Stephen Leahy is passionate about the environment. So passionate, in fact, that the 61-year-old Canadian journalist is willing to live below the poverty line in his in-laws’ basement apartment so he can continue reporting on environmental injustices.

Those sacrifices seem worth it when Inter Press Service agrees to publish his story about the Ninth World Wilderness Congress in Mexico. It’s November 6, 2009, and Leahy has a huge scoop—a group of scientists has concluded that in order to preserve the earth’s wildlife, more than half the planet will need protection from the effects of climate change.

But Leahy soon learns that four fellow journalists tried, and failed, to sell the same story to mainstream news outlets. Never mind environmental sustainability—what about the journalistic ecosystem? As his colleagues consider careers in public relations, Leahy hatches a plan. He jots down the facts: Canadians want to stay informed about the environment, and he’s a qualified journalist with a loyal following. If traditional publishers won’t pay, then he’ll go directly to the public. Leahy calls his brainstorm “community-supported environmental journalism.”

The crowdfunding website Kickstarter launched in April 2009, about seven months before Leahy attaches a PayPal account to his website. The timing for crowdfunding appears fortunate, as journalists in this country have had to endure a string of massive budget cuts—the Canadian Media Guild reported that roughly 2,000 industry jobs were cut from January to May in 2009. At the same time, environmental reporting had started to lose its permanent home at traditional news organizations.

Some newspapers, such as the Guelph Mercury, have seldom maintained an environmental beat, while others, including The Hamilton Spectator, have seen such coverage decrease. Many newspapers publish sporadic stories from freelance writers and general assignment reporters that tend to focus on political conflicts instead of environmental consequences.

Today, almost six years after it launched, Kickstarter is no longer just a niche option for quirky indie musicians trying to record an EP; it’s a powerful method of innovation. Crowdfunding success stories include the Pebble smartwatch, which raised millions of dollars, and the Coolest, a high-tech portable cooler with more than 60,000 backers. Meanwhile, user-supported environmental reporting is still waiting for its Pebble or Coolest.

Crowdfunded journalism offers the public an opportunity to engage with the material they’re funding and make suggestions before it’s published. But the risks and challenges of journalism by donation are numerous. Can it reach the same number of people as mainstream media? Will its content remain engaging enough to sustain funding? And, finally, can it prevent longform journalism—including quality environmental stories—from getting stuck on the outskirts of the internet?

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Staff environmental reporters were also not afraid to make bold linkages. When smog began to cloud B.C.’s horizon in April 1995, Ross Howard wrote in the Globe that ozone, one of smog’s ingredients, was “the second-greatest cause of lung disease after smoking.” While Howard and Keating were two of Canada’s leading environment reporters, neither had environmental sciences degrees. But their articles conveyed heft and knowledge because they had access to leading scientists and the time they needed to craft compelling narratives.

While Howard and Keating chased acid rain woes, Peter Calamai, a science reporter for the Toronto Star, had his eye on another prize. He wrote with three prominent parts of the paper in mind: front page, page three and a section front in the weekend editions of the paper. “If I got anywhere else other than that,” he says, “I considered it a failure.”

Even before he started at the Star in 1998, he realized that the only way the majority of the population would read his stories was if he “shoved it down their throats.” He believes that it’s even harder for journalists today, because editors no longer push for science-related stories.

What was, until recently, considered mainstream environmental coverage may now be scorned as activism by some critics and politicians. On December 24, 2012, Mike De Souza, then a national political correspondent for Postmedia, wrote a story about the high price of the government’s new fuel efficiency standards. After combing through the fine print of the report, De Souza found that stricter fuel economy standards on new cars could increase road congestion and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Ten days later, in a letter published in The Windsor Star, then-environment minister Peter Kent dismissed De Souza as an activist.

Being called an activist generally doesn’t bother the reporter, but it may have bothered his bosses at Postmedia. De Souza called out the federal government’s relationship with oil companies, and held the Conservatives accountable for casting doubt on climate change and allegedly muzzling scientists. Although De Souza didn’t let what he calls the “intimidation tactics” distract him from his investigations, Postmedia laid him off along with two full-time political reporters at its Ottawa bureau in February 2014. “It wasn’t explained to me,” De Souza says after a long pause. “I was told there were budget cuts, but I wasn’t ever given any official reasoning why I would be picked as opposed to other people who remained in the bureau.”

