In the summer of 2014, The Globe and Mail narrowly avoided an editorial staff strike over native advertising—the practice of working with advertisers to create ads that resemble journalism. A leaked memo from Globe management to the paper’s union proposed a system in which editorial staff would write for advertisers, compromising, in the minds of many Globe reporters, their integrity as journalists.

Now, the Globe has launched a new website for Globe Edge—a potential solution to the hotly debated question of whether newspapers can produce native advertising without selling their souls to ad clients. Despite the inextricable problem with publishing clearly biased ads designed to blend in with theoretically unbiased journalism, the relaunch of Edge may represent the better of many evils, as well as an industry warming up to the idea of writing for someone other than readers.

According to Globe Edge managing editor Sean Stanleigh, Edge operates as a micro property of The Globe and Mail, much like a section of the newspaper. While Edge staff still write native ads in the same physical space as the rest of the paper, an important divide exists between Globe employee roles.

The seven members of the Edge team who work on native advertising—though many once worked as journalists—are distinct from the Globe’s editorial staff. This workforce divide distinguishes Edge from the Globe’s first bungled attempt at native advertising, which nearly caused the strike. Stanleigh says this is crucial because it separates editorial work from work supervised and directed by clients, which is outside the scope of acceptable journalism.

Another important divide appears within the articles themselves, albeit not as prominently as it should. Take, for example, “Roughnecks, armed with tablets, transform the energy industry,” a distinctly uncritical look at new technology in the oil fields: a tiny banner along the top declares, “sponsored content” (in size 7.5 font); the type shade is slightly lighter than the standard black (though nearly indistinguishable); and an italicized message at the end of the article clarifies that the Globe’s editorial staff had nothing to do with it.

As native advertising has become more standard–particularly online (BuzzFeed makes nearly all its money this way)–many believe these small design cues aren’t enough. In a 2013 article following a native advertising misstep that led The Atlantic to publish a glowing endorsement of Scientology, the Globe’s own Simon Houpt took a firm stand against native advertising, writing, “Given the way readers consume stuff online, scanning articles on tiny screens, simply sticking a label at the top or bottom of an article won’t do the trick.”

But Stanleigh has observed a shift in the Globe newsroom away from knee-jerk rejection of native ads as unethical without exception. “I haven’t felt any antagonism from my colleagues,” he says. “I think they understand that we need to make the money it takes to produce great journalism.”

This awareness of a newspaper’s financial needs is keener than ever, and the softening of journalists toward native advertising has likely been prodded along by declining revenues.

Another contributing factor toward the acceptance of native ads is increased responsibility on the part of the advertisers. In 2013, the U.S.-based Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) published the Native Advertising Playbook, which attempts to establish industry-wide standards such as clear and unmistakable disclosure to readers. “It’s eminently possible to protect institutional integrity and provide a platform for paid points of view,” says IAB President Randall Rothenberg.

But “integrity” is a distinctly subjective concept, and its definition for advertisers may differ wildly for journalists. For Stanleigh, who was once deputy national editor for the Globe and has also worked as a senior editor at the Toronto Star, bridging this gap is essential. “One of the most important parts of my role is making sure advertisers have an understanding of journalistic principles,” he says.

While the concept still makes many journalists queasy, the development of Globe Edge is a leading example of a bad thing done well. If we accept that journalism needs to be profitable to exist—and that it may soon have exhausted all morally sound means of making money—a careful, responsible approach toward native advertising may be our next best bet.

At least 43 people were killed by a double suicide bombing in a residential area of Beirut yesterday, an attack for which ISIL has since claimed responsibility.

The New York Times initially reported the story with this headline, causing an uproar on Twitter. Reuters also ran with a similar headline.

ISIS blows up crowd of civilians in Beirut and this is the headline pic.twitter.com/mbxYAo43uk

— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) November 12, 2015

The headline came under fire because it implied all the people in the residential area were somehow associated with Hezbollah, therefore implying that they may have been militants instead of civilians.

Roqayah Chamseddine, a Lebanese-American journalist, says the use of the phrase “[Hezbollah] stronghold” creates a “fabricated picture of what exists on the ground.”

“That language is meant to show that what is in essence a simply poor neighborhood is some sort of military compound,” Chamseddine says. “While there are many [Hezbollah] supporters in the southern district of Beirut, the idea that it is a [Hezbollah] bastion is an outright lie.”

Many others argued the headline was inappropriate.

The NYT term “Hezbollah stronghold” shows dehumanizing & flawed facts–NYT needs "mindset" reset, not headline reset

— Rula Jebreal (@rulajebreal) November 13, 2015

.@rulajebreal I wonder if @nytimes will start saying "Stabbing attack in Zionist stronghold" or "Attempted stabbing in Likud stronghold"

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) November 13, 2015

The New York Times has since changed the headline on the article to “ISIS Claims Responsibility for Deadly Blasts in Southern Beirut.” The journalist behind the article also admitted the error and apologized.

.@snarwani you are correct. The characterization is not meant to diminish civilian casualties. I've corrected it. Thanks.

— Ayman Mohyeldin (@AymanM) November 12, 2015

Several major Canadian publications, however, were still using a headline that dehumanizes the victims of the blast as of 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, including The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

The RRJ contacted editors at both papers via email at 7:50 p.m. Thursday evening asking why they chose the headline, and if they’re willing to change it to something more accurate. The Globe and Mail editors altered their headline at 8:36 p.m., but have not yet responded to the email request.

The Toronto Star editors have not yet altered their headline or responded to the email. Any responses received will be added to this post.

On October 22, 2014, news of the Ottawa shooting began with a misspelled tweet and a cellphone video by Globe and Mail reporter Josh Wingrove. At the same time, veteran CBC cameraman Jean Brousseau quietly rolled his camera and collected raw footage that would later tell a full insider story while Bruce Arthur, sports columnist for the Toronto Star, found himself near Parliament Hill instead of the hockey arena.

Gunfire in pariament

— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) October 22, 2014

Visual discretion is advised (Source: CBC)

The structure of the reports were non-traditional: bullet points, quotes, brief summary paragraphs with links to allow for the option to dig deeper, photo galleries with informative captions and interactive maps. By forgoing the news briefs and article format, the live coverage in this way permitted more engagement and more consistent and updated information.

This is why, when looking back at the archives, one hopes that someone patted all these journalists on the back for accomplishing what they did on that day. Maclean’s had an ongoing ScribbleLive stream of tweets, photos, videos and audio. The Globe put together an interactive timeline that included time-stamped maps, tweets, updates and raw cellphone photos and videos from their reporters on Parliament Hill.

The rapid collation of information and visual illustration of all the details only continued in the days and months after the shooting. The Globe staff put together a “What we know so far” piece, assimilating the same elements as their live coverage. CBC put up the raw footage collected by Brousseau and reconstructed everything that happened on the Hill, based solely on the video. Maclean’s also reconstructed the entire day’s events solely through quotes from witnesses, politicians, security members and so forth who were at or near the site in question.

And then there was the commentary that retraced the entire day again. Ian Brown took the reader through Ottawa “in the footsteps of a killer” the day after the shooting. Arthur walked us through the streets hours after the shooting ended in an article published on the day (to me, the most memorable article from the day).  A couple of months later, Wingrove took us through his first-hand traumatic experience and its psychological aftermath.

All these articles and interactive timelines are a testament to the multifaceted nature of modern-day journalism that only intensifies in live situations like the Ottawa shooting. The successful execution of the examples above are a testament to the fact that even live coverage can be detailed and extensive, and that the efforts that went—and are still going—into portraying the full story are worthy of recognition.

On it’s one year anniversary, Maclean’s put together a long-form feature detailing the actions during and after the shooting of “the heroes of October 22“, and The Globe and Mail put together another timeline of yesterday’s memorial ceremony, adding links to past multimedia articles from the day for context.

Perhaps, one year on, we should have a conversation about the lines of live reporting in this way. Josh Wingrove’s video has been viewed over 4.5 million times now, but no one ever asked if it should have been released as quickly as it was. Couldn’t it have compromised the situation? Couldn’t it have caused trauma despite the disclaimer for viewers it was released with? Would the live reporting have been as strong without it?

These questions weren’t asked because they didn’t need to be. Despite the rapidness of the day and the multi-faceted details of the shooting, Canadian news organisation gave an impressive display of thorough and careful reporting. There were no glaring mistakes made. There were no breaches caused. In fact, the combination of live-tweeting, multimedia and interactive journalism and quick, thoughtful commentary on October 22 may be one of the best displays of Canadian journalism.

Andrew Coyne resigned as the editor of the Editorials and Comment section of the National Post today, and journalists should be thankful he did.

The resignation comes after Postmedia executives prevented Coyne from writing a column dissenting from the National Post’s endorsement of the Conservative Party of Canada because it would “confuse readers and embarrass the paper.”

Coyne took to Twitter to explain his resignation, and said he did not view his desire to write a dissenting column as confusing because, “Readers, in my view, are adults & understand that adults can disagree.”

So anyway… I have resigned as editor of Editorials and Comment for the National Post, effective immediately. I will remain a columnist.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

Coyne said newspaper owners do have a right to dictate who the paper endorses, but that not speaking out would give the impression that he agreed with the Conservatives, and prevent him from doing his job as a columnist. Coyne also said he believes the intervention from Postmedia executives is unprecedented, and so he felt like he had to resign to help prevent it from becoming one.

Coyne is right to resign on principle. A dissenting Coyne column in the National Post would not have embarrassed the paper in the eyes of readers. The only embarrassment would have come from owners, upset that their star columnist didn’t go along with their plan to force the entire Postmedia chain to cheerlead for the Conservatives.

What Postmedia executives should find embarrassing is their insistence on all of the chain’s papers endorsing the Conservatives, and then sitting by as these papers sell their front pages to political advertisers also endorsing the Conservatives. This certainly provoked more outrage over the weekend from readers and journalists alike than a dissenting Coyne column likely ever could have.

