We’re pleased to announce that this year, the Review snagged four awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication to add to the magazine’s collection.

Judges recognized the Spring 2015 issue, doling out a first-place award for Single Issue of an Ongoing Magazine (Editorial). This is the ninth time the Review has received the top prize in the category.

Online editor Amanda Panacci earned first place in the “Specialized Business Press Article” category for her story, “Silenced Spring,” exploring environmental journalists’ use of crowdfunding.

Senior online editor Alanna Kelly also picked up a third-place award for her piece on sports columnists, “Prize Fighters,” in the “People” category.

Lastly, head of research Aimee O’Connor was recognized with an honourable mention in the “Features” category for her story, “Where the Wild Things Are.” The piece provides an in-depth look at how well Canadian journalists are covering animal issues.

The masthead extends a huge thank you to all of the editors and instructors who helped put the magazine together.

Check out a full list of the Review’s awards and citations here.

Last night, some of the biggest names in Canada’s oh so tight-knit magazine community came out to celebrate the 38th annual National Magazine Awards. While the Review was not among those honoured this time around—and yes, we are holding out hope for some nominations next year—many former masthead members scooped up prizes.

• Maisonneuve won big last night with three gold medals and two silver medals. Its masthead includes Review alums Daniel Viola (Summer 2012, “The Ethics of Staging“) and Haley Cullingham (Winter 2012, “Lost in The Grid“), who also served as a handling editor in our Spring 2015 issue.

• Hazlitt took home a gold medal for Magazine Website of the Year. Its masthead includes Review alums Jordan Ginsberg (Spring 2010, “Donnybrook” and Spring 2015 handling editor), Haley Cullingham and Scaachi Koul (Summer 2012, “Supportnet“).

• Lauren McKeon, who wrote the cover story for our Summer 2007 issue (“Into the Wild“) and was a handling editor in our Spring 2015 issue, won gold in Personal Journalism for her Toronto Life piece, “Save Me from My Workout,” detailing her love-hate relationship with CrossFit.

• Joe Castaldo, who wrote the cover story for our Spring 2006 issue (“Whyte Noise“), won silver in Investigative Reporting for his Canadian Business piece (yes, this is the full head), “The Entirely True Tale of the Man Who Had an Idea, Borrowed a Boat from Neil Young, Dumped Iron in the Ocean, Angered the Vatican, Ticked off the United Nations and Tore a Small Town Apart—Just to Make Some Salmon Happy.”

• Spring 1998 senior editor Leah Rumack (“‘The Personal is Political, Honey’“) was part of the Today’s Parent team who took home gold in Editorial Package: Web for “Miscarriage and Pregnancy Loss.”

• Marta Iwanek (Winter 2012, “Northern Revival“) took home gold with her Maclean’s team in Online Video for their work on “Ukraine in Crisis.”

• Blake Eligh (Spring 2003, “Wheels of Fortune“) won silver with her team at Today’s Parent in Single Service Article Package for “30 Awesome Cupcakes” (sounds delicious!).

• Dafna Izenberg (Summer 2005, “The Conscience of Nunavut“) won silver in Editorial Package: Print with Sportsnet‘s “How to Cheat.”

Congrats to all the winners! Did we miss any? Tweet us @RyersonReview!

Image courtesy NMAs

Anne Marie Owens marks her arrival as editor-in-chief of the National Post with a laugh. It’s not a giggle, nor is it quiet. It is guttural and warm, a comforting capital-H Ha-Ha-Ha. It shakes her frame, all five feet, two inches of her. It comes out often. Post colleagues hear the laugh around the corner from their desks and from within glass-enclosed offices. Anyone who knows Owens knows her laugh. It seems to say: Yes, I am here now. I am laughing. Together, we can thrive.

The Post hasn’t had much to laugh about in recent years. Parent company Postmedia Network Inc., which owns 15 newspapers across the country, has endured tens of millions of dollars in quarterly losses, though it has pushed to cut costs over the past three years. That has led to layoffs and decreased circulation—but the turmoil was anticipated. The Post has teetered on the edge of death for years. In 2009, it almost succumbed when Postmedia went bankrupt, only to be revived by U.S. investment firm Silver Point Capital L.P. (the same company that saved Twinkie manufacturer Hostess). The newsroom of 110 journalists services nearly one million weekly print and digital readers. But the Post has turned a profit in only the last three of its 16 years.

