It all started with a lighter. In the dog days of August, one of The Grid’s senior editors sparked an ironic hashtag in the twittersphere: #UnfriendlyToronto. Edward Keenan was on a city beach with his wife and two children when a six-year-old boy came over to borrow a lighter for the candles on his brother’s birthday cake. When Keenan obliged, the boy’s mother invited his family to join the party, and they spent a lovely afternoon talking bikes and kids with perfect strangers.

The same week, Toronto Life came out with its “Exodus to the Burbs” issue. The cover story, by Philip Preville, described young families fleeing the city for small towns and characterized Toronto as a place where residents “don’t make eye contact, don’t eavesdrop, don’t assume someone else is watching the kids.” Irked by the piece and inspired by his beach encounter, Keenan published a rebuttal online. Then Grid readers shared similar experiences on Twitter and tagged the anecdotes #UnfriendlyToronto.

The hashtag quickly went viral as Torontonians described neighbours who lent out pearls for weddings, ran out the door to hand umbrellas to a kid waiting for the bus in the rain and raised money for a local woman’s medical supplies. The cover of The Grid that week featured a row of monotonous houses. The headline? “Dear Toronto Life, This Is What a Suburb Looks Like.” As far as The Grid was concerned, the monthly could keep its urban exodus and leave documenting what a city really looks like up to the design-heavy free weekly.

The Grid is something of a gamble for Star Media Group. The media conglomerate’s president,Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank, hired Laas Turnbull as publisher and editor-in-chief of Eye Weekly based on Turnbull’s vision of a new free paper. Cruickshank is betting on his ability to grab the attention of a group of readers in transition: an audience that no longer searches for the next “it” bar on blogs, doesn’t connect with alt-weekly now’s countercultural ethos and feels alienated by Toronto Life’s aspirational tone. With Turnbull at the helm, The Grid is attempting to combine great design with blog-style community content, intelligent civic criticism and tastemaking lifestyle pieces. It’s a radical departure from the traditional alt-weekly modus operandi, and that’s why the paper has dropped the alternative label and wants to become something more akin to a magazine, but in a free weekly format.

Named after the layout of Toronto’s streets, The Grid hopes to capture what deputy editor Lianne George describes as a “moment” in the city. That moment is the synthesis of civic frustration (inspired by mayor Rob Ford) and cultural excitement (mostly a burgeoning culinary movement). “If someone who’s recently arrived in Toronto picks this up, I think they’re going to feel like they’re learning something about the city,” says staff writer Matthew Halliday. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work for people who have been kicking around for a while. Toronto-based novelist Zoe Whittall tweeted that Turnbull’s brainchild is “a tourism magazine for people who live here.”

The documentary-style photography, popular local columnists and blog-inspired community content make for skimmable but inviting reading. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Eye Weekly or even NOW in the hands of so many people when I’m walking around downtown,” says former Torontoist editor David Topping, who has since begun writing for The Grid. “It’s just a really good package.” So far, though, the paper’s editorial product doesn’t always live up to its slick packaging.

When then Torstar publisher John Honderich and VP of sales Andrew Go took NOW owners Michael Hollett and Alice Klein out for lunch in 1991, they didn’t just pick up the tab—they offered to buy the pair’s successful alternative paper. After Klein and Hollett refused the offer, Torstar launched Eye Weekly with 20 staff crammed into a tiny office, deliberately across town from “the mothership,” the Toronto Star. A corporate mouthpiece with indie sensibilities, Eyenever really fit into what National Post writer Daniel Kaszor calls “the big caviar communist family” of alt-weeklies.

Like many corporate-owned alts, Eye’s strength was arts and entertainment. In 1992, inspired by a stunt pulled by British magazine Q, staffers invented a band called The Obvious. A freelance writer, the production guy, a friend of the editor and some other dude posed for an official eight-by-ten glossy photo, which music writer Laura Lind put with a one-page bio and a cassette tape and then hand-delivered to A&R reps at 18 record companies. One rep called two hours later—his copy wouldn’t work. None of them did, of course. The tapes were all blank. But that didn’t stop 12 reps from claiming they had listened to it when Lind placed follow-up calls posing as a manager. When Eye published “Sound of Silence” about the stunt it earned the loyalty of the music community. In the early 2000s, with the indie rock explosion led by local collective Broken Social Scene, the paper graduated from cheeky troublemaker to cheerleading gatekeeper to the scene.

But before the end of the decade, things changed. Stuart Berman, who has been with the paper since 2000, says the internet and mainstream attention to indie culture siphoned readers from Eye’s arts-heavy coverage. Keenan, who has been with the paper since 2002, agrees: music fans turned to sites such as Pitchfork , and mainstream publications started covering the scene Eye had captured so well. “We saw a lot of what we thought of as our role, and the need for it, eroding slowly,” Keenan says. Whatever claim to alternative Eye had was gone, and when Turnbull came on board in August of 2010, he decided to drop the label and go for a different demographic. The last Eye cover featured local singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith bathed in syrupy sunlight.

“Now, what we’re doing with food is very reminscent of what we did with music,” says Berman. The emphasis on all things culinary is a reflection of both a cultural shift in the city and Turnbull’s own passion. “He sends me food pictures all the time,” says staff writer Karon Liu, who was hired in part because he’s so tapped in to the food scene. Showcasing writers with niche expertise is one of a few ideas Turnbull has incorporated from Eye’s past (another is strong columnists, which appeals to advertisers as well as readers). But he is quick to point out his paper is its own publication, and he’s hoping to eclipse the past and move on. “By hiring Laas, you’re not hiring somebody who’s going to stay the course. You’re getting somebody who’s going to totally transform something and put his mark on it,” says parenting columnist Christopher Shulgan. “He is very, very smart. He’s very, very competitive, and he’s a good guy to be leading something that you’re a part of.”

A veteran of Shift, Maclean’s and Toronto Life, Turnbull has been gunning for a publisher’s chair since he dropped out of journalism school in the early ’90s. In 2002, he became editor atReport on Business magazine. His plan? Dress up a consumer business title as a general interest magazine. It worked. Under Turnbull’s leadership, Report on Business amped up the personality and style and won several National Magazine Awards, its first in two years. He focused on the design: the art direction, front of book and photography improved. After ROB, Turnbull served as executive vice president at Brunico Communications, which publishes trade mags such as Strategy and Media in Canada. Here, he learned more about the business side of publishing. Turnbull’s ambition is no secret in media circles, and whether it was confidence or cockiness, his faith in his new product was evident in the lead-up to the launch when he made it clear he was going after Toronto Life’s readers—and its ad dollars.

“Toronto Life, they have 50 reasons to like Toronto or whatever, but I’m never quite convinced,” says Halliday. In The Grid offices, they’re happy to run with the David and Goliath narrative. Toronto Life’s editorial missteps, such as “Exodus to the Burbs,” have bolstered that myth. That article was indicative of what one of the magazine’s own freelancers calls an identity crisis. He says even staff have been questioning editorial decisions that seem more stodgy than innovative. “They’re also experiencing a serious brain drain,” he says. At the beginning of the summer, publisher Sharon McAuley and art director Jessica Rose left the title. As well, Liu and Carley Fortune migrated to The Grid.

The new talent has infused energy into the paper, which was limping along with a skeleton staff before Turnbull arrived. “Jokes were about how we were all about to get fired, and how we were all about to be on the street,” says former staff writer and current contributor Kate Carraway of the gallows humour. “Being revitalized in the way that it was just felt like a dream.”

The Grid has also rethought the locations of the old Eye newspaper boxes, removing them almost entirely from suburban areas. Now, distribution is concentrated downtown where targeted readers live. Those readers are more likely to drink coffee bearing the name of award-winning barista Sam James than Tim Horton, but Liu says they look for buzz restaurants where a meal for two costs less than $80 with booze.

And they want to be able to leave the weekly paper lying around without worrying about a toddler opening up a page of sex ads. Glossies are now the main competition and the rivalry with alts is out—so The Grid is gladly surrendering the escort ads to NOW. Those raunchy back pages are a huge source of revenue for free weeklies, but Cruickshank makes flinty eye contact from behind his tortoiseshell glasses to say, with no hint of regret, that they don’t fit with the Torstar brand.

The decision to ditch the escort ads is significant. The paper wants to capture Toronto “at street level,” but it’s a carefully selected street. Sex at The Grid is tongue-in-cheek dating stories, burlesque dancers peeking from beneath bowler hats, erotic portraiture, a think piece about a young man’s sexual freedom. Gone is the sophomoric, freewheeling edge that traditionally characterizes a free weekly. It’s less the angry kids smoking behind the bleachers and more the yearbook club’s perky enthusiasm.

The Grid wants to tap into Toronto’s neighbourhoods, which isn’t just good for readers; it’s good for advertisers and an important part of the online strategy. Thegridto.com features a Neighbourhoods section with separate pages for every corner of the city. This might be a way to compete with now’s lock on the local business owner’s advertising dollars. Bolstering the online presence also allows a print product to package contests into its advertising more easily. In August, the site received 225,000 unique page views and 650,000 page views in total. For the print incarnation, the paper cut the run from 110,000 to 80,000, but according to researchThe Grid commissioned through the Angus Reid Forum, an online market research panel, within eight weeks of the May relaunch, it went from two readers per copy to three. And the publication has the industry talking.

Turnbull isn’t, though. His response to interview requests is friendly, but firm: Talk to my writers and editors, talk to my boss, hang around the offices as much as you like, but when it comes to my final word, I’d prefer people get it by picking up the paper, not knocking on my door.

Either way, NOW’s Hollett isn’t worried. “The Grid is the absolute latest in a million attempts across North America to do the complete misguided dream of big business media,” he says. “Their fantasy is that the world is waiting for alt-weeklies lite. And you know what? They’re not.”

At a Tuesday morning production meeting on the second floor of the Star building, art director Vanessa Wyse leans over the IKEA table and scoops up three empty wine bottles. “We don’t usually drink at our morning meeting,” jokes George. “Sometimes, but not often.” As the lake reflects the sunlight beyond the wall-to-wall windows, the staff gravitate toward the table, pulling chairs behind them. Seth Rogen’s bespectacled face watches over the quiet office. Pinned side by side, the covers of NOW and Cineplex feature the same stock photo of the Canadian-born actor. Flanking the otherwise empty bulletin board are giant posters of recentGrid photos.

Galleys in front of them, the team sits down to put the final touches on the book. Someone makes a joke about the Ontario Green Party’s new ad campaign featuring a nine-year-old girl in a pantsuit. “Child labour!” one staffer cries and everyone chuckles. After a few concerns over lack of content, some notes on the production pages, a quick back and forth on styling credits for a spread on dressing like a nonchalant celebrity, the meeting ends. The team works like a many-headed creature—there’s a definite rhythm as they finish one another’s sentences and change tack quickly as soon as George vetoes something. If this office ever saw the belligerent, passionate defence of ideas that is such a big part of alt-weekly lore, it’s long gone.

Infused with new money, talent and vision, The Grid hopes to create a climate of urban optimism, but not at the expense of civic dialogue. It’s as unafraid to criticize local government, regardless of party lines, as it is to celebrate the place it calls home. In his rebuttal to theToronto Life piece, Keenan wrote, “I could fill a shelf of books with little stories like the one I just described.” In another column, however, he was eager to call utopian dreaming at city hall to task: “Despite what we’d all like to believe, you cannot build a city for free.”

When Turnbull and George took over, observers were surprised Keenan stayed, since he was effectively demoted to make room for the new team. Keenan went into Turnbull’s office, half expecting to be fired, and walked out with the same title and a job description that, he says, had far more appeal. With more time to concentrate on writing, his urban affairs pieces are some of the best work in the paper. Keenan’s insider knowledge of city hall translates the circus of metropolitan politics into intelligent, unbiased criticism while capturing the vivid characters and telenovela-esque levels of personal antagonism between the city’s civic leaders. His profile of Giorgio Mammoliti, a colourful councillor who has proven to be a political shape-shifter, introduced readers to “The Thumb,” which Mammoliti uses to direct the mayor’s allies on votes. A more recent piece outlined five ways the mayor could save his sinking policy strategy without losing face with supporters.

Still, many other features are tame: “49 Totally Rad Things to Do with Your Kid in the City,” for example, or “Like a Boss,” a flat feature on affluent young people who started their own businesses. And packages such as “86 Excuses to Drink Now” seem more typical of a blog. As a weekly, the paper has to find new ways to approach stories that might be a few days old. So good packaging is crucial. Photo features and infographics make up the bulk of the paper’s anatomy, but there are other graphic choices, such as tiny maps that ground articles on a specific street corner. “There’s a kind of disease infecting magazine journalism these days, in my view, and it’s over-packaging,” says one magazine editor, flipping through a copy of The Grid. He pauses at a flow chart outlining restaurant suggestions for Father’s Day. “I don’t get this,” he says. “You can stare at it for two minutes, but people don’t. There’s not a lot of journalism in this publication.” The trick is executing packages so readers don’t have to figure them out.

That execution rests on the shoulders of George. In her early 30s, she has a spare and tidy office, but she’s constantly apologizing for the state of it. She rarely blinks, making her seem supernaturally aware. “She’s a very nice, very personable woman who works her ass off and has an anarchist’s sensibility,” says Shulgan. In 2000, Turnbull hired her as an intern at Shift. Since then, she’s worked as a senior editor at Maclean’s and as deputy editor through a relaunch at Canadian Business. She and Turnbull have a similar editorial approach. “Lianne’s a package person,” says former Grid senior editor David Fielding.

The cover of the first issue featured a grainy portrait of Jen Agg and Grant Van Gameren, then-owners of the trendy charcuterie restaurant the Black Hoof. The centre spread, which required wrangling 35 top culinary figures to an Easter Monday photo shoot on two days’ notice, played on the notion of accessibility. Thanks to a little studio magic, the men and women behind some of the most exclusive spots in the city sat on a curb eating street meat. It was ambitious, outlandish—and it worked.

But there have been a few bumps since then, like a misleadingly packaged June feature by Paul Aguirre-Livingston entitled “Dawn of a New Gay.” The think piece about “Post-modern Homos,” a generation of young men who feel they no longer need the gay rights movement, fit with what former writer Sarah Nicole Prickett calls The Grid’s “emptily provocative new agenda.” The response from critics within the gay community was immediate and angry. Within a day, 500 people—many questioning the narrowness of the argument—had commented on the website; that was 12.5 percent of the comments it received in the first six months in one day. “I thought it showed a serious lack of both hindsight and foresight on the publisher’s part,” Prickett says. “Truly a mind-blowingly stupid decision that was not ameliorated by a defensive non-apology.”

Elie Chivi was one of nine young men on the cover of the “Dawn of a New Gay” issue. “It wasn’t an educated look at our community. It was more of a privileged look,” says Chivi, who grew up in the Middle East, studied in Montreal and moved to Toronto in 2010. The Gridemailed him a short blurb describing the piece as covering “the new generation of gays who feel they shouldn’t be so radically defined by their sexual orientation.” After the issue came out, Chivi wrote a scathing response on Montreal blog The Gaily. As someone who is no stranger to a culture of oppression, he resented The Grid using his photo to represent a reality that is far from his. “Thanks to Will & Grace and Britney Spears, it’s all fine and dandy? That to me was really a slap in the face.”

The problems with the feature contributed to Prickett’s decision to leave The Grid. “I composed an email to the publisher containing the words ‘embarrassing parody of whiteness,’ but never sent it,” she writes in an email. “Maybe because I looked at myself in the mirror.”

Eight of the nine young men featured on the “Beyond Gay” cover were white; Chivi was the only exception. The masthead, as well, is almost entirely white. When the mission is to cover Toronto, that weakness is telling—and it shows up on the page. The paper has run precious little journalism, beyond streeters, featuring black Torontonians. Coverage of the South Asian community has been more robust, with a story on the people behind a popular Indian restaurant, a Bollywood Oscars cover and a Toronto Internatonal Film Festival spread starring comedian Russell Peters. All of the ambitious packages, from the chefs and mixologists to a piece on young entrepreneurs, have been predominantly, if not entirely, white. The Grid’s lack of diversity is surprising given that Turnbull made eliminating that kind of narrow coverage one of his goals at rob. This may be another part of the learning curve. The art for a November cover story featured an ethnically diverse group of LGBTQ young people and their allies, suggesting The Grid is widening its view to represent the city as a whole. Still, the cover featured the one white portrait.

