Last year, I woke up suddenly from a hyper-realistic nightmare: it had become commonplace to write articles completely in emoji. As I frantically checked Twitter and came back to reality, I assured myself it was only a dream; this could never really happen to journalism.

I was wrong, so, so wrong. In January, a friend of mine who knew of my terrifying premonition sent me this: The State of the Union translated into emoji by The Guardian. After scanning through the lines upon lines of clapping hands in lieu of applause and American flag sprinkled throughout, I knew my vision was coming true.

It wasn’t an isolated incident. Less than a month later, The Washington Post published an article detailing 2016 candidates’ drug and alcohol histories in emoji: beers clinking for alcohol, a red maple leaf for weed, the hashtag emoji for hashish, a nose for cocaine and a puff of air for nitrous. It included the following key: “Faded icons indicate no evidence one way or the other. Slightly faded icons indicate a rumor. Brightly colored icons mean we know with confidence about a candidate’s drug or alcohol use (or lack thereof).” Of course, it came as no surprise that current president Barack Obama was in the lead with three emoji, though he tied with balloon-huffing Republican senator Rand Paul.

Even if news outlets aren’t directly incorporating emoji into stories, there are an increasing number of stories about emoji being published. Take the recent New York Times piece that asked the burning question, “Should Grown Men Use Emoji?”

This proliferation has also sparked a copy-editing debate: is the plural form “emoji” or emojis”? Since the term comes from Japanese, it’s not pluralized with an “S” in its language of origin, but you could, for instance, use “emoji characters.” However, as Associated Press has decided, since the term is being used in English, it can be pluralized like an English word. CP has yet to take a stance, but clearly I’m in support of the purist sans-S approach.

Given the above evidence, I’m assured that emoji are becoming integrated within journalism. The Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times are some of the most globally respected newspapers, and if all of these have begun to incorporate the elusive characters, this certainly isn’t the last time we’ll see them in journalism. And now that emoji are finally embracing diversity, maybe there is a place for these tiny graphics in journalism—as scary and self-prophecy fulfilling as that concept is.

Image courtesy of Erika Low. 

Hamilton, Ontario’s Barton Street is barely recognizable from its former self. A layer of grey dust sits on the pharmacies, bookstores, tailor shops and billiard halls that thrived in the 1960s. Differentiating between the closed and abandoned brick retail buildings is difficult—“We’re Closed” signs hang indefinitely on storefront doors, and other properties have turned residential with absentee landlords. This 3.4-kilometre stretch is known as a place to score heroin, prostitutes and, for some journalists, sources. Molly Hayes, a Hamilton Spectator reporter, exits one of the new businesses on the street, a coffee shop known by its address (541 Barton) and its pay-it-forward payment system using buttons from clothing. She walks along, pointing to the provincial jail, a steel factory and Hamilton General Hospital. She soon spots one of her sources from a story reported last summer about Pauline, a 24-year-old woman who died from a heroin overdose. At the time she was writing on Pauline’s death, Hayes was about the same age as the woman.

“Hey, do you remember me?” the reporter asks. “I’m from the Spec!”

The man, in his fifties, is weathered and greying in skin and hair. He pauses and looks at her sideways. “No. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah! How you doing?” he replies in a boisterous yet raspy voice.

Standing over six feet tall, he towers above Hayes, a five-foot-six Hamiltonian in the third year of her city reporting career. Accompanied by a man and a woman, both thin and tired-looking, perched on bicycles behind him, the source begins chatting away. First he rants about Pauline’s funeral, then about a local drug dealer who’s allegedly been slinging bad junk leading to overdoses. He’s visibly pissed off—sweating, muscles flexing, eyes widening. When he doesn’t want to talk anymore, Hayes simply continues the dialogue—an invaluable tactic, according to many journalists who’ve written about drugs and the people who use them.

The source, who was a relative of Pauline’s, says he too was a junkie and that he’s done over 20 years in jail for various offences, including violent ones. He tells vivid tales of coming off heroin, comparing it to someone taking a sledgehammer to every joint in his body. “I’m a tough guy, but I was bawling like a baby,” he says. “It was like hell.” His talk turns to God, and Hayes just nods her head. She’s used to enduring tangents. “I took a Bible course,” he says. “Believe me, I’m telling you guys, God is real.”

Using an interview technique to redirect him, Hayes mentions Wesley Urban Ministries, a Christian organization that helps drug addicts. “Do you know Mike at Wesley? He’s a chaplain.” He doesn’t recall the name. It’s time to go meet another source.

Passing a street corner, she stops to point out the spot for Pauline’s memorial. There is nothing there now, but in the summer teddy bears and flowers surrounded the corner near where the young woman hung out. Hayes was told that neighbourhood addicts stole the stuffed animals. As one of her sources said, “Only in Hamilton.”

Hayes confirmed a heroin overdose was the cause of death through Pauline’s mother, who had been told by hospital staff it was one of three overdose deaths in the city that week. Hayes says it’s difficult for reporters to get numbers from authorities. She and her colleagues, such as Nicole O’Reilly—who, along with Hayes, spearheaded a series of investigative pieces on drug-related deaths in Hamilton’s provincial jail—are often stuck between the public and the authorities, fighting for information. Toxicology reports can take many weeks, and police and coroners are rarely forthcoming with numbers. In 2012, there were over 580 overdoses linked to opiates in Ontario—one of the few hard statistics Hayes is able to cite in her articles. But numbers for the city of Hamilton haven’t officially broken out.

Canadian journalists are more careful than ever when reporting on illicit drugs. Until the late 1980s, journalists recklessly used terms such as “epidemic” and “overdose,” and commonly referred to drugs as “dope” when covering sudden increases in recreational drug casualties. Today, this sensational language has decreased. Reporters are more likely to go down to street level to find people affected by drug addiction—and tell their stories with empathy.

 ***

An early example of illicit drug coverage in Canada was news about drug smuggling. A 1940 Globe and Mail article told the story of the “king of smugglers,” Louis (Lepke) Buchalter. The
author commonly referred to the drugs Buchalter was trafficking as “dope” and “narcotics.” Up until the late 1950s, journalists who covered smuggling or drug busts did so from a distance, often unable or unwilling to convey details about the substances themselves.

But in the 1960s, as the baby boomer generation reached adulthood, the stories started to change. Newspapers and magazines began to report on the effects of LSD, often referring to “hippies” and the “flower power” movement that was luring young people into drug use. A Globe feature from 1969, for instance, read, “LSD mixed with strychnine, LSD mixed with speed … LSD mixed with God-knows-what,” followed by nightmarish descriptions from a music festival of “kids on the verge of psychotic breaks, paranoid kids, kids deep into sub-suicidal depression, kids showing signs of regressing to childhood prodded on by the chemicals in their brains.”

In the 1970s, Canadian news outlets had picked up a “War on Drugs” mentality. In the 1980s, a new drug took over headlines: cocaine. Stories of major cocaine trafficking busts ran alongside articles about cannabis and LSD. At the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, heroin, a more dangerous drug than any other at the time, began receiving more coverage.

