Canadian journalists have spent the last couple days shooting fish in a barrel and congratulating themselves for it.

On Tuesday, The Rebel reported that its journalists were barred from several government events between January 29 and February 3 because Alberta’s department of justice ruled that the publication — started by Ezra Levant — does not produce journalism, and as such its reporters “are not entitled to access media lock-ups or other such events.” The government has now reversed its decision.

The 48-hour-long pat on the back began shortly after The Rebel‘s initial report, as journalists rushed to condemn the decision, claiming the government shouldn’t decide who is a journalist.

Their argument, of course, is accurate: you don’t need a degree to be a journalist, and working for an alternative publication does not mean you should be barred from events mainstream reporters can access.

The issue is that journalists made this point in the most self-aggrandizing manner, depicting it as if it was the beginning of a totalitarian crackdown on the press, and they were the only ones capable of stopping it.

The Globe and Mail published an editorial on the matter, writing, “This is beyond deplorable. It is not the place of a government to decide what constitutes a journalist or a media outlet. This is not Russia, not Egypt, not Iran – countries where government controls the media through bogus licensing regimes or outright censorship.”

In the Edmonton Sun, Lorne Gunter wrote, “Outrageous is an overused word in politics, but this is truly outrageous.”

Meanwhile on Twitter, journalists were trying to channel Voltaire.

Ezra Levant is a garbage human being and The Rebel is a garbage website but both still deserve journalist status & all that entails.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 16, 2016

@bruceanderson I can't say I've really ever appreciated what Ezra's contributed to the conversation, but I don't think it's for gov't… 3/n

— Alex Boutilier (@alexboutilier) February 16, 2016

@bruceanderson to stop his employees or contributors from attending press conferences. If the gallery allows it to stand for him … 4/n

— Alex Boutilier (@alexboutilier) February 16, 2016

With pretty much every reporter in Canada rallying to his defence I guess all there is to say is welcome, @ezralevant, to the media party.

— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) February 17, 2016

These articles and tweets perpetuate the myth that journalists are all in it together. In reality, Levant’s case is an easy one for reporters to congregate around, expressing outrage without any serious consequences or thought.

Meanwhile, earlier this year RCMP officers entered Vice Canada’s office in Toronto and Montreal to seize documents and notes, and there was very little outrage from journalists: no Globe editorial, no columns and few reporters coming to Vice’s defence on Twitter.

In 2015 I wrote that, “The executive director of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Tom Henheffer, defended Vice’s decision to fight the RCMP’s production order. ‘Journalists are not lackies for the police and to use us that way is a totally unjustifiable violation of free expression and privacy rights,’ Henheffer said, adding that ‘this sets a dangerous precedent for the free press in Canada that must not be repeated.’”

As such, the invasive methods used against Vice should be regarded as a serious threat to the future of adversarial journalism, especially in post Bill C-51 Canada. Journalists don’t deserve a pat on the back until these limits to the freedom of the press are challenged head on.

As winter turned to spring in 2014, journalists at The Hamilton Spectator worked to the sound of contractors drilling through concrete floors and reconfiguring the wiring. The “banana cream” yellow on the walls soon became grey and indigo blue, the Spec’s corporate colours. The paper moved the curved desks to create pods of four and six. The city and web desks took over the middle of the newsroom, with the general assignment, business and entertainment desks on one side and production on the other. And, glowing at the centre of it all, a Chartbeat monitor: a 40-inch television screen turned sideways to display the paper’s online analytics.

The new floor plan fosters creative conversations and connectivity. No matter which direction reporters walk through the newsroom, the digital team is within reach. The redesign—the paper’s most drastic in 20 years—emphasizes digital journalism. “It might have been at the centre in our hearts and minds,” says managing editor Jim Poling, “but it wasn’t at the centre physically—now, it’s physically there.”

As the industry changed over the last decade, many papers strategically rethought their newsroom space. The Toronto Sun and The Globe and Mail are both moving to new office buildings this year: the Sun to the new Postmedia building, and the Globe to a new building. Even papers that haven’t moved to new buildings, including the Spec and the Winnipeg Free Press, have undergone redesign. These Canadian newspapers are harnessing the newsroom’s potential as a storytelling tool for efficient, digital-minded journalism—an industry’s eagerness to adapt and improve, physically manifested.

Back in 1989, the Sun newsroom was a mess of paper piles and desks crammed together. Typewriters were stacked on top of filing cabinets in the wake of computerization. James Wallace sat beside Sun legend Bob MacDonald, whose ashtray was always overflowing with cigarette butts amidst mountains of paper. These newsrooms had a more colourful personality, says Wallace, now the vice president, editorial for Sun newspapers. But that smoky, papery geography has become a thing of the past.

The new landscape is an open sea of screens with a focus on how information flows from department to department. As the Free Press’s publisher, Bob Cox will sometimes pass a story idea on to an editor, who will pass it on to the city editors, and on it goes until it reaches the reporter. By the end of that line of transmission, the idea has sometimes changed considerably. This problem can be circumvented in part by the physical path these ideas take. At the Free Press, the editors, including copy editors, work in the centre of the newsroom, surrounded by the other departments in pods or clusters. Content is centrally gathered, stories are edited and then it flows out into web or print platforms.