“We’re trying to invite everyone into the conversation,” says George. But lack of staff diversity has long been an issue for weeklies, says Charles Whitaker, a research chair at Northwestern University’s Medill Journalism School and veteran of Chicago’s black community paper, Ebony. He says the lack of diverse coverage is a bigger problem than the lack of diverse staff. But, he says, “It is up to the community to decide that a publication’s narrow coverage is unacceptable.”

Community loyalty is the rogue variable in Turnbull’s carefully crafted strategy. Cruickshank says the vision that scored him the job “really has to do with creating a publication that digs in and understands what’s great and not so great about the community that we live in.” In his response to Toronto Life, Keenan wrote, “The downtowner’s ideal [is] rooted in the nostalgia for what they imagine a ‘real’ human-scale community…looks like.” This is the city The Grid wants to reflect, but with a smaller lens comes exclusion, and as the paper approaches its first birthday, its challenge will be to bring together Toronto’s community sensibility with its cultural scope—in a good-looking package, naturally.

Len Gold looks nervous as he stares into the black eye of the camera. Wearing a leather jacket over a Vancouver Canucks T-shirt, he recites his question for the leaders of Canada’s four main political parties. Framed by mountains meeting the ocean in Gibsons, British Columbia, Gold says, “My concern is safety for people in this country, to be able to walk down the streets at night and being safe in their homes, and I’d like to know what the government plans on doing, dealing with these criminals and the light sentences being handed down to them by the courts.” His is one of just six questions chosen from over 6,000 submitted to the Broadcasting Consortium for the only English-language televised debate in the 2011 federal election.

Gilles Duceppe, then leader of the Bloc Québécois, tells Gold, “The American model imported to Canada would be an important error. We can’t accept that. Their philosophy is more guns and big prisons and I think that is a dangerous social cocktail.” Then Stephen Harper, who calls the man “Len,” takes his turn. “We have mandatory penalties that involved gangs and organized drug crimes, for sexual predators. We want to repeal the case where criminals can get pardons automatically.” Harper, referring to an omnibus bill later titled “The Safe Streets and Communities Act,” says, “These are bills sitting before Parliament. When a re-elected Conservative government gets back, we’ll package these bills together and get them passed.” While the other candidates dismiss Gold’s question, Harper exploits it; he answers with what his party is doing about “lighter sentences” with his push for mandatory minimums (without talking about if they work or not). He’s direct, he looks compassionate and, according to many studies and criminology experts, he’s completely wrong about what it takes to reduce crime.

If the news reported the most common offences, we’d drown in drunk driving stories. We’d hardly ever hear about rapists hiding in bushes attacking strangers; instead, women would be warned to guard against the people they trust the most. Serial killers would almost never come up. But Christopher Schneider, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, explains that the news gives us stories that feed our fear and capture our attention. So we get serial killings, not drunk driving, which killed 714 people in 2009, according to the Traffic Injury Research Foundation. “We’re generally the safest, healthiest human beings, especially in Canada, to ever walk the earth,” Schneider says. “And yet we’re the most afraid.”

Crime was clearly a wedge issue during the campaign, something that Harper used to separate the Conservative agenda from the rest of the pack. His platform document devoted six pages to crime. Meanwhile, as Ira Basen wrote in a cbc.ca piece, the Liberal Party’s platform was “silent on all of the red-meat, law and order issues that the Conservative government has been pushing for the past five years,” even though it helped pass (or at least didn’t block) many of the 21 crime reforms the Conservatives pushed through during their minority tenure. Harper may have been aided and abetted by the so-called liberal media because, while crime continues a decades-long downward trend, coverage of it remains a staple of our news diet. But does “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism favour right-of-centre politics by putting a conservative bugbear in the limelight? And does the way journalists cover crime affect policy-making and the political landscape?

In Canada, as in most Western countries, crime is declining. Many theories purport to explain this—from legalized abortion to the phasing out of leaded gas—but the most sensible reason, to me, is demographics: fewer young men, who are most likely to commit crimes, in an aging population. The most recent statistics showed that the amount of crime reported to the police in 2010 fell five percent from the previous year; the severity of those crimes fell by six percent. With a population of just over 34 million, Canada had 554 homicides that year; by comparison, 865 people were murdered in the state of New York, which has fewer than 20 million residents. Drug crime, though, was up by 10 percent in Canada, mostly because more people were busted for marijuana possession. Child pornography, gun crime and sexual assault all increased, but not enough to influence the overall downward trend. Canadians haven’t seen a crime rate this low since 1973.

Despite all this, crime shows up everyehere, especially on local TV. It’s a broad category, too; there are reporters on justice, crime, police and courthouse beats producing breaking news, daily articles and features. In a 2006 study of local TV news in the United States, the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) analyzed the content of 24 newscasts on one day in three cities: Houston, Texas; Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Bend, Oregon. Crime took up 42 percent of all the newscasts. It’s a small study, but as a report on media coverage of organized crime, commissioned by the RCMP in 2002, noted, “even the relationship between the media and crime/justice has not yet been thoroughly explored.” The study found that journalism favours straightforward and violent crimes over environmental and corporate ones and concluded that the media aren’t reflecting “the true criminal reality of our society.”

Of course, sensational crime stories have been in vogue since the “murder” pamphlets of the Renaissance. One of the most popular, published in 1551 by a German Lutheran minister, featured this long headline: “A True and Most Horrifying Account of How a Woman Tyrannically Murdered Her Four Children and Also Killed Herself, at Weidenhausen Near Eschwege in Hesse.” Just as we are with horror stories around a campfire, we’re drawn into and terrified by true crime accounts, and that interest never seems to be sated. Frank Magid, a social psychologist turned news consultant, took this time-honoured truth to local television stations. By the 1970s, he was remaking the 6 p.m. news: it was cheaper and flashier with a steady stream of weather and traffic—but mostly crime. Magid taught the now-standard TV approach: visuals of guns, crime scenes, lights flashing, short hit from a reporter interviewing shocked onlookers and victims’ family members.

Though he recently died, his company, Frank Magid Associates, continues. CBC hired the firm for its news relaunch in 2009. But Magid’s wisdom has come under fire. A 2007 PEJ study, “We Interrupt This Newscast: How to Improve Local News and Win Ratings, Too,” found that Magid may have been underestimating local TV news audiences. The five-year analysis across 50 different American markets found that trend pieces actually garnered higher ratings—especially among younger people, a prized demographic for advertising—than the scandal of private citizens and racier stories. One of the main findings was: “Flashing lights, yellow police tape, and so-called eyeball-grabbing visuals do not by themselves attract viewers.” The study is also careful to point out that though “too much crime” was a common concern among local TV producers, there was still a way to cover it that improved ratings and the quality of journalism at the same time: provide context, choose cases involving public malfeasance over breaking news about violent crime and explain the relevance of the event to the audience.

Aaron Doyle worked the police beat at the Etobicoke Guardian andother community newspapers before he went to graduate school. “I spent a lot of time reflecting on my former sins as a journalist,” jokes the criminology professor at Carleton University. More seriously, he explains, “We know that people who watch a lot of TV tend to be more afraid of crime, but it’s very hard to actually prove scientifically that watching a lot of TV causes them to be afraid of crime.” Elderly people, for example, tend to watch a lot, but do they think crime is rampant because of what they watch? Perhaps they stay home because they’re afraid to go out or because it’s harder to get around. It’s likely, though, that the fear, however it started, is reinforced by TV. With so many other factors in people’s lives, academic study has hit an impasse figuring out the cause and effect.

In his 2003 book, Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in Front of the Television Camera, Doyle found a way around this, showing a kind of feedback loop between television news, the police and policy-makers. He doesn’t think politicians are only swayed by journalism through voters, i.e. the audience; they are, after all, news watchers, too. “If an issue gets a lot of media attention, political actors and people in the justice system tend to start responding to that without waiting to hear from the public,” Doyle says. “Often there can be a kind of bubble in which there’s the media and the key players, and the key players are sort of just reacting to the media coverage.” In other words, politicians consume news, too, and heavy coverage might push them to react with a policy change or new initiative, either to try to fix the problem or to appear proactive and get more attention from the same journalists who got the ball rolling. This might help explain a startling statistic in the 2009 StatsCan “General social survey on victimization”: despite many assumptions to the contrary, 93 percent of Canadians are either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their personal safety. It’s an idea that complicates how journalists affect democracy. Not only does journalism inform citizens, who appeal to or vote for politicians, politicians react to the news while courting it.

To get a closer look at crime journalism, I spent two sunny spring mornings in the basement of the Fredericton courthouse sandwiched between linoleum floors and acoustic ceiling tiles with Michael Staples, 21-year veteran crime reporter with The Daily Gleaner. He’s dressed in his usual suit and tie as we sit in the public gallery of the provincial courtroom, in the farthest pew from the entrance, right at the front to better hear the proceedings. The mundane bureaucracy of shuffling case documents and schedules and the perfunctory exhortations to “keep the peace and be of good behaviour” take up most of the time, but it’s the horror that Staples is here to recount. The first case he expects to write about—a sexual assault a fellow reporter told him had something to do with the internet—is dismissed in the first five minutes of the first day. On the second day, after a few hours of scheduling, we witness the verdict of a sexual assault of a minor by her stepfather. Staples mostly keeps his head down, furiously writing notes in an illegible custom shorthand while I watch the lawyers uncomfortably recount the nauseating details, most of which appear the next morning in Staples’s front-page story. As we walk out, he says it is one of the worst cases he’s covered in his career.

At a café down the street, Staples tells me how crime reporting has changed. “Back in the ’90s, for example, it was very much sensationalized. You could put pretty well anything in the paper. And I printed some pretty gross stuff,” he says, eyes earnestly wide. “And then at the start of this new millennium there was less interest in that. Now we seem to be easing back into that again.” But, I ask, where do journalists draw the line about what to print? “We try not to sensationalize it,” he says. “I think the public has a right to know about those types of things that are going on.”

I hear much the same answer from other journalists. Sam Pazzano, a court reporter for theToronto Sun, calls his work a public service. And when I ask Catherine McDonald, a Global TV crime reporter in Toronto, whether crime is over-covered, she says, “In the 11 years I’ve been here, we’ve reported, I believe, the same amount of crime. If it’s a newsworthy crime, it’s a crime that will outrage people, then we’ve reported it. If it affects people, we’ll report it. We haven’t changed our criteria.”

Tim Appleby, who’s worked the beat at The Globe and Mail for close to 30 years, says journalism has become more competitive, which changes the kinds of stories that get coverage: “It certainly has become more graphic. When I came here, we wouldn’t show photographs of dead bodies,” he said. “We wouldn’t name people who had been charged, but not convicted. So yeah, they didn’t cover it or they covered it right. Certainly that’s changed.” Appleby uses the trial of Russell Williams, disgraced colonel and serial killer, as an example of just how graphic crime coverage can be. He wrote A New Kind of Monster: The Secret Life and Shocking True Crimes of an Officer…and a Murderer, a book that despite its tell-all headline-style title and its meticulous cataloguing of Williams’s torture and killing, doesn’t dwell on the sickening details. “It was largely unprintable,” he says, adding that the Globe also decided against printing many of the photos that came out in the evidence. Despite that restraint, competition often trumps decency. “I don’t think we have any choice,” says Appleby, “because if you don’t print it, somebody else is going to.” The Toronto Star, by contrast, published a self-portrait of Williams on its front page, posing for his own camera in stolen lingerie. In defence of the decision, public editor Kathy English quoted publisher John Cruickshank: “It’s a story that we shouldn’t turn our heads from. And it’s for that reason we made the choice that we did.”

As to whether their reporting affects policy decisions, there’s much less consensus. Pazzano hesitates before admitting, “I mean I guess I think to a certain degree [it can]. You can get a skewed view of the world.” But ultimately he says he’s just telling the facts, and his job is “to present the story.” When I ask McDonald if she thinks crime reporting changes what the public thinks or politicians do, she vehemently doesn’t know. “I don’t cover politics. So I don’t report thinking about the political implications. And I don’t cover the political side of crime, either. I cover the crime scene. I don’t cover what the politicians are saying about crime.” She contends it’s rarely an election issue and low on the political agenda, anyway.

But when I ask Michael Staples if his work affects public policy, he answers simply: “Absolutely.” In 2002, a front-page series he wrote on the consequences of cuts to New Brunswick’s RCMP budget on underserved rural communities and overworked, stressed-out cops contributed to a reversal of the decision. And Appleby believes his feature stories can affect policy, too. He uses a long article he’d written for that week’s Globe as an example. It’s about murder in subsidized housing, a great piece of crime journalism that took several months collaboration with freelancer Stephen Spencer Davis. Using data from freedom of information requests, they showed how neglect and poverty lead to violence in city-owned housing, where tenants are four times more likely to be murdered than other Torontonians. It puts a face to a societal trend while staying rooted in meticulously researched numbers and covers the issue from a variety of angles with interviews from tenants, academics, spokespeople from the city and community activists. It treats crime as a social issue, not a series of events. But it’s a rarity. Citing a small staff, Appleby says his work is “almost entirely breaking news and court stuff.”

Luckily, there are many journalists who can go beyond the “quick hits” and latest stabbings to create pieces that orient crime within the constellation of societal factors, statistical trends and personal lives. The June 2011 edition of The Walrus featured Rachel Giese’s cover story, “Arrival of the Fittest,” which linked the dropping crime rate with increasing immigration. John Macfarlane’s editorial reflected on how shortcomings in crime coverage and readers’ and journalists’ misunderstanding of statistics drive Canadians to support policies that are punitive—and don’t work. (A 2010 Angus Reid survey showed that a majority of Canadians support the death penalty for murderers, up from just under half in 2004.) In a Globe column about the newest statistics, Jeffrey Simpson laid out the relationship between the Conservative agenda on crime and journalism’s coverage. “The average citizen, especially those who favour the Conservative Party, is told by political leaders that crime is on the rise, and needs to be fought with a bevy of harsh new measures,” he wrote. “Then they watch the television news, where ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ dominates local coverage. Then they turn to the tabloid press, or tabloid elements in the so-called serious newspapers, to read endless stories about crime. No wonder some people believe a crime wave is washing over Canada.”

The Toronto Sun dutifully reported the falling crime rate, though it seemed to more often highlight the specific crimes that were increasing, while other newspapers didn’t or relegated it to the requisite counter-argument paragraph close to the end. Sun columnist Lorrie Goldstein kept his opinion constant, if not his reasoning: a Statistics Canada survey showed a slight increase in crimes not reported to police, but Goldstein claimed there was an “alarming” and “statistically significant” jump in unreported crime. Then, in July, when research showed that crime was continuing its downward trend, Goldstein undermined the statistics: “What does the crime rate matter to a rape victim who discovers unsupervised temporary absences and early parole make a mockery of the sentence the judge pronounces in court?” As Simpson wrote in an online discussion with readers, “We all live with the tyranny of the anecdote.”

But another way to put that is an old adage of good journalism: put a face to every story. Romayne Smith Fullerton, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Western Ontario, is editing a collection of essays on crime coverage. She says it’s difficult for a journalist to sell a story about the statistics. “Oh, that’s a good news story: ‘Hey, guess what? There are less robberies than ever!’” she says sarcastically. “So what’s the timely peg for that? What’s the angle? What kind of photograph are you going to run with that kind of story? You’ve got nothing. It’s got no sex appeal at all.” But without those stories, “we journalists completely play into the hands of politicians like the Conservatives” who, she says, take the stories as evidence that we need to get tough on crime.

The high-stakes competition in North American journalism only makes it harder, but it’s not the only way to report today. In other countries Fullerton has researched, stricter rules reduce sensationalism. In Sweden and the Netherlands, for example, it’s rare for news outlets to name the accused or the victim. That refocuses a story, bringing it out of the personalized, emotional realm and letting the implications of the crime for society out from under it.

