The video is tightly framed around Justin Trudeau in the middle of a Montreal crowd, days before last fall’s federal election. Off-screen, a reporter’s voice says, “As recently as yesterday evening, your party was defending Mr. Gagnier’s actions—” Trudeau nods “—saying essentially that he played by the rules.” Trudeau nods again, tight-lipped and wide-eyed.

Dan Gagnier, the party’s campaign co-chair, resigned days before the election amid a scandal over an email he wrote providing lobbying advice to a pipeline company. “This morning—” the reporter continues, but boos from the crowd interrupt him. Trudeau extends his arm boldly, palm flat like a stop sign. He looks off-camera to where the boos began. “Hey,” he says. “We have respect for journalists in this country. They ask tough questions, and they’re supposed to, okay?” He turns back to the reporter. “Sorry, go ahead.”

That attitude is a welcome change for journalists, but what reporters need more than a friendly face is an upgrade from ancient legislation that’s making their jobs harder. Since the October election, the prime minister has charmed reporters in a way his predecessor rarely tried to do. Last November, he even emerged from the private cabin of a plane en route to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Manila to converse with journalists travelling with him. Charm aside, however, many journalists are wondering if he also has the guts to tackle the flawed Access to Information (ATI) Act.

Under the Conservatives, Newspapers Canada’s annual audit of the freedom of information system gave the feds a failing grade for speed of disclosure in 2015. The audit tracks how well governments comply with their respective freedom of information legislations and compares practices among jurisdictions. In the most recent audit, almost 450 access requests were sent to various levels of government, and 70 percent were answered within the standard response time of 30 days. But many came back in non-machine-readable formats, making them difficult to work with electronically. Newspapers Canada considered these requests denied in part. In Ottawa, over half of the requests for electronic files took more than 60 days.

Often, requests come back so censored (anything from names and dates to full pages can be blocked out) that journalists have no access to the information they should have the right to see. Some reporters used Twitter and the hashtag #cdnfoi to show their dismay. This January, Dean Beeby, senior reporter for CBC’s Ottawa Parliamentary Bureau, tweeted, “Need laws to suspend ‘routine’ destruction of gov’t docs frm day of elxn [right] to day next gov’t takes office.” A week later, Sean Holman, a journalism professor at Mount Royal University, retweeted the J-Source article “Why Saskatchewan is Canada’s black hole of policing information.”

During the election, the Liberal platform boasted important changes to the ATI act. The party proclaimed that government data and information should be open by default and planned to give the Information Commissioner power to issue binding orders for disclosure. It also proposed eliminating all associated fees except the $5 filing fee. Last year, the total assessed fees were $74,000. Notably, the Liberals promised to make the prime minister and ministers’ offices subject to the ATI act. In addition, the party vowed to review the act every five years.

Beeby files thousands of freedom of information requests a year. He’s still getting requests back that were processed by the Harper government. “The act has fossilized,” Beeby says. It hasn’t been updated since coming into effect in July 1983, when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister.

Re-evaluation of the act will help, but the government also needs to increase staff and make the operation more independent. Justin Ling, a reporter at Vice, says, “If anything, increasing the scope and breadth and reach of the ATI act without corresponding investment is going to just break the system further into disrepair.”

Trudeau’s flat-palm stop signal against silencing the press is going to turn into an unreturned high-five if his government is unable to keep the promises the Liberal Party made during its campaign. Holman is skeptical of how long Prime Minister Trudeau can last before he is “seduced by secrecy.” He said observers need look no further than the Harper government, which came into power in 2006, criticizing the Liberals and promising an open government. The Conservatives later tried to eliminate media scrums after cabinet meetings.

It’s too early to tell if Trudeau will be able to uphold his image as friend to the press. Susan Delacourt, a long-time Ottawa reporter for the Toronto Star who now does freelance work, noticed a change—basically overnight—once Trudeau was elected. “Look,” she says. “I lived near Harper. I never ran into him. Two days after Trudeau was elected, I bumped into him walking around.” As ministers’ offices are being filled with deputies and administrative staff, she is hopeful the change will stay.

But Beeby, Holman and Ling are wary of applauding the prime minister just yet. “Eventually, people will develop doubt and skepticism of this government as they did for the last,” says Ling. “And that’s good.”

Update: Linda Solomon Wood, editor of the National Observer, disputes the characterization of the Observer as “anti-corporate” and “green.” It is the Review writer’s own analysis and does not necessarily reflect the mandate of the publication. The Observer would rather describe itself as “anti-corruption.” Also, while the Observer did indeed win a CJF award for Excellence in Journalism in 2012, it also won the award in 2014.

Bruce Livesey has been working for 30 years, putting time in with CBC’s the fifth estate, Al Jazeera English’s People and Power and Global TV’s 16×9—all investigative shows. His beat is corporate affairs. In late 2014, when he was researching a story about the Koch brothers, owners of the second-largest private business in America, and their Canadian connections, he uncovered what was only to be expected: big money, American influence and pipeline politics. 16×9 commissioned and approved the story and published a teaser on its website, but in late January 2015, two days before the air date, the show pulled the piece from its broadcast schedule without explanation. Soon, a Canadaland post blamed the documentary’s removal on Global TV’s associations with the oil industry. Rishma Govani, a spokesperson for the network, says the story was “set aside solely for editorial reasons.”