 ***

In Niagara Falls, about 75 kilometres east of Hamilton, John Robbins has written about both busts at the border and drug use within Canada. The Ontario city is a hub of tourists and activity—it’s adjacent to Buffalo, New York, at the junction of numerous major American and Canadian highways. In 2001, Robbins was working as a weekend reporter on the health beat at the Niagara Falls Review. He checked out a minor overnight fire at a ball hockey court near the skeletons of the city’s decommissioned factories, northwest of the Falls. The guy cleaning up the vandalism complained about “junkies.” “What do you mean?” Robbins asked. “Just take a walk with me,” the man said.

The two strolled along the abandoned industrial-era railroad track leading to former factories such as the Kimberly-Clark paper mill. They walked only about 20 feet before seeing used needles. The environment sparked Robbins’s interest and led to a series of features in which he hung out with addicts in seedy motel rooms. He had to give some sources anonymity, a practice several other journalists say is necessary when covering illicit drugs. “The bottom line was that you had to get down to the street level,” Robbins says. “Short of taking the drug yourself to see what it feels like, you need to talk to somebody.” This work won him his first Ontario Newspaper Award in 2002. His days of hanging out in motel rooms with addicts are long over. Today, as publisher and managing editor of Bullet News Niagara, he still covers drug busts at the border.

***

Niagara Falls has more issues with drug use because it’s a border town and its touristy nature has created a thriving sex trade that often intersects with other criminal activity. Similarly, Vancouver’s port city status makes it a breeding ground for drug use and trafficking. Vancouver became another scene affected by drugs many years before Robbins’s discovery. Addicts, scattered in alleyways alongside dumpsters and fire escapes, smoked crack or shot up heroin and rode out their highs. Opiate fatalities were in the triple digits each year during the 1990s and reached a high of 250 in 1993. Today, some intravenous users on the streets opt to use Insite, the only supervised injection clinic in the city, which opened its doors in 2003 and has never had an overdose death.

Globe reporter Robert Matas began pitching drug stories at daily meetings in the Vancouver bureau in the ’90s, and he wrote many articles related to heroin. But it wasn’t always easy for Matas to convince his editors of the importance of reporting on drug-related topics at a paper focusing primarily on politics and business. Interest spiked when there was a drug death, then waned again. His first sources were social action groups in the Downtown Eastside and through them, he was eventually able to meet addicts. “They had incredible stories to tell,” he says. “It touched on a lot of different parts of the city. They were affected by the health policies, they were affected by police—a lot of them had issues with social support.” Because of the different aspects of life addiction touches, drug reporting is often an intersection of the health, crime and city beats.

In the early 2000s, the story of serial killer Robert Pickton shocked the nation. He was found to have lured drug-addicted sex workers from the Downtown Eastside to his farm, where he murdered them and fed their bodies to his pigs. It also changed how drug addiction was perceived in the city and affected policing policies. Today, officers don’t respond to non-fatal overdose calls in Vancouver unless there is a public safety concern—emergency medical responders do.

Lori Culbert was six-months pregnant when she started hanging out on Downtown Eastside streets to report on about 30 missing women in the area. Despite the neighbourhood’s nefarious reputation, Culbert says she was never scared. She recognized that many addicts were in fact also suffering from mental health issues. “Even though the public was aware these women were going missing,” she says, “it wasn’t a high-profile story.”

Culbert understood the importance of writing about the relationship between drugs and prostitution in non-discriminatory terms. “It shouldn’t belittle their worth as human beings,” she continues, “and they deserve to be written about.” In a November 2001 article, she profiled Dawn Crey, one of the female addicts who had gone missing: “Dawn’s fragile world was turned upside down in November 1999 when [her father] died of cancer.” Culbert made an effort to show the humanity of the women, often trying to figure out why they became addicts in the first place. Crey’s DNA was found on Pickton’s farm.

In the late ’90s, hard news reporters weren’t the only people covering drug addiction in Vancouver. Lincoln Clarkes developed what he now understands to be an “obsession” with photographing female addicts, some of whom ended up becoming Pickton victims. Over four years, more than 400 addicts agreed to pose for Clarkes, and some of those photos appeared in his book Heroines. He sometimes worked alongside print journalists and won a Western Magazine Award and a National Magazine Award for his Vancouver Magazine work.

The project took over his life. Most Sundays, he would go to an area near his neighbourhood in the Downtown Eastside with an assistant, armed with gifts (a bag of apples, a pack of cigarettes, some Band-Aids) and approached women hanging out on the streets. After he offered them cigarettes, some would open up to him, revealing details of their lives and addictions. One of his girlfriends eventually asked, “What do I have to do to get you to pay attention to me, stick a needle in my arm?” Maybe she was onto something—Clarkes experimented with crack and heroin. “I had to do it as my homework for this project,” he says. “I had to really understand what the women were going through—what was going on in their heads.”

Clarkes hates how journalists reduced drugs to a Downtown Eastside problem; drug abuse had been rampant in many parts of the city for a long time. That’s why Frank Luba, The Province’s general assignment reporter in Vancouver, says he inevitably finds himself writing about drugs.

But it’s not without challenges. Some commenters recently gave him flack when “overdose” appeared in a headline over one of his stories: “Potent Heroin Blamed for Vancouver Woman’s Death in Hostel, 31 Overdoses at Insite Injection Facility.” While overdose doesn’t necessarily mean death, and the story makes it clear that the term is not referring to deaths, some people read the headline and assumed that 31 had died.

“Epidemic” is another term avoided by many journalists interviewed for this story. “I’m not qualified to call it an epidemic,” Luba says. “I’m neither a health professional nor someone involved in law enforcement.” While reporters used epidemic in stories up to the late ’80s, the word is disappearing from Canadian journalism about drugs today. Reporters generally agree they should leave terms such as overdose, epidemic and “bad” drugs out of the news unless they are quoting an expert.

Before he retired in 2012, Matas ended one of his last stories about heroin on a hopeful note. An article featuring a recovering addict titled “A Chance to Change Fate” almost reads as a metaphor for the city healing its drug problem. In other stories, Matas cited decreasing crime rate statistics and observed the positive effects of public housing programs. While it’s clear that Vancouver and Hamilton still have visible drug problems, journalism has evolved. The ignorance and prejudice is disappearing.

When Edgar-André Montigny was a part-time history professor at York University in Toronto, he edited The Real Dope: Social, Legal, and Historical Perspectives on The Regulation of Drugs in Canada, a 2011 book that compiled stories about drugs written by authors from interdisciplinary backgrounds. “People who have no working knowledge of drugs, they trust what they hear in the media,” he says. “It’s getting better in the last few years—there’s certainly a lot more balanced reporting. For a long time, statements in the media were usually pretty stereotypical.” Montigny, who’s now a disability lawyer, thinks journalists still have a long way to go, but he’s pleased they’ve been more critical of government drug policy in the past few years.

Still, journalists agree there is more work to be done. “There is this overwhelming stigma,” Hayes says about drugs. “But the people who have been affected by it and seen the damage it can cause—they want the public to know.” It’s a tough position to be in: she’s trying to tell the stories of individuals affected by drug abuse while also fighting against a broader issue of government transparency.

***

In early August, two people at Toronto’s Veld Music Festival died and 13 others went to hospital. That same weekend, during the Boonstock Music Festival in B.C., one died and 80 went to hospital. A week earlier, another festival-goer died at B.C.’s Pemberton Music Festival. The suspect in all these cases? Party drugs.

Brian Platt was a Toronto Star intern when the news broke about Veld. He had just an hour to type up a story about the supposed drug-related deaths of a 22-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman. He wrote a well-informed article, citing the recent rash of festival deaths. But like Hayes, he experienced the frustration of getting hard numbers. Initially, journalists have little to go on except what police state publicly, and in this case, they said the drugs that caused problems at Veld could be considered “poison.” Platt followed up with a feature, “Party Drug Strategy Sought for Festivals,” and interviewed harm reduction experts and a Canadian psychotherapist who holds a licence to import MDMA.

Platt’s story “Deaths at Music Festival Spark Concern Over Drugs” contrasted with past headlines. In 1999, for instance, when 20-year-old Allen Ho died after taking ecstasy at a Toronto rave in an underground parking garage, headlines such as “A Deathwatch on Raves” (the Globe) and “Young Clubbers Ecstatic About Rave ‘Chemicals’” (Toronto Sun) appeared. In September 1999, Toronto Life served up its own take. For “Adventures in Clubland,” Ian Brown hung out in nightclubs for a few weeks and then wrote about the drug culture he encountered: “$25 for a hit of E, $10 for a vial of crystal meth, $30 for half a vial of Special K.” While he maintains the assignment was mainly about the club scene, there was a lot of drug talk in the feature.

Other journalists, such as Leah McLaren at the Globe, criticized him for making a piece more fiction than fact. Brown wrote the feature in first person, combining the views of ravers he interviewed with his own reporting to create a composite character, although he says this unnamed character was based mainly on one guy he hung around with and interviewed a few times at length. He wrote about using drugs in the feature when, in fact, though he’d tried some of the drugs in the past, he was sober the entire time. In his forties when he wrote the article, Brown was older than most at the club. As a feature writer, though, he has no qualms about taking on any subject.

Unlike Brown, the Star’s music critic Ben Rayner is intimate with the party scene as a self-proclaimed long-time raver. He was a strong voice in Toronto’s 1999 iDance movement, which protested banning raves. He responded again after the Veld and Boonstock deaths with the following advice: “Believe it or not, folks, there is such a thing as responsible drug use.” His opinion is not a common one in journalism, but other ravers-turned-journalists, such as NOW Magazine’s former music editor Benjamin Boles and senior editor Joshua Ostroff at The Huffington Post Canada, share Rayner’s viewpoint. All three agree that 15 years later, the press is better behaved. “In 2014, the media was relatively reserved in comparison to what happened in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” Ostroff said. “I feel like they didn’t blow it up.”

While it’s part of Hayes’s job as a general assignment reporter, covering drug-related news is a never-ending process. For her and O’Reilly, it’s a tangle of access issues, sifting through the words of addicts on the streets and waiting on calls from people who are incarcerated (the reporters can’t call them, the inmates can only dial out). In spring 2014, Hayes worked with O’Reilly, who sits across from her and has been with the Spectator for five years, on a story about drug-related deaths at the provincial jail. 

Even when Hayes was finally able to tour the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre, a group of government officials accompanied her. O’Reilly has been frustrated by slow responses to her freedom of information requests, not to mention the thousands of dollars in charges for estimated work times to complete the requests. She filed five requests in May 2014 and is still waiting on three as of this magazine’s publication. “It’s sometimes hard to get information from official sources,” Hayes says, “so I do end up relying on a lot of people who are either keeping me posted from jail or that I run into on the street. It makes it more difficult to get regular updates.”

O’Reilly would come into the office in the morning and there’d be seven missed overnight calls from collect numbers. “There’s nothing you can do,” she says. “They can’t leave a message, they can’t tell you why they’re calling.” Through jail sources, Hayes and O’Reilly found out how drugs were being smuggled in (sometimes sparing the public the vulgar details), what drugs they were and how much they were being sold for.

Hayes is regularly in touch with three inmates; one calls her several times a week. And several others still keep in contact with O’Reilly. While they fill the Spec reporters in on drugs, they also update them about other pertinent information—after all, says Hayes, most crimes in the area can be traced back to one thing: drugs.

***

One of Hayes’s sources is about to get out of jail. He calls her collect in December 2014 to talk about what “free life” will be like.

“There’s going to be a lot of temptations,” he says. “Fentanyl is so easy to get.”

“How exactly do people do fentanyl?” (Fentanyl is a prescription synthetic opiate similar to but more powerful than morphine.)

“You take a patch,” he tells her, “burn it until it peels off and then freebase it.” After a few minutes, she wishes her best jail source good luck with his freedom.

Before hanging up on what he hopes is his last interview from inside, he says, “I promise to keep in touch.” About a month later, Hayes gets a call from her source to let her know he’s out. He tells her that he’s doing drugs, but he’s trying to lie low. Just over a week later, she gets a collect call—he’s back in jail and going through withdrawal.

Photo courtesy The Globe and Mail

Three heat maps with the accompanying titles “Our Sites’ Users,” “Subscribers to Martha Stewart Living” and “Consumers of Furry Pornography” look exactly the same to the untrained eye. The subjects seems to be directly related. But they’re not—maps purporting to show user data or subscribers with multi-coloured blobs are sometimes just regular population density maps.

Digital journalist William Wolfe-Wylie stood in a Bay Street boardroom on November 25 beside these maps delivering a presentation he created for a group of Ontario Public Service employees. He was illustrating one of his biggest pet peeves: infographics with misinformation. “Just because you make a heat map, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually showing what you think it’s showing,” Wolfe-Wylie says. “People fall into that trap all the time.”

Data visualizations, such as graphs and infographics, can help readers better understand concepts in an article, but there are pitfalls. As Alberto Cairo, an assistant professor of journalism at University of Miami and author of a book about infographics, has written, the creation of data visualizations is a stretch for journalists—creators have to think about more than words when it comes to structures, styles and graphic forms. Sometimes, journalists don’t challenge collection methods enough before converting data into a visualization. Because audiences process visual information differently than they do words, charts and graphs can appear more authoritative, making readers trust them. But bias and misinformation can creep in and when this happens, tainted visualizations can look the same as those that aren’t.

The Ontario government asked Wolfe-Wylie to contribute to the panel because of his extensive data journalism career at Sun Media, Postmedia and now at CBC. In his presentation, he discussed the spread of misinformation after the July 2013 Toronto flood. The information about the water levels was wrong, but some journalists trusted the data because it came from an authoritative source—the government. “If you don’t look critically at what it’s measuring and how it’s set up,” he says, “you could be reporting false information to readers.”

As the judge for the infographics category at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards for the last three years, Rabble.ca publisher Kim Elliott has critiqued data journalism in many forms. “The way humans respond to images makes a bigger impression. An infographic sticks in your mind immediately in a way that words don’t necessarily do,” Elliott says. “The concern about bias is very much there.”

While Elliott and Wolfe-Wylie both suggest the data source as the likeliest point for bias or misinformation to seep in, it’s not the only one. Iffat Jokhio, a senior designer at Toronto firm Pivot Design Group, says the different design elements can create problems. For example, she says, red has a negative connotation, whereas green has a positive one. Iffat mentions it all depends on the context of where these colours are used. In western society, these colour associations can be illustrated by the red of a stop sign or the green that signals “go” at a traffic light. When it comes to bar graphs, she says, shading and the thickness of shapes can affect perception as well.

