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.

“Failure!” says Ian Brown. “Big failure.”

The feature writer and broadcaster is talking about his failure — to write a book he still owes Random House, the chronicle of a car high-jacking and kidnapping. We’re well into our conversation that began about an hour earlier, just after 8 a.m., when he burst through the wooden doors of Bar Mercurio, an Italian restaurant in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, and ordered a mushroom omelette, side of potatoes and coffee. “I don’t usually eat this much in the morning,” he explained. Later, in his car, Brown will look in the rear-view mirror, see that the heavy folds beneath his eyes are puffier than usual, and say, “Jesus! Oh fuck! I look like I didn’t go to bed last night.”

 On this chilly October morning, Brown wears only a suit; he forgot his overcoat at the International Festival of Authors’ “opening blowout” the previous evening, where there were “writers, drinking constantly. I end up drinking too much and having hangovers.” He liked the party, but it was depressing, he says, returning to the subject of failure: “Because you’re surrounded by people who have just written really successful books.”

At 53, Brown is a Canadian media mini-celebrity. His talent and big “I” charm come through in all he does: his newspaper and magazine writing; his books, Freewheeling and Man Overboard,plus editing and contributing to What I Meant to Say, a collection of essays by and about men; and his broadcasting, as host of CBC Radio’s Talking Books and two TVO documentary series,The View From Here and Human Edge. By any measure he has had major career success. So why does he seem so fixated on failure?

Brown will admit to worrying about measuring up to the great nonfiction writers he admires, such as Nicholson Baker, Tom Wolfe and Garrison Keillor. A long-time friend has said of him, “He wants to be among the best, anywhere.” But when I ask Brown what he wants to be remembered for, he begins by saying: “I’d like [my daughter] Hayley to remember me nicely. That’s most important. To be good company. Good in bed — that’d be nice.” Reflective pause. “It would be nice if someone remembered me as a good writer. I’d much rather they kept reading me. They pick up the book. They read something, ‘Oh, that’s good. Oh, that’s Brown.’”

Much of what he writes is good, really good; nearly every person interviewed for this feature can recall a favourite Brown piece, a few citing newspaper articles 20 years old. However, even some of his biggest boosters say that, lately, his writing is too often superficial and lacks great import.

Brown’s high school English teacher says his student was “a natural,” blessed with a “golden tongue.”Toronto Life called him a “legendary journalist” by age 35. He was, in many ways, the golden boy of Canadian journalism: articulate, smart, with an equally accomplished spouse and a large circle of friends. But what most people didn’t see was the hell he put himself through while writing. Then, in 1996, came the event that would forever change his life: the birth of a severely disabled son, Walker, who a friend describes as Brown’s “great grief, his great madness.”

Now he is about to embark on the writing challenge of his life: a book-length memoir about Walker. It could be the work that puts him right up there with Baker, Wolfe and Keillor, as well as other favourites, John McPhee, Ian Frazier, Calvin Trillin and Joan Didion.

But Brown, the natural born writer with a strutting kind of confidence, is no Norman Mailer when it comes to public braggadocio about his work. He often seems to prefer to hide behind a façade of self-deprecation. Of his book on Walker, Brown, sipping the morning coffee that may ease his hangover, says simply: “I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to anybody.”

To read the rest of this story, please see our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.
 It can be purchased online here.