“I have some difficult news to share with you today,” began Renato Zane, director of news at Omni. He had called his Toronto team of multilingual journalists to a meeting. None of them knew what it was about, but that morning in May 2015, many feared the worst. Somewhere in the newsroom, a phone rang steadily, unanswered.

Zane went on to announce that, after 35 years, Omni News was over. The channels would survive, but the newscasts that had become staples of daily life in so many immigrant households would not. After going over details of the termination, Zane gestured to a photo of himself taped to the wall—a photocopy of his original employee ID, taken more than 30 years earlier. He briefly reminisced about his time with the broadcaster and thanked his employees for their hard work and dedication to ethnic journalism.

Then came the layoffs. Of the nearly 50 people who came to the office that morning on the third floor of Rogers’s downtown broadcasting hub, only 10 would remain.

Before breaking off to meet with management about the details of her own termination, producer Laura D’Aprile spoke briefly with anchor Dino Cavalluzzo.

“So this is it, right?” he asked in a hushed voice.

“I hadn’t thought they would do that, but…” She trailed off. Cavalluzzo said good luck and headed toward his own meeting.

“Bocca lupo!” D’Aprile called after him, an Italian good-luck phrase that translates to “into the wolf’s mouth.”

Later that day, news team members returned from a union meeting above the Hard Rock Cafe across the street, many still brushing away tears, to find their key cards deactivated. They stood together, locked out of the place they had worked in for years, where they’d arrived that morning intent on putting together Omni’s summer lineup. Finally, a colleague let them in to retrieve their belongings.

The loss of Omni’s newscasts was something none of its journalists expected, but it was the culmination of a nearly decade-long decline for the ethnic network. After years of growth championed by Rogers president Ted Rogers, a new generation of management had all but wiped out Omni, severely diminishing the linguistic and cultural diversity of Canadian broadcast journalism. And, with TV news struggling to stay relevant for an increasingly online audience, this death may be the beginning of an industry-wide extinction.

When viewers recognize Cavalluzzo on the street, or at functions in his new capacity as business development manager for an event and hospitality company, they all ask the same question: “What happened?”

He was one of two long-time anchors, alongside Vincenzo Somma, for Omni’s Italian newscasts. Cavalluzzo had started in the sports department in 1988 and, as operations were trimmed and consolidated, ended up responsible for sports, entertainment and, occasionally, entire newscasts. His on-air persona as an affable sports guy, with hair cropped to a short buzz and eyes that seemed to always be smiling, complemented Somma’s more serious, authoritative delivery. Together, they were an institution in Toronto’s Italian community. “Every weeknight for years, at 8 p.m., always at the same time,” says Cavalluzzo, “people would tune in.”

Omni was founded in Toronto in 1978 by Dan Iannuzzi, an enterprising Italian-Canadian journalist who originally named the station CFMT-TV, for Canada’s First Multilingual Television. It soon gained an audience among the city’s large and growing immigrant population.

For immigrant communities, the appeal of Omni’s journalism was twofold. First, it offered coverage of their cultures and countries of origin that went deeper than mainstream outlets did. It assumed a higher level of knowledge about other countries than programming meant for a Canadian-born audience.

Second, Omni succeeded in precisely the opposite way with distinctly local issues, from elections to garbage collection schedules. The coverage assumed minimal foundational knowledge and took on an educational role for those new to Canadian life. Doug Cheng, former managing editor of Omni B.C. Cantonese, says elections are the best example of how the network reported differently. “In China, you can’t vote nationally—these are people who may never have voted before. So it’s important to report to them about where the parties stand, but also to drive home the privilege of voting and why they should exercise it.”

During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, Omni informed foreign-language households about how to protect themselves. For viewers who spoke no English, these newscasts were essential. As Rinaldo Boni, the network’s union vice president, notes: in some cases, being informed in time can be a matter of life or death.

Despite playing a vital role in Canada’s multicultural society, ethnic television proved unprofitable from the beginning. By 1986, Iannuzzi had lost nearly $10 million on CFMT and sold majority ownership of the station to Rogers—then a growing media empire-to-be.

Against all advice from company insiders, who were unwilling to look past the station’s niche market and near-bankruptcy, Ted Rogers invested in CFMT, affectionately dubbing it “The Little Engine that Could.” As the first television station under his passionate, business-savvy leadership, CFMT thrived.

To solve Iannuzzi’s problem of funding inherently unprofitable ethnic programming, Rogers negotiated with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for the right to broadcast American reruns and syndicated programs during prime time. These included popular shows such as Jeopardy and The Simpsons.

This lucrative programming supported the rest, keeping the station profitable for decades. “I insisted that Omni not become a social project of Rogers—that it become a legitimate, self-financing business,” says Leslie Sole, a former network vice-president who became CEO of Rogers Television. “That’s the only way we could prove that media in different languages aren’t just charming. They’re good business, and they’re good for the Canada that was being built.”

