Convergence Spring 2010 by Convergence Magazine

The Humber School of Media Studies & Information Technology

CONVERGENCE Spring 2010

amber lighting keeping journalists

in the dark

elite plaintiffs a match made in

and

english courts

hell

ethnic media

the original niche

one-on-one with Peter Mansbridge catastrophic coverage inside

DISASTER PORN

Message from the dean

“Listen to me . . . television is a god-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom–killing business.” Quoting this 34-year-old proclamation from the then-biting news satire, Network, takes a lot of nerve. This and other gems by crazed news anchor Howard Beale – played by actor Peter Finch – were staples at journalism schools until finally people said: “Okay, we get it. Entertainment is to news as cyanide is to KoolAid.” But that was then. Now the questions are: “Do they?” and “Is it still?” Even when times are tough, entertainment continues to draw an audience and no one can deny that the past year has been turbulent for all sectors of the media. Pressure to attract readers, viewers, subscribers, advertisers, buyers or all of the above hit a fever pitch as media players struggled to maintain or grow their share of the pie. Convergence wondered where the line between entertainment and news should be drawn, and we took that question to those in the know. You’ll see their reflections in the ribbons throughout the magazine. Veteran CBC news anchor Peter Mansbridge gives us his take on the topic, as well as the National’s format change, in a one-on-one interview with Alana Gautreau. In most cases we found people struggling to strike the right balance. In earthquake-shattered Haiti, journalists found themselves praised for opening the eyes of the world to plight of victims, but under attack for allegedly exploiting the horrors. Their experience is recounted in Nicole McIsaac’s article, “Disaster Porn.” Whether or not they allowed themselves to become

CONVERGENCE Editor-In-Chief David Perri

EXECUTIVE EDITOR PHILIPPA CROOME

ART DIRECTOR

MICHAEL SUTHERLAND-SHAW

MANAGING EDITORS STEPH DAVIDSON ALANA GAUTREAU NICOLE MCISaAC

SECTION EDITORS

ALISON BROWNLEE MIGUEL AGAWIN ERIN DECOSTE SEPTEMBRE ANDERSON

“players” rather than observers is examined in a companion piece by Melissa Sundardas, “In the Thick of It.” For communications officials charged with opening the books on legally-available government information, pleasing their political masters and an inquisitive press has always been a tightrope walk. Erin DeCoste’s story on “amber lighted” Toronto Star investigator Robert Cribb, suggests that all is not well on the freedom-of-information front. For media lawyers and their clients – who are enjoying the warmth spread across libel chill by recent Supreme Court decisions – editor David Perri tells a cautionary tale of so-called “libel tourists” seeking hefty awards within plaintifffriendly foreign courts. Wherever we went, we found the search for a gyroscope. We found disgraced public figures trying, and mostly failing, to balance the need for openness against the craving for privacy. We saw outcast advertisers finding gifted space in the headlines, and we found news icons sucked into embarrassing gaffes at the hands of pranksters-with-a-message. In New York we found giants of the news establishment putting it all on the line to make news hyper-local and, more importantly, no longer free online. And if they needed any lessons on “local,” Convergence offers the example of Alfred J. Sirleaf, the Liberian scribe who painstakingly writes the news by hand each day on a streetside chalkboard. And, sadly, we record a blow to the equilibrium of Canadian journalism with the passing of Edith Josie, the grand dame of community correspondents who, for more than half a century, reported in an idiosyncratic style beloved and protected by generations of big-city editors. From Old Crow, north of the Arctic Circle, she wrote: “I’m sure glad everyone gets my news and know everything what people are doing.”

William Hanna, dean School of Media Studies and Information Technology

RESEARCH CHIeF ALISON BROWNLEE

Research

Nicole Mcisaac Steph Davidson TIm MORSE ALANA GAUTREAU ADRIENNE MIDDLEBROOK

ONLINE

SCOTT RENNIE MELISSA SUNDARdAS JADEN PATO

COPY EDITORS

ADRIENNE MIDDLEBROOK TIM MORSE

CREATIVE CONTRIBUTORs Miguel Agawin MAEGAN MCGREGOR

photo editor ANGELO ELIA

FACULTY ADVISeRS terri arnott carey french

PUBLISHER

william hanna School of Media Studies and Information Technology PROGRAM CO-ORDINATORS Andrew Ainsworth/Barbara Elliott/Bernie Monette/Carey French/Chau Tran/Chitra Reddin/Eva Ziemsen/Greg Henderson/ Heather Lowry/Jamie Sheridan/Lorne Frohman/Lynne Thomas/Michael Glassbourg/ Michael Rosen/Mike Karapita/Noni Kaur/ Rob Robson/Robert O’Meara/Robert Richardson/Terry Posthumus/Vass Klymenko Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning School of Media Studies and Information Technology 205 Humber College Blvd. Toronto, Ontario, Canada M9W 5L7 Phone: 416-675-6622 ext. 4111 Fax: 416-675-9730 http://magazines.humber.ca

Convergence | Spring 2010

CONTENTS cover story 22

Journalists screaming in the wind The amber light cast on Robert Cribb spotlights a culture of government secrecy. Investigative journalists are pushing for access to information â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but without public support, authorities will continue to keep the media in the dark. By Erin DeCoste

features 18

Playbook for a scoundrel Image makers explain how to rescue a reputation gone wrong By Rose Ditaranto

Copy and paste reporting Online media trade accuracy for speed By Tim Morse

22 36

Libel tourism English courts side with elite plaintiffs to silence the media By David Perri

The original niche Ethnic media syncs coverage with immigrant waves By Philippa Croome

Information evangelist Liberian messenger dreams of educating a nation By Michael Sutherland-Shaw

Media trap Ashley Madison makes the most out of controversy By Steph Davidson

Spring 2010

Meet the Yes Men An American duo with a knack for duping the media

By Adrienne Middlebrook

The science of reporting Media centre takes aim at subpar science coverage

By Miguel Agawin

The future isn’t free New York Times’ online pay wall will answer the multimillion-dollar question By Scott Rennie

Pitfalls of iPublishing Canadian magazines reluctant to invest in new format

By Septembre Anderson

Disaster porn Blurring the line between essential reporting and exploitation

Access denied Media called to join the fight against cyber censorship

By Jaden Pato

By Michael Sutherland-Shaw

Surviving supression Citizen journalists give hope to Iran

Mob marketing Flashy ad campaigns risk overexposure

Advertising in a new dimension Marketers ride the 3-D wave By Angelo Elia

By Erin DeCoste

By Nicole McIsaac

In the thick of it When calamity hits, correspondents can get dangerously close to the story

Bringing it home Media conglomerates take cues from community news

By Alison Brownlee

Edith Josie (1921-2010) Remembering the legendary columnist from Old Crow By Philippa Croome

By Melissa Sundardas

one-on-one

8 Peter Mansbridge sits down with Convergence’s Alana Gautreau to discuss CBC News’ format change and the balance between entertaining and informing

Throughout the issue

See how media experts respond to our overarching question below

We asked the media . . . As a news professional, do you feel pressure to entertain?

In Brief . . . Taking the sting out of the SLAPP Ontario journalists, community groups and activists are increasingly targeted by strategic lawsuits against public participation or SLAPP suits, according to Environmental Defence, the Toronto-based environmental advocacy group. Rebecca McNeil, project co-ordinator for the group, says in a SLAPP suit, the plaintiff “doesn’t actually intend to win in court. They’re meaning mostly to tie up the resources, time and energy of the defendant instead.” SLAPPs tend to be “completely frivolous and unfounded” libel suits, McNeil says, often launched by developers at critics in the media or other community groups who oppose their development projects. Environmental Defence is lobbying the Ontario government to introduce anti-SLAPP legislation, similar to what exists in Québec and in many U.S. states. McNeil says there is broad support for the campaign with more than 60 municipalities and numerous community groups signing a letter sent to the Premier this year, but it has not yet received the government’s response.

to help kids get into summer camps. In a Globe and Mail opinion piece, he lauded the positive impact camp had on him as a child where he made morning announcements over the camp’s public address system at the age of seven. In April, he co-hosted a fundraising event at the Toronto Centre of the Arts to send kids to camp. Matt Galloway, former host of afternoon drive show Here and Now, replaced Barrie on Metro Morning.

Canadian dailies outpace U.S. Numbers released in April by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show Canadian daily newspapers fared better than their U.S. counterparts over the previous six months, according to the Globe and Mail. Weekday sales for Canadian newspapers remained flat, while dropping 9 per cent in the U.S.

A newspaper for one pound

Photo by Alison Brownlee

Andy Barrie moves on On March 1, Andy Barrie left behind a 15-year CBC Radio legacy as the host of the top-rated Toronto morning show, Metro Morning. Over the years Barrie established an intimate relationship with his loyal listeners. In 2007, he shared the news of his Parkinson’s diagnosis with Metro Morning listeners on the air, saying his ability to perform his radio duties would not be compromised. After announcing his departure in early February, Barrie told Convergence he is “retooling,” rather than retiring. “I don’t think I want to ask questions, I think I’d like to listen, maybe have other people talk, work on projects with people who are in front of me,” he says. Since leaving the show he has begun advocating

Convergence | Spring 2010

newspapers and 500 online providers. “A reader could get the latest gossip about former tennis champion Boris Becker from Germany’s biggest-selling tabloid, Bild . . . and even incorporate a few pages of international politics from English-language papers like the New York Times and Komsomolskaya Pravda from Russia,” Time magazine reports. Berlin will act as the testing ground for the publication’s first six months, with a target circulation of 5,000. Tiedemann and Oberhof told the World Editors Forum their success will lie in the ability to target readers based on their preferences – a potential gold mine for advertisers. But some proponents of the move to online are skeptical. “Niiu shares the same dilemma of print journalism in the age of the Internet: every paper you read in the morning only contains yesterday’s news,” Stephan Weichert, a journalism professor at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, told Time magazine. Co-creator Oberhof doesn’t agree. “Many people prefer to read a newspaper; they like the feel of paper.” Berlin Sciences, a research arm of the Berlin Senate, reports Niiu’s subscribers have steadily increased since its start in November 2009.

British blogger censured

Alexander Lebedev, Russian billionaire and former KGB spy, has purchased British daily newspaper the Independent and the Independent on Sunday for £1 – the cover price of a weekday edition of the paper. Irish publisher Independent News & Media sold the media properties in March for the token price because they have acquired over £200-million in debt, which will be assumed by Lebedev’s company, Independent Print Limited. IPL released a statement saying it will safeguard the future of the newspapers. This is the second time Lebedev has purchased an ailing paper. In 2009, he bought a 75 per cent stake in the London Evening Standard, also for £1. The Standard has since become a free newspaper and has seen its readership rise. Lebedev also co-owns Novaya Gazeta, a prominent Russian newspaper, with former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev.

For the first time, England’s Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint against a blog. The commission censured Rod Liddle, who blogs for both the Spectator and the Sunday Times, for violating their code of ethical standards. Liddle wrote on his Spectator blog, “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community.” A reader complained to the PCC that Ministry of Justice statistics did not support Liddle’s claim. A PCC official says the ruling was significant because it means blogs will be held to the same ethical standards as print media in England.

Custom newspaper selling in Berlin

Crowd-sourced copy editing

The first “customized” newspaper, Niiu, is being distributed in Germany. The brain child of entrepreneurs 27-year-old Hendrik Tiedemann and 23-year-old Wanja Oberhof, Niiu allows readers to customize their printed newspaper – pulling news from 17 German and international

An online tool welcoming readers to copy edit web pages is increasing accountability and grammar in the online world. The widget, developed by gooseGrade, appears as a small, red, “Copy Edit” button and is being used on communications expert Ian Capstick’s blog,

MediaStyle.ca. After reading a posting, visitors may click the button, highlight any questionable text and make notes on grammatical, spelling or factual errors they find. The suggested changes are then compiled electronically for site administrators to accept or reject. The widget was founded by 24-year-old CEO John Brooks Pounders. According to a Cnet.com article, gooseGrade introduced the free crowdsource editing tool to actively involve readers, preventing them from flooding blog comment boards with snarky jabs about copy errors.

Iranian blogger wins prize Jila Bani Yaghoob, an Iranian journalist and blogger won Reporters Without Borders’ Freedom of Expression prize in April for her blog, titled We are Journalists. “Her Persian-language blog deals with the news in Iran, social issues and the subject of women. Jila is in the forefront of the struggle for freedom of expression in her country,” RWB says in a press release. Yaghoob and her husband were both arrested after authorities cracked down dissent after the 2009 presidential election. Access to her blog is blocked in Iran.

Iceland ponders becoming a haven for journalists A coalition of parliamentarians in Iceland has tabled the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, which proposes passing strong source protection, freedom of speech and libel tourism prevention laws, to make the country a haven for investigative journalism. Wikileaks, a Sweden-based organization that publishes leaked classified documents while protecting the identity of sources, is helping to draft the legislation. Wikileaks editor Julian Assange told the BBC in February the aim is to try to “reform Iceland’s media law to be a very attractive jurisdiction for investigative journalism.” In 2007, Iceland was ranked first in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.

International character country codes approved Four countries are now able to use Internet country code domain names written in their local alphabetical characters. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved internationalized domain

names for Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in April. Arabic or Russian characters can now replace the English alphabet in online domain names and country codes. According to Domain Name Wire, Russia was delegated .рф (meaning R.F.) and Saudi Arabia ‫( ةيدوعسلا‬Al-Saudia). The U.A.E. was assigned ‫( تاراما‬Emarat) and Egypt ‫( رصم‬Misr). ICANN has also received requests for new delegations from China and Taiwan, which are being processed. The new domain names for the first four countries should be globally accessible by mid2010, according to ICANN.

Privacy Commissioner keeps an eye online In April, Facebook announced it will allow software developers who create applications for the social networking site to hold on to users’ personal information – a sharp change from the 24-hour limit previously in place. Jennifer Stoddart, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, says the move goes against recommendations she made last year, after a 14-month investigation, which exposed software developers’ access to user information on Facebook. “I’m very concerned about these changes. More than half a million developers will have access to this data,” Stoddart told the Globe and Mail. “The information will be stored indefinitely and it opens the possibility that a lot of people can be blackmailed from all corners of the world.” In the same week, the Privacy Commissioner and a coalition of international watchdogs and authorities publicly condemned Google Buzz, the social networking site launched quietly in February on Google’s e-mail service, Gmail. In a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the coalition wrote: “It is unacceptable to roll out a product that unilaterally renders personal information public, with the intention of repairing problems later as they arise. Privacy cannot be sidelined in the rush to introduce new technologies to online audiences around the world.”

Photo by Alison Brownlee

Network addiction Ban university students from their cell phones, Twitter or TV for a day and you just might mistake them for addicts.

A study conducted by the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda involving 200 University of Maryland students between 18 and 21 years old, found the subjects unhappy, on edge and extremely bored when separated from their cellphones, iPods, computers, TVs, radios and newspapers over a 24-hour period. Students began using the same language and terms as addicts when describing their feelings and moods during the test. One student wrote, “By 2:00 p.m. I began to feel the urgent need to check my e-mail, and even thought of a million ideas of why I had to. I felt like a person on a deserted island . . . I noticed physically, that I began to fidget, as if I was addicted to my iPod and other media devices, and maybe I am.” To cope with their media withdrawals, study participants studied, walked, took long showers, slept, and even did drugs to fill the void of their social tech cravings.

Courtesy Yellow Pages Inc.

Yellow pages making moves Montreal-based Yellow Media Inc., publishers of the Yellow Pages telephone directory changed has purchased its Vancouver-based rival Canpages for $225-million. Canpages has a strong online presence, including a visual search tool where users can see the streets of Toronto, Montreal, Whistler and Vancouver. The company also developed a feature called “augmented reality” where users can take a picture on their smart phones and the site will tell them what businesses are inside the building. This feature will launch soon on Yellow Media Inc. sites. Yellow Media Inc. has also recently bought up other user-friendly directories such as Restaurantica.com and RedFlagDeals.com. The company also rebranded Yellow Pages, changing its familiar logo with fingers walking on the pages of a book. The new logo ditches the pages, and is instead shaped like a computer mouse. According to the Globe and Mail, Yellow Media Inc. CEO Marc Tellier says the move was made to entice a younger demographic and highlight the company’s rising digital presence. A press release on the company’s website says the new look is a way to remind users that the company is a jack-of-all-trades. “We’re online, we’re mobile and we are still the leading and most widely used print directory in the country,” Tellier says.

Convergence | Spring 2010

Mansbridge one on one Convergence’s Alana Gautreau sits down with CBC News’ chief correspondent to discuss the program’s format change and the balance between entertaining and informing

The new face of CBC Television’s The National revealed itself last October to a number of less than flattering reviews. Its flashing graphics, open set, quick-hit pace and standing anchors stirred opinion from media critics and viewers alike. The Toronto Star columnist Greg Quill called the new show “glitzy” and “contrived” – and its host Peter Mansbridge a “wandering, gracious maître d’.” Respondents on the network’s open blog told Mansbridge he was “classier” when seated. Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells was less scathing of the rebrand, offering this: “There’s the potential here for a news operation that impresses instead of merely dazzling. First they just need to stop flashing all those strobe lights in our eyes.” Six months later, Convergence reporter Alana Gautreau caught up with Mansbridge for a oneon-one sit-down to hear the news veteran’s view of how the reformat has fared, who he considers a real critic – and why he can no longer wear shorts

In your years in the industry, have you seen a shift toward less straight news coverage? The concentration on the end product being the news and the hard-news value hasn’t changed. What has changed, there’s no question, is in the way we present it – in the attempts to keep eyeballs, especially young eyeballs, focused on the news. When I started in the business 42 years ago, television was in black and white. So the first big change was simply to colour and that was all to make it more interesting. It’s been continually shifting. [Some]time’s it’s gone too far in its attempts to present things in a way that was perhaps too entertaining and we’ve had to pull back. But there’s always been some give and take on these things and you settle in because your audience reacts right away if they feel you’ve gone too far on extremes.

Any specific examples when you have gone too far?

[In the] early 1990s we were in kind of a crisis mode. There had been the first severe budget cuts which had changed our hour from [being shared by] The National and The Journal. We lost money through budget cuts and we lost half the people. In the attempt to make it all one hour, we changed a lot of things. We switched from 10 o’clock to nine o’clock. We concentrated much more on sort of soft news . . . the OJ Simpson trial . . . We lost our base, there was no question in that. You can

Convergence | Spring 2010

Courtesy Christopher Wall

lose your base overnight and it takes you years to get it back. It was a catastrophe.

Recently the CBC has gone through another rebranding and from my reading of blogs and message boards you have taken a lot of flack.

I don’t mind taking flack from blogs because most of them don’t know what they’re talking about. Half the time you don’t know who they are because they don’t have the guts to say who they are. All I know is – unlike that period in the early ‘90s where we made major changes that were based on nothing, no research, very little discussion – the changes that we’ve gone through here are substantive and widespread and have very little to do with the look. It’s more in the delivery of the program and reaching out to different platforms.

[They’ve] been part of a three-year program of preparation, discussion, research, analysis, focus groups, you name it, and man, has it paid off. I look at our numbers now compared with where they were when we first did this. It’s like night and day. There’s a focus on me standing, which is just ridiculous. I’ve been standing for 22 years doing The National. Every big show we’ve ever done I was standing. Nobody seems to have noticed. Viewers don’t care about this. I can show you viewer feedback that I’ve had and I could count on the fingers of both hands the number of letters or e-mails I’ve had from viewers that seem to have a problem with me standing. Most, actually, quite like it. And it was my idea.

Why do it?

It gives a whole new energy to the program and it gives me a lot more ability to move around. When you’re sitting at a desk, you’re tied to the desk. We’ve got a great studio, it’s

very flexible, there’s all kinds of things we can do in there and we do them.

Do you think the look or the style of the program has changed the content of the program?

Not at all. Our journalism is as aggressive as it’s ever been. And our focus is on stories that matter to people. Now we’re seeing the second half of the program often, many nights, as strong as the first half, which is tough, especially when you’re doing an hour in prime time against real competition . . . against CSI and American Idol and all this kind of stuff, you’ve got to have a program that’s moving and smart and informative to keep an audience . . . A lot of people will turn on just to see what’s happened and they’re gone fast unless the world’s falling apart. But the gap is much smaller between the first half and the second half of the program than it was a year ago.

Is that because of the content or the format?

. . . The journalism’s got to remain the basis of what you do and the most important thing in what you do. The way you present it has

evaluate what is actually news?

We’re not Twitter and we’re not Facebook – and we’re not TMZ. We’re The National. We’re an important program that deals with important information. Now, do we ignore what those venues are offering? No. We keep an eye on what they’re doing. And when it starts to trend into areas that we consider to be important stories we will learn from them. But you’ve got to be careful. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s happening on some of those that isn’t true and it turns out to cause all kinds of problems. I mean they had Gordon Lightfoot dead and major news media including CanWest airing that stuff. And you know you can’t eliminate the basic journalism from our work. You know Twitter isn’t the CP wires, nor is TMZ. They all have an audience, and they are servicing a certain brand of viewer and that’s fine. Our responsibility is different than theirs and we have to ensure that we don’t fall across that line or we’ll be back exactly where we were in the early ‘90s – chasing all these kind of tabloid stories. When it comes to what we air at 10 o’clock, we’re still professional journalists and we have to look that way.

interesting for the market we’re in. We’re alone in the landscape at 10 o’clock in terms of news. And so people who come to us are making a conscious decision that to them this is more important than all that other stuff. So there’s no point in being all that other stuff. We’ve got to be a newscast. I’m not sitting there with a wig on. I’m not sitting there in shorts. I’m still the same guy I was a year ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. I’m a journalist. I’m just trying to do my job.

Except now we can see your pants.

(laughs) Yeah, at least now you know I’m not wearing shorts . . . Although in fact, I used to wear shorts when were in another building and we didn’t have any air conditioning in the middle of summer.

Has it been difficult for you to get used to the new format?

Any time you change the format there’s a break-in period. We had a chance to road test this a few times before we put it on the air. I know what it’s like when you’ve got a problem show because I’ve seen it before and I knew right away this one wasn’t that. There

I’m not a juggler or a dancer or a comedian. I’m not entertaining from that level, but we are in the toughest hour of the day [for] television broadcast. We’re up against the biggest shows that happen so there’s no point coming on and being boring. You’re trying to be informative in the most interesting way. clearly changed. There’s a different look to our program and I don’t mean me standing. I mean everything – the way the items are shot, the way the stories are told, the graphics that we use, all of that. We’re dead, as are other networks if they don’t appeal to younger viewers – many of whom don’t watch television. The most important elements of our change are the ones that nobody’s talked about, because you can tell the age level of most of the journalists who write about us – they don’t get it. The main changes are where we’re offering the program beyond television. You know you can get The National now on this (picks up Blackberry) at six o’clock at night.

And now the 10-minute quick hit that you can get online…

Exactly. All of that stuff is crucial for us in expanding our audience. And they all count. To us those are people who are watching The National. They watch it on here, watch it on there, watch it on a television. It’s all important.

In the age of TMZ and Twitter, how do you

When you go out there every night do you feel a pressure to entertain or at least engage your audience?

Absolutely trying to engage. I’m not a juggler or a dancer or a comedian. I’m not entertaining from that level, but we are in the toughest hour of the day [for] television broadcast. We’re up against the biggest shows that happen so there’s no point coming on and being boring. You’re trying to be informative in the most interesting way. That’s why we have a new set. That’s why the music has changed a little bit.

Is there a line you won’t cross so long as the content says the same? 3-D perhaps?

(laughs) You know, how we transmit is not my decision. It’s hard for me to imagine that people are going to be sitting watching newscasts with [3-D] glasses on. That part I don’t know. As I said I’m not a juggler, or singer, or dancer — I’m a journalist and so are the people I work with. And we feel strongly about that. But at the same time we also understand there are ways of making the program more

were things we were going to have to adapt and you figure that [out] over time. But if you look at a tape of us from the first week and look at a tape from this week you’re not going to notice some of the changes. They’re small. They’re in terms of the typeset on supers, they’re the backgrounds, that kind of stuff. And those things have been toned down or in some cases hyped up because they weren’t working. That kind of stuff happens all the time.

And the critics?

. . . You don’t listen to all the crap that’s going on around you, you just watch it and say, “is that really what we want to do?” The best critics are not those with an axe to grind. When the main television critic in the country works for CTV you don’t expect that he’s going to say anything good about it. When some of the bloggers who are criticizing you are people who were fired or laid off from here because their work was not good enough, you don’t expect them to praise you. But when your mother or your father or your uncle says to you, “Geez what’s going on in the background?” Then you go, “Well he wouldn’t say that unless it was really bothering him.” Those kinds of things matter.

Convergence | Spring 2010

Courtesy Christopher Wall

Do you think there’s anyone else out there who’s doing a really good job of still giving us journalism?

The argument about what’s news and [whether it’s] entertaining and water cooler, or whether it’s news that’s important for people to know is not a new one. That one’s as old as journalism. Networks and newspapers and magazines will take different views on that. Right now [there are] media organizations who are over on this side (gestures right) and they feel strongly about that and that’s fine you know. That’s their prerogative and they do what they do. Over here (gestures left) on the side of “news

is what’s important for people to know,” they’re a much smaller group of people. We’re one of them. And it’s kind of nice, sometimes, to be in a smaller group.

What does the future look like for journalism?

I’d be confident about the future. Unsettled as to what the media’s going to look like not just 10 years down the road, but five years down the road. I mean when you see how things have changed in the last five, 10, 15 years – it’s pretty dramatic and one assumes it’s going to keep changing. But there’s always going to be demand for information. . . . It’s not like we do an hour of absolutely pristine [news], only the most important things

in the world. There’s always a mix. And people will go, “oh they covered this story about a bear falling out of a tree” – yeah, but it was like eight seconds long and it was at five to 11. Please. There’s some responsibility to let people think the sun’s going to come up the next day. You’re not going to hammer them over the head for an hour and tell them everything’s falling apart. (laughs) It’s a big world out there. . . . I’m almost 62 years old, but I still work 12 to 14 hour days [because] I love it and I know that I want it. I like talking to people. I like knowing what’s going on around me. I like challenging assumptions and telling people what I’ve learned. And I’m still doing that. C

The case for rebranding Lauren Feldman, assistant professor of communication at American University in Washington, D.C., says rebranding is necessary to stay relevant. When it comes to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s recent format changes, Feldman is clear: “News is a business, unfortunately, and like everything else, these news programs need to keep their ratings up in order to maintain advertising and stay on the air.”

Convergence | Spring 2010

To attract younger audiences, Feldman says networks need to be conscious that their broadcasts and clips will often be repurposed and recontextualized online. She says the successes of less traditional sources of information such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have added pressure on conventional news programs to keep viewers. “With the proliferation of channels and outlets it’s becoming increasingly easy for people to

tune out of news and politics altogether in favour of entertainment.” Feldman says changes such as having Peter Mansbridge standing to deliver the news can be important tools to break down the barrier between the audience and newscaster. As long as the content of the program maintains its integrity, she encourages news organizations to reformat, to “communicate to younger people that, ‘hey, this is news for you too.’”

Meet the

Yes Men By Adrienne Middlebrook

Courtesy Yes Men

Yes Men Jacque Servin (left) and Igor Vamos (right) have impersonated representatives of some of the world’s most powerful corporations.

Jacque Servin is about to make a statement on behalf of Dow Chemical Company. Sporting a sharp suit and slicked-back hair he sits in front of a Paris backdrop in a BBC news studio in 2004. Servin doesn’t work for the giant multinational corporation – he’s an imposter, but the BBC and its viewers think he is Jude Finisterra, a spokesperson for the company. “Today I am very, very happy to announce that for the first time Dow is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe,” says Servin, referencing the Union Carbide Corporation’s 1984 chemical leak in India, which has killed thousands. He went on to promise billions of dollars to the victims and their families. Servin, under the alias of Andy Bichlbaum, is one half of the Yes Men, an American duo that practices what it calls “identity correction.” The ultimate goal of identity correction, according to the Yes Men, is to impersonate “big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them.” Their targets are usually leaders of large corporations “who put profits ahead of everything else.” The BBC later found out Servin was not who he said he was and invited him back on air to clear things up.

Peter Connors, senior press officer for BBC World Service told Convergence the Yes Men hoax was a learning experience for everybody at the BBC and news editors spoke to their reporters about how to watch out for fake websites such as the one the Yes Men created. Servin’s partner is Igor Vamos (alias Mike Bonanno), and since joining forces they have been making mischief with their impersonations, announcing pledges on behalf of large organizations and getting their stunts reported as fact in the news media. The mischievous pair met in the mid-90s after Servin was fired from his job for inserting unauthorized content into a video game (specifically two male characters getting points for kissing one another). Vamos had also been creating a buzz by switching voice boxes of Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls and putting them back on store shelves. Mutual friends introduced the two troublemakers. Vamos, an associate professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., says they started putting up some fake websites claiming to be big corporations, to see if they could attract attention and allow them to impersonate the companies. To their surprise, they started to receive e-mails, inviting them to attend conferences. “We realized we could pull it off,” Vamos said in an interview with Convergence. Laurel Whitney is an environmentalist who has

helped organize a few Yes Men hoaxes, including one against Environment Canada during the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. The ruse involved sending out a fake press release, from a fake Environment Canada website announcing Canada was going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. “We didn’t actually choose to target Canada ourselves,” explained Whitney. A group of Canadian activists asked the Yes Men to get involved to expose what the activists thought was a poor environmental policy from their government. After the hoax, Vamos told The Associated Press about their strategy for this stunt. “The idea was to confuse the Canadian government, which set up a war room to positively spin their position in the debate even though everyone knows that their position is a cruel joke.” Whitney says the Canadian delegation didn’t like the prank, but there were no repercussions. Other accomplishments include delivering a keynote speech at Canada’s Go-Expo oil conference in 2007, as representatives from ExxonMobil and the National Petroleum Council. In 2009, the pair helped produce phony copies of the New York Times, which were distributed declaring “Iraq War Ends” on the front page. They have also produced Yes Men Fix the World, a 2009 documentary that follows the two behind the scenes for some of their pranks. Despite their constant mischief-making they Convergence | Spring 2010

“The Yes Men don’t play fair with journalists, granted. But . . . their antics do serve as a reminder to keep a skeptical perspective and try not to take interviews at face value.”

Randall King film critic

have enjoyed a charmed legal life – until now. “Well, we have finally been sued,” says Vamos. “But for years I think the thing that inoculated us against lawsuits was really that we have very little, and we were willing to go to court,” he says. “If someone wants to sue us, it exposes them much more than us,” Vamos says. “People live in fear of lawsuits, [for us] it’s not the end of the world.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is suing the Yes Men, accusing them of trademark infringement, unfair competition and false advertising for a hoax which included a fake website, press release and press conference where they announced a phony climate change stance. Not only do they embarrass the people and companies they impersonate, but the media often end up having to run corrections and apologies for reporting bogus news. Nonetheless, “the media for the most part is pretty accepting,” Vamos says. “We see journalists, in a sense, as collaborators. And, in a sense, they see us that

way because we do sometimes provide a hook to a story that otherwise wouldn’t pass through their editorial board.” However, Allan Woods, who reported on the Environment Canada hoax for the Toronto Star, has a different view. “I’d say that journalists were not collaborating, but were rather duped,” says Woods. “But that’s the whole trick to the success of the Yes Men.” Dan Metcalf, online media executive producer for ABC 4 News in Salt Lake City, has reported on various media hoaxes in his career. “I don’t like the hoax idea, I would call it gonzo activism,” he says. The rapid growth of social media and technology over the past 10 years contributes to the success of hoaxes, Metcalf says. “Social media is rumour in a hurry. It’s rumour squared,” laughs Metcalf. “The media has to be ever vigilant to look out for these.” Randall King, a film critic for the Winnipeg Free Press, says he enjoyed the Yes Men’s satiric pranks in their documentary but the journalist in him has mixed feelings. “The Yes Men don’t play fair with journalists, granted. But to accentuate the positive, their antics do serve as a reminder to keep a skeptical perspective and try not to take interviews at face value,” King says. The disruptive duo have no plans to slow down, Vamos says. They’ve been mastering their craft over the years. “It’s kind of like anything; you get a bit better at it. I don’t know if it’s really improved what we’ve done, but it’s gotten easier to open doors,” he says. The Yes Men have a team of volunteers behind their stunts and so far haven’t had their popularity interrupt their ability to impersonate others. “In the grand scheme of things we don’t seem to be recognized on the street, especially by business people at conferences. It’s not such a concern to be recognized. We can always get other people to do it for us.” C

Courtesy Yes Men

Still images from the 2009 documentary about the duo’s stunts, The Yes Men Fix the World.

As a news professional, do you feel pressure to entertain? Part of what a journalist does is entertain the audience. But there are ways of entertaining the audience without dumbing down. Ideally, you want to inform your audience and tell them the news in a way that’s accessible, that’s compelling and makes them take an interest. It’s not about putting on a performance, but rather about presenting the news and delivering news in a way that grips them, that engages them and makes a connection. Alfred Hermida UBC journalism professor and former Middle East correspondent for the BBC

Convergence | Spring 2010

Pitfalls of iPublishing by Septembre Anderson

Canadian magazines reluctant to invest in new format If Steve Jobs builds it, they will come. And at the longawaited U.S. launch of the iPad in April, consumers did just that, buying over 300,000 units of the product hailed by some as the saviour of magazines. The Canadian release date was delayed because of the huge U.S. response. But whether Canada’s publishers will be poised to profit when it arrives is another question entirely. Moving from print to iPad requires a change in the Canadian publishing industry, says Doug Bennet, publisher of Canadian magazine industry news site Masthead Online. “Publishers are very used to hiring editors and circulators – it is a very well established pattern.” To migrate a magazine to the iPad, “you need to have an entirely new skill set, on the editorial side for sure. And how are we going to tell this story in this new format that has movement and it’s not two pages connected to a spine? It’s a flat frame that can move.” American publishing giant Condé Nast is embracing the new technology, creating iPad apps for five of its publications – Glamour, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired and GQ, which launched in April. Time, Men’s Health and Interview magazine also released apps to coincide with the iPad release. While publishers south of the border are in the midst of an iPad rollout, north of the border is a different story. To date, the only Canadian publication to announce plans to create an iPad edition of its glossy is 2: The Magazine for Couples, which is set to release its app this summer. Bennet insists the reluctance of Canadian publishers to jump aboard the iPad is, largely because they don’t have the resources. In the United States, publishers are backed by huge corporations, which facilitate investment in new formats. “I just think it’s a question about dollars, and available investment dollars, to be able to spend a lot of money and time on these untried, unproven formats.” The struggling state of the economy and publishing industry, with ad pages in decline, makes such an investment even more difficult, he says. But Bennet is confident that the Canadian magazine publishing industry will eventually adopt this new platform. “It will take time, but we have seen Canadian publishers purchase the machine and experiment with it and they are developing applications.” The new technology poses some additional challenges for magazine publishers, who may have to hand Apple control of pricing and content, as has been the case in the online music market, following iTunes’ 2003 introduction. Jason Kirby, senior writer for Maclean’s, says this could lead to a struggle. “The publishers want to control things, the distributors want to control things, Steve Jobs is going to want to control

things,” he says. “It’s going to be a pretty epic battle between all these different groups over who gets a share of the proceeds.” Jason Chen, editor of the American consumer electronics blog, Gizmodo, who famously got his hands on a misplaced fourth-generation iPhone in April, believes the iPad will provide the publishing industry with an opportunity to reach a new generation of readers. The younger, more tech-savvy crowd will help to combat the “internet-equals-free” mentality of web users who refuse to pay for online content. “If you just put your magazine online and just access it through the browser, that taps into ‘Why am I paying for this? The web should be free,’” he says. “But if you put it into an application, it’s different, because people are used to paying for applications already.” In addition to the potential revenue to be generated by selling magazine apps, Bennet says a potential new readership on the iPad presents new advertising opportunities. “It is a

“It’s a question about dollars, and available investment dollars.”

Doug Bennet

publisher Masthead Online way, it seems, to create new advertising formats that are a cross between print and video,” he says. “So they might be more engaging, they might be more measurable, in terms of actual response through click-through rates.” And maintaining advertising is key for magazines already saddled with both production expenses and the cost of creating content for websites. Bennet says the cost savings of digital publishing (with no paper, printing or postage) are mostly offset by new costs associated with developing online content, and server and IT expenses. Industry observers say it’s too early to tell whether the iPad will revolutionize magazine publishing or be a flash in the pan. But most agree the future of print just got a little bit more interesting. “Who really knows what’s going to happen in the future?” Kirby wonders. “For the last 10 years publishers have been training people to expect everything for free, and [they’re] going to have to offer something pretty amazing to get them to change their minds.” C

Illustration by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

Convergence | Spring 2010

disaster

porn by Nicole McIsaac

Blurring the line between essential reporting and exploitation

Images of disaster aren’t normally associated with porn. But for some media critics, the coverage of the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shook Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010 blurred the line between concern and voyeurism. A full week after the fact, Haiti’s earthquake accounted for 27 per cent of all U.S. news coverage, according to a report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Syndicated columnist David Sirota is one of the harshest critics of CNN’s coverage of Haiti. In his widely publicized opinion piece, the political commentator condemned journalists “with visions of Peabodys and Pulitzers dancing in their heads” for exploiting the carnage and downplaying historical issues that intensified the tragedy. “Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot. The lens flits between body parts and journalists pulling perverse Cronkite-in-Vietnam impressions,” he wrote in his column picked up by the Huffington Post and Seattle Times, among others. “There is little discussion of how western Hispaniola was a man-made disaster before an earthquake made it a natural

Convergence | Spring 2010

one. That’s why I call it disaster porn – it’s completely exploitative and voyeuristic, rather than contextualized to tell the larger story of the tragedy of Haiti.” Nick Dixon, anchor at Hamilton’s CHCH news, reported from Haiti for two weeks after the disaster struck. He firmly disagrees with Sirota’s criticism. “It was a complete disaster and there was a certain reality that people needed to see.” Catherine Porter, a Toronto Star columnist sent to Haiti told Convergence at a Canadian Journalism Foundation panel that the earthquake and its aftermath deserved the amount of attention it got. “More than 200,000 people died. A million people are living on the streets and they sent another 800,000 to another city. This issue is huge… it should be covered big.” For Dixon, the proof was in the grassroots response. “For people to say that it was too much, well look at how much money was contributed. People cared about Haiti,” he says. “Because they saw so much disaster they cared even more perhaps.” Canada raised more than $16-million in one night during two one-hour telethons – one English, one French. The reaction and subsequent charity was a result of the way the tragedy was covered, says Jeffrey Dvorkin, executive director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen and

a Ryerson University journalism professor. “We will look back on the Haiti coverage and say that it’s the moment when the coverage of tragedies in far off lands changed, because the response was phenomenal.” The financial response may have been due in part to relentless coverage. The week following the earthquake, CNN devoted 60 per cent of its programming to the disaster in Haiti, according to Project for Excellence in Journalism. “When you’ve committed resources to a story in a significant way, you really have to produce. So that tends to push everything else off the news agenda,” explains Dvorkin. According to the Pew report, during the week after the earthquake, 19 per cent of U.S. newspaper front pages carried pictures from Haiti, while 30 per cent of online content and 35 per cent of television content was devoted to showing and reporting the tragedy. Dvorkin worries this “sympathetic journalist” type of coverage may have changed the face of disaster reporting for good, encouraging empathy and entertainment over objectivity. While Dvorkin is reluctant to call Haiti coverage disaster porn, he says images of the Georgian luger who crashed to his death during a practice run before the Olympics does fall into the category of “news pornography.” “One of the qualities of pornography is looking at something that you shouldn’t

look at,” he says. “You’re compelled to watch it because it’s fascinating and obscene.” Herbert Northcott, sociology professor at the University of Alberta, teaches a course called Death and Dying, in which he includes a class discussion on whether the media’s portrayal of death desensitizes society. Fascination with images of mass destruction evolves from an inherent fear of death, says Northcott. “We’re both afraid of death and yet we’re very much attracted and fascinated by it.” Northcott refers to the article “Pornography of Death,” by English anthropologist and author Geoffrey Gorer in 1955, which likens the conversation of death to that of sex. “Byand-large death has not been a topic for polite conversation, so people explore death the same way that they explored sexuality when you can’t talk about it directly,” he says. Sally Armstrong, human rights activist, former editor-in-chief at Homemakers magazine and author, told the CJF panel that disaster reporters can be described as “vultures of sorrow.” “We tell the stories that will break your heart, but those stories do give the public the information they need and they tend to raise money for organizations to gather funds to make the rescue.” Christopher Wilson, creator of Documenting

-Reality.com, a website that allows people to post and discuss images of murders, autopsies and car accidents, says his site brings in more than 100,000 new hits every day. “Those who claim they have never been curious at some point are just lying. It’s the same thing you see at car accidents – people slow down as much as possible in order to see what they can,” Wilson says. Dvorkin acknowledges the challenge for any editor in deciding the level of disaster coverage. When the Bush administration wouldn’t let the media show caskets returning from the Iraq war it was trying to “sanitize the war,” he says, but the public needed to see it. University of Alberta’s Northcott says the reaction to media coverage generally has the effect of distancing the viewer from the event. “One can feel sympathetic with those who are suffering, but at the same time feel relieved that it’s them and not us.” People’s genuine curiosity about death is what has made evening shows such as CSI popular, yet we are still able to distance ourselves from it because by the end of the hour everything is resolved, he says. But even news coverage of a tragic accident doesn’t last forever. As Northcott says, “It is good that we’re reminded, but it’s also good that we’re able to get on with life.” C

“One of the qualities of pornography is looking at something that you shouldn’t look at... You’re compelled to watch it because it’s fascinating and obscene.” Jeffrey Dvorkin executive director Organization of News Ombudsmen

Courtesy Toronto Star

Convergence | Spring 2010

Courtesy DVIDSHUB

In the thick of it

Courtesy Marco Dormino and Sophia Paris/United Nations Photo

When calamity hits, correspondents can get dangerously close to the story

by Melissa Sundardas

In the aftermath of this year’s disastrous earthquake in Haiti, cameras captured CNN’s Anderson Cooper pulling a boy, bleeding from his head, away from a crowd of looters. It was a sensational story with a heroic journalist at the centre. But when reporters get involved in the action they risk inserting themselves into the story – a threat to journalistic integrity, says Catherine McKercher, a journalism professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. “When it’s laid on, predicted or arranged – then that becomes showmanship rather than behaving like a decent human being,” she says. “If it’s genuine, that’s fabulous. But if it’s done for ratings and if it doesn’t resonate with what the audience is feeling, it doesn’t work,” she says. Making news out of a journalist’s humanitarian act can take coverage away from the actual story – and should be avoided, says Kelly McBride, a media ethics expert at the Poynter Institute in Florida. “At a disaster like the Haitian earthquake, there’s a story every two steps,” McBride says.

Convergence | Spring 2010

“You don’t have to choose the story where you ended up helping somebody.” Cooper was undoubtedly the focus of the CNN story about the bleeding boy’s rescue, but McKercher says in this case, his actions were journalistically sound. “There was nothing staged about this, there was nothing manipulative about this,” she says. “They were out covering the situation in Haiti and things got out of hand . . . Cooper ran in and grabbed [the boy] and pulled him to safety, and then basically, the kid disappeared,” she says, describing the footage. “It wasn’t a matter of CNN exploiting this kid or following this kid’s life and meeting his family and wringing every bit of tears and sympathy that they could out of this thing – this was something that really happened and Cooper just did it,” McKercher says. Some journalists may feel pressured to stage insincere stories, she says. “The media business lives and dies by ratings,” she says. “I think there’s pressure on journalists to bleed and weep all over the scenery and some of it has to be restrained,” she says. When a story is centred on a reporter rather than the situation, it makes journalists look

like egomaniacs – the story loses its impact and effect, she says. “Our job is not to make it all about us, our job is to make it about the people we’re covering for.” Two days after the earthquake shook Portau-Prince, a team of five filmmakers, including Toronto’s Nicolas Jolliet, went to Haiti to film Inside Disaster, a documentary series set to air this fall on TVOntario. Filming the quake’s aftermath brought the crew face-to-face with the devastation. But Jolliet says he made a conscious choice to stay detached, and stick to his task of accurately reporting the story to the world. “There was a food distribution [site] outside the UN, outside of Cité Soleil. People started to push in the line and they were getting crushed. There was a kid standing near the fence getting crushed and there were a few seconds where I didn’t know what to do,” Jolliet recalls. “These can be very long seconds. You decide to put yourself in a state of mind where you are not there to save people in a direct way. You are there to tell their stories so they can be helped, so you create a shield – you always have that lens in between that separates you. You don’t get involved in the same way as an aid worker or doctor. You just do your job,” he says.

But for some reporters, it’s not so easy. Maclean’s foreign correspondent Michael Petrou struggled to stay on task as a journalist in Haiti, he told a Canadian Journalism Foundation round-table in March. At one point, he recalls watching rescuers dig out a Haitian woman who was trapped in the rubble – suddenly gunshots rang out. “It was a terrible scene to watch,” he says remembering the scene, when about 50 “internationals” piled into their convoys and drove away, leaving the woman under the rubble. “I remember a Haitian man yelling after them, ‘She’s going to die!’” After driving for about 200 metres, Petrou says, he didn’t feel right about leaving. “I climbed out and I walked back through the streets and the Haitian people were digging the woman out themselves.” He did report on this experience, but managed to stay outside of the story, as locals helped the trapped woman. But Poynter’s McBride maintains that journalists must remain uninvolved if they hope

to tell an accurate, overarching story. Carleton’s McKercher points out there’s a long history of gimmicky journalism, usually used in pursuit of attracting audiences. “This goes back for 150 years or more,” she says. “In fact, in the 19th century, a lot of it was done by women – the Nellie Bly Around-the-World-inEighty-Days kind of stunt journalism.” But the pressure of today’s 24-hour news cycle is exacerbating the appeal of such stunt journalism, McKercher says. In their defence, reporters face the unrealistic expectation “that there will be something new and exciting every second of every day,” she says. But, in McKercher’s mind, giving in to pressures from the business side of news won’t win you any respect. “The journalists I admire most are the ones who couldn’t care less about ratings and about sales – what they care about is the story.” C with files from Mehreen Khan and Nicole McIsaac

“There was a kid standing near the fence getting crushed, and there were a few seconds where I didn’t know what to do. These can be very long seconds.”

Nicolas Jolliet documentary filmmaker

Courtesy Alona Cherkassky/Internews

Internews Haiti radio reporter Robenson Sanon interviews residents coping with devastation from Haiti’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

As a news professional, do you feel pressure to entertain? As an investigative editor and reporter, of course I feel pressure to be entertaining in my writing about corruption and organized crime. Theft in the privatization of a state company in some Eastern European capital can be a dull thing if I don’t do my job and find the interesting human angle to tell the story . . . That doesn’t mean we have to be light, or flippant, or vulgar, but we can be funny and engrossing and enthralling. Drew Sullivan

Advising editor, Center for Investigative Reporting, Sarajevo

Convergence | Spring 2010

Playbook for a scoundrel

by Rose Ditaranto

Image makers explain how to rescue a reputation gone wrong

Courtesy Jason Thompson Photography

Adam Giambrone quit Toronto’s mayoral race when news of his salacious escapades hit the media.

Robin Sears, “the kingmaker” and campaign strategist and political consultant for Adam Giambrone, was sitting in the former mayoral candidate’s apartment when news of the affair broke. A senior partner at Navigator – the same PR firm to swoop in to rescue former prime minister Brian Mulroney and former attorney general Michael Bryant – Sears says he “was not happy,” but didn’t panic. He’s both firm and calm in his refusal to discuss the details of what went on behind closed doors. His handling of the media is rehearsed, polished and professional. For an expert in crisis management, it simply meant doing “what needed to happen, when it needed to happen.” The rash of recent public scandals – from Tiger Woods to David Letterman to Adam Giambrone – has shone a light on the varying success of the spin. Convergence talked to a range of public relations heavy-hitters to find the lessons to be learned from scandal.

Convergence | Spring 2010

Be first to the presses If your reputation is threatened, you should be the first to release the story, says Sears. “Get your good news out fast and your bad news out faster – that way you help frame the discussion and the ground on which you are going to fight.” Failing to deal with the fallout from your actions leaves your reputation open to the public to manipulate, says Dwayne Winseck, a professor in the School of Journalism and Communications at Carleton University. “If you don’t step up and actively engage in trying to create the frame through which the issue is going to be dealt you basically, by default, hand it off to somebody else and that somebody else doesn’t have your interests in mind.” Winseck says. Silence isn’t golden Winseck says that although there is a great need for privacy in the midst of a scandal, holding back can hurt one’s image. “The standard kind of practice now is that you do have to come forward and work this out.”

