My ears were buzzing from the latest news: two female protesters had interrupted the annual anti-abortion March for Life on Parliament Hill—topless. The senior producer at CBC News Network’s Power & Politics with Evan Solomon wanted me to get both women, who were part of the feminist group FEMEN, in the studio as soon as possible. I punched in the phone number and felt a brief jolt of surprise when the woman at the other end of the line answered, “Allo?”

November 25, 2008. Light rain drizzled over the city as Marie-Maude Denis walked along Amherst Street from CBC/Radio-Canada’s offices in southeast Montreal. She had a 10 a.m. meeting with a source at Pouding Café, a neighbourhood coffee shop. Her boss, Pierre Tourangeau, had suggested she talk to this contact, someone he relied on during the Gomery Commission’s investigation into the federal sponsorship scandal in 2005.

Denis was an ambitious television crime reporter, a go-getter with a strong work ethic that impressed her superiors at Radio-Canada. A few days before this meeting, the then-27-year-old had received a brown envelope from a confidential law enforcement source. The tip mapped out long-standing collusion linking construction entrepreneurs and union bosses to high-profile municipal and provincial politicians throughout Quebec, prompting her to meet with this new source at the café. The evidence focused primarily on Laval, a city north of Montreal.

At the time, Denis knew little about the Quebec construction industry, or the cast of characters her source was rambling on about at the coffee shop. But she learned a lot as he shared his intimate knowledge of the systemic corruption that had gripped much of Quebec for the previous decade. The people involved included Tony Accurso, one of the city’s most prominent construction entrepreneurs.

Back at her newsroom cubicle, Denis asked her colleague, Christian Latreille, for advice on how to handle the information. Latreille recommended she share it with Radio-Canada’s newly revamped investigative unit. He urged Denis to contact Monique Dumont, a senior researcher known for her interest in the Laval corruption dossier. Denis walked down to Radio-Canada’s current affairs department on the building’s ground level. She knocked on Dumont’s door and introduced herself. They walked over to a glass-enclosed conference room, where Denis watched as Dumont’s eyes widened; then she began running around the office, screaming, “I’ve got my smoking gun! I’ve got my smoking gun!”

 ***

Since Denis took that smoking gun to her colleagues at Enquête in 2008, Montreal reporters have successfully exposed deep-rooted corruption, in what has been hailed as a golden moment for Canadian journalism. By 2009, the investigations began to snowball and over the many years it took to reveal the whole stunning story, several Montreal journalists became involved—including Denis and Alain Gravel at Radio-Canada, André Noël and André Cédilot at La Presse, Kathleen Lévesque at Le Devoir, Linda Gyulai at The Gazette and Fabrice De Pierrebourg at RueFrontenac.com, the news site launched by locked-out Le Journal de Montréal employees in 2009. They were competitive, but they built on each other’s stories. Although many received defamation suits from people they were investigating, they persevered.

“We’ve been part of the solution regarding the fight against corruption and crime,” says Brian Myles, a reporter at Le Devoir and former vice-president of the Quebec Federation of Professional Journalists. He and his colleagues have every right to be proud: their exemplary, old-fashioned reporting and the astonishing results—cemented by the creation of the Charbonneau Commission in 2012—reaffirmed that investigative journalism can lead to change. “The real work, and the part that people don’t realize,” says Les Perreaux, a Quebec correspondent for The Globe and Mail, “is the story that comes the day after the big scoop.”

The journalists had their work cut out for them. Corruption is not new to Quebec politics and public works contracts. Since 1925, there have been eight inquiries, including the 1973 commission on organized crime and the 1974 Cliche Commission that revealed intimidation practices within construction unions.

In 1977, then-Premier René Lévesque enacted a new law prohibiting companies and unions from donating to political parties and limiting individual donations. Thirty years later, though, construction and engineering firms had found ways around the rules. A well-oiled underground system with arm’s-length connections to the Mafia was involved in rigging contracts for public works and providing illegal political financing.

By 2008, the public realized something was not right. The city’s infrastructure was in a dire state, while Quebec remained the highest-taxed province in the country, with Montrealers paying 30 percent more for their public works contracts than anywhere else in Canada. It soon became clear that many of those in power had been abusing the system for years. In their arrogance and complacency, they weren’t expecting a group of astute journalists and an informed public to put them to shame.

At Radio-Canada’s Enquête, Gravel, a middle-aged television journalist with stern features, teamed up with Denis. The two became local celebrities as their show generated unprecedented audience interest. From 2009 to 2011, they produced bombshell investigations into corruption, primarily focusing on the construction industry’s ties to organized crime. Their work paved the way for other journalists to contribute to the sensational story. The picture was coming into focus and the public was outraged, as long-standing suspicions were confirmed by the meticulous reporting.

At La Presse, Noël, a seasoned investigative reporter, revealed the details of the Faubourg Contrecoeur real estate deal between the City of Montreal and Frank Catania Construction & Associates. The housing and development department allegedly sold the land to construction entrepreneur Paolo Catania for well below the estimated $31-million market value. The secret deal had been orchestrated before the call for tendering on the project. Those accused of being involved included Frank Zampino, then-chair of the city’s executive committee; Bernard Trépanier, a Union Montreal party fundraiser; Martial Fillion, the director of housing and development; and Catania.

In 2012, Noël left La Presse to work for the Charbonneau Commission. (He declined to be interviewed for this article because it would be a conflict of interest.) For much of his career, he and Cédilot were the only investigative reporters at La Presse. Small-statured with a trim moustache, Cédilot mastered the organized crime beat. The two collaborated on the tell-all book Mafia Inc., first published in 2010, which explored the intricacies of Montreal’s Sicilian mob.

Meanwhile, at the independent daily Le Devoir, Lévesque, a reporter with piercing eyes and youthful energy, investigated engineering firms. She detailed their close ties to illegal political fundraising operations and alleged that bids for city contracts were rigged. Her diligent reporting over the years helped force the province’s auditor general to become involved, and he eventually proposed the creation of the public inquiry.

At The Gazette, Montreal’s only English-language daily, civic affairs reporter Linda Gyulai also contributed to the unfolding story. She’s the kind of journalist people don’t see coming even though she’s always three steps ahead of them, says her colleague Monique Muise, who covered the Charbonneau Commission for The Gazette. With two decades of municipal reporting experience, Gyulai’s analytical skills and expert knowledge of city hall helped her reveal a correlation between city contract allocations and political party donations.

Big news organizations weren’t the only ones working the story. The now-defunct website RueFrontenac.com also covered it. Rugged-looking French-born Fabrice De Pierrebourg broke a shocking story linking the construction industry to municipal party donations in the lead-up to the Montreal municipal elections in 2009.

