By Megan Jones

In the early afternoon, fear crept in and drove Dave Seglins back to bed. Now he’s coming undone. He lies still, held by terror, unable to roll over, let alone get up and do something besides think, think, think. The outside world continues to move around him, but Seglins doesn’t notice. All that registers are the images and stories the CBC reporter absorbed during the week he covered the Russell Williams sentencing, during which the Trenton-based army colonel pleaded guilty to 88 charges, including sexual assault, forcible confinement, break-ins and first-degree murder. Seglins was in the courtroom all four days, taking in the catalogue of sadistic crimes and relaying them to the country.

There’d been no time to think then. It was wake up, get to the courthouse by 5 a.m., live hits at six, seven, eight o’clock, listen to the evidence and file regular updates online. Step out at noon for radio and TV hits, head back to the courtroom, listen, file online again. Radio hits at four and five o’clock; another TV hit at six. Race up to the nearby town of Tweed, Ontario, to interview victims’ families and gather material for the next morning. He’d finish by midnight, leaving just enough time to swallow some food and pound back two or three pints—to dull the nerves—before catching three-and-a-half hours of sleep.

But at home, Seglins has time to think. The gruesome evidence replays uncontrollably, a long tape of horrors, winding, winding—never stopping—like a trip on some horrific drug. First, the colonel, posing straight-faced in stolen lingerie; now, one of his victims, Jessica Lloyd, convulsing, pleading, “If I die, willyou make sure that my mom knows that I love her?” Williams masturbating in young girls’ beds.

Seglins has kids of his own.

He calls his wife. “You need to go for a walk,” she tells him. The cold October air pierces his panic, and the tape slows down. As his terror subsides, he realizes he needs help. Later that day, he calls the emergency helpline available through CBC’s employee assistance program (EAP) and speaks with a counsellor. Throughout that session, and a few more in the coming weeks, Seglins realizes what many journalists haven’t: you don’t need to report from a war zone to experience trauma or burnout. Sometimes, the right mix of sleep deprivation, intense deadline pressure and horrifying material is enough.

While employers are paying increasing attention to post-traumatic stress disorder among reporters in conflict zones, little is devoted to the mental health of domestic staff. As newsrooms shrink and the appetite for constant real-time updates grows, organizations expect journalists to do more with less, often on a variety of platforms. Alongside older newsroom realities—the competitive, deadline-driven atmosphere and the need to appear detached, brave and strong—these new expectations contribute to a culture that can foster poor mental health and inhibit open discussion of it.

News organizations and journalists are inadvertently creating a double standard: they are changing the way they report on mental health (for example, last August, CBC News and the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma began developing a guide to mental health reporting, aimed at reducing stigma and improving coverage), but failing to address the issue among their own employees.

Mental illness in the newsroom takes a number of forms. Some journalists develop long-term conditions, such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder or addiction, which might have developed regardless of their work. They may seek treatment and continue successful careers. Other journalists burn out and become unable to handle daily pressures. This can be the cumulative result of failing to deal with day-to-day stress, or, in cases like Seglins’s, caused by specific traumatic experiences or exhausting conditions on the job.

Either way, journalists can experience stigma. Mental health may no longer be a scary taboo, but many people still consider it an awkward topic best avoided. While reporters are learning the language necessary to cover mental health adequately, they don’t always use it on themselves.

When Shelagh Rogers broke her ankle in 2000, she took a short leave from her job at CBC Radio. When she returned, smiling colleagues presented her with a card and a cake inscribed with “Welcome Back.” Then, in 2003, she took what she intended to be a short break from her post at Sounds like Canada after developing high blood pressure. Rogers had been dealing with depression for decades, and, deprived of the adrenaline of producing a daily program, she fell into one of the deepest episodes she’d ever experienced. Her leave extended to four months. When she returned, there was no card, no cake and barely any eye contact. “It was as though people felt I had some kind of contagious disease,” she says. “I felt like I was a ghost.” Her colleagues’ unwillingness to acknowledge the reasons for her leave made the transition back to work even harder.

Rogers briefly regretted disclosing her struggle with depression—a choice she’d been anxious about making. “You could always feel someone breathing at your back,” she says. “I was sitting on a great big lump of national-radio real estate, and I liked it. I wanted to make sure that I kept it.” Ultimately, her openness didn’t affect her career prospects, she says, and, awkwardness aside, her co-workers were supportive. Rogers stayed on the show for five more years, but began to find the schedule gruelling. In 2008, she left to pursue a freelance career, which offered more flexibility with her hours. Today, as the host and co-producer of CBC’s The Next Chapter, Rogers works to a weekly deadline, which gives her more control over what she does and when she does it. Although bad days are rare, Rogers’s schedule allows her to cut back on work and pick it up later. Her producers also have an enlightened approach to mental health, meaning she can discuss her depression openly.

Others aren’t so lucky. “I still can’t counsel somebody and say, ‘Yeah, you should disclose, absolutely.’ It’s individual circumstances,” Rogers says. “There are people who will say, ‘Oh well, she can’t handle that assignment. She might have a nervous breakdown.’ Those people absolutely are out there.” Indeed, some of her friends have had trouble with managers and editors after opening up. “It changed everything,” she says. “The way they related on a day-to-day basis, the kind of assignments they were given.”

Such stigma isn’t unique to journalists. Newsrooms operate in a society where mental illness is often misrepresented, misunderstood or ignored. One in three Canadians will live with a mental illness or a substance abuse problem at some point. But understanding that hasn’t automatically led to public acceptance. According to the Canadian Medical Association, nearly half ofthe country’s population believes people use mental illness as an excuse for bad behaviour. These attitudes trickle into the workplace and can lead to employee silence. A 2012 Ipsos Reid survey found that more than 30 percent of Canadian employees felt that if they were to disclose their depression, their supervisors wouldn’t be understanding or supportive.

They may be right. Companies take a hands-off approach to mental health, and only one in three managers reported receiving training in how to intervene when employees show signs of depression. Even when they noticed the signs, only 55 percent of supervisors stepped in. Newsrooms are no different. Asked if the Toronto Star’s bosses receive training regarding mental health, editor-in-chief Michael Cooke responds: “No, we expect our managers to manage within the boundaries of common sense and common decency.” He believes mental health is better left discussed with non-editorial staff. “If there are mental health issues in this newsroom—and I guess there must be—then that’s really dealt with by the employee and the human resources department. That’s none of my business.”

Stigma is detrimental because job stress, if left unattended, can lead to mental illness. According to Statistics Canada, employees who consider most of their days to be “quite a bit” or “extremely” stressful are over three times more likely to suffer a major depressive episode, compared with those who report low stress levels. Workplaces in many sectors offer counselling, or coverage for drugs or therapy through EAPs. But in organizations where workers feel uncomfortable disclosing their mental health issues, employees might be reluctant to seek help, and their illnesses are likely to get worse.

Sometimes this means losing a job. Paul Morse, president of the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild, says newsroom managers often don’t recognize mental health issues and attribute lack of productivity or absenteeism to laziness. As discipline, the bosses may attempt to have them suspended or fired. Unionized employees are likely to grieve the decision. Depending on the nature of the issue, some grievances go before the Ontario Labour Relations Board or a human rights tribunal for resolution. Some employers accept that they were wrong and team up with the union and the worker to establish accommodations. But for some employees, the shame and stress of being fired compounds the stigma they feel over their mental illness, and they leave.

Fear of losing a job, or of being perceived as weak and incapable of taking on big assignments, may prevent some journalists from seeking help, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t available. EAPs are safety nets for employees who use them, offering access to emergency counselling hotlines and to a limited number of counselling sessions with a therapist set up through work. In addition, drug and therapy coverage is available through benefit plans. While job stressors caused his breakdown, Seglins says CBC’s assistance program allowed him to start to recover within a few weeks.

But EAPs aren’t flawless. Many offer four to six therapy sessions per year, leaving some in need of costly additional care. Provincial healthcare plans cover psychiatrists’ fees, but waiting lists are long—sometimes months after referral. Seeing psychologists is usually quicker, as they don’t require referrals. But their fees are high—for example, the Ontario Psychological Association suggests a rate of $220 per hour—and aren’t covered by most provincial health plans. Meanwhile, corporate benefits coverage is limited. The Star, for example, offers up to $600 for therapy costs through its insurance provider; at Montreal’s The Gazette, beyond the standard four sessions offered through the EAP, employees can claim up to $300 per year. That’s a meagre, and possibly useless, one or two sessions with a psychologist.

Newsrooms still dedicate more attention to physical ailments than psychological ones. The Star has an in-house physiotherapy unit, and The Globe and Mail brings a chiropractor and a massage therapist in two days a week for drop-in appointments—but neither has in-house counsellors. It’s not for lack of trying, though. The Star has offered anonymous on-site counselling in the past, but hardly anyone participated, according to Brian Daly, human resources vice president at the paper. “People might prefer not to go through a company provider, just because of the stigma,” he says. That was certainly the case with Seglins. “I actually wanted it to be arm’s-length,” he says. “It’s a danger, given the stigma around mental health issues, to go and talk to your editor, because you don’t want to be perceived as weak or in crisis.”

The Star also has a back-to-work transition program for employees who take leave, including those who take time off to deal with mental health. Initially, some journalists may work reduced hours. They may also do a different job—such as copy editing—if they feel unprepared to return to reporting. CBC gives employees access to counsellors who know what journalists may face in the field. At the Gazette, if journalists are in crisis, the news outlet will sometimes authorize extra sessions through its EAP, based on individual circumstances.

In an ideal world, human resources departments would learn from each other. But they face the same financial pressures that editorial departments do. Tight budgets prevent organizations from expanding their programs.

***

Journalism will always be a stressful occupation, but burnout can be avoided through better communication between newsroom staff and managers. Scott Reinardy, a University of Kansas journalism professor, has been studying stress in American newsrooms for a decade. He recently found that 22 percent of those who work in TV exhibited signs of burnout.

Reinardy believes a newsroom’s most important commodity is its staff. But he says mental health is usually the last thing organizations consider when they are strained for time and money. Too often, the story comes first. Editors, facing their own pressures, seldom pay enough attention to the psychological well-being of their reporters.

Seglins believes this was the case when he covered the Williams sentencing. “They were giving lots of lip service to being understanding,” he says. “But I didn’t see them making a decision to say, ‘Look, you’re on your third 20-hour day. Maybe we need to bring in more staff.’” His editors did let him know about the EAP, and he admits that when they asked how he was feeling, he said he was fine. “If somebody puts up their hand and says, ‘I need out,’ I expect my newsroom would say, ‘No problem.’ But it’s so against the culture of the newsroom to say, ‘I can’t handle this.’”

Without training, managers may also be genuinely unaware of how to deal with burnout or illness. In the late 1990s, Rona Maynard, then editor-in-chief of Chatelaine, had openly dealt with her own depression. She thought she knew what mental illness looked like. But when one of her staffers fell into an extreme depression, she realized she was wrong.

It began when the colleague stopped smiling and then no longer bantered with others, spending more and more time burrowed in her office. One day, Maynard saw that she’d covered her door window with paper, shutting herself in completely. Not wanting to admit that her staffer had a problem, Maynard justified the barricade by telling herself the woman was just trying to concentrate.“I really didn’t want to see how bad it was,” she says.

Eventually, the staffer didn’t file a story. When the managing editor couldn’t get straight answers, Maynard went to the employee, and found her staring at a blank monitor. Defeated, she told Maynard she wasn’t able to work. Not only was she having difficulty writing; she couldn’t read anything.

She went on long-term disability, and Chatelaine kept her job open. But when the woman returned, Maynard didn’t know how to help her make the transition. “I could really have used a frank discussion about what success looks like when a person with a mental illness returns to work,” she says. The employee couldn’t adjust and, eventually, left the magazine. Maynard has often wondered what would have happened if she’d stepped in earlier and authoritatively helped her colleague find treatment. “I think there’s certainly a good chance it would have made a difference.”

Employees also need to look out for themselves. Even perceptive and sensitive managers can’t accommodate those who won’t accept, or admit to needing, help. Journalists must be self-aware enough to know their limits and brave enough to communicate with managers in the event that they reach them. “The self-care issue is absolutely fundamental,” says Jane Hawkes, co-founder of the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma. If you’re not aware of yourself, you’re going to get into trouble quickly.” Hawkes works with both domestic and foreign reporters, and she suggests peer support can connect journalists with others who understand what they are going through and can offer informed advice. As more people talk freely about their experiences, awareness will grow, and shame and stigma will erode.

But even Hawkes isn’t sure how possible this is, given the hard, fast and competitive nature of the job. “Can you even change a newsroom culture that much? I don’t know,” she says. “Is it just the nature of the beast?”

Still, some things do change, and newsrooms have come a long way in the last 20 years. Veteran reporters and editors give the impression that mental illness simply didn’t exist before the new millennium. No one can explain how newsrooms dealt with it, because it was so rarely discussed.

