In early February 2009, staff reporter Rick McGinnis walked intoMetro Toronto, mentally preparing for the meeting he’d scheduled that day with editor-in-chief Dianne Rinehart. Several of his beats and columns had been eliminated since Rinehart had taken over the paper the previous May, and the seven-year veteran of Toronto’s most-read free daily was wondering what Metro even wanted him for anymore. Morale in the newsroom had been low for a while, and had continued on this course since the previous December, when publisher Bill McDonald had informed the crew that the company was bleeding money and he was going to cancel their holiday party as a cost-cutting measure. McGinnis was beginning to pull away from the paper; he had interviewed for another job before coming into work that day.

But before McGinnis got the chance to speak with Rinehart, he was called into a different kind of meeting, one that involved Rinehart, McDonald, an HR person and a union rep. They told him that his position had been eliminated, that they were sorry, and that he should wait in the lobby while someone packed up his desk things. As bad as McGinnis knew it was at Metro, he hadn’t seen this coming.

Before the day was out, two more reporters and a managing editor from the newsroom found themselves toting away their belongings, leaving just one reporter on staff: a woman on maternity leave. She later learned that her position had been eliminated also. Rinehart would later defend the move by saying the poor economy had forced the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail to cut jobs, so what were four reporters?

Well, in this case four reporters equalled the paper’s entire reporting department. Though McDonald said at the time that the plan was to beef up the content with extensive use of freelancers, Metro Toronto became little more than a news aggregator, overwhelmingly filled with information from wire services and content partnerships (namely from the Toronto Star). Whether this move was a sad reality of the recession or just a publisher trying to protect profit margins is a moot point. The question remains, is Metro capable of putting out a strong paper without a staff of writers?

The uproar over the firing of the four reporters rivalled, if not surpassed, whatever cutbacks the Globe and theStar had been facing at the time. By the Monday following the layoffs of McGinnis and the others, news of the move appeared in Patricia Best’s “Nobody’s Business” column for the Globe. Best wrote that Metro “won’t be without copy for its pages because it will be using non-paid interns instead.” The Globe later published a clarification explaining that Metro’s internship program had not changed as a result of the layoffs, and that a group of news interns had been taken on days before the layoffs was simply a matter of bad timing. However, few saw the clarification and the news hit the blogosphere fast. J-Source and BlogTO, among others, wrote scathingly about the layoffs, while Torontoist mocked the paper for printing an egregious error (the word “breasts” appears out of nowhere in the middle of a Friday the 13th movie review), blaming overworked copy editors having to deal with inexperienced interns and freelancers. This wasn’t necessarily true, but once the information was out there, it was difficult to take back.

Despite Metro’s protestations that it was the victim of bad timing, its union, the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild, launched grievances over the issue, which are still in arbitration. “The union felt that there was work being done by interns,” says Brad Honywill, president of SONG. “We felt that the contract restricted their use of interns and freelancers and they went against the provisions of their contract.” He continues: “It’s just shocking to think that a newspaper would get rid of its regular writers and fill that with temporary workers.” Honywill adds that regurgitating stories that appear elsewhere doesn’t provide in-depth coverage. It’s the journalistic equivalent of fast food.

Meanwhile, Metro scaled back its pay rates for freelancers in May. Originally, Metro had paid a flat rate (usually about $175 for a 350- to 400-word story) and then an extra fee if a story got published in any other edition (it isn’t uncommon for a story to run in all seven editions, which might double the writer’s original fee). In May, it raised the flat rate slightly but no longer offered reprint fees. Nevertheless, Halifax-based freelancer Jon Tattrie, who has been a regular contributor to Metro Halifax for more than a year (and writes for Metro Canada’s other editions, including Metro Toronto), says the difference wasn’t much and he really enjoys working with the paper. Not surprisingly, Tattrie has seen a lot more work coming his way from Metro in recent months.

Raf Brusilow, a Toronto-based freelancer who’s been writing for Metro for more than five years, doesn’t buy into the notion that unpaid interns are picking up the slack, and says that he’s been getting more work than ever since the layoffs. He does, however, suspect that as the market continues to change, more publications will veer away from the staff-writer model and toward the “cash-and-carry” style of working with freelancers. Most magazines shed their staff writers long ago, if they had staffers to begin with, and the system has worked out well for the magazines.

Not surprisingly, morale inside Metro continued to decline. McGinnis suggests one reason may have been Rinehart’s editing style, which he says was “inconsistent,” and whose management approach could make staff feel alienated—a perspective echoed by some people currently or formerly involved with Metro who would only speak off the record. Rinehart refuses to comment on the specifics of her time at Metro, but says that it would be difficult to find anyone in a management position—especially during a recession—who receives only accolades from her employees. She says she was very proud of the staff she worked with atMetro, calling them an “energetic, principled, dynamic lot.”

Prescient, too. After McGinnis was let go, he thought of all the things he wished he had said to Rinehart before he left. “I should have turned to her,” he says, “and said, ’This is going to be you before the year is out!’”

Rinehart and Metro parted ways on October 28. Former Homemakers editor Charlotte Empey has been hired to replace her, and will assume her post in January.

After The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente wrote a column about the risks of talking on a cell phone while driving, it didn’t take long forsomeone to notice it seemed very similar to one by Maureen Dowd that had run in The New York Times the day before. The NYTPicker, a website that follows the Times, cited Wente for “uncredited reporting,” structural similarity and lifting quotes. Both columnists quote psychologist John Ratey and cite research by David Strayer. Both make reference to their mothers. And both take advantage of their own experience with distracted driving. Dowd opens with a scene on the road. She’s driving, she’s on her cell phone and she rear-ends the car in front of her. Ditto Wente, except she narrowly escapes collision. Dowd closes her column with the theory that our short-circuited attention spans crave this constant diversion. Wente has a similar premonition at the end of her column.

Plagiarism is a form of theft, but the specifics can be tricky. There’s no copyright on the news. And it can be impossible to trace the origin of an idea. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen has referred to columnists as “literary kleptomaniacs” because of the contents of their pockets—”notes on napkins with mysterious origins that come from someone else.” Once rewritten, he says, ideas take on new ownership.