Livesey says that he was later fired because of the Canadaland article, though he maintains he wasn’t the one who leaked the story of his documentary’s removal. He took the Koch brothers story with him when he left. Three months later, the National Observer published the piece as part of the independent publication’s launch.

The National Observer, which debuted in April and markets itself as Canada’s national news source for both environment and politics, has a mandate that’s resolutely green and anti-corporate. Energy journalism in Canada has generally been split—on one side, corporate coverage from energy business reporters in national publications, and on the other, green bloggers and activists. The Observer delivers the attitude of the activists with the quality reporting of national publications. “This is what I like about the Observer,” says Livesey. “It’s a journalistic enterprise, but it definitely has a point of view.”

The news site is the second founded by Linda Solomon Wood. The Vancouver Observer, a local daily she launched in 2006, won the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2012. Following that success, Solomon Wood took the concept of a grassroots, crowdfunded news site and made it national and green.

As a Vancouver-based site, the National Observer has an advantage over publications that have their heads wrapped up in Toronto and Ottawa, says Solomon Wood. Readership quadrupled to 1.2 million unique readers from across North America between April and November 2015. Still, a lack of funds means the Observer, despite its energy focus, doesn’t have an Alberta correspondent. “It’s always been hard,” says Solomon Wood.

A link on the website asks visitors to “support our reporting” with a monthly donation or one-time contribution. A series last May about the April earthquake in Nepal includes sponsored content—a reported multimedia article that promotes Kina, a non-profit organization that educates Nepalese girls. The Observer also asks for donations via letters to its readers, and it relies on advertising, subscriptions, crowdfunding and fundraising to pay for everything—from daily journalism to the salaries of its 10 staff members to its investigative projects. The Tar Sands Reporting Project produced by the Vancouver Observer raised $53,040 by January 2016 with the promise to explore the relationships involved in the tar sands industry—local workers to green activists to First Nations leaders—on the West Coast.

The National Observer focuses on the type of stories Livesey produces and uses grabby headlines to lure people in (and, once they’ve read the article, to donate). When Livesey produced his story on the Koch brothers for 16×9, it was called “The Koch Connection.” For the Observer, it became “How Canada made the Koch Brothers rich.” Other stories he’s written for the site have a similar tone.

The website is a mix of the social activism of Rabble and the headlines of BuzzFeed. But Solomon Wood says that instead of producing clickbait, which drags people in only to disappoint them, she tries to publish stories that only get better once on the page. The investigative team has completed 11 special reports on topics ranging from the global refugee crisis to animals in the face of climate change.

An energy beat reporter might call the website biased toward environmentalists in the same way the Observer might call mainstream newspapers biased toward the industry, says Shawn McCarthy, global energy business reporter for The Globe and Mail. But he simply covers a “different side of things.” Energy reporters at other publications watched the website’s launch with enthusiasm. Most are impressed, says McCarthy. “The Observer is filling an important niche here.”

Rebecca Penty, energy industry reporter at Bloomberg News, agrees. But she says she can’t see a clearly defined strategy from the Observer. Within the jumbled array of stories, from the Nepalese earthquake to senate scandals, it’s hard to define the site’s mission. The website covers the environment and energy industry, she says, but it seems to still be in the process of determining its priorities as a national publication.

Perhaps that’s why, for Livesey, working at the Observer offers freedom. He can write stories about corporations and corruption from his home office, and Solomon Wood gives him the time to follow wherever his research may lead. Livesey adds that he doesn’t have to worry about his stories getting cut because of corporate influence. “When you work in the private sector media, they’re generally not interested in going after big companies,” he says. “With the Observer, that’s never an issue.” Quite the opposite: going after corporations is part of the mandate.

As winter turned to spring in 2014, journalists at The Hamilton Spectator worked to the sound of contractors drilling through concrete floors and reconfiguring the wiring. The “banana cream” yellow on the walls soon became grey and indigo blue, the Spec’s corporate colours. The paper moved the curved desks to create pods of four and six. The city and web desks took over the middle of the newsroom, with the general assignment, business and entertainment desks on one side and production on the other. And, glowing at the centre of it all, a Chartbeat monitor: a 40-inch television screen turned sideways to display the paper’s online analytics.

The new floor plan fosters creative conversations and connectivity. No matter which direction reporters walk through the newsroom, the digital team is within reach. The redesign—the paper’s most drastic in 20 years—emphasizes digital journalism. “It might have been at the centre in our hearts and minds,” says managing editor Jim Poling, “but it wasn’t at the centre physically—now, it’s physically there.”

As the industry changed over the last decade, many papers strategically rethought their newsroom space. The Toronto Sun and The Globe and Mail are both moving to new office buildings this year: the Sun to the new Postmedia building, and the Globe to a new building. Even papers that haven’t moved to new buildings, including the Spec and the Winnipeg Free Press, have undergone redesign. These Canadian newspapers are harnessing the newsroom’s potential as a storytelling tool for efficient, digital-minded journalism—an industry’s eagerness to adapt and improve, physically manifested.

Back in 1989, the Sun newsroom was a mess of paper piles and desks crammed together. Typewriters were stacked on top of filing cabinets in the wake of computerization. James Wallace sat beside Sun legend Bob MacDonald, whose ashtray was always overflowing with cigarette butts amidst mountains of paper. These newsrooms had a more colourful personality, says Wallace, now the vice president, editorial for Sun newspapers. But that smoky, papery geography has become a thing of the past.

