“You’re going to court,” my editor told me on my second day as a National Post intern. “You need to leave now.” I was all nerves as I threw my recorder and notebook into my shiny, black purse and sprinted to the elevator. I was off to the sentencing of wannabe Toronto rap star and convicted killer Mark Moore. Christie Blatchford had been covering the case, but she was out of town on assignment, and I was the undeserving—but lucky—available person. As the elevator slowly dropped to ground level, I became consumed with anxiety knowing that Blatchford would likely read the piece. I scanned my outfit: a pleated, cream-coloured sleeveless blouse, a pair of fitted, cropped black pants and two-toned, leather-heeled sandals. Despite my panic, I felt confident about my choices; I looked put together. I’d spent the previous night picking out an outfit to convey that I took my stint at the Post seriously. My degree in fashion helped me realize that my personal style allows me to assert poise. Dressing well is as important as showing up to work on time. As the elevator doors opened, I took a deep breath. “As long as you look like you know what you’re doing,” I told myself, “people will think you do.”

The next day, senior writer Peter Kuitenbrouwer visited me at my desk. He was holding the paper, opened to my court story on A3—my first byline for the Post. “Nice work,” he said. “But I think you meant to write ‘peace’ instead of ‘piece.’” My confidence sank, but I adjusted my handcrafted necklace—a reflex I assumed was the female equivalent of straightening a tie—and thanked him.

The ability to convey confidence through clothing is something freelance writer Rea McNamara knows a thing or two about. During times of uncertainty, the former style columnist “glamouflages.” One time, when she felt particularly challenged, she wore red lipstick every day for a week. “I just needed to feel confident,” she says. “And if I didn’t feel confident on the inside, I needed to project that I had my shit together.”

I, too, like to glamouflage. Dressing up gives me an instant boost and makes me feel like I have control—even if I don’t. The way you present yourself sends the outside world a message. “Your sense of style,” says McNamara, “should be reflective of the life you lead.”

We construct identities as we select pieces of clothing. “When you make these conscious decisions about your own personal aesthetics, it feels like you have a sharper take on the world around you,” says Shawn Micallef, co-owner of Spacing and a dapper dresser known for his bow ties. He understands the powerful relationship between clothing and confidence and gets a kick when he leaves the house dressed up. Yet, when working at home, the stylish journalist dresses “terribly.” Unlike Gay Talese, who worked from home dressed to the nines, Micallef doesn’t need a uniform to be productive.

Talese’s style became part of his identity as a journalist. In Rachel Tashjian’s 2015 Vanity Fair article, Talese credits getting his first job at The New York Times to the three-piece suit he wore to the interview. “I was polite, well-dressed,” he said. “I just know, though I never got any confirmation, that I made a good impression.” Tashjian also notes how Talese’s obsession with clothing intertwines with his writing. “When I write stories, it’s like making a suit: the pieces hang together, and you sketch,” Talese said. “The whole process: handwork.”

An effortlessly cool persona makes Joan Didion a style icon in and out of literary circles. French fashion house Céline made her the face of its spring 2015 campaign. “Didion might be the ultimate Céline woman: brilliant, creative, vaguely recalcitrant,” Vogue wrote. She kept a detailed packing list—which included two skirts, cigarettes, a mohair throw and a typewriter—taped inside her closet. “The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do,” Didion wrote. “Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture.”

While some writers want to blend in, others stand out. Tom Wolfe’s uniform—his legendary white suit—became synonymous with his work. “Wherever he went, he was the outsider,” Micallef says. “Everyone knew he was the writer.”

During my last week at the Post, I wore gold-stained leather clogs I bought at a flea market after bargaining with a vendor for 20 minutes. Each time I slipped into them and reflected on the victorious price adjustment, they gave me confidence. As the heavy carved heel of the wooden soles hit the newsroom tile, I passed Kuitenbrouwer. “Nice shoes!” he said. I smiled, satisfied that he’d complimented my writing—and my footwear.

