As a journalist of colour, I find few things as disheartening as an editor replacing “Black people” with “black people.” This first happened to my work with an essay about the racism I experienced while dating as a Black woman in London, Ontario. I was overjoyed when the piece appeared— until I saw that all of my capital-B “Blacks” had become sad, irrelevant “blacks,” except for the two that were in quotation marks.

I was devastated that a news outlet claiming to have fresh, bold ideas—including sections specifically for people of colour to contribute—chose rigid grammar rules over expression. With every “B” on the page, I was asking for Black people to be heard; instead, I felt silenced. Since then, I’ve lost almost every battle for the capital “B.”

Capitalizing proper titles for Black people has been on activist and journalist agendas for decades. For me, in the era of Black Lives Matter, capital-B Black is an act of defiance against a society that often paints minorities as secondary. That inferiority nags at me when I’m called a racial slur; when I’m forced onto the road because a group of white kids see me and won’t share the sidewalk; when a security guard follows me around a store. Trying to explain to your (often) white editor that Black is so closely tied to your own lived experience can be complicated and emotional. I’ve heard “I just don’t get it” too many times. But when the profession meant to expose systemic issues doesn’t “get it,” that becomes yet another barrier.

One of the earliest capitalizing champions was W.E.B. Du Bois, an American author and activist who started a letter-writing campaign in the 1920s. He demanded that publishers and newspaper editors capitalize the “N” in Negro, the official term for Black people at the time, to show respect. In 1929, Encyclopedia Britannica lowercased “negro” in Du Bois’s article prior to its publication. He wrote to the editor’s assistant, saying, “The use of a small letter for the name of twelve million Americans…[is] a personal insult.” Soon after, the encyclopedia restored the capitalization for the final version, and by 1930, The New York Times added it to its style guide.

No mainstream news outlets in Canada capitalize Black, and neither do most news sites such as BuzzFeed or Vice. The Canadian Press Stylebook says to “capitalize the proper names of nationalities, peoples, races, tribes,” such as Aboriginal Peoples, Arab, Caucasian, Negro and Pygmy, but “write aboriginal…black, brown, [and] white.” James McCarten, editor of the CP Stylebook and Caps and Spelling, says that editors, bureau chiefs and staff members have discussed capitalizing Aboriginal, but Black falls under another broader style policy. “Black is not a race. Nor is white,” he says. “Both are generic terms and therefore are lower case. We are not currently considering a change in that regard.”

Anthony Collins, co-chair of the Toronto Star’s style committee, says the paper follows Canadian Press style and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, which does not capitalize Black. While Collins says the Star has made strides with language around sexual orientation, disability and race in general, the conversation about Black hasn’t happened. “Language has power, and capitalizing words can be seen as a mark of respect,” he says. “But our chief goal as editors is to serve the reader, and in doing so, we are guided by established English usage.”

Some Canadian publications such as This Magazine have decided to start capitalizing. This year, the Review began capitalizing Black, Aboriginal and Indigenous after the masthead agreed it was a necessary step toward more accurate and respectful reporting on under-represented communities. Rabble.ca capitalizes Black “to acknowledge there is a shared Black experience that is larger than just sharing a similar skin tone,” says blog editor Michael Stewart. “It has cultural, social and political implications.” He adds that the Black and Indigenous writers he’s spoken to prefer the words to be capitalized. “We respect a community’s right to choose the way it describes itself.”

But that doesn’t mean all Black journalists are pro-capital “B.” CBC anchor Asha Tomlinson is torn: while she sees the distinction it can give, she thinks journalists should seek out where their sources are actually from. “Black and white have no origins,” she says. However, she notes that while the Black population in the United States is predominantly African-American, Canada’s is so diverse that journalists need an umbrella term when reporting on Black communities.

Style guides evolve, as does language. If we can change “E-mail” to “email” and take the “ed” out of “transgendered,” we can capitalize one letter to reflect the way a community identifies. Gangbangers, drug dealers, violent brutes—Black people have been victims of damaging stereotypes for years. After decades of non-Black folks telling us who they think we are, it’s time we get to decide how we want to identify.

