Pacinthe Mattar is in a story meeting when the news drops: on February 11, 2011, after 18 days of civilian protests in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak is resigning. The meeting dissolves, and the As It Happens producer runs to her desk to monitor social media and watch Arabic-language news channels. While covering the Egyptian Revolution for the CBC Radio show, she’d been rushing to the TV every morning, bracing herself for the worst possible headline. As her cousins, aunts and uncles protested in the country where she was born, she heard rumours of military plans to scare protestors away by lighting streets on fire.

After the morning’s chaos, Mattar is enveloped by the dim lighting, wood floors and intimate quiet of the control room. She had set up an interview with Tarek Zohny, a young Egyptian-Canadian professional who went to Cairo to join the protests. She calls him from the control room and transfers him to the show’s host Carol Off. Mattar watches Off through a big glass pane. The sound quality is spotty, and Zohny yells himself hoarse over the jubilation in the background. People cheer and clap, and he describes the waving flags and scarves. From thousands of kilometres away, Mattar hears car horns honking. She starts crying. In a country where people honk in anger, happiness and hurry, the sound is now a distinctly Egyptian joy. As the interview continues, her own joy, national pride and disbelief join the pressures of being new to the show and conveying the story’s magnitude to a Canadian audience.

Now a producer for The Current, Mattar went into journalism to give voice to under-represented perspectives. Even on a team that does have other journalists of colour, she has experience and expertise that her colleagues don’t. She can connect her communities with the newsroom. She provides translation between Arabic and English or draws upon her network of experts, writers and activists for interviews. Other times, her own perspective illuminates a story’s nuances.

Being the rare person of colour in a newsroom can mean the honour of bridging the distance between colleagues and untold—or poorly told—stories. But the longer the responsibility of representing diversity weighs on a few, the longer newsrooms deprive Canadians of richer journalism.

In the early 1990s, John Miller was riding a Toronto streetcar to Ryerson University, where he taught journalism. He looked out the window and saw the diversity of the downtown core. “My God,” he thought. “The city has changed.” Before he was a professor, Miller was deputy managing editor of the Toronto Star. He barely saw the actual city he covered, one of the most diverse in Canada, because he worked in an office during the day and drove home in the evening. “I was as guilty when I was at the newspaper of being blind to this as they are,” he now says of editors who are reluctant to address diversity in their newsrooms.

That streetcar moment sparked his curiosity; curiosity sparked research. After his 1994 study on newsroom diversity for the Canadian Daily Newspaper Association (CDNA), he recommended the organization conduct an annual investigation like the American Society of News Editors’s Newsroom Employment Census. Miller doesn’t recall getting any reaction from publishers. He conducted a similar study in 2004—this time, independently. The survey of newspaper editors across the country revealed visible minorities accounted for only 4.1 percent of staff in papers with circulations over 100,000. (The 2006 census found non-white Canadian residents constitute around 16 percent of the population— about 40 percent in Vancouver or Toronto.) Worse, the commitment to diverse hiring had actually decreased from the 1994 results. A few returned the survey empty; one scribbled across the page, “I find these questions insulting.” Some explained they had bigger concerns than diversity, including layoffs in their newsrooms. Again, Miller recommended an annual investigation, and, again, he doesn’t remember receiving a response. “Well, I guess it’s hopeless,” he thought. Then he shook his head. “No, goddamnit, you’re an educator!” He launched a course at Ryerson on cross-cultural reporting, which was reduced to one lesson within a general critical issues course in the early 2000s.

To date, Miller’s 2004 study, published in 2006, is the most thorough on the makeup of the newspaper industry. Even if someone were willing to update the statistics, it could be difficult, since CanWest refused to participate in both studies, and Postmedia, which bought CanWest’s publishing arm, now owns 44 Canadian daily newspapers. Broadcasters are federally regulated under the Broadcasting Act and other policies. They must submit an annual cultural diversity report to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission or risk losing their licence. Although broadcasters don’t have to report specific numbers, CBC’s 2015 to 2018 Inclusion and Diversity Plan claims visible minorities composed 8.3 percent of its permanent positions in 2014. However, that includes administrators and other non-journalists

Many news outlets have made public commitments to diversity, devoting a few sentences in their policies to reflecting their communities or “looking like” their readers. They also state that they’re equal opportunity employers welcoming a diverse applicant pool. Miller thinks newspapers should have acted 15 or 20 years ago. “Today, I don’t know. I just don’t think anybody has an appetite for it,” he says. “But it’s still going to be the issue.”