Columnists, in particular, can argue semantics and get away with it. Apologists such as Cohen, who make theft seem romantic, aren’t helping the cause. Editors can be a little too reverent with the copy, especially if the writer is famous or popular. And when writers are constantly told they’re brilliant, says the Globe’s Rick Salutin, they’re more likely to believe they are the genesis of every idea. So columnists aren’t running low on ego—or excuses.

But that doesn’t mean they always have something to say. National Post columnist Barbara Kay contends that both Dowd and Wente are guilty of coming to “predictable conclusions” and writing on “automatic pilot.” That’s understandable, she says: “Why not, when they are in print so often?” Wente writes three columns a week, so Kay, who appears weekly, is sympathetic. “I let her get away with a clone-like cousin column to Dowd’s.”

Another Globe columnist, Christie Blatchford, once quoted Michael Forber: “I only have a finite number of words in me.” Since being pithy and insightful so often isn’t easy, Salutin says there ought to be an opt-out option for people with “nothing to say today.” Don Obe, former columnist and editor at Toronto Life, agrees. Obe admits to “begging off” his column on a few occasions, but says postponing it is better than theft. “One is embarrassing, the other is a literary crime.”

Still, Craig Silverman, author of Regret the Error, won’t include Wente’s transgression on his blog’s annual plagiarism round up. If she is guilty of anything, he says, it’s stealing ideas, not words. Intellectual theft is a much more forgivable sin, he says, “but it sure as hell isn’t good journalism.”

Wente, who declined to be interviewed for this story, isn’t alone. In fact, Dowd has also faced accusations of plagiarism. She told The Huffington Post that she’d inadvertently taken the quote in question from Josh Marshall after a friend mentioned it to her “spontaneously.” Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle took jokes, of all the banal things. Among Wente, Dowd and Barnicle, only Barnicle lost his job. But it wasn’t his first offence. He was then hired by the Boston Herald and is now a commentator on MSNBC’s Hardball.

All plagiarism takes is an ego and a slack newsroom culture. Newsrooms do a lot of preaching about ethics and almost nothing practical about it, says Silverman. “My mother works at a kindergarten to Grade 12 school and it has more anti-plagiarism methods in place than the average journalistic organization.” Repeat offenders aren’t unusual at newspapers, since lax practices make the habit easy to acquire. And if the Barnicle case is any indication, it’s not difficult for the accused to find new work.

Thorough background checks are rare, especially for big names with a fat set of clippings. Most errors caught before publication are found by copy editors, and by chance, says John McIntyre, who worked at theBaltimore Sun copy desk for 23 years. One of the paper’s copy editors discovered that a Sun reporter had lifted passages of description about a town while verifying the spelling of the town’s name from the cribbed source. The offending reporter had just attended a newsroom workshop on preventing plagiarism.

The best guard against plagiarism is an editor’s common sense. In “Lying, cheating and stealing,” McIntyre’s draft of a Sun copy editing policy-turned-blog post, he cites Jack Kelley’s fabrication at USA Today as a particularly glaring example. “When Kelley claimed to have seen human heads rolling down the street, their eyelids still blinking,” writes McIntyre, “it would have been good for the paper if the editor had said, ’What the hell?’ and followed up.” Thankfully, a copy editor was paying attention and this detail never went to press.

Plagiarism can be as obvious as Kelley’s blinking corpse or, McIntyre notes, in a sudden change in diction or syntax. And if a tenured columnist, who last received accolades before the advent of the internet, is inspired, editors should proceed with caution. The same goes for a dull writer who suddenly sounds influenced: “Lifting is likelier than infusion from the muse.”

Writers should also be wary, since unintentional plagiarism—a stolen passage sneaking into your notes and mistaken for your own—is a famed excuse. Obe doesn’t buy it. “If you can’t recognize your own prose from someone else’s,” he says, “you’re not a writer.”

This method might have flagged Salutin’s one act of plagiarism, which still goes unnoticed. In Grade 6, he lifted a phrase from his Big Book of Baseball: “the sound of hardened ash meeting horsehide.” Instead of questioning the sophisticated writing of a sixth-grader, the teacher asked him to read it to the class. Salutin recently discovered that the cliché originated elsewhere. Apparently he wasn’t the first to steal it, but he’s felt guilty ever since. This is his first published confession.

As reporters Andrew McIntosh and Daniel Leblanc await Supreme Court of Canada rulings that will determine whether they can continue to protect the identities of their confidential sources, the decision to grant someone anonymity remains a difficult one for Canadian news organizations. We asked three senior editors how they deal with the issue.

RRJ:What’s the procedure when requesting anonymity for a source? 

Esther Enkin, executive editor, CBC News: There’s a discussion, and all decisions are made against our policy book.

Ellie Kirzner, senior news editor, NOW Magazine: The editor always has to know who the source is so she can be part of evaluating whether this is a worthy source to bother quoting—a source of substance or, as we would say, an “authorized knower” or an “unauthorized knower,” someone in a position to actually know. Just because a source is anonymous doesn’t mean you don’t have to go to great lengths to assess whether it’s worthy information.

Jeremy Keehn, senior editor, The Walrus: If we’re reporting a narrative—particularly one that’s investigative—we’ll have a discussion right away if we think a source is going to require anonymity, and if so, what sorts of arrangements we’ll need to make and why. We have to decide what the interest is in protecting his identity and if it’s a situation where there’s a clear public interest in people knowing who the source is. People will sometimes request a cloak of anonymity for reasons that are more related to their desire for privacy than their need to conceal their identity.

I can’t think of any instances where I’ve received a draft and the writer has changed a name without us having discussed it beforehand. In the November issue, for example, Alex Hutchinson had a piece where he was working with someone’s medical history—a case study where, because of the rules in the medical community, we couldn’t reveal the person’s name. We had a discussion around the time the draft came in, and since even Alex didn’t know the identity of the person, we had to discuss at what point to mention the changed name to the reader and how to be clear about it.

RRJ: How often do writers make these requests?

