Leaving The National after 28 years won’t be easy—but Mark Harrison is ready for a new challenge.

Harrison, now the former executive producer of The National, is taking over the health unit and the growing science and technology unit at CBC. He says the decision to leave CBC’s flagship nightly program was a personal one, but it also aligned with the broadcaster’s increasing focus on digital. Harrison says Jennifer McGuire, editor-in-chief of CBC News, is also interested in “raising the profile and building technology and science coverage up,” so his interest in switching jobs came at the right time.

His first day at The National was also Peter Mansbridge’s first day. “I’ve been here a long time. I’ve done a lot of jobs,” he says. “I started as a writer, a senior writer, and I’ve been executive producer for seven years and for some time now, probably a few years. I’ve been wondering when I would stop doing it.”

“I mean, I love the job, but it’s not something that I wanted to keep doing forever. It does take a toll. It’s a seven-day-a-week job…so it’s a bit unrelenting in that sense.” Harrison says he felt comfortable leaving the show because it was in “a good spot. Peter’s on top of his game, the people I’m working with here all seemed to be doing really well.”

The National’s new executive producer is Don Spandier, who’s moving back to the program—he used to be the senior current affairs producer—from his spot as the senior producer at World at Six. Harrison says he and Spandier will “be exchanging lots of smiles” when they see each other around the CBC building. “The program is constantly changing. The way we do what we do is changing, evolving, and it’ll be interesting to see Don’s perspective on how it’s changed since he was last here and his ideas on how to take it in to the future.”

Harrison says he’s excited to work more on health stories—which he’s been interested in since he was at school—and has wanted to develop more digital skills. The content units at CBC provide stories for TV, radio and online, “so it’s going to stretch me in different ways,” Harrison says.

“I’m really excited about the move, but it’s very much with mixed emotions and mixed feelings,” he says. “I love The National. I mean, people who work at The National, it really gets under our skin…we end up feeling very strongly about the people we do The National with too.” Although he likes the program and the team, Harrison says he also believes that it’s important not to get too comfortable.

“I do believe it’s good to try different things and stretch things differently into all aspects of the work we do.”

Offleash, the Review’s podcast created by senior editor Viviane Fairbank and multimedia editors Allison Baker and Eternity Martis, is now on iTunes.

In honour of this, we made a list of some of our favourite podcasts:

1. all songs considered by NPR
2. Stuff Mom Never Told You by How Stuff Works
3. The Backline – An Improve Podcast
4. Unreserved by CBC
5. Mystery Show by Gimlet Media
6. How my mind came back to life – and no one knew by TEDTalks audio
7. Rantin’ and Ravin’ with Yamaneika and Friends
8. 99% Invisible
9. The Next Chapter by CBC

Subscribe to Offleash on iTunes today to keep up with our analysis of the issues affecting the Canadian journalism industry. New episodes come out every other Wednesday at 3.33 p.m.

Last week, CBC journalists Susan Ormiston, Corinne Seminoff and Jean-Francois Bisson made the 12-hour trek to CBC’s new pocket bureau in Moscow, Russia, where they’ll spend the next three months documenting the transformation of Russian society under Vladimir Putin’s leadership.

“Moscow is a place we haven’t been for many years,” says CBC managing editor Greg Reaume. “It’s a region that’s under-reported, given its growing influence and Putin’s willingness to be active in the world well beyond Russia’s borders.” He adds that some of these problems are extremely complex—like Russia becoming more involved in partnerships with Canada and the U.S. to contain ISIS and Putin’s aggressive response to foreign policy. “It’s of interest and importance to Canadian audiences,” he says. “We hope this will be an opportunity to address some of those issues.”

Permanent foreign bureaus once held a prominent place in broadcast journalism; high operating costs have made many disappear from the map. To maintain a presence in faraway lands where news is breaking, organizations are now looking to pop-up bureaus as a solution to fit the ever-changing news agenda.

