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.

On the ground floor of 121 Bloor Street East, Dawna Friesen and Tom Clark are hosting a live panel: big screens with “Decision Canada” and “Global News” behind them, three cameras in front of them. Down the hall in a back room, 20 or so analysts are calmly watching over computers as polling data and election results are updated every couple of minutes. A couple of floors up, social media — Twitter, to be exact – is having a party.

This year, Global News and Twitter Canada partnered exclusively to bring real-time, in-depth coverage of Canada’s election night for online and broadcast audiences.  This partnership was unique for two reasons. First, there was an in-house team from Twitter Canada using data visualization technology to analyze live social media reactions.

This allowed on-site journalists like Global News’ Nicole Bogart to turn to the Twitter guys in the room and tell them that the hashtag #RockTheIndigenousVote was increasingly appearing on her Twitter feed because the minister of agriculture lost his seat and she needed data on it. The in-house Twitter team can then produce a cool chart for her to use in her online story.

Second, there was a Twitter-centric party, which is like every other party, except live-tweeting is encouraged.

The idea was to combine the election experience of Global News journalists with the immediacy of Twitter. Considering that over 6 million election-related Tweets were sent out over the past two-and-a-half months, it seemed reasonable to find the online conversation trends and chatter and put it into the context of the election to create what I’ve dubbed the “virtual streetcar” effect.

There were more than 4x as many Tweets sent about #elxn42 in 2015 than there were about #elxn41 in 2011 #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/2nnebN9npL

— Twitter Canada (@TwitterCanada) October 20, 2015

News organizations are capable of doing all of this on their own, according to Steve Ladurantaye, former journalist and current head of Canadian news and government partnerships for Twitter Canada. Wanting more of the best on-screen visualizations for the widest possible audience in the face of an under-staffed and under-resourced newsroom leads to partnerships like this one.

None of this is new information. Global News was merely practicing more closely what everyone knew about the importance of social media. The average person’s reactions as well as the pundit’s and the expert’s commentary didn’t have to be sought on the streets when they could be found at the fingertips.

However, the usefulness of the inclusion of social media in election coverage remains in doubt, as will be evident by the many articles on the subject today, including this one. When Global News’ decision desk declared a Liberal majority government around 9:40 p.m.,  everyone at the party tweeted out their Justin Trudeau graphic and then cheered, and Bogart quickly posted how social media reacted soon after.

On one hand, the inclusion of tweets from online platforms in newspapers and broadcasts has meant that the virtual streetcar effect is working. Yet is this is at the risk of too much chatter? At one point in the night, I watched Mike Armstrong’s TweetDeck column for #elxn42 updating every second, so fast that the tweets were illegible, making it a literal “stream” of information. “It’s just noise at this point,” said Armstrong, the anchor-host of the Global News #elxn42party. Except that for the in-house Twitter guys, it was data to collect.

Election coverage is layered, nuanced and complex, but it’s also calm — or at least it seems so on the surface (unless something unpredictable happens). Social media is the opposite of that: it’s fast and it’s wild. How do you find the voice of the crowd among the millions of voices in the crowd?

Perhaps figuring that out was why Global News formed a partnership with Twitter Canada for #elxn42.

It’s 9 a.m. and senior producer Dayna Gourley and executive producer Alan Habbick gather in a conference room at the CBC headquarters to discuss and assign the stories of the day. Within the hour, they will assign reporter Marivel Taruc to cover the death of former NHL player and coach Pat Quinn, which has shocked local fans. Quinn, a beloved sports figure, played defence for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the late 1960s and came back to coach the team from 1998 to 2006. As Taruc makes her way past her co-workers’ cubicles, she decides the best way to showcase Quinn’s legacy is to first speak to current Leafs players and then to some hockey fans.

At 11:20 a.m., Taruc finishes her research, gathers her things and heads out the door with Chris Mulligan, her videographer for the day. She starts at the Leafs’ practice facility, where she joins other reporters gathering in the locker room for a scrum around defencemen Morgan Rielly and Cody Franson. Standing in the circle, Taruc finds her link between the former coach and the current players: both Rielly and Franson looked up to Quinn. The next stop is Maple Leaf Square at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, where she and Mulligan will approach pedestrians to share their thoughts on camera.

She hopes to give a voice to the average person—something streeter segments have done for decades. To reporters, it’s either a quick way to gauge public opinion or useful filler on slow news days. For viewers, such segments are either entertaining or pointless. For the industry, devoting reporters to the task is increasingly becoming a luxury, and Mulligan is lucky to have one on this story. Faced with decreasing resources, assignment producers cannot afford to assign streeter segments to reporters. Now, camera operators must often do these shoots alone, learning interviewing techniques and research methods that were once reserved for reporters.

A long-time staple of television news, streeters are a fast and easy way to find out what the public thinks—journalists ask questions, people give answers—but they are also a target for critics because they don’t always provide viewers with any new information or insight. “When used well, they give a voice to the ordinary people in our stories,” says Jeremy Copeland, a lecturer from the information and media studies faculty at Western University in London, Ontario. “It makes for great TV and, at times, fills a hole within our story—but it’s not great journalism.”