In response to the company’s financial unrest, executives have committed to what president and CEO Paul Godfrey calls a “radical transformation.” It began in 2011 when Postmedia rolled out online paywalls for Montreal’s The Gazette and Victoria’s Times Colonist. Within two years, readers required a digital subscription to see more than 10 online articles a month for all Postmedia papers. “Newspapers around the world are realizing you can’t spend millions of dollars on content and give it away for free,” Godfrey said in 2013. By 2014, executives had created their latest attempt at salvation, a four-platform approach now known as “Postmedia Re-Imagined.” The plan will be released in its entirety by spring 2015, and incorporates new tablet and smartphone versions of the Post with the pre-existing web and print editions of the paper. Executives hope it will boost the Post’s weekly digital readership far past the current 240,000 per week mark and, in turn, increase ad sales.

In Owens, executives want an editorial ringleader who can find the balance between producing a profitable publication and maintaining the “Post spirit,” a loose term higher-ups use to reference the “good old days” of “fearless” print media. They have placed their faith in her energy and optimism to lead the Post through the final stages of its transformation into a digital-ready news organization. If it’s successful, Owens will have good reason to keep on laughing.

 ***

During her walk-through of the 11th floor of Postmedia’s office in Toronto, Owens comes off like a celebrity: in each room she enters, she receives a Cheers-like welcome. Everybody knows her—and her nickname, “AMO” (pronounced “ammo”). Colleagues stop their conversations to say hello; she always waves back. Even elevator rides are punctuated by chats with staff. “When I walk through like this,” she says, “it makes it seem like I’m everyone’s friend here.”

When I first meet her, Owens buzzes like a hamster on Red Bull. She is a fast talker and her sentences often begin with a convoluted “I think–but I–you know–.” When they aren’t in the air, her hands are drawing imaginary diagrams on the table in front of her. During our interview at the Post’s Collaboration Café—a cafeteria resembling an oversized Starbucks—she picks her hands up and slaps them back down so often that the table wobbles on its steel legs. She bobs her head, too, in time with her hands; the gold hoop earrings she wears dangle and tap her cheeks, moving like a metronome.

Owens’s predecessor Stephen Meurice was, as he says, “let go” from the Post last March, despite working for the paper since day one in 1998. After his departure, Post executives, including Gerry Nott, who assumed the role of interim editor, were desperate for a fast-moving leader. They sought someone who could take the reins and immediately begin forming the skeleton of a more organized and optimistic newsroom—someone who felt the same sense of urgency in kick-starting “Postmedia Re-Imagined.” Once hired, Owens moved quickly, taking four months to restructure her leadership team. After five managing editors left their positions, she appointed a single deputy editor: Julie Traves, who had been Focus section editor at The Globe and Mail. The managing editors were given more responsibilities for both digital and print, and became symbolically known as “executive producers.” The shift also included hiring Erin Valois from theScore. She brought experience in tracking how readers consume news to her new role as executive producer of digital. The former managing editor of features Benjamin Errett became director of strategy, a role that oversees the execution of the four-platform plan. The restructuring communicated a clear message: to survive, the Post can’t think of itself as a print product.

Much of the restructuring, it appears, is thanks to financial losses. Little more than a week before Owens’s first day on the job, Postmedia announced a quarterly loss of more than $20 million despite its three-year restructuring program that meant job cuts. In 2010, Postmedia slashed 500 full-time positions, followed by 25 additional cuts in 2012. Later on, job losses included some of the Post’s biggest names and most talented journalists: just two months before Meurice was let go, the paper laid off seven editors, including social media editor Jeremy Barker and sports editor Jim Bray. In March 2014, Postmedia terminated 48 jobs in the Calgary advertising sales office. Newspaper circulation also took a hit: the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Ottawa Citizen all lost their Sunday editions, while the Post hasn’t published on Mondays in the summer since 2009. Still, the losses kept coming. In January, eight months after Owens started, Postmedia reported a quarterly loss of $10 million.

To deal with the financial pressures, Owens has focused her attention on management. Five months into the job, she has yet to unpack all of her belongings in her office. “Nothing in there really says much about me,” she says. Instead, she has been training her leadership team to take on their new roles. When she isn’t in meetings, she’s usually whirling around the newsroom before deadline—not unlike the cartoon Tasmanian Devil.