“I think it’s the next best thing to having a permanent presence in a foreign country,” wrote Seminoff in an email to the RRJ. “But we’ve barely been here a week, and I already feel we will never get it all done. We just won’t have the time to do all the stories I’d like to do.” Still, Seminoff says that pop-up bureaus are a better alternative to no coverage or trying to report from home through agency material and Skype interviews. “We are very grateful that we can still do journalism the way it should be done, through our own eyes and with our own knowledge.”

CBC has less than half the number of full-time overseas bureaus it did 10 years ago (the Moscow bureau used to be a permanent one), but it’s been able to compensate through temporary set-ups in Hong Kong, Cairo, Berlin and Ghana. An emphasis on mobility has become a lot more important for foreign reporting, but pop-up bureaus don’t have the capacity to meet the long-term benefits of a full-time foreign placement.

Part of the problem is money. “We’re finding opportunities to do some really meaningful reporting while not incurring the extremely heavy cost of permanently locating somewhere where the news agenda may well wax and wane,” says Reaume. According to a report by communications strategist and former CBC reporter Dan Halton, “International News in the North American Media,” operating costs can hover around one million dollars for a major television station.

In 2014, BBC launched a mobile bureau in the U.S. as part of an experimental project. The travelling bureau—a red SUV filled with camera equipment and a small team of BBC video journalists—relocated to a different American city each month to produce content for the global news services. One year later, in 2015, BBC Pop Up came to Canada to film a documentary series in Yellowknife.

To keep up with shifting news priorities, CBC is looking for other ways to expand its global footprint, says Reaume. With the summer Olympic Games on the radar, Rio de Janeiro will likely be the next bureau to pop up on the map.

This is an updated version of the story, which includes a quote from Corinne Seminoff. 

A husband and wife who lived in downtown Toronto both died on December 20, but a CBC article told only one of their stories.

A significant chunk of the article described the husband, Robert Giblin:

Giblin had served with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan, Department of National Defence officials have confirmed.

In a statement, the DND said Giblin was a sergeant and served with the Joint Task Force Central (JTFC) based out of Denison Armoury in Toronto.

The federal department said Giblin joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 1997. He deployed on HMCS Regina in 2003 and to Afghanistan in 2005 and 2007, and was an intelligence operator.

‘The loss of any soldier is devastating to the military community and our thoughts and condolences go out to Sgt. Robert Giblin’s family and friends,’ read the statement.

…

‘Rob my Brother. We were just chatting when you down in Halifax. Joking how us two old dogs were finally getting promoted. You kept me sane on our 6As and the SDIAC,’ one man wrote on Giblin’s Facebook page. ‘Thanks for all the good times Bro. I’m devastated.’

The CBC article allocated far less space to Precious Charbonneau, Giblin’s wife. The only details offered about Charbonneau were a police estimate that she was nine weeks pregnant and a brief mention of a friend writing “Rest in Peace Presha” on her Facebook wall.

This article leaves a lot of questions about Charbonneau. Who was she? What would friends say about her? Was she more than just a wife and mother robbed of a chance to raise her child?

Unfortunately, the cause of death only makes the lopsided story worse. According to police reports, the couple were not killed in any sort of tragic accident. Instead, police said Giblin stabbed Charbonneau several times before throwing her off the balcony of their 21st-floor apartment. Giblin then jumped to his death.

At best, the story turned out this way because Giblin’s details were easier to find than Charbonneau’s, though this is no excuse given reporters’ duty to dig, especially in cases like this.

The head of public affairs at CBC, Chuck Thompson, told the RRJ, “On the day that this story was written (and subsequent days thereafter), CBC News made several attempts to speak with family and friends of Precious Charbonneau. Unfortunately, attempts to contact and speak to friends and family on the record were unsuccessful.”

At worst, however, this article is an example of a systemic bias in Canadian journalism, where soldiers and veterans receive unwarranted respect or admiration simply by virtue of holding that position. This bias is by no means limited to an individual reporter, or the CBC at large, but the article certainly seems to exhibit the bias.

In response to a question regarding this potential bias, Thompson replied “I can assure you that CBC News makes every effort to ensure all of our stories are fair and balanced.”