The new landscape is an open sea of screens with a focus on how information flows from department to department. As the Free Press’s publisher, Bob Cox will sometimes pass a story idea on to an editor, who will pass it on to the city editors, and on it goes until it reaches the reporter. By the end of that line of transmission, the idea has sometimes changed considerably. This problem can be circumvented in part by the physical path these ideas take. At the Free Press, the editors, including copy editors, work in the centre of the newsroom, surrounded by the other departments in pods or clusters. Content is centrally gathered, stories are edited and then it flows out into web or print platforms.

At the Sun, the once-separate sports and general news reporters are now about 10 feet away from each other. The Toronto and Ottawa papers’ production staff are in the same area, cheek-by-jowl. To keep up with journalism going digital, the Sun also built a photo studio with broadcast lighting to do video hits and some sports coverage. Similar to the Spec’s current newsroom, the new Sun office will put the web team close to the national and local news desks, and will have a Chartbeat monitor.

Annick Mitchell, an interior design professor at Ryerson University, says a newsroom should promote and support journalistic creativity. In her experience, people are not creative in isolation or solitude, which makes collaborative spaces a crucial consideration for newspapers. The Spectator chose to put the web team in the middle to secure its place as a priority in the story process. Poling’s office is right across from the digital desks, where he can hear conversations and also jump in with his thoughts. That kind of openness, which invites collaboration, extends throughout the newsroom. Poling, who finds that some of the best ideas and stories arise from informal conversations at the heart of the newsroom, compares it to a natural news amphitheatre: “Like a big, digital whiteboard in the middle of the room.” Even the Spec’s formal news meetings take place in the open, and everyone is invited to gather around the glassy black table or listen in from his or her desk.

But Canadian papers haven’t had much structural redesign of their office spaces in comparison to papers such as The Guardian and The New York Times. Cox says that’s a result of a lack of investment. The Times had a brand new building designed from the ground up in 2007. The focus at Canadian papers has mostly been on moving furniture and people around—nothing structural. The interest Cox saw in newsroom redesign from four or five years ago has somewhat fizzled out. “Talking about newsroom design is a little bit of a luxurious conversation,” says Poling. Canadian papers bear the marks of media consolidation and the industry’s shaky financial situation. Before selling its building in 2010, the Sun had six storeys of office space. After the sale, it moved all operations to the second floor. Now, the paper is preparing for its move this year to the Postmedia building, which also houses the National Post. The Free Press’s 20,000 square foot newsroom has empty space at the back—wounds from editorial cutbacks.

No matter where a newsroom is or what it looks like, big stories still send adrenaline rushing through the space. The culture of chasing and telling stories, Wallace says, remains unchanged by the moment’s trends. Beyond a web desk or a hub-and-spoke office design model, that is the newsroom’s true, unchanging core.

A previous version of this story stated The Globe and Mail will be moving into the complex that the Sun currently occupies. The Globe and Mail will not be moving into the same building that the Sun currently occupies, but one nearby.

The streets of downtown Montreal are cluttered with protestors chanting, “Fuck the police!” Traces of the sun filter out from behind department store buildings as anti-capitalists rally for International Workers’ Day. Spectators capture footage of police spraying a thick cloud of tear gas into the crowd, which sends people running. Marie-Espérance Cerda interviews protestors and documents the unfolding events, but instead of using a standard video camera, she’s using six GoPros on a rig to produce virtual reality (VR) journalism.

Later, electronic headgear that creates a three-dimensional, interactive environment will immerse viewers in the same scene Cerda witnessed. This experience—the feeling of being in a place and the heightened sense of emotion that goes with it—isn’t possible through traditional journalism. Words on a page or a video on a screen creates distance between the reader and the story, an empathy divide that VR shrinks.

While the concept has been around since the Second World War, long before computer scientist Jaron Lanier coined the term “virtual reality” in the 1980s, its most common commercial application so far has been video games. In the past year, though, journalists have explored VR’s powerful storytelling possibilities, but they must navigate the tricky ethics that invariably come with new technology.

A VR headset creates a 360-degree field of vision that moves with the user, allowing her to explore virtual surroundings and become part of the story. Lenses focus and reshape the display to make a three-dimensional stereoscopic image similar to one in a View-Master toy. Most high-tech headsets take measurements of the user’s skull to record motion, giving the user control. In 2014, Google released Google Cardboard, a build-it-yourself device that makes VR accessible to anyone with a smartphone. A small magnet works with the phone’s magnetometer (which controls the compass) to create movement.

Cerda’s Montreal experiment began as a major research project for her master’s degree in media production at Ryerson University. The 10-minute video starts outside of a downtown Burger King. Straight ahead, people wave Quebec flags and hold picket signs high. Look up and you’ll see the remnants of daylight reflected in a partially blue sky. If you turn around, there’s a white bus parked in the middle of an intersection. Police armed with riot shields file out one by one. Then they start spraying tear gas.

The coolness of VR can overshadow ethical concerns. There’s more control, but the viewer is confined to the passenger seat. “You’re existing in a universe of possibility that’s been defined by the person who’s made the news item,” says Gene Allen, a journalism professor at Ryerson and the supervisor for Cerda’s project. “They’ve decided what to shoot, and they’ve decided how to put it together.” While “inside” the protest video, viewers can pick where to look and whom to listen to—an illusion of choice. But there’s limited perspective on what’s happening outside the frame. There’s a similar selection process in all forms of journalism, notes Allen: reporters include what’s interesting and toss the rest.