Owens starts every day with a two-hour commute from Waterdown, Ontario, southwest of Toronto. She attends daily story meetings at 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. and usually leaves by 7 p.m. to head home to her husband, a teacher, and their four teenage sons. She spends her evenings refreshing her email to see proofs. All of her weekdays are the same: rinse, repeat.

When describing Owens, most of her colleagues paint a starry-eyed portrait of an energetic, happy-go-lucky editor. One goes as far as to call her efforts “superhuman.” Energy and dedication, however, aren’t enough to pull the Post out of its financial slump. During our interview, Owens puts a positive spin on her work, bouncing from idea to idea. When I probe about the survival of the Post, she acknowledges that Postmedia is financially unstable compared to her previous employer, Rogers Publishing, but then quickly changes the subject to reflect on how wonderful an opportunity it is to be editor-in-chief. After an hour, Owens ends our conservation to attend a meeting. I bank my follow-up questions on the stability of the paper.

Many of these questions, however, go unanswered—at least by Owens. While I spent the next four months analyzing the Post’s future under her leadership and asking dozens of her former and current colleagues what she’d bring to the paper, Owens never granted me another interview. Though she initially agreed to let me shadow her on the job, she later dodged my weekly requests to do so. In October, following another request to spend a day with her at the paper, I received my last response from her: “This is a bad week for me.” Perhaps she was just too busy—at the bottom of an Everest-sized to-do list as the paper undergoes its digital transformation. Or perhaps she just wasn’t interested in talking about the Post’s financial future under her reign.

***

The Ottawa Citizen first tested “Postmedia Re-Imagined” in May 2014. Five months into the trial, company vice-president Lou Clancy dubbed it a success: readers were now spending 18 percent more time with the paper, largely, he claimed, because of its mobile accessibility and new smartphone and tablet editions (Postmedia has yet to break down the increase by platform). According to an introductory post on the Citizen’s website, the move was backed, in part, by a Postmedia-funded 2013 Ipsos Canada survey that found the company could reach several demographics through different platforms. Younger readers were more likely to read the news on their smartphones, while middle-aged readers preferred tablets and older readers favoured the printed page.

For the company’s executives, the Citizen’s results were encouraging. But how the strategy will hold up on a national scale is unclear. In the U.S., The New York Times similarly fragmented its audience in April 2014 by releasing several digital niche editions of the paper targeted toward different demographics. In October 2014, the organization experienced a third-quarter loss of $9 million, compared to an $12.9-million operating profit during that same period in 2013. It also announced the elimination of 100 newsroom jobs by the end of 2014. The Times might be able to afford the experimentation; Postmedia cannot.

Perhaps that’s why these efforts have moved so slowly with the Post. The paper’s most notable moves toward digitization were in 2011. At that time, 30 percent of Canadians were relying primarily on the internet for news consumption, according to a Canadian Media Research Consortium study. “Providers that fail to focus on providing content for computers, tablets and smartphones will be left behind,” declared the study’s co-author, Darryl Korell. In response to readers’ shifting tastes, newsrooms began to consider online paywalls. Consequently, one of Meurice’s big tasks was to overhaul the Post’s website. The digital focus reeled in profits for the first time. But then Meurice was let go. Though executives never told him exactly why, Meurice speculates they wanted “a fresh set of eyes on the paper.” He adds, “I was too invested in the old ways of the Post.”

Meanwhile, Owens, the effervescent former Postie, was at Maclean’s, helping launch a tablet edition and redesign its website. She quickly discovered she had a knack for digital thinking. In March 2014, the national newsmagazine’s online pageviews increased about 35 percent, and the popularity of its app helped Rogers Publishing reach one million downloads for all of its publications’ apps.

Owens says she never had a plotted job trajectory. Her career in journalism began in January 1988, when just eight months into her graduate degree at Western University in London, Ontario, (where classmates described her as a “great drunk dancer”), she landed a job at the St. Catharines Standard. There, she commuted three days a week between St. Catharines and London until she graduated and became a full-time reporter. Owens held multiple titles at the Standard—from education reporter to columnist—but her coverage of the case of serial rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo in 1995 gave her byline recognition. Realizing there was little room for more career growth at the Standard after the trial, she joined the Post’s inaugural masthead in 1998, anticipating big-city opportunities.