When crime coverage becomes too overblown, too emotional and too out of proportion, what citizens and politicians alike may end up with is the current California prison system, radically changed by the “three strikes, you’re out” law passed 19 years ago. In 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was abducted from her home, raped and murdered by career criminal Richard Allen Davis. The media coverage was high-pitched from when she went missing through the two-month-long search for the girl to the moment Davis was convicted of first-degree murder, smirking and flipping the bird to the TV cameras. In response, California enacted the “three strikes” policy, an extreme version of mandatory minimum sentencing: commit three offences (the first must be serious, the last could be shoplifting) and you’re in jail for life. It’s a simple, catchy baseball metaphor that puts criminals away; criminologist Aaron Doyle calls it “sound-bite justice” because its pith is easily captured for the 6 p.m. news. President Bill Clinton even invoked Polly’s name during a State of the Union address to shame the House Representatives into passing a national crime bill, which became law shortly after. “Polly’s legacy is immense,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1994.

The policy had many advocates in the media, according to Doyle. “And it was a public policy disaster.” The law pushed California’s prisons to 200 percent capacity, causing miserable crowding and a suicide rate 80 percent higher than the national average for prisoners by 2010. Meanwhile, the prison system has nearly bankrupted the state. In May 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision that broke along ideological lines, ordered California to reduce the number of inmates to 137.5 percent of its prison capacity because the conditions have caused “needless suffering and death.”

Polly’s legacy even reached Canada. In 1994, the Reform Party adopted a resolution calling for a similar three-strikes law, though it downgraded the punishment from life in prison to an indefinite sentence in a bid to “be more saleable and defensible in mainstream politics,” according to a Globe article filed from the party’s convention. At the time, MP Harper was Reform’s chief policy officer. Once at the top of a western protest party, today Harper is mainstream. But even conservative Texan lawmakers are warning Canadians against the tough-on-crime approach championed in their state. “It’s a very expensive thing to build new prisons and, if you build ’em, I guarantee you they will come,” one Lone Star State Republican representative told cbc’s Terry Milewski. “They’ll be filled, okay? Because people will send them there.”

Designing new prisons has been a large part of my architect parents’ livelihood since 1992, when they built their first penitentiary in Joyceville, Ontario. I was five years old. As a tween, I got a prison toothbrush as a souvenir of my dad’s business trip to Indianapolis; the handle was less than an inch long and round like a loonie, he told me, to make it impossible to sharpen into a shank or choke a grown man. But my parents won’t compete for federal prison projects anymore. In anticipation of more overcrowding after the omnibus bill passes (the problem is getting worse thanks to two reforms already in effect), the federal government has been building cookie-cutter cell blocks across the country, without incorporating the sustainable architecture or rehabilitative design that have become my parents’ hallmark. Their designs incorporate “small gestures,” my dad told me, which make prisons—and thus prisoners—less aggressive and intimidating, features such as real wood doors, windows without bars that actually open and a set-up that lets inmates get outside without a guard, all without compromising security. Some jobs have to be done right, goes their thinking, and housing inmates—the vast majority of whom will be released one day—is one of them. Crime journalism is the same: nobody wants to pay for it, but it’s still worth doing right, even if it doesn’t make our politicians happy.

Television first came to the North in the late 1960s at the request of mining companies that wanted to keep their transient workers occupied through long, dark Arctic winters with southern sitcoms and soap operas. No one consulted the local Inuit population. Transmissions were in French and English and came in one direction: in. One broadcaster, who watched children turn away from their parents and Inuktitut language in Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit), compared TV to a neutron bomb that “destroys the soul of a people while leaving the shell of a people walking around intact.”

Zacharias Kunuk, then an Inuk carver from Igloolik in what is now Nunavut, noticed that when television came, “everybody stopped listening, visiting one another and telling stories.” In 1975 and again in 1979, his hamlet rejected government offers to broadcast satellite signals from the South until Inuit had a broadcaster of their own. But Kunuk didn’t want to wait for Canada to restore his Inuit traditions. Born Atagutaluk Kigutikajuk Tagaaq Kuatuk Nujaktut, he was E5-1613 to the government, which rechristened him Kunuk. An Anglican priest called him Zacharias. Southern institutions had claimed enough of his culture. In 1981, the 24-year-old flew to Montreal and sold three of his carvings at Westmount’s Eskimo Art Gallery; he returned with a Sanyo beta camera, a VCR and a 26-inch television.

Kunuk tells only one story from one perspective: the Inuit one, and he tells it in his own language, Inuktitut. Inuit, he says, have gone from the Stone Age to the digital age in one generation, and he’s spent the past 30 years salvaging stories that were nearly forgotten in the transition from an oral culture to one where the written word determines political policy and power. In the process, he’s pressed the Canadian government to acknowledge past human rights offences against Inuit and challenged the effectiveness of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. He’s created his own form of journalism, one that tells stories from the inside out, and he’s unrepentant about the one-sidedness of that approach. Kunuk’s documentaries sketch the first draft of the losers’ history, and he’s not looking for input or approval from the winners.

“Has it been a bad week?” I ask. It’s early July in Igloolik, the sun hasn’t set in months and it’s stiflingly dusty. I’m at the dump with Kunuk, searching for a ball joint that will connect the wheel to the axle of his burgundy Jeep. His company has just gone into receivership. His equipment and costumes have been repossessed, his office doors are padlocked and the receiver has requested his computer and his vehicle registration. A week ago, he blew a tire on that car and, two days ago, the wheel fell off completely.

Kunuk pulls his head from the wheel well of a half-crushed pickup truck and stops searching for a match to the car part in his hand. We walk back to a borrowed four-wheeler and he finally answers my question.

“Kch!” It’s a quick, percussive sound—not exactly a laugh—that he makes when disaster strikes and, after two weeks in Igloolik, I’m starting to recognize it. He revs up the four-wheeler and yells, “It’s too hot for the helmet” (it’s seven degrees) and “Companies go bankrupt all the time. You just start a new one.”

As in many of Nunavut’s 25 hamlets, the houses of Igloolik are bound by the graveyard on one side and the airport on the other, creating the impression that the only way out is through death or the air. This is the Igloolik—and the Nunavut—I recognize from news 2012

reports. It’s the Nunavut of the southernized political system, the astronomical suicide rate, 40 percent unemployment, alcohol abuse and a century of cultural oppression. Ole Gjerstad, a Nunavut documentarian, says it’s a world portrayed so negatively in newspapers: “You walk away from those six to eight pages devoted to Nunavut and man, oh man, we may as well just nuke the whole place and liberate the planet from all that misery.”

But there are two Iglooliks: the town and the island. The name means “place of houses” and refers to the land around the town where Inuit settled before contact with southerners. Kunuk drives through dirt, boulders and soft brown tundra clods to show me another, ruined Igloolik where the political units were families and elders held sway. Suicides were rare and predominantly practiced by elders in times of scarcity. He has made close to 30 docs and two features in as many years and, though roughly half of them are set in modern Nunavut, he never loses sight of this world. We stop the Jeep and get out. The air is absolutely silent. It’s so windless that contrails from the morning flights crisscross like pencil lines through the sky.

“This is where we lived,” Kunuk says, pointing at a square-shaped welt in the grass where a sod house once stood, eight feet wide by eight feet deep. There are six more like it stretching down the coastline. It’s the site of a community that died only decades ago, but it’s not marked on any map. The day he left his sod house, Kunuk says, “was the saddest day of my life.”

To read the rest of this story, please see our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.
 It can be purchased online here.

Twice a month, Edith Josie lowered her five-foot frame into a chair at her large, plywood kitchen table with pen in hand. Looking out the window at other cabins, all raised on wooden pilings because of permafrost, she lit up a cigarette and started writing in longhand on foolscap with carbon between the sheets. “It is a very small village here at Old Crow, but the news is getting better every week,” she wrote in 1963. “Even now the spring has come cause it is daylight around 11 o’clock p.m. Pretty soon we won’t use light for night time. Everyone glad to see plane every day. Even the same plane come in one day, they all have to go down to see what is going on…. I’m sure glad everyone gets my news and know everything what people are doing.”

She mailed her dispatches from her fly-in community, 130 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, to The Whitehorse Star, which published “Here Are the News” verbatim, despite the weird syntax and grammatical errors. Harry Boyle, her first editor, thought the mistakes just added character and it would be wrong to change anything. Her column, which ran from 1953 to 2005, was syndicated by larger papers such as the Toronto Telegramand the Edmonton Journal. It was translated into many languages—including German, Spanish, Italian and Finnish—and eventually collected in a book, The Best of Edith Josie.

Josie, who spoke two aboriginal languages and English, wrote the way she spoke, but her unconventional style—rooted in an oral tradition—resonated with readers. Despite her popular column, Josie’s own story is a contradictory one. She drew attention to her small community, but she also fed the idea of the North as quaint and charming, a desolate land full of heartwarming inhabitants in mukluks getting ready to compete in dogsled races.

Born in Eagle, Alaska, in 1921, Josie was a member of the Vuntut Gwich’in (People of the Lakes) and attended school until Grade 5. She became the Star’s Old Crow correspondent when the wife of the town’s Anglican priest turned down the job and offered it to Josie, who was unmarried. “Most of the ladies had someone to look after them,” Sarah Simon said. “Edith didn’t have a husband to look after her, so I gave Edith the job.”

Josie had a simple approach to her column. She once told Farley Mowat, who visited Old Crow in the ’60s, she focused on people, “hunting and fishing, and cut-wood they got for sale. And sometimes I write about old-timers like my mother.”

While she was always positive about the town and the people, Josie was honest with her readers, even apologizing for missing information: “Women dog sled race held today. Nine teams was in the race. Sorry the time sheet is lost. It was tack up on the post and the kids of torn it off.”

She liked it when fans of her writing visited her, but Josie did not want to be portrayed as property of The Whitehorse Star and believed her columns contributed to improvements to Old Crow and awareness of the need for better infrastructure in the town. According to a Globe and Mail report, she told off local boys who’d taunted her with the moniker “Whitehorse Star” by saying, “When I came here in 1940, people had a hard time and lived in poor buildings. When I write the news, from there your parents started getting new house. I write the news, that’s how Old Crow became better. So don’t call me ‘Whitehorse Star’ again.”

The boys in town were not the only readers to underestimate Josie. In a CBC North radio series called “Yukon Nugget,” broadcaster Les McLaughlin said that when he first read Josie’s writing, he thought, “It was kinda cute. Not very deep or insightful…just…well…just cute. But more than 30 years later, Edith Josie’s columns have become an important record of lives of the people of Old Crow.”

In 1965, Life sent reporter Dora Jane Hamblin to profile the columnist in a piece titled, “Everybody Sure Glad.” The dek read, “In the Yukon, Indian reporter Edith Josie wrestles with words to tell the news.” And the story claimed, “Most people start reading Edith just for the fun of watching her grapple with the English language and lose.” Hamblin argued that Josie’s work “evokes the stark stuff of life in the Far North.”

But Valerie Alia, author of Un/Covering the North: News, Media and Aboriginal People, spent time in Whitehorse and believes calling Josie’s grammatical quirks endearing is patronizing and that she was the voice of an important First Nation in a remote community. “Often, people think it’s just about quaintness and charm and northern landscapes,” she says. “But this stuff is also about political and cultural landscapes, North and South, and how they interact.”

Edmonton journalist Linda Goyette was in Old Crow writing a book when Josie died of natural causes in January 2010. Goyette, who attended the funeral, discovered the North through Josie’s writing in the mid-’60s in an overheated Grade 5 classroom in Lucknow, Ontario. A teacher wearing horn-rimmed eyeglasses tapped a wooden pointer at the top of a Neilson’s map of Canada and said, “See up there? That’s where she lives! Way up at the top of the Yukon!”

Goyette later realized that “Here Are the News,” though ungrammatical, was a more vivid depiction of life in a small northern town than southern reporters ever supplied. Supposedly more professional and accomplished, they tended to interview missionaries, priests, local RCMP officers, Hudson’s Bay workers and teachers, but not aboriginal people. “Her writing,” says Goyette, “challenged the prevailing southern notion of that era that any young outsider could drift into a community for a day or two and get the story right.”

She adds that at least Josie gave the North a voice back then. Now, quaint reporting has given way to dead air. “The patronizing or racist writing of colonial times seems to have been replaced with this vast, unacceptable silence.”

And Josie’s world was anything but silent. She bypassed Yukon caricatures and stereotypes that Goyette calls “The cremated Sam McGee and the frozen Mad Trapper, Hollywood Mounties and Klondike dance hall girls—all larger than life and full of bravado,” and she wrote about the life of a town and the people in it. Old Crow has changed, but ravens still seem to have personalities and dogs howl into the early evening as hunters make their way back from their river camps.

The remnants of the Anglican Church and its steeple overlook the Porcupine River, and 100 metres away, in Josie’s cabin, her infectious laugh seems to linger in the air, permanently clouded with wood and cigarette smoke. Yukon artist Jim Robb’s depiction of the cabin—with two ravens perched on the eaves and salmon drying on a rack in the sun—hangs above Josie’s kitchen table, just as it has for decades. In the drawing, the sign on the roof reads: “Miss Edith Josie. Grandma, storyteller, journalist, historian, community leader, Member of the Order of Canada.”

On Day 11 of the Egyptian uprising against the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak, Globe and Mail correspondent Sonia Verma and her colleague Patrick Martin were walking through what she describes as the “nouveau riche” neighbourhood of Mohandeseen. Verma was filming a pro-Mubarak crowd marching in the streets. At first this all-male crowd seemed friendly, some of its participants even smiling and waving flags for the camera. Suddenly, though, the scene turned menacing as some armed marchers charged Verma and Martin. As she recalls, “We were basically surrounded by this mob on all sides and they were becoming violent toward us.”

Fortunately, a security guard from a nearby apartment block emerged, firing gunshots into the air. The crowd froze. He grabbed the two journalists and hustled them into an apartment building. A woman living on the first floor took the three of them in. They stayed for several hours until the mob moved on. It was only after the security guard had escorted the two reporters back to their hotel that Verma realized she had deep bruises along her back and one arm.

Today the incident is an afterthought. But that day in the apartment in Mohandeseen, Verma’s immediate concerns were escaping and the safety of the family who sheltered her, leaving her no time to think about her daughters: Annie, then three, and Sarah Jane, two.

It was thinking about her own two children—ages one and two—that may have kept Lara Logan alive on February 11, 2011, the day Mubarak resigned from office. As is widely known, the CBS News chief foreign correspondent was not as lucky as Verma when she ventured into the celebratory crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square with her bodyguard, producer, fixer, cameraman and two Egyptian drivers. As she noted later about the response to Mubarak stepping down, “It was like unleashing a champagne cork on Egypt.”

But the mood wasn’t purely triumphant. Logan’s fixer, Bahaa, could hear men shouting in Arabic to attack her.

In a 60 Minutes interview, Logan recounted how, after she was forcefully separated from her crew, men began to grab her everywhere. They stripped her of clothing, pulled at her hair, scalp and limbs, beat her with sticks and raped her with their hands. She believed she was going to die and had essentially given up. Then she thought, “I can’t believe I just let them kill me…that I just gave in, that I gave up on my children so easily.” She decided to survive for them by surrendering to the assault.

In response to the attack on Logan, the Toronto Sun’s Peter Worthington wrote an inflammatory column that posed the question, “Should women journalists with small children at home, be covering violent stories or putting themselves at risk?” His answer: “It’s a form of self-indulgence and abdication of a higher responsibility to family.” Logan’s decision to report from Egypt was, he said, “the right thing for her to do journalistically—unless, of course, she had small children, which was the case. Her son…should have taken precedent over her wishes to cover the world’s biggest story for the moment.” Worthington continued, “This holds true for any woman covering wars or revolutions.” (Worthington later clarified that by small children he meant those under age five.)

