Walking into the Cottage Life offices—located in a repurposed house in downtown Toronto—you are immediately greeted by two large Muskoka chairs. Sitting in these chairs encourages you to lounge back, relax and take in all of the products surrounding you. Everything from Cottage Lifesweaters, towels and baseball hats to cottage-themed chess sets, decks of cards and beer bottle holders are sprinkled around the bookshelves and tables in the reception area. As you make your way up the stairs to Al Zikovitz’s office, the area around you transforms from rustic cottage to corporate office, complete with cubicles and computers. Zikovitz, president and chief executive officer of Cottage Life Inc., which will soon be launching a digital-TV specialty channel, is seated behind a large desk, with a small balcony behind him overlooking the backyard of the office. He laughs when he discovers that, once again, the office coffee machine has been left with less than a mug of hot coffee. It isn’t the first time he’s started his day off with the dregs from the carafe. The office is nice, far from any special cottage decor, but Zikovitz looks relaxed and ready to talk business aboutCottage Life’s digital presence, and how the brand began with the magazine.

It’s 1985 and Zikovitz, his wife and three children have just bought a cottage in Haliburton, Ont. It’s an unfinished place that needs some work, but it has a great view of the lake, and the dream of resting and relaxing on the dock seems close at hand. The only issue: this family has never owned a cottage, and had rarely visited one. At around the same time, Zikovitz leaves his sales job at Telemedia (since gobbled up by TC Media) and realizes he has unexpectedly come across a golden opportunity. For years he had wanted to publish his own magazine, and now he had discovered an untapped market. “I come from a blue-collar family,” he says, thinking back. “My father was a carpenter, I used to work as a carpenter, and I look around and I see so many cottagers are white-collar people. They’re professionals. They don’t even know how to use a hammer and yet they want to do their own stuff around the cottage, and I thought, ‘I know more than them and I have a million questions.’”

So Zikovitz and his wife, Wendela Roberts, “sat at the cottage through all of 1987 coming up with an idea for a magazine. We came up with story ideas that would last us for five years. I wrote a business plan, went out and raised money and in 1988 we came out with our first two issues.” The concept was a magazine that would serve cottagers and those in the market to buy a cottage. Zikovitz knew he didn’t want, as he describes, “a fancy coffee table magazine full of pretty pictures.” He wanted something every cottager would need. It would be a resource for all things cottaging, from repair tips to how to decorate.

From the beginning, Zikovitz wanted Cottage Life to be more than just a print magazine—he wanted to own the cottage market. “I don’t look at us as being just publishers. I think we’re marketers of the cottage product,” he says. This is what sparked the company’s decision to enter media outside of print early on. Penny Caldwell, editor of Cottage Life, says: “Getting into other platforms was just sort of a normal part of the growth of this company. If there’s another way that we can serve cottagers and get them information in a way that they can absorb it, then that’s great for them and good for us.” The company expanded into various platforms—first to a consumer show and a radio show, then to books and a TV series, followed by halting steps into the digital era, when Zikovitz once again found himself with a million questions. And in the years since, like all publishers trying to build an online presence, he still has lots of questions but finally has a few answers.

Back in the mid-1990s, people were saying to Zikovitz, “You’ve got to go into digital. Everybody’s doing it.” But, as a businessman, he was concerned with how to make money if he did. “The easiest thing in the world is to give stuff away for free,” he says. “How do you pay for it? We have to remember that we pay writers. We pay photographers. We pay illustrators. And the reason we pay is because we can make money on it. We have advertisers who will give us money, we have subscribers who will give us money, and that money pays [writers like] you. If I give your information away free, I can’t pay you.”

Looking back at those early days, Terry Sellwood, chief operating offi cer of Cottage Life Inc., recalls that when the magazine finally launched a website in 1998, it was “pretty anemic; basically, it was a brand statement” featuring several cottage-esque images in the top-right corner, such as a loon, a bear, a Muskoka chair on a dock, all of which changed depending on the page being viewed. Tabs at the top included links to pages about the magazine, consumer show, books and videos, merchandise and advertising. Within these pages were small blurbs about the magazine and its various extensions, complete with what appears to be family photos scattered around the length of the page, plus, for the most digitally advanced feature, a loon that occasionally opened its mouth. However, Sellwood notes, the digital didn’t need to be any more complicated than that in the early days.

Cottage Life quickly discovered what every publisher expanding to the web learns: there is no one right way of developing a digital presence. A lot depends on what the brand’s target audience is looking for and what devices they want to use to connect with that content. As Sellwood explains, “We’re very sensitive to the way people feel about their cottage. It’s a deep connection. It’s a deep feeling. It’s about family, and so whatever we offer has to fit into that mentality.”

Between 2008 and 2009, Cottage Life decided it was time to give its digital presence a boost “because we could see the audience was growing,” Sellwood says. “Then it made more sense. It’s a chicken-and-the-egg thing—in order to get a bigger audience, then you need to produce more content…” The question then became how the publication could make digital work better for the brand. Nancy Parker, circulation manager for Cottage Life, says: “I think for publishers it’s almost like the blind leading the blind because everybody is just testing right now. Nobody really knows what kind of results to expect, no one really knows what kind of fees to charge.”

As the digital platform grew to include new extensions, such as social media and smartphone applications, Parker says the company asked itself: “Do we really need to be on all the platforms?” The answer is yes. “Whether you can justify it financially right now, probably not; but I think you have to be there and I think that things will change as they emerge and it will become financially viable for us.”

The expansion into online for Cottage Life has been slow, and this may be partially attributed to its audience, who are older—mostly 40 and up—and not as savvy online, says Sue Haas, digital director of Cottage Life. As well, Sellwood points out, “a great part of cottaging, traditionally, is getting away from it all… [There] is a whole group of people who just want to get away and leave that all behind—you know, like put their iPhone in a plastic bag at the bottom of the lake for the weekend.” Even so, when a user comes online, they’re not worth the same financial return annually as a print reader. “If you’re lucky, you’re getting $8 or $10 a year per user on a website… In traditional media, you’re looking at $100,” Sellwood explains.

It’s no secret that making online profitable is difficult and ever-changing, but Cottage Lifehas begun to explore ways to monetize its digital offerings. For instance, the magazine recently launched two Cottage Life e-books and is looking to launch four more before the end of 2012. The e-books are comprised of back-issue content, and titles include:Winter Cottages: How to enjoy your cottage all year round and Cottage Trees & Plants: Keeping your forest healthy. Each costs $2.99. “The concept is you take a bunch of your back-issue articles and bundle them into a book,” Haas says, “so maybe we do a book on cottage weddings. There’s limitless options because you have all of the back-issue content at your disposal.” The uptake and profit on the e-books has been slow to start, she adds, explaining that “part of it is we aren’t marketing it as well as we could be for various reasons, but I am hoping to do a marketing push around the holiday season.”Cottage Life has currently slated two e-books—Cottage Bugs: A practical problem solver and Green Cottaging: How to preserve the cottage environment—for release in December 2012.

With new devices come opportunities for special features and capabilities. Though Cottage Life currently has a digital edition that can be viewed on a variety of devices, it is not interactive. Like many Canadian magazines, the company originally opted to use a PDF replica of the print edition. No extra features, no extra content. These editions are available through Zinio via an app that allows users to purchase single copies and subscriptions. In an effort to attract more readers, Cottage Life is now available on the Apple newsstand and through Google Play. Other magazines, such as House & Home, have recently created media-rich interactive editions that allow users to tap, swipe and play. Interactive digital editions are attractive to Cottage Life, but this type of media-rich content requires more time and work by the staff, so the question becomes: How will this be cost effective? Cottage Lifewill most likely charge extra for this offering, says Parker, though a final price has not yet been determined. “I think if we’re going to be giving the consumer added video and even being able to archive different things within issues… If we can do stuff like that then I think it’s worth more to the consumer.”

For its first interactive digital edition, Cottage Life is creating a special interest publication because “it was a good way to have a first test run without a long-term commitment of doing every issue…it was less of a risk,” says Haas. If the edition doesn’t get enough attention or positive feedback, it wouldn’t need to be repeated; but if it is a major success, then it could be. The publication is slated to come out in late 2013.

Cottage Life’s online department has also been busily exploring the social media world. Twitter isn’t a great tool for the magazine because “it’s more of the real-time updates. It’s very newsy, it’s more opinionated… Facebook is more community-driven. It’s just a better fit with our demographic,” says Haas. Stuart Berman, online editor of The Grid, uses an analogy to explain Twitter: “In the old days, people would come to your newspaper box and take your magazine with them. Now you have to throw the paper at their front door…that’s what Twitter is.” This is exactly what Cottage Life doesn’t want to do. It’s more complicated because of the connection people have with their cottages and with the magazine, Sellwood explains. “It’s sensitive, and I think you have to have a light touch. This is not an approach where you can beat someone over the head and always be reminding them that you’re there.” However, Facebook has provided a forum for Cottage Life’s audience to connect with the magazine and other readers in a much more casual way. It has proven to be an amazing tool for running contests, which can drive traffic back to the Cottage Life website, though they’ve discovered it’s not a great tool for gaining subscriptions.

