During the attack and manhunt in Parliament and around downtown Ottawa yesterday, there was a flood of journalists, citizens, police and politicians trying to keep to country informed. From approximately 10 a.m. onwards, your newsfeeds were likely filled with commentary and updates on the situation.

When the whole nation is watching a story unfold, journalists understandably want to report unique, timely information. However, in a haste to break news quickly, reporters are often too quick to accept statements as fact, especially when others are reporting it. As we saw yesterday, media organizations can’t trust each other when a story is developing so rapidly, because they often get it wrong.

In the early afternoon, many organizations were claiming there was a shooting at the Rideau Centre shopping mall. This is a screenshot taken of a Toronto Star article at 2 p.m.

The Ottawa Police Department later cleared that up:

Around the same time, CTV claimed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was alive while a headline by The New York Times stated he had been killed. Later that afternoon, it was confirmed Cirillo had died as a result of gunshot injuries.

At one point, Sun News claimed there were five shooters. The number of shooters has yet to be confirmed.

And as we’ve seen before, CNN wrongly reported that the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. was on lockdown:

With so many different aspects of a story like this being circulated, it can be difficult to discern fact from rumour. Last year, On The Media created a tip sheet for breaking news that could come in handy:

But if a story’s unfolding too quickly to go through the list above, just follow Kady O’Malley’s lead:

By Kate Hefford

“This is a good brand,” says sex blogger Erika Szabo, motioning toward a pair of $50 underwear. They’re silky smooth, dusty blue boxer briefs with an exaggerated bulge. We glance over electrosex gear, sex toys that apply electric stimulation to the genitals. We’re in Priape, a sex shop and gay haven in Toronto’s Church and Wellesley Village. We discuss natural lube (“You should try Sliquid!”), kegels, and BDSM—she says bondage tape is great for first-timers.

Szabo often finds herself in stores like this doing research for her blog, xoxoamore. Like sex columns worldwide, it features sex tips, toy reviews, and date ideas. She also often interjects her personal experiences in her sex toy reviews. Of the Evolved Duo Obsessions Lavish vibrator, she writes that“flipping the toy onto its side and using the textured shaft for clitoral stimulation proved better, but was awkward.” Szabo tells me, “What is so interesting is you have to put yourself out there and try to make it informative.”

Szabo works as a copywriter at the head office of Seduction, a three-storey sex shop that claims to be “North America’s largest adult department store.” She founded her blog in August 2011 with her boss. For Szabo, blogging is a more personal form of journalism, at a time when the mainstream coverage of all things hot and heavy in Canada isn’t exactly turning her on. “Sometimes I think sex journalism can be misguided,” she says. “A lot of it is biased and stereotypical. It’s not aiming for the right hole.”

She’s right: the way magazines cover sex can leave something to be desired. Publications like Best Health, Canadian Living,and Chatelaine are attempting to improve Canadian women’s sex lives, one article at a time. They offer solid information, but they’re so scared of rubbing people the wrong way, they’ve turned sex into sex ed. It’s time for Canadian media to stop being such prudes around anything kinky.

There’s no argument we’ve made progress. Journalists were reminded of how far we’d come last August with the death of Helen Gurley Brown,Cosmopolitan’s eminent editor for 32 years until 1997. Before she took over Cosmo in 1965, it was a literary magazine. She brought sex, “the subject that every woman wanted to know about but nobody talked about, to life, literally, in Cosmo’s pages,” said David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, in reaction to her death. When Brown was hired, she pledged to give how sex was written about a makeover. Her philosophy was: “So you’re single. You can still have sex. You can have a great life. And if you marry…don’t use men to get what you want in life, get it for yourself.”

Journalists today—and Cosmo in particular—are still following her blazing-hot path. Current Cosmo coverlines include “100% Hotter Sex,” “Dirty Sexy Sex,” “His #1 Sex Fantasy,” “Best. Sex. Ever.,” and “What Guys Crave…(Besides Beer and Pizza).” There are still taboo topics, though, in almost all magazines. Body abnormalities, kinks, disabilities, and even mainstream LGBT sex seem not to exist in their glossy pages.

The exception is the weeklies. We can thank the explicit example set by Savage Love. The sex advice column by Dan Savage that appears in a number of Canadian alt-weeklies is syndicated by Seattle’s The Stranger, in which it has been published since 1991. Savage gained popularity when he launched the It Gets Better Project in 2010 after several high-profile teen suicides. More recently, he’s been the star of the MTV showSavage U, on which he visits American universities and answers students’ sex questions with wit and honesty. And he isn’t shy. In the November 1, 2012, column, reader “Completely Utterly Mortified” asks about salining one’s balls. Savage responds with directions: Saline can be injected into the ball sack with a needle to make testicles appear larger. He elaborates that “the inflation process takes about an hour, the effect lasts a day or two, and the sack gradually returns to normal size as the saline is absorbed into the body.” Education, one; judgement, zilch.

Occupying the same real estate in Toronto’s The Grid is a column called Dating Diaries, which gives the real estate back to the readers. Gay, straight, or whatever readers offer their “diaries” of a date they’ve been on recently—and a rating. Nothing is off limits, from tales of blowjobs to one-night stands. On these dates, men say insensitive things like “You failed,” women have filthy apartments, and guys meet up after spotting each other on gay dating sites. “What I love the most is anything that is either unexpected and there’s a crazy twist,” says Kate Carraway, a columnist for The Grid, Vice, and TheGlobe and Mail, who compiles the tales. “[Or] something that is universally wonderful or terrible.” A favourite column of hers involves someone who accidentally made a date with someone she met online but didn’t like, then had a great in-person date. “That to me is perfect,” Carraway says, “because it definitely shows something about dating that is common [which] is something we understand about the randomness of it.”

In February of last year, she wrote an article outlining what we can learn from Dating Diaries, and it’s clear that it subtly provides sex and relationship advice. Where to pick up, what not to say, when to invite your date upstairs…it’s all in there. Weeklies don’t hold back on dirty details. They have the kinky content that their magazine counterparts are lacking. So where do the magazines fit in?

American publications like Elle, Glamour, InStyle, and Cosmo hit Canadian newsstands every month. But the climate is way different up here. While the U.S. mostly spills its sex secrets in fashion magazines, in Canada, it’s often the health and lifestyle titles that are giving “the talk.”

“We’re the trusted resource for if you’re wondering about the G spot, or sexual health, female reproductive health and fertility, those kinds of things,” says Bonnie Munday, editor-in-chief of Best Health, a magazine published by Reader’s Digest Canada aimed at women in their 30s to 50s. “It’s about the whole woman, it’s about all aspects of health, including mental health, sexual health, looking great, feeling great,” says Munday. The magazine often includes readers’ questions for B.C.-based sex and relationship therapist Cheryl Fraser. It also features a column called Girlfriend’s Guide, where women can ask embarrassing body questions. It’s proven so popular that Best Health has compiled it into a book. The magazine doesn’t, however, touch taboo content like fetishes. “We’re kind of driven by what our readers are asking for information about,” says Munday. “We’re covering topics that we think our readers want to hear about from Best Health.”

Sex—as health? Hugh Hefner must be rolling over in his, um, bed. He launched sex into the mainstream when Playboy hit the stands in 1953. But amid the nude centrefolds and photos of Playboy-Bunny-suit-clad women, and despite the fact that the magazine’s noteworthy features showed it was clearly capable of doing great journalism, articles about sex itself weren’t common. Its competition, Penthouse magazine, which launched in the U.S. in 1969, did sometimes feature sex tips, hidden among nude pictorials. But by then, Cosmo had already set the precedent.

In the early 1980s, the lack of accurate coverage was deadly. When mainstream publications ignored the facts about the AIDS epidemic, the harmful stigma arose that it only existed in the gay community. In journalist Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On, he reports that “the mass media did not like covering stories about homosexuals and was especially skittish about stories that involved gay sexuality.” The publications considered it a “dirty little joke.” Nowadays, most mainstream publications are solidly on the side of equality—running coverage of bullying and gay celebrities, for example—although many are still heteronormative, which is most obvious in their sex coverage.

Magazines aren’t the only way the public is getting information on how to get off. Who could forget the Sunday Night Sex Show, with sex educator Sue Johanson, which took live call-ins about all aspects of sex until 2005? Certified sex and relationship therapist Rebecca Rosenblat has assumed the mantle, answering viewers’ questions and interviewing experts on her show Sex @ 11 with Rebecca. Since she moved to Canada from India, she’s realized that sex is a taboo subject here.

