By Allison Baker and Viviane Fairbank

By some strange irony, Canadian journalism made headlines in the last couple of months of 2015–and not always for good things.

It feels like just yesterday when Andrew Coyne began the new and ongoing trend of resignation-via-Twitter…

Then there were our colleagues who faced the wrath of every journalist’s arch enemy: money. The budget cut is truly the deepest.

The clouds cleared for a second when the new Liberal government ended the 10-year-long battle over no-information-land between journalists and Parliament Hill. How long the sunny days will last is to be determined.

Finally, let’s not forget The Walrus tears that flooded our Twitter feeds. Jonathan Kay apologiiiize (yes, we’ve linked the song. Journalism could use a soundtrack).

Here’s to whatever journalists decide to do in 2016 (including the 16 of us on the masthead)!

A heavy silence takes over the room as Sylvia Maracle, executive director of the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres, takes a pause during her seven-minute speech. “You need to make sure that when people arrive they understand that some of the trauma they have left is the trauma that exists here for the original people of this country,” she tells the audience at “The Walrus Talks Cities of Migration.” Maracle’s speech is titled “Strangers in Our Own Land,” and her soft voice grows louder as she says that when some people arrive in Canada, they are not remotely aware an indigenous population is present. “We’re asking you to make some space for the conversation.”

The Talks are one such space for conversation, often on subjects covered in the pages of The Walrus. Despite a report of tumultuous internal affairs within the editorial department of the publication, the event series runs smoothly and generates much-needed revenue to sustain the respected magazine.

With approximately 20 Talks across the country annually, and an average attendance of 400 to 450 people, the series has allowed The Walrus Foundation to move its business model away from advertising dependence. This year, the Talks generated $1.3 million, making up approximately 27 percent of the foundation’s revenue. “It is our lifeblood,” says Shelley Ambrose, publisher of the magazine. She has run the Talks with David Leonard, the foundation’s event director, since 2012.

The origins of the series date back to 2007. As a non-profit organization, The Walrus Foundation is restricted to a smaller ad revenue than mainstream commercial magazines, and when the financial slowdown hit and advertisers began pulling out, the already limited ad base became even more precarious.

The foundation turned to creating events to make up for the third of revenue that had once come from advertising (charitable donations and circulation make up the rest). Ambrose moved to create a more engaging platform that would continue to uphold The Walrus’s mission statement to “promote debate on matters vital to Canadians.”

To find the just-right way to do this, Ambrose played Goldilocks: some events were too long, some too disorganized and some too old-fashioned, boring and ineffective. “We were looking for a format that allowed for a lot of ideas with the right length of time,” she says. “Anything over 90 minutes, your bum is numb, your brain is tired, you’re thirsty and you need to pee.” A former CBC radio producer, Ambrose settled on an arrangement akin to live radio: eight speakers delivering seven-minute speeches about one broad “Walrus-y” topic—a serious issue such as resilience, water or transportation.

After Leonard joined the team in 2009, he and Ambrose set out to make sure the right conversation happened in the right city. Leonard’s aim is to generate a conversation that can continue after the event, so he curates speakers from different backgrounds. For instance, at “Cities of Migration” in Toronto, other speakers included pianist Robi Botos; Gautam Nath, a marketing expert who immigrated from India; journalist Desmond Cole; and Meb Rashid, the medical director of the Crossroads Clinic, a Toronto-based clinic that serves refugees. Then, Leonard makes sure that about 20 percent of the audience are invited guests such as business leaders, philanthropists and community leaders in culture and education. “Imagine if the head of the TTC, a social media advocate for cycling, a CEO and a community leader came together and talked about transportation,” he says. “That’s a win.”

Occasionally, the topics come together with stories in the magazine in a way that highlights the symbiotic relationship. This unity was evident at “The Walrus Talks Transportation.” “This is a perfect world,” says Ambrose. “We’re talking transportation. The magazine’s cover story is on Uber by Jon Kay. Jon Kay is a speaker tonight.” In this way, the Talks generate revenue for the magazine, but they also create content as contributors become speakers and vice versa.

Together, the Talks and the magazine attempt to profitably adapt to the way people consume information today, combining the best elements of live events, radio and social media. Consultant D.B. Scott, president of Impresa Communications Limited, says the Talks have the ability to draw subscribers to become part of the greater community and community members to become subscribers. The downside of this is that people may not want to go year after year, time after time. “They’re driven by the topic and the presenter, and maintaining a high quality of talks will be, in my opinion, a challenge,” says Scott. “There is a question as to whether there is a limit to what they’re going to be able to sustain.”

Leonard and Ambrose have already booked 21 Walrus Talks for next year. For each one, Leonard will fly to the host city, help the speakers prepare, set up the venue and live-tweet the speeches.

One constant at each event is a big red poster for The Walrus Foundation that sits next to the podium, the words Read and Watch visible from every corner of the room. The word order is inaccurate, because without the revenue generated from people watching the Talks, there would, perhaps, be no Walrus to read.

Mohamed Fahmy has been toeing the line between being a journalist and being a story for over a year now.

