Lisa Coxon and Ronan O’Beirne 

We asked some Canadian broadcast reporters to share some helpful tips they’ve received from camera operators, editors and the like over the years. From serious to silly, here’s what they’ve been told:

“When you are doing particularly sad stories, if you don’t feel the emotion of those you are interviewing, you aren’t doing your job . . . it’s not about being a robot; it’s about telling the best story.” 
—Quinn Ohler, Global News Edmonton

“It’s exceedingly simple, but it’s so true: when you do an interview, the most important thing is to listen to the answers. So many times, you’re caught up in asking questions, thinking about what you’re going to ask, that you don’t really listen to the answer and sometimes, that’s the most important thing—it leads you to what you should be asking.”

—Christina Stevens, reporter, Global National

“The shorter, the better—keeping it concise, keeping it tight. And nobody likes to see a talking head. So if you have enough B-roll to cover that, do it.”
 —Aaron Streck, reporter, Global Saskatoon

“You want to dress for the job that you want, not the job that you’ve got. People always have first impressions; they can’t help themselves. It’s instinctual to automatically judge someone based on what they’re wearing. If you really want to present yourself as credible and professional, it’s important.” 
—David Gerow, reporter/anchor/videographer, CBC Ottawa

“I was told once by an audio guy to stop wearing turtlenecks because the microphone was echoing on my chest. The funny thing was, my mic was actually on my jacket. Never understood that one, but I think he just didn’t like turtlenecks.”
—Quinn Ohler, Global Edmonton

“I once had a cameraman tell me I’d look a lot better if I faced away from the camera.”
—Ed Watson, reporter for CTV B.C.

Remember to follow the Review and its masthead on Twitter. Email the blog editor here.

By Shannon Clarke and Rebecca Melnyk

Canadian-Egyptian journalist, Mohamed Fahmy, will begin trial tomorrow in Egypt, alongside Al-Jazeera colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed. The three are among 20 journalists accused of cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood to threaten the country’s reputation. They have been detained since December 29, 2013 and were officially charged on January 29. Journalists (including our blog editor) have been asking why Ottawa hasn’t been making enough noise about Fahmy’s case. In the absence of a response from politicians, they’re taking their support for him and his colleagues online and to the streets.

Remember to follow the Review and its masthead on Twitter. Email the blog editor here.

By Aya Tsintziras

I was standing in line at the movies recently with a friend when she mentioned she still wants to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, Blue Jasmine. All I could think about was Maureen Orth’s November 2013 Vanity Fair piece on Mia Farrow and her children—specifically, the allegations that Allen sexually assaulted Dylan Farrow, their daughter.

As it turns out, this would become big news a few weeks later. When Dylan wrote her “open letter” for Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s blog on February 1, she began it this way: “What’s your favourite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know:” before telling her story. I thought she was brave. Others did, too, includingGirls star Lena Dunham, who took to Twitter and other media outlets to defend Dylan:

To share in this way is courageous, powerful and generous. Please read:

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) February 1, 2014

But it didn’t end there. When Allen wrote his own Times piece on February 7, he put a larger journalistic debate into motion: should a prestigious newspaper be a space to air one’s personal issues?

Orth wrote her February 7 follow-up, “10 Undeniable Facts About the Woody Allen Sexual-Abuse Allegation” because, as she explains, she wrote two “heavily researched and thoroughly fact-checked” Vanity Fair articles in 1992 and 2013 on the subject. While the truth of the allegations has of course come up for debate (Allen was investigated, but not charged, when the allegations first surfaced 20 years ago), there is a second discussion over why Dylan’s piece ended up on Kristof’s blog: Politicosays the Times editorial department rejected the letter before Kristof picked it up. According to Politico, the piece was published where the paper “felt it was most appropriate.”

There’s another layer to that story—one that I believe sheds light on whether this really was the most appropriate place for the dueling letters. In 2004, Steven Hatfill sued Kristof and the Times for libel, after the columnist implied that he was a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. (The suit was dismissed, but Hatfill received a multimillion-dollar settlement from the government, who had leaked the information to Kristof and others.) Reflecting on the controversy in an August 2008 column, Kristof wrote, “The job of the news media is supposed to be to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Instead, I managed to afflict the afflicted.”

When he posted Dylan’s letter on his blog, he was definitely afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. He was right to give her the space to voice her truth. But the Times’s decision to allow Allen to respond was only comforting the comfortable. As Dylan says, she’s lived her whole life with others praising Allen’s films, and the director has long been able to bankroll a robust (but questionable) defence against Dylan’s allegations: Orth writes that Allen hired private investigators to look into state-police detectives who investigated Dylan’s claims in the early 1990s.