On Saturday, media commentator Bruce Anderson tweeted about the Postmedia fiasco.

Spare a thought for the journalists who work diligently for papers that sold a front page today. Not their choice. pic.twitter.com/Dx2ZN7gGGa

— Bruce Anderson (@bruceanderson) October 17, 2015

Anderson is entirely correct as the overwhelming majority of journalists have little choice but to grit their teeth and accept that their employers are damaging their reputation as journalists. In an ultra competitive industry, where jobs are hard to come by and dissent is hardly tolerated, it’s no surprise most journalists didn’t take some sort of public action against Postmedia (or The Globe and Mail, for that matter).

This is exactly why it’s important that Coyne did. Coyne is one of Canada’s most high profile journalists, who is all but guaranteed employment, even at the National Post (as a columnist) after resigning, as Jesse Brown pointed out.

Must be nice to resign on principle but keep a six-figure salary!

— Jesse Brown (@JesseBrown) October 19, 2015

It’s tempting to shrug off Coyne’s resignation as an easy choice from a high profile journalist with little but his ego on the line. But this would be wrong, as Coyne is a good example of what privileged journalists should do: use their status to push back against the status quo when necessary.

In an ideal world Coyne would have also pushed back against the practice of newspaper owners dictating endorsements, but still, his resignation should be applauded.

Hopefully Postmedia executives learn a lesson from Coyne’s principled stance and refrain from intervening in future situations where columnists simply try to do their job.

Election day is finally, finally upon us, but the longest campaign in Canadian history since 1872 didn’t end quietly for the country’s print newspapers. If anything, it ended nonsensically.

Questions of who controls newspapers’ editorial voice haunted the final week of #elxn42 as print media outlets published their editorial board’s federal election choices. Some internet media, including the RRJ, questioned whether such endorsements are a practice worth keeping.

“For us, it seems a bit outdated,” said BuzzFeed Canada’s Emma Loop, while speaking to The Current on October 9. Although BuzzFeed does weigh in on particular issues, Loop said, the organization will “stay away from the partisan element” of politics by not endorsing a candidate.

Kathy English, public editor of the Toronto Star, was on The Current with Loop. She maintained that newspaper endorsements still have a place. “The Star is an institution that dates back over three centuries. Every day, it takes stands on issues that matter to the community,” said English. “It would be a cop-out not to do so in an election campaign.”

That morning, the Star published an editorial endorsing the Liberal Party of Canada. Two other Torstar papers, the Hamilton Spectator and the Waterloo Region Record, also endorsed the Liberals on October 15 and 17 respectively.

But it was the Postmedia endorsements on October 16 that made noise on Twitter as paper after paper in the national chain published an editorial endorsing the Conservative Party of Canada. The endorsement wasn’t by the editorial staff, however, as Edmonton Journal writer Paula Simons said in a tweet:

And yes. Before you ask, this was a decision made by the owners of the paper. As is their traditional prerogative.

— Paula Simons (@Paulatics) October 16, 2015

On Saturday, the National Post itself followed suit. Its editorial board’s pronouncement was also at odds with the opinions of columnists at the Post and other Postmedia holdings whose columns appeared on Friday and Saturday. Even Conrad Black himself weighed in, favouring a Liberal minority and referring to Stephen Harper as a “sadistic Victorian schoolmaster” who doesn’t know when to leave office. And one column was notable in its absence from the Saturday edition: that of Andrew Coyne, head of the Post’s editorial board.

According to Canadaland, Coyne’s column would have endorsed somebody other than the Conservatives, unlike the editorial endorsement he signed off on for the Post.  He has not spoken out on why his column did not appear, and his usually voluble Twitter feed has fallen silent — though Ricochet’s Ethan Cox noted that Coyne has disappeared in similar circumstances before.

UPDATE: Coyne has resigned from his post as editor

So anyway… I have resigned as editor of Editorials and Comment for the National Post, effective immediately. I will remain a columnist.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

2. Postmedia executives and I had a professional disagreement. Their view was that the publication of a column by the editorial page editor…

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

3. … dissenting from the Post’s endorsement of the Conservatives would have confused readers and embarrassed the paper.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

4. My view was that that was what I was paid to do as a columnist: give my honest opinion on issues of public interest.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

5. I don’t see public disagreement as confusing. I see it as honest. Readers, in my view, are adults & understand that adults can disagree.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

Numerous Postmedia properties were also notable for their front pages in the last days of the election campaign: full-page, bright yellow wrap ads from the Conservatives bashing the competition. The ads appeared on the covers of the Penticton Herald, Vancouver Sun, Calgary Sun, The Province, The London Free Press, Ottawa Citizen, and 24 Hours Toronto. Most were aimed at the Liberals, but the Penticton Herald ad targeted both the Liberals and NDP. Curiously, the Friday edition of 24 Hours Vancouver, also a Postmedia property, featured an NDP wrap ad. While it isn’t a new practice, one reporter noted that these ads were a step up from the norm.

@belindaalzner Never seen one in such big papers, either, but correct me if I'm wrong

— Selena Ross (@seleross) October 17, 2015

Meanwhile, back at The Globe and Mail‘s offices, editor David Walmsley spent an hour fielding questions on Facebook about the paper’s unconventional endorsement of the Conservatives without endorsing party leader Stephen Harper. 

“The half-heartedness is a sign of the weakness of the political candidates,” Walmsley said in response to one questioner. “It would be great to find a clear, obvious winner the country could unite behind, but we don’t have that at the moment.”

In response to the Globe’s ambivalence, some Twitter users channeled their inner political humourist with the hashtag #MoreGlobeEndorsements.

Globe endorses BLT: hold the bacon, hold the lettuce, hold the tomato. #MoreGlobeEndorsements #elxn42

— Jeff Meldrum (@jeffmeldrum) October 16, 2015

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, without the rights and freedoms. #MoreGlobeEndorsements

— Justin Mathews (@JustMath19) October 16, 2015

The Walking Dead. But no zombies. We have enough of them on our editorial board. #MoreGlobeEndorsements

— Erynn Watson (@erynnwatson) October 16, 2015

Here at the RRJ, we endorse newspapers, but we’re on the fence about newspaper endorsements.

Journalists have been enthralled with the niqab debate over the last few weeks. In order to get a better sense of what to make of the niqab coverage, I spoke to the communications director at the National Council of Canadian Muslims, Amira Elghawaby.

Elghawaby’s most pressing critique of niqab journalism is simply that there’s too much of it. Elghawaby noted that, “The media has a responsibility to report the news” but that journalists have had trouble distinguishing “between news, and the deliberate attempts of the Conservative party to keep the issue alive.”

The result of this failure, according to Elghawaby, is the amplification of the niqab “issue multiple-fold compared to other relevant issues raised during leaders’ debates.”

Elghawaby certainly has a point, and so I wanted to look a little deeper to get a sense of how much niqab coverage there has been. To do this, I went to the websites of the National Post, the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, and counted how many articles from October 7 to October 14 contained the term “niqab,” and then did the same for “trans-pacific partnership.”

The niqab debate, as many commentators have accurately pointed out, is focused on an insignificant issue, with only two of 680,000 potential citizens being affected by the ban since 2011. Meanwhile, the Trans-Pacific Partnership has geo-political significance for states around the world, including Canada.

The results I found don’t reflect this, with 133 mentions of “niqab” found, compared to only 102 for “trans-pacific partnership.”

Despite this, Elghawaby notes that the overwhelming emphasis in journalism on the niqab has led to some positives.

“The diversity of voices given space on this issue has been refreshing. Women who wear niqab slowly were given space to share their perspectives and experiences.”

There are several good examples of this from the Toronto Star and the CBC.

As such, Elghawaby says that “while the [niqab] issue was over amplified, given its relatively minor impact on the lives of the vast majority of Canadians, including Canadian Muslims, there seemed to be a sincere effort on the part of media to hear from those directly impacted, or who had a perspective that countered popular opinion, to share.”

In a journalism landscape where people constantly speak for Muslim women, the fact that Muslim women have been given more opportunity to speak for themselves is important.

There are exceptions, of course, like this CBC piece that tells the exciting saga of what it was like for a white woman to wear a hijab for a day, as if there aren’t enough Muslim women who could speak more authoritatively to the issue.

Overall though, while the coverage of the niqab debate did draw up some positives due to the range of voices speaking on the issue, Elghawaby says, “It would be nice if other equally or more important issues were given this kind of treatment and attention!”

Let’s hope her wish comes true in the last few days of the election.

On October 17, The Globe and Mail published an editorial announcing their endorsement for Toronto’s mayoral race: “John Tory is Toronto’s best bet.” Torontoist wants citizens to vote for Olivia Chow and the Toronto Star will release their endorsement this week.

These endorsements may be a big deal for candidates. But beyond politician’s personal promotion, it’s difficult to tell how much they matter to voters. Carleton University professor Dwayne Winseck showed editorial endorsements were out of step with public opinion in the 2011 federal election. In a 2007 editorial, The Hamilton Spectator admitted its track record of picking winners wasn’t good.

As the editors at the Winnipeg Free Press point out, these endorsements may be more about the editorial board’s ego. This year, the Press is endorsing only the act of voting  in Winnipeg’s municipal election. The Guelph Mercury is also sitting out. Managing editor Phil Andrews writes that, while he supports the tradition, publishing an endorsement could be counter-productive from a business perspective.

There could be multiple reasons for this. Bloomberg Businessweek notes that as voters become increasingly accustomed to hyper-partisan media, the idea that readers would trust an editorial board to come to a balanced, authoritative conclusion about a candidate’s record can seem like a stretch. According to the Pew Research Journalism Project, voters are getting much of their news about candidates from the campaigns themselves rather than journalists. For the most part, endorsements are also predictable. You can disregard this piece if the Star gives two thumbs up to Doug Ford.