Rosenblat has noticed a few hot topics in Canadian magazines right now: sexting, cheating, and sex addiction—although sex addiction is being written about inaccurately, as if it were alcoholism, she says. “Then some of the stuff is the same old same old, but people are able to talk about it more openly…like how women are every bit as sexual as men. Which makes my job easier.”

Rosenblat says magazines can be dry about sex, and they get it wrong sometimes. She blames writers using unqualified sources, pointing out that relying on the so-called expertise of other people can lead to inaccuracies. She says that “you go into any kind of a therapist forum [online], and everyone is saying how they were cringing that some person could have given such wrong advice.” One example of bad advice that Rosenblat sees repeatedly online is that men who suffer from erectile dysfunction should drink wine to loosen up. “That’s so irresponsible, because as soon as he has that, circulation will be impacted and chances of getting a boner are close to nil.” She also bristles at the term “sexpert.” “Like, what is that? It could be someone working in a sex shop, or who has decided to write a column. I need to know, what are their credentials?”

Following in Hef’s footsteps, modern men’s magazines rarely talk about sex. Publications like Sharp, GQ, and Esquire include pictures of sexy women in place of articles about sex. The exception is Toro, an online magazine that has both. Letters to Levenson is an advice column for men with questions about their wives and girlfriends, or, in Noah Levenson’s words, “people who are so confused and hurt that they reach out to a stranger for advice.” What is lacking in advice columns is what it’s really like to be a sexual man, he says in an email. “Men are either portrayed as whimpering, hyper-sensitive eunuchs or dinosaur-brained guidos. Of course, the reality is that we’re all somewhere in the middle.”

But Szabo, the xoxoamore blogger, believes the genre may be heading in the right direction. “I like to think it’s becoming more and more open.” She stresses that the ultimate purpose of sex journalism is to teach the readers something they didn’t know before. “A lot of sex columns are not always educational, or aren’t sex education that people can understand.”

“If you’re coming to us for information, we owe it to you to be accurate,” says Kaitlyn Kochany, a freelance journalist and fellow blogger on xoxoamore. To her, getting it right allows it to be legitimate, and the internet makes this information accessible to readers. She cites from the rules of the internet, as created by the online-culture-based wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica: “If it exists, someone has made a porno about it.” In this way, sex blogs have leveled the playing field, and anything that readers aren’t getting from magazines may be found online.

University and college students have access to another format for accessing sex tips: the school paper. Kaite Welsh, author of “Sex and Blogs and Shock-‘n’-Tell Journalism” in Times Higher Education, says that students are taking this trend personally. She found that prospective journalists in western universities are using their schools’ papers to discuss sexuality issues, and that the papers can be more explicit than mainstream magazines. “Whether it is pictures of scantily clad models or sex-obsessed bloggers, the modern student press is increasingly X-rated,” writes Welsh. School papers are, even now, producing future Carrie Bradshaws.

So why is sex covered by every form of media? “There’s an old adage, and it’s not just for magazines: sex sells,” says Scott Bullock, a magazine circulation expert in Canada and the U.S. “What I tend to focus on is just how covers influence people’s buying decisions.” He’s compiled data on magazine sales and compared them with what’s on covers. This reveals interesting information about how we relate to sex in magazines: the sexier the cover star, the better they sell, usually.

Photograph of Erika Szabo by E. Wynne Neilly

Illustration by Kathryn MacNaughton

By Karizza Sanchez 

It’s the September launch party for Sharp magazine’s Book for Men, a hardcover offshoot filled with glossy images of luxurious cars, men’s fashion, and exotic destinations. The ballroom at the new Shangri-La Hotel in downtown Toronto is crowded, lit with purple lights, and filled with loud music playing—a little reminiscent of a nightclub. The male guests are all carbon copies of one another: handsome, impeccably dressed in suits, and seemingly successful. They are the men Sharp wants reading its magazine, and the men Sharp’s advertisers want to reach.

Some of those advertisers are at the party. Near the back of the room, in an area dubbed the Editor’s Lounge, there are displays of luxurious Chanel and IWC watches, and bespoke shoes from Treccani Milano. There are also complimentary shoeshines from Walter’s Shoe Care and hand massages from American Crew. Nearby is a bar stocked with drinks courtesy of Glenlivet, Absolut Elyx, Peroni, and Havana Club.

“It’s the one event where Sharp brings everything we think men are interested in to the men we want,” says the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeremy Freed. The coffee-table Book for Men is a biannual publication, one of Sharp’s newer projects under the aegis of parent company Contempo Media. Contempo’s founders, publisher John McGouran and editorial and creative director Michael La Fave, had the idea for the oversized book when they first launched Sharp five years ago, but decided to wait a few years before starting it in 2010. “When you launch those things,” says McGouran, “they’re very expensive and probably won’t make money on the first issue, and it did not.” But it is meant to take Sharp to greater heights, he says. “We wanted that kind of product out there so that people know, Hey, these guys are very serious about what they’re doing and that they have the capability. If there’s one point I would look to that kind of really jumpstarted our fortunes, [it] was when we launched that.”

The Book for Men is sold for $16.95 on newsstands, with total sales amounting to about 9,500 copies, and roughly 10,000 copies are distributed at special events throughout the year. A portion of the leftovers that don’t sell on newsstands (around 10,000 copies) is used for other events and specialized distribution. Readers will sometimes order the book through the magazine’s website; about 7,000 are purchased by companies in bulk to use as handouts. “Sometimes it’s a premium to their customers because it’s a prestigious product,” says McGouran.

The Fall/Winter 2012 edition of The Book for Men is essentially a 268-page guide to the hottest men’s fashion trends and products, including a 32-page “MANual” full of how-to pieces on etiquette, health, travel, and even survival. The content is not far from what can be found in Sharp itself, which is also home to style and grooming manuals.

Flip through any issue of Sharp and you’ll see fashion layouts, service pieces, and plenty of product write-ups. While there are celebrity profiles, travel stories, and car reviews, most of the editorial focuses on Sharp’s idea of the best of what’s out there. “It’s almost like it’s glorified advertising in a way,” says Chris Lachine, a Toronto-based painter and Sharp reader.

Still, Sharp has a great reputation among Canadian men who appreciate the lavish lifestyle, maintains Rob Cribb, a Toronto Star investigative reporter and former columnist. Sharp is smart, he adds, because there’s a sensibility that it’s been able to capture.

Since launching in April 2008, Sharp has courted affluent men aged 25 to 54—and those who aspire to join those ranks—and it’s been able to stay in business in a men’s market where other efforts have failed. The most recent Winter issue is Sharp’s biggest so far—198 pages of editorial and ads, plus an insert of Time & Style, a watch magazine, well up from the 130-page average.

Published six times a year, Sharp is distributed through the National Post in Toronto, the Vancouver Sun, the Calgary Herald, and The Gazette in Montreal (a total of 100,000 copies), as well as through events (10,000), newsstands (20,000 to 30,000, with a cover price of $5.95), and subscriptions (2,500). Copies are also supplied to Air Canada Maple Leaf lounges and VIA Rail Canada, and mailed directly to members of the Cambridge Club health club chain in Toronto and Montreal. Though a majority of its circulation of 146,500 is controlled distribution, Sharp’s subscriptions are increasing, says McGouran. And in 2011, the title landed just outside of Masthead Online’s ranking of the top 50 Canadian magazines according to total revenue, chalking up an estimated $2.3 million.

Much of Sharp’s content is similar to that of other men’s lifestyle publications, such as GQ and Esquire—in theory, at least. Certainly it aspires to be as good as, if not better than, those titles, and thinks it fares well against them. “You can take our products for the year 2012, six issues of Sharp and two issues of The Book for Men, and compare those to any leading men’s lifestyle magazine and say, Hey, this is on par with them in terms of quality,” says McGouran.

But is Sharp really as good as it claims? Does it have the same quality and scope of content that GQ and Esquire offer? Or is it more focused on landing advertisers than serving readers with the best editorial possible?

For a company that touts the look of its magazine, Contempo Media’s head office—on Queen’s Quay West near Spadina Avenue in Toronto—is surprisingly plain. There are off-white walls, black shelves separating desks, and a lone bookshelf holding other publications used for inspiration, but not much else. La Fave’s office is similarly low key. His inner sanctum has few decorations, other than some items from PR companies. His desk features no photograph of his wife and son; there is only a computer monitor beside his MacBook, an empty glass, loose paper, and a copy of British GQ’s October 2012 issue. “In our opinion, the world’s standard for a men’s magazine is British GQ,” says La Fave. “This is obviously the pinnacle. That’s what we aspire to.” Though he seems private about most things, La Fave is honest and open about this goal. He knows men’s lifestyle magazines like Sharp need to be just as good as GQ and Esquire to compete.

