“Oh my God/Oh my God/If I Die, I’m a legend,” shouted thousands of concert-goers through the haze of smoke and fireworks during the final song of Drake’s OVO Fest last August. For two people, those words foreshadowed the night ahead. As the three-day festival ended at Toronto’s Molson Canadian Amphitheatre around midnight, some excited fans tweeted on their way to the after-party at Muzik nightclub.

The Toronto Star later reported that Ariela Navarro-Fenoy couldn’t get tickets to the sold-out show, but she did get into Muzik. She reportedly texted a friend around 11 p.m. to let him know. Meanwhile, Duvel Hibbert also made it to the nightclub. Through- out the night, people posted on social media from the party, but around 3:30 a.m., journalists took over Twitter: shots had been fired at Muzik. On the club’s patio, Hibbert lay dead. Outside, Navarro-Fenoy had been hit by a stray bullet. By morning, both were dead, and three other people were injured. By the next afternoon, police formally released the victims’ names, but some journalists were already a step ahead.

The headlines reflected their findings: Navarro-Fenoy, who had an active social media presence, became the “beautiful, smiling” girl caught in a hail of bullets: “Drake fan was an innocent victim of Muzik shooting,” read a Star headline.

Hibbert received different treatment. A Google search for his name brought up a Canada-wide warrant issued by the Ontario Provincial Police in 2013 for his parole violation on a possession of a firearm offence. The Brampton Guardian titled an article “Muzik nightclub shooting victim had criminal record that included gun crimes,” and a Toronto Sun headline read: “Man slain at OVO Fest after-party was under house arrest.”

An online GoFundMe campaign for Navarro-Fenoy’s funeral costs surpassed its goal of $20,000. A campaign for Hibbert, started by someone identified as his sister Angie, collected less than $4,500. She begged people to look past the news stories about him—a life had still been lost.

The Muzik tragedy falls under one of Toronto’s biggest crime concerns: gun violence. While other cities have common crimes—stabbings in Regina and homicides in Winnipeg—gun homicides in Toronto get national coverage. The 2012 shooting at the Eaton Centre (followed by Danzig Street a month later), Yonge Street on Boxing Day 2005 and a Just Desserts café in 1994 represent the city’s gun problem.

The shooting deaths of youngsters Jordan Manners, Ephraim Brown, Kesean Williams and Lecent Ross also highlight the region’s issue with violent crime. While fatal shootings have dramatically decreased since Toronto’s “Year of the Gun” in 2005, shooting injuries—many involving young Black men from disadvantaged neighbourhoods—have increased. That worries the police and the public.

For years, media critics, lawyers and criminologists have denounced the coverage of gun violence, arguing that it perpetuates the stereotype that Black people, particularly Jamaicans, are violent gangbangers—Toronto’s obstacle to safe streets. In 2000, then-York University professors Frances Henry and Carol Tator analyzed two decades of English-language Canadian newspapers and found that reporters and editors not only contribute to the association of crime with Black people, but they also have the power to shape how the public views minority groups.

When Black shooters are easily identified, the crimes are “bloodbaths” that “spill” into Toronto streets, while others—like a January double murder in Toronto’s downtown Chinatown, which included three people injured on a busy nighttime street— are simply called “fatal.” In 2012, Christopher Husbands shot and killed two men in the crowded Eaton Centre food court, injuring four others. The shooting was called a bloodbath in some articles. Both the Star and the Sun described the Danzig barbecue as “Caribbean-themed” with “jerk chicken,” affiliating Black people with the shooting. Headlines and coverage involving Black shooters reflect sensational tones that spark fear of Black men and public panic about who is causing the shootings. And the focus on Black male shooters in high-profile cases and the underwhelming coverage of young Black victims suggest an implicit racial bias that, even in Toronto—known for its motto “Diversity our strength”—journalists fail to adequately address.

In the era of Black Lives Matter and a shift toward more diversity in newsrooms, journalists should be held accountable for how they report on crime when race is involved. They will have to learn to be sensitive to how their coverage can stigmatize an entire community. Such sensitivity is possible, but only if journalists are willing to report on the underlying issues.

Jamaicans started moving to Canada in large numbers throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, and many settled in Toronto, where newspaper employees were—and remain—mostly white. Turf wars erupted in low-income neighbourhoods over the crack cocaine trade, mainly run by Jamaicans in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The city was fearful, and mainstream news outlets often lumped all Black people together when laying the blame. “It was terrible,” says former Sun reporter Tom Godfrey, who worked at Contrast, one of Toronto’s first Black newspapers, in the mid-’80s. He remembers being one of only a few Black reporters in the city. “You could be from Africa or Jamaica, but it was all ‘the Black community.’”

Meanwhile, Black leaders condemned police for beating and shooting people, including Albert Johnson in 1979 and Lester Donaldson and Michael Wade Lawson in 1988. “Young Black males were thrown into police cars and questioned later,” Godfrey says. “It was open season.”

He remembers dozens of Black people lined up outside the Contrast office to report alleged police beatings. Often, they’d have blood streaming from their faces. “They thought Black community papers would give them a fair shake,” he says, since mainstream news often sided with police.