During an interview, actress Meg Tilly tells Tony Wong, the Star’s television reporter, about taking her son to China to celebrate his high school graduation.

“Are you Chinese?” Tilly asks. Yes, he replies.

“Well, my name is Chan!” Margaret Chan, to be specific.

And so, Wong had found an unexpected angle for his 2012 article about the new series Bomb Girls: Chan’s mother had told her to hide the Chinese half of her heritage, afraid other parents wouldn’t let their kids play with her. Instead of a standard TV series launch story, Wong wrote a feature examining questions of identity in Tilly’s life and in the show. “That might not have come out in another interview, in another circumstance,” he says. Wong has also penned pieces on mooncakes, camping for the first time as a Chinese man and how Star Trek: Voyager’s Harry Kim had yet to ever get the girl. “I don’t think we have to make excuses for writing about our own condition,” he says. “It illuminates a little more of the human condition about diversity and race.”

To Karen Ho, who recently left a position as a business and labour reporter at Northern News Services in the Northwest Territories to freelance full-time in Toronto, being a woman of colour in journalism is like wearing a different set of goggles. “That comes with advantages and disadvantages,” she says, “but they’re goggles I can never really take off.”

The goggles were at work the day Mattar pitched a story about the Starbucks “Race Together” campaign, the coffee giant’s attempt to start a dialogue about race. Some of her colleagues at The Current also pitched it, but while they praised the initiative, her angle was critical. A lively debate ensued. Mattar pointed out that “race relations” wasn’t a new conversation: it’s been her reality since childhood. The show ended up hosting a panel that included two journalists of colour.

Mattar loves providing her own perspective, but she is cautious about appearing as an expert voice. Some colleagues have assumed her knowledge spans Central Asia and the entire Middle East. She once received a phone call from within the CBC building asking whether she knew how to “call Afghanistan.” Another time, someone asked her to secure an interview with Mohamed Morsi, as though contacting an embattled Egyptian president was as easy as calling a cousin. At times, she feels responsible for catching the things her newsroom doesn’t cover properly or misses entirely.

Although often related, a journalist of colour’s ethnicity is not inherently her expertise. Jan Wong was born in Montreal and didn’t grow up speaking Chinese at home. Only later did she get a degree in Asian studies and live in China for 10 years as a student and foreign correspondent. That helped when, at The Globe and Mail, she covered the 2003 kidnapping of Cecilia Zhang, a nine-year-old Toronto murder victim. Wong’s familiarity with the Chinese language and diaspora gave her a way into the Zhang family’s circles. “That’s not because of my skin colour or the shape of my eyes,” she says, “but because I have expertise in the area.” That distinction guides Star assignment editor Scott Colby’s approach. He’s seen journalists of colour start off pitching a lot of ideas from their communities and then, over time, pitch fewer and fewer, afraid of pigeonholing themselves. Instead, he finds it’s best to assign a reporter to a story only when she speaks the language or has other special access. Otherwise, he gives stories based on skill or, on rare occasions, whoever happens to walk through the newsroom door first.

Assigning even the best journalist to a story doesn’t always make it worth telling. When diversity pieces are little more than annual fluff about holidays or culturally tied occasions like Diwali or the Lunar New Year, it can do more harm than good. “Every year, we think our readers have some collective amnesia and need to be reminded,” says Asmaa Malik, former deputy managing editor at Montreal Gazette and now a Ryerson journalism professor. “So the question is: who is that piece for? It’s obviously not for the people who celebrate it year in and year out.”

Diversity reporting for diversity’s sake tends to create a mentality of “us versus them,” says Kenny Yum, managing editor of The Huffington Post Canada. And that distances people of colour by portraying them as a separate brand of citizen, their behaviour under observation. These stories end up being about, rather than for, people of colour and their communities. In 2013, the Year of the Snake, Toronto’s CityNews aired “Kicking off the Lunar New Year at the Dragon Ball,” about a fundraising party for a non-profit geriatric care centre. The opening visuals: women dancing in traditional Chinese dress. The rest of the story focused more on the event’s food—and reporter Sangita Patel wearing a large, live snake—than on the event’s cause.