Enkin: There are two levels. There’s an anonymous program participant, which is like a clip in a story or an interview on a morning show, as opposed to a source in an ongoing investigation. It’s the same ethical dilemma, but one obviously has a little more impact than the other. So, “Can we interview a recovering alcoholic and not use his name?” Those are almost daily. The more serious, working with an anonymous source, I don’t know if I could quantify that…I would say it’s not as common.

Kirzner: It happens a fair amount, but we always need to know the reason for the anonymity. To inject yourself into a story without using your name, you’re affecting people’s lives, so we need a good reason why a source won’t reveal his name. There are many reasons why this might happen. We’re always weighing it.

But it’s complicated. Unlike The New York Times, which can use “unnamed sources” in major political stories because the reader is to assume the writer has close connections inside Washington, we can’t lean on our readers in that way. The story has to be set up in a way to assure our readers that the information is credible. Unless we have the one smoking gun, the “Deep Throat”—it can happen, but using an unnamed source as the key point of a story doesn’t happen much.

Keehn: Very rarely. Of the 30 we’ve published in the last couple months and including the ones we’ve got planned, I think we have three where it’s been an issue.

RRJ: How often do you reject requests for source anonymity?

Enkin: Usually, a serious investigative piece is so thorough and has so many checks and counterchecks that…it’s not often. Once we’re that serious, we’re going to keep at it. Do we drop stories from time to time because we can’t get other proof? Yeah. But it’s not that frequent.

Kirzner: Sometimes. It’s not often, but a story can perish if it’s not credible enough to the reader. Also, unnamed sources often require other levels of substantiation. Every reporter, once in his life, will get a hot story from a “Deep Throat” that rises or falls on the one source, but it’s not common, and usually you need corroboration, someone in the vicinity of the game who has a similar take. It’s an assessment game, but it’s a deep process.

Keehn: It’s rare, and usually it’s clear why we need to do it. In the maybe one or two cases where I’ve had some qualms about it, I wouldn’t have said there was a clear public interest in knowing who the source was or that anything was lost in terms of the credibility of the story by not saying who it was.

RRJ: Is the policy you follow a physical document?

Enkin: We follow CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices.

Kirzner: It evolves in discussion, but I assume other news media have similar—if not identical—guidelines.

Keehn: We don’t have a formal in-house code of ethics. The two I personally tend to consult—almost interchangeably, because they cover the same principles—are the Canadian Association of Journalists one and the CBC Journalistic Standards and Practices. If it’s more of a legal concern—if we ever ran into a situation where someone could legitimately get fired, because Canada has crappy whistleblower protection—I have a legal guide we’d use for those sorts of things. Or we’d get a lawyer.

Tom Hanson is on the first green of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club in Gatineau, Québec. The Canadian Press photographer and his long-time colleague, Jonathan Hayward, are there to shoot the LPGA’s du Maurier Classic and someone has spray-painted “Go Canada Go” on the green a week after Canadian Lorie Kane won her first career title in Eureka, Missouri. Standing beside the tribute, Hanson and Hayward can see the red paint doesn’t look like much. If they want the shot, they’ll have to go up. “Jonny, you’re goin’ up that fuckin’ tree.”

Hanson puts Hayward—camera equipment and all—on his back and lifts him to the lowest branches. “Hey Tom, I can’t climb this fuckin’ tree.” Hayward’s gear weighs him down, but he manages to hoist himself up and can hear Hanson in the earpiece of the cheap walkie-talkies they’re using. “Hey Jon, how does it look?”

Not bad, but I could go higher.”

“Well, go higher!”

Hayward scales most of the tree just before the golfers hit the green. As they play, Hayward hears a branch snap. Hanson hears it too. “Don’t be so fuckin’ loud. You’re going to get kicked out of here.”

Though it was his direction that led to the LPGA tournament photo, Hanson let Hayward snap the picture that became a two-page spread in Sports Illustrated. Hanson, who died of a heart attack at 41 while playing hockey in March, sometimes came across as gruff—cursing at Hayward, riding up to the Governor General’s residence on his Harley and giving Parliament Hill staffers hell for denying photographers access to politicians—but the cowboy persona was only his first layer. “He seemed like a Maurice ‘Mom’ Boucher,” says CP’s Montreal news editor Alex Panetta, referring to the former president of the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter, “but he really had the disposition of a Shakespeare.” It was these sides Hanson tapped into when taking photos, with his hard-nosed approach and his discerning eye coming together to capture the human side of Canadian history.

When Hanson started freelancing for CP’s Montreal bureau in 1989, he wasn’t an outspoken character. “If you want to get ahead, you keep your mouth shut and your ears open. And that’s what he did,” says Ryan Remiorz, Hanson’s CP colleague and friend. “He let his pictures do the talking.” He shot the picture that spoke the loudest while covering the Oka Crisis the same year he started at CP. The conflict between the Mohawks and the town’s people had been brewing for about a month and, after an unsuccessful attempt by the police to dismantle the Mohawk protest, police established their own blockade to restrict access to the town. Hanson and John Kenney, a photographer for Montreal’s The Gazette, found a back road in and made a dash for the top. Hanson snapped the iconic image of Mohawk warrior Richard Livingston Nicholas—rifle in hand, arm raised and standing atop an overturned Sûreté du Québec truck. (Coincidentally, Nicholas died the same day as Hanson, also at age 41.)

CP’s Ottawa bureau hired Hanson full-time in 1992. He went on to win several awards, including NPAC’s 2001 Picture of the Year for a photo he took at the Summit of the Americas. Fred Chartrand, Hanson’s mentor and long-time CP colleague, remembers him coming in from the protests reeking of tear gas, but excited about one particular shot: it showed a gas mask-wearing bagpiper with water-cannoned protesters behind him. Everyone else was just as excited, including the newspapers that picked it up.

But protest shots weren’t the only ones Hanson was after. He was always determined to bring home the Canadian angle of any event he covered. Hanson shot the 2000 Sydney Olympics with Remiorz and Kevin Frayer, and stood at the highest position possible in the crowd during the opening ceremonies. The three heard the athletes were going to unfurl a massive Canadian flag, so Hanson was perfectly placed when they did—except the flag was turned the wrong way for his shot. Hanson called the chef de mission and screamed at him, “The flag’s upside down! The flag’s upside down! Tell them to turn it around!” The flag slowly turned to face Hanson, giving him his Canadian angle.