John Honderich, the current chair of Torstar’s board of directors and former publisher of the Star, points out that before the 1980s, the paper didn’t even have built-in psychological aid for employees. He and his colleagues introduced an early version of the current EAP after negotiations with union representatives.

Attitudes toward alcohol abuse and addiction have also improved. For decades, journalism and drinking went hand in hand for many. The Star’s Jim Coyle has been sober for nearly 20 years, but he lived for decades as a functioning alcoholic. In his early days at The Canadian Press, he routinely brought a 12-pack to work on weekend shifts. “I’d just sit there, half in the bag, drinking the beer as I did my Junior A hockey listings,” he says. “No big deal.”

Later, Coyle covered provincial politics; he remembers that alcohol was always available in the Queen’s Park press lounge. In the evenings, reporters and politicians would gather around a large table to talk and drink. By the end of the night, the table would be covered by a blanket of bottles.

***

In the late 1980s, Coyle’s alcohol use began to affect his work. When colleague Peter Gorrie had to pick up the slack, he became worried, and eventually reported it to management, who laughed off Gorrie’s concerns. “I get a call about an hour later from the editor, who was one of my drinking buddies,” Coyle says. “He goes, ‘That fucking Peter isn’t much of a team player, is he?’”

Coyle believes he is genetically predisposed to alcoholism but suspects that for some journalists, drinking was, and may still be, a form of self-medication, administered to cope with the stress of the job. And regardless of motivation, he says, the permissive newsroom culture allowed for abuse.

Today, journalists may still drink as a way to deal with stress, but managers are far more cognizant of substance abuse. Larger organizations like the Star now often pay all, or part of, the cost of rehabilitation. Sometimes, Daly says, a year will go by with no cases; other years, the Star sends three or four people to rehab.

Addressing mental health isn’t just an ethical issue—it’s a financial one. Nearly a quarter of Canadian workers are currently affected by mental health problems or illnesses, leading to absenteeism and turnover. Overall, mental health-related losses cost workplaces $20 billion annually. In the event that mental illness causes journalists to leave the newsroom, finding, hiring and training new staff takes time and costs money. And when experienced reporters leave, they take the knowledge of their communities or beats with them, which can lead to less critical and less informed coverage. If coverage suffers, news organizations may lose their audiences.

In November 2013, about three years after his breakdown, Seglins has a medical appointment scheduled for his four-year-old. He and his wife have waited for months to get their son a spot with a specialist. That morning, he tells his editors he’ll be leaving early. The conversation stresses him out. It’s not that they won’t let him go, it’s just that they aren’t happy. Not an hour before Seglins gets ready to leave, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford admits to smoking crack cocaine. No one was expecting this. The CBC newsroom melts down as reporters and editors jump to cover the admission, but Seglins makes the excruciating decision to leave anyway. He’s aware of the divorce-rate statistics, the parenting absenteeism statistics. Today, his son is more important. Even so, he can’t help the guilt that takes over. He was CBC’s lead reporter on the Ford saga and knows he’s let a lot of people down. To make amends, he comes to the newsroom at 5 a.m. the next day, and works a 15-hour shift.

By Luc Rinaldi & Abigale Subdhan 

In May 1976, three Mounties walked into Peter Worthington’s glass-walled Toronto Sun office with a search warrant. They wanted a leaked RCMP letter that contained information about Canadians charged with espionage and treason, which the Sun editor had recently mentioned in a column. He refused to hand it over. When they pleaded for a hint, Worthington replied, “Sorry, fellas, you’re on your own on this one.”

Over the next five hours, camera crews and Sun reporters—some sporting pre-emptive “Free Peter Worthington” T-shirts—watched as the Mounties searched the boss’s office. After looking through piles of books and filing cabinets, behind pictures and under rugs, the officers found the letter—in the top drawer of the desk.

Worthington’s refusal to co-operate shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The hard-nosed Sun co-founder, who died last May of a staph infection, was a staunch advocate for free expression, which showed in his gutsy, conservative journalism. Over roughly four decades as a columnist, he was fiercely opinionated and unfailingly controversial. “There was no grey. There was no mush,” says Rob Granatstein, a former Sun reporter and editor. “There was Peter telling you what he thought. Period.”

Unlike many of the columnists who came after him, whose branding depends on sensationalistic, knee-jerk panache, Worthington backed his views with hard facts and the experience he’d gained travelling the world, first as a soldier and then, for 15 years, as a foreign correspondent for the now-defunct Toronto Telegram. He brought knowledge—colleagues considered him the pre-Internet Wikipedia—where many of today’s right-wing op-ed writers offer reflexive anger; he earned a loyal following for his intelligent analysis, while contemporary pundits lure readers with outrageous claims that ignite the Twitterverse. Although he certainly inspired many of today’s Canadian conservative columnists, they’ve yet to live up to the standard he set.

***

Peter John Vickers Worthington was born in 1927, at Fort Osborne Barracks in Winnipeg. The son of a polished Quaker mother, and a father who was a major-general in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, he had a nomadic childhood, roving between different army camps. Early on, he took to mischief—the morning after a New Year’s Eve party, a four-year-old Worthington drained leftover bottles before wandering into the canteen and defiantly chugging a glass of beer—and to opinion. “[My father] tried to instil in us a feeling of independence and self-sufficiency,” he wrote in his 1984 memoir, Looking for Trouble, “and both my sister and I were encouraged to have opinions about whatever was being discussed at the table.”

Worthington followed in his father’s military footsteps. Rejected by the merchant navy at 15, he became the Royal Canadian Navy’s youngest sub-lieutenant three years later. He fought in the Korean War, interrupting an arts degree at the University of British Columbia that he would complete eight years after enrolling.

He then went on to study journalism at Carleton College, which later became Carleton University, on veteran credits. “The part of him that loved reporting was the same part of him that loved being a soldier,” says Worthington’s stepdaughter, Huffington Post contributing editor Danielle Crittenden. “It allowed him to go out and see not just areas of combat, but world situations that fascinated him. And he could be there on the spot to witness it.”

Worthington soon became a night reporter at the Telegram, a feisty afternoon broadsheet, where he earned $60 a week. Though he thought his military background would make him well-suited to international reporting, his editors refused his requests to cover the 1956 Suez Crisis. So he paid his own way and filed stories for the Tely free of charge, which led to a post as a foreign correspondent.

In his first years reporting abroad, Worthington began his trips by writing features, detailing interactions with locals and brushes with authorities, while learning the area’s politics and culture. He took risks (like venturing into a notoriously dangerous casbah in northern Africa), offered personal observations (writing “I saw” or “I was at the scene when”) and made stories relevant to Canadian audiences. An extreme example: while covering the Algerian War of Independence in 1962, he wrote, “If Toronto was Algiers—what would life be like? . . . At noon a car cruises slowly along Bloor Street between Yonge and Spadina, machine-gunning people as it goes. Six people lie dead on the sidewalk in a space of 10 minutes.”

As a foreign correspondent, he covered everything from the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet to riots in Belgium, from the Vietnam War to kidnappings in Zambia. He was the only Canadian journalist to witness the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy’s assassin, on November 24, 1963. (“Oswald . . . suddenly came through the doors,” he wrote in the next day’s Tely. “He looked into my eyes briefly but intently. He was white-faced, tight-lipped and held his head high and defiantly.”) Andy Donato, a Sun cartoonist and Worthington’s friend of 50 years, says, “I can’t name a country in the world that he hadn’t visited at some point.”

***

When the Tely folded in 1971, Worthington co-founded the Sun with general manager Don Hunt and publisher Doug Creighton. As editor, Worthington could usually be found chatting with Donato, gossiping with the women operating the switchboard (“They worshipped him,” says Crittenden) or, most likely, sitting at his desk writing. He could churn out a column in 20 minutes, filing seven a week—12 if you really needed them—according to Granatstein, who adds, “He drew on his experiences, and nobody had the experiences Peter Worthington had.”

Whatever the topic, the columns had a common thread. “Peter was always a defender of conservatism,” says Sun columnist Joe Warmington. “He was a defender of the unpopular.” He trod familiar right-wing ground—standing up for the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Don Cherry, criticizing the CBC and Jack Layton—with uncommon critical intellect. When questioning the true value of arts grants in a May 1977 Sun column, he referenced their 14th-century origins and failed Soviet counterparts, and was more concerned with creating better art than saving taxpayers money: “As a national make-work scheme for needy artists, Canada Council may be an answer. But it doesn’t—almost can’t, by the very nature of its being—contribute to excellence in ‘art.’” Lamenting the United Nations’s hypocrisy and inefficiency, he offered globe-spanning examples of slavery left unchecked to back his protests. On abortion legalization in 1988 (surefire fodder for a controversial columnist), Worthington asked, “Why are there so many men in the ranks of the anti-abortion movement? . . . I would trust female attitudes toward it more than male.”

He drew criticism for his stance on homosexuality while he was Sun editor—in 1981, he threatened to publish the names of gay men found in future bathhouse raids—but his views on the issue seemed to evolve over time: in a 2012 Sun column, he wrote, “I suspect most people (like me) don’t give a damn who marries whom.”

And when he tackled politics, no party was sacred: the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney—a politician who “wants popularity more than realistic solutions,” he wrote in the mid-1980s—was as common a target as Trudeau (first father, then son).

His avid readership was another constant. “If we had stopped running Worthington, we would have had a revolt on our hands,” says Granatstein, the Sun’s editorial page editor from 2006 to 2011. “I’m surprised readers didn’t complain after he died that we weren’t running him.”

Worthington had an on-again, off-again relationship with the paper. He resigned several times on principle—over advertising qualms, the paper’s mayoral backing, its sale to Maclean Hunter—before being fired in 1984 for publicly criticizing the Sun chain’s news coverage. “The Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail are going to inform people as to what’s happening far more than any of the Suns,” he said in a book tour interview. “If I was in Edmonton, I’d read theJournal if I only had one newspaper, no question.”

He bounced between a handful of publications before ending up back at the paper he helped launch. “[Firing him] was one of those things that really didn’t mean shit,” says Christie Blatchford, a former Sun reporter and long-time friend of Worthington’s. “Peter never really left the place.”

***

In 1982, during one of his breaks from the Sun, Worthington ran as an independent in Toronto’s federal Broadview-Greenwood riding. But he didn’t campaign with the same audacity he brought to writing. “He was the worst campaigner,” remembers Crittenden. “He hated asking people to do things for him.” She canvassed while Worthington waited uneasily near the street. “Sometimes I’d have to go down the walk and trudge him along up to the door.”

Worthington narrowly lost the race to the riding’s NDP candidate, which was perhaps for the best; colleagues say he wasn’t restrained enough for party politics. A politician “is someone who is circumspect, who watches every word, who hesitates to speak his mind,” says conservative journalist and analyst David Frum, Crittenden’s husband. “In that sense, Peter was a very impolitic person.”

A political life could also have robbed Worthington of his reputation as a newsroom prankster. At the Sun, he would often call his assistant, Christina Blizzard, from elsewhere in the building, with thick foreign accents. “It only became a problem,” she says, “when I would hear from legitimate callers who I thought were Peter.”

Back in the Tely days, Donato arranged to have the cover of The Naked Gourmet—a cookbook Worthington wrote with journalist and cartoonist Ben Wicks in 1970 that featured recipes they had picked up reporting in Africa—airbrushed to show them in the nude. “An artist painted in male genitalia,” says Donato. “He painted Ben resembling a donkey and Peter a little cherub.” Donato hung a proof of the retouched photo in the newsroom. Initially, Worthington went ballistic—he thought it was going to be the actual cover—but laughed when Donato explained the joke. Worthington later got his revenge by surprising Donato with a banana cream pie to the face.

“I used to joke that when my mother remarried, I didn’t just get a new father, I got a new younger brother,” says Crittenden, whose mother, Yvonne, married Worthington in 1970. “He was spiritually about seven years old—maybe 10.” He was always home for dinner, after which he never failed to play baseball on the street or shinny with teenagers at the local rink. “Pete was nothing if not playful,” says Frum. “There was nothing that would make him happier than a fistful of jelly beans and a BB gun, and nothing more horrifying than a black-tie dinner with three different wines.” As a prominent journalist, he would often have to attend those types of functions—but, Frum says, “Never very happily.”

Worthington was also an animal lover. His family joked that it was a greater privilege to be one of his dogs than one of his three children or six grandkids. He was “insane” for Jack Russell terriers; they fit his personality perfectly, says Blatchford. “If Peter was a dog, he would be a Jack Russell: small, wiry, tenacious, fucking ferocious and just a formidable opponent.”

***

On a cold night in the fall of 2003, a 77-year-old Worthington bounced along an Afghan mountain road, riding in the open roof hatch of a light armoured vehicle. The oldest journalist on site with the military in Afghanistan, he offered a signature mix of hard news and colourful description. He gave context for the reader, explaining what the Afghan elections meant for politics back home. “It was an arduous physical journey,” says friend and Postmedia international affairs columnist Matthew Fisher. “Peter handled himself well, of course.”

