Stephen Leahy is passionate about the environment. So passionate, in fact, that the 61-year-old Canadian journalist is willing to live below the poverty line in his in-laws’ basement apartment so he can continue reporting on environmental injustices.

Those sacrifices seem worth it when Inter Press Service agrees to publish his story about the Ninth World Wilderness Congress in Mexico. It’s November 6, 2009, and Leahy has a huge scoop—a group of scientists has concluded that in order to preserve the earth’s wildlife, more than half the planet will need protection from the effects of climate change.

But Leahy soon learns that four fellow journalists tried, and failed, to sell the same story to mainstream news outlets. Never mind environmental sustainability—what about the journalistic ecosystem? As his colleagues consider careers in public relations, Leahy hatches a plan. He jots down the facts: Canadians want to stay informed about the environment, and he’s a qualified journalist with a loyal following. If traditional publishers won’t pay, then he’ll go directly to the public. Leahy calls his brainstorm “community-supported environmental journalism.”

The crowdfunding website Kickstarter launched in April 2009, about seven months before Leahy attaches a PayPal account to his website. The timing for crowdfunding appears fortunate, as journalists in this country have had to endure a string of massive budget cuts—the Canadian Media Guild reported that roughly 2,000 industry jobs were cut from January to May in 2009. At the same time, environmental reporting had started to lose its permanent home at traditional news organizations.

Some newspapers, such as the Guelph Mercury, have seldom maintained an environmental beat, while others, including The Hamilton Spectator, have seen such coverage decrease. Many newspapers publish sporadic stories from freelance writers and general assignment reporters that tend to focus on political conflicts instead of environmental consequences.

Today, almost six years after it launched, Kickstarter is no longer just a niche option for quirky indie musicians trying to record an EP; it’s a powerful method of innovation. Crowdfunding success stories include the Pebble smartwatch, which raised millions of dollars, and the Coolest, a high-tech portable cooler with more than 60,000 backers. Meanwhile, user-supported environmental reporting is still waiting for its Pebble or Coolest.

Crowdfunded journalism offers the public an opportunity to engage with the material they’re funding and make suggestions before it’s published. But the risks and challenges of journalism by donation are numerous. Can it reach the same number of people as mainstream media? Will its content remain engaging enough to sustain funding? And, finally, can it prevent longform journalism—including quality environmental stories—from getting stuck on the outskirts of the internet?

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Staff environmental reporters were also not afraid to make bold linkages. When smog began to cloud B.C.’s horizon in April 1995, Ross Howard wrote in the Globe that ozone, one of smog’s ingredients, was “the second-greatest cause of lung disease after smoking.” While Howard and Keating were two of Canada’s leading environment reporters, neither had environmental sciences degrees. But their articles conveyed heft and knowledge because they had access to leading scientists and the time they needed to craft compelling narratives.

While Howard and Keating chased acid rain woes, Peter Calamai, a science reporter for the Toronto Star, had his eye on another prize. He wrote with three prominent parts of the paper in mind: front page, page three and a section front in the weekend editions of the paper. “If I got anywhere else other than that,” he says, “I considered it a failure.”

Even before he started at the Star in 1998, he realized that the only way the majority of the population would read his stories was if he “shoved it down their throats.” He believes that it’s even harder for journalists today, because editors no longer push for science-related stories.

What was, until recently, considered mainstream environmental coverage may now be scorned as activism by some critics and politicians. On December 24, 2012, Mike De Souza, then a national political correspondent for Postmedia, wrote a story about the high price of the government’s new fuel efficiency standards. After combing through the fine print of the report, De Souza found that stricter fuel economy standards on new cars could increase road congestion and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Ten days later, in a letter published in The Windsor Star, then-environment minister Peter Kent dismissed De Souza as an activist.

Being called an activist generally doesn’t bother the reporter, but it may have bothered his bosses at Postmedia. De Souza called out the federal government’s relationship with oil companies, and held the Conservatives accountable for casting doubt on climate change and allegedly muzzling scientists. Although De Souza didn’t let what he calls the “intimidation tactics” distract him from his investigations, Postmedia laid him off along with two full-time political reporters at its Ottawa bureau in February 2014. “It wasn’t explained to me,” De Souza says after a long pause. “I was told there were budget cuts, but I wasn’t ever given any official reasoning why I would be picked as opposed to other people who remained in the bureau.”