In 2002, Rogers was granted a second ethnic licence in Toronto. CFMT relaunched as Omni.1, covering European and South-American languages, and the new station, named Omni.2, covered pan-Asian languages.

In order to make its application for Omni.2 more palatable to the CRTC, Rogers set up the “Omni Fund”—$50 million to support various ethnic broadcasting initiatives, such as documentary programming by independent producers, public service announcements and dramatized series.

Critics argued that a second channel gave Rogers an uneven share of the ethnic market in Toronto, preventing smaller, independent foreign-language media from prospering. But while that may have been the case, the CRTC saw little harm in allowing Rogers a near-monopoly, as long as it committed its vast resources to advancing the cause of multiculturalism through journalism. By 2006, Chinese, Italian and Indian viewers—three principal chunks of Omni’s audience—each made up approximately 10 percent of Toronto’s population.

In 2007, Rogers purchased five City TV stations across Canada, including its first English-language, over-the-air broadcast station in Toronto. Soon, Omni was no longer a priority. The CRTC is strict about who can obtain free over-the-air broadcast licences such as Omni’s and City’s, which don’t require cable subscriptions, reach a broader audience and are more attractive to advertisers.

Had it not been for Omni.1 and Omni.2’s ethnic mandates, dividing languages between stations, Rogers would never have been able to get two licences in the same market—never mind the largest market in the country. Now, it had three.

The potential ad revenue Rogers could generate with three broadcast licences in the Greater Toronto Area was massive, but it was dampened by the fact that two of the three stations were restricted to two-thirds foreign-language content. D’Aprile says Rogers’s purchase of City created problems for Omni and that, increasingly, company management viewed the network’s ethnic mandate as a restriction rather than a responsibility.

Then, in December 2008, Ted Rogers died of congestive heart failure at the age of 75. His funeral at St. James Cathedral, on a rainy day in Toronto, was a sombre gathering of the country’s most powerful politicians and business leaders, from Stephen Harper to Galen Weston. And while Canada mourned one of its most successful entrepreneurs, Omni had lost its protector.

“‘The best is yet to come,’” said Rogers’s only son, Edward Rogers III, toward the end of the eulogy, echoing Ted’s beloved slogan. “With him gone, it’s hard to think how this can now still be the case.”

The last time production director Nick Christoforou felt optimistic about Omni Toronto’s future was in 2009. That year, the stations moved into the former Olympic Spirit Toronto building, constructed as part of Toronto’s unsuccessful bid for the 2008 summer games. The main floor editing facilities were sprawling, state-of-the-art suites that promised added production value, and a new location in the heart of downtown meant increased visibility for the Omni brand.

But as they settled into their new workplace, Christoforou and his colleagues had to work around increasing restrictions on their budgets, staff and equipment. Managers were under pressure to cut costs, and, as a result, Omni would produce less original reporting. One documentary, on Greek Easter traditions, was made almost entirely with recycled footage from television programs in Greece that had sharing agreements with Omni. Every ethnic community in the network borrowed from its homeland, Christoforou says.

Now that Omni was sharing space with City, an inferiority complex developed. Budgets were lower than those at City, which employees believed was due to lower viewership and smaller potential audiences. Several former Omni journalists describe feeling like second-class Rogers employees. The main reason they put up with it was the sense that, for foreign-language reporters in Canada, there was nowhere else to go. “No ethnic media would pay us better than Rogers—this has to be said,” says former producer Patricia Almeida. “But it was clear that we were not important to the company.”

At a town hall meeting toward the end of 2011, shortly before Almeida was laid off, both City and Omni employees gathered in a boardroom. Partway through, a City producer asked when his station was getting its helicopter. (It never got one.) The Omni team, who worked for a station that could barely afford to pay reporters, looked at one another, bewildered. Almeida says, “It was like we were talking about different universes.”

By 2012, the “Omni Fund” had expired. Much of the reporting for ethnic programs was done by students, volunteers and new immigrants freelancing for Omni who were paid between $50 and $150 per story. Production values declined as editors watched their resources gradually erode. Ad revenues for Omni were also plummeting. Rogers salespeople operated on commission and thus had an incentive to sell the more profitable time slots on English-language City.

Even before the move to Olympic Spirit Toronto, Omni journalists were overworked. Late one night, around 11 p.m., Christoforou sat in a computer screen-lit editing suite with a fellow producer. He was helping her piece together a story in post-production, and she was becoming increasingly frustrated—segments weren’t lining up, and her reporter couldn’t come in so late to help. Suddenly, she turned to him and said, “You know what, Nick? They’re taking advantage of us.”

The first major cuts fell on the diversity department, the other half of Omni Toronto: a team of journalists and producers from around the world in charge of putting together documentary programming in nearly 30 languages.

One night in June 2012, diversity producers received an email telling them to come in the next day and meet with their managers. Everyone knew what that meant. Omni’s diversity department had just succeeded, less than a year earlier, in unionizing. Almeida recalls managers making it clear in a meeting that they didn’t want her department to join the union, primarily because they couldn’t afford to pay union wages.