Together, the reporting fuelled public discontent, leaving politicians no choice but to create the Charbonneau Commission to examine Quebec’s construction industry and its connections to organized crime. As Gravel says, “Sometimes you need a perfect storm in order for everything to explode.”

 ***

The timing was right for a big story at Radio-Canada. When Alain Saulnier became senior director of information in 2006, he had two goals: increase international coverage and produce more investigative reports. He helped kick-start the return of hard-hitting journalism in Quebec. Meanwhile, the network’s public affairs program Enjeux was going through an existential crisis. That same year, Jean Pelletier, Radio-Canada’s director of television information, came to Saulnier with an idea.

“Are you crazy!? You want us to produce a weekly investigative show?” exclaimed Gravel, then-host of Enjeux. “We are never going to be able to pull that off.” Although he had never been particularly fond of Enjeux’s soft human-interest stories, he remained uncertain about the feasibility of the idea and worried that sources would refuse to speak to them after they heard the premise of the new program.

Saulnier was immediately on board with the idea. His vision was to dismantle the traditional boundaries between the newsroom and current affairs. He wanted the six o’clock news to lead with breaking stories, while the weekly show Enquête would follow up with in-depth coverage. “I felt like we needed to prove that we were indispensible, and that the public could count on us for our professionalism and our thorough work ethic,” says Saulnier, now a journalism professor at the University of Montreal. “I knew it was a risk worth taking.”

Initially, Enquête struggled to produce investigations every week, but everything changed in late 2008. Soon after Denis’s scoop, Radio-Canada executives allocated time and resources that enabled the journalists to see their investigation to fruition. Denis created a makeshift desk in Gravel’s office, where she began pinning central figures and events onto a bulletin board. The duo chipped away at a list of possible sources, conducting numerous off-camera interviews. “This was a Cinderella story for me,” recalls Denis.

In conversations with sources, one name kept surfacing: Ken Pereira, director of the industrial mechanics branch of the Quebec Federation of Labour’s (FTQ) construction wing, the province’s largest union. Pereira noticed irregularities with executive director Jocelyn Dupuis’s expenses. It appeared that he and other union executives were indulging in first-class dinners at restaurants, receiving tickets to hockey games and more. Pereira had also discovered close ties between the FTQ and the Mafia.

In January 2009, Pereira arrived at Radio-Canada looking for Gravel. The whistleblower presented the Enquête team with a duffel bag full of Dupuis’s receipts. He produced hard evidence about the Mafia’s involvement with Quebec construction union officials and how they tampered with the Fonds de Solidarité, a multi-billion dollar pension fund in which half a million Quebeckers keep their life savings. “This is when I realized we had something solid here,” recalls Gravel. “This wasn’t bullshit.”

Enquête’s lawyers suggested the show package the expense scandal story and the report on the ties to the mob. On March 5, 2009, it aired its first episode on corruption. “What happened after that was very much like Watergate,” says Gravel. “We all understood that we would only be able to bring the big picture to light through smaller stories, piece by piece.” La Presse picked up on it the next day but added new details, proving that it had been working on the story as well. “As journalists, we don’t necessarily like being quoted or scooped by others,” says Gravel, “but in this case, it was a good thing.”

***

In the days following that first Enquête episode, Denis and Gravel searched for a new piece of the puzzle. It appeared that several high-profile public servants had taken all-expenses-paid holidays on The Touch, a yacht owned by construction magnate Tony Accurso. Through privileged information, they knew that Michel Arsenault, who was FTQ president and Dupuis’s boss, had vacationed on the boat. As a representative of the labour union, Arsenault shouldn’t have accepted this kind of gift.

“My boss told me we were going to do something we never do,” remembers Gravel. “We were going to sacrifice our scoop.” Pelletier instructed his team to scrum Arsenault, who happened to be in Quebec City at the time, and ask him straight out about the boat. To everyone’s surprise Arsenault confirmed everything. That evening, Céline Galipeau, host of Le Téléjournal, led the newscast with this latest scandal.

At the same time, Noël was investigating Accurso and his alleged ties to Montreal’s former executive-committee president Frank Zampino—the same Zampino involved in the Faubourg Contrecoeur scandal. He’d retired from municipal politics in July 2008 and was now working for the engineering firm Dessau-Soprin, which was part of the consortium that received Montreal’s largest contract for water meters. On March 13, 2009, La Presse’s headline shook things up yet again. La Presse’s judicial affairs columnist Yves Boisvert wrote “Copinage et Pantouflage” (“Cronyism and Revolving Doors”), exposing the friendships between civil servants and members of private enterprises. Boisvert summarized all of the suspicious behaviour that had emerged through other reporting. Buried at the end of the column, he made reference to Zampino vacationing on The Touch while the city was awarding the water meter contract—a contract Accurso’s construction firm won. “I felt like I needed to support the movement and follow up on my colleagues’ investigations,” explains Boisvert. “A column can accelerate a news story.”

Journalists had successfully uncovered ties between construction unions and the mob, as well as connections between municipal politicians and the construction industry. From then on, they continued to reveal information piece by piece. “In the industry,” laughs Gravel, “this is what we call a one-two-three punch.”

In the months that followed, this combination of competition and cooperation continued among the journalists. According to Gravel, Noël leaked information to him after La Presse hesitated to publish one of his stories, then went to his bosses to say that Gravel had scooped them—leverage to convince them to publish. When asked about it, Noël said, “I can’t confirm this.”

Meanwhile, at Radio-Canada, the journalists became a close-knit group as they enjoyed success after success. “I think that was our real strength at Enquête,” says Latreille, who worked with Denis and Gravel. “We lunched together, we had fun together—just like a hockey team.”

 ***

While the Montreal story was unfolding on TV and in the press, the journalists knew the problem was much larger in scope. The provincial transportation ministry was responsible for awarding public works contracts to engineering firms, which in turn put out a call for proposals to construction companies. Then the bidding would begin. At the time, the government was increasingly using private engineering firms instead of the Ministry of Transportation. This was also occurring at the municipal level. It appeared that engineering firms were communicating with the construction firms that were receiving the contract bids. This type of collusion is illegal, and Lévesque uncovered it early on. She also paid close attention to a similar trend: the engineering firms being invited to municipal political financing events were the same firms receiving city contracts. Her dedication and attention to detail resulted in several stories that revealed the larger corruption picture in Quebec.