News outlets began seeing a trend in gun violence: Jamaicans were often suspects and victims, and reporters fed the public’s anxiety about Jamaican crime taking over Toronto. Timothy Appleby, then a police reporter for The Globe and Mail, wrote a three-part series in July 1992 called “Crime: the Jamaica connection.” Each instalment started on the front page. The first of the series was headlined “Island crime wave spills over” and stated that “a small but volatile group of young Jamaican males has altered Toronto’s criminal landscape significantly in the past three years.” The pull quote in the full-page spread showcased the words of a law enforcement official in Jamaica: “The people who migrate are the riffraff. The quality ones stay home.”

The death of Georgina “Vivi” Leimonis, shot when three Jamaican men robbed a Just Desserts café, riveted Toronto in 1994. Described as an act of “urban terrorism” by police, the story ran repeatedly in the city’s major outlets. Newspapers published more than 200 stories on the murder in the following seven weeks. Editorials demanded tougher immigration laws, and an op-ed by the Globe’s Michael Valpy said the “barbarians are inside the gate” committing “alien slaughter.”

Globe reporter Peter Cheney says it was the most sensational murder case he’d seen in Canada, which he attributes to the growing racial tension between Black and white communities. “The Jamaican community in particular felt it was singled out for coverage that reflected poorly on it,” he says. “Was there actually a crime problem in that community? Was the media guilty of racist coverage? I think both were true.”

A late-’90s study of the Star and the Sun by criminologist Scot Wortley found that Black people appear predominantly in crime, sports and entertainment stories, while white people overpopulate politics, business and science. In 1999, not much had improved. Henry, then Ryerson University’s chair of diversity for the school of journalism, and research assistant Marnie Bjornson found that about 40 percent of all stories about Jamaicans in those two newspapers, between 1994 and 1997, were in relation to “social problems,” including crime and immigration, and only 2 percent were positive.

In 1999, Cheney finished “a.k.a. Brownman,” his in-depth fea- ture on Lawrence Brown, who was later convicted of first-degree murder in Leimonis’s death. Cheney says the case crystallized the white fear of Black men who, until then, the public believed were only killing each other in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. “But then it spilled over into the ‘privileged’ community—the white community,” Cheney says. “And a white person was shot while getting dessert. And so the two worlds had intersected.”

A decade later, the Jane Creba case also unnerved Toronto. On Boxing Day 2005, a stray bullet hit the 15-year-old during a gang shootout while she shopped on a busy downtown street. Detective sergeant Savas Kyriacou called it “the day Toronto lost its innocence.” Creba’s death ended the “Year of the Gun,” which led to the formation of the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) with $5 million from the province to create trained officer teams.

Wortley, now an associate professor at the University of Toronto Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, believes the case gained public sympathy because it was a “perfect storm.” It was an interracial shooting, and Wortley says that “Creba was what might be called the ‘ideal victim’: young, female, white, innocent, caught in gang warfare,” adding that people were also interested because it happened on Boxing Day in a busy Yonge Street shopping area. “Those crimes generate fear because it suggests that violence has stepped outside of its normal boundaries.”

Six weeks later, York University student Chantel Dunn was killed in a shooting the police said was meant for her boyfriend, who escaped with injuries. “It took place near Jane and Finch,” says Wortley, referring to one of Toronto’s well-known “priority” neighbourhoods, a euphemism for low-income areas. “The impression is if you’re unlucky or stupid enough to live in a high-crime area, then those types of things happen there, so it’s not a big story.”

Each year in his introductory criminology course, Wortley asks his students to make a list of famous Canadian criminals. They throw around names: Bernardo, Homolka, Pickton, Magnotta, Olson—all white. When he asks them which group they think is responsible for most violent crime in Canada, they say African and Aboriginal Canadians. Wortley challenges students to name one offender from either group, but nobody can. “It illustrates how white crime is individualized,” he says. The public learns about their childhoods, jobs and mental illnesses, even excuses for the behaviour. “But minority crime is a cultural phenomenon. It’s a problem in the neighbourhood. It’s a problem with Jamaicans. It’s hip hop culture,” he says. “Everybody in that group is stigmatized by it.”

Listen: Rob Lamberti, who covered crime at the Toronto Sun for almost 30 years, talks about the mistrust between Black communities and the Sun, and what the paper got wrong when reporting on crime involving Black people

After the Danzig shooting, the National Post published an article entirely about the Hennessy bought for the party, saying it has “a reputation as the go-to drink in hip hop circles” and is “popular among rappers.” Below the article is a list of lyrics about Hennessy by rappers Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Mac Dre, who all wrote about gang life in their music, and two of whom were killed by gunfire.

A Post story in July about Mark Moore, a Toronto rapper convicted of murdering four people, featured two screenshots of Moore from rap videos. In one, he’s wearing gold jewellery and pointing at the camera. In another, Moore is rapping in a limo, wearing sunglasses and gold chains and holding stacks of bills.

Paul Nguyen was so tired of seeing people’s expressions when he told them he lived at Jane and Finch that he started saying he lived in North York instead. He noticed that journalists came to the neighbourhood rarely—only when crimes occurred. So, after graduating from York University in 2004, he created Jane-Finch.com to dispel its negative image. “We have a lot of young people here doing amazing things, winning all kinds of awards, competing on national levels,” he says. “I wanted to share and promote those positive things here.”

Nguyen says reporters feed the perception that the neighbourhood is dangerous. A TV reporter approached him to do a story on young people using music to escape gang life. One of Nguyen’s friends, known for wearing a bulletproof vest, was helping out. The friend showed a reporter where bullets had been fired near a convenience store. The lead for the next day’s story: “Sometimes a simple trip to the corner store in Toronto’s Jane-Finch neighbourhood means wearing a bulletproof vest.”