More than 20 years earlier, Worthington had faced danger with a similarly cool attitude. In 1978, sitting at his Sun desk working on a column, his chest began to hurt. He was having a heart attack.

He casually broke the news to his assistant and headed to the hospital. Later, he had a triple-bypass operation, but was playing tennis three weeks after that; in three months, he was hang-gliding. Crittenden says, “He’d been this sort of superman until he was 82.”

In his final years, though, it became difficult for him to walk. He had to stop every few feet to rest. “He just paused and chatted and pretended that he didn’t notice,” Crittenden says. “But he really hated it.”

Worthington was 86 when he died. His obituary, published the next day in the Sun, had an unusual byline—he’d written it himself: “If you are reading this, I am dead. How’s that for a lead? Guarantees you read on, at least for a bit.”

After his column appeared, someone stuck a giant “-30-” sign on his office door.

By Jennifer Cheng

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Amelia Brown

The tables are filling up quickly and the kitchen bell is ringing, just as more diners arrive. I seat them before running back for the food. The young woman at the door doesn’t have a reservation, but I happen to know who she is. Her photo appeared in a story with my byline. We exchanged emails and phone calls as I tried to fill in details that she resisted telling me because it was “all on the website.” As I show her party to table nine, with the warning that it’s booked again in an hour, I note that her tone is much kinder than it was during our tense phone interviews.

I’ve served sources before; it’s always awkward. In the middle of the evening rush, it’s easiest to avoid eye contact and concentrate on turning the table over before the next seating.

Although I assume my sources know that writing doesn’t quite pay the rent, I do sometimes wonder, as I deliver the cheque, whether they’ll think twice before agreeing to talk the next time I contact them for a story.

There’s certainly no shame in serving; even average service warrants a 15 percent tip that adjusts with inflation, while the usual national magazine rate of $1 per word for freelancers has remained stagnant for decades. Relationships with sources are the bread and butter of freelancers’ careers, but for many, a part-time job is necessary for the dough.

When he started out in the ’80s, film critic Richard Crouse worked in print and radio by day and served in bars and restaurants by night. “Freelance can be a very tough way to make a living,” he says. “It’s not for the weak of heart.”

But behind the bar, he honed some of the skills that paved the way to a career as a TV host: the ability to read people comes in handy during interviews, and the sense of urgency helps him manage deadlines. Crouse stopped serving 15 years ago; he could support himself with freelance work, and his show, Reel to Real, was popular enough that people recognized him on the job.

For some journalists, running into a contact while working part-time is a face-palm-inducing nightmare. Alison Garwood-Jones picked up shifts at a downtown pub to support her freelancing, especially after 2008’s economic downturn made writing gigs harder to come by. She pulled out chairs and hung coats for shocked editors, but took it all in stride: “Too many journalists think if they take a job like that, it means they’re not successful.”

Caitlin Kelly agrees: “So what if they see you? See you doing what? Making money? Paying your bills on time?” After being laid off from New York’s Daily News in 2006, Kelly took on a retail associate position to support her freelance career, an experience she later turned into her 2011 book, Malled. “You’re more than just your byline,” she says, adding that other jobs make you a deeper, smarter and more empathetic person. “And if you’re not that person, I probably don’t want to read your work.” She adds that running into sources, editors or colleagues isn’t worth dreading. “A smart person won’t judge.”

Still, I hesitate at table nine, then decide against introducing myself or asking if she read the story. Instead, I ask: “Can I get you anything to drink to start?”

By Lisa Coxon 

As I reach for the voice recorder on the desk, the professor asks, casually: “You’ll send me my quotes, right?” I freeze. I’m sitting in an office on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, finishing up an interview my classmate and I are conducting for a story about legalizing weed. Trying to be polite, we tell the professor that showing quotes is not something we normally do—but that in this case we will.

It feels wrong to someone coming from a news culture that trains journalists never to hand material over before publishing it. After five months of study among members of 26 other nationalities at the Danish School of Media and Journalism (DSMJ) in Aarhus, Denmark, I’ve learned something unexpected. Unlike in Canada, sending sources their quotes is the norm here in the world’s happiest country, so I couldn’t help but wonder: when journalists report abroad, what principles do they have to compromise?

Over the course of the semester, my class travelled to Copenhagen as foreign correspondents, Brussels as European Union reporters and a destination of our choice for a final project. We put a magazine together in a weekend and acted as an international daily news desk for three days. I had to get used to working every day, albeit with shorter hours: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. After all, reporters in foreign lands must learn to adapt their journalistic ethics and practices in order to get the story.

Sometimes it’s small, painless adjustments that must be made; they can help you avoid having minor panic attacks, like the one I nearly had when I first glanced at the number “10,000” in my professor’s instructions and assumed it meant words. (It actually referred to characters; it’s not unusual for Danish news outlets to provide a character count instead of a word count, or sometimes both.)

Other times, the necessary adaptations are more morally challenging. Øjvind Kyrø, a Danish journalist who teaches risk reporting at DSMJ, has been a freelance war correspondent since 1992, travelling often to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country he drily calls “one of the worst places on earth.” Locals aren’t familiar with how journalists work, and in their eyes he’s a rich man, because he usually stays in a hotel with running water and electricity. When sources divulge their horror stories, they expect gifts or money in return. “It’s very difficult,” he says, admitting that he gives sources money, but only for transportation or food. “That’s the way I do it. I don’t feel bad about it.”

Canadian foreign correspondents have had similar experiences. Martin Regg Cohn, the Toronto Star’s Queen’s Park columnist, recalls his time as the paper’s Middle East and Asia bureau chief, a position he held for 11 years. In 2000, while in Kabul, Afghanistan, with his wife, Cohn wrote about the challenges of educating young girls in makeshift schools forbidden by the Taliban. A burka-clad woman approached them and revealed that she was running a secret school. Cohn and his wife covered the story, but as they were leaving, they looked at each other: “Is that it? Are we just going to walk away?” Cohn pulled a U.S. $100 bill from his wallet and gave it to the woman for her expenses. “It was a bit of a departure to step out of that bystander role,” he says. “But it was the right thing to do.”

Back in Aarhus, my colleague and I leave our source’s office and look at each other, bemused, as we walk down the hallway. Then we shrug. What can we do? We’re not in Canada anymore.

By Luc Rinaldi

There was more booze on that bar’s back wall than I’ll drink in my entire life. Yet I sat on a stool, staring at 400 bottles of alcohol, as the bartender pointed out the most popular spirits, showed off several different types of glasses and compared brandies to bitters (like I knew the difference).

The subsequent feature I co-wrote for The Grid—“94 Excuses to Drink”—had to have been my most ironic story ever. After all, to my friends, I’m the one who doesn’t drink, the sober guy at parties, forever the designated driver. So I cheered, but mostly laughed, when the piece won a silver National Magazine Award. It was as if one ofCosmopolitan’s “99 mind-blowing sex positions” packages had won a Pulitzer—and the writer was a virgin.

I’ve written my share of service journalism since then. I’ve felt qualified for some of it: concert guides and open-mic-night picks made sense for me, a choirboy turned wannabe singer-songwriter. Others, not so much: it was strange recommending kid-friendly summer activities to parents as a childless 20-year-old, or taste-testing treats for a Toronto International Film Festival guide (can anyone really be an authority on popcorn?).

Service journalism, perhaps more so than any other kind, demands a writer with expertise in the relevant field, something I often felt I lacked. I didn’t want my writing relegated to a bit-part in the substance-free nonsense that saturates grocery store newsstands: the arbitrary fall fashions, the recipes no one will ever make and all those bogus ways to shed pounds. But service journalism isn’t all bad news. When done properly, it helps readers save time and money and reminds writers like me that even a sober journalist—there is such a thing!—can teach readers how to make a killer cocktail. Research is all that separates an amateur from an expert.

Ask Denise Balkissoon. Last year, the freelancer and former Toronto Life service editor won an NMA for her how-to guide to buying a condo, published in The Grid. She wasn’t always a real estate buff. “It was something I had to research because I bought a place,” she says. “I couldn’t find what I wanted to read. There wasn’t anything to teach me.” Balkissoon, who now often writes about real estate, says a good service feature can take just as much time and research as a non-service piece. “It’s not groundbreaking investigative journalism, but it’s helpful.”

That’s a good way to describe Ray Ford’s May 2012 Cottage Life story, “Eek! A mouse!” The award-winning guide may not be hard-hitting reportage, but it helps readers keep the mice away. It’s also an enjoyable read. “I don’t really think of myself as a service writer,” says Ford, who approaches service like any piece of narrative journalism. “I look for anecdotes, characters, sometimes even dialogue.” Despite writing service pieces for Cottage Life, he’s not a cottage owner. He compensates by doing more interviews and by fact-checking himself. When I tell him about my anxieties writing service stories on topics I hardly understand, he laughs and says, “You can’t win. Even if you think you’re an expert and have legitimate credentials, someone else is going to disagree with you.”

Maybe I can’t win, and maybe that’s a good thing. The uneasiness I feel writing service pieces is inevitable, like my anxieties about botching a fact or missing an important detail in any other story. It’s what forces me to research—to be a good journalist. And if I ever start to lose that, that’s probably a sign I should write about something else. Just as long as it’s not for Cosmo.

By Graeme Bayliss

Chrystia Freeland walks as though she can’t keep pace with her own excitement. Dressed in Grit red, she sashays down the aisle of a Toronto Reference Library auditorium, the last candidate to arrive, flanked by hundreds of supporters and watched by dozens of journalists. On this September afternoon, the author and former senior editor at Thomson Reuters is vying for the Liberal nomination ahead of November’s federal by-election in Toronto Centre. She tells the audience this is the biggest job interview she’s ever faced—but she knows a bigger one lies ahead. There are 90,000 electors in the riding, and Freeland is ready to face them.

A few hours later and a few blocks south, in an overheated hall at the downtown YMCA, Freeland’s likely opponent is roaring through her own speech. Linda McQuaig, author and freelance political columnist, is seeking the NDP nomination. Her booming voice and the din from the audience send shudders through the floor. She inveighs against income inequality and social-spending cuts, and soon the crowd begins to chant her name: “Lin-da! Lin-da! Lin-da!”

That evening, Freeland and McQuaig receive their nominations and become the latest aspirants to carry on a long tradition in Canada of journalists making the leap into politics—of the watchdogs becoming the watched. Their path to Parliament will be different from that taken by Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin, ex-journalists (and now suspended senators) who were appointed, not elected to their posts. But Freeland and McQuaig will come up against the same flashing recorders and the same scratching pens Duffy and Wallin faced amid scandal—and soon they’ll find out what it takes to handle the kinds of questions they spent their careers asking, and become the stories they once told.

***

Before the media scrutiny, and before the lessons learned through door-knocking and debating and winning and losing, there’s the decision to run. It’s a decision few journalists make lightly, although motives vary from one potential candidate to another.

Some make the leap out of a genuine desire to do good. (“It sounds corny, but I wanted to make a difference,” says Chris Tindal, once a Toronto municipal candidate, twice a federal Green Party candidate and currently Postmedia’s director of project development.)

Others start to believe they can do a better job than the politicians they write about. (“I’ve spent 15 years covering city hall and Queen’s Park,” says Toronto Sun journalist and former provincial Progressive Conservative candidate Sue-Ann Levy, “and I often looked at that cast of characters and thought, ‘Oh my god, I could do this with my eyes closed.’”)

Freeland says she wants to put her economics expertise to work in Parliament. She’s written about finance and the global economy throughout her career, including for theFinancial Times, The Atlantic and The Globe and Mail, where she was deputy editor from 1999 to 2001. In 2012, she wrote the critically lauded Plutocrats, a bestseller about rising income inequality around the world. Now, income inequality and the middle-class squeeze are part of Freeland’s political agenda.

Sitting at the back of her campaign office weeks after her nomination, Freeland looks on confidently as a team of volunteers prepares for a canvassing sortie. The ringing phones and ceaseless chatter call to mind a newsroom, and the sense of continuity this provides illustrates Freeland’s belief that entering politics is a natural step in the evolution of her career. “It wasn’t a rejection of journalism,” she says. “Journalism, and the ideas that I care about—the things I’ve learned in my reporting—brought me here.”

Like Freeland, McQuaig has written extensively about income inequality—most notably in The Trouble with Billionaires, the 2010 book she co-authored—and she, too, believes running for office is a logical next step. In her nomination speech, McQuaig proclaimed, “I’m now ready to move from advocacy to action.” The phrase became one of her campaign slogans, and it encapsulates the reason so many journalists enter partisan politics: they want to bring about change in government, and seek more effective means than journalism to do so.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of the University of Toronto Scarborough’s journalism program, says it’s understandable that political reporters—so close to the mechanisms of government and yet unable to manipulate them—want to use their knowledge of the political system to become active participants in it. “I’ve known a number of them who have become frustrated with the limitations of journalism,” he says. “Journalism is often an insufficient response to reality.”