Not surprisingly, the response among journalists was almost universally negative. Jan Wong, a former Globe reporter, called him a misogynist. Stephanie Nolen, the Globe’s South Asia bureau chief, was also dismissive: “It’s not 1940.… My partner is every bit as engaged, as involved, as important to my children, and it would be an equally devastating loss for my children if either of us were killed. And I think it is profoundly insulting, not only to women, but to men who are parents and care about their children, to suggest otherwise.” Wilf Dinnick, Verma’s husband, wrote an open letter to Worthington demanding an apology and indicating that Verma chose not to write about her mob experience in Egypt “because she feared sexist and antiquated views like yours might take away from the importance of the story in Egypt.” He concluded: “Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Middle Eastern dictators of your vintage are being tossed out of power for being so out of touch.”

Heated rhetoric aside, is the journalistic community out of touch with the particular risks faced by female reporters, mothers or not, in conflict zones?

Even as the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) launched an investigation into sexual violence as an occupational hazard, more incidents surfaced. A little more than a month after Logan’s ordeal, New York Times photojournalist Lynsey Addario was released from six days of captivity in Libya, during which she was repeatedly sexually assaulted. Four weeks later, CBC reporter Mellissa Fung’s memoir Under an Afghan Sky, about her 2008 kidnapping that lead to 28 days as a hostage in Afghanistan, revealed she had been raped while in captivity.

To research the CPJ paper, senior editor Lauren Wolfe spoke with more than 50 women who reported assaults ranging from aggressive physical harassment to groping to gang rape. (She notes that male reporters, to a much lesser degree, are also at risk for rape.) In the resulting report, “The Silencing Crime: Sexual Violence and Journalists,” released in June, she charged that “sexual violence has remained a dark, largely unexplored corner.”

Four years before Wolfe’s report, Judith Matloff, now an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School and a former long-time foreign correspondent, wrote “Unspoken,” about the sexual abuse experienced by female foreign reporters. The piece appeared in the May/June 2007 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, but went largely unnoticed. Only in the wake of the Logan episode, when CJR featured her article prominently on the website, did 30 news organizations interview Matloff. Today, she says the Logan episode “really blew the lid off what had basically been a dirty secret in the industry for a long time.”

Gillian Findlay of CBC’s the fifth estate regrets not revealing that she found herself at the mercy of groping hands while caught in a Baghdad crowd in 1999. It wasn’t until March 2011 that Findlay publicly spoke about the incident for the first time, at a symposium on female reporters. She recalled how she had been separated from her crew and was terrified before her fixer came to the rescue. Now, Findlay describes what kept her silent: “I didn’t want my male colleagues—at the time most of my colleagues were male—to look at me differently or feel differently about me or feel they had some responsibility to take care of me. I just knew it wasn’t good if I talked about it.”

In “Unspoken,” Matloff tells a more extreme version of Findlay’s experience: the case of a photographer working in India who was set upon by a group of men “baying for sex.” Rescued at the last minute, she later decided not to tell her editors what happened. “I put myself out there equal to the boys,” she says. “I didn’t want to be seen in any way as weaker.”

Wolfe and Matloff also discuss women’s feelings of shame, their fear of being labelled troublemakers and their concern that they won’t be believed. But both highlight this issue of self-image. In her CJR article, Matloff wrote, “[T]he compulsion to be part of the macho club is so fierce that women often don’t tell their bosses.” More recently, she elaborated: “The bosses don’t know about it because the women don’t talk about it. And then because the bosses don’t talk about it, the next generation of women don’t talk about it.” Even today, those bosses are predominantly male—the foreign editors for the National Post, the Toronto Star, CTV, the Canadian Press and the Globe are all men.

Ann Rauhala was one of the exceptions when she served as the Globe’s foreign editor from 1989 to 1994. Based on her experience, she speculates that having a female boss could make women dealing with sexual abuse feel safer speaking up and more likely to seek help. She adds: “It might make editors [and] newsrooms more inclined to make sure that everybody who goes out there gets training and education that takes into account the possibility of sexual assault.”

On the other hand, Stephen Northfield, the Globe’s foreign editor for the last six years, doesn’t see safety as a gender-specific issue. “We support everybody who wants to do this kind of work,” he says. The paper has 12 staff foreign correspondents based overseas, three of whom are women, in addition to Verma, whom the paper parachutes in.

Of course, as the Globe figures suggest, it’s no longer unusual to find women in the field, unlike the days of Kit Coleman. The journalist and war correspondent for Toronto’s Daily Mail and Empire in the late 1800s to early 1900s, was credited with being one of the first female foreign correspondents. Even in the 1970s and ’80s, female correspondents such as CBC’s former Beirut bureau chief Ann Medina, who covered mostly the Middle East, were a novelty.

The types of conflicts journalists cover have been transformed too. “Things started to change in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the end of formalized conflict,” says Paul Knox, a former Globe foreign editor and reporter. In an email, Sherry Ricchiardi, senior writer for the American Journalism Review and professor at Indiana University’s School of Journalism, explained the implications of the shift from wars between states to wars within them. In Libya, for example, the conflict originated within the country between opposing factions. Thanks to “no designated front lines or definite chain of command,” she says, “danger, including sexual violence, is far greater.”

Though Matloff agrees, she emphasizes that rape can happen in all kinds of situations. “Most of the cases I documented occurred in hotel rooms—from Russia to Iraq—or in rowdy crowds in such places as Pakistan and Egypt,” she says, adding that journalists can also be abused when detained.

How aggressors perceive journalists generally has also changed. Knox notes that there used to be an unwritten rule that journalists, male or female, weren’t targets. One example he gives from his days reporting in Latin and Central America is the practice of pasting the letters “TV” (an international code for journalist) on vehicles. To do that today would be like painting a “target on your back,” Knox says, because reporters are no longer viewed as independent or as likely to provide fair coverage. “They’re seen in many ways as agents of one side.” This also translates into greater peril for female reporters, according to Melissa Soalt, a women’s defence expert who was inducted into Black Belt Magazine’s Hall of Fame in 2002. The combination of reporters viewed as targets and blurred enemy lines means more risk. “When all bets are off and chaos prevails and men are armed and law and order and conventional boundaries break down, you have prime conditions for attack against journalists,” she says. “And for women that means targeted for sexual assault.”

Still, Tony Burman suggests that journalists who live and work in the developing world are more apt to be aware of the risks. The former CBC News editor-in-chief and, more recently, Al Jazeera English managing director says, “From the Al Jazeera perspective, some of our most prominent and most experienced correspondents are women and they [have been] dealing with these challenges for years.”

For everybody else, there’s hostile environment training.

To prepare their staff for modern-day conflict, many major media outlets send newbie foreign reporters to training conducted by former British Royal Marines and U.K. Special Forces who work for companies such as Centurion Risk Assessment Services Ltd. and AKE Ltd., respectively. Journalists learn how not to die of dehydration, how to identify certain weapons just by their signature noise and how to be a good hostage—essentially, how to stay alive. At Centurion, they also undergo mock kidnappings. In her 2011 book, Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone, Michelle Shephard, national security reporter for the Star, recalls the week she spent in Virginia at Centurion’s U.S. camp in 2006. She writes of the instructors’ “Oscar-worthy performances” as they “threw burlap sacks over our heads and then had us march, kneel, lie motionless face down in the dirt in a drill that felt all too real.”

Such verisimilitude isn’t cheap: AKE charges $3,950 (U.S.) for a five-day course; Centurion’s fees are $500 to $800 a day. But what these courses don’t offer is much—or any—training on how to deflect or, at worst, come to terms with sexual assault. AKE takes female journalists aside for a live video chat with a female representative to address rape and sexual assault; Centurion will offer “extended closed sessions about rape and sexual assault for female journalists if wanted,” according to Carole Rees, the company’s business development manager. Since the attack on Logan, she says, there have been a lot of inquiries as to whether sexual and gender-based violence is offered in Centurion’s hostile environment training. However, according to “Unspoken,” the BBC, which Matloff calls “a pioneer in trauma awareness,” is the “only major news organization that offers special safety instruction for women, taught by women.”

This omission isn’t always the trainers’ fault, according to Matloff. Since the responsibility is on the employer to request any specific training, she says, “We can’t blame Centurion and AKE for not offering it if it wasn’t requested.” Scott White, CP’s editor-in-chief, for example, did not ask for any specialized sexual assault training beyond the regular hostile environment courses before sending his reporters to Afghanistan. The female reporters who covered that war encountered dangerous situations, but he says, “I don’t think they encountered them because they were female.” CP’s Stephanie Levitz, who did two rotations in Afghanistan, is dubious about what specialized training would look like. Is it “How not to get sexually assaulted?” she asks. “That’s impossible.”

But Matloff disagrees. She is one of the primary organizers of a new course, Reporting in Crisis Zones, recently launched by the continuing education department of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Specifically designed to fill the gaps in training journalists receive elsewhere, with an emphasis on conflicts and “avoiding unnecessary peril,” it first ran last November. Topics in the first two days included cybersecurity, risk assessment, situational awareness, dealing with emotional trauma and emergency first aid. But the third day, open only to women, addressed rape and assault prevention (the pilot version of the course cost $795 for the first two days and $895 for all three days). “The goal is to provide rape prevention training for foreign correspondents so that they can avoid situations like Lara Logan’s, and better cope should the unmentionable occur,” Matloff says. The website lists delay tactics, basic self-defence and healing as part of the third day’s curriculum. Matloff explains the reasoning behind this specialized instruction: “[A]s we saw with this horrible incident with Lara Logan, where her male colleagues were beaten, she was beaten and sexually assaulted.”

Obviously passionate about the issue of women’s safety and the need for addressing the issue of sexual assault, Matloff recalls a friend who was raped while on foreign assignment but felt too uncomfortable to tell her editor. Fearing that she might have contracted AIDS, the reporter told a convoluted cover story to her boss so she could leave the country where she was stationed and then spent a fortune on anti-retroviral drugs in another country. Had she divulged the rape, her employer could have covered her expenses. “I never want to see that happening to another colleague,” Matloff says with conviction.

CP’s White calls the fledgling course “a welcome and needed addition to this type of training.” Although CP has no immediate plans to send any staff into conflict zones, White says he would consider the program in the future. And Colin MacKenzie, the Star’s political editor, says, “The rape-prevention module is overdue.”

Still, some female reporters aren’t sold on the Columbia course. Medina is skeptical about the program’s aim to teach participants how to work effectively and safely in volatile situations. “The only way to do that,” she says, “is to not work effectively or to stay home.” She’s also wary about attention given to the threat of sexual assault: “The more the academics and media and articles, perhaps, such as this [story], talk about rape and sexual assault, the more journalists will fear it,” says Medina. “If you go into a situation wearing that fear, you can invite it.”

Meanwhile, Corinna Schuler, a former Post correspondent who served in Africa, believes the course is not practical “for people who are already working as full-time reporters,” partly because when a journalist is in the field, a lot comes “down to instinct and learning on the job, on the fly.” And Stephanie Nolen says, “I think it’s really dangerous to frame this as a conversation about the vulnerability of women in this job when I don’t think women are any more vulnerable than men,” although she concedes women may sometimes be “differently vulnerable.”

One reporter who does believe Matloff’s program could teach her something new and valuable is Sonia Verma. She notes that when she did training in Kingston, Ontario, about 10 years ago, she was only one of three women in a class of about 20, so she didn’t think specific training for women made sense in that context. (She does recall that the instructor did mention sexual violence, but it was regarding male journalists being raped in Mogadishu.) Verma thinks the Lara Logan incident is a wake-up call for the industry. “There isn’t really specific training for women—the unique situations that women might find themselves in,” she says. “The question should be how can we better equip women to do their jobs.”

Larry Zolf is prepared for an ambush. A pair of thick, black-framed glasses sits atop his schnozz, the legendary nose that’s been described as his spare sex organ. A microphone clenched in one hand and a 60-pound Frezzolini news camera in the other, he stands on the stoop of a mansion in Montreal’s prestigious Westmount neighbourhood. It is winter 1966, and the light from his camera is so harsh it could make Mother Teresa look guilty.

Zolf hopes to shine that light on Pierre Sévigny, the former associate defence minister caught in the middle of the Gerda Munsinger affair, a scandal involving a German prostitute who seduced several cabinet ministers to obtain information for the Soviet Union. RCMP officers exposed Sévigny, who lost his leg during World War II, after detecting the thwack of his wooden prosthesis on surveillance tapes they compiled of Munsinger from 1958 to 1960. When Prime Minister John Diefenbaker caught wind of the scandal, he tried to handle it privately, asking Sévigny to resign and deporting Munsinger. But in 1966, the private matter became a public issue when the minister of justice under Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson brought it up during a tussle in the House of Commons.

Zolf is on the story as part of the team at This Hour Has Seven Days, a CBC news program that pushed boundaries using satirical sketches and ambush interviews. Doug Leiterman, executive producer of the show, instructs him to question Sévigny at his mansion with a warning: “He’s a hard drinker, and he’s got some unsavoury friends.” But when Zolf knocks on the door, Corinne Sévigny answers.

“He’s not here,” she explains, though Zolf can see her husband through the window, reclining in his easy chair with a drink in hand. He turns to retreat, the snow coming down hard. But before Zolf can leave, Sévigny appears on the stoop, motioning for him to return.

And then, suddenly, thump. The former politician swings his cane, hitting Zolf across his shoulders, which are, fortunately, padded by two winter coats.

“You fuckin’ cocksucker!” Zolf yells.

During the ensuing scuffle, he delivers a swift kick to Sévigny’s wooden leg, which flies into the front yard. All is silent. The Schnozz disappears into the blizzard.

That was classic Larry Zolf. The CBC Television personality, history buff and writer with a nose for politics died of kidney failure at the age of 76 in March 2011. He had a hell of a way of silencing people and he usually filled that silence with a barrage of one-liners. He never totally fit in, but as an outsider he had a knack for revealing the ludicrous in politics and culture. Always bold, he was respected by his peers and even the insiders he exposed. Perry Rosemond thought his long-time friend gave the best advice because of his logical thinking—and even used him as an inspiration when he created the Larry King character for the popular 1970s TV show King of Kensington. Zolf kept people’s attention with a combination of intelligence, passion and persistence, says Rosemond. “We would have long discussions as kids. At the end, I would always say, ‘It was nice listening to you, Larry.’”

All that talking paid off. Zolf earned a spot at CBC as an unlikely broadcaster: a loose cannon with a look unlike anyone else in the business. But it’s doubtful that he’d be able to talk his way into a job at the Mother Corp. today. “The CBC was much braver then,” says fellow writer Barry Callaghan of the 1960s and ’70s, when Zolf’s career reached its peak.

In its early years, CBC Television, which began broadcasting in 1952, had room for the outsider with the rumbling voice who couldn’t type or drive and certainly never played by the rules. Robin Taylor, who has worked as head of current affairs for CBC, says Zolf’s unique qualities managed to keep him relevant in Canadian journalism for 45 years. “He looked at the world in a funny way. He was loud, boisterous at times, but that was his style,” says Taylor. “He wasn’t a phony. He was a talker.” And what he said always had a substance, a wit and a unique charm that just can’t be found on the airwaves today.

When Zolf was born in 1934, the north end of Winnipeg was a hub for politically active Ukrainian, Polish and Russian immigrants. His father, Russian-born Joshua Falek Zolf, raised his youngest child to be a rabbi, although he was a writer as well (Falek’s autobiography, On Foreign Soil, was published in both English and Yiddish). Falek was also the principal at Isaac Loeb Peretz Folk School, where Zolf found his voice, memorizing poems by Jewish poets at just six years old and reciting them in front of engrossed audiences. By eight, he had features published in both Yiddish and 2012

English newspapers in Winnipeg and performed with Yiddish acting troupes visiting from New York.

His high school years were tougher, though. Because of his poor math skills, Zolf was part of the remedial class at St. John’s Technical High School. Some teachers believed he was more advanced than the other students; he scored the highest in his entire school on a Grade 11 English exam—but his overachieving father remained disappointed in his son.

Zolf proved his worth at United College in Winnipeg, where he would meet his three great loves: history, political science and Patricia—his first shiksa girl. Their first date was a screening of Lover Boy and the Sex Kitten Bandit in the basement of the Manitoba Legislative Building (the movie was in the process of being banned and they snuck in). She was beautiful, intelligent and bold. By 1958, to the disapproval of both their families, they were married and living in Toronto so Zolf could attend the University of Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School.