While De Souza had to deal with the pressures of the government and advertisers, not all environmental journalism is like this. So what does that look like? During question period on December 9, 2014, the Conservatives withdrew support for a carbon tax and pointed out that no other countries have regulations on their oil and gas sector. The next day, DeSmog Canada countered the prime minister’s claims with a colourful infographic titled “Carbon Regulations Around the World.”

DeSmog found that more than half of the world’s population live in countries with some form of regulation on carbon consumption and production. The piece linked to news articles and official government websites from countries such as New Zealand, India, Switzerland and Japan. Harper’s denunciation of a carbon tax came shortly after the UN climate talks in Lima, Peru, where the majority of nations agreed to eliminate the wholesale use of fossil fuel energy by 2050.

Mainstream news outlets did cover that story. Ottawa Citizen reporters Jordan Press and Jason Fekete held the government accountable for failing to regulate the gas industry. Using several quotes from Liberal and NDP opponents, they revealed that Canada is unlikely to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

While the crowdfunded version lacked access to government sources, the Citizen story omitted the connection between government inaction and the consequences it might have on the environment. But neither DeSmog nor the Ottawa paper offered a full picture of cause and effect.

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The launch of the Tyee Solutions Society (TSS) in 2009 offered a new approach to journalism. “Solutions journalism” refers to rigorous reporting that tackles both issue and response. Using this framework, reporters such as Geoff Dembicki interview sources from oil companies, government representatives, environmentalists and academics to bring together different perspectives, opening a dialogue so opposing groups can work toward a consensus. “One of the most surprising things I found was that many of Canada’s largest oil companies actually support a price on carbon dioxide,” he says. Effective solutions journalism employs the same techniques as investigative journalism. When big companies claim they want a price on carbon, Dembicki scours through internal documents to find proof. “The result was I was able to present a story that wasn’t just taking these companies at their word,” he says, “but really looking into how they were preparing for climate change.”

Following the success of TSS, co-founder David Beers is willing to experiment with both journalism and how it’s funded. He employed this successful model when he launched the campaign to take sister site The Tyee national. By creating an in-house crowdfunding campaign called the “builder program,” the goal is to ensure that The Tyee can continue producing quality journalism. The program crowdfunded over $120,000 in 2013 and used that money to successfully establish a model that accounts for 20 percent of the site’s earnings.

In part, this crowdfunding success stems from using it as a tool for expansion, instead of simply as a means of survival. “It has made our relationship with readers that much closer,” explains Dembicki. “They can see now that by reading The Tyee, and by contributing a small amount of money, they were really able to improve the reach of a small independent publication.”

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From artists looking for investors to finance their next work, to teachers seeking classroom materials, to journalists looking to fund investigative projects they believe are in the public interest, crowdfunding has helped many entrepreneurs around the world realize their visions. The global crowdfunding economy grew to over $5.1 billion in 2013. But one of the biggest problems with using this technique for journalism is that in an age of free information, readers are no longer accustomed to paying for unpleasant news.

Although Leahy asks the general public for money, his regular donors are journalists, scientists and environmentalists. But when reporters fund other reporters, there’s a concern that the work will not reach the broader public. And if journalists must spend more and more of their time on crowdfunding campaigns, they have less time to devote to researching and writing.

Crowdfunded journalists must juggle their passion for environmental journalism with the dreaded task of fundraising and hope their stories don’t get labelled as activism or pushed to the fringes of the internet. Peter Fairley, a freelance environmental reporter based in Victoria, B.C., has experience with crowdfunding through the Society of Environmental Journalists. As a volunteer board member, he watched fellow journalists rush to assist their peers when the SEJ struggled to stay afloat. But he insists crowdfunded journalism doesn’t always reach a mass audience. “It’s preaching to the choir. It’s being financed by the choir. It’s the choir financing itself.”

Howard doesn’t think the specialized approach is financially sustainable and wants to see a shake-up in mainstream reporting. Climate change is one of the biggest stories of our time, yet mainstream coverage is often reactionary or riddled with conflict. Howard believes that without a well-educated citizenry, stronger environmental regulations are unlikely. But an informed public is unlikely without bold and prominent environmental coverage in mainstream news.