***

Those limitations led Jennifer Hollett to run against McQuaig for the NDP nomination. Hollett, formerly of CBC and MuchMusic, wanted to be a journalist so she could cast light on social problems and, perhaps, help to correct them. But the job couldn’t fulfill that desire. “In television, you have about a minute, a minute and a half, to do that in a story, and then you’re on to the next story,” she says. “So I wanted to do more, and I wanted to move from asking questions to finding answers.”

Similarly, when former Globe journalist Michael Valpy ran for the federal NDP in the Toronto riding of Trinity-Spadina in 2000, he hoped to correct a social problem: “I wanted to run in a student riding; I wanted to demonstrate to young Canadians that parliamentary politics was still valid.”

Valpy had an interest in street politics and, inspired by the so-called Battle of Seattle, in which tens of thousands of activists staged demonstrations outside a World Trade Organization meeting in autumn 1999, he pitched a story to the now-defunct Elm Street magazine about a similarly themed protest that took place the following summer, when the Organization of American States met in Windsor, Ontario. In his reporting, Valpy spoke to many young activists. He was impressed by their political acuity, but disturbed by their disillusionment. “They had no faith whatsoever in institutional politics—nothing’s changed, eh?—but this really struck me, and I thought so deeply about it that I decided to run.”

Valpy says most people supported his decision, but not all. “I got a much more negative response from my fellow journalists than I did from any other group,” he says. That negativity stems from a belief that reporters who enter partisan politics forfeit the integrity of their work—past, present and future.

In a 2010 paper, the Canadian Association of Journalists attempted to address the ethical issues that arise in seeking public office: “Journalists are not expected or required to take some vow of political chastity when they take up the profession,” the paper states, but it also notes that they “bear the burden of a higher public expectation that they submit personal bias and political view to the demands and disciplines of their work. And perhaps that is exactly as it should be.”

Peter Kent, who spent more than 40 years in journalism before becoming a Conservative member of Parliament, believes the CAJ’s perspective hearkens back to a time when the demarcation between opinion journalism and news reporting was clearer. Kent encourages journalists to run for office, and notes that many have done so over the years. “But I’m surprised that more don’t,” he says, “simply because every day of a journalist’s life—every story a journalist does—deals with public policy in some form or another.”

Valpy, too, believes reporters and editors should be encouraged to run. “The thought that somehow, because we’re journalists, we should insulate ourselves completely from the formal political life of the country is silly.”

***

It’s late October and Freeland is bouncing like a pinball door-to-door down the 17th-floor hallway of a downtown apartment building. She stops in front of one door and, as she does every time, prepares a smile before knocking. Satisfied that no answer is forthcoming, she slips an information card between the door and its frame. Suddenly, an elderly man emerges from the apartment. “Don’t do that!” he shouts with a jowly wobble as the card falls to the floor. “I’m sorry,” Freeland replies, impishly imitating his voice. But this only makes him angrier. “Get out of here!” he shouts, bending over to push the card away. “Get out of here and take your garbage with you!” It was a small blunder, and Freeland doesn’t have time to be embarrassed—she canvasses the entire building in just over 40 minutes, before moving on to the next. She says door-knocking techniques are like “variations on a recipe,” and she’s still working out her measurements.

The journey from byline to ballot box is full of lessons in electioneering. It teaches journalists what to say and how to say it, when to canvass and how best to position lawn signs. More importantly, the campaign trail forces journalists to adapt to new ways of thinking and behaving, and shows them what of themselves they’ll have to lose if they want a shot at winning.

Valpy received little formal instruction during his campaign (apart from a single elocution lesson from an actress, aimed at correcting his slight sibilance). Most of his training occurred on the doorstep of a sometimes irascible electorate. He says the repetitiveness of door-to-door canvassing compelled him to try out new opening gambits—some more waggish than others.

“Good evening,” he said to one resident. “Vote for me or I’ll have your name taken off the voters list.”

Valpy believed he was talking to an NDP supporter—or at least a voter with a sense of humour—but he was wrong, and he knew it as soon as he saw the man’s jaw drop. It took him five minutes to explain that he was joking.

Later that evening, Valpy consulted his campaign manager, who told him plainly, “No more jokes.”

For much of his campaign, though, he struggled to keep his tongue away from his cheek. (During one doorstep exchange, having run out of things to say, he asked a voter if his dog would be interested in the NDP’s healthcare policy. “As I recall,” Valpy says, “the guy shook his head very seriously and said, ‘No, the dog wouldn’t be.’”) His quirky wit is part of his personality—but such idiosyncrasies are often the first casualties of politicking.

Chris Turner is a journalist and author who, in November 2012, represented the federal Green Party in a Calgary Centre by-election. He anticipated that his personality would be ill-suited to campaigning. “My day job for the last 15 years had been sitting by myself in a room,” he says, “and there’s a reason for that: I’m not an extroverted guy. The glad-handing, schmoozing stuff is not something that comes naturally to me.” Nor does it come naturally to many reporters. “In my experience,” he says, “journalists are, if not introverted, at least very unconventional personalities.” Turner adjusted to being a political participant, rather than an observer—but the change took some getting used to. “I think it’s one of those things where you have no idea how you’re going to handle it until you’re in the middle of it.”

Former BBC correspondent and ex-federal Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff says that, to be a successful politician, “you need to fit a new filter between your brain and your mouth—or you should.” In the 2011 federal election, Ignatieff led the Liberals to their worst-ever showing and failed to win his own riding, but not because he was introverted or given to flippancy. Rather, he was gaffe-prone, which, in politics, simply means he was prone to speaking his mind.

Some journalists, like Turner, say media experience can be a campaign asset. “I know what this reporter’s looking for,” he says. “I know the 30 seconds that they need to fill their spot, and so I know better than to go on and on.” But according to Warren Kinsella, who advised Ignatieff politically from late 2008 to early 2009 (and in 1997 unsuccessfully ran for office himself, in the federal riding of North Vancouver), not all journalists who seek election are so adept at using the media to their advantage. Kinsella has observed politics through many different lenses, as a lawyer, author, political chief of staff and bass player in a punk band called Shit from Hell. He studied journalism at Carleton University before attending law school, and today he writes for the Toronto Sun and The Hill Times. He says journalist-politicians like his former boss have trouble speaking in 10-second sound bites. “It’s like, yeah, sure, I know you want to get all 700 words in there so people can fully appreciate the depth and breadth of your brilliance,” Kinsella says, “but that’s just not how it fucking works.” He rejects Freeland’s and McQuaig’s claims about the naturalness of the transition from journalism to politics. “I think they’re both full of shit,” he says. “This is not a natural evolution; it is totally, totally different.”

Tindal says talking to the media is like standing at a gap, with reality under your feet and a snappy sound bite on the other side. “You know what people want to hear,” he says, “and you know what your truth is, and you have to find that sweet spot in the middle where you can tell them what you want to say in a way that they’ll be receptive to.”

Levy echoes Kinsella’s opinion of Freeland’s and McQuaig’s evolution: “They are full of shit,” she says. She found her 2009 provincial by-election run difficult, often having to keep her controversial opinions to herself. “I think I had a lot of ruts on my tongue by the end of the 35 days.”

By the end of a televised all-candidates debate, it’s hard to imagine McQuaig has any ruts on hers. She looks frustrated and frequently interrupts her opponents. During a disagreement over Quebec sovereignty, McQuaig finds herself sparring with Freeland (who until recently lived in New York) and struggling to make herself heard. “Listen,” she bristles, even as moderator Steve Paikin tries to rein her in, “I’m not going to take lecturing from someone who hasn’t even been in the country, to talk to me about how important it is to keep a country together.”

Before the campaign had begun in earnest, McQuaig was emphatic: “I didn’t get into politics to become namby-pamby and middle-of-the-road and filter out everything interesting and important.” But on this occasion, she gave her opponents the opportunity to appear scandalized, and Freeland evidence to back her claim that the NDP was running a negative campaign.

Valpy rarely felt the sting of a bitten tongue during his campaign—but he soon came to fear the sting of the party whip. It’s a concept fundamental to the Westminster system of governance, and fundamentally in conflict with Valpy’s journalistic instincts. It was something he hadn’t considered before running for office, but as his campaign forged onward, he began to realize that some of his political ideas weren’t in line with NDP ideology. “There were things that were party policy that I could see myself having difficulty with,” he says. Valpy is a staunch supporter of the monarchy, for example, while the NDP is not.

He began to wonder what would happen if the subject came up in caucus. “Could I shut up, or would I have to publicly disagree with my party? Would I have to publicly disagree with my leader?” he asks. “I mean, those things sat on my mind.”

McQuaig faces a similar challenge. For years, she’s advocated higher taxes for the wealthy. In The Trouble with Billionaires, she proposes overhauling income taxes to introduce “a new rate of 60 percent to be applied to income above $500,000, and a new top rate of 70 percent for income above $2.5 million.” But personal tax increases are not part of the NDP’s platform.

As recently as her nomination speech, McQuaig railed against “tax cuts for the rich,” yet she insists she fully supports the NDP’s policies. When speaking with constituents about income inequality, she mentions that she’s written on the topic, but without providing specifics; she says the NDP is committed to addressing the problem, but never quite explains how. When pressed on the matter during a debate, she could only express her support for a more progressive tax system.

***

Although journalist-politicians learn much from the campaign, some discoveries can be made only after the ballots have been counted. On election night, November 27, 2000, Valpy sat in his office with campaign worker Bob Gallagher—just the two of them, he recalls, like a scene from The Candidate. About 30 minutes after the polls closed, the phone rang. Gallagher took the call. He listened silently, replaced the receiver, made a few calculations and turned to Valpy: “We’re not going to make it.”

They sat for a moment, looking eye-to-eye, and then shrugged. In the end, Valpy was relieved not to win. “I was uncomfortable with the idea of sitting in a caucus,” he says. “I’m just too independent.”

Kent has had no difficulty submitting to the party whip since he was elected in 2008; he says it’s just what good politicians do. “Everybody has to toe the line on common expressions of policy,” he contends. “That is the reality, and the most disciplined parties are the most effective parties.”

But party discipline has led Kent to contradict his own journalistic work. In a 1984 documentary called The Greenhouse Effect and Planet Earth, produced for CBC’s The Journal, Kent said, “The greenhouse gas effect must be considered as the world’s greatest environmental concern.” Yet, as minister of the environment (a job he held from 2011 to 2013) he vociferously supported the development of Alberta’s oil sands—one of the Conservative government’s economic priorities—in spite of its demonstrable contribution to the greenhouse effect.

Party discipline is something nearly all journalist-politicians must face, especially if they are elected. But there are lessons to be learned in losing, too. Turner says people who disagree with his politics sometimes invoke his former candidacy as a means of impugning his journalistic integrity. “The people who come at me now,” he says, “and try to dismiss me as ‘just that Green guy’ are doing that to dismiss the facts I’m reporting.”

Partisan politics gave him a fuller understanding not just of how campaigns are run, but also of Canadian democracy itself. It’s an understanding he may never have achieved as a journalist. “You have a much clearer sense of why elections go the way they do, what leads voters to vote one way or the other,” he says. Talking to so many people on the campaign trail gave him a better read on the electorate: “Where are they at? What are their concerns? How do they think about politics?”

Valpy, too, says his brief political foray gave him a closer look at politics, and from a new perspective. “It was a different world out there. Encountering people as me, as Michael Valpy, as opposed to encountering people as a Globe and Mail journalist—it was a very different experience,” he explains. “And that part was exhilarating.”

Looking back, he says his five-week campaign was life-changing. “I’d had a taste of a different persona, of me as a different person,” he says. The change was refreshing: “I realized that I was getting tired of the old person—of the person who’d been a journalist for more than 30 years.”

***

On election night, November 25, 2013, hundreds of Liberal supporters gather at a restaurant in downtown Toronto. They watch as the NDP’s early lead disappears; they cheer as McQuaig concedes defeat. They chant as their new MP enters the room: “Free-land! Free-land! Free-land!”

She’s sworn in to Parliament on December 9; her transition from journalist to elected official is complete. But a month later, she tells me she’s determined to adapt her journalistic skills to the House of Commons. “What I found to be at the core of journalism—which is the learning and the asking questions,” she says, “that’s something I’m going to keep on reminding myself to continue to do.”

As I begin to ask my last question, though, Freeland cuts me off—something Justin Trudeau advised her to do should an interview with a reporter run long. “He said, ‘You’re a journalist and you love journalists, so you’ll always say, okay, one more question.’ But he said it’s always a mistake, so answer the last question and say, ‘Thank you very much’—and I will say that.”

And she did.

By Rebecca Melnyk 

Inside his west-end Toronto apartment, Justin Giovannetti was cocooned in blankets, sick in bed with a bad cold on his day off. His cellphone rang. Dennis Choquette, his editor at The Globe and Mail, wanted him in the office. Giovannetti rolled off his mattress, slipped into his least flattering clothes and schlepped in to work. Soon enough, he found out a train had derailed overnight in a Quebec town called Lac-Mégantic. He attempted to build stories from calls to the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, and emails from the Globe’s chief Quebec correspondent, Sophie Cousineau, who was already on the scene. Finally, on that humid evening of July 6, 2013, Choquette told the summer intern to book a flight.