As journalists, we have tremendous power in shaping how people see each other and, with that, a responsibility to get it right. We don’t get to call ourselves “progressive” if we’re unwilling to modify a community’s name just because it’s not in the dictionary. We should all know that black is a colour, but Black is for people.

“Oh my God/Oh my God/If I Die, I’m a legend,” shouted thousands of concert-goers through the haze of smoke and fireworks during the final song of Drake’s OVO Fest last August. For two people, those words foreshadowed the night ahead. As the three-day festival ended at Toronto’s Molson Canadian Amphitheatre around midnight, some excited fans tweeted on their way to the after-party at Muzik nightclub.

The Toronto Star later reported that Ariela Navarro-Fenoy couldn’t get tickets to the sold-out show, but she did get into Muzik. She reportedly texted a friend around 11 p.m. to let him know. Meanwhile, Duvel Hibbert also made it to the nightclub. Through- out the night, people posted on social media from the party, but around 3:30 a.m., journalists took over Twitter: shots had been fired at Muzik. On the club’s patio, Hibbert lay dead. Outside, Navarro-Fenoy had been hit by a stray bullet. By morning, both were dead, and three other people were injured. By the next afternoon, police formally released the victims’ names, but some journalists were already a step ahead.

The headlines reflected their findings: Navarro-Fenoy, who had an active social media presence, became the “beautiful, smiling” girl caught in a hail of bullets: “Drake fan was an innocent victim of Muzik shooting,” read a Star headline.

Hibbert received different treatment. A Google search for his name brought up a Canada-wide warrant issued by the Ontario Provincial Police in 2013 for his parole violation on a possession of a firearm offence. The Brampton Guardian titled an article “Muzik nightclub shooting victim had criminal record that included gun crimes,” and a Toronto Sun headline read: “Man slain at OVO Fest after-party was under house arrest.”

An online GoFundMe campaign for Navarro-Fenoy’s funeral costs surpassed its goal of $20,000. A campaign for Hibbert, started by someone identified as his sister Angie, collected less than $4,500. She begged people to look past the news stories about him—a life had still been lost.

The Muzik tragedy falls under one of Toronto’s biggest crime concerns: gun violence. While other cities have common crimes—stabbings in Regina and homicides in Winnipeg—gun homicides in Toronto get national coverage. The 2012 shooting at the Eaton Centre (followed by Danzig Street a month later), Yonge Street on Boxing Day 2005 and a Just Desserts café in 1994 represent the city’s gun problem.

The shooting deaths of youngsters Jordan Manners, Ephraim Brown, Kesean Williams and Lecent Ross also highlight the region’s issue with violent crime. While fatal shootings have dramatically decreased since Toronto’s “Year of the Gun” in 2005, shooting injuries—many involving young Black men from disadvantaged neighbourhoods—have increased. That worries the police and the public.

For years, media critics, lawyers and criminologists have denounced the coverage of gun violence, arguing that it perpetuates the stereotype that Black people, particularly Jamaicans, are violent gangbangers—Toronto’s obstacle to safe streets. In 2000, then-York University professors Frances Henry and Carol Tator analyzed two decades of English-language Canadian newspapers and found that reporters and editors not only contribute to the association of crime with Black people, but they also have the power to shape how the public views minority groups.

When Black shooters are easily identified, the crimes are “bloodbaths” that “spill” into Toronto streets, while others—like a January double murder in Toronto’s downtown Chinatown, which included three people injured on a busy nighttime street— are simply called “fatal.” In 2012, Christopher Husbands shot and killed two men in the crowded Eaton Centre food court, injuring four others. The shooting was called a bloodbath in some articles. Both the Star and the Sun described the Danzig barbecue as “Caribbean-themed” with “jerk chicken,” affiliating Black people with the shooting. Headlines and coverage involving Black shooters reflect sensational tones that spark fear of Black men and public panic about who is causing the shootings. And the focus on Black male shooters in high-profile cases and the underwhelming coverage of young Black victims suggest an implicit racial bias that, even in Toronto—known for its motto “Diversity our strength”—journalists fail to adequately address.