Still, she supported unionization even if it meant losing her job and calls it a point of principle. “We were doing the same jobs as people at City, and we were making a lot less money—less security, less everything,” says Almeida. “Because we were catering to a less profitable immigrant audience, we were not treated by the company in the same way. We thought that was extremely unfair.”

When contacted for comment on the role of unionization in the diversity department cuts, Colette Watson, vice-president of television and operations, replied, “These allegations are completely false…We need to continue to adapt to position us for continued success and growth. This was not an easy decision, but was right for our business longterm.”

Omni’s diversity department disappeared, but newscasts carried on with dwindling resources until last May. Boni still remembers watching his last Omni newscast the evening before the cuts—a Wednesday night. Vincenzo Somma signed off, saying in Italian, “Goodnight, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow came,” Boni says sadly, “but the news didn’t.”

Daily newscasts are the core programming for any free over-the-air television station in Canada. But if Omni needed newscasts to justify its valuable broadcast licences, how could it justify losing them?

In June 2015, Rogers Media president Keith Pelley—along with Watson and Susan Wheeler, vice-president regulatory—appeared before the House of Commons’s standing committee on Canadian heritage to answer questions about the end of Omni News. From a ring of long tables in the parliamentary chamber, MPs grilled Pelley about the cuts. They quoted angry constituents; statements on Rogers’s commitment to local ethnic programming from Omni’s 2014 licence renewal (many of which the company has reiterated even since killing the newscasts); and a comment from Pelley on the obligation of corporations to support an informed citizenry when broadcasting on public airwaves.

For decades, free over-the-air stations have tolerated the financial obstacles inherent in producing journalism as part of an unwritten contract with the public. But as economic pressure makes this commitment less and less sustainable, broadcasters are looking for ways out.

In Omni’s most recent licence renewal hearing, Rogers requested a range of amendments that included removing percentage restrictions for programming in non-official languages and lowering the required hours of local programming, a category that includes newscasts. The majority of these requests were denied. “Advertising on conventional television is declining at a torrid pace,” Pelley told the MPs, unwaveringly disagreeing with each objection to the local programming cuts. “This isn’t just a couple of years—this isn’t cyclical—this is a structural change. And unfortunately, Omni, as the smallest and most niche player in the market, feels the pain.”

Developments since the Omni cuts suggest Pelley was right about the state of his industry. Last December, Hamilton’s CHCH TV filed for bankruptcy and laid off 167 employees, although 81 were offered deals that would let them produce content for the station through an outside company. CHCH also cut back its newscasts.

And in November, Bell Media announced its intentions to cut 380 positions, mainly in production and editorial, and cancelled TSN’s Off the Record. It’s not unreasonable to predict that Bell may also lop off entire newscasts in the years to come.

If Rogers’s financial woes and the drastic measures they inspire are representative of the television industry—one struggling, like others, to remain relevant in an online era—then the death of Omni News could be the beginning of something bigger, an unfortunate early demise in the decline of broadcast journalism. But Omni’s weren’t just any newscasts. They carried cultural heft and a message about Canada being welcoming and accommodating to newcomers—an immigrant country, rather than somewhere non-English speakers are forced to assimilate or be left in the dark.

Omni News produced the only professional-quality, widely available, freely accessible foreign-language broadcast journalism in Canada, but that significance was lost on those who controlled the network. “The new management didn’t know what they owned, and they didn’t understand what they were cutting,” says Sole, a former Rogers Media CEO. “The loss of newscasts was the loss of Omni. It isn’t Omni anymore.”

Now, Omni’s ethnic journalism comes in one form: a series of magazine-style, foreign-language current affairs shows. These are cheaper to produce than the cancelled newscasts and involve little original reporting. Watson urges viewers to give these new programs a chance, saying, “They won’t be disappointed with the depth of local issues they explore.”

Current affairs shows certainly have journalistic value, but what they offer in depth, they lack in timeliness and range. Ideally, these shows work in conjunction with newscasts. First, reporters present the news, clearly and without comment, and then guest experts can discuss and analyze it. Without newscasts providing the first half of the equation, it’s difficult for current affairs programs to stand on their own.

In the months following last year’s cuts at Omni, the CRTC deliberated on whether or not Omni could retain its licence without broadcasting daily newscasts. Several community organizations lobbied the federal broadcast regulator, writing letters that called for either the restoration of multilingual newscasts or revoking the licence.

The loss of news is made worse by a CRTC limit of “one over-the-air television station in a given language in the same market.” According to Stephen Hawkins, president of the local union for Omni in Vancouver, Rogers is “sitting on” its ethnic licence. By cancelling the news, the company is not only depriving Canadians of Omni, it’s depriving Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto of any freely accessible multilingual news.