Few, if any, would disagree that those two titles are the big dogs in the men’s lifestyle market. Both award-winning magazines have a good mix of celebrity news, serious journalism, fashion, service pieces, product reviews, and literature. As David Granger, editor of Esquire, told The New York Timesin 2004, “Men have range! There’s no man interested only in sports, only in women, only in electronics.” GQ and Esquire balance the different things men are interested in. Take Esquire’s November 2012 issue, for instance. Inside, there’s a feature on the presidential election, while a topless Mila Kunis adorns the cover.

As for GQ, it serves a younger demographic (the average reader is 34 years old; Esquire’s is 44), yet also offers serious narrative journalism. Even its reputation as a fashion magazine hasn’t stopped the editors from publishing excellent writing and earning multiple U.S. National Magazine Awards nominations and prizes in the feature writing and reporting categories. “It’s an important part of the editorial identity of those big American magazines,” says Cribb, “and frankly, it brings a level of credibility that I think Sharp doesn’t have journalistically.”

For his part, McGouran says he’s subscribed to GQ since he was 18, so starting a men’s lifestyle magazine was not so far-fetched for him. Prior to co-founding Sharp, he worked as the director of advertising and sales at Hockey News for five years, and later as the director of sales at Quebec-based Auto Journal Group, which published Motomag, Automag, Auto Journal, Québec Tuning, Auto Passion, and, starting in 2004, Driven. It was at Auto Journal Group that he first got to know La Fave, who would become Driven’s editor-in-chief.

It was actually La Fave who first approached Michel Crépault, the owner of the Auto Journal Group, in 2003, Crépault says, with the idea of starting a Toronto-based men’s lifestyle magazine with an automotive core. “He told me more, and quickly I said yes, because lifestyle was definitely in my court,” says Crépault in his thick Québécois accent. “Also, starting in Toronto was an interesting challenge for me, so I said yes.”

The now-defunct Driven was published six times a year and distributed through The Globe and Mail. Crépault appointed McGouran—someone he describes as the best sales guy he’s ever met—as the magazine’s director of sales. La Fave’s previous business partner and friend, Laurance Yap, became the artistic director, and with McGouran they made up the core of Driven, which at the time had a staff of about six people.

In mid-January 2008, the Auto Journal Group faced challenges—namely, the recession and the crippled automotive sector. But Crépault would come across even tougher times. The core team of McGouran, La Fave, and Yap was leaving Driven, and tendered their resignations, effective immediately. “I was in despair,” says Crépault. Almost four years after the fact, you can still hear the grief in his voice. “I was completely taken by surprise.” There was no explanation provided for the departure, not that one was needed to make sense of the situation. “I knew that if they were leaving together it was definitely to start something,” says Crépault.

“In hindsight, it’s clear the reason they left,” says Johnny Lucas, who took over as editor-in-chief of Driven the week after La Fave departed. “They wanted to do their own thing. I just thought the way it was done was not my idea of what was proper.”

Crépault says he sent McGouran a letter in 2010, about a year and a half after Driven and the Auto Journal Group folded, saying he finally understood why McGouran had left, although McGouran denies receiving it. In 2007, a marketing consultant from the Auto Journal Group advised Crépault to hire a director of sales for all the magazines the company published. McGouran wanted the position, and while Crépault thought highly of him, he didn’t feel he was right for the job—he didn’t speak French (Driven was the only English magazine in the group), and he didn’t live in Montreal. “I understand that he was, rightly so, disappointed,” says Crépault. “Maybe pissed off. Maybe at the time that was the button I pushed, without realizing it, that contributed to the three of them leaving.”

As for La Fave, Crépault says he could always sense he wanted to do something bigger, and he kept his door open for him. “But unfortunately, he took his decision without talking to me first, the way I would have wished that things could have happened.”

McGouran and La Fave simply say they left Driven, and took Yap with them, because they wanted to go in a different direction from where the magazine was heading. Both men wanted to start a Canadian-made publication modeled on GQ and Esquire—something they thought was missing in the market.Sharp would grow out of ideas discussed over a casual lunch at Vox on Adelaide Street East in Toronto—although they didn’t meet with that purpose in mind. “It was fate,” says McGouran. They launched Sharp four months later, after starting Contempo Media, which now also publishes the custom magazines Volkswagen, Audi, Time & Style, S/Style & Fashion, and M/Men of Style.

Fate aside, some questioned the pair’s decision to launch a men’s lifestyle magazine, especially in the heat of the recession. “I don’t know that anybody thought it was going to be an easy ride for them,” says the Star’s Cribb. Canadian men’s general-interest magazines have struggled to stay afloat over the past decade—Toro folded in 2007 after just under four years in print, followed by Driven. According to Toro’s former editor, Derek Finkle, the pool of potential advertisers was shallow, especially compared to what was available south of the border. Then with the recession in 2008, advertising dollars overall were down. Any magazine that didn’t have deep enough pockets to help ride it out until things improved was in trouble.

Were McGouran and La Fave concerned about this? They funded Sharp with their own money, so they were taking a big risk. “Absolutely,” says McGouran. “Sleepless nights. But at that point there was no turning back. It’s sort of like swimming halfway across the lake and saying, ‘Oh, I can’t make it, I better turn around.’ That was never really an option. We just had to find a way.”

A large part of that way was to concentrate on fashion. Indeed, Sharp has been able to attract male readers with its heavy fashion content, largely thanks to a growing interest in the subject. Simply, men are no longer as diffident as they were in the past about grooming and style. “Men have always cared,” says Henry Navarro Delgado, an assistant professor at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion. “It’s just a matter of publicizing that care.”

Enter Sharp, whose readers say they look to the magazine for style advice and ideas. “I would say that I wasn’t [a fashionable man],” says Ira Brenton, a business manager and reader of Sharp, “but I’m making more of an attempt right now, and Sharp is a good tool.” The accessibility of the brands and products featured in the publication has also helped build readership. “I know it’s Canadian,” observes Brenton, “so I know that a lot of the stuff will be Canadian-centric.”

But simply offering Canadian content may not be enough. “You can’t rely on that because I’m not sure enough people care,” says Finkle, adding that magazines need to offer comparable editorial to what can be found in the big men’s publications.

Back in 2008, Sharp’s inaugural issue featured Leo Rautins, a former Canadian basketball player and head coach of the Canadian men’s national basketball team—a national celebrity, but certainly not a George Clooney, Denzel Washington, or Leonardo DiCaprio, the Hollywood stars who would appear on subsequent covers. While products and style guides were evident in early issues, there were also full-length features covering such topics as child soldiers, counterfeit fashion, brain injuries, and the Beijing Olympics. Today, however, long-form investigative features in the magazine are scarce. While Finkle says he thinks Sharp has improved and has made genuine attempts in the past, he does wish it had “more stuff to read.”

Nonetheless, La Fave says the magazine has done well over the years. “We’ve had a number of pieces that I’m very proud of and that I think are definitely noteworthy,” he says. He’s entered features, such as the brain injury story, into the National Magazine Awards, albeit without success. “To not even receive a nomination had us wondering, Are we on the outside of this community or something?” La Fave says Sharp would love to publish stories that could be picked up by CBC. They’re on the lookout for great writers, he says, and want to make more space for features. They also recently commissioned award-winning writer Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall to contribute a fatherhood column. But, La Fave adds, with a hint of uncertainty in his voice, “A lot of the things we’ve done haven’t necessarily attracted attention within the writing community. Perhaps it’s just a case of Canada. Perhaps people are more inclined to go to Maclean’s or someone else with those types of stories.”

Certainly that wasn’t the case with Toro, which leaned heavily toward strong magazine journalism. The men’s lifestyle glossy was generally well regarded by readers and the industry, and was a frequent National Magazine Awards nominee—and winner. The content was witty, honest, intelligent without being overly intellectual, and at times unabashedly sexual. In one issue, you could read a serious, long-form feature on the Canadian Mafia and then a more humourous piece on the 24 pick-up lines that never work. While not all were award-winning articles, they sparked conversations. “If you went into a news meeting after Toro would come out,” says Cribb, “inevitably, somebody would say, ‘Hey, did you see that piece in Toro?’”