He dropped out of law after a year, but remained at the university to pursue a master’s degree in Canadian history. In 1959, Zolf started working at CBC after his friend Michael Nimchuk suggested a road trip to Louisiana to do a story financed by the radio program Assignment. The two pals went into producer Harry Boyle’s office to deliver their pitch, but Boyle rejected all of Nimchuk’s ideas. Even though they never made it to Louisiana, he asked Zolf to review a book on the history of Upper Canada and that led to more freelance radio work.

When his father died, Zolf lost focus in school, separated temporarily from his wife and his career stalled. But in 1964, he decided to audition for a reporting position with This Hour Has Seven Days. His specialties were ambush interviews and rapid-fire questioning. CBC management wasn’t ready for This Hour’s daring, irreverent and challenging brand of news and cancelled the show after two years. He then covered Parliament Hill for a TV program calledWeekend.

Zolf stuck around the CBC as a well-connected production consultant. But by the 1990s, his place at CBC was uncertain, despite several successful decades there. The network was hesitant to keep such a controversial character after his contract was up for renewal—the broadcaster was now a more organized, rigid bureaucracy and no longer saw the value of a character like Zolf. “He was underused and there were producers who didn’t really understand his talent then,” says Gordon Stewart, a former CBC producer. To make matters worse, Zolf was diagnosed with colon cancer and his 33-year marriage broke up not long after he recovered. Luckily, Taylor and others fought to help him obtain a permanent position at CBC in consulting—and he went from misfit to mentor. He also continued to freelance in his spare time. In 2007, he secured the final gig of his 45-year career: writing a regular column, mostly about politics, for cbc.ca.

Zolf managed to stay relevant in Canadian journalism for so long because of his willingness to speak his mind. The Dance of the Dialectic, his 1973 book about Pierre Trudeau, whom he grew to respect while working on Parliament Hill, fearlessly criticized the prime minister and his Liberal government. Zolf’s philosophical concept was that because everyone thought Trudeau would get elected, he did. But instead of being offended, the former PM actually requested more. A few months later, he asked Zolf to write a speech for the Press Gallery dinner, an annual event where politicians and the Hill reporters make fun of themselves at a raucous off-the-record gathering.

Trudeau dreaded the event—after all, he was not exactly known for his sense of humour—so the Schnozz crafted a speech that was a masterpiece of sarcasm. Unfortunately, the aloof intellectual read Zolf’s words as if he were reciting the phone book. “I have to take organ grinder lessons five days a week,” he droned, ruining a crack about what it’s like to run the country with a minority government. The speech writer watched in horror and drank every ounce of alcohol he could get his hands on. Years later, though, Trudeau learned to pause for his laughs—and Zolf finally forgave him.

His close relationship with politicians made some other journalists question whether he was biased. He eventually declared himself a Red Tory, but earlier in his career, he was known as a diehard socialist and pro-labour. For a while, there were even rumours that he was a Communist. (In fact, he had been intrigued by the ideology—but only for one day when he was 12 years old. Rosemond and Zolf auditioned for a communist camp in Winnipeg, both toting succulent corned beef sandwiches. Lunchtime came but, much to the boys’ dismay, the sandwiches went into a “sharing pot.” They pulled one sardine sandwich and one peanut butter and jelly. “That was our first and last day as communists,” says Rosemond.)

But any real or perceived bias was overshadowed by Zolf’s ability to ask the tough questions. During an interview with René Lévesque in 1964, he challenged the Parti Québécois founder: “You’re not concerned about the feelings of English Canadians outside of Quebec. What about those inside Quebec?”

His fearless interviewing sometimes got him into trouble, as it did with Sévigny, but it often created electric segments. A chat with feminist Germaine Greer for Midweek started out dull—until he accused her of not paying attention to class and ethnic differences among women. “You liar!” Greer fired back. “I cannot have you sitting here distorting my book for the people who are foolish enough to think that you know about things.” Zolf asked her what she actually meant in her book. Greer vigorously defended herself in what ended up being an entertaining interview.

Though his interview style could be blunt, he had a knack for talking his way out of the sticky situations his mouth got him into. In 1969, his colleague Peter Reilly (who would go on to be one of the first reporters on the fifth estate) was too sick to cover race integration in the South, so Zolf went in his place.

He was possibly the most Hebrew-looking reporter to ever cover the issue (which was, at that time, quite violent), but he talked his way through it. When the Ku Klux Klan was opening a separate high school in Mississippi, he showed up and charmed his way in. “Sir, I know you don’t trust me and I know why,” he told the school’s security guard. “I’m no commie, sir. I hate commies, especially Jewish ones. I’m a Canadian.” He succeeded, and the resulting news report was a compelling look inside the KKK.

Zolf sometimes needed the same techniques of persuasion in his personal life. He once came home to his first wife with a charred afro, stinking of women’s perfume. Although he concocted an outlandish story that he claimed Patricia bought, he’d actually been having an affair with a woman who loved to light dozens of candles when she made love and the flames ignited his hair. That was the night the Schnozz learned that perfume makes a very poor fire extinguisher.

But behind all of his chutzpah, there was hesitancy. “Although he was one of the guys who wrote it as he saw it, he somehow wanted people to like him,” says Norm Snider, fellow political journalist and friend. “He was all kinds of insecure, going back to being the big-nosed guy from Winnipeg.”

In his later years and in ailing health, Zolf began to lose confidence in his abilities. Though he masked his insecurities with wit, he couldn’t help but question himself, especially when he began writing a column for cbc.ca. Barbara Diakopoulou, his second partner (they never married), spent a lot of time encouraging him during those years. Before he submitted columns, he’d often flip through his Rolodex, ring up a friend and read the piece aloud. “He would keep you on the phone literally for forever and a day if you didn’t find a way to get off,” explains Bernie Farber, a friend and the head of the Canadian Jewish Congress. “And I could have listened to him all day, too. But you wouldn’t get a lot of work done that way.”

Entertaining as his columns were, working with him wasn’t always easy. After Saturday Nighteditor Robert Fulford assigned Zolf a short article, the piece came in months late—and more than seven times too long. But the magazine still ran it because it was too captivating to pass up. Though Fulford can’t remember just what the “lighthearted piece” on parliamentary affairs he assigned was, an article titled “The New Shape of Canadian Politics” from the December 1975 issue seems to fit the bill. Running 10 pages, it included quips on Canada’s government and politicians, including this gem: “For socialists, going to bed with the Liberals was like getting oral sex from a shark.”

The Schnozz may not have been keen on following instructions or playing by the rules, but he could always come up with a good argument and he couldn’t resist a good debate. His favourite person to argue with was Diakopoulou, who works with Elections Ontario. Not long after he separated from his first wife, Zolf spotted her for the first time in the middle of five Greek men—arguing. He watched as each man left, exasperated. Now that was a woman he could love.

Zolf also enjoyed picking fights with neighbours on Toronto’s Danforth, where he and Diakopoulou lived, and with the cab drivers who drove him home—while the meter was running. (The cabbies sometimes inspired his columns.) But friends say his tough exterior was just a part of his schtick. Really, Zolf could find a redeeming quality in just about everyone, even people Rosemond thought could surely have none. He was constantly asking, “Larry, are we talking about the same person?”

In particular, he loved William Lyon Mackenzie King, a prime minister who had a reputation for strange behaviour. But to Zolf, King’s eccentricities were his best features. He identified with the fellow iconoclast in a time when there were few left in the world of Canadian politics or journalism. In fact, Diakopoulou remembers that on one of their first dates, they passed by Mount Pleasant Cemetery, home to King’s grave. “I’d like to be buried here someday,” he told her. That way, he could spend his spirit life doing what he loved best: ambushing a politician and immersing himself in Canadian history.

Though he wasn’t quite as outspoken in his final days, Zolf collaborated with Barry Callaghan on his memoirs, The Dialectical Dancer, which came out the fall before he died. Now, this unconventional Canadian icon, the likes of which we’re unlikely to see, hear or read again, is six graves away from Mackenzie King and finally silent.

CORRECTION: The published print version of this story—and the version that originally appeared on this site and was recently unpublished—said that CTV Atlantic was shut out in the major television categories at the 2010 Atlantic Journalism Awards. In fact, CTV Atlantic did not enter the Journalism Atlantic Awards. The Ryerson Review of Journalism regrets the error and apologizes to CTV Atlantic.

It’s 5 p.m. on an October Monday in Halifax, which for Live at 5 co-hosts Starr Dobson and Bruce Frisko means show time. The big story tonight on the popular Atlantic Canada newsmagazine is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. There are several separate stories devoted to the campaign, including one about a hair salon that created a fundraising calendar featuring local breast cancer survivors. The rest of the show is pretty standard fare for a newsmagazine—weather, sports, entertainment and several interviews. Dobson and Frisko wrap up the broadcast by previewing stories that will be on the 6 p.m. news with anchor Steve Murphy. Both shows come out of the same studio and share equipment, camera people and newsroom staff. Then the voice-over comes in. “Live from our Maritimes news centre, this is CTV News. Here is Steve Murphy.”

Live at 5 celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2012, while its sister show, CTV News at Six, and its predecessor The ATV Evening News, have been on the air since the early 1970s. Together, they make up a CTV Atlantic news package that is consistently among the top watched programs in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, with approximately a quarter of a million viewers every night—not bad in a region with a population of 1.8 million.

Typically, the 6 p.m. news has finished higher, according to recent BBM Canada statistics, withLive at 5 right behind it. When the programs started out, they faced little challenge in their time slots, as few Atlantic Canada–based news or newsmagazine shows existed. Today, that’s no longer the case: both online and on television, there are more options providing local, national and international news, all threatening to steal audience share. Now the two programs—which have undergone few major format or personnel changes in the past 10 years—must decide how best to use their limited resources to adapt in the face of these new challengers.

It’s impossible to talk about how these shows became so popular with Atlantic Canadians without first talking about The Notebook. Hosted by Dave Wright in the late ’70s, it was the region’s first supper-hour magazine show and a precursor to Live at 5. Like today’s CTV Atlantic anchors, Wright was more than just a host. The Notebook covered stories influenced by his editorial decisions, including local news, celebrities and health. The charismatic host took the air at 5:30 p.m., and the show gained a huge following of viewers almost immediately. Most of them stuck around for The ATV Evening News (which later became CTV News at Six). While the 5:30 p.m. show bridged the gap between news and its effects on people’s daily lives, the 6 p.m. program focused firmly on news—local, national and international. People in the Maritimes probably grew up watching CTV Atlantic: it became a daily ritual to come home from work or school, turn on the television at 5 p.m. and see the same familiar faces.

Viewers have grown to know the long-standing personalities well, especially within the last decade. Wright hosted Live at 5 until 1986, when Steve Murphy took over. Since 1993, he’s hosted the News at Six, making him one of the longest running news anchors in Atlantic Canada. Other well-known personalities since ’93 include some of those that have, at one time or another, hosted or co-hosted Live at 5, such as Paul Mennier and Nancy Regan. ATV’s Bruce Graham and weather forecaster Laura Lee Langley also became familiar to viewers thanks to their nightly appearances as anchors.

But in the last few years, the playing field has grown crowded and Maritimers have more options on the dial. CBC now has suppertime programs, as do Global Television, EastLink and other television providers in Atlantic Canada. “There’s a reason why the car that’s in the lead has a rear view mirror,” says Steve Murphy. “You have to look at who’s in the rear window, and never lose sight of it.”

Yet, while CBC’s and Global’s suppertime programs are constantly reinventing themselves and tinkering with their formats, Live at 5 and CTV News at Six seem to operate according to the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Ask CTV Atlantic employees to identify any major format changes to either program and they’ll be hard-pressed to come up with anything other than the opening credits or the technology they use to put the shows together. “We’ve resisted the temptation to reinvent the wheel,” says Murphy, “Every season we put a new tire on it, but we’re not trying to reinvent it.”

This consistency just might be the key to the station’s success. “It’s not easy to dislodge people’s viewing habits,” says Don Dickson, a journalism instructor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Every year, many North American television networks spend millions to hire consulting firms to advise them on what they are doing wrong. This is not a new trend—when Live at 5 first started out, the show’s news director Dick Prat hired consultant Jacques DeSuze of the Washington, D.C. firm McHugh and Hoffman—but the problems facing the small Atlantic Canadian market have changed.

AR&D, one of the biggest American television news strategists, has worked with local broadcasters in Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. Jerry Gumbert, the company’s president and CEO, says the biggest challenge is that local television news is quickly becoming irrelevant, because of the “rule of scarcity,” which states that the rarer something is, the more value it has. Local news has historically been scarce. “In the ’70s and ’80s, and even into the early ’90s, if you wanted to know what happened in your community, your country and the world in which you lived, you had to watch a local evening newscast,” says Gumbert. Thanks to cable news and the internet, consumers now have more control. “The true reason that the industry is struggling today is the rule of scarcity no longer applies to its product.” And that’s led to cutbacks and layoffs. On March 3, 2009, CTV announced the cancellation of local morning shows and evening newscasts in Ottawa, Barrie, London and Victoria—and eliminated 118 positions.

Approximately a 15-minute drive away from the CTV Halifax studio is the headquarters of its biggest competition. Tom Murphy (no relation to his CTV counterpart) is the host of CBC News: Nova Scotia at 6, the flagship show in the station’s hour and a half block of programming, which starts at 5 p.m. The 6 p.m. show is only two years old, making it, relatively speaking, the new kid on the programming block. “There are lots of people who want to eat your lunch and you want to stay ahead,” says Murphy, who admits that various CBC format changes nationwide, including to Atlantic Canadian coverage, in the past 10 to 15 years, have caused confusion among the CBC Nova Scotia audience. And recent ratings show that the programs have a long way to go before they pose a serious challenge to CTV. CBC News: Nova Scotia at 6 finished 17th in the spring 2011 prime time ratings (BBM publishes a report on ratings and viewership numbers twice a year), with the 5 and 5:30 p.m. shows finishing even lower.

Meanwhile, back at CTV Atlantic, the staff have been working hard to make sure they don’t get lost in the 21st century social media and technology shuffle. In an effort to make the shows as accessible as possible, the station recently created its own interactive website to replace the previous static page and frequently uploads pictures and videos, including stories, interviews and popular Live at 5 segments, such as “Milestones” (viewers’ birthdays and anniversaries) and “Weather Watchers” (weather-related drawings submitted to the show by younger viewers). All the hosts have their own Facebook fan pages and post status updates about the show.

But is simply having a website and social media presence enough for CTV Atlantic to stay ahead of the pack? For one thing, CBC and Global have also expanded their online content and are taking advantage of social media. Sue Newhook believes that these developments have advantages and disadvantages. With more platforms come larger workloads for already stretched staff. “You’re asking people to do more with less,” says the journalism professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax. “It’s been a long time since anyone simply went home at six,” she says of staff’s increasing responsibility.

Another challenge the internet poses is competition for advertising. According to Gumbert, Google is now a significant advertising competitor in every market because local businesses have shifted ad dollars to the internet giant to advertise everything from barber shops to cleaning services to restaurants.

The three most common suggestions that AR&D makes to its clients are to air local news at different time periods, spend lots of time on investigative and in-depth reporting and make sure that  they have the right personalities and talent. That last one doesn’t seem to be a problem for CTV Atlantic—its hosts and reporters are respected and recognized in the communities they report in. Besides its flagship shows, CTV Atlantic also has a morning and afternoon show.

Being a package that covers the entire Maritimes, the CTV shows have always faced criticism over which province gets the most coverage and which gets the least. “People in Nova Scotia often think we do too much New Brunswick news, people that live in New Brunswick think we do too much Nova Scotia news, people that live in P.E.I. think somewhere in between,” says Dobson, who is also a Live at 5 producer. “That’s the nature of being a regional program.”

Whether or not the show’s brand of the news can be considered hard journalism is debatable. The purpose of the show has always been to explain how the stories reported on CTV News at Six are important to Maritimers. During the lead up to the 2011 Canadian federal election, CTV News at Six covered campaign events and the candidates, while Live at 5 looked at issues such as apathy among young voters. The 5 p.m. show focuses on the “magazine” side of newsmagazine.