In response to the letters, the CRTC declined to take action at all. Forcing Rogers to reinstate ethnic newscasts was beyond its jurisdiction, it claimed. And revoking the licence would be unfair given that, because of the unwritten nature of the social contract for broadcasters to support journalists, Rogers was technically not in violation of its licence conditions. This weak response further upset immigrant Canadians.

While many people, from multilingual journalists to community organizations to viewers, are angered by the loss of the news, Cavalluzzo simply sounds sad. The former anchor knows what he would have said to his audience, had management given him the chance to say it.

He would have explained that this was the end, it wasn’t what he wanted and it was beyond the news team’s control. He would have said thanks. “Our viewers deserved an explanation,” he says, “and we wanted to say goodbye.”

In the summer of 2014, The Globe and Mail narrowly avoided an editorial staff strike over native advertising—the practice of working with advertisers to create ads that resemble journalism. A leaked memo from Globe management to the paper’s union proposed a system in which editorial staff would write for advertisers, compromising, in the minds of many Globe reporters, their integrity as journalists.

Now, the Globe has launched a new website for Globe Edge—a potential solution to the hotly debated question of whether newspapers can produce native advertising without selling their souls to ad clients. Despite the inextricable problem with publishing clearly biased ads designed to blend in with theoretically unbiased journalism, the relaunch of Edge may represent the better of many evils, as well as an industry warming up to the idea of writing for someone other than readers.

According to Globe Edge managing editor Sean Stanleigh, Edge operates as a micro property of The Globe and Mail, much like a section of the newspaper. While Edge staff still write native ads in the same physical space as the rest of the paper, an important divide exists between Globe employee roles.

The seven members of the Edge team who work on native advertising—though many once worked as journalists—are distinct from the Globe’s editorial staff. This workforce divide distinguishes Edge from the Globe’s first bungled attempt at native advertising, which nearly caused the strike. Stanleigh says this is crucial because it separates editorial work from work supervised and directed by clients, which is outside the scope of acceptable journalism.

Another important divide appears within the articles themselves, albeit not as prominently as it should. Take, for example, “Roughnecks, armed with tablets, transform the energy industry,” a distinctly uncritical look at new technology in the oil fields: a tiny banner along the top declares, “sponsored content” (in size 7.5 font); the type shade is slightly lighter than the standard black (though nearly indistinguishable); and an italicized message at the end of the article clarifies that the Globe’s editorial staff had nothing to do with it.

As native advertising has become more standard–particularly online (BuzzFeed makes nearly all its money this way)–many believe these small design cues aren’t enough. In a 2013 article following a native advertising misstep that led The Atlantic to publish a glowing endorsement of Scientology, the Globe’s own Simon Houpt took a firm stand against native advertising, writing, “Given the way readers consume stuff online, scanning articles on tiny screens, simply sticking a label at the top or bottom of an article won’t do the trick.”

But Stanleigh has observed a shift in the Globe newsroom away from knee-jerk rejection of native ads as unethical without exception. “I haven’t felt any antagonism from my colleagues,” he says. “I think they understand that we need to make the money it takes to produce great journalism.”

This awareness of a newspaper’s financial needs is keener than ever, and the softening of journalists toward native advertising has likely been prodded along by declining revenues.

Another contributing factor toward the acceptance of native ads is increased responsibility on the part of the advertisers. In 2013, the U.S.-based Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) published the Native Advertising Playbook, which attempts to establish industry-wide standards such as clear and unmistakable disclosure to readers. “It’s eminently possible to protect institutional integrity and provide a platform for paid points of view,” says IAB President Randall Rothenberg.

But “integrity” is a distinctly subjective concept, and its definition for advertisers may differ wildly for journalists. For Stanleigh, who was once deputy national editor for the Globe and has also worked as a senior editor at the Toronto Star, bridging this gap is essential. “One of the most important parts of my role is making sure advertisers have an understanding of journalistic principles,” he says.

While the concept still makes many journalists queasy, the development of Globe Edge is a leading example of a bad thing done well. If we accept that journalism needs to be profitable to exist—and that it may soon have exhausted all morally sound means of making money—a careful, responsible approach toward native advertising may be our next best bet.

In 2008, Canwest Global Communications CEO Leonard Asper was perplexed. His business—once Canada’s leading media company—was failing, and he didn’t know why. Canwest stocks, once trading at $20 a share, were down to 60 cents. The purchase of Alliance Atlantis’s broadcast division, widely regarded as a savvy business move, hadn’t brought Canwest the boost he expected. Instead, Asper was facing nearly a billion dollars of debt.

This became the catalyst for the Postmedia Network—the largest instance of newspaper consolidation Canada has ever seen. Some claim the conglomerate is a malignant force in Canadian journalism, lumping newsrooms together so they can be controlled and cut with convenience, while others consider consolidation a natural occurrence in a struggling industry. But whatever the case, evil or not, Postmedia remains the product of a company smothered by debt—and one that appears to be headed toward a similar fate.