While De Souza had to deal with the pressures of the government and advertisers, not all environmental journalism is like this. So what does that look like? During question period on December 9, 2014, the Conservatives withdrew support for a carbon tax and pointed out that no other countries have regulations on their oil and gas sector. The next day, DeSmog Canada countered the prime minister’s claims with a colourful infographic titled “Carbon Regulations Around the World.”

DeSmog found that more than half of the world’s population live in countries with some form of regulation on carbon consumption and production. The piece linked to news articles and official government websites from countries such as New Zealand, India, Switzerland and Japan. Harper’s denunciation of a carbon tax came shortly after the UN climate talks in Lima, Peru, where the majority of nations agreed to eliminate the wholesale use of fossil fuel energy by 2050.

Mainstream news outlets did cover that story. Ottawa Citizen reporters Jordan Press and Jason Fekete held the government accountable for failing to regulate the gas industry. Using several quotes from Liberal and NDP opponents, they revealed that Canada is unlikely to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

While the crowdfunded version lacked access to government sources, the Citizen story omitted the connection between government inaction and the consequences it might have on the environment. But neither DeSmog nor the Ottawa paper offered a full picture of cause and effect.

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The launch of the Tyee Solutions Society (TSS) in 2009 offered a new approach to journalism. “Solutions journalism” refers to rigorous reporting that tackles both issue and response. Using this framework, reporters such as Geoff Dembicki interview sources from oil companies, government representatives, environmentalists and academics to bring together different perspectives, opening a dialogue so opposing groups can work toward a consensus. “One of the most surprising things I found was that many of Canada’s largest oil companies actually support a price on carbon dioxide,” he says. Effective solutions journalism employs the same techniques as investigative journalism. When big companies claim they want a price on carbon, Dembicki scours through internal documents to find proof. “The result was I was able to present a story that wasn’t just taking these companies at their word,” he says, “but really looking into how they were preparing for climate change.”

Following the success of TSS, co-founder David Beers is willing to experiment with both journalism and how it’s funded. He employed this successful model when he launched the campaign to take sister site The Tyee national. By creating an in-house crowdfunding campaign called the “builder program,” the goal is to ensure that The Tyee can continue producing quality journalism. The program crowdfunded over $120,000 in 2013 and used that money to successfully establish a model that accounts for 20 percent of the site’s earnings.

In part, this crowdfunding success stems from using it as a tool for expansion, instead of simply as a means of survival. “It has made our relationship with readers that much closer,” explains Dembicki. “They can see now that by reading The Tyee, and by contributing a small amount of money, they were really able to improve the reach of a small independent publication.”

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From artists looking for investors to finance their next work, to teachers seeking classroom materials, to journalists looking to fund investigative projects they believe are in the public interest, crowdfunding has helped many entrepreneurs around the world realize their visions. The global crowdfunding economy grew to over $5.1 billion in 2013. But one of the biggest problems with using this technique for journalism is that in an age of free information, readers are no longer accustomed to paying for unpleasant news.

Although Leahy asks the general public for money, his regular donors are journalists, scientists and environmentalists. But when reporters fund other reporters, there’s a concern that the work will not reach the broader public. And if journalists must spend more and more of their time on crowdfunding campaigns, they have less time to devote to researching and writing.

Crowdfunded journalists must juggle their passion for environmental journalism with the dreaded task of fundraising and hope their stories don’t get labelled as activism or pushed to the fringes of the internet. Peter Fairley, a freelance environmental reporter based in Victoria, B.C., has experience with crowdfunding through the Society of Environmental Journalists. As a volunteer board member, he watched fellow journalists rush to assist their peers when the SEJ struggled to stay afloat. But he insists crowdfunded journalism doesn’t always reach a mass audience. “It’s preaching to the choir. It’s being financed by the choir. It’s the choir financing itself.”

Howard doesn’t think the specialized approach is financially sustainable and wants to see a shake-up in mainstream reporting. Climate change is one of the biggest stories of our time, yet mainstream coverage is often reactionary or riddled with conflict. Howard believes that without a well-educated citizenry, stronger environmental regulations are unlikely. But an informed public is unlikely without bold and prominent environmental coverage in mainstream news.

Still, Howard sees a role for crowdfunding. He hopes it can strengthen reporting by paying for research that will lead to stories in mainstream publications. That’s the only way he thinks crowdfunded journalism will reach the masses. “I don’t think it will radically change anything else,” he says. “It will just strengthen these stories so that they are so good they can’t be denied.”