For some journalists, worrying about elements such as colour could be getting too psychological. But Metro News Toronto’s Luke Simcoe knows it’s possible for a designer to manipulate elements on a graph to prove a point. “A graph that lies looks the same as a graph that tells the truth,” he says. “Sometimes you can adjust the X or Y axis so that you’re still telling the truth, but it more clearly conveys the story.” If designers want to illustrate a decline over time, for example, they can adjust an axis to show part of a data set instead of all of it. Messing with the baseline zero, or the number a line graph starts with, can create a more intense dip.

Sometimes this part of the graph is one of the major ways that data visualizations can become misleading, explains Chad Skelton, a reporter at the Vancouver Sun and journalism instructor who teaches data visualizations at Vancouver’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University. An example he shows his students is a line graph of actor Aaron Paul’s Twitter followers before and after his role in Breaking Bad. Official Twitter analytics profile @TwitterData posted a line graph showing only the jump between Paul’s 600,000 followers to just over 750,000. Skelton tweeted back, “Or, less misleadingly:” with his own graph, which started at zero followers and showed a much more gradual increase than the spike Twitter Data plotted. “If you’re doing any kind of chart, the bottom of your chart should be zero,” Skelton says. “If it’s not, then it can really mislead the reader into thinking the difference was more dramatic than it was.”

Who’s responsible for creating infographics varies from news outlet to news outlet. It can be an in-house designer, a freelancer or a member of the art department. Ideally, this role is taken on by a journalist-designer hybrid. At Rabble.ca, Elliott says, several people in different roles create infographics, but she’s considering hiring a person specifically to make them. She says that if a designer without a journalism background makes one, it should be in close collaboration with a reporter.

Wolfe-Wylie, who falls into the hybrid category, says he doesn’t think bias can be completely avoided in any form of journalism. But, he says, a way to ensure a data visualization represents information fairly is to bounce it off others—not only those in the newsroom, but also people from different backgrounds. Wolfe-Wylie thinks this can help push a visualization in a better direction. As visual storytelling becomes more common, journalists need to ensure that they’re keeping pace with ethical standards. “You wouldn’t misquote a person,” Simcoe says. “So don’t misquote the information.”

Here is a sneak peek at one story from our Spring 2015 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism magazine.

John Martin didn’t have a face for television. Even his son allows that his father was “not a good-looking guy.” He was more the kind you would see in a pub, and to a large extent his life revolved around pubs. His former assistant jokes that he was a “ladies’ man”—with dreadful teeth.

Google doesn’t turn up much about him. But it would be unjust to overlook the significance of what the late Martin created behind the scenes of Canadian journalism and entertainment. Martin pioneered music journalism television in this country in the late 1970s, with the hour-long rockumentary show The NewMusic. He took the Rolling Stone magazine template—an intelligent focus on popular music, mixed with political and cultural commentary—and transferred it to television. The show predated the launch of MTV, and helped CHUM-owned Citytv push the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to green-light MuchMusic in 1984.

Martin was a visionary, but not one who demanded praise or accolades. His jovial character is what friends and co-workers remember. It’s been seven years since his death, but it’s important to put Martin back in the picture, to appreciate where TV music journalism got its start, and where it’s going today.

Martin meets Moses

Martin, a native of Manchester, England, came to Toronto in the early ’70s in pursuit of a young Canadian named Val Ross. They’d met while she was studying in London. (She would later write for Maclean’s and The Globe and Mail, before her death in 2008.) Their romantic relationship did not last, but Martin stayed in Canada anyway, pursuing television producing at the short-lived CBC show 90 Minutes Live, hosted by the late Peter Gzowski. After 90 Minuteswas cancelled in 1978, Martin became a cabbie, never abandoning his dream of starting a music documentary show.

Back in England, music interview shows had already taken shape. One in particular, Ready Steady Go!, gained a loyal audience during the swinging ’60s, largely due to the appealing young host. Cathy McGowan often showed her nerves, stumbled over lines, and had no background in journalism or broadcasting. She was a train wreck, yet became a massive hit. Audiences could identify with her genuineness. “McGowan-ism” became a model for what Martin wanted to bring to Canada and its music scene on television.

He shopped The NewMusic around to a number of stations, including CBC and CTV. But they all passed, not knowing what to make of it or what type of audience it would speak to. It wasn’t until Martin met with Moses Znaimer, the co-founder of Citytv, that he got a deal: Znaimer would take the show in half-hour segments on a trial basis if Martin would direct the 6 p.m. City newscast. The first episode aired on September 29, 1979, with hosts Jeanne Beker and John (J.D.) Roberts. It quickly caught fire and grew to be a one-hour show.

At a time when musicians didn’t undergo media training, Martin was able to present them to Canadians in the raw, and they would discuss anything, from their music to global politics. The breezy style of the hosts and formats was frowned upon by more traditional media. “I don’t think anyone in the early days took it seriously,” says Larry LeBlanc, one of Canada’s longest-serving music journalists, and a friend of Martin’s. “We didn’t see them as journalists. They were TV people. TV was not journalism and still isn’t journalism; it’s puff to a large degree.”

LeBlanc has been obsessed with music since booking bands in the early ’60s as a high school student. Since then, he’s written thousands of articles for most music publications, from Billboard to Rolling Stone, and has travelled the world surveying music culture. LeBlanc also does consulting work for Heritage Canada and was awarded the 2013 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at the 2013 Juno awards in Regina. Despite his successes, LeBlanc remembers looking at The NewMusic (episodes of which he still has on Betamax tapes) with some resentment in its early days.

“They could get anyone we couldn’t get. They got to hang out with the artists, travel with them, take pictures, trips to Jamaica. Are you kidding? Complete jealousy,” says LeBlanc.

It wouldn’t have helped if LeBlanc had known the laissez-faire approach the rumpled Martin had to being a producer and boss. Most often he was at his “other office,” across the street—he hated the office environment, preferring the dark corners of a pub and the loud music from a subpar sound system. He was a walk across the street for his staff if there were pressing issues, which they accepted.

“I think it was really smart,” says Laurie Brown, former host of The NewMusic, and current host of The Signal on CBC Radio 2. “If you are making rock-and-roll television, you don’t want to sit around a place that makes you think you are working for OHIP.”

Martin wouldn’t breathe down the necks of those he hired. Instead, he let them put in their hours until they got it right.

In its infancy, The NewMusic had a shoestring budget. The joke among the staff was whether there was enough money for Post-It notes. Script approval and perfectly shot angles were of no concern. This was the age of experimental live television. “Sometimes it’s Iggy Pop trying to grab Jeanne Beker’s tits, other times it’s a really thoughtful quote from Pete Townshend,” recalls David Kines, former editor of The NewMusic.

Despite sneers from the print world and the show hosts’ natural growing pains—on live television—it was all according to Martin’s vision as he continued to experiment. The show was making up the rules along the way, playing less well-known genres such as jazz, reggae, and rap (which was still in its infancy, and considered a “fad” by some critics), giving the music industry a wider selection to present to Canadians.