Taruc and Mulligan arrive at Maple Leaf Square and set up. “As streeters go, this is an easy one to do,” the reporter says. “Even if you were one of the few who’s never heard of Quinn, you know who the Toronto Maple Leafs are.” But the reporting technique relies on the luck of the draw, which means the quality depends on how informed random people are of the day’s news. In this case, the story is about Quinn, not just the Leafs. A common criticism of streeters is that unprepared people answering questions about topics they simply don’t understand can be of limited value to viewers. “There is a risk that they can be a lazy way to do journalism,” says Copeland. “Sometimes journalists can’t come up with a creative way to find another voice for their stories, so they go out and do a couple of streeters and they think that’s it, they’ve covered it.”

The questions are another problem. When the approach works, it’s thanks to a reporter who knows what to ask and how to ask it. “You can’t generalize what you’re saying—you have to be specific,” says Susan Harada, the associate director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication. “They have to be used carefully. That’s where journalists make the mistake.” Taruc knows that how she asks her questions is crucial to an effective story. To make her subjects feel at ease, she poses questions that are direct and simple.

Of the dozen people she approaches today, half agree to be interviewed. She first asks them if they’re hockey fans, then moves on to questions about Quinn’s legacy. Some know about his history with the Leafs, while others are not sure who he was. From half of those interviews, Taruc generates enough for her story. “I know with talking to all those people, that one person is giving me the content I need.”

One interview does stand out from the others. An older gentleman speaks about an incident that has since become part of NHL lore: the time Quinn, playing for the Leafs, body-checked Bobby Orr and left the legendary Boston Bruin lying on the ice unconscious. “I remembered when he levelled the great Bobby Orr, way back then,” the man tells Taruc. “The Bruins weren’t really happy with him.”

Even with strong answers like that, streeters raise concerns about whose opinion matters most. Reporters have to be careful they don’t make one person’s point of view represent a whole community. That’s especially crucial for more contentious issues. “You are at the mercy of the people you come across on the street,” Taruc says. “If they share the same ideas on a story, then you don’t have a variety of opinion.”

When the technique works, a bond forms between the subject and the reporter. But these days, reporters are making those bonds less frequently. More and more, videographers shoot streeters and give the footage to an editor. Luke Yung was the go-to cameraman and streeter interviewer for Rogers TV for six years. “It is easier when there is a reporter or assistant to help, like when I was covering the Toronto garbage strike and the crowd was getting a little chaotic,” Yung says. Ultimately, though, he understands the budget cuts. “In the end, the reporters aren’t really needed; they are not even seen. It’s the people’s opinion that matters.”

That’s why many news outlets rely more and more on an even cheaper way to show public opinion: social media, especially Twitter. “You can see conversations happening in real time,” says Sylvia Stead, public editor at The Globe and Mail. “Getting public feedback, thoughts and views through Twitter, Facebook or streeters and sharing them—it’s so important for the media to realize that we all take part in discussing and shaping the news.”

But Stead adds that social media streeters make it hard to identify the truth. In her December 2012 column, “A Valuable Lesson in Using Social Media for Journalism,” she cites the example of a woman who identified herself online as a lawyer, but it later became clear that was unlikely. Of course, people can pretend to be someone else on television, too. As Stead wrote, “It’s a reminder that editors and reporters should do all they can to confirm the identities of the people they quote.”

As Taruc’s 5 p.m. deadline approaches, Mulligan heads to CBC’s basement offices. He slides the media card into the computer. A senior editor quickly cuts the footage as the senior producer vets the script. They run the final take in the office control room. Meanwhile, Taruc moves to the Hockey Hall of Fame for a live hit that will precede her piece. She doesn’t get a chance to see it, but that’s normal and she’s satisfied. It’s one of the hundreds of streeters she’s done in her career—and while it may not have been the best way to pay tribute to someone’s legacy, it made the six o’clock news.

Photo courtesy PlainPicture

Scrolling through Twitter one afternoon last September, I came across an account that stood out in an alarming way. “In Iraq killing Shias, etc.,” said the bio of @MuhajirSomali, a supposed Canadian member of ISIS. While I don’t know what he meant by “etc.,” he certainly was claiming he was in Iraq killing Shias and others. His posts were terrifying and I wanted to break the news, so I took a screenshot of his bio. On my Twitter feed I posted: “The #Canadian ISIS member says on his bio on Twitter that he is in #Iraq to kill Shias. #ISIS #NO2ISIS #Canada.” I attached the screenshot as evidence to tell my more than 4,000 followers what this fighter said he was doing in Iraq.

At that time, @MuhajirSomali had fewer than 500 followers on Twitter. My post would amplify his message. But I am far from the only journalist to draw attention to the purported activities of ISIS online. The shocking nature of these posts makes them difficult to ignore.

@MuhajirSomali, along with a second Twitter handle @muhajirsumalee (both now suspended), allegedly belonged to Farah Mohamed Shirdon, a Somali-Canadian from Calgary in his early twenties. He first appeared in a viral April 2014 video, in which he and other foreign fighters burned their passports in a campfire while chanting, “Allah is great” in Arabic. Their threat to North Americans was explicit: “We are coming to you and we will destroy you with Allah’s permission. . . . With Allah’s permission we came to you with slaughter.”

ISIS has become infamous over the past year for its massacres and kidnappings in Iraq and Syria. The extremist group has been fighting a parallel propaganda war on social media. ISIS members use platforms including Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to send their messages and aim for videos of beheadings and other hateful acts to go viral.