But before that came part one of the water meter scandal. In 2007, Lévesque received a phone call from a source who had helped her in 1996, when she first wrote about water meter scandals. She remembers the conversation being brief, and her source telling her to look into the water meter contract—the city’s largest. Lévesque struggled to find out what had actually happened, but she was eventually able to put the pieces together. On December 13, 2007, under the headline “Conflict of Interests in Connection with a Contract for $355 million,” Lévesque revealed that BPR, the engineering firm the city had hired, was allegedly collaborating with engineering firm Dessau on several other projects. It was no coincidence that Dessau undertook the water meter contract. “Two years later, the scandal took on a new dimension and greater importance,” says Lévesque. “This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

 ***

By 2009, as The Gazette’s civic affairs reporter, Gyulai was investigating another angle to the water meter story. Since her time as a freelancer at the Montreal Mirror, a now-defunct weekly, she’d believed in old-school sleuthing in service of the public interest. “What I love about municipal reporting is that you ride this righteous horse waving your arm in the air.”

While Denis and Gravel reported on the construction industry and Lévesque investigated irregularities within engineering firms, Gyulai sifted through municipal archives. A source hinted that the eventual owners of the water meter system would be a private consortium called GÉNIeau, co-owned by Dessau and one of Accurso’s construction firms, Simard-Beaudry.

Gyulai discovered that the contract usually attached to the service file was missing. This piqued her interest. After all, the $355-million contract was the largest awarded in Montreal’s history. She was dumbfounded that city councillors didn’t have a copy of the contract to review before approving it. Through an access to information request, Gyulai received the documents from a 2007 council meeting. She discovered that the water meter contract passed in a group with other resolutions in 53 seconds without objections or debate.

“For people like Linda, it was really a lasting commitment that they were going to devote themselves, their talent and their energies, to these stories,” says Muise. The Gazette didn’t have the resources other news organizations had for these investigations, which is why it decided to focus its coverage on city hall.

Gyulai looked for patterns within the paperwork and then cross-referenced her data. After she received the tip on the water management contract, the newspaper granted her the summer of 2009 to advance her research. “You are on this track and you just keep following it. It’s about seeing a pattern and following it down whatever path,” she says. “You aren’t really driving the car. It’s kind of driving you.” In August of that year, Gyulai wrote a story with the headline, “City Deal Was Changed at the 11th Hour.”

Her extensive investigation revealed that changes to the contract removed the financial risk to the consortium. Not only would the city not own the water meters, but it would likely have to replace them 15 years down the line. Montreal Auditor General Jacques Bergeron then investigated the matter. “Everything he wrote and all of these findings supported everything I wrote that summer,” says Gyulai. On Bergeron’s recommendation, former mayor Gérald Tremblay announced the cancellation of the contract in September. “She is the reason we didn’t have a bogus $355-million water meter contract,” says Martin Patriquin, Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. Gyulai “saved us $355 million, and that alone is astonishing.”

As the only investigative reporter at Le Devoir, Lévesque couldn’t cover everything. After her research into the water meter scandal in 2007, she focused on the engineering firms. In 2009, she filed an access to information request with the City of Montreal after receiving a tip from an anonymous source. She filed another with the provincial ministry of transportation on the same issue of outsourcing contracts. What she discovered was just as astonishing as what she’d previously uncovered. Almost all of the city and province’s construction contracts were being outsourced to a small number of private firms. Whether in the public interest or not, it was certainly benefitting the small coterie of politicians, bureaucrats and construction executives who lined each other’s pockets with money they grabbed from the public purse. With every new revelation from the journalists, public outrage grew. Something had to be done.

Quebec’s Auditor General Renaud Lachance came to the same conclusion as Lévesque. He recommended the creation of an anti-corruption unit (UPAC) headed by Jacques Duchesneau, a former Montreal police chief. In September 2011, Duchesneau leaked his own report to the Enquête team, later recommending to a parliamentary commission that, in light of his findings, the government launch a public inquiry. He was fired a month later for the leak. In 2013, UPAC raids led to the arrests of Zampino, Catania, former Laval mayor Gilles Vaillancourt, interim Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum and many others. Several engineering firms, including Dessau, were also raided.

Lévesque says the engineering firms “are at the centre of it all. They are the professionals making the plans and the decisions at the start of any contract.” She investigated donations to political parties and the bid-rigging system within a core group of nine engineering firms in Montreal—“the fabulous nine,” as they came to be known. “The last thing you should do as a journalist is work alone in your corner,” says Lévesque. Looking back now, she understands that by building on each other’s work, they were able to move forward.

 ***

Denis and Gravel continued their research during the summer of 2009, while other journalists, including Fabrice De Pierrebourg, sought to contribute to the ever-growing story. After the Journal de Montréal locked out its employees, the newsroom staff created the website RueFrontenac.com to host their reporting. These journalists were not paid, and the newsroom was a decrepit ballet studio across the street from the Journal’s office.

In August, De Pierrebourg’s phone rang and he recognized the number. “Are you ready to write this down?” asked a familiar voice. He grabbed his pen and notebook. The source went into great detail about a meeting that took place at a restaurant in Old Montreal in March 2008. Municipal politician Benoît Labonté had asked Accurso for money to help fund his campaign. Louise Harel, the leader of the opposition party Vision Montreal was running for mayor in the November 2009 elections, and Labonté was her right-hand man. Vision Montreal’s entire campaign was based on the idea of cleaning up city hall.

After weeks of research, De Pierrebourg managed to get three other sources to confirm the details. But Normand Tamaro, RueFrontenac.com’s lawyer, thought it would be best to release the story as part of a series over the course of three days. “I didn’t like this idea at all because as a journalist you are always afraid of being scooped,” says De Pierrebourg. But Tamaro’s “bear trap” strategy lured in readers and created shockwaves throughout the city. Labonté resigned from his position at Vision Montreal and Louise Harel subsequently lost the election to the incumbent Gérald Tremblay.

This was the first time an investigation proved direct ties between political financing and construction entrepreneurs. “I remember everyone jumped to write follow-up stories after that,” recalls Vincent Larouche, who contributed to RueFrontenac.com and is now at La Presse with De Pierrebourg. “We all had something to contribute.” After his resignation, Labonté chose to give his first sit-down interview to Denis. He was emotional and admitted to accepting cash from Accurso, stating that “prêtes-noms” (“straw men”) were commonly used to conceal illegal political donations from private companies.

 ***

Cédilot sits at the busy Première Moisson bakery in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a neighbourhood west of Montreal’s downtown core. His grey moustache and vintage black-rimmed glasses make for a distinguished look. Now retired from La Presse, he spends most of his days commenting on radio or television about organized crime or the latest developments at the Charbonneau Commission.