The reporter was Black, so his angle particularly shocked Nguyen. Another time, reporters came to do a live hit for a positive story—and brought two men Nguyen believed were security guards. As Nguyen says, “Jane and Finch is a brand.”

The annual Toronto Caribbean Carnival, which used to be known as Caribana, is also a brand known for gunfire. Stephen Weir, public relations manager since 1999, says the public sometimes still calls it “Caribana” and, each year, the carnival ends up in the news for “pre-Caribana” or “Caribana weekend” crimes. Weir says many journalists don’t realize that club promoters use the name to help boost attendance at events that aren’t affiliated with the carnival.

In 2009, Wesler Fabien, a Black man from Ottawa, was shot to death outside the Howard Johnson Hotel in the posh Toronto area of Yorkville. Even though police said the shooting wasn’t related to the carnival, several articles included that it happened on carnival weekend and that Fabien and a friend were visiting the city to attend. “Good or bad,” Weir says, “Caribana is thought of as everything that happens on the August first weekend.” Sometimes, crimes are linked to the carnival weeks before it even begins. On July 23, 2010, a teenager was shot and killed at a church basement party in Ajax, about 50 kilometres east of Toronto. A Durham police officer was quoted saying, “We’ve been told that it was a pre-Caribana party.” Weir says the event had nothing to do with the carnival—it wasn’t even in Toronto.

In 2015, a stabbing took place during Nuit Blanche, an all-night art event; later that night, a crowd at Yonge-Dundas Square threw bottles at police. CityNews published an online article that reported, “Nuit Blanche was taking place at the same time although there were no installations at Yonge-Dundas Square.” Weir says, “If it had been a mostly Black or Caribbean crowd, it probably would have been called a ‘Caribana riot.’”

He says journalists rely heavily on police, who can use “throwaway lines” that end up sticking. If an officer incorrectly links a shooting to the festival, Weir has to call reporters to clarify. Although most journalists will issue a correction, he says some refuse or don’t follow through.

Reporters rely on crime information from police press conferences, which can’t give the full picture because they’re usually focused on a specific crime. “I think that police sometimes have a vested interest in creating moral panics about particular types of crimes because it can help mobilize public support,” Wortley says. In two decades as a criminologist, he’s seen public spending and police power increase dramatically after sensational shootings.

News outlets fed into this when they quoted former police chief Bill Blair’s statement labelling Danzig the “worst incident of gun violence in my memory anywhere in North America” as he stood at the scene. This statement is an example of why Wortley urges journalists to think hard about their sources. His op-ed in the Star the next day criticized Blair’s inaccurate statement about Danzig, in which two were killed, while pointing out that 14 people died in the Montreal Massacre and 32 were killed at Virginia Tech.

Journalistic accuracy is critical, and race-based data on crime could help journalists show a more accurate picture of crime in Canada. But, unlike American law enforcement, many Canadian cops don’t analyze it. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an assistant professor in the department of criminal justice at Indiana University (although he’s originally from the GTA), says the information could help journalists dispel stereotypes: “We rely on news media from the United States, so we vastly overestimate Black and other racial groups’ participation in crime,” he says. Wortley adds that the vast majority of all communities are actually law-abiding.

That’s what Star columnist Royson James wanted to show. “Yes, we have murders and gun violence and Black people are involved,” he says. “And a number of times it’s Jamaicans. So it’s going to get reported. You can’t sugarcoat that. The problem is that’s all that gets out there.”

James came to the city in 1969 as a poor teenager from rural Jamaica. He worked at Contrast before joining the Star in 1981, trying to prove himself as a well-versed reporter at a time when Black journalists were sparse. But he grew tired of seeing Black people—mainly Jamaicans—making headlines as criminals and gang members. “Why can we only focus on criminals of Jamaican descent? It’s the same criminals we all hate,” he says. “It blocks out everything else that the community does because it becomes the overriding narrative of a people.”

Jamaica’s 50th Independence Day on August 6, 2012, offered a golden opportunity to showcase positive stories. James suggested a series of articles, including following as many successful Jamaican-Torontonians as he could in 24 hours. His editor liked the idea, but said it would be difficult to do in that time frame without using already known people. James and six other reporters with Jamaican roots, including Donovan Vincent and Ashante Infantry, accepted the challenge. They followed 50 people, including a lawyer, a teacher, TTC operators, a dentist and a surgeon. “My editor said there were too many doctors,” says James. Too many doctors. “That was one of the best days of my journalism career.”

It was so unbearably hot when Peter Kuitenbrouwer woke on the morning of July 17, 2012, that the fire alarm in his house kept going off. But he didn’t have time to fix it. His editor at the Post needed him to get to Scarborough, in Toronto’s east end, fast: the breaking story was the Danzig Street shooting. Several weeks earlier, a shooting at the Eaton Centre killed two and wounded five others. This one, at a community barbecue in public housing, also killed two but injured 23.

Dozens of reporters crowded around the yellow tape. Mayor Rob Ford and representatives of Toronto Community Housing were there. Kuitenbrouwer wanted to go beyond the story that officials would give, so he went into the neighbourhood to talk to locals—but it wasn’t easy. “‘White guy from far away shows up and wants to stick his nose in our business.’ It’s usually that way,” he says. “It’s pretty hard to get trust.”

He picked up an extra meal for a resident at lunchtime, and the two ate outside together—a small way to ease the tension reporters cause by swooping into low-income neighbourhoods to report on a crime and then leaving, which, to Kuitenbrouwer, creates an “us versus them” relationship.