A large, silver-framed whiteboard with the names of the people killed in a December 2014 mass shooting hangs on the wall behind Otiena Ellwand’s desk at the Edmonton Journal. It’s December 2015, almost the one-year anniversary of the crime. Under the heading “Victims North” are the names of those Phu Lam murdered at his north-side neighbourhood home: Tien Thuy Truong, Elvis Lam, Ha Thanh Truong, Valentina Nguyen, Dau Thi Le…the list goes on. Written in a once-bold green marker, the faded names won’t come off. “It’s like it’s haunting me,” Ellwand says. Covering the largest mass killing in the city’s recent history would be a tough undertaking for any reporter, let alone one who had been at the Journal for just over a year.

The 26-year-old journalist is the first one to arrive at the paper’s downtown office each morning. Because of her 6:15 a.m. start, Ellwand is the only reporter there and must be ready to write about anything and everything. But over the past couple of years, she has also regularly covered police press conferences, developed contacts within the police force and earned a good reputation for her crime reporting.

Ellwand worked across from former crime bureau chief Jana Pruden, who resigned in January. She reports to the city and business editor, Mark Iype, who expects her to update web copy as news unfolds. When on assignment, she may get an accompanying photographer or videographer, but often doesn’t. The newsroom is trim, with about a dozen beat and general assignment reporters, and money is always tight. “Because we are so short-staffed,” she says, “a lot of the beat reporters have to write general assignment stories.” (In fact, one day, when I was shadowing Ellwand, Pruden mistook me for a new intern and called out, “Hey, are you busy working on anything?”) Ellwand makes herself valuable by interviewing, taking photos and shooting video—often at the same time. “When you’re a young reporter,” she says, “you definitely have to sell yourself as being versatile, adaptable and multi-talented.”

Just after 11 a.m. one wintry Thursday, Ellwand gets a press release from the RCMP that says police have charged a man with the murder of two young women in Grande Prairie, Alberta. After reading the release, Ellwand tweets: “A 28-year-old man from Grande Prairie has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of two women #yeg #ejlive.” Her co-worker Paige Parsons, who’s on the last week of her four-month contract position, writes a quick web hit, and Ellwand calls around for more information. She finds one of the victim’s parents in the phone book but can’t get the person to talk. After speaking to RCMP media relations, she learns that Global News is already headed to RCMP Edmonton headquarters for a quick press conference—and it starts in 20 minutes. Springing out of her cushioned chair, Ellwand reaches into a nearby desk drawer and grabs a set of car keys. She throws on her plum, knee-length parka, and she’s off.

Ellwand halts the Journal’s Nissan Pathfinder in a no-parking zone, gathers her notebook, iPhone and audio recorder, and jumps out. A reporter and camera-man from Global are the only others there for the press conference. They’ve already set up inside, but RCMP inspector Gibson Glavin is late. When he arrives, Ellwand shoots video on her phone while balancing an audio recorder. She listens attentively to him and interjects with questions. She notices holes in his statement and wants more information. The inspector begins to show impatience with all the questions—he says he’s already told them everything he can in the 15 minutes. “My time is precious,” a parting Glavin says to Ellwand and the Global reporter, “and so is yours.”

Back in the freezing Pathfinder, still illegally parked, Ellwand replays her audio and transcribes. She calls the Journal to update her co-worker, then emails the strongest quotes, which will go into an update on the web. She’s too busy tweeting on her phone to start the car and turn on the heat, even though I can see her breath when she speaks. Before pulling her seatbelt across her puffy, down-filled jacket, she expresses frustration with how hard it is to take notes while filming. She turns on the engine to head back to the office as light, crystal snow falls from the sky. The Journal gig is Ellwand’s first full-time reporting job apart from a one-year contract in New Brunswick. It’s a coveted position—she is one of the paper’s few permanent hires in the last couple of years. She has worked hard to make her way from intern to contract to staff, but she still doesn’t have her own official beat.

As newsrooms continue shrinking, the number of beats has dwindled. Structural reconfiguration and digital disruption have combined to create a completely different landscape from that of the pre-social media era. A new breed of reporters—the lucky, usually much younger ones filling the voids left by staff cutbacks—now cover specific interest areas in addition to general assignment duties. Beat reporting is not dead, but it’s now more loosely defined.

