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

Gunfire in pariament

— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) October 22, 2014

Visual discretion is advised (Source: CBC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In July 2012 I reached out to Xtra, Toronto’s free gay and lesbian newspaper, in hopes of becoming an intern. Then-managing editor Danny Glenwright invited me up to the Pink Triangle Press offices and sifted through some of my clippings before asking his only question of the interview: “Why do you want to volunteer your time here?”

The answer was—and still is—straightforward: I am a young gay journalist who cares about the treatment of LGBTQ people in Canada. That should be reason enough to pursue work at a paper like Xtra. It does pride itself, after all, on being the voice of “everything gay.”

For more than three decades, Xtra has been a staple read for Canada’s LGBTQ community. It began originally as a promotional tool for The Body Politic in 1984, eventually outgrowing its parent mag and coming into its own. For the past two and a half years, I have been curating its letters page. But all that is coming to end this February. On January 14, Pink Triangle Press announced it would cease the printing of Xtra’s Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver paper issues, opting for a digital-only publication—marking the end of the days you could pick up an issue from Xtra’s trademark bright pink news boxes on street corners.

Though the news is not a surprise to me (financial instability is a reality for most free papers these days), it is incredibly saddening. The end of Xtra as a print product signals the end of the standout attitude its gay writers and columnists brought to the streets of Toronto. Plenty of passersby were taken aback or even disgusted by the covers Xtra would fearlessly print—half-naked men, cartoon women wearing nipple tassels and alien Stephen Harpers never seemed too far away. But whether the paper’s content would cause discomfort to those who saw it never seemed to concern Xtra. And for those in the community, like me, the covers were always funny, content always inspiring. The offbeat photos and stories were something we could relate to and often laugh about.

What first drew me to the paper, though, was not its outlandish covers, but its content. In it, I found news that mattered to me about issues that concerned people just like me. In 2011, reporter Andrea Houston’s coverage of gay-straight alliances in Catholic high schools sparked debate that led to the passage of Bill 13 in Ontario. For years, it has put out guides to Pride (something newly out-of-the-closet 16-year-old me loved). And most recently, the paper put together a series about PrEP, the latest in HIV-prevention treatment. Xtra long celebrated a part of my identity that I struggled to come to love.

While the paper will still exist online in all its gay glory, I’ll miss the sense of pride in seeing those bright pink boxes throughout the city.

Goodbye, Xtra.

Thanks to Joy Waller for the featured image. 

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: