By Jennifer Cheng

It’s September 1982, and Linden MacIntyre has just sneaked into the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut with his camera crew and a taxi driver. Lebanon is in the midst of a civil war, and a week earlier, Christian militia had slaughtered hundreds—possibly thousands—of Palestinians. As the CBC broadcast journalist watches a front-end loader excavate body parts from a demolished residence built of cinder blocks, a baby’s hand falls at his feet. Looking up, he sees the aftermath of the massacre in the faces of the teenage boys who witnessed the slayings. It hits him that what happened here will reverberate throughout their lives forever.

Later that day, MacIntyre does his stand-up on location, then flies to an editing suite in Israel, where he and a colleague produce an eight-minute segment for The Journal. Years later, he realizes that he hadn’t even scratched the surface. “The story is larger than the moment. The story is how violence alters the DNA of an individual and society,” the 70-year-old says in his office at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto. “The roots of violence in the 21st century are deep into the 20th century and possibly before that.”

The winner of 10 Gemini Awards, MacIntyre has co-hosted The Fifth Estate since 1990. He got his start in print journalism in the ’60s and spent much of the ’80s covering the Middle East, Central America and the Soviet Union for The Journal. As a reporter, however, he can’t use all of his material; the “excess,” as he puts it, is emotionally and psychologically toxic. “I reached a point in my life where there was an awful lot going on in my head and it was making me unhealthy,” he says. “When I became a journalist, it never crossed my mind that journalism would put me in a mental and emotional state that required me to turn to fiction to sustain myself in a spiritual way, but it did.”

The themes of MacIntyre’s journalism found deeper expression in his novels. Starting with 1999‘s The Long Stretch (followed by the Giller Prize-winning The Bishop’s Manin 2009 and 2012’s Why Men Lie), his Cape Breton trilogy explores the impact of violence as a secondary phenomenon, like second-hand smoke. “You can suffer from the consequences of violence simply by being in the presence of someone close to you who was damaged by violence,” he says. Cape Breton was the perfect setting—“a place that seemed to be untouched by violence but was nevertheless subliminally scarred by it”—despite being worlds away from the places that inspired the series. “I consider my novels to be books of journalism as well as works of fiction.”

The two forms may seem contradictory: journalism requires strict adherence to the facts, while fiction requires the writer to make them up; journalism is time-stamped, fiction is timeless. But they share a basic objective. As American author Paul Auster once told The Paris Review: “Novels are fictions, of course, and therefore they tell lies (in the strictest sense of the term), but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.” Many great novelists have expanded on the work of journalists, probing injustice and conveying profound messages to a wide audience.

In the 1940s and ’50s, publishing a novel was the dream for many writers. By the early ’60s, however, journalists began applying elements of fiction—scenes, dialogue, climax, plot and character development—to their reporting, to equal effect. This approach, once known as New Journalism, is what Timothy Taylor, a journalist and novelist who writes for Air Canada’s enRoute magazine, calls “that big shake-up.”

Popularized by writers like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer and Gay Talese, it broke down the cold, objective reporter’s voice “into a much hotter set of personal experiences through which the world was glimpsed,” Taylor says. This alternate form became another means of vivid storytelling. Now, both avenues are equally relevant: journalism informs, fiction enlightens.

Rick Mofina, a crime novelist, saw his first corpse while working as a reporter for the Calgary Herald in the fall of 1989. A dark green Sedan had rolled off the Deerfoot Trail and landed on its roof in the ditch; the driver was a man in his early 20s. Mofina, then 32, left a note for the paper’s day staff, who produced a short story and ran an obituary—and nothing more. “That’s what the business calls for, but it should go beyond this,” he says. “And I think that sort of forged this desire for me to go a little deeper than what you do in daily journalism.”

His second novel, Cold Fear, was inspired by a case he reported on for the Herald in the early ’90s. A 13-year-old girl (and her black poodle, Cookie) had gone missing in the Rocky Mountains, where she’d been camping with her parents. That night, it snowed, and she was wearing just a T-shirt and jeans. When Mofina started heading back to Calgary days later, the girl still had not turned up and investigators had given up hope.

Then he got a call to go back to the mountains. She had been found in a trapper’s cabin, where she’d survived on packs of soup and kept warm by cuddling her dog. The RCMP had been investigating the family—a routine in such cases. “That went off like a bell in my creative memory,” he says. Cold Fear explores the disappearance of a 10-year-old girl in Montana’s Glacier National Park and a multi-agency task force’s massive search for her. In the novel, the parents look awfully suspicious to the FBI.

“You can be inspired by a case that was reported publicly, but I certainly was not writing at all about the real people involved,” Mofina says. “You shouldn’t be writing about real, private people.” Instead, the characters from his novels are part of him. His 16th novel, Whirlwind, published in March, explores how a community reacts to tragedy and how a reporter fulfills professional and ethical obligations in the face of it. It’s inspired by his experience covering floods, forest fires and school shootings. For instance, he was one of the first Canadian reporters on the scene after the Columbine massacre on April 20, 1999.

Fiction allows Mofina to serve creative justice, expanding on cases that would otherwise halt with the news cycle and writing the endings that don’t always pan out in reality. “In my novels, there’s hope in the end for the people who’ve endured the worst,” the 56-year-old says. “In real life, families are left grieving.” His novels come with an implied contract for readers: they’ll get a “thrill ride,” but they won’t feel bad afterward. “I wouldn’t say happy ending, but all my books end the way they should.”

New York-based crime novelist and freelance travel writer Hilary Davidson describes a similar dynamic between her fiction and her journalism. The locales the 42-year-old reports on add drama to her novels. As a honeymoon columnist for Martha Stewart Weddings, her job was to “spin a fantasy” for readers and advertisers, but her interests—and her imagination—went deeper than that.

Later, while in Peru on assignment for Glow magazine, she went to Machu Picchu. Looking out over the breathtaking site in the mountains nearly 8,000 feet above sea level, Davidson saw intrigue. There were no handrails on the glorious stone staircases, and few security officers; someone could easily be pushed off. In 2012’s The Next One to Fall, the second book of the Lily Moore series, a woman falls to her death while ascending one of those unguarded staircases. In Davidson’s upcoming novel, Blood Always Tells, she looks at how a perfect setting can make a murder look like an accident.

Although journalism can provide rich themes and rich material for fiction, the inverse is also true: writing fiction can make for better journalism. A piece Trevor Cole wrote for a magazine appeared on a Friday, and by Monday one of his sources had been fired. “It didn’t bother me that this had happened to him,” Cole says. “In fact, I felt quite righteous. I felt I had done an excellent job with the story.” He says his source shouldn’t have told him the things he did. The interview was “the ultimate get.”

In 2004, he published his first novel, Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life. Cole had relished the “assassin’s glee” as a journalist, but this was the first time he’d explored a protagonist—in this case, one based on his father—to such a great depth, which fostered a greater sense of understanding and empathy. “Novels force an in-depth relationship with your characters,” the 54-year-old says. “You’re going to spend a lot of time with the characters in your novels, so you do have to understand what’s going on in their minds to write about them effectively—and you do have to empathize with their point of view.”

Today, the author of three novels would still quote the source who got himself fired, because the material supported the article’s theme. “But I certainly wouldn’t be gleeful if what I wrote had that kind of negative effect.” For example, in 2006, Cole thought he had enough material to write his Toronto Life profile of CBC Radio’s Stuart McLean, so he didn’t dig for any possible dirt about the Vinyl Cafe host’s personal life. “That might not have been true early in my career,” he says.

Of course, moving from journalism to fiction has its difficulties. Growing up, novelist Robert Hough never had much interest in current events or magazines, which is a strange thing, the 50-year-old concedes, given that he would go on to make a living as a freelance magazine journalist for 12 years. But it was a job he enjoyed while he figured out how fiction worked. (Tom Wolfe once distinguished between two camps of journalists: scoop reporters, who competed with others to “get a story first and write it fastest,” and feature writers, who saw “the newspaper as a motel you checked into overnight on the road to the final triumph”: the novel.) “Journalism was good in that it kept me alive, and I met a lot of editors that way, so I could get people to read early stabs at novels,” Hough says. “But in terms of helping me learn the form of fiction writing, it was a liability.”

Once he began writing fiction, Hough had to unlearn a lot of habits. Exposition works differently in the two disciplines: in fiction, “you can’t explain anything. It’s got to read like it’s dropped from space. You are shooting through a different lens.” In journalism, you are constantly drawing attention to yourself as a reporter. “If you draw attention to yourself as a writer in fiction, you are dead. It just doesn’t work. There is a person present in the article: the person who is writing it.”

But the same writer animates both forms—the same material, too, according to MacIntyre, who says it’s just a matter of refining similar techniques. “You learn how to go deeper into people’s hearts and minds. That’s all. But you use the exact same experience.”

Now that he’s completed his Cape Breton trilogy, MacIntyre is working on his first stand-alone novel, set for publication in 2015. It was informed by his work as a journalist in courts and prisons across the country, and deals with the conflict that can arise when a judicial verdict contradicts popular opinion.

Journalism has given him a great ear for dialogue and a great eye for a story—and introduced him to a broad range of experiences and personalities. In short, it helped him to understand the world he writes about.

“I only wear one hat,” he says, “and that’s storyteller.”

In mid-November, Andrew Lundy, director of digital at The Canadian Press, sent an internal email to about 20 bureau chiefs, department heads and news editors asking them to come up with nominees for Newsmaker of the Year. A week later, he had a list of 18 candidates, including Rob Ford, senators, Chris Hadfield, Alice Munro, Rehtaeh Parsons, Theresa Spence, Justin Bieber and the IKEA monkey. In early December, CP’s editorial supervisors sent electronic ballots to about 300 people at the news service’s client newspapers, broadcast stations and online portals. On December 22, CP will announce this year’s choice.