Around eight o’clock the next morning, the 26-year-old rented an SUV in Montreal and drove about three hours across the countryside until he saw smoke on the horizon. He pulled into town, where small clusters of locals huddled along Rue Laval—the main road leading straight to a metal barricade, and beyond that, a sea of black ash from the explosions that had set the downtown ablaze. Adrenaline set in and his cold disappeared as he viewed the disaster scene. He thought he’d be there for a few days, but he finally departed two months later. When he left on September 2, he knew many in the community.

This wasn’t just a parachute-in, sweep-up-the-facts reporting job, although many journalists rushed there to do just that. This was a story that needed to transport readers—farther than fleeting Twitter fixes can do—to a town that could have been just about any small town across the country.

Like the maple tree at the edge of the disaster zone—one side singed and dead, the other, verdant and alive—our relationship with trains now has stark sides. They bring energy, but they also carry hazardous materials and threaten our way of life.

One train was all it took to set a tragic narrative in motion. Some reporters raced to Lac-Mégantic to gather hard facts and keep us updated, but left gaps in the process. Others dug deeper and stayed longer to bring us to the heart of the tragedy. The reporters who stayed to tell stories showed how narrative journalism helps answer questions that others leave smouldering in the ashes.

***
Just after midnight on July 6, about 60 people are up late at Musi-Café on Rue Frontenac. They’re enjoying one of the first warm nights of summer after days of cold rain. Some are celebrating birthdays. Some are dancing to the songs of local musicians. Others are smoking on the terrace, about 20 metres from the tracks that loop through town. Around 12:58 a.m., less than 13 kilometres away, a driverless, 73-car train carrying crude oil from a Bakken oil field in North Dakota begins rolling toward them.

The sky flashes bright orange around 1:15 a.m. as the train derails and tanks burst into massive fireballs. Flames swallow the Musi-Café, illuminating the Appalachian Mountains across the lake. Residents stand silently on the streets while firemen wander helplessly around the edge of the inferno. Soon, police bang on doors and evacuate the area.

One confirmed dead. Many missing. Two thousand evacuated. Thirty buildings destroyed. That’s all reporters can confirm by the following morning as they wander around with recorders and notepads. Riley Sparks, an intern at Montreal’s The Gazette and one of the first reporters to arrive, has no idea what to write when he gets there in the early afternoon. Later, he steps out of his car and crouches down next to a couple sitting on their back porch, watching their town burn.

When Giovannetti arrives on Sunday afternoon, he, too, has no clue where to start. There are no reliable estimates of a death count; numbers keep fluctuating, and people who are missing may be on hunting or fishing trips. Giovannetti joins four other Globe reporters in the evening—Cousineau had spent the night in her car in front of a McDonald’s, one of the only places with Wi-Fi and power outlets. They pitch a tent outside the town since all the B&Bs are swarmed with journalists. In the thick heat of summer, with no running water for showering, the reporters have no time to think between getting to bed after midnight and attending 6 a.m. press briefings.

During those first updates, Giovannetti is among about 30 reporters, a number that doubles by the afternoon of Monday, July 8, when CNN, BBC and other international outlets show up. Four days ago he was writing about the battle over butter tarts in rural Ontario. Now he’s in his home province, which he left in May for the Globeinternship, scribbling notes on the worst train disaster in modern Canadian history. He follows a Facebook discussion group and learns some residents are angry at insensitive journalists failing to respect their privacy. But on July 10, Edward Burkhardt, CEO and chairman of the Chicago-based Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, which operated the train that derailed, arrives in town, and Giovannetti sees the negative sentiment toward reporters turn for the better.

The press centre is one block south of École Sacré-Coeur, an elementary school serving as a temporary police station. When Burkhardt, a man in his 70s with a slight hunch, walks out the school’s glass doors, a reporter spots him. A horde of journalists soon follows. Giovannetti, who is across town when he gets a call from a Globecolleague, races up the street in his SUV. Seeing no parking spots, he leaves it in the middle of Rue Champlain, which is already jammed with abandoned vehicles. He runs toward Burkhardt, who’s now being grilled in a full-on scrum. Photographers climb trees to snap pictures. “You’re a rat!” one resident yells through the crowd. After about 30 minutes, cops lead Burkhardt into the back of a police car and drive away.

***
Back in Toronto, Choquette and others in the newsroom begin contemplating various story ideas, such as a magazine-like piece about life inside Musi-Café before the fire consumed the building. “We all wanted to hear the band playing that night,” Choquette says. That means speaking with witnesses who were at the bar, finding out how paths intersected that evening—and writing a story that captures the emotional toll of the train wreck. Good narrative arises out of a “profound need to make sense of the chaos,” he says. “It’s one of the best tools we have as journalists.” And reporters who value the tools of literary journalism often take on disasters because they’re great stories, full of danger, suspense, suffering and blame.

But making narrative sense out of chaos hasn’t always been a top priority in Canadian disaster coverage. There was a time when reporters distanced readers from tragedy with hard facts rather than offering meaning and context. The St-Hilaire train crash in 1864 killed close to 100 immigrants and resulted in fact-heavy coverage stacked into narrow columns. Stories sent by telegraph centred on identifying the dead and relaying the proceedings of the inquest that followed the disaster.

During the 1917 Halifax Explosion, in which a French cargo ship blew up and killed an estimated 2,000 people, various Canadian Press reports revealed stories about survivors without describing their emotional ordeal or giving a sense of who they were. One such article, “Late notes from a great disaster,” summed up assorted facts about the event—the destruction of a textile mill, missing family members and so on—but related no specific details to give readers any sense of the scene, the victims or their families.

Flickers of narrative began to appear during the third Springhill mining disaster in November 1958. CP’s “Wives and children waited at pithead” described the seconds before the rescue of trapped miners, turning eyewitnesses into three-dimensional characters. Bruce West, a Globe reporter who covered the disaster, returned to Springhill to write about what the paper called “a hard-luck town that refuses to die” for the now-defunct Globe Magazine. The feature focused on the emotional and economic implications of the disaster for the town’s residents.

Writing about the aftermath of a tragedy has purpose. Joe Scanlon, director of the Emergency Communications Research Unit at Carleton University, worked the Toronto Daily Star rewrite desk on the November day the last miners were rescued. The paper had pulled reporters from the scene days earlier, so Scanlon wrote the front-page report from Toronto. He says writing features about a disaster after the initial event is a way of keeping the story alive when there’s nothing new to write about.

This summer, the Globe spent thousands of dollars—on car rentals, phone bills and lodging—to keep Giovannetti in Lac-Mégantic building relationships and fine-tuning the chronology of events through survivors’ stories. Sticking around is essential to narrative, according to New Yorker editor David Remnick, who said in 2011, “The good stuff comes when you come back, and back, and back and back.” When the news caravan moves on, narrative writers can take the time to write meaningful stories.

***
Giovannetti is still in Lac-Mégantic on August 1. Other journalists return to their offices after the tragedy becomes more about the condition of railways, how to transport oil safely and the environmental consequences of the explosion. Yet what becomes increasingly clear after the disaster is how significant Musi-Café was to the town—a gathering space for young and old, and the place where most of those killed spent their final moments. Giovannetti not only speaks the language, but also understands the culture; that’s why he got the assignment. At the edge of a Maxi grocery store parking lot near a rundown suburban strip mall, he talks with workers as they set up a makeshift Musi-Café. Hammers nail white tents into the ground as locals carry in palm trees similar to the ones that stood on the bar’s patio. More than 1,000 people fill the grassy hills surrounding a large stage. Folk musician Fred Pellerin begins to play his guitar and rain falls hard as Giovannetti runs back and forth to his car, uploading photos and filing a story. He types on his computer: “For the bar’s staff, the trees were a reminder of the bar’s rebirth. . . . on an evening when dark clouds loomed.” He believes these narrative elements are important because few people he writes for have been to Lac-Mégantic.

Many reporters have branched out from the early, prosaic coverage of man-made disasters to write pieces that dig deep into the story, create room for emotion and stretch the boundaries of detached voice. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the human toll and the resulting economic, political and environmental concerns spurred news outlets such as USA Today and The New York Times to reconstruct the event through profiles of different survivors who had escaped the World Trade Center.

A good deal of research has examined narrative coverage of 9/11, including Carolyn Kitch’s study, “Mourning in America: ritual, redemption, and recovery in news narrative after September 11.” She points out that newsmagazines replaced fear with patriotic pride, showing how journalists make sense of senseless news by placing these events in a “grand narrative” of resilience. Narrative doesn’t just take us places—it’s also powerful enough to change the way people perceive their country in the wake of violence and destruction. By transporting readers to the scene of 9/11, journalists let them become witnesses as well—personally involved in the event and, perhaps, more willing to care about the resulting circumstances.

On April 25, 2013, The Boston Globe published Eric Moskowitz’s “Carjack victim recounts his harrowing night,” a story about a man terrorized by the Boston bombing suspects. The reporter spent time in the victim’s home, getting to know him and developing trust, which helped his story unfold like an action film or, as Moskowitz says, like a “Tarantino movie.” During a live online chat hosted by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, he wrote that narrative helped him avoid trying to “march readers toward a particular understanding.” But in the end, it let readers understand more. A resident near the Watertown shooting site emailed him to say the tick-tock piece “helped fill in gaps that had been gnawing at him.”

***
Rémi Tremblay, a reporter at Lac-Mégantic’s L’Écho de Frontenac for 32 years, hears explosions less than 500 metres away after his son wakes him abruptly. Without a computer and unable to get to his office, Tremblay drives down to Rue Laval where other residents are standing. “I was a witness more than a journalist,” he says. But the paper hadn’t missed a week of publication since 1929, so he begins to write a story in his head—one he will later say came from his heart and gut.

Later, his editor brings him a laptop and he sits down at the corner of a table in an emergency station kitchenette. His fingers pound the keyboard. “Everyone has a horror story to tell,” he types. “Images that will not fade.” What follows is an emotional narrative called “La ville des âmes en peine,” or “The town of suffering souls,” praised by readers for capturing the essence of how residents felt. The following Thursday, the newspaper adds 2,000 copies to its usual print run of 9,000.

A dentist’s nameplate still hangs on the door of L’Écho de Frontenac’s makeshift office. Until he can return to his old office on a leafy street beside the red zone, Tremblay works at a long, adjustable table surrounded by mismatched office chairs. He says he lost all objectivity that night. The result was an award from the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec for local and regional news coverage. The jury said the “poignant account” put readers at “the heart of the tragedy.”

The “heart” of narrative forges what Josh Greenberg, associate director of Carleton’s journalism and communications school, calls an emotional connection between storytellers and readers. Policy stories, he believes, may fail to resonate on their own. But with the context of narrative journalism, readers may be more engaged. With issues of national importance—in this case, railway safety and the transportation of hazardous materials—there’s good reason for the public to be emotionally attached. “Readers need to be reminded of why these stories are important,” he says. “But in order for them to re-experience an event, they need to be drawn back in, not just through digging up facts and probing questions, but also by the way the material is organized.”

Mark Kramer, founding director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University, says non-narrative reporting is an impersonal language where the standard journalistic voice is most often not human; narrative voice is “more perfect, more delineated, a bigger voice that causes emotions.” It humanizes a story worth worrying about.

It’s also a voice that, according to Greenberg, can differentiate one paper’s coverage from another’s. When trains began to roll back into Lac-Mégantic in December, theNational Post focused on residents’ “psychological distress” over the reappearance, while the Globe emphasized the town’s economic dependence on the railway, speaking with residents who’d lost friends but were pleased for the train’s return.

The cycle of man-made disaster coverage—human loss, cause, rebirth—usually ends with the public choosing to stop expending brainpower on the tragedy. A feature on the last moments of the lives of survivors, like the one Giovannetti would write, may not be breaking news, but its intent is to draw readers back to the story they’ve wandered away from or, as Kramer says, to use “emotion for public purpose.” At the Poynter Institute, senior scholar Roy Peter Clark says narrative carries readers to another time and place. “It makes you more human,” he says. There’s more empathy to understand a richer variety of people in turmoil when you feel like you’re there with them.

***
Once a carrier of forest products, now a transporter of dangerous goods, the train is a character in a large but often ignored Canadian story. During the first week of coverage, Globe reporter John Allemang makes policy more engaging when he walks along a bike path 20 metres from the tracks. At one point, he transports readers to Nantes, where the runaway train originated. “You leave Lac-Mégantic,” he writes, “pass a highway roundabout where Guy Lepage believes the train line could be diverted from the town centre, and soon come across graffiti-covered freight cars that are at once a misplaced urban art project and a reminder of the diminished status of rail.”