Sharp sparks a different kind of conversation. The publication does a great job of capturing the lighter side of the market, says Cribb, but adds, “I worry a little bit about the relationship with the advertisers and to what extent editorial is influenced by advertising.” In its September 2012 issue, Sharp ran a feature titled “Sharp’s Guide to Effortless Italian Style,” with ads from the Italian brewer Peroni. The fashion spread, shot on location in Italy, included a photograph that showed models drinking Peroni’s Nastro Azzurro beer. “We were in Italy and we thought it was appropriate to have Peroni there,” explains La Fave flatly.
The separation of editorial and advertising has long been a concern for editors, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to uphold as advertisers make greater demands for reader engagement. But the advertising-editorial guidelines, created by a Magazines Canada task force to help editors, publishers, and advertisers maintain a distinction between editorial and ads, state: “Advertisements should not be placed immediately before, within or immediately after editorial content that includes mention of the advertised products or services. Exceptions are allowed for listings and contests.” So, was Sharp’s piece about Italian style more advertorial than actual editorial?
Other conversations have revolved around the ads on Sharp’s covers. In the April 2010 issue, an Audi ad was visible beneath a transparent plastic cover. Some argue this contravened one of the magazine industry’s key guidelines: “No advertisement may be promoted on the cover of the magazine or included in the editorial table of contents, unless it involves an editorially directed contest, promotion or sponsored one-off editorial extra.” Then in the September 2011 issue, there was a BMW ad that incorporated cover flaps that revealed the company’s tagline “Shape the Future”—one flap turned theSharp nameplate into “Shape” while the other revealed “the Future.” Again, Sharp arguably contravened the guidelines.
But Todd Latham, publisher of ReNew Canada, says the ethics of such covers are debatable. “It depends on how it’s done,” he says. As with other publishers and editors, he suggests the lines of editorial and advertising are blurred only when the ad is directly on the cover; flaps and gatefolds are similar to ads on the back of the cover, so those are okay. Consider: Cottage Life has published a “peel and reveal” cover featuring Corona beer andMaclean’s featured a “trapdoor” ad for the Audi Q5 on its cover.
Still, D.B. Scott, president of Impresa Communications Ltd., a magazine industry consultancy firm, says covers should not include ads, referring to such “flapvertising” as gimmicks. “It sends the message that everything in the magazine, including its brand and its cover, is a commodity and it’s for sale,” he says.

So, is Sharp more focused on landing advertisers than building its readership? A source close to the magazine says he worries that sometimes it “doesn’t care enough about the reader” and it’s concerned “more about creating that beautiful environment and creating a nice premium package.”

As Sharp marks its fifth year in the market, the questions are beginning to pile up. Will it finally win a National Magazine Award in something other than the beauty category (Sharp won gold for “Fragrances,” a visual spread that ran in the Fall/Winter 2011 Book for Men)? Will it once again give readers more than a look at the best new suits and manly gizmos? And will Canadians ever recognize Sharp in the same way they do GQ or Esquire?

On the cover of the December/January issue, Ryan Gosling wears a red lumberjack jacket and holds a flaming bottle. Across the page, in bold letters: “Ryan Gosling Is a Better Man Than We Are (and We’re Okay with That).” Would Sharp say the same if it were comparing itself to the heavyweights in the American men’s lifestyle market? More likely it would say, “GQ Is No Better Than We Are.” But to convince some industry observers of that, Sharp clearly still has some work to do. “It’s a catalogue of things to buy,” concludes Johnny Lucas, La Fave’s successor at Driven. “Is that a magazine? Meh.”

Photographs by Darrin Klimek

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 Davida Ander

“What’s your problem?”

“Isn’t it obvious? He’s an unemployed welfare bum.” 

“Grow up.” 

“Once you are done you may fornicate yourself.”

“You just antagonize people to get people to react, dude. It’s what you do! You have serious issues!” 

“I win every time due to your lack of brains, slightly amusing on occasion but bore quickly of you, til next time I’m bored, bye bye schmuck….”

“Bye bye, coward.” 

“This comment has violated our Terms and Conditions, and has been removed.”

For the large, silent majority of readers turned off by comments sections, the solution is simple: stop reading them. But for journalists, who are frequently themselves the subjects of discussion, and who are increasingly being pressured to moderate and participate in online discussions, ignoring the problem just isn’t an option anymore.

Nor should it be. Canadian news sites need to become more comment-conscious and replace vague suggestions for comment response with positive examples, clear policies, and how-to instructions. Frustrating as comments sections can be, useful contributions should be welcomed—and deserve to be answered.

There are positive examples out there. For Kim Bolan, responding to reader comments on her Vancouver Sun crime-beat blog means getting access to exclusive information from some of her gang-involved readers. “Sometimes it’s a little tidbit of information, because people will post, for example, the name of a murder victim long before the police are prepared to give that information out publicly. So I get it and I have to, of course, confirm it, but I get a leg up, in essence, because I’m on this blog and communicate with people,” she says. And Bolan’s work has paid off. She says her blog averages 250,000 to 300,000 readers each month, one of the highest numbers in the Postmedia chain for a blog. Bolan’s participation in her blog’s comments threads has not just improved the tone and quality of the comments; it’s paid dividends for her reporting, as well as the size of her audience.

But when it comes to journalist-reader interactions in the comments sections of Canadian media, Bolan is an exception. While newsrooms encourage journalists to dip their toes into the comments sections, they’re rarely instructing them on the practical level: when to respond, and how.

At the Toronto Star, editors are working on a new comments strategy. The current guidelines say journalists “may respond” to online reader comments, but debating any issues is off limits. Any reader concerns or complaints should not be addressed by the journalist; instead, they should be sent to the public editor for investigation. “We’re starting to have a conversation around just exactly what is the comment section for,” digital editor John Ferri says. “Should there be a conversation in it? Should we consider it content? All those questions are being discussed.”

By Rhiannon Russell

Waubgeshig Rice pulls his van over and darts onto the street, video camera hoisted on his shoulder. Dressed in a CBC/Radio-Canada coat and heavy-duty boots, he’s covering the second national day of action for Idle No More, an indigenous rights movement. It’s a miserable day for a protest: below zero, snow swirling in thick, fluffy flakes, downtown streets a slushy lagoon. The wind pelts exposed bits of skin. But the protesters march, drum, and dance toward Parliament Hill, and Rice, an Ojibwa video journalist at CBC Ottawa, is in his element—despite the elements. Since moving here two years ago, he’s immersed himself in the city’s Aboriginal community, attending powwows and other events. As Rice keeps ahead of the pack, there is a call. “Is that Waub?” Later, another, more personal: “Hey, cousin!” He is familiar with the people and the issue. That afternoon, during a live hit outside Parliament for CBC News Network, anchor Asha Tomlinson changes direction from the standard questions to ask Rice: Does he think Idle No More can sustain itself?

When we trudge back to the newsroom, my boots and socks sopping wet, Rice tells me her question was unusual. As a reporter, he doesn’t give opinions on the news. Today was different, he thinks, because of his essay about Idle No More, posted to CBC.ca this morning. “Modern history is largely defined by the faces of the people who make it,” he wrote. “When we think of the Oka crisis of 1990, we all think of that one shot of the warrior and the soldier, which instilled pride in so many First Nations people across the country. That same potential is here. This time, there are thousands more people from all First Nations willing to put their faces on history.”

But Rice’s understanding of the story is unusual, too. Most stories about Idle No More have lacked depth, context, and analysis. Though the grassroots movement is complex, with no appointed leader and various mandates, that doesn’t excuse vague and misinformed coverage. By offering only a play-by-play of protests and blockades, reporters missed the point. A few, including Rice, proved that analytical, thorough coverage is possible. Idle No More demands a change from the political norm, and for Canadian journalists, the norm has long been poor coverage of indigenous people. Sure, you could argue journalists don’t cover any minority as well as they should, but as Mary Agnes Welch, the public policy reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, told me, natives are the founding people of Canada, and they’re marginalized more than any other group. “I think you could make an argument that we have a treaty obligation to First Nations, and also we have a Canadian obligation because so much of what they’re experiencing is, it’s un-Canadian, frankly.”

I kept my thumb on the Idle No More hashtag from the first national day of protest in December. For more than a month, I lived in an INM media bubble, scouring news websites, newspapers, blogs, and videos, and consuming as much coverage as humanly possible. Idle No More’s trajectory is one worth charting, if for no other reason than the movement started as a Twitter hashtag and grew to be one of the top stories of the year. But it’s also an opportunity to check on the state of Aboriginal coverage.

This is the log of my media diet since the movement became national news.

DECEMBER 10 > Let’s start with the “official” first day, although the #IdleNoMore hashtag first appeared in November, when a Cree woman in Alberta used it to promote an information session on Bill C-45, the federal government’s second omnibus budget bill. First Nations activists are concerned about its contents: changes to the Indian Act and Navigable Waters Protection Act.

Today, the hashtag became more than a call to action—it is action. We saw the first of dozens of protests in major Canadian cities and #IdleNoMore trended on Twitter as people shared photos and updates from rallies.