A voter may well be able to make a decision by reading competing endorsements. It certainly is convenient, and many major publications still publish them. The Star’s public editor, Kathy English, says that by telling citizens who the paper considers the best candidate, the Star is living up to its democratic responsibility to both foster public debate and take a clear stand on issues that matter to citizens of the community. The posts are popular, with the Globe’s endorsement garnering 316 comments to date. But they may not be more than an affirmation for dedicated readers and a chance to spew hate for critics.

By Rebecca Melnyk 

Inside his west-end Toronto apartment, Justin Giovannetti was cocooned in blankets, sick in bed with a bad cold on his day off. His cellphone rang. Dennis Choquette, his editor at The Globe and Mail, wanted him in the office. Giovannetti rolled off his mattress, slipped into his least flattering clothes and schlepped in to work. Soon enough, he found out a train had derailed overnight in a Quebec town called Lac-Mégantic. He attempted to build stories from calls to the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, and emails from the Globe’s chief Quebec correspondent, Sophie Cousineau, who was already on the scene. Finally, on that humid evening of July 6, 2013, Choquette told the summer intern to book a flight.

Around eight o’clock the next morning, the 26-year-old rented an SUV in Montreal and drove about three hours across the countryside until he saw smoke on the horizon. He pulled into town, where small clusters of locals huddled along Rue Laval—the main road leading straight to a metal barricade, and beyond that, a sea of black ash from the explosions that had set the downtown ablaze. Adrenaline set in and his cold disappeared as he viewed the disaster scene. He thought he’d be there for a few days, but he finally departed two months later. When he left on September 2, he knew many in the community.

This wasn’t just a parachute-in, sweep-up-the-facts reporting job, although many journalists rushed there to do just that. This was a story that needed to transport readers—farther than fleeting Twitter fixes can do—to a town that could have been just about any small town across the country.

Like the maple tree at the edge of the disaster zone—one side singed and dead, the other, verdant and alive—our relationship with trains now has stark sides. They bring energy, but they also carry hazardous materials and threaten our way of life.

One train was all it took to set a tragic narrative in motion. Some reporters raced to Lac-Mégantic to gather hard facts and keep us updated, but left gaps in the process. Others dug deeper and stayed longer to bring us to the heart of the tragedy. The reporters who stayed to tell stories showed how narrative journalism helps answer questions that others leave smouldering in the ashes.

***
Just after midnight on July 6, about 60 people are up late at Musi-Café on Rue Frontenac. They’re enjoying one of the first warm nights of summer after days of cold rain. Some are celebrating birthdays. Some are dancing to the songs of local musicians. Others are smoking on the terrace, about 20 metres from the tracks that loop through town. Around 12:58 a.m., less than 13 kilometres away, a driverless, 73-car train carrying crude oil from a Bakken oil field in North Dakota begins rolling toward them.

The sky flashes bright orange around 1:15 a.m. as the train derails and tanks burst into massive fireballs. Flames swallow the Musi-Café, illuminating the Appalachian Mountains across the lake. Residents stand silently on the streets while firemen wander helplessly around the edge of the inferno. Soon, police bang on doors and evacuate the area.

One confirmed dead. Many missing. Two thousand evacuated. Thirty buildings destroyed. That’s all reporters can confirm by the following morning as they wander around with recorders and notepads. Riley Sparks, an intern at Montreal’s The Gazette and one of the first reporters to arrive, has no idea what to write when he gets there in the early afternoon. Later, he steps out of his car and crouches down next to a couple sitting on their back porch, watching their town burn.

When Giovannetti arrives on Sunday afternoon, he, too, has no clue where to start. There are no reliable estimates of a death count; numbers keep fluctuating, and people who are missing may be on hunting or fishing trips. Giovannetti joins four other Globe reporters in the evening—Cousineau had spent the night in her car in front of a McDonald’s, one of the only places with Wi-Fi and power outlets. They pitch a tent outside the town since all the B&Bs are swarmed with journalists. In the thick heat of summer, with no running water for showering, the reporters have no time to think between getting to bed after midnight and attending 6 a.m. press briefings.

During those first updates, Giovannetti is among about 30 reporters, a number that doubles by the afternoon of Monday, July 8, when CNN, BBC and other international outlets show up. Four days ago he was writing about the battle over butter tarts in rural Ontario. Now he’s in his home province, which he left in May for the Globeinternship, scribbling notes on the worst train disaster in modern Canadian history. He follows a Facebook discussion group and learns some residents are angry at insensitive journalists failing to respect their privacy. But on July 10, Edward Burkhardt, CEO and chairman of the Chicago-based Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, which operated the train that derailed, arrives in town, and Giovannetti sees the negative sentiment toward reporters turn for the better.

The press centre is one block south of École Sacré-Coeur, an elementary school serving as a temporary police station. When Burkhardt, a man in his 70s with a slight hunch, walks out the school’s glass doors, a reporter spots him. A horde of journalists soon follows. Giovannetti, who is across town when he gets a call from a Globecolleague, races up the street in his SUV. Seeing no parking spots, he leaves it in the middle of Rue Champlain, which is already jammed with abandoned vehicles. He runs toward Burkhardt, who’s now being grilled in a full-on scrum. Photographers climb trees to snap pictures. “You’re a rat!” one resident yells through the crowd. After about 30 minutes, cops lead Burkhardt into the back of a police car and drive away.

***
Back in Toronto, Choquette and others in the newsroom begin contemplating various story ideas, such as a magazine-like piece about life inside Musi-Café before the fire consumed the building. “We all wanted to hear the band playing that night,” Choquette says. That means speaking with witnesses who were at the bar, finding out how paths intersected that evening—and writing a story that captures the emotional toll of the train wreck. Good narrative arises out of a “profound need to make sense of the chaos,” he says. “It’s one of the best tools we have as journalists.” And reporters who value the tools of literary journalism often take on disasters because they’re great stories, full of danger, suspense, suffering and blame.

But making narrative sense out of chaos hasn’t always been a top priority in Canadian disaster coverage. There was a time when reporters distanced readers from tragedy with hard facts rather than offering meaning and context. The St-Hilaire train crash in 1864 killed close to 100 immigrants and resulted in fact-heavy coverage stacked into narrow columns. Stories sent by telegraph centred on identifying the dead and relaying the proceedings of the inquest that followed the disaster.

During the 1917 Halifax Explosion, in which a French cargo ship blew up and killed an estimated 2,000 people, various Canadian Press reports revealed stories about survivors without describing their emotional ordeal or giving a sense of who they were. One such article, “Late notes from a great disaster,” summed up assorted facts about the event—the destruction of a textile mill, missing family members and so on—but related no specific details to give readers any sense of the scene, the victims or their families.

Flickers of narrative began to appear during the third Springhill mining disaster in November 1958. CP’s “Wives and children waited at pithead” described the seconds before the rescue of trapped miners, turning eyewitnesses into three-dimensional characters. Bruce West, a Globe reporter who covered the disaster, returned to Springhill to write about what the paper called “a hard-luck town that refuses to die” for the now-defunct Globe Magazine. The feature focused on the emotional and economic implications of the disaster for the town’s residents.

Writing about the aftermath of a tragedy has purpose. Joe Scanlon, director of the Emergency Communications Research Unit at Carleton University, worked the Toronto Daily Star rewrite desk on the November day the last miners were rescued. The paper had pulled reporters from the scene days earlier, so Scanlon wrote the front-page report from Toronto. He says writing features about a disaster after the initial event is a way of keeping the story alive when there’s nothing new to write about.

This summer, the Globe spent thousands of dollars—on car rentals, phone bills and lodging—to keep Giovannetti in Lac-Mégantic building relationships and fine-tuning the chronology of events through survivors’ stories. Sticking around is essential to narrative, according to New Yorker editor David Remnick, who said in 2011, “The good stuff comes when you come back, and back, and back and back.” When the news caravan moves on, narrative writers can take the time to write meaningful stories.

***
Giovannetti is still in Lac-Mégantic on August 1. Other journalists return to their offices after the tragedy becomes more about the condition of railways, how to transport oil safely and the environmental consequences of the explosion. Yet what becomes increasingly clear after the disaster is how significant Musi-Café was to the town—a gathering space for young and old, and the place where most of those killed spent their final moments. Giovannetti not only speaks the language, but also understands the culture; that’s why he got the assignment. At the edge of a Maxi grocery store parking lot near a rundown suburban strip mall, he talks with workers as they set up a makeshift Musi-Café. Hammers nail white tents into the ground as locals carry in palm trees similar to the ones that stood on the bar’s patio. More than 1,000 people fill the grassy hills surrounding a large stage. Folk musician Fred Pellerin begins to play his guitar and rain falls hard as Giovannetti runs back and forth to his car, uploading photos and filing a story. He types on his computer: “For the bar’s staff, the trees were a reminder of the bar’s rebirth. . . . on an evening when dark clouds loomed.” He believes these narrative elements are important because few people he writes for have been to Lac-Mégantic.

Many reporters have branched out from the early, prosaic coverage of man-made disasters to write pieces that dig deep into the story, create room for emotion and stretch the boundaries of detached voice. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the human toll and the resulting economic, political and environmental concerns spurred news outlets such as USA Today and The New York Times to reconstruct the event through profiles of different survivors who had escaped the World Trade Center.

A good deal of research has examined narrative coverage of 9/11, including Carolyn Kitch’s study, “Mourning in America: ritual, redemption, and recovery in news narrative after September 11.” She points out that newsmagazines replaced fear with patriotic pride, showing how journalists make sense of senseless news by placing these events in a “grand narrative” of resilience. Narrative doesn’t just take us places—it’s also powerful enough to change the way people perceive their country in the wake of violence and destruction. By transporting readers to the scene of 9/11, journalists let them become witnesses as well—personally involved in the event and, perhaps, more willing to care about the resulting circumstances.