Then there’s Les Perreaux, a Montreal correspondent for the Globe, who partly walks and partly drives along the MM&A tracks, tracing the destruction of the historic railway. “Journey to the end of the MM&A Railway line” takes readers back in time to what could have led up to the disaster. He points out that at Cowansville, Quebec, “the wooden support beams on the bridge are so rotten, saplings have sprouted from them” and how in Greenville, Maine, in October 1998, a train carrying butane ran “past the hospital and the school” and “rolled down an embankment into the town cemetery, landing on graves.” All man-made disasters have villains, but seeing the framework of a deteriorating railway suggests the possibility of more than one scapegoat.

Tom Harding, the train’s driver, appeared to fill that role after Burkhardt—who supported one-man crews—publicly accused him of improperly setting the hand brakes. And so, in the dense heat of mid-August, Star reporter Wendy Gillis drives to the dusty town of Farnham, Quebec—Harding’s hometown—to find out if he’s a true villain. She walks through his neighbourhood, past his stone bungalow, hoping to speak with him. He’s with his teenage son, strapping two yellow kayaks to his black pickup truck. She wasn’t sure she’d see him; he had supposedly gone into hiding. Her heart was racing—he’s said no to other reporters. She asks a question, but he shakes his head “no” and goes inside. Instead, Gillis knocks on the door of a neighbour who willingly spends a long time discussing Harding’s good character. She stays up most of the next night at a bar, chatting with a couple of local guys over a few beers. “Railway crossing signs dot Farnham’s wide streets, the thud-thud of tracks unavoidable on a drive around town,” she writes in a September 7 article that reflects her time spent in the town. “Sometimes there are no easy villains.”

If Harding is no easy villain, Gillis discovers, then “the train is no simple villain, either.” Instead of the usual report on Harding’s involvement in the train crash, she reveals how those who are blamed are three-dimensional. Clark says the “why” of a story is often a tricky element. “We often fall into the logical fallacy of the single cause,” he says. “In real life, people’s motives are more opaque.” If Harding grew up with the trains and learned to trust them—just as the people of Lac-Mégantic did—juggling odd jobs until he was old enough to work for Canadian Pacific Railway, perhaps he, too, was a victim.

***
Ten kilometres outside Lac-Mégantic, at around 6 p.m. on October 4, it’s the kind of fall evening when stars begin to seem brighter, the sky seems darker and summer feels like ages ago. Two hours before actors of La troupe des deux masques de Beauce perform the comedy Tuxedo Palace in an old steepled church on a grassy hill in Marston, Sue Montgomery, a straight-talking, curly-haired reporter for the Gazette, pulls out a used pad of paper. She hugs Karine Blanchette, an actress and former waitress at Musi-Café who is about to perform the same play she was supposed to on the night the fire killed many of her friends. The two sit down in blue-cushioned seats in the front row while the stage manager dashes up and down the aisle. “Macarena” blasts over the stereo in the empty auditorium that will soon fill up with locals who all seem to know each other. Before walking backstage, Blanchette updates Montgomery on how the town is feeling: angry, but gaining some semblance of hope.

Montgomery was on her way to her cottage the morning she heard about the disaster. She didn’t arrive at the scene until late July, long after most journalists had left. But that’s the way she likes it—it’s better to come in when the crowds fall off, when people have had time to let things sink in. “You’re not competing with a bunch of other journalists. There’s not the rush of the daily news, the updating of what’s going on, what’s going on, what’s going on,” she says, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Being able to take her time and sit down with people rather than shoving a microphone in their faces during a disaster, Montgomery becomes part therapist, able to listen and understand what they went through.

Later that evening, she files a story about plans to rebuild the town: “The flaming red and orange leaves on nearby hills begin to fall and people stock their woodsheds for what will surely be an emotionally difficult winter.” Montgomery believes residents appreciate this patience.

During the first few days of the disaster, people were in shock, unable to fully grasp the consequences, but reporters probed for leads amid the chaos, biting at the same sources. While news reporting is essential—go in, get the necessary information, file stories by deadline—scrambling for hard facts doesn’t reflect Montgomery’s patience. Though also based on facts, of course, narrative requires context that takes time to build. In the rush to inform, some reporters angered the community by leaving gaps in the story.

Or worse. On July 10, Le Journal de Montréal, Quebec’s most read newspaper, published a list of missing people—some of whom were alive and accounted for. The newspaper depended on Facebook connections, even running photographs from the site next to some names. “We were stuck with the good and the bad of journalism,” says André Laflamme, a volunteer firefighter and paramedic, who saw a picture of his nephew in Le Journal and called his family to make sure the news wasn’t true.

France Dumont, founder of the Facebook group Lac-Mégantic: Support aux gens, says everything was a rush during the first week. Some reporters didn’t double-check information after interviews. One reporter claimed that it’s not customary to recheck pieces before publishing. Journalists asked to go on balconies and into living rooms of people with views over the barricades. Some residents felt invaded and became wary.

Gazette city reporter Christopher Curtis worried about striking the right balance. “I’d leave town at night and feel really shitty about not being able to be there and tell these stories about people who are so generous and brave,” he says. “Then, on your way back, you’d feel bad you were going in to exploit their tragedy.”

Although Curtis saw the disaster as valuable public information, his concerns were valid. “It was an absolute circus,” says Jeannette Lachance, a resident who knew half the people who died. Anytime she left the house she felt that reporters and outsiders would not see her; they would just see the fire. She recognized inaccurate stories, specifically in French papers.

Lachance’s niece, Katy Cloutier, a former sports journalist for Radio-Canada Montréal, moved back to Lac-Mégantic, her hometown, to write about the tragedy. She pulls up to Salon Noël, near the construction zone, in a lime-green car with two bumper stickers that read, “Support Lac-Mégantic.” She has the date July 6, 2013, tattooed in black ink on her left foot. She thinks back to the first week of coverage, when reporters packed the sidewalk she’s now standing on, itching to interview a female customer getting her hair done inside the salon. The woman, whose son owns a funeral home in town and lost half of his office space to the fire, didn’t want to talk. A neighbour distracted reporters so she could duck away.

Down the street from the salon, at the edge of the disaster zone, a brown cat scurries under the barricade along a familiar path, not far from the sugar maple singed by the fire. The same fire continued to flash on television screens from news outlets like TVA. Dumont says it caused trauma among residents who watched repeated images of the disaster. Carleton’s Josh Greenberg says that’s one of the risks of going back to write in-depth narrative stories: people must relive these events.

Still, many of the town’s residents were grateful for journalists. Gerard Begin, who’s lived in Lac-Mégantic for almost 70 years, looks over his shoulder at the construction site. “That’s my life,” he says, gazing over flattened ground where homes and businesses once stood.

If narrative journalism transports us to the scene to stand next to people who trusted the railway, who walked downtown often enough to call it their life—people who could have been us—then being there could quite possibly help us care a little more, and caring might lead to a disaster like this never happening again.

***
Back in Toronto, Giovannetti heads to the office after a short lunch break. He’s meeting his editor, Choquette, at 4 p.m. to discuss the feature he’s been writing since July. He’s also preparing to return to Lac-Mégantic for follow-up interviews. He’ll be back on the road, away from his desk—one reason he became a journalist.

The road he’s been on for four months led to a town moving through cycles of shock and grief. He went to witness the struggle and write that story. “We invested so much time with Justin in Lac-Mégantic and we had so much material that it cried out for something bigger,” says Choquette, who doesn’t view the piece as a conventional Saturday feature, but rather a story with narrative elements, such as suspense, to draw readers in, followed by three policy reports.

On Saturday, November 30, a photograph of a bright orange explosion hovering over the silhouette of a town spreads across the front page of the Globe with the headline “Last call.” Almost 8,000 words divided into 10 character-driven sections, plus an epilogue. The stories are a series of brushstrokes.

***
Near the barricade in Lac-Mégantic, on an October afternoon, there’s no noise except the dampened motor of an excavator and the hinges of a porch door. Looking east through the fence holes to where the sugar maple still stands, you can see amber leaves sway over the backyard of a home that the fire never touched. On the other side of the tree, curled black leaves cling to burnt branches—dozens, right there above the construction site. The tree stands on the forbidden side of the barricade, where workers in hard hats now decontaminate the earth.

The fire is a memory now—the fire that consumed 47 lives, the fire that spared part of this tree. But just as the lush leaves show us stories of good fortune, the dead leaves show our vulnerability. They warn of trains that come and go from town to town, they make us question our certainty. The dead leaves show us stories we must tell.

By Christina Pellegrini 

When John Stackhouse first met Jim Balsillie at a business social almost a decade ago, the co-CEO of Research In Motion didn’t mince words. Once Balsillie figured out who Stackhouse was—the freshly appointed editor of The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business section—he pointed a finger at him and launched into an attack on what he saw as the paper’s negative coverage of RIM. “I have this very clear memory of him, not quite shouting, but speaking in a very aggressive manner,” says Stackhouse, now the Globe’s editor-in-chief. “I don’t recall being challenged that publicly by a CEO.”

Relations with RIM had been bad for at least two years. In fact, the company’s executives were hardly speaking to the paper at all—no advance warnings of news or press events, no interviews and no responses from the press relations department. Things got so bad that Balsillie banned copies of the Globe from RIM’s Waterloo, Ontario, headquarters. “It was astonishingly vindictive and petty,” Stackhouse says.

The tensions developed after a December 2002 article that questioned the true value of a much-heralded donation RIM’s other CEO, Mike Lazaridis, made to his Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo. Both CEOs were furious, and time didn’t change that. Stackhouse, who was foreign editor in 2002, says Balsillie “was still pissed off” two years later. For the Globe and most other Canadian papers, stories that didn’t celebrate the firm, its leaders or its products threatened future access.

By 2004, 75 percent of RIM’s revenue came from the U.S., so journalists north of the border were likely nothing more than a nuisance for Balsillie. “He liked to say he didn’t need the Canadian media,” recalls Stackhouse.

And when Balsillie did relent and speak to the Globe, he kept the pressure on. Around the end of 2006, Simon Avery, then the paper’s technology reporter, found himself on the phone with Balsillie as the executive angrily aired his historic grievances about the paper. He concluded his diatribe with a warning. “I remember his words exactly,” Avery says: “‘Your editors are watching you like a hawk. I’ve spoken to them.’”

***

The Globe’s experiences with RIM, now known as BlackBerry, were typical. As it became a globe-spanning firm, it gained a reputation as a notoriously difficult company to cover. Like other technology giants, it could be reticent about disclosing information and fickle about whom it was willing to disclose it to. But the company’s press relations were especially dismissive and inaccessible—and run to an unusual extent by Balsillie, who wasn’t afraid to make his influence felt.

This imperious nature was an open secret among the journalists who encountered it, but details of the tempestuous relations between news outlets and the company—the blacklisting, the phone and email tag, the unanswered queries, the run-ins with Balsillie—were never shared. Heidi Davidson, currently senior vice president of corporate communications at BlackBerry, had no knowledge of the company’s rocky past with the press. “I’ve not heard any of those stories,” she said. “I’m surprised.” Lazaridis did not respond to interview requests for this story, and Balsillie’s spokeswoman declined on his behalf.

While American publications relished describing the frustrations of dealing with secretive Apple and the late, mercurial Steve Jobs, Canadian journalists barely made a peep about dealings with their homegrown superstar. They had their reasons for keeping it all to themselves—the main one being the need to maintain relationships with their sources. Besides, RIM was ascendent, and its performance in the marketplace made the nature of its dealings with the press seem inconsequential. Of course, its success wouldn’t last forever. The company eventually foundered in a fit of what Iain Marlow, another Globe reporter, calls “institutional arrogance”: a string of missed opportunities, bad decisions and delayed, then botched, product launches.

The rocky press relations in the early to mid-2000s were symptomatic of problems that were brewing inside the company. Given what we now know about how far and how fast BlackBerry has fallen, it’s hard not to ask whether, by not reporting their experiences with the company, journalists missed an ominous clue about the years to come.

***

Reporters had struggled to get timely access to official RIM sources for years. Many found that they either attracted the attention of Balsillie or didn’t get any access at all.

Chatting with senior management isn’t just for quotes. Time with an executive gets reporters into the minds behind a company’s decisions and helps quash speculation, which is especially rampant in the tech world. It allows journalists to get ahead of the market, as opposed to following the movements of stock prices to see how a company is doing. And it gets them scoops.

Since the company was founded in 1984, RIM’s relationship with the press described a long arc, from a young company that needed Canadian journalists, to a global giant that didn’t, to an embattled company that needed them again. In the early days, RIM’s press relations pitched the budding start-up to Ian Austen, who was then writing forCanadian Business. Once, Balsillie talked shop and hockey with then-technology reporter Mark Evans over coffee in the Globe’s cafeteria.

But RIM severed such established relationships in the years after it outsourced its media relations to the New York City office of PR firm Brodeur Partners in 1997. “It became a lot harder to talk to senior executives. They were well insulated,” says Evans, now a start-up marketing consultant. With Brodeur, the rules of engagement changed: RIM became selective about whom it talked to, and many responses came only via email. (BlackBerry’s Davidson denies this, saying that many queries of the era were indeed answered by phone and in person. Marisa Conway, who managed the RIM account at Brodeur for nearly a decade, until 2013, declined to comment.) Reporters and editors started to mock the answers they received. “There used to be jokes about Balsillie using those emails as a pseudonym,” says Stackhouse, “because [Conway] didn’t communicate by voice.”