Although one of the boys, Hanson called his wife, Catherine, every day—no matter where an assignment took him. Catherine is now on the selection committee for the CJF’s Tom Hanson Photojournalism Award, which gives a photojournalist in the early stages of his or her career a six-week internship at CP’s Toronto office. His friends think that’s the way Hanson would have wanted it. “He had a very warm heart. He always had time to help,” says Hayward. “If he saw that you were someone who wasn’t going to waste his time and that you had potential, he gave you the world.”

It’s long been a tradition in Ottawa for the prime minister to, every now and then, brave the eager scrums that form in the lobby of the House of Commons and answer a few questions. Brian Mulroney would climb a few stairs up what some on the Hill know as the “Stairway to Heaven” and, looking ever dignified above the fray, answer those questions he felt were appropriate. Jean Chrétien also had his unique method of dealing with the chorus of reporters—many felt he kept a list in his head of journalists to avoid. Mulroney also left an impression that he maintained a mental list of reporters to subject to his “deep freeze.” But Stephen Harper’s government, says Rob Russo, The Canadian Press’s Ottawa bureau chief, has gone even further. “This is a PM who wants a list in his hands, and if not in his hands, then in the hands of a trusted aide.”

The list, which reporters say is now standard practice under the Conservative government, requires reporters to submit a request to the prime minister’s press secretary in order to ask the PM a question in public. Russo says the list is supposed to work on a first-come, first-served basis, but he’s heard “people who work for the PM say, ‘This reporter will never get a question in as long as I’m running the news conferences.'”

The list is just one of numerous techniques being employed by the Harper government that reduce press freedoms in the country. This is reflected in a report released by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in October, which indicated Canada’s standing on the organization’s press freedom index had dropped from 13 last year to 19. In 2002, under the Chrétien administration, Canada ranked fifth.

Dennis Trudeau, spokesman for RSF, says part of the decline is due to more legal challenges to journalists’ rights to protect their sources and the rise in the number of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP suits). But for reporters seeking information in Ottawa, a bigger issue is the administration of the Access to Information Act, which ostensibly allows anyone willing to pay $5 to request files held by the federal government with an expectation of a response within 30 days.

Public interest researcher and freelance Hill Times columnist Ken Rubin suggests that outright procrastination, inefficient staff, poor attitude and hundreds of loopholes are among the reasons for the frequent failure of the 26-year-old legislation. “There’s no will to facilitate rather than deflect, delay and deceive,” he says. “It makes us look like a Third World country when we treat information the way we do.” The Harper government was given an opportunity to expand and modernize both the act and privacy laws in October by adding provisions that included giving the information commissioner more authority to make the government release information in a reasonable amount of time. But the recommendation by a Commons committee was quietly rejected by Justice Minister Rob Nicholson.

Simple inquiries to the government outside the realm of the Access to Information Act have also been futile. Reporters complain that no matter how innocuous their questions are, every answer must go through a constricted process that takes too much time and often results only in a short, uninformative e-mail. “We just get bits and pieces,” says Hélène Buzzetti, president of the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and a reporter for Le Devoir in Quebec. “It’s all spread out, it’s not thorough and at some point you don’t know what to think anymore.” Buzzetti, who has worked on the Hill for 10 years, has been trying to discern since January how much of the economic stimulus package has been spent, but has so far only received ambiguous responses. “This is government information that is being taken by the political party in power for their own purpose and agenda,” she charges. As a result, she says, many reporters are forced to rely on government spin, which affects the accuracy and quality of information the public receives.

In the past, reporters had additional opportunities to acquire information from the prime minister and cabinet ministers after cabinet meetings, but this practice has become difficult. “We don’t even know when they are being held anymore,” says Richard Brennan, parliamentary reporter for the Toronto Star and past president of the National Press Gallery. And even if the press does find out, says Brennan, reporters are no longer allowed onto the third floor, where the meetings are held.

Despite these roadblocks, Russo suggests the challenging conditions are forcing good reporters to get even better. “I always tell young reporters to go for the wallflowers—people who don’t have fancy names after their titles. Everybody wants to dance with a cabinet minister. Reporters need to go to the edge of the dance floor to find the people nobody wants to dance with.” This, he says, includes public servants, diplomats, the lobbying community and other people the government talks to. “They need to sense you’re serious and you’re trying to add value to journalism,” he adds. “You’ve also got to be worth their time and provide them with information they want.”

It’s unlikely the situation in Ottawa will change anytime soon. According to Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, “This balloon of control keeps on expanding and it’s getting really worrisome. What will change this behaviour is when the public catches on.” However, because journalists “are reluctant to do whiny stories,” Welch says this issue has not received as much attention as it merits.

Not surprisingly, the PMO could not be reached for comment.

When the round-faced girl with a downturned mouth and long, limp brown hair sat before a Toronto court last July and tearfully apologized for her role in Stefanie Rengel’s murder, journalists in the room knew they had to be very careful in their reporting. Bound by the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), they were prohibited from reporting the teen’s name or any other details that would identify her. The six-year-old act makes publishing that information illegal when a person under the age of 18 is accused of a crime.

Although the journalists couldn’t identify the young woman, her identity was no secret. Her name, Melissa Todorovic, had been leaked on Facebook days after Rengel was stabbed in the stomach repeatedly and left to die in the snow outside her home on New Year’s Day 2008. So was the name of the co-accused, David Bagshaw, who carried out the murder at the behest of Todorovic, his then girlfriend. And then there was the “Free Melissa Todorovic” page set up by the young girl’s supporters.

Under the act, identifying details about young offenders can’t be published (unless the offender is sentenced as an adult), whether it’s in The Globe and Mail or on Facebook. Making this information available to the public amounts to a criminal offence—which is likely news to the creators of many memorial sites. Last year, Corey Hafezi, who dated Rengel in middle school, set up the Facebook group “In Loving Memory of Stefanie Rengel.” When contacted about the site by the Toronto Star, he said he didn’t know his site was breaking the law, because some group members had posted the names of the accused. Hafezi thereafter deleted such posts when he saw them, sometimes checking the group as often as seven times a day. He subsequently warned visitors: “You are…reminded to remember that the law is in effect here. The YCJA is most definitely in effect.” But the breach had already happened; the names of the accused teens had been revealed to the group members and any other Facebook user who happened upon the online memorial.

