“Should the government get involved?”

It’s a question that’s been floating around ever since Canadian journalism decided to spiral down into a black hole of unemployment and goodbye columns. The argument: the loss of print media will create a void where important stories will go, along with the very basis of democracy—accessible information and accountability. And while the Paul Godfreys of the industry don’t seem to care, government and journalism have always been implicitly tied together in an “it’s complicated” relationship—they need us to inform voters; we need them to make news.

The government should get involved, say many, or at least start an investigation to inquire into the ethical nature of this black hole. “The crisis in journalism is too important to be left to a laissez-faire approach,” says Lawrence Martin in a column for The Globe and Mail. “What good is a new voting system if the voters don’t have the information on which to make an informed decision?”

Yet, at the same time, “the Internet has blown away whatever feeble ideological reeds underpinned the leftist view of corporate control of newspapers as contraptions of power,” writes Terence Corcoran in a column for the National Post. To all the calls for government subsidies, Corcoran writes,”No thanks.”

Both sides of the argument are much too dramatic—cries of panic in moments of despair that have yet to end. First, there is no proof that government subsides can help a dying print news industry. Second, journalists are watchdogs, not lapdogs. Third, while the massive job cuts in newsrooms are nightmare-inducing, entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, as can be seen in the work done by Buzzfeed Canada, Vice Canada and their friends south of the border. Lastly, when news has branched out to multiple formats and mediums, subsidies would only be hindering innovation and progress in an industry begging for it.

I’m not suggesting that the option for government subsidy be taken off the table completely. It’s just that there is an opportunity here for change—change that no one is considering. The industry is looking outward at a moment when it should be looking inward. What should be a light bulb for innovation is instead a dying fire signalling help from the government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story has been updated from a previous version.

By Lisa Coxon

After a few glasses of Côtes du Rhônes, Stephen Maher asks if we can turn the recorders off—one faces him; the other, Glen McGregor. We’re on the patio of Métropolitain, a restaurant just below Parliament Hill that’s a popular after-work hangout among political reporters and parliamentary staff. McGregor is less concerned about inappropriate chatter getting picked up as the wine flows. His tieless light grey suit looks casual compared to Maher’s black ensemble, which is accented with a striped tie. On the Hill, journalists dress more formally. The two reporters, both 48, are recounting how they uncovered one of the biggest election scandals in years when an acquaintance—one of several who have stopped to chat—approaches our table. “Plotting the next Michener, are they?” 

The duo earned that award, among others, in 2012, for their coverage of the robocalls scandal. The Ottawa Citizen’s McGregor and Postmedia’s Maher broke the story that, in 2011, Elections Canada was investigating fake election-day calls that misinformed voters in Guelph, Ontario, that their polling stations had moved. Maher and McGregor’s investigation revealed voter suppression by Conservative operatives, reminding us all of the value of investigative journalism. 

***

McGregor has been on the Hill since 1998. Maher began working there in 2004 as the bureau chief for Halifax’s The Chronicle Herald. During the 2011 federal campaign—before the robocalls story—Maher began looking into strange, harassing calls to voters in Prince Edward Island and Toronto. Following the May election, several news outlets covered the Guelph robocalls. That August, Postmedia hired Maher as a columnist. In his job interview, he told senior vice president of content and editor-in-chief Lou Clan- cy what he’d been working on. “There sure was a lot of smoke coming out,” says Clancy. “It wasn’t rocket science to think that could be a hell of a story.”

After the election, in December 2011, McGregor wrote a story about a Conservative call centre phoning Irwin Cotler’s constituents; the calls falsely implied the Montreal MP had already announced he was going to resign and asked which potential candidate his constituents would support in a by-election. McGregor downplays the story today, but Maher gives him more credit. “It got some chum into the water,” the Atlantic Canadian insists. “It started to make things move.”

Eventually, Maher convinced McGregor to join him, and the two pitched the idea of collaborating to their managing editors—Christina Spencer, then of Postmedia, and the Citizen’s Andrew Potter. “McMaher” was born.

At first, neither editor fully understood the scope of the story. “I kept thinking at some point they’ll either get something or they won’t,” recalls Potter, now the Citizen’s editor. “It wasn’t anything I was terribly excited about at the time.” Maher, meanwhile, told Spencer, “I’ve been working on this thing, and it looks like it’s kind of coming together. When do you want to talk?” She thought about it and realized it sounded “amazing.” 

Colleagues use the word “dogged” to describe the pair, so it’s fitting that Spencer calls Maher a “terrier.” When it comes to interviews, the two reporters have different philosophies: Maher tries to build trust while McGregor tries to get information. Maher is the good cop and McGregor the bad, but as interviewees, the roles are reversed. There’s McGregor, who offered his iPhone recorder so I don’t have to keep moving mine back and forth. Then there’s Maher, suggesting again that we turn the recorders off, after thetwo debate why CTV’s Robert Fife—McGregor’s hero—is the most important political reporter in Canada right now. McGregor says it’s because he’s the best, while Maher suggests it’s because of CTV’s reach and influence. “If you’re the prime minister’s director of communications, you can deal with two dozen shitty stories in the Ottawa Citizen. You can tell the boss, ‘Ah, it’s those fuckin’ jerks at the Citizen again,’” says Maher. “You get one bad day at CTV National News and you are in big trouble with Mr. Harper.”