As for its sister show, recent examples of investigative reporting are harder to find. Current or past hosts, reporters or staff are more likely to mention CTV’s breaking coverage in the show’s early and middle years: the failure of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990, the 1995 G7 summit in Halifax or the Swissair Flight 111 crash off Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, in 1998.

Steve Murphy—who has interviewed many noteworthy political figures in his long career—made news in 2008, after an unedited version of an interview he conducted with Stéphane Dion during the federal election campaign ran on CTV News at Six (and then across the country). The then Liberal Party leader had trouble understanding Murphy’s questions and asked to restart the interview several times. After the show aired the unedited interview, it received angry complaints from viewers who thought it unfair. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council found Murphy’s question confusing and reprimanded CTV for airing the uncut version.  But CTV management made it clear it felt Murphy was “unfairly criticized.”

At this year’s annual Atlantic Journalism Awards, the award for “Best TV News Broadcast” went to CBC News: Nova Scotia at 6, with the silver finalists being CBC News Compass (based in Charlottetown, P.E.I.) and Global Maritimes’s Global Evening News (based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia). While the 6 p.m. show’s current field reporters are competent, more competition has meant more shows are covering the same stories. Simply put, there are more fish in a small pond competing for suppertime news supremacy in Atlantic Canada.

Regardless, the CTV suppertime shows remain at the top of the ratings. Paul Mennier, a formerLive at 5 sports anchor and co-host who occasionally hosted CTV News at Six, likes to quote a line that was a favourite of Live at 5’s former senior producer Ian Morrison: “No one likes us except the people.” And for now, at least, that appears to be enough.

“I’m not a fat ninja,” declared Ezra Levant. “It’s just me, Ezra, wearing a niqab.” That was the beginning of a segment of his Sun News Network television show, The Source, last July. He was indeed dressed in a style of burqa worn by women throughout the Arab Peninsula and wore it to make a statement against what he later referred to as “gender apartheid.” The niqab, according to Levant, is “a symbol of the inequality of women in radical Islam.” He dubbed it a “body bag” and Iran, “a hell hole.” Crew members giggled audibly from behind the scenes, suggesting that this was more of a gag than a feminist call to action. Heatedly, Levant detailed the reasoning behind his discomfort toward the niqab and wondered why Canadian feminists, “the bra burners from the 1960s,” hadn’t rallied together in protest over it. With his voice slightly muzzled by the cloth, Levant made his position on the garment painfully clear: “I’m in a one-person prison.”

The segment combined all the qualities that define Sun News Network: stubbornly contrarian, outrageously flippant and lacking in nuance, qualities many Canadians find distasteful. Quebecor Media is betting that the rest can’t wait to tune in for more, but the danger is the channel may exacerbate the growing political polarization in this country.

Quebecor’s announcement that it would launch Sun News generated widespread derision and plenty of angst. Jeffrey Simpson of The Globe and Mail labeled the channel “Fox News North” early on, a comparison that has either plagued or propelled the network since even before its April 2011 launch—depending on who’s talking. An activist organization called Avaaz garnered over 80,000 signatures protesting the channel months before it had even rolled the first clip. Among those signatories was Margaret Atwood, who emailed the Globe to say that the very idea of an unabashedly right-leaning television network was “part of the ‘I make the rules around here,’ Harper-is-a-king thing.” Sun Media’s Ottawa bureau chief, David Akin, host of Sun News’s Daily Briefs, said he was disappointed that Atwood would join what he called an “anti-free speech movement.” But even conservative Tasha Kheiriddin, a member of theNational Post’s editorial board, wrote: “Sun TV really isn’t about Hard News and Straight Talk. It’s about Hot Chicks and Sexy Outfits.”

The tide of negative opinion has done nothing to temper the network’s tone and has perhaps even energized it. Sun News is calculated about doing the opposite of what other networks claim to take pride in, which is presenting the news as objectively as possible. Parent company Sun Media regards objectivity suspiciously, either simply as a force that turns every news story grey, bland and monotonous or as a cover for hidden (read: liberal) leanings. The company even withdrew its newspapers from the Ontario Press Council last July, citing incompatibility with the industry group’s “politically correct mentality.”

Antipathy to “political correctness” is the driving force at Sun News, the dark power against which the network heroically struggles—and its Death Star is undoubtedly Canada’s public broadcaster. “The CBC is exceedingly politically correct,” says Levant. “They have an official ‘line’ on everything from niqabs to the oil sands. That’s my chief criticism of the mainstream media in Canada: not that they’re liberal—though they generally are—but that they are so drearily uniform.” Beyond dull, CBC is a “billion-dollar Liberal campaign machine,” according to Levant. “Without a $1.1 billion a year subsidy like the CBC has, we just haven’t been able to afford hundreds and hundreds of middle managers to make our news as bland and politically correct as theirs.”

Quebecor wants to position Sun News as the polar opposite of what it sees as the CBC-Liberal Party establishment—right down to hiring Stephen Harper’s combative former communications director, Kory Teneycke, as vice-president in charge of the channel. That underdog posture—despite the backing of a multibillion dollar parent company, as well as political connections, informal or otherwise—is no coincidence. It’s how Fox News built its status as the number one cable news network in the United States. “Fox News North” is not an insult; it’s a mission statement.

I’m not in the business of deciding who my watchers and listeners should be,” says Luc Lavoie, head of development for Sun News and former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. “I’m in the business of offering a well-put-together product.” Lavoie, who maintains that he has no lingering connections to the Conservative Party, also points out that one of Sun News Network’s biggest media buys came from the Liberal Party during the last federal election campaign.

“Everyone was sounding the same,” he says of Canada’s media outlets prior to the launch of Sun News. “Everyone was pretending to be objective and reporting along the same lines. Everyone was in ‘do not disturb mode.’ We’re disturbing. We’re blue collar. We are provocative. And that’s what people were waiting for.”

Levant agrees. “Our news and views are circumscribed by a battalion of government regulations, including those enforced by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council,” he says. Of course, the CBSC is an industry organization, not a government one, but Levant is not about to let facts get in the way of a good rant. “Our government doesn’t trust us to listen to or watch as wide a variety of news as Americans are allowed.” Not without hope for a more Americanized style of reportage, Levant perks up when it comes to what the future holds. “Canada is slowly growing up out of its political correctness,” he says. “I think we’re slowly realizing that we’re not part of the European politically correct censorship model; we’re more in sync with the United States first amendment model.”

Though Sun has no formal affiliation with Fox News (in fact, it has a foreign footage agreement with CNN), the American network’s attitude, style and strategy are obvious inspirations. South of the border, Fox has bullied its way to the top of the cable news heap with a potent combination of slick production values, shrill headline-grabbing personalities and reactionary populism. By cannily exploiting—and exacerbating—the country’s deepening political divides, Fox has appointed itself a political rainmaker.

Sun News may have arrived at an opportune time to do the same for Canadian politics, where the middle ground is also eroding. With the Liberals in disarray following the 2011 federal election, the Conservatives sitting on a solid majority and the rise of the NDP to official opposition, Canadians increasingly have to choose between left and right. Sun News is here to capitalize.

Early opposition to Sun News contained a paradox: some critics decried the existence of the network while othersasserted no one would watch it anyway. This is Canada, after all—we’re not supposed to go for this sort of thing. Early ratings were, indeed, laughably low. Last summer, Quebecor announced it would not apply to renew Sun’s over-the-air broadcast licence, apparently content to live in the triple-digit Siberia of the specialty cable channels instead.

A Category 2 status designates the network as a broadcaster of “analysis and interpretation,” as opposed to a Category 1, which broadcasts news. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t watching. In fact, Sun is celebrating ratings that should make its competitors sweat: one month after its launch, figures from independent ratings agency BBM showed that Sun News’s prime time slots were attracting an average nightly audience of 18,900 in their first month. According to Lavoie, ratings are climbing even though he says Sun News reaches half the viewers of its competition. “It looks like there was a window in the market that was waiting for something.”

Kim Lian Khoo was waiting. “All TV channels in Canada up to this point have been Liberal-minded or socialist-biased in their views,” says the retired teacher from Fournier, Ontario, who watches Sun regularly. “This could be the legacy left behind by years of the Liberal government. There are so many issues which most mainstream media will not touch….”

She is not alone. “Unlike the regular Canadian mainstream media news channels, Sun TV pushes aside political correctness and reports on issues as they really are,” insists Orlin Olsen, a retired railroad worker living in Winnipeg, in what might as well be a spontaneous ad for the network. “I believe they look at the issues of the day through the eyes of ordinary Canadians rather than those of the liberal-left academic elites who seem to call the shots in our country. Ordinary Canadians appreciate their honesty and candour.”

Arguing about the definition of bias is nothing new. “At the core of the debates about affirmation journalism and outlets like Sun TV is the question of whom journalism should serve, and how,” says Candis Callison, an assistant journalism professor at the University of British Columbia. “When opinion masquerades as fact, it can be very dangerous.”

For Sun News, concerns about objectivity or political correctness come second to “Grreeeat TV,” which is what Canada Live host Krista Erickson promised viewers before she began an infamous interview with Margie Gillis last summer. The dancer and choreographer sat alone in a Montreal studio last June to do a satellite interview. The show’s producers had told Gillis the discussion would be about the value of funding the arts. When the interview began, however, Erickson, who’d spent 11 years as a CBC reporter before joining Sun, interrogated Gillis with questions about how much government funding she’d received during her 39-year career and why she felt any arts community was deserving of government money at all. Swirling her arms around to mimic the style of modern dance Gillis performs, Erickson didn’t mince words: “Why does this cost $1.2 million over 13 years?”

The interview quickly melted down. Gillis responded, repeatedly, that she thought Sun News’s statistics were inaccurate and that Canadian dance deserves funding. At one point, as the two women spoke over each other, Gillis piped up as the voice of reason. “I’m your guest,” she reminded Erickson. “Perhaps you might let me speak.”

The segment resulted in more than 6,600 citizen complaints against Sun News filed with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. It typically receives 2,000 per year.

Such stunts have become Sun’s stock-in-trade. In June, Levant invited an animal rights activist from PETA onto his show to discuss the ethical treatment of zoo animals and then proceeded to eat chicken wings throughout the interview. Such gimmicks follow in the tradition of Glenn Beck, the former Fox host who once poured pretend-gasoline on the head of a guest because he felt “disenfranchised” by Barack Obama. “Most people do not consume news,” says Levant. “So anything that makes the news more entertaining is probably helpful. I do not regard myself as being in the ‘strictly news’ business. I am not a reporter. I’m in the opinion business, which is more suitable for humour and entertainment.”

Because the Sun personalities on prime time don’t consider themselves reporters, that allows them to do and say whatever they want. By not making claims about being fair and balanced, Sun News doesn’t have to make any promises it can’t keep. (When he was at Fox, Glenn Beck preferred the term “opinion guy.”) But doesn’t the blurry line between fact and opinion threaten to misinform viewers, who tune in for news but get commentary instead? “If that were the case,” says Levant, “We would all be drinking New Coke and driving Edsels and we would have voted for the Charlottetown Accord. People are skeptical and they’re smarter than most journalists give them credit for.”

Canada already has news networks and publications whose mandates champion objectivity. It wouldn’t have been in Quebecor’s financial interest to start another, nor would it help polarize Canadian politics and bury the Liberals. So where most networks proclaim fairness and balance, Sun News promises “Hard News and Straight Talk.”

And when its reporters—ahem, commentators and analysts—talk about what exactly this means, they repeat the following like a mantra: “Unbiased reporting is a myth.” Mike Strobel, former editor-in-chief of the Toronto Sun who is now a columnist at the paper and a regular on Sun News, doesn’t hesitate to defend the channel’s overt biases and redirects any pointed fingers in the direction of CBC: “Their claims to objectivity mask the fact that a lot of CBC journalists tend to be kind of left-wing. Biases tend to be more subtle, whereas Sun News, to its credit, is in your face.”

The matter of discerning bias in reporting is a fertile topic, but let’s not forget the fact that Sun’s flagship news anchor is calling Iran “a hell hole” on prime time television. That’s something new in Canadian broadcasting, and while the academics ponder the ethics of “fairness” and “balance,” Sun News Network is barging ahead, ignoring its prudish critics and accumulating viewers in the process. And if anyone doesn’t like it, Lavoie has a simple suggestion: “Switch to another channel.”

Many people will, of course, just as many Americans despise Fox News. Sun doesn’t need to lead in the ratings to have an effect on other channels, on political parties and on the tenor of Canadian political culture. The culture of news reporting in America today is different because of competitive pressures from Fox. With Sun going after the CBC, and the Conservatives holding a majority government, the conversation will surely shift on every channel. Ripples emanating from that outpost in cable Siberia show the signs of things to come.

Paul Watson wends his rented car along the picturesque Alaska Highway. Past Carcross, he keeps heading south on a road that hugs a towering mountain to the right with blue snow-capped mountains across a grey lake to the left. The rain gently pitter-patters and the windshield wipers do not change their slow, steady pace. Country music plays on the FM radio.

Watson is on his way to Faro, four-and-a-half hours north of Whitehorse. After spending four days in Yukon’s Peel River Watershed, working on a story for the Toronto Star, the Arctic-Aboriginal correspondent wants to make an extra trip to an old mining town where a reclamation project will cost taxpayers an estimated $700 million. He hopes the visit will give him a good ending to his piece about the battle to protect one of Canada’s last pristine wildernesses in the face of rampant mineral exploration.

When we pass a “Now Entering British Columbia” sign, he remains unfazed. But after another half hour, he realizes he’s going the wrong way. He turns the navy Kia Sorento around on a gravel shoulder used for taking pictures.

“Here’s Carcross and here’s Whitehorse and here’s Faro,” I say as I trace my finger on the glossy yellow tourist map. “So we could have just gone…Carmacks!”

“Oh, Carmacks! Carmacks.”

“That’s over here.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah.”

“So we’re not even close.”

“No, we just went the opposite way.”

“OK,” he says nonchalantly. “So where’s Carmacks?” The yellow-green lit clock on the dashboard says 10:30 a.m. We’ve been driving two-and-a-half hours the wrong way.

“Sorry,” he says. “See, I told ya, I always get lost. This is why I need a GPS.”

While no sense of direction may be a curse for others, some of Watson’s best stories come from getting lost. And it’s this wandering and losing his way that he wants to apply to his work in the North, a place where southern Canadian journalists face a lot of criticism. By wandering, Watson hopes to find stories that aren’t preconceived; to understand the place rather than sensationalize or trivialize it—even if those stories don’t always create the buzz that editors crave. Using Vancouver as a base, Watson heads north for about six weeks at a time to do a story or hang out.

That’s a luxury that makes him the envy of many southern journalists, who usually report on the North by phone. The Canadian Press, the Edmonton Journal and Global TV have all closed their Yellowknife bureaus. The Globe and Mail—which in 1984 killed its northern column that was predominantly about Yukon—recently ran an in-depth Nunavut series, but it doesn’t have a reporter stationed in the North full time.

Watson admits he has a long way to go, though. He started the Arctic-Aboriginal beat three years ago, but also covers Afghanistan, so he must divide his time between two corners of the world. Typically, southern coverage of the North, a place that is a big part of Canada’s national identity, falls into two extremes that sell: the quaint or the negative. But because this is a vast territory with many different, complex people and issues, many northerners feel that southern Canadians have a skewed perspective of their life and their land. And with the region on the rise politically and economically, understanding the North is more critical than ever.

Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are home to 111,200 people, just 0.32 percent of Canada’s population. But depending on who’s talking, the borders of the North sink below territorial boundaries to include the northern parts of many provinces, such as northern Quebec, or extend into the international circumpolar region. Indeed, some see it as a way of life more than a geographical designation. Martha Flaherty, former president of the national Inuit women’s association Pauktuutit, who now translates films into Inuktitut at the National Film Board of Canada, believes that while access to the North is greater than ever, there still isn’t enough media interest. She’s the granddaughter of Robert Flaherty, whose 1922 filmNanook of the North follows an Inuk man and his family as they hunt for seal and walrus and build igloos on the sea ice (see sidebar page 34). That movie continues to “represent and misrepresent Inuit” and “northerness” to southern audiences even today, wrote Valerie Alia in her 1999 book Un/Covering the North: News, Media and Aboriginal People.