Clearly, the YCJA hasn’t caught up with the technological reality of Facebook and Twitter, which makes the law increasingly difficult to enforce. As well, some journalists complain the act means they can’t produce full accounts of youth crime. So is it time to revamp the YCJA?

Some argue scrapping the publication ban might allow journalists to do their jobs better. Daniel Henry, senior legal counsel at CBC, for example, argues the viral—and often inaccurate—flow of information on the internet allows misinformation and half-truths to spread. He believes journalists should be able to write freely, instead of being forced to “dance around the details.”

Henry, who stresses his views about the YCJA are his own, not the CBC’s, praises the “well-meaning motivation” behind the act, which is to ensure that young offenders are given a fresh start at 18. But he thinks we should have a system that encourages accurate information and answers, as opposed to one that assists rumours.

Perhaps getting rid of the publication ban offers audiences a better understanding of the motives, family history and psychology that drive young people to commit gruesome crimes. Media lawyer Brian MacLeod Rogers suggests the ban “throws up a spectre of the anonymous troubled youth who at any time could pull out a knife and kill somebody.” Full disclosure, on the other hand, “actually helps to not only de-anonymize the crime, so it makes it more real, but also helps society to grapple with and understand what lies behind it.”

Henry agrees. “When a serious crime happens, people want to understand it better,” he says. “They want to know whether to be afraid for their kids when they walk out the door. They want to know what the face of crime looks like so they can rationalize it.”

Some journalists are equivocal. Star court reporter Peter Small says, “It’s really reasonable to give a certain level of protection. That’s the citizen in me talking. The journalist? You’re dying to tell the real story and publication bans often make it very difficult.” Readers tune out when reading about anonymous crime, he adds, and it’s often the identifying details that make a story compelling. “Who could forget that baby-faced Melissa Todorovic looking out at us,” Small says. “She was just a baby when she was telling this guy to kill Stefanie. I mean, that’s gripping.”

Those details can be so gripping some journalists think youth convicted of serious crimes shouldn’t be granted anonymity after a certain age. “Sixteen years old is fair game if you’re involved in a homicide, sexual assault or a string of robberies,” says Daryl Slade, the Calgary Herald‘s justice reporter, who’s been writing from the courts for 15 years. He agrees that younger teens who make youthful mistakes should be protected but, after 16, the right to print an offender’s name and picture “should almost be automatic.”

The Globe‘s Christie Blatchford has covered more high-profile trials involving youth during her 26-year career than almost any other Canadian reporter. Yet, she doesn’t believe the law is an impediment to accuracy. “You do get the full picture,” she says. “The only thing the YCJA really protects is the name.” She firmly believes in the anonymity the act bestows on young offenders and she’s never been tempted to break the law—so much so that she sometimes uses initials of the accused when she’s talking to editors. She didn’t even write Todorovic’s full name in her notebook. When names are leaked online, it makes a “mockery of what we all do in respecting the law” Blatchford says. “It’s frustrating to be the old-fashioned guy playing by the rules and have other people not. Everybody is a journalist today,” she adds, indignantly. “If everybody is a journalist, then everybody plays by the same fucking rules.”

However, Blatchford thinks most teenagers who use Facebook don’t know—or don’t care—the law exists. Henry suggests since the names of young offenders are repeatedly leaked online, this makes the law nearly impossible to enforce, another reason he argues we should get rid of the publication ban. But defence lawyer Marshall Sack, who represented Todorovic, says even though some flout the law, it should remain in place because there’s a basic expectation that most people will follow it. Besides, you can’t stop teens from talking. “Kids are going to gossip—it’s cafeteria gossip,” he says. “Instead of saying it on the telephone and texting each other, they’re going to put it on Facebook. But does any adult really look at Facebook?”

There are more adults on Facebook than Sack assumes. The social networking site has more than 12 million Canadian subscribers and the fastest-growing group of users is over 35, a demographic that includes people who could potentially be selected for a jury.

Sack doesn’t know how to fix the problem, but he’s certain getting rid of the law is not the answer. Same for Blatchford. However, she too doesn’t believe that justifies dismantling the YCJA: “Because some people are breaking the law or choosing to ignore the law, therefore the law is stupid and we should all break it?”

On a Friday afternoon late this past summer, Scott Fee, an anchor for Victoria’s CHEK News, sat waiting to tape what might have been the station’s final 5 p.m. newscast. Over a month earlier, Canwest Global—the station’s cash-strapped owner since 2000—had announced that it planned to shut down the money-losing station. Employees had been trying to broker a deal with Canwest all summer, but now, Fee’s future was out of his hands and written in the script in front of him. He looked up from his notes and read to the camera the day’s top story. “A deal by employees and several local investors has been accepted by Canwest,” Fee announced, poker-faced. “CHEK TV has been sold,” he continued, slowly breaking into a smile, “and is now not only your island’s own, but your island-owned.”

CHEK employees and local investors bought the station for $2 (on top of $2.5 million that was raised to cover the operating costs during the handover). A Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) hearing to approve the handover began on October 30, and a decision is expected in mid-November. The employees and investors will run the station as an independent broadcaster and become Canada’s first employee-owned station.

While television stations are losing money and shutting down across the country, CHEK journalists are making a statement. By putting their own livelihoods at stake, they’re voicing confidence that the future of broadcasting is not only in news that’s local, but news that’s locally owned as well. “We don’t need huge ratings points and as many dollars as corporate TV,” says station manager John Pollard, “but I think what we can do is prove to Canada that local TV can survive.” The group’s strategy is simple: keep the operation small. The station will reserve modest profit expectations, while keeping a narrow focus on what it does best: local news. And though ethics experts question the idea of journalists with a direct financial stake in their work, debt-ridden news outlets across the country may find themselves looking to what the 53-year-old station has done as a model that could work for them, too. Employees in employee-owned companies do end up saving their own jobs, after all, but is that enough to save local news?