As the former Al Jazeera bureau chief in Cairo, Fahmy, 41, was arrested in Egypt in 2013 with two colleagues and convicted of terror-related charges. The case, the court trials, the journalist and his family have since then gone viral, nowhere more so than in Canada, his home country.

In an earlier news conference, Fahmy spoke at great lengths about feeling “betrayed and abandoned by Prime Minister Harper” and about the need to address the relationship between journalists who work abroad and their governments.

Speaking to the RRJ, Fahmy says that he is grateful for the many platforms he has received to use his voice to further the discussion about journalists who work abroad and how to protect them from situations like his.

So how does a journalist deal with becoming the story? We asked Fahmy in an exclusive interview with the RRJ.

It was the wee hours of the morning when I finished writing my first op-ed about another failed Toronto FC campaign and the frustrations of being a season ticket holder. I had no idea how difficult it could be to translate my thoughts to paper.

After reading it for what felt like the thousandth time to check over the grammar, I sent it off to a half-dozen soccer publications and journalists around Toronto before passing out in my bed. Sending those emails was slightly horrifying. I had no idea how to pitch myself. I was worried I didn’t know how to write. I was scared people would think I was an idiot.

When I woke up in the morning I had one response. It was Ian Clarke from Red Nation Online (RNO)—he had posted my piece on the site’s homepage. He asked if I planned on keeping my season’s tickets for next year (I was), then offered me a place on the site’s masthead as a TFC columnist. There was one catch: he couldn’t afford to pay me.

This offer came just after a speech in class from one of my professors, urging us never to give away our work for free. I was conflicted, but the allure of having my name and thoughts in a real online magazine won.

For the past two years I’ve been paying to watch TFC games from the stands, then writing a column for RNO (cue questions about my intelligence) for free. There have been times when I wished I could go out for a drink (or ten) after a game instead of rushing home to write, but other than that, the column has been one of the best professional decisions I’ve made as a young writer.

Mark Twain advised, “Write without pay until someone offers to pay you.” This is obviously easier said than done. The unpaid column for RNO has given me a regular outlet to practice my writing. Reading my old posts now, I can see the progression I’ve made. I’m developing my own voice, I can point out fat in those pieces that would never make it into the final copy today, I’ve stopped trying to throw in words I would never use in speech.

Without being accountable to the editorial team at RNO, there’s a chance I wouldn’t have written at all outside of school over the past two years. I spend enough time crafting pieces throughout the semester—the last thing I want to do on a Saturday night is write something nobody will ever read.

RNO gave me a place to experiment and be judged not only by myself and an editor, but the public. I’ve learned how to deal with malicious comments and felt a great sense of pride when somebody compliments my work. I’ve gained a large editorial portfolio that helps me stand out from many young journalists. I’ve been published dozens of times for writing about something I love. The schooling I’ve gotten by writing this column more than makes up for the fact that I pay to write it.

Thanks to Carissa Rogers for the image. 

It’s 5 p.m. and Washington, D.C. buzzes with pencil-pushers crowding into Beltway bars. Julian Sher joins them at a spot not far from FBI headquarters and the U.S. Department of Justice. One Child at a Time, his book about the child pornography underground, has just come out and he’s here to catch up with two of his sources. Special Agent Emily Vacher is petite and blonde, casually dressed in jeans; Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, towers almost a foot above Sher and looks Viking-like, save for his customary suit and tie. They can’t get a table, so they stand at the bar and talk about the investigative journalist’s next project.

“You should do something about child prostitution,” says Oosterbaan.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” says Vacher. “In terms of child abuse, internet predators are important, but there are hundreds of thousands of other girls who are being ignored.” They tell Sher about their work to save child prostitutes and he’s shocked to hear they’re talking about American kids, not foreign children subjected to trafficking. “It’s the girl next door, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks,” says Oosterbaan. “These are the invisible children.” Vacher nods and says, “The FBI’s got a whole squad of people now doing nothing but trying to rescue these kids and going after the pimps.”

Over a career spanning more than three decades, Sher’s heard from lots of people who want their stories told: the wrongfully convicted, after he helped unearth the truth about the shoddy police work in Steven Truscott’s case; the informers, after he co-wrote two books about the Hells Angels. These are mostly people with personal agendas, but this tip was coming from two insiders he trusts. He also knows Vacher and Oosterbaan can open doors for him in his research.

Sher is good at keeping in touch with his sources. Whenever he finds himself anywhere other than his native Montreal, he tries to give someone a call: the people who fought the KKK in his 1983 book White Hoods; the cops he met a decade ago while writing about the Hells Angels; or the Truscott family, to whom he devoted 10 years of his life. He wants to see how they’re doing and catch up, but he gains more than friendship from keeping contacts close. His stories are often interconnected, with a previous source leading to the next big idea. And Sher knows his connections keep him a step ahead of the pack, because the problems he runs up against are not uniquely his. All investigative journalists face them today: risk-averse book publishers, budget-slashing broadcasters and media-induced shortened attention spans. Investigative journalism doesn’t quite fit in; its need for more words and more airtime makes it a difficult sell.