On April 25, 2013, The Boston Globe published Eric Moskowitz’s “Carjack victim recounts his harrowing night,” a story about a man terrorized by the Boston bombing suspects. The reporter spent time in the victim’s home, getting to know him and developing trust, which helped his story unfold like an action film or, as Moskowitz says, like a “Tarantino movie.” During a live online chat hosted by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, he wrote that narrative helped him avoid trying to “march readers toward a particular understanding.” But in the end, it let readers understand more. A resident near the Watertown shooting site emailed him to say the tick-tock piece “helped fill in gaps that had been gnawing at him.”

***
Rémi Tremblay, a reporter at Lac-Mégantic’s L’Écho de Frontenac for 32 years, hears explosions less than 500 metres away after his son wakes him abruptly. Without a computer and unable to get to his office, Tremblay drives down to Rue Laval where other residents are standing. “I was a witness more than a journalist,” he says. But the paper hadn’t missed a week of publication since 1929, so he begins to write a story in his head—one he will later say came from his heart and gut.

Later, his editor brings him a laptop and he sits down at the corner of a table in an emergency station kitchenette. His fingers pound the keyboard. “Everyone has a horror story to tell,” he types. “Images that will not fade.” What follows is an emotional narrative called “La ville des âmes en peine,” or “The town of suffering souls,” praised by readers for capturing the essence of how residents felt. The following Thursday, the newspaper adds 2,000 copies to its usual print run of 9,000.

A dentist’s nameplate still hangs on the door of L’Écho de Frontenac’s makeshift office. Until he can return to his old office on a leafy street beside the red zone, Tremblay works at a long, adjustable table surrounded by mismatched office chairs. He says he lost all objectivity that night. The result was an award from the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec for local and regional news coverage. The jury said the “poignant account” put readers at “the heart of the tragedy.”

The “heart” of narrative forges what Josh Greenberg, associate director of Carleton’s journalism and communications school, calls an emotional connection between storytellers and readers. Policy stories, he believes, may fail to resonate on their own. But with the context of narrative journalism, readers may be more engaged. With issues of national importance—in this case, railway safety and the transportation of hazardous materials—there’s good reason for the public to be emotionally attached. “Readers need to be reminded of why these stories are important,” he says. “But in order for them to re-experience an event, they need to be drawn back in, not just through digging up facts and probing questions, but also by the way the material is organized.”

Mark Kramer, founding director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University, says non-narrative reporting is an impersonal language where the standard journalistic voice is most often not human; narrative voice is “more perfect, more delineated, a bigger voice that causes emotions.” It humanizes a story worth worrying about.

It’s also a voice that, according to Greenberg, can differentiate one paper’s coverage from another’s. When trains began to roll back into Lac-Mégantic in December, theNational Post focused on residents’ “psychological distress” over the reappearance, while the Globe emphasized the town’s economic dependence on the railway, speaking with residents who’d lost friends but were pleased for the train’s return.

The cycle of man-made disaster coverage—human loss, cause, rebirth—usually ends with the public choosing to stop expending brainpower on the tragedy. A feature on the last moments of the lives of survivors, like the one Giovannetti would write, may not be breaking news, but its intent is to draw readers back to the story they’ve wandered away from or, as Kramer says, to use “emotion for public purpose.” At the Poynter Institute, senior scholar Roy Peter Clark says narrative carries readers to another time and place. “It makes you more human,” he says. There’s more empathy to understand a richer variety of people in turmoil when you feel like you’re there with them.

***
Once a carrier of forest products, now a transporter of dangerous goods, the train is a character in a large but often ignored Canadian story. During the first week of coverage, Globe reporter John Allemang makes policy more engaging when he walks along a bike path 20 metres from the tracks. At one point, he transports readers to Nantes, where the runaway train originated. “You leave Lac-Mégantic,” he writes, “pass a highway roundabout where Guy Lepage believes the train line could be diverted from the town centre, and soon come across graffiti-covered freight cars that are at once a misplaced urban art project and a reminder of the diminished status of rail.”

Then there’s Les Perreaux, a Montreal correspondent for the Globe, who partly walks and partly drives along the MM&A tracks, tracing the destruction of the historic railway. “Journey to the end of the MM&A Railway line” takes readers back in time to what could have led up to the disaster. He points out that at Cowansville, Quebec, “the wooden support beams on the bridge are so rotten, saplings have sprouted from them” and how in Greenville, Maine, in October 1998, a train carrying butane ran “past the hospital and the school” and “rolled down an embankment into the town cemetery, landing on graves.” All man-made disasters have villains, but seeing the framework of a deteriorating railway suggests the possibility of more than one scapegoat.

Tom Harding, the train’s driver, appeared to fill that role after Burkhardt—who supported one-man crews—publicly accused him of improperly setting the hand brakes. And so, in the dense heat of mid-August, Star reporter Wendy Gillis drives to the dusty town of Farnham, Quebec—Harding’s hometown—to find out if he’s a true villain. She walks through his neighbourhood, past his stone bungalow, hoping to speak with him. He’s with his teenage son, strapping two yellow kayaks to his black pickup truck. She wasn’t sure she’d see him; he had supposedly gone into hiding. Her heart was racing—he’s said no to other reporters. She asks a question, but he shakes his head “no” and goes inside. Instead, Gillis knocks on the door of a neighbour who willingly spends a long time discussing Harding’s good character. She stays up most of the next night at a bar, chatting with a couple of local guys over a few beers. “Railway crossing signs dot Farnham’s wide streets, the thud-thud of tracks unavoidable on a drive around town,” she writes in a September 7 article that reflects her time spent in the town. “Sometimes there are no easy villains.”

If Harding is no easy villain, Gillis discovers, then “the train is no simple villain, either.” Instead of the usual report on Harding’s involvement in the train crash, she reveals how those who are blamed are three-dimensional. Clark says the “why” of a story is often a tricky element. “We often fall into the logical fallacy of the single cause,” he says. “In real life, people’s motives are more opaque.” If Harding grew up with the trains and learned to trust them—just as the people of Lac-Mégantic did—juggling odd jobs until he was old enough to work for Canadian Pacific Railway, perhaps he, too, was a victim.

***
Ten kilometres outside Lac-Mégantic, at around 6 p.m. on October 4, it’s the kind of fall evening when stars begin to seem brighter, the sky seems darker and summer feels like ages ago. Two hours before actors of La troupe des deux masques de Beauce perform the comedy Tuxedo Palace in an old steepled church on a grassy hill in Marston, Sue Montgomery, a straight-talking, curly-haired reporter for the Gazette, pulls out a used pad of paper. She hugs Karine Blanchette, an actress and former waitress at Musi-Café who is about to perform the same play she was supposed to on the night the fire killed many of her friends. The two sit down in blue-cushioned seats in the front row while the stage manager dashes up and down the aisle. “Macarena” blasts over the stereo in the empty auditorium that will soon fill up with locals who all seem to know each other. Before walking backstage, Blanchette updates Montgomery on how the town is feeling: angry, but gaining some semblance of hope.

Montgomery was on her way to her cottage the morning she heard about the disaster. She didn’t arrive at the scene until late July, long after most journalists had left. But that’s the way she likes it—it’s better to come in when the crowds fall off, when people have had time to let things sink in. “You’re not competing with a bunch of other journalists. There’s not the rush of the daily news, the updating of what’s going on, what’s going on, what’s going on,” she says, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Being able to take her time and sit down with people rather than shoving a microphone in their faces during a disaster, Montgomery becomes part therapist, able to listen and understand what they went through.

Later that evening, she files a story about plans to rebuild the town: “The flaming red and orange leaves on nearby hills begin to fall and people stock their woodsheds for what will surely be an emotionally difficult winter.” Montgomery believes residents appreciate this patience.

During the first few days of the disaster, people were in shock, unable to fully grasp the consequences, but reporters probed for leads amid the chaos, biting at the same sources. While news reporting is essential—go in, get the necessary information, file stories by deadline—scrambling for hard facts doesn’t reflect Montgomery’s patience. Though also based on facts, of course, narrative requires context that takes time to build. In the rush to inform, some reporters angered the community by leaving gaps in the story.

Or worse. On July 10, Le Journal de Montréal, Quebec’s most read newspaper, published a list of missing people—some of whom were alive and accounted for. The newspaper depended on Facebook connections, even running photographs from the site next to some names. “We were stuck with the good and the bad of journalism,” says André Laflamme, a volunteer firefighter and paramedic, who saw a picture of his nephew in Le Journal and called his family to make sure the news wasn’t true.

France Dumont, founder of the Facebook group Lac-Mégantic: Support aux gens, says everything was a rush during the first week. Some reporters didn’t double-check information after interviews. One reporter claimed that it’s not customary to recheck pieces before publishing. Journalists asked to go on balconies and into living rooms of people with views over the barricades. Some residents felt invaded and became wary.

Gazette city reporter Christopher Curtis worried about striking the right balance. “I’d leave town at night and feel really shitty about not being able to be there and tell these stories about people who are so generous and brave,” he says. “Then, on your way back, you’d feel bad you were going in to exploit their tragedy.”

Although Curtis saw the disaster as valuable public information, his concerns were valid. “It was an absolute circus,” says Jeannette Lachance, a resident who knew half the people who died. Anytime she left the house she felt that reporters and outsiders would not see her; they would just see the fire. She recognized inaccurate stories, specifically in French papers.

Lachance’s niece, Katy Cloutier, a former sports journalist for Radio-Canada Montréal, moved back to Lac-Mégantic, her hometown, to write about the tragedy. She pulls up to Salon Noël, near the construction zone, in a lime-green car with two bumper stickers that read, “Support Lac-Mégantic.” She has the date July 6, 2013, tattooed in black ink on her left foot. She thinks back to the first week of coverage, when reporters packed the sidewalk she’s now standing on, itching to interview a female customer getting her hair done inside the salon. The woman, whose son owns a funeral home in town and lost half of his office space to the fire, didn’t want to talk. A neighbour distracted reporters so she could duck away.