Rock (TV) around the clock

Martin had his finger on the pulse of the underground music scene, and lived the lifestyle as much as he was documenting it on TV. It wasn’t uncommon to see Martin with bands like Motörhead after shows, sharing a laugh and a pint. Martin ran The NewMusic through personal relationships with artists and his English charm. He could make an impression on Van Morrison at social events, call him up a week later, reprise a joke they’d shared, and ask Morrison for an interview with no hesitation. He could do a special in Jamaica on the death of Bob Marley and persuade Ziggy Marley to do an interview by challenging him to a “football” dribbling contest, knowing what a fan Ziggy was of the beautiful game. But for Martin it wasn’t a matter of “he could.” Mostly, “he did,” and with success. Martin didn’t punch out at 5:01 p.m.; he was at it 24 hours a day. The crew would often be at a show and wait for the final encore to get the clearance for an interview. They wouldn’t end up at Citytv headquarters till 2 a.m. and would work on their tapes with editors throughout the night.

The aura around The NewMusic was enticing for both music fans and those who wanted to join the team. That team did expand and added depth with Daniel Richler, Laurie Brown, and Denise Donlon. Richler, a London-born Montrealer with big hair, made a demo tape and called Znaimer every week for six months until he finally got the position, working the alternative underground street beat. Brown, a Citytv film editor and actor, had some experience with television. Donlon joined the mix after working a show called Rockflash News.

Turning the amp to 11

Despite never blatantly having the label, The NewMusic was a sociopolitical show that encouraged the audience to think beyond the hit parade. The crew would use music as a springboard to talk about bigger issues, such as drug addiction and politics. To get those stories, however, hosts sometimes got too close to the rock-and-roll lifestyle.

“There was a lot of bad behaviour on a work trip,” Richler recalls. “We found ourselves inCocksucker Blues moments,” he says, referencing the raw and controversial 1972 Rolling Stones documentary. According to Richler, journalists reporting on the rock scene could sometimes end up being privy to unsavory behaviour. “What do you do with that footage? That’s something that troubled me a lot.”

In those situations, Martin sent the footage back to the band manager; he was not obsessed with gossip and up-skirt moments. He wanted a more collaborative approach, not an us-versus-them situation. Richler describes Martin as discreet and fair, making sure there were no victims. However, Richler does bring up a moral question that he had to deal with in his early days at The NewMusic as a music journalist: “Do you want to be a goody two-shoes when you are a journalist? When you see someone snorting cocaine are you going to call the police?”

By the time an entire new cast of The NewMusic debuted in 1984, MuchMusic had just launched. Znaimer and Martin smartly kept the two entities separate. MuchMusic provided nonstop fun devoid of criticism or music discourse, while The NewMusic became the place for serious music fans, where the questions they had could be answered.

Soon, The NewMusic was becoming a heavyweight, getting more and more syndication worldwide and gaining the credentials and respect of those in the music industry. Martin’s baby had grown up. But as the show moved into the ’90s, establishing its relevance to the Canadian and international music scene, the music industry was becoming savvy about how the TV medium could be advantageous to image, a vehicle to promote buzz around an act and generate sales. Substance wasn’t necessary for profit. Not all artists were choosing this route, and MuchMusic wasn’t only catering to what music executives wanted, but it was hard to ignore the strategy when the results were clear.

“Why would you want to sit down with a snotty [print] person when you could go on TV and control the medium and the image?” asks LeBlanc.

The end of a long, strange trip

Corporate culture went into full swing at MuchMusic. The station was no longer an adolescent, and moved past its experimental, awkward phase. It wanted to be taken seriously, and that meant branching out from the practices of its early days. No longer was it okay to be taking professional calls at a pub. By this time, the CHUM-City building had an extensive video vault of music and music-related shows. Why create new television when the company was sitting on years of content?

CHUM started relying on its archival footage instead of producing and airing new material. Martin was slowly being pushed out of an organization he helped create. Every fibre of his being rebelled against what the music industry and CHUM were turning into. His days at MuchMusic were numbered.

“It was very difficult for John; it was his baby—he was being asked to leave home,” says Bill Bobeck, a friend of Martin’s who worked in publicity at CHUM Television for more than 10 years.

Depending on whom you ask, Martin was either fighting for relevancy in a company that was changing every day or getting bored without even realizing it. He was in a rut and being forced into a desk job, which was making him crazy. Running a tab on Queen Street with a phone in his hand, Martin was still conducting business the way he had been doing all along. “John Martin was his own worst enemy,” says Ward. “He was very engaging. If you met him, you would have learned a lot and laughed a lot, but he didn’t help his own cause in a lot of ways because of his own personal behaviour.”

Martin was fired by CHUM in 1993, a tough break for someone going through a divorce and with a young son. There was no company going-away party. Instead, LeBlanc and Richard Flohil, who has been promoting Canadian music for decades, threw a party on the second floor of the El Mocambo. LeBlanc purchased a gold record for $65 and had it framed, with Martin’s picture in the middle, as a tribute to his contribution to the Canadian music industry. LeBlanc swears he still has the receipt somewhere.

The new NewMusic

Denise Donlon took over as director of programming, and The NewMusic got new hosts: Jana Lynne White, Avi Lewis, and George Stroumboulopoulos. Donlon calls this era “the drive to relevance,” as MuchMusic pushed shows that engaged audiences and artists in such issues such as HIV, censorship, and politics, coverage that led to MuchMusic winning a Gemini Award.

Under Donlon’s command, The NewMusic was syndicated in over 13 countries and found individuals like Avi Lewis, who had a political background and could tackle music from that perspective.

I meet Lewis at a quiet Roncesvalles Timothy’s on a mild afternoon. The coffee shop is full of regulars escaping the day with a newspaper or a book in hand. An old couple sits across from us, speaking in Polish, occasionally smiling and trying to listen in on our conversation.

Lewis got his start as a local news reporter at Citytv, and was approached by Znaimer to cover politics for MuchMusic. He extracted a promise from Znaimer that he if covered politics for MuchMusic, he could work on The NewMusic, a dream since he was 12 years old.

“My friends and I were rabid watchers. We didn’t make plans for Saturday night until after the show was over,” says Lewis. “Watching The NewMusic on Saturday night was beyond appointment TV, it was do-or-die TV.”

Lewis, who has hosted and created serious political shows for CBC and Al Jazeera English, remembers a MuchMusic with a corporate mandate, executives coming down from meetings and congratulating the crew for keeping “everyone happy today.” That was revealing, says Lewis. “What that meant was we kept all the different record companies happy that day and the management saw that as its role.”

With huge commercial interests beating down the door, the show rarely paid for trips and CDs. It was a trade-off for Lewis and his colleagues: For every item of music journalism, there would be promotion for a band or musician. Lewis proudly remembers going to South Africa and looking at the role of music after Nelson Mandela was elected. The flip side: His first big interview for The NewMusic was with Jon Bon Jovi, who was disappointed that he couldn’t sit across from a journalist whose breasts he could stare at; the piece was fluff. But that was the game Lewis had to play in order to get to the artists he felt mattered.

“Once in a while you got to do a story that you really liked. I got to interview Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, which was one of the highlights of my life, forget my career.”

Despite artists often not being open to probing questions, The NewMusic asked anyway. Lewis remembers being very nervous before a David Bowie interview. As a long-time fan, Lewis felt that after the release of Scary Monsters, Bowie embarked on an entire decade of commercial records. Lewis knew he had to ask what the fuck happened.

“He was fantastic about it; he answered pretty honestly,” says Lewis. “Uncomfortable questions have to be embraced—not for the drama that they create, but if they need to be asked. Still, Lewis questions the level of music journalism that was accomplished during his time at The NewMusic.