Fuelled by his tenacity and natural gift as a networker, Sher’s work has appeared everywhere from The Globe and Mail to CBC’s the fifth estate. But media outlets’ commitment to investigative journalism is fading. Investigative stories are costly to produce in any medium, and space and funding are dwindling. With a trail of successes behind him, even Sher can’t see what lies ahead.

Sher can barely sit still. As he talks, his hands are in constant motion, as if they are what push his ideas forward. He talks fast; perhaps his second career choice could have had him standing at the auction block. But the 56-year-old never had any interest in auctioneering. He always wanted to be a journalist. After writing a serial thriller for his summer camp’s newspaper, contributing to a newspaper for children in the hospital when he was a grade schooler and writing an annual play for the kids near his family’s summer cottage in the Laurentians, his career seemed set. And from the beginning, he was ambitious: At his high school paper, his first interview—with questions and answers sent by mail—was with Pierre Trudeau. He chose McGill University largely because he wanted to work at TheMcGill Daily, where he was a fixture for five years while getting a history degree. There, he became involved in student politics, including backing a support workers’ strike—a galvanizing moment. He spent the rest of his 20s involved in campus activism and writing for the left-wing Montreal newspaper The Forge. He worked at United Press International and at the Westmount Examiner before he accepted a one-day contract at CBC Radio’s Daybreak in 1983. He ended up staying there until nabbing a position in local TV. In the late 1980s, Sher helped produce an investigative segment about poor roadway infrastructure for CBC Montreal’s supper-hour show, Newswatch. It caught the attention of Kelly Crichton, a producer at the fifth. “It showed he knew how to dig,” she says, “and he wasn’t afraid of flak.” She asked him to fly to Toronto to talk about working for the current affairs program. He found himself on the same plane as his first interview subject. Sher struck up a conversation and, later, when Crichton asked about his flight, he told her about his encounter with the former prime minister. He got the job.

* * *

After their chat in the bar, Oosterbaan puts Sher in contact with prosecutors who try cases involving child prostitution. He starts talking to them. He wants to understand the law. Federal prosecutor Sherri Stephan tells him about a pimp she tried for conspiracies to commit trafficking and money laundering. Sher is shocked that she and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Richardson were able to put Matthew “Knowledge” Thompkins away for nearly 25 years. Sher keeps digging. After Vacher tells him about the FBI’s Innocence Lost National Initiative, he writes to the bureau, telling the agents about his book involving the Innocent Images unit, and asks them for access. That gets him an interview with the taskforce heads, and leads to a list of the unit’s best agents across the country. Sher contacts Dan Garrabrant, a New Jersey agent who tells Sher about his cases and mentions a girl from Atlantic City referred to as Maria. Garrabrant’s been trying to help her since they met during an arrest when she was 17 years old—four years into her life as a prostitute. But her name is one of many, and Sher doesn’t get the details of her story for two months. When he does, Garrabrant provides a thorough explanation of her case, including the name of her former pimp: Knowledge.

* * *

I’m not in the good news business,” Sher says. Instead, he likes stories that “hold a dark mirror to society.” He wants to make people uncomfortable. But he did more than that with one 1992 piece he produced for the fifth. Sher and the rest of his team, including reporter Hana Gartner, were looking into gangsters running drugs in Montreal when associate producer Dan Burke talked to RCMP drug inspector Claude Savoie. They had no idea Internal Affairs was already investigating him for accepting bribes, but with each question they asked, more questions cropped up. They were suspicious of his associations with drug kingpin Allan Ross and added the information to their story. Twenty-four hours before the documentary was set to air, Sher and his team learned that Savoie had shot himself in the head with his service revolver while two officers inRCMP headquarters were preparing to question him. “We were both like whirling dervishes,” remembers Gartner. “No story is worth anybody offing himself.” They hurried to the studio to film a stand-up so she could add the news to the story, as well as to include recorded conversations between Burke and Savoie. It aired on schedule.

Investigative journalism can drastically alter lives—even play a hand in ending them. It’s part of the job, and Sher accepts that. But only because he has to. Savoie’s suicide still weighs on his mind. His eyes drop and his near-constant smile fades as he says, “All I could think was that his kids would never have another Christmas with their father.” He looks down at his unusually still hands, then looks up again. “But I have to remind myself that I’m not the one who accepted the bribes.”

Other times, investigative journalism drastically alters lives for the better. Steven Truscott, wrongfully convicted of murdering Lynne Harper in 1959 when he was 14 years old, had lived under an assumed name since his release from prison in 1969. Early on in Sher’s investigation, he and reporter Linden MacIntyre spoke with Truscott. While MacIntyre was more sympathetic, Sher told him, “If you want somebody to clear your name, hire a defence attorney. That’s not our job. But if you give us free rein to investigate wherever we can, that’s what we’ll do.”

