining its editorial and operational independence.

The Observer isn’t the only publication to make the case for a feisty, independent religious press. Geez, an eight-year-old, ad-free quarterly, is like Adbusters for Christians. That’s no surprise, considering its founder, Aiden Enns, is a former managing editor of the anti-consumerist magazine. You can see traces of the Adbustersethos in Geez’s regular Civil Disobedience section and Feministry department, or in its Fall 2013 issue, which was entirely dedicated to peace activism (including a “Plan Your Own Peace Action” guide). The cover package of the Winter 2013 issue was a series of sermons you’d never hear in church; one line reads, “Get out of the church. Run!”

“Faith-based periodicals are important vessels,” says Enns, “especially if they take their journalistic mandate seriously.” But Geez’s independence comes at a price. With roughly 1,400 subscribers, it has four part-time staff members, who earn $12 an hour—the same wage I made as a summer student at the Register.

***

Coverage of religion is also in decline at secular, mainstream newspapers. Neither the Toronto Star nor The Globe and Mail has a dedicated religion reporter or editor. Positions once occupied by veteran journalists have been slashed thanks to cutbacks. In 2007, the Star’s managing editor moved the religion page, which typically consisted of a feature and two columns, from the Life section to the Insight section. It sputtered for a few months before disappearing altogether. Libby Stephens, who edited the page, says problems arise when general editors handle religion stories. “I’m not asking that they know the specifics—the difference between Convention Baptists and Evangelical Baptists—I’m just asking for someone who knows the story of the Good Samaritan,” she says, adding that religion plays into a significant number of news stories. “If you don’t have some grasp of that, you’re giving a very shallow, millimetre-deep recitation of what’s happened, without any context.”

Douglas Todd, The Vancouver Sun’s religion and diversity reporter, is just about the only one providing that context. The last journalist left on the beat, he self-assigns three-quarters of his stories because his editors have less knowledge of faith than he has. Until recently, Charles Lewis reported on religion for the National Post and edited its Holy Post religion blog. But the paper opted not to appoint a new full-time religion reporter when Lewis left for health reasons in December 2013, and today the fate of the blog is uncertain. Lewis says a tendency not to treat religion as a serious beat plays into secular journalists’ coverage of faith. “It’s the only beat at the paper where you cover people who adhere to something that’s invisible,” he says. “Unions have contracts. Miners have holes in the ground. We have God.”

Twenty-five million Canadians have God, or at least some sort of faith, according to 2011 Statistics Canada data. But that bald stat does little justice to the complex religious narrative of an increasingly diverse, secular country. Only two-fifths of us view our faith as important in our lives and, since 2001, the number claiming no religious affiliation has risen from five million to nearly eight million. If secular journalists won’t provide informed religion reporting to the audience that remains, then religious reporters must. Religion is at the root of some of the world’s most heated international conflicts and is often behind aid that comes in their wake. Like anything else, it should be constantly questioned, prodded and tested against truth. At its best, journalism serves truth, and truth has the power to topple beliefs like dominoes.

***

A few days after attending mass at St. Chad’s, I run into Feheley as I walk to an interview. He’s heading back to the ACOC office after an appointment at the diocese’s headquarters. It’s a trip he makes often, cycling between his different duties. He’s forever caught in-between—between offices, between organ and altar, between propagating the Church’s official message as the archbishop’s secretary, preaching it as a pastor and commenting on it as an editor.

The Journal and outlets like it are similarly between roles, forced to choose between adhering to doctrine and risking closure. When I ask Feheley about the paper’s role under his editorship, he says, “The Journal needs to be able to tell the Church about the Church in a way that doesn’t simply reflect what upper management thinks.” I’m reminded of this when, in the next issue, I read his editorial, an honest questioning of the ACOC’s stance—or lack thereof—on euthanasia. “I, for one,” Feheley writes, “need the Church to speak.” What he doesn’t realize is that he speaks for the Church.

This piece was published in the Spring 2014 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

By Luc Rinaldi

On a summer afternoon in August 2011, Globe and Mail investigative reporter Greg McArthur sent an email to his editor with the subject line, “Ideas.” Inside, he suggested: “A portrait of Rob Ford as a young man—who is Rob Ford, really?” Alongside freelancer Shannon Kari, McArthur called Ford’s high school classmates and hunted down yearbooks. “I was a little naïve about the willingness of the people who knew Ford to talk,” says McArthur. But the sources who did speak quickly changed the story. “Robby was a good kid,” one source told him. So Doug and Randy became the focus of the story.