She worked her way up to general assignment reporter, often writing features, where she stayed until 2006, when Meurice nudged her into editing. “She had the kind of vision we needed with features,” he says, “and with dealing with other reporters.” Eventually, Owens stopped writing altogether and became features editor. From there, she moved up the ranks. By the time she jumped ship to Maclean’s in 2011, she was the Post’s managing editor of news.

Following Meurice’s departure, Postmedia senior vice-presidents Nott and Clancy handpicked Owens to fill the vacant spot. Her hire suggests executives saw a more versatile leader in Owens, someone willing to take digital risks, though Nott says it wasn’t a “him-versus-her situation.” Yet when I ask about her motivations for accepting the role, Owens’s answer surprises me. Rather than talking about multimedia innovation, she immediately lands on another, far different subject. “The job itself is great,” she tells me. “But the opportunity to be the first female editor of a national paper is pretty huge, right?”

 ***

Owens has always been a proponent of feminism and equality in journalism—something John Ibbitson, now writer-at-large at the Globe, learned on his first day of journalism school in 1987. The class of 40 had a simple task: interview your deskmate and write a brief story about his or her life. Paired with the gregarious Owens, Ibbitson anticipated an easy assignment. “Anne Marie Owens is an energetic, perky 23-year-old,” he typed, satisfied with his description. Upon reading the story, Owens was enraged. “Perky? Perky?” she exclaimed. Her voice went louder: “What man would ever describe a woman in all of human history as perky?” Ibbitson recalls the day with shame, even some 20 years later, and now admits, “I never used the word ‘perky’ to describe anything again in the rest of my career.”

Being a female journalist has informed much of Owens’s work as a reporter and editor. While at the Standard in the early 1990s, she and Marlene Bergsma successfully fought for the use of gender-neutral language in the paper. Around the same time, she purchased a Non-Sexist Word Finder at a small bookstore in Port Dalhousie, Ontario. It was her parody of a writing bible until 2011, when she jokingly passed it on to Meurice before she headed to Maclean’s. (Inside the book’s front cover, her signature remains in black ink.)

Not everyone agrees Owens’s gender is a big deal. When asked for his thoughts on her appointment as the first woman to run a national paper in Canada, Toronto Star editor Michael Cooke said, “It doesn’t matter.” Cooke, along with many of Owens’s male colleagues, says Owens being a woman has little effect on her ability to move up the ranks. Even the Post’s homepage editor and assistant managing editor, John Racovali, says that she landed the position on her own merit, so calling attention to the fact that she is the first female editor at the paper is “a hollow accolade.”

Yet, to say so is to ignore the male domination of the news industry. Ann Rauhala, a professor at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, examines women’s roles in newsrooms. She points to a slew of reasons women aren’t often appointed to top-tier positions. For one, women who are juggling domestic responsibilities with their careers feel that their employers are not supportive. For another, executives want to hire journalists who are just like them, who reflect their values. “That translates to white guys hiring nice, young white guys,” she says. That Owens is heading a national paper is just not the norm—according to Newspapers Canada’s annual report for 2014, of 111 daily newspapers, only 18 have women in the top job.

But Owens’s feminist values won’t mean the end of the Post’s staunch, right-wing political commentary—or even define her reign as editor. Though the Post has come a long way from its origins as a “tits-and-analysis paper,” as the Star’s former executive managing editor James Travers once described it, right-wing columnists are part of the Post’s brand and are there to stay. “The Post,” stresses Owens, “is not sexist.” Well, not quite. Even with a self-proclaimed feminist at the helm, the Post still runs headlines such as “Feminist Video Turns to Child Abuse to Send Distorted Message.” And in December 2014, a Rex Murphy column denounced the efforts of mainstream feminists. “In an era when college students under the mighty sway of heteronormative patriarchy have conjured up the concept of ‘micro-aggression’ and stamped their books with ‘trigger warnings,’” he wrote, “there is surely nothing too silly, too intellectually vacuous, for educated feminists to embrace.”

At a time when anti-feminist columns like Murphy’s fare well with Post readers, it’s far easier to imagine Owens’s commitment to the digital overhaul shaping her legacy as editor, and her gender fading to an afterthought.