The chilling videos showing the beheadings of journalists James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Kenji Goto make another message clear: reporters who go to conflict zones in Iraq and Syria are risking their lives. This makes finding local sources and conducting firsthand research challenging. Without on-the-ground sources, it is tempting for journalists to lean on social media, seeking out users who claim to be ISIS members.

Individual news organizations must decide if and how to use these sources, but the risks in doing so are great. It’s a difficult task to verify that these people are who they claim to be and it’s easy for those reporting on the online activities of ISIS to get the story wrong. Worse, when journalists reproduce social media messages by anonymous ISIS sources without adequate context, they can sensationalize the story, playing into the hands of those who want to spread fear.

***

A decade ago, I went to Iraq. My parents were born and raised there, and I wanted to see the places of their childhood memories. While they had lived there under a dictatorship, the situation during my visit was even more volatile. Sectarian violence, kidnappings, assassinations and car bombs emptied whole neighbourhoods of Baghdad. Al-Qaeda-affiliated militants, other armed groups and militias caused chaos and fear, disrupting lives in an attempt to enforce a fundamentalist understanding of Islam. At this time, ISIS was still allied with Osama bin Laden and known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

Black banners mourning the deaths of young men and women flew all over the city. Two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, I sat on the pavement under the blazing August sun in Baghdad, a witness to a mortar attack that targeted civilians. The ground underneath my feet shook and the sound pierced my ears. A few minutes later, a child rushed to her mother. “I saw their slippers soaked in blood. There were pieces of flesh,” the crying girl said. Unlike most who lived there, I was witnessing such a horrific scene for the first time.

A year after my visit, AQI renamed itself ISI, adding the “S” in 2013 for al-Sham, the Arabic name for Syria, to reflect its cross-border territories. In northern Iraq, ISIS seized control of the cities of Fallujah and Mosul in its brutal campaign to control the Muslim world. The group targets Iraq’s Shia majority and leaves a humanitarian crisis in its wake. Last spring, around the same time Al-Qaeda severed ties with the group, ISIS dropped the geographically specific part of its name, rebranding as Islamic State to reflect its heightened ambitions.

In its current campaign, ISIS has become adept at using social media to build a fearsome brand and has recruited young men and women from different parts of the world, including Canada. Ten years ago, militants recorded video and audio and sent it to mainstream news outlets in hopes of getting airtime. Today, they have direct access to an audience through platforms including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to boast about acts of brutality and make threats.

Sometimes their messages are worth reporting—it would have been difficult to ignore the graphic beheadings and mass executions, or the kidnappings of thousands of Yazidi women and children. But there’s an ethical dilemma: does the coverage serve ISIS propaganda designed to terrorize people?

 ***

Stewart Bell, a senior reporter specializing in foreign affairs and national security for the National Post, frequently covers foreign fighters, especially those who join extremist groups. In his Twitter bio, he describes himself as a “journalist and author who writes about Canadians who do stupid things in the name of their causes.” Currently, many of his subjects are ISIS members or supporters, and Bell uses Twitter a lot—tweeting, retweeting and reporting on the posts from those claiming to be ISIS members. Authorities estimate that over 100 Canadians are fighting in Iraq and Syria, though not all are supporting ISIS.

On September 16, 2014, the Post published a front-page story by Bell with the headline, “Unmasked Canadian Jihadist Tweets His Deadly Ideology.” Online, it was even more succinct: “Canadian Jihadist Unmasked.” The story revealed the identity of Abu Turaab, who had been tweeting threats and exhorting people to join the fight in Syria from the handle @AbuTuraab. “While he has been careful not to reveal his real identity, posting only photos of himself wearing ski goggles or with a scarf covering his face,” wrote Bell, “the National Post has learned he is a 23-year-old Canadian citizen named Mohammed Ali.”

The article, illustrated with images pulled from Twitter, addressed the phenomenon of Canadians travelling to Syria to fight for ISIS, and built a profile of Abu Turaab through his Twitter posts. They included an exchange following Foley’s execution in which he threatened Bell: “I wonder how my homie
@StewartBellNP feels after watching the latest IS video?”

The article didn’t say how the Post confirmed the identity behind @AbuTuraab. As a reader, I was left with an article based on Twitter posts of someone who is allegedly a terrorist. To me, Abu Turaab remains an anonymous source since he doesn’t publicly reveal his identity. There is no way to ensure it’s Mohammed Ali posting and not someone pretending to be him.

Bell doesn’t see it this way. I have been following his reporting on ISIS and I have one main concern: it’s too easy to pretend to be someone else online. Consider the supposed Syrian blogger behind Gay Girl in Damascus from a few years back who turned out to be an American man studying in Scotland. In a more recent incident, Indian authorities arrested 24-year-old engineering student Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who was running the pro-ISIS Twitter account @ShamiWitness. Biswas had more than 17,000 followers (including jihadists), a following cultivated from his home in India.

When I meet with Bell to discuss his use of ISIS Twitter accounts, he tells me social media offers insight into the minds of those who travel to Iraq and Syria to fight. “This is the first conflict where journalists have been able to follow people who have gone to participate,” he says. “And this allows us to identify who they are, where they are, what they are, what they are seeing and also their thinking, their justification for doing what they are doing.”