At the Sun, the once-separate sports and general news reporters are now about 10 feet away from each other. The Toronto and Ottawa papers’ production staff are in the same area, cheek-by-jowl. To keep up with journalism going digital, the Sun also built a photo studio with broadcast lighting to do video hits and some sports coverage. Similar to the Spec’s current newsroom, the new Sun office will put the web team close to the national and local news desks, and will have a Chartbeat monitor.

Annick Mitchell, an interior design professor at Ryerson University, says a newsroom should promote and support journalistic creativity. In her experience, people are not creative in isolation or solitude, which makes collaborative spaces a crucial consideration for newspapers. The Spectator chose to put the web team in the middle to secure its place as a priority in the story process. Poling’s office is right across from the digital desks, where he can hear conversations and also jump in with his thoughts. That kind of openness, which invites collaboration, extends throughout the newsroom. Poling, who finds that some of the best ideas and stories arise from informal conversations at the heart of the newsroom, compares it to a natural news amphitheatre: “Like a big, digital whiteboard in the middle of the room.” Even the Spec’s formal news meetings take place in the open, and everyone is invited to gather around the glassy black table or listen in from his or her desk.

But Canadian papers haven’t had much structural redesign of their office spaces in comparison to papers such as The Guardian and The New York Times. Cox says that’s a result of a lack of investment. The Times had a brand new building designed from the ground up in 2007. The focus at Canadian papers has mostly been on moving furniture and people around—nothing structural. The interest Cox saw in newsroom redesign from four or five years ago has somewhat fizzled out. “Talking about newsroom design is a little bit of a luxurious conversation,” says Poling. Canadian papers bear the marks of media consolidation and the industry’s shaky financial situation. Before selling its building in 2010, the Sun had six storeys of office space. After the sale, it moved all operations to the second floor. Now, the paper is preparing for its move this year to the Postmedia building, which also houses the National Post. The Free Press’s 20,000 square foot newsroom has empty space at the back—wounds from editorial cutbacks.

No matter where a newsroom is or what it looks like, big stories still send adrenaline rushing through the space. The culture of chasing and telling stories, Wallace says, remains unchanged by the moment’s trends. Beyond a web desk or a hub-and-spoke office design model, that is the newsroom’s true, unchanging core.

A previous version of this story stated The Globe and Mail will be moving into the complex that the Sun currently occupies. The Globe and Mail will not be moving into the same building that the Sun currently occupies, but one nearby.

The streets of downtown Montreal are cluttered with protestors chanting, “Fuck the police!” Traces of the sun filter out from behind department store buildings as anti-capitalists rally for International Workers’ Day. Spectators capture footage of police spraying a thick cloud of tear gas into the crowd, which sends people running. Marie-Espérance Cerda interviews protestors and documents the unfolding events, but instead of using a standard video camera, she’s using six GoPros on a rig to produce virtual reality (VR) journalism.

Later, electronic headgear that creates a three-dimensional, interactive environment will immerse viewers in the same scene Cerda witnessed. This experience—the feeling of being in a place and the heightened sense of emotion that goes with it—isn’t possible through traditional journalism. Words on a page or a video on a screen creates distance between the reader and the story, an empathy divide that VR shrinks.

While the concept has been around since the Second World War, long before computer scientist Jaron Lanier coined the term “virtual reality” in the 1980s, its most common commercial application so far has been video games. In the past year, though, journalists have explored VR’s powerful storytelling possibilities, but they must navigate the tricky ethics that invariably come with new technology.

A VR headset creates a 360-degree field of vision that moves with the user, allowing her to explore virtual surroundings and become part of the story. Lenses focus and reshape the display to make a three-dimensional stereoscopic image similar to one in a View-Master toy. Most high-tech headsets take measurements of the user’s skull to record motion, giving the user control. In 2014, Google released Google Cardboard, a build-it-yourself device that makes VR accessible to anyone with a smartphone. A small magnet works with the phone’s magnetometer (which controls the compass) to create movement.

Cerda’s Montreal experiment began as a major research project for her master’s degree in media production at Ryerson University. The 10-minute video starts outside of a downtown Burger King. Straight ahead, people wave Quebec flags and hold picket signs high. Look up and you’ll see the remnants of daylight reflected in a partially blue sky. If you turn around, there’s a white bus parked in the middle of an intersection. Police armed with riot shields file out one by one. Then they start spraying tear gas.

The coolness of VR can overshadow ethical concerns. There’s more control, but the viewer is confined to the passenger seat. “You’re existing in a universe of possibility that’s been defined by the person who’s made the news item,” says Gene Allen, a journalism professor at Ryerson and the supervisor for Cerda’s project. “They’ve decided what to shoot, and they’ve decided how to put it together.” While “inside” the protest video, viewers can pick where to look and whom to listen to—an illusion of choice. But there’s limited perspective on what’s happening outside the frame. There’s a similar selection process in all forms of journalism, notes Allen: reporters include what’s interesting and toss the rest.