Kristof’s 2008 column looks at the balance between the public’s right to know something and respecting someone’s privacy, and both those issues are at play here. Allen is undeniably a public figure; Dylan just happened to be adopted by one. And that is an important distinction.

Remember to follow the Review and its masthead on Twitter. Email the blog editor here.

By Kate Hefford

“This is a good brand,” says sex blogger Erika Szabo, motioning toward a pair of $50 underwear. They’re silky smooth, dusty blue boxer briefs with an exaggerated bulge. We glance over electrosex gear, sex toys that apply electric stimulation to the genitals. We’re in Priape, a sex shop and gay haven in Toronto’s Church and Wellesley Village. We discuss natural lube (“You should try Sliquid!”), kegels, and BDSM—she says bondage tape is great for first-timers.

Szabo often finds herself in stores like this doing research for her blog, xoxoamore. Like sex columns worldwide, it features sex tips, toy reviews, and date ideas. She also often interjects her personal experiences in her sex toy reviews. Of the Evolved Duo Obsessions Lavish vibrator, she writes that“flipping the toy onto its side and using the textured shaft for clitoral stimulation proved better, but was awkward.” Szabo tells me, “What is so interesting is you have to put yourself out there and try to make it informative.”

Szabo works as a copywriter at the head office of Seduction, a three-storey sex shop that claims to be “North America’s largest adult department store.” She founded her blog in August 2011 with her boss. For Szabo, blogging is a more personal form of journalism, at a time when the mainstream coverage of all things hot and heavy in Canada isn’t exactly turning her on. “Sometimes I think sex journalism can be misguided,” she says. “A lot of it is biased and stereotypical. It’s not aiming for the right hole.”

She’s right: the way magazines cover sex can leave something to be desired. Publications like Best Health, Canadian Living,and Chatelaine are attempting to improve Canadian women’s sex lives, one article at a time. They offer solid information, but they’re so scared of rubbing people the wrong way, they’ve turned sex into sex ed. It’s time for Canadian media to stop being such prudes around anything kinky.

There’s no argument we’ve made progress. Journalists were reminded of how far we’d come last August with the death of Helen Gurley Brown,Cosmopolitan’s eminent editor for 32 years until 1997. Before she took over Cosmo in 1965, it was a literary magazine. She brought sex, “the subject that every woman wanted to know about but nobody talked about, to life, literally, in Cosmo’s pages,” said David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, in reaction to her death. When Brown was hired, she pledged to give how sex was written about a makeover. Her philosophy was: “So you’re single. You can still have sex. You can have a great life. And if you marry…don’t use men to get what you want in life, get it for yourself.”

Journalists today—and Cosmo in particular—are still following her blazing-hot path. Current Cosmo coverlines include “100% Hotter Sex,” “Dirty Sexy Sex,” “His #1 Sex Fantasy,” “Best. Sex. Ever.,” and “What Guys Crave…(Besides Beer and Pizza).” There are still taboo topics, though, in almost all magazines. Body abnormalities, kinks, disabilities, and even mainstream LGBT sex seem not to exist in their glossy pages.

The exception is the weeklies. We can thank the explicit example set by Savage Love. The sex advice column by Dan Savage that appears in a number of Canadian alt-weeklies is syndicated by Seattle’s The Stranger, in which it has been published since 1991. Savage gained popularity when he launched the It Gets Better Project in 2010 after several high-profile teen suicides. More recently, he’s been the star of the MTV showSavage U, on which he visits American universities and answers students’ sex questions with wit and honesty. And he isn’t shy. In the November 1, 2012, column, reader “Completely Utterly Mortified” asks about salining one’s balls. Savage responds with directions: Saline can be injected into the ball sack with a needle to make testicles appear larger. He elaborates that “the inflation process takes about an hour, the effect lasts a day or two, and the sack gradually returns to normal size as the saline is absorbed into the body.” Education, one; judgement, zilch.