Early in their research, the pair mostly sniffed for a pattern, either geographical or among call companies. They created a spreadsheet of reported calls, assembled media reports and ran searches on Infomart and Google News. They asked campaign managers open-ended questions such as, “Did you have any strange calls?” Though McMaher hadn’t heard of anything similar targeting Conservative voters, they also talked to the Conservative Party’s director of communications, Fred DeLorey. The Guelph story had surfaced, but a pattern had not.

***

Investigative journalism is time-intensive and costly, and it doesn’t guarantee a story at the end. It requires patience while waiting for sources to talk and time to analyze data, chase court documents and conduct extensive research. But data journalism, which encompasses everything from developing apps to computer-assisted reporting (CAR), has made the process easier. For example, “scraping” is a time-saving technique in which specialized computer software extracts unstructured data from a website—typically in HTML format—and structures it so that it can be analyzed in a spreadsheet. 

While CAR is a good example of how investigative journalism adapts to new technologies, it’s just another tool in the arsenal. Investigative reporting also depends on a newsroom culture that views it as a priority—but as newsrooms shrink, it’s often one of the first things to go. The catch: investigative journalism is crucial to setting a newspaper apart.

For reporters, gaining the trust needed to get the time to investigate a story requires a track record of “catching rabbits,” says Maher. “Every time you go down the rabbit hole for a week or a month and come back with a rabbit, your bosses look at you and say, ‘Okay, he says he wants to go back down the rabbit hole again.’”

Not all news organizations can afford to pay salaries for several months of research, but Spencer says newsrooms should foster an environment in which every reporter is an investigator. “Investigative reporting has much more to do with getting that into people’s minds than saying, ‘We’re going to create a team’ or ‘We’re going to give people six months on a project,’” she says, pointing to McMaher as an example. “Almost every story they do, even if it’s a minor story, will reveal an investigative mindset in the way they go at it.”

Catching rabbits doesn’t always mean being cleared of other work; investigative reporters still must juggle daily assignments. “Is it asking for the moon?” says CBC’s David McKie, who has used CAR for many of his investigative projects. “Yes. Are you going to get away from it? No. It’s just reality.”

***

McMaher work in the “hot room”—named for its characteristic buzz of activity—with fellow members of the parliamentary press gallery. And it’s actually warm in here on the third floor of Centre Block, which holds the House of Commons and the Senate. Six large windows, one featuring a dingy air conditioner, line the back wall. Four televisions suspended from the ceiling broadcast the Commons feed throughout the day. Reporters shout to each other from their desks. “It’s like being in a monkey cage,” McGregor says. The room is one giant fire hazard: 26 desks overflow with papers and books. Everything reporters need is on this floor—cafeteria, washrooms, the Commons, the Senate. They call eating lunch off the Hill “going ashore.”

McGregor and Maher sit five rows apart. Both have Mac desk- tops, though McGregor’s is balanced on a stack of three fat phone books—he’s taller—while Maher’s sits flat on his desk beside three boxes containing Deadline, his self-published political thriller, set in Ottawa.

Various pins, including one that reads “Stop Harper,” line the left side of his cubicle. Just above those, taped to a white cardboard box, is a black and white photo of Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews. In a cheeky attempt to signal to Mathews that they wanted to talk, McMaher posed beside the picture, in March 2012, for The Hill Times, a politics and government newsweekly based in Ottawa that ran a story about their work. (Mathews never agreed to McMaher’s interview requests.) In keeping with their modest sense of humour, both men have the same newspaper clipping tacked up—a headline with a comical typo: “Citizen calls McGregor and Maher ‘McMaher’: reporters who broke explosive roboballs story.”

***

McGregor’s order of eight oysters arrives at the table. Maher jumps at them after he learns they’re from Cooks Cove, Nova Scotia. McGregor doesn’t like to put a lot of “stuff” on them; Maher agrees that’s not the point.

“Poor you, listening to this later,” Maher says to me. “I don’t know about you, Glen, but I find that oysters . . .” The two of them start to chuckle. Maher begins asking a question, then answers it himself: “Is this going to end up in the—never mind.”

McGregor and Maher have a symbiotic relationship; each re- porter has strengths that complement those of the other. McGregor has a reputation as the data-mining mastermind—“Probably a little overblown,” Maher says, “but they say that about him.” McGregor has learned to combine data skills with storytelling. “Glen has a skill set that very few journalists have,” says Potter. “He’s the only one who knows how to do the analysis, the scraping, but also the reporting.”

Maher is the source guy, the one who develops contacts. “He knows everybody,” says Spencer. “He’s easy to talk to and knows how to make people talk.” That’s one of the reasons McGregor liked working with him. “I had gotten so far into data journalism that I wasn’t talking to human sources anymore,” he says. McGregor chased court documents and access to information requests, but the stories involved a lot of talking to people. Since there wasn’t a huge data component to robocalls, he had to get his interviewing skills “back up to snuff.”

***

In January 2012, McGregor obtains the Guelph campaign phone records (and learns other journalists have obtained them too). For weeks, he pores over the list, trying to determine who is be- hind the robocalls. He gets excited, believing there are about four different suspects: “This guy has gotta be it because of all these weird calls to Calgary!” But the leads are all dead ends. Then, in early February, the first big break happens: a source revealsElections Canada is looking into the robocalls. One source leads Maher to another—code-named Simone de Beauvoir—who tells him the investigation is linked to RackNine Inc., an Edmonton voice broadcast company working nationally for the Conservative Party, and confirms Mathews is going through campaign phone records. A Conservative source admits the party is rattled and conducting its own internal probe.

