Large printouts of proposed site changes sit on CBC.ca editorial director Jonathan Dube’s desk at CBC headquarters in downtown Toronto. Just prior to its tenth birthday on July 4, the award-winning website will receive a makeover. Dube says the new design will be modern, lively and put more emphasis on exclusive features. A new “Canada and the World” page will be integrated into the redesigned website. “It will give us a lot more flexibility,” Dube says, “and the navigation will be a lot more useful.”

Although the redesign process was well underway by the time Dube arrived from Seattle in July 2005, he’s given a lot of input since accepting the newly created position. In order to keep up with the daily workings of the website, the American online journalist has become a chronic BlackBerry user. In fact, he says, he’s often found himself so immersed in his tiny handheld screen that he ends up on the wrong floor of the CBC building. He also admits to getting in trouble with his wife, Rebecca Cook Dube, on more than one occasion for using his BlackBerry at the dinner table.

“I may have once or twice threatened to kidnap the BlackBerry,” Cook Dube jokes, “or drop it from a great height, or otherwise do bodily harm to the thing.” She says Dube tends to focus intensely on his tasks, “Which is great in a lot of ways but can make it challenging to grab his attention when I want it.” But Cook Dube says she benefits too because he’s just as dedicated to other things, like planning their vacations or designing her personal website.

“I don’t know where he gets all his energy from,” Cook Dube says, “but he’s the type of person who’s happiest when he’s figuring out solutions, coming up with innovative new ideas and juggling a million different things at once.” Dube more or less agrees, saying, “I don’t know what else I’d want to do right now – I love it.”

It’s an old love affair. “Jon has always been really interested in online journalism,” Cook Dube says, “even back when it was barely a blip on most people’s radar screens.”

Dube, who grew up in New York City, brings more to CBC.ca than his master’s degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also brings a long history in the online news industry. He is founder and publisher of CyberJournalist.net, an online resource for journalists, and has worked as a national producer at ABCNews.com. When hurricane Bonnie hit in 1998, Dube, who was working for The Charlotte Observer at the time, used a blog to cover the breaking news – something news sites had never done before.

At the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, Dube also taught online storytelling and collaboration skills as a visiting instructor from 2000 to 2003, and he still writes a column on web tips for the school. He also did a stint at The New York Times, has written freelance pieces for the Columbia Journalism Reviewand The Washington Monthly, and won a number of awards for his online work.

CBC.ca senior director Sue Gardner says Dube wasn’t the first person she thought of when she began to look for someone to fill the editorial director position. “I started on a hunt to hire someone,” she recalls, “and it took me about eight months. My first instinct, obviously, was to look around Canada.” But online journalism is a young discipline and hasn’t had a chance to develop a deep pool of talent, and Gardner figures she can count on one hand the number of Canadians that could fill the role. “I know them all,” she says, “and I talked to them about it.”

Gardner says one difficulty is that CBC.ca has one of the country’s largest online news teams, so it would have been a steep climb for anyone coming from modestly sized Canadian sites. She also considered bringing in someone with a background in print or broadcast, but she felt she already had a large enough talent pool at CBC. “What I needed,” she concludes, “was someone with a strong online background and good craft skills.”

Dube heard about the opening through a friend in Halifax who had been a former CBC employee. He’d already met some other CBC people through his involvement with the Online News Association (a Bethesda, Maryland-based association for journalists who produce news on the Internet and other digital platforms), and done some training sessions with CBC staff on convergence and online writing.

Gardner was delighted when Dube expressed interest. “He was exactly what I was looking for,” she says. “We’ll sit in meetings and he can say, ‘Well we did this at MSNBC,’ or, ‘We tried this and ended up going down some other road,’ or, ‘I know folks at CNN who can do X or Y or Z.'”

