Media spring 2016

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T HE C A N A D I A N A SSOCIAT ION OF JOURN A LIS TS • L’A S S O CIATIO N CA N A D IEN N E D ES J O U R NAL I ST E S 2016 S P RIN G • V O L.17, N O . 6

T H E PA N A M A PA P E R S Lessons are to be learned from the multi-media partnerships to pursue big money, tax havens

2016 SPRING • VOLUME 17, NUMBER SIX

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CENSORING A CRITICAL VOICE: Ezra Levant and Alberta Premier, Rachel Notley did battle over the right of access, and who should be considered a journalist.

Outspoken political commentator Ezra Levant was at the centre of a national debate over who should be considered a journalist.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff McIntosh/THE CANADIAN PRESS

Table of contents

Alberta Premier, Rachel Notley was forced to back down on her opposition to Ezra Levant.

PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Dean Bennett

MEDIA A PUBLICATION OF

THE CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF JOURNALISTS L’ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE DES JOURNALISTES EDITOR

David McKie 1-613-290-7380

LEGAL ADVISOR Peter Jacobsen, Bersenas Jacobsen Chouest, Thomson Blackburn LLP

ART DIRECTION and DESIGN David McKie

Table of contents THE CONTRIBUTORS James Bagnall, Brad Clark, Romayne Smith Fullerton, Mary Gazze, Sean Holman, Dean Jobb, Andrew McIntosh, Gillian Steward, Lucas Timmons, Fred Vallance-Jones, Stephen J.A. Ward

Page 6 Data Journalism: The Panama Papers exposed big money and tax havens, but it also set up a database that allows people to do their own digging. By Fred Vallance-Jones Page 8 Feature: As newspapers and broadcasters struggle to survive, the race is on for a new business model.

By Romayne Smith Fullerton Page 12 Feature: Journalism schools must adapt to a changing media landscape, but not before asking themselves some tough questions and providing honest answers. By Brad Clark Page 14 Feature: Journalism schools must find a way to stress content over form. By Sean Holman

COVER PHOTO: Protesters hold placards featuring portraits of Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron near the regional head office of the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca in Hong Kong, Tuesday, April 12, 2016, as they demand taxes on the rich.

PHOTO CREDIT: Kin Cheung/ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHOTO AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE: There was a day when The Calgary Herald thick with advertising. How times have changed.

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2016 SPRING EDITION

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2016 SPRING • VOLUME 17, NUMBER SIX The Crown’s crumbling case of bid rigging: Ottawa Judge Bonnie Warkentin (left) presided over the trial in which the jury tossed out the case against Sue Laycock (right) and the rest of the defendants, intoning the words “not guilty” 60 times. The case contained many lessons for The Ottawa Citizen’s James Bagnall.

Page 16 Feature: Will the golden years of newspapering ever return? Gillian Steward hopes so.

Page 18 Tools of the Trade: There are many valuable lessons to be learned from covering lengthy trials, and James Bagnall is not talking about Senator Mike Duffy.

Page 20 The Fine Print: Who is a journalist? A recent controversy in Alberta involving Ezra Levant put that question to the test. By Dean Jobb Page 22 Food For Thought: The tyranny of media response lines. Journalists should refuse to print canned responses in which governments claim to take issues “seriously.” By Andrew McIntosh Page 24 Ethics: The rise of organizations of journalists across the globe working together to break stories is a positive development. Stephen J.A. Ward wonders what kinds of ethics are guiding their work?

Page 26 Lessons Learned: Working with dates in Excel can give your reporting impressive precision and impact.

Lucas Timmons uses his downloadable tutorial to walk us through the basics.

Page 26 Lessons Learned:: More newsrooms are using Snapchat. The slight learning curve is worth the effort.

By Mary Gazze Page 27 Lessons Learned: Online tools that help journalists tell stories are becoming more sophisticated and user-friendly. You can add Esri Canada’s ArcGIS Online to the list.

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The First Word The Way Forward For Journalism

By David McKie

T

here’s justifiable concern these days about where journalism is heading.

And nowhere is that debate being played out more intensely and urgently than in journalism schools where educators are asking tough questions about what to teach.

It was with this thought in mind that Media reached out to journalism educators for some of their thoughts. Happily, a few agreed to weigh in with their blunt assessments and possible fixes.

Interestingly enough, the Panama Papers, and the political fallout that investigation has caused, works its way through much of this discussion.