He acknowledges identities can be manipulated online, but believes verification of certain ISIS fighters is possible. “Most of the ones that are very active on social media, with few exceptions, they don’t want you to know who they really are,” he says, admitting that it’s challenging to identify someone when they don’t post photos showing their face. “When somebody does that and they go overseas, then inevitably there are people here who know who they really are.”

Still, there’s no way to ensure it’s always the same person posting from a Twitter account. Abu Turaab changed his Twitter accounts as each one was suspended, making his trail difficult to follow. (The threatening nature of ISIS accounts violates Twitter’s terms of service, so they are routinely shut down.) If Abu Turaab and others are misidentified, the whole story could be wrong.

Bell says he verifies information from a Twitter source such as Abu Turaab before publishing by doing traditional reporting, speaking to people who know about him or his activities. But Canadian journalists have been wrong before. In August 2014, several journalists reported the death of Canadian-born jihadist Shirdon based on social media posts of ISIS members or supporters. On August 15, 2014, a Post headline declared: “Farah Mohamed Shirdon, Calgary ISIS Fighter Reportedly Killed in Iraq, was ‘Dead Inside’ Long Ago, Friend Says.” CBC reported the same story: “Farah Mohamed Shirdon of Calgary, Fighting for ISIS, Dead in Iraq, Reports Say.” As did The Calgary Sun: “City Radical Dies in Iraq—Third Young Calgarian Killed Fighting with Extremists.” A month later, Shirdon was resurrected in a Skype interview with VICE Media co-founder and CEO Shane Smith. In a room with other combatants, Shirdon claimed he was in Mosul alongside 10,000 to 15,000 fighters. He added that he was motivated by the Qu’ran, rather than a recruiter. Throughout the interview, Shirdon maintained his smile. To me, it seemed like a wicked, mischievous expression suggesting those who believed his death were fools.

Verification is a foundational principle of journalism, and news organizations lose credibility when they get stories wrong. Craig Silverman, author of Regret the Error and an expert in journalistic accuracy, says reporting unverified news lends authority to an idea that may or may not be true. Even when news organizations use hedge language in reporting on a rumour, he says, they provide it with wider distribution and an element of credibility. The boundary between fact and fiction becomes blurred.

On June 23, 2014, Shirdon appeared in an article on VICE’s science and technology vertical Motherboard. Benjamin Makuch, an editor with a history of engaging with ISIS sources online, wrote the piece. He believes verification can be achieved by reporting and correlating social media accounts—many militants are on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter—though they remain essentially anonymous. “You have to go with the best information you have available,” he says.

Even when their identities cannot be verified, messages from ISIS present problems. Makuch believes pursuing these stories is worthwhile because ISIS is inherently newsworthy, even if its motive is to disseminate propaganda. He cites the example of the news of Foley’s beheading, which originated from ISIS social media posts. “You can’t actually question the news value of something like that,” says Makuch. As a journalist, he would report on the “horrifying image” because “it needs to be known.”

VICE’s willingness to publish Shirdon’s viewpoint provides an uncritical platform for the sensational messages of ISIS. When the Foley video first circulated online, a headline I saw on the Toronto Star website—“Foley Execution Video Going Viral Is Exactly What ISIS Wants”—summed up what I was thinking.

The more people share videos of beheadings, the wider the spread of ISIS’s threat. Louie Palu, a Canadian documentary photographer and photojournalist who has worked in Afghanistan, says he is reluctant to go to Syria. It’s not the fear of death, but the possibility of being kidnapped and used by militant groups that makes it dangerous.

He is repulsed by the spread of the beheading videos. “It is like video terrorism,” Palu says. “If they can’t terrorize us by doing a car bomb in our city, they’ll send a video saying, ‘We’ll cut your heads off.’”

Susan Sachs, foreign editor at The Globe and Mail, says her newspaper does not post videos or stills of beheadings or any other horrific killings. Her reason is straightforward: “We don’t provide a platform for anyone, whatever group they are, to put out their propaganda.” CBCNews.ca features writer Andre Mayer doesn’t use ISIS Twitter posts as sources, though he may refer to them during research. “[Twitter posts] are 140 characters, so you aren’t getting a lot,” he says. “You don’t know the person behind any given tweet, really.” Mayer’s sources instead are analysts, institutions and universities because he believes they offer more credibility and sophistication.

Including a range of Muslim voices, rather than focusing on the tweets of extremists, can provide less sensational and more nuanced reporting. Religion is an important issue to address, since ISIS members claim to be following teachings of the Qu’ran.

Imam Syed Soharwardy, founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, routinely speaks to reporters about the diversity of Islam. He points out that ISIS members belong to the fringe Wahabi sect. “These terrorists should not be identified as Muslims. They should be identified with their sects,” says
Soharwardy. “Do not associate that person with the religion of 1.6 billion people.” A reader with no knowledge of Islam may not necessarily understand the difference between a fanatic who commits crimes in the name of religion and the rest of the Muslim population. Sensational coverage has the effect of promoting an insidious form of Islamophobia.

On the more fundamental question of ethics in reporting on ISIS’s threats and boasts on social media, I spoke with Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of the journalism program at University of Toronto Scarborough. Dvorkin counsels extreme caution in reporting on the online activities of ISIS. “There is a very fine line between giving an organization publicity and hearing their point of view in order for the audience to understand what the organization is about,” he says. “A journalist’s obligation is to make those difficult choices to help the audience understand who these people are without necessarily giving them a free ride.”