In November 2015, The Globe and Mail launched a roughly three-month VR trial. Three employees spend their days inside an incubation lab on the main floor of the paper’s building. A lot of the current focus is on the technological aspect, says Matt Frehner, senior editor of mobile and interactive news, adding that the VR team is still in the “how does this work” phase. The goal is to create an immersive experience that’s as different from regular video as IMAX is from a regular movie. Meanwhile, Canadian Press plans to explore the technology’s potential within the next year.

Still, Canada is a few steps behind American outlets. ABC and The Wall Street Journal have created VR content. And last November, Associated Press announced plans to produce a series of downloadable stories, which will be released by March.

On Sunday November 8, 2015, The New York Times arrived with Google Cardboard, allowing subscribers to watch an 11-minute video called The Displaced. It followed three child refugees, including 9-year-old Chuol. When his village in South Sudan was attacked, he fled to the swamp with his grandmother; his father and grandfather were burned alive, and he was separated from his mother. He stands at the front of a hollowed-out wooden boat, paddling through a narrow stream surrounded by thick blades of grass and lily pads. The sun reflects off the water, which may conceal crocodiles—an ever-present threat in the swamp. “I know that if I am eaten by a crocodile, it may be a slow death,” the boy says in the video, “but it is better than being killed by the fighters.”

Stories told through VR are usually emotional ones, and the danger is some will go too far. Would people want to experience the terrorist attacks in Paris? The earthquakes in Nepal? Empathy is a powerful tool, when used correctly, and VR breaks down familiar barriers that stand in the way of complete understanding. In the Times project, instead of trying to imagine what living conditions are like in South Sudan, VR lets people temporarily experience it for themselves. Feelings are enhanced and perceptions are amplified, but that can push people into dark corners.

After the paper launched the VR project, Michael Oreskes, news chief at National Public Radio and a former Times editor, was among the people who voiced concern. “Our stories can’t be virtually true,” he wrote. “They must be fully real.” While some projects (including Cerda’s video and the Times’s refugee film) are made from real-time footage, others use computer-simulated images based on maps and photographs. But can embellished stories be honest stories? Allen believes they can, so long as reporters clearly indicate what they’re doing. Feature writers reconstruct scenes all the time, he says, and television programs, including CBC’s the fifth estate, often use simulated footage. The difference with VR is that it’s harder to draw the line between what’s real and what’s recreated. It’s up to the journalist and the editor to produce content that serves as a genuine representation of a story.  

Late last September, Cerda presented her VR project at Ryerson to a small group of people huddled around a boardroom table. A woman strapped on the cardboard headset and became immersed in cluttered Montreal streets as people chanted and police filed out of a white bus. She spun around in a black office chair and said, “Incredible.”

Russell Wangersky peeled away the cling wrap encasing the chicken, thinking of it sizzling on a barbecue. When he turned the bird over, he saw “a great honking fistful of still attached skin and fat” tucked in where the ribs should have been. Over six months, he investigated the meat-to-fat ratio of Newfoundland Farm Products chickens. Wangersky made several trips to the grocery store. Almost every purchase was “larded up” to increase the weight—and the price—of the chicken.

He shared his findings in a St. John’s The Telegram column in April 2009, and the comments confirmed that his readers had also been duped. But “Penney” wrote, “I can’t believe someone was paid to write this useless waste of an article…A true indicator of the abysmal state of journalism in this province.”

Wangersky, who also moderated comments at the paper, has seen much worse. He’d sift through close to 100 comments per day (a small fraction of what larger publications receive) and kill about 20 percent of them based on their racist or libelous nature. “I don’t know what it adds in the end,” he says. “Unless what you’re looking for is to establish that out there, among us, there are truly objectionable people.”

His is one of many voices in the growing call to remove online comment sections. But commenters and tech experts say it’s a short-term solution to a lack of accountability and engagement from both sides of the computer screen.

In December, the Toronto Star shut down its comment section, joining publications such as Popular Science and the Toronto Sun. The Star will now curate “the most thoughtful, insightful and provocative comments from readers” that it finds through social media, and letters and emails to the editor. “My fear is that they are just going to cherry–pick a few comments that they like and highlight those,” says Mathew Ingram, former communities editor for The Globe and Mail and now a senior writer at Fortune. He says the move will “reflect all kinds of inherent biases” and, in selecting individual comments, publications “will be more likely to avoid the topics or viewpoints that don’t fit with those biases.”

Popular Science axed its comment section in September 2013, stating that comments don’t belong within the realms of a science-based publication. That same month, Huffington Post did away with anonymous comments. Former managing editor Jimmy Soni cited the “online toxicity” of anonymity as an explanation. In 2014, Reuters closed comments on news stories but kept them open for opinion and blog pieces. It has no incentive to engage in criticism because its stories are “straight news,” says digital executive editor Dan Colarusso.

Last September, the Sun eliminated the comment sections from most of its online stories. It says the move is only temporary, until the paper finds a “better and more accountable way” for readers to interact with the publication and each other. Comment sections “are a big part of our history and our culture at the paper,” says vice president of editorial James Wallace. “But we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t serving the interests of our readers and that there wasn’t a good or easy way to fix it while we figure out the best solution that will allow signed commenting.”

In November, CBC closed comments on all stories about indigenous issues. In a statement on its website, it said that while providing a “democratic space” for readers is important, there had been an influx of “hate speech and personal attacks.” Claiming it didn’t want a small minority of commenters to ruin the experience for everyone, CBC will be “taking a pause” until it finds the best way to proceed.