His approach to the story was simple: presume Truscott’s guilt, but examine every piece of evidence to see if all the pieces of the puzzle fit. Sher and his team read all the reports, scoured every court transcript, and talked to any witnesses still alive from that time, as well as witnesses who never took the stand. The team resubmitted the original medical evidence to modern-day experts, the results of which showed that “the initialmedical examination was a sham,” says Sher. His crew found one crucial fact: a dubious time of death in the autopsy report, which MacIntyre calls “scientifically impossible,” helped prove Truscott could not have been the killer. Without Sher’s research for the documentary and for the book he later wrote—“Until You Are Dead”: Steven Truscott’s Long Ride into History—the Ontario Court of Appeal might never have acquitted Truscott.

* * *

The pimp known as Knowledge helped bring Sher’s latest book together. He was the connection between theFBI’s story and the prosecutor’s case. Although he never answered the letters Sher sent him in jail, his story still gives the book—tentatively called Somebody’s Daughter—a narrative thread. But girls like Maria, the former child prostitute, give readers a reason to care about the book. If only someone would publish it.

“Prostitutes are only seen as ‘black hos’ or ‘white trash,’” says Sher. “The whole point of the book is that these girls are neglected and nobody cares about them. So it’s a little hard to convince a publisher to do a book about kids that nobody cares about.” Diane Martin, publisher-at-large of Random House Canada, attests to this. She worked with Sher on some of his previous projects, but says, “I’m not sure what would motivate people to spend say, $32, for a hardcover on that subject. I know I wouldn’t.” Book sales in Canada are holding steady, but this story is too gritty for most major publishers and retailers. “Places like Wal-Mart and Costco are big customers now. If they think their buyers won’t be interested, they won’t buy it.” And this book might be too much for those shoppers.

Sher pitched his idea to Random House, HarperCollins and Disney’s Hyperion. All liked it, but knew they’d never get the book by their sales departments. All declined.

* * *

We’re on our way to meet editor Ilona Crabbe in a CBC edit suite in Toronto. Sher is working with her on an episode of a six-hour series about World War II called Love, Hate and Propaganda. After we get there, they start talking about the firebombing in Tokyo and whether or not to use some costly stills of bodies charred in American attacks.

She leans back in her chair, rocking, hands behind her head and legs crossed. He sits at a long table behind her, leaning forward to read the script in front of him. They talk over each other, Sher’s hands flailing. His colleagues at the fifth nicknamed him “the hamster” for a reason. He taps his pen on the script while Crabbe continues rocking in her chair. He highlights what he needs to fix, then they talk about the pictures again—one of a charred baby in particular.

“I’m going to fight for that picture,” says Sher. “We’re trying to show the horrors of war here.”

We watch the scene on the monitor to our left. Crabbe stops the video. “Is it too gruesome?” Sher asks me. I say no, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

While Crabbe sets up the mic for his voice-over, she sings the Mickey Mouse Club theme song under her breath. After recording, they dicker over the script and try to find another word for “featured.” Before we leave, they watch a scene about American propaganda and Sher and Crabbe dance ironically, bodies twisting and fingers pointing in the air, while on screen the musicians sing, “We’re gonna have to slap / the dirty little Jap.”

The World War II documentary isn’t Sher’s usual story. He isn’t burrowing into a tight-knit community to save the underdog. He doesn’t have to worry about anyone shooting at him or suing him. A piece like this gets an average budget of $500,000, and with this six-part series, CBC hopes to reach a younger audience—even hiring George Stroumboulopoulos to host. Sher likes the idea of doing something out of the ordinary. He’s seen a lot of changes in investigative journalism during his career and believes the current scarcity is a reflection of the shift in what media head honchos are willing to pay. “I think there’s a lot of penny-pinching by short-minded publishers, or even managers in broadcast. It’s funny; they’re interested in cheap reality shows,” Sher says. “Duh, what greater reality show is there than investigative journalism?”

* * *

Somebody’s Daughter is almost complete and Sher still hasn’t signed with a publisher, so he tells his agent to devote his time to more lucrative projects. Then Sher tries something he’s never done before: after five books—four with major publishers—he sends his unsolicited manuscript to 12 independents. He doesn’t hear back from most of them. He gets feelers from a couple. And then, he gets a call from Chicago Review Press, which wants to publish the book that seemed so undesirable. Sher will get $10,000 upfront, but it’s a smaller advance than he’s used to.

Catering to fewer and fewer outlets is the reality for today’s independent investigative journalists. Sher juggles many projects to keep busy and to fund the ones he struggles to sell. “Books and freelance are in many ways the way to go to do investigative work. But you can’t survive on that,” he says. “So you have to do whatever documentaries and other freelance stuff you can to pay for spending two years on writing a book about child prostitution.” He flew to the U.S. with reward points he’d saved; when his destination was close enough to home—New York City, for example—he took the train. Sher believes there’s still a thirst for important, well-researched stories, but even good journalists have to be lucky to get a stint at the fifth or sign a contract with CBC’s documentary unit. “We don’t have that feeder system—that training system—that’s grooming the next generation.”