Journalists risk crossing the “fine line” when reporting on atrocities that could be labelled as war crimes. Broadcasting an unedited video or post and giving the perpetrators the chance to talk about it amplifies their message. Context is crucial, says Dvorkin: “It is possible, I think, under certain circumstances, to report on stories overseas from Canada, but with a warning that some of the information can not be verified.”

***

Reporting on what ISIS members do without being their mouthpiece is challenging—even according to readers. On September 29, 2014, the Post published on its letters page responses to the question “Should the media be reporting on what jihadists are posting on social media?” The replies varied: “The public has the right to know”; “The media is giving them what they want”; “It depends.” The same discussion goes on in newsrooms as journalists try to figure out what to report and what not to report.

ISIS’s weapons on the ground are guns, bombs and mortars, but social media is its conduit to the rest of the world—a tool for spreading fear and recruiting new members. It’s also, unfortunately, one of the few windows available to North American journalists looking to understand what’s happening in Iraq and Syria. But it offers a distorted view of the conflict, mediated through the self-
interest of the aggressors—a necessary fact to keep in mind when making decisions about if and how to report on social media messages from ISIS.

“There is a great value in being on the scene and being a reporter and witnessing events firsthand, even though it’s extremely dangerous,” says Dvorkin, pointing out how little we know about ISIS beyond the violent headlines. But that may not be a good reflection of reality on the ground. “If we are trying to understand them, we need to do more than report on what they are tweeting.”

Art courtesy Chris Tucker

By: Erica Lenti

It started with a shaky, selfie-angled smartphone shot. Kevin Newman, then 54, held his device up for the opening monologue of his new TV show the same way a teenager would at the club—arm raised, head slightly tilted. He then began the broadcast straight from his smartphone. The night’s top story, Newman announced enthusiastically, hand still shaking, the shot dizzying, was Rob Ford’s loss of mayoral power, the introduction triggering a barrage of viral clips. By the time the title card appeared—“Personal! Immediate! Now: Kevin Newman Live”—the show had already distanced itself from the typical Canadian newscast.

Kevin Newman Live launched on November 18, 2013 to broadcast the day’s news as dictated by social media. But the premise never stuck and after just seven months, CTV cut KNL from its lineup. At first, producers considered the show the answer to broadcasting’s loss of young viewers to the digital world; but the team, like so many others in television news, quickly found the solution wasn’t that simple. While TV newscasts primarily attract an older demographic, younger Canadians dominate engagement on the internet—and a single show can’t attract both groups. Rather, the younger, active audiences of social media and the older, passive viewers of broadcast, like oil and water, are inevitably bound to separate. These two vastly different worlds of news consumption are best off avoiding the merger and the failure of KNL proves why.

While KNL was the first full-length show its kind in the country, many news organizations have attempted social media coverage, including Canada AM’s “Things I Learned on the Internet Today” segment to City News Toronto’s viral video of the day. Like KNL, these segments attempt to bridge the gap between digital and broadcast. Often, they fail to engage because the ability to share content is non-existent. There are also concerns of accuracy: viewers aren’t getting firsthand, original reporting from traditional journalists. But most important, much of the content runs the risk of being pegged as old news, already devoured online by the same audience producers are desperately trying to reel in: the younger crowd.

The primary viewers of television news are in their 40s and 50s, consumers Statistics Canada has found are not as plugged in as their younger counterparts. In fact, a study by the Canadian Media Research Consortium found precious few Canadians over 55 consume news via social media.

Regardless, CTV proceeded with the digital-TV crossbreed. In April 2013, looking to pioneer an innovative newscast for the channel, the network’s president Wendy Freeman set her sights on Newman. By June, he and Jack Fleischmann, the vice-president of CTV news channel at the time, were working on the bare bones of the show. It opted to present viral memes and “click-y” news stories that fare so well online in a broadcast format for one hour every weeknight, using little to no original reporting and a reliance on social media for editorial direction. But it was like watching a seasoned journalist reciting BuzzFeed articles on air—show taglines took cues from clickbait headlines. Hashtags loomed in the corner of the screen for the 50-minute duration of the program. Aggregators who found stories on Reddit and Twitter replaced all but one original reporter, and Facebook comments and tweets often took on the role of streeter interviews. But watching journalists read social media commentary on air is awkward at best.

Without an interactive demographic, engagement flops. Despite touting the benefits of a “two-screen approach”—interacting with the KNL’s crew online using a tablet, smartphone or laptop—the show found little traction using live-blogging tool ScribbleLive, which let viewers converse with the show’s producers on social media. The blog picked up little steam from the start, with few viewers joining in on the conversation. By June, the blog was cut. Colin Horgan, a writer and producer for KNL, admits, “We never generated that online conversation we had hoped for.”

The sentiment reveals a core, contradictory issue with traditional media’s attempts to cover digital content: broadcast news conditions viewers to be passive, while online content is often active and dependent on crowdsourcing. Whether because of their age or preferred form of news consumption, Newman says: “People watching TV don’t really want to be interactive.”

That’s Rena Bivens’s take, too. The author of Digital Currents, which examines the digitization of broadcast journalism, agrees that it makes sense to tap into the world of news through social media. Yet the translation to broadcast can become stunted. “While so many of us are interested in what’s happening on our social media feeds,” she says, “it doesn’t mean we necessarily want take the culture of what’s going on there and see it in a different context.”