Another tool Cottage Life has been experimenting with is Pinterest, which allows users to “pin” images gathered from the web onto digital pinboards. Cottage Life has had some success with Pinterest because it is well-suited to its content. Photos and videos of cottages can be quite beautiful, as well as inspirational, to those looking to revamp their space or those who do not own cottages, but are still interested in looking at them. In fact, says Haas, the tool has “skyrocketed to one of our top 10 referrals [to the website] every month, so we’ve decided to put more effort into Pinterest than Twitter.”

In order to be able to keep up and continue to produce online content and new digital offerings, there needs to be a strong team in place. The Cottage Life digital team consists of four members—a major boost since the early days when the website was considered a part-time job for one person.

Growing this team was by no means easy. The first challenge: attracting talent “to a company that isn’t a digital-first company. It’s a problem for magazines and media in general… If you want to be in digital then you probably want to go work for Google. Who doesn’t want to work for Google? And Cottage Life has a certain attraction, but again there’s a print bias,” says Sellwood.

So if the digital talent isn’t attracted to Cottage Life, what are the options? The company has had some success in training traditional “print” people and finding new talent for the digital team. But this brings us to challenge No. 2: funding. Haas says it hasn’t been easy “for publishers such as ourselves to ramp up existing staff or bring people on—especially when the revenue isn’t there yet for digital. So how do you have the right team in place when you’re not having high expectations for revenue? So it’s a challenge.”

But what they have accomplished is a long way from that early Cottage Life website with its loon. Today, the only similarity is the row of tabs at the top linking to pages about the consumer show and the magazine, but even these have been updated. As soon as the website loads, you’ll see icons for all of the various social media platforms Cottage Life has expanded into, including Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. A carousel of images runs on a loop in the middle of the page, with pictures such as a wood organization unit, a husky, dried fruit bars and mugs of hot chocolate with melting marshmallows. The website also encourages user interactivity with a special Q & A box and an option to leave your questions with an expert.

As you scroll down the page, your eye is drawn to several links to the most recent and popular stories of the day, such as “top apps for cottagers,” “creative ways to use a mason jar” and “how to make your woodstove more efficient.” But perhaps one of the most noticeable changes is the advertisements sprinkled around the website, including top and bottom banner ads.

All of which prompts Zikovitz to say, “Digital was always a challenge. I think we’ve figured it all out now… We spent a lot of money on our web site, advertising was increasing, but generally speaking, advertising in websites is not increasing. A lot of the money that has been pulled out of magazines and that advertisers have pulled out of magazines has gone to digital. But a lot of that has been absorbed by people like Google. So there’s less money for us, [but] we still need to produce a good quality product on less money,” he says.

Zikovitz explains that the company’s profit margins are now much smaller than they were before. “You have to try to get them back if you want to survive. I think the success to survive is to continue to give good quality, to deliver [a] good quality product to your readers, to cottagers; product that is credible, a product that your readers can trust in, that your readers will continue to go to for good, valuable information. I think it’s all going to come out in the wash as time goes on, and people will start to  learn where to go for credible information rather than just any information.”

He adds, going back to his roots: “I think the magazine is still the heart and soul of it all.”

Few shoppers here are in a hurry. It’s a hot, late-August afternoon, and Carrot Common is dappled with shade. Two young women sit outside with organic takeout boxes, their feet sporting charity-chic Toms shoes. To their left, a bulletin board advertises holistic nutritionists and alternative health therapies. To their right, a juice bar churns out murky green detox smoothies and blood-red beet juice. At the back of this eat-well oasis, nestled in the heart of Toronto’s Greektown, is the city’s iconic ultra-healthy grocery store, The Big Carrot. Inside is a new world of food: the carrots are purple, the tea is fermented, and the aisles are stocked with bags of hemp hearts.

On most days, the store buzzes like a swarm of contented bees alighting on their favourite organic agave nectar. The shoppers are diverse: some Lululemon-clad patrons head straight for the dulse granules. Other miracle-food seekers meander the aisles, pausing to identify things like edible bits of “sprouted ancient grains”: a box of kamut, wheat, adzuki, lentil and fenugreek squiggles.

After 10 years of working at the The Big Carrot, store nutritionist Cathy Hayashi is used to buyers’ uncertainty. From noon till 8 p.m., Monday through Thursday, she stands by the entrance, offering new customers guided tours or directions to the latest much-hyped superfood. The media plays a large part in such popularity cycles, Hayashi says. “If Dr. Oz says something,” she explains, “for weeks on end we’ll be hearing about whatever was highlighted by the show.”

Big Carrot shoppers aren’t the only ones lured into stores by the media’s never-ending stream of “breakthrough” reports on healthier eating. In 2008, almost two-thirds of Canadians said they consulted newspapers and magazines for health-related facts—making print media one of the four most-used sources for such information (along with doctors, other health professionals and family/friends), according to non-profit research group Canadian Council on Learning. Surely, some stories deserve that trust; many others do not. And, as ridiculous as certain super-cure stories can be, this on-trend reporting also has the potential to do great harm. “It’s absolutely wrong and irresponsible,” says Toronto dietitian and TV/print journalist Leslie Beck, “to make people think that if they eat blueberries every day, they’re going to reduce their risk of heart disease.”

The health and wellness beat, after all, deals with serious stuff—from diet and exercise regimens to illness treatment and when to see a doctor. All this, as Beck says, requires a particularly careful and balanced approach to providing the tips readers crave. Instead, in many ways health reporting has come to mimic tabloid entertainment: stories on nutrition, fitness and lifestyle are ubiquitous and hard to sift through, which makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction. The result is a cycle of (often inaccurate) “bad for you” and “next big thing” stories that risk discrediting the entire health beat. On top of that, in place of real health help, readers and viewers are left following a potentially harmful “Media Diet” based on miracle cures, fad diets, superfoods and food scares.

In February 2012, cardio-thoracic surgeon and television personality Dr. Oz introduced another superfood, just in time for Valentine’s Day. “I’ve got the number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. It’s raspberry ketone,” Dr. Oz began solemnly, fixing TV viewers with a soul-searching stare. He had finally found it: the miracle cure for women who will do anything—anything!—to lose weight. During the segment, guest expert Lisa Lynn (a specialist in metabolic disorders and personal training) provided this vague prescription: “Try 100 milligrams at breakfast,” she said, “and if that doesn’t work, go to 200, try it again at lunch.”

Last April, the Toronto Star ran the story under the headline “Weight loss ‘miracle’ supplement: Dr. Oz extols virtues of raspberry ketone.” The Globe and Mail followed with greater skepticism in June: “Is this supplement a weight-loss miracle?”

Beck hadn’t even heard of raspberry ketone until Dr. Oz pushed it into the headlines. Sitting in her glamorous North York office (a mixture of luxe boutique and spa, lined with books and health products), she throws up her manicured hands at the mere mention of ketones: “I just knocked that to shreds on CTV!”

The method behind the miracle fat cure seems sound. According to Dr. Oz, raspberry ketone regulates adiponectin (which “sounds like a big word,” he added), a protein used by the body to regulate metabolism. Lynn’s recommended daily dose of 100 mg of concentrated ketone (the equivalent amount in 90 pounds of fresh fruit) purported to break up the fat contained in the body’s cells, allowing it to be metabolized more efficiently. There is only one problem, as Beck mentions: “Raspberry ketone has never, ever been tested or studied in humans.”

One of the few raspberry ketone studies involved two groups of mice, which were fed the same high-fat diet. One group received a supplement of raspberry ketone, and these rodents gained slightly less weight than expected. The results are significantly less impressive than the word “miracle” implies. With the endorsement of media darling Dr. Oz, however, these results helped prove the basis for the next miracle cure.

Besides the limited scope of the study, there are other important caveats to consider, such as the amount of ketone the mice were forced to consume each day: a minimum of 0.5 per cent of their total body weight. By comparison, Lynn’s recommended dose of 100 mg would amount to a miniscule 0.0001 per cent of the total body weight of a 75-kilogram woman.

Ketones weren’t the only magic bullets fired in recent years. In June 2011, we heard “A yogurt a day may keep heart disease away” from The Globe and Mail; in August 2012, it was “Goji berries pack an antioxidant punch,” according to CBC News; and in April 2012,The Gazette featured quinoa: “‘The mother grain’ is really a tiny, nutrient-packed seed.” The list of such articles goes on and on. Of course, some of these headlining foods are likely very good for us—but the danger lies in telling the two apart when sensational stories and credible scientific studies are presented on the same platform: our magazines and newspapers. “I don’t know if this whole superfood thing will really ever go away. People want a food to keep them healthy forever,” says Beck. “That’s why that story sells.”