Journalism that reduces a complex culture to a single holiday or trait alienates large chunks of potential readership and viewership. It also sells short how much journalists of colour can improve a news outlet’s reporting. Global Calgary anchor Stefan Keyes has read too many news releases describing crime suspects as having a Jamaican accent. Born to Jamaican parents, he knew how challenging it could be for someone not from the Caribbean to accurately differentiate between the region’s accents. The suspect could be from Jamaica, Trinidad or Barbados, but police, victims and witnesses often make assumptions, and then newsrooms report them as fact. One day, Keyes brought this up. His colleagues listened, omitted that description and avoided reporting a potential inaccuracy that could continue damaging a community’s reputation.

A journalist’s personal connection to her racial identity can also lead to seeing a story’s worth and reporting it with proper depth. Mai Duong’s international search for a bone marrow donor caught Global Montreal web producer Rachel Lau’s attention in 2014. Duong had leukemia and needed a donor, fast. The cells had to be a near-exact ethnic match, but only one percent of the international bone marrow donor bank was Asian. And within that category, Duong needed to find someone to match her part-Vietnamese, part-Filipino background. Of Chinese descent herself, Lau realized she could one day be in Duong’s position. Her first report on the story, “Vietnamese community rallies to help Montreal mother find bone marrow donor,” portrays Duong gently and presents her search for an exact match as the main conflict. Lau did follow-up pieces over the next year as Duong found an umbilical cord blood donor and returned home to her family. In her most recent video report, Lau interviewed Duong on a bench in a sunny park following the treatment. Done well, diverse journalism brings out unseen layers in the Canadian narrative. And a compelling story, with thoughtful reporting and the right sources, makes for good journalism.

After his 1994 diversity study, Miller conducted focus groups to research how people of colour perceived newspapers in 1995. Many felt invisible in print because they were portrayed with prejudice. The white subjects, on the other hand, described newspapers as objective, fair and balanced. Feeling alienated from major news organizations, people of colour may turn to alternative sources such as the ethnic media. They address untold stories, but they can ghettoize the coverage of under-represented communities and lack both the resources and influence of major news organizations. In an effort to serve Chinese-speaking readers, the Vancouver Sun launched taiyangbao.ca in 2011, a news site with original reporting in their language. While taiyangbao.ca grew in popularity, Chuck Chiang, Asia Pacific columnist for the Sun, says many readers wanted to be part of the mainstream English-language voice. They wanted to see themselves represented in a paper of record, not just a Chinese-only website.

And people of colour do respond when they see themselves reflected in journalism. “Jennifer Pan’s Revenge,” Ho’s Toronto Life story about a woman who arranged the murder of her parents, is available in English and simplified Chinese online—the magazine’s first bilingual article. Not only does Ho tell Pan’s story, she writes about her own childhood: Ho also experienced high expectations from an immigrant parent. At over a million total page views by the end of 2015, the piece became Toronto Life’s most popular long-form feature of the year. The number of views on the Chinese version alone would qualify it as a hit for the publication. The story attracted readers as far away as Hong Kong and Indonesia.

Diverse coverage, enriched by a diverse newsroom, could be vital to maintaining and growing readership. Stories reaching out to neglected audiences draw them in to click, turn on the TV, read another sentence and come back for more. “Diversity is good for news organizations’ bottom line,” says Malik. “If that’s the only language they understand, then shouldn’t that be enough of a sell?” Ron Waksman, Global News’s director of online news and editorial standards and practices, sees diversity as good business and good journalism. “If you represent people’s common interests and agendas and experience, they can relate to you better,” he says. “If they relate to you, they will consume more news. If they consume more news, they’ll consume more of your brand.”

Unfortunately, cutbacks continue in the industry, and many newsrooms operate under union conditions: last hired, first fired. As they’re often the youngest and newest hires, the most diverse slice of the staff tends to bear the brunt of layoffs. Meanwhile, top tiers of editors remain predominantly white. Since the Star renovated its office a few years ago, the paper’s daily story meetings take place in the open, in the centre of the newsroom. Twice a day, reporter Ashante Infantry witnesses what she rarely saw in full array when bosses met behind boardroom doors: approximately 15 people around the table, mostly white.

She doesn’t think this means current management should be fired. But she worries that news outlets aren’t actively grooming journalists of colour for these leadership positions. Infantry joined the Star when reporter Philip Mascoll recommended her for an interview in response to the paper selecting an all-white group of summer students in 1995. As far as she’s aware, she’s one of only two Black full-time reporters the paper has hired in the last 20 years. The other was Morgan Campbell, who was interviewed on Infantry’s referral in 2003. Although both have remained at the Star because of their talent and skill, both needed a good word from another Black reporter to be considered for the job. “What concerns me more than how things look today,” says Infantry, “is how they’re going to look tomorrow—and there’s no fucking plan.”