Finally, two numbers at the bottom of the phone list jump out: calls made on the morning of election day from the Guelph campaign to RackNine, just minutes after the robocalls went out. “And that was like, ‘Shit,’” says McGregor, who still can’t explain why he didn’t see the suspicious calls earlier.

Doing what Maher describes as a “fist-pumping slow-walk,” McGregor comes around the corner in the hot room and puts the list on Maher’s desk. “RackNine!” he says, pointing at the numbers. Maher got the source, McGregor got the document and now they have a story.

One morning soon after, McMaher are discussing the story in the lounge adjacent to the hot room—a regular meeting place. Previously a smoking lounge, it features dark wood, black leather furniture, cathedral windows and photos of press gallery members dating back to 1873.

The reporters need to contact RackNine’s owners: McGregor will call Rick McKnight and Maher will phone Matt Meier simultaneously so the men don’t have time to compare notes. McGregor prepares scripts so they will at least get the allegations on the record in case the owners hang up on them.

At their desks, McGregor and Maher peek above their cubicles: “Ready, one, two, three, go.” Maher comes over to McGregor and says he struck out, getting Meier’s voicemail. McGregor gets a live voice, but it’s not McKnight—it’s Meier. He covers the receiver, mouthing “Meier!” When McGregor alleges RackNine is being investigated, Meier plays it “clever and cute” and says he’ll call back. Eventually, he does: he had no idea RackNine’s servers were used to initiate the robocalls until he was contacted by Elections Canada in November 2011; Elections Canada has obtained a search warrant and executed an Information to Obtain (ITO)—the judge’s orders to hand over phone records; he’s co-operating with the investigation. Weeks later, McMaher learn McKnight doesn’t exist; he’s an online persona created by Meier.

The reporters now have evidence tying the Conservative campaign in Guelph to RackNine. McGregor files a draft to Potter, who, realizing what they have, says, “Holy fuck.” The story appears online on February 22, 2012, and runs the next day on A1 of the Citizen.

The following week, Ryan Cormier, court reporter for the Edmonton Journal, faxes a copy of the ITO to McMaher. The two publish a story on it, but McGregor knows from his work on the “in-and-out” scandal of 2006 (a scheme that saw the Conservatives spend a million dollars more on advertising than they should have during the election campaign) that they need more. The investigating officer—in this case, Mathews—has to swear an affidavit that will become part of the public record. “Go back,” they tell Cormier. “You gotta get the affidavit.”

Cormier finally scores it. On February 28, McGregor tells Potter they’ll have it by 2 p.m., 15 minutes before Question Period.

12:32 p.m.: McGregor emails Potter: “just worried about our useless fucking website taking 30 minutes to update.”
12:49 p.m.: Potter replies, saying the URL can be up within two minutes, but the server needs 30 minutes before it will show up in the index.

Huddled over the fax machine, McMaher can only wait. They want to break the story online during Question Period and tweet it so the Opposition can get a question in. The fax machine ticks along, and they read every page as it spits out: “Okay, I know that, I know that, we know that.” Finally, at 1:30, they get the affidavit and spot something unexpected: Pierre Poutine of Separatist Street, Joliette, Quebec. Elections Canada traced the number on the call display to a disposable cellphone with a Joliette area code that was used to set up the robocall account with RackNine.

“We have this moment where we kind of look at each other,” Maher remembers. “I think we embraced and kissed.” Several reporters in the press gallery are now chasing the story, and even though McMaher are ahead of the curve, they’re worried The Globe and Mail’s Daniel LeBlanc and Campbell Clarke might beat them to it. Maher’s desk is closer, so he grabs the affidavit and starts writing—500 words in 15 minutes. McGregor runs to his own desk and, at 1:46, unable to resist, tweets, “The made-up name ‘Pierre Poutine’ will be on all lips later today.”

1:49 p.m.: Cormier emails everyone involved: “Yeah, CBC has the Racknine ITO . . .”
2:14 p.m.: Maher emails Spencer and Potter: “hurry cbc has this”
2:17 p.m.: Potter emails the Citizen’s web guy, ccing McGregor, asking him to put the URL up. “HIGH PRIORITY” is in the subject line.
2:21 p.m.: McGregor replies to Potter’s previous email: “Whatever . . . just need the URL soon. Globe and CBC both have same docs!! We gotta move here!”

McGregor does not like to be scooped. “He loves to be first,” says Michael Bate, editor of Frank magazine, where McGregor worked for eight years. “It’s a game for him.” However, as the robocalls story demonstrates, in investigative journalism, collaboration can sometimes be more helpful than competition.

The co-production model—two or more news organizations working together on a story—brings journalists together to pool resources and produce more comprehensive investigations. This is especially useful in a time of budget cuts. The Toronto Star’s “enterprise team,” comprising reporters Robert Cribb, Jennifer Quinn and, until recently, Julian Sher, has experimented with co-pros on several investigative stories since late 2012. Now senior producer at The Fifth Estate, Sher says co-pros were always useful, but today “they’re a life-saving necessity for good investigative journalism”—not because they save money so much as because they maximize what news outlets are willing to spend. Handing over sources and research to colleagues isn’t easy; it requires trust. But once journalists build that trust, Sher says, “It is unshakeable.”