The Superfood club has its VIPs: margarine, chocolate, red wine, coffee and eggs—just to name a few foods under constant scrutiny. When journalists aren’t telling consumers why these foods will kill them, they are busy extolling their virtues. Much of this can be blamed on the bad habit of headline-plucking—emphasizing one small element of a study, without context, as the basis of a story or attention-grabbing headline. Take, for instance, an August 2012 Toronto Sun story about egg yolks, with this fear-inducing headline: “Egg yolks almost as unhealthy as cigarettes: Study.”

The social media backlash was enormous, with egg eaters’ ire directed at both scientists and journalists. “Please ‘NO MORE STUDIES,’” wrote one aggravated online reader, dubbed Slappybeaver. “I am tired of everything being bad for us, then it is good for us, then another study says it is bad. I don’t care anymore I will do whatever I feel like doing.”

The next day, The National Post ran a story tracking the ups and downs of egg coverage over the years: In November 2008, Harvard Medical School research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, linked a daily egg habit to early deaths. In the same issue, former American Heart Association president Robert Eckel issued a response to the study, stating that eggs were a neutral (neither healthy nor unhealthy) food. In January 2009, University of Alberta scientists discovered that certain proteins in eggs are similar to medications for high blood pressure. Yet, in September 2011, egg-yolk consumption was linked to an increased risk of dying from prostate cancer. Then, in November 2011, the University of Cambridge released a study suggesting that egg whites were a better source of energy than jam.

The Toronto Sun story comparing eggs to cigarettes is based on a study by University of Western Ontario scientists J. David Spence and David Jenkins, titled “Egg Yolk Consumption and Carotid Plaque.” Judged by title alone, the study would be less than exciting to the general population. From a sell perspective, though, everything changes once egg-yolk consumption is compared to the dangers of smoking. As Medical Post clinical editor Terry Murray says, “It’s got a ready-made headline because of the cigarette connection.”

The researchers analyzed data from 1,262 older individuals. Information was divided into three categories: plaque buildup by age, plaque buildup in smokers by “pack-years of smoking” (defined as packs smoked per day multiplied by years smoked) and plaque buildup in egg-yolk eaters by “eggyolk years” (the number of yolks consumed per week multiplied by the number of years consumed). They found that plaque buildup increased linearly with age, but exponentially along egg-yolk years or pack-years. By isolating the correlation between egg-yolk years and plaque buildup, the researchers concluded that egg-yolk consumption was detrimental—meaning egg yolks do accelerate carotid plaque buildup over time, and people at risk of heart disease should avoid them—but also that the connection merited further research, not a nationwide exodus from the egg aisle. The article also stated that some key factors weren’t taken into consideration, such as exercise and waist-to-hip ratio. Despite the researchers’ acknowledgement of the study’s limitations, the media focused on the sensational sell. “[Publishers] want something provocative on page one,” says Murray. “We are not the most angelic, pure of heart, motivated by the desire, solely, to make people’s lives better. We also want to say, ‘Hey, look: I’ve got a good story here, and a million people read it.’”

But will people keep reading it? For all those who read the egg story—and the hundreds of other roller-coaster stories—arguably just as many ignored any useful information the study provided on the effects of eating eggs because they, like Slappybeaver, dismissed the news as another scare story. Like so many other health fad articles, the egg story made headlines for a few short days, then vanished forever.

Even the most routine health reporting is often like a game of broken telephone. The communication of research from scientist to journalist to reader is what reporter Julia Belluz refers to as “knowledge translation”—and there are many places where it can go wrong, even when journalists, editors and publishers aren’t trying to find the sell. Belluz is the writer of the blog Science-ish, a joint project of Maclean’s, The Medical Post, and the McMaster Health Forum. Science-ish functions as a bridge between health research and reporting. In doing so, it challenges the sensationalist headlines that so often make the paper, and holds journalists, policy makers and opinion leaders accountable for their roles in the public’s perception of health reporting. Since the blog launched in the summer of 2011, it has been examining where journalists go wrong. “[We’re] looking at studies that are reported in the media,” says Belluz, “how they are reported, how we end up with the crazy headlines we have, when we get things wrong.”

Part of the trouble comes from the way scientists and journalists communicate about each “breakthrough.” The ups and downs of studies, for instance, often simply reflect science’s pursuit of new discoveries (though they may alarm magazine readers with a newly toxic tub of margarine lurking in their fridges). The answers you might be getting in a study one day aren’t the final answers, says Belluz. The conclusions are really situated within a larger body of research. Unfortunately, many readers are looking for the quick fix—and they don’t want to be told exercise and sensible eating are the best way to get fit, or that there is no easy answer. As Beck says, the real question when it comes to giving sound advice is “How do you make that sexy?”

Belluz isn’t so sure it can be done. “They’re not things that you can buy, so we [media] overcomplicate,” she says. “We’ve overcomplicated all of this messaging about health to the point that people are just genuinely confused about what the best thing to do is.”

Megan Griffith-Greene, in charge of fact-checking at Chatelaine from 2007 to 2010, agrees. While at the magazine, she set out to restructure the way health stories were researched and reported in an effort to avoid the roller-coaster effect of superfoods that heal one minute and harm the next. She says that even in 50- to 150-word health briefs, factual infractions can add up and contribute to a culture where the public no longer trusts the media when it comes to health research.

“I found it very humbling at Chatelaine because you’re reaching millions of Canadians, and millions of Canadians will trust you and will change their lives because of what they read,” she adds. “The potential harm you can do with inappropriate information is very great at mass publications, at women’s publications.”

Like Belluz, Griffith-Greene blames much of the harm factor on a disconnect between journalists and academics. She says many journalists often rely on press releases about studies instead of reading the actual scientific research. For this reason, the guidelines Griffith-Greene set up required that writers read the full study and contact the lead researcher to check that the  magazine brief captured the methodology and conclusion of the research. “There was an appreciation to take the time to ensure we got it right,” says Griffith-Greene. “Academics love to talk about their research. They love to have their research get picked up in print.”

Griffith-Greene cautions that a conversation between researcher and reporter isn’t the cure-all. Statistical illiteracy is rampant in all beat reporting, but especially in health stories, where journalists are presented with figure-heavy abstracts and expected to interpret the results. In other words, just because journalist and scientist are talking to each other, it doesn’t mean they understand each other. “I wish journalism schools would provide, or require, a course on the fundamental reading of statistics,” says Griffith-Greene. “We think that it’s simple math…but statistics can often be really misleading, especially when it comes to things like disease burden, incidence levels, treatment efficacy…”

Belluz puts it another way: “Lifestyle magazines are tough…the stuff that’s peddled to [readers] is total pseudoscience—it’s insanity.” But it doesn’t have to be.

The first organized push to get journalists and researchers talking to each other began with Frankenfood. Starting in 1999, sensationalism swept through the British media. The scare story of the year focused on what’s officially known as genetically modified (GM) food. These crops were designed to be more nutritious, more disease-resistant and better-tasting than their non-modified cousins. A great hope for these super-plants was that they would put an end to world hunger. Instead, GM foods were vilified by the British press and ultimately banned from being grown in the U.K. Scientists, politicians and public figures complained about the unbalanced coverage, insisting that the media was slowing the progress of a powerful disease-fighting tool in the name of a good scare.

Following the GM food coverage, along with similar horror stories about mad cow disease and a supposed correlation between autism and MMR vaccines (immunization against measles, mumps and rubella), the House of Lords decided to examine the state of science and society in Great Britain. One of the resulting recommendations was to set up a new initiative to support and encourage scientists to engage more effectively with science journalists, and vice versa. In 2002, this initiative culminated in the Science Media Centre (SMC).

“The SMC facilitated a much more proactive culture,” says Fiona Fox, SMC’s chief executive. For starters, the centre encouraged scientists to get involved, whether it was making themselves available for interviews or breaking down their research for  journalists to ensure no facts were lost in translation. The idea is to prevent situations like the Frankenfoods fiasco from ever happening again. Fox believes that through the centre, the public can say yes—or no—to new science after an informed debate, and after receiving accurate scientific information from journalists and the SMC’s database of experts. “We will never know how that GM debate would have gone if the best plant scientists in the country…had taken up the opportunity of interviews.”