“I want to be really clear. I am not saying that we didn’t do journalism,” he says. A little later, he elaborates: “We have to look at systems and structures in journalism because they determine so much of what is possible in journalism. What we look at right now is the crisis of journalism and the funding of journalism and how they make money online going to foundations for money; that has its own issues.”

Lewis left The NewMusic in 1998 and the show returned to a half-hour slot. As the years progressed, what had once made it special became ubiquitous, as analysis of music and social issues could increasingly be found online. Every music magazine was making these connections. Hannah Simone (currently playing the role of Cece Parekh on the hit TV show New Girl) was the final host before The NewMusic was cancelled in 2008. For many, it marked the end of an era.

The new NewMusic TV

Despite the dwindling of intelligent TV music journalism, some have continued to promote the genre. Aux TV, a Canadian music station founded by GlassBOX Television (now owned by Blue Ant Media), offers music documentaries and reviews. Launched in 2009 as a specialty channel catering to the 18-to-34 audience, it airs shows that take music fans behind the scenes. Hosts of music-related shows include Alan Cross and George Pettit of the band Alexisonfire. Aux can be viewed in over a million Canadian homes, but it isn’t part of basic cable packages, and carriers like Telus or Cogeco don’t carry it. But, according to Raja Khanna, co-CEO of Blue Ant, Aux TV didn’t start out wanting to gain mainstream Canadian attention.

“We launched Aux for music fans, for people who love music. Not people who just listen to music—that’s everybody,” says Khanna. “It was all about the real music fan.”

The heart and soul of the Aux brand lies in its website and digital publication, Aux Magazine, for iPad and iPhone. It’s obvious that care and extra planning go into the digital front. The first digital issue launched in June 2012, and despite being less than a year old, beat out the more established BBC Music and iGuitar to win the 2012 Digital Magazine Award for music magazine of the year. The website—the origin of the Aux brand—gets steady traffic, but according to Khanna, Aux has not gained a strong following in TV. He believes music fans are a “fickle thing” the station is still trying to figure out. “I am the first one to admit that we didn’t get it right.”

Khanna and his team have big plans for Aux TV, with a possible revamping of the whole TV model. The mantra is “Real Music Television,” and for Khanna, that means rethinking the channel’s purpose in today’s TV music culture.

“Music journalism on television has become a joke. Journalism is not the right word. It’s not even happening; it’s entertainment,” he says. Khanna, 39, who grew up on The NewMusic, attests that the show changed his life. He remembers almost every episode. “When we were cooking up the idea of Aux, we literally said the words, ‘We want to take what was The NewMusic and turn it into an entire channel,’” says Khanna. “For better or worse, that was our plan.”

The voice of the channel, Alan Cross, provides a degree of weight and legitimacy. Cross, now in his 50s, never intended to be a music journalist. But after lasting only 23 days as a news reporter, he realized he wanted to talk about and play music. He joined the CFNY radio team in 1986. In 1992, as CFNY was transitioning into “The Edge,” the station was looking to create a program segment with historical context. The only on-air personality with a history degree, Cross was chosen against his will and given an ultimatum: either do the show or get fired. “I had to really work hard to find information, to find stuff to write about,” says Cross. “After a while I found out I was actually really good at this, and I really enjoyed doing it.”

I meet Cross at Soho House Toronto. The private club for “creative types” in media, arts, and fashion is the most recent of the Soho Houses in the world. Antiques sprinkle the lounge; most could be props from an Indiana Jones film. We sit beside a black Steinway Boston piano between the entrance and the main bar. Cross, who recently got membership, is just as unfamiliar with the setting as I am. Despite his release from Corus Entertainment in 2011, he continues to work on a variation of his famous Ongoing History of New Music show (now entitled The Secret History of Rock) and has a close relationship with the Aux brand. When you talk to him about music and music journalism, he makes you care about it. He remembers The NewMusic vividly, and sees an uphill battle for smart music television today.

“The problem is that, like all news programs and documentaries, it’s expensive. It’s expensive to produce a documentary. Especially licensing audio and video is hideously expensive and it’s getting more expensive,” says Cross. “It’s very difficult to clear that video for broadcast, so it takes time, it takes effort, it takes people, it takes money.”

The lack of quality music television journalism is directly affecting the way we consume music. According to Cross, music, more than ever, is becoming more disposable, less savoured.

“What you end up doing is, with an iPod and a set of headphones, you end up sealing yourself in a bubble of music that you only find agreeable. There is no one taking you by the hand to say, ‘Hey, stupid, you need to listen to this, you need to pay attention to this or try this. I know it’s going to hurt at first, but you’ll thank me for it.’ I think it’s limiting people’s appreciation for music and limiting their musical experience.”

Cross would like to see a return to interviews done in more casual settings. It worked for The NewMusic and often led to interesting dynamics, as opposed to staged interviews. But, Cross says, it’s hard to rekindle what once was, especially with the current reality-TV culture. A&E, TLC, and History—with roots in promoting education and discourse about arts and culture—now rely on shows such as Storage Wars and Duck Dynasty.

“What happened to us?” he asks.

What’s happening now

NewMusic alumnus George Stroumboulopoulos hosted the show in 2000. He’s been preaching the importance of smart music and entertainment journalism for years. He has called the CBC home since 2005 and—much like The NewMusic—his show has switched from an hour to a half-hour format. At the time of our interview, his office was an explosion of Canadiana. Taking up all the real estate on his leather couch is a gritty painting of the Ontario flag. To the left, in front of his desk, is a box of knickknacks ranging from a Corner Gas mini-pump to a papier-mâché statue of himself. Behind him sits a bag of Holy Crap cereal that appeared on Dragons’ Den. Before our interview he pops open an energy drink, mentioning before taking a sip that it’s made by a Canadian company. The only exceptions to this patriotic theme are his desktop wallpaper of rap group Public Enemy and an Alexander Ovechkin hockey stick standing in the left corner. (Then again, the Ovi stick is made by Canadian company CCM.)

Stroumboulopoulos admits his first love was music radio. His mother often hid the TV in the closet and only let him watch on Friday nights. His first glimpse of music on television was The NewMusic; a twisted coat hanger served as the antenna and pliers turned the broken dial. He remembers the Jesus and Mary Chain, Grandmaster Flash, and later on, a band that had a tremendous effect on him: Public Enemy. After creating a fan base with The Strombo Show on 102.1 The Edge, he went to MuchMusic in 2000 and left in 2004. He brought a third of his staff from MuchMusic (most of whom worked on The NewMusic) to the CBC, to surround himself with his own pack, knowing he was throwing himself to the wolves.

His phone constantly flashes with text messages and calls during our interview. But much as he does on television, Strombo focuses on the topic at hand and pays no attention to anything else.

What he finds missing in music journalism today is what he calls the “myth.” “Back then, rock and roll was filled with shadows, and music journalism—when done right—would shine a light on a few corners, but not too much of a light, because it was journalism and it was storytelling, he says.

Now that he has been covering music for over 20 years in both radio and television, he has it on his mind 24/7. He has popularized the term “insongnia,” often tweeting and sharing songs in the late hours of the night. During our chat he takes out his iPhone and plays Tracy Nelson’s “Down So Low,” having listened to it about five times at three in the morning the night before. He is excited when he can share a track on his radio show.