In the era of Black Lives Matter and a shift toward more diversity in newsrooms, journalists should be held accountable for how they report on crime when race is involved. They will have to learn to be sensitive to how their coverage can stigmatize an entire community. Such sensitivity is possible, but only if journalists are willing to report on the underlying issues.

Jamaicans started moving to Canada in large numbers throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, and many settled in Toronto, where newspaper employees were—and remain—mostly white. Turf wars erupted in low-income neighbourhoods over the crack cocaine trade, mainly run by Jamaicans in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The city was fearful, and mainstream news outlets often lumped all Black people together when laying the blame. “It was terrible,” says former Sun reporter Tom Godfrey, who worked at Contrast, one of Toronto’s first Black newspapers, in the mid-’80s. He remembers being one of only a few Black reporters in the city. “You could be from Africa or Jamaica, but it was all ‘the Black community.’”

Meanwhile, Black leaders condemned police for beating and shooting people, including Albert Johnson in 1979 and Lester Donaldson and Michael Wade Lawson in 1988. “Young Black males were thrown into police cars and questioned later,” Godfrey says. “It was open season.”

He remembers dozens of Black people lined up outside the Contrast office to report alleged police beatings. Often, they’d have blood streaming from their faces. “They thought Black community papers would give them a fair shake,” he says, since mainstream news often sided with police.

News outlets began seeing a trend in gun violence: Jamaicans were often suspects and victims, and reporters fed the public’s anxiety about Jamaican crime taking over Toronto. Timothy Appleby, then a police reporter for The Globe and Mail, wrote a three-part series in July 1992 called “Crime: the Jamaica connection.” Each instalment started on the front page. The first of the series was headlined “Island crime wave spills over” and stated that “a small but volatile group of young Jamaican males has altered Toronto’s criminal landscape significantly in the past three years.” The pull quote in the full-page spread showcased the words of a law enforcement official in Jamaica: “The people who migrate are the riffraff. The quality ones stay home.”

The death of Georgina “Vivi” Leimonis, shot when three Jamaican men robbed a Just Desserts café, riveted Toronto in 1994. Described as an act of “urban terrorism” by police, the story ran repeatedly in the city’s major outlets. Newspapers published more than 200 stories on the murder in the following seven weeks. Editorials demanded tougher immigration laws, and an op-ed by the Globe’s Michael Valpy said the “barbarians are inside the gate” committing “alien slaughter.”

Globe reporter Peter Cheney says it was the most sensational murder case he’d seen in Canada, which he attributes to the growing racial tension between Black and white communities. “The Jamaican community in particular felt it was singled out for coverage that reflected poorly on it,” he says. “Was there actually a crime problem in that community? Was the media guilty of racist coverage? I think both were true.”

A late-’90s study of the Star and the Sun by criminologist Scot Wortley found that Black people appear predominantly in crime, sports and entertainment stories, while white people overpopulate politics, business and science. In 1999, not much had improved. Henry, then Ryerson University’s chair of diversity for the school of journalism, and research assistant Marnie Bjornson found that about 40 percent of all stories about Jamaicans in those two newspapers, between 1994 and 1997, were in relation to “social problems,” including crime and immigration, and only 2 percent were positive.

In 1999, Cheney finished “a.k.a. Brownman,” his in-depth fea- ture on Lawrence Brown, who was later convicted of first-degree murder in Leimonis’s death. Cheney says the case crystallized the white fear of Black men who, until then, the public believed were only killing each other in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. “But then it spilled over into the ‘privileged’ community—the white community,” Cheney says. “And a white person was shot while getting dessert. And so the two worlds had intersected.”

A decade later, the Jane Creba case also unnerved Toronto. On Boxing Day 2005, a stray bullet hit the 15-year-old during a gang shootout while she shopped on a busy downtown street. Detective sergeant Savas Kyriacou called it “the day Toronto lost its innocence.” Creba’s death ended the “Year of the Gun,” which led to the formation of the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) with $5 million from the province to create trained officer teams.