Still, Howard sees a role for crowdfunding. He hopes it can strengthen reporting by paying for research that will lead to stories in mainstream publications. That’s the only way he thinks crowdfunded journalism will reach the masses. “I don’t think it will radically change anything else,” he says. “It will just strengthen these stories so that they are so good they can’t be denied.”

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that a September 30, 1981 article in The Globe and Mail stated Canada’s governments were petitioning the U.S. to lower its carbon emissions. The campaign was to petitioning to stop the production of acid rain. The Review regrets the error.

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

At 5 a.m. yesterday, the screen went dark for Sun News Network.

There was not one on-air announcement before the Sun TV logo appeared on the screen, eventually being replaced with notices from distributors that the channel has ceased operation.

News of the closure leaked online before the formal letter was sent to the 150 full-time employees and 50 contributors Friday. In the letter, Sun Media Corporation President Julie Tremblay insisted that “every possible effort was made…to generate the profits needed to operate a national news channel.”

Now, the future of these 200 employees is trending on social media, and not many comments are supportive.

“Sun News was not ‘centre right,’ or ‘provocative.’ It was histrionic garbage, with a dash of daily racism,” tweets journalist Denise Balkissoon. To pile on the shame, a Canadaland headline read, “Everyone at Sun News Deserved to be Fired.” In the article Omar Mouallem writes, “It doesn’t matter how many people lost their jobs or how many young and talented journalists Sun News Network took a chance on. Everyone who accepted a cheque from the network was complicit in spewing its hatred.”

Was Sun News a highly combative television network? Yes. Were its “fact-based” reports laden in opinion on contentious issues (like the home-grown extremism and misspending on Aboriginal reserves)? Yes. But is it fair to say that 200 hard working journalists deserved to lose their jobs on Friday? Absolutely not.

Quebecor launched Sun News network on April 18, 2011, and billed it as a patriotic alternative to existing Canadian TV news. But the network had a tumultuous run, quickly dubbed “Fox News North” by critics. The channel soon became known for its small audience and opinionated far-right personalities such as Ezra Levant, then host of The Source, and Brian Lilley, then host of Byline. The Ford brothers even had a brief cameo on the network with Ford Nation (the show reportedly lasted less than 24 hours because it took more than five hours to film one episode).

“These days, I don’t know what my numbers are,” admitted Levant in a January interview with Canadaland’s Jesse Brown. “You don’t know what your numbers are?” asked Brown, clearly taken aback. For a network that was known for its thin audience, shouldn’t there be a concern about numbers? But Levant insisted he didn’t watch his ratings. “I want to get more viewers,” said Levant. “But I also know that when you aren’t on 60 percent of cable channels, and when the ones you’re on, you’re on channel one million, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to compare yourself to channels that have mandatory carriage.”

“Mandatory carriage” status from The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) would have ensured that the network would be carried on all basic cable packages. In 2013, the Sun News Network vice-president Kory Teneycke attempted to persuade Canada’s broadcast regulator, arguing that anything less would be a “death sentence” for the network. CBC reported that at the time of the application, data showed that the network was available to 5.1 million households, but only attracting an average of 8,000 viewers on any given day. The request was denied. But later that year, the CRTC gave the network some relief, introducing new rules that force television distributors to carry all five national news channels, including Sun News, bundled in a package of discretionary channels.

Another blow to the network came in late 2014 when Postmedia bought the English language Sun Media newspapers and digital news sites from Quebecor for $316 million, but left the television arm out of the deal. In recent months, Quebecor tried to broker a sale of the station to ZoomerMedia Ltd., led by TV veteran Moses Znaimer, but the talks reportedly failed.

Dwindling audience numbers and financial troubles are partly to blame for the Sun News Network demise. But the bigger question is, did the far right views expressed on the show and the controversial on-air personalities play a role in the unpopularity factor? Well, in April 2014 reporter and commentator, Faith Goldy, demanded Liberal leader Justin Trudeau be excommunicated from the Catholic church for his “extremist” views on abortion. Gender-inclusive school washrooms was another topic in which Goldy and then-host Michael Coren’s uneducated opinion on transgendered people really shine through. “It’s not that I lack sympathy, I’ve interviewed people who think that they are in another gender’s body; invariably I think that they need a lot of psychiatric help,” Coren says, while quickly adding the words love, sympathy and understanding, of course. The most recent example of prejudice is from February of this year, when Brian Lilley demanded an apology from Muslim leaders because they themselves wanted an apology from Stephen Harper. The hosts were biased, and as a result, the content came across as racist, homophobic and elitist.