To get accurate information out to readers, the SMC functions as a middle ground between scientists and journalists. The centre sifts through journals and press releases and flags the stories the media will most likely be interested in—often the ones that arrive at either a cure for or cause of cancer, according to Fox. Researchers then examine the scientific paper and provide journalists with made-for-print feedback on the study, red-flagging issues that the writers may not notice, such as human conclusions being drawn from a study conducted on mice, inadequate sample sizes, or conflicts with the overwhelming evidence of previous studies. They deliver this analysis to the writers and their editors to help them make a more informed decision about the value and significance of the story. SMC researchers will also provide a quote that journalists can insert into the story, should they so choose.

Although Fox agrees that some stories obviously deserve front-page coverage, she says that the big message, really, is: “Science journalists, tell your editor: do not splash this on the front page. This is a lovely study, but it should be on page 15, and preferably copy and paste the quotes we sent you, which are very nicely written, very clear, very accessible, and put them in the article.” She adds, “And every single day that happens in the SMC.”

Health and science communities around the globe have taken notice of the SMC’s success. To date, there are similar centres in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, and plans for new centres in other countries, including the United States.

The Science Media Centre of Canada (SMCC) began to take shape in 2008, the result of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation’s desire to promote a “culture of innovation.” The centre opened its doors two years later, using the British SMC as a model.

SMCC executive director Penny Park, who helped create the Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet, was particularly enthusiastic about joining the centre. She recognized journalists’ desire to cover science stories — as well as their hesitation to delve into the complicated reporting this involved. While Park was at Daily Planet, this hesitation was a recurring theme at meetings she attended with other journalists from several programs owned by CTV. At these meetings, Park and her colleagues would discuss the lineup for the next top stories. Time and time again, stories about climate change, health and technology were brought up, but many were ultimately, reluctantly, dismissed. “I was going ‘Oh my gosh, there’s so much science!’” she says. “I could see that they wanted to do more science but didn’t have the resources. They wanted to cover [science] in more depth.”

Canadians trust scientists, but need to understand what the challenges are for journalists, says Park. Similarly, scientists and journalists needed to come together to forge a network of communication and understanding. She believes that the SMCC champions this cause. Through the centre, science journalists are able to read studies early under publication embargo and engage scientists about their research. Scientists, meanwhile, are exposed to the culture of journalism and situations they don’t encounter in the lab, like the boiling point of an editor or the unstable pressure of an imminent print deadline. The aim is to make scientists start thinking about their research in a way that gets them to communicate it effectively, says Park.

The SMCC takes a multi-faceted approach to providing resources for both journalists and academics. Like the original SMC, the Canadian centre releases studies under embargo to allow journalists time to speak with experts, provides highlights of the latest  findings, and matches writers with researchers. While the SMCC is dedicated to helping all science journalists, it may also serve as a particularly useful tool for the underappreciated general assignment reporters who are often handed health stories.

Park and her colleagues plan on going into newsrooms to conduct boot camps on how these reporters should approach studies and identify the key risks, statistics and weaknesses of the research. They will also teach journalists to avoid sensationalizing one finding in a study. “[We] fine-tune their bullshit detectors, basically,” says Park.

Boot camps and courses for scientists are already taking place at universities. The media awareness skills taught at these sessions are intended to facilitate communication between scientists and journalists, minimizing the possibility of embarrassing mistakes in their stories. On the flip side, the SMCC plans to offer a formal Science 101 course to journalists to teach them basic scientific literacy.

The health beat is sick, but courses like these, watchdog blogs and the efforts of individual editors to improve the credibility of their health coverage will lead to more balanced reporting.

“We really do hope this attitude that says ‘we love a good scare story’ disappears,” says Fox. “We are [not] asking the media to write boringly. There’s enough. There’s enough ‘exciting’ happening in science for there to be hundreds of front pages on science stories—but just written accurately.”

It’s May 2012, and I’m visiting my grandparents in Karachi, Pakistan. Though it’s spring, the city has been hit with a heat wave. Luckily, there haven’t been any power outages in the past few hours; my hair is off my neck in a loose bun at the top of my head, and I can feel the light breeze from a ceiling fan. Still, my thin cotton clothes stick to my skin. My mother and I are seated with my grandparents at the dining room table that has served my family for four decades. It’s covered in a blue batik cloth, stained with age but freshly starched.

My grandmother calls in a boy in his late teens to clear our plates and bring the dessert. It’s his first day working at my grandparents’ house, and as he walks to the wooden cabinet cluttered with antique dishes to retrieve ice cream bowls, a memory comes to mind from a time when I was nine years old. I was being taught how to play cricket in the front yard by a different boy, Shahbaz, who worked for my grandparents at the time. I ask my grandmother what happened to him, while serving myself some of my grandfather’s homemade vanilla ice cream. It takes her a few moments to place the name, but then she remembers and tells me, bluntly, that he had slept with the girl who worked in the house across the street and gotten her pregnant. Shahbaz skipped town without saying goodbye, and the girl was swiftly taken to have a secret abortion. My mother and I stare at my grandmother in shock. In Pakistan, premarital sex is a crime punishable by prison time, and abortions are illegal, except to save a woman’s life. I ask why the neighbours didn’t send the girl home after she had been abandoned, so that she could make a decision about the pregnancy with her family. My grandmother says that was out of the question, as it would have ruined the girl’s reputation and, consequently, her family’s honour. “If the neighbours had sent her back to her village unmarried and pregnant,” she says, “who knows what her family would have done with her.”

Though my family is originally from Pakistan—where, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, almost 1,000 women were victims of honour killings in 2011, the highest rate in the world—I’ve never lived there. I was born in New York and raised in the States until I was 14 years old. We moved from California to Dubai, and since relocating to the United Arab Emirates, I’ve made regular trips to Karachi. In 2009, I started studying journalism in Canada, a country that, in recent years, has also seen honour-based crimes—crimes that take place due to the view that women must remain chaste before marriage and obedient to the men, mostly fathers and husbands, who control their lives. If females in the family stray from these restrictions, they suffer the consequences.

When I first came to Canada, I noticed a general Muslim mistrust of the media. My observation was reinforced after I spoke to academics within the Muslim community about the coverage of the Aqsa Parvez murder and, later, the Shafia massacre. As a journalist-in-training, I’ve learned that reporting the facts is a priority—sensitivity less so. But as a Pakistani and a Muslim, I can’t bear seeing my culture and religion take the blame for the sadistic insanity that leads to murder for the sake of honour. “Shafia trial a wake-up call for Canadian Muslims,” claimed a headline in The Globe and Mail. “Dad charged after daughter killed in clash over hijab,” I read in the National Post. “Clash between traditional values, modern culture may be behind teen’s death,” reported CBC.ca. All of a sudden, I was part of an “honour culture,” in the words of The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente, and my first reaction was irritation. Irritation that educated journalists seemed to take the easy, simplistic route to reporting, framing the tragedies as a clash of cultures, thereby provoking culture smearing and stereotyping. Though their writings are laden with sympathy for the victims of honour killings, in between the lines lies a more sinister tone, one that insists honour killings are cultural practices and challenges what I see as a trademark of Canadian society—multiculturalism. Seeing these headlines and  reading the stories raised some complicated questions. What was it about the coverage of the two cases that instigated an outcry from members of the Muslim community? How would the writers defend their work? And, overall, was the coverage fair?

In January 2012, Québec residents Mohammad Shafia, his second wife, Tooba, and their son Hamed, then 20, were found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to prison for 25 years for killing the couple’s three daughters and Mohammad’s first wife, who were found dead in a car submerged in the Kingston Mills Locks on June 30, 2009. The month before she died, Zainab, 19, had married her boyfriend, but the marriage was annulled because her father didn’t approve of a Pakistani son-in-law joining their Afghan family, and had only agreed to the marriage to draw Zainab home from the women’s shelter she had run to. Sahar, 17, had a boyfriend from Honduras, and her brother Hamed had found photographs of her posing in a bikini. Geeti, 13, regularly stayed out past her curfew, had been caught shoplifting and earned bad grades at school. The eldest victim, 50-year-old Rona Amir Mohammad, had been deemed useless by her husband because she was infertile, and had been treated like a servant for years by him and his second wife. After the four bodies were found, police noticed signs of foul play. They  wiretapped Mohammad Shafia’s minivan, and in a conversation with Tooba and Hamed, he was recorded referring to his dead daughters as “treacherous” and “whores.” Unfortunately, the horrifying mass slaughter was not the first honour killing case to take place in Canada’s Muslim community.

Two years prior to the Shafia murders, another young woman lost her life. Aqsa Parvez was a 16-year-old student in Mississauga, Ont., who was having a difficult time following her conservative family’s rules. In many Muslim households, daughters are not permitted to date, wear revealing clothing or lead completely independent lives, and in Aqsa’s family, wearing the hijab was compulsory. She ran away from home twice, living in youth shelters and spending nights at friends’ houses.