Wortley, now an associate professor at the University of Toronto Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, believes the case gained public sympathy because it was a “perfect storm.” It was an interracial shooting, and Wortley says that “Creba was what might be called the ‘ideal victim’: young, female, white, innocent, caught in gang warfare,” adding that people were also interested because it happened on Boxing Day in a busy Yonge Street shopping area. “Those crimes generate fear because it suggests that violence has stepped outside of its normal boundaries.”

Six weeks later, York University student Chantel Dunn was killed in a shooting the police said was meant for her boyfriend, who escaped with injuries. “It took place near Jane and Finch,” says Wortley, referring to one of Toronto’s well-known “priority” neighbourhoods, a euphemism for low-income areas. “The impression is if you’re unlucky or stupid enough to live in a high-crime area, then those types of things happen there, so it’s not a big story.”

Each year in his introductory criminology course, Wortley asks his students to make a list of famous Canadian criminals. They throw around names: Bernardo, Homolka, Pickton, Magnotta, Olson—all white. When he asks them which group they think is responsible for most violent crime in Canada, they say African and Aboriginal Canadians. Wortley challenges students to name one offender from either group, but nobody can. “It illustrates how white crime is individualized,” he says. The public learns about their childhoods, jobs and mental illnesses, even excuses for the behaviour. “But minority crime is a cultural phenomenon. It’s a problem in the neighbourhood. It’s a problem with Jamaicans. It’s hip hop culture,” he says. “Everybody in that group is stigmatized by it.”

Listen: Rob Lamberti, who covered crime at the Toronto Sun for almost 30 years, talks about the mistrust between Black communities and the Sun, and what the paper got wrong when reporting on crime involving Black people

After the Danzig shooting, the National Post published an article entirely about the Hennessy bought for the party, saying it has “a reputation as the go-to drink in hip hop circles” and is “popular among rappers.” Below the article is a list of lyrics about Hennessy by rappers Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Mac Dre, who all wrote about gang life in their music, and two of whom were killed by gunfire.

A Post story in July about Mark Moore, a Toronto rapper convicted of murdering four people, featured two screenshots of Moore from rap videos. In one, he’s wearing gold jewellery and pointing at the camera. In another, Moore is rapping in a limo, wearing sunglasses and gold chains and holding stacks of bills.

Paul Nguyen was so tired of seeing people’s expressions when he told them he lived at Jane and Finch that he started saying he lived in North York instead. He noticed that journalists came to the neighbourhood rarely—only when crimes occurred. So, after graduating from York University in 2004, he created Jane-Finch.com to dispel its negative image. “We have a lot of young people here doing amazing things, winning all kinds of awards, competing on national levels,” he says. “I wanted to share and promote those positive things here.”

Nguyen says reporters feed the perception that the neighbourhood is dangerous. A TV reporter approached him to do a story on young people using music to escape gang life. One of Nguyen’s friends, known for wearing a bulletproof vest, was helping out. The friend showed a reporter where bullets had been fired near a convenience store. The lead for the next day’s story: “Sometimes a simple trip to the corner store in Toronto’s Jane-Finch neighbourhood means wearing a bulletproof vest.”

The reporter was Black, so his angle particularly shocked Nguyen. Another time, reporters came to do a live hit for a positive story—and brought two men Nguyen believed were security guards. As Nguyen says, “Jane and Finch is a brand.”

The annual Toronto Caribbean Carnival, which used to be known as Caribana, is also a brand known for gunfire. Stephen Weir, public relations manager since 1999, says the public sometimes still calls it “Caribana” and, each year, the carnival ends up in the news for “pre-Caribana” or “Caribana weekend” crimes. Weir says many journalists don’t realize that club promoters use the name to help boost attendance at events that aren’t affiliated with the carnival.