In their assessment, some educators use the impressive global investigation into big money, tax havens and seemingly impotent governments as a metaphor for where journalism – especially investigative journalism – is heading, and whether this cooperative model is a sustainable one. All good questions. All worth debating.

Fred Vallance-Jones kicks off our coverage with an overview of the Panama Papers, and the value-added component that may not have received the kind of attention that it should have: downloadable and searchable databases that allow for a tax-haven crowdsourcing, or individual investigations into specific companies and individuals.

Romayne Smith Fullerton, who teaches at the University of Western’s school of journalism, uses the Panama Papers to launch into a thought-provoking discussion about business models that journalism may need to survive.

For instance, should be we following the lead of countries that have either found ways to subsidize media outlets, or are seriously considering ways to pump public money into struggling enterprises?

Brad Clark and Sean Holman from 2016 SPRING EDITION

Mount Royal University in Calgary make the case that journalism schools must re-think what and how they teach. For instance, are J-schools focusing too much on form over content? Are they teaching students enough ways of finding the kind of original material that would help distinguish them from the part-time bloggers and wannabe journalists? Great questions that should be debated.

And with newspapers not only shrinking their news holes, but also reducing the number of outlets or closing up shop altogether, it’s instructive to look back at a time when business was booming. Gillian Steward recalls her days as managing editor for The Calgary Herald when the newspaper was so thick with advertising that it was a struggle for paperboys to deliver the newsy bundles to waiting doorsteps. The Herald moved into a new building. Life was good. It all seemed to go downhill after a bitter strike, that we covered in this magazine back in the winter of 2000. But Gillian’s piece is not simply a yearning for the days of yesterday. Rather, it is a clarion call for fourth estate to find its way.

There is one positive development that has allowed journalists to actually tell better stories. The migration online has given award-winning journalists such as the Ottawa Citizen’s James Bagnall more space to do deep dives into complex court cases like the one he writes about in this edition.

And we’re not talking about the recently exonerated Senator Mike Duffy.

Adding his voice to our regular columnists is U.S.-based investigative journalist Andrew McIntosh who takes us to task for giving oxygen to canned email statements, presumably rather than pushing harder for real interviews. Andrew has taken the controversial position of refusing to print these statements, in essence, treating them as a no-comment.

Arguably, the nature and appetite of the 24-hour news cycle makes it virtually impossible to avoid using these statements.

But should we avoid doing so? It’s a good question worth debating.

And speaking of controversy, how about the Alberta premier’s attempt to silence right-wing rabble-rouser Ezra Levant? In his column, Dean Jobb takes us back to the controversy that unfolded in Alberta earlier this year. He raises questions about who should be considered a journalist and what rights, if any, do governments have to censor voices, no matter how disagreeable or critical they may be.

Stephen J.A. Ward rounds out our coverage with his typically thoughtful ethics column, this time looking at the phenomenon of global ethics and whether efforts like the Panama Papers are guided by a new model. With an increasing number of news outlets teaming up to conduct investigations, everyone must be bound by the same rules. Is this possible? Read Stephen’s column.

And, finally, in keeping with our attempt to also make this magazine an instrument of learning, in addition to enlightenment, we have downloadable tutorials that teach us how to work with dates in Excel.

Lucas Timmons of The Canadian Press walks through the process which, for those with some understanding of spreadsheet, is extremely useful.

Mary Gazze, also of The Canadian Press, introduces us to a social media tool that had been thought of as the exclusive preserve of teenagers. Now, journalists are figuring out ways to use Snapchat to enhance their coverage.

And Esri Canada explains how to use ArcGIS Online, an interactive mapping tool that is becoming more user-friendly.

As usual, we’ve packed a lot into this edition.

Happy reading.

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Data Journalism

In this April 12, 2016, file photo, a police officer stands outside the Mossack Fonseca law firm while organized crime prosecutors raid the offices, in Panama City. The law firm says that it will sue the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism for making public a stolen database of its clients.

PHOTO CREDIT: Arnulfo Franco/AP

Bringing the Panama Papers to your doorstep An online database allows users to do their own digging

By Fred Vallance-Jones

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f you’ve been fascinated by the revelations in the Panama Papers leak, you can now delve into some of the data used by the international team of hundreds of journalists who spent a year on the project before going public in early April.

Just as it did with its earlier offshore leaks investigation, The Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has released both searchable data and a downloadable dataset derived from the Panama Papers.

The data combines information from both investigations, making it possible for anyone to explore companies and individuals connected to offshore tax havens.

The ICIJ is at pains to point out that many uses of such offshore accounts are perfectly legitimate, but that others are not, and with that warning has unleashed the data for anyone to explore.

The release is quite brilliant in many ways. Not only does it allow anyone to explore some of the data from the two investigations, but it permits a kind of crowd-sourced journalism whereby people who may be familiar with particular individuals, organizations or local circumstances can use their own knowledge to find patterns and stories that the international team has not identified.

The original Panama Papers leak was mammoth, more than 2.6 terabytes of documents and data from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca slipped to the German newspaper Süeddeustche Zeitung by an anonymous source, publicly known

only as John Doe. There was so much data, so many documents, that Süeddeustche Zeitung turned to the ICIJ for help making sense of it. You can read more about how the team extracted all of the information here: http://panamapapers. sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d3 c3495adf4/.

The Panama Papers investigation rocked the world, and had immediate impacts, such as the almost immediate resignation of Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson over revelations about his family’s use of offshore tax havens. British Prime Minister David Cameron also faced questions about his own benefit from an offshore trust fund that had been set up by his late father.

As it did with the offshore leaks data, the ICIJ employed a graph database, a type of program specialized at making connections between disparate entities. But most potential users won’t want to be bothered with the rather steep learning curve involved, so the ICIJ has made the data available both in an interactive, searchable application, and as a series of CSV files that can be downloaded from its site and opened in a spreadsheet or conventional relational database. For most people, these two options will be more than sufficient.

The easiest and quickest way to explore the data is through the interactive application, which allows you to search for particular names, or for all of the corporate entities associated with a particular country. It allows the user to dig into the

various relationships, and generates visualizations that allow you to see the nodes (companies, individuals, etc.) and the connections between them. The basic search functionality may be all you need; it’s slick, and it doesn’t require you to have any extra software. ICIJ is careful to warn that a great deal of the information it used in its original investigations is absent from the publicly available data, meaning extra caution is necessary to avoid mistaken identities and other errors.

Anyone exploring the data on their own would probably be wise to keep in mind that the investigations have involved hundreds of reporters, and some of the most sophisticated data analysis yet done by journalists. You probably won’t be able to duplicate it using this data (he says with some considerable understatement).

But you may be able to run down some specific, individual connections that could lead to stories with further research.

The CSV files available from ICIJ: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/pages/database were extracted from the graph database. Graph databases have a different logic from relational databases, connecting what are called “nodes”, — for example an address of a company or the name of an officer of a company — with each other using connections that are called “edges” or “relationships.” The CSV data groups the nodes into several tables, and also includes a table with all of the edges used to relate nodes to each other. It’s a bit of a hack, but as the ICIJ notes, it makes it

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The ICIJ is at pains to point out that many uses of such offshore accounts are perfectly legitimate, but that others are not, and with that warning has unleashed the data for anyone to explore.

available to a much wider range of folks who might simply want to look at the tables individually in a spreadsheet.

It didn’t take me long exploring the CSV data in MySQL to discover some interesting patterns, such as numerous offshore entities associated with the same Canadian addresses and individuals. Far more research would be needed to determine the significance of these, so I’m not going to elaborate here.

For those who have the greatest technical skill, or want to learn a new way of 2016 SPRING EDITION

looking at data, ICIJ has provided the data in a download that includes a customized distribution of Neo4j and tutorials on how to use it. Be forewarned though: there’s a steep learning curve here if you don’t already understand how to use these specialized tools.

It can be kind of exciting to walk in the footsteps of such a large and important, collaborative investigation. In a way, we are in a new era of investigative work that takes on datasets so large, subjects so expansive, that no single person or even

single news organization has the resources to tackle it alone, be they financial resources or human ones. By making some of the data available, the team becomes even larger.

Happy hunting.

Vallance-Jones is associate professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax and coordinator of the annual King’s summer schools in Data Journalism and Coding for Journalists.

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The Future of Journalism

The Toronto Star’s Rob Cribb (second from the left), Radio-Canada’s Frédéric Zalac (second from the right) and Will Fitzgibbon (at the podium) of the ICIJ explain their roles in the Panama Paper investigation at the 2016 Toronto Watchdog Workshop.

PHOTO CREDIT: David McKie

It’s time to find a new business model…. ……because without journalism, our democratic system will fail

By Romayne Smith Fullerton

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he Panama Papers:For people who love journalism, it’s a “good-newsbad-news” story.

It’s a good news story because this work demonstrates that despite declining newspaper revenues, shrinking television audiences, and a global, hyper-competitive