***

Maher heads into the Commons press gallery and sits in a green-leather-upholstered wooden chair, overlooking the MPs. Meanwhile, McGregor is in the lobby, ready to scrum interim Liberal leader Bob Rae. Maher repeatedly hits refresh on his phone, waiting for the link to show up from the Citizen’s website. At 2:27 the story lands and Maher tweets it. Opposition members start showing each other their phones. 

2:39p.m.: A Liberal researcher emails McGregor: “Sending a Q into the House.”

An NDP and a Liberal MP step behind the mustard-yellow velvet curtain to prepare questions. Government House leader Peter Van Loan shows his phone to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who scrolls through the story without showing any emotion. Denis Coderre, then a Liberal MP, addresses the prime minister, informing him the Opposition has just learned of the direct link between RackNine and his party. “Can someone please explain to us why this electoral fraud took place? Could he set the record straight and tell us why the Conservative Party did such a thing?”

These are the moments investigative journalists live for. McGregor admits, “That was pure adrenaline for an hour.”

***
Predictably, McGregor and Maher faced mockery and ridicule from Conservative bloggers and right-wing news organizations such as Sun News Network. Ezra Levant implied that Maher had once been booted from a Conservative conference for being drunk. Byline host Brian Lilley used McGregor’s college job—DJing at a strip club—and the fact that his mother once worked for the NDP to try to discredit him. Lilley also suggested McMaher willfully omitted facts from their stories; Maher denies this, noting that some facts were leaked only to party-friendly news outlets.

At the time, Maher was bothered by the cheap shots, but now he’s more philosophical. “When we put politicians in the crosshairs and they are subject to negative public scrutiny, it is extremely unpleasant for them,” he says. “I didn’t understand how unpleasant until I was subjected to something similar.” But if anyone tried to put pressure on their editors, the reporters never knew about it. Potter says the same about Gerry Nott, then the Citizen’s publisher and editor-in-chief. “For all I know, he was getting calls from the PMO. I don’t know, but there was never any pressure on that front from Gerry,” says Potter, who adds that the paper kept the reporters in a bubble so they could just do their jobs. “We put that story on the front page almost every day for two months, and I know some readers and other people thought we were making a mountain out of a molehill.” Clancy remembers it the same way: “There were a lot of naysayers outside of government too. Not all the media bought into this story right away.” But the editors told the duo to keep reporting it. And they did.

In early 2013, proposed redrawn Saskatchewan riding boundaries would have favoured opposition parties. A robocall disguised as a poll told voters that eliminating the province’s hybrid ridings (part country, part city) would pit urban areas against rural ones and “offend Saskatchewan values.” While Maher was on holiday, McGregor pursued the story. The Conservatives denied responsibility, but when one of the phone numbers associated with the calls surfaced, McGregor called it and immediately recognized the voice of Matt Meier. After recording the outgoing message, he sent it to Maher, who then sent it to a forensic voice analysis expert in the U.S. The expert compared McGregor’s recording with the RackNine voicemail and concluded both were the same guy. McMaher emailed the Conservatives, who later sent a memo to the press gallery admitting to arranging the robocalls. McMaher’s subsequent story proved the Conservatives had again hired RackNine, to execute the Saskatchewan robocall. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigation and Harvey Cashore’s coverage of the Mulroney Airbus affair are part of a long history of investigative journalists uncovering political scandals. But reporters, no matter how persistent, can only know as much as they’re allowed to find out. In the beginning, Maher says, the government had all the information, but now, “A lot of marbles have crossed the table from them to us, and there’s every reason to believe that they will be sliding more marbles to us before it’s over.”

So far, Elections Canada has charged only one person in connection with the robocalls scandal: Michael Sona, a young Conservative Party staffer who worked on the Guelph campaign. Still, McGregor and Maher talk about it almost every day. “We don’t move the puck a whole lot,” says McGregor, but they’ve followed up on new developments. In November 2013, after a judge lifted a publication ban on the names of six witnesses who alleged Sona bragged about arranging the Guelph robocalls, McMaher wrote a story identifying the witnesses and outlining their accusations.

“It’s ultimately an unfinished piece of work,” says McGregor, highlighting one reason the story was so explosive. The reporters uncovered a lot, but not the most important part: the smoking gun. That hole drove the story forward, dominating political news for weeks. If McMaher had identified Pierre Poutine, it might have been a one-week sensation. “Ottawa is a very competitive media environment, and everybody wanted a piece of that story,” says Spencer. Even though they didn’t crack the case, their reporting earned much acclaim. In one weekend, they won the “triple crown” of awards: Press Freedom, Canadian Association of Journalists and National Newspaper. “I think it’s what could be called a grand slam,” says Clancy, adding that as a result of the story, Maher spends more time on investigative reporting. His once triweekly column now appears only weekly so he has time to pursue investigative pieces.

“Like a lot of things that turn out extremely well,” says Potter, “you don’t plan them and you don’t expect them.” McMaher believe the story mattered to the public. “What’s important in politics is what’s important to people, and with robocalls, you have voters who want to exercise their franchise being deceived,” says Maher. “You can write a lot of important stories, and if nobody gives a shit, then it will have no impact.”