On December 10, 2007, Aqsa was found in her bedroom, strangled. Her brother and father, Waqas and Muhammad Parvez, both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and were sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 18 years.

The facts seem straightforward. But according to many critics, they were manipulated to support a more complicated plot, one that intertwines the Muslim community with stereotypes of violence and oppression. I speak to a variety of feminists and academics who voice similar frustrations with how the Parvez and Shafia stories were told. Undue emphasis was placed on Islam and South Asian principles of honour, they say, causing honour killing to be written off as an issue associated with the religion and inherent to the culture. They also claim there are important details of the cases that were overlooked and unreported by the media, because they didn’t fit the mainstream storyline—one that places tolerant Canada on one side and dangerous Muslims on the other, according to Eve Haque, associate professor in linguistics at York University.

Haque believes that the hijab is an icon that is repeatedly used to manipulate this narrative. Shahnaz Khan, professor of women and gender studies, and global studies at Wilfred Laurier University, agrees. “[The media] is obsessed with it,” she says. In most of the stories that emerged from the slaying of Aqsa Parvez, journalists wrote that her rejection of the head scarf was the cause of her death. “I’ll never forget the cover headline in theToronto Sun that in giant letters read ‘HIJAB TEEN,’” says Haque. “They just leached the personhood out of it—this young woman becomes defined by what is on her head.” Though Aqsa’s refusal to wear the head scarf added fuel to her father’s fury, it wasn’t the sole reason for her murder, argues Richelle Wiseman, former executive director of the Centre for Faith and the Media in Calgary. “It was only a tiny piece of the whole thing. The fact that she ran away from home was much more of a provocation to her father, and a bigger deal in the long run than the hijab,” she says. Court documents reveal that prior to running away from home, Aqsa was fighting with her father because she wanted to get a part-time job. This detail, however, didn’t make it to any newspaper headlines.

Muhammad Parvez may have forced his daughter to wear the hijab because he believed his religion decreed it compulsory. But most Muslim community members agree that his decision to take her life was by no means Islamic, and they fear readers and viewers will walk away from the news believing that honour crimes are permissible in the religion. In coverage of the Shafia trial, “Muslim” was used as a loose and convenient identifier, since the family wasn’t religious, points out Sheema Khan, the author of the book Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman. She followed the trial closely and wrote about it for The Globe and Mail. “[The Shafias] didn’t even know where the mosque was. Their allegiance to Islam was pretty minimal,” she says. Nor did Mohammad Shafia want his children fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, because he thought it would stunt their growth. Though honour killings have also taken place in Canada’s Sikh and Hindu communities, the Shafia murders were portrayed in a more racist manner because the family was Muslim and Afghan, says Alia Hogben, executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW). She emphasizes that the Shafia victims were all Canadian residents and that social service agencies and the police knew about their unhappy home situation, since phone calls from the girls and their schools had put up red flags, but treated the case differently because they didn’t know how to deal with the culture. Yet this fact didn’t generate much  concern in mainstream reports.

Social services may have kept their distance from the victims’ family life because their culture seemed foreign, but many members of the Toronto Muslim community believe that culture had nothing to do with it. One woman, who requests anonymity, tells me that neither the Shafias nor Parvez died because of their cultures, but because of power struggles with men. “These men exercised that power ultimately in a deadly way, using culture as a crutch to lean on,” she says. After reading stories about the murder of Aqsa Parvez in the news, she wrote a blog post about why culture cannot be blamed for honour killings. Her first sentence reads: “Aqsa Parvez is a Canadian tragedy—not an immigrant tragedy, or a Pakistani tragedy, or indeed a Muslim tragedy.” She goes on to list similarities between herself and Mohammad Parvez. They were both born in Pakistan, both relocated to Canada, and both raised to value honour. What makes them different, she tells me, is their interpretations of honour. “While I understood culture and honour to mean respect your women and to never lay a hand on them, which is what my father taught us, [Parvez’s] understanding of culture meant that he could kill his daughter,” she says. Her own understanding of culture, she  believes, allows her to fit into Canadian society perfectly.

Women’s rights and gender equality are embedded in the ethos of the contemporary Western world, and although women in  Canada are supposedly treated with respect, much of the coverage of the Aqsa Parvez and Shafia murders was controversial in that it disrespected the victims by prying into their personal lives. Photos of Aqsa Parvez posing in front of her bathroom mirror were taken from her Facebook profile, while pouty images of the Shafia sisters were acquired from their mobile phones, fished out of the Kingston Mills Locks, and used as evidence to support the clash-of-civilizations narrative, explains Haque. A particularly outrageous example was the 2008 Toronto Life cover with an illustration of Aqsa from the neck up, head provocatively cocked to one side, lips pursed, with no clothing visible except for one skinny strap. “I think they could have chosen a photograph that’s more respectful to the dead,” says Farrah Khan, a counsellor at the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic in downtown Toronto and a founder of AQSAzine, a publication created for and by young Muslim women in the community soon after Aqsa’s death. Khan points out that a year later, Toronto Life published an article about a white murder victim, Stefanie Rengel, who was killed by her ex-boyfriend. “Inside the issue, the only image of Stefanie is this pencil drawing of her looking angelic,” she says.

When my grandmother first tells me the story of the servant girl in Karachi, I’m disturbed. I excuse myself from the table and sit upstairs in my room, envisioning her alone in an unsanitary clinic with no family or friends there for support. I had always thought close relationships, especially those between children and parents, to be a hallmark of my culture. Framed photographs of my own family hang on the walls around me. I see my dad outside his college campus in London, my uncle giving his daughter a piggyback ride through a park in Missouri, and my grandmother and me with the Queen of Hearts at Disneyland in California.

The servant girl’s story has me shaken, but I think of the countless Muslim families who practise Islam, are well integrated into society and lead lives that are balanced, conventional and honourable. At a friend’s wedding recently, her father was in tears at the ceremony, and he recited a prayer asking that her husband treat her with compassion. Another friend, whose family annually performs the Islamic pilgrimage of Hajj, and whose mother wears the hijab, went to the Maldives with her parents and siblings last summer and enjoyed a beach vacation complete with jet-skiing and sunbathing.

Parvez and the Shafias were not as lucky, but their deaths should not be considered representative of a clash of cultures. The photos that appeared in the media in the days following their murders—pictures of the girls in bikinis, intimate photos sent to boyfriends, a sexualized Toronto Life cover image of Aqsa—imply that they were rejecting their families’ cultures and embracing Western values. However, taking self-portraits in the bathroom mirror or while in the car on the way to a special outing is hardly a Western habit. Take it from someone who has lived amongst Middle Eastern women—vanity is a universal quality in females. The difference is that in Islam, modesty is imperative, and most Muslim women would feel violated if those pictures were made public.

Pakistani activist and media consultant Raheel Raza believes that sensitivity is too much to ask for from journalists, because they don’t have time for it. Raza has written for theToronto Star and The Globe and Mail, as well as a few Dubai-based newspapers. She is also the author of Their Jihad… Not My Jihad: A Muslim Canadian Woman Speaks Out. “I don’t think it’s fair to expect every journalist or reporter to understand how the Afghan community works, or how the Sikh community works—this is a lot of homework,” she says.

So I meet with a handful of journalists who wrote about Aqsa Parvez and the Shafias, to hear how they dealt with that homework. I start with a columnist who was recently chastised for plagiarizing in her past columns, though her honour killing writings appear to be her own words. I’m referring, of course, to the controversial Margaret Wente, branded “one of Canada’s most admired but offensive writers” by Wente Watch, a blog dedicated to refuting the claims she makes in her columns. We meet at a crowded Starbucks in downtown Toronto, and as soon as I enter, I see her—a well-dressed, middle-aged white woman in a white blouse, cream-coloured pants and large, brown speckled glasses, sitting in a brown leather chair.

Wente has been a columnist for The Globe and Mail since 1999, and wrote about both killings for the paper. The clichés and stereotypes about Muslims, Arabs and South Asians so often used in the media are what provoked me to embark on this story—it was her columns, printed out and annotated in angry red pen marks, that cluttered my desk. She speaks confidently and altruistically about the need to save girls in Canada from their patriarchal cultures. “There are thousands of girls in this country who may not get murdered, but are fighting the same kinds of battles with their families every day—how to fit in with Canada but also whether being Canadian is at all compatible with the family values that have been brought with them,” she tells me.

When news broke about each of the murders, Wente was shaken at first. “I was shocked because it’s not something that is supposed to happen here,” she says. “But it’s just part of the multicultural fabric. It’s the downside of that fabric.” I would argue honour killings are a result of the fanatical behaviour of specific families and individuals rather than a snag in Canada’s  multicultural fabric, but Wente claims honour killings are impossible to understand without understanding the culture they stem from, and that often they are approved or tolerated by the community.