Occupying the same real estate in Toronto’s The Grid is a column called Dating Diaries, which gives the real estate back to the readers. Gay, straight, or whatever readers offer their “diaries” of a date they’ve been on recently—and a rating. Nothing is off limits, from tales of blowjobs to one-night stands. On these dates, men say insensitive things like “You failed,” women have filthy apartments, and guys meet up after spotting each other on gay dating sites. “What I love the most is anything that is either unexpected and there’s a crazy twist,” says Kate Carraway, a columnist for The Grid, Vice, and TheGlobe and Mail, who compiles the tales. “[Or] something that is universally wonderful or terrible.” A favourite column of hers involves someone who accidentally made a date with someone she met online but didn’t like, then had a great in-person date. “That to me is perfect,” Carraway says, “because it definitely shows something about dating that is common [which] is something we understand about the randomness of it.”

In February of last year, she wrote an article outlining what we can learn from Dating Diaries, and it’s clear that it subtly provides sex and relationship advice. Where to pick up, what not to say, when to invite your date upstairs…it’s all in there. Weeklies don’t hold back on dirty details. They have the kinky content that their magazine counterparts are lacking. So where do the magazines fit in?

American publications like Elle, Glamour, InStyle, and Cosmo hit Canadian newsstands every month. But the climate is way different up here. While the U.S. mostly spills its sex secrets in fashion magazines, in Canada, it’s often the health and lifestyle titles that are giving “the talk.”

“We’re the trusted resource for if you’re wondering about the G spot, or sexual health, female reproductive health and fertility, those kinds of things,” says Bonnie Munday, editor-in-chief of Best Health, a magazine published by Reader’s Digest Canada aimed at women in their 30s to 50s. “It’s about the whole woman, it’s about all aspects of health, including mental health, sexual health, looking great, feeling great,” says Munday. The magazine often includes readers’ questions for B.C.-based sex and relationship therapist Cheryl Fraser. It also features a column called Girlfriend’s Guide, where women can ask embarrassing body questions. It’s proven so popular that Best Health has compiled it into a book. The magazine doesn’t, however, touch taboo content like fetishes. “We’re kind of driven by what our readers are asking for information about,” says Munday. “We’re covering topics that we think our readers want to hear about from Best Health.”

Sex—as health? Hugh Hefner must be rolling over in his, um, bed. He launched sex into the mainstream when Playboy hit the stands in 1953. But amid the nude centrefolds and photos of Playboy-Bunny-suit-clad women, and despite the fact that the magazine’s noteworthy features showed it was clearly capable of doing great journalism, articles about sex itself weren’t common. Its competition, Penthouse magazine, which launched in the U.S. in 1969, did sometimes feature sex tips, hidden among nude pictorials. But by then, Cosmo had already set the precedent.

In the early 1980s, the lack of accurate coverage was deadly. When mainstream publications ignored the facts about the AIDS epidemic, the harmful stigma arose that it only existed in the gay community. In journalist Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On, he reports that “the mass media did not like covering stories about homosexuals and was especially skittish about stories that involved gay sexuality.” The publications considered it a “dirty little joke.” Nowadays, most mainstream publications are solidly on the side of equality—running coverage of bullying and gay celebrities, for example—although many are still heteronormative, which is most obvious in their sex coverage.

Magazines aren’t the only way the public is getting information on how to get off. Who could forget the Sunday Night Sex Show, with sex educator Sue Johanson, which took live call-ins about all aspects of sex until 2005? Certified sex and relationship therapist Rebecca Rosenblat has assumed the mantle, answering viewers’ questions and interviewing experts on her show Sex @ 11 with Rebecca. Since she moved to Canada from India, she’s realized that sex is a taboo subject here.

Rosenblat has noticed a few hot topics in Canadian magazines right now: sexting, cheating, and sex addiction—although sex addiction is being written about inaccurately, as if it were alcoholism, she says. “Then some of the stuff is the same old same old, but people are able to talk about it more openly…like how women are every bit as sexual as men. Which makes my job easier.”

Rosenblat says magazines can be dry about sex, and they get it wrong sometimes. She blames writers using unqualified sources, pointing out that relying on the so-called expertise of other people can lead to inaccuracies. She says that “you go into any kind of a therapist forum [online], and everyone is saying how they were cringing that some person could have given such wrong advice.” One example of bad advice that Rosenblat sees repeatedly online is that men who suffer from erectile dysfunction should drink wine to loosen up. “That’s so irresponsible, because as soon as he has that, circulation will be impacted and chances of getting a boner are close to nil.” She also bristles at the term “sexpert.” “Like, what is that? It could be someone working in a sex shop, or who has decided to write a column. I need to know, what are their credentials?”