Regardless, the fact remains that the military career of a man accused of killing his wife received far more space in the CBC article than details of the incident, the wife’s life or relevant background issues.

The praising quotes about Giblin in the article made it seem as if the two had just mistakenly fallen to their death, even though the causes of death were clearly stated. I had to read the article several times before I was sure police had actually reported that Giblin killed Charbonneau. Thompson says, “What we reported with respect to Robert Giblin’s character was how he was described to us by his friends and family.”

The CBC published a follow up article on December 22, 2015. This article reported some issues that should have been explored in the first article, including violence against women and the potential that Giblin had post-traumatic stress disorder. This article has only been shared 107 times, according to the CBC website, while the earlier article has been shared 1905 times.

The CBC should have done a much better job reporting on this incident from the start.

Six years after reporting on a B.C. surgeon whose patients had a troubling tendency to experience serious post-op complications, Kathy Tomlinson and CBC successfully invoked the relatively new defence of responsible communication to win a defamation lawsuit.

Dr. Fernando Casses, who had his medial license revoked in Arizona before moving to B.C. to work as a surgeon, initially sued three former patients who had been quoted in Tomlinson’s story. This is known as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (or a SLAPP suit). The complainants in SLAPP cases don’t typically expect to win the case but instead target individuals without the money to defend themselves in a lengthy legal battle. The patients, who had been on the brink of death years earlier due to mistakes made by Casses during surgery, were particularly vulnerable targets.

“That was the hardest part for me—they put their trust in me and then they were sued,” Tomlinson says, expressing guilt at her role in exposing the patients to a lawsuit. “It was horrible,” she says.

Soon after Casses launched his suit against former patients, CBC became involved, using its legal resources to defend both Tomlinson and her sources. The resulting court battle was a gruelling experience for Tomlinson, who, over the course of long days on the stand, saw her story ripped apart and her character attacked. Roger McConchie, Casses’ lawyer, called Tomlinson’s story “a disgrace to journalism,” among other things.

Responsible communication, a legal defence first used by Torstar in December 2009, was created to bolster a journalist’s ability to defend themselves against libel (prior to 2009, the best defence was absolute truth—difficult to prove for even the most well-reported stories). It allows defamatory stories in the public interest to go unpunished as long as the journalist can prove they were thorough and balanced in reporting and verifying facts.

Though easier to prove than total truth, responsible communication is by no means an easy defence. Even Tomlinson, who had done over three months of reporting prior to the September 2009 story on Casses, found the process exhausting. In the end, though, she was able to prove she’d done everything in her power to report a balanced an accurate story—even to the point of showing up uninvited to Casses’s house with the allegations against him. Not long after Casses refused to speak with Tomlinson, CBC received a chill letter from his lawyer.

After delaying one week to double-check each detail, CBC decided to go ahead with Tomlinson’s story, believing it to be solid in the event of a lawsuit. And, thankfully, they were right. In an exhaustive, 169-page verdict, Justice Elaine Adair ruled that Tomlinson had done nothing wrong, and that “a more complete reporting of the facts would only have been more damaging for Dr. Casses.”

Following her legal win, distanced from long days defending herself against Casses and McConchie in the hyper-adversarial atmosphere of the legal process, Tomlinson is able to see her trial as an excellent learning experience. She came out of it with a better understanding of what it takes to responsibly communicate in the eyes of the law, as well as advice for fellow journalists who may find themselves in similar predicaments.

“Know that you have this defence at your disposal, and report accordingly,” she says. “If you don’t take good notes, if you don’t give the other side an adequate and full chance to respond, if you’re not thorough, if you’re not diligent, if you’re not fair and even-handed, this defence will not help you.”

The original version of this story has been corrected to ensure accuracy. 

I don’t know who’s telling the truth about the Liberal refugee plan.

On the one hand, there’s Paul McLeod, BuzzFeed‘s political editor, who published an article on November 25, 2015, titled “Someone Gave The Media A Bunch Of False Info About Canada’s Syrian Refugee Plan.” McLeod takes issue with a CBC report by Rosemary Barton that, days before the Liberals revealed their official refugee plan, stated “unaccompanied men seeking asylum will not be part of the (refugee) program.”