In November 2015, The Globe and Mail launched a roughly three-month VR trial. Three employees spend their days inside an incubation lab on the main floor of the paper’s building. A lot of the current focus is on the technological aspect, says Matt Frehner, senior editor of mobile and interactive news, adding that the VR team is still in the “how does this work” phase. The goal is to create an immersive experience that’s as different from regular video as IMAX is from a regular movie. Meanwhile, Canadian Press plans to explore the technology’s potential within the next year.

Still, Canada is a few steps behind American outlets. ABC and The Wall Street Journal have created VR content. And last November, Associated Press announced plans to produce a series of downloadable stories, which will be released by March.

On Sunday November 8, 2015, The New York Times arrived with Google Cardboard, allowing subscribers to watch an 11-minute video called The Displaced. It followed three child refugees, including 9-year-old Chuol. When his village in South Sudan was attacked, he fled to the swamp with his grandmother; his father and grandfather were burned alive, and he was separated from his mother. He stands at the front of a hollowed-out wooden boat, paddling through a narrow stream surrounded by thick blades of grass and lily pads. The sun reflects off the water, which may conceal crocodiles—an ever-present threat in the swamp. “I know that if I am eaten by a crocodile, it may be a slow death,” the boy says in the video, “but it is better than being killed by the fighters.”

Stories told through VR are usually emotional ones, and the danger is some will go too far. Would people want to experience the terrorist attacks in Paris? The earthquakes in Nepal? Empathy is a powerful tool, when used correctly, and VR breaks down familiar barriers that stand in the way of complete understanding. In the Times project, instead of trying to imagine what living conditions are like in South Sudan, VR lets people temporarily experience it for themselves. Feelings are enhanced and perceptions are amplified, but that can push people into dark corners.

After the paper launched the VR project, Michael Oreskes, news chief at National Public Radio and a former Times editor, was among the people who voiced concern. “Our stories can’t be virtually true,” he wrote. “They must be fully real.” While some projects (including Cerda’s video and the Times’s refugee film) are made from real-time footage, others use computer-simulated images based on maps and photographs. But can embellished stories be honest stories? Allen believes they can, so long as reporters clearly indicate what they’re doing. Feature writers reconstruct scenes all the time, he says, and television programs, including CBC’s the fifth estate, often use simulated footage. The difference with VR is that it’s harder to draw the line between what’s real and what’s recreated. It’s up to the journalist and the editor to produce content that serves as a genuine representation of a story.  

Late last September, Cerda presented her VR project at Ryerson to a small group of people huddled around a boardroom table. A woman strapped on the cardboard headset and became immersed in cluttered Montreal streets as people chanted and police filed out of a white bus. She spun around in a black office chair and said, “Incredible.”

I don’t know who’s telling the truth about the Liberal refugee plan.

On the one hand, there’s Paul McLeod, BuzzFeed‘s political editor, who published an article on November 25, 2015, titled “Someone Gave The Media A Bunch Of False Info About Canada’s Syrian Refugee Plan.” McLeod takes issue with a CBC report by Rosemary Barton that, days before the Liberals revealed their official refugee plan, stated “unaccompanied men seeking asylum will not be part of the (refugee) program.”

McLeod quotes an anonymous senior Liberal member who “said they don’t know where the information came from, but they suspect it was from someone who did not have their best interests at heart. In other words, someone trying to screw them.”

There’s one word being interpreted and responded to differently in the Liberal government’s Syrian refugee plan: “prioritize.”

Other reports also counter the CBC reports on the claim to exclude single male Syrian refugees. As a Vice article states:

Initial reports had suggested that the government would not be allowing in any unattached single men in under the program, unless they are a sexual minority.

Government officials confirmed Tuesday that wouldn’t be the case. While the government will “prioritize” families, women at risk, LGBTQ minorities, and those who are accompanying elderly parents, it will not be disqualifying any would-be refugee on the basis of gender.

The Toronto Star also made this clear: “Officials say [the plan] does not preclude men — including gay men and single men accompanying their parents — from admission.”

The events of the Paris attacks last night are still unfolding–“still” being the operative word. Much journalistic attention has been given to the situation in Paris, and rightly so. At the time of writing, CBC reports stated that at least 150 people had been killed after six separate attacks in public places like a music venue in central Paris, two restaurants and outside a stadium.

It’s difficult, however, to avoid comparing the coverage of the Paris attacks to the coverage of the suicide bombs in Beirut on Thursday. The events were equally historical in their own right, as the Tweets below demonstrate, for they marked a drastic shift in the safety and security of the people of each respective capital city. Both, however, were not covered equally.

Day of mourning in Lebanon after 43 people killed in two suicide bombings in Beirut yesterday. Worst incident since civil ended war in 1990.

— CBC World Report (@CBCWorldReport) November 13, 2015

A city-wide curfew is now in place in #Paris for the first time since 1944.

— CP24 (@CP24) November 13, 2015

The Paris attacks have been extensively reported on a minute-by-minute basis as reporters took to the ground to find the facts and share them in an efficient manner. All the main journalism organizations in Canada had updated versions of their articles, a timeline of the events, a map of where the attacks were happening as they unfolded, an article with pictures and videos and a social media reaction article. News outlet reports were also supplemented by the individual coverage shared, reported and commented on by Canadian journalists on Twitter.

Comparatively, when the Beirut attacks unfolded on Thursday, the same journalism organizations carried an Associated Press article supplemented by Reuters images and video. Little else was seen on Twitter in terms of additional reporting or coverage.

While understanding that logistical and resource-based strains limit the coverage of international reporting in an industry continuously tightening its belt, there are questions to be asked about the decision to cover some events extensively while leaving the coverage of others lacking. There are rationales to consider, of course. France is a country more historically and culturally tied to Canada’s population than Beirut, thus perhaps justifying more in-depth coverage.

This, however, conflicts with the journalistic practice of fair and objective reporting that the industry is founded on. If journalism is meant to bring to attention the realities of such events and the impacts they have, what deems one attack more worthy of attention than the other?

In the face of the Paris attacks, journalism organizations seem to have forgotten about Beirut. It’s yesterday’s news, except that it’s also news that wasn’t properly covered when it happened. As my fellow blog editor, Davide Mastracci, noted in his previous post, several headlines on the Beirut attack incorrectly illustrated the conflict on the ground.

Beirut and Paris weren’t very different. Both were attacks on capital cities that affected innocent residents in public places. Both saw the city come to a standstill and a shutdown. Yet in examining the news coverage, there is a glaring imbalance that doesn’t make this similarity very obvious. In a country like Canada that prides itself on its multiculturalism and continues to be home to communities from places across the world, including Beirut, Paris, Baghdad and Japan–the four places that faced some sort of serious devastation yesterday–balanced all-around coverage seems all the more pertinent.

This inherent, perhaps implicit, perhaps natural bias is something journalists need to recognize in the mirror and deal with. If journalism frames the narrative about these events, the onus is on journalists to do so responsibly and fairly.

Not all stories are equal, but perhaps they should be.

I sat in a heart surgeon’s office, waiting to ask what it’s like to touch a beating heart. It’s not every day that you get to put such questions to people, even as a journalist. But this summer at the Calgary Herald, my editor assigned me to a project called What’s it Like? The idea was to ask local people about unique experiences. I also spoke to a former astronaut, a meteorite tracker, a paramedic and a paleontologist. I mostly presented the stories from the perspective of the subjects, as though they were talking directly to the reader. This approach erased me, the journalist, as the messenger.

The goal of our series, according to Tony Seskus, the Herald’s senior editor of news and my supervisor, was to find stories that reporters rarely tell. They’re about “people who are everyday, maybe unsung people, who do some pretty extraordinary, amazing things,” he says. We are surrounded by neighbours with stories to share, yet we never ask to hear them. These vignettes are meant to start that conversation. They’re “friendly,” as though you’re telling someone over a drink about something notable you did that day, except it’s an interesting person engaging with the reader at home.

Such series help readers get to know their neighbours at a time when, for many of us, connections over social media are more common than face-to-face encounters. It has become normal to know someone you’ve never met, who may live anywhere in the world and have a life that’s completely different from yours. You may be keeping up with Kim Kardashian West’s every move, but here’s someone who lives around the corner and has an interesting life. Although vignette journalism doesn’t tell the full story, it helps us understand the communities we live in. We can get our long features and our traditional human interest stories anywhere, but now some news outlets are engaging readers and audiences by putting more emphasis on this style of storytelling in the age of social media.

When I started working on the Herald series, it reminded me of Vice stories with headlines that start, “We talked to the guy who…” and Brandon Stanton’s wildly popular Humans of New York, a series of photographs accompanied by short captions, usually a quotation. Stanton has even gone global on sponsored tours, most recently to photograph refugees in Eastern Europe. Another example is The Globe and Mail’s What It’s Like health series, which health editor Hayley Mick says was partly inspired by Humans of New York. Reporter Wency Leung writes the majority of these stories from the perspective of the subject—with some even written by the subjects themselves—to build a sense of connection between the subject and the reader, which fosters empathy. This is especially true for health stories, where part of the aim is to help the audience understand what it’s like to have a certain medical condition.

Vignette stories connect well with online audiences because of their conversational tone, says Alfred Hermida, author of Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters and director of the graduate school of journalism at the University of British Columbia. Social media is about making connections between people, so the impartial voice of a news article doesn’t play well. “You don’t want the voice of God through social media,” he says. “You want a person talking to you.” Longer human interest stories, meanwhile, usually have a mix of people telling their stories and disinterested voices from experts or information from documents.

When I asked Hermida if vignettes are the modern evolution of human interest stories, he pointed out that they aren’t necessarily anything new. Broadcast journalists have long used one person as an example of a larger story, as have print journalists with their anecdotal leads. But what’s different these days is the time and emphasis given to these vignettes, says Hermida. “It’s seen as more a central part of what the organization should be doing: reflecting the community back to itself.”

There are still challenges with this type of writing, including the problem of trying to fully reflect a community with only a few people’s stories. When we were putting our series together, it was hard to go beyond the usual suspects and find “unsung” people who had done interesting things. This is also the most challenging part for Leung, who says, “It’s not like there’s a phone book of people that you can look up people who have an allergy to cold.”