In 2009, Wesler Fabien, a Black man from Ottawa, was shot to death outside the Howard Johnson Hotel in the posh Toronto area of Yorkville. Even though police said the shooting wasn’t related to the carnival, several articles included that it happened on carnival weekend and that Fabien and a friend were visiting the city to attend. “Good or bad,” Weir says, “Caribana is thought of as everything that happens on the August first weekend.” Sometimes, crimes are linked to the carnival weeks before it even begins. On July 23, 2010, a teenager was shot and killed at a church basement party in Ajax, about 50 kilometres east of Toronto. A Durham police officer was quoted saying, “We’ve been told that it was a pre-Caribana party.” Weir says the event had nothing to do with the carnival—it wasn’t even in Toronto.

In 2015, a stabbing took place during Nuit Blanche, an all-night art event; later that night, a crowd at Yonge-Dundas Square threw bottles at police. CityNews published an online article that reported, “Nuit Blanche was taking place at the same time although there were no installations at Yonge-Dundas Square.” Weir says, “If it had been a mostly Black or Caribbean crowd, it probably would have been called a ‘Caribana riot.’”

He says journalists rely heavily on police, who can use “throwaway lines” that end up sticking. If an officer incorrectly links a shooting to the festival, Weir has to call reporters to clarify. Although most journalists will issue a correction, he says some refuse or don’t follow through.

Reporters rely on crime information from police press conferences, which can’t give the full picture because they’re usually focused on a specific crime. “I think that police sometimes have a vested interest in creating moral panics about particular types of crimes because it can help mobilize public support,” Wortley says. In two decades as a criminologist, he’s seen public spending and police power increase dramatically after sensational shootings.

News outlets fed into this when they quoted former police chief Bill Blair’s statement labelling Danzig the “worst incident of gun violence in my memory anywhere in North America” as he stood at the scene. This statement is an example of why Wortley urges journalists to think hard about their sources. His op-ed in the Star the next day criticized Blair’s inaccurate statement about Danzig, in which two were killed, while pointing out that 14 people died in the Montreal Massacre and 32 were killed at Virginia Tech.

Journalistic accuracy is critical, and race-based data on crime could help journalists show a more accurate picture of crime in Canada. But, unlike American law enforcement, many Canadian cops don’t analyze it. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an assistant professor in the department of criminal justice at Indiana University (although he’s originally from the GTA), says the information could help journalists dispel stereotypes: “We rely on news media from the United States, so we vastly overestimate Black and other racial groups’ participation in crime,” he says. Wortley adds that the vast majority of all communities are actually law-abiding.

That’s what Star columnist Royson James wanted to show. “Yes, we have murders and gun violence and Black people are involved,” he says. “And a number of times it’s Jamaicans. So it’s going to get reported. You can’t sugarcoat that. The problem is that’s all that gets out there.”

James came to the city in 1969 as a poor teenager from rural Jamaica. He worked at Contrast before joining the Star in 1981, trying to prove himself as a well-versed reporter at a time when Black journalists were sparse. But he grew tired of seeing Black people—mainly Jamaicans—making headlines as criminals and gang members. “Why can we only focus on criminals of Jamaican descent? It’s the same criminals we all hate,” he says. “It blocks out everything else that the community does because it becomes the overriding narrative of a people.”

Jamaica’s 50th Independence Day on August 6, 2012, offered a golden opportunity to showcase positive stories. James suggested a series of articles, including following as many successful Jamaican-Torontonians as he could in 24 hours. His editor liked the idea, but said it would be difficult to do in that time frame without using already known people. James and six other reporters with Jamaican roots, including Donovan Vincent and Ashante Infantry, accepted the challenge. They followed 50 people, including a lawyer, a teacher, TTC operators, a dentist and a surgeon. “My editor said there were too many doctors,” says James. Too many doctors. “That was one of the best days of my journalism career.”

It was so unbearably hot when Peter Kuitenbrouwer woke on the morning of July 17, 2012, that the fire alarm in his house kept going off. But he didn’t have time to fix it. His editor at the Post needed him to get to Scarborough, in Toronto’s east end, fast: the breaking story was the Danzig Street shooting. Several weeks earlier, a shooting at the Eaton Centre killed two and wounded five others. This one, at a community barbecue in public housing, also killed two but injured 23.