McLeod quotes an anonymous senior Liberal member who “said they don’t know where the information came from, but they suspect it was from someone who did not have their best interests at heart. In other words, someone trying to screw them.”

There’s one word being interpreted and responded to differently in the Liberal government’s Syrian refugee plan: “prioritize.”

Other reports also counter the CBC reports on the claim to exclude single male Syrian refugees. As a Vice article states:

Initial reports had suggested that the government would not be allowing in any unattached single men in under the program, unless they are a sexual minority.

Government officials confirmed Tuesday that wouldn’t be the case. While the government will “prioritize” families, women at risk, LGBTQ minorities, and those who are accompanying elderly parents, it will not be disqualifying any would-be refugee on the basis of gender.

The Toronto Star also made this clear: “Officials say [the plan] does not preclude men — including gay men and single men accompanying their parents — from admission.”

The events of the Paris attacks last night are still unfolding–“still” being the operative word. Much journalistic attention has been given to the situation in Paris, and rightly so. At the time of writing, CBC reports stated that at least 150 people had been killed after six separate attacks in public places like a music venue in central Paris, two restaurants and outside a stadium.

It’s difficult, however, to avoid comparing the coverage of the Paris attacks to the coverage of the suicide bombs in Beirut on Thursday. The events were equally historical in their own right, as the Tweets below demonstrate, for they marked a drastic shift in the safety and security of the people of each respective capital city. Both, however, were not covered equally.

Day of mourning in Lebanon after 43 people killed in two suicide bombings in Beirut yesterday. Worst incident since civil ended war in 1990.

— CBC World Report (@CBCWorldReport) November 13, 2015

A city-wide curfew is now in place in #Paris for the first time since 1944.

— CP24 (@CP24) November 13, 2015

The Paris attacks have been extensively reported on a minute-by-minute basis as reporters took to the ground to find the facts and share them in an efficient manner. All the main journalism organizations in Canada had updated versions of their articles, a timeline of the events, a map of where the attacks were happening as they unfolded, an article with pictures and videos and a social media reaction article. News outlet reports were also supplemented by the individual coverage shared, reported and commented on by Canadian journalists on Twitter.

Comparatively, when the Beirut attacks unfolded on Thursday, the same journalism organizations carried an Associated Press article supplemented by Reuters images and video. Little else was seen on Twitter in terms of additional reporting or coverage.

While understanding that logistical and resource-based strains limit the coverage of international reporting in an industry continuously tightening its belt, there are questions to be asked about the decision to cover some events extensively while leaving the coverage of others lacking. There are rationales to consider, of course. France is a country more historically and culturally tied to Canada’s population than Beirut, thus perhaps justifying more in-depth coverage.

This, however, conflicts with the journalistic practice of fair and objective reporting that the industry is founded on. If journalism is meant to bring to attention the realities of such events and the impacts they have, what deems one attack more worthy of attention than the other?

In the face of the Paris attacks, journalism organizations seem to have forgotten about Beirut. It’s yesterday’s news, except that it’s also news that wasn’t properly covered when it happened. As my fellow blog editor, Davide Mastracci, noted in his previous post, several headlines on the Beirut attack incorrectly illustrated the conflict on the ground.

Beirut and Paris weren’t very different. Both were attacks on capital cities that affected innocent residents in public places. Both saw the city come to a standstill and a shutdown. Yet in examining the news coverage, there is a glaring imbalance that doesn’t make this similarity very obvious. In a country like Canada that prides itself on its multiculturalism and continues to be home to communities from places across the world, including Beirut, Paris, Baghdad and Japan–the four places that faced some sort of serious devastation yesterday–balanced all-around coverage seems all the more pertinent.

This inherent, perhaps implicit, perhaps natural bias is something journalists need to recognize in the mirror and deal with. If journalism frames the narrative about these events, the onus is on journalists to do so responsibly and fairly.