***

Rob Roberts knew he had a winning story on his hands when he assigned a piece about an avalanche to Post writer Joe O’Connor. It had all the right elements: a charismatic, hubristic main character, death, conflict and a Canadian backdrop. For Roberts, the executive news producer, a typical page three spread—several column inches dedicated to a longform feature—was in order. He slated it to go to print ASAP. But Owens said no. Go further, she instructed. The result was an interactive online feature, complete with high-resolution portraits of snow-covered mountains, on-camera interviews with O’Connor’s main character and infographics depicting the anatomy of an avalanche. The team published “The Day the Mountain Fell” in September 2014 and it soon garnered hundreds of thousands of pageviews. The Post has also published several popular multimedia stories that fall outside the realm of daily news, including Adrian Humphreys’s “Hacker, Creeper, Soldier, Spy,” a 15,000-word online interactive profile of a former U.S. military man seeking asylum in Canada (which began the model), and “Gangland Confidential,” his multimedia coverage of Canadian mafia ties in Italy.

Turning ordinary print features into interactive stories is a tactic Owens hopes to employ more frequently as the Post undergoes its digital makeover. As Roberts puts it, the focus is shifting from filling tomorrow’s paper to telling good stories in different ways—and, with the addition of smartphone and tablet editions, on different platforms. Owens isn’t the first to go forth with such a plan, and for most Canadian newspapers a move toward multimedia seems inevitable. By 2017, Canada’s newspaper industry could see revenues decline by up to 20 percent, according to a 2013 report by international financial firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Anticipating that number will prove true—and could be even worse—many traditional news organizations have turned to web and tech-forward platforms, reframing a scramble to stay financially afloat into a bold and innovative path.

“Users are going to mobile—they’re often consuming their news on various apps via their mobile devices as opposed to any other platform,” says David Silverberg, editor-in-chief of Digital Journal, who has been following trends in the industry since 2009 through his Future of Media events in Toronto. In 2014, close to 60 percent of 18- to 34-year-old and 40 percent of 35- to 49-year-old Canadians consumed news on mobile devices or computers, according to a Media Technology Monitor report. The company also found 45 percent of anglophones now own a tablet. But, Silverberg adds, publishers need a good plan in order to successfully market their multiple digital platforms: “They can’t just take content and slap it onto a tablet or smartphone app.” Reformatting this content and giving it added value can help papers improve their chances. Often, that’s through interactivity, additional visual content such as infographics or presenting it in a prettier package.

Publishers must also confront what David Skok, a 2012 Nieman Fellow and current digital adviser at The Boston Globe, calls “disruption theory,” a term coined by his Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. The theory refers to a dynamic whereby newer, more agile firms disrupt more established companies stuck in their old ways. During his fellowship, Skok and Christensen applied this theory to the journalism industry. While sites such as The Huffington Post (its parent company, AOL, is worth $3 billion) and BuzzFeed (worth $850 million) are successful, much of their revenue is generated through clicks on low-cost listicles and branded content. Still, news organizations can reinvest their clickbait revenue into features and harder-hitting news stories.

Yet under Owens, there is little room for for BuzzFeed-esque quizzes or viral videos. In fact, it contradicts her plan for “great storytelling and voices,” and it could be the core flaw in the digital strategy. Producing smart journalism across a series of platforms is great in theory, but it costs money and it’s unclear where the funding—especially at a publication that took 13 years to make a profit—would come from. Papers that have succeeded at rolling out multiple editions of their product over a series of digital platforms have invested millions in doing so. Montreal’s La Presse tablet app, for instance, cost $40 million and three years worth of research—money the notoriously poor Postmedia would be hard-pressed to match. La Presse has also announced it will eventually replace its print newspapers with an all-digital publication—something that seems unlikely at the Post, which has many older readers who still rely on paper and ink.

Owens did not tell me how she plans to balance the need for good content with the paper’s current financial state. Talking about her move to Postmedia from the financially stable Rogers, she said she appreciated the “experimental” nature of the Post. “All the tumult and all the uncertainty,” she says, “it does mean that you have a good environment for trying new things.” But company executives have never mentioned a back-up plan if the great “Re-Imagined” experiment fails. And if there is one, I never had the chance to ask Owens about it. During our brief interview, Owens said she would focus solely on the Post’s needs within the immediate future, planning for “whatever comes in the next six months and whatever comes in the year after that”—suggesting, perhaps, even she doesn’t know what will lead the Post into financial stability.