Reporters received terse boilerplate statements that were either not helpful or were delivered post-deadline. So they began to offer confidentiality in exchange for information, resulting in stories that cited “high-level sources close to the company,” and which, Davidson says, often contained inaccuracies.

“It was basically impossible to write a good-news story about them,” says Marlow, who started reporting on RIM in 2010 and became the Globe’s first reporter dedicated to covering the company. “They wouldn’t really co-operate with you.” When he wanted to write about the smartphone’s latest operating system, BlackBerry 10, requests to interview the engineers who built it were declined, ignored or left in limbo. The company would say it would try to arrange an interview—but nothing materialized, Marlow says. “That happened so many times I lost count.”

The Globe wasn’t the only paper that ran into trouble with RIM. Before the company went public in 1997, it co-operated with Waterloo region’s The Record, but that soon changed. “What appeared in The Record wasn’t so important,” says business editor Ron DeRuyter. “It was more important for them to be in larger newspapers around the world.”

Still, that didn’t stop RIM executives from bearing down on The Record when they didn’t like what they saw in the paper. Balsillie’s 2006 bid to purchase the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins—after flat-out denying to The Record having any interest in doing so—sparked a behind-the-scenes clash between RIM and the paper. “There was a huge falling-out over that particular issue,” says DeRuyter. “For a while, it was almost like they shut us out.”

In 2007, the company cut ties with The Record’s then-business reporter Matt Walcoff because it felt his coverage of the Penguins deal was too negative. The tensions led DeRuyter to a series of phone, email and in-person exchanges with RIM’s vice president of corporate marketing at the time, Mark Guibert. DeRuyter told him that Walcoff would stay on the beat, but promised to edit all copy about RIM himself. (Walcoff died in 2012.) Guibert still wasn’t satisfied, says DeRuyter, so Balsillie went up the chain and met with The Record’s editor-in-chief and publisher.

RIM became increasingly aloof as it excelled. “The more successful they got, the more arrogant they became,” says Evans. “They just became the people that thought of themselves as the smartest people in the room.” Larger outlets struggled as well—even the international papers that RIM prized. “In terms of the accessibility scale of corporations, they were at the Stephen Harper end of things,” says Austen, now the Canadian correspondent for The New York Times. “They weren’t highly co-operative.”

Barrie McKenna, the Globe’s Washington correspondent until 2010, had a front-row seat to RIM’s antics and arrogance when he covered its bitter five-year patent infringement dispute against NTP in Richmond, Virginia. “Quite frankly, their treatment of the media back then was exactly the way they treated people suing them,” recalls McKenna, now the Globe’s Ottawa-based national business correspondent and columnist. “It was with total disdain, like they didn’t need to talk with you.”

If Canadian reporters wanted to chat with product engineers or senior managers other than Balsillie, they often had to go to RIM’s biannual developers conferences in the U.S. “They were local in Waterloo, but you couldn’t get in to see much. You had to go to these road shows out of town,” says former Record reporter Chuck Howitt. “That was one of the ironies of the company.”

Not everyone had trouble with RIM, though; Kevin Restivo seemed to enjoy better relations than most. A National Post technology reporter in the mid-2000s who now works as a financial analyst covering mobility companies including BlackBerry, Restivo says Balsillie was “always very professional” and hands-on—it wasn’t uncommon for him to return emails directly or chat by phone during his travels. “He read everything we wrote; I’m sure of that,” he says, adding that Balsillie was quick to point out when he felt the Post’s reporting failed to grasp the company’s potential or appreciate its dominant position in the market. And Restivo contends that Balsillie, at times, was right.

***

RIM’s overbearing demeanour created turbulence within newsrooms. Through 2005 and 2006, Stackhouse, sensing the Globe’s coverage was suffering, quietly pursued a way to restore access. He would cross paths with Balsillie at a handful of business socials. “I would go out of my way to talk to him,” Stackhouse says. But it always ended the same way: “He refused to talk to the Globe.”

So Stackhouse and then-editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon drove to Waterloo to meet with Balsillie. It was the first time Stackhouse would see the buildings where RIM executives worked and the last time he would go out of his way to build ties with the company. As he expected, nothing but more ranting ensued. “Another earful,” he recalls.

Avery told him about Balsillie’s “watching you like a hawk” warning. “I was offended,” Stackhouse recalls, but since the Globe had no access, Balsillie had little leverage; it was only bluster. “It was ironic in that there was nothing to threaten us with.”

But not everyone was convinced that Stackhouse’s efforts to reach out to RIM executives wouldn’t be seen as caving in. Mathew Ingram, then a business columnist, had been critical of the company, contending that its shares were overvalued, even as they continued to rise. According to an email exchange obtained from Ingram, now a senior writer at technology blog Gigaom, Stackhouse told him it was time to write a “bold, confessional-style column” to own up to his mistakes.

While it’s not uncommon for investment columnists to acknowledge their hits and misses publicly, the timing of Stackhouse’s request—January 10, 2006—troubled Ingram. “I kind of get the feeling that I’m the only one who has to write a mea culpa mainly because Jim Balsillie has been shouting the loudest,” he wrote in his reply to Stackhouse. (For his part, Stackhouse rejects the notion that his meeting with Balsillie prompted his request to Ingram, calling it a “curious assertion.” He says it was reader feedback, and not Balsillie, that brought about his suggestion.)

Stackhouse thought the Globe’s coverage of RIM was overly focused on the technology behind its smartphones, rather than what was really going on inside the company. “We had really fine technology writers. We didn’t have really strong corporate reporting,” Stackhouse says. The paper’s limited access meant its writers just scratched the surface of RIM’s narrative, paving the way for in-depth investigations soon to come.

***

RIM’s corporate culture, in which its co-CEOs played no small part, is one of the accepted reasons why the firm stalled and plummetted. It failed to respond to consumer-friendly iPhones and Androids, and swiftly lost its status as America’s smartphone of choice.

Post-mortems of RIM’s glory days, written with the benefit of hindsight, describe a company where complacency replaced boldness. Internally, it wasn’t a friendly or creative place. The company was swift to litigate. A 2012 report in The Verge described a culture that punished failure with firings, leading to an environment where risk was something to be avoided.

Simon Avery says he learned a lot about RIM through his interactions with its people. “The communications department was a window into the rest of the company,” he says. “And I really felt that it showed weak management, and it was a harbinger of troubles to come across the company.”

In the early to mid-2000s, journalists depicted Balsillie as brash, but intense and competitive. But when the company began underperforming in the late 2000s, arrogance and hubris became the descriptors of choice. Except, of course, they could have been applied long before RIM faltered, as early exchanges with reporters and editors made clear.

Kevin Restivo sees it differently. Difficult people have run successful tech companies before: Apple’s Steve Jobs, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, to name a few. “Drawing a line from his temper to shareholder returns is tenuous at best,” the financial analyst says. “I don’t see it.”

But the things that journalists left out about RIM’s press relations seem more relevant because they show a pattern that would reappear as the company stumbled. And although it was something journalists were intimately familiar with, they never shared it with readers. Outsiders were unaware of Balsillie’s high-handed temperament.

In 2009, a court deposition by Craig Leipold, the former owner of the Nashville Predators, an NHL team Balsillie once tried to buy, painted him in a startlingly negative light: “He operates by threats, by innuendos, by phone calls to people. Quiet phone calls, and you can connect the dots.”

Maclean’s quoted the deposition in “Why Balsillie went ballistic,” an October 2009 cover story. But Nadir Mohamed, then CEO and president of Rogers Communications, which publishes Maclean’s, later criticized the article in a letter to the editor, claiming the piece “fails to tell the whole story about Jim Balsillie.” A Richard Ivey School of Business case study written by a former reporter at Canadian Business (another Rogers publication) concluded, “According to Maclean’s employees, the message was loud and clear: ‘Don’t mess with Balsillie.’”

A new side of the esteemed business leader, and the type of company he and Lazaridis ran, was slowly coming into focus. “Up to that point, I’d called [RIM’s co-CEOs] stealth executives,” Queen’s University business professor John Pliniussen told Maclean’s in 2012. “We didn’t get any insight into their personalities, so most of us assumed they were sort of staid. When Balsillie got into the sports arena, we got a glimpse of personality and the reaction was, ‘Omigosh, he’s a fiend!’”

Balsillie’s relentless pursuit of an NHL franchise wasn’t shocking; after all, his passion for hockey was well documented. But his approach—as in his dealings with journalists—was ruthless.

It’s the same way both he and Lazaridis publicly dismissed Apple’s iPhone and its prospects (in 2007, for example, Balsillie said: “In terms of a sort of sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it”). They underestimated the mobile consumer applications market (in 2010, Balsillie said: “You don’t need to make the web an app. I don’t need a YouTube app to go to YouTube”). And they remained silent for the first two days of a three-day worldwide BlackBerry service outage in 2011. The chief executives appeared to have no fear or any notion that, one day, their company would be jolted off its perch.

For all the bad blood, Canadian journalists kept their troubles with RIM to themselves. Writers and editors say calling the company out on its abysmal press relations would have been unprofessional, unfair, self-serving, inconsequential and irrelevant. They were reluctant to become the story. “I could never write about myself,” says Ian Austen. Simon Avery, who left the Globe for a not-for-profit last year, wouldn’t write about himself when he was a reporter either. “I can talk about it now as my personal opinion,” he says, “but it’s very hard to write a story like that at the time.”

Some did offer hints, though. Avery’s approach, for example, was to write that Balsillie repeatedly turned down interview requests from the paper. While true, the disclosure understated the extent of the tensions between RIM and the Globe. In fact, few people knew the paper was even on a blacklist.

And then there was the hometown-hero factor. RIM was Canada’s high-tech champion—a sorely needed success story in a country whose last tech titan, Nortel, had imploded in scandal. Among the product evangelists, or “fanboys,” who cheer for the company as they would a sports team and heckle bearish technology-beat reporters, the BlackBerry maker is still held in high regard.

The co-CEOs were heroes, too. Engineering whiz Lazaridis helped pave the way for Waterloo to become a thriving start-up tech ecosystem. Some journalists branded Balsillie as the ultimate salesman: smart, humble, charming, persuasive. One 2009 Globe sports piece glowingly referred to him as “Captain Canada.” Both CEOs were philanthropists, donating millions to local causes, especially education. They were celebrated for their success: Time included the pair in the Time 100 in 2005; together they were Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year in 2006; and the Canadian Journalism Foundation honoured them in 2010 for the way the BlackBerry revolutionized news reporting.

At its peak, the company seemed like the subject of a modern-day corporate fairy tale. A great many Canadians—including telecom executives, investment bankers, lawyers, government personnel, institutional investors and traders—had a financial stake in RIM’s success.

Journalists often quoted those people in their news articles, especially since most reporters heard from the co-CEOs only once every three months, during quarterly earnings conference calls. And even then, as with other public companies, journalists could dial in and listen, but they couldn’t ask questions. (They still can’t.)

Infrequent access to RIM executives left journalists looking elsewhere for insight. Many reporters depended on financial analysts to make sense of news and look ahead. These experts play a key role in business news, but at times, an astute reporter can know just as much as they do. Still, analysts interviewed for this story say Canadian journalists were too bullish on RIM for too long. “When it came time to actually take an objective look at BlackBerry’s prospects,” says Neeraj Monga, executive vice president and head of research at Veritas Investment Research, “nobody did that in the media.”

***

In July 2011, the Globe got the break it needed: layoffs created roughly 2,000 former employees, many of whom were willing to chat—confidentially, for the most part. By mid-November, Stackhouse, by then editor-in-chief, and Derek DeCloet, managing editor of ROB, assigned reporter Iain Marlow to cover the company from the paper’s “Waterloo bureau,” where he’d spend three days a week for the next year and a half.

As the company’s fortunes waned, its press relations improved. Months after Thorsten Heins succeeded Balsillie and Lazaridis as CEO in January 2012, RIM brought the bulk of its press relations in-house and, slowly, became more open. (Turnaround specialist John Chen replaced Heins in November 2013.) Journalists such as The Record’s Howitt noticed an improvement; once, he even swapped story ideas with a BlackBerry staffer at a local coffee shop. “It was very unusual,” he says. “That would have never happened in the past.”

The company shifted its communication strategy to “developing relationships.” After Davidson joined RIM in 2011, one of her first meetings was with Stackhouse. The company’s new openness was evident when Marlow travelled to Lagos, Nigeria, in September 2012 to see and write about BlackBerry’s successes and challenges in the developing world. “It’s a good example of a story that can come out because of a collaboration between media relations people and journalists,” says Marlow, who rode around Lagos, observed press conferences and attended ribbon-cutting events with company executives. “Years ago, they’d have never granted that sort of access.”