His article, “Life and death on ‘the other side of the tracks,’” made the front page. He says the time constraints of daily news make it difficult to report on underlying issues, but it’s essential to try, especially with a case like Danzig. “You go in thinking this is a horrible, dark place where people shoot each other,” he says. “But then you hang around for a while and realize it’s just people trying to get on with their lives but having some struggles.”

The Star’s Jim Rankin has written several features about the lives of young Black offenders and those affected by gun violence, including Audette Shephard. He thinks journalists still aren’t doing enough to present a balanced image of Black people. “Reporting on crime like it’s a sporting event is not getting beyond the surface,” he says. “All stories need to be told, whether they’re about the one who pulled the trigger or the one who died.” For Rankin, it helps to understand the systemic racism the Black community faces—contributing to a lack of opportunity, poverty, hopelessness and low-wage jobs, which, among other factors, make youth vulnerable to joining a gang or selling drugs.

In 2013, Star reporters David Bruser and Jayme Poisson did an investigative series about the guns smuggled into Toronto along U.S. Interstate 75—weapons that, they reported, were responsible for over 70 percent of the city’s shootings. The stories showed how lax gun-control laws in the United States made for easier gun access in Toronto—a root cause of street violence reporters rarely discuss.

James believes hiring journalists of colour could help newsrooms better understand these underlying causes, instead of relying on officials. “If your news team doesn’t have people who interact with members of the Black community except in exceptional cases of crime and violence,” he says, “then that’s all you’re going to get.”

Listen: Jeff Dvorkin, director of the journalism program at the University of Toronto Scarborough, talks about the importance of addressing race in reporting and how his students are creating the discussion in their classes

Featured image by Gary Denness

Rob Ford is back in the news–this time, of his own choosing.

In a special to the National Post published on December 3, 2015, Ford wrote an op-ed to mark the one-year anniversary of John Tory’s mayoral term. “Congratulations, John, you’re sitting in the big chair and you’ve finally shaped up to be a typical politician,” wrote the former mayor and sitting Toronto city councillor.

Naturally, there’s a heated discussion happening on social media about the decision by the Post to run a piece penned by Ford, many sarcastically dubbing him as “Postmedia’s newest columnist.”

The underlying issue at the heart of such comments is the concern that arises when politics and journalism intersect. Giving a politician space to write his own thoughts on a medium that is supposed to be critical of him, a watchdog over how he serves the public, seems contradictory.

Ryerson Review of Journalism spoke to Matt Gurney, acting editor of the Post‘s Full Comment section, to learn about the editorial decision to run Ford’s op-ed. Rob Ford’s chief of staff contacted Gurney directly and expressed Ford’s interest in making a submission to the Post. Gurney directed him to the official email for op-ed pitches.

After reviewing the piece carefully, Gurney decided to run it. “Rob Ford remains an elected official in the City of Toronto, and in general, I do try to give our elected officials every opportunity to speak to the people through my pages,” said Gurney in an email to the RRJ. Gurney considered the fact that Ford was “a noteworthy figure, beyond the mere fact of his elected office” and that people would be interested in what he said.

Given that, and his stated intention to run against Mr. Tory in 2018 (health permitting), I thought it would be interesting to print the piece. I have also offered Mayor Tory the option of replying with an op-ed article of his own. I hope he does.

There is no rule in journalism that news can’t be critical of the former mayor and not run his voice at the same time. The concept of “opportunity to reply” exists to allow for fair, balanced and thorough coverage of an an issue or event. “So long as it’s not presented as news, which this piece wasn’t, there is, I think it’s fine,” said Gurney. Naheed Nenshi, mayor of Calgary, for instance, recently published an op-ed in The Globe and Mail to respond to the refugee debate in Canadian politics.

The issue arises when a conservative-leaning newspaper like the Post gives the space to a conservative politician like Ford to make an explicit comparison of his mayoral successes with the current mayor’s progress. Gurney stating that he factored in Ford’s “stated intention to run” implies this, as does the fact that Ford’s op-ed read more like a political speech than any substantive opinionated analysis of an issue or topic.

The fact that the persona of Rob Ford was going to get the Post traction is the problem, which Gurney too recognizes:

I grant that Rob Ford’s personal … characteristics … did appeal to me,” said Gurney, “he generates controversy. I like controversy. But setting that aside, I tend to think I would generally always side on publishing a piece of this nature. Indeed, if it was anyone but Rob Ford, I doubt you’d be interviewing me about the decision to publish.

He’s (mostly) right. Personalities like Rob Ford make the news no matter what they do, and the question is why we let them. Perhaps it is because we have a responsibility to allow these voices–all voices–to exist in the public sphere, unfiltered. The motives to do so, whether they be clicks, traction, politics or curiosity should, however, be kept in check.

Mayor Tory, the ball is in the public sphere for you to take should you want to.

Racks of t-shirts with “Toronto vs Everybody” emblazoned across the locally made threads hang near toques uniquely stitched with different urban neighbourhoods in the Toronto Spacing Store. Stocked with mostly city-themed paraphernalia, the shop is a curated collection of clothing, houseware items and novelty gifts. The perimeter is lined with books about architecture, vintage subway map posters, handcrafted knickknacks and the store’s popular button and magnet collection. Opened in November 2014, the downtown store resembles a souvenir shop without the made-in-China kitsch. It’s located on the ground level of a heritage building and the magazine’s staff works from a small office studio hidden behind the checkout counter.