Down the street from the salon, at the edge of the disaster zone, a brown cat scurries under the barricade along a familiar path, not far from the sugar maple singed by the fire. The same fire continued to flash on television screens from news outlets like TVA. Dumont says it caused trauma among residents who watched repeated images of the disaster. Carleton’s Josh Greenberg says that’s one of the risks of going back to write in-depth narrative stories: people must relive these events.

Still, many of the town’s residents were grateful for journalists. Gerard Begin, who’s lived in Lac-Mégantic for almost 70 years, looks over his shoulder at the construction site. “That’s my life,” he says, gazing over flattened ground where homes and businesses once stood.

If narrative journalism transports us to the scene to stand next to people who trusted the railway, who walked downtown often enough to call it their life—people who could have been us—then being there could quite possibly help us care a little more, and caring might lead to a disaster like this never happening again.

***
Back in Toronto, Giovannetti heads to the office after a short lunch break. He’s meeting his editor, Choquette, at 4 p.m. to discuss the feature he’s been writing since July. He’s also preparing to return to Lac-Mégantic for follow-up interviews. He’ll be back on the road, away from his desk—one reason he became a journalist.

The road he’s been on for four months led to a town moving through cycles of shock and grief. He went to witness the struggle and write that story. “We invested so much time with Justin in Lac-Mégantic and we had so much material that it cried out for something bigger,” says Choquette, who doesn’t view the piece as a conventional Saturday feature, but rather a story with narrative elements, such as suspense, to draw readers in, followed by three policy reports.

On Saturday, November 30, a photograph of a bright orange explosion hovering over the silhouette of a town spreads across the front page of the Globe with the headline “Last call.” Almost 8,000 words divided into 10 character-driven sections, plus an epilogue. The stories are a series of brushstrokes.

***
Near the barricade in Lac-Mégantic, on an October afternoon, there’s no noise except the dampened motor of an excavator and the hinges of a porch door. Looking east through the fence holes to where the sugar maple still stands, you can see amber leaves sway over the backyard of a home that the fire never touched. On the other side of the tree, curled black leaves cling to burnt branches—dozens, right there above the construction site. The tree stands on the forbidden side of the barricade, where workers in hard hats now decontaminate the earth.

The fire is a memory now—the fire that consumed 47 lives, the fire that spared part of this tree. But just as the lush leaves show us stories of good fortune, the dead leaves show our vulnerability. They warn of trains that come and go from town to town, they make us question our certainty. The dead leaves show us stories we must tell.

By Brittany Devenyi, Gianluca Inglesi, and Rhiannon Russell

The morning of Monday, September 17, 2012, reader Carol Wainio sent a 2,135-word email to Globe and Mail editor-in-chief John Stackhouse. It detailed multiple instances in a 2009 column by Margaret Wente, “Enviro-romanticism Is Hurting Africa,” of what Wainio called “very significant overlap” with stories from sources as disparate as Food Chemical News and The New York Times. The greatest number of similarities—including virtually a whole paragraph—were with a 2008 article by the Ottawa Citizen’s Dan Gardner. Wainio’s introductory note concluded, “[A]ny comment from you as to whether the examples are consistent with Globe policy would be welcome.”

Stackhouse responded early that afternoon, indicating that he had passed the matter to the paper’s public editor, Sylvia Stead. Wainio wasn’t surprised when she heard nothing more; after all, in May of the previous year Stead had told her, via email, she would no longer reply to her missives.

The next day, Wainio posted her findings on her blog, Media Culpa. In it, she gave side-by-side comparisons of Wente’s prose and that of the other sources. The title read “Margaret Wente: A ‘Zero for Plagiarism’?”

In about 30 previous posts, Wainio had called out Wente for everything from identifying a scientist as a fisherman to relying heavily on a NYT‘s book review without attribution. The biggest result, up to this point, had been corrections or discreet editor’s notes appended to some columns. This time was different. The day Wainio’s blog post went up—Tuesday—National Post columnist Chris Selley took to Twitter: “Sorry, Globe and Mail. But you’re going to have to do something about this.” Maclean’s columnist Colby Cosh retweeted Selley, adding, “Only if they’re capable of shame.” (Wente declined to be interviewed.)

The debacle that rapidly unfolded said a lot about the newspaper that styles itself as the country’s paper of record. It was revealed as arrogant and hubristic, defensive rather than transparent, given to a double standard when confronted with journalistic lapses. As one Globe reporter, who, like others at the paper, chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, says, “The great fear in the newsroom is that the message that has got out there is we just think we’re entitled.”

Over the past four decades, the Globe has had a conflicted and arguably opportunistic relationship with the concept of fostering readers’ trust.

Take the example of the Ontario Press Council, created in 1972 in the wake of the Report of the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media, or Davey report. As journalist Richard Lunn noted at the time, the document “had some extremely unkind things to say about the ways in which Canadian newspaper publishers discharged their responsibilities to their readers in particular and the public in general.” Yet even the report’s recommendation that the government form a Press Ownership Review Board wasn’t enough to convince the Globe to sign on with the council.

A decade later, the Royal Commission on Newspapers also had stern words about the responsiveness of papers to the public: “It is notorious that the press, which assumes a licence to criticize every other institution, is the least open of any to criticism of its own performance.” The commission proposed an anti-concentration measure that would force the Globe to either sell its other newspapers or fold itself. That got the paper’s attention, as the concerns over opaqueness had not. By the time the Globe joined the OPC, its membership included almost 75 percent of the province’s dailies, with the Globe by far the biggest-circulation outlier.

Given its status as what a former reporter calls “a key part of Canadian society,” the Globe was equally tardy in appointing a public editor. While the Starhas had an ombudsman since 1972 and the NYT appointed its first in 2003, the Globe resisted. Paul Knox, a former long-time Globe editorial staffer who’s now an associate professor at Ryerson’s School of Journalism, believes it was a “pretty deliberate decision not to have one. It wasn’t just by default.”

It’s true—it wasn’t. In 2005, with the support of publisher Phillip Crawley, editor Edward Greenspon formed an Integrity Committee, whose primary brief was to “[p]resent the pros and cons and conduct a survey of other media organizations in North America and Britain that have an ombudsman/public editor.” Today, Greenspon explains in an email, “Given that integrity is a foundational issue, I wanted us to think about how an institution like The Globe and Mail should assure the highest standards in a rapidly evolving environment.” The eight members, who lightheartedly called themselves the Aces, included Stead, then deputy editor; copy editor Kathy English, now the Star’s public editor; and six others.

The Aces presented many recommendations to the senior executives—including Crawley, Greenspon, and executive editor Neil Campbell—from counseling when to run corrections and where to place them in the paper to advising a revamp of the code of conduct. Many were accepted. But in 2006, they advised against the appointment of a public editor, apparently concerned about being a bit too transparent:

“Many media organizations have attempted to deal with these issues [of accuracy and transparency] by appointing an ombudsman or public editor who is independent of the normal editorial hierarchy. As a consequence of these appointments, some media organizations (The New York Times and Washington Post for example) have suffered from public airings of internal editorial disputes.”

Instead, they proposed hiring “a reader/editor who reports to the deputy editor.” Thus arose the role of “reader response editor,” which was given to English. This involved answering reader complaints and drafting corrections. “I did a lot of responses on behalf of the editor-in-chief, on behalf of Edward Greenspon,” English says. “When things would come to him, he’d send them off to me to respond.”

In 2007, when English left to become the Star’s public editor, Gerald Owen, a recent addition to the editorial board, took over. Like English, he reported to Stead, and still does—he continues to perform this role, in addition to his editorial board responsibilities. “[I]t seems as if something comes up of that sort as much as twice a day,” he says.

Finally, Stackhouse created the public editor role in January 2012. “We had discussed this idea for years, and always felt that the editor-in-chief is the public editor. I’m accountable to the public. If readers have a question, I’m always available to them,” he says. “Over time, the deeper I got into the job the more I realized that there needs to be a person within the company beyond the publisher who can challenge the editor and challenge the people that work for the editor.” He appointed Stead. “We opted for someone who knows us, who’s respected internally, and who is going to have both the respect of the readership and the respect of the newsroom.”

Owen congratulated Stead and asked if their working relationship would change. “And she said, no,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned it hasn’t changed at all, because we do confer back and forth quite a bit.”

Starting in April 2009, one of the things they doubtless conferred about was the flurry of emails from Wainio regarding Wente’s columns—at least 20 between then and last September. But contrary to Wainio’s impression that she was being blown off—an impression buttressed by Stead’s message that she would no longer respond—Stead and Owen were busy doing damage control. There were talks with Wente about “attributing much more carefully,” and corrections popped up on some of the pieces Wainio had called out.

As Owen says, “I had been quite involved in a number of corrections and clarifications for Peggy’s work previously [there were at least 10 between 2009 and last September]. And in fact I’d believed we had solved the problem before it came a major public issue.”

They were sandbagged by the scandal arising from the “Enviro-romanticism Is Hurting Africa” column. “The one thing that was really most damaging was one that had occurred before we had started working on this set of problems.”

A typical email from Carol Wainio to the Globe looks much like her blog posts—long, detailed, occasionally nit-picky. “I’m sure it’s annoying to get responses from readers, particularly ones who are persistent,” she says. “But still, there is a bigger issue at stake, it seems to me.”

The artist and adjunct professor in the University of Ottawa’s department of visual arts began her press gadfly career in 2008, when she peppered the Citizen with complaints regarding factual errors in David Warren’s columns and similarities between his prose and others’. Next, Mark Steyn’s tendency to recycle his own pensées in Maclean’s caught her attention. She explains how she decides whom to follow: “When I’ve found a few of these things with a particular author, then I just continue looking at that particular author.”