Research in her book also shows that journalists receive little feedback from their audience and yet social media allows those same viewers to discuss the journalism online with other viewers. So far, no one has figured out how a television newscast can handle this convergence despite attempts such as KNL. The news organizations that have been most successful in crossbreeding digital and broadcast journalism are native to online. The Toronto Star’s senior editor of social media Jennifer Wilson points to Mashable, which produces minute-long videos of viral stories with catchy, witty scripts that provide a snippet into a newsworthy event and are easy to share. Still, they too rely on aggregation in place of original reporting and a jump to television sets is unlikely.

KNL responded to its shortcomings with traditional broadcast news tactics. Newman stopped emphasizing interactivity and instead opted to read tweets on air and reference Google Maps and Instagram photos. He went as far as explaining the meaning of #TOpoli, the Twitter hashtag for discussion about Toronto politics. By KNL’s last episode in June 2014, stand-up shots of Newman, a tried-and-true staple of broadcast news, had replaced the shaky smartphone shots.

Despite the show’s cancellation, many former KNL journalists, including Newman himself, insist shows with a similar format will continue to crop up. The prospects for such shows remain bleak. And networks would be wise to stop trying.

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the KNL live blog was cut in its first month, and aggregators replaced all original reporters. The live blog ended after six months, and the team had a single original reporter. The Review regrets the errors.

When a gunman attacked Parliament Hill on October 22, Canada was left with many questions and eager journalists determined to find the answers first.

As the shooting shook Ottawa, many journalists were quick to jump onto social media to give breaking news updates depicting what was occurring on site. But what some reporters didn’t do before sending out their tweets was ask: “Are we putting the people of Ottawa in more danger?”

With the death of 24-year-old Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and a gunman still at large, by sending out a message with their location (and the location of civilians), journalists could have been leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for an attacker.

Online content should be reported as carefully as print content and, when possible, subjected to full editing, says the Canadian Association of Journalists in its ethical guidelines. It also says that speed should never compromise accuracy, credibility or fairness.

Many journalists started tweeting out photographs and posts describing their exact location, and some posted photographs and videos of officers across the city. Others may have given away their locations, even if they didn’t mean to. If they had enabled location services on Twitter previously, each current tweet would have a specific address or neighbourhood attached to it, allowing anyone to see the exact location of the sender.

At one point, information about where Prime Minister Stephen Harper was hidden surfaced on Twitter, but was quickly revised.

Harper was hidden in Parliament’s Centre Block when the gunman stormed into the building. Releasing information of where he was located during this attack seems dangerous.

Other individuals gave an update that they were “still trapped,” but did not disclose where they actually were.

In the age of social media, it has become accepted that private information will be posted even when it probably shouldn’t be released into the public realm. The public is eager to know exactly what’s happening in the moment, and journalists are hungry to get the story first. As a result, reporters often make mistakes when stories are breaking. This is understandable with the confusion and speed of unfolding stories, but because an attacker can follow any stream of posts, social media posts risk putting citizens’ lives in danger.

The RCMP National Division expressed their concern with social media, which was retweeted 3,385 times and had many comments asking the media to stop posting footage of their locations. The Ottawa Police Department also asked for social media silence.

Journalists need to remember that social media is accessible to everyone. A written policy may be helpful for reporters when using social media during attacks like this. Photographs and locations may have to wait to be released until lockdowns have been lifted and police have found the perpetrators. Not only are journalists risking their own lives by reporting in the field, but possibly also the lives of everyone around them—even if they are in hiding.

Jonathan Goldsbie is a Toronto civic geek. He bikes everywhere, drinks ethically sourced coffee and likes talking about local indie music in Kensington Market. And, of course, he tweets. Constantly. Over his two-and-a-half years on Twitter, he’s averaged about 35 tweets per day. But somehow, this seemingly harmless dude landed himself in one of the city’s most talked-about Twitter brawls of 2011. Goldsbie is such a prolific tweeter that early this year, many of his followers banded together through the hashtag #goldsbiephone to raise funds and update his “Flintstonian pterodactyl” to a fancy new Android. Armed with a new smartphone, he continues to take joy in calling people out. The Globe and Mail deemed him “loyal to few, loved and loathed in equal parts by many.”

Toronto Sun columnist Sue Ann Levy seems to be a member of the loathing contingent. She made it clear in her columns leading up to Pride 2011 that she wanted the city to stop funding Pride if Queers Against Israeli Apartheid was to march in the parade. So in March, Levy, who is Jewish, wrote to several Jewish community leaders, urging them to contact councillors and strip Pride Toronto of city money. The letter quickly leaked and, before long, Andrea Houston wrote a story about it for Xtra!, a gay and lesbian newspaper. She quoted city councillor Adam Vaughan: “[Sue Ann Levy] has an agenda. She is on the Ford team. She is doing work for the mayor… Take everything she says in light of that.” The pro-Palestinian organization bowed out of the parade after city hall threatened to pull Pride’s funding.