Like his pal Noël, he has a different perspective on these events. Throughout the 1990s, he and Bruno Bisson published a series of investigations into corruption in Laval—a precursor to what would come in Montreal and other municipalities across Quebec. Yet the timing wasn’t right and the public didn’t take much notice. Having spent 20 years covering organized crime, Cédilot’s interest in Montreal’s mob family the Rizzutos runs deep—as Mafia Inc. showed. “When the book arrived, it was like the cherry on the sundae,” he admitted. “To say that the Mafia was involved in all of this—the pizzo!”

But Cédilot remains skeptical about what the commission report will accomplish, especially since the inquiry didn’t clearly identify the ties to organized crime and failed to look into Hydro-Québec—the government-owned corporation that deals with many of the same crooked players. Though journalists played an instrumental role in revealing the intricacies of the corrupt system, the commission didn’t hear testimony from high-profile provincial players such as Jean Charest and Pauline Marois. Andrew McIntosh, who leads Quebecor’s new investigative unit (which Cédilot sees as a competitive response to Enquête), also questions how far the commission went. “It’s like we’ve been at the buffet and they’ve been plucking at the juiciest cuts of meat, but they never drilled down.”

The commission proposed reforming the province’s Access to Information Act, but reporters also want better protection of whistleblowers and greater access to municipal documents. “The access to information law has become a way to block journalists,” says Pierre Tourangeau, now Radio-Canada’s ombudsman. “It’s time for governments to demonstrate more transparency.”

 ***

As this extraordinary period of investigative journalism comes to an end, no one doubts that more scandals will surface in the years to come. “Where there is money being exchanged, there will always be the potential for corruption,” says Alan Conter, a media consultant and journalism lecturer at Concordia University in Montreal. “And when this does happen,” he hopes “journalists will be there to uncover the facts yet again.”

In the meantime, the climate of journalistic collaboration has shifted back to one of competition, as more news outlets create or expand their investigative units. La Presse recruited Lévesque and De Pierrebourg. And while budget cuts at Radio-Canada may affect shows such as Enquête, in late September—six years after the initial scoop—it’s business as usual.

Gravel leans in toward his computer screen, mouthing the words as he reads his script. A copy of Mafia Inc. is open on his desk, and piles of documents are spread on the floor. Photos of his children are on the wall, and on the other side of the room are awards and newspaper clippings collected over the years. “I don’t have the status of Peter Mansbridge,” says Gravel as he points to the investigative unit. Empty desks and boxes line the pathway to his office.

Dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt under a blazer, he makes a few final changes to his script before picking up the phone to speak to one of the show’s lawyers. After Accurso unsuccessfully sued Radio-Canada three times, vetting scripts for a television show such as Enquête has become a tedious but necessary process. This is going to be a big “Accurso-Mafia” episode, Gravel says with a sense of vindication.

People used to congratulate him for his work, but now they thank him. “The Charbonneau Commission is the stamp of validation on everything we said,” he says, and while he believes reporters still have work to do, this whole chapter in Quebec’s history helped reaffirm journalism’s core values. His boss Pelletier agrees. “Journalism is by definition investigation. If it is something else, then I don’t want to practise it.”

Photo by Scott Adamson

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

By now you all have heard the horrific news: Twelve people were killed at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper headquarters in Paris earlier today. At 11:30 a.m., local time, three men dressed in black emerged from a vehicle in front of the newspaper’s office, carrying automatic weapons. The gunmen stormed through, killing two police officers and eight journalists—including Hebdo editor, Stéphane Charbonnier (“Charb”) and cartoonists Bernard Verlhac (“Tignous”) and Jean Cabut (“Cabu”). According to raw video footage shot from a nearby building, the gunmen were overheard shouting, “We avenged the Prophet Mohammed! We killed Charlie Hebdo.”

The shooting is being described as the worst militant attack in France in decades. French President François Hollande referred to it as a “terrorist attack” and placed the country in its highest level of terrorism alert. Hollande noted that other attacks have been prevented in France in recent weeks.

As the world mourns the loss of these twelve lives, these events have sparked conversations in newsrooms, on the streets and online, about freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

A left-wing weekly, Charlie Hebdo is not new to controversy and skewering religious leaders and politicians. In 2011, the magazine made headlines for publishing an issue “guest-edited” by the Prophet Mohammed. Soon after, their offices were firebombed. But the magazine’s cartoonists and editorial board didn’t back down. In addition, their website has been hacked and they have been accused of blasphemy. Since those 2011 attacks, police bodyguards accompanied Charbonnier at all times.

Charlie Hebdo prided itself in provoking debate and commentary on world affairs. Their cartoonists were journalists, many of whom also wrote thought-provoking columns. The pen was their means of expression. It is important to note that they didn’t only target radical Islam. Some of their infamous covers include former Pope Benedict XVI embracing a Vatican guard and an Orthodox Jew kissing a Nazi soldier.

These journalists were not provoking for the sake of provocation. They were trying to prove a point through their cartoons: that by respecting these taboos, we are only serving to strength the power of censorship. A strong democracy is a place where opposing views are accepted and embraced.

Today, people turned to social media to express their anger in frustration regarding this senseless act and created the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie and #CharlieHebdo. Cartoonists around the world responded in solidarity, and Ottawa-based satirical publication Frank, responded by changing its logo to that of Charlie Hebdo’s. Michael Bate, the magazine’s editor, also stated that it’s going to run some of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons.

So what sparked today’s attack?

The reasons behind today’s carnage remain unknown, with the hunt to find those responsible for the crime ongoing. But many media outlets have hinted to Charlie Hebdo’s current cover, a cartoon of a new controversial book recently published by French author Michel Houllebecq, Submission, where the author imagines France run by an Islamic party in the future.

Charbonnier famously said, after the attacks in 2011, that his job was not to defend freedom of speech, but without freedom of speech we are dead. He was a man who would not be silenced. “I prefer to die than to live like a rat,” he said.

Journalism is experiencing difficult times. We are now living in a world where ordinary citizens claim to be journalists, and where professional journalists continue to face severe cuts from news organizations as well as deal with the reality of increasingly concentrated media ownerships.

Are today’s attacks proof of the price to pay for journalism? The individuals who died today stood up for freedom of speech and freedom of the press until the very end—because freedom of the press will only disappear if we stop using it altogether.