A push toward diversity on television in the ’90s and early 2000s put many people of colour on camera. But behind the camera, little changed. Fennella Bruce recalls that she was the only producer of colour when she started at CityNews in 1994. For a long time, it was just her and four older white men. Intimidating, but not surprising.

Nor does Bruce, who’s now a news producer at CTV’s Canada AM, see many people of colour at Radio Television Digital News Association events attended by senior management types. With the power to decide editorial direction, hire, fire, promote and mentor, less diverse senior management teams can be quick to assume their viewers and readers are exactly like them. Lucinda Chodan, editor-in-chief of the Gazette, likens such management to a huge guinea pig in the stomach of a boa constrictor: “Our newsrooms will be much more diverse when the baby boomers have exited.”

Video by Eternity Martis and Anda Zeng

When Bruce was in journalism school, City’s Jojo Chintoh talked to her class about a crime series he was doing. He invited the students to watch it and call him with their thoughts. Bruce, the only Black person in the class, was also the only student who called. Chintoh invited her to shadow him, and he ultimately became one of her mentors. A former president of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists and part of the launch of Toronto’s all-news station CP24, Bruce thinks journalists of colour have many obstacles to overcome and should, like any journalist, make their own opportunities. Still, the mentorship of established journalists was crucial to her career development, and she now extends that helping hand to the next generation. One of her former students at Centennial College is now a writer on her news desk. A former intern is an assignment editor at City.

Mentorship can help ensure Canadian journalism’s diverse future, especially since formal organizations supporting journalists of colour have been in decline since the early 2000s. Some, like the Strategic Alliance of Broadcasters for Aboriginal Reflection, no longer receive the same funding from networks. Ho, a member of the Asian American Journalists Association, says her fellow journalists of colour would rather invest their limited time and energy into other groups, such as those dedicated to furthering their skills and networks in digital journalism.

Mentors made a difference for Elysia Bryan-Baynes. She describes herself as being quieter than her peers, belying her deep-seated ambition and determination. Some people perceived that quietness as weakness. Not that being more “bombastically aggressive” would have benefited her either. The Global Montreal anchor lowers her voice and leans in slightly, lest she be misunderstood: “As a Black woman or as a minority woman, you have to be very careful about the kind of possibly aggressive ambition that might be okay for somebody else.” Her mentors helped her develop confidence in her quiet strength and taught her to push back in a way that would subvert the “angry Black woman” trope.

The diversity among her group of mentors is its strength; it includes members of Black communities, a few Global Montreal colleagues and an introverted, white male print journalist. Each mentor provides different elements of support. The tight-knit nature of her newsroom also helps. Bryan-Baynes knows many fellow journalists of colour who have been denied opportunities because of their perceived weaknesses, while other candidates—with their own shortcomings—landed a job. The bosses simply chose to invest in their potential. With the help of her mentors, Bryan-Baynes has lived what she calls a Goldilocks situation for a person of colour: an ideal alignment of conditions, just right.

Building diversity is a collaborative effort. It begins with a commitment from management and develops into common newsroom practice. It’s recruiting, grooming and preparing for the payoff. Sometimes, big payoffs arrive in small moments.

Mattar cries after watching Off weave gold out of her interview with Zohny. As much as Mattar is filled with joy and pride, watching the interview is heartbreaking. People like Zohny dropped everything to be in Egypt and protest, and she regrets that she couldn’t do the same.

“Tarek, I’ll let you get back to the party,” Off says. The call transfers back to Mattar in the control room. She and Zohny take a moment to finally congratulate each other. “We did it.”

Mattar, heart heavy from the weight of the day’s events, leaves the studio with Off. They face each other in the small hallway. “I know you’d much rather be in Egypt,” Off says. “But we’re so glad you’re here with us.” She reaches out and gives Mattar a big hug. And, without a doubt, Mattar knows she’s in the right place at the right time.

As winter turned to spring in 2014, journalists at The Hamilton Spectator worked to the sound of contractors drilling through concrete floors and reconfiguring the wiring. The “banana cream” yellow on the walls soon became grey and indigo blue, the Spec’s corporate colours. The paper moved the curved desks to create pods of four and six. The city and web desks took over the middle of the newsroom, with the general assignment, business and entertainment desks on one side and production on the other. And, glowing at the centre of it all, a Chartbeat monitor: a 40-inch television screen turned sideways to display the paper’s online analytics.