The title is not meant to be an honour or popularity contest, just a measure of who was most newsworthy. As each voter has a different definition of that, CP’s editor-in-chief Scott White, who used to handle the responsibility, admits, “This is just a thing that’s been done since 1946. I don’t know what the value is. I think this is just something that people naturally want to do at the end of every year.” Still, some picks generate more attention than others—last year, for instance, CP awarded the title to Luka Magnotta, who made headlines after allegedly dismembering Concordia University student Lin Jun and mailing his body parts to political offices and elementary schools. But such controversy helps make the Newsmaker of the Year a good storytelling device.

Since the first Newsmaker, 70 percent of the selections have been politicians or diplomats (Lester Pearson nine times and Pierre Trudeau 11 times) while 16 percent have been athletes (including Rick Hansen and Terry Fox). Three have been criminals: Lucien Rivard, Russell Williams and Magnotta. Time started a similar annual tradition in 1927, when it named aviator Charles Lindbergh its Man of the Year. Time picked the Twenty-Five and Under generation in 1966, Endangered Earth in 1988 and You in 2006. Like CP, the magazine has also made stomach-churning choices—Adolf Hitler in 1938—for the title, which became Person of the Year in 1999. Earlier this month, Time generated controversy by selecting Pope Francis.

Paul Harvey, assistant managing editor of local news at the Calgary Herald, doesn’t think the Newsmaker “award” has much impact on journalism or readers. “How could it? It’s just a popularity contest of past events.” He admits there’s debate over the definition of a Newsmaker even among journalists, recalling newsroom discussions about it. “Are you voting for the guy who makes the most headlines or are you voting for the guy who is the most significant?” he asks. “Otherwise, you can just go to Infomart and count the number of times somebody’s name has been mentioned and the number of front-page headlines he or she gets.” Noel Hulsman, managing editor of finance at Yahoo Canada, agrees and thinks the criterion has not evolved over time. “It’s just somebody who garnered the most headlines, which could be for good reasons—or frequently, bad reasons.”

CP certainly generated controversy when it named Magnotta last year. Former minister of Canadian heritage and official languages James Moore tweeted: “’Newsmaker of the year’ ought not simply be the person with the most Google News hits due to morbid curiosity. Revisit the criteria #2cents.” Former interim Liberal leader Bob Rae expressed his outrage with: “Canadian Press reaches new low with its naming Magnotta ‘newsmaker of the year.’ Truly disgusting.” Jian Ghomeshi, host and co-creator of CBC Radio’s Q, followed with: “CP and others have given him the status he so craved.” Then, Conservative MP Jay Aspin joined the chorus: “I appeal to decency & better judgement of the Canadian Press and ask them to rescind their choice.”

Lucinda Chodan, editor-in-chief of Montreal’s The Gazette, wasn’t surprised by the social media reaction. She notes that when it comes to people who are recognizable across the country, politicians, athletes and criminals are the most obvious picks. “As proud as we are of Alice Munro as Canadians, it really was a one-week sensation,” she says, “whereas Luka Magnotta was in the headlines for weeks.”

But Harvey voted for runner-up Amanda Todd, the 15-year-old B.C. girl who committed suicide shortly after posting a video on YouTube about being bullied for years. He says quantity or longevity shouldn’t be the only criteria and a Newsmaker should also raise important issues, as Todd did: the government, school boards, the public and parents all paid attention. “I thought there was a bigger issue there instead of a guy who was just a crazy nut job—allegedly,” he says. “Maybe I’m breaking the rules by voting for who I did, but I’m not going to vote for a guy who is accused of being a cannibal. How is that guy a Newsmaker of the Year?”

Canadian regionalism presents another problem. Jim Poling, managing editor of The Hamilton Spectator, consults his newsroom staff before voting. He says that the votes might skew to where there are more publishing entities. Last year, 36 out of 110 voters were from Ontario, while only 10 were from Québec—where Magnotta didn’t receive a single vote. And Chodan points out that the majority of past Newsmakers hail from Ontario, which reflects the local scope of most news coverage outside of the province. On the Gazette’s website, for instance, Rob Ford stories are currently not among the top 10 most-read, she says, but he has been in the news “for a prolonged period of time with no end in sight seemingly.”

While Chodan thinks Toronto’s mayor is the definition of a Newsmaker, Hulsman worries he could be a less-than-compelling choice. “I’m sure it will be Rob Ford and it’ll be for all the wrong reasons,” he says, because people don’t understand the criteria for the title. “People are just going to go, ‘Oh great, him again. Big surprise.’” But National Post and Postmedia columnist Christie Blatchford, who calls the survey a gimmick, figures some people will still find it controversial. “If it’s Rob Ford this year, are people on Twitter going to go, ‘Oh my god, it’s outrageous, he’s such a goof?’” she says. “Yeah, they probably will.”