Apart from a place to sell goods, the store is a business strategy that’s helping the magazine survive. Canadian publications—especially independent ones—often need to find additional revenue streams to sustain themselves. The store has been a lucrative move: Spacing has doubled its yearly revenue since opening the shop. It has also boosted magazine newsstand sales by 15 percent and increased subscriptions. And since opening the Toronto-based retail shop, the publication, which covers urban issues, is finding success rooting itself physically in a city that it critiques and celebrates. Matthew Blackett, the publisher, editor and co-founder of Spacing, says the benefit of operating out of a public retail space is that it allows the magazine to live what it preaches.

Blackett was part of a team of journalists that launched Spacing in 2003. Soon after, they realized they needed to find additional revenue if the magazine was going to grow. The quarterly (two issues a year focus on Toronto and two are national) publishes content on urban issues such as public transit, municipal politics and community planning. Advertising and subscription sales are often not enough to sustain a small publication, so within a year of going into print, Spacing began selling buttons and magnets—including the popular subway stops and Toronto highway signs collections—online. The in-house designs started to take off and began to make up about 15 to 20 percent of the company’s revenue.

From the success of its online store, the idea to open a bricks-and-mortar retail one was “pretty organic.” Spacing teamed up with independent publisher Coach House Books for a pop-up shop in 2013 and used the temporary store experience to see how receptive people were to the idea of a permanent retail space. “We have demonstrated that we have a very good knack of either creating, or choosing and finding people that are doing good stuff,” says Blackett.

Consultant D.B. Scott, president of Impresa Communications Limited, says that most magazines today can’t just rely on their publication for financial security. He cites Downhome as another example of a magazine finding success through a retail space. Its store in St. John’s, Newfoundland, has been a staple for the brand and attracts shoppers from across Canada. Grant Young, president of Downhome Incorporated, says the company generates $4 million annually, with $1 million coming from retail sales and another $1 million from wholesale distribution. The store sells a range of merchandise from stuffed plush puffins, t-shirts and Newfoundland souvenirs.

Success, Scott says, depends on a business strategy that’s consistent with the general image of the magazine. But shops aren’t just for small publications. Monocle, the glossy London-based magazine about current affairs, business, culture and design has opened retail stores in Europe, Asia and, in 2012, in Toronto.

While Spacing has no immediate plans of opening more shops in other parts of Canada, the store was designed in a way that the concept would be transferable to other cities. They can use the same model to sell merchandise related to different urban areas. Spacing wants to conquer the Toronto market first before considering a location in Vancouver or Calgary.

Blackett thinks stores can help save some magazines, depending on the genre. He believes sports magazines, active lifestyle publications and niche titles could thrive in a retail market. “We’re lucky that we are editor-owned,” he says, “which allows us to experiment and take risks that other magazines can’t existentially afford.”

But it’s not just about money. The Spacing team previously operated out of an office building that didn’t allow readers to access staff without passing security, which wasn’t aligning with the magazine’s notion of public space and overall ethos. “Now,” says Blackett, “you can walk right into our store and theoretically yell at us about an article, or pitch an article, or talk to us about an issue.”

My ears were buzzing from the latest news: two female protesters had interrupted the annual anti-abortion March for Life on Parliament Hill—topless. The senior producer at CBC News Network’s Power & Politics with Evan Solomon wanted me to get both women, who were part of the feminist group FEMEN, in the studio as soon as possible. I punched in the phone number and felt a brief jolt of surprise when the woman at the other end of the line answered, “Allo?”

Toronto Star photojournalist Richard Lautens shares the moment he photographed famous singer Rihanna, his most terrifying picture to capture, his famous Toronto G20 picture and even shares some wisdom to aspiring photojournalists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodbye, Xtra.

Thanks to Joy Waller for the featured image. 

Need something to spice up your house tonight? Try an old election poster!

Credit to Josh O’Kane for the snap.

Do you have a topic you want covered on the blog? Email the editor. And while you’re here, have you followed the Review and its masthead on Twitter yet?

Q: What happens when an internationally-recognized Canadian journalist who has written extensively on what is arguably the country’s biggest political scandal to date holds an online question-and-answer period?

A: She receives a bunch of really, really stupid questions.

Robyn Doolittle should be applauded for her efforts to connect with Torontonians on Reddit Tuesday after hosting an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) thread in which her readers could ask their burning questions. She braved the possibility of encountering a cesspool of trolls; but while they seemed to stay at bay for this AMA (Daniel Dale excluded), the session still fell flat. What could have been an opportunity to peek into the world of Canadian investigative journalism, instead turned into a boring collection of queries regarding Doolittle’s House of Cards lookalike, her dog grooming schedule and if she had ever met Rob Ford (seriously).

The outcome is a shame. Reddit has long been a launching pad for great crowdsourced journalism. In 2012, several major Canadian publications commended and cited the Redditor-produced timeline on the Danzig shooting. The forum has also been a platform for connection, a place where those who have been out of reach from the general public can converse with laypeople.

For journalists, AMAs serve as an opportunity to answer the questions behind their stories, help readers better understand their jobs and be transparent about how they gather and report news. The AMA subreddit is five years old, and boasts more than 6 million members and there have been plenty of well-informed journalist-hosted AMAs: In June, Ricochet editor Ethan Cox held one that yielded questions about the sustainability of a Canadian journalism start-up. In January 2013, Andy Carvin discussed the implications of covering Arab revolutions using social media. And last October, Postmedia columnist Andrew Coyne talked paywalls and Canadian politics.