The breakup of Canwest in 2010 was the largest sale of media assets in Canada to date. While its broadcast arm went to Shaw, a group of Canwest’s creditors headed by Paul Godfrey acquired the company’s print publishing branch. They called themselves Postmedia—a name chosen because, according to Godfrey, it “reflects where we have been and where we are going.”

“This is a difficult day,” Asper said as his company was dismantled. “I’m most concerned about the impact on employees. It will be minimal, but there will be an impact. I regret that. I don’t feel great about that.”

While Asper’s bad feeling was well warranted, the impact on journalists and former Canwest employees would hardly be minimal. Just one year into its life, Postmedia was already experiencing financial difficulties. Anxious about going into the red, Godfrey announced the elimination of 500 full-time jobs, or about 9 percent of his workforce, expecting to save around $30 million per year.

But regardless of Godfrey’s expectations, by the end of 2011, Postmedia was losing money. The company unveiled a cost-cutting plan to transform Postmedia from a print-based to a digital-first media company. This plan came with further cuts—the loss of 25 editorial positions across the network’s 10 papers, as well as the cancellation of Sunday editions at the Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald and Ottawa Citizen. Then, as losses continued to grow, Postmedia eliminated the publisher position across all 10 papers.

Over the course of 2012, Godfrey received a 50 percent raise, taking home $1.7 million. That same year, his company’s losses neared $100 million. “I have no apologies to make to anyone on that,” Godfrey said of receiving a raise as his company plummeted. “No apologies whatsoever.”

Last year, Postmedia became the largest newspaper owner in Canada by purchasing 173 Sun Media publications from Quebecor. It now controls just under 50 percent of all Canadian daily newspapers. Between its 2010 birth and the Sun deal, Postmedia had cut 2,900 jobs—over 50 percent of its total workforce. Yet, years after the merger, Godfrey would claim, “the people at Sun were so happy to join us.”

Postmedia took on $140 million in new debt to finance the Sun deal, now owing $652 million to its creditors. “I think it probably bought us three to four years,” Godfrey said of the merger. And time, for Postmedia’s creditors and especially for Godfrey, is money.

In several major Canadian cities, Postmedia now owns multiple papers—broadsheets and tabloids. Earlier this year, Godfrey cut 90 editorial positions, merging newsrooms for papers in the same city. In Ottawa, for example, the highbrow Citizen and trashier Sun are now, in all respects except appearance, the same.

Postmedia currently loses over $120 million a year—a figure that has grown exponentially since 2012. Much of the company’s debt becomes due in 2017 and 2018, which will make surviving into the 2020s nearly impossible for the sinking news empire. For Canadian journalists—practitioners in an industry that may soon kill a second major conglomerate in the past decade—the death of Postmedia may seem more end than new beginning. But, while the companies that own it can (and, in many cases, will) go bankrupt, journalism is more than a business, and it never can.

John Dunn is on welfare. To journalists and other curious citizens using Canada’s free information laws to seek out public records, this is his greatest asset.

For a small fee (Dunn is allowed to make only $200 per month while receiving government assistance), Dunn will file an access to information (ATI) request on your behalf. The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) states that if the citizen filing an ATI request can’t afford it, the fees may be waived. Dunn will apply, and, in all likelihood, the government will agree that a citizen on welfare can’t reasonably be expected to pay often expensive, sometimes exorbitant, ATI fees. You pay Dunn less than you would have paid the government, and everybody wins.

For years, enterprising, policy-savvy individuals such as Dunn have been using the complexity of Canada’s ATI system to their benefit, mastering the convoluted process and charging journalists and news organizations for their services. Deadline-driven reporters in increasingly understaffed, overworked newsrooms rarely have the time to file and stay on top of ATI requests (which, beyond a slow-moving back-and-forth through Canada Post, often require multiple phone calls and prodding of ministries to keep on track). But, as much as ATI professionals help journalists uncover important records otherwise buried within ministry archives, it shouldn’t take a professional to navigate a system meant to guarantee every Canadian access to public records.

Among the many pitfalls that plague access to information, both federally and provincially, fees are foremost. FIPPA states that the fees attached to ATI requests can’t exceed the actual costs of fulfilling the request, which include research, photocopying and redaction (yes, that means you have to pay the government to withhold information from you). But this isn’t always the case.

For every John Dunn helping journalists navigate access to information, there are private contractors performing similar work on the government side and making, in most cases, much more money. In the past decade, the federal government has spent over $57 million on outside consultants to handle ATI requests—an expense that has grown steadily every year. These consultants charge anywhere between $20 and $225 per hour to assess which public records can be released in response to an ATI request.

Part of every ATI fee is designated for research and, in cases where outside consulting is involved, research fees spike. Fortunately for journalists, there are several ways to work around this. Narrowing a request, either by time span or subject matter, yields fewer documents and takes the ministry less effort to process, resulting in (at least theoretically) lower fees. Another way to narrow a request is by asking to see a list of relevant documents after filing the ATI, then picking and choosing from that list.