***

Hours have passed, but Maher is still playing bad cop. “I’m worried that this is all a scam, and she’s really writing a feature on Bob Fife,” he says before he beat-boxes into McGregor’s iPhone, which, despite Maher’s many requests, is still recording. He leans forward, looking at me with ice-blue eyes, one brow raised. “Could it be . . . Bob Fife: a good reporter or not a good reporter? You could hang us with that.”

McGregor appears to remember something. “Can we tell her about the Manitoba thing?”

Maher pauses: “I don’t think we should. We’ve given her enough. We’ve given her too much.”

The recognition they’ve received—including that Michener—makes nostalgia inevitable. “I’ve never done any work in my career that has been as satisfying or as interesting,” Maher says. “Stories like robocalls come along maybe once or twice in a career,” McGregor adds. “I love paper chases, having a mystery to find out.”

It was the most fun they ever had on a story.

***

A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the headline of the clipping above McGregor and Maher’s desks as “Citizen calls McGregor and Maher ‘McMaher’: reporters who broke explosive robocalls story.” “Robocalls” should instead be “roboballs.”

This piece was published in the Spring 2014 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

Stunned silence filled the meeting room. The 11 governors on the board of the National Newspaper Awards were in a daze. Three of them-Bill Peterson, executive editor of The Star Phoenix in Saskatoon; John Honderich, editor of The Toronto Star; and John Paton, general manager of the Ottawa Sun-had just resigned. They were protesting the majority vote in favour of accepting, without comment, the decision of the judges to uphold the 1990 award for enterprise reporting to Greg Weston and Jack Aubry of The Ottawa Citizen. For a moment, it seemed that not just an award but the fate of the NNA program itself hung in the balance.

The feature article splitting the board was a two-part profile of Marc Lepine, the killer of 14 women at the Ecole Poly technique in Montreal. The Canadian Association of Journalists had already given the 12,000-word piece the CAJ award for best investigative reporting. But the possibility of plagiarism by Weston and Aubry was raised by reporters at The Gazette in Montreal. The complaints forced the boards of both organizations to ask the original judges to reconsider their decisions. In June 1991 theCAJ judges upheld the award and in September the NNA judges followed suit.

The protest resignations at the NNA board meeting later in September showed that not everyone was happy with the judges’ review. But, after three hours of rancorous discussion, the resignations were withdrawn and the governors reached a compromise. By a vote of six to five, they accepted the decision of the judges that the entry was original. However, their final press release went on to name the five governors who disagreed with the majority. Peterson, the chair of the board, says he decided to live with the compromise because everyone would know “there had been a pretty good brawl over this.”
Yet the fallout from the controversy over the Lepine profile still hangs over the Canadian newspaper industry. Few journalists believe that the issues raised during the stormy debate in the summer of 1991 have been settled by the confirmation of the awards to Weston and Aubry. On the contrary, concepts such as plagiarism and ethical journalistic practice, which formerly had seemed straightforward, suddenly became complex and difficult to define. At the same time, the hidden issue of the fundamental relationship of trust between the writer and the reader gradually came into focus.

The Weston/Aubry profile ran in the Citizen, a Southam paper, on February 7 and 8, 1990, two months after the massacre. The Gazette, also a Southam paper, ran a much shorter version on February 11. Its reporters had already written over 100 stories on the massacre, a collection of which earned the Gazette a 1989 runner-up NNA for spot-news coverage. But it was only when theCitizen’s profile won an award, over one year after it first ran, that Gazette reporters Alexander Norris and Elizabeth Thompson raised the question of plagiarism.

A third Gazette reporter, Rod Macdonell, was authorized by the paper to investigate the complaints. His intensive analysis of the Lepine profile focuses on three contentious areas that he and the others claim reveal improprieties, and that the NNA and CA] boards asked their judges to consider in their reviews.

The first was a section where Isabelle Lahaie, a friend of Lepine’s sister, is directly quoted. Her initial exclusive interview appeared in Ie journal de montreal under Michel Benoit’s byline. In the Weston/Aubry profile, she is quoted in English saying exactly what she said in French in the journal without attribution to the original source. Weston and Aubry admit they never interviewed Lahaie but Aubry says he spoke to Benoit to confirm that his story was not altered in editing. Weston says they didn’t feel attribution was required once the accuracy was established. But Benoit told the Ryerson Review of Journalism that he never spoke to Weston or Aubry .

The second area of doubt was a section dealing with Erik Cossette, Lepine’s roommate, which Weston and Aubry later readily admitted was taken from an exclusive interview given by Cossette to Alexander Norris. Again there was no attribution. Aubry says that when he asked for an interview, Cossette refused to answer any questions but “more or less” gave Aubry “carte blanche” to use the Norris interview. Weston says that the interview acquired the status of a press release because Cossette called it “his statement.”

The last item questioned was a quote by Jean Belanger, Lepine’s childhood friend. It ran in the Gazette on December 9, 1989 under the shared byline of Rod Macdonell, Elizabeth Thompson, Andrew McIntosh and William Marsden as follows: “‘He kept his plans very close to himself,’ he added. ‘If he would have a problem, he would never ask for help. If something hurt him inside, he would keep it to himself. ‘” In the W eston/Aubry piece Belanger is quoted as saying: “‘He kept everything very close to himself, even with me,’ Belanger says, shaking his head. ‘If he had a problem, he would never ask for help.'”