If this wasn’t enough of a hook, the next day, Theresa Spence, chief of the northern Ontario community of Attawapiskat, started a hunger strike to pressure Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Governor General David Johnston, and First Nations leaders into meeting to discuss treaty rights. Neither the protests nor the hunger strike received national mainstream coverage, save for articles on The Globe and Mail website  and The Huffington Post Canada. Even local coverage was patchy. Only Aboriginal Peoples Television Network covered the rallies all day, posting videos and stories to its Facebook and Twitter accounts and putting the events at the top of its nightly newscast.

Unimpressed, Aboriginal people took to Twitter to lament the void. “There is a media bias,” tweeted Wab Kinew, a former CBC journalist who’s now director of indigenous inclusion at the University of Winnipeg. “Any other group of people who brought out as many people in as many cities would have had wall-to-wall coverage.”

Instead, a monkey in a Toronto Ikea dominated headlines. “‘Tens of thousands of Native people turned out for a coordinated, national….Oh, look, a monkey’—the Media,” tweeted one person. Another wrote: “The media isn’t interested in well-behaved native peoples.”

Meanwhile, I had a job interview at a major daily newspaper. In the hours before, I kept an eye on its website for INM coverage. Nothing surfaced. When I pitched a story about the movement in the interview, one editor said it sounded like something they’d assign to a freelancer.

DECEMBER 18 > Idle No More finally made CBC’s The National tonight with a story on how Spence’s hunger strike is “part of a wider movement.” It’s thorough—Adrienne Arsenault also reported on the protests, the crucial social media component, and the controversial legislation. She concluded with a reference to the second wave of rallies planned for December 21: “If the turnout is what they suggest it will be and hope it will be, then it’s possible that this might just be the beginning of something.”

Back when I first talked to Rice, in October, before INM, he foreshadowed the movement by crediting social media as a way for Aboriginal people to unify. “A lot of younger people are a lot more aware, and they’re able to share their stories to a greater degree, and maybe influence other news organizations and bring some issues to light from a grassroots level,” Rice said. He recalls seeing tweets in INM’s early days about how the movement didn’t need the mainstream media to spread its message. “Well, you kind of do,” he said, adding that Twitter runs the risk of being an echo chamber.

If you want widespread attention, you need the mainstream media, and in the following week, Idle No More started earning more space in local newspapers and broadcasts, thanks to regional protests. Still, Duncan McCue, an Ojibwa reporter for The National and journalism professor at the University of British Columbia, said reporters mistook the groundswell for isolated gatherings. “That there was something national going on. Didn’t get it. Perhaps didn’t care. Perhaps were heading on holidays. All three of those things combined, and unfortunately, there wasn’t as much coverage as there could have been.”

DECEMBER 21 > Today, I travelled to Ottawa for the largest rally yet. Protesters met on Victoria Island—traditional Algonquin land and Spence’s home during her hunger strike—before marching to Parliament Hill. On the plane, I made the mistake of telling my seatmate, a pompous businessman, where I was headed. He hadn’t heard of Idle No More, and for the remainder of the flight—only an hour, phew—he ranted about “those corrupt Indian chiefs who steal money from the government.” That, he said, is what he sees in the media.

So far, there has been little reportage from First Nations communities. The problems on many reserves—poverty, unemployment, substance abuse, suicide, and violence—have been covered before, but with INM, everything is on the table (unlike, say, Attawapiskat, where housing and poverty were the issues, and Oka or Ipperwash, which were about land). Of course, coverage of squalor on reserves can perpetuate the stereotype of the poor, lazy native if journalists don’t balance those drastic, yet important, stories with more positive ones.

Over the Christmas break, Idle No More thrived with rallies, blockades, and solidarity hunger strikes, but so did the stereotypes. Journalists covered these events as they always had—with photos and videos of natives adorned with feathers and buckskin, dancing, chanting, and pounding drums. Though this is undeniably a facet of Aboriginal culture, most reporters didn’t dig below the surface of the image or sound bite. “Journalists just love this stuff,” theOttawa Citizen’s Terry Glavin later wrote. “It means you don’t actually have to do any work.”

JANUARY 7 > Early January was a whirlwind. A judge ordered the Ontario Provincial Police to remove protesters blocking railway tracks near Sarnia. Harper agreed to meet with First Nations leaders, including Spence. Just three days later, an audit commissioned by Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada leaked to CBC. The Deloitte audit investigated Attawapiskat finances between 2005 and 2011, finding that 81 percent of examined transactions had inadequate documentation; 60 percent had none. The Globe headline—“Attawapiskat Audit Raises Questions About Millions in Spending”—was typical. But the audit also showed accounting practices had improved after Spence became chief in 2010, so APTN reporter Kenneth Jackson tweeted: “My lede would have been: Serious financial problems on Attawapiskat but improved under Chief Theresa Spence audit indicates.”

The story reinforced the stereotype of the fat-cat chief with money-lined pockets. On The Huffington Post Canada, journalist Yoni Goldstein argued that reserve “hellholes” are the fault of leaders such as Spence. “How is it possible that native leaders have managed to squander…millions of dollars federal and provincial governments keep handing over, year after year?” he wrote. These commentaries undermined the quality of discussion. In a letter to Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley Echo, John Logan wrote that Spence’s position as a symbol for Aboriginal people was a “sham.” Spence attended a residential school as a child, but the scathing critiques lacked this context. In fact, she is a credible symbol: she knows the history of Aboriginal people because she’s lived it. The Telegram in St. John’s was the only news outlet I found to mention this.

Never mind that Spence wasn’t even tied to Idle No More. Her fast just happened to coincide with INM’s kickoff—something many reporters confused. For instance, at the Assembly of First Nations presser in Ottawa on January 10, David Akin, Sun Media’s national bureau chief, asked AFN chief Shawn Atleo if it was acceptable that Attawapiskat police kicked out a reporter. “The Attawapiskat angle was so much more tabloid-friendly than history,” wrote Michael Harris on iPolitics. “It was character assassination by dull razor blade.”

In the days leading up to the meeting with Prime Minister Harper, journalists capitalized on so-called cracks in INM’s armour, as some provincial chiefs opted out of the meeting for fear it would amount to no more than a photo op. A Globe headline sounded ominous: “Idle No More Protests Beyond Control of Chiefs.”

The possibility of violence was a popular topic. In the National Post, Kent Roach and David Schneiderman, University of Toronto law professors, arguedthat police were right to be cautious about the protesters. Because, you know, those violent natives. And in the Globe, John Ibbitson patted the government on the back: “Thus far, the Conservatives have gotten the big things right, by ignoring peaceful demonstrations and engaging with the responsible leadership in order to marginalize extremists. But that is exactly the moment at which events can spiral out of control: Oka; the Dudley George shooting. Then no one can predict what will happen.”

In the same vein, John Ivison wrote in the Post: “Despite the posters proclaiming ‘zero tolerance to all forms of violence,’ the guys barring the gate did not look they’d [sic] be dogmatic about the principle. ‘Friend or foe?’ growled one to a native girl who was looking to gain access.” As if growling signals imminent bloodshed.

JANUARY 14 > Small-town Manitoba weekly the Morris Mirror caused an uproar with an editorial claiming Aboriginal people were acting like terrorists. “Indians/Natives want it all but corruption and laziness prevent some of them from working for it,” wrote editor Reed Turcotte beside an editorial cartoon of a native person making smoke signals, with this caption: “Before they were partially wiped out by white men’s diseases, the Canadian Indian had a highly evolved society built around the world’s first cell phone.” Media outlets across Canada ran this story. The Mirror later ran an apology, but maintained “we stand by the fact that the Natives must work to get out of their situation.”

And in a Cowichan News Leader op-ed, Patrick Hrushowy, president of the Cowichan Valley constituency association of the B.C. Liberal Party, wrote of provincial chiefs issuing “thundering calls for ‘warriors’ to prepare to take the fight to the streets. All of this scares me…I pass someone on the street and wonder if this is one of the ‘warriors’ who wants to put my livelihood at risk to achieve his or her demands.”

Meanwhile, APTN reported on a Sun News poll asking readers to describe Spence in one word to win a prize: “Some of the words used included: fat, oink, garbage, chief two-chins and hippo. Others couldn’t stick to just one word. One wrote, ‘Stop sucking Lysol.’” This type of discourse prompted Idle No More supporters to protest outside Sun offices in three cities. At a Toronto INM rally, I watched a man accost a Sun News cameraperson, throw his hand in front of the lens, and lecture him about the network’s “agenda.”