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that a September 30, 1981 article in The Globe and Mail stated Canada’s governments were petitioning the U.S. to lower its carbon emissions. The campaign was to petitioning to stop the production of acid rain. The Review regrets the error.

The following is a guest post from this year’s Review instructor Tim Falconer. 

“I suck at math—that’s why I went into journalism” has been a humblebrag since before the invention of the humblebrag. I heard people chortle about their mathematical incompetence back when I was a student and I still hear them laughing today. My reaction has long been to roll my eyes, but I now realize silence just enables bad journalism.

I’m lucky: I flunked out after two years of mining engineering and then ended up doing what I really wanted. While the academic verbiage in some scientific studies can still trigger flashbacks of past struggles with differential equations, I never lost my fascination with science and technology. Good thing, too, because if I’ve learned anything over three decades as a freelance writer, it’s that most good stories need numbers.

Sure, you might be able to fashion a career free of data journalism and business reporting—though that would be your loss—but how can you be effective on the police beat if you don’t understand crime statistics? How can you discuss social trends if the numbers in demographic studies scare you? How can you write about hockey without a good grasp of salary caps and advanced stats? (Alas, the ability to read medical research on concussions will also come in handy.)

For generations, though, people who dropped math and science as soon as their high school would let them have chosen reporting as the ideal profession. The inevitable result is a lot of innumerate journalism. Newspapers are rife with number blunders—my guess is that screwed-up percentages are the most common errors, but that’s anecdote, not data—and reporters are terrible at covering polls, especially political ones (as Ronan O’Beirne explained in the Review last year.)

When journalists are intimidated by math, why would we expect them to be any good at covering health and science? The recent gong show at the Toronto Star is a particularly egregious example. But it’s just the latest in a long tradition of junk science journalism because reporters regularly misinterpret academic studies; confuse correlation and causation; and treat anti-vaxxers and climate-change deniers as reputable sources even though the facts prove these cranks are too ignorant to be quoted.

Reporters don’t deserve all the blame, though. Far too many editors and producers—often dazzled by hyperbolic press releases hawking dubious studies—make bad decisions because they’re bamboozled by science. Every day, assignment desks waste thin newsroom resources by sending people out to chase ridiculous stories. Some reporters blithely do what they’re told (even if it means cribbing sexed-up press releases) while others are too wary of developing “story killer” reputations to set their bosses straight. Worse, when the work comes in, these editors and producers are so clued out they don’t ask the right editorial questions and then, oblivious to the consequences, play the stories in stupid and dangerous ways.

In a census-free Canada, where the government gags its scientists and fabulist mayors appear to invent transportation policy in one of their drunken stupors, it’s crucial that journalists don’t think math and science are icky. I’m not suggesting we make a B.Sc. a requirement to be in this business. After all, lots of excellent reporters started with nothing more than a liberal arts degree and that most precious journalistic trait: curiosity.

But we do need a different attitude toward math, science and technology and it needs to start in j-schools and continue into newsrooms. So the next time a colleague smirks about his or her innumeracy, don’t laugh—suggest another line of work instead.

Tim Falconer’s next book, Bad Singer, has a lot of brain science in it.

I’m a journalist. I traded advanced functions and calculus for data management in high school. I use Google when I need to calculate a percentage. I have no idea what constitutes a polar vortex, or the difference between a tidal wave and a tsunami. When reporters proudly say they suck at math, how can we expect competent science coverage?

The Toronto Star is just the latest publication to take a hit for jumping too quickly to conclusions about a complicated science. For years, the Review has been looking at where we seem to keep failing as journalists. Here’s some of our work:

Polar vortex meme shows journalists don’t have the weather down to a science by Christina Pellegrini
When reporters sacrifice accuracy for readership and retweets, they deserve cold criticism

The media diet by Stephanie Maris
Why the wellness beat has become an unappetizing blend of sensational headlines, mixed messages and unhealthy reporting

Hard to swallow by Natalya Schafer
Should there be media guidelines in Canada for reporting on and discussing eating disorders?