Why, then, are Doolittle’s readers so interested in her resemblance to Kate Mara and her relationship status? It’s impossible to pinpoint. Her gender plays a role in how she’s perceived, but so does the fact that she uncovered such a sensational story about one of Canada’s strangest political figures and has appeared globally on late-night TV shows. Doolittle is a female journalist who was thrust into the spotlight—and as research shows, it’s not a surprise she faces intense scrutiny and an onslaught of irrelevant questions.

Not all was terrible: Doolittle did glean some insight on her move to The Globe and Mail (spoiler: she loved it) and paying for news. Otherwise, all we can take from her AMA is that she likes creeping people’s brunch and her love for the Eyeopener is undying.

Can we try a little harder next time, Internet?

Photo courtesy of Zach Copley.

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Worn Fashion Journal was my first and only proper internship. The day I found out I had an interview, I had been fired from my job at American Apparel and I was miserable. Not because of the job, but because I wanted to buy some more stuff with my employee discount.

I showed up to my interview dressed to impress in whatever mismatched outfit I could pick out in time. Their old office was a mess—small, cluttered, decorations were all over the walls and back issues were in an organized pile in the corner. I loved it. I remember telling Serah-Marie McMahon, the editor in pants, that I had just been fired from American Apparel. She liked that. Before I met McMahon, I didn’t know how to write. She was my introduction to finding a voice in writing and my guide in, as corny as it sounds, finding myself.

Worn prided itself on provocative, diverse commentary instead of caring about trends. It was a fashion magazine with a true, distinct voice. And now it’s closing down. On November 22, Worn will be releasing its last issue—a special double anniversary edition. I remember when they made the announcement. I cried.

I wouldn’t be the same person I am today without Worn. It was my first proper byline, my first introduction to feminism and some of the greatest, most fascinating and talented people that I would ever meet. I wouldn’t trade anything for my time with Worn, and though I stopped interning there and started only occasionally contributing, it’s still a huge part of who I am. Every new issue that comes out fills me with pride. I swell because I get to say that it’s something that I was a part of: Toronto history, I’ll call it. Worn is, was—no, still is—a local powerhouse a source of pride. Joy. Excitement.

Worn: I will always love you.

Featured image courtesy of ranti. 

By Miro Rodriguez

Martin Baron walked home from a late dinner with his wife and son on a warm July night in Toronto, he saw what appeared to be an empty streetcar stopped in the middle of the road. Brushing it off as just broken down, the family continued walking. Suddenly, police officers ran toward the empty streetcar. With guns drawn, they yelled: “Drop the knife!”

Baron stopped and, looking closer, saw a lone man inside, holding a knife. “Drop the knife!” the officers continued to yell. Baron pulled his iPhone from his pocket, unlocked it and started recording. What he couldn’t have known was what repercussions the one minute and 37 seconds of video he shot would have for the public, the police and journalism.

An officer fired nine shots, and eight of them struck Sammy Yatim. Then another officer Tasered the 18-year-old as he lay on the ground. About one hour after the shooting, Baron uploaded his video to YouTube, tweeted the link and sent it to a local broadcaster. It wasn’t long before reporters contacted him with interview requests. “Having that video was huge in terms of getting the amount of coverage that it did,” says former National Post reporter Megan O’Toole. Toronto Star reporter and photographer Jim Rankin adds, “You can count the bullets, you can count the seconds, you can see what the officers are doing.” Baron’s video—and others from that night—offered a rare look into a tragic incident and shaped how journalists pursued the story of the police shooting. Cellphones allow the public to capture events as they happen. Video, Baron says, “provokes an emotional response without having to think about it.” And the existence of video shot by citizen journalists, as in the case of Yatim, leads to more coverage and more in-depth analysis from professional journalists.

***

Citizens have been recording violent police behaviour for years. In 1991, Los Angeles police officers were caught on video viciously beating Rodney King, a 26-year-old African-American man pulled over after a high-speed chase. Their subsequent acquittal caused riots and brought issues of police brutality and racial pro- filing to the forefront.

An October 2007 video shot by Paul Pritchard captured four RCMP officers repeatedly Tasering Robert Dziekanski, a Polish man immigrating to Canada who had grown agitated after a long flight and hours spent in the airport’s customs area. He died on the floor of a Vancouver airport terminal. One officer claimed that Dziekanski “came at” police officers, screaming and brandishing a stapler. Pritchard’s video proved that was false, and the evidence led to perjury charges against all four officers in 2011 (one was acquitted last summer; the others are expected to go to trial this year).

Canadian Journalists for Free Expression presented its first Citizen Journalism Award to Pritchard in 2009. The association’s president, Arnold Amber, said at the event, “The remarkable partnership between investigative journalists and the citizen who recorded the last minutes of Dziekanski’s life has led to all these revelations and impact.” Later, Star public editor Kathy English wrote, “Mainstream media have come to count on those tech-ready citizens with a sense of news to help us cover breaking stories.”

Early news coverage of the Yatim incident relied heavily on Baron’s video. The partner at Teeple Architects in Toronto made the recording because, he explains, it was “something crazy that happened in front of my house.” He says the officers made no attempt to talk to Yatim: “It was instant guns-out, yelling demands.” Baron planned to upload the video to Facebook to share with friends, but he quickly realized how horrific the situation was. The video has since received more than 600,000 views on YouTube.