In this case, Weston did interview Belanger. Weston gave Belanger a clipping of the Gazette story to confirm its accuracy and in the hope that he would add more details. He later described, for the Review, what happened when Belanger read the interview: “He’s been talking about the subject [Lepine] and going around and around and when he gets back to it he’s sitting there shaking his head and saying ‘yea.'” So Weston added the descriptive gesture to the quote, reinforcing the reader’s mistaken impression that Belanger had said these words originally to Weston rather than to the Gazette.

The Gazette reporters’ objections to the awards, backed by Macdonell’s research, raised unsettling questions for the boards of the CA] and NNA. Nothing like this had ever happened before and neither had rules to cover such a contingency. However, in their instructions to the judges, both boards avoided mentioning “plagiarism,” which the Oxford dictionary defines as the action or practice of taking and using ”as one’s own the thoughts, writings or inventions of another.”

The CA], a national association of active journalists and editors, asked its judges only to uphold or revoke the award in light of a formal complaint lodged by Elizabeth Thompson. The only CAJ judge who provided a written decision was Richard Cleroux, an Ottawa-based free-lance journalist. In his four-page response he accused Weston and Aubry of a lack of journalistic courtesy for not giving credit to the original sources of some of their material. But he ruled out a verdict of plagiarism in favour of “replication,” a vague misdemeanour rather than an outright crime. Furthermore, he excused Weston and Aubry by pointing out that the lifted quotes were a very small part of an otherwise “brilliant” work.

CAJ judge Peter C. Newman’s response was a terse fax saying that he voted to let the award stand. There was no plagiarism, he told the Review, because what Weston and Aubry did is normal journalistic practice for using quotes. Quotes are constantly being taken from his books without attribution, he said, and he has no objection.

At the other extreme, CAJ judge Peter Desbarats, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario, told the Review there was no doubt that Weston and Aubry were guilty of plagiarism. Desbarats is supported in his view by Errol Aspevig, professor of philosophy and a non-journalist instructing in media ethics at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. Aspevig says that while spoken words may belong to the interviewees, once writers put them on paper between quotation marks and that is published as original material, those direct quotes are the property of the writers: they are, literally, their writings.

Nevertheless, Desbarats also argued that the plagiarized material was such a small percentage of the whole story that it would have been a disproportionate penalty to take the award away, especially since it was already tarnished. Still, if the accusation of plagiarism had been made during the judging process and ifhe had investigated the charges then, he says, he would not have given them the award in the first place.

The CA] board had already committed itself to upholding the judges’ final decision without knowing what the decision was-a strong statement in support of the integrity of the independent jury system. Just the same, when the judges’ ruling was made known, board chair Charles Bury, among other board members, was content with it. “They [Weston and Aubry] were accused of stealing,” says Bury, editor of The Record in Sherbrooke, “but what it came down to was the judges determined that they had actually borrowed.” It made their story “imperfect,” he says, but not “total garbage.”

Matters were more difficult for the NNA, an industry association whose sole purpose is to give awards and uphold standards of excellence. Confronted with a complaint from the Gazette’s Alexander Norris, the board specifically instructed the judges to decide if the story was an original work as required by the contest rules.

The NNA judges’ five-page unanimous decision upheld the award because they felt the story was original. But they slapped Weston and Aubry on the wrists for “bad form” because they failed to attribute information and direct quotes from the exclusive interviews with Cossette and Lahaie. The use of direct quotes without attribution wasn’t plagiarism-it was merely “the use of material under false pretenses.” In support of this ruling, and contrary to Aspevig’s views, they argued that direct quotes, properly attributed to the speakers, are not considered plagiarized. The speakers are the owners of the words, not the journalists who report them.

Unlike the CAJ, the NNA board voted on whether to accept the result of the review with full knowledge of what that result was. Not surprisingly, the board ended up deeply divided. Governor John Miller, chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism, says: “We disagreed on what we feel our obligations are and the power we wield as a board.” He winces when he says he felt compelled to accept the judges’ decision because “the rules don’t provide for us [the governors] to deny a prize on the basis of shoddy journalism. The judges’ decision is final.” But even on this point the governors were split. Stuart Robertson, a media lawyer on the board, says there would have been no legal or constitutional problem if they had decided to set aside the judges’ decision and begin the process again.

Even if Weston and Aubry were not guilty of plagiarism but were guilty of discourtesy, bad form and using quotes under false pretenses, both boards were uncertain if any punishment was called for. Norris, on the other hand, was certain that both rulings depicted Canadian journalism as a “bush-league affair with low standards.” Fighting to control his bitterness, Norris told the Review, “Some people say I was making a mountain out of a molehill…that a small amount of plagiarism is all right. Don’t make a fuss about it.”

But even after the judges’ criticisms, Weston, who quit the Citizen in April 1991 to finish a book, is unrepentant. “What was done here [in the Lepine story] goes on in every newspaper every day of the week.” His operating philosophy is to do what serves the reader best. And that, he says, is to verify the accuracy of previously published information before he uses it. When he can’t do that, he attributes. But attribution instead of verification is “cheap journalism,” according to Weston. The average reader doesn’t care who first reported something, only that it is correct.