Wainio first emailed the Globe about Wente in April 2009, regarding a column that contained a quote that had originally appeared elsewhere, and was missing its context. That garnered no response, but a second email in early May to Greenspon about another column’s similarities to material on the Cato Institute website did. Gerald Owen replied, defending Wente and pointing out the distinction between a columnist and a reporter. A quote in a news story, he said, invited an inference that the words had been spoken directly to the reporter, while a columnist’s use of quotes implied no claim to have been spoken to the author. “While I appreciated receiving a response,” Wainio says by email now, “I felt Mr. Owen’s answers didn’t thoroughly address the issue of wandering quotation marks (which sometimes also captured another journalist’s surrounding prose or ideas), the misidentification of speakers, or other issues I had raised.”

A few weeks later, Wainio wrote to point out parallels between a Wente column and a Washington Post piece, and again Owen swatted her away.

Since 2008, Wainio had been passing her findings along to journalist Craig Silverman, best known for his Regret the Error franchise, but his focus was primarily American transgressions, so most of her discoveries didn’t make it to his popular site. After about a year, he suggested she create her own blog. “Basically I said, she seems very good at being able to find the sources to things,” Silverman says of his email to her. So, in January 2010 she created Media Culpa.

Wainio didn’t home in on Wente again until early May 2011, when what she thought was an ill-selected photo accompanying one of Wente’s columns caught her attention. Though the image was undoubtedly not the writer’s choice, Wainio wrote a Media Culpa post about it, and tacked on the end was this startling comparison:

Wente, April 26, 2011: “Red snapper are unbelievable right now,” one fisherman said. “You could put a rock on the end a string and they’d bite it.”

Associated Press, October 2010: “Red snapper are unbelievable right now,” said Mike Carron, head of the Northern Gulf Institute in Mississippi. “Now you could put a rock on the end of string and they’ll bite it.”

Wainio describes Owen’s response: “He just sort of said, Well, I believe Margaret Wente was reading, there was an article about this particular kind of fishing in the leisure section about fly-fishing in The New York Times and she must’ve confused it with that or something.” She makes a skeptical face.

It was Wainio’s next message, about parts of a May column that bore a suspicious resemblance to a 2009 Times article, that prompted the first—and last—response from Stead. Wainio recalls, “I viewed it as sort of threatening. She used words like ‘defamatory.’” Undeterred, Wainio kept shooting bulletins to the paper, and posting on her blog, about things like the phantom Occupy protester who showed up in a November 2011 column—“John,” who was unconnected to the Occupy movement and whose information seemed to come from an Obama campaign site. “They would not respond to me.”

Today, Wainio says thoughtfully, “I think if they had been more forthcoming about fixing those things immediately, I probably would have been less inclined to pursue it as closely as I did.”

Stead joined the Globe in 1975, fresh out of the University of Western Ontario journalism program. Initially a reporter—courts, education, Queen’s Park—she later took on a variety of more senior roles: national editor, executive editor, and, under Edward Greenspon, deputy editor. When Stackhouse replaced Greenspon in 2009, he swept out most of the existing senior editors. “There was great speculation at the time that Sylvia would go, too,” says a Globe reporter. “And in the end, she stayed.” Her new title: associate editor, staff and training.

John Saunders, a reporter who left the paper in 2004, notes, “Every time there was a masthead shake-up, there would be Sylvia, clinging to a piece of the wreckage.” He continues, “She seemed to have a knack for coming out among the living after each purge.” A current staff member suggests the reason for Stead’s longevity: “Sylvia’s hard-working, she’s a good administrator, she does what she’s told. She’s risen very high in the Globe on those credentials.”

“People like Sylvia well enough,” the reporter goes on. “I think some people are very cautious with her because she is a survivor, and so you kind of go, ‘Well, what is it she does to survive?’ She’s played the hatchetman sometimes.”

Take the 2006 incident involving reporter Jan Wong. Following the virulent backlash to her story about the shootings at Dawson College, in which she used the term pure laine to note that three recent school shooters in Quebec were not Québécois, Wong became depressed and took sick leave.

“[Stead] was the one who would drop a letter off at my desk, another disciplinary letter while I was away sick and trying to get back to work,” Wong recalls. Once she had returned to the office, she remembers Stead delivering yet another disciplinary letter. Stead, along with Human Resources, interrogated Wong following the release of Toronto Life’s “Notes on a Scandal,” by David Hayes. They pressed her to admit she had spoken to Hayes, which she hadn’t—she was under a formal gag order.

After she became the Globe’s public editor, Stead moved offices. She had been in a spacious one across from John Stackhouse’s office, in the middle of the second-floor newsroom. Her new space was smaller and off to the side. Post-Wentegate, she moved again. She’s still in the newsroom, but nearer to Crawley’s office. By contrast, at the Star, Kathy English’s office is located in a part of the building occupied by the Star’s editorial board writers and columnists. English says being away from the newsroom, along with reporting to the publisher, allows her to “operate independently of the newsroom and the editor.” Margaret Sullivan, the NYT’s public editor, works in the newsroom, though, as she told Poynter in October, her desk is near the obituary department, which is slightly removed. “It’s a perfect vantage point, because I can easily find the people I need to talk to, but it’s not as if I’m sitting within earshot of reporters and editors,” she said.

Seemingly, no one at the Globe considered the optics of Stead’s office location. Even more telling—and more damaging to the credibility of the position—was the decision to have Stead report directly to the editor-in-chief, with “dotted-line responsibility to the publisher,” as Craig Silverman reported. He interviewed Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of the journalism program at University of Toronto Scarborough and executive director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen. “These days there may be more than one way to be an ombudsman, so as long as the Globe has guaranteed Sylvia’s independence to investigate and report, it may be possible to have a different model,” Dvorkin said. “But the credibility of the position with the public and the newsroom is based on the ombud’s freedom to operate and not be perceived as management with a different title.”

The unconventional reporting arrangement, which one observer bluntly calls “effed,” may have further hampered Stead. “When all this Wente stuff blew up, she of course didn’t have much latitude,” says a former staffer. “There was not much she could do because she was answering to an editor who had already decided to support Wente. Now she’s answering to the publisher, so it’s possible she’ll have more time to do a better job as public editor.”

Still, there’s the fact that during Stead’s 37 years at the paper, she’s played a role in personnel matters and supervised many reporters and editors, directly or indirectly. That history makes her an unlikely fit for the job, says Paul Knox, the former Globe staffer now at Ryerson’s journalism school. “She’s one of the longest-serving employees there, a person who had occupied senior management positions for a long time,” he says. “So existing practices, one could argue, are very much things that had her fingerprints on them.”

While he praises Stead for “her ability to mediate and smooth troubled waters,” he also wonders, “Do you want the public editor to be a mediator? Or do you want the public editor to be a person who is the readers’ advocate, and who is able to distance themselves from the way things look in the editorial department and say, What does it look like from outside?” He answers his own question: “I think it would be hard for anybody who had been there as long as Sylvia, had been in as many senior management positions, to see the world as an independent reader sees it.”

During the time Stead has been at the Globe, there have been three high-profile plagiarism cases. In early September 1980, Dick Beddoes, an acclaimed columnist, cribbed extensively from the NYT’s Russell Baker. Within two weeks, Beddoes was gone, after a graceful and contrite mea culpa: “This is a correction, an apology, a confession of error, a disorderly retreat.”

A decade later, an arguably much more subtle and controversial plagiarism case occurred. In November 1990, Deirdre Kelly’s editor accused her of parroting another writer’s sentence in a story. Suspended briefly without pay, she was warned that future plagiarism would warrant immediate termination. Three months later, a security guard escorted Kelly to her desk and told her to pack up her belongings. The issue this time was a phrase in a piece on figure skating that had appeared in an earlier Maclean’s piece.

Unlike Beddoes, Kelly refused to accept her Globe expulsion. “I knew I had done nothing wrong. I had to fight back. I launched a grievance, backed by the newspaper’s union,” she wrote in her book Paris Times Eight. In August 1994, an arbitration board ruled she should be reinstated with back pay, finding that she “acted in accordance with the standards of journalism accepted in the newspaper industry.”

The current standard at the Globe is clearly outlined in its code of conduct: “Excerpts from other people’s prose must be attributed so as to avoid even a suspicion of copying. Although it is sometimes reasonable to adopt a few words without attribution (in a technical definition, for example), careful judgment is required….Any extensive unacknowledged use of another’s words, structure or ideas may constitute plagiarism.”

In the prelude to the Wente case, it was no secret in the newsroom that there had been complaints about her work. “Certainly people within the newsroom were aware of the [Media Culpa] blog, and they were aware that these accusations were made,” says a source. “And had been made for some time.” Staff whispered in the corridors, the source adds. “But nobody was going to actually go to a manager and say, ‘What the hell?’”

It took a long three days for Stead to address the “Zero for Plagiarism?” blow-up. When Stackhouse appointed her public editor, he had promised  a figure whose role was “to make the organization more transparent and accountable to its readers and the general public.” Instead, the headline on Stead’s blog—“We Investigate All Complaints Against Our Writers”—suggested a Globe loyalist on the defensive. Ditto for the skepticism reflected in her statement: “The concern was that seven different sources were reproduced. That seems highly unlikely.” Then there were Stead’s references to Wainio as an “anonymous blogger.” As English wrote at the time, “Given that Stead had a history of corresponding with Wainio about Wente’s work, this was not the full story—the aspect of all of this I find most unsettling.” (Later, Stead wrote, “I should have referred to the blogger’s complaints, not the anonymous blogger. In the meantime, I have asked Carol Wainio if she wants me to refer to her by name and she said yes, so I will.”)

The brush-off didn’t work. One Globe source characterizes management’s initial reaction as “arrogance,” and then “panic as they realized, Oh, my God, we can’t just do our usual Globe thing and be really snotty and disengaged. We actually have to be responsive.” Stackhouse himself says he was unaware of the fiasco until September 21, “but I didn’t get to look into it deeply until the Saturday. And I felt upon investigation this was something that deserved a greater degree of attention, and it went from there.”