The resulting story, titled “The Ford Family’s history with drug dealing,” used 10 confidential sources and ran on May 25, 2013. In early September, the Ontario Press Council (OPC) heard a complaint that argued the story relied too heavily on unattributed information. On October 16, citing a handful of Supreme Court decisions that said it is occasionally responsible to rely on confidential sources, the council dismissed the complaint, ruling that the Globe acted ethically and responsibly. It said the same of the Toronto Star and its “Rob Ford in ‘crack cocaine’ video scandal” story, which had also generated complaints to the OPC. But the council concluded that “the robust and extensive journalistic standards that good newspaper reporting should meet are not well known or understood by the public.” It suggested the onus is on journalists to communicate what those standards are.
    
If the public doesn’t understand journalism, it also doesn’t have much confidence in it. A 2012 Ipsos poll revealed only 31 percent of Canadians trust journalists. The Globe and Star used confidential sources responsibly, but they didn’t communicate why those sources were credible or neglected to fully explain why the papers granted them confidentiality. If journalists intend to keep—or win back—the public’s trust, they must make sure that if readers can’t know the sources’ identities, they’d better know everything else.

* * *

On the evening of May 16, Star investigations editor Kevin Donovan was coaching a girls’ rep team. Shortly after 8:28, he received an email telling him that American gossip website Gawker had broken the story about the alleged video of Rob Ford smoking what appeared to be crack cocaine—a video Donovan and city hall reporter Robyn Doolittle had viewed three times. Then, a terse message from Star editor-in-chief Michael Cooke: “Get in.” 

Donovan rushed back to the newsroom and, with his colleagues, made 14 attempts to get a response from the mayor—by phoning Ford, knocking on his front door and contacting his chief of staff and press secretary. Only the mayor’s lawyer replied, calling the claim “false and defamatory.” Donovan and Doolittle quickly wrote the story before meeting with Cooke, Star lawyer Bert Bruser and two other senior editors to scrutinize it line by line. At 11:07 p.m., it went online.
    
The Star reporters later learned the man who’d shown them the video was Mohamed Siad, an alleged drug and gun dealer who was later stabbed several times in jail after his arrest in a June police raid. “I know he doesn’t sound like the greatest source in the world,” Donovan says now. But a number of other confidential sources told them they’d also seen the mayor smoking crack cocaine, which made them more comfortable running the story. “They’re confidential because they’re afraid they’re going to be beaten up or killed.”The story never mentioned those sources or their safety concerns. Doolittle says it shouldn’t have to, because she and Donovan saw the video. “This is not a story that relies on confidential sources,” she says. “The source is the video.” But, she adds, the public is increasingly unsatisfied with news it can’t see itself. 
    
The use of those sources came out in media interviews—collectively, Donovan and Doolittle did roughly 100 in the week after the story—and at the OPC hearings, but for some readers that was too late. “A lot of people had already made up their minds,” says OPC executive director Don McCurdy. “The Fords are very polarizing political figures. People had already taken sides.” In other words, Ford critics tended to accept the legitimacy of the stories while Ford Nation refuted them.

Like many of the Star’s sources, McArthur’s wouldn’t speak on the record. He lists the reasons: fear of speaking out against the mayor’s family, of criminal charges, of an inability to travel, of a reaction from the system supplying the drugs, of reputational damage because of involvement, whether as traffickers or consumers. In the Globe’s 4,177-word story, only one line—“Upon being approached, the sources declined to speak if identified, saying they feared the consequences of outing themselves as former users and sellers of illegal drugs”—explains why the paper gave the sources anonymity. A similar sentence appears in editor-in-chief John Stackhouse’s letter justifying the decision to publish the story. “If I could do it over again, I would lay out all the different reasons we were given,” says McArthur. “It’s sort of an aside, so you want to get back to the narrative.” 
    
He and others, like McCurdy, suggest putting information about the sources in a sidebar or editor’s letter in the future, as long as those details are provided at the same time as the story and not afterward. “People read the story and move on,” says McCurdy. “Sometimes it just takes a couple more sentences.”

* * *

Toronto’s journalism world is packed into the white-walled Sears Atrium at Ryerson University on Monday, September 9. Doolittle and Donovan chat with a cast of Star editors. Nine television cameras line the room’s north wall. The 100 people in attendance sit with smartphones out and TweetDecks open, ready to report the minutiae of the OPC hearings.

Mid-afternoon, Connie Harrison, who brought a complaint against the Globe before the council, leans into a microphone on the table in front of her. She questions the story’s sources, their motivations and what they feared would happen if they spoke on the record. “The only right thing to do is to have one person come out and say, ‘I am willing to go on the record,’” she tells the council. “Burn the source.”

McArthur is disappointed with that suggestion. “Anonymity is really the main tool in our toolbox to get people to talk. So to be seen as someone who would be willing to burn a source, I might as well decide I’m going to go sell insurance.” Still, he concedes he and the Globe haven’t done a good enough job at communicating why the sources were confidential. At the hearing, Stackhouse delivers a speech and McArthur answers questions, detailing every reason for their sources’ anonymity. Next time, he’ll put those reasons in the story.

Update: Due to an error, a previous version of this story was posted. This is the correct version.