But I can also argue, that today, the reason is not important. Or at least not as important as this question: What will happen to the journalists who are now out of work? To discredit the work of any journalist is to say that you are somehow better than they are. In the face of increased cutbacks and buyouts across the industry, who is to say that any of us are safe?

National Post journalist Matt Gurney added some sense into the tweet storm taking place on the evening of February 12: “The people who’ll be most hurt are young journalists trying to get some experience working as producers and camera ops, etc. Remember them.” He adds that the reason many critics are gloating is because they dislike the high profile, on-air personalities. But, the sad truth is: Ezra Levant will likely find another job, but the dozens of others employees may not.

 

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By Amanda Panacci

It began with an aerial shot of a wheat field. The September 24 lead story on CBC’s The National recounted the horrific murder of three Aboriginal boys near Pefferlaw, Ontario, more than five decades ago. But the brief, beautiful opening visual was noteworthy because it was the first shot aired from CBC’s pilot drone journalism project. Manager of technical services Carl Swanston and resource producer David Kovacs have navigated through a lot of bureaucracy to get to this point. They chalk the drone’s premiere up to progress, knowing the device will soon offer much more.

Swanston’s excitement about drones is striking as he launches into the story of the Costa Concordia. The Italian cruise ship struck a reef off the island of Giglio in January 2012 and capsized, killing 32 people. When CBC’s the fifth estate investigated, the reporters relied on video footage from passenger smartphones. “Had we had a drone, could you imagine going into that harbour?” Swanston asks Kovacs. They would launch the drone from the shore and hover it over the ship to give viewers a look at the devastation inside. “It would’ve changed that show completely.”

Designed for military operations, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) also work for anything from mundane tasks—delivering pizza or dry cleaning, for example—to commercial surveillance of farmland. Journalists around the world are reimagining the limits of storytelling by using drones as a visual tool. The machines cover protests without compromising the safety of reporters and fly at low levels and into tight spaces that helicopters cannot reach. But drone journalism pits new technology against the public’s fear of being watched. The worry is that journalists will use drones to search out stories and compromise the privacy and safety of citizens.

Classified as aircrafts, drones fall under Transport Canada regulations and require a Special Flight Operating Certificate (SFOC) for commercial operations, with some new exemptions added recently. Transport Canada, which issued 945 certificates in 2013, has seen a spike in SFOC applications. With the numbers steadily rising, Matt Schroyer, a journalist in Oklahoma and founder of the Professional Society of Drone Journalists, cites safety as an immediate concern. The technology is still developing, so there is always the possibility that a drone could lose control, drop out of the sky and smack a civilian in the head. When it comes to using drones for reporting, Schroyer says, an operator should be an experienced commercial pilot, or at the very least, possess technical knowledge of the device.

As of November 26, an exception has been made permitting commercial entities—including news organizations such as CBC—to forego the detailed SFOC application for drones weighing two kilograms or less. Since the certificate takes a minimum of 20 working days to process, flying a two-kilogram drone, such as the DJI Phantom 2 Vision, may seem like a journalist’s best option. But opinion remains divided on whether the regulations will offer much help for reporters covering breaking news. Ian Hannah, owner of the aerial photography business Avrobotics, says journalists would still need to be at least 9.26 kilometres away from an airport, creating problems for news organizations in urban settings. He adds that it’s a good sign that Transport Canada is slowly making changes to its regulations, but it may not be enough to be worth journalists’ extra time and effort.

Regulations are changing, in part, because of a demand for commercial operation. Preparing for a time when drones are commonplace, Jeff Ducharme, a photojournalism instructor at Newfoundland and Labrador’s College of the North Atlantic, has created a drone code of conduct for student journalists to follow. He incorporated drones into his course to give his students hands-on training, while also teaching them the importance of not turning the news into a video game. His code covers 21 points of ethics, law and operation. He stresses number four, which states that under no circumstances should they use a drone to search for stories. “Our biggest responsibility with this technology is to prove that we can operate it in a respectable, ethical and lawful manner,” he says. He created his code in June, but to his knowledge, no news organizations have adopted it yet.