Not all stories are equal, but perhaps they should be.

The little ghosts of Snapchat have been taking over my Twitter feed this last month.

We’ve talked about how Snapchat is being used for a kind of citizen journalism. But not much has been said about how professional journalists and news outlets are using the app—at least not in Canada.

These little white ghosts on my Twitter feed have replaced the logos of news outlets like Huffington Post Canada and CBC Toronto, promoting their Snapchat coverage on Twitter.

Despite the publicity these organizations have given to their Snapchat accounts, they seem to still be experimenting with the tool, and each one of them seems to be using it a little differently.

The Toronto Star, for example, seems to be doing more basic coverage, like snaps of their front cover or notes about the weather.

Screenshots from the Toronto Star’s Snapchat on October 28.

On the other hand, Global News has taken to posting their headlines in a lighthearted style. Instead of images, they use more emojis. They also ask direct followers to go to their website for more on a specific story.

Screenshots from Global News’ Snapchat on October 28.

Still, more dramatically different are the posts Canadian Press reporter David Friend used to cover the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The coverage was much more personal and more in the style of something you would see on a video blog. Most of the snaps involve Friend talking to the camera about his day at TIFF, creating a relationship between Friend and the viewers that is not the stiff one of reporter to audience. For example, throughout the coverage, Friend mentions that he’s not interested in certain parties or that he was hardly able to keep his eyes open on the last day.

CBC Toronto is another outlet that’s been experimenting with Snapchat. Associate producer Nicole Brockbank says that one way they’ve used Snapchat is to cover Blue Jays games. A reporter went to the game and took videos and pictures of big moments. The reporter also used Snapchat to take casual streeters of people at the game. In that way, Snapchat seems to be useful for providing the experience of a specific moment or mood that the audience isn’t there to see. In fact, Huffington Post Canada covered a Raptors game the very same way.

Brockbank says that the CBC Toronto digital team is trying out the medium in different ways, but that ultimately, whatever reporters do with Snapchat, they would likely use it to stitch a narrative together.

It’s clear that Canadian media is toying with Snapchat, but it’s still unclear how big of a role it will play in future coverage. Brockbank says that she sees potential in using Snapchat to cover news in the field at some point in the future. The reporter would be on scene, take a couple of shots and provide an update on camera. But as always, time would be a factor. Would a reporter have time to cover a scene with all the existing methods as well as Snapchat?

So far, Snapchat doesn’t seem to be a place to cover every type of story, but the stories that do get covered there are being presented in a different context that’s often more lighthearted, personal and about the moment.

On October 22, 2014, news of the Ottawa shooting began with a misspelled tweet and a cellphone video by Globe and Mail reporter Josh Wingrove. At the same time, veteran CBC cameraman Jean Brousseau quietly rolled his camera and collected raw footage that would later tell a full insider story while Bruce Arthur, sports columnist for the Toronto Star, found himself near Parliament Hill instead of the hockey arena.

Gunfire in pariament

— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) October 22, 2014

Visual discretion is advised (Source: CBC)

The structure of the reports were non-traditional: bullet points, quotes, brief summary paragraphs with links to allow for the option to dig deeper, photo galleries with informative captions and interactive maps. By forgoing the news briefs and article format, the live coverage in this way permitted more engagement and more consistent and updated information.

This is why, when looking back at the archives, one hopes that someone patted all these journalists on the back for accomplishing what they did on that day. Maclean’s had an ongoing ScribbleLive stream of tweets, photos, videos and audio. The Globe put together an interactive timeline that included time-stamped maps, tweets, updates and raw cellphone photos and videos from their reporters on Parliament Hill.

The rapid collation of information and visual illustration of all the details only continued in the days and months after the shooting. The Globe staff put together a “What we know so far” piece, assimilating the same elements as their live coverage. CBC put up the raw footage collected by Brousseau and reconstructed everything that happened on the Hill, based solely on the video. Maclean’s also reconstructed the entire day’s events solely through quotes from witnesses, politicians, security members and so forth who were at or near the site in question.