People who participate in debate to deliberately offend others are called “trolls.” Though they make up a small minority of the commenting community, trolls are the biggest catalyst of the comment section downfall. People who read negative comments below an article are more likely to view the information as less trustworthy, according to a 2013 study co-authored by Dietram Scheufele, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study, “The ‘Nasty Effect’: Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies,” used a fake blog post to gauge the change in reader perception after exposure to negative comments. Several news outlets, including Popular Science, have used Scheufele’s study as justification for eliminating comment sections.

Others, including Reuters and the Star, point out that reader discussion is happening on social media. Ingram says both of these reasons are simply excuses for laziness. “It requires more work to moderate, but at least the paper is exposed to points of view it might otherwise not want to listen to,” he says, adding that comment sections are a large part of building an online community, because they give readers a voice and make them feel engaged with a topic. Taking that away removes the conversation between author and audience.

Leaving comments to social media isn’t any better, though. When publications hand over the conversation, they’re taking traffic away from their own articles. And, according to a Pew Research study, trolling exists regardless of the platform.

So, what’s the solution? De Correspondent, a crowdfunded news site in the Netherlands, is expanding with a focus on writer-to-reader engagement. The founders, Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth, say their goal is engagement through in-depth digital storytelling. The member-based subscription publication allows only members to comment (or “contribute,” as De Correspondent calls it). It also holds live events where readers and writers can speak face-to-face. This creates a sense of real engagement and accountability.

Accountability, according to the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), is what’s needed to make comment sections work. In a 2014 report, the organization’s Ethics Advisory Committee concluded that it’s the responsibility of journalists to “set the tone for the conversation” by contributing to the comment sections themselves. The report also pointed out that readers are “likely to be more engaged if they see other commenters and journalists responding constructively.”

While Wangersky and others would love to see comment sections—in their current form—disappear completely, it doesn’t seem likely. People will always have opinions, and providing a public space to air them is an integral part of a transparent news organization. Both Scheufele and Ingram agree that the trick to making it work is to be vigilant, ensure accountability and, above all, to engage. Because no matter what new form comment sections take, there will always be a Penney waiting to fan the flames of uncivil discussion.

At age 12, Julie Scott was the only girl in a boys’ hockey team. There were no girls’ teams when she was growing up in the 1980s in Guelph, Ontario, but she was determined to play hockey just like her big brother. Buried under padding and sometimes using her brother’s old equipment, she proved she was just as good as the boys. Now, almost 30 years later, the head of the sports section at Canadian Press applies the same determination to a male-dominated industry.

Many women in sports journalism acknowledge the skewed gender balance and sexism in the industry but would rather not dwell on these negative aspects. Instead, some female leaders are supporting each other and mentoring the next generation.

There has always been a huge gender gap in sports journalism. According to a 2014 U.S. study by the Women’s Media Center, women make up less than 10 percent of journalists in this beat in print and online. This ratio extends beyond the borders of the U.S. and many sports desks continue to be notoriously unbalanced.

Early in Megan Robinson’s career, a much older male superior told her that she would never make it because she talks like a girl. That was a decade ago, but she still thinks about it from time to time. Today, the Global sports anchor runs a series called Women at Work on her blog that highlights women in various industries. She wants to give them a platform to discuss challenges they face across all fields, and to unite them through storytelling. Robinson says there were many times when she experienced sexism at work at some of her past jobs. She’s been doubted by male colleagues and catcalled in locker rooms. In one post, she links a CBC video of sports reporters speaking out against sexism. The women in the video discuss experiences they’ve had on the job and why they feel like they can’t talk about it. One says, “If you said something, you’d probably be perceived as being weak.”

But things are finally starting to change: at four leading Canadian news organizations, women hold some of the highest positions in the sports sections. Scott is the senior editor of the sports-arts-lifestyles section at CP, Jennifer Quinn is the sports editor at the Toronto Star, Shawna Richer is the sports editor at The Globe and Mail and Bev Wake is the senior executive sports producer at Postmedia Network in Vancouver.

These women made it to the top in an industry that is historically overwhelmingly male despite the pitfalls and ingrained sexism that accompany the job. Although there is competition between their news organizations, the women are friends. They meet often—usually when Wake is in Toronto—to have dinner, catch up and encourage each other. “We’re a good support system for each other,” says Scott.

While it’s refreshing to see women at the top in sports journalism, Jan Kainer, a professor at York University in gender, sexuality and women’s studies, says it’s an anomaly for many professions. The majority of women aren’t given leadership opportunities. Kainer’s course on women in professions analyzes the way women need to act like men and sound like men in order to be accepted. The way female sports broadcasters speak is distinctly masculine, while their appearances are exaggeratedly feminine. “It’s such a contradiction,” says Kainer. This is why comments such as “you talk like a girl” can be damaging.

Subtly sexist language can be the most harmful. Robinson is always referred to as a “female sports journalist,” while male colleagues are just sports journalists. “It’s a subtle way of sorting or reducing,” says Rachelle Williams, a freelance writer and intersectional feminist advocate in Toronto. “The problem is that this can delegitimize the work a woman in a field is producing, and make her sex or gender identification more prominent than the actual work she’s producing.” She says this practice of modifying titles can be seen in other typically male-dominated industries, such as engineering, and can also be applied to people of colour and those with diverse sexual orientations.