Mainstream news outlets piled on: a January search for “Sam- my Yatim” on the CP24 website yielded 66 results. The same search turned up 81 hits on Citynews, 97 on CTV news and 364 on CBC. When the police shoot someone and citizen video doesn’t exist, the story doesn’t attract the same amount of attention: a similar search for “Michael Eligon,” a 29-year-old shot in 2012 after leaving a Toronto hospital and stealing scissors from a convenience store, yielded 13 hits on CP24, 11 on City, 19 on CTV and 47 on CBC.

At first, broadcasters were cautious about showing video of the Yatim shooting. CTV news’s executive producer, Lisa Beaton, says she and many others at the network had several discussions with legal experts before deciding to air the video. “It gives an irrefutable record of what happened,” she says. “If you have video testimony, you really can’t dispute it.” Soon, though, newscasts began to air citizen videos of the incident repeatedly, newspapers ran screenshots of the streetcar and websites embedded the video in their stories. “To some extent, the video was the story,” says Star crime reporter Jennifer Pagliaro. Post columnist Matt Gurney agrees, adding that the initial coverage was repetitive and broadcasters took a “let’s see that video now” attitude. “There wasn’t a lot of in-depth analysis.”

Questions about Yatim’s home life, how many shots struck him and which officer fired the shots didn’t surface right away. Although the coverage soon improved, gurney says, “The first few days were a whole lot of outrage, not a lot of information.”

Torontonians were galvanized. Hundreds of people marched on July 29, protesting what they believed to be the use of excessive force. Others took to social media, tweeting, “unfortunately, the fatal shooting of Sammy Yatim by @TorontoPolice is nothing new,” and “Dear @TorontoPolice, why not taser #SammyYatim first? He had a knife and you outnumbered him. Was 9 Shots necessary?” Another rally took place in mid-August, when hundreds of people marched to police headquarters to demand “justice for Sammy” while the Toronto Police Services Board met inside.

***

“Video has changed the game, not just offering proof when none existed in the past, but raising public consciousness about the fact that some police do engage in illegal behaviour,” Kirk Makin, former justice reporter for The Globe and Mail, writes in an email. At each step of the Yatim investigation, the public knew what was happening. Tamara Cherry, CTV Toronto’s crime reporter, says journalists might sometimes be cautious in reporting details of incidents like police shootings because they don’t want to jeopardize their relationships with the police. She says that when she was first to identify Const. James Forcillo as the officer under investigation, some colleagues were concerned about how the Toronto Police Service (TPS) would react.

Before citizen video, coverage was based only on witness accounts and police statements. In some cases, dashboard video (from police cruisers) or surveillance video captured the shootings, but that footage didn’t go viral or wasn’t released until much later. In the case of Sylvia Klibingaitis, who was killed by a police officer in 2011, the dashboard video wasn’t released until the October 2013 inquest into her death and the deaths of two others.

Access to information beyond that was scarce. Once the Special Investigations unit (SIU) looks into an incident—as it must whenever a police incident results in a serious injury or death—officers are prohibited from discussing it. As Rosie DiManno, a columnist for the Star, wrote in August, “When reporters asked the TPS for the relevant in- formation about Forcillo, they were provided with the minimum that could be disclosed.” And in a column published two days after the shooting, DiManno wrote, “Police in this country have become accustomed to withholding information, as they choose, ducking behind the curtain of privacy laws selectively wielded.” If the public were to depend solely on police accounts, she argued, “the truth might never come out.”

Although citizen video is great for capturing a moment, Star columnist Joe Fiorito says, “It’s not necessarily as good or as thorough as what mainstream newspapers do in terms of follow-up reporting.” His paper was first to offer a closer look into Yatim’s life, but soon all Toronto dailies began to ask friends and family about the young man, and a more detailed picture of the victim emerged. The papers reported that Yatim immigrated to Toronto in 2008 from Aleppo, Syria, which was then peaceful. He lived with his father, Nabil Yatim, while his mother, Sahar Bahadi, stayed in Aleppo and worked as a pediatrician (the couple was divorced). It is unclear when Bahadi came to Canada, but Yatim’s younger sister, Sarah, moved to Toronto about two years ago. Yatim enrolled in a Catholic school, but he completed his final credits at an alternative high school geared toward teenagers new to Canada and marginalized students seeking a “new beginning.” His math teacher in grades 9 and 10, Megan Douglas, was surprised to learn that Yatim’s mother didn’t come to Canada with him, but says Yatim was always smiling.

However, Douglas noticed a change after Yatim moved on from her class. He wore hats in school even though they were forbidden. He wore baggier clothes, listened to different music and associated with a “rough” crowd, with whom he partied and smoked. Teachers and students told Douglas that Yatim began skipping a lot of his classes in grades 11 and 12. “He was trying to fit in and trying to be this cool bad-boy, but I knew it wasn’t him,” she says. “I figured he had to be on something [at the time of the shooting]. There had to be drugs or alcohol involved because somebody like him, if you said, ‘Drop the knife,’ and he was of sound mind, he would have done it.”

Reporters portrayed Yatim as a young man trying to find him- self, “someone who struggled to fit into a new culture,” as the Star put it. “All the times I’ve read about young black men being caught up in these kinds of police confrontations,” says Star business reporter Ashante Infantry, “I never recall reading such a sympathetic view of the challenges that a troubled kid could have found himself in.” Gurney adds: “It was not treated as just a police shooting where a carjacker or a drug dealer had pulled a knife and an officer opened fire.” From the outset, he says, journalists presented the case as the shooting of someone who had a mental illness, although Yatim’s mental state has never been confirmed (his family has denied he had any mental health issues).