 ***

It’s a cold November night, and Owens is standing out in the “smoking patio” of Toronto’s Opera House, a shoddily taped-off barrier between the sidewalk on Queen Street East and the venue. Inside, hundreds of media professionals and news junkies are in attendance for Newzapalooza, an annual “battle of the bands” charity event during which journalists take on the role of rock stars for the night. Though she isn’t smoking, Owens is standing among a group of young women who crowd around her. Out here, she is the star.

This opportunity to mingle with Owens outside the newsroom after weeks of chasing her is rare and golden. And she is beaming with excitement: the crowd loved the Post’s band, Conrad Black Sabbath. But she ignores me for a while, turning her back toward me, until I say hello.

“Oh, gosh, are you still looking for colour for your story?” she asks me. She laughs. I ask again if I can shadow her, but the question hangs in the air as she re-enters the Opera House, disappearing into the thick of the crowd. It’s the last time I ever see her.

It reminds me of our interview. When I pressed her about where the paper is headed under her direction, Owens dodged the question in a different way: she pretended to be forthright. “If you ask, ‘What is the National Post going to look like five years down the road?’ I don’t think anyone can honestly say,” she said. Then she whisked on to the next subject. At the end of our only chat, she laughed that signature, booming laugh, as if to assure me: I have it all under control. This paper will thrive.

Illustration by Tony Healey

This story was updated to reflect changes to female editors at the helm of Canadian newspapers, including the departure of Janice Dockham at the Leader-Post and the appointment of Heather Persson at the StarPhoenix. The story also previously incorrectly stated that Adrian Humphreys’s “Hacker, Creeper, Soldier, Spy” was published after “The Day the Mountain Fell.” The Review regrets the errors.

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

In July 2012 I reached out to Xtra, Toronto’s free gay and lesbian newspaper, in hopes of becoming an intern. Then-managing editor Danny Glenwright invited me up to the Pink Triangle Press offices and sifted through some of my clippings before asking his only question of the interview: “Why do you want to volunteer your time here?”

The answer was—and still is—straightforward: I am a young gay journalist who cares about the treatment of LGBTQ people in Canada. That should be reason enough to pursue work at a paper like Xtra. It does pride itself, after all, on being the voice of “everything gay.”

For more than three decades, Xtra has been a staple read for Canada’s LGBTQ community. It began originally as a promotional tool for The Body Politic in 1984, eventually outgrowing its parent mag and coming into its own. For the past two and a half years, I have been curating its letters page. But all that is coming to end this February. On January 14, Pink Triangle Press announced it would cease the printing of Xtra’s Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver paper issues, opting for a digital-only publication—marking the end of the days you could pick up an issue from Xtra’s trademark bright pink news boxes on street corners.

Though the news is not a surprise to me (financial instability is a reality for most free papers these days), it is incredibly saddening. The end of Xtra as a print product signals the end of the standout attitude its gay writers and columnists brought to the streets of Toronto. Plenty of passersby were taken aback or even disgusted by the covers Xtra would fearlessly print—half-naked men, cartoon women wearing nipple tassels and alien Stephen Harpers never seemed too far away. But whether the paper’s content would cause discomfort to those who saw it never seemed to concern Xtra. And for those in the community, like me, the covers were always funny, content always inspiring. The offbeat photos and stories were something we could relate to and often laugh about.

What first drew me to the paper, though, was not its outlandish covers, but its content. In it, I found news that mattered to me about issues that concerned people just like me. In 2011, reporter Andrea Houston’s coverage of gay-straight alliances in Catholic high schools sparked debate that led to the passage of Bill 13 in Ontario. For years, it has put out guides to Pride (something newly out-of-the-closet 16-year-old me loved). And most recently, the paper put together a series about PrEP, the latest in HIV-prevention treatment. Xtra long celebrated a part of my identity that I struggled to come to love.

While the paper will still exist online in all its gay glory, I’ll miss the sense of pride in seeing those bright pink boxes throughout the city.

Goodbye, Xtra.

Thanks to Joy Waller for the featured image. 

While your reporter spoke to the two former editors of KDN, she put out what appears to be little effort to speak to anyone at KTW, where I work, other than to use one quote from editor Chris Fould which seems to have been taken completely out of context.