Sher aimed to foster future talent himself by starting JournalismNet, a collection of online tools for reporters. He’s since sold the site to a U.S. internet company, but continues doing newsroom training on web research techniques. He’s happy to spill the secrets of his working process to anyone who will listen. If a story needs to be told, he says, it doesn’t matter who tells it. He’s trained reporters at BBC, CNN, CBC and CTV, and they all have good things to say about him. So do his colleagues—more than one of them apologizes for telling me how much they like him because they’re sure I’ve heard it all before. Only Ricky Ciarnelleo, a spokesman for a B.C. branch of the Hells Angels, is less than complimentary—and even then, his opinion seems tepid for a member of a biker gang: He calls Sher a “pimp” who “sells books instead of women.” Sher’s innate talent for networking, working sources and staying in touch even when he doesn’t need a favour, turns out to be a skill that wins friends, not just scoops. What it doesn’t win is big paycheques.

* * *

Maria, the young girl exploited by Knowledge and saved by Garrabrant, is now 22. Garrabrant holds her newborn in his arms as he, Maria and Sher stand in her parents’ comfortable Atlantic City home. Sher looks on as Garrabrant and Maria discuss baby formula. It seems normal, save for the fact Sher knows their past.

Earlier this year, he completed the World War II doc and had nothing planned for the immediate future. He was “gainfully unemployed” and waiting for Somebody’s Daughter to come out in the fall. But, he recently signed a one-year deal with Global Television to do a series on crime and justice. He also has a pitch out for a book he’s writing about a former FBI profiler who sometimes writes for the TV series Criminal Minds. (He contacted Sher after reading One Child at a Time.)

His connections aren’t just with cops and prosecutors, though. Maria has been out of “the game,” as she calls it, for a while now and wants to go back to school, but she’s had to start stripping to take care of her baby. She tried working as a telemarketer, but couldn’t stand lying to people. Garrabrant, who insists she hasn’t gone back to prostitution, continues to check in on her. So does Sher, even bringing her baby clothes. He understands she’s doing what she must to survive. He does the same.

The morning ritual at CBC begins in a typical boardroom with a long wooden table and well-worn chairs. The windows overlook the hydro substation across the street. The room is busy. People mill in and out, preparing for different deadlines, but there are always 10 or 12 in the boardroom. The microphone in the centre of the table lets them communicate with journalists in other bureaus across Canada.

On this day in April 2003, veteran reporter Maureen Taylor is there with a team of reporters who, for the past two weeks, have been following the outbreak of SARS, a new virus that’s proving highly infectious. The body count is mounting in Toronto, and with so little known about SARS, it has quickly taken over the evening news.

“Hey, folks,” says editor George Hoff. “Do you think somewhere in Maureen’s story tonight we could squeeze in a line about how people are actually getting better who’ve had this disease?”

As Taylor watches the people around the table nod in agreement, it dawns on her just how gloomy her reporting has become. “That was a good wake-up for me,” she says now. “I think in the beginning I may not have understood. I may have created panic.”

That lesson stuck with her when bird flu first appeared in Toronto a couple of years later. The virus was a particularly dangerous strain of influenza that some epidemiologists predicted could morph into a pandemic and kill as many as 50,000 Canadians. As grim as that sounded, Taylor worked to keep her reporting balanced and in context. She wanted to educate her audience without contributing to widespread panic about a potentially catastrophic illness. It’s a lesson that reporters across the country are now considering in the wake of the recent H1N1, or swine flu, pandemic. With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that many journalists treated the outbreak the same way they cover most infectious diseases—recklessly.

Driven by audience demand, saturation reporting of potentially dangerous viruses can leave people feeling either panicked or apathetic. Even before the second wave of H1N1 fizzled out, almost everyone felt fed up. That suggests newsrooms failed to maintain perspective, and audiences took notice. If journalists don’t change the way they approach these stories, they may be giving people one more reason to shut outtraditional media.

* * *

The appearance of H1N1 wasn’t sudden—that’s not the pattern these kinds of outbreaks follow. In late March and early April 2009, reports emerged about an influenza-like illness killing people in Mexico and spreading to the southern United States. This virus was different from other flu bugs because it was killing so many young, healthy people, and by April 25 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus an international threat.

Two days later, Canada had six confirmed cases of what became known as H1N1. The first death came one day after that: 39-year-old Tina L’Hirondelle of Gift Lake, a Métis settlement in northern Alberta, suffered from asthma and other ailments. The first peak of H1N1 coverage soon followed, with hundreds of stories about the virus appearing in newspapers and on television sets across the country in late April, according to CBC. By June 11, who declared a level six pandemic, the highest level possible, for the first time in over 40 years. Nevertheless, H1N1 fear dwindled over the summer, but as fall came, so did fear of a second wave, which hit Canada in mid-October.

On October 26, the vaccination program finally rolled out to priority groups. That day, a 13-year-old Toronto boy named Evan Frustaglio died of H1N1. This sparked another surge of reporting. Canadians rushed to get vaccinated, waiting in line for hours and sometimes being turned away entirely. The panic subsided as more of the vaccine became available; public health’s worst-case predictions failed to come true and the number of cases dropped. By January, almost half of Canadians had been vaccinated.