I also found that we ended up speaking to a lot of men for our series. I’m sure there were many reasons for that, including the common view that men are more comfortable sharing their achievements. But it still meant that we didn’t have the most balanced reflection of the community that we could have. CBC Vancouver did a Faces of BC project, with the goal of including a resident from every country in the world, but it depended on people submitting photos and captions. The station didn’t quite get every country, although it did reach an impressive 147 out of 194.

The Faces of BC project highlights one of the benefits of vignette journalism—it can increase an audience while encouraging participation. Seskus hopes that the Herald series, which started rolling out in early October, will help the paper engage with the community in new ways. He wants readers to submit other interesting experiences.

These stories move people to engage because they’re powerful. Mick says that power can come from how direct and personal they are: “Sometimes in 300 words, you can move people more than you can with a whole bunch of experts and a whole bunch of stats.”

As a studio arts, fibres and material practices student at Montreal’s Concordia University and having worked in the fashion industry, Serah-Marie McMahon wasn’t able to find the insightful fashion writing she craved as a reader. While skimming through newsstands, she found nothing she could relate to in traditional fashion magazines. So she created Worn Fashion Journal. “I was experimenting with what I liked,” says McMahon. “I said to myself, ‘I can make it and don’t have to wait for someone else to create it.’” For 10 years, as editor-in-chief, McMahon documented what fashion could be—focusing on reporting, not just trends.

But last November, Worn ceased publication after 20 issues. McMahon says it was her choice to shut the doors. The magazine’s longevity depended on factors such as time, funding and resources. But while its print run of 5,000 was small, the dedication of its readers proved that some people want an alternative to mainstream fashion publications.

Fashion journalism covers clothes, style and trends in both service pieces and analytical features, but Canadian magazines have relied heavily on how-to lists and glossy centrefolds. This means readers get little analysis—adding fuel to the classic debate about whether fashion journalism is real journalism. But today, despite the closing of Worn, tried-and-tested formats are being challenged. Some determined fashion writers are trying their hand at heavily-reported cultural trend pieces that blend fashion and current events. VICE, for instance, reported on what it’s like for minorities to work in the industry. And in November 2014, Flare Magazine ran a controversial online piece about how appearance affects impression in Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault case. These publications are trying to lead with balanced service journalism and solid, well-written articles, but the formula hits a roadblock when magazines still feel the pressure to appeal to consumers.

Creating an in-depth fashion magazine isn’t easy because editors and writers still have to cater to advertisers. A concern for what sells can overwhelm a publication. “There needs to be more of a separation between advertisements and editorials because of how melded they are together,” says Sabrina Maddeaux, fashion and design editor at Now Magazine. “It all comes down to how independent the publication is.”

Editorial content can seem like promotions in disguise. Even a series of photographs with a narrative and a theme can reinforce the stereotype that the genre relies on sell-heavy visuals. “Editorials are not taken seriously, it’s no surprise,” says Nathalie Atkinson, culture critic and columnist for The Globe and Mail. The images are a huge part of the problem, but the visual content gets the most recognition. At the National Magazine Awards in 2013, Flare won gold for fashion and silver for best art direction for its November 2013 issue. ELLE Canada won gold for best beauty shoot, and Fashion Magazine won silver for still photography. The majority of the awards these magazines won went to the visual content rather than the writing.

But according to ELLE Canada features director Kathryn Hudson, fashion journalism is undergoing a shift. Photography will still have a place in fashion magazines, but it will have to share space with stories that deserve equal attention.

Meanwhile, there is a “serious or not” debate between bloggers and journalists. Bloggers are a vital part of fashion coverage, but readers see them less as journalists and more like social media gurus. As fashion magazines try to adopt a more serious tone, though, bloggers have been left a platform to establish their voice and keep fashionistas informed, blurring the ethical lines by producing both good pieces and PR-related content. Both serve different purposes and borrow from each other, although it can be hard to tell them apart. “It’s become a question of, are you a fashion journalist or not?” says Atkinson. “Bloggers want to call themselves journalists and have to behave with journalists’ standards. They’re not less than fashion journalists—they’re just different.”

Elio Iannacci, features editor for Fashion Magazine, says the industry is too exclusive. “We have fashion television shows, good and bad, discussing fashion and great magazines and blogs,” he says. “That whole old world thinking is outdated and unfashionable, it doesn’t make any sense to think that way.”

Fashion publishing has been depicted as a harsh industry in popular movies such as The Devil Wears Prada. This world is full of well-dressed people who will do whatever it takes to get to those higher places. “The fashion industry is portrayed as cruel, cold and soul-crushing, and something our heroine has to overcome,” says Haley Mlotek, a former Worn publisher. “That idea has seeped into our real-life interpretation of what fashion journalism is.”

But today’s journalists are trying to push past these stereotypes and return to the standard investigative style that Worn started. Its last issue hit stands in November but it remains an example of how fashion magazines can be a hybrid of both beautiful visuals and quality storytelling.