On social media, things were even more heated. Manitoba’s Thompson Citizen shut down its Facebook page due to an onslaught of anti-native comments. And a tweet from Ivison a few weeks earlier—“It seems there are certain native leaders intent on conflict; who want hapless Theresa Spence to become a martyr. God forbid that happens”—sicced the attack dogs. Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, a professor at the University of Victoria, called Ivison a “racist prick” and threatened to kick his “immigrant ass” back to Scotland if he disrespected Spence again.

Several pundits seemed intent on discrediting INM and disparaging Aboriginal people. “While Chief Spence, and others, may long for ‘nation-to-nation discussions,’ there is I think a genuine question as to whether there’s enough of Aboriginal culture that has survived to even dream of that lofty status,” wrote Post columnist Christie Blatchford. “Smudging, drumming and the like do not a nation make.” The Globe’s Jeffrey Simpson ridiculed the desire for sovereignty: “But too many communities remain within the dream palace, hungering for a return to a more separate existence, even if the lands on which they sit are—and likely always will be-—of marginal economic value.” He didn’t mention that these communities were relegated to marginal land years ago so the government could harvest natural resources.

Barbara Kay, also of the Post, trivialized Spence’s fast, suggesting she was merely “detoxing” to lose weight (she was consuming fish broth, after all) and criticized her for a diet that probably includes “a lot of carbohydrates.” Spence’s hunger strike was media fodder for all its 44 days. First, it was just that—a “hunger strike.” Then, it became a “liquid diet” or “liquid fast,” though Spence was open about her consumption of water and fish broth early on. A story on Globalnews.ca before she ended her hunger strike read, “It is not known just how many calories Spence is ingesting, subsisting on fish broth and medicinal teas (a true hunger striker drinks only water).” The Post called her wise for drinking fish broth to preserve her strength, as though this were a sneaky tactic to fast without really fasting.

Fish broth actually has special significance. In a Huffington Post Canada editorial, Leanne Simpson wrote that her ancestors survived on fish broth during the winters because, once their land was colonized, it was their only sustenance. “It carries cultural meaning for Anishinaabeg,” she wrote. “It symbolizes hardship and sacrifice. It 
symbolizes the strength of our ancestors. It means 
survival.”

JANUARY 17 > Protests and blockades took over the roads today, and a Canadian Press and Postmedia story discussed these events: “Some groups spoke of their own land claims, others decried the federal government’s changes to environmental oversight. Still others spoke of the need to honour all First Nations treaties.” That the movement wasn’t monolithic was one of the major difficulties for journalists.

I can guess what you’re thinking: it’s easy for me, a 21-year-old student, to pick apart professionals. Really, though, I do see the abundant challenges. First of all, Idle No More is grassroots with no appointed leader, so reporters don’t know who has authority to speak about it. Second, although some complained journalists were slow to cover INM, the Post’s Tristin Hopper pointed out the wisdom of waiting to see if a movement has legs. “We can’t write about a hashtag. We’ll just look like clowns.” And journalists are often wary of covering hunger strikes for the same reason they are of suicides—fear of encouraging them.

INM also challenges the country’s colonial history and it’s impossible to provide that context in two minutes or 600 words, said McCue. Journalists attempted to cover this history with one line or a short paragraph, buried as the inverted pyramid model dictates. This perpetuated the idea that INM was disorganized and vague, even after organizers identified specifically what they were fighting for.

I also understand the news cycle and what Rice called the curse of daily news. “There’s not that much opportunity to really offer context,” he said. “You’re only skimming the surface.” I can see that all a tight deadline allows for is a recap of that day’s protest, and not a dissection of the issues. Also tricky: Canada is home to 50 or so First Nations and more than 600 native communities. As Peter Edwards, a Star reporter who covered Ipperwash in 1995, wrote in his book One Dead Indian, “It was all a confusing jumble for the media, who like things in tidy packages….” With millions of Aboriginal people across Canada, there are no “tidy packages,” which made it difficult for reporters to suss out the majority’s sentiments. But, as Hayden King, an Anishinaabe politics assistant professor at Ryerson University, wrote in the Globe, “Recent attempts to interpret the Idle No More movement has resulted in conclusions of sudden divisions, fracturing and ‘chiefs losing control.’” These divisions, though, are normal and have always existed, just as they do in Canadian politics.

INM was also tough because its message evolved. In the early days, supporters fought against Bill C-45, but gradually, their desires grew to include treaty rights, nation-to-nation discussion, and an improved relationship with the federal government. These issues aren’t easy to sum up in a couple of sentences.

Spence complicated things. When, throughout January, she waffled on her demands, it was undoubtedly confusing. Of course, reporting is difficult when you’re physically removed from the story: Spence supporters escorted Star reporter Joanna Smith from the Victoria Island enclosure and police kicked a Global News team out of Attawapiskat.
But journalists have long struggled with covering native issues. As the Royal Commission Report on Aboriginal Peoples found in 1996: “Many Canadians know Aboriginal people only as noble environmentalists, angry warriors or pitiful victims. A full picture of their humanity is simply not available in the media.”

Thanks to this relationship, many indigenous people distrust reporters, which in turn can further discourage non-native journalists from wading into the deep waters of Aboriginal affairs. It’s a vicious cycle. As Susan Gamble, a reporter who covers the Six Nations reserve for The Expositor in Brantford, Ontario, said, “There’s a lot of reluctance among some people to switch over to something like that because they feel like it’s a delicate subject. They feel like it’s a tough subject.”

Some INM supporters decried criticism as “racism,” even if the issues raised were legitimate. Accusations of racism are nothing new, but when everyone has a smartphone, racist comments and angry tweets are even easier.

Gamble has experienced this. “If somebody doesn’t like what you write, the natural thing is to accuse you of not understanding the issue because you’re not native or that you’re trying deliberately to do something negative to the natives because you are non-native.”

JANUARY 19 > A revealing, magazine-length feature appeared in the Post today. Jonathan Kay visited four reserves along James Bay, and found most were financially stable. “As we drive through the Fort Albany reserve in Edmund Metatawabin’s pick-up truck, he asks me: ‘Do you see any drunk people. Are all the homes broken down?’ The answer is no — and he wants me to say it,” wrote Kay. “Based on the way the media reports stories from remote fly-in reserves such as Fort Albany, many Canadians have formed the impression that communities such as his are crumbling junkyards full of miserable alcoholics.”

Certain outlets and journalists demonstrated how INM coverage could be better. Both The National and TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin hosted round-table discussions featuring native and non-native experts leading up to the First Nations meeting with Harper. On the former show, Idle No More was the top story each night, with analysis of different angles and guests who included urban Aboriginals and young activists. Reporters venturing to nearby or far-off reserves gleaned context that, although removed from highway blockades and mall round dances, showed a fresh take on the movement.

A week ago, I highlighted a Star story in my notes. “To get lost in the diet particulars of one hunger-striking chief in Ottawa,” wrote Jim Coyle in a well-researched feature, “or the accounting idiosyncracies of one reserve’s band council, or a decision in Attawapiskat by a people grown wary of media to ban a TV crew, is to miss the larger and legitimate point of Idle No More and the opportunity it presents for essential change.”

At the height of the Spence-money-management frenzy, The Gazette in Montreal published a feature about the successful Mohawk community of Kahnawake—a reminder that some reserves are indeed financially stable. Late in January, the Free Press published an INM primer. When did it begin? What is a treaty? Where does the Indian Act fit in? It was an informative read.

APTN’s coverage was consistently good. Reporters Jorge Barrera and Kenneth Jackson—focusing on politics and the “streets,” respectively—committed to dig deep and tell the whole story. “Our job isn’t to defend Spence by any means. If I had that audit, I’d do a story,” said Jackson. “I just would add context. And I think that’s the main role as a reporter—add context wherever you can.”

The journalists I talked to agreed that hiring more Aboriginal people is crucial to improving coverage. “There’s a genuine lack of awareness about a lot of issues that are affecting First Nations people, and until you have more First Nations journalists in the mainstream, I think that that might always be the case,” said Tanya Talaga, an Anishinaabe-Polish reporter at the Star. During INM, some papers commissioned native freelancers to write analysis. But King said newspapers should regularly feature perspectives from native people, not just during crises.

The Strategic Alliance of Broadcasters for Aboriginal Reflection (SABAR), a partnership of mainstream and Aboriginal outlets, encourages the media to hire more native reporters and change how they cover indigenous people. CBC has a stronger record of covering native affairs than most—its TV series 8th Fire, for instance, delves into Canada’s relationship with indigenous people—and it broadcasts in eight Aboriginal languages. But this diversity doesn’t carry over to hiring practices. From January 2003 to March 2012, the number of full-time, permanent Aboriginal employees rose from 1.2 percent to 1.4 percent of the broadcaster’s workforce. (As of 2006, Aboriginal people accounted for 3.8 percent of Canada’s population.)