Newspaper editors, with fewer resources at their disposal, are prying as much output as they can from their reporters. It’s a stressful time for young journalists, but it’s also exciting. In this scrambled beat culture, the line between general assignment and specific areas of focus is blurring. Reporters such as Ellwand at the Journal, Ashley Csanady at the National Post and Kelly Bennett at CBC Hamilton are examples of this shift. In newsrooms today, doing more with less is an imperative.

At the Post, evolving technology has meant an evolving newsroom. Csanady joined the paper in winter 2015 to post content to the website. Yet, her proper title, web producer, doesn’t mean much in terms of her actual work. In fact, she writes a lot about politics for both print and the web. “It’s a new experiment for the Post to have someone who is on the web who is also sort of on a beat,” she says of the nimble newsroom and her informal specialty. Before the Post, Csanady worked for Queen’s Park Briefing—a subscription-based online political publication owned by the Toronto Star—covering the Ontario legislature for over two years. She then moved to Postmedia’s Canada.com in late summer 2014 before landing a spot at the Post. “I was fortunate that Queen’s Park was a specialty—and that the paper had a hole. I am essentially the Queen’s Park person, but without any formal title behind it.”

Bopping between the legislature and the Post’s headquarters, the 28-year-old reporter doesn’t have a typical day at work. She often files stories for the web before writing a slightly different version for print. The notion of quickly publishing information online is a massive shift from the traditional model, where reporters had more time to file stories for the next day’s paper. Csanady’s work is a good example of how reporters can do web-first journalism and then develop a version better suited to print. “Some people who have been in the industry for a long time still think filing everything at 7 p.m. is a good thing,” she says. “But when you look at web traffic, it always spikes at noon.”

Ellwand and Csanady’s situations extend to more experienced reporters as well. “The days of 20 or 30 beats being posted and having all these individual reporters on them are gone,” says veteran Vancouver Sun crime reporter Kim Bolan. “We all need to be more flexible with our resources.”

An employee of the Sun since 1984, Bolan has seen the newsroom shrink and beats come and go. Her work has won numerous awards, including the National Newspaper Award for beat reporting in 2015. Her fearless investigative crime reporting has brought her death threats, and she’s even taken security measures to maintain her safety. But none of this has stopped her, and because the Sun currently doesn’t have an assigned court reporter, she and legal affairs columnist Ian Mulgrew collectively cover court stories. The paper doesn’t put official titles under reporters’ bylines, but people take on beats informally. “We had a period several years ago when we didn’t have formal beats,” Bolan says. “But reporters often develop an interest or expertise in a certain area.”

Despite the evident shift in personnel structure, Hamilton Spectator managing editor Jim Poling says newsrooms have changed because the way we consume information has changed. He’s been at the Spec for 29 years and says the new ways readers access information come with an evolution in how newsrooms cover their communities. “It is too easy to say we don’t have beats because newsrooms have fewer staff,” he says. “There’s some truth in that, but that’s not the sum total of what’s going on.”

The Spec’s traditional police reporters used to visit precincts, where they attended regular media briefings and worked with staff sergeants to pick out prime stories. Today, because officials tend to cite privacy reasons for limiting the release of once readily available information, the relationship between cops and journalists has changed. “We could look at the arrest sheets throughout the day,” says Poling, who has worked various beats over his career. “That’s unheard of now.”

News gathering techniques, such as using social media and the internet, have also altered the way journalists access information. “It helps reporters gather much more information quickly,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean they will get the answers, but they’ll get the context.” That means developing leads, finding angles and spotting trends. And finally, some beats have vanished simply because general assignment reporters have swallowed them up. “Journalists should be broad-based,” Poling says, arguing that the loss of beats is not necessarily a bad thing. “To say ‘I only cover what’s within this box’ doesn’t work anymore.”

This makes sense given that budgets are so tight, yet when I was researching this story, many reporters cautioned me that the changing nature of beats doesn’t really apply to the Toronto Star. The Star is an example of a newspaper that maintains a strong beat structure, with most reporters sticking to a defined topic. Deputy city editor Julie Carl says beat reporters are important to the Star because their work reflects the Atkinson Principles, named after the paper’s influential former publisher Joseph E. Atkinson: social justice, civic engagement and workers’ rights are all important aspects of the paper’s mandate. Knowing what’s going on in the government and informing readers is crucial, Carl says, and beat reporters, with their expertise, can bring hard-to-access information to light. “Beat reporters don’t just know their topic,” she says. “They have formed relationships, which can get them to the very information we don’t even know exists.”