Critics would likely consider Wente’s holier-than-thou perspective to be part of what Haque calls the “moral panic” that engulfed the media and public as soon as the crimes were reported in the news. “It’s only in death that civilized society cares about these young women,” Haque explains. “It reconfirms a missionary thinking, which is that we are civilized, we are tolerant and we will rescue.”

The columns of Jonathan Kay, National Post comment pages editor and author of Among the Truthers, a novel about 9/11 conspiracy theorists, suggest that this is a natural reaction for the Canadian public. “The desire to protect women in immigrant communities is completely rational,” he tells me. In his National Post column “Assessing the state of Islamophobia in Canada,” Kay makes one point that I’ve never considered. “Gestures and cultural habits that project an aura of isolation and standoffishness, the burka or niqab being obvious examples, will turn Canadians off, regardless of how many upbeat pro-Muslim features are run in the mainstream media,” he writes.

Kamal Al-Solaylee, a Ryerson University journalism professor and author of Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, explains that journalists are not always to blame when it comes to the representation of minorities in the media. “The Arab and Muslim communities are not as actively engaged in civic society as others. They’re enclosed and silent, and are letting other people write their narrative for them,” says the former Globe and Mail theatre critic. Al-Solaylee grew up watching Arabic films, and honour was a regular theme. “The country girl who goes to the city and loses her virginity to a man and then the family comes in and kills her—that was a cinematic motif I was very familiar with, growing up in the Middle East,” he says. “Even if the family member who kills the girl eventually gets arrested, it’s presented as if the girl is the one who broke the rules.”

The rigid view of honour ingrained in Eastern popular culture has perhaps contributed to the Western media’s perception that honour killings are a common and accepted cultural practice. Some journalists, however, went beyond the mainstream narrative.

In February 2012, while working for Sun Media Québec, Ryerson journalism graduate Brian Daly told a different side of the Shafia story. He compiled a broadcast story titled “Failing the Shafia Girls,” about Centre jeunesse de Montreal, a youth protection agency that admitted it could have intervened. “They knew a little bit about the allegations that life was difficult in the Shafia home, but they didn’t take it to the next level of getting police involved,” he tells me.

In September 2011, National Post columnist Barbara Kay (Jonathan Kay’s mother) wrote “A westerner’s guide to honour killings,” in which she shows evidence of honour killings occurring in the West, amongst communities that are neither South Asian nor Muslim. She writes that the Bible tells the story about the first honour killing in Judeo-Christian civilization. She also explains that up until 1991, honour killings, specifically adultery-motivated wife killings, were considered non-criminal in Brazil; in England, adultery was a legal defense for men who killed their wives until 2009.

Similarly, in the documentary Ces crimes sans honneur, which premiered at the 2012 Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, Montreal-based journalist and filmmaker Raymonde Provencher shows that in Western immigrant communities, Muslim women are not the only ones subject to emotional and physical abuse. She interviews Toronto social worker Aruna Papp, a Christian South Asian who endured 18 years of oppressive abuse, to show that this type of violence occurs irrespective of religion. But later in the film, a seemingly random 20-second clip shows women walking in the streets, each clad in a hijab. The well-meaning Provencher tells me that she included a Christian victim because honour killings are not unique to Muslims, but by invoking the symbol of the hijab, she nevertheless connects oppression to Islam.

It’s one of the last summer evenings of 2012, and Doug Saunders, international affairs columnist at The Globe and Mail, is discussing his new book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide, at the Toronto Reference Library, along with Jonathan Kay and TVOntario journalist Steve Paikin. Described by Kay as “a good antidote to fear mongering,” Saunders’s book challenges the belief that Muslim immigrants are a threat to democracy and to Western civilization. He explains that at one point in history, there was a Jewish tide and there’s even been a Catholic tide, and they triggered similar alarmist responses from host communities. Immigrants from Poland and Ireland were often seen as “religiously extreme” members of an alien civilization in America, much like the way Arabs and South Asians are perceived by some today.

Saunders studied surveys from European Muslims, and found that there is little support for honour killing. He cites statistics showing that French, German and British Muslims who approve of honour killing number only two percent, one percent and one percent, respectively. Saunders explains to the crowd of about 300 that honour killings are not a mainstream custom, but rare acts by insane murderers. “Religion becomes an excuse for insanity,” he says. “You could point out that more Christians were killed in Ontario by botched exorcisms in the last 10 years than Muslims killed by honour killings.”

In 2011, the Department of Justice commissioned Dr. Amin Muhammad, psychiatry professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, to compile a report on honour killings in Canada. He found that there have been 13 in the past decade, including the Parvez and Shafia murders. The collective hand-wringing after these deaths triggered a terminology debate—when news of Aqsa Parvez’s murder first broke, many news outlets used the phrase “honour killing” without reserve, while others, like the

Toronto Star and Global News, referred to the murders as possible cases of “domestic violence.” Kay believes “honour killing” is an appropriate term. “When a family thinks its honour is at stake and the participants in the plot even use that explicit terminology, I see no problem with calling it an ‘honour killing,’” he says, explaining that domestic violence cases tend to be different—typically, drug abuse, alcoholism and mental illness are factors. “When there’s an honour killing case, it’s not like someone gets drunk and says, ‘I’m going to honour kill you,’” he says.

Wente says that debating the terminology is “a total academic dead end.” But some activists want to eliminate the use of the term “honour killing” and replace it with “femicide.” When I first call CCMW’s Alia Hogben to discuss the issues around media coverage of honour killings, she tells me, “I won’t answer if you keep calling it ‘honour killings.’”

I sit stunned on the other end of the line as she goes on. “You are being the media, and it doesn’t matter that you happen to be a Muslim.” Though our conversation makes me question whether I’m doing a disservice to my community by referring to the crimes as “honour killings,” I decide that I’m not doing any harm. The intention behind the murders was, after all, to protect a “completely twisted concept of honour”—a fitting combination of words used by Justice Robert Maranger when sentencing Mohammad, Tooba and Hamed Shafia to life in prison.

I’m back in Karachi in August 2012, this time to spend Eid, the Islamic holiday at the end of the month of Ramadan, with my relatives. At lunch, I fill my plate with biryani and cucumber yoghurt while listening to the elders discuss the sorry state of Pakistan, ruled by corrupt governments and influenced by misled extremists. The conversation was inspired by a local news story about an 11-year-old Christian girl with Down syndrome who has been charged with blasphemy and is being held in jail, after being found rummaging through garbage with burnt pages of the Qu’ran in her hand. “Our country is such an embarrassment,” says one uncle. Replies another, “Very backward.”

My family is not an ultra-modern minority in Pakistan. Our values are typical of the middle class, a group usually devoid of honour killings and other crimes falsely assumed to be cultural. Nor is our open-minded outlook a result of any recent wave of Westernization. Washington, D.C.-based journalist Beenish Ahmed wrote a piece for National Public Radio in August 2012 titled “Picturing Pakistan’s Past: The Beatles, Booze and Bikinis,” about how the nation was once a liberal hot spot. But to writers like Wente, this is irrelevant, since it doesn’t aid their argument that honour crimes are ethnically endorsed. “My job is to frame the issue the way I think it ought to be framed,” says Wente. “Social workers—their job is to be sensitive. A journalist’s job is to report clearly.”

That may be so, but circulating sexualized images of Muslim women is unwarranted. So is exploiting victims—making poster girls of  the deceased to fight a presumed plague of cultural patriarchy.

Patriarchal systems are a part of my culture. But that doesn’t mean there are no warm, loving and peaceful patriarchies—I, like the majority of my friends and community members, am a product of one. Our fathers may sit at the head of the household, and our brothers may have later curfews and are less sheltered by our parents, but if we disobey rules, we don’t pay with our lives. Though media coverage may have implied otherwise, Aqsa, Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona were not victims of a rigid religion, “Muslim Rage” or a stifling South Asian culture—they were victims of ruthless patriarchs with an inflamed sense of honour.

I come from a country with a complicated culture, where honour crimes, though neither sanctioned nor tolerated by religion, still take place amongst the less educated and enlightened of us. Fundamentalists use culture to justify confining the women of their households with ultra-conservative customs.

Most Western journalists seem to be driven not by racism or a hatred of Muslims, Arabs or South Asians, but simply by a duty to call out these callous mindsets. And that’s fair.

Raza explains that while Muslims are quick to blame the media for bashing them, journalists often feel that Muslims are not forthcoming. “Since 9/11, Muslims are under the spotlight, a reality we must accept,” she says. “We should take it as an opportunity—let’s clean up our act!”

Cleaning up after misguided Muslims, like those found guilty in the Parvez and Shafia cases, is a lot to ask of the community, and for those of us disgruntled with the way that honour killings are portrayed, it’s just the first step. Often, the media and the Muslim community seem diametrically opposed—the media’s hunger for scandal is at odds with Islam’s inherent modesty and conservatism.