In a survey this year, the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University found that only 12 percent of the public supported reporters using UAVs. Journalists are no strangers to breaking the law or crossing ethical boundaries, especially when it works to combat the competition. Ethicist Klaus Pohle says that news organizations should have a code of ethics that deal specifically with the technology. As a journalism professor at Carleton University, he watches the competitive nature of the business closely: If CBC uses drones, then CTV will most likely follow suit. “Media organizations are going to use whatever method is available to get the better story.”

And if news outlets don’t, citizen journalists will. Hobbyists, a term Transport Canada uses to identify anyone who doesn’t profit from using a UAV, can do things with drones that journalists can’t because there are no regulations on hobbyists here—only safety guidelines. During the Hong Kong protests in October, a citizen hovered a drone at high altitudes to capture the thousands of youth crowding the streets during the Umbrella Movement—and reading about the number of people protesting is not the same as seeing the crowd take over the streets.

After illustrating the power of using a drone at the Hong Kong protests, Swanston recounts when the film crew for the fifth estate used a drone to zoom up on the barred windows of a garment factory in Bangladesh to report on its poor structure and unethical working conditions. Drones can deliver one continuous shot, one that goes against the standard quick cuts of broadcast news: a “big picture” view so powerful, no words are necessary. “I doubt that drones will create news,” Swanston says. He doesn’t want to overuse the device; he just wants to be able to use it for stories that would benefit from the in-depth visuals. The drone enthusiasts may not be there yet, but they aren’t giving up until the flying video camera becomes as mainstream as the smartphone.

Ricochet is the latest attempt to unite crowdfunding and journalism in Canada.

On October 2, Ricochet launched as an independent, interactive, investigative and not-for-profit online news outlet with a promise to embrace Canadian identity by producing bilingual content. Their campaign video was posted on Indiegogo on May 20 and managed to raise an impressive $82, 945 from 1,548 funders within one month. The ambitious video could be the reason for their crowdfunding success. In it, Ricochet cofounders and contributors label mainstream news as sensationalistic and conformist. They offer their utopian journalistic model as a replacement, while asking for money to produce it.

So far, Ricochet is living up to its promises. They advertised accessibility and delivered a simple web design that adapts to all devices. They promised a diverse range of topics and voices and delivered with in-depth stories that range from “Canada’s education apartheid” to “Female DJs tackle gender bias.” Readers can easily switch between English and French versions of the site and the content changes depend on what language they’re reading in. For example, on October 6, the English feature story focused on the environment, while the French homepage featured politics with focus on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement.

Ricochet was born out of the founders’ frustrations with how English news organizations covered the Quebec student strike and protests in 2012. In an interview with CBC, cofounder and editor Ethan Cox calls the current state of mainstream news a “cannibalistic system” dependent on unpaid or underpaid journalists. Ironically, Cox and 10 other Ricochet editors will not be paid. Divided between Ricochet’s Vancouver and Montreal offices, the editors will be volunteering their time and paying the bills with various communications jobs. All funding will go towards web development and paying their writers. Their tentative plan is to pay $100 for standard pieces, and anywhere from $500 to $1,000 for investigative pieces. It’s a noble model, but one that may be unrealistic. If Ricochet gains in popularity, it could be a race to whether the funding or patience of the volunteer editors will run out faster.

With a paid membership, they promise readers the chance to pitch their own story ideas (the application won’t available until November) and the ability to embed videos and photos into the comment section—just in case a web troll would rather flip the bird instead of write out their hateful ramble. They also vaguely tempt readers into membership with “exclusive offers,” without giving any idea of what they are.

Why would a reader pay $5 a month when articles are free to non-subscribers? And why would someone donate $300 for a lifetime subscription with no guarantee that Ricochet will still be producing content by the end of year? A belief in the vision is one thing, but consistently opening up wallets is another.

Incentives like a mention on “The Wall” or a free T-shirt may not be enough for those who are happy getting their daily news from any other free outlet. Buyouts and budget cuts don’t affect those who only have time to briefly scan the headlines while gulping down their morning coffee. Ricochet may only appeal to Canadians who regularly read investigative journalism and enjoy pieces of analysis.

I would like to say that Ricochet has the potential to compete with powerhouses like CBC and Radio-Canada. But realistically, their model doesn’t seem sustainable.