At the Star, the vast majority of reporters are assigned beats. Interns work general assignment, taking stories from the news desk. Star reporter Tess Kalinowski, along with The Globe and Mail’s Oliver Moore and the Post’s Kristine Owram, is one of the few full-time Toronto-based reporters covering transportation. Carl says beats like Kalinowski’s are important, because subjects like transit can be social equalizers, and readers are interested in issues that affect them. “We want to make life better for the average person,” Carl says. During her career, Kalinowski hasn’t seen many beats evaporate at the paper but has seen some evolve. They are shared more broadly today, especially with the paper extending its offerings from print to online to a tablet edition. As Kalinowski says, “No one person can do everything for all those platforms.”

Although she works in the ninth-largest city in Canada, 31-year-old Kelly Bennett is one of just three full- time reporters at CBC Hamilton. The digital publication also employs one producer and one executive producer. Bennett has worked as a general assignment reporter since moving to “the Hammer” in 2014, but she has also built a reputation for covering police carding. The informal beat grew out of an assignment to cover a local rally after police shot and killed Michael Brown, a young Black man in Ferguson, Missouri. That’s when she learned Toronto wasn’t the only Ontario city carding its citizens, and she began investigating the controversial police practice in Hamilton. “I just tugged on that thread, despite not having a beat,” she says. Her digging helped her become known for the subject while still working general assignment. “Though I would never have ‘Kelly Bennett, CBC Hamilton, police reporter’ on my email signature, I have been the person to unravel that.”

Bennett’s career began in 2006, when the then-22-year-old Canadian reporter started working at Voice of San Diego. The non-profit digital news organization tried to put reporters on beats where enterprise stories could blossom. Bennett’s initial beat was housing and economics, so she submerged herself in the topic. In 2006, she began writing about the local real estate market and, later, the subprime mortgage collapse of 2007 and 2008. “When I think about the stories that have defined my career, they often took longer than one day to do,” she says. Bennett maintains a long-term mindset in Hamilton, even though the newsroom isn’t conducive to working on investigative pieces since daily stories demand urgency. “General assignment reporters should think of the stories they are doing as possible investments towards a specialty.”

From a marketability perspective, Bennett says experience on a beat is a selling point. Csanady also thinks a niche helps emerging journalists get jobs, even if they’ll be expected to cover totally unrelated stories. Ellwand echoes this stance: “On the job, you can develop your area of interest and talk to your editors about how you’re interested in moving into something else.”

Although working a beat is a significant role for journalists, it shouldn’t come at the cost of fulfilling general assignment duties. “The expectation is not that you’ll take a few days and not file any- thing,” Bennett says. “That’s just not the way the model works.”

Later on that December afternoon, it’s minus 15 degrees outside, and Ellwand power walks from the Journal’s office to police headquarters in downtown Edmonton. It’s only about 20 minutes away, but the temperature drags out each step. She’s been on the job for eight hours, and her shift is over, but Ellwand is set to meet police inspector Regan James for a video interview at 3 p.m. The topic is the aftermath of last year’s mass shooting. James was the first officer on the bloody scene, making him a central character for Ellwand’s upcoming anniversary feature. Freelance videographer Topher Seguin sets up his camera while Ellwand preps her questions. Her story will run in the paper, but the video is for a special web component.

A grey-haired James enters the room in an impeccably pressed, short-sleeved white dress shirt, dark pants and a straight, black tie. He speaks with the same seriousness of his uniform—sharp and without blemish. “Domestic violence—it can reach epic proportions,” he says. Ellwand leans her left elbow onto the large boardroom table and asks James to walk her through the horrific events. “And what happened after that?” a focused Ellwand asks. James tells her about the blood, about the screams, about the crying and about the bodies. “By no means did those people deserve their fate in any way,” he says. “And certainly not the children.” As Ellwand pulls out powerful details for her piece, James is calm, despite the chilling story he tells. As he adjusts his tie, a tattoo on his left upper arm peeks out from under his shirt. He pauses. “You never forget these types of events,” he says. “They stay with you forever.”