We need stories that reflect the true character of Muslim communities, not just the acts of a few deranged individuals. But bridging the divide would require journalists to sacrifice sensationalism when covering murders of girls and women in Muslim communities, and that’s not likely to happen.

It seems like my community is always in damage control mode. Constantly defending ourselves from the “culture clash” stereotypes plastered all over the media is tiresome, but if speaking frankly about honour crimes helps build awareness and prevent another parent-approved strangling or stabbing in my community, then it’s a small price to pay. It’s a shaky compromise, but one I’ll have to make peace with.

Elisha Lim, a well-known Canadian queer activist, graphic novelist and celebrated artist, hoped the transition into living as gender queer—an identity that rejects the limitations of the binary female and male, and trades “she” for “they” and “her” for “their”—would be relatively easy. The pronoun change was quickly becoming a contemporary trend in Lim’s community: many of their  acquaintances were already using gender neutral pronouns. But when Xtra, Canada’s largest gay and lesbian newspaper, approached the artist for an interview on their work at Toronto’s Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) in April 2011, Lim found resistance where they least expected it. When Lim tried to implement the neutral pronoun in an interview with Xtra, it refused.

“There was this one moment where I said I prefer the pronoun ‘they,’” Lim says. “It was kind of my shaky first attempt so I wasn’t too confident about it, and the interviewer sort of laughed and said, ‘We’re not going to use that. But anyway what about…?’ I walked away after the interview and thought, ‘Now wait just one minute, I think that I should be mad!’”

Lim sent an e-mail to Xtra’s editor in protest. A day later, with no reply, Lim took to Facebook. It started with a casual status on Lim’s personal wall—something along the lines of: I can’t believe Xtra won’t let me use “they.”

Friends and acquaintances instantly showed their support, “liking” the status and commenting with similar stories. Realizing they weren’t alone, Lim and their then-partner Coco Riot—who also identifies as gender queer—created a petition on Facebook called “Please don’t call me ‘she.’” Within 24 hours 1,000 people had signed the petition in support.

Riot, a Toronto-based visual artist and cartoonist for Shameless magazine, is glad the community made its disappointment known. Having faced similar constraints speaking to the Montreal Gazette and winning an apology from the newspaper for its pronoun misuse, Riot knew “they” was a pronoun worth fighting for—especially at an LGBT publication.

“Xtra doesn’t make much effort to show the diversity of the queer community,” Riot says. “It’s very white- and male-identified and middle class. [The pronoun] ‘they’ is also one of the [things] this gay newspaper is not handling well in Canada. Xtra is not respecting or representing the queer community.”

When we met over deep-fried food in an Elvis-themed bar on Bloor Street West on a stormy day this past June, Lim was obviously still excited by the support they received. At first, Xtrarequested that the petition be deleted, suggesting Lim’s post was misleading. When Lim responded to the paper with an idea for an alternative to removing the petition—providing Xtra with exclusive rights to Lim’s side of the story—Xtra asked Lim to please leave it alone. Six months later, conflict flared up once again. Canadian gender-queer musician Rae Spoon very publicly declined to appear on the cover, explaining on their blog that they were boycotting the paper until “they” was editorially accepted as a pronoun.

After half a year of disagreements, Xtra relented, but with a note explaining how “they” works. Lim feels this was a reaction to the pressure from the community, but Lesley Fraser, copy editor at Pink Triangle Press (Xtra’s publisher), says the paper was misrepresented. “We were represented as having this policy of not doing that [using “they”], which wasn’t true,” she says. “We just didn’t have a policy.”

How can the media keep up with a community so changing, so evolving, so in transition? As the number of visible trans people grows, media outlets are dealing with subjects and stories they don’t have the knowledge or experience to cover. As a result, their subjects can be framed by disrespect, confusion and inaccurate information. The process of moving away from hurtful labels to something more politically correct is a pattern Canadian media has seen before. The trans community is calling for change, and as it has in the past with emerging communities, the mainstream media is struggling to understand and embrace their demands.

From pronoun mismatches to inappropriate questions regarding a subject’s body parts and surgery plans, there’s clearly a lot of misunderstanding surrounding how trans people should be both spoken to and spoken about. Consider the April 2012 article from the National Postby Tristin Hopper, “Human Rights tribunal to would-be women: You can take your penis with you.” The lede reads “A man doesn’t need to have his penis removed to legally become a woman,” and the article later uses a quote that suggests men get their reproductive organs “lopped off ” in order to be recognized as a woman in gendered documents like passports and birth certificates. To people in the trans community and their allies the wording in the piece is offensive, misleading and sensational—and it almost completely leaves out an explanation of the range of gender reassignment surgeries and legal regulations related to gender identity.

This lack of understanding carries over to anyone who doesn’t fit into the confines of gender binaries. When worldfamous androgynous model Andrej Pejic came to Toronto to model during fashion week, CityNews journalist Avery Haines pulled out a chair for him and threw him questions like “Do you identify as a woman?” and asserting “when I look at you, I see an absolutely beautiful, ridiculously tall, lean, gorgeous woman.” Haines’ questions continued on the topic of gender, and while they were thoughtfully met by Pejic, who explained gender doesn’t define who he is, Haines failed to show any understanding of the subject at hand. This trend is evident throughout Canadian media, from the Toronto Sun’s categorization of stories on Thomas Beatie (a famous trans male who became pregnant) into the “weird news” section, to the Vancouver Sun publishing the birth name and past photos of Jenna Talackova, a trans woman who competed in the Miss Universe Pageant.

The disconnect between the media and the community grows larger when even Xtra is out of touch. For nearly 30 years, it has been the country’s most visible, colourful, and popular LGBT publication. It’s out, it’s proud, it publishes sexually explicit content, and grabs big-name advertisers. But it’s having trouble keeping up with the fast-moving times.

As the queer community has expanded to include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transexual, intersex, queer, questioning, two-spirited, allies, pansexual and asexual, as well as those who identify as gender queer, Xtra’s masthead does not yet include a trans person and content has remained fairly limited to lesbian and gay issues. But staff say the paper is slowly shifting to a new place of inclusion and fairness.

“I think it’s a murky grey area that’s always changing,” says Xtra assignment editor Danny Glenwright. “The LGBT acronym just keeps getting longer as the years go on. We’re all learning all the time, and we’re all trying to adjust the way we report on  stories.”

At Xtra, every step in the writing process is being reexamined—from interview to the final edit—to ensure that journalists are getting it right. Andrea Houston, one of Xtra’s reporters, explains that she starts each interview by asking people how they identify, which pronoun they prefer and if it’s okay to label them with those words in an article. Danny Glenwright agrees this is the best step toward accuracy. “It’s a new terrain for journalists,” he says. “We’re not used to asking for permission when we describe somebody. Normally we just do it.”

Houston adds, “We’re used to going by our instincts. At my previous paper, a mainstream daily, I didn’t ask anyone [how they wanted to be identified]. But I value this skill: I value that I’ve gotten into a habit of doing this. It’s respectful. As much as I’m trying to break stories and get to truth and corner politicians and evildoers, I also really want to be respectful of people, and I want their message to be conveyed accurately.”

But speaking with Ken Popert, executive director of Pink Triangle Press, it’s clear editorial ideologies don’t exactly match those of the big decision makers. Popert’s sparse, clinical office appears just moved in, decorated sparingly with a framed blood-stained t-shirt on the wall. His take on Xtra is a little different from that of some of its younger staff. Popert says the paper—despite its explicit tagline “Canada’s Gay and Lesbian News,” heavy Pride presence and strong community following—is not a publication for the queer community.

“Our focus is not on communities, as such,” he says. “If you look at our mission statement, we’re a vehicle of the sexual revolution. Now, as it turns out, gay and lesbian communities are very receptive of that. That being said we call ourselves community papers for obvious reasons. For us, the gay and lesbian communities are mobilizable groups.” For Popert, Xtra was meant to be a voice in the community—not a voice for it.

Perhaps this reasoning is the easiest route for Pink Triangle Press when combatting criticism of incidents like the conflict with Lexi Tronic in December 2011. Houston had written a piece about the dangers of sex work and interviewed Tronic for the story. On December 12, Glenwright posted a link to the article on his personal Facebook wall, including Tronic’s birth name—which wasn’t even included in the original story. This was inappropriate because it’s considered to be disrespectful to publicly refer to a trans person’s former first name without permission. Tronic declined to contribute to this article, but according to her statement published on the blog Leftytgirl, she kindly asked Glenwright to take down the post, attaching the WikiHow page on “How to Respect a Trans Person.”