Scott and Quinn know they’re lucky to work in progressive newsrooms and want to mentor and support other women in the industry. Along with other colleagues, they run Women in Sports Toronto, a networking and mentoring community inspired by their friendship. “We recognize that we’re quite lucky to have each other and it’s good to share that with other members of our community,” says Quinn. Events so far include a panel discussion at Ryerson University and a time for members of the industry—mainly women—to socialize and talk about jobs, applications and story ideas.

At Women in Sports, the focus is on mentoring. Terry Taylor from Associated Press and Jane O’Hara from the Ottawa Sun were pioneers of female sports journalism and women that Scott looked up to and admired. Now, she is able to do the same for others, which she considers the most rewarding part of her job.

Meanwhile, Robinson uses the negative aspects of the job as motivation. “No matter what,” she writes in an email, “I have chosen and continue to choose this field every day because I love it and because the stories matter to me.”

“Journalism is about relationships,” says Joey Coleman. And, walking with him on a sunny day through downtown Hamilton, I’m beginning to see what he means. At Dr. Disc record store, he stops to chat with owner Mark Furukawa—Coleman’s having issues with the sound equipment he uses to live stream council meetings at city hall. Furukawa refers to the indie journalist as “a unique animal,” lamenting that there aren’t more like him. Later, we stop at a bakery on King William Street, where the woman behind the counter asks if Coleman will have the usual (two oatmeal-raisin cookies). He does. On our way out, a fellow customer calls after him: “Give ’em hell, Joey!”

Since starting The Public Record—a one-person news site featuring live-streamed city council meetings alongside written news and analysis—Coleman has become a fixture in his community. But, despite Furukawa’s praise, his situation isn’t unique. Or necessarily ideal. Though independent reporting offers unparalleled freedom and editorial control, it’s certainly the more difficult path, littered with challenges not faced by traditionally employed journalists or even freelancers working for established brands. As Coleman quickly discovered, it doesn’t always pay to work alone.

One-person newsrooms are nothing new, but as traditional newspapers increasingly consolidate under the ownership of large media corporations, independent journalism has taken on new meanings. For Sean Holman, who founded Public Eye in 2003 to cover B.C. provincial politics, it meant keeping his government transparent through investigative reporting. For Gagandeep Ghuman, who founded The Squamish Reporter in B.C., it meant a closer relationship to readers.

Coleman’s own self-described mission to “find a new model to sustain local journalism” in Hamilton began in 2012. He bemoans the lack of fellow reporters at city hall, but isn’t blaming anyone because the council meetings he attends religiously are, more often than not, mind-numbingly boring. “I wanted to go more in-depth on something that wasn’t profitable,” he says, adding that traditional newsrooms rarely allow reporters to choose what they cover.

Update: After this story appeared, the office of the mayor contacted the Review to contest Coleman’s statement that few other reporters regularly attend council meetings. According to Coleman, his work on The Public Record has encouraged more reporters to attend, but he stands by the claim that there is a lack of reporting at Hamilton City Hall.

To make a living reporting the unprofitable, Coleman turned to crowdfunding. He accepts donations via his website (which, at its peak, made $600 per month), but relies on heavily publicized Indiegogo campaigns every few years for the bulk of his funding.

The Public Record is a video archive of city council as well as a news site. Rather than raking in clicks and page views, Coleman hopes his online streams can empower neighbourhood associations and help Hamiltonians hold councillors to their word. And he doesn’t get discouraged by low viewership, which averages around 50 for most streams, because the freedom to be boring, and to choose what to cover based on community significance rather than widespread appeal, is an upside of independent journalism.

By the winter of 2014, Coleman’s watchdogging had irritated city councillors who thought he was deliberately looking for gaffes. Lloyd Ferguson, for example; he’s the ward 12 councillor and former chair of Hamilton’s accountability and transparency committee. One evening, while speaking with a fellow staff member on the second floor of city hall, Ferguson spotted Coleman nearby. Assuming the journalist was eavesdropping, Ferguson confronted him and, after some shouting, grabbed Coleman by the arm and shoved him away from the conversation.

After this incident, Coleman says he found himself facing a number of restrictions that made it difficult for him to do his work. (Ferguson refused to comment on the incident for this story.) He is currently not reporting from city hall, but intends to return in January under the oversight of the Ontario Ombudsman. That oversight, he hopes, will do what the backing of an established news organization does for other journalists.

Legal protection is one the most significant benefits independent journalists miss out on. “I needed to make sure everything I published was airtight,” says Holman, whose investigations at Public Eye often scrutinized B.C. politicians. “I couldn’t afford to take a risk.”

In 2011, financial strain forced Public Eye’s website, which was funded primarily through reader donations and advertising, to cease publishing. Despite over 6,000 investigative and enterprise stories, some of which led to the resignation of public officials and even changed laws, people were turned off from donating to Holman’s reporting due to its aggressive nature.

Funding remains one of the largest issues facing independent publications. The pressure to make money from journalism—a strain on even the largest newsrooms—can be crippling when applied to a single person. In a competitive news market, independent journalists need to offer something different, says Susan Harada, associate director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication and head of the journalism program. “When you look at someone like Sean Holman, he wasn’t competing against mainstream media,” she says. “He was providing something different.”

Ghuman, whose paper is profitable because of ads from local businesses, says independents can be better poised to attract readers than their corporate counterparts. A transparent, direct relationship makes for a stronger connection to the audience—which, for The Squamish Reporter, and especially for the crowdfunded Public Record, makes all the difference.