After about 45 minutes, the interview winds down. Ellwand has learned some new details and is able to fact check her timeline. While packing up her notebook and thanking James for his time, she tells him about her victim whiteboard. “The names won’t come off.”

After her feature ran, Ellwand poured bleach on a large paper towel and erased the letters that made up the names. “It’s just empty and white, which feels foreboding,” Ellwand says. “One day it will be filled, probably after something horrific has happened. I’m sort of dreading that day.”

Before the public knew Jian Ghomeshi the alleged sex offender, they knew Jian Ghomeshi the radio personality.

As the first week of Ghomeshi’s sexual assault trial wraps up, endless reporting and thousands of tweets have documented the case, closely following every statement made and each piece of evidence brought forward. The cutthroat cross-examination of defence lawyer Marie Henein attempted to shred the credibility of witnesses—women who were strong enough to come forward, only to now be broken down.

I’m following the trial religiously—I can’t look away for fear of missing a detail, a detail I would likely dismiss in normal everyday life, like whether or not I wore hair extensions on a particular day over a decade ago. Before Ghomeshi was charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking, I listened to him on CBC’s Q. And even though I found his smooth-talking tone to be annoying, I greatly admired his work as a journalist.

When those we idolize—or at the very least appreciate—are accused of immoral acts, we become perplexed. How do we make sense of someone who is capable of making art for the world to enjoy while also being capable of destroying lives? If you believe art is an extension of oneself, it becomes hard to enjoy the art created by a sexual predator.

Appreciating the art while disliking the artist isn’t clear-cut. After the passing of David Bowie, Stacey May Fowles wrote a thought-provoking piece for Hazlitt about coming to terms with the fact that one of her role models had a history of sexual abuse.

Fowles shared how she, a survivor of sexual abuse, found herself initially trying to explain Bowie’s actions. She wrote, “In the moment I was actively trying to excuse his horrifying behaviour to justify my own admiration for him, becoming the very apologist I criticized out of the fear of complicating my own experience of loss.”After coming to the realization that idols can also be monsters, her perspective changed: “…knowing how harrowing it is for victims to see perpetrators celebrated in the media, I have a personal responsibility to examine and acknowledge the idea that he was potentially involved in someone else’s trauma.”

Fowles’s analysis made me think: who decides what celebrities receive a get-out-of-jail-free card? Bowie’s alleged rape certainly didn’t affect his legendary status. Tupac, who passed in 1996, was found guilty of sexually assaulting a woman and served time in prison for the charge. Yet the masses of fans that still mourn his death rarely remember this dark fact. R. Kelly’s alleged penchant for exploiting and abusing young women hasn’t ended his career, either—he released an album in 2013 and was featured on a hit Lady Gaga track that same year.

Perhaps it’s because celebrities like these also contribute to society in ways we enjoy. We don’t want to think about accusations that Woody Allen molested his adopted daughter because it makes it harder to like Annie Hall. Buying an R. Kelly album feels wrong if we think about the possibility he urinated into a young woman’s mouth.

But the truth is, even if we choose to forget what these men have done, the victims of their crimes don’t. Enjoying, celebrating and supporting sexual abusers is wrong—morally and ethically. If we turn a blind eye or justify unacceptable behaviour, we are creating a society that condones it. We are telling women that their abuse isn’t as important as the man who is responsible for it. We’re allowing art—albeit often good art—to bear more significance than our respect for human decency.

Despite the horrible circumstances, I find it reassuring to read outraged tweets and comments about the reality of the women involved in the Ghomeshi trial. People are starting to discuss how the legal system is set up to fail victims of sexual assault and how few convictions are actually made. Many Canadian journalists are also expressing their thoughts on the case and its portrayal of women. Ashley Csanady of the National Post tweeted: “What’s so chilling about Lucy’s testimony in #Ghomeshi is I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t done something she regrets just to be nice.” Alyshah Hasham, court reporter at the Toronto Star, wrote: “In case it’s somehow not crystal clear through the tweets this looks like a lead-up to accusing the complainant of lying. #ghomeshi.”

Despite Ghomeshi’s lack of emotion in court and Henein’s ruthless questioning, we are starting to talk about women and how they’re treated. The Star even put together a piece featuring different women’s tweets about the case.