The following Monday, he released a statement: “The journalism in this instance did not meet the standards of The Globe and Mail in terms of sourcing, use of quotation marks and reasonable credit for the work of others. Even in the spirit of column writing, which allows for some latitude in attribution and expression, this work was not in accordance with our code of conduct and is unacceptable.” The statement indicated Stackhouse had “taken appropriate action” on the disciplinary front, although not what that was, and mystifyingly contained his pledge to “continue to defend [Wente’s] right to free expression.” Finally, he announced that “the Public Editor position should be made fully autonomous from the newsroom,” and that Stead would now report to the publisher.

The next day, the paper carried a column by a not-particularly-chastened-sounding Wente: “I’m far from perfect. I make mistakes. But I’m not a serial plagiarist. What I often am is a target for people who don’t like what I write.” Then she disappeared from the paper.

Meanwhile, Stackhouse was engaged in an uncharacteristic activity. “There was an unprecedented series of meetings that John Stackhouse had department by department,” a source says, “and in those meetings, he mainly just listened to what staff had to say.” He is upbeat about the exercise: “There was a good airing of concerns, and I heard a great many insights in terms of the process—how we edit, how we assign, how we question and challenge writers. That was healthy and helpful.” The source, however, says two themes emerged. The first was that the staff didn’t think the Wente furor was going to fade.

The source continues, “And the second message, perhaps more quietly or more subtly, was the sense that there was a double standard, that there was one rule for a famous columnist and another for the rest of us. In the years I’ve been there, I have seen many instances where there’s one treatment for someone who’s not in favour and another kind of treatment for someone who is in favour.” For example, the paper did not stand by Wong. It did stand by Wente. “So, yeah, there are favourites. And that’s another thing that obviously is very, very detrimental to the morale of the newsroom.”

In just over two weeks, Wente was back in her usual space on the op-ed page.

“Many editorial staffers were under the impression that plagiarism is a firing offence,” says an insider caustically. “We now know that that is not true.”

Six days after the RRJ submitted questions to Stead by email—she could not be contacted by phone—she’s responded. She ignores the query about the Wente affair (“What did you take away from the Globe’s interactions with reader Carol Wainio?”). In answer to the question about the importance of the public editor role, she serves up a quote from the Stackhouse announcement of her appointment. Overall, there’s the sense her answers have been carefully vetted and buffed:

“The [public editor’s] job is to represent readers’ interests and I think it can be better done by someone who has managed serious news files and is respected for their journalism.”

And, “As someone who has worked for the Globe for many years and been a reader even longer, I also care very deeply about the quality and integrity of the newspaper and website and want it to be its best.”

Her response is just over 400 words long.

More than Crawley’s. In reply to an interview request, he emails that Stead will respond, adding, “If the Ryerson Review publishes a piece about the Globe that is balanced and fair, that will be a first.”

A second contact with Stead regarding the various allegations about her gets a speedier response. She’s not any more forthcoming, though: “I have answered your previous fact-based questions as you know, but I will not respond to anonymous opinions.” She adds pointedly, “The Globe and Mail’s policy on the use of anonymous quotes might be instructive: ‘Reporters should strive to minimize the use of unattributed quotes, keeping in mind that the justification for omitting attribution is to get the fullest story possible, not to let people dodge accountability or take anonymous potshots.’”

Stackhouse, by comparison, is almost disarmingly cooperative. (A former staff member at the paper says this is his characteristic response to awkward situations.) In a phone interview, he answers questions about the choice of Stead, the unconventional original reporting structure, and the importance of transparency vis-à-vis readers, saying about the last, “We’re in an age of authenticity, and that means the credibility of everything and everyone is being put to a new level of scrutiny, and the media is no exception. The transparency, and being open to readers, is an essential part of any credible media operation.” Nothing new there.

What is startling is his disclosure that he wasn’t aware Stead had stopped replying to Wainio in May 2011: “I don’t recall knowing Sylvia was not responding to her. I know I learned that later, after all of this blew up, but at the time, I think I was still referring Wainio’s emails to Sylvia.”

And then there is this exchange, after a long response to the question of whether plagiarism—“a word that is often misinterpreted”—is a firing offence at the Globe:

“So you’d say that what Wente did isn’t plagiarism then?”

“I’m not going to comment on that.”

Photograph by Curtis Lantinga

By Loren Hendin

Tabatha Southey hadn’t expected to hear anything back. She’d sent three children’s stories to a publisher, but, six months later, nothing. Oh, well, she’d sent them only at the urging of a friend anyway. She had been driving with writer and editor Jane L. Thompson, two toddlers, and a baby buckled up in the back, and Southey prattling away, as she is wont to do. “Do you write?” cut in Thompson.

“No, I don’t write,” Southey said sheepishly.

“Well, you should.”

So she wrote some stories she’d told her children. After six months of silence, the phone rang. “Hi, so we really like your stories,” said a voice. “But you didn’t put your name on them.” That rookie mistake could easily have been the end of her career; instead, Key Porter Books liked her writing, hunted her down, and published The Deep Cold River Story in 2000.

That’s the way it’s always been for Southey: people want her. A year earlier, she had run into an acquaintance, Andrew Coyne, then National Post national affairs columnist, who suggested that she write for his paper. “In my mind I thought, that doesn’t really happen,” she says. “One doesn’t just get to write.” But if you’re Southey, apparently it does.

“Drunk with Men,” the query letter she sent the Post, pitched doing what she thought she was most qualified to do: “I would like to be employed to get drunk with various men, and document my experiences, so that I may bring some of the wonders I have seen back to the general public and possibly raise some awareness in single-men-aged-15-to-26-who-will-never-get-a-date-until-they’re-30.”

Classic Southey. Her writing was a little more convoluted then, she used too many hyphens, and some paragraphs were so wordy you had to go back and reread. But there was that Southey voice. Ellen Vanstone, then editor of the Post’s weekend section, remembers thinking, “We should just publish the query letter.” After a tiny bit of editing, she did.

A quick wit and trademark voice were the only résumé that Vanstone needed. She started using Southey regularly, and in 2004 recommended Elle Canadahire her as the Elle Girl columnist, a role Vanstone was leaving. That led to work for Explore and The Walrus, and three years later, a coveted Globe and Mail column.

Today, the woman who forgot to put her name on her manuscript is one of Canada’s most hilarious political commentators. Although she’s written everything from the will of the last Pinta Island Tortoise to a discussion between giant squid, her political columns are the shrewdest. She’s known for her distinct style, humour, and insight, but it didn’t come from world-class schooling. She dropped out of high school after Grade 9, left Guelph, Ontario, for Toronto, and found odd jobs like nannying, serving, and retail. She says she learned everything she knows reading three newspapers a day behind various jewelry and vintage store counters, and tells a story about starting on the front page of the Globe and finishing in the classifieds of the Toronto Sun going, “Oh, look, I see Todd sold that Camaro. I never thought that’d happen!”

Entering journalism as an underdog gave her a point of view that is not only funny, but also relatable. She puts political discussions in a new perspective for readers who might otherwise be bored or confused by them. She gives them something to engage with in a way that many political writers do not, and as her following has grown, Southey has worked her way into the centre of Canadian journalism. The outsider is now an insider.

Southey’s writing makes you laugh out loud when she imagines Prime Minister Stephen Harper scolding Conservative MPs for calling their political opponents pedophiles—“No, no, ‘Nazi’ and ‘pedophile’ are the bad words, remember?”—or nod your head with her on the David Petraeus scandal: “We must either disassemble the Internet or decide that sex between consenting adults is often an excellent idea, always a private matter, and mostly not that entertaining to anyone not in the bed.” Sometimes you just admire her sentences: “Apparently, to Mr. Romney, hiring a woman is, in spirit, an exaggerated take-your-child-to-work day, and anyone hearing that respect for women in the workplace demands a gallant acceptance of their innate desire to be home to cook dinner at 5 o’clock might almost be forgiven for thinking that this dinner-at-5-before-all-else thing explains why women in the United States still earn about 72 cents to the dollar earned by men.”

Other writers have opinions on what Southey’s special something is. “Her take on things zeroes into the weirdness of the situation,” says Toronto Starcolumnist Shawn Micallef. “She often starts from an unexpected place with a subject and often reels her readers slowly into her point,” says her editor at the Globe, Carl Wilson. Adds Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells: “She’s got a bullshit detector that allows her to see through all the artifice and get to what’s really going on.”

If it were Southey, she’d probably say it’s her expert online shopping skills. She might make a sarcastic joke, crediting her success to her dog, Tulip, or her love of scotch. She points to The Goon Show, the absurd and surreal British radio program, for contributing to her sense of humour, and British singing duo Flanders and Swann for implanting their comedic pattern into her subconscious. Southey has also spent a large part of her life with what many people would consider the bottom rungs of society. “Down in the Ds, we’re an interesting group,” she says. “But I’m glad I did those years in retail, I’m glad I did all those jobs. I took a lot away from all those things.” For one thing, the wayward path led her to a six-year marriage to Dave Foley, best known for The Kids in the Hall and NewsRadio. Joking with him and his fellow comedians refined her sense of humour and comedic timing.

Applying those tricks to her own trade, Southey combines that humour with insight, as she sees news stories from a different angle. “She either articulates what you’ve been thinking but no one’s been saying,” says Helen Spitzer, editor of bunchfamily.ca, “or completely turns things around for you.”

Southey considers a column successful if she can make herself laugh out loud, so she explains things to readers the way she explains the obviously ridiculous to herself. She described Conservative MP David Wilks’s conflicting statements on the omnibus budget bill by comparing them to Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, saying, “I have a dream, but I won’t bore you all with it, because I know other people’s dreams are never very interesting.” And she turned Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s follies into the city’s newest tourist attraction: “Now, the name Toronto is evocative to people, like other great cities’ names: I Love New York; Paris, the City of Light; Toronto, the City with the World’s Most Embarrassing Mayor.”