Yet, even among those who make a living off the Byzantine complexity of the current system, some have joined the ongoing call for reform. According to award-winning ATI specialist Ken Rubin, Canada’s self-described “information warrior,” free information should be a constitutional right, rather than a privilege. “I’ve got to admit I enjoy the work,” Rubin says of his job. “I want to stimulate others to go out, dig around and question authority.”

Despite his noble aims, Rubin’s class of ATI specialists is a profession that shouldn’t exist. Canada shouldn’t need information warriors because accessing free information shouldn’t be a battle.

On November 20, 2014, Tim Duncan received an access to information (ATI) request. As executive assistant to the minister of transportation and infrastructure, he was asked for all records relating to the Highway of Tears, a 724-kilometre stretch of B.C.’s Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert where, by some estimates, over 40 aboriginal women have been murdered or gone missing. He searched his emails for “Highway of Tears,” yielding over a dozen results.

Duncan, then a new employee, says he quickly alerted fellow ministerial assistant George Gretes to the records. Gretes said, according to Duncan, “You got to get rid of these.” Duncan hesitated, at which point he remembers Gretes taking his mouse and keyboard from him, moving them to the corner of his desk and permanently deleting the records. “Hey, you don’t need to worry about this anymore,” Duncan remembers Gretes saying. “It’s done.”

A year later, Duncan’s account of the incident (wholly denied by Gretes) was published in a report by B.C.’s information and privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham. “I am deeply disappointed by the practices our investigation uncovered,” writes Denham, and she’s not the only one.

Canada’s ATI system has long been criticized by journalists for its bureaucratic complexity, extended wait times and prohibitive fees. Though the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act guarantees each citizen right of access to any record in the custody of a public body (with notable exceptions including trade secrets and personal information), Denham’s investigation has exposed a culture of secrecy within certain branches of government. The fact that this scandal centred on a request about missing and murdered aboriginal women—an issue already exacerbated by years of government inaction—makes it all the worse.

Duncan, who says he wanted to go public with his story sooner, instead put it off until he left his government position months later. He says coming forward while working for the government would have been “career suicide.”

In the aftermath of last year’s elections, journalists have amplified their demands for reformed national and provincial freedom of information policies. According to the National Freedom of Information Audit, which Newspapers Canada conducts annually by filing nearly 450 requests at the municipal, provincial and federal level, Canada’s 32-year-old federal Access to Information Act has been “effectively crippled as a useful means of promoting accountability.”

Along with the outright deletion of records, Denham decries what she calls “oral government,” in which decisions are made in person and no written record is created. Government employees are also allowed to broadly interpret exemptions to the freedom of information act, which are meant to be used only in specific cases, and often liberally redact even innocuous documents.

The Access to Information Act, implemented in 1983 under Pierre Trudeau, was written for a paper-centric government and hasn’t aged well. At a time when important public information exists in many forms–much of it online–scandals such as B.C.’s point to the need for an updated framework with clear guidelines for the preservation of electronic formats such as email in the face of ATI requests.

But institutional change, however long overdue, would only address part of the ATI problem. In his letter to Denham, Duncan stresses that what happened to him was not an isolated incident but rather a sign that the government doesn’t respect the public’s right to know. And while many civil servants across all branches of Canadian government work diligently in the name of free information, Duncan’s testimony—along with decades of newsroom gripes—has emphasized that many don’t.

When it comes to ATI, the government’s system is only as strong as the conviction of those who comprise it. The hope among journalists is that, as out-dated ATI policies become reformed, so too will outdated attitudes promoting government secrecy.

Stay tuned as the RRJ continues to tackle problems with Access to Information next week.

“Journalism is about relationships,” says Joey Coleman. And, walking with him on a sunny day through downtown Hamilton, I’m beginning to see what he means. At Dr. Disc record store, he stops to chat with owner Mark Furukawa—Coleman’s having issues with the sound equipment he uses to live stream council meetings at city hall. Furukawa refers to the indie journalist as “a unique animal,” lamenting that there aren’t more like him. Later, we stop at a bakery on King William Street, where the woman behind the counter asks if Coleman will have the usual (two oatmeal-raisin cookies). He does. On our way out, a fellow customer calls after him: “Give ’em hell, Joey!”

Since starting The Public Record—a one-person news site featuring live-streamed city council meetings alongside written news and analysis—Coleman has become a fixture in his community. But, despite Furukawa’s praise, his situation isn’t unique. Or necessarily ideal. Though independent reporting offers unparalleled freedom and editorial control, it’s certainly the more difficult path, littered with challenges not faced by traditionally employed journalists or even freelancers working for established brands. As Coleman quickly discovered, it doesn’t always pay to work alone.

One-person newsrooms are nothing new, but as traditional newspapers increasingly consolidate under the ownership of large media corporations, independent journalism has taken on new meanings. For Sean Holman, who founded Public Eye in 2003 to cover B.C. provincial politics, it meant keeping his government transparent through investigative reporting. For Gagandeep Ghuman, who founded The Squamish Reporter in B.C., it meant a closer relationship to readers.