But the mythologizing began even earlier. An 1899 National Geographic piece about explorer Robert Peary’s quest to conquer the North Pole reported: “The hand-to-hand battle against the opposing forces of darkness, frost and distance which Peary waged during the entire winter makes a chapter daring and effective as any recorded in Arctic history.” Much more has been written since, of course, but colonial attitudes are hard to shake. Journalists parachute in for a few days, usually for a special event. “People joke about it: if you go in for a day you get an article, if you go in for a week you get a book,” says Alia, adding many reporters “don’t pay as much serious attention to the humans there as to the landscape and the resources and a kind of romance with the North.”

In downtown Whitehorse, they joke about the way southern papers cover the North. “They don’t,” is the common line. Others aren’t amused. “I think that they make us sound too remote, almost like we’re so far North that we’re out of reach,” says Yukoner Greta Thorlakson as she walks down Main Street. “Just because we aren’t a province doesn’t mean that a lot of what goes on down south doesn’t happen here too.” A recent poll commissioned by Yellowknife-based magazine Up Here had editors concluding Canadians have a Grade 1 level knowledge of the North. Canadians roared with laughter at Rick Mercer’s “Talking to Americans,” which inspired the poll, but Up Here’s senior editor Katharine Sandiford says when the ignorance is about our own country, “it’s a lot less funny.”

Hoping to change that, Watson sent Toronto Star managing editor Joe Hall a proposal titled “The New Frontier: A Multimedia Arctic-Aboriginal Beat” in 2009. It outlined the veteran correspondent’s idea to cover the North as a foreign bureau, not just restricted to Canada, but including the circumpolar region because this would add more context to the issues the people there face. Watson wrote the proposal from Jakarta, Indonesia; he was working as Southeast Asia bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times but his editor wanted to turn him into a freelancer to save money, Watson emailed Hall about coming back to Canada. To Watson, a journalist who’d made his name at the Star as a foreign correspondent, the decision made sense. Within a few days, he sent his pitch, which came as a shock to Hall because it was so out of left field for a reporter who’d spent much of his career overseas. At the time, the Star’s northern coverage was, like other outlets’, usually done by telephone and occasional visits. But Hall was intrigued. It didn’t hurt that the proposal came from Watson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1993 photo of the dead body of a U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after the downing of his Black Hawk helicopter.

Today, he’s in downtown Whitehorse looking for a history book on the Peel watershed. He finds the Globe in the basement of Mac’s Fireweed Books and taps the newspaper on the counter twice. An article on the front page is about the assassination of the mayor of Kandahar. His Afghan fixer had emailed him about it while he was in the Peel, but he couldn’t write the story from Yukon. He can’t get Afghanistan off his mind; after all, he’s covered it since 1996 and, with Canadian troops and reporters leaving the country, he believes reporting on it is more important than ever. Still, Watson says the North is exactly where he wants to be, especially since he’s drawn to places where other journalists don’t usually go.

Darrell Greer, editor of the region’s Kivalliq News, was one of the few photographers who caught Governor General Michaëlle Jean eating raw seal heart when she visited Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, in 2009. Southern news outlets offered Greer as much money as he makes in a week for his photos, but he was pretty sure he knew how they would use them, so he turned down the cash and now says, “Go through all the stories of that period and try to find one that will tell you why the Governor General came to Nunavut to begin with.”

CP photographer Sean Kilpatrick was one of the other photographers in Rankin that day. His news wire’s lead read: “On the first day of her trip to the Arctic, Michaëlle Jean gutted a freshly slaughtered seal, pulled out its raw heart, and ate it.” Other articles quoted animal rights groups calling her actions “revolting” or “Neanderthal.” The narrow spotlight doesn’t do justice to a complex place with its own traditions and culture, though CP’s Alex Panetta did add that Jean made a forceful pitch for federal money to create a university in the North. Perhaps the headline on Up Here’s online article put it best: “Michaëlle Jean Eats Raw Seal Meat, World Goes Nuts.”

Coverage varies from reporter to reporter, but Kent Driscoll, Nunavut bureau reporter for Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), says the most frustrating misunderstandings happen when journalists come in packs to cover big stories such as a prime minister’s visit. He’s seen Iqaluit’s name spelled with an extra “u,” which changes the meaning of the city from “the place of fish” to “unwiped buttocks.” In a pack, journalists tend to all pick up on the same story, without worrying about context. During the conference of G7 finance ministers in 2009, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., a group that looks after Inuit land claims, offered workshops about Inuit culture and perspectives. Driscoll says no southern journalists showed up, and in order to see more than the backs of other reporters’ heads on the tour bus, southerners should come alone more often and when there isn’t a big story.

Researching ahead of time also helps. When Bob Weber headed up to the Northwest Territories to cover an election in 1997, he discovered there were no political parties, in the southern sense, with decision-making leaders at the helm. His whole plan fell apart because he didn’t know that the territorial government operates by majority consensus. The Edmonton-based reporter, who does most of CP’s Arctic coverage, has since built a formidable list of contacts and a knowledge of the North that impresses many of the people who live there.

Yet, he admits stories written from a desk tend to be more institutional because they rely on the government, police and land claims groups that have the resources to get their information to journalists. But when they travel, reporters can get the stories that nobody’s packaged and go beyond cute and fluffy or big issues such as poverty, addiction and crime. Weber is proudest of his stories that have come out of being there.

But that’s expensive. The Star devotes about $150,000, excluding salary, to post Watson there, a cost comparable to the Star’s foreign bureaus, which range from $100,000 to $150,000, without salary—but it’s four to five times more expensive than other national bureaus. Ed Struzik of the Edmonton Journal, who has been reporting on the North for over 30 years, says his newspaper sent him up at least once or twice a year, but now doesn’t have the budget to send him at all. Since the bureau closed, he pays his own way to the eastern Arctic to research and write books in and about the North. His editors give him time off and, in exchange, he usually files a few stories from each trip. Given the cost, he has some sympathy for his bosses. “I can understand the trepidation of editors when they look at a bill of, say, $5,000 or $10,000 to do a story and then wonder what the fallout will be when the story is just okay instead of spectacular.”

In the fall of 2010, a spate of gun violence in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, prompted the entire RCMP detachment to take stress leave. The story caught the eye of the Globe’s Patrick White, who’d covered the territory when he was the paper’s Winnipeg bureau chief. It had the makings of an intriguing story: an artist’s colony unraveling was “symptomatic of a territory unhinged,” he later concluded. National editor Sinclair Stewart thought so too and, much to White’s surprise, sent the reporter and photographer Peter Power up North for two weeks. “I imagined just doing it from my desk in Toronto,” says White with a laugh. After all, that’s how southern journalists usually cover the region.

At more than 7,200 words, his April 2011 article looked at how Nunavut was doing 12 years after its launch. With a violent crime rate seven times the national average and a homicide rate 10 times that of the rest of the country, White concluded, “The bold experiment in domestic nation-building Canada launched in 1999 has gone deeply wrong.” Being there gave him stories such as the man who lived in one small house with 15 others. Remembering his conversation with the man, White explains, “He offered his own personal diagnosis for what was wrong, not only with his family being in such an overcrowded house, but for all of Nunavut.”

On the first Saturday of April, the Globe’s front page showed Leo Nangmalik looking off into the distance. In White’s piece, the man talked about the abuses he suffered in residential schools, his time in jail and his attempted suicide. But the story ends on a hopeful note with his words: “What I have told you…I have never been able to tell. I feel a peace right now. Maybe this is what we need, this talking.” Later the same day, though, White’s BlackBerry pinged: Nangmalik had committed suicide. The reporter alerted Stewart and Power and within an hour Stewart posted an editor’s note on the paper’s site. White soon learned that the source, who’d become more than that, was facing the prospect of going back to jail for a charge from his past drug dealings. He killed himself a few days before the article ran.

Even without the suicide, the piece was controversial. Greer dismisses it as a typical southern take on the North. He has no problem with White broaching uncomfortable topics, but says an outsider wouldn’t understand much of the context about territorial development. “It’d be nice once in a while to see a tip of the hat from southern media as to what we’re accomplishing and not always beating us down.” Meanwhile, Health Minister Tagak Curley delivered an angry speech in the Nunavut Legislature. He was outraged that the series had suggested “there is no hope” in his territory and that “the leaders have their face under the snow and they’re not willing to admit it.”

White, who is currently the Globe’s Toronto City Hall reporter, counters that Nunavut’s social issues were something that hadn’t been thoroughly covered by the media and “to just dismiss that outlet as being overly negative is a pretty easy way to ignore what that outlet has reported on.” And Jim Bell, editor of Nunatsiaq News, a paper based in Iqaluit, believes the story was accurate and says Canadians have a right to journalism that explores the reasons the territory is in trouble, considering the amount of money the federal government has invested in Nunavut. “You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know there’s a problem.”

Jimmy Johnny, a Na-Cho Nyak Dun First Nation elder, chats with Watson outside the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society office in downtown Whitehorse. As he puts a Player’s cigarette to his lips, he whips around and points to a tan-coloured chipmunk as it scurries across the fence. Watson smiles knowingly: their time together in the Peel provided plenty of evidence of Johnny’s ability to recognize wildlife that Watson couldn’t even identify with his telephoto lens. Days spent hiking and talking around the campfire helped Watson know more about Johnny’s life and how decisions on the Peel will ultimately affect him and others. Southern Canadians may romanticize the northern wilderness and believe it is unlimited, but it’s disappearing.

In his story on the Peel, Watson devoted just as much space to Johnny as to environmental scientist David Suzuki, who was also in Whitehorse. That’s uncommon; “I often hear up North: how come we never got to be part of these stories?” says Mary Simon, president of national Inuit organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. “We are the experts of the North.” The story appeared in the Saturday and Sunday editions of the Star in late August. The first part, “A Majestic Yukon Where Humans Are Still Outsiders,” ran on A1 with a photo. Watson began the story with a spiritual tone because he thought it was the best way to connect his audience to such a remote place. He ended Sunday’s story, which ran on A8, with his visit to Faro and gave the mining industry one paragraph. Faro is, he suggested, a cautionary tale for those making decisions about the Peel. Johnny liked the story: “His writing is a lot different from other people.”

Others are more critical. Valerie Alia notes how few aboriginal voices were actually in the series. About the first story, adds: “The headline implies that old-style portrayal of ‘unpeopled wilderness.’” Of course, Watson isn’t the first writer to have his best intentions ruined by a headline writer.

Although he has many ideas for his beat, Watson admits he hasn’t come close to what he wants to do with it. He is experimenting, trying to figure the place out, acquainting himself with people, which often means leaving the paper, pen and camera in the hotel. But the wandering pays off. When University of Guelph researcher Tristan Pearce met Watson in the coffee shop of the Arctic Char Inn in Ulukhaktok during white-out conditions, he was the first southern Canadian reporter Pearce can remember seeing in the hamlet on the west coast of Victoria Island, let alone one who stayed a while. And Watson found a story. But instead of focusing on Pearce, who has been studying the impact of climate change on the community since 2003, “Victoria Island: Where Warming Means Danger” looked at the issue from the perspective of Jerry Akoaksion and Jack Akhiatak, two local hunters who took the reporter on the ice with their sled dogs.

Watson wants to earn people’s trust, which takes time, before tackling hard-hitting stories, though he thinks his High Arctic exiles series in 2009 came close. The three pieces were about how the federal government moved Inuit 2,000 kilometres north from the southern Arctic to the High Arctic during the Cold War, essentially leaving them to fend for themselves. Although other reporters have covered the issue, this part of Canada’s history is not yet in the public consciousness. Watson envisioned a landing page for the Star site that teachers could use in classrooms, but that never materialized. Indeed, as of November, Watson had produced just nine videos and hadn’t taken advantage of the web nearly as much as he and his editors wanted.

It takes time to build a bureau, and progress on this one has been slowed because Watson splits his time between the North and Afghanistan. (And this fall, Watson’s title changed from Arctic-Aboriginal correspondent to foreign affairs columnist, which will mean a portion of his time will be spent in the circumpolar region—and, therefore, the Arctic—but he’ll also be dividing his time between even more countries across the globe.) Still, Flaherty, who was only five when her family relocated to Grise Fiord and who went back with Watson to tell her story, was impressed with him. “We go through a lot of pain. We go through a lot of problems, but we also have a lot of beauty and people don’t see that when they don’t go up there,” she says. “He’s seen the beauty of it.”

“The Toronto Star Discovers the ‘Arctic’” was the sarcastic head Nunatsiaq editor Jim Bell wrote on his personal blog when Watson started his beat. He thought Watson did a good job on his first story about researchers aboard the Louis St. Laurent, a coast guard icebreaker, but it wasn’t really news since the project had been announced a couple of years earlier. And the display didn’t impress Bell. Phrases such as “the planet’s new frontier,” a place where “nations rush to stake their claims” and where “Ottawa aggressively fights back to protect our land,” had him laughing: “The Star’s dim-witted copy editors pack in more clichés per pixel than I ever thought possible.”

But Bell believes that southern media coverage has improved in recent years due to a core group of reporters who report on the North more frequently and have a better understanding of the region. In addition, APTN and CTV have an informal copy sharing agreement. AndNunatsiaq News entered into a similar arrangement with Postmedia, after the former Canwest papers wanted a story about a murder trial in Iqaluit. No money changes hands; the copy just gets credited to the organization and author. But the southern outlets save money and get better northern stories, while the northern outlets get access to more southern stories.

Although Bell says an Arctic beat is a good idea, he sees little evidence of the Star really having such a beat. After all, Watson lives in Vancouver for family reasons and says if he lived in the North, he would no longer be able to relate to what his southern audience would find new. “You have to have more than the idea,” says Bell, who argues that a reporter who splits his time between Afghanistan and Canada doesn’t do much to make the newspaper look serious about covering the region. And although Sandiford believes Watson has become the trusted voice for his reporting, she says the fact that no major southern newspaper has a correspondent in the North full time “baffles me.” From his hotel room in Kabul, Watson says, “Ideally, I should be there all the time. As a compromise position doing it as much as I can when I’m not here or somewhere else is better than where we were before.” And Alia says all reporters juggle different topics: “It’s how you go if you go and how seriously you take it.”

Former Star national editor Tim Harper hopes the paper continues to take it seriously, but admits, “We often jump on a hobby horse for a while and then tire of it and move on to some other area that is underreported.” And Watson’s beat took some explaining to a newsroom operating in a “southern” style. “Every so often one of my many masters in Toronto would say, ‘Where’s Paul? We haven’t seen Paul lately. What’s he got?’ There seemed to be a misunderstanding sometimes that he could hop on a plane and file something by three o’clock.”

Watson says he won’t give up on the Arctic-Aboriginal beat, in part because he realizes how easy it would be to not cover the region. “No one’s going to notice, no one’s going to wail and say, ‘How dare you not cover Canada’s North?’” But northerners would notice.

In 2010, he stands among a crowd of kids who play with faded yellow soccer balls in a school gym on a Friday night in Ulukhaktok, N.W.T. They wait for Ghanaian-born Isaac Ayiku, an economist and soccer player, to arrive and teach them the sport. The Vancouver Olympics are underway and Ayiku is coming to make sure this northern community of about 400 people isn’t left out of the Olympic fever transfixing the South. A plump boy with a round face notices the outsider and boldly walks up to him. He looks up at Watson, his chin no higher than the journalist’s waist and blurts, “What’s your name and when are you leaving?”

Watson bursts into laughter and the boy is gone before he can answer, but the kid’s simple view of the world was the most genuine thing anyone had said to the journalist since he had started the beat. That moment crystallized the attitude northerners have for southerners. “All they ever see is outsiders who pass through, get what they need, take it and leave.”