Dozens of reporters crowded around the yellow tape. Mayor Rob Ford and representatives of Toronto Community Housing were there. Kuitenbrouwer wanted to go beyond the story that officials would give, so he went into the neighbourhood to talk to locals—but it wasn’t easy. “‘White guy from far away shows up and wants to stick his nose in our business.’ It’s usually that way,” he says. “It’s pretty hard to get trust.”

He picked up an extra meal for a resident at lunchtime, and the two ate outside together—a small way to ease the tension reporters cause by swooping into low-income neighbourhoods to report on a crime and then leaving, which, to Kuitenbrouwer, creates an “us versus them” relationship.

His article, “Life and death on ‘the other side of the tracks,’” made the front page. He says the time constraints of daily news make it difficult to report on underlying issues, but it’s essential to try, especially with a case like Danzig. “You go in thinking this is a horrible, dark place where people shoot each other,” he says. “But then you hang around for a while and realize it’s just people trying to get on with their lives but having some struggles.”

The Star’s Jim Rankin has written several features about the lives of young Black offenders and those affected by gun violence, including Audette Shephard. He thinks journalists still aren’t doing enough to present a balanced image of Black people. “Reporting on crime like it’s a sporting event is not getting beyond the surface,” he says. “All stories need to be told, whether they’re about the one who pulled the trigger or the one who died.” For Rankin, it helps to understand the systemic racism the Black community faces—contributing to a lack of opportunity, poverty, hopelessness and low-wage jobs, which, among other factors, make youth vulnerable to joining a gang or selling drugs.

In 2013, Star reporters David Bruser and Jayme Poisson did an investigative series about the guns smuggled into Toronto along U.S. Interstate 75—weapons that, they reported, were responsible for over 70 percent of the city’s shootings. The stories showed how lax gun-control laws in the United States made for easier gun access in Toronto—a root cause of street violence reporters rarely discuss.

James believes hiring journalists of colour could help newsrooms better understand these underlying causes, instead of relying on officials. “If your news team doesn’t have people who interact with members of the Black community except in exceptional cases of crime and violence,” he says, “then that’s all you’re going to get.”

Listen: Jeff Dvorkin, director of the journalism program at the University of Toronto Scarborough, talks about the importance of addressing race in reporting and how his students are creating the discussion in their classes

Featured image by Gary Denness

Offleash is the Ryerson Review of Journalism’s first-ever regular podcast, published on RRJ.ca every second Wednesday at 3:33 p.m. (with the exception of today—we’re a few days early to make it on time for Valentine’s Day listeners).

In this week’s episode, our multimedia editors Eternity and Allison discuss all things journalism and love.

Dan Westell and Kimberley Noble, two journalists who are married to each other, talk about when they first met and their tips for dating a fellow reporter. And Marina Adshade, an economist and author, discusses the complex relationship between love and the economy.

Later in the show, Eternity speaks with Laura Hensley, departments editor, and Davide Mastracci, blog editor, about writing about their love lives. There is also talk of secret admirers.

Offleash, the Review’s podcast created by senior editor Viviane Fairbank and multimedia editors Allison Baker and Eternity Martis, is now on iTunes.

Music courtesy of Paul Nathan Harper, also known as A F L O A T. Find his music here: @a-f-l-o-a-t

As the RRJ podcast crew got ready for this week’s episode on indigenous reporting in Canada, we knew it was impossible to talk about indigenous coverage without commenting on the largest serial killer investigation in Canadian history.

Robert Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, Vancouver, had been raping and killing women, mostly from the downtown Eastside of Vancouver, since as early as 1991. Even though he was on the radar of the Vancouver Police Department for several years, he was finally arrested in 2002 on a firearms warrant. While they raided his farm and house, police found DNA of over 33 women on his farm–their personal belongings, medication, blood, hair and bones.