And then there was the commentary that retraced the entire day again. Ian Brown took the reader through Ottawa “in the footsteps of a killer” the day after the shooting. Arthur walked us through the streets hours after the shooting ended in an article published on the day (to me, the most memorable article from the day).  A couple of months later, Wingrove took us through his first-hand traumatic experience and its psychological aftermath.

All these articles and interactive timelines are a testament to the multifaceted nature of modern-day journalism that only intensifies in live situations like the Ottawa shooting. The successful execution of the examples above are a testament to the fact that even live coverage can be detailed and extensive, and that the efforts that went—and are still going—into portraying the full story are worthy of recognition.

On it’s one year anniversary, Maclean’s put together a long-form feature detailing the actions during and after the shooting of “the heroes of October 22“, and The Globe and Mail put together another timeline of yesterday’s memorial ceremony, adding links to past multimedia articles from the day for context.

Perhaps, one year on, we should have a conversation about the lines of live reporting in this way. Josh Wingrove’s video has been viewed over 4.5 million times now, but no one ever asked if it should have been released as quickly as it was. Couldn’t it have compromised the situation? Couldn’t it have caused trauma despite the disclaimer for viewers it was released with? Would the live reporting have been as strong without it?

These questions weren’t asked because they didn’t need to be. Despite the rapidness of the day and the multi-faceted details of the shooting, Canadian news organisation gave an impressive display of thorough and careful reporting. There were no glaring mistakes made. There were no breaches caused. In fact, the combination of live-tweeting, multimedia and interactive journalism and quick, thoughtful commentary on October 22 may be one of the best displays of Canadian journalism.

Journalists have been enthralled with the niqab debate over the last few weeks. In order to get a better sense of what to make of the niqab coverage, I spoke to the communications director at the National Council of Canadian Muslims, Amira Elghawaby.

Elghawaby’s most pressing critique of niqab journalism is simply that there’s too much of it. Elghawaby noted that, “The media has a responsibility to report the news” but that journalists have had trouble distinguishing “between news, and the deliberate attempts of the Conservative party to keep the issue alive.”

The result of this failure, according to Elghawaby, is the amplification of the niqab “issue multiple-fold compared to other relevant issues raised during leaders’ debates.”

Elghawaby certainly has a point, and so I wanted to look a little deeper to get a sense of how much niqab coverage there has been. To do this, I went to the websites of the National Post, the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, and counted how many articles from October 7 to October 14 contained the term “niqab,” and then did the same for “trans-pacific partnership.”

The niqab debate, as many commentators have accurately pointed out, is focused on an insignificant issue, with only two of 680,000 potential citizens being affected by the ban since 2011. Meanwhile, the Trans-Pacific Partnership has geo-political significance for states around the world, including Canada.

The results I found don’t reflect this, with 133 mentions of “niqab” found, compared to only 102 for “trans-pacific partnership.”

Despite this, Elghawaby notes that the overwhelming emphasis in journalism on the niqab has led to some positives.

“The diversity of voices given space on this issue has been refreshing. Women who wear niqab slowly were given space to share their perspectives and experiences.”

There are several good examples of this from the Toronto Star and the CBC.

As such, Elghawaby says that “while the [niqab] issue was over amplified, given its relatively minor impact on the lives of the vast majority of Canadians, including Canadian Muslims, there seemed to be a sincere effort on the part of media to hear from those directly impacted, or who had a perspective that countered popular opinion, to share.”

In a journalism landscape where people constantly speak for Muslim women, the fact that Muslim women have been given more opportunity to speak for themselves is important.

There are exceptions, of course, like this CBC piece that tells the exciting saga of what it was like for a white woman to wear a hijab for a day, as if there aren’t enough Muslim women who could speak more authoritatively to the issue.

Overall though, while the coverage of the niqab debate did draw up some positives due to the range of voices speaking on the issue, Elghawaby says, “It would be nice if other equally or more important issues were given this kind of treatment and attention!”

Let’s hope her wish comes true in the last few days of the election.