Dube arrived in July 2005 to take over responsibilities for all CBC.ca editorial programming, including news, arts and sports sections, and he has made a number of online content changes already. One took effect just in time for the January 23 federal election. Riding Talk, a series of moderated forums for each riding throughout Canada, allowed voters to discuss local issues directly affecting them. Over ten thousand comments from across the country were published. An online version of “Reality Check,” an election segment on The National, was also created. It examined what candidates said and tried to take viewers beyond the spin. CBC.ca also provided live analysis during the debates. “They took a detailed look at everything candidates were promising,” says Dube. “They added up what all the promises were, what all the spending was, and tried to compare what they were promising and what they weren’t.”

Dube also introduced an early version of the coming redesign for CBC.ca’s winter Olympics coverage in Torino, Italy. The new Olympics site not only proved to be popular, it’s also up for a prize in the Excellence in News, Information category at the Canadian New Media Awards.

These changes might be clicking with the website’s audience. According to a report released by ComScore Media Matrix, CBC.ca was the most popular media site in February 2006, with over five million visitors at home and work. CTV.ca came in second place with three million visitors.

Based on the company’s own WebTrends traffic logging software, on the January 23 election, the site had 1,329,500 unique visitors. It was the first time the site had broken the one million mark in a single twenty-four-hour period. It then broke its own record twice after that, with 1,381,076 unique visitors the day after the election, and 1,549,054 unique visitors on during the Torino Olympics on February 22.

Catering to its online audience has become a priority for CBC as the Internet becomes the preferred way to consume daily news. A national segmentation study conducted in 2004 by WashingtonPost.com in collaboration with Nielsen//NetRatings and Scarborough Research found that forty-seven per cent of respondents had increased significantly their usage of online media for news and information over a twelve-month period. The poll also found that sixty per cent of users accessed online resources daily. The top reason for their preference was “24-hour availability, ability to multi-task while browsing, breaking news, easy ability to search and free access.”

According to Statistics Canada, “Of the nearly 6.7 million households with a regular [Internet] user from home in 2003, an estimated 4.4 million (65 per cent) had a high-speed link to the Internet through either a cable or telephone connection.” This two-thirds penetration gave news providers the market they needed to invest in fancier websites. “It used to be that you were designing things knowing that the majority of people were going to be accessing it Monday to Friday, while they were at work where they have the best Internet access,” says Joyce Smith, assistant professor at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, “but that’s not true any more. They can do it at home as well.” Also, users can now routinely handle larger files, which means media outlets can design interactive material, stream videos and generally produce higher quality website for a larger audience.

Online news sites have come a long way since they were first created. Smith says that although most major news organizations have had a web presence for some time, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that breaking news became a part of it. Before then, newspapers simply posted online replicas of stories that had appeared in the paper. “So there’s the point at which people had sites up,” she says, “but then a point at which they started to morph into breaking news sites with actual dedicated staff.”

Dube has dedicated himself to thinking about the transformation of news dissemination for the past decade. Cook Dube says that when she met her future husband at The Charlotte Observer in 1997, his passion for online journalism was already obvious. “I remember thinking,” she says, “‘Gee, he sure is enthusiastic about this online stuff, I wonder if it will really go anywhere?'”

“Now, of course,” she concludes, “journalism is all about online, and here we are in Toronto! What can I say, he was ahead of his time.”

But it only looks as if colour is the hot new commodity. Behind the scenes, the story is different. Visible minorities make up 13.4 per cent of the population, not including Aboriginals who make up another 3.4 per cent, according to 2001 census data from Statistics Canada, the latest year for which figures are available. In 2004, the Task Force for Cultural Diversity on Television found that visible minorities comprise only 12.3 per cent of anchors and hosts and 8.7 per cent of reporters and interviewers in English-language news. And last year, Ann Rauhala and Marsha Barber of Ryerson University released a study that examined the demographics of news directors across Canada. They found that more than ninety per cent of news directors – television’s key decision-makers – are white.

The truth is, Canadian news broadcasters do have a ways to go to reflect Canadian society accurately. It’s important that diversity goes beyond the faces on television to include producers, editors and news directors because they’re the ones assigning, cutting and assembling stories. Albert Lewis, a senior editor at Global Ontario, says, “When those big jobs come, we need veteran reporters who’ve been out there for ages to say, ‘Hey, you know something? I want that job because I want to make a difference.'”