Coleman’s own self-described mission to “find a new model to sustain local journalism” in Hamilton began in 2012. He bemoans the lack of fellow reporters at city hall, but isn’t blaming anyone because the council meetings he attends religiously are, more often than not, mind-numbingly boring. “I wanted to go more in-depth on something that wasn’t profitable,” he says, adding that traditional newsrooms rarely allow reporters to choose what they cover.

Update: After this story appeared, the office of the mayor contacted the Review to contest Coleman’s statement that few other reporters regularly attend council meetings. According to Coleman, his work on The Public Record has encouraged more reporters to attend, but he stands by the claim that there is a lack of reporting at Hamilton City Hall.

To make a living reporting the unprofitable, Coleman turned to crowdfunding. He accepts donations via his website (which, at its peak, made $600 per month), but relies on heavily publicized Indiegogo campaigns every few years for the bulk of his funding.

The Public Record is a video archive of city council as well as a news site. Rather than raking in clicks and page views, Coleman hopes his online streams can empower neighbourhood associations and help Hamiltonians hold councillors to their word. And he doesn’t get discouraged by low viewership, which averages around 50 for most streams, because the freedom to be boring, and to choose what to cover based on community significance rather than widespread appeal, is an upside of independent journalism.

By the winter of 2014, Coleman’s watchdogging had irritated city councillors who thought he was deliberately looking for gaffes. Lloyd Ferguson, for example; he’s the ward 12 councillor and former chair of Hamilton’s accountability and transparency committee. One evening, while speaking with a fellow staff member on the second floor of city hall, Ferguson spotted Coleman nearby. Assuming the journalist was eavesdropping, Ferguson confronted him and, after some shouting, grabbed Coleman by the arm and shoved him away from the conversation.

After this incident, Coleman says he found himself facing a number of restrictions that made it difficult for him to do his work. (Ferguson refused to comment on the incident for this story.) He is currently not reporting from city hall, but intends to return in January under the oversight of the Ontario Ombudsman. That oversight, he hopes, will do what the backing of an established news organization does for other journalists.

Legal protection is one the most significant benefits independent journalists miss out on. “I needed to make sure everything I published was airtight,” says Holman, whose investigations at Public Eye often scrutinized B.C. politicians. “I couldn’t afford to take a risk.”

In 2011, financial strain forced Public Eye’s website, which was funded primarily through reader donations and advertising, to cease publishing. Despite over 6,000 investigative and enterprise stories, some of which led to the resignation of public officials and even changed laws, people were turned off from donating to Holman’s reporting due to its aggressive nature.

Funding remains one of the largest issues facing independent publications. The pressure to make money from journalism—a strain on even the largest newsrooms—can be crippling when applied to a single person. In a competitive news market, independent journalists need to offer something different, says Susan Harada, associate director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication and head of the journalism program. “When you look at someone like Sean Holman, he wasn’t competing against mainstream media,” she says. “He was providing something different.”

Ghuman, whose paper is profitable because of ads from local businesses, says independents can be better poised to attract readers than their corporate counterparts. A transparent, direct relationship makes for a stronger connection to the audience—which, for The Squamish Reporter, and especially for the crowdfunded Public Record, makes all the difference.

Despite considering it the worst experience of his career, Coleman’s struggles with city hall and the underdog narrative they created have garnered him more support than ever. Thanks to publicity from his forced hiatus, he expects his upcoming crowdfunding campaign to be the most successful since his first one in 2012, when he raised over $10,000 in two months. “I’ve been really lucky,” he says.

But Coleman’s financial situation remains precarious, his luck vulnerable to running out. He estimates his expenses are $2,500 per month—including camera batteries, software licensing fees, travel costs, a rented room in a friend’s house and a lifestyle he calls student-like by necessity. Walking with Coleman through downtown, listening to him go on, ever optimistic, about the future of The Public Record, I can’t help wondering how long it will be before he hits the same financial wall as Holman.

“Maybe I can find a way to make local journalism work,” Coleman says, hopeful even while describing the mounting economic pressure on both his one-man newsroom and the larger industry. “History is full of economic disruptions that lead to better ways of doing things.”

Previous versions of this story incorrectly stated that Coleman’s media credentials had been revoked and that he was restricted from live-streaming council and committee meetings. Hamilton City Hall does not accredit journalists, and Coleman has not been formally restricted or banned from live-streaming either council or committee meetings. Additionally, previous versions of this story stated that the City of Hamilton contacted the Review, occasioning an update to the published story. In fact, it was the office of the mayor. The Review regrets the errors.

Six years after reporting on a B.C. surgeon whose patients had a troubling tendency to experience serious post-op complications, Kathy Tomlinson and CBC successfully invoked the relatively new defence of responsible communication to win a defamation lawsuit.