The new floor plan fosters creative conversations and connectivity. No matter which direction reporters walk through the newsroom, the digital team is within reach. The redesign—the paper’s most drastic in 20 years—emphasizes digital journalism. “It might have been at the centre in our hearts and minds,” says managing editor Jim Poling, “but it wasn’t at the centre physically—now, it’s physically there.”

As the industry changed over the last decade, many papers strategically rethought their newsroom space. The Toronto Sun and The Globe and Mail are both moving to new office buildings this year: the Sun to the new Postmedia building, and the Globe to a new building. Even papers that haven’t moved to new buildings, including the Spec and the Winnipeg Free Press, have undergone redesign. These Canadian newspapers are harnessing the newsroom’s potential as a storytelling tool for efficient, digital-minded journalism—an industry’s eagerness to adapt and improve, physically manifested.

Back in 1989, the Sun newsroom was a mess of paper piles and desks crammed together. Typewriters were stacked on top of filing cabinets in the wake of computerization. James Wallace sat beside Sun legend Bob MacDonald, whose ashtray was always overflowing with cigarette butts amidst mountains of paper. These newsrooms had a more colourful personality, says Wallace, now the vice president, editorial for Sun newspapers. But that smoky, papery geography has become a thing of the past.

The new landscape is an open sea of screens with a focus on how information flows from department to department. As the Free Press’s publisher, Bob Cox will sometimes pass a story idea on to an editor, who will pass it on to the city editors, and on it goes until it reaches the reporter. By the end of that line of transmission, the idea has sometimes changed considerably. This problem can be circumvented in part by the physical path these ideas take. At the Free Press, the editors, including copy editors, work in the centre of the newsroom, surrounded by the other departments in pods or clusters. Content is centrally gathered, stories are edited and then it flows out into web or print platforms.

At the Sun, the once-separate sports and general news reporters are now about 10 feet away from each other. The Toronto and Ottawa papers’ production staff are in the same area, cheek-by-jowl. To keep up with journalism going digital, the Sun also built a photo studio with broadcast lighting to do video hits and some sports coverage. Similar to the Spec’s current newsroom, the new Sun office will put the web team close to the national and local news desks, and will have a Chartbeat monitor.

Annick Mitchell, an interior design professor at Ryerson University, says a newsroom should promote and support journalistic creativity. In her experience, people are not creative in isolation or solitude, which makes collaborative spaces a crucial consideration for newspapers. The Spectator chose to put the web team in the middle to secure its place as a priority in the story process. Poling’s office is right across from the digital desks, where he can hear conversations and also jump in with his thoughts. That kind of openness, which invites collaboration, extends throughout the newsroom. Poling, who finds that some of the best ideas and stories arise from informal conversations at the heart of the newsroom, compares it to a natural news amphitheatre: “Like a big, digital whiteboard in the middle of the room.” Even the Spec’s formal news meetings take place in the open, and everyone is invited to gather around the glassy black table or listen in from his or her desk.

But Canadian papers haven’t had much structural redesign of their office spaces in comparison to papers such as The Guardian and The New York Times. Cox says that’s a result of a lack of investment. The Times had a brand new building designed from the ground up in 2007. The focus at Canadian papers has mostly been on moving furniture and people around—nothing structural. The interest Cox saw in newsroom redesign from four or five years ago has somewhat fizzled out. “Talking about newsroom design is a little bit of a luxurious conversation,” says Poling. Canadian papers bear the marks of media consolidation and the industry’s shaky financial situation. Before selling its building in 2010, the Sun had six storeys of office space. After the sale, it moved all operations to the second floor. Now, the paper is preparing for its move this year to the Postmedia building, which also houses the National Post. The Free Press’s 20,000 square foot newsroom has empty space at the back—wounds from editorial cutbacks.

No matter where a newsroom is or what it looks like, big stories still send adrenaline rushing through the space. The culture of chasing and telling stories, Wallace says, remains unchanged by the moment’s trends. Beyond a web desk or a hub-and-spoke office design model, that is the newsroom’s true, unchanging core.

A previous version of this story stated The Globe and Mail will be moving into the complex that the Sun currently occupies. The Globe and Mail will not be moving into the same building that the Sun currently occupies, but one nearby.

In last week’s installment of Report on Business’s weekly profile series, The Lunch, one line brings a whole new side to the story. Appearing right before the opening scene, translated to English: “Click here to read the full article in Chinese.”