“Whatever job I do in my life, this show, music is still a big part of it. I am still putting Jello Biafra and Tom Morello in the red chair,” says Strombo. “It doesn’t matter how old I get, I am going to be a music fan, a music guy, my whole life.”

While he understands the importance of business and revenue, he also feels television today is lazy when it comes to the arts. “I don’t think the CRTC has done a good enough job protecting Canadians and Canadian interests when it comes to music and culture. I think they have been very short-sighted,” says Strombo. At the same time, he points out that music fans don’t need mainstream media to create places to gather. Real music lovers form a “small but loud army” that drives the cultural shift. In his opinion, what often permeates music culture is the exposure of gossip, humiliation, and failures. A discourse on music is an afterthought.

“Most music programs on TV are insulting and idiotic simply because they make no effort to get under the surface of ‘So, what’s it like to be a star?’” says Daniel Richler, in an exaggerated American accent. “Who gives a fuck about what it’s like to be a star? You know what it’s like to be a star? It’s isolating and damaging and a dead end, that’s what it is. We should stop celebrating it.”

Even when music journalists try to go beyond the surface, the environment does not lend itself to natural discussions. Richler, who interviewed Mick Jagger in 2011 about his music project “SuperHeavy,” a collaboration between Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, A.R. Rahman, and Damian Marley, remembers being ushered into a room with bodyguards, sitting around a table with half-a-dozen European radio DJs and reporters. They were instructed not to ask certain questions. “It was impossible to get into depth,” says Richler.

Despite the obstacles, Strombo, like Richler, feels that music journalism, at its best, is about personal connection, and sharing that with an audience, whether it’s a top-40 hitmaker or underground rock band. “Music is just a song written by some cat that you will never meet in a country that doesn’t exist anymore and he wrote it about a girl we will never know, whose name is probably not recorded,” says Strombo. “How can something so disconnected from you work so well in that moment? That’s a real human connection. That’s what I built my life around, that connection.”

The last waltz

David Martin, son of John Martin and Margaret Konopacki, was born in 1987. He remembers his father as jovial and confident. He also remembers a man with no money, living in squalor. It was a hard upbringing, as his mom worked three or four jobs to pay the mortgage on their house, which they ended up renting out while they lived in an apartment after the divorce. David would see his dad on weekends, making the most of their visits.

“We weren’t going to baseball games or hockey games. At times we were sitting by candlelight in his apartment because he couldn’t pay his energy bill.”

John Martin continued working in the music field, directing the 1999 documentary The Genius of Lenny Breau, which ended up winning a Gemini. Despite Martin’s name being the first shown as the credits roll, his name is not mentioned anywhere on the IMDb page of the movie. In fact, the role of director is attributed to someone else. Martin followed up with another documentary looking at Nova Scotian country singer Hank Snow.

When Martin was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, he was working on other musical projects about Canadian artists. Close to the end of his life, he fell and broke his nose. David remembers waking up at 4 a.m., the hospital calling him to come. John was in his bed, wheezing, trying to breathe through an oxygen mask. To the surprise of the people in the room, he opened his eyes. They all waited to hear what they thought would be his final words. In a perfect Marlon Brando voice, he looked up at those around him and said, “I bet you’re wondering why I gathered you here today.”

That is what David Martin remembers of his dad. “He had this stoicism to the bitter end. He stuck to his guns and never sold out.”

John died in 2006. The NewMusic was cancelled in 2008. It still exists as a blog, but it hasn’t been updated since September 2010.

It’s hard to find another show that spawned talent the way The NewMusic did, and hard to imagine it all started with a working-class Manchester kid who had an idea while being a cabbie on the streets of Toronto. There has been talk about naming a Juno award after Martin, or a posthumous induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

“He had his foot in both sides of the industry. We have had no one since, not in Canada, with the scope and background and understanding,” says his old friend, Larry LeBlanc. “He’s the hidden man in our industry.”

The NewMusic helped launch names that have gone on to become staples in Canadian music and beyond. Former hosts and reporters include a president of a multinational company, hosts of their own radio and television shows, respected music journalists, a star in a popular comedy show, and a recipient of the Order of Canada.

“These people became icons of music television,” says Ward. “John saw them in the raw and he knew instinctively they would fulfil some kind of destiny.”

The legacy of The NewMusic is profound: It respected its audience, showcased a diversity of youthful talent and veteran musicians, and promoted political and social discussion in a musical context. It gained admiration from fans and musicians by challenging the conventional interview structure. Denise Donlon remembers covering a music festival in Knebworth, England, where Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, and Eric Clapton were playing. Donlon and her cameraman were up against the BBC and MTV, which had built their own sets and had several big trucks of equipment. Despite the odds, Donlon was able to grab interviews with all the musicians, thanks to the show’s reputation. At the end of the night, she and her colleagues found themselves trying to hitch a ride back to London; the makeup truck of an MTV host passed them by. In that moment, Donlon says, the difference between The NewMusic and everyone else was clear.

“I challenge any of those broadcasters there to have any of the material that we brought back. We aced that shoot—we got everybody,” says Donlon. “Everything in our backpacks was gold.”

Before Martin’s death, he frequented an English pub in Toronto on the Danforth called the Old Nick. A few of his awards, donated by his son, hang above the bar. If ever in the area, grab a pint, look up, and toast the man who helped bring music journalism television to Canada.

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Emily Candy does not mince words.

“The internships that we have now are all over the place,” says Rogers Publishing’s peppy HR manager with unexpected frankness. “We have people who are really getting some good mentorship from senior editors, and then we have people who are just in the Flare fashion closet helping out with some merchandising or stuff like that.”

Though Candy insists that all interns receive a good experience, the company is introducing  the M-School (the “M” stands for magazine), a full-time, paid, four-month internship program that it says is designed to provide rigorous, formalized training for those looking to break into the industry. Aside from working with Rogers Publishing staff in different sectors—including editorial, marketing, and design—the 10 carefully selected interns will attend mandatory seminars that count toward a certificate of completion.

But while the program may appear to be a step up from the usual intern experience, it still fails to fairly compensate interns for their labour, and leaves Rogers’ less educational, unpaid internships unexamined and unchanged.

The M-School, which launches in May, was largely inspired by an internship program at Chatelaine. The brainchild of the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jane Francisco, and assistant editor Lora Grady, the Career Institute at Chatelaine (which Rogers is shutting down after its current interns finish up) took on paid interns for six months, and provided them with a two-day magazine boot camp, workshops, seminars, and one-on-one mentorship.

“They were really good ideas and they were exactly what we wanted to do,” Candy explains. “But we didn’t want it to be focused just on editorial. We wanted to extend to other areas of the business.”

M-School interns will be placed in different departments at a variety of titles, from consumer magazines likeChatelaine to lesser-known trade publications like Benefits Canada. (The “legacy” internships at Maclean’sand Canadian Business will be excluded from the program.) Though they’ll focus on the area of their preference, the interns will be exposed to other parts of the industry through seminars, which will focus on things like choosing a good cover, pitching ideas, using multimedia, and getting to know magazine readers.

Though the final amount has yet to be decided, Candy says interns will probably be paid a monthly honorarium of about $1,000. While this may seem lucrative compared to the many Rogers internships that provide no compensation, this is still considerably less than minimum wage in Ontario.