Pickton was convicted in 2007 on six counts of second degree murder in the deaths of Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Mona Wilson, Georgina Faith Papin, Sereena Abotsway and Brenda Ann Wolfe. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for 25 years. The Crown stayed 20 other first-degree murder charges against him in 2010, leaving dozens of the victims’ families with no justice. Pickton confessed to killing 49 women.

After publishing her first book in 2002 titled The Pickton File, Stevie Cameron published On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women in 2010, a 768-page book on the lives of Pickton and his victims and the sensational trial. In 2011, Cameron won the Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction crime book.

In our upcoming podcast, Cameron says the case was one of the greatest moments of her career, and it played a major role in the disappearances and murders of women on the Downtown Eastside as well as the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry.

Cameron commented on a significant misconception perpetuated by the coverage of the Pickton case. Many journalists inaccurately framed it as a missing and murdered indigenous women’s issue. “The vast majority of [Pickton’s] victims were white,” Cameron says. “Then [indigenous], black or mixed.”

A possible reason for the misconception, according to Cameron, could be journalists basing their coverage solely on the convictions against Pickton: of the six women whose deaths he was charged with, four of them were indigenous. In addition, of the 33 women whose DNA was found on the farm, 12 were aboriginal.

To help keep track of all the women potentially linked to Pickton, Cameron created a chart with all information on each victim–and for many, their untimely deaths. The chart took Cameron eight years to create– her lifeline to the case.

Cameron’s chart, which included 71 potential victims (and four Jane Does) showed that 42 women were white, 14 were indigenous, one was black and one was multiracial (Mexican, black, and Aboriginal). The ethnicity of every women listed on the chart is not known.

To hear more about Stevie Cameron’s experience on Pickton case, her time with the victims’ families and what she learned spending time at the Downtown Eastside, tune in to Offleash podcast, airing today at 3:33 p.m.

Richard Moon, a law professor at the University of Windsor, came to Ryerson University on Monday, November 23, to speak to students and community members about the fine line between hate speech and free speech. His conclusion? He doesn’t have one.

Moon’s lecture was focused specifically on speech related to the Muslim faith in relation to the recent Paris attacks. “When speech that attributes undesirable or dangerous qualities to a group that has been the recent target of hate and hate groups, it is more likely to be hate speech,” he said, citing how this speech can lead to the burning down of mosques and global violence against innocent Muslims.

Moon said that religion is a cultural and personal part of identity. When such a belief is deeply held, the impact of insult can be devastating on the believer. It’s an experience that outsiders to that belief may not understand. “The impact and insult may be greater for marginalized groups that see it as further subordination of a group in public,” he said. However, Moon drove home the point that there are different levels of belief in each religious group—not everybody associated with that religion will be insulted by offensive speech.

There was some discussion on journalists’ use of offensive speech relating to the Muslim faith, such as Mark Steyn’s article in Maclean’s entitled “The Future Belongs to Islam” and Jyllands-Posten’s publishing of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad (see the image below). But while Moon asked his audience to question how this speech, used as a tool by members of the press, could incite hate against an entire group by calling its members “dangerous” and “violent.” But he also discussed the impact on free speech if religious criticism were to be silenced.

Moon said that personal beliefs should be open to debate. If religion is an untouchable area of free speech, then just about any belief can be claimed to be a part of an identity that can’t be insulted—political, scientific or cultural. How else would we function in this free and democratic society? But what if this speech, uncensored or unpunished by law, incites violence on the targeted group?

Confused? That’s the point. It’s a complicated debate, one where the chips fall on every side depending on your experiences and how you identify. As Moon said, there’s no other country where freedom of expression and freedom of religion can be so freely exercised. But in our multicultural landscape, they intersect. And so far, it’s been a collision, not a complement.

Amidst Moon’s own attempts to battle out the pros and cons of free speech on religion, there’s one stance he holds clear: it’s not the subjective experience of someone hurt by offensive speech that should be measured—it’s the context of that speech. But who decides that is another issue.