As H1N1 calmed, accusations of irresponsible coverage ran rampant. Soon, even news organizations were questioning their work. At the height of coverage—late October to early November—the amount of reporting exceeded that of SARS, even though that virus killed almost one in every five Canadian patients, and H1N1only about one in every 250,000, according to Dr. Brian Goldman, the host of CBC’s White Coat, Black Art. (Although since Canadian health authorities stopped counting H1N1 cases in the summer, an accurate mortality rate is impossible to come by.) On November 5, The Globe and Mail’s Judith Timson wondered whether the media had hyped the pandemic, causing unnecessary anxiety. Her column ran the day before the paper published a piece about H1N1 paranoia terrifying children, filling them with anxiety about even attending school. Timson wasn’t a columnist gone rogue—and she wasn’t alone.

On the same day, Wendy Mesley moderated a CBC debate between Richard Schabas, a former chief medical officer for Ontario’s health ministry, and Allison McGeer, director of infection control at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. While Mesley told viewers there had been 225 stories about Evan’s death, Schabas slammed the media for not providing context: “There has been a constant lack of trying to put the story in perspective, of trying to take a step backwards and saying, yes, someone died, but remember people die actually all the time.” And a National Post story noted how reporters repeatedly drew comparisons betweenH1N1 and the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed more than 50 million people around the world. The piece quoted a British sociology professor who denounced the reference, saying it only served to “transform the flu into an apocalyptic threat.”

The appeal of that angle is obvious. At a time when traditional media compete with an explosion of online and alternative news sources, everyone’s looking for an advantage. Minute-by-minute coverage of a scary disease guarantees people stay glued to radios and TVs and keep buying newspapers. The desire to squeeze the most from a story isn’t necessarily bad. But because many reporters didn’t include enough context in their stories information that would educate rather than alarm—Canadians ended up consideringH1N1 a far worse threat than it was, or not considering it a threat at all.

Back in late May 2009, TNS Healthcare, a market research and public polling company, discovered a disparity between the severity of the illness and how Canadians perceived it. Fifty-three percent of Canadians surveyed believed H1N1 was serious or “extremely serious,” even though it was fairly mild. Journalists who neglected to write about people recovering from the illness and focused on the number of H1N1-related deaths contributed to the prevalence of such misinformation. Joseph Hall’s Toronto Star story on September 11 suggested that the late arrival of the vaccine would mean an ineffective immunization program. Hall didn’t mention that only 74 patients of the 1,445 who ended up in hospital since the pandemic began five months earlier had died. The vast majority of cases didn’t require hospitalization. These details would have helped readers put the late arrival of the vaccine into perspective; instead, the impression was that having to wait longer to be immunized would put people at considerable risk. On November 13, a Globe story by Caroline Alphonso and Karen Howlett featured this lead: “A sudden spike in H1N1 deaths over the past week reveals that the pandemic virus is taking a far greater toll on Canadians during the second wave, raising fears that it’s just as severe, if not worse, than seasonal flu.” And by not comparing the number of deaths to the number of infected people, the story made the virus appear far deadlier than it was. In the roughly 650-word article, variations of the words “died” and “killed” appeared 15 times, which may have left readers with the impression that an H1N1 diagnosis was a death sentence.

Part of the problem, of course, is that more context isn’t the best way to draw readers into a story. The pull is often a big, scary number or equally terrifying anecdote. Star faith and ethics reporter Stuart Laidlaw says there’s a desire among journalists to use the biggest number possible. Headlines illustrate his point. The Star: “Hundreds of flu shot doses get thrown out” and “2M swine flu doses await go-ahead.” Globe: “Cost of vaccinating the nation hits $1.5 billion and climbing.” London Free Press: “H1N1: Ontario is now reporting 1,781 cases, five in London.” Even when they weren’t entry points into the story, numbers were crammed into copy, sometimes distorting the perception of the virus.

Numbers may be enticing for readers, but personal stories are far more affecting—and without the proper context, they can be just as misleading, as Evan’s case shows. The otherwise healthy 13-year-old died within a few days of showing H1N1 symptoms and the media pounced on his story. The response to a father willing to give interviews was an explosion of coverage, with headlines ranging from “Grieving father struggles with son’s death,” to “Healthy boy’s death leaves dad reeling,” to “Officials urge calm as H1N1 claims teen.” This story single-handedly changed the way Canadians perceived the threat. A week before Evan’s death, polls suggested that just 36 percent were worried about the disease. Two weeks later, 55 percent of Canadians feared catching H1N1, and 54 percent had either received the vaccine or planned to receive it. People swarmed vaccination clinics, and no one could tune in to a news channel or pick up a newspaper without reading something—anything—about the long waits in panic-induced lineups.

* * *

The sheer volume of coverage wasn’t the only alarming aspect of the story. Many reports failed to say that, however tragic, Evan’s death was a rare event. On October 28, an article in TheHamilton Spectatortallied the total number of deaths in Canadian adults and children—almost 100. It failed to compare the tallies to the total number of people hospitalized with H1N1 by that date—almost 2,500. The story quoted Ontario’s chief medical officer of health saying that death from H1N1 was rare halfway through the piece. As with similar stories, that viewpoint was buried; by then, readers may have lost interest.