Dr. Fernando Casses, who had his medial license revoked in Arizona before moving to B.C. to work as a surgeon, initially sued three former patients who had been quoted in Tomlinson’s story. This is known as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (or a SLAPP suit). The complainants in SLAPP cases don’t typically expect to win the case but instead target individuals without the money to defend themselves in a lengthy legal battle. The patients, who had been on the brink of death years earlier due to mistakes made by Casses during surgery, were particularly vulnerable targets.

“That was the hardest part for me—they put their trust in me and then they were sued,” Tomlinson says, expressing guilt at her role in exposing the patients to a lawsuit. “It was horrible,” she says.

Soon after Casses launched his suit against former patients, CBC became involved, using its legal resources to defend both Tomlinson and her sources. The resulting court battle was a gruelling experience for Tomlinson, who, over the course of long days on the stand, saw her story ripped apart and her character attacked. Roger McConchie, Casses’ lawyer, called Tomlinson’s story “a disgrace to journalism,” among other things.

Responsible communication, a legal defence first used by Torstar in December 2009, was created to bolster a journalist’s ability to defend themselves against libel (prior to 2009, the best defence was absolute truth—difficult to prove for even the most well-reported stories). It allows defamatory stories in the public interest to go unpunished as long as the journalist can prove they were thorough and balanced in reporting and verifying facts.

Though easier to prove than total truth, responsible communication is by no means an easy defence. Even Tomlinson, who had done over three months of reporting prior to the September 2009 story on Casses, found the process exhausting. In the end, though, she was able to prove she’d done everything in her power to report a balanced an accurate story—even to the point of showing up uninvited to Casses’s house with the allegations against him. Not long after Casses refused to speak with Tomlinson, CBC received a chill letter from his lawyer.

After delaying one week to double-check each detail, CBC decided to go ahead with Tomlinson’s story, believing it to be solid in the event of a lawsuit. And, thankfully, they were right. In an exhaustive, 169-page verdict, Justice Elaine Adair ruled that Tomlinson had done nothing wrong, and that “a more complete reporting of the facts would only have been more damaging for Dr. Casses.”

Following her legal win, distanced from long days defending herself against Casses and McConchie in the hyper-adversarial atmosphere of the legal process, Tomlinson is able to see her trial as an excellent learning experience. She came out of it with a better understanding of what it takes to responsibly communicate in the eyes of the law, as well as advice for fellow journalists who may find themselves in similar predicaments.

“Know that you have this defence at your disposal, and report accordingly,” she says. “If you don’t take good notes, if you don’t give the other side an adequate and full chance to respond, if you’re not thorough, if you’re not diligent, if you’re not fair and even-handed, this defence will not help you.”

The original version of this story has been corrected to ensure accuracy. 

When former Vancouver Magazine editor Michael White began his fundraising campaign last Sunday—$4,000 for travel and accommodations to visit the Spasmodic Torticollis Recovery Clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico—he expected it to take at least a month. Twenty-four hours later, he’d raised more than he asked for, and the donations just kept coming.

Now, at the time of writing (four days since he began fundraising on gofundme.com), White is just shy of the $6,000 mark. He says the extra money will go a long way toward helping him find treatment and cope with the rare, incurable condition of spasmodic torticollis.

Spasmodic torticollis, also known as cervical dystonia, is a disorder affecting muscles in the neck. For White, its onset was scarily sudden and progressed at a ferocious rate, and within weeks of his first symptoms it felt like his head was constantly being pulled backward, the tension becoming stronger every day. Now, White’s neck is in a constant state of spasm, making simple tasks such as walking to the grocery store nearly impossible—let alone his journalistic endeavours, which he’s been forced to abandon.

While there’s no such thing as a good time to lose control of your neck, the onset of White’s condition was particularly inconvenient given the state of his career. At 45, White made the difficult decision to leave Vancouver Magazine in pursuit of freelancing, as well as to edit the debut issue of a brand new magazine. Two weeks later, he had his first neck spasm, and this exciting new phase of his career gradually fell apart.

“The spasms that I experience in my neck not only make it difficult to maintain balance when I’m walking, but they’re also exhausting,” he says. “I certainly wasn’t able to go out and do interviews and run around meeting with prospective advertisers, and I didn’t have the clarity of mind to write good content.”

As White and many others can attest to, journalism is not a well-paid profession, let alone one with many safety nets. Soon after he became unable to work, White and his partner found themselves in a precarious financial situation—making this week’s outpouring of online generosity all the more meaningful.

But more surprising to White than the sheer speed of donations was who they came from, including people he hadn’t seen since high school and colleagues he didn’t even think were particularly fond of him. “That these people apparently think well enough of me to donate that quickly and that generously—it’s a very good feeling in the midst of a whole lot of terrible feelings,” he says.

Though journalism is often a competitive profession, White’s situation proves that it can be communal as well. Thanks in large part to fellow writers and reporters he had never thought of as friends–those who donated and those who simply spread the word–White will be able to receive treatment in Santa Fe. Hopefully, as he learns to live with his debilitating condition, White will someday be a journalist again.