Following in Hef’s footsteps, modern men’s magazines rarely talk about sex. Publications like Sharp, GQ, and Esquire include pictures of sexy women in place of articles about sex. The exception is Toro, an online magazine that has both. Letters to Levenson is an advice column for men with questions about their wives and girlfriends, or, in Noah Levenson’s words, “people who are so confused and hurt that they reach out to a stranger for advice.” What is lacking in advice columns is what it’s really like to be a sexual man, he says in an email. “Men are either portrayed as whimpering, hyper-sensitive eunuchs or dinosaur-brained guidos. Of course, the reality is that we’re all somewhere in the middle.”

But Szabo, the xoxoamore blogger, believes the genre may be heading in the right direction. “I like to think it’s becoming more and more open.” She stresses that the ultimate purpose of sex journalism is to teach the readers something they didn’t know before. “A lot of sex columns are not always educational, or aren’t sex education that people can understand.”

“If you’re coming to us for information, we owe it to you to be accurate,” says Kaitlyn Kochany, a freelance journalist and fellow blogger on xoxoamore. To her, getting it right allows it to be legitimate, and the internet makes this information accessible to readers. She cites from the rules of the internet, as created by the online-culture-based wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica: “If it exists, someone has made a porno about it.” In this way, sex blogs have leveled the playing field, and anything that readers aren’t getting from magazines may be found online.

University and college students have access to another format for accessing sex tips: the school paper. Kaite Welsh, author of “Sex and Blogs and Shock-‘n’-Tell Journalism” in Times Higher Education, says that students are taking this trend personally. She found that prospective journalists in western universities are using their schools’ papers to discuss sexuality issues, and that the papers can be more explicit than mainstream magazines. “Whether it is pictures of scantily clad models or sex-obsessed bloggers, the modern student press is increasingly X-rated,” writes Welsh. School papers are, even now, producing future Carrie Bradshaws.

So why is sex covered by every form of media? “There’s an old adage, and it’s not just for magazines: sex sells,” says Scott Bullock, a magazine circulation expert in Canada and the U.S. “What I tend to focus on is just how covers influence people’s buying decisions.” He’s compiled data on magazine sales and compared them with what’s on covers. This reveals interesting information about how we relate to sex in magazines: the sexier the cover star, the better they sell, usually.

Photograph of Erika Szabo by E. Wynne Neilly

Illustration by Kathryn MacNaughton

By Davida Ander

“What’s your problem?”

“Isn’t it obvious? He’s an unemployed welfare bum.” 

“Grow up.” 

“Once you are done you may fornicate yourself.”

“You just antagonize people to get people to react, dude. It’s what you do! You have serious issues!” 

“I win every time due to your lack of brains, slightly amusing on occasion but bore quickly of you, til next time I’m bored, bye bye schmuck….”

“Bye bye, coward.” 

“This comment has violated our Terms and Conditions, and has been removed.”

For the large, silent majority of readers turned off by comments sections, the solution is simple: stop reading them. But for journalists, who are frequently themselves the subjects of discussion, and who are increasingly being pressured to moderate and participate in online discussions, ignoring the problem just isn’t an option anymore.

Nor should it be. Canadian news sites need to become more comment-conscious and replace vague suggestions for comment response with positive examples, clear policies, and how-to instructions. Frustrating as comments sections can be, useful contributions should be welcomed—and deserve to be answered.

There are positive examples out there. For Kim Bolan, responding to reader comments on her Vancouver Sun crime-beat blog means getting access to exclusive information from some of her gang-involved readers. “Sometimes it’s a little tidbit of information, because people will post, for example, the name of a murder victim long before the police are prepared to give that information out publicly. So I get it and I have to, of course, confirm it, but I get a leg up, in essence, because I’m on this blog and communicate with people,” she says. And Bolan’s work has paid off. She says her blog averages 250,000 to 300,000 readers each month, one of the highest numbers in the Postmedia chain for a blog. Bolan’s participation in her blog’s comments threads has not just improved the tone and quality of the comments; it’s paid dividends for her reporting, as well as the size of her audience.

But when it comes to journalist-reader interactions in the comments sections of Canadian media, Bolan is an exception. While newsrooms encourage journalists to dip their toes into the comments sections, they’re rarely instructing them on the practical level: when to respond, and how.

At the Toronto Star, editors are working on a new comments strategy. The current guidelines say journalists “may respond” to online reader comments, but debating any issues is off limits. Any reader concerns or complaints should not be addressed by the journalist; instead, they should be sent to the public editor for investigation. “We’re starting to have a conversation around just exactly what is the comment section for,” digital editor John Ferri says. “Should there be a conversation in it? Should we consider it content? All those questions are being discussed.”