Although the first instinct may be to hide under a desk, Sears warns against dropping too far from the public eye. Leaving a “news hole” opens the door to critics to fill the space with wild speculation and “generally bad coverage.” In Giambrone’s case, Sears sees a lesson. “The really serious mistake that one should not make in these situations is to get involved in foolish denials,” he says. “It’s never the crime – it’s the cover up that kills you.” John Crean, a partner with National Public Relations, says the first point of action must be strategic. Decide what has to be addressed first and how best to do it, because silence implies guilt. “It’s imperative to get out very quickly with your version of events and your version of the story,” he says. “Silence is not golden.” Say you’re sorry Anne Sowden, an image consultant with Here’s Looking At You, a Toronto-based PR firm, and co-author of Executive Image Power, says if the apology is good, the public is much more likely to forgive. “Let’s think back to David Letterman – he handled it really well. He said this is what I’ve done and I’ll confess,” she says. “But Tiger didn’t say anything – he should have just come out and said, ‘yes this is what I have done and I’m dealing with it and please give me some time to sort this out.’” “People want to see that you really mean it when you say you’re sorry,” she says. “You’ve got to be really sincere, you’ve got to really mean it.” Sears agrees. “Publicly acknowledging your stupidity and the mistakes you made is essential,” he says. “If an apology is appropriate – which it usually is – apologize.” Crean says apologizing isn’t always the best policy. “You have to allow the person to come back and defend themself,” he says. “To first apologize presumes it’s all true. [It] presumes the person knowingly committed these offences.” But Crean adds “if you have been caught with your hand in the cookie jar,” you have to come clean. Being completely transparent once proof of an indiscretion surfaces is the only choice. The public memory Public figures should capitalize on the public’s short-term memory, says Sowden, who specializes in helping people project a positive image. For instance Tiger Woods’ road to redemption might not be as long as one might think. “I think he probably has to be seen with his wife and his kids.” However this avenue is closing for Woods as his wife is divorcing him. Sowden, adds that people are always waiting for the next fall from grace, from someone

Courtesy Keith Allison

Tiger Woods’ pristine image was stained by an infidelity scandal late last year.

who claims to have changed their ways. “If six months or a year from now someone hits the tabloids and says I had a fling with Tiger Woods… he’s toast,” she says. “They’ll forgive you once, but I don’t think they are going to forgive you more than once.” Don’t set yourself up to fail Professor Winseck says the problem is in the presentation. The pressure Giambrone felt to maintain a pristine political image, or in Tiger’s case, “the perfect black, faithful, male husband… the measure of all a good man should be. When you set yourself up as holier than thou, then it’s a long way to fall,” he says. “Don’t be setting yourself up for such stupid downfalls. If Tiger never presented himself the way he had, perhaps the fall wouldn’t have been so far.” Have the right friends Ideally, you need reinforcements, third parties who can reinforce your character, says National PR’s Crean. “It’s important to get third parties to say good things about you,” agrees Sears. Whether it be colleagues, business partners or friends, public support from respected figures is key. But it’s not always enough. In Giambrone’s

case, he had no other choice but to pull out of the race when his affairs with younger women came to light, says Sowden. Despite Toronto Mayor David Miller’s defence of Giambrone’s work as TTC chair likely securing his current position, his dreams of being the city’s youngest mayor were dashed. “I don’t think he had any other choice. I don’t think people would have been comfortable voting for him,” says Sowden. Patiently plan a comeback Regaining an image like the one Tiger created involves many components – it takes time, says Crean. “The road to redemption is usually not a short journey, it’s a longer journey,” he says. “Often times [it takes] behaving in a certain way that is distinctly different than the old life.” Sowden says in order for any of these men to revamp their tarnished images, they’ve got to be in it for the long run. “It’s almost like an overall company objective, what’s your five year plan? In this case you probably need to have an overall one year plan. But you need to set aside the different tasks you are going to do within that one year. You have to be absolutely, positively true to yourself, that you can really do this.” C

As a news professional, do you feel pressure to entertain? The advantage of science writing is that it provides a tonic to most of the news we read in the newspapers. [Science writing] tends to be about discovering things new to human experience while most news is crime, corruption and celebrity canoodling and catastrophe . . . People should get a little bit of that in the news along with stories about all the things that have gone wrong that scare the crap out of us. Charles Petit

Head web tracker, Knight Science Journalism Tracker

Convergence | Spring 2010

Copy and paste reporting Online media trade accuracy for speed by Tim Morse

Bob Steele is used to being quoted in the media. But when his words from an L.A. Times interview hit the web, they took on a life of their own. “I was sitting in my office, preparing my for my classes when I received various Google alerts with my name surfacing in news stories – I was shocked to see how many misquoted me.” It’s known as melting, ripping or aggregating. And the growing practice of repurposing information to compete in the online news race is something Steele is now all too familiar with. “After the article was published, several bloggers and blog sites repurposed the information from that article and transformed what I said into something different,” recalls the journalism ethics professor at Indiana’s DePauw University. “The quotes I had said in the interview with the L.A. Times were then taken out of context and filtered to fit the opinion of those writers. All of a sudden I was getting these e-mails from people who read the repurposed articles and they were furious.” When an angry Steele attempted to contact one of the offending bloggers and an editor, they were nowhere to be found. “They didn’t have any contact information listed, no masthead, no numbers,” he explains. After sifting through the site and e-mailing the few available addresses, Steele says there was still no reply. “Clearly they had read them and didn’t care or they gave a dead e-mail [address].” A recent study by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism has uncovered a dirty side of the speed-obsessed online news environment. It found that of all the news content in blogs and new media, “95 per cent came from traditional media – mainly newspapers.” “It’s lazy audiences, lazy journalists and now a fundamental problem,” says Kelly McBride,

Convergence | Spring 2010

Photo illustration Michael Sutherland-Shaw

a media ethicist at the Florida-based Poynter Institute, from her St. Petersburg home. She says the prevalence of “drifter audiences” online – readers who tend to sift through Google searches rather than visit a preferred news site – means the original source has become all the more distant. The PEJ study used Baltimore as the testing ground to examine how stories migrate through news outlets – including everything from newspapers, local TV and radio, to niche or new media. “We discovered something we weren’t looking for,” says PEJ founder and director, Tom Rosenstiel. The study suggested stories – in all forms – were being released without any original

in Washington, D.C. among others as sources of largely new material. “But an awful lot of tweets, blogs and certainly aggregation sites just repackage the work of traditional journalists without paying them for the material,” he concedes. “Aggregation may not hurt original sources. If the aggregator links back to the original source it may actually increase traffic,” says Tompkins. “It’s those who do not link back to the source, who steal content without attribution that create problems for me.” Not all blogs are aggregators. One example is Toronto’s BlogTO – a site that’s gaining traction with its entrepreneurial citizen journalism. Editor Jerrold Litwinenko says the mandate for

article from the News Tribune in Tacoma had never once mentioned the words “waterboard” or “torture.” “As citizens, we need a new tool kit to discern what’s true and trustworthy online and though there is a civic movement,” she says, “it will take a lifetime for this because we’re in the beginning stages.” McBride says such a movement is emerging to combat the rise of dodgy news on the Internet. In New York State, the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University claims to be dedicated to teaching students how to critically think about the news. In Bethesda, Md., the News Literacy Project aims to teach middle and high school students about media literacy. In Canada,

“This rise of repurposing and misinformation is very concerning for me . . . It’s counter productive to a good society.”

Bob Steele journalism ethics professor

reporting. Rosenstiel explains that in some cases, media outlets were publishing verbatim press releases without identifying them as such. “What was once the raw ingredient, is now the content.” Emphasis has shifted away from the quality of content to speed and search engine optimization (SEO), he says. At a recent 2010 State of the News Media lecture at Massey College in Toronto, Rosenstiel talked about “accidental news acquisition,” when news consumers stumble upon information rather than seeking out a reliable news source, the Canadian Journalism Project reported. This is only exacerbated by the amount of available online news. Al Tompkins, Poynter group leader for broadcasting and online, says although the trend can raise issues for both journalists and the future of online media, it isn’t all bad. He cites online outlets such as ProPublica in New York and the Center for Public Integrity

his reporters is simple – all local and all original. “Though we’re no longer really a blog, we still have a hyper-local focus and we want our journalists to write in first-person. We’re very grassroots.” BlogTO does repurpose some news stories, but “we repurpose in a different way. We add originality to a story, again so long as it’s local, but we interview the people we think the original source missed, add photos and make it ours… we’re not posting for page views,” Litwinenko says. The site has had its own content repurposed without permission. “A while ago, there was a blog site who took one of our articles and just basically claimed it as their own, no sourcing,” Litwinenko recalls. “We contacted them immediately and got them to change it.” Litwinenko says SEO can be both a positive and negative for online news sites. “SEO is very important to us, but at the same time it causes problems and makes it easy for the repurposing sites to find what they need,” he says. Even with proper attribution, online news repackagers can still add to the climate of misinformation. McBride recalls an online article from Slate magazine, which reported a U.S. soldier had allegedly waterboarded his child in Washington. But after tracing the dissemination points up the online chain of news, she found that the original

a partnership has emerged between non-profit public interest group Samara and the Massey College Canadian Journalism Fellowship at the University of Toronto. Monty Cook, former editor and senior vice president of the Baltimore Sun, has taken the lessons from online media literacy to heart. “What we’ve done is transformed our newsroom,” he says. In 2009 the Sun decided to re-vamp its operation to make it more equipped for digital media. Learning SEO and utilizing social media sites were at the top of Cook’s list. “We spend a lot of time with every editor on how to provide SEO tagging, and if we’re not the first choice when searching, then shame on us,” says Cook. “We’re engaging in that world to make sure our stories are relevant, as well as our archives.” To turn a profit in the world of new media, Cook says the audience has to be given its due. “People will know what’s good and trustworthy information, and things will rise and fall based on that.” But left unchecked, Steele says the growth of shoddy online news gathering is a serious threat. “It’s counter-productive to a good society, this rise of repurposing and misinformation is very concerning for me,” he says. “Unfortunately, the landscape is filled with landmines – and many of us have hit them.” C

As a news professional, do you feel pressure to entertain? You have to be able to make your [story] either newsworthy or attention-getting or really, really interesting, and that really interesting part has to have human interest. There’s an element of journalism that you can’t deny about that. When you start bombarding them with information that’s a bit too dense for [the audience], they’re going to turn off and you can’t do anything to stop them. Kathryn O’Hara

President, Canadian Science Writers Association

Convergence | Spring 2010

Journalists screaming in the wind

The requester is a member of the media

by Erin DeCoste

A stoic Robert Cribb stands by his desk at the Toronto Star. The 12-year veteran of filing freedom of information requests has barreled through obstacles with mounting frustration, uncovering some of the dirtiest government secrets in recent memory, from grave food safety violations to medical malpractice. But it was one request – for information about Ontario’s private career colleges – which confirmed the government is “amber lighting” media requests. “There’s always been a suspicion among journalists that our requests are treated differently,” says the co-author of Digging Deeper, a prominent text on investigative journalism in Canada. “Its gotten worse in some ways – but it’s always been difficult.” The federal Access to Information Act governs the process and it’s the basis for provincial and municipal acts. It sets the time for government response at 30 days, but 30 months passed before the data revealing widespread problems inside Ontario’s private career colleges was in Cribb’s hands. So he filed another request – but this time, for all the documentation related to his original inquiry. The inside-the-process request revealed that the authorities had amber lighted Cribb as a member of the press. “I now know that it was taking a long time because there were numerous layers of interest and oversight and approvals and meetings and PowerPoints and terror over the request,” he says. “There was intense scrutiny applied to my request and a lot of hand-wringing on how to deal with it.” The follow-up FOI showed the bureaucrat behind Cribb’s file had not only alerted her department to his profession, but also the request’s status and detailed wording. Cribb’s struggle over what he calls his most “contentious and adversarial FOI” is nothing

Convergence | Spring 2010

Photo illustration by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

new, says Jayani Perera, a corporate issues treated fairly. “If I request it or if a member of management analyst from the Ontario Ministry the media requests it, it should be no different. of Government Services. We’re requesting public documents that we’re “Protocols have been in place since 1990 to entitled to see, so there’s no relevance to the provide the heads-up and to prepare briefing identity of the requester.” materials to anticipate issues that may arise as a result of the release of requested records,” she says. The Canadian Newspaper Association filed a complaint to the federal Office of the Information Commissioner in Sept. 2005, alleging embedded practices by government departments that lead to unwarranted delays. The resulting study found 16 of 21 departments and agencies have employed amber lighting techniques, to alert superiors and media relations personnel. These practices have continued despite the study’s recommendations advocating that senior officials be made aware of requests free of the requester’s identify. Alan Shanoff, a lawyer with Sun Media for 30 years, emphatically defends Graph from this year’s special report, delivered to Parliament the media’s right to be by the Interim Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault.

Cribb agrees. “It’s the only legislation that exists to protect our right to understand how we are governed,” he says. “It’s the only piece of legislation that allows us to demand from governments the documents that explain to us what they’re doing in our name. It’s essential as freedom of speech. It’s as essential as any other right of access in our society.” Ross Hodgins, senior advisor to the federal information commissioner, says that businesses and other inquirers, not just journalists, also experience delays. But he concedes, “As a tool for journalists, it has never been satisfactory… the story gets kind of cold.” Cribb says some journalists try to skirt the delays and flagging by filing under a spouse or friend’s name – a strategy he won’t employ. “I just think, at the end of the day, just be honest and say who you are and deal with it that way,” Cribb says. “It’s a fight, and I want to be the one in the duel.” But the battlefield has changed. “I have a sense that it’s getting worse,” says Abby Deshman project director for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “There’s been multiple government studies calling for reform for many years,” she says, “and they haven’t been adequately responded to.” An April 2010 report by Interim Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault blasts the government for undermining the public’s right to obtain information by perpetuating delays and bureaucratic barriers. In the report more than half of the assessed federal government institutions received a “below average” or “unsatisfactory” grade. “As scathing as it is, it [the criticism] is not that unusual,” says Cribb. “It’s seen as an expected thing and not usually followed by any public outrage or demands for change.” The resulting stories from access to information requests do stir outrage. In a column that described his battle to uncover Toronto’s food safety violations, Cribb writes, “The public reaction was enormous, triggering sweeping changes in the food inspection system in Toronto and beyond, including the country’s first public disclosure system for restaurants.” Cribb says the media needs to do a better job of informing Canadians about flaws in the FOI process. The public is “not engaged in it and that’s partly our fault, because we don’t tell them,” he says. Founding president of the Canadian Media Lawyers Association Brian Macleod Rogers says

Photo by Miguel Agawin

Canadians in general tend to undervalue the importance of records obtained through FOI requests. “We haven’t played up and enhanced the value of it in the eyes of the private citizen,” he says. “I think we could do so and we should

standard of government accountability.” Cribb says the bureaucratic culture of stonewalling persists, and there’s no indication it will change. Although transparency is entrenched in FOI legislation at federal, provincial and municipal

“It’s a fight, and I want to be the one in the duel.”

Robert Cribb Toronto Star reporter

do so. I think citizens realize how important it is to understand what governments are doing.” The term “freedom of information” can seem arcane to the general public says professor Fred Vallance-Jones, who led the CNA’s 2008 National Freedom of Information Audit (see story below). “It doesn’t compete very well with ‘the ballgame’ or ‘taxes’ – things people care about,” he says. Nonetheless, “People have to be able to peer into the filing cabinets of the government,” he says, “if we’re going to have this 21st century

levels in Canada, a lack of repercussions has allowed the system to give media the runaround since the federal act was passed in 1983. “It’s ridiculous,” Cribb says. “We have antiquated laws that don’t even begin to ponder the modern reality of digital information and databases and computers.” He says change will only come with civic engagement with the issue. “There’s no public outrage. And until there is – it’s just a bunch of journalists screaming in the wind.” C

Auditing government transparency The Canadian Newspaper Association releases a National Freedom of Information Audit yearly – the only one of its kind in the country – to test how readily government and institutional officials disclose public information by sending out information requests and tracking their progress. Fred Vallance-Jones, a professor of journalism at the University of King’s

College in Halifax and the audit’s leader, says the CNA sidesteps amber lighting by filing their requests as members of the public. The numbers for the fifth audit will be released in May. Vallance-Jones says, generally, the audits show a variance across the country, with some municipalities performing well while the federal government remains a problem.

Last year’s audit showed that many Canadian institutions are still denying access – more than one third of the CNA’s requests were received late or not responded to at all. In 2008 more than one in eight requests remained outstanding or unacknowledged. In 2007, 50 records were released out of the 85 requests sent out.

Convergence | Spring 2010

Enemies of the press

Turkey

Editors face jail terms of 10 to 525 years for spreading propaganda for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, reports the IPS Communication Foundation. Even outside its borders, Turkish authorities wield influence in curbing press freedom.

Source: International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) Photo illustration by: Michael Sutherland-Shaw

❖ ❖ ❖

Liberia

Mexico

Mexican columnist Enrique Villicana Palomares was found dead April 10. Villicana, who wrote for the Voice of Michoacan newspaper, was kidnapped a week before. His body, throat slit, was found in Morelia, Mexico. His family says the journalist had reported on attacks by armed groups against the Purepecha, one of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. He is the fifth journalist killed in Mexico in 2010.

Convergence | Spring 2010

Colombia

Colombian editor Clodomiro Castilla Ospino was shot and killed March 19. Ospino, who edited and owned El Pulso del Tiempo, was murdered outside of his house in Monteria. He was an outspoken critic of Colombian corruption.

Liberian radio reporter Nixon Todd was arrested and beaten on orders of Monrovia’s acting mayor, Mary Broh. Todd, who works for Love FM Radio and Television, was reporting on a story on the shutting down of the Monrovia City corporation task force.

Russia

Sri Lanka

Konstantin Popov, a Russian journalist, was beaten to death in police custody after he was arrested in Tomsk, Siberia on Jan. 4. After being comatose for two weeks, he died in hospital on Jan. 20. He worked at Tomskaya Nedelya.

Authorities detained and questioned journalists in a post-election crackdown in February. Journalists who sided with the opposition were specifically targeted.

China

A new series of bans and orders has been issued by China’s Central Propaganda Department forbidding independent coverage of events in the country, including government efforts to rescue workers trapped in a flooded mine in the Shanxi Province. China is the world’s second largest jailer of journalists, with 24 in prison.

❖ ❖ ❖

❖ Iran Zimbabwe

Freelance journalist Stanley Kwenda fled Zimbabwe after reportedly receiving a death threat from police on Jan. 15. The threat came after one of Kwenda’s stories was published in the Zimbabwean.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports there are at least 52 journalists and writers imprisoned in Iran, giving the country the ranking of first in the world for journalist imprisonment. IFEX says most of the charges against the journalists are vague and shrouded in secrecy.

Thailand

Reuters journalist Hiro Muramoto was killed in the political violence in Thailand on April 10. IFEX reports that Muramoto, 43, was carrying a video camera when he was shot in the chest. An autopsy linked military bullets to several deaths that day, but officials deny they shot Muramoto.

Convergence | Spring 2010

The Science of Reporting

Confused science reporting may be a thing of the past with the arrival of the Science Media Centre of Canada. The venture launches this fall with the expressed goal of making science coverage “more informed, more accurate and more incisive.” Peter Calamai, who spent 10 years as the Toronto Star’s senior science reporter and is a director of the SMCC, says the number of full-time science reporters in Canadian newsrooms has been cut in half since the by Miguel 1970s. Meanwhile, the science stories covered are increasingly done by general assignment reporters who lack the expertise and time to understand the issues. The SMCC, an Ottawa-based not-for-profit started by a group of journalists and researchers disappointed with Canadian media’s social, natural and biomedical science coverage, will offer rapid response to media requests about current science issues, providing credible contacts and other resources to reporters, says Penny Park, SMCC’s executive director. It will also help journalists interpret statistics and decipher medical and scientific studies, she says. While Canadian data is not available, a 2009 Pew Research Center survey suggests 83 per cent of American scientists believe TV coverage of science news as only “fair or poor.” For newspapers, the dissatisfaction level is 63 per cent. Quality science reporting is more important than ever, says Timothy Caulfield, professor of health law at the University of Alberta. “Science now permeates our lives, never more so in human history. It’s a part of our economy, it touches our day-to-day decisions about health, how we’re going to raise our families and decisions we make about our food. It’s incredibly important and it’s never been more complicated,” he says. Calamai says public appetite for science news in North America exploded with the space race in the late 1960s. The rise of personal computers and electronic gizmos in the ’70s and ’80s led to expanded science and

Convergence | Spring 2010

technology sections in newspapers, with advertisers competing for space near tech stories. Since then, the prestige of science news has ebbed, he says. “The whole emphasis on science as the ‘endless frontier’” has declined. Kathryn O’Hara, president of the Canadian Science Writers Association, says the recession has tightened the squeeze on newsrooms. “As long as journalism runs on a revenue model, it’ll always be subject to market forces.” The thinning ranks of news specialists hurts science Agawin communication, says Dr. Judy Illes, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia. “I think there’s a sincere effort in accurate reporting but it gets complicated, and maybe even compromised, by the need for speed, the need for conciseness and the need for readership,” she says. “A misstep in reporting will reflect badly on the scientist whether or not that scientist was a party to the error.” Dr. David Shore, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience and behaviour at McMaster University, found his research on children’s attention misconstrued by the media in 2006. While his experiment showed children do not grow adult-like attention until the ages 12 to 15, a story published on the study suggested children can’t attend to what adults say to them. The article also used auditory examples despite the experiment being completely visual. Shore says the goals of scientists and the media don’t always mesh. He articulates the oft-heard – and oft-challenged – charge that while scientists are interested in the pursuit of truth, reporters are driven by the desire to sell newspapers. “That’s not to say the media’s not there to tell the truth,” he says, taking the edge off the complaint. “But they may not always reflect the most accurate facts and balance.” Returning the ball with a little journalistic topspin, veteran reporter Calamai says scientists often don’t take the time to understand media culture and what constitutes news. He says scientists commonly believe the news media has a responsibility to educate the public. “The premise

Media centre

takes aim at subpar science coverage

Courtesy

Charles Petit, Head web tracker, Knight Science Journalism Tracker

is wrong here. They think everybody should be interested in science,” he says. “Many people are quite happy to go through their lives without understanding how photosynthesis works or how chlorophyll works – they don’t. They just eat the corn,” Calamai says. News consumers have the option of not reading or tuning in to the news, he says. The Canadian education system has failed to make scientific knowledge stick in the minds of most adults, he says. “So why would the news media be the people to do that job?” Calamai says scientists pooh-pooh the idea that science journalism should be presented in a way that grabs attention, and sniff at what they see as pandering to entertainment. Scientists “can call it what they want but they’re being totally blissfully ignorant to what the reality is, in terms of most people’s time, and how they choose to spend [it,]” he says. Bridging the divide is part of the mandate of the SMCC, which will offer workshops designed to help scientists get into the head of journalists, says Park. The aim is to improve communication so that both researcher and reporter work off the same page, she says. According to a 2009 study about improving neuroscience communication, which UBC’s Illes co-wrote, journalists are also often frustrated by scientists’ reluctance or

inability to speak candidly about their findings. Indeed, the 2009 Pew survey shows only three per cent of scientists talk often with reporters about new research findings while nearly half never talk to them at all. Further tangling the lines of trust is the “cycle of hype,” resulting from the practice of some scientists to exaggerate the importance of their work, says the University of Alberta’s Caulfield. Scientists are often under pressure to present their research in exciting terms, so universities can boost their reputations and justify research funding, he says. Journalists also want an exciting story to deliver to their audiences. “And round and round it goes. All are complicit collaborators,” he says, adding that in the long run this hurts the legitimacy of the science. Charles Petit, head web tracker at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, a website established by MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowships, says a bigger problem is the decline in volume of science stories. Petit says covering science is a type of social service. “It reminds people there are careers in exploring how the universe works, and the puzzles we see every day around us in innovation, in health, etc. As that drops off, it has a toll.” There are still islands of comprehensive science

“Many people are quite happy to go through their lives without understanding how photosynthesis works or how chlorophyll works – they don’t. They just eat the corn.”

coverage, he says. Large news outfits such as The Associated Press and the New York Times still produce good science coverage, but “there are relatively few people who go to them for information. [Readers] are going online.” UBC’s Illes says more can be done by both communities to improve science journalism, with scientists making communication a priority and journalists focusing on accuracy. “Content, content, content,” she says – “rather than a sound byte.” Knight Science’s Petit says a long-term solution requires better education so people are more interested in science and better understand it. In the short term, a better business climate is needed for news media “so they can invest and re-invest in all their beats, including science.” Fiona Fox, director of the U.K.’s Science Media Centre, which SMCC was modelled after, encourages scientists to directly communicate with the public, but says the news media has a far greater reach so science reporting needs to improve. “Our view is, you ignore media at your peril,” she says. “And if you engage with them constructively, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how you can rely on media to get your science story out there.” C

Kathryn O’Hara,Canadian Science Writers Association president

Courtesy

Peter Calamai

As a news professional, do you feel pressure to entertain? Print is not performance. I’ve held executive positions with newspapers over the years and there’s a public relations element and an advertising-marketing element, but as a pure journalist, in print, no. But broadcasting is performance and if you don’t realize it, you shouldn’t be in it. It’s about hair and teeth, it’s about punchy sentences, looking good and being succinct. That’s broadcasting. And radio is about entertaining, informative conversation, so that’s also performance. Diane Francis

National Post editor and columnist

Convergence | Spring 2010

Access denied by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

â&#x20AC;&#x153;We live in a century where the ability of dictatorships to isolate their own people and thereby stay in power is less accomplished with barbed wire, stone and steel and more through electronic manipulation and interference.â&#x20AC;?

Photo by Maegan McGregor Illustration by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

Convergence | Spring 2010

When Google reports surfaced claiming the Chinese government hacked into human rights activists’ e-mail accounts, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on the media to join the fight for Internet freedom. “We are urging U.S. media companies to take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance,” she said in a January speech in Washington. “The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression. And when their business dealings threaten to undermine this freedom, they need to consider what’s right, not simply what’s a quick profit.” Google withdrew from mainland China on March 23, moving to less restrictive Hong Kong. Since then, a number of China-based Internet companies have stopped doing business with Google, and U.S.-based provider GoDaddy has stopped selling Chinese domain names in response to “several cyber attacks” and demands from authorities to release client information, according to a bulletin from the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, a network of over 80 organizations. Companies like Google and GoDaddy have shown a willingness to put principles above profits, but all of the interests involved need

to decide on a singular action, says Arvind Ganesan, Human Rights Watch’s business and human rights program director. “There needs to be a collaborative attack against censorship and the abuse of power in China,” he says. “It’s going to require a combination of institutions, whether it’s governments or other companies. It is going to require a collective action.” Before media outlets can be involved in any real way, the U.S. government needs to clearly identify how it hopes to achieve unlimited Internet freedom, says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “Don’t just throw money at what seems to be the best idea, let’s actually figure out what we might do.” In her speech, Clinton called on Congress to help software developers build new tools to help closed societies access information. But despite allocating US$30-million in 2010 to support counter-censorship programs and technology in China and Iran among others, the funds have not been distributed. In the 2008 budget the U.S. State Department appropriated US$15million for developing new technologies for Internet freedom. The grant was awarded to Internews, an international NGO that fosters independent media and access to information worldwide. That was a mistake, says David Tian, a NASA engineer and technical director of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIF), a non-

Praise and pleas for the GIF technology from Iranians Thursday, 9. July 2009 05:03  this is great this is awsome  we are in the country just like a prison  they dont let us even to talk.  talk = bullet  plz keep this service to us.to world know that what people are us and  help us. we have just this unblock service in iran. plz keep it to us  for free.plz  tanx for those who publishing this srevice.someday when we reach to freedom  i promis promis to you we will thank you with somethig special tan.x  for everything. and we sorry about your people that was killed three  days ago.

Thursday, 9. July 2009 12:55  FreeGate is the best way to access internet in Iran withouth filter. I  wish you can service us in future, we need that. please help us. and I  am thankful of you.  Freedom for Iran

Friday, 10. July 2009 21:37  Most internet websites including BBC, VOA, My space and ... are  severly blocked. The only way we could get trustworthy information is  via the use of freegate and ultrasurf.  Please help keep running these services.

Wednesday, 8. July 2009 16:55  When Ultra surf not working , we have no contact with true data and true news.  I and my friends beg you keep working with your full spirit. we have  no way to help you so we just encourage you .  please do your best .

profit organization that develops and advocates for anti-censorship technologies. “It was awarded to an organization which had nothing to do with Internet censorship – they had no single server to support such an activity,” Tian says. Since 2000, he says, his organization has focused on circumventing the firewall in China, and more recently in Iran. Along with an alliance of private and non-profit Internet technology organizations, GIF says they’ve found the solution – developing servers that allow users to penetrate the firewall without being detected or blocked. Use of GIF servers spiked during and after the Iranian presidential elections in June 2009, with more than 120 million web users logging on. A few days after the election on June 16, GIF protocols recorded more than 200 million hits (page loads), from an estimated 400,000 unique users. Tian says the swell of traffic crashed the servers and forced the organization to cap daily usage at six to seven million hits. GIF servers account for about 90 per cent of the total censorship circumvention efforts, he claims. Despite its effectiveness and popularity, GIF has been unable to secure the funding it needs from the U.S. government to raise its cap to 50 million daily hits. Michael Horowitz, senior fellow and director of the Project for Civil Justice Reform at the Washington D.C.-based Hudson Institute, is a staunch supporter of GIF servers. He says with government funding GIF servers will mean the

Wednesday, 8. July 2009 13:17  Dear sir  I would like to sign this petition to make sure GIF (programs) is  running smoothly in future specially for my country in Iran as it’s  our ONLY way to reach out and connect to each other & get latest news.  Please please make this program available free of charge for Iran youths ....  Thank you very much

Friday, 10. July 2009 17:07  Please restore it since as a female representative i request to allow  ultrasurf since we ladies have to suffer i name of censorship.

Wednesday, 8. July 2009 06:38 thanks a lot you guys dont know what it means to me to have a free internet and all the thanks goes to GIF team hope i could do something in return Thank you so much !!!!!!!

Photo illustration Michael Sutherland-Shaw Source: Global Internet Freedom Consortium

end of firewalls in closed societies such as Iran, Cuba and Myanmar. But circumvention tools such as GIF servers can be very problematic, says Harvard’s Zuckerman. “Even if you did feed them with hundreds of millions of dollars, there’s some very difficult unintended consequences. You end up creating tools that are very useful for criminals, hackers and harassment, as well as tools useful for Internet freedom.” Zuckerman is also the co-founder of Global Voices Online, a collaborative blog that discusses freedom of expression abuses internationally. He says other circumvention techniques may be more effective. “One thing you can do is you can mirror content. So rather than just having content on a site that’s blocked you can put copies of it elsewhere.” Mirror sites, with different IP addresses could allow sites such as YouTube and Facebook to evade censorship, he says. Horowitz agrees, saying a large IT company could make a difference when it comes to breaking down the firewall in closed societies. One example is Yahoo, he says, which could combine with GIF technologies to gain access to countries such as China and Iran, and attract advertisers who want to have a presence there. But Horowitz is skeptical that any of this will happen if the U.S. State Department does

not recognize and support the available anticensorship tools. “They are sacrificing the interests of the demonstrators in Iran in order to appease the Chinese government,” he says. Though Zuckerman cautions, “Smart governments like the Chinese government don’t just block access to YouTube.com, they block access to the proxies [GIF intermediary servers] as well.” The Hudson Institute’s Horowitz says the attention on Google and China presents an extraordinary opportunity for Canada to make its mark on history by asserting a strong foreign policy to break down Internet firewalls. “Canada is well positioned to do it in part because it is a country of immigrants, and it understands what it’s like when home-country persecution takes place,” he says. “I would love to see Canada take this on as a foreign policy and human rights priority – it would vault Canada into the major players on the international scene overnight.” Horowitz says the U.S. has prioritized conjecture and economic interests over basic human rights. “We live in a century where the ability of dictatorships to isolate their own people and thereby stay in power is less accomplished with barbed wire, stone and steel, and more through electronic manipulation and interference.” C

Photo by Miguel Agawin

Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari was arrested and spent 118 days in Iran’s Evin Prison.

Surviving supression DeCoste by Erin

Citizen journalists give hope to Iran

On a chilly March night, journalists, students, professors and human rights advocates fill a University of Toronto a lecture hall to hear Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, recently released from prison in Iran, speak about his experience. While Iran’s June election results were being

Convergence | Spring 2010

protested in the streets, Bahari was arrested without charge, along with dozens of other journalists and demonstrators in the country. He was working as Newsweek’s Tehran correspondent at the time. He was asleep just before his arrest, he says, speaking softly into the microphone. “When I

The Great Firewall of China Chinese government censors block anything considered pornographic or politically sensitive on the Internet. Censored information includes search results and websites about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, supporting the independence movements of Tibet and Taiwan, and the Falun Gong movement. In 2007 President Hu Jintao said the stability of China depends on the government’s ability to “purify” the Internet.

The Way Forward? FreeGate software allows users to access blocked websites by taking advantage of a range of open proxy servers which evade censors. It allows users to have quick and unresticted access to the Internet. FreeGate was developed by Dynamic Internet Technology Inc. (DIT), a partner with GIF.

woke up I saw four men in my room. I could smell them before I could see them. They smelled of rosewater and sweat from their feet.” Bahari was incarcerated for 118 days in Evin Prison, a notorious jail for Iranian dissidents. He was held in solitary confinement, interrogated daily and coerced into a televised confession where he acknowledged western journalists as spies. Iran holds the dubious honour of being the nation with the most journalists behind bars, with 52 known cases, according to the International Freedom of Expression Exchange. Bahari describes working as a journalist in Iran as being like a trapeze artist. “It’s always a very difficult task to know what you can say next. How can you push the envelope politically?” While the government crackdown silenced many, Bahari maintains the oppressive measures will ultimately prove futile, and the flow of information will continue in the era of citizen journalism. “Even though many journalists cannot work in Iran, citizen journalists still get their material out.” Of the current Iranian regime’s efforts to control information, he says, “They are just fighting the tide of time, fighting the tide of history.” While Behari endured his ordeal, he is haunted by thoughts of those who continue to face abuse. “Sometimes bad things happen to you, sometimes good things happen to you, and you survive most of them,” he says. “But what really saddens me on a daily basis is the harassment and imprisonment of my friends and colleagues.” C

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“Eastern European oligarchs and organized crime figures and sleazy British lawyers have found each other in a match made in hell. When unlimited money meets unlimited nastiness, it invariably leads to a lot of damage being done.” That’s how American journalist Drew Sullivan describes the emergence of libel tourism – when the powerful threaten or launch libel suits against the media in plaintiff-friendly, foreign, and usually English courts. Sullivan authored a recent report on the subject for the Center for International Media Assistance. It highlights libel tourism’s rise in the Internet age and its ability to muzzle the media – especially independent outlets in the developing world. Convergence reached Sullivan in Sarajevo, where he is an advising editor for the Center for Investigative Reporting. For about 10 years Sullivan has been working in eastern Europe, where he says the rich and powerful use libel tourism to crush free expression. Libel plaintiffs have been shopping for friendly courtrooms since at least the 1980s, when celebrity suits were most common, Sullivan says. They have always had to prove media had distributed the offending work in a given jurisdiction before a court would hear a case. But today’s online content can land in the legal jurisdiction of any country with access. The web has “expanded the liability of any news organization to basically the whole world,” says Sullivan.

English hospitality According to the CIMA report, England is the world’s premier libel tourism destination. Home to pro-plaintiff laws, high litigation costs and a welcoming court system ready to hear cases from across the globe. France, Singapore and Canada have all served as libel tourist destinations, and libel law in many Commonwealth states is based on the plaintiff-friendly English system. However, a series of favourable rulings in recent years has secured English courts as the best bet for libel tourists, Sullivan’s report says. “Media have historically lost 90 per cent of all British libel cases.” The fear of facing a libel suit in England has

Courtesy Robert Sharp/English PEN

Libel Reform Campaign supporters demonstrate in front of London’s Royal Courts of Justice. Convergence | Spring 2010

made the country “a global pariah,” says Padraig Reidy, news editor for Index on Censorship, a London-based organization that advocates for free expression. American gossip paper the National Enquirer, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize nominee, now blocks people in England from viewing its website to avoid being sued there. Reidy calls this an odd form of censorship that could soon spread. “We have American and other international organizations saying that they just don’t want to come here, that they fear publishing here.” Sixty-five per cent of English libel cases launched in the past two years were settled out of court, Reidy says. The mere threat of an English libel suit is often enough to silence many media outlets before any official court documentation is filed – making the true breadth of the phenomenon impossible to track. In 2004, American writer Rachel Ehrenfeld was sued in London by Saudi billionaire banker Khalid bin Mahfouz for associating him with terrorists in her book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It. The book was never published in England, she says, yet the court accepted jurisdiction after Mahfouz’s lawyers alleged 23 copies of her book were ordered online by customers in England, and an excerpt was briefly published on the web. Ehrenfeld says Mahfouz, who died in 2009, had successfully exploited the English laws and courts by using the mere threat of a suit to halt the publication of information about him on multiple occasions. “All he had to do is threaten them with a suit, and they caved in,” she tells Convergence from New York City. Ehrenfeld refused to go to court in England on principle, so she lost by default. “I didn’t have any chance to win because the British law is plaintiff-friendly,” she says. The judge ordered her to apologize, publish retractions in major newspapers and pay about US$225,000. She never complied. Instead, she fought back in New York, initiating a process that led to the 2008 passage of “Rachel’s Law,” which allows courts to bar the enforcement of a foreign libel judgment if the ruling court failed to afford free speech rights similar to those in the U.S. Several other states have since adopted the law and a national version is pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Big publications should have taken the initiative, not wait for an individual like me,” she says, referring to the time and resources she has invested. “But I feel very strongly about my free speech rights.”

Pounding the precarious press Large media in the U.S. and other places with strong legal protections for freedom of expression are often sued in foreign courts, but they tend to have the resources to fight cases and pay if they lose. The small, autonomous media in the developing world, however, are the most vulnerable, Sullivan says. The presence of independent media in the developing world is small and fleeting, he says. Most of them “have been bought out by organized crime, political parties, oligarchs,

Convergence | Spring 2010

10 recommendations of the English Libel Reform Campaign 1 In libel, the defendant is guilty until proven innocent

6 There is no robust public interest defence in libel

2 English libel law is more about making money than

7 Comment is not free

3 The definition of “publication” defies common

8 The potential cost of defending a libel action is prohibitive Cap base costs and make success fees and “After the Event” (ATE) insurance premiums non-recoverable

4 London has become an international libel tribunal

9 The law does not reflect the arrival of the Internet Exempt interactive online services and interactive chat from liability

Require the claimant to demonstrate damage and falsity saving a reputation Cap damages at £10,000

sense Multiple publications shouldn’t equal multiple libels, introduce a single publication rule No case should be heard in this jurisdiction unless at least 10 per cent of copies of the relevant publication have been circulated here

5 There are few viable alternatives to a full trial

Establish a libel tribunal as a low-cost forum for hearings

and business interests.” The few remaining autonomous outlets are like a “nail sticking out.” They’re the ones that get “pounded down” by foreign libel threats and suits, Sullivan says. Often, these independent organizations don’t even have any English-speaking people to communicate with the courts, let alone the pounds to pay London lawyers. “There’s no capacity for the news organizations in most of the developing world to even consider fighting,” he says. Consequently, organizations such as the Center for Investigative Reporting, where Sullivan works, are forced to be unnecessarily conservative. “Our stories take much more time than we would like simply because of the U.K. libel law.” The mere threat of an English lawsuit has led others to abandon stories. “They kill it. They leave out information. They capitulate and apologize,” he says. “How many newspapers have killed stories, overly censored themselves or quietly settled? We will never know.”

Prospects for a solution Stopping libel tourism is not easy. Legal protections for media against foreign libel awards, such as Rachel’s Law, are only effective within a given jurisdiction. Another way to curb the threat is through legal reform in the libel tourist destinations themselves, to discourage plaintiffs from suing there. In England, the Libel Reform Campaign has been gaining momentum since the November 2009 release of its report, Free Speech is Not for Sale. Reidy works on the campaign for Index on Censorship, one of the three organizations behind the movement. English PEN and Sense About Science round out the group, which is lobbying politicians to legislate legal reform, both to protect domestic media and stop libel tourists from using their courts, which, he says, have become an international “laughingstock.” Reidy says the movement has garnered political support from both governing and opposition parties. A Ministry of Justice working group on legal reform recommended several changes in late March. The proposed reforms include giving courts the ability to identify and dismiss cases with no substantial connection to England. A libel reform bill has been planned for after May’s

law Strengthen the public interest defence

Expand the definition of fair comment

10 Not everything deserves a reputation

Exempt large and medium-sized corporate bodies and associations from libel law unless they can prove malicious falsehood

general election. The LRC’s report recommends 10 reforms (see sidebar). Reidy says a clampdown on costs has gained the most traction with politicians so far, and if implemented, would make libel suits more affordable to defend. But he stresses the 10 recommendations work as a package that together create “a much fairer system.” Reidy says the LRC is committed to pursuing significant reforms. “We’re in this for the long game. This isn’t something that’s going to change overnight, but it’s something that will have to happen.” Back in Sarajevo, Sullivan says he is skeptical an effective solution will come anytime soon given the range of legal standards around the world. Even if English laws are reformed, lawyers will simply find the next best jurisdiction and advise plaintiffs to sue there. Canada could very well become the next haven for libel tourists, if significant reforms are made in England, says Dan Burnett, founding member of the Canadian Media Lawyers Association. “We’re the next best place,” he says. Recent rulings, such as the Supreme Court of Canada’s acceptance of a responsible journalism defence in 2009, have strengthened free speech in the country, but libel tourists may still move to Canada if significant reforms are implemented in England. Burnett says libel tourism has a “shaming effect” in host countries such as England, which can spur reforms. “There is a certain embarrassment factor,” he says, when judges notice foreigners taking advantage of their courts to win libel cases. It sends a message “more than any sort of scholarly article could,” Burnett says. Pending English reform, the potential flood of libel tourists to Canada could actually pave the way for more protections for free speech, he says. For a comprehensive solution, Sullivan isn’t holding his breath. He advises media to learn the risks and protect themselves. He advocates for precautionary measures like getting libel insurance, legal advice, better training for their editors and maintaining higher journalistic standards. “There is never likely to be a comprehensive solution, outside of countries adopting an American-style system,” Sullivan says. “That won’t happen.” C

Photo by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

The original niche Ethnic media syncs coverage with immigrant waves by Philippa Croome

One of the first things Federal Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney does each morning is find out what Canada’s major ethnic media outlets are talking about. “It allows us to be more responsive, allows us to hear what’s been said off the radar screen of the mainstream media,” he told Convergence. “There are a large number of Canadians whose primary source of information on public affairs is through socalled ethnic media and we owe it to them to be accessible.” And in a country where Statistics Canada predicts over a quarter of the population will be foreign born by 2031, the line between ethnic and mainstream media is destined to get fuzzy. The same StatsCan projection says two out of three residents of the Greater Toronto Area will be a visible minority by 2031. Convergence | Spring 2010

Photo by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

South Asians will represent close to one quarter of the forecast 8.9 million residents and Chinese will make up more than one million people in Toronto. Similar trends are expected in Vancouver and Montréal. A 2006 study by Solutions Research Group, a Toronto-based market research firm, says traditional media measurement tools underestimate the significance of ethnic media as they fail to accurately track rapidly changing populations. The study pinpoints the largest and fastest-growing demographic in Canada to be immigrants of Chinese and South-Asian descent – the heaviest consumers of samelanguage ethnic media (see sidebar). Canada’s demographic changes produce a similar transformation in media consumers, and ethnic media is nestled comfortably to capitalize on the booming niche market. Peter Li, vice-president of operations for the most widely-read Chinese daily across Canada, Sing Tao Daily in Toronto, says, “We publish in the Chinese language, you can’t get much more

“The growth in the ethnic media, especially in big cities, is something of a phenomenon,” she tells Convergence from her desk at the Winnipeg Free Press where she is a public policy reporter. She says the mainstream media is largely unaware of developments in ethnic media. “It behooves the mainstream media to take that niche market into account, because we’re losing readers to it in a lot of cases.” Madeline Ziniak, chair of the Canadian Ethnic Media Association, says she sees the ethnic audience commanding more attention than ever. “The audiences aren’t all being reached by mainstream media,” she says from her CEMA office. “Not only are other media noticing, but increasingly you’re seeing more interaction of different organizations who want to reach a larger audience, and starting to work with multilingual media.” And advertisers are leading the charge. In 2007, Sing Tao News Corporation Ltd. created Canadian City Post, a free GTA weekly paper published in mainland China’s simplified

cut, marketers looked to cheaper options, and ethnic media was there. “You get a bit more bang for your buck,” says Poy. Where a full page in Sing Tao will go for about $3,000 (depending on what kind of deal you cut) – that same ad in the Toronto Star would run you almost $20,000 depending on the regions, Poy says. Ethnic media has also been more willing to accommodate advertisers, pushing boundaries the mainstream has traditionally resisted. “Chinese newspapers were actually the first to allow you to advertise completely on a full front page – that used to shock our clients,” Poy says. Advertorials are often more prevalent, as well as joint ventures – ads that will look and sound like an article, but in fact be paid placements. “When you have a smaller operation, your ad sales guys tend to mingle a lot more with the editorial guys,” says Poy. Such practices, once exclusive to ethnic media, have become more accepted at larger media outlets making concessions to advertisers’

“Chinese newspapers were actually the first to allow you to advertise completely on a full front page – that used to shock our clients.”

Justin Poy, advertising agent

niche than that.” A 2009 report by the New Washington Press Corps, an arm of the PEW Research Center, says: “As the mainstream media have shrunk, a new sector of niche media has grown in its place, offering more specialized and detailed information than the general media to smaller, elite audiences, often built around narrowly targeted financial, lobbying and political interests.” According to Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, ethnic media in Canada – which can be traced back to the 1850s with the first Black presses – is the original niche.

Convergence | Spring 2010

version of Mandarin. Despite being a brand new publication targeting a specific group of immigrants in the midst of a recession, it actually had a waiting list for ad space. “They couldn’t actually accommodate all of the advertisers – very unusual,” says Justin Poy, head of the eponymous ad agency that for the past 17 years has specialized in matching advertisers with GTA media outlets. “We tried to get a couple of clients in there and they made us wait almost a month.” Advertisers saw the benefits of using ethnic media in the height of the recession – their ability to target a specific demographic for relatively low prices. When ad budgets were

demands. “Even though the Toronto Star won’t allow you to advertise on the front page, they will allow you to do a half-page fold-over, or false cover,” Poy says. Running a leaner operation is also part and parcel of ethnic media. At Sing Tao, a bustling 90 person staff maximizes its resources. The printing press in the basement of its Power Street office on the east end of the city churns out 180,000 daily newspapers. “These guys work hard – you look at how many responsibilities an individual has at an ethnic media operation and you’d be amazed,” says Poy. The Toronto Star was remarkably quick to try to capitalize on the ethnic media trend 12 years

outlet will decline as successive generations become detached from their ancestors’ culture. He explains a general trend observed in earlier ethnic groups such as Polish-Canadians, whose publications faded with the end of its firstgeneration immigration wave. “It is quite clear that the great majority of the children who grew up here have no interest in the language of their parents,” he says. “That’s a dynamic that kills ethnic media.” Li, however, is confident that for Chinese-Canadians, the language continues to be instilled in future generations from a young age. Combined with the paper’s attention to changing demographics, he’s certain Sing Tao has a place in media for years to come. Advertiser Poy says partnerships like Sing Tao and the Toronto Star are the future for media that want to expand into the booming niche market. Welch says CAJ hopes to expand on these types of collaborations, even suggesting teaming up reporters from different outlets to facilitate a wider understanding of the changing

cultural landscape. For Li, while mainstream needs to ensure that it is involved in the success of niche media, it cannot do so by completely overhauling its image. It’s about making it more inclusive, he insists. “If there is money to be made by the mainstream media in the niche market, you want to be positioned to have a presence in that – but not by changing yourself.” C

180,000 copies of the Sing Tao Daily fly of the printing press in the basement of its Toronto office every day. Across Canada, it’s the most read Chinese-language daily newspaper.

Photos by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

ago. It partnered with Sing Tao’s Hong Kong parent company for an equity interest worth $20-million “to cover a bigger segment of the market,” says Sing Tao’s Li. The paper gained access to the Toronto Star’s stories which are translated by a dedicated team. The relationship was hit by a scandal last year when a managing editor was fired for editing out criticism of the Chinese government from a translation of a Toronto Star article. But Sing Tao steamrolled ahead. The paper’s resilience stems from its distinct awareness of the community it serves through rigorous audience tracking. The amount of coverage devoted to a particular region in China matches the waves of immigrants that arrive, says Li. “In order to cater to this new segment of readership demands, we enhance our coverage,” he says. CEMA president Ziniak is also national vice president of OMNI television, Canada’s largest multicultural broadcaster. She says ethnic media recognize immigrants’ preferences. “Although many are bilingual, or even trilingual,” she says, they’re better able “to retain information in their language of comfort.” Li couldn’t agree more. He cites the Ipsos Reid Canadian Chinese Media Monitor survey from 2007, which showed that despite English literacy rates of 80 per cent, the same percentage of Chinese-Canadians preferred to read the news in their language of origin – 52 per cent read Chinese language publications exclusively. Ziniak shakes off criticism that ethnic media perpetuates cultural silos by preventing new immigrants from integrating into the country’s landscape. She says ethnic media is a support mechanism, which more effectively communicates with immigrants, ultimately making them better Canadian citizens. However, she is critical of ethnic media that don’t meet a certain level of Canadian content. While required for broadcasters, print remains free to provide non-English speaking citizens with news solely from their country of origin if they so choose. Amir Hassanpour, a professor of Middle Eastern ethnic media at University of Toronto, says the popularity of a given ethnic media

Findings on ethnic media from Solutions Research Group “Rapid population change in major markets is a serious challenge to traditional media measurement and this issue is not going away. Current measurement tools such as BBM, Nielsen or NADBank either ignore or severely underrepresent millions of people in major markets, resulting in a waste of advertiser dollars.” Kaan Yigit, director of 2006 Diversity in Canada study

• 75 per cent of Chinese Canadians and South Asian Canadians aged 15 and over tune in to at least one ethnic radio or TV station, or read an ethnic newspaper every week • Among Hispanic Canadians, 55 per cent do so every week

• English-language newspapers only reach 50 per cent of Chinese Canadians and 57 per cent of South Asian Canadians • English-language radio reaches 74 per cent of South Asian Canadians and 65 per cent of Chinese Canadians

Convergence | Spring 2010

t s i l e g n a v E n o i t Informa ting a nation

by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

Photos by whiteafrican/ Erik (HASH) Hersman and disterics

of educa s m a re d r e g n e s s e m n a ri e Lib

Throngs of honking cars and thousands of people pass by the busy Tubman Boulevard as Alfred J. Sirleaf sits in a small wooden newsroom meticulously printing the day’s biggest stories in large letters on a collapsible chalkboard. The headlines glare in reverse newsprint – white on black. As the dust from the chalkboard mixes with that from the busy road, Sirleaf’s immaculate writing is a stark contrast to the battered shack he calls his newsroom. A crowd gathers as Sirleaf’s visual aids relay the news to the illiterate – he hoists a UN helmet onto the roof of the shanty to depict international forces in the country and uses a bottle of coloured water to help convey changes in petrol prices. The Daily Talk is the first and only free news publication in the western African nation of Liberia. Seven days a week in the port city and capital Monrovia, one man with barely a high school education posts the news for thousands of passersby. “I saw a need. People wanted to know what was happening. The chalkboard newspaper was made to inform because without it, the majority of Liberians have no means of getting information,” Sirleaf, the Daily Talk’s executive director, tells Convergence through a scrambled connection from his prepaid cell phone. Following the first civil war from 1989 to

1996, thousands of Liberians were left homeless and still struggle with poverty and illiteracy. Once rebel leaders took over, the media yearned for new hope. Sirleaf, 36, came up with the idea for a chalkboard newspaper in 2000, while the second civil war was raging from under the brutal dictatorship of Charles Taylor. He criticized the Taylor regime, so government soldiers destroyed his newsroom. He was jailed briefly for acts of treason – his writings – and forced to seek refuge in Ghana. Sirleaf recalls being told they would make him disappear if he persisted. “The chalkboard newspaper was destroyed twice and I was run out of Liberia,” he recalls. Rebel groups overthrew Taylor in 2003 and Sirleaf returned to Liberia, rebuilt the Daily Talk from the ground up, and resumed publication for the people of Monrovia. Sirleaf says the conflicts were devastating to his country. For Liberia to graduate to a developed state a number of things must happen. “We’re talking about knowledge to help empower people so that they can see themselves as important in society,” he explains. As a former U.S. colony, Liberia is an English speaking country. Sirleaf says there are three types of consumers of the Daily Talk: the illiterate, semi-literate and literate. He adjusts to this range of readership by sometimes writing the

news in broken English and by making it more colourful and creative. “I write in a style that is different from Western style of writing because of my environment. I use symbols to help readers better understand certain topics, and in some cases, to keep them entertained.”

Behind the board Sirleaf begins his day at 8 a.m. when he opens the doors to his small wooden-shed newsroom in the centre of Monrovia. In this windowless room – barely big enough for one person – he looks through the daily headlines of local newspapers, selecting stories. Then he painstakingly transcribes them and turns the chalkboard to face the street. “The news is written a day in advance, and stays public for two days, so if I publish the news Monday morning it stays up until Tuesday at 10 p.m.” Sirleaf says this is the best way for the information to reach a wider audience, in addition to the fact he needs time to physically write the news.

“The only time I add to the board is if there is breaking news that is important for people to read,” Sirleaf adds. Breaking news updates are added as Sirleaf sees fit, written in red chalk and placed in the middle of the board, which is usually reserved for headline stories. All information is fact-checked online and by phone calls because Sirleaf says the Daily Talk has a standard to uphold. In recent years, Sirleaf has added a number of volunteers to create a skeleton staff who work as roving reporters, helping him find daily stories from government agencies, press

releases, institutions, and religious organizations. a need for a free news publication throughout Sirleaf also does his own original writing western Africa. This year, Sirleaf hopes to and reporting for the Daily Talk. He puts an raise US$64,000 through sponsorships and emphasis on local news, but sometimes adds an donations to purchase a vehicle and community international news column into his publication, outreach mobile news unit. especially that of news in the U.S. as it directly “My dream is to educate other nations. I want affects Liberians. to transform the Daily Talk into a mobile news For breaking international news, such as the source, giving information to more than just earthquake in Haiti, Sirleaf sometimes acts as an those in Monrovia because I know everyone in “information evangelist” – where he physically Africa wants to be informed,” says Sirleaf. He is stands in front of the board and explains the convinced that one day someone will help him news to bystanders. achieve his dream of informing all of western For almost 10 years Sirleaf has put out the news Africa. C in Monrovia with donations, which range from chalk to dictionaries and occasionally Executive director Alfred J. Sirleaf has developed proposals to bring money, while supporting the Daily Talk to a wider audience. Below are the three projects, for which he is raising funds to complete. his two children. “I don’t work anywhere else. I have • US$59,142 for office space and equipment dedicated all of my time and • US$4,056 to contruct more chalkboard-newspapers efforts to inform the public free • US$64,787 to construct a “Project Screen-PA-system media billboard vehicle.” See Sirleaf’s design below. of charge on a daily basis, to run this humanitarian centre, because I feel the need to keep the media going,” he says. “Sometimes I get exhausted, but if the Daily Talk were to shut down for just one day, the people would be lost and not understand why it’s closed,” says Sirleaf who is determined to continue in this endeavor. Sirleaf says the response from the public has been so impressive that he now wants to extend the Daily Talk’s reach because he discovered

Bringing It Home Media conglomerates take cues from local news by Alison Brownlee

For media magnate Rupert Murdoch, it’s an old-fashioned newspaper war – with his Wall Street Journal taking aim at the New York Times. Murdoch’s weapon of choice: hyper-local coverage. In a widely publicized move, the News Corporation chairman and CEO lambasted the New York Times in March for neglecting local coverage. “They have mistakenly overlooked the most fascinating city in the world—and left the interests and concerns of people like you far behind them,” he told a group of real-estate professionals in New York. “I promise you this: the Wall Street Journal will not make that mistake.” Murdoch isn’t the only one putting an emphasis on hyper-local journalism. For many in the industry, local reporting combined with digital communication is the wave of the future. “I think you have to be very local to survive. And if you’re not a local paper, you’d better be world-class. There ain’t anything in between,” says National Post columnist and editor Diane Francis. “What we provide better be unique and distinctive and different from the news that everybody else gets at the same time.” Francis, who was part of a group bidding on ownership of CanWest’s National Post, Montréal Gazette and Ottawa Citizen, suggests going digital and local are close to the only options for newspapers.“If you’re a Toronto newspaper, you’d better talk to people in Toronto about what’s going on in their city – city hall, local politics, amateur sports events, and cultural grassroots things – all the things that mean something to people in your city.” Shake ups like the CanWest Limited Partnership’s bankruptcy could help the hyperlocal push, says Concordia University journalism director and former Vancouver Province reporter Dr. Mike Gasher. Rather than focusing on bits and pieces of news from around the globe, he says newspapers would be better to pre-empt Internet databases by cornering the market on local news. By changing owners, the CanWest papers have the opportunity at a new life based on quality journalism, and more community reporting,

Convergence | Spring 2010

$ $ $

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Gasher says. “It’s kind of like the Montréal Canadiens getting a new general manager – you’ve got to hope that that will be a good thing,” he says with a laugh. “But there’s no guarantee. It really depends on who buys these properties and what their approach is going to be.” For Joanne Burghardt, Metroland Durham Region Media Group editor-in-chief, the shifting power structure is giving community papers the advantage. “When they talked to me about becoming hyper-local, I kind of snickered to myself because that’s what we’ve always done, that’s what we’re really good at. For the first time I think community newspapers are actually in the driver’s seat,” Burghardt says. “I think readers are turning more and more to community news, and I think that’s why you’re seeing daily newspapers trying to figure out how to get local.” National Post CEO Paul Godfrey argues local-

$ $

Photo illustration by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

centric content has always had a place in major Toronto papers. “That’s not new,” says Godfrey, who is also the former publisher and CEO of the Toronto Sun. “When I joined the Sun in 1984, it survived totally on being local news. I think if you take a look at the Sun paper today even, the front-page story is a local news story, and that’s what they do.” What’s new are drastically improved websites targeting the next generation of online readers. “Everyone wants to capture young people because they’re going to be around the longest – that’s when habits begin,” he says. “If you get them to read your newspaper online, it’s just as good as having them read the hard copy.” Godfrey, who was part of a consortium vying for ownership of the CanWest paper chain, also says the shift to digital won’t compromise printed papers. “First, 90 per cent of your revenue today comes from the hard copy newspaper.

“When they talked to me about becoming hyper-local, I kind of snickered to myself because that’s what we’ve always done, that’s what we’re really good at. For the first time I think community newspapers are actually in the driver’s seat.”

Joanne Burghardt editor-in-chief Metroland Durham Region Media Group

Courtesy

Second, there are a lot of people reporting things online that just aren’t factual, or it’s not legitimate journalism. At least newspapers are the collectors of legitimate content,” he says. “I think people who work in front of computers all day long, they’ll still like the portability of having a hard copy newspaper. Now, that doesn’t mean all newspapers that exist today will continue to exist, but I do believe there will be one or two papers in all major cities in the world going forward.” But even community papers have work to do to stay relevant in the digital age. For Marc Ouellette, Transcontinental Media newspaper group senior vice-president, staying on top of digital publication and marketing is key. “We’re implementing the latest version of our Internet platform for our newspapers,” says Ouellette, whose company owns more than 100 community newspapers across Canada. “We’re in the process of going through our fourth generation. [But] we never rest. We haven’t finished installing this platform and we’re already thinking of the next one.” “There’s a phenomenon going on,” Ouellette says, referencing a Montréal radio station that distributes its morning show in Québec City, Gatineau and Trois-Riviéres to cut costs and increase efficiency. “We call it the ‘Montréalization’ of news.” “As the electronic media are paring down on their local coverage, it leaves us more room than we had before,” giving Transcontinental top billing in the community news market, he says. “If you look at what’s going on in Afghanistan today, you can find that on a gazillion number of websites. If you want to know what happened at city hall in Truro, Nova Scotia last night, we’re the only people who are there to cover it,” he says. “It’s important to be there and make an impartial summary and cover it with a very local slant.” Burghardt says her company, Metroland, has managed to stay ahead of the pack by moving publications online around 1995 – entering the market at the same time as the Toronto Star – producing videos and newscasts by 2004, and now its papers, including Oshawa This Week and the Port Perry Star, are constantly updated and

published online in their entirety before they’re printed. Print publications won’t disappear any time soon, she says. It’s too early to make money online yet, and hard copies are still profitable at the community level, she says. Journalists will still have to stay on their toes, learning about new media every chance they get, Burghardt says.

“If you want to stay competitive and stay ahead of the curve, you have to constantly be learning and constantly be bringing new skills to market.” The next step will be a heavier focus on social media, she says, and possibly live-streaming local council meetings online to enable community papers to engage the public as never before. Hyper-local digital journalism at its finest. C

Convergence | Spring 2010

The future isn’t

At least that’s what the New York Times is betting on. In 2011, the Old Grey Lady will end free access to the web version of its newspaper – replacing it with a system which gives NYTimes. com’s readers access to a set number of articles per month, after which users will be charged for further reading. In moving to the pay-to-read model, the Times will join only a small group of newspapers to charge for web content, such as the Wall Street Journal, which has been charging online readers since 1997. The Times’ website is one of the most heavily trafficked news websites in the world. It had 15 million unique visitors in February 2010. But will it be able to transform its popular free website into a successful revenue generator? It’s going to be an experiment, says John Hinds, CEO of the Canadian Newspapers Association, “I think it’s the multi-million dollar question.” Monetizing online content is one of the biggest issues facing the newspaper industry today, he says. “I don’t think anyone at this point has figured out how it’s going to happen.” Brett R. Gordon, assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School concurs. “It’s just like in the cigarette industry where all the smaller labels look to Phillip Morris or Marlboro to initiate price changes, and then they follow the leader.” Charging for online news is a bad idea, says Alfred Hermida, journalism professor at the University of British Columbia. He argues that one of the reasons online news is a tough sell is because people have never actually paid for news content. Hermida explains that newspaper consumers are really just buying a service. They pay for the convenience of a paper, delivered to their door and because it has sports results,

“It’s just like in the cigarette industry, where all the smaller labels look to Phillip Morris or Marlboro to initiate price changes, and then they follow the leader.” Brett R. Gordon marketing professor Columbia University 40

Convergence | Spring 2010

free

by Scott Rennie

horoscopes, and other things that are packaged in with daily news. “This idea that people paid for news is just flawed,” he says. He says the Times is mistakenly convinced it must get readers to bankroll its operation when historically the cover price has only provided a fraction of the revenue needed to produce content, with most of the money coming from ads. The pay wall plan is a flawed “knee-jerk reaction,” he says, where the paper is trying to compensate for its dropping ad revenues by charging readers for content. Diane McNulty, director of media relations for the New York Times Company, says the pay wall is “an evolutionary step” for the paper’s business plan that will “create another revenue stream for

might be the exception, not the rule. “[It’s] an anomaly because their audience is a business audience who are paying out of their corporate cards, not their own pockets,” he says. UBC’s Hermida says charging for news content may work in a niche market such as financial news, but may fail for general-interest news. “For news to have value, it has to be scarce. And the real problem for the news industry is that news has never been more abundant than now.” Another challenge for newspapers is that young, tech-savvy news consumers have been conditioned to get “the news for free at any time, on any platform,” Hermida says, and people are unlikely to change the way they consume media later in their lives. But Columbia’s Gordon

the company.” Ernie Sander, managing editor for Paid Content, an industry-news organization that covers the economics of charging for online content, says the Times might be able to pull it off. From his Manhattan office he tells Convergence he’s troubled by the notion that papers which produce distinctive, high-quality journalism, such as the Times, must continue to give it away for free. In Sander’s mind, news is a valuable commodity, and monetary value can be attached to it. “I think the Times believes that there is a certain percentage of people who will pay for what it does,” he says. The Times’ McNulty says the newspaper has researched pay models used by other organizations, and looked into what their readers would pay for, and how much. A recent Nielson poll surveyed 27,000 people internationally, and found that one-third of respondents would be willing to pay for content on the Internet. The Wall Street Journal’s success behind a pay wall for more than 10 years is the “gold standard” in this realm, Sander says. But it

says the Times’ pay wall might be successful despite this because there’s a demographic that understands they are getting the Times for free right now, but appreciates that they should not. And “people who do not appreciate that it’s free were never their target subscribers to begin with,” he says. Paid Content’s Sander says the Times’ new business model may not be the right one for everyone. Papers’ will need an online strategy based on needs, depending on their size, readership and content. And according to Gordon, the benchmark for success isn’t necessarily that high. The Times doesn’t need to market the new program, nor does it need many paid members, he says. “I would expect that only 10 per cent of their current customer base would sign up. “But at the right price, that might be enough.” Any revenue is good revenue, Gordon says. The Times’ has recognized the potential of its online content to generate revenue, he says. And even if the pay wall earns the Times an extra $10-million a year, Gordon adds, that’s $100-million dollars over a decade. C Photo illustration by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

Media trap

Ashley Madison makes the most out of controversy

by Steph Davidson

Avid Life Media Inc.’s spacious uptown offices could be those of any corporation – the phones ringing in the background, employees typing away at rows of computers, glass-walled offices for the higher-ups. Only the magazines in the waiting area hint of something different: all of them have cover stories on the company’s president, Noel Biderman, declaring him to be the “king of infidelity.” Avid Life is the parent company of what it calls “niche brands with highly engaged users” – and one of those brands just happens to be controversy-plagued AshleyMadison.com. The website, which caters to married men and women looking to have an affair, and Biderman have both been vilified in sensational media coverage. His appearances on shows like The View and The Tyra Banks Show cast him as the enemy of happily marrieds everywhere. His fervent challenges to monogamy did nothing to win over either the hosts or their audiences. He came across as a used car salesman, using his best pitch to convince you – this lemon really is your dream car. In person, however, Biderman comes across as anything but a merchant of sleaze. Wearing jeans and a pink polo, which he covers with a powder blue sport jacket for photographs, he asks that we make sure his kids’ pictures aren’t visible in the background. He also requests when we tour the office, we don’t take any pictures of his employees without asking first. He’s not the lothario the media appearances painted him to be – or maybe that was all part of his plan. One such case was the Toronto Transit Commission’s rejection of Ashley Madison’s bid to wrap a streetcar with the slogan, “Life is short. Have an affair,” which made headlines in December. Media coverage of the ad’s rejection was swift and extensive. A Google search for “Ashley Madison Toronto streetcar” yields almost 29,000 results. Editors had fun with the story; headlines ranging from “Ad-ultery” to “No streetcars named desire” littered the newsstands. And Biderman was prepared for exactly that reaction. “What we always know is that with some of our brands: Ashley Madison, Man Crunch – sometimes people accept the ads and sometimes they don’t. And so what we knew is that there had to be a plan A and a plan B. Plan A would be, ‘Okay, if we execute a marketing strategy, what are we willing to spend, and how do we want to spin that?’” he explains. “Then plan B was, ‘What happens if they say no, what can we

do or say about this?’” He couldn’t have designed a better outcome himself. “You know the plan B can get legs and a life of its own . . . I cannot predict that the chair of the TTC is going to be found out to be a philanderer himself. That’s just, for lack of a better term, gravy for me. That’s just a situation where now I get roped back in, a whole new news cycle on my story.” Biderman says when news of TTC chair Adam Giambrone’s own string of affairs broke, he had to cancel his day to make room for the onslaught of interview requests. He couldn’t refuse the media who had been there for him when he had wanted the ad’s initial rejection covered. While Biderman does acknowledge the coverage led to a rise in website traffic, he claims it was never his intention to use the free press as his primary advertising. “It’s not free, it takes up a lot of our people’s time. It’s a lot of strategy,” he says. “The plan A’s are our first choice and that’s why we try and execute on them, but we’re totally content with a plan B if that’s what matriculates.” Brock University advertising professor Jacqueline Botterill says it’s not that unusual to have a fallback marketing position. “There’s no such thing as bad press to use the cliché . . . I think now it’s even strategized into what people do.” In fact, Botterill says potential for spin-offs can begin to factor lessons from past campaigns into new business. “It’s a form of communication

that is very powerful – even more powerful than the ads.” Botterill acknowledges stories like these can present challenges to journalists struggling to strike a balance between news and public relations. “You’re caught in a dilemma, because there’s a huge contradiction,” she says. But given context and news value, the story becomes valid, she says. “As long as you try and find alternative views to it and you make it amenable for the public, I think you’re doing your job as a journalist.” Kenyon Wallace, who covered the Ashley Madison story for the National Post, agrees, but says a balance can be achieved. “There’s always a story, so some stories might carry more . . . explicit exposure for whoever it is you’re writing about, but it doesn’t mean your aim is to provide that exposure. Your aim is always to provide the story.” Wallace says journalists should focus on what is happening and why it matters. Free publicity or not, newsworthy stories need to be covered, he says. “And if it involves giving publicity to somebody, well so be it, but that’s part of what the news is all about, right? I mean look at the pages that the news is printed on. Our stories fill in space between ads,” he chuckles. Wallace contends the real story was the possible use of taxpayer-funded vehicles for ads, which many people would find morally reprehensible. “The by-product of doing a story about that meant that, of course, whoever is trying to buy the ads would get some press,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing or a good thing, it’s just what happens when you do stories like this. Whenever you do stories that involve a company or even a famous person, inevitably their name’s going to be in the news, so you can look at that as free press or you can look at it as part of the story,” Wallace says. “I look at it as part of the story, because if you’re going to talk about a company, obviously you have to tell people about the company. And if you want to call that free advertising, fine. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a story.” C