***

Not all reporters have been so lucky. It took The Canadian Press’s David Friend 15 months to get a face-to-face interview with Heins. And the only time Joe Castaldo ofCanadian Business chatted with the new CEO was shortly after Heins took the job. “I, personally, didn’t notice too big a change,” Castaldo says. “I didn’t think the company got drastically more accessible.”

My own experiences with BlackBerry weren’t so far removed from the difficulties many of these journalists describe. When I attempted to reach the company’s media relations department for comment, my emails and phone calls went unanswered for three months—even though BlackBerry says it aims to respond to media requests within 30 minutes. It was only after I emailed every former member of the company’s PR team I could find on LinkedIn that I got a response from an official source.

That’s not the type of department Davidson strives to run. “You can be a company that just lobs statements or press releases,” she said when she finally spoke to me in January. “We want to have relationships where it’s a give-and-take, always.”

Business reporters will be watching to see if that’s the relationship they get. Readers, if they’re lucky, will find out either way.

By  Harriet Luke

Five medical experts enter the Ideas Room on the third floor of the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in downtown Toronto. They’ve flown in from Saskatchewan, Wisconsin and England to help tackle some complex data. It’s 9 a.m., and the glass-walled room provides a sense of openness as Anita Elash, an associate producer at The Fifth Estate, passes the experts notepads, and five-page booklets containing a few questions to consider. Their mission is to create the first national online rating system for Canadian hospitals. The idea is to give viewers the opportunity to go online and rate their hospitals in five categories: respect, communication, timeliness, cleanliness and whether or not they would recommend them.

There’s a quick demonstration of a similar Irish website, then the conversation flourishes between the experts and the CBC team. They discuss the availability and limitations of medical data. After 5 p.m., the meeting comes to a close, but the discussion doesn’t end there, as Elash will continue to relay emails and phone the experts with questions.

Rate My Hospital required one of the largest teams Jim Williamson, executive producer of The Fifth Estate, has ever assembled. Within 24 hours of the website’s premiere in April 2013, the online rating system had over 23,000 responses and plenty of comments—some positive, some negative. Along with the rating tool, CBC assigned letter grades to 239 facilities across the country. This was the part of Rate My Hospital designed to ignite conversation about the state of Canadian healthcare. Indeed, the grading system sparked the most controversy; the hospital report card was the bait that hooked Canadians and reeled them in to the website.

Creating new experiences that differ from passive TV watching keeps viewers interested and entertained—and news organizations relevant. Multiplatform stories are a matter of survival for broadcasters, says Williamson. But they’re also an opportunity: data-led investigative projects engage audiences and offer a chance to stand out in a noisy online world. Since stories can live longer outside the television set, producers are turning to interactive features and online experiences to capture and keep a loyal audience.

***

With the average Canadian spending 45 hours per month online, broadcasters face the challenge of keeping their audience’s attention. One way they can do this is by taking advantage of the fact that 50 percent of Canadians have a smartphone or tablet with them while watching television, and offering a “second screen” experience that lets viewers interact with a show via social media or a website. Broadcasters can also create interactive and multiplatform stories that offer audiences a way to consume information before or after the show. Interactive features encourage viewers to take part in the story, allowing them to leave the passenger’s seat and put both hands on the steering wheel.

As television audiences move online, the ability to connect with viewers means greater engagement and a larger community for the broadcaster. “The vast majority of creators, producers and broadcasters now embrace the fact that you cannot tell a story in a screen-based industry without reaching out on all platforms,” says Catalina Briceno, director of industry and market trends for the Canada Media Fund. The CMF is a public-private partnership created in 2010 by the Department of Canadian Heritage to fund and promote productions.

Over the past few years, the CMF has seen a steady increase in the number of applications from digital media. According to the organization, “funding to English documentary digital media components has grown . . . from $0.7 million in 2011–2012 to $5.5 million in 2012–2013.” Its 2013–14 budget is $360.7 million.

Rate My Hospital is one example of a multiplatform project. CBC aired the documentary segment two days after launching the online rating system. Throughout the show, host Bob McKeown reminded viewers to check the site and rate their hospitals, then see how the broadcaster graded each facility. This allowed the show to live past its air date, drawing viewers back to the website to see how other Canadians rated various hospitals.

What was different about this project was that the website acted as the first screen. Williamson says getting important information about hospitals out there was the priority. “For months I resisted assigning people to do the television show,” he says, noting that he wanted it to be largely an online story. Marissa Nelson, senior director of digital media for CBC news and Centres, wants her staff to continue to challenge the standard storytelling format. “I don’t think there’s enough of that in Canada,” she says. From a business perspective, this type of tool is about creating loyal viewers and an audience that will want to tune in week after week—and about getting people to stay on the site longer. “Maybe they stay 10 minutes instead of two,” says Nelson. “And they’re more likely to remember CBC news than any other competitor.”

***

Anna Mehler Paperny, senior producer of data desk investigations at Global News, works two desktop computer monitors, scrupulously analyzing Excel spreadsheets. What looks like the equivalent of an unfinished Rubik’s Cube is, to Paperny, a collection of patterns to be discovered and puzzles to be solved.

Senior web co-ordinators Patrick Cain and Leslie Young sit across from her. Cain is soft-spoken, but his hands animate as he talks about analyzing the data he deals with. He can tolerate repetitive work, but admits that when handling multiple spreadsheets, “It can be really easy to screw up.”

A bigger problem, though, is gaining access to data from governments and private companies. “When those bastards make it hard for me to get something, it motivates me even more,” says Cain, adding that the information he usually wants comes in PDF files—making it difficult to transfer the data into an Excel document so he can analyze it. But the team saves time by using software and templates from previous pieces.

The results are often worth the headaches. Young’s series The Gardiner: Trouble Overhead won the 2012 Radio Television Digital News Association awards for best in-depth and investigative series and best digital media series. For that look at Toronto’s slowly crumbling Gardiner Expressway, she created an interactive map that showed where concrete was falling. Along with the map, Global wrote a series of articles with embedded links via DocumentCloud to show that the city “downplayed Gardiner structural concerns.”

The data desk posts as much of the original data as it can. “People want to know where this information comes from,” says Paperny. David Weisz, a freelance digital journalist who has done work for Global, says, “You can run a print story with unnamed sources, but you just can’t do that for data.”

Created in 2010 to produce original pieces for the web and provide additional context for news stories, the data team originally worked at Global’s satellite office in downtown Toronto, but now sits in the centre of the main newsroom in the suburbs. The move came after executives realized just how important the team’s work is. “If we want to distinguish ourselves from other news organizations,” says Ron Waksman, a senior online director at Global News, “it is not enough to take what we do on the broadcast side and push it across to online.”

He says there’s a gold mine of undiscovered information that has sat untouched and he wants his team to dig into it. “Oxycontin’s gone, but Canada’s pill-popping problem is worse than ever” went up on Global’s website in March 2013 with graphs and charts that viewers could click for more information. This led the team to the November 2013 data-led story that showed deaths from opioid use had declined while those from other painkiller prescriptions had drastically increased. “Data can change from year to year,” says Paperny. “This means you can continue a story a month or a year later and people will still be interested.”

***

Armed with leaked financial documents that exposed offshore tax havens, CBC’s Special Investigations Unit decided to produce an interactive to make the complicated information accessible to everyone. But during the first couple of meetings for Stashing Their Cash, the journalists and tech team were speaking different languages. “I had no idea what was going on,” says Harvey Cashore, senior producer of the unit, and it took a few meetings for the two groups to understand each other as they brainstormed ideas. “We realized that my idea was far too complex and would have taken probably two years to build.”

This is not unusual. “A lot of the time I’m trying to get the person making the TV show to let go of their preconceived notions,” says Sean Embury, principal and creative director at Fulscrn, a company that helps networks with creative development and accessing funds. He believes this type of storytelling provides another level of comprehension that television can’t always provide, but broadcasters often underestimate how long it takes to produce a complex interactive story. Even the research for these ambitious investigative stories can take a lot of time; Rate My Hospital, for example, took about nine months to create.

Multi-screen experiences can be costly and can require hiring experts, as Rate My Hospital and Stashing Their Cash did. Fortunately, a lot of material and research that goes into a television show can also be used for its accompanying online interactive piece. Embury cites Truth and Lies: The Last Days of Osama bin Laden as an example of how CBC maximized its content. Interviews gathered for The Fifth Estate episode were incorporated into the online story. “I don’t want to spend twice as much telling my story five different ways or on five different platforms,” says Embury, “so a lot of it has to do with planning.”

Williamson’s team now has weekly meetings to discuss how best to communicate stories and on what platform. CBC won’t be able to do big projects all the time—Nelson says the network will focus on one or two a year and try to knock them out of the park—but the numbers make them attractive. Rate My Hospital has drawn more than two million page views and nearly 64,000 ratings on the patient rating tool. During the 2011 federal election, the Vote Compass tool, which asks users a series of questions and matches them with the most appropriate party platform, had almost two million respondents. And Stashing Their Cash, one of CBC’s most successful interactive stories, was shared on websites such as NYTimes.com.

***

Alex Bottle, an associate professor of medical statistics, arrived from London the night before the Rate My Hospital expert panel meeting. CBC wanted his advice on measuring and presenting the information gathered to rate the hospitals. Bottle spent weeks researching the Canadian healthcare system to prepare. While eager to be a part of the project, and knowing that CBC wanted to get it right, his initial concern was that this was being done for the first time in Canada—and by journalists.

Gary Teare, director of Quality Measure and Analysis with Health Quality Council Saskatchewan, was worried the journalists didn’t truly understand the limitations of the data they were looking at. “I’ve been doing this for years,” he says, “so I’m aware of how difficult it is.”

The holes in the data were not CBC’s fault; individual hospitals record information such as infection rates differently, and some hospitals aren’t required to report much at all. Elash was surprised by how little information is available to the public, and by the secrecy surrounding hospital data. Teare says CBC did the best it could with the information it had, but the “fundamental weakness in the analysis is the reliability of the underlying data to begin with.”

Because of this, some of the experts worried about the plan to rank the hospitals A through D. “I was less thrilled about the grading system,” says Teare, who attempted to put together an Ontario hospital report card 10 years ago. Back then, he and other medical experts had the same questions as CBC but didn’t create a “multiple-level grading system because the data wouldn’t support it.”

Elash says the report card was a way to start a conversation, and it did a good job of that. But some experts thought it was a way to get attention with controversial content. Sholom Glouberman, president of Patients Canada, says, “I thought the project was very dangerous. . . . What it did was it eroded people’s confidence in the healthcare system unnecessarily.”

He believes it also reinforced the notion that healthcare issues are the fault of individual hospitals and acute care, when the public should be focusing on chronic conditions and how well our system manages them. Yet it did start a conversation between the public and healthcare providers, and got people thinking about the way Canada’s system works.

Vote Compass also generated discussion. Heather O’Brien, a professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the university of British Columbia, used Vote Compass during the last B.C. election and says finding out which political party the tool assigns you became a hot topic among her colleagues. “It was sort of a game around the lunch table,” says O’Brien. “‘So what did you turn out to be?’”

Part of her research looks at what motivates people to use a particular website. When it comes to news sites, visitors value the various aspects of multiplatform stories differently. “For some people, the value added is the content, and other people really think about the value in the interactive components,” she says. “It’s a really complex puzzle of different users with different motivations.”

Some users had a problem with Vote Compass’s content. Brian Kelcey, a Toronto public policy consultant and former Conservative aide, argues the tool assigns values for voters based on their opinion of a party rather than on the party’s actual accomplishments; it shows platforms but doesn’t provide any links to past performance. “The CBC has access to this information,” he says. The interactive also doesn’t account for changes in policy during campaigns, which can cover decisive issues. Kelcey believes the tool is put up in a rush come election time, adding, “There’s such a race to get the Vote Compass engine out to draw clicks and users and page views into the CBC website and get everyone hooked on their election coverage.”

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Technology lets producers link to more information and add more depth to the stories they tell, but interactive, data-led investigations are also changing the editorial direction. “The force used to be from broadcast to online,” says Waksman. But that isn’t what viewers want now; they want original reporting. “The future is not about commodity news, what happened today,” he says. It’s about going deeper into stories, investigating and providing analysis and context.

News organizations realize that smartphones, tablets and laptops aren’t necessarily second screens anymore. Waksman sees Global as a network, not a broadcaster, and it needs to provide its audience with a variety of ways to consume and interact with news. “You apply the medium that makes the most sense.”

Waksman plans to add to his data desk team and Elash plans to keep Rate My Hospital going. “It was a call to hospitals to be accountable, to be open, and I think you can’t call for that and go away,” Elash says. “You have to stay on the story.”

The former freelance health reporter and Toronto Sun staffer is working on meeting with her experts again. CBC will launch a new version of Rate My Hospital in the fall, and this time, the team will have a better sense of the challenges, says Elash. “We didn’t fully understand what we were up against.”