She satirized accusations that women can’t take a joke about sexual harassment: “The next time one of your superiors presses his pelvic area against your bottom as he passes behind you at the photocopier, burst out laughing loudly.” After Julian Fantino, then associate minister of national defence, endorsed longer sentences to deter criminals, she asked if he imagined “would-be criminals sit down at their desks and carefully plot out their next moves on a spreadsheet, doing a lengthy cost-benefit analysis of armed liquor-store robbery versus enrolling in that pastry-chef course they’ve always dreamed of, and perhaps opting for a little light shoplifting as a compromise?”

Often her distinct view comes from something she has done, said, or tweeted. When a friend mentions a broken toilet handle, she says, “I can fix that, I fixed a handle last week. I can fix all your toilets, even the deep, inner parts.” Then adds, “I looked it up on Google.” You half expect the rest of a 600-word column to come tumbling out of her mouth right then. Her columns flow so effortlessly that they read as if she writes them on a napkin over a bagel and coffee—but that is far from the case. Her office, on the second floor of her sumptuous Victorian home, is lined with green leaf-patterned wallpaper and covered in vintage photos and children’s artwork. Her bookshelf bursts with books stuffed into every open space and her large, sloped wooden desk—reminiscent of a teacher’s desk from the days when students used individual slates—faces the bay window.

After filing her column on Thursdays, she will start looking for that week’s topic the following Monday. As soon as Wednesday night hits, she is holed up in her office, pumping out her piece, not to be seen or heard until Thursday. She reads her columns aloud eight or nine times, believing, “Bad writing cannot stand being read out loud,” and she sometimes Googles her jokes and checks Twitter to ensure no one else has used them. Then, between Thursday, when she files her column, and Saturday, when it appears, she lives in fear that Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert will crack one of her jokes. “There are so many columnists who are happy to be the 13th or 14th columnist to write the same thing,” says Wells. “She’s never been like that.”

Political satire has been around since there were leaders to make fun of. Two of the best are P.J. O’Rourke and Calvin Trillin. O’Rourke, one of America’s only Republican humourists, started as an editor at the National Lampoon, before working for Rolling Stone and writing 16 satirical books, and Trillin, who writes much of his political humour in poetry, is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a columnist for The Nation, and author of 18 books. They’ve helped sustain a market for insightful, yet scathing, satirical writing.

From The Onion to The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs section, humour is everywhere, but Southey claims her reading of choice is dark and dry. Still, she admits to liking P.G. Wodehouse, best known for his novels about wealthy Englishman Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves, but also for parodying politicians and the mid-20th century in his storylines. David Sedaris, another of Southey’s favourites, has mastered the personal essay by satirizing his own life. In Canada, The Rick Mercer Report and This Hour Has 22 Minutes make fun of politicians on TV, Scott Feschuk writes political humour forMaclean’s, and Terry Fallis’s novel, The Best Laid Plans, won the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, but otherwise, political coverage isn’t very funny.

Canadians miss out on more than good laughs. Lance Holbert, a professor of mass communications at Ohio State University and specialist on political satire, says visible, relevant political humour benefits democracy by generating awareness, increasing knowledge, and even getting people involved and out to the polls. Often without even realizing it, people who read political humour expecting something funny end up more aware and engaged.

Southey is under no illusions she’s responsible for the political knowledge and participation of Canadians. She will set up her columns with a few brief sentences, but expects her audience to be relatively informed. Sometimes she writes to illuminate a topic in the news she believes isn’t getting enough attention, sometimes she tries to make a dull topic more exciting, sometimes she is simply trying to understand an issue better herself. Above all, her goal is to be funny: “I think it is almost impossible to chronicle the world with any accuracy, and not end up with something that is at least occasionally funny.”

Southey sits in a dimly lit corner at the back of House on Parliament pub in Cabbagetown, a Toronto neighbourhood full of Victorian homes and cozy cafes. Staff here keep picking up the maroon knit scarf that she can’t manage to keep safely on the back of her chair. “This is my local,” she says. She talks about her career humbly, eyes darting to her lap, to the wall and back, and mentions eight times over the course of an hour how lucky she has been.

But when she thinks about the Globe’s decision to discontinue her column in 2010, she becomes exasperated, throwing her hands up and raising her voice. “I was fired, I was devastated,” she says. “I kept thinking, ‘That last column I filed, it wasn’t very good! It should’ve been better!’” Gabe Gonda, editor of the Focus section at that time, initially denied killing Southey’s column, then conceded that it was “suspended briefly,” then gave a “no comment,” and finally said the paper “briefly toyed with the idea of changing the column and running another column in that space.”

But others speculate. The Globe, which was launching a major redesign, may have been looking to clear out some old voices and bring in fresh ones. “Maybe the people making the decisions didn’t share Tabatha’s sense of humour quite as much, so they didn’t see the appeal,” says Wilson. Wells thinks that by starting to run columns by bigwigs like Irshad Manji and Chrystia Freeland after Southey left, editor-in-chief John Stackhouse was trying to buy prestige with brand names and glistening CVs. “Unfortunately for that theory, Tabatha can write better than the next 15 columnists combined,” he says. “And the Globe just simply needed their readers to tell them that.”

And they did. Colleagues and loyal readers started a Twitter uprising not quite as powerful as the Arab Spring, but significantly stronger than the Jian-Ghomeshi-for-the-Canadian-Bachelor movement, and deluged Stackhouse’s inbox with angry emails. They weren’t looking for “fancy people with fancy job descriptions,” as Wells calls them. Within weeks, Stackhouse sat down for drinks with Southey and invited her back. She says Stackhouse gave her the impression he didn’t know she’d been fired.

To be fair, anyone who has devoted fans also has devoted critics. One commenter attacked her for questioning Ann Romney’s statement that she and Mitt once had an ironing board for a dinner table: “Stick an iron in it, Southey.” Another advised her, “Open a small business because you can’t write.” Her convoluted sentences and sense of humour are definitely a particular brand. Her politics lean to the left, giving her some critics from the right. One of Jason Kenney’s people once ominously warned her: “We’re watching you.”

But how effective is a political satirist in a paper whose average reader is 51 years old and has an annual household income of about $96,000? What purpose is left for Southey if her readers are already explained, informed, and engaged? Andreas Krebs is one of the creators behind The Satire Project, which has partnered with rabble.ca  to publish videos, cartoons, and columns to reach Canadians who don’t read newspapers. He argues that since her readers tend to be older, affluent white people—and informed—Southey doesn’t achieve what he believes is satire’s purpose: engaging those who are fed up with traditional politics and news. Perhaps the school dropout has become too exclusive for her own people.

Nonetheless, after five years and hundreds of columns, her followers are eager for the day she writes without constraint of word count or weekly deadlines, and publishers have been approaching her almost since the day she began. She has considered fiction, non-fiction, and an anthology of her columns, but Southey’s in no rush.

In the meantime, both Elle and the Globe have more or less given her free rein to write whatever she wants. Wilson knows columnists are important to analyze the news, to inform, and to entertain—and serve as familiar faces to identify with in a sea of bylines. That’s especially valuable in the paywall era. Southey is your Canadian girl next door who taught herself everything she knows by just reading the newspaper, but perhaps coming from no status or prestige gives her that highly sought-after insight. It has certainly contributed to her being so damn funny.

“Let me check on my cheese puffs.” Southey parts the crowd in her kitchen and reaches the oven, where her cheese puffs are cooking away. Moments later, in her lobster-motif apron, she serves them on a red ceramic dish in a red-oven-mitted hand: “Cheese puff? Cheese puff? Try a cheese puff.”

The crowd is here to watch the results of the American election. Her home is carefully kept; decorative plates adorn the walls, antique lanterns hang from doorways. The space is filled with Toronto journalists mingling and glancing at the mini-TV above the fridge. Even so, all eyes are on Southey. She sympathizes with a just-fired friend while cutting up more cheese for the immense platter, calls out for an election update as she washes glasses for the never-ending stash of wine, and, of course, never forgets about her cheese puffs. Her guests seem to hover near her like a cloud of electrons around a nucleus, vibrating around her as she circles the kitchen. She disappears into small groups of people, sending them into fits of laughter before being drawn to the next.
Helen Spitzer met Southey as she was leaving the National Magazine Awards gala. Spitzer and a group of middle-aged male journalists stepped into the elevator and faced that famous head of red hair. “They were all abuzz with being in the elevator with Tabatha. Everyone’s attention was drawn to her,” she says. Presented with a private audience, Southey nailed it with witty one-liners about the evening. “It was like seeing a bunch of puppy dogs run into the elevator and start wagging their tails.”

Southey is a study in opposites: a shopper at Holt Renfrew who bikes there, a high school dropout with a national column, humourous while making a serious point, a regular joe outside the journalism world, and a celebrity inside it. On Twitter, she banters with other journalists (frequently outwitting them), and come Saturday morning, big names retweet her column—their equivalent of a thumbs-up. Yet, she still has the same voice and outlook she did 10 years ago, and writes about omnibus bills the same way she wrote about getting drunk with men.
Inside the kitchen, Southey is off in a corner chatting away, iPhone in one hand, picking at the remnants of pasta with the other. “Tabatha, they announced California and Obama won!” someone shouts. All heads swivel for her reaction as she cuts for the TV.

Minutes later, Southey whips out her iPhone and posts a new tweet: “Has anyone checked on Lindsay Lohan?”

Of course, Lohan, a Romney supporter, would be the first thing to pop into Southey’s mind. And the result is a six-word tweet that’s different, takes a new perspective, and is hilarious. The line that others will wish they’d written. Once again, Southey nails it.

Photographs by Darrin Klimek