“I cannot predict that the chair of the TTC is going to be found out to be a philanderer himself. That’s just, for lack of a better term, gravy for me.” Noel Biderman Ashley Madison founder

Photo by Michael Sutherland-Shaw

MOB M G arketin

by Jaden Pato

Urbanites hustle along on an ordinary spring afternoon in Vancouver. There are places to go, people to see and work to be done. Suddenly 50 people dressed in neon spandex appear and engage in a co-ordinated workout regime. Passersby stop and wonder what exactly is going on. Just as they notice the Koodo Mobile brand logos emblazoned throughout the spectacle, the “flash mob” scatters, hopefully impressing a message upon witnesses. Koodo Mobile used the flash mob in Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal to launch their brand in Canada. Claire Lamont, director of experiential marketing at SMAK media agency in Vancouver, spearheaded the campaign. She says the method is a unique, relatively affordable way for brands to differentiate themselves from competitors. Virgin Mobile used the technique with great success when their mob swarmed Toronto’s Yonge and Dundas Square in February, says Andrew Bridge, director of brand and communications for the company. “It stood out, got us a lot of views on our YouTube channel, and we thought it was a real success.” Executing a successful flash mob can require months of preparation. Branding the mob is vital, Lamont says, along with choosing the right location where the target audience will be present – which may require a permit. The element of surprise is also key: if the flash mob is expected, the impact is lost. But flash mobs didn’t start in marketing. The phenomenon was invented in 2003 by Harper’s Magazine senior editor Bill Wasik, who planned it as a social experiment about conformity. More than 100 participants gathered at Macy’s department store in New York City to inquire about a carpet – which they said they had to select as a group. The concept proved popular and it wasn’t long before it was repurposed for everything from protests, to entertainment, to marketing. But Lamont warns that the strength of flash mob marketing could become diluted as more and more brands use it. “Unless they are incredibly creative and incredibly different and incredibly well thought out, people are going to say, ‘That’s been done before.’’ C

Convergence | Spring 2010

Courtesy Todd Duncan

Harper’s Magazine editor Bill Wasik executed the first flash mob as a social experiment.

Advertising in a new dimension marketers ride the 3-D wave

by Angelo Elia

Spectacles firmly on face, popcorn in hand, you’re ready for the show. What you may not be ready for is a smiling cow, larger than life, which jumps straight out of the screen. And all you are supposed to think of is a tall, cool glass of milk. Revolutionary 3-D advertisements, created by Due North Communications and animated by Head Gear Animation for the Dairy Farmers of Canada, are being screened at movie theatres across Ontario and the Maritimes. “It’ll be a different experience and a new way of seeing commercials,” Georgia Sourtzis, Cineplex Entertainment communications manager, says of the ads being screened at Cineplex’s IMAX theatres. Rob Nadler, Due North Communications vice-president group account director, says the 3-D milk advertising campaign uses the same technology as the world’s highest grossing film, Avatar, and new films such as Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans. The ads, which have been playing in theatres before 3-D movies since February 2010, are called Dot Spot commercials because they air for only five seconds. The new 3-D ads are an evolution of Dairy Farmers of Canada’s 2-D Dot Spot ads, created in 2007. But 3-D adaptations take twice as long to create. Due North made three of the 3-D ads, and the company is in the process of making more. One of the 3-D ads, Kid Kong, shows a city rumbling and people running for their lives from a giant King Kong-esque boy, who has bulked up after drinking milk. “Every time he walks, the city shakes,” says Nadler. Another ad, Jump Rope, has a girl falling through clouds after leaping high into the sky while skipping rope because of the strength she gained from drinking milk. Nadler says the commercials target teenagers, who are huge fans of 3-D technology.

Courtesy

Solange Heiss, assistant director of marketing and nutrition communications for Dairy Farmers of Canada, says the ads show teens that drinking milk is cool. “We know that target group is very much in with everything that’s new and it’s our way to grasp their attention,” she says. “It was an ideal opportunity to shatter the teens’ expectations.” Jeff Robinson, Due North’s account director, says the ads catch teens’ attention because they “love things that are out of the blue or are crazy.” Humber College’s 3-D animation program co-ordinator, Terry Posthumus, co-designed the layout of many animated scenes of Disney’s film Return To Neverland. He says design and composition are crucial when it comes to creating 3-D scenes. “It’s all about directing the viewer’s eye to where you want them to look and it’s also about dressing the set so it looks good,” he explains. Although 3-D technology is trendy right now, the milk ads have yet to appear on television. However, Sony, Mitsubishi, Samsung, ViewSonic and other manufacturers have started selling televisions that allow 3-D technology to be viewed from home. Robinson says there’s a chance the ads will appear on 3-D TV in the future, but the technology for 3-D TV is unknown to Due North. Posthumus acknowledges the new 3-D television technology but recalls there have been 3-D films on television before. “I remember when I was a kid, one Halloween we watched a film on TV and I had the green and red glasses on,” he says. “That technology has been out a real long time. We’ll see if it sticks this time.” The 3-D televisions still require glasses and are very expensive, with some costing more than $5,000.

However, Cineplex’s Sourtzis says 3-D is a great form of theatre that provides enjoyment. “It’s something that’s new and exciting,” she says. “It really makes you feel that you’re into the movie.” Other advertisers are catching on to the trend. “We’re starting to see more 3-D ads in cinema,” he says. “They may not have copied the form but they copied the medium. We’re happy that we’re the first.” Posthumus says 3-D campaigns are great marketing tools and a great use of 3-D technology. “I love it,” he says. “3-D is not just for film, it’s a wonderful tool.” One barrier to using 3-D is the increased production costs, Posthumus says. “Animation, whether it’s hand drawn or 3-D, the combination of those two things, is very expensive,” he says. Robinson acknowledged the milk ads were expensive, but would not reveal the actual price. But as technology advances, Posthumus says, there will be no stopping creative new ideas. “Don’t be surprised if someday you’re watching a commercial and they’re trying to sell an air freshener and the technology is able to trigger our sense of smell.” C

Photo by Angelo Elia

Convergence | Spring 2010

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3-D animation

Michael Eves

Edward McEvenue

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Miranda Burley

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Andy Elenis

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Where are they now? Convergence catches up with graduates of Humber Collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s School of Media Studies and Information Technology

CHRIS BARNES

Creative photography, 1981 Barnes got his start as a photographer at Toronto-based design firm Umbra in 1983, and has been there ever since. Now the manager of photography and publishing, Barnes is responsible for all of Umbra’s photography, video, and print materials – worldwide. The firm’s products are sold in more than 75 countries. Barnes got into photography because he liked drawing, graphic design, and media. He says the best part is “working with a lot of creative people to produce great products.” He credits Humber with instilling a high level of professionalism in him, and providing a hands-on learning experience. A personal highlight of his career was when his personal photography was exhibited at the Umbra store on Queen Street in Toronto. He says graduates need to be persistent and true to themselves to make it in the business.

Erica Dymond

Multimedia design and production technician, 2004 Since leaving Humber, Dymond has worked for several firms and done graphic design and web banners for clients such as Much Music and MTV. More recently she designed the new logo for Office Depot. She currently works as a project manager at Telus’ head office co-ordinating the launch of a new website for the company. Dymond says her job still keeps her involved in the graphic design field and she continues to do freelance jobs. To seeking creative jobs, Dymond says, “Stick your nose into everything, take initiative and look at as many good examples that are out there, whether it’s graphic design or keeping current with what’s new.”

GARY HAYES Film and television production, 2009

In Hayes’ mind, passion equals success. Since graduation he has been working for a small production company in Toronto called Tickle Scratch Productions as a production co-ordinator. He also creates short films on the side. Hayes says the best part of his job is being able to do what he likes and work with people who share his passion. He says Humber taught him the skills he needed to succeed. His advice for recent graduates and current students is to work hard and help your peers because they’ll be helping you one day.

Convergence | Spring 2010

Stefania Sgambelluri

Creative photography, 2008 Photography has been a hobby of Sgambelluri’s since childhood. Today she is proud to get paid to do what she loves. She was hired immediately after graduating from Humber at the same place she interned, Hermann and Audrey Photography. She has worked with top clients such as Harry Rosen, Revlon and Molson specializing in portrait photography. Her work has also been featured in a spread in Applied Arts magazine. She says without Humber and the internship program she wouldn’t be where she is today.

Jeremy Eaton

Journalism - accelerated, 2009 After studying at Memorial University in his home province of Newfoundland, Eaton left his ambition to be a journalist behind and travelled around the world. He taught English in Korea, backpacked across Asia, did some acting in Italy and studied in England before moving to Toronto and coming to Humber where he specialized in broadcast journalism. Eaton now works for the CBC in Labrador City, Newfoundland as a TV reporter, though he still dreams of being the centre fielder for the Atlanta Braves.

Caryl Canzius

Fundraising and volunteer management, 2006 Canzius has always been a volunteer at heart. After volunteering with Oxfam in Japan, she came home and enrolled at Humber. Since graduating, she has interned at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She then immediately took her current job at Free the Children where she’s been involved in executing large events featuring the Jonas Brothers, the Dalai Lama and Mike “Pinball” Clemons, as well as a visit by the British Royal Family to raise awareness and empower youth. This year Canzius spent January in Sierra Leone on a development project with NestBuilders International and in February she was a volunteer team leader during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

KEVIN KELLY

Advanced web development for e-business, 2006 Multimedia design and production technician, 2005 After graduating from Humber Kelly interned with Rogers Communications’ consumer publishing unit working on websites such as Maclean’s, Chatelaine and Flare. He currently works for Kenna – an advertising and design company – as a front-end web developer, working with a team of developers, designers, copy writers, the project manager and account manager. While he initially shied away from networking, he says it’s the best tool to get jobs. “It’s key. Try to get a link in as fast as you can and take part in the field – get started with blogging, attend a few events as well because you’ll meet other programmers.”

Jaime Hogge

Creative photography, 2007 Hogge developed a love for photography from a young age by fiddling with his grandmother’s old cameras. After earning a fine arts degree from York University he studied photography at Humber and hasn’t looked back since. After graduating, he freelanced for two years before opening his own business. He’s had clients such as the National Film Board of Canada, and magazines such as Maclean’s and Toronto Life. Hogge misses his free access to Humber’s studio space and equipment, well worth the tuition, he says. His advice for aspiring photographers: Don’t get bogged down by marks and assignments, think outside the box and think about photography day and night.

Lindsey Title

Fundraising and volunteer management, 2004 When a speaker from the Mount Sinai Hospital Foundation visited one of her classes at Humber, Title made a great impression and landed a job at the organization right after graduating. She was responsible for fostering relationships between donors and recipients. She then served as an ambassador to recent volunteerism graduates and moved on to work for the United Way of Toronto before opening her own business as a partner at TDS Personnel, a full-service staffing organization. While she no longer works in the non-profit sector, Lindsey says the network she built since enrolling at Humber has been very important to her. She advises students to do three things: listen, understand and make an impact.

JACKIE CHAN

Film and television production, 2009 Chan travelled across Canada and Central America filming Survivor Chan, a television pilot, after graduation. He’s also opened his own restaurant, Front Porch Bistro, and teaches youth workshops about film and media production. He has worked as a digitizer and logger on the second season of Canada’s Next Top Model, and with the band Finger Eleven as a talent coordinator and music video creator. He says Humber taught him real world skills that got him into the job market. His advice for recent graduates and current students is to apply for bursaries and grants to get your career started.

Josh Cornell

Creative photography, 1994 After graduation Cornell worked as an assistant for three years, building up his portfolio to help him break out on his own. He is now a Toronto-based freelance fashion photographer who has shot for clients such as Flare, Tip Top Tailors, and Dove. He’s also photographed supermodels Daria Werbowy and Theodora Richards. His work has taken him to some exotic overseas locales. “Working in the Virgin Islands is always the best, whatever the job is,” he says. His advice for photo graduates is to be aggressive. “If you hustle, you can get things rolling pretty quick.” He cautions novice photographers watch out for pushy clients. “Sometimes you lose some work by standing up for yourself, but in the long run it’s better for you,” he says.

Stephanie highfield

Fundraising and volunteer management, 2008

Highfield got her job at the Toronto Children’s Chorus through a connection she made at her internship. She finished her placement on a Friday and started working the following Monday. Stephanie says her job is great because she sees those helped by her fundraising efforts all the time. Watching the chorus perform and meeting the kids involved makes her feel personally invested in her work. Stephanie was impressed by the hands-on experience she received at Humber. There was no busy work, she says, every assignment was for a real organization which provided a first-hand appreciation of each client’s needs. Stephanie advises striking a balance between professional and personal life to avoid burning out. Above all, she says, love what you do and follow your passion.

Convergence | Spring 2010

Edith Josie 1921-2010 by Philippa Croome

Edith Josie, Gwitchin elder, syndicated newspaper columnist, grandmother and Order of Canada member, died of natural causes on Jan. 31, 2010. She was 88 years old.

“At home, Old Crow got only 300 people,” she wrote. “I write my big news. That’s how all of the people know where is Old Crow. Before the news go out nobody know where is Old Crow.” And for more than 40 years, Edith Josie let them know with four short words: “Here Are The News.” No copy editor could touch that signature Josie style – combining English words with Loucheaux phrasing, with no concern for spelling or grammar. Josie’s publisher at the Whitehorse Star, Jackie Pierce, told the CBC, “When her column would come in we would give it to the newest typist and she would try and correct it. And we would give it back to her and say, ‘You have to type it just the way it is.’ That’s what made it the column it is, just the way she spoke.” Her northern Yukon community of Old Crow can be reached only by plane or canoe. Its residents take their name from the surrounding waters – the “Vuntut Gwitchin” or “People of the Lakes” are the ancestors of Loucheaux Indians from the Gwitchin First Nation. For thousands of years, the village’s inhabitants lived off the land in isolation – until she introduced them to the world. Here Are The News ran from 1962 to 2005, including observations, opinion and events – from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, (“As I know everyone mist him in all over Canada and also around the state. Because he did very nice work for the people. And may we remember him in good many years even though he pass away,”) to hunting porcupine caribou, (“Amos Charlie Abraham been up River and killed three caribou around Simon Cache. The Old Crow is sure lucky for game.”) Her column was syndicated to papers in Toronto, Edmonton, Fairbanks and California, and a collection was published in a book, Here Are The News by Edith Josie. She appeared regularly on CBC’s Gwitchin radio show. In 1965, LIFE magazine featured Josie in a piece entitled “Everyone Sure Glad.”Josie became known worldwide for her work, which has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish and Finnish.

Convergence | Spring 2010

Courtesy Yukon Archives

Edith Josie’s words touched the nation. She is seen here in her home of Old Crow, Yukon in 1972. She was humble about her myriad of accomplishments. “I guess I’m kinda famous now that I’m gonna receive the Order of Canada next week from the Governor General,” she wrote in 1995. Also appointed Justice of the Peace for Old Crow in 1957, she held the post for seven years. Josie received the Canadian Centennial Award in 1967, and the Yukon Historical Museums Award in 1994. The National Aboriginal Achievement Awards honoured her contributions to art in 2000. Her stories charmed and captivated a nation. But it was Josie’s mark on the community of Old Crow, her home of 70 years, that will see her legacy live on in the Gwitchin way of life. “We have to care for our Elders so we all say no to development on our land,” she wrote. Darius Elias, MLA for Vuntut Gwitchin, told the Whitehorse Star it was Josie who pushed the community towards resolving land claim

negotiations in 1993: “I always respected her honesty.” A mother of three, Josie split her time between writing, teaching Gwitchin to students at Yukon College, lay reading for the Anglican Church and being an elder in the Old Crow community. Never married, she supported her family by selling animal skins before being paid for her writing. In Josie’s lifetime, Old Crow opened itself to an airport, the Internet, and trade. She was traditional in her love of Gwitchin culture while modern in her openness to change. And it allowed us an unprecedented insider’s view into one of the country’s most remote and ancient communities: “Norman when they was up River they saw strangers so they bring them into town. Just like big town strangers coming in and out to their home. Glad to see people and strangers in Old Crow.” C