The piece, written by The Globe and Mail’s Asia-Pacific correspondent Iain Marlow, profiles Mark Rowswell, a Canadian famous in China for his comedic performance career. For over 20 years, the Chinese have watched Rowswell on TV under the name Dashan, which means “Big Mountain.” Marlow also writes about Rowswell’s most recent career move in the economic superpower: stand-up comedy. The Globe published the story in both English and simplified Chinese online.

“I was interested in getting the piece in front of people who might not be a natural Globe audience,” Marlow says, “either because they were in China and never heard of the Globe, or because they were people in Canada who would feel more comfortable reading the piece in Chinese.” Unlike his stories about real estate in Shanghai or emerging market economics—which would also be covered in Chinese language papers—Marlow figured the Dashan story would be of interest to a wider audience. To some, it would be a first introduction to a fellow Canadian of foreign fame. To those who’ve watched Dashan for years, the story is a chance to learn more about the performer’s past. Marlow himself heard about Dashan on and off over last 10 years during his travels to China, but only found out in the interview for this piece that he was a student at Beijing University at the time of Tiananmen.

When Marlow brought up the idea of translating the story to his editors, they treated it as an experiment: let’s try it, see what happens and see where it might lead. Marlow asked a former colleague in Beijing to translate it. While the English version explains certain terms to the readers, like the meaning of the name Dashan or what “cross-talk” is, the Chinese version doesn’t have to—a simple, but significant show of mindfulness.

For some, like the parents of one of Marlow’s friends from Shanghai now living in Toronto, it may have been the first Globe article they’ve ever read. The piece briefly linked their Chinese and Canadian experiences. “Even just hearing that was really encouraging and really warming,” says Marlow, who emailed them the article. “The guy himself is a bridge between two different cultures, and I think that was what we were trying to do with the piece in general.” He also finds it signals to a whole group of readers that the Globe is interested in them and their stories.

The Globe has done translated stories in the past. Last July, Stephanie Nolen’s multimedia project on racism in Brazil was also released in Portuguese online. While Marlow is cautious to predict the future implications of his bilingual experiment, it has already yielded an informative, unexpected result for him: no one term for stand-up exists in Chinese. The article and its accompanying tweets weren’t translated by the same people, and each used a different term for the comedic style. For now, it’s another link between cultures still ironing itself out.

For his 23rd birthday, Peter Lozinski received a newspaper. The Cold Lake Sun, to be exact. To be even more specific, the responsibility of single-handedly producing a weekly paper that serves a population of 15,000. For 10 brutal weeks this year, Lozinski was running a one-man newsroom.

Lozinski was hired as a reporter for the Cold Lake Sun last September, just a few months out of journalism school.  The newsroom was a two-person operation at that time: him and his editor. But when his birthday rolled around in February, the editor had left the paper for a job outside of journalism, and Lozinski’s supervisors had to look for a replacement. Lozinski was offered the position, but he turned it down at first. He didn’t feel ready. That was his first day running the paper alone as a reporter.

“I’m just maintaining it until the next person,” Lozinski would say. He became the next person four weeks later, when he accepted the editorial position—this time without hesitation.

What does it take for one man to produce a weekly paper that averages 44 pages while running the paper’s website and social media accounts? To begin with, a fridge fully stocked with frozen dinners. He ate every meal at the office. He worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week—sometimes up to 15 hours a day, around the weekend. One Sunday, with the paper due the next morning, he slept on the floor of his office because he wasn’t sure he could drive home safely. He attended council meetings, community events, ribbon-cuttings; he learned how to use a DSLR camera and InDesign. He became familiar with the community in the northeastern Alberta oil town, which is also home to the busiest fighter base in Canada and large First Nations and Métis populations.

“The loneliness definitely crept in a bit,” he says. “But I didn’t really have time to worry about that. It was all work, all the time. I had no work-life balance. There was no life—it was work.” He did, however, take five days off near the end of March, during which a few journalists and editors from other Sun Media papers in Alberta helped put the week’s issue together. The other Cold Lake Sun staff were also a source of support for him. If he couldn’t make an event, the communications staff helped him get photos or phone calls with the right people. The Cold Lake community was understanding; he’s only one man, after all. In mid-April, as Lozinski was really beginning to tire out, the paper finally hired a reporter, Celina Ip. The two-person balance was restored.

At 23 years old, Lozinski has worked longer as an editor than a reporter, covering First Nations stories, military issues, developments in the oil industry—beats he wouldn’t have gotten to do as a new reporter in a large daily.

Lozinski’s 24th birthday certainly has large shoes to fill.