Despite considering it the worst experience of his career, Coleman’s struggles with city hall and the underdog narrative they created have garnered him more support than ever. Thanks to publicity from his forced hiatus, he expects his upcoming crowdfunding campaign to be the most successful since his first one in 2012, when he raised over $10,000 in two months. “I’ve been really lucky,” he says.

But Coleman’s financial situation remains precarious, his luck vulnerable to running out. He estimates his expenses are $2,500 per month—including camera batteries, software licensing fees, travel costs, a rented room in a friend’s house and a lifestyle he calls student-like by necessity. Walking with Coleman through downtown, listening to him go on, ever optimistic, about the future of The Public Record, I can’t help wondering how long it will be before he hits the same financial wall as Holman.

“Maybe I can find a way to make local journalism work,” Coleman says, hopeful even while describing the mounting economic pressure on both his one-man newsroom and the larger industry. “History is full of economic disruptions that lead to better ways of doing things.”

Previous versions of this story incorrectly stated that Coleman’s media credentials had been revoked and that he was restricted from live-streaming council and committee meetings. Hamilton City Hall does not accredit journalists, and Coleman has not been formally restricted or banned from live-streaming either council or committee meetings. Additionally, previous versions of this story stated that the City of Hamilton contacted the Review, occasioning an update to the published story. In fact, it was the office of the mayor. The Review regrets the errors.

Five writers gather in a dimly lit room on a Sunday evening. Black shutters and posters line the deep purple walls of the second floor of The Central, a Toronto bar. Classic rock bounces up from the deserted first floor and a faint smell of urine wafts from the nearby bathroom. Three writers sit around a chipped wooden table, the other two lounge on a grey couch. They all pitch headlines.

Editorial meetings for The Beaverton, a Canadian satirical news site, are about headlines, not story ideas. Editor-in-chief Luke Gordon Field reads from his laptop: “Conservatives unveil last minute attack ad accusing Justin of supporting Kansas City.” The old radiator by the window gurgles to life as the writers snicker.

“Like he was seen wearing a blue hat.”

“And Kansas City has blue uniforms…”

“But it was really a Blue Jays hat.”

Laughter means everyone likes the idea. Field will write the story later that night. The others read headlines they’ve prepared, but the Kansas City story is one of the few that gets the go-ahead. The joke doesn’t really need explaining.

To Field, the perfect headline is equal parts funny and attention-grabbing, sometimes provocative and reveals something true about Canada or society. He echoes what many other satirists believe: fake news can offer something traditional news or commentary can’t, won’t or shouldn’t. While journalists are confined to facts, satirists point out absurdities.

The Beaverton’s founding editor Laurent Noonan loved The Onion, but he couldn’t see a Canadian counterpart. So, in 2010, he decided to create one. He recruited writers, built a website and later created a print edition that he handed out to strangers on the street—while dressed in a beaver costume.

Field, a stand-up comedian, joined the writing team soon after and, in 2012, took over the editorial side when Noonan traveled to teach English in France. In December 2014, Noonan died and Field became the official editor-in-chief and the one in charge.

The Beaverton has gained a steady following over the past five years. In May 2013, a story about astronaut Chris Hadfield’s return from space, “Hadfield comes home to $1.37-million Rogers phone bill,” caught people’s attention and caused a spike in readership. A Hong Kong newspaper even reported the story as real news. By August 2015, the website averaged about 400,000 readers per month. In October, election coverage pushed those numbers up to 750,000.

While in the U.S. The Onion is the authoritative satirical outlet, Canadian outlets run on shoestring budgets and have trouble staying afloat long enough to establish themselves as the publication of record. Halifax’s Frank magazine launched in 1987 and became popular. Another version of the magazine, based in Ottawa, began publishing two years later. It shut down in 2004, reappeared and closed down yet again in 2008 in the face of online competitors. It resurfaced in 2013 using an online subscription model and print editions.

The Lapine and The Syrup Trap are two other fake news publications that began within a few years of The Beaverton. The Trap’s founder and editor-in-chief Nick Zarzycki finds it troubling that Canada doesn’t have a widely-read national humour publication because he believes satire is a vital part of any functioning democracy. Both publications cover politics in their own style, but not as frequently as The Beaverton.

During the federal election, Field’s site created fake platforms for each party and ran articles from the silly (“Justin Trudeau removed by mall security for walking up wrong escalator”) to the skewering (“Globe and Mail heroically defend country’s most vulnerable rich by endorsing Conservatives”). After the election, The Beaverton ran an article titled “50% female cabinet appointments lead to 5000% increase in guys who suddenly care about merit in cabinet.” Many journalists at traditional news outlets made the same point, but The Beaverton captured the argument in a single headline.

Canadian satire and parody researcher James Onusko sees an edge in much of the political coverage. While he acknowledges that some the site’s stories are silly, he appreciates its more hard-hitting material, such as questioning the integrity of political parties. “There were some mainstream sites that didn’t even go there,” he says. To Onusko, fake news websites can be better at commentary because their biases are usually more obvious. “Both are trying to report what’s going on, one is just doing it tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time doing it honestly in many ways.”

Still, some issues may not be suitable for satirical commentary. In August 2015, Ashley Burnham (previously Callingbull) became the first First Nations woman to be named Mrs. Universe. A Beaverton article with the headline “Ashley Burnham crowned Mrs. First Cree Woman to Gain National Coverage if She Disappears” said Burnham “is showing all those aboriginal girls out there, that as long as you look like a supermodel and get on TV, you too can get the same news coverage as a white girl should you ever be abducted.”