Even if Ghomeshi is found not guilty—because that’s the way the system works—hopefully, his career is toast. When the trial wraps up, and the media frenzy dies down, I hope we forget about Ghomeshi, but not the women. The women who found the courage to stand up for themselves in an attempt to have their voices heard, despite the odds being stacked against them. Because hearing the voices of survivors of sexual abuse on the radio would be a pleasant change from hearing Ghomeshi’s.

February 5, 2016: The original version of this story has been corrected to ensure accuracy.

Racks of t-shirts with “Toronto vs Everybody” emblazoned across the locally made threads hang near toques uniquely stitched with different urban neighbourhoods in the Toronto Spacing Store. Stocked with mostly city-themed paraphernalia, the shop is a curated collection of clothing, houseware items and novelty gifts. The perimeter is lined with books about architecture, vintage subway map posters, handcrafted knickknacks and the store’s popular button and magnet collection. Opened in November 2014, the downtown store resembles a souvenir shop without the made-in-China kitsch. It’s located on the ground level of a heritage building and the magazine’s staff works from a small office studio hidden behind the checkout counter.

Apart from a place to sell goods, the store is a business strategy that’s helping the magazine survive. Canadian publications—especially independent ones—often need to find additional revenue streams to sustain themselves. The store has been a lucrative move: Spacing has doubled its yearly revenue since opening the shop. It has also boosted magazine newsstand sales by 15 percent and increased subscriptions. And since opening the Toronto-based retail shop, the publication, which covers urban issues, is finding success rooting itself physically in a city that it critiques and celebrates. Matthew Blackett, the publisher, editor and co-founder of Spacing, says the benefit of operating out of a public retail space is that it allows the magazine to live what it preaches.

Blackett was part of a team of journalists that launched Spacing in 2003. Soon after, they realized they needed to find additional revenue if the magazine was going to grow. The quarterly (two issues a year focus on Toronto and two are national) publishes content on urban issues such as public transit, municipal politics and community planning. Advertising and subscription sales are often not enough to sustain a small publication, so within a year of going into print, Spacing began selling buttons and magnets—including the popular subway stops and Toronto highway signs collections—online. The in-house designs started to take off and began to make up about 15 to 20 percent of the company’s revenue.

From the success of its online store, the idea to open a bricks-and-mortar retail one was “pretty organic.” Spacing teamed up with independent publisher Coach House Books for a pop-up shop in 2013 and used the temporary store experience to see how receptive people were to the idea of a permanent retail space. “We have demonstrated that we have a very good knack of either creating, or choosing and finding people that are doing good stuff,” says Blackett.

Consultant D.B. Scott, president of Impresa Communications Limited, says that most magazines today can’t just rely on their publication for financial security. He cites Downhome as another example of a magazine finding success through a retail space. Its store in St. John’s, Newfoundland, has been a staple for the brand and attracts shoppers from across Canada. Grant Young, president of Downhome Incorporated, says the company generates $4 million annually, with $1 million coming from retail sales and another $1 million from wholesale distribution. The store sells a range of merchandise from stuffed plush puffins, t-shirts and Newfoundland souvenirs.

Success, Scott says, depends on a business strategy that’s consistent with the general image of the magazine. But shops aren’t just for small publications. Monocle, the glossy London-based magazine about current affairs, business, culture and design has opened retail stores in Europe, Asia and, in 2012, in Toronto.

While Spacing has no immediate plans of opening more shops in other parts of Canada, the store was designed in a way that the concept would be transferable to other cities. They can use the same model to sell merchandise related to different urban areas. Spacing wants to conquer the Toronto market first before considering a location in Vancouver or Calgary.

Blackett thinks stores can help save some magazines, depending on the genre. He believes sports magazines, active lifestyle publications and niche titles could thrive in a retail market. “We’re lucky that we are editor-owned,” he says, “which allows us to experiment and take risks that other magazines can’t existentially afford.”

But it’s not just about money. The Spacing team previously operated out of an office building that didn’t allow readers to access staff without passing security, which wasn’t aligning with the magazine’s notion of public space and overall ethos. “Now,” says Blackett, “you can walk right into our store and theoretically yell at us about an article, or pitch an article, or talk to us about an issue.”