For seven years, Toronto Life editor Sarah Fulford has seen the glossy covers of her magazine go through a demanding selection process before hitting newsstands. Since the editorial and art direction teams, as well as the publisher, are involved, the final version is often the result of many revisions and even late changes. The May 2015 cover story was to be Tinder dating on Bay Street, but Desmond Cole’s “The Skin I’m In,” a memoir about being repeatedly subjected to police carding, was too compelling not to showcase, and the photos were understated yet powerful. So that became the choice. Fulford believes a successful cover demands attention with punchy headlines, colours and photos that make a shopper stop, pick the magazine up and flip through its pages. “The best Toronto Life covers,” she says, “are the ones that feel irresistible.”

Given that a magazine has three seconds or less to make an impression on a newsstand reader, irresistibility is crucial. But with more and more readers going online for their stories, grabbing them in stores is no longer the only goal. Toronto Life and The Walrus are two magazines that still place traditional emphasis on the cover, but their editors, Fulford and Jonathan Kay, acknowledge that its power as the public face of the magazine is shifting.

At Toronto Life, the conversation often begins with Fulford and art director Christine Dewairy about a possible cover based on a story already in progress or any sketches and headlines they have in mind. Once they’ve agreed on some potential ideas, they take them to the editorial team. Dewairy begins drafting mock-ups and discusses them with the editorial team. By the time the issue goes to print, she has often created over 40 of them.

“Covers are the personality of the magazine—the persona,” says Patrick Kennedy, a Western University professor who teaches a course with a focus on producing consumer magazines. “It has to have impact and it has to connect with the audience that the magazine tends to serve.” As newsstand advisor for Toronto Life and The Walrus, Annie Gabrielian studies the performance of past covers. Real estate covers do well at Toronto Life, while the Summer Reading issues are popular with readers of The Walrus. Gabrielian views the cover as an invaluable marketing tool and looks for background colours to draw readers in. She also uses tiny badges and starburst images to tell readers the issue is a special or seasonal one, and to celebrate exclusive material. However, even with the work of the consumer marketing team, at many magazines, the publisher has the final say.

Unlike Toronto Life’s in-your-face fonts and photographs, The Walrus covers boast warm pastels and artistic illustrations that contrast its cover stories on science, politics, health and literature. Brian Morgan, the magazine’s art director, says fine art and illustrations have always been a part of its covers, which he thinks add an element of surprise for readers. Circulation and marketing manager Bryan Maloney agrees. “We’re not trying to shock you as you walk by the newsstand—we’re trying to intrigue you,” he says. “You want someone to stop and think.” This appeals to The Walrus readers who, on average, are 41, enjoy reading more serious writing and have a household income of almost $100,000.

As digital readership grows, magazines put the focus on producing quality features for the magazine instead of paying as much attention to the cover. Kay thinks covers are irrelevant in the digital age because most people find stories through social media: “When you click on a link, you don’t think of what’s on the cover,” he says, adding that it must still work to intrigue print subscribers and impulse buyers. “It is strictly a print phenomenon.”

But Fulford argues that the digital age has given covers a new purpose: they appear on Facebook walls, across other social media and in photo galleries. Citing Caitlyn Jenner on Vanity Fair and Bill Cosby’s accusers on New York, Fulford says print covers can spark viral online discussions on important issues.

A recent controversial example was Toronto Life’s July 2015 cover promoting Leah McLaren’s “The Cult of Jian.” Many readers were horrified to see a smiling Jian Ghomeshi on the magazine. “The topic itself is incredibly upsetting. The allegations, if true, around what he did are truly horrific,” says Fulford. “In my experience, when you tackle tough subjects, you stir up feelings, and we certainly did that.”

Dewairy struggled to craft a cover for the issue that was attention grabbing yet sensitive. Colour looked too celebratory and was more disturbing for people, so after discussing it with the editors, she decided on a black-and-white treatment. “I wanted the type to be bright and bold and his face to be a memory of him, of that Jian persona—smiling in an almost menacing way,” she says. Regardless of the controversy, or perhaps because of it, Hunt says the issue was a success: “It was the best-selling Toronto Life issue on the newsstand in the last two years.”