The journalist is in—and dishing about doctors by Claire Prime
Brian Goldman, an emergency room doctor and CBC Radio host, examines the medical community in White Coat, Black Art

Showtime for science by Dan Falk
To make it on TV news, scientists must step out of character: If the role is wrong, so is much of the coverage

What we lose when papers give up on beat reporting by Lisa Coxon
As general assignment becomes the norm in newsrooms, publishers save money while the journalism—and the readers—suffer

Thanks to Nic McPhee for the image. 

“This used to be a forest,” says David Suzuki, standing in a wasteland of tangled roots and jagged stumps near Tofino Creek on Vancouver Island. Walking towards the camera, he continues: “It’s a typical example of clear-cut logging, that accounts for well over 90 percent of all trees cut in British Columbia. It’s crude and fast, and it maximizes profit.” Suzuki, who is filming a two-hour television special called “Voices in the Forest,” will bring this bleak, heart-wrenching scene into living rooms across the country and around the world. His voice projects authority, yet his face seems disarmingly casual and sincere.

Those are the qualities that have won Suzuki a loyal audience for more than two decades. The former professor became a household name in the seventies as the man who could make sense out of science for a prime-time audience. He was the original host of the CBC Radio science show Quirks and Quarks, before he was asked to join CBC TV’s The Nature of Things in 1979. He’s wtitten hundreds of newspaper columns and written or coauthored 21 books, including 12 for children, as well as a university genetics textbook. In his shows and columns he has tackled a wide spectrum of topics, from microbiology and silicon chips to black holes. In the past few years, however, the focus of Suzuki’s work has narrowed. More and more, his work deals with a single issue; the destruction of our natural environment.

Without doubt, no one in this country has done more than David Suzuki to bring environmental issues to the forefront of our collective conscience. But his repeated doom-and-gloom environmental predictions are now threatening the very authority that has given him access to larger and larger audiences. His slide from journalism to advocacy is costing him.
The Globe and Mail dropped him in 1989, saying that his column had become monotonous and depressing. And last year, The Vancouver Sun, too, gave his green column the red light. The Sun’s Saturday section editor, John Skinner, called Suzuki a “one-note, predictable columnist” who seldom offered fresh insights.

But Suzuki is charged with more than just being boring. Increasingly, the scientist turned journalist has come under attack from both camps. As a journalist, he’s criticized for being one-sided, a radical, an overzealous environmental preacher. As a scientist, he’s said to have overstepped the bounds of his area of expertise (Suzuki earned his Ph.D. in zoology). His critics say he has no authority to condemn, say, the practices of the logging industry in British Columbia, and that his attacks are founded on sloppy science and prejudice instead of facts.

My first attempt to contact Suzuki for an interview was by mail. His response, a brief hand:-written note on a CBC scratch pad, was that he spends little time in Toronto, and, of that, most is devoted to The Nature of Things. A few weeks later, after I spotted him walking in College Park mall across from The Nature of Things’ Bay Street offices-I heard the real reason. Suzuki said that recent critical articles in Harrowsmith and Vancouver magazines were full of inaccuracies and have damaged his career. Slowing his pace just slightly, but clearly with no intention of stopping, he told me he feels no need to defend himself again.

“Voices in the Forest,” Suzuki’s most critical attack on the practice of clear-cut logging, aired in February 1991. Eagles soar; wildlife from moose to salamanders is seen close up. The theme is explicit: the splendour of our natural wilderness is in danger; only by accepting “nature’s agenda”preservation for preservation’s sake-can we avert disaster.
While the stance that “Voices in the Forest” took on clear-cut logging was unambiguous, the credibility of the supporting script was less clear. According to the B.C. Ministry of Forests, the show contained factual errors. It was described as a “blatantly biased” and “reprehensible” piece of journalism by The Council of Forest Industries and drew numerous complaints to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The show’s producers had to answer dozens of letters from angry academics and forestry officials.

Paul Pashnik, Port Alberni district manager for the Ministry of Forests, told Western Report he was “incensed that Suzuki did not interview known ecologists, academics and professional foresters on the government side who are promoting and practising new forestry concepts-people who know what is actually happening in the forest as far as replanting and survival are concerned.” Bernie Waatainen, a regional forester with MacMillan Bloedel, said that the company spent about four days with Suzuki’s TV crew and that only two clips from one forester were used on the two-hour show.