A bit of research would have shown your writer KTW was named the best community newspaper in the country last year by the CCNA. Two of us also received mention for our journalism during that awards ceremony. We have a larger newsroom than we have had in the past, expanding to 10 people. I’m not sure there are many other newsrooms in this country that are growing. We added a third print edition. I’m not sure there are many community newspapers adding editions. The list of editorial awards our staff has won in past years is very long.

But what I find most disappointing is your reporter’s assertion KTW does not provide much more than an online news presence and lacks coverage in the environment and education. We hired the Daily’s best environment reporter and he is doing the same stellar job for us he did for it. I know the level of educational coverage because I do that beat. A search of our website would reveal the many stories we have done on those beats as well as many others.

I was a senior editor at the London Free Press during the Blackburn family ownership days and am in my sixth year as chair of the Canadian Association of Journalists. My husband worked for the United Press and Canadian Press covering Parliament and now teaches journalism. We both know good journalism and see it in my colleagues every single day.

I would ask you to do some research of your own on our newspaper and then decide if the story you published was balanced and accurate.

By: Erica Lenti

It started with a shaky, selfie-angled smartphone shot. Kevin Newman, then 54, held his device up for the opening monologue of his new TV show the same way a teenager would at the club—arm raised, head slightly tilted. He then began the broadcast straight from his smartphone. The night’s top story, Newman announced enthusiastically, hand still shaking, the shot dizzying, was Rob Ford’s loss of mayoral power, the introduction triggering a barrage of viral clips. By the time the title card appeared—“Personal! Immediate! Now: Kevin Newman Live”—the show had already distanced itself from the typical Canadian newscast.

Kevin Newman Live launched on November 18, 2013 to broadcast the day’s news as dictated by social media. But the premise never stuck and after just seven months, CTV cut KNL from its lineup. At first, producers considered the show the answer to broadcasting’s loss of young viewers to the digital world; but the team, like so many others in television news, quickly found the solution wasn’t that simple. While TV newscasts primarily attract an older demographic, younger Canadians dominate engagement on the internet—and a single show can’t attract both groups. Rather, the younger, active audiences of social media and the older, passive viewers of broadcast, like oil and water, are inevitably bound to separate. These two vastly different worlds of news consumption are best off avoiding the merger and the failure of KNL proves why.

While KNL was the first full-length show its kind in the country, many news organizations have attempted social media coverage, including Canada AM’s “Things I Learned on the Internet Today” segment to City News Toronto’s viral video of the day. Like KNL, these segments attempt to bridge the gap between digital and broadcast. Often, they fail to engage because the ability to share content is non-existent. There are also concerns of accuracy: viewers aren’t getting firsthand, original reporting from traditional journalists. But most important, much of the content runs the risk of being pegged as old news, already devoured online by the same audience producers are desperately trying to reel in: the younger crowd.

The primary viewers of television news are in their 40s and 50s, consumers Statistics Canada has found are not as plugged in as their younger counterparts. In fact, a study by the Canadian Media Research Consortium found precious few Canadians over 55 consume news via social media.

Regardless, CTV proceeded with the digital-TV crossbreed. In April 2013, looking to pioneer an innovative newscast for the channel, the network’s president Wendy Freeman set her sights on Newman. By June, he and Jack Fleischmann, the vice-president of CTV news channel at the time, were working on the bare bones of the show. It opted to present viral memes and “click-y” news stories that fare so well online in a broadcast format for one hour every weeknight, using little to no original reporting and a reliance on social media for editorial direction. But it was like watching a seasoned journalist reciting BuzzFeed articles on air—show taglines took cues from clickbait headlines. Hashtags loomed in the corner of the screen for the 50-minute duration of the program. Aggregators who found stories on Reddit and Twitter replaced all but one original reporter, and Facebook comments and tweets often took on the role of streeter interviews. But watching journalists read social media commentary on air is awkward at best.

Without an interactive demographic, engagement flops. Despite touting the benefits of a “two-screen approach”—interacting with the KNL’s crew online using a tablet, smartphone or laptop—the show found little traction using live-blogging tool ScribbleLive, which let viewers converse with the show’s producers on social media. The blog picked up little steam from the start, with few viewers joining in on the conversation. By June, the blog was cut. Colin Horgan, a writer and producer for KNL, admits, “We never generated that online conversation we had hoped for.”

The sentiment reveals a core, contradictory issue with traditional media’s attempts to cover digital content: broadcast news conditions viewers to be passive, while online content is often active and dependent on crowdsourcing. Whether because of their age or preferred form of news consumption, Newman says: “People watching TV don’t really want to be interactive.”