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By Arielle Piat-Sauvé

Guy Crevier knew something needed to change when he compared the drop in newspaper revenue to the aging baby-boomer population. The president and publisher of La Presse suspected that as his core readership aged, newspaper sales could decrease significantly. Fearing it was only a matter of time before the traditional newspaper model collapsed, Crevier decided to endorse a new approach, relying only on advertiser revenue. In April 2013, the company launched its La Presse+ tablet app in an attempt to reshape the way its readers consume news.

The goal was simple: create a platform that would increase audience engagement and reach. Crevier, who is also president of Gesca, a subsidiary of Power Corporation that publishes six French papers in Quebec and Le Droit in Ottawa, wanted to work with an existing digital platform. So La Presse approached Apple in 2010, a few months before the technology company was set to release its first iPad. Then Gesca invested three years of research and $40 million into the new app. The 130-year-old newspaper’s headquarters in Old Montreal were also redesigned to include television studios and wall-mounted video displays to show the iPad app.

Last May, during Power Corp.’s annual meeting in Montreal, co-CEOs André and Paul Desmarais Jr. confirmed their plans to phase out newspaper print editions. Gesca believes this tablet technology and new business model will save its newspapers. Today, 40 percent of La Presse’s revenue derives from the app. The interactive platform is designed to increase readership and, in turn, attract more ad dollars. The danger is that without money coming from circulation, the pressure to change editorial content to please the last paying customers—the advertisers—becomes even greater.

La Presse+ seeks to attract a broad and engaged audience that is also willing to interact with its mostly national multimedia ads. Video and interactive storytelling are replacing black newspaper ink. So far, the results are encouraging. Over the last 18 months, La Presse+ reached 600,000 downloads, with an average 160,000 daily views. The average reader spends 44 minutes on the app during the week and 73 minutes on Saturday. Half the app’s downloads are by readers who aren’t subscribed to the paper’s print edition. While newspapers across the country cut staff, La Presse hired several new journalists specializing in multimedia, video and graphic design.

Providing readers with free news is an essential element to La Presse+ and Jacques Nantel, a marketing professor at the University of Montreal, believes this is a smart gamble. “They started with the assumption that no matter what the platform will be, advertising now will be your sole source of revenue,” he says. “This is where the clientele is.” The papers aren’t gone yet, but when they are, Crevier hopes all the advertisers will move to the digital platform.

But others remain skeptical of the model’s sustainability in the long run. Marc-François Bernier, a journalism professor at the University of Ottawa, fears relying exclusively on advertising revenue will force the paper to alter its content to focus on entertainment instead of news and information. “When your source of financial revenue relies too heavily on advertisers, this undoubtedly leads to weaker and less independent content, more susceptibility to pressure from advertisers,” he says. Bernier points to new commercials that feature a man and a woman flirting while surfing La Presse+ as an example of advertisers influencing the way consumers perceive the app.

Meanwhile, La Presse’s sister papers in towns across Quebec continue to wait for further information from Gesca about where they fit into this new digital model. At Quebec City’s Le Soleil, the atmosphere remains optimistic about what these changes could mean for their paper. Pierre-Paul Noreau, now the deputy editor and managing editor, remembers when he first entered that newsroom 37 years ago as a 22-year-old reporter. Back then, the paper had 150 journalists instead of the 65 it has today. But Noreau isn’t nostalgic for the glory days and he believes in the La Presse+ model, even if this means trading in his former readers for new ones.

Although no official decisions have been made regarding Gesca’s other papers, Noreau’s ideal scenario would be for his Quebec City newsroom to produce local content, while being part of the larger La Presse+ app that would include tabs for the different newspapers. However, Le Soleil and Gesca’s other papers may not have the digital and financial resources required to produce the content for an app.

Other papers are taking notice. The Toronto Star recently became the first newspaper to announce plans to release its own tablet app based on the La Presse+ platform technology. That will happen next fall and the paper plans to remove all existing digital paywalls. This partnership between the two media outlets will provide advertisers with joint marketing opportunities to reach both French and English audiences.

Yet, most newspapers remain reluctant to adopt the La Presse+ model. Le Devoir, an independent French language paper in Montreal, was the first in Canada to create a paywall on its website back in 2002. Publisher Bernard Descôteaux also feels the pressure to shift to a new digital strategy in order to survive, but insists that model won’t limit his paper’s app from including rich content, different from its print counterpart. Newspapers opting for a paywall are hoping to convince their readers that quality journalism comes at a price.

Today, Crevier admits he doesn’t read a single print newspaper or watch the evening news, but he says he’s never consumed as much information as he does now. Although there are definite risks associated with being first, La Presse+ is his attempt at creating a new sustainable newspaper model. This tablet technology is also a way of competing with a whole new realm of multimedia platforms, for broader audience reach and more advertiser dollars.

For weeks now, everyone wondered how CBC would cover the downfall of its own golden boy.

“Our story tonight is not an easy one to tell. Many of those you’ll hear from are our colleagues. But we are telling it because five weeks after Jian Ghomeshi was fired, important questions still have no answers: what did managers know? When did they know it? What did they do?”

And with those words, the fifth estate’s Gillian Findlay began last night’s much-anticipated episode.

The fifth estate told a story of a charismatic young man’s rise to fame within the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and how his flagship show quickly became an arena for promoting his own celebrity. But last night’s episode was about more than rehashing Ghomeshi’s past and re-exposing details of the scandal.

In what was sometimes an uncomfortable episode to watch, but absolutely necessary, the fifth estate produced a one-hour investigation unearthing the inner malfunctions and miscommunications that occurred at CBC. In the midst of the media frenzy surrounding the high-profile former CBC employee, the fifth estate sought to set the record straight by answering questions about the timeline of events, who knew what, and when specific decisions were made.

Through its own investigation with Q staff, the fifth estate found that, unlike what CBC management was saying, there was no investigation undertaken over the summer to look into allegations of workplace abuse and assault—at least not to the Q employees’ knowledge. Findlay cornered Chris Boyce, CBC’s executive director of radio, with her persistent questions. Boyce continued to refuse to answer her questions, stating that this was what lawyer Janice Rubin was looking into. When Findlay pushed Boyce for more answers, he appeared almost at his breaking point, unable to remember what happened and arguing that he doesn’t hold the same responsibility as the police in this story.

By highlighting the untold stories of Q producers Brian Coulton and Sean Foley, the fifth estate cast away any doubts of biased reporting. Coulton and Foley—who brought their information and concerns to CBC managers in early July—still feel as though their faith in the public broadcaster has been shaken following this incident.

Perhaps using the fifth estate to air details of what looks like a mismanaged crisis is part of CBC’s concerted efforts to quickly move on from this downfall and literally scrub away any association with Ghomeshi.