Suzuki neither writes nor produces The Nature of Things, but the public identifies him with the show, and he must ultimately take responsibility for it. For most viewers, The Nature of Things is Suzuki. His response, in Western Report, was that “Voices in the Forest” was balanced, containing comments from Adam Zimmerman, president of Noranda Forest Inc. (a major MacBlo shareholder) and John Cuthbert, B.C.’s chief forester.

However, the length of each clip varied according to how strongly the speaker supported Suzuki’s anti-clear-cutting stance. For example, the first clip from Janna Kumi, a forester with MacBlo, was 50 seconds long, but she was sandwiched between a forest ecologist and an anti-clear-cutting forester, who each got twice that time to condemn the B.C. forestry industry. One of them, Herb Hammond, was allowed to speak directly to the camera. The result was compelling, emotionally charged television. Unfortunately, in many places it was little more.

Rod Carrow, dean of the faculty of forestry at the University of Toronto, called “Voices” a “two-hour show with about 15 minutes of content.” A former student of Suzuki’s while at the University of British Columbia in the sixties, Carrow says Suzuki was an inspiring professor and a great scientist. But he has watched Suzuki’s move toward advocacy with uneasiness. “I think he’s reached the point now where he’s totally abandoned scientific principles,” says Carrow. “He’s essentially become an environmental activist. That’s his raison d’etre.”

Despite the accusations of one-sidedness, Jim Murray, The Nature of Things’ executive producer, says he stands by the facts presented in the program. He says that having a point of view-an environmental one in this case-is nothing to be ashamed of. If “Voices in the Forest” wasn’t what journalists like to call “objective,” says Murray, we should take a closer look at other examples of public broadcasting. Shows like the CBC’s Venture, he says, and to a lesser extent The National and The Journal, promote an economic perspective in which growth and development are paramount. “[Those shows] have a very particular bias and perspective. The Nature of Things has its own bias and perspective, an ecological one, which says that money is not the bottom line, economic growth is not the bottom line-the sustainability of nature is the bottom line.” Anita Gordon, who produced and cowrote the 1989 CBC Radio series, It’s a Matter of Survival, with Suzuki, says, “I think the most important thing is not to nitpick people like David Suzuki. If people focus on the small errors he might make from time to time, and miss the larger statement, I think it’s very, very dangerous. You ask, ‘is it fair,’ ‘is it balanced’ butjournalistic balance does not mean dividing something 50-50.”

True enough. Journalists have come to realize that the quest for balance is a tougher game than the playground see saw, where opposing viewpoints sit at the two ends, and the journalist straddles the middle. The very act of positioning the fulcrum is subjective, and the journalist has to carefully weigh numerous arguments before reaching conclusions. But Suzuki’s platform either dismisses or downplays arguments from the other side. His critics have called it “Suzukiscience,” a neatly religious devotion to an inescapable higher truth.

The CRTC eventually ruled that “Voices in the Forest” violated none of the requirements for fairness and balance outlined in Canada’s federal Broadcast Act. But controversy proved a repeat visitor. Seven weeks after “Voices in the Forest,” another Nature of Things special-this one on the environmental impact of the James Bay hydroelectric project-would once again put Suzuki and his show on the defensive.

The drama was familiar: The native people want to protect their land; the big corporation, in this case Hydro Quebec, is evil; and governments, at best, are ignorant. Most of what Suzuki says is true, but the tactics he uses are again suspect. At one point in the show, an Inuit schoolteacher breaks down in tears as she tells of her fear of “new technology.”

This sort of manipulation, when used for political ends, makes Suzuki’s critics wonder if he should be on a public television network. The Globe’s science reporter, Stephen Strauss, described the political Suzuki in a column in 1990: “There is something profoundly appalling about the way Mr. Suzuki manipulates us,” Strauss writes. “He is a media wise politician who uses science to buttress positions in which he implicitly believes,… He has been captured by the media that have made him. His logic is television’s logic: the image is everything, qualifiers are boring, other realities should not get in the way of good drama.”
In “Voices in the Forest,” as in many of his shows and columns, Suzuki mourns that our society has ignored nature’s agenda and imposed its own. Ultimately, Suzuki must convince us that it is truly nature’s agenda, not his own, that he speaks for. The first step would be a renewed effort to document his facts, as every scientist-and every journalist-is expected to. Only then will his audience be rewarded, and his critics muted. Otherwise his message-and it is surely one of the most powerful of our time-will be lost in a forest of doubt and suspicion. For all its sound and fury, it is in danger of falling on deaf ears.