And things should be different. Unlike newspapers and magazines, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regulates broadcasters to reflect the “multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society and the special place of Aboriginal Peoples within that society” under the Broadcasting Act. In August 2001, the CRTC asked the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) – the industry association representing over 600 private television and radio stations as well as networks, specialty, pay and pay-per-view television services – to determine how private broadcasters might better reflect Canada’s cultural mosaic. It responded with the creation of the Task Force for Cultural Diversity on Television, formed the following year. Among its many activities, in 2003, some members conducted twenty focus group sessions in major cities across Canada. They interviewed 150 people from a range of ethnic backgrounds about their impressions of the onscreen presence and portrayal of visible minorities and aboriginals on Canadian television.

The focus groups showed that viewers clearly form judgements based on what they see. “In the news, people believe everything they see,” said an aboriginal participant during a focus group in Vancouver. “There [were] some cuts to social services, so instead of maybe showing the minister’s office or something like that, the camera [panned] the Downtown Eastside [and showed] aboriginal people. You don’t see any other [group]. That makes people form opinions.” Another participant, a Toronto man of Middle Eastern background, said, “People on TV all look the same. Out on the street, you see all different cultures.”

“Diversity is a growing reality,” says Madeline Ziniak, co-chair of the CAB Task Force, and vice-president and station manager of Omni Television in Toronto, “because, of course, immigration continues to grow.” A 2004 report prepared by the Task Force said that “newsroom culture must become well-versed in cultural diversity, in understanding vocabulary, culturally unique behaviours and other methods of communication.” It advised broadcasters to establish and maintain connections within the community through viewer forums, which encourage communication. The CAB is expected to release another report this spring documenting the changes stations have made since the release of the initial results.

In October 2004, Andrew Cardozo, a former commissioner of the CRTC, released a report that outlined the number and names of visible minorities and aboriginals in on-air positions on Canadian television. His data, gathered mostly from the websites of each affiliate station (because the networks generally do not distribute such information) show that as of May 2004, Global Television had sixteen visible minority and aboriginal on-air personalities across its national network of sixteen stations. CTV had twenty-one among eighteen stations, while CHUM Ltd., the parent network of Citytv, fared a little better, with forty-three appearing on its thirty-three local and specialty stations.

“It’s a journey,” Ziniak says. “It’ll take a while for broadcasters to evolve.”

A black woman with long braided hair stands in a small bedroom, her back to the television camera. She leans over and closes a travel bag on the bed in front of her. In another room, her young son folds a red, white and yellow striped blanket and places it in a similar bag.

“It might just be a few days away at camp,” says a female reporter’s voiceover, “but for these kids, it means the world.”

“I’m going fishing,” says a beaming young black girl, her hair pulled back in a neat half-ponytail. “I’ve never gone fishing before.”

The young boy is now outside on the grass. “What are you most excited about?” asks the reporter, off-camera.

“Swimming,” he replies with a smile.

Under the bright sun, the children play duck, duck, goose on the crisp summer grass. Then, another voiceover: “A handful of kids from the Jane and Finch area are getting ready to go to camp in Muskoka. It’s a place only a few hours away, but a place many have never seen.”

The clip, from a story that ran on Global Ontario’s evening news program last summer, recounts how a local church raised the funds to send a group of Toronto children to a camp in Ontario’s cottage country. “Of the twenty kids going to camp today, eight are from this neighbourhood, one of the many subsidized communities in the Jane and Finch area,” the reporter continues. “Reality is, many of them are being raised by just one parent, and because money is hard to come by, for many of them this is the only world they know.” The reporter’s blonde hair, black suit and navy shirt contrast sharply with the T-shirts and jeans of the parents and kids she’s interviewing. The trip, she says, is an “opportunity to experience something other than the often dangerous world around them.”

The reporter’s intentions are honourable, says Global Ontario’s Lewis, but the point of view is skewed. “The story makes it look as if every single black person in the community is on welfare,” he says. “To me, that is unbalanced. You’re saying the black kids are so poor they can’t afford to go to camp, but the white kids, well geez, they’re fine. This story is not about the black kids – it’s about kids going to camp.”

Lewis says he normally doesn’t see stories until they actually go to air, but in this instance he recalls seeing children from many different ethnic backgrounds on some of the raw tape – none of whom made it into the final piece. When he saw the final cut, he decided to approach news director of Global Ontario Ron Waksman and express concern about the aim of such stories.

“From my standpoint,” Lewis says, “this was a good story, but it offended that community.” The station is trying to change some of its procedures, he says, and uses Lewis now as a resource when covering Toronto’s black community. “They’ve started to inquire, talk to people like myself and others at the station who are of a Caribbean background, saying, ‘Should we be saying this?'”

Lewis is also president of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists. Once, he took some clips to a school in Toronto to teach young people about “the kinds of stories you don’t want to do.” When he started at Global in 1986, he was the only black editor. There are more visible minorities now, but he still feels it’s not enough. “Every time I talk to young people, I say we need to make changes to get more ethnic people in broadcasting.”

Sarah Crawford, vice-president of public affairs for CHUM, says Toronto is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world, and Citytv has always aimed to reflect that diversity. The station has never treated visible minorities as a fragment of the population, she says. Instead, it sees diversity as the mainstream. “We don’t necessarily reflect the diversity of the city because we think it’s an important thing to do,” says Derek Miller, a producer for CityNews at 6. “We aggressively pursue stories that reflect diversity because those are our viewers. It’s also good business to reflect viewership.”

Miller considers his diverse newsroom to be his biggest resource. “These people have their own lives, they read their own newspapers, and they talk to their own people whom they go to church with and go shopping with,” he says. “If we can reflect what is important and interesting in reporters’ lives, that will probably be important and interesting at least within certain segments of the population.”

Having someone from the community on the inside has its advantages. Just ask Citytv’s Dwight Drummond, who was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica and grew up in Toronto’s Jane and Finch area. Drummond became a journalist because he was disheartened by the media’s coverage of his neighbourhood. He felt perspective was lacking and thought he could do a better job. “I understand you need to tell stories,” he says. “But the stories were wrong in the sense that they were giving people the feeling that we were all just running around ducking bullets.”

Or dodging police officers. On a cold October night in 1993, police stopped Drummond and a friend while they were driving on Dundas Street East in downtown Toronto. Both were taken out of the car at gunpoint, searched, handcuffed and told to lie in the middle of the road.

At the time, Drummond had started working on air at Citytv, anchoring a regular segment on emergency services called “Street Beat.” He had a police media pass that allowed him to visit crime scenes. “The whole tone changed when they found that in my wallet,” he says. “They went from treating me like a punk to all of a sudden treating me more respectfully.”

Drummond later filed a complaint. “I heard through the grapevine that they were just bored and wanted to perform a high-risk takedown,” he says. “They saw a black guy driving a half-decent car and thought they were bound to find something.”

A lifetime of similar experiences has certainly affected the way Drummond does his job. So has his knowledge of his community and his neighbourhood. “When I go in, I don’t treat people differently than I would if I were doing a story in a more affluent neighbourhood,” he says. “It’s all in the way you treat people.”

Treating people fairly in reporting the news is just good journalism, but so is the worry about being too close to the story. “Just because someone is a visible minority, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be good at covering their own community,” says Mutsumi Takahashi, co-anchor of the noon and 6 P.M. news at CTV Montreal. “They could be more involved in the community, so they might be less objective.”

Diversity is important, but even Lewis says it’s important to proceed with caution. Having an ethnically diverse newsroom is not the same as having the right person for the job. To put this in perspective, he says, if he were to ask stations to make their newsrooms more diverse, he wagers they’d say, “‘We’re going to hire two black reporters, we’re going to hire a Chinese reporter, we’re going to hire an Indian reporter, we might hire somebody who’s Hispanic. Okay, that’s our diversity.'”