This subsidiary investigation on behalf of the fifth estate was a difficult exercise of self-analysis and reflection, but CBC succeeded in doing so graciously, without avoiding the hard-hitting questions. The fifth estate reminded viewers that as a corporation of journalists, it was their duty to tell this behind-the-scenes story—reminding everyone they are first and foremost journalists.

Image courtesy of the fifth estate. 

In 1967, Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously said, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Recently, Trudeau’s bedroom activities were fair game for Ezra Levant on his show, The Source. Levant said Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s “frat boy” antics around a stranger’s bridal party were no surprise considering his parents’ behavior, calling his father a “slut” and saying his mother Margaret “wasn’t much different.”

While the original video has been taken down, a column similar to the monologue is still on Levant’s blog. Trudeau replied by boycotting all Sun Media journalists, refusing to answer their questions until he received an response from the chain.

Trudeau’s actions sparked a debate about the freedom of the press. Chantal Hébert said he obstructed fair journalistic access. Blacklisting one of the country’s largest newspaper publishers in the lead up to a federal election may not be appropriate. Levant’s views expressed on his show aren’t representative of all Sun Media journalists, so why should the entire news organization suffer as a result of one loose canon? But, as political science professor Emmett Macfarlane pointed out, freedom of the press guarantees that the government won’t restrict journalists, not that reporters will land interviews.

Bruce Anderson argued we should take the spotlight off Trudeau and ask ourselves how low we’re willing to let media standards fall. Not only was Levant’s rant based mostly on opinion, he also got many facts wrong. He claimed Trudeau pushed his way into the photo, when in fact, the wedding party had asked him to join. Levant also failed to mention that the groom didn’t have a problem with the kiss. Anderson questioned why journalists spent so much time criticizing Trudeau’s response instead of looking into Levant’s lack of integrity, which he claims is “an embarrassment to journalists.”

On Monday, Sun Media—not Levant—apologized for the segment, saying it shouldn’t have aired. Trudeau’s camp accepted the apology and lifted the ban on its journalists. And we await the next round of controversy between the two.

Few shoppers here are in a hurry. It’s a hot, late-August afternoon, and Carrot Common is dappled with shade. Two young women sit outside with organic takeout boxes, their feet sporting charity-chic Toms shoes. To their left, a bulletin board advertises holistic nutritionists and alternative health therapies. To their right, a juice bar churns out murky green detox smoothies and blood-red beet juice. At the back of this eat-well oasis, nestled in the heart of Toronto’s Greektown, is the city’s iconic ultra-healthy grocery store, The Big Carrot. Inside is a new world of food: the carrots are purple, the tea is fermented, and the aisles are stocked with bags of hemp hearts.

On most days, the store buzzes like a swarm of contented bees alighting on their favourite organic agave nectar. The shoppers are diverse: some Lululemon-clad patrons head straight for the dulse granules. Other miracle-food seekers meander the aisles, pausing to identify things like edible bits of “sprouted ancient grains”: a box of kamut, wheat, adzuki, lentil and fenugreek squiggles.

After 10 years of working at the The Big Carrot, store nutritionist Cathy Hayashi is used to buyers’ uncertainty. From noon till 8 p.m., Monday through Thursday, she stands by the entrance, offering new customers guided tours or directions to the latest much-hyped superfood. The media plays a large part in such popularity cycles, Hayashi says. “If Dr. Oz says something,” she explains, “for weeks on end we’ll be hearing about whatever was highlighted by the show.”

Big Carrot shoppers aren’t the only ones lured into stores by the media’s never-ending stream of “breakthrough” reports on healthier eating. In 2008, almost two-thirds of Canadians said they consulted newspapers and magazines for health-related facts—making print media one of the four most-used sources for such information (along with doctors, other health professionals and family/friends), according to non-profit research group Canadian Council on Learning. Surely, some stories deserve that trust; many others do not. And, as ridiculous as certain super-cure stories can be, this on-trend reporting also has the potential to do great harm. “It’s absolutely wrong and irresponsible,” says Toronto dietitian and TV/print journalist Leslie Beck, “to make people think that if they eat blueberries every day, they’re going to reduce their risk of heart disease.”

The health and wellness beat, after all, deals with serious stuff—from diet and exercise regimens to illness treatment and when to see a doctor. All this, as Beck says, requires a particularly careful and balanced approach to providing the tips readers crave. Instead, in many ways health reporting has come to mimic tabloid entertainment: stories on nutrition, fitness and lifestyle are ubiquitous and hard to sift through, which makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction. The result is a cycle of (often inaccurate) “bad for you” and “next big thing” stories that risk discrediting the entire health beat. On top of that, in place of real health help, readers and viewers are left following a potentially harmful “Media Diet” based on miracle cures, fad diets, superfoods and food scares.

In February 2012, cardio-thoracic surgeon and television personality Dr. Oz introduced another superfood, just in time for Valentine’s Day. “I’ve got the number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. It’s raspberry ketone,” Dr. Oz began solemnly, fixing TV viewers with a soul-searching stare. He had finally found it: the miracle cure for women who will do anything—anything!—to lose weight. During the segment, guest expert Lisa Lynn (a specialist in metabolic disorders and personal training) provided this vague prescription: “Try 100 milligrams at breakfast,” she said, “and if that doesn’t work, go to 200, try it again at lunch.”

Last April, the Toronto Star ran the story under the headline “Weight loss ‘miracle’ supplement: Dr. Oz extols virtues of raspberry ketone.” The Globe and Mail followed with greater skepticism in June: “Is this supplement a weight-loss miracle?”

Beck hadn’t even heard of raspberry ketone until Dr. Oz pushed it into the headlines. Sitting in her glamorous North York office (a mixture of luxe boutique and spa, lined with books and health products), she throws up her manicured hands at the mere mention of ketones: “I just knocked that to shreds on CTV!”

The method behind the miracle fat cure seems sound. According to Dr. Oz, raspberry ketone regulates adiponectin (which “sounds like a big word,” he added), a protein used by the body to regulate metabolism. Lynn’s recommended daily dose of 100 mg of concentrated ketone (the equivalent amount in 90 pounds of fresh fruit) purported to break up the fat contained in the body’s cells, allowing it to be metabolized more efficiently. There is only one problem, as Beck mentions: “Raspberry ketone has never, ever been tested or studied in humans.”

One of the few raspberry ketone studies involved two groups of mice, which were fed the same high-fat diet. One group received a supplement of raspberry ketone, and these rodents gained slightly less weight than expected. The results are significantly less impressive than the word “miracle” implies. With the endorsement of media darling Dr. Oz, however, these results helped prove the basis for the next miracle cure.