The Citizen’s national editor, Graham Parley, claims there was no plagiarism in the Lepine profile and no need for attribution. Parley; who was the supervising editor on the piece, argues that all the questionable parts stood on their own. They had either been verified or, in the case of the exclusive Cossette interview by Norris had appeared once before in the Citizen under Norris’s byline vi:; the Southam News service. It was now in the Citizen’s data base and therefore the Citizen’s to use as it wished. Not the least bit humbled by the judges’ criticisms, Parley says, “In future if in doubt we’re going to attribute just because of the enormous fuss that happened this time.”

Veterans like Desbarats agree that journalistic shoplifting has been very common in the industry. One of Desbarats’s first jobs at the Gazette and the old Montreal Star was to rewrite stories from other papers to make them look original, often without adding any new information. There was no thought given to attribution. “That was quite common and I expect a lot of that stuff is still quite common,” he says.

Globe and Mail columnist Stevie Cameron calls this lack of attribution “the magpie approach to journalism.” The fact is that newspapers hate to give each other credit, she says. At the same time, Norris claims there is an invisible old boys’ network in the industry which made both the CAJ and NNA go to incredible lengths to avoid stating the obvious even after they all acknowledged that Weston and Aubry copied material from his story without attribution. He angrily denounces this reluctance as “cronyism.” Journalists love to condemn irregularities in other areas of society, he notes with frustration, “so why the hell can’t we point it out when it happens in our own backyard?”

Perhaps the answer to Norris’s question is that journalists are reluctant to challenge the status quo-an implicit code that permits the lifting of information without attribution. Miller is aware of this practice but he is unwilling to accept it as inevitable. “I think it’s like some cancer that you have to expose,” he says. “You have to root it out.”

But rooting it out is difficult when there are unwritten industry rules that say newspapers shouldn’t knock each other. If papers throw stones, the reasoning goes, they put their own glass houses at risk. But when Weston and Aubry won their CAJ award and Macdonell “smelled a rat,” his subsequent investigation of the three problematic sections in the profile was actually sanctioned by the Gazette’s management group made up of senior editors. He was given the time and expenses he needed to do a thorough job.

And Macdonell was thorough. He documented his evidence, including a face-to-face interview with Weston and Aubry, in a memo to Raymond Brassard, the Gazette’s city editor. Brassard then sent copies of the memo to his senior colleagues and, after a series of discussions, they decided to pursue the matter no further. Brassard told the Review: “We felt as a management group that there just wasn’t quite enough hard evidence that these people had gone out and plagiarized.” However, he agrees that there were some “questionable journalistic practices” involved in the Citizen’s story. “The problem obviously is the old ‘he who casts the first stone’ theory. How many reporters have not gone into the files and pulled out background material and used it?”

In the following months, Gazette management did not publicly back Norris and the others in their complaints. Gazette editor Norman Webster says his organization was vulnerable to accusations of sour grapes because the Ottawa paper had won the awards for a Montreal story, so management had to be careful about what it said. He also cites his conflict of interest as a member of the NNA board of governors, although he resigned in June before the September vote on the matter. But even after his resignation he didn’t support his reporters. Webster says he wanted to appear impartial. “I didn’t think I had to mount a white horse and charge.”

Meanwhile at the Citizen, Graham Parley had no such inhibitions. He wrote impassioned letters to the CAJ and The Globe and Mail defending his reporters’ integrity and, ultimately, his own. Parley appears to be especially enraged by the proprietary claims of a Southam sister newspaper to material that he considers to be public domain. He says disdainfully that Gazette reporters “almost became hysterically obsessive and puritan to the point of nausea with their complaints and shrieks of plagiarism.”

But if information can so easily be classified as “public domain,” it will only reinforce the industry tendency not to attribute, even when it is a small, fairly insignificant section of a story. Desbarats explains the Weston/Aubry motivation not to give credit as “partly that old tradition of borrowing without attribution and the other part was perhaps a little bit of that competitive feeling. It doesn’t look quite as good if you admit that the information came from somebody else. It raises the question-‘Well, why didn’t you get the information yourself?'”

In the last of Macdonell’s three problem areas-the Belanger interview in which Weston described him as “shaking his head” Weston did in fact try to get the information for himself. Unlike the Lahaie and Cossette sections taken from published stories, he did interview Belanger personally. But the addition of the “shaking his head” stage direction particularly bothered Honderich and Miller as well as Aspevig. While no one goes so far as to call it fabrication, Aspevig says that, in the context of the previously published quotation, it suggests a “setious, intentional misrepresentation” and breach of the implied trust between writers and readers. Readers trust that what they read is the product of the writer’s own efforts unless told otherwise, he says. When that tacit understanding is broken, a fundamental condition of journalistic credibility is breached and readers are justified in being suspicious of the accuracy of the entire story.

The controversy surrounding the awards has shone a spotlight on several ethical problems-plagiarism and good journalistic practice; the relationship between the writer and the reader; and the effect the tradition of not knocking other newspapers has on all these issues. The question of how or even if the industry, professional organizations and individual journalists will deal with these matters remains to be answered. For Alexander Norris, there were few options. He quit the CA] in disgust after it upheld the award to Weston and Aubry. In his letter of resignation he says the CA] “no longer has the moral authority to speak on issues of journalistic ethics.” Jock Ferguson, an award-winning investigative reporter and a founding member of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, the precursor of the CA], says the organization has no focus and doesn’t know what it stands for. He is also no longer a member and, like Norris, he says the award should have been revoked.