Although some reporters say they don’t control how audiences interpret their work or what they end up believing, the failure to take a step back and put deaths into perspective may have painted a deceiving picture of H1N1. According to risk amplification theory, when people are overexposed to a single-issue story, they imagine the threat is more perilous than it actually is. York University researchers Daniel Drache, David Clifton and Seth Feldman discovered that’s what happened with SARS, and Drache thinks it likely happened with H1N1. The team looked at over 1,600 articles about SARS from the Star, Globe, Post and two American papers. They found that during “saturation periods,” each one ran up to 25 SARS-related articles a day. The researchers concluded the intense coverage shaped the public notion of the ferocity of the crisis. Drache says the media just aren’t effective at covering breaking infectious diseases. “Did they do a better job this time?” he asks. “I doubt it.”

Many reporters don’t see it that way, of course. They see themselves as “fair and measured,” says A News health reporter Jan Sims, based in London, Ontario. “I think coverage has been done in a way that hasn’t inspired fear.” Ioanna Roumeliotis, who tracked H1N1 for cbc, agrees. “I don’t think that we don’t put things in perspective,” she says. Reporters may be defensive, but so are editors, who share the burden of accountability. “I think we’ve done a responsible job,” says Sun Media national news editor Mike Therien, who oversees the company’s wire service.

But it’s hard for reporters and editors to do a good job covering breaking health stories because, in most cases, they don’t have the experience or knowledge to fully understand what’s going on. According to research by Maija Saari, a journalism professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, 70 percent of reporters spend less than two years on any sort of medical beat. And anyone looking to editors for institutional memory should think again. Saari found that most strong science journalists had trouble explaining their stories to scientifically illiterate editors. Most editors are spread thin, overseeing a number of reporters in different areas, and “these things affect how much room the reporter gets to write,” she explains. Without understanding the complex nature and nuances of many health stories, editors have trouble guiding their reporters.

And lacking the right experience or background, editors can sometimes encourage over-coverage. This past summer, Charlie Fidelman, a health reporter at Montreal’s The Gazette, had to keep writing H1N1 stories even though she wasn’t convinced the virus was proving serious enough to warrant it. “How do you write about something that seems to be sort of benign?” she asks. Her assigning editor, Michelle Richardson, wanted to keep the story going because she knew it would return in the fall; she never discussed temporarily shelving the issue with either of her two health reporters. “I don’t think either of them ever thought it wasn’t worth covering,” says Richardson.

That’s not to say journalists don’t face considerable challenges—short deadlines, limited resources and shrinking newsrooms. Many reporters also wrestled with public health officials for tidbits of information. Tamara Cunningham, a reporter with Alberta-based Didsbury Review, was on the brink of tears when she called Michelle Lang, who was the health reporter at the Calgary Herald. (Lang died a few months later covering the war in Afghanistan.) Cunningham was tired of fighting with the bureaucracy at Alberta Health and Wellness for information and access to sources. But with some advice from Lang, she was able to get around the public relations people.

With layoffs and buyouts, the institutional memory has evaporated in many newsrooms, but veteran health reporters, such as Maureen Taylor, still have valuable advice to share. She’s currently on leave and studying to become a physician assistant. (Taylor doesn’t plan to return to journalism. She grew tired of revisiting the same stories.) “I don’t like to tell other reporters what to do,” she says. “I don’t want to be seen as Miss Know-It-All.” Yet, after some cajoling, she shared some of what she learned covering SARS in a piece for J-Source. Taylor says asking medical experts and public health officials for predictions is asking for trouble because no one really knows what will happen, particularly with a virus like H1N1. But that doesn’t mean reporters shouldn’t push for accountability. Taylor remembers when David Butler-Jones, the country’s chief public health officer, kept saying the H1N1 vaccine was rolling out on schedule. “He would say very emphatically Canada is on track to get millions of doses of vaccine on time. And nobody would say to him, ‘How do you define on time?’ There were already cases in B.C.”

* * *

Taylor’s advice may have fallen on deaf ears, but not all reporters succumbed to sensationalist reporting. ThePost’s Tom Blackwell thinks the story was blown out of proportion from day one and his stories reflected that skepticism. His editor, Scott Stinson, shared his view, and together they decided on more restrained coverage than what they saw their competitors producing. For example, just three paragraphs into an early November 2009 article, Blackwell soothed readers with the fact that the flu hadn’t reached the levels of the previous wave and that it was far from a crippling pandemic. In an earlier piece, he wrote there was no reason to believe Canada was at risk for a severe second wave, based on the southern hemisphere’s experience with H1N1.

Surprisingly, the over-the-top H1N1 reporting may have been a made-in-Canada phenomenon. According to an article by Blackwell on November 14, the terms “flu” and “vaccine” found their way into 36 stories in his paper, 66 in the Globe and 72 in the OttawaCitizen during the two previous weeks. South of the border, the terms appeared 23 times in The New York Times and 10 times in The Washington Post.