But not all police shooting victims get compassionate treatment. Like others in the past, Yatim was holding a knife when police shot him. But the tone of the reporting differed significantly this time. O’Brien Christopher-Reid, a mentally ill man, was 26 years old when he was shot and killed by police officers in 2004, after he pulled a knife during a confrontation. In the Globe, Jonathan Fow- lie and Christie Blatchford wrote that Christopher-Reid “pulled a long knife and attacked police.” The Globe’s Oliver Moore was more gentle about Yatim: “The teenager was killed after he bran- dished a small knife on a streetcar in late July.”

***

Two days after the July 27 shooting, the police force suspended Forcillo. Less than a month later, he was charged with second-degree murder and released on $510,000 bail. He’s only the second Toronto police officer to be charged with the offence since Ontario created the SIU in 1990. CBC’s Daniel Schwartz wrote, “The SIU . . . acted with uncharacteristic speed in the Toronto streetcar shooting, perhaps because of videos of the incident that have been watched around the world.” According to The Canadian Press, Forcillo’s criminal case is “proceeding with unusual speed.”

Pagliaro says although police shootings are rare, they don’t always get a lot of attention. Just over a month before Yatim’s shooting, Toronto police shot and killed 39-year-old Malcolm Jackman, but, absent a video, the story received little coverage.

The public often criticizes police tactics. Many victims of police shootings—including Klibingaitis in 2011, Reyal Jardine-Douglas in 2010 and Edmond Yu in 1997—have had mental illnesses. Although some of these shootings were captured by dashboard cameras or surveillance video, without immediate and viral citizen video, the public didn’t see the events leading up to these deaths the way they did with Yatim. These incidents have led to the current debate about police training and de-escalation strategies. It is clear that Yatim was in distress: witnesses reported that he had a “knife in one hand and his penis in the other.” But police say that these situations are not clear-cut: Const. Andrew Boyd testified at the 2013 inquest into three police shootings that the Eligon incident was not “a situation where you can have a nice leisurely chat.” According to the Toronto Sun, he added, “We’re not psychiatrists.”

The Yu shooting was a watershed moment. The victim suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was carrying a hammer on an empty TTC bus when police shot him three times. The subsequent inquest led to the creation of the Mobile Crisis Intervention Team (MCIT), a program within the TPS that pairs psychiatric nurses with trained officers when needed. Through a partnership with Toronto East General Hospital, the program has recently expanded to cover 12 of 17 policing divisions. Hospital CEO Rob Devitt called the MCIT initiative “a wonderful way to provide an additional layer of support within an integrated mental health system.”

Former Sun crime reporter Rob Lamberti says coverage is too concerned with whether or not a police officer was justified in shooting; it should instead focus on the victims’ circumstances. He’d like to see more coverage asking why the healthcare system leaves people with mental health issues on the street for police officers to handle. The citizens taking videos are recording history in the moment, he says. “And it’s up to the journalists to try to figure out what is happening, why it’s happening and what led us here.”

Others believe reporting on police shootings needs to be better. Mark Pugash, director of corporate communications for the TPS, says experienced journalists are losing their jobs because of news- room cutbacks. “So you’re seeing, in many cases, inexperienced people with not much supervision. That doesn’t usually lead to accurate reporting.”

***

One of the videos that surfaced after the June 2010 G20 summit in Toronto exposed the way police officers handled protestors. Bystander John Bridge caught a police officer beating protestor Adam Nobody with a baton as he lay on the ground. Because of the video—which Toronto police Chief Bill Blair initially claimed had been tampered with—the constable was convicted of assault with a weapon.

Steven D’Souza, a CBC Toronto reporter who covered the two-day summit, believes such incidents changed the relationship between the public and the city’s police. Video often attracts close public attention, which can lead to more calls for change. Since the videos of the Yatim shooting drew such outrage, there have been four investigations: the SIU probe into his death, Blair’s internal practices review, the Ontario Ombudsman’s investigation into de-escalation strategies and, most recently, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director’s examination of the TPS’s use of force in dealing with people with mental health issues.

Procedures are also changing. The province recently allowed police forces to arm all front-line officers with Tasers, but the TPS board rejected Blair’s request for $386,000 to increase the force’s Taser arsenal by one-third. Following recommendations from a 2013 Police and Community Engagement Review and the recent coroner’s inquest, the TPS will be testing out lapel cameras this year.

Forcillo remains suspended with pay, and a preliminary inquiry is set for spring. He faces a disciplinary charge of discreditable conduct, which has been put on hold until the end of the trial. “The video laid the basis for the charge,” says prominent defence lawyer Peter Rosenthal. “Without the video, who knows what the police would have said happened, and who knows whether they would have been charged or not.”

In his exit interview with CBC News in October, Ian Scott, former director of the SIU, said that smartphones and surveillance videos are not only “compelling pieces of evidence” but ultimately are “truth-seeking tools.” 

Digital media writer Jesse Brown is glad citizens now have a way to “document police behaviour and hold law enforcement to account,” he writes in an email. “I know that the next time I see the police involved in any kind of altercation, I’ll be taping them with my smartphone and I encourage everyone else to do the same.”

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