“People can’t afford to live and work in Toronto if they’re only getting paid $1,000 a month,” says Toronto-based lawyer Andrew Langille, who also blogs about youth employment issues. “It’s less of a meritocracy and more choosing from a pool of applicants from privilege.”

Langille says, “A centrally managed program is better insofar as there’s a greater, better look at what’s happening.” But he questions whether M-School internships—$1,000 honorarium or not—would be considered legal under the Employment Standards Act, because, based on the duties listed on its website, the M-School would require that participants take on jobs that are usually performed by paid employees. (An editorial internship, for example, would include fact-checking, writing web content, and contributing ideas to the magazine line-up.) According to the Ontario Ministry of Labour, an employer can only deny an intern the usual employee rights, including minimum wage, if “[the] employer derives little, if any, benefit from the activity of the intern while he or she is being trained.”

It’s doubtful that paying interns would be a financial burden at Rogers. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Rogers Media, of which Rogers Publishing is an arm, made $75 million in adjusted operating profit (its parent company, Rogers Communications, netted $455 million). Hiring 10 interns at minimum wage for the summer (about $1,640 a month each, for four months) would require less than one percent of that.

By choosing not to pay its interns in spite of its hefty profits, Langille believes Rogers is showing a lack of appreciation for the labour they provide, and a misunderstanding of what internships are really for.

“It’s foolish to view interns as a crew of disposable labour or cheap labour,” Langille says. “The best practice is to view interns as potential full-time employees and to use internships to test the waters and see if the intern is a good fit for the culture of the company.”

Candidates will have to work hard if they want that opportunity at the M-School. Along with submitting a résumé, applicants need to write a short essay detailing why they want to be a part of the program and what they have to offer. If they make the shortlist, they’ll have to go through multiple rounds of interviews and complete an assignment related to the department they hope to join. Then, maybe, they’ll get the position.. “It would really be like a pretty rigorous job screening process,” says Candy.

But for each of the 10 interns getting the holistic training experience, Rogers has a few other interns whose experiences are nowhere near as closely monitored. (Full disclosure: I interned at two Rogers magazines.) Candy admits that HR isn’t always aware of where or when these interns are working, and doesn’t receive feedback from anyone about their learning experience. (Chatelaine’s Career Institute was an exception, as the organizers did collect regular feedback from participants.)

Robin Green (not his real name) , a former editorial intern at one of Rogers’ most popular consumer magazines, remembers wishing that his experience had been more focused on education and training. Though he worked two to three days a week, he always felt as though he was “clocking in and out instead of learning, networking, and becoming part of a team.” “I feel like I was taken for granted. The interns are a key part of the production cycle, but I felt like I was just a cog,” he says.

When he started, he was expecting to receive one-on-one mentoring from editors, and to learn about the editing and writing process at magazines. Instead, he spent most of his time fact-checking, organizing freelancer contracts, mailing packages, and emailing public relations associates. His editors acted as though they couldn’t be bothered to assign him work, let alone share their experiences as young journalists, and his supervisor wasn’t even at the office to debrief him on his last day.

“Because it was unpaid, I really wanted more. I wanted it to be a curriculum for me instead of me walking in, begging for something to do and feeling awkward,” says Green, who worked full-time hours to support himself during his internship. “If I’m working for free, I want to learn something.”

Candy is doubtful that Rogers will go out of its way to make sure that the rest of its interns, most of whom are unpaid, get the same comprehensive experience as their incoming M-School interns. At most, they’ll be able to attend the seminars.

“Our business relies heavily on interns,” she says. “I think it’s a two-way street. Some of the schools and some of the programs rely on us to provide internships and, in turn, we’ve come to start relying a little bit on the amazing skills that we get from our interns to help us with our business.”

In spite of his own negative experience, Green is interested in applying for the M-School. He’s excited about the amount of structure and the prospect of a paycheque, even if it doesn’t cover his cost of living. One thousand dollars is a lot when you’re used to working for free.

“Working in a so-called rock star industry like media? I’ll take it,” he says. “I’d take that in a second.”

Photo by SimonP

The Fellowship in Global Journalism at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto is a journalism program unlike any other.

“What we decided to do was, instead of teaching a specialty in the course of a journalism degree, which is what a lot of places do, we would actually go and recruit the specialists and then teach them the journalism,” says program director Robert Steiner.

As Steiner suggests, most journalism programs teach students to be generalists, but he says there are more than enough programs like that to fill the demand. What readers want, he believes, is more niche content on subjects like health, science, business, and law. According to Steiner, this reporting needs to come not only from generalist reporters, but also from those who are already specialists in the given area. It’s with this in mind that the Munk School launched the program last September.

The current Munk Fellows, who will finish the program at the end of April, include a lawyer, an architect, and a former advertising executive. Though they come from different fields, they all have advanced degrees or years of job experience, as well as a common urge to share what they know with the world. Since their backgrounds typically aren’t in reporting, the Fellows get a crash course in pitching, research, and writing from former Ryerson journalism instructors Don Gibb and Shelley Robertson. They’ll also work with Steiner and Bernard Simon, a former Canada correspondent for the Financial Times, to write stories for publications such as The Globe and Mail and CBC News.

In December 2012, Burton Lim, a Munk Fellow with a background in mammalian zoology, wrote a a story for theToronto Star  about a fungal disease that had been found in the bat caves of North America. The fungus was decimating the bat population as they hibernated. But the real story, as Lim found out, was the financial impact that this could have on the Canadian and American farmers who rely on the bats for pest control.

The fact that he happened to specialize in bats meant that he got wind of the story before anyone else in the media, and had a more accurate understanding of the fungus and the research surrounding it. Coming from a field that values strong academic writing may have made it harder for Lim to learn the clear, simple style newspapers require, but it also allowed him to look more critically at the findings and claims of other scientists.

Munk Fellow Stephen Starr has been reporting on the uprising in Syria, where he lived and reported for five years before moving back to Toronto to be part of the Fellowship. It’s obvious from his writing that Starr has witnessed the Syrian revolt up close. “Being in the field gives you a sense of what you want to write about as a journalist, as opposed to sitting at a desk,” Starr says.

For example, in February, Starr wrote a story for The Globe and Mail about how the unrest, which had remained mostly in the poor, rural parts of Syria, was beginning to make its way to the wealthy, urban areas. But instead of simply writing that the rebels were moving in, Starr used his understanding of the social tension in Syria to bring deeper insight to what was taking place.

“Why is this important? Not because the insurgents need money and logistical support from their wealthier countrymen to beat the Assad regime… but because the divisions taking root between Syria’s urban and rural populations will take far longer to reconcile,” Starr wrote.

Having lived in Syria during the conflict gives Starr an edge over other foreign affairs reporters who are coming into Syria, he says, but the true advantage comes from having both the background and the journalistic training.

“I think this is the way that foreign correspondence should be moving,” Starr says.

After what seems to have been a successful debut, the Fellowship has begun recruiting for the coming year. So far, the program has received applications from a diplomat, a couple of doctors, and several economists, among others. From the applications he’s seen so far, Steiner believes the lineup will be quite different and diverse—just like journalism itself.

Photo courtesy of the University of Toronto.

It seemed like any other workday. Jagdish Grewal, editor and publisher of Canadian Punjabi Post, was in his newsroom in Brampton working late after attending a meeting. Around midnight, he walked out into the parking lot and slid into the driver’s seat of his van.