That’s Rena Bivens’s take, too. The author of Digital Currents, which examines the digitization of broadcast journalism, agrees that it makes sense to tap into the world of news through social media. Yet the translation to broadcast can become stunted. “While so many of us are interested in what’s happening on our social media feeds,” she says, “it doesn’t mean we necessarily want take the culture of what’s going on there and see it in a different context.”

Research in her book also shows that journalists receive little feedback from their audience and yet social media allows those same viewers to discuss the journalism online with other viewers. So far, no one has figured out how a television newscast can handle this convergence despite attempts such as KNL. The news organizations that have been most successful in crossbreeding digital and broadcast journalism are native to online. The Toronto Star’s senior editor of social media Jennifer Wilson points to Mashable, which produces minute-long videos of viral stories with catchy, witty scripts that provide a snippet into a newsworthy event and are easy to share. Still, they too rely on aggregation in place of original reporting and a jump to television sets is unlikely.

KNL responded to its shortcomings with traditional broadcast news tactics. Newman stopped emphasizing interactivity and instead opted to read tweets on air and reference Google Maps and Instagram photos. He went as far as explaining the meaning of #TOpoli, the Twitter hashtag for discussion about Toronto politics. By KNL’s last episode in June 2014, stand-up shots of Newman, a tried-and-true staple of broadcast news, had replaced the shaky smartphone shots.

Despite the show’s cancellation, many former KNL journalists, including Newman himself, insist shows with a similar format will continue to crop up. The prospects for such shows remain bleak. And networks would be wise to stop trying.

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the KNL live blog was cut in its first month, and aggregators replaced all original reporters. The live blog ended after six months, and the team had a single original reporter. The Review regrets the errors.

Q: What happens when an internationally-recognized Canadian journalist who has written extensively on what is arguably the country’s biggest political scandal to date holds an online question-and-answer period?

A: She receives a bunch of really, really stupid questions.

Robyn Doolittle should be applauded for her efforts to connect with Torontonians on Reddit Tuesday after hosting an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) thread in which her readers could ask their burning questions. She braved the possibility of encountering a cesspool of trolls; but while they seemed to stay at bay for this AMA (Daniel Dale excluded), the session still fell flat. What could have been an opportunity to peek into the world of Canadian investigative journalism, instead turned into a boring collection of queries regarding Doolittle’s House of Cards lookalike, her dog grooming schedule and if she had ever met Rob Ford (seriously).

The outcome is a shame. Reddit has long been a launching pad for great crowdsourced journalism. In 2012, several major Canadian publications commended and cited the Redditor-produced timeline on the Danzig shooting. The forum has also been a platform for connection, a place where those who have been out of reach from the general public can converse with laypeople.

For journalists, AMAs serve as an opportunity to answer the questions behind their stories, help readers better understand their jobs and be transparent about how they gather and report news. The AMA subreddit is five years old, and boasts more than 6 million members and there have been plenty of well-informed journalist-hosted AMAs: In June, Ricochet editor Ethan Cox held one that yielded questions about the sustainability of a Canadian journalism start-up. In January 2013, Andy Carvin discussed the implications of covering Arab revolutions using social media. And last October, Postmedia columnist Andrew Coyne talked paywalls and Canadian politics.

Why, then, are Doolittle’s readers so interested in her resemblance to Kate Mara and her relationship status? It’s impossible to pinpoint. Her gender plays a role in how she’s perceived, but so does the fact that she uncovered such a sensational story about one of Canada’s strangest political figures and has appeared globally on late-night TV shows. Doolittle is a female journalist who was thrust into the spotlight—and as research shows, it’s not a surprise she faces intense scrutiny and an onslaught of irrelevant questions.

Not all was terrible: Doolittle did glean some insight on her move to The Globe and Mail (spoiler: she loved it) and paying for news. Otherwise, all we can take from her AMA is that she likes creeping people’s brunch and her love for the Eyeopener is undying.

Can we try a little harder next time, Internet?

Photo courtesy of Zach Copley.

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Sarah Boesveld, general assignment reporter at the National Post, tells the Review about her embarrassing encounter with The Boss.

Leah Wong talks about her upcoming profile “Bravissimo” in the Summer 2012 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.