A less dramatic response to the affair comes from Eliza Thompson, a CA] board member and an original complaint She has decided to stay on at the CA] to work with other b members on a code of ethics. A national association like the I with over 1,000 members might be a good source for a journalistic code, but Bury says pointedly, “We are not responsible for ethics of journalists.” A model code of ethics would never beci a policy of the organization, according to Bury, because then too many individual codes to come up with one that could as everyone.

Other industry bodies are trying to combat the issue, however The Ottawa Citizen now has its own policy book that including lengthy definition of plagiarism. Patley says it was underway be the awards controversy. “I think the better papers leave no dc with their reporters on what their ethical standards are,” he say Although the NNA isn’t codifying its ethics, it has decided we should be responsible for them. To avoid the inner turmoil of year’s controversy, the governors have amended NNA rules so t in the future they alone will decide disputes which reflect on NNA standards.

Still, the industry as a whole gives no sign that the issues rai by the profile haven’t been buried prematurely. After all, the N~ and CA] upheld their awards so why discuss it further? Maybe, was plagiarism, maybe it wasn’t. Daily newspapering doesn’t all much time for reflection. There are deadlines to meet. Meanwhile the most difficult ethical question raised by the Lepine profile the ongoing breaches of trust between journalists and their readers-remains unexamined. At least until the next time, who something more than a few withdrawn protest resignations may needed to root out the cancer within.

Saturday Night, the magazine that hasn’t made a penny for more than 40 years, has always been a hard sell. And now that the venerable but perennially money-losing magazine is operating on a controlled-circulation basis, few media forecasters are predicting an easier economic future. At the magazine’s glitzy launch party last October at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, David Olive, editor of Report On Business Magazine, foresaw a rocky ride. “The bigger the launch, the bigger the fall,” he said, recalling the demise of Vista, Domino, Quest and City Woman.

Under the intense scrutiny of the country’s magazine industry, consulting publisher Jeffrey Shearer has been charged with the burdensome task of turning Saturday Night, which is one of Canada’s most expensive magazines to produce and is estimated to still be losing money, into a profitable success. Shearer rode the controlled-circulation concept to heady heights with Quest and City Woman, as executive vicepresident of Comac Communications Ltd., until Quest got into trouble in the early eighties. He ought to know that controlled circulation is a hard sell.

But Shearer believes Saturday Night will not only break even, but will also see profits within the next two to five years. “We’re doing tracking studies by phone and personal interviews with readers after every issue. We’re getting an excellent response. Our targetted audience is clearly interested in this broader range of editorial material. They may not have read it before, but they’re reading it now,” he says.

Restructured from a subscriber base of 127,000 to a controlled-circulation newspaper supplement of 400,000, gracing homes with incomes of $40,000 a year or more, the new Saturday Night is delivered with selected issues of the Montreal Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal, The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. Still available on the newsstand and delivered by mail to paying subscribers outside the targetted controlled-circulation areas, the relaunched magazine is a controlled/subscriber hybrid.

Patrick Walshe, vicepresident of the advertising firm Harrison, Young, Pesonen and Newell Inc., says, “It’s a quasi-controlled magazine. A magazine that will succeed is one that is really well-focused and well-niched, and I don’t see Saturday Night delivering on these scores. The key issue is not the receivership of 400,000 magazines, but the amount of time spent by its readers and how they value it.”

Janet Landreth, media group head of the McKim Media Group, explains, “Advertisers in the first few issues weren’t taking a big risk because of the huge discounting that went on.” The rejuvenated Saturday Night will have to continue discounting rates until it can assure advertisers it is not only being received but read. Nevertheless, advertising sales manager Jennifer Bedford says ad sales are strong. “In the first three issues alone, we’ve generated more advertising business than we did all of last year.”

The flashy premier issue resembled a cross between Vanity Fair and Harper’s, instead of the blend of stodginess and cultural nationalism that characterized its former incarnation. There was more lavish display of type, artwork, photography and graphics. But despite the new look, clearly aimed at a younger audience, there wasn’t much new in the new Saturday Night. Ironically, the cover, an arresting photo of Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins, left the impression that the magazine was outdated. Timmins might have been hot, say four years ago, but at the time of the release of the magazine, she wasn’t on tour, nor had she produced a new record.

After reviewing the first issue, Doug Bennet, editor of Masthead magazine, didn’t think the restructuring was satisfying both new and old readers. “It’s unfocused right now. The new graphics are amazing, but it’s not known who they’re trying to appeal to,” he said. “As a result of this ambivalence, advertisers will probably wait for six months to a year before buying.”

But despite such negative predictions, there are at least a few who don’t expect the new Saturday Night to fall from the sky just yet. Hugh Dow, president of Initiative Media, agrees there is some obvious fallout from the previous readership, but he believes the magazine will ultimately attract a broader audience. “It has a sizable circulation and good editorial content.”

Joann Webb, who has been the editor of a number of publications, sees the magazine as a breath of fresh air. “I am personally excited that Saturday Night has the guts to move forward in the midst of the bleakest environment I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if they will succeed, but I sure as hell hope they do.”