CHEK employees think so. They’ve shifted their 11 p.m. newscast to 10 p.m., a move they hope will generate larger audiences. They’re also toying with the idea of producing shows based on local interests such as gardening and home repair, which Pollard refers to as “DIY programming.” Levi Sampson—one of CHEK’s main investors, who organized a similar employee buy-out at the HARMAC pulp mill in Nanaimo last year—believes that keeping a local focus can help make the station profitable again. Under Canwest, he says, money was wasted on importing expensive prime time programming from the U.S. “You can’t make enough advertising dollars to make it up,” he explains. Instead, the station will now air programming it can produce itself at a lower cost.

Under the new model, Sampson and a small group of local investors comprise about 70 percent of CHEK’s ownership. These investors form the board of directors, but aren’t involved in day-to-day operations. The station’s 45 employees dug into their own pockets to raise $500,000, giving the group about a 30 percent stake in the company. The management remains intact, but employees now have more opportunities—an internal blog, for example—to voice their thoughts on how the company should be run.Just five years ago, I was a student,” the 35-year-old Fee says. “If someone had told me five years ago that I’d be a co-owner of a television station…it’s unbelievably surreal.” He says it’s been a steep learning curve, but already an owner mentality is starting to form amongst employees. “You’re concerned about more than just the story you’re working on,” he says. “You’re worrying about the company as well.”

This idea of owner-operator journalists does, however, raise ethical questions. Journalists pride themselves on separating editorial decisions from business ones—a difficult distinction when reporters have their own pocketbooks on the line. Dave Secko, assistant professor of journalism ethics at Concordia University, says that as the line between journalist and entrepreneur becomes blurred, more and more focus from the public is placed on journalistic independence. Because of this, Secko says, conflict of interest—real or perceived—and public skepticism will have to be managed carefully. But Rob Germain, CHEK’s news producer, doesn’t see this as a problem. “We realize that as journalists, it’s our integrity that’s valued more than anything,” he says. Selling out will turn off audiences, and without an audience, he explains, “We won’t have advertisers.”

As for whether this model could succeed elsewhere in the country, CHEK employees don’t see why it wouldn’t. Pollard says it can work for local television all over Canada, as long as there’s a large enough population base. According to Pollard, Victoria—with a population of about 80,000, or 345,000 including suburbs—is a big enough city to garner national advertising dollars, imperative for any television station.

But others, including Duncan Stewart, who runs his own Toronto-based media consulting firm, DSAM Consulting, disagree. Unlike Pollard, Stewart is doubtful that a city of Victoria’s size can generate adequate advertising, and says an independent broadcaster would be generally more vulnerable to dips and lows in the economy. Although he’d like to see the CHEK model succeed, it likely won’t. “It’s important to remember that the Aspers weren’t idiots,” says Stewart, who until recently wrote a column for the National Post. “They knew how to do this stuff.” Nor does he buy the argument that sticking to local content will keep CHEK afloat. “That strategy has been tried many times in Canada—but it may not draw advertising and ratings enough to justify the cost of doing it.”

John Morton, a media-industry analyst and columnist for the American Journalism Review, echoes Stewart’s concerns. Morton has studied employee-owned media companies in the U.S., and says that so far, similar models in the States have been unsuccessful. Part of the reason for this, Morton says, is that a switch in ownership doesn’t change the surrounding economic conditions. “Employee-ownership is not a panacea,” he says. “All the things that plagued the station before likely will remain.”

Regardless, CHEK employees are pleased that they’ve made it this far. “You wouldn’t believe the atmosphere in the newsroom,” Graham Barnes, one of the major investors, says. “These people own the station. They are in charge of their own future.”

The online game many news organizations are playing these days is a lot like poker. Everyone’s waiting to see what cards the other players have. But as Howard Elliott, managing editor of web/editorial page at The Hamilton Spectator, points out, to even get to the table you’ve got to have the goods—in other words, great journalistic content. And for the Spec, that means producing great local stories. “When you’re playing poker, you have to be able to put in money to begin with,” he says. “If you don’t have a great local product that brings real value to your web users, you don’t even get to sit at the table.”

According to Elliott, the Spec is not only at the table, but raking in readers: traffic to the site has increased by 40 percent in the last year. The dollars are a little harder to come by. “The reality is [the website] is not generating enough revenue, and that’s what we need to address,” he says matter-of-factly.

As revenue from print editions has declined, many papers have responded by tweaking or redesigning their news websites, trying things like including more vertical content, using social media tools and creating iPhone and BlackBerry apps. Perhaps in response, online news readership has increased in recent years. According to the 2008 NADbank survey, which asked respondents which news sources they consulted in the past week, 20 percent included online, compared to 16 percent in 2005. The same trend holds in the U.S.: a 2008 Gallup poll found that the number of Americans visiting online newspaper sites on a daily basis had risen from 22 percent in 2006 to 31 percent in 2008.

However, an online news reader appears to have the attention span of a poker chip, similar to an anxious poker player waiting to deal his cards. Martin Langeveld, a former newspaper executive who now blogs for the Nieman Journalism Lab, admits, “The average time that people spend on a newspaper website is barely a minute today. They’re looking at a lot of different places and putting it together and they’re skimming more than reading. And all of this makes it more difficult, obviously, to monetize with advertising. You haven’t gotten that share of attention, that 15-minute block at breakfast.” This behaviour is hardly going to convince advertisers to drop their dough on news sites.

Marissa Nelson, senior editor, digital news at the Toronto Star, confirms that the paper’s bread and butter still comes from the print product, but she and her colleagues have been experimenting to figure out what the site’s different audiences want. Nelson says one thing that thestar.com is doing is offering vertical content, or niche material. Go to the parentcentral.ca section, for example, and you’ll find information about family outings, public school issues, blogs on pregnancy and parenting, and links to other components such as discussion groups—all flanked by ads for products like GoodNites and events like the Seasons Christmas Show.

As Nelson explains, “Traditional media have organized their websites based on the newspaper, so if we have a section of the newspaper then we have that page online, whereas how people actually consume their information online is not based on sections of the newspaper.” She adds that some advertisers like vertical content because they know exactly what type of audience the readers will be.