Five years ago, three Yukon News reporters held a meeting tosee who would cover which political party on election night. Genesee Keevil, who had been at the News for two years, drew the right-of-centre Yukon Party. It wasn’t the short straw. She wanted the assignment, as did others. When she arrived at the conference room of Whitehorse’s High Country Inn, it was calm and almost empty. But as more people showed up, things changed. While party supporters watched the favourable results come in, some yelled and harassed the reporter. Someone suggested she should be shot; another was surprised her editor, who had written an editorial calling on voters to reject the Yukon Party, was still alive. A woman followed her around, interrupted her interviews and grabbed her by the arm. Another ushered potential interview subjects away from her. A man asked the crowd, “Who is the loneliest person in the room?” while waving a beer bottle through the air. Others joined in the mockery. Another person told her to go home.

She stayed. And the next day, she wrote a news story about the election, which the Yukon Party won. Then, after lots of thought and debate, editor Richard Mostyn and an apprehensive Keevil decided to tell the rest of the story. She was reluctant, she says, because she believes it isn’t a journalist’s job to put herself into stories. Mostyn says now: “She did not want to get into any of the nonsense that happened that night. She wanted to be bigger. I admire her immensely.” In a “situational” (a first-person article based on the writer’s experiences) titled “Good Thing They Didn’t Lose,” she wrote: “For three hours I’d been yelled at, heckled, shoved and sprayed with spit. They’d tried to intimidate me, and delivered their threats.” The revelations generated a flood of letters and calls critical of the Yukon Party, and forced an apology from then-Premier Dennis Fentie.

Much of the election night outrage was over Mostyn’s editorial, but it was no fluke that Keevil was the reporter at the centre of it. She’s made plenty of enemies and sold lots of papers while working at the News. She writes stories on troubling topics such as mental health, homelessness and addiction that other reporters don’t bother with, don’t have time for or don’t want to touch. She has also faced criticism for not doing her homework or for writing one-sided stories. But she continues to uncover uneasy truths, regardless of the consequences. Balancing hard-nosed, big-city journalism with a small-town sense of community is difficult and it’s no surprise that everyone in town has an opinion about her, but Keevil’s work stands as an example of how the North should cover the North: fearlessly.

Until she was seven, Keevil lived without electricity or running water on a farm just outside Powassan, near North Bay, Ontario. After high school, she studied philosophy and literature at McGill University in Montreal. Later, she mushed dogs full time in Finland and played in what she calls “a cartoon punk band” (they wore crazy costumes, space helmets with stars on them and capes) in Taiwan. Then, as a wilderness guide, she led 40-day Ontario canoe trips. After spending a few years drifting between Ontario and British Columbia, Keevil headed to Whitehorse to work as a wilderness guide, which meant leading canoe trips in the summer, mushing dogs in the winter and starting a dog team of her own. Her team consisted mostly of rescued sled dogs that mushers planned to kill. The 35-year-old, who is tall with long reddish-brown hair, now lives off the Alaska Highway at a place called Squatters’ Row, a small neighbourhood fighting to separate from the city. One of her 19 sled dogs has no eyes, so it can’t run with the team in public events such as the Quest 300, the first leg of the Yukon Quest, a 1,000 mile race from Whitehorse to Fairbanks, Alaska, but he practises with the rest of the team.

Yukon’s population boomed during the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1800s, but today there are only about 27,000 people in Whitehorse and 35,000 in the entire territory. It is a place where people get to know each other. However, a small population in an area roughly the size of Texas can make it hard for journalists to understand and report on what happens in the smaller communities. Many towns struggle with political corruption, homelessness, substance abuse and environmental degradation by mining companies, but each is different.

Whitehorse has two English papers: The Whitehorse Star and the Yukon News. The Star comes out Monday to Friday, with a circulation of 2,400. The News comes out just twice a week and sells 6,300 copies on Wednesdays and 8,400 on Fridays. The city also has a cbc North station and two independent radio stations, as well as a bi-weekly arts magazine called What’s Up Yukon. Jim Butler, who has worked at the Star for 30 years, is the long-time editor of the 111-year-old publication. “We try to be a paper of record,” he says. Sitting in his crowded office, surrounded by books, papers and clippings, he says the News has a talented staff and has earned a reputation for breaking big, uncomfortable stories. One 2003 sensational scoop, for example, revealed Fentie’s past as a heroin dealer. The News dug up old Edmonton Journalarticles to reveal police had charged him with two counts of trafficking heroin in the 1970s. After serving 17 months in a federal penitentiary, he was released and received a federal pardon, sealing his records from public inspection. “You’ve got to give them credit,” Butler says of his competitor. “It was a major achievement.”

When Mostyn started working at the News in the late ’80s, he and his colleagues wanted to treat Whitehorse as the capital city it is—not a small town. But it took a while for the community to grow accustomed to an upfront reporting style that didn’t hold back. Showing photos of accident victims or following the money trail, for instance, didn’t sit well with the community. Sometimes 450 complaint calls would light up the switchboard on Friday afternoons. Publisher Stephen Robertson stood by his staff and the anger eventually subsided. But people still complained about the paper—particularly its fiery editorials—when Keevil waltzed into the newsroom in 2003. She asked to write a story. And though her only journalism experience was writing monthly youth columns for her local paper and editing her high school paper, Peter Lesniak, the editor at the time, tossed her an assignment. Mostyn, who would become editor in 2005, witnessed her “crazy raw talent.” She freelanced before getting on full time, and soon enough, Keevil discovered she had a knack for getting information out of people.

Chris Ouellet had been selling drugs out of his house for 20 years. People in Whitehorse knew who he was, but no journalist had interviewed him. So Keevil repeatedly knocked on the door of his house in the shade of the clay cliffs in the older part of downtown. She didn’t tell anyone—not even Mostyn—because she was worried he wouldn’t want her to do it alone. Day after day, the voice inside the house told her to go away. Then, after several months, someone told her to enter and she let herself in. Ouellet was lying on a bed, fully clothed, in a room with drawn curtains. In her flip-flops, Keevil stepped around the used needles that littered the floor, sat down and started talking to Ouellet, making sure he wasn’t totally out of it. He told her about everything, from his childhood to how he became so successful in drug dealing. Then she called a photographer at the office and said, “Don’t tell anyone. I’m at 810 Wheeler.”

After the News published “Making Tracks at 810 Wheeler,” in which Ouellet boasted of how much money he made (up to $4,000 a day) and how he’d done cocaine with RCMP officers, readers reacted immediately. Many people wrote emotional letters to the editor claiming Keevil had glorified a dealer and angry parents made sure not to leave the paper on the coffee table. An out-of-uniform cop confronted her at the News and told her to stop what she was doing with the Ouellet story. (She wasn’t intimidated. “I towered over him,” she says, smiling.) But a few readers argued it was a story that needed to be told. Some even wrote to Keevil personally. And the Canadian Community Newspaper Association, which represents 700 English-language papers, considered it the best Canadian feature written in its circulation class in 2007.

Keevil gets most of her story ideas by talking to people. When someone told her about 70-year-old Mabel Peterson, who lived down by the clay cliffs under a tattered and damp tent, she went to find her. Peterson had lost everything, including her residential school settlement from the federal government, but after her story ran, she reunited with her family. In November 2010, Keevil wrote a story called “Into the Wild, Downtown Whitehorse” about a 51-year-old man named Allen Kempel, who came to Yukon with his dog Bandit. He wanted to live off the land and ended up living near the clay cliffs in an old school bus, with seven puppies, hunting for firewood in the winter. Keevil wrote: “The job search is tougher because Kempel smells like his bus—creosote, tanned leather and a little bit like puppy.”

Along with these human-interest pieces, Keevil continued tackling controversial issues. Often, she interviewed inmates of the Whitehorse Correctional Centre (WCC) for stories, but when the guards told her to interview them for their point of view, the communications department wouldn’t let her. She remembers a media relations person making a snide remark about her reporting being biased in favour of the inmates. “They’re the ones that shut it down and then say it’s biased,” Keevil says. “It’s ridiculous.” The WCC eventually introduced a media policy that made landing interviews harder for all journalists. (The inmates admire her work, though: a week after she wrote about them not having a dentist, they had one.) But the reporters who occasionally go for drinks with Keevil at the Roadhouse or the Gold Rush on Fridays weren’t happy with the policy change.

PR flacks aren’t the only ones who seldom speak with Keevil on the record. Some sources panic when they hear it’s her and hang up. She keeps trying anyway. “I’ll call them and be like, ‘Hi, it’s Genesee again’ and they’ll freak out,” she says. But other sources ask specifically for her and she hears from ex-government employees who no longer have to deal with gag orders and call to say, “I know you’ve been calling me.” And there are still those who call just to yell at her. It’s become a bit of a joke in the newsroom.

A number of Keevil’s stories involve young people. Angels Nest is a small youth centre named after a 19-year-old whose remains were found in the woods in a case, that was classified as a “suspicious death,” but remains unsolved. At the centre, a friendly tabby named Pandora jumps from sofa to sofa, looking for affection, while homeless teenagers make dinner, their art displayed on the brightly painted walls. The kids who hang out at Angels Nest have not had easy lives. Samantha Sam is one of them. Keevil wrote that she spent time in a government-run group home called 16 Klondike, was raped at age 11, started using crack at 13 and almost bit her tongue in half after taking 14 hits of ecstasy (Sam, who was 17 at the time, clarifies that she took 8 or 9 hits). Keevil’s story read, “While kids her age were in Grade 8 learning algebra and reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sam was graduating from crack, and taking ecstasy as an elective.” Sam, now 20, who has kept the story in a scrapbook, says Keevil’s lead made her laugh because it rang so true: “The smell of toast makes Samantha Sam sad.” But Sam was also taken aback by the article. “It was all political,” she says. “I sat back and thought, ‘Oh, my goodness.’” Sam was surprised to see her personal story used to illustrate the failings of the territorial government, but wanted to be open about her past, because so many people aren’t.

Angels Nest founder Vicki Durrant ran for the Yukon Party and was one of the few people who spoke kindly to Keevil on election night. She trusted her and stood by during the interview with Sam. She believes “Of Abandoned Children and Abandoned Reports” was a positive story, but admits it generated a lot of censure, anger and hurt feelings from government employees and some of the young people who lived at 16 Klondike. It called attention to an ignored territorial report on the living conditions in all group homes, including 16 Klondike. “I think the wonderful thing about Genesee is that she does bring the youth to the surface,” says Durrant, who has worked with high-risk kids for over 13 years and believes Whitehorse residents live with their heads in the sand. “People don’t want to talk about sexual abuse, people don’t want to talk about the fact that young girls are prostituting themselves, people don’t want to hear about this stuff.”

Keevil also looked into problems at a youth detox shelter. Since the emergency centre at Alcohol and Drug Services opened in early 2008, only 34 people had used it and just four had slept there at the time Keevil’s article ran in August 2011. Even though the shelter is empty most nights, it had two full-time employees who earn wages totalling $150,000 in 2010. According to Keevil’s story, “An Empty Youth Shelter Tug of War,” the problem is staff members search the kids when they arrive and then send them home early the next morning. People who advocate against this shelter consider it a waste of money and say that these youth need more than one night to deal with their problems.

That story included government sources because it was a rare example of public servants being allowed to speak to her on the record—and it took years of trying. Most of the time, though, communications departments remain uncooperative. “It’s really frustrating,” Keevil says. “It undermines your credibility a little bit.” But Katharine Sandiford, senior editor at Up Heremagazine, who works out of Whitehorse, says sometimes Keevil doesn’t give the government enough time to respond. “There’s always a message to her stories, whether they are balanced or not.”

Keevil knows some of her stories can look biased, but says she tries to get as many sides as she can. Eventually some people may talk, but only after a long time or after they quit their jobs. So she writes, sources refuse comment, she continues without their side and the cycle continues. In an effort to get out of that rut, she met with an RCMP sergeant to improve their working relationship and open the lines of communication.

Competitors aren’t impressed, though. “She isn’t afraid of criticizing the powers that be, but I do find it frustrating to read any work based on a single source,” says Justine Davidson, who until recently was a Star reporter. Davidson offers no specific examples, but Keevil’s 2008 series, “Jailed Without a Cause,” seems to fit the bill. She interviewed Veronica Germaine, a troubled WCC inmate, arguing correctional centre staff had detained the woman for two years after she’d been found not criminally responsible for her crimes due to mental disorders. Germaine, who remained in jail because there was no halfway house for women or a secure psychiatric hospital in the territory, felt she wasn’t getting the treatment she needed. Keevil consulted court documents and three government officials for the series, but many major sources declined to comment and Germaine was clearly the focus of the piece. “We’re not allowed to run a story without contacting both sides. That’s our policy,” Keevil says. “But the government often won’t comment, so it seems like I have one source.” Still, one-sided stories make for compassionate characters, and Davidson argues, “It’s a lot easier to read a really sympathetic story.”

Indeed, the series won silver in the investigative journalism category of the B.C.-Yukon Community Newspaper Association Awards. “From an outside perspective, from people who do not live in this community, who just read those 800 or 900 words, they look like pieces of really great advocacy journalism and probably sometimes that’s well deserved,” says Davidson. But reporting in a small town can be fraught. “You have to be careful because you live in the community. You’re not in Toronto. You’re not in New York City. You live with 25,000 other people and can’t go around pissing on their doorsteps.”

Meanwhile, Harry Kern, a Whitehorse photographer and Yukon Quest board member, says he’s wary of talking to reporters after an experience with Keevil. After running into her, he let it slip that a prominent board member was resigning and was shocked to see the information printed in the News. “I’m no longer a virgin anymore when it comes to media,” he laughs. “It was a sort of involuntary deflowering.”

After she wrote stories about the lack of regulation for taxis and how young women were exchanging sex for rides, a group of cab drivers gathered outside the News office and then went inside to look for her. She could hear them from her desk as they stood at the top of the stairs talking to the advertising staff. When her colleagues told them she wasn’t in, the drivers asked, “Well, when is he coming back?” Keevil, unfazed, sat at her desk. Although she’s used to people being angry with her, she was amused that they thought she was a man.

But for those who know who she is, Keevil is easy to spot. She is a colourful dresser. When folks do recognize her on the street, they either give her tips or avoid conversation altogether. Others won’t allow the News into their homes because of its stories. “I try to shake people out of their passivity,” she admits. She certainly has: she’s received two death threats.

Still, she has her fans. Durrant, for one, asks, “Can you imagine if Whitehorse didn’t have a Genesee?” Meanwhile, Sandiford praises Keevil for finding “those pretty buried stories” and points out that some of her pieces have spurred the government to make needed changes to policies and bylaws.

And there were days when Davidson opened the News and thought, “Damn, we don’t have that.”

After midnight, the Dawson City bar that Yukoners call the Pit fills up and the daylight briefly comes in each time the door opens. Patrons slow dance despite the mostly fast-paced rockabilly. Keevil, in a long and dramatic pink wig and thrift store prom dress, stands at the edge of the stage, left hand wrapped around her upright bass. The only woman in her four-person band, Sasquatch Prom Date, she dedicates a song to all the trailer park wives with too much hairspray. She later plays “I Shot Your Dog,” a cover of a Fred Eaglesmith classic, but its title could easily describe another Keevil story that created a stir: A Dawson man shot his badly neglected dogs in protest after the municipality said he couldn’t keep them. After Keevil wrote about it in 2006, the man sued the News for libel, but the case still hasn’t gone to court.

Working in Yukon means there’s certainly no shortage of colourful people for her to write about, and that’s one reason she has no interest in moving on to bigger papers, as many journalists who work in Whitehorse are so eager to do. After eight years, she’s been around longer than most other reporters and she knows the politics, the issues and the small town allegiances. And nobody denies that she is talented—not even the people who yelled at her on election night. Keevil, who is working on a master’s degree in human security and peace building, has written freelance articles for The Globe and Mail and the Financial Post and wants to explore long-form magazine writing, but she says she’s staying put for now.

Storytelling is important to her—“I try to draw people in, in a way that keeps people reading,” she says—but mostly, she takes satisfaction in improving people’s lives by holding those in power to account. She believes journalism is a vehicle for legitimate change in a community, especially a small one. And she knows she’s making a difference: The night “Making Tracks at 810 Wheeler” ran, Keevil walked into the historic Taku bar on Main Street—and received a standing ovation. “It was another one of those small town moments,” she says. “That wouldn’t have happened in Toronto.”