When Goldsbie heard about the letter, he was shocked: “I couldn’t believe the email had her Sun signature on it.” So he tweeted, “It can’t be kosher for a full-time newspaper columnist to be campaigning for councillors’ votes on an item about which she often writes.” Levy bantered back and forth with Goldsbie and name-calling eventually ensued, culminating with Levy tweeting, “Thx to Adm Vaughan for calling me influential int Xtra trash piece…and thx to leftist blowhard for showing his true anti-semetic colours.” Goldsbie responded: “You know, I’m pretty sure labelling a public figure anti-Semitic is defamatory, even if you misspell it.” The Sunremoved Levy from the Pride beat and while councillors slugged it out over Pride Toronto funding at city hall, she took a trip. She returned and wrote in her column , “I was glad to be in Mexico that week.”

Levy isn’t the only journalist to cause a stir on Twitter. In August 2011, Dave Naylor from the Calgary Sun came under attack for tweeting, “Maybe he’s not dead. Maybe he’s just stiff and needs a good massage,” after Jack Layton’s death. He was referencing a story that broke during the last federal election about the late NDP leader being found in a massage parlour 15 years earlier. Michael Coren, a Sun News television host, tweeted, “Still world hunger. More prayers to Jack please!” Despite many angry responses, Naylor and Coren managed to hold on to their jobs.

Damian Goddard, an on-air host from Rogers Sportsnet, was not so fortunate. The network fired him the day after he tweeted his unenthusiastic opinions about gay marriage in May 2011. (He said he supported “the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage.”) And Octavia Nasr, CNN’s senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs, experienced a similar fate. She tweeted in July 2010, “Sad to hear of the passing of [spiritual leader] Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah…One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” Although Nasr tried to explain, saying she respects Fadlallah because he was a proponent of women’s rights, it was of little use. CNN fired her three days later.

Unfortunately for journalists, nuances can’t be explained in 140 characters, which is why news organizations are nervous about Twitter. They would prefer that journalistic bickering, activism and stupid jokes stay private, confined perhaps to the smoky press clubs of yore.

In an effort to get their way, major news outlets have released social media guidelines. But many insiders criticize these documents for being too restrictive and ignoring the fact that journalists are people too. Twitter is a great way for reporters to find stories, locate sources and gain a bigger audience—but the let-it-all-hang-out transparency also calls into question the myth of objectivity that underpins the entire profession.

As far back as 1898, The New York Evening Post believed impartial reporting would make more money because partisan papers couldn’t sell as much advertising space. Since then, impartiality has taken on a new meaning. In their 2007 book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write, “In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction or art.” It is the discipline of journalism—not the reporter—that is objective. The goal, according to this view, is to record what happened correctly, regardless of personal views about Hezbollah, gay marriage or left-wing politicians. (And if this happens to sell more ads, even better.)

But social media have exposed the messy, complicated and opinionated side of journalists. It turns out reporters aren’t just objective information-gathering machines—they’re people too. Hence the new guidelines that many organizations have created to try to avoid the next Twitter meltdown. The rules range from gentle reminders to stern warnings: the National Post points out that a source can Google reporters before an interview and the Sun tells its journalists that “the same legal implications of the newspaper apply to social media broadcasts, as regards libel and defamation.” (Calling someone anti-Semitic apparently has the okay, though.)

All of the guidelines have one thing in common: play your role. Headstrong columnists are going to have more leeway with their tweets than political reporters. And editors, for their part, shouldn’t blurt out rash responses, which is why Raju Narisetti, managing editor of The Washington Post, had to email his staff some guidelines after an employee responded to critical tweets on the paper’s Twitter account over a column about gay teen suicide. Dozens of websites reposted Narisetti’s email, which said, “No branded Post accounts should be used to answer critics and speak on behalf of the Post.” But a personal account still allows journalists to voice their opinions—be it shamelessly or naively.

Rules can’t define what proper composure is for every journalist. The Toronto Star released a new social media policy in April 2011. Part of it reads: “Never post information on social media that could undermine your credibility with the public or damage the Star’s reputation in any way, including as an impartial source of news. Such postings could be construed by readers as evidence that the Star’s news coverage is biased.”

But the paper has no intention of taping the mouths of its reporters. “My role is not to censor people,” says public editor Kathy English. “But making personal comments against or for any of the candidates in the election would put a reporter who was covering the election in a tricky spot.” English, who has held her position since 2007, hears from hundreds of readers every year and she knows they still expect impartiality. She truly believes, “You can show personality without expressing strong opinions on issues.”

In defending the paper’s policy, English points to Susan Delacourt, who shows plenty of personality through her Twitter account. The Parliament Hill reporter, who has collected over 12,000 followers since she started tweeting two years ago, doesn’t have a problem showing any strong points of view because she devotes criticism to the government as a whole: “The government is the one that holds power and it’s our job to keep that power in check.”

Delacourt thinks there’s a disturbing tendency to call critical journalists biased. “I strongly disagree with that. Journalists need to abide by openness and honesty.” Still, she admits that her Twitter account isn’t policed by the Star much. “Twitter doesn’t make money,” she notes, “and my bosses aren’t interested in things that don’t make money.”

Rosemary Barton, a CBC national reporter on the Hill, uses Twitter for things she might not necessarily say on television. “There’s more room for humour, more room for my personality,” she says. But when it comes to showing any political biases, she agrees with Delacourt: “I actually don’t have any political views. I’m equally tough on everybody.”