That’s one of the ideas behind a Journalists for Human Rights program slated to launch later this year in several northern Ontario communities. An organization that usually works with reporters and editors in Third-World countries, JHR will train native journalists in print and radio reporting.

Improving how reporters interact with native people is the goal of McCue’s website, Reporting in Indigenous Communities. The toolkit includes a checklist for visiting a reserve and a terminology guide, compiled by SABAR. Journalism schools should also give students some grounding in Aboriginal issues, because with a growing native population in Canada, most reporters will cover native issues at some point. If media outlets want to get it right (and King believes they genuinely do), they must commit more time to understand history, and avoid centuries-old stereotypes.

On a more basic level, Aboriginal people have to become commonplace in the media. “So if there was just a story about a medical breakthrough and then they interviewed an Aboriginal doctor, and it wasn’t a big deal,” said Kinew. “It wasn’t like, okay, here’s a story about Aboriginal doctors.” Steve Bonspiel was more vocal about reporters resorting to stereotypes: “It’s bullshit,” said the Mohawk editor and publisher of The Eastern Door in Kahnawake, Quebec. “I think they can look at a native story not as a native story, but as a human story.”

Dan David, a Mohawk freelance journalist in nearby Kanehsatake, has a unique take. When I spoke with him last fall, he said the “mainstream media” can seem like such a big, unchangeable entity. “If you had one newspaper just devote its resources to improving its coverage of human rights issues—and that’s what indigenous issues are, they’re human rights issues—then that’s a step in the right direction.”

Yet Kay thinks the main reasons for poor Aboriginal coverage—the cost of travelling to remote communities and lack of reader interest—are out of journalists’ control. “Most Canadians just don’t care that much about First Nations stories, and so the market isn’t there,” he wrote in an email. “The media aren’t going to report on stories that most people don’t care about.”

After the evening newscast on December 21, Rice admitted he was worried about writing that INM analysis piece for CBC.ca. What if his editors saw it as a threat to his objectivity? “Much to my surprise,” he said, “they sort of fed into that and played off it in terms of the coverage, which is kind of cool. I mean, I wasn’t expecting that at all today.” When Rice was a kid, the only time he saw reporters in his Wasauksing, Ontario, community was when things went awry. “I developed a distrust for media very early on. Why are these guys only showing up when something bad here happens? There are so many good things happening in my community.”

Rice first considered a journalism career in high school. “There’s a bridge that really needs to be built there of understanding and awareness,” he said. “I thought, if I can get in there and try to do my part and just do one little story at a time, then I saw that as sort of a success.”

JANUARY 24 > Spence ended her hunger strike today. The media’s sentiment was clearly that INM will fade away as Occupy did—and the fast’s end is certainly the termination of something—but journalists who thought the movement was over clearly didn’t understand it in the first place.

Last week, a poll suggested only 38 percent of Canadians support INM, and 60 percent believe native people’s problems are brought on by themselves (up from 35 percent in 1989). “While most Canadians have likely heard of Idle No More, many Canadians apparently haven’t bothered to properly educate themselves about what exactly it is,” stated a Globalnews.ca article. But have journalists? It’s unrealistic to expect the average Canadian to understand INM, when it’s debatable reporters did.

Journalists missed another chance to cover Aboriginal affairs in a balanced and detailed way. In a guest column for the Cambridge Times, Atinuke Bankole compared INM to the 1950s civil rights movement. Both started out grassroots and protested social justice issues, and both were criticized for being disorganized. “Blaming the victim was rampant among polite, average white Americans back then. ‘Well, things wouldn’t be so bad for blacks if they weren’t so lazy. Black people are backwards and that is why they are  underdeveloped. Slavery ended 100 years ago. Get over it.’ Sound familiar?”

Of course, INM differs because Aboriginal people lived on this land centuries before most of us did. Colonialism and the treaties stemming from it are complicated. Yet, I do see a parallel between the two movements. Mainstream media don’t portray any minority well—black, disabled, or queer. But colonial history sets the Aboriginal population apart. And what’s lacking in much of the coverage is an understanding of that history. Deadlines will always be tight and budgets will no doubt get tighter, but Canada’s indigenous population is growing and the issues INM raised won’t go away. It’s time for journalists to take a step, even a small one, towards consistent, thoughtful coverage of indigenous people instead of waiting for the next crisis or protest.

Photographs by Eric J. Magiskan / AHKI photography

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

Hi Gloggers. I’m your scarey moderator Bil asking what frightens you.” It’s a November evening in the newsroom as Global News writer and producer Bill Marshall’s index fingers stammer out his greeting. He knows he’s a crappy typist and freely admits it’s been his biggest challenge since he started moderating the live-blog that runs alongside the 11 p.m. broadcast.

About a dozen of the regulars—Marshall calls them his “midnight crowd”—have been with him since the launch of the blog in March 2009. They started calling themselves gloggers, or Global bloggers, about a month later.

They’re signing on promptly tonight. Victor is there as soon as Marshall starts up CoveritLive, the live-blogging software. “Hello gloggers,” Victor chirps. “Is it safe to come on tonight?” Yesterday the group spent almost an hour debating a challenge to Ontario’s pit bull laws. National Fearless Day headlines tonight’s show—a lighter subject, which leads to a discussion about food, the group’s favourite topic. Sure enough, it takes just 15 minutes before Nina, the group’s self-described blog diva, brings up wine. She tells Jim Todd he missed a wine fest the other night. “That’s right JT, we all had to take a wine break,” she taunts. “It was a raucous old time!”

“Nina,” Victor teases, “are you sure it wasn’t a whine break?”

After joking with meteorologist Anthony Farnell for predicting snow and Marshall for operating an illegal still in the office—a running joke within the group—someone mentions putting honey on ice cream with Nutella and food dominates the rest of the discussion. While the gloggers congratulate themselves for getting their tweets about their fears on-air during anchor Carolyn Mackenzie’s Twitter Topic segment, banana white-chocolate-chip pancakes and peanut butter-covered waffles dominate the conversation. Even Mackenzie gets in on it, dropping in from her laptop on the anchor’s desk.

“Peanut butter and Nutella,” she gushes. “Killing me…softly…”

“It’s killing me, too,” Marshall mutters. “I’m always going home thinking about Dairy Queen and pizza. I wasn’t hungry when I started.”

* * *

Such a conversation would have been impossible back when mainstream media were the only source of news. Journalists controlled the content—and anyone else could mail a letter to the editor. The gatekeeper mentality followed the media onto the first news websites, according to Alfred Hermida, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Graduate School of Journalism and co-founder of bbcnews.com. By refusing to link to other sites or provide a comment system for reader feedback, newspapers had simply recreated the physical product in a digital medium, giving them the same control over both the content and conversations around it that they had traditionally enjoyed. “Journalism is essentially based upon a system of control,” argues Hermida. “The problem with that approach is that these conversations are happening anyway.”

What no one had counted on was how easy it is for people online to undermine the gatekeepers by circumventing that control. Yochai Benkler captured the essence of the problem in his book, The Wealth of Networks. As the creation and distribution of information becomes more and more decentralized, Benkler argues, there is now greater individual autonomy to do more for and by ourselves.

This autonomy includes both crowdsourced dessert recipes and breaking news. Hermida says that over the last five years, reporters, editors and producers have found themselves competing with blogs and citizen journalists for an online audience. When a U.S. Airways jet landed in New York’s Hudson River on January 15, 2009, tweeter Janis Krums snapped the first photo. Two months earlier, mainstream media followed connected citizens in Mumbai as they tweeted about terrorist attacks around the city. “The idea of the journalist as gatekeeper has largely eroded,” says Hermida. “There is no gate any more.”

Vince Carlin, a CBC ombudsman, witnessed first-hand the erosion of the old ways. In March 2008, cbc.ca opened up for comments and through the avalanche of feedback rose a subculture of people who took it very seriously. From April 1, 2008 to March 31, 2009, the ombudsman received 2,666 complaints, which was an increase of 829 from the previous year.

What surprises Carlin more than the extra scrutiny is his colleagues’ acceptance of his role—20 years ago, they would have been indignant with his investigations. “Before, we thought we were the College of Cardinals. We made our decisions and the public could like it or lump it,” he says. But the whole culture changed. “People actually bought into the notion of being transparent and were open to discuss decisions.”