Not that the advertisers currently seem to be showing their gratitude for this helpful approach. In 2008, advertisers spent $2 million on online ads in Canadian daily newspapers, compared to the $2.5 billion they shelled out for print advertising.

Does this suggest that newspapers will rethink pay walls? Bryan Borzykowski, a senior editor at Canadian Business online, thinks it’s too late to charge at this point for most content, like general news, but mobile applications may be a future source of revenue: “Down the road fewer and fewer people will read newspapers, but people will still want the news from a brand-name source, so I think papers should really look at figuring out how to make these apps and make them good enough so people will want to pay for them.” He also thinks that Canadian media can’t experiment with their online content as much as large American newspapers because they don’t have as many resources, so they will look to publications like The New York Times to see what works there. Ironically, at the moment one of the things the Times is pondering is re-erecting some version of a pay wall, after dismantling its first attempt in 2007.

Even if some tactics work, there is not yet any jackpot for the people producing that great journalistic content, says the Spec‘s Elliott. Meanwhile, Neil Sanderson, who was assistant managing editor, digital at the Toronto Star until last May, predicts that as news organizations figure out what is needed to make a profitable news website, their team of professional journalists will shrink. “My own opinion is we cannot sustain, in most cases, the sort of newsgathering organizations that we’re accustomed to,” he says. “They’re going to have to match their costs to their revenues and not just try to justify sustaining their current cost structure, because the revenue just isn’t going to be there.”

It’s also possible that Langeveld is right when he speculates, “Maybe at some point I’ll say the heck with walking down the driveway for the paper. I’ll just use the laptop.” At the moment, though, that poker game seems a lot like a penny-ante proposition.

When a radio or television report suggested something was “unprecedented in Canada,” Douglas Fisher would probably guffaw and shake his head. He knew it probably wasn’t. And who could argue with him? Even if you drummed up the courage to confront his massive six-foot-five frame, you would be faced with a man who could recall the goings-on of Canadian politics back to the days when Louis St. Laurent was prime minister.

Fisher, who died in September, a day shy of his 90th birthday, was a huge man-in reputation, vocabulary and voice. After decades of participating in, and writing about, politics in Ottawa, Fisher estimated he had written more than 2,400 columns for the Toronto Sun alone. While many political reporters around him focused on “gotcha” journalism and dreamed of sensational exposés, Fisher wrote thoughtful, informed criticism. “He was probably the most insightful and knowledgeable person writing about politics in Ottawa,” says Peter Worthington, former editor-in-chief of the Sun. That understanding came, in part, from poring over Hansard reports daily. This, coupled with his previous experience as an MP, meant that his columns showed a far greater understanding of the inner workings of Parliament. “So few people understand how politics actually work,” says Susan Reisler, a former Hill reporter. But Fisher was one of those people.

His political career began in 1957. A high school history teacher in Port Arthur, Ontario (now a part of Thunder Bay), he ran for Parliament. And in a stunning upset for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, he defeated Liberal incumbent C.D. Howe, one of the most powerful politicians in the country and a man known as the “Minister of Everything.”

But Fisher complained that an MP’s salary of $10,000 a year was insufficient for a married man with five sons, residences in his riding and in Ottawa, and copious collect calls from constituents. So he wrote a freelance article for the Toronto Telegram in 1962 and eventually became a staple at the paper (and at its successor, the Sun), appearing thrice weekly until his retirement in 2006. The fiercely loyal World War II veteran also contributed to Legion Magazine, and was a booming presence on television and radio. His broadcast gigs included hosting CJOH’s Insight, a political interview and debate program, and regularly appearing on CTV’sQuestion Period.

But it was in front of his typewriter where Fisher would often be found. In his National Press Building office, he would knock out 70 words a minute (index fingers only), surrounded by all that epitomizes journalism. There was his desk littered with press releases, books piled to the ceiling (biographies, Royal Navy histories, Zane Gray westerns), dozens of filing cabinets lining the walls and, until he quit smoking, ash-trays filled with the butts of cigarettes he had rolled himself while driving to work. Every cabinet was filled with meticulously organized clippings accumulated over the course of his career. As Globe and Mail columnist Roy MacGregor jokes, “He was sort of the original Google.”

Though organized, Fisher had trouble being brief. Worthington says the Sun‘s audience never seemed to care about the buried leads, but admits, “I had a little trouble with him writing short.” The columnist, who had written longer pieces for the Telegram, grumbled when the Sun reduced his word limit to 600. But he relented when the shorter pieces attracted more readers.

Regardless of the word count, Fisher’s writing was not weighed down by fanciful prose or jargon. Anne Dawson, former Sun Media bureau chief, respected his ability to take complicated political concepts and break them down so a reader unfamiliar with the complexities of Canadian government could understand. His blunt style revealed an upbringing in the backwoods of northern Ontario, “despite his intellectual weight,” says Andrew Cohen, who covered Parliament Hill for the United Press International wire service in the 1980s.

Fisher rarely barbed his words in a partisan or antagonistic manner, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t critical of his subjects. When reviewing The Secret Mulroney Tapes by Peter Newman, with whom he had been close, Fisher held little back, writing, “I think this is the poorest book yet in a score Newman has produced about Canadian politics, politicians, tycoons and companies.”

This mingling of respect and brutal honesty characterized his “testy relationship,” as son Tobias calls it, with Pierre Trudeau. Fisher first encountered “the new guy from Québec” in the Parliament’s steam room. The rivalry of wits and words would last their entire careers. Fisher was always critical of Trudeau’s use of the War Measures Act during the October Crisis in 1970. He asked Trudeau if he would change the Act every time he got the chance, up until, and including, Trudeau’s very last press conference. Once when Trudeau quoted a philosopher, Fisher countered with the rest of the quote in question, thus negating Trudeau’s point. Tobias suspects this annoyed Trudeau no end.

In his final column, which ran in July 2006, Fisher, admitted, “Aging, of course, has made me more conservatively-minded.” His own politics aside, he didn’t hide his disdain for the increasingly scrappy and theatrical nature of Ottawa politics. “He saw debate die, and it hurt him greatly,” says MacGregor. Even fellow journalists couldn’t escape his ire. His son Matthew says, “He hated ‘gotcha’ journalism,” and the notion that reporters were “the natural opposition.”