“Danny responded back to me that it was his personal Facebook page and he was using my name to ‘spark dialogue’ and thus he was not going to remove it,” Tronic wrote. “I shared with him that I found my former first name being printed on his page to be hurtful, and I pleaded with him to remove my name.”

But Glenwright didn’t; instead blocking Tronic on Facebook and failing to answer calls (Glenwright insists he was just busy with production). Unsure what steps to take next, Tronic shared the conversation between Glenwright and herself with a few people she thought might offer guidance. They were outraged, initiating a widespread boycott of Xtra on December 13, the day after Glenwright posted Tronic’s birthname on his Facebook wall. “They felt that it was an abuse of power on behalf of the editor and disrespectful to me,” she wrote.

The next day when the story started gaining attention, Glenwright called Tronic to apologize. They had a lengthy discussion about growing up in Winnipeg, a connection Glenwright used to justify his intentions on Facebook; he had wanted to show mutual friends in their hometown how far Tronic had come. The conversation ended with accepted apologies and discussion of better trans coverage in Xtra. Tronic called off the boycott and assumed everyone would move forward. But this wasn’t the end of the conflict. Tronic says a day passed and Glenwright had still not removed the post. Glenwright is unclear today on the exact timeline.

Two days after the controversial Facebook post, Glenwright published a much-discussed semi-apology: “Response to a strange boycott,” a piece that framed him as a victim who’s still hurt by the Tronic he knew as a kid growing up in Winnipeg. Glenwright links Tronic to “some of the worst bullying” he had ever received as a “young, awkward, (not yet happily) gay kid,” adding, “she is someone who unearths memories I’d rather suppress or forget.” Although the status concerning Tronic was removed from Glenwright’s wall, his words made the trans community even angrier.

In response to this series of controversies, a panel discussion was organized with members of the trans community. Susan Gapka, one of the panelists in that discussion, raised the idea of intention versus impact and explained that although media may not intentionally be trying to be offensive, the impact on the community is significant. When I met with Gapka nearly a year later, her views hadn’t changed. Dressed in a long periwinkle blue skirt with a matching floral top and purple sheer stockings, she sips hot coffee from a Thermos outside the Rogers Communications Centre at Ryerson University and recounts the many offences she has seen in the media over the past few decades.

Gapka, now middle-aged, is the founder and chair of the Trans Lobby Group, and is a well-known advocate for trans rights. She has tirelessly pushed for social justice in Toronto, getting herself out of a life on the streets to advocate for affordable housing, supporting those with mental health issues and fighting for LGBT rights. She won the City of Toronto’s Pride Award in 2004 and she has quickly become the person media outlets turn to for the trans perspective on issues. In the Globe and Mail in April 2011 she was described as “a wondrous weirdness that descended like that mammoth spaceship in Close Encounters” with a voice “somewhere between Gregory Peck and Foghorn Leghorn.” But Gapka remains hopeful. “Being trans is getting a little bit less hard, but not always,” she says, adding her own personal advice for journalists is: “Be kind. Whatever you call us, be nice to us. And if you don’t know, ask.”

One of the first loud, gay voices in Canada, 68-year-old Gerald Hannon remembers a time before trans rights had even started to enter the conversation. Keepsakes, clippings and photos line the museum-like walls of his 16th-floor apartment. In a shadowy corner, behind the large C-shaped fabric sofa, a Virgin Mary figure has been sawed in half and turned into a side table. It quickly becomes clear the love of Hannon’s life was a magazine called The Body Politic. The radically political gay magazine gave a voice to those silenced throughout the ’70s and previous decades. The publication ran alongside Xtra for a short time in the ’80s, both within the Pink Triangle Press company, but was eventually replaced by the splashy upstart, Xtra. Although Pink Triangle Press claims to carry on the work of The Body Politic, the content today is more sex than societal reform.

Hannon flips through the issues he helped create, showing off a cover featuring him and his boyfriend at the time, both young, handsome and obviously in love. Hannon first came across the magazine at a gay dance when he was 27; issue one was being sold for 25 cents. Having travelled throughout Europe for a year in search of fellow revolutionaries, Hannon finally found the vehicle he had been looking for: a smart, boundary-pushing, political gay publication that sought to bring like-minded men together. He immediately got involved. “It was my life for 15 years,” he says.

Now writing his memoir, Hannon admits the community The Body Politic helped build and strengthen has grown too complicated for single publications to mirror. He, along with Lim and Popert, are quick to pass the baton to the internet, where many different voices can be published for little-to-no cost and minimal constraints. Lim points me to No More Potlucks, a queer culture, arts and politics website (and on-demand print magazine), the Shameless blog (which recently changed its tagline to explicitly include trans youth) and the new art and politics blog they have started with Riot, Call Me They.

Many young people are also turning to YouTube. Ryan Cassata, an American musician and trans activist from Bay Shore, Long Island, was only 15 when he first spoke out about trans youth and his personal experiences on YouTube. With hundreds of thousands of video views over the past four years, Cassata has appeared on talk shows such as The Tyra Banks Showand Larry King Live. Some forms of media, however, weren’t as educated and respectful as he expected them to be. Satisfied that the discussion would provide positive insights to viewers after being prepped with thoughtful questions by Tyra Banks’ producers, Cassata sat on Tyra’s couch prepared and confident. But what happened next on air was a shock as “The ‘professional’ Tyra Banks read from her notecards, asking me the most impersonal, most offensive questions, I have ever been asked,” Cassata says.

These questions included: “Are you getting your period?” and “Are you getting breasts now?” The most offensive, says Ryan, were cut. “Tyra Banks asked me ‘Do you use tampons?’ It was like she had completely forgotten that the only reason I was sitting on her couch was because I identified as a transgender male,” he says.

Although many of his experiences with the media left Cassata feeling like he’d been portrayed as a “freak” whose identity was more important than him as a person, an article inPulse Magazine this past March about his music career, he says, “portrayed who I really am” and gives him hope. “The only way to reach equality is to diminish ignorance, especially ignorance based on stereotyping and false portrayals. The only way to diminish ignorance is through education and exposure. I encourage everyone to stand up and join the movement,” he says.

While Cassata focuses on his identity as an artist, Bklyn Boihood (or BBH) co-founder Ryann Holmes is concerned about the visibility and portrayal of people of colour and focuses specifically on masculine-of-centre (MoC) people of colour, a relatively new term that aims to encompass all those leaning toward the masculine end of the gender scale, whether they be trans, lesbian, bois or any other identity. BBH aims to build community awareness and bridges of self-love. Holmes thinks the biggest issue in the media today is the lack of narratives coming directly from people in this community. She’s never seen herself represented on TV or in the mainstream news. “On a less mainstream level, there is light and visibility around MoC people, but there’s still only a few lenses. We’re so conditioned to hear one story about one particular type of people,” she says.

Holmes says lack of representation and a heavy focus on negativity in place of celebrating people’s gifts and strengths affects all types of people of colour in North American media: “Media will articulate our struggle rather than the ways that we’re powerful.” To combat this, she advises, “don’t be afraid to tell the real story, and let people unpack it. Everybody is going to have their preconceived notions about everybody; that’s just the world we live in. But the cool thing is the door is open now to hear something from somebody else, to hear it in their own words.”

While Canadians can turn to Trans Pride Canada’s media reference guide—a webpage with a downloadable PDF created by a non-partisan network of people working together for trans rights—it isn’t nearly as extensive as the guides, examples and statistics provided by U.K. organization Trans Media Watch (TMW). Founded in 2009, TMW believes in “accuracy, dignity and respect,” and aims to provide guidance to the media when portraying transgender people and guidance to transgender people dealing with the media. A survey it conducted in the U.K. between November 2009 and February 2010 provides evidence the media needs to improve: 78 percent of participants—a group made up of 250 self-identified transgendered people and six individuals with transgender family members—felt media portrayals were either inaccurate or highly inaccurate. An overwhelming 95 percent felt the media does not care what trans people think of trans coverage.

“I think most individual journalists are not negatively inclined at all,” says Jennie Kermode, TMW’s chair. “I think there’s massive ignorance that we’ve gradually begun to chip away at. Some of that has to do with not just problems we address directly, but advocating in the press. Other journalists will read that and start to look at it a different way.”

The media, in Canada and elsewhere, is undergoing a transition. Many organizations have seen the need for change, “coming out” in a way. From new style guides and resource sites for the media, to panels built from the community offering advice to mastheads, change is evident. But no transition is easy, and from freelancers to editors, the education of the media will be a long journey of growth, understanding and respect.

“Journalists should be the avant-garde of bringing information to people,” says Riot. “They should always ask ‘How do you want me to talk about you?’ It’s very easy to say right now ‘the audience won’t understand,’ because maybe you don’t understand. But journalists should be responsible for bringing those ideas to the people and thinking that people can understand them, because they can.”