According to a Harris/Decima poll released in mid-November, 61 percent of Canadians believe their government did a fair to good job on “preparing for and dealing with” the virus. Even more—65 percent—believe the media overreacted.

That’s bad news for journalists. But the future doesn’t have to be gloomy; institutions can change. And now is the time to decide if, after this latest fiasco, news organizations are willing to adapt. Yet, improvement is hard when some of the most experienced reporters are reluctant to offer constructive criticism. “I would never want any of my colleagues to tell me I wasn’t doing a good job,” says Taylor. “When they did, I can tell you I didn’t take it very well.”

But when it came to including context, she learned her lesson seven years ago, thanks to an editor who was conscious of public fears. And that lesson must become part of the institutional memory of newsrooms across the country if journalists hope to regain the public’s trust and remain relevant. Reporters and editors require better training on how to cover breaking health and medical stories, and they should consider the cumulative effects of their work on the public.

The next time a new, potentially deadly virus strikes—and there will be a next time—newsrooms need to be ready to cover the story with context and restraint. If they aren’t, they risk sending their audiences elsewhere. “If you’re constantly screaming with the most alarmist headlines,” says Laidlaw, “after a while, your own credibility starts to suffer.”

After a final scan over his question sheet and a nod from the control room, Carlin went to work. For the next 40 minutes, the host of The Media File, CBC’s half-hour discussion show that runs Tuesday nights at 7:30, turned the apparent confusion into a comprehensive debate on the ethics involved in sports journalism. Williams lambasted professional baseball broadcasters, calling them “clowns” for drooling over the “carpet-bagging baseball player who spends his winters in California.” Short called the Toronto Blue Jays “foreign mercenaries” and criticized the press for labelling them “Canada’s Team.” Frayne took a rip at team owners and suggested the media should ignore them completely. When it was over, Carlin again smiled. After a good edit, it would make a critical, interesting and entertaining item that would run less than a week later on January 21.

It’s these qualities that Carlin, senior producer Stuart Allen and editor Dale Ratcliffe have tried to inject intoThe Media File since it first went to air last October. It wasn’t always easy, but then again, no one expected it to be. When the trio took the assignment, they knew they were breaking new ground. And despite their share of unforeseen difficulties, they’ve created a program that has made front-page news, done well in the ratings, and generated response from its listening audience. “This type of program is a major, major breakthrough for radio news,” says Allen, a veteran newsman at CBC. “The standard view is that radio doesn’t have opinions.”

The idea for the show developed one day last September. A group of CBC news executives, including Allen, had met with managing editor of radio news Michael Enright to come up with an idea for a show to fill the Tuesday time slot following As It Happens.

The CBC decision-makers were interested in a show about the media, but under one condition: it had to appeal to regular listeners, not just journalists. Allen agreed to this, but quickly added a condition of his own. “We had to make it clear to the hierarchy of the CBC that we were going to take a hard look at all the media-CBC included.”

This was easier to envision than to implement. As Allen and company would soon find out, breaking ground can be a harrowing experience. Time would prove to be the first problem. The original format called for as many as three items per show as well as a response to listener mail-all crammed into 30 minutes. This left little time for details. On one occasion, a taping session was arranged among six people at once-four in the studio and two on broadcast lines from studios in other cities-for a story on the manipulation of the press by the government. Even though Carlin managed to fit everyone in, the result was too many opinions and not enough focus.

But time wasn’t the only problem. The trio quickly discovered that journalists are not quick to criticize themselves. In the early stages of the show, the refusal rate for those asked to appear was close to 50 per cent. And when the journalists did consent to an interview, Carlin often found them hesitant. He faults himself for not being able to bring out the replies he wanted. “Interviewing a person in a short period of time was a new technique for me,” says Carlin, “I found I was letting easy answers go by.”

Throughout the first month, the trio struggled to overcome these problems. Then came a break. CBC president Pierre Juneau called one morning in October to agree to an interview for a story on the latest government cutback plans for CBC. Recalls Allen: “We agreed beforehand that if he said absolutely nothing, we wouldn’t run it.” Despite warnings from their peers that they were wasting their time, Allen and his associates gave it their best shot. Juneau responded to the first question from Carlin by saying the CBC would be “destroyed” if current cutbacks continued. The CBC news department immediately wanted the story, but Allen told them to wait until after it aired on the November 5 Media File. When it did, CBC used the story as did others. The Globe carried the story on its front page.

From here, the evolution of the show seemed to speed up. In the fall ratings, The Media File was tops among the five CBC special-interest programs that filled the 7:30 p.m. weekday time slots. Listener response has also been good. During the first month, fewer than five letters a week were received. During one week before Christmas, 86 listeners wrote in. Journalists as well seemed to be paying attention. “Now only about 15 per cent won’t talk to us,” says Allen.

Understandably, Carlin, Allen and Ratcliffe are all happy with what they’ve accomplished. But they are not about to let their minds slip into neutral. Says Allen: “My personal philosophy is that there is no such thing as a perfect show. But we’re striving for that.”