Illustration by Harrisson Joseph

Dressed in a navy blue suit, Cathal Kelly sits on the edge of his seat hunched over his MacBook Air. Other writers in Toronto’s Rogers Centre press box sit back in their chairs, some chatting, others racing to finish their first stories of the day. Many are dressed in T-shirts and shorts to stay cool in the heat. It’s 1:07 p.m. and R.A. Dickey has just thrown the first pitch for the Toronto Blue Jays, but Kelly keeps his head down as a grin forms at the corners of his mouth. After years of covering baseball he relies on the crack of the bat to get his attention—even the screaming fans can’t break his focus when he is writing. Now he’s the only one whose eyes aren’t on the diamond. The sports columnist for The Globe and Mail writes quickly without stopping, mumbling quietly to himself. The only reason he stays in the press box is to avoid missing anything, but his column is unlikely to change unless “someone throws a grenade on the field.” He finishes his 800-word column just after the seventh-inning stretch. “I am not a nuts-and-bolts guy,” he says. “I want people to read it and have a laugh, think that five minutes was worth it.”

A couple of weeks later, Bruce Arthur is in Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, eating ham and scalloped potatoes in the media room before he heads up to the narrow press box in the rafters. The Toronto Star sports columnist slides in his earbuds to drown out the noise of the hockey pre-game show and writes his lede before checking Twitter, which he says helps him think. Beside him, Star beat reporter Kevin McGran has already started to write his story. After Toronto Maple Leafs sniper Phil Kessel scores in overtime, all the other reporters run to the locker room, but Arthur heads for the eerily quiet media room.

Later, McGran rushes in. “I wish I had more time,” he says. Arthur’s column is almost finished and he hurries to the locker room so he doesn’t miss the players. He talks to a few, then joins the rest of the reporters listening to then-head coach Randy Carlyle. Arthur stands off to the side intently focusing on his notebook. But instead of writing notes, he’s doodling a cartoon face with beady eyes—the same face he often draws to help him process information.

As two of Canada’s best sports columnists, Kelly and Arthur rarely have to worry about writing game recap stories. Their ability to blend culture and sport in their writing is a far more valuable offering. In 2014, crosstown papers scooped up both Arthur and Kelly. First, the Globe snatched Kelly from the Star, and then the Star raided the National Post for Arthur.

Sports sections are struggling to bring in new readers and keep existing ones in the face of increasing competition. But they still have their ringers: columnists with distinctive voices who cut through the clutter and keep readers coming back.

***

On Saturday mornings, eight-year-old Kelly wouldn’t get out of bed until he’d read a Hardy Boys book. Later, while studying political science at the University of Toronto, he worked in a bookstore, read prolifically and wrote “one really, really terrible” sports article for The Varsity. He then studied journalism at Ryerson University, eventually landing a job at the Star as a copy editor. Later, he became a beat reporter covering the Jays. He wrote with an “I dare you not to print this, I dare you to change it” attitude. “I never could adapt to being a beat writer,” says Kelly. “I was piss-poor at it.” Even as a beat reporter, he was writing columns and his editors would pull out his outrageous flights of fancy and goofy digressions. Looking back, Kelly says they saved him from himself and he now understands how right they were. He expected his editors to say his stories were idiotic, that they needed to find something else for him to do. And they did find something else—four years after he took over the Jays beat, the Star made him a columnist.

In March 2014, Globe sports editor Shawna Richer emailed him, asking if he’d like to meet up. They were friends and the request was a little more formal than usual, but Kelly didn’t think too much of it. When they met, she asked if he wanted to come work for her. Kelly was interested, but the relationships he’d formed over 14 years at the Star were hard to ignore. “My head was spinning,” he says. “I was going to all my rabbis in the business, guys I trust and saying, ‘How do I do this?’” One of them, Norris McDonald, current editor of the Star’s Wheels section, let Kelly babble on and on, then held his hands up. “Dick Beddoes, Allen Abel, Christie Blatchford, Stephen Brunt,” he said in his pebbly voice. “Those are four people who have done this job before you.”

Kelly’s departure wasn’t the only hit to the Star’s Sports section. Columnist Damien Cox announced that he was leaving for Sportsnet, though he would continue to write a weekly column. The paper moved quickly to fill the gap.

Monday, April 14, 2014 was one of the busiest days Arthur can remember. Before scheduled TV and radio appearances, he attended a press conference for newly appointed Leafs president Brendan Shanahan, who was the main subject in his next column. That evening, his kids threw him a surprise birthday party because he was scheduled to be on the road for the big day. Then, around 10 p.m., he met with Star editor Michael Cooke, managing editor Jane Davenport and former sports editor Jon Filson about making the move.

He thought about his decision carefully: he wanted to be good at his job and take care of his family. Although he didn’t like the idea of change, the offer was enticing. He took it. “I left a great job to go to a great job.” Going from the Post to the Star was “abrupt,” says Arthur. “It happened really, really fast.” He left the Montreal Canadiens playoff series and started covering the Toronto Raptors post-season effort, all within two days.