This new openness, combined with the overwhelming popularity of social media, has meant an increasing focus on collaborative journalism. In July 2009, Global News started letting people share its stories through Facebook, Twitter and rss feeds. But while Marshall certainly acknowledges a connection to viewers that wasn’t there before, he wonders if live-blogging might be just another fad—a sentiment common to every new communication tool since CB radio. If it isn’t, though, news outlets that can’t harness social media to improve newsgathering and relations with readers and viewers may struggle to retain an audience over the next few years. In fact, the real fad might just be journalism’s gatekeeper model.

* * *

In April 2008, Global News hired Andrew Lundy to bring its website out of the Dark Ages. His job was to direct the redesign of an underfunded site that had been an afterthought to the broadcast product. Lundy had been editor-in-chief at msn.ca and had spent nearly a decade working with various online sections at CBC. David Skok, senior producer of online content, once jokingly called him “The Messiah,” but even with all of his experience, the redesign was a substantial undertaking. “The site had been neglected for years,” Lundy says. “There wasn’t a digital culture at all. So there was a lot of work to do.”

The last redesign was in 2005. The amount of new content and technology Global News was pumping into the site cluttered that version. So Lundy and his team went to several other sites, including cnn.com and nytimes.com, to research examples of how to better display and organize content. Then lead designer Andrew Davies sketched out where each element would appear on a page and sent the plan to the stakeholders for their approval. About 40 people were involved with the redesign, all with their own ideas. None of those stakeholders, however, were members of Global News’ audience.

The revamped website was ready to launch in a year. Lundy streamlined the layout so that video, the network’s biggest strength, is now more prominent. Top headlines are easier to look through, and the home page features a widget that shows local news. A strip of links leads to social media extensions—Facebook and Twitter pages, rss feeds and e-mail alerts, podcasts and mobile applications. Lundy’s hope is that these features will help convince the broadcast audience to become loyal and devoted visitors to the website. The problem, especially before the redesign, was a huge disparity between the TV and website viewer numbers.

The plan seems to be working. Page views across the country rose from 1.5 million in January 2009 to 4.1 million in January 2010—a 166 percent increase. Lundy says his team is maintaining that growth.

But, of course, it’s still too soon to tell whether there’s money to be made from social media. And while news is more participatory and two-way, it might not be enough yet to staunch decreasing viewership numbers. A study released in 2008 by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (crtc) found that, though local television news ratings have not dropped significantly from 2004 to 2007, viewership numbers have begun to fall in the most desirable demographics—ages 18 to 54. Eighty-one percent of Canadians between 18 and 34 who use the internet at least once a month access news information online. But these people, who spend an average of 41 hours online each month, devote just one hour to the news—a fact that has taken its toll on media websites, including ctv.ca.

In 2000, Mark Sikstrom, executive producer of CTV News syndication and ctv.ca, had a staff of 12 and 300,000 unique visitors a month. A decade later, full-time staff has grown to 18 and the site receives around three million unique visitors monthly. But when it soft-launched a redesign in September 2009, page views increased only five percent per month. “We need our audience to survive,” explains Richard McIlveen, a late-night news producer at ctv. “Our audience is declining fairly dramatically and it’s certainly worrying for us. And they’re not going to the competition. They’re not going to Citytv; they’re not going to Global.”

McIlveen removes his glasses. “They’re just going,” he says. “It scares the shit out of me.”

* * *

Will social media save Global News? Perhaps, but Lundy and his team may have to start socializing more effectively. When a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti at 4:53 p.m. EST on January 12, a live-blog went up the next morning at 10:41 a.m., almost two hours after the one on theglobeandmail.com. For the next seven hours, Skok moderated the blog while posting updates on the event every few minutes. Some updates linked to stories elsewhere on the Global News website, while fewer linked to outside publications—there were only four mentions of eyewitness accounts from users on Twitter, for example.

Newspaper websites such astheglobeandmail.comaregenerally employing social media more effectively than broadcast websites. The Globe’sHaiti live-blog, for instance, offered outside input almost as often as its own updates. While Skok linked to a Hollywood Reporter story about Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean calling for aid, the Globe featured Jean’s original message from Twitter telling followers how to donate. It also included user comments, many of which suggested charities to donate to, while others warned against giving money to unknown organizations. And when users asked questions, a moderator often answered.

While Global News set up a separate microsite linking to the live-blog, Twitter updates and ways to donate and send condolences, the blog was closed to comments; viewers had to go somewhere else if they wanted to contribute. Skok says he wanted the blog to focus on covering the event, since there was a lot of repetition on Twitter and he didn’t want to clutter the story. Global News offered other venues for users to interact, and that seemed enough.

In these situations, the squeak of the gate is still clearly audible. According to Steve Anderson, the national coordinator of openmedia.ca, many major news organizations continue to produce news only as a product to be consumed. And it’s this mentality, he believes, that’s “exacerbating the crisis in journalism.”

Anderson has written for The Tyee, the Toronto Star and other publications arguing for more open and transparent media. He believes journalism’s mindset is still one-to-many, as opposed to the web’s many-to-many. “The change-up to a more social news environment hasn’t taken a hold of the newsroom culture,” he says. “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So the internet looks like another broadcast outlet to them.”

Online publication is now the start, not the end of the information journey, says Hermida, and stories are no longer finished products until the feedback stops. A comment forum enriched Monte Paulsen’s 2009 Tyeeinvestigative series on affordable housing, “A Home For All.” For nearly all of the eight articles in the package, Paulsen began the discussion with a question that he hoped would focus the commenters away from “rehashing the political rhetoric.” In the first story, for example, he challenged them to talk about where they lived, and more than 160 had replied by the end of January, almost a year after it was posted.

Paulsen believes that some commenters improved the series by adding details, facts or context. Others made clarifications—one of Paulsen’s sources added something that hadn’t made it in an article. All of this meant greater depth and ultimately more value for both the journalist and his readers. He now says, “I would do it for every story.”

Still, some news organizations may be stuck trying to hammer a screw by holding fast to old gatekeeping values. Though thestar.com’s redesign allows readers to use their Facebook profiles to register, making it easier to comment, feedback on many stories is closed or open only for a limited time. And writers often do not respond to comments. “This disdain for the audience strikes at the core of why news organizations aren’t making it,” says public policy expert and blogger David Eaves. “Why would you want to engage an audience you think is so stupid?”

By ignoring their readers and viewers, reporters are losing a valuable source of information. Journalists have always relied heavily on their connections, and with the web, Anderson points out, the number of and accessibility to these sources only increases: “The intelligence of your network becomes your intelligence.”

But developing a supportive network of potential sources isn’t easy, says Mathew Ingram, a senior writer for gigaom.com. Previously, Ingram spent about 13 months as communities editor at the Globe to build a collective of users there. He says trust is an important ingredient. “I think you have to show that you trust the members of your community, or why would they bother to form a community around your content?” Ingram says. “They would just see you as grudgingly putting up with their noise.”

* * *

Social media communities are changing journalism, but not all the efforts to adapt take full advantage of the technology’s potential. Global News set up three Twitter accounts for Remembrance Day as part of an online package that simulated coverage of the events leading up to the Armistice, as if websites existed back then. For nine days, Lundy’s team managed an interactive map, photo galleries and daily news stories. The Twitter accounts represented a soldier, an aide to Prime Minister Robert Borden and another soldier’s mother. The accounts never gained more than six followers, and two of those followers were the other characters. Because Global’s online team treated Twitter as if it were television, an otherwise active community ignored the broadcaster’s efforts on the micro-blogging site.

Lundy does recognize his obligation to allow input through forums, polls and comment sections. People are going to access social media, he says, adding that “those are forces that are far beyond our control.” The changes will take some getting used to, but there’s no alternative. And Lundy knows that if this change is going to happen, it will need to happen fast. “If you don’t know about Facebook and the rise of social media, you’re going to be left behind. And that pace just wasn’t there when I started in journalism.” Skok often references author and technologist David Weinberger: “There’s an inverse relationship between control and trust.” And Skok believes “the more we give up control and allow users to participate in the democracy of our work, the more they’ll trust us and provide that brand loyalty.”

For now, at least, Global News is choosing control over trust when its social media experiments coincide too closely with its news products. (Don’t expect live-blog diva Nina to be filling in for anchor Carolyn Mackenzie anytime soon.) Lundy and Skok know engaging with the audience is now an important part of the job. But even Lundy admits that too often they’re just following eyeballs, hoping that advertising will do the same. So, yes, there’s still work to do.

Not that a dozen gloggers are going to save the broadcast industry. But if Global News can see social media as the main meal rather than simply dessert, the network may increase the size of its most dedicated following—and offer better journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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