Aboard a vehicle called the Rhino Runner, four journalists pass through some of the most dangerous areas of Baghdad. It’s August 2, 2009, and they’re travelling to the American military’s Forward Operating Base Warhorse. They’re surrounded by highly trained soldiers. They don’t feel so unsafe. Recounting the moment early the next day, Tom Hewitt wrote on the group’s blog, Short Timers, to which the quartet posted about their experiences: “It seemed again like the war was a concept that existed someplace far away.”

Suddenly the convoy halts. The reporters become anxious. After a few minutes, the turret gunner tells them an improvised explosive device (IED) has detonated on the route ahead of them. The mood inside the vehicle shifts. “The realization that we were minutes away from having triggered an IED triggered a reaction that came like a flood,” wrote Hewitt. “This is a war.”

Three of the four—Hewitt, Jennifer Canfield and Jessica Hoffman—are actually fourth-year students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). This past August, they travelled with their professor, Brian O’Donoghue, to the front lines in Iraq as part of an extreme school project: to spend one month embedded primarily with Alaska’s Fort Wainwright 1-25th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, writing stories, shooting videos and recording audio. The idea, according to O’Donoghue, who is also the head of the department of journalism, was to give them a taste of what it’s like to be war correspondents: “Nothing is more real than covering a war.”

But how real is too real?

Sending university kids into a war zone is obviously controversial—exploding IEDs, live gunfire and the threat of abduction are all major concerns. “There’s definitely always the possibility that things will go catastrophically wrong,” says Hewitt. But O’Donoghue—whose international reporting experience includes serving as a United Press International photo stringer in Cairo during the peace talks between Israel and Egypt in 1979—argues that as long as precautions are taken, there’s no reason not to send students around the world chasing stories. O’Donoghue remembers a student saying it was as though they had gained a year’s worth of newsroom experience while on this trip. “They were meeting daily deadlines. They were grappling with communication difficulties. They were being challenged to identify and report coherent stories in the midst of chaos.”

Like O’Donoghue, Peter Klein, a 60 Minutes producer and professor with the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, believes giving students the chance to report abroad is necessary, especially since it’s often young journalists who end up covering those stories. “A lot of the veteran journalists don’t want to do it,” he says. “They’ve got families; they don’t want to be away for long periods of time.”

So last year he created an international reporting course that gives 10 students at a time the chance to work abroad for up to two weeks on a multimedia documentary project. Originally a semester-long course, it was expanded to two semesters this year. Klein’s first group of students, nine of whom graduated this past spring, produced a 20-minute doc—Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground, aired on PBS’s Frontline on June 23, 2009—about electronic waste dumps in China, Ghana and India. They did the initial research in Vancouver, then split into three groups, one for each locale (Klein leading the China team), and trekked through computer graveyards where scavengers—often children—burned plastic computer monitor cases and the lead coatings on chips to get at the valuable metals inside. They breathed in toxic plumes of smoke and at times stood next to barrels full of acid used for stripping parts. “The classroom is great, but until you get out there and actually do it, I don’t think you’re learning as much as you can,” says student Allison Cross. “It’s probably one of the best experiences I’ve had in journalism.”

Not every journalism prof thinks it’s realistic or even sensible to shepherd students to hot spots. Klaus Pohle of Carleton University says of embedding students with the military overseas: “That’s not anything you’d want to expose a student to. It’s terribly irresponsible.”

From a practical perspective, there’s also the money issue: the UBC program costs $100,000 a year. The UAF jaunt cost $35,000. But neither students nor the schools had to front the funds. The philanthropic group Mindset Social Innovation Foundation gave UBC a $1 million endowment to fund its program for 10 years. O’Donoghue and his students received a $35,000 grant from the University of Alaska Foundation, which is funded through alumni and outside donations, and, the Stryker Brigade lent everyone helmets and flak jackets, which saved them around $10,000.

As for liability issues surrounding the arguably more dangerous Iraq trip, Hewitt, Canfield and Hoffman each signed a rather alarming-sounding waiver acknowledging the possibility of being kidnapped, tortured or beheaded. The UBC students endorsed a standard university participant agreement.

Even with these documents, O’Donoghue and Klein were on edge throughout their travels. O’Donoghue worried what would happen if one of his students decided to wander off alone through a Baghdad bazaar. He badgered them to remember to wear their helmets. Klein made sure he was the one manning the camera in China’s more dangerous toxic dumps so his students could avoid being attacked by organized criminals in charge of the scavengers. “I ended up filming all of those sections, and we were chased by some goons quite a few times,” he says.

Students also prepared for months before setting foot on foreign soil. The UAF group studied the pros and cons of being embedded with the military at length. One member even attended a National Public Radio war-reporting workshop in Los Angeles. The UBC class took part in a health and safety session where students identified potential problems they might encounter and discussed how to avoid them.

There are even tougher training programs students heading to troubled areas could complete. Before assigning him to Afghanistan in 2006, The Globe and Mail sent now 30-year-old correspondent Graeme Smith on a five-day war zone course in Hampshire, England, as it does with most virgin war correspondents. There, he was taught combat first aid, how to behave in a minefield, how to handle soldier-patrolled checkpoints and what to do if he were kidnapped or taken hostage. “Students could be given that kind of training before they go into a combat zone,” he says. He also notes that those who fret about sending students into dangerous areas are overlooking the fact that many of the American soldiers in the region where the UAF group spent most of its time are not much older than the average undergrad themselves.

While Smith thinks both the UAF and UBC programs offer students important opportunities, he says UBC’s international reporting class may be more useful, since it teaches students how to operate independently in developing countries. “Going on an embed is pretty easy. You’re with the troops.”

Some might wonder why, while newspapers slash foreign bureaus, universities would bother to risk sending students to volatile regions and into unpredictable situations. O’Donoghue counters that journalists are supposed to be bold, relentless story-chasers, and the point of these programs is to cultivate that skill. “It has to do a lot with you,” he says.”Is your world outlook the sort that you shy away from the possibility of risk? Or do you recognize that the odds are in your favour in most circumstances? The burden is on you not to do something stupid.”