Exceptional sports writers have always been one of the strengths of newspapers. At the Globe, that tradition includes not just the writers McDonald mentioned, but also Scott Young, Trent Frayne and Roy MacGregor. The Star had Jim Proudfoot, Randy Starkman and, for decades, Milt Dunnell. Even the Post, the relative rookie among the big papers, fielded Abel, and Blatchford, who covered the Olympics before Arthur.

All of these sports writers earned the loyalty of readers with engaging profiles, colourful investigations and well-crafted stories. Like Young, some wanted to be novelists, some wanted to be political journalists and some knew from the beginning that they were destined to write about sports. All shared the ability to go deeper than what happened in a game.

That’s what may just save the sports section from extinction. The game story, also known as a “gamer,” is more difficult to write as deadlines get tighter while journalists get less access to players and must create more content on a variety of platforms. Besides, when fans can watch any game on television, receive game updates on their phones and find almost limitless analysis on the web, a game story in the next day’s paper is largely irrelevant. One of the worst things in sports journalism is the play-by-play, says Arthur. “It’s like Morse code. It’s completely value-free.”

***

Doug Smith was in a bar one night in September 2004 when his phone rang. The voice on the other end claimed to be Toronto Raptor Vince Carter and said he really needed to talk. The Star sports reporter chuckled and said, “Yeah, right. Call me back in 30 minutes.” But Jim LaBumbard, the Raptors director of media relations, confirmed the call really had come from the star shooting guard. When they spoke again, Carter told Smith it was time for him to be traded. The next morning, the story ran on the front page of the Star with the headline: “‘I Want to Be Traded,’ Vince Carter Says It’s Time to Go.”

If he received a call like that today, Smith would tweet, “Vince wants a trade” as soon as he could get his story online. Then, a piece with a different angle would appear in the paper the next day. Other reporters might chase it as soon as they saw the tweet. Reporters would previously have to steal these stories straight off delivery trucks for a scoop—something the internet has now made extinct.

While the internet makes exclusivity harder, so does decreased access to athletes. That wasn’t as big a problem for Wayne Parrish in the 1980s. During his time at the Star and The Toronto Sun, his working relationship with George Bell, for example, meant that the Jays slugger would have called him to share personal details. He would ask Bell questions in private, trying to get to the essence of him not just as an athlete but as a human being, without other reporters within earshot. “Today, that is much more difficult to do,” says Parrish, who is now the chief operating officer at Postmedia.

Meanwhile, economic turmoil in the newspaper industry is also hurting sports sections and increasing reliance on wire service copy. Reading through the Star one Friday in December 2014, the Sports section featured six articles by the paper’s own staff, one from a freelancer and seven from wire services. There was an Arthur column on the NFL; two Dave Feschuk stories, one a game recap and the other about Leafs goalie Jonathan Bernier; two NBA stories from Smith; a Josh Rubin piece on Toronto FC; and a column about hockey analytics from a freelancer. The “scoreboard” filled one page. The rest of the seven-page section was wire service stories, including a piece on NHL superstar Sidney Crosby from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

***

If the game story is dead, or at least desperately ailing, the good news for publishers and editors is that reporting resources may become available for writing other stories. “If you free up journalists from that and get them to do other things, I think you would be surprised at how productive they would be,” says Sean Holman, a journalism professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. But it also means losing a valuable farm system for future columnists. Writing columns offers journalists the chance to explore stories those on the sports beat can’t, but it takes years of experience—and sometimes embarrassing lessons—to get there.

Kelly rarely has trouble sleeping, but tonight is an exception. Tomorrow is his first day of spring training camp in 2007. He tries to lie still, feeling sick to his stomach all night long. In the morning, he heads to the ballpark in Dunedin, Florida, with two fellow Star reporters, Richard Griffin and Mark Zwolinski. They seem like nice guys to Kelly, who just landed the sports section job. Though he feels out of place with all the rituals of baseball, he still manages to think up a story idea.

He approaches Griffin for advice, and the veteran reporter suggests he talk to pitching coach Brad Arnsberg, a man standing in centre field talking to some of the players warming up. Kelly starts marching toward the coach without knowing the area is generally off-limits to reporters during practice. Arnsberg watches in growing fear as Kelly closes in on him.

“Hi, I’m Cathal Kelly with the Toronto Star and I was hoping I could ask you some questions.”

“Yeah, but you can’t be here,” replies Arnsberg. Realizing everyone is staring at him, Kelly slinks off the field.

“You can’t run, you can’t show fear!” he says now. After he became a columnist, Kelly passed on notes to Brendan Kennedy explaining everything he wished he knew when he started covering the Jays.

Beyond his experience with the Jays, Kelly has run into other uncomfortable situations while chasing a unique story. Three lines of scars mark the left side of his head are a testament to this. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Kelly walked into razor wire outside the tightly guarded stadium where the North Korean team was training. It didn’t hurt, despite all the blood, but he was worried about the rust. He needed to see a doctor, but the only one around was with the North Korean national team.

As other journalists watched the team practice, Kelly found himself alone with one of the players—Ri Jun-Il. He pointed to his head and Jun-Il winced appreciatively. Kelly prodded some more: “You. Brazil,” he said, miming a running motion and giving a thumbs up for the team’s losing effort against the South American powerhouse in its last game, in which they “ran like demons.” Jun-Il responded by shaking his head, and saying, “No, no. No good.” It occurred to Kelly that he was having the first-ever sit-down interview with a North Korean soccer player inside a dressing room.