She thinks CBC’s social media guidelines leave plenty of room for her personality even though they say, “The expression of personal opinions on controversial subjects or politics can undermine the credibility of CBC journalism and erode the trust of our audience.” But Barton knows that if she wasn’t using Twitter she would be missing out on a lot of inside access to ministers on the Hill. Like journalists, politicians make announcements on Twitter, and they certainly follow what reporters are saying about them. Barton has more than 14,000 followers and has tweeted more than 25,000 times. She says politicians “see me up in the foyer where I’m doing my main job and crack jokes with me about references I’ve made on Twitter.” For her, that interaction is invaluable.

But the policies don’t sit well with everyone. GigaOm’s senior writer Mathew Ingram (formerly the communities editor at the Globe) is an outspoken critic of these guidelines. He believes the best way to make social media work is to allow reporters and editors “to be human” and engage with readers through Twitter, Facebook, story comments and blogs. Strict social media rules encourage fear and paranoia. “Sure, the best way to avoid skin cancer is to never go outside,” Ingram says. “You might not get skin cancer, but you have a really shitty life and you die unhappy.”

Goldsbie, because he’s a freelancer, has freedom when writing under his Twitter persona. He’s also on good terms with many city councillors, mostly lefties, which means he’s able to get exclusive information from them. Goldsbie was a political activist and blogger before reporting at city hall and his opinions are a big part of what landed him a gig as a regular on the National Post’s Posted Toronto Political Panel. He believes objectivity is an inherently difficult concept: “I established myself as a personality first and then got journalism work because of it,” he says. Despite (or because of) his obvious left-wing biases, Goldsbie has amassed 4,300 followers. As a self-defined guerrilla advocacy journalist, he is comfortable with Twitter because it helps define him.

Duncan Clark, the Post’s vice president of digital media, explains that columnists have particular knowledge in an area. “Goldsbie is a columnist and with that there’s a different expectation,” he says. On the other hand, if reporters on a beat are expressing opinions on Twitter, “it compromises their ability to report on that story.”

It’s okay for Levy or Goldsbie to express whatever opinions they want—within reason—because that’s their job. It gets trickier when Barton or Evan Solomon, host of CBC’s Power and Politics, decides to tweet because there appears to be no middle ground between the messy freedom that Ingram encourages and the bloodless objectivity that CBC expects.

Not that Solomon has a problem with the corporation’s social media policy. He thinks journalists are capable of doing their jobs without letting their personal opinions leak in. “I think that’s what separates good reporting from shit reporting,” he says. With a two hour Monday to Friday political show, he can’t afford to appear biased. “If I’m perceived to be promoting one political view over another, then I’m not serving my audience in a way that I’m supposed to,” he says. He likes to compare the impartiality of journalism to that of a judge. He asks, “Do you think a judge, who has all sorts of views, is capable of applying the law in an unbiased way?” For Solomon, this is a much better question than, “Does a judge have biases?”

Solomon isn’t the only person to compare the concept of journalistic objectivity to that of a judge. Tim Currie, who helped write the social media guidelines published by the Canadian Association of Journalists in 2011, says, “Although we all have opinions and we all have biases, we also know judges have biases but we hope that they’ll put them aside and apply the law as best they can.”

But judges and journalists have two very different occupations. Journalists pursue their own evidence and often their own cases, whether that’s hard-hitting investigative reporting or reviewing an album. Bert Bruser, a media lawyer, believes news outlets are right to be concerned about Twitter. He’s wary of journalists tweeting about their social causes. Although transparency makes good journalism, he notes, “What’s at stake is the credibility of the news organization—and that’s a big problem people are grappling with.” Bruser, who has a permanent legal office at the Star, thinks journalists often say things they regret on Twitter and it leads to trouble for both them and their bosses.

One of the biggest shortcomings of these new social media guidelines is they serve to illustrate that the problem isn’t that journalists are human, but that some reporters are allowed to reveal more of themselves than others. From Barton’s Twitter account, no one can tell if she’s married or has kids, but Goldsbie has no problem tweeting his insecurities about a T-shirt decision.

Sun Media’s social media manager, William Wolfe-Wylie, says the best approach is “understanding yourself, your audience and how those two players can interact.” This explains why Levy—the Sun’s Toronto columnist—can start political brawls: she does the exact same thing in her columns. Goddard couldn’t bash gay marriage because he was a sports anchor.

These policies, in the end, are more for the news outlets than they are for the journalists they employ: they legally ensure that a journalist can be fired for tweeting something offensive or stupid. The Star, the Sun and CBC are simply covering their asses. Most, if not all, of the social media policies can be condensed into one simple rule: if you wouldn’t like it up on a 30-foot billboard, don’t post it. Save it for the bartender at the dusty old press club.

For now, we’ve got a bunch of reporters tweeting, and not talking about their feelings. But there are some personalities who refuse to be defined by social media guidelines, and they are best followed with a bag of popcorn. The Post and the Sun have long moved on since the Pride debacle between Levy and Goldsbie. In fact, so have the two combatants. In July, Goldsbie tweeted, “Saw @SueAnnLevy’s post-Pride column blowing in the wind along the sidewalk. Picked it up; read it. Was actually moved.” Levy was quick to respond: “At least you didn’t find the column in a bird cage. Thanks for the vote of support!”

And a month later, almost to the day, they were back at it, fighting over library funding. #SomeThingsNeverChange.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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