The piece caused a backlash on Twitter and The Beaverton apologized and took the piece down. “The point of the article was to call out the Media for their failure to properly cover missing and murdered Aboriginal women,” Field wrote in an apology on The Beaverton’s Facebook page. “We will happily give a quote to any news outlet wishing to write a story on the backlash to this article, provided they agree to also do a week of coverage on missing and murdered Aboriginal women.”

Field wants to make people laugh, and he knows good comedy can cut to the bone, but he admits some ideas might be more difficult to get right than others.

As the editorial pages editor at the Ottawa Citizen, Kate Heartfield oversaw 11 columnists until she resigned on November 18. Only one of those columnists isn’t white. The absence of opinion writers of colour means the paper may become a publication just for white people, admits Heartfield, who worries about the relevance of the conversation the Citizen is generating. “If you’re only publishing a certain selection of people, you’re not getting all the perspectives on any issue,” she says. “Canada is not that homogenous.”

This lack of diversity is not unique to the Citizen. Canadian columnists are predominately white, and this undermines the relevance of the conversation they help shape on a daily basis. But this problem cannot be solved overnight—and fixing it will require the support of those in power at newspapers.

People of colour make up only 3.4 percent of staff at Canadian newspapers, according to a 2004 study by Ryerson University professor emeritus John Miller, the most recent on the matter. This demographic makeup, which does not seem to have improved much since 2004, stands in stark contrast to the country’s population as a whole; visible minorities make up 19.1 percent of the population, according to the 2011 National Household Survey. Stats specifically examining the race makeup of Canadian columnists do not exist, but a scan through a staff list at any major Canadian newspaper suggests the opinion pages are even less diverse. A 2014 J-Source investigation also revealed that the median age of national columnists is 58.5 and 73 percent of the columnists surveyed were men. In other words, opinion writing in Canada is dominated by old white men.

Shari Graydon, founder of Informed Opinions, a project for amplifying women’s voices in opinion journalism, says this disparity is troubling because it means the problems facing the most marginalized people in Canada aren’t getting enough attention, while other issues are over-emphasized. That means the proposed solutions for problems facing marginalized people lack the insight that those most affected can offer.

Editors and publishers don’t want their outlets to predominately serve white people. Regardless, the internal demographic at newspapers across Canada is out of skew with the national demographic. Something has gone wrong.

According to the Vancouver Sun website, all 17 columnists identify as white, though the editor-in-chief Harold Munro says two columnists of colour aren’t listed. Columns often go to seasoned reporters, who often hold onto them for years, and columnists typically pass down from one editor to the next, so new op-ed managers lack the autonomy to fundamentally reshape the demographic of their pages.

Newsroom hiring has also diminished over the last few years, intensifying the problem by giving editors less power to address the imbalance. The Canadian Media Guild estimates that over 10,000 jobs were lost between 2008 and 2013. Mary Elizabeth Luka, a Banting postdoctoral fellow at York University, says companies typically function on a “last in, first out” basis, so the young reporters, who are more likely to come from diverse backgrounds, are unlikely to survive recessions.

While Heartfield says the longevity of columnist positions contributes to the imbalance, she did most of her recruitment for potential columnists—who are all freelancers at the Citizen—from op-eds. This process avoids some of the pitfalls of picking columnists from an imbalanced pool of staffers, but structural issues still make it hard for more people of colour to get hired. The problem, she says, is that the overwhelming amount of content in the newspaper produced by white people leads others to feel unwelcome and believe that, “Clearly this editor only wants white people, because that’s all they publish, so why am I going to send my stuff to be rejected?” The vast majority of submissions Heartfield received came from middle-aged white men, hampering her ability to get to know writers from other backgrounds.

But Luka says there’s no excuse for the extent of demographic imbalance because editors can select the voices they showcase. “If 90 percent of the people they’re getting solicitations from are middle-class middle-aged white men, then they still have 10 percent, and there are still people they can go out to solicit.”

Heartfield also admits many editors suffer from subconscious racism, which leads them to contact the same few white men when someone is needed for comment on developing issues. Minelle Mahtani, a professor in human geography at the University of Toronto who has done extensive research into race and representation, says whiteness is often mistaken for expertise. This can exacerbate subconscious racism.

There are solutions to the demographic imbalance. Luka says publications could broaden internship opportunities to give people of colour an avenue into the industry. Editors can diversify their predominately white columnist roster by actively looking for talented writers in underrepresented communities. The Toronto Star recently added Desmond Cole as a weekly columnist, for example. Mahtani says this sort of concerted effort in hiring opinion writers is important because, “It’s a nebulous process at best, and one that is offered to individuals not necessarily based on merit, but networks.”

The idea of columnists being assigned due to connections instead of merit points to a bigger problem. Mahtani says the pattern of overwhelming whiteness among columnists will continue until shot-callers at newspapers diversify. Luka adds that a significant amount of research collected since the 1970s demonstrates the necessity of diversity among those with power in journalism. “If you don’t have a variety of people with a variety of perspectives in charge of decision-making, then you won’t get decisions made that represent a multiplicity of views.”

A drastic reshaping of the upper echelons of Canada’s white-owned media monopoly is unlikely, so a truly diverse columnist roster may seem unattainable. Still, editors should do all they can to improve Canadian journalism. So far, they haven’t made full use of their limited autonomy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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