Besides the limited scope of the study, there are other important caveats to consider, such as the amount of ketone the mice were forced to consume each day: a minimum of 0.5 per cent of their total body weight. By comparison, Lynn’s recommended dose of 100 mg would amount to a miniscule 0.0001 per cent of the total body weight of a 75-kilogram woman.

Ketones weren’t the only magic bullets fired in recent years. In June 2011, we heard “A yogurt a day may keep heart disease away” from The Globe and Mail; in August 2012, it was “Goji berries pack an antioxidant punch,” according to CBC News; and in April 2012,The Gazette featured quinoa: “‘The mother grain’ is really a tiny, nutrient-packed seed.” The list of such articles goes on and on. Of course, some of these headlining foods are likely very good for us—but the danger lies in telling the two apart when sensational stories and credible scientific studies are presented on the same platform: our magazines and newspapers. “I don’t know if this whole superfood thing will really ever go away. People want a food to keep them healthy forever,” says Beck. “That’s why that story sells.”

The Superfood club has its VIPs: margarine, chocolate, red wine, coffee and eggs—just to name a few foods under constant scrutiny. When journalists aren’t telling consumers why these foods will kill them, they are busy extolling their virtues. Much of this can be blamed on the bad habit of headline-plucking—emphasizing one small element of a study, without context, as the basis of a story or attention-grabbing headline. Take, for instance, an August 2012 Toronto Sun story about egg yolks, with this fear-inducing headline: “Egg yolks almost as unhealthy as cigarettes: Study.”

The social media backlash was enormous, with egg eaters’ ire directed at both scientists and journalists. “Please ‘NO MORE STUDIES,’” wrote one aggravated online reader, dubbed Slappybeaver. “I am tired of everything being bad for us, then it is good for us, then another study says it is bad. I don’t care anymore I will do whatever I feel like doing.”

The next day, The National Post ran a story tracking the ups and downs of egg coverage over the years: In November 2008, Harvard Medical School research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, linked a daily egg habit to early deaths. In the same issue, former American Heart Association president Robert Eckel issued a response to the study, stating that eggs were a neutral (neither healthy nor unhealthy) food. In January 2009, University of Alberta scientists discovered that certain proteins in eggs are similar to medications for high blood pressure. Yet, in September 2011, egg-yolk consumption was linked to an increased risk of dying from prostate cancer. Then, in November 2011, the University of Cambridge released a study suggesting that egg whites were a better source of energy than jam.

The Toronto Sun story comparing eggs to cigarettes is based on a study by University of Western Ontario scientists J. David Spence and David Jenkins, titled “Egg Yolk Consumption and Carotid Plaque.” Judged by title alone, the study would be less than exciting to the general population. From a sell perspective, though, everything changes once egg-yolk consumption is compared to the dangers of smoking. As Medical Post clinical editor Terry Murray says, “It’s got a ready-made headline because of the cigarette connection.”

The researchers analyzed data from 1,262 older individuals. Information was divided into three categories: plaque buildup by age, plaque buildup in smokers by “pack-years of smoking” (defined as packs smoked per day multiplied by years smoked) and plaque buildup in egg-yolk eaters by “eggyolk years” (the number of yolks consumed per week multiplied by the number of years consumed). They found that plaque buildup increased linearly with age, but exponentially along egg-yolk years or pack-years. By isolating the correlation between egg-yolk years and plaque buildup, the researchers concluded that egg-yolk consumption was detrimental—meaning egg yolks do accelerate carotid plaque buildup over time, and people at risk of heart disease should avoid them—but also that the connection merited further research, not a nationwide exodus from the egg aisle. The article also stated that some key factors weren’t taken into consideration, such as exercise and waist-to-hip ratio. Despite the researchers’ acknowledgement of the study’s limitations, the media focused on the sensational sell. “[Publishers] want something provocative on page one,” says Murray. “We are not the most angelic, pure of heart, motivated by the desire, solely, to make people’s lives better. We also want to say, ‘Hey, look: I’ve got a good story here, and a million people read it.’”

But will people keep reading it? For all those who read the egg story—and the hundreds of other roller-coaster stories—arguably just as many ignored any useful information the study provided on the effects of eating eggs because they, like Slappybeaver, dismissed the news as another scare story. Like so many other health fad articles, the egg story made headlines for a few short days, then vanished forever.

Even the most routine health reporting is often like a game of broken telephone. The communication of research from scientist to journalist to reader is what reporter Julia Belluz refers to as “knowledge translation”—and there are many places where it can go wrong, even when journalists, editors and publishers aren’t trying to find the sell. Belluz is the writer of the blog Science-ish, a joint project of Maclean’s, The Medical Post, and the McMaster Health Forum. Science-ish functions as a bridge between health research and reporting. In doing so, it challenges the sensationalist headlines that so often make the paper, and holds journalists, policy makers and opinion leaders accountable for their roles in the public’s perception of health reporting. Since the blog launched in the summer of 2011, it has been examining where journalists go wrong. “[We’re] looking at studies that are reported in the media,” says Belluz, “how they are reported, how we end up with the crazy headlines we have, when we get things wrong.”

Part of the trouble comes from the way scientists and journalists communicate about each “breakthrough.” The ups and downs of studies, for instance, often simply reflect science’s pursuit of new discoveries (though they may alarm magazine readers with a newly toxic tub of margarine lurking in their fridges). The answers you might be getting in a study one day aren’t the final answers, says Belluz. The conclusions are really situated within a larger body of research. Unfortunately, many readers are looking for the quick fix—and they don’t want to be told exercise and sensible eating are the best way to get fit, or that there is no easy answer. As Beck says, the real question when it comes to giving sound advice is “How do you make that sexy?”

Belluz isn’t so sure it can be done. “They’re not things that you can buy, so we [media] overcomplicate,” she says. “We’ve overcomplicated all of this messaging about health to the point that people are just genuinely confused about what the best thing to do is.”

Megan Griffith-Greene, in charge of fact-checking at Chatelaine from 2007 to 2010, agrees. While at the magazine, she set out to restructure the way health stories were researched and reported in an effort to avoid the roller-coaster effect of superfoods that heal one minute and harm the next. She says that even in 50- to 150-word health briefs, factual infractions can add up and contribute to a culture where the public no longer trusts the media when it comes to health research.

“I found it very humbling at Chatelaine because you’re reaching millions of Canadians, and millions of Canadians will trust you and will change their lives because of what they read,” she adds. “The potential harm you can do with inappropriate information is very great at mass publications, at women’s publications.”