The doctor arrived and wrapped Kelly like a mummy, pointing to his own head and telling him, “I have great pity.” In his column, Kelly reflected, “He was saying sorry that this had happened to me at all. I liked him more than any doctor I’ve ever met.”

Kelly wrote his column in 50 minutes. He told not just the story of his trip through the forbidden stadium, but also how the experience changed his view of the country and its oppressive dictatorship. “I met them for only a moment yesterday. But those two men changed my mind. The regime is evil. They weren’t.” Kelly shook both their hands before he left and thanked them. They smiled and nodded in return. “They seemed embarrassed by my thank-yous,” he wrote. “So I left.”

Kelly regularly makes readers feel connected to the athletes he writes about. One-by-one, the Raptors walk into the large room on the second floor of Toronto’s Real Sports Bar & Grill, squeeze past the reporters and stand in front of the traditional black backdrop for some pre-season face time. Kelly, dressed in a grey suit and black tie, doesn’t join the sweaty circle of journalists digging elbows into backs and yelling over each other. Instead, he stands about three metres back and watches until a player who’s just signed with the team drifts off near him. Kelly introduces himself with an outstretched hand.

As they talk, Greg Stiemsma laughs and opens up to Kelly about a little cabin he’s stayed in with no electricity on Lake St. Joseph in northwestern Ontario. As other reporters notice, their heads pivot toward the pair and soon they surround the once-private conversation. But Kelly has his column. “First guy out of the gate? Greg Stiemsma, a gentleman so fetchingly midwestern you want to take him home so that he can make everyone pancakes and advise you on livestock purchases,” he wrote, using the new player to show how the Raptors are finally getting attention in a hockey town and telling the story the way he’d share it with a friend in a bar.

Kelly knows he must grab readers and hook them within 100 words. The first thing you want to tell a friend, he says, is what the story should be about. He understands his audience wants the bigger picture and not just a breakdown of statistics. The only two things that matter are what happened and what it means.

To Arthur, sports writing is about stepping back and tackling the story from a different angle. As he watches the Leafs skating circles during their morning practice, he says, “You need to be able to write bigger picture and be able to write small details. Perspective is the word—sports is really easy to not put in perspective.” If he could cover one event for the rest of his life, he says it would be the Olympics. “It means something to people—everyone watches, everyone cares.” Sports is one of the things that ties municipalities together (other than traffic) and is something that can make people feel in ways that few other activities can.

That was the case with a 2008 story about a Vancouver basketball star who’d disappeared more than 20 years earlier after playing his last game at the age of 17. Arthur offered a vivid account of the people who knew him: “And so they live their lives. They experience joys and sorrows, indignities and triumphs. And through all the years, a lost boy named Acron Eger follows them, sits on their shoulders, inhabits their dreams. Acron Eger may never be found. But he will never be completely lost, either.”

Similarly, a Post column about Brian Burke marching in Toronto’s Pride Parade gave a rare glimpse into the pain of a father who’d lost his son, and the pressure that gay athletes face. “One year ago Brian Burke promised his son Brendan he would march in the Pride Parade with him. And in a way, he did…But the reason marching was easier is that every time he tries to talk about Brendan, 156 days later, he gets strangled by his heart. Brian Burke can talk about anything but this,” Arthur wrote in a July 2010 column that earned him his first National Newspaper Award nomination. In 2012, he was named Sportswriter of the Year by Sports Media Canada.

***

Arthur and Kelly are different personalities, have different voices and they take different approaches. Eccentric and witty, Kelly is often the first to say hello to fellow reporters. He makes his readers laugh. Arthur is friendly, but is quieter while working. He entertains by making his readers think.

Their readers form relationships with them, whether they agree with them or not. That’s why sports columnists are so valuable to newspapers when they can find—or steal away—good ones. They represent a level of excellence that editors and publishers wish they could put on every page. “I think many of the newspapers that we’ve got around at the moment will struggle to survive the next ten years because they have cut back so much on the quality,” says Globe publisher and CEO Phillip Crawley.

Those cuts mean losing distinctive content that make sports sections a must-read. “Everyone is vulnerable right now, regardless of their property and regardless of their reputation,” says Holman. To stay competitive, newspapers need to invest in unique voices and insight, which often comes in the form of columnists. “You’ve got to give them something that is special,” Holman adds. And that is why columnists are so invaluable.

Readers don’t buy the Globe for sports, admits Crawley, but they expect high-level journalism in every section—and since Kelly joined the paper, people who wouldn’t normally look at the sports section find themselves laughing out loud at what he writes. Crawley wants to see his star columnist write general columns in the near future, but for Kelly, there isn’t a better part of the newspaper to work for than sports. Arthur agrees: “It can make you feel ways that very few other things can.”

Sports columnists such as these two writers may not be able to save newspapers on their own, but they sure can keep the fans wanting more.

Photo by Laura Arsie

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

Here is a sneak peek at one story from our Spring 2015 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism magazine.