Like Belluz, Griffith-Greene blames much of the harm factor on a disconnect between journalists and academics. She says many journalists often rely on press releases about studies instead of reading the actual scientific research. For this reason, the guidelines Griffith-Greene set up required that writers read the full study and contact the lead researcher to check that the  magazine brief captured the methodology and conclusion of the research. “There was an appreciation to take the time to ensure we got it right,” says Griffith-Greene. “Academics love to talk about their research. They love to have their research get picked up in print.”

Griffith-Greene cautions that a conversation between researcher and reporter isn’t the cure-all. Statistical illiteracy is rampant in all beat reporting, but especially in health stories, where journalists are presented with figure-heavy abstracts and expected to interpret the results. In other words, just because journalist and scientist are talking to each other, it doesn’t mean they understand each other. “I wish journalism schools would provide, or require, a course on the fundamental reading of statistics,” says Griffith-Greene. “We think that it’s simple math…but statistics can often be really misleading, especially when it comes to things like disease burden, incidence levels, treatment efficacy…”

Belluz puts it another way: “Lifestyle magazines are tough…the stuff that’s peddled to [readers] is total pseudoscience—it’s insanity.” But it doesn’t have to be.

The first organized push to get journalists and researchers talking to each other began with Frankenfood. Starting in 1999, sensationalism swept through the British media. The scare story of the year focused on what’s officially known as genetically modified (GM) food. These crops were designed to be more nutritious, more disease-resistant and better-tasting than their non-modified cousins. A great hope for these super-plants was that they would put an end to world hunger. Instead, GM foods were vilified by the British press and ultimately banned from being grown in the U.K. Scientists, politicians and public figures complained about the unbalanced coverage, insisting that the media was slowing the progress of a powerful disease-fighting tool in the name of a good scare.

Following the GM food coverage, along with similar horror stories about mad cow disease and a supposed correlation between autism and MMR vaccines (immunization against measles, mumps and rubella), the House of Lords decided to examine the state of science and society in Great Britain. One of the resulting recommendations was to set up a new initiative to support and encourage scientists to engage more effectively with science journalists, and vice versa. In 2002, this initiative culminated in the Science Media Centre (SMC).

“The SMC facilitated a much more proactive culture,” says Fiona Fox, SMC’s chief executive. For starters, the centre encouraged scientists to get involved, whether it was making themselves available for interviews or breaking down their research for  journalists to ensure no facts were lost in translation. The idea is to prevent situations like the Frankenfoods fiasco from ever happening again. Fox believes that through the centre, the public can say yes—or no—to new science after an informed debate, and after receiving accurate scientific information from journalists and the SMC’s database of experts. “We will never know how that GM debate would have gone if the best plant scientists in the country…had taken up the opportunity of interviews.”

To get accurate information out to readers, the SMC functions as a middle ground between scientists and journalists. The centre sifts through journals and press releases and flags the stories the media will most likely be interested in—often the ones that arrive at either a cure for or cause of cancer, according to Fox. Researchers then examine the scientific paper and provide journalists with made-for-print feedback on the study, red-flagging issues that the writers may not notice, such as human conclusions being drawn from a study conducted on mice, inadequate sample sizes, or conflicts with the overwhelming evidence of previous studies. They deliver this analysis to the writers and their editors to help them make a more informed decision about the value and significance of the story. SMC researchers will also provide a quote that journalists can insert into the story, should they so choose.

Although Fox agrees that some stories obviously deserve front-page coverage, she says that the big message, really, is: “Science journalists, tell your editor: do not splash this on the front page. This is a lovely study, but it should be on page 15, and preferably copy and paste the quotes we sent you, which are very nicely written, very clear, very accessible, and put them in the article.” She adds, “And every single day that happens in the SMC.”

Health and science communities around the globe have taken notice of the SMC’s success. To date, there are similar centres in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, and plans for new centres in other countries, including the United States.

The Science Media Centre of Canada (SMCC) began to take shape in 2008, the result of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation’s desire to promote a “culture of innovation.” The centre opened its doors two years later, using the British SMC as a model.

SMCC executive director Penny Park, who helped create the Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet, was particularly enthusiastic about joining the centre. She recognized journalists’ desire to cover science stories — as well as their hesitation to delve into the complicated reporting this involved. While Park was at Daily Planet, this hesitation was a recurring theme at meetings she attended with other journalists from several programs owned by CTV. At these meetings, Park and her colleagues would discuss the lineup for the next top stories. Time and time again, stories about climate change, health and technology were brought up, but many were ultimately, reluctantly, dismissed. “I was going ‘Oh my gosh, there’s so much science!’” she says. “I could see that they wanted to do more science but didn’t have the resources. They wanted to cover [science] in more depth.”

Canadians trust scientists, but need to understand what the challenges are for journalists, says Park. Similarly, scientists and journalists needed to come together to forge a network of communication and understanding. She believes that the SMCC champions this cause. Through the centre, science journalists are able to read studies early under publication embargo and engage scientists about their research. Scientists, meanwhile, are exposed to the culture of journalism and situations they don’t encounter in the lab, like the boiling point of an editor or the unstable pressure of an imminent print deadline. The aim is to make scientists start thinking about their research in a way that gets them to communicate it effectively, says Park.

The SMCC takes a multi-faceted approach to providing resources for both journalists and academics. Like the original SMC, the Canadian centre releases studies under embargo to allow journalists time to speak with experts, provides highlights of the latest  findings, and matches writers with researchers. While the SMCC is dedicated to helping all science journalists, it may also serve as a particularly useful tool for the underappreciated general assignment reporters who are often handed health stories.

Park and her colleagues plan on going into newsrooms to conduct boot camps on how these reporters should approach studies and identify the key risks, statistics and weaknesses of the research. They will also teach journalists to avoid sensationalizing one finding in a study. “[We] fine-tune their bullshit detectors, basically,” says Park.

Boot camps and courses for scientists are already taking place at universities. The media awareness skills taught at these sessions are intended to facilitate communication between scientists and journalists, minimizing the possibility of embarrassing mistakes in their stories. On the flip side, the SMCC plans to offer a formal Science 101 course to journalists to teach them basic scientific literacy.

The health beat is sick, but courses like these, watchdog blogs and the efforts of individual editors to improve the credibility of their health coverage will lead to more balanced reporting.

“We really do hope this attitude that says ‘we love a good scare story’ disappears,” says Fox. “We are [not] asking the media to write boringly. There’s enough. There’s enough ‘exciting’ happening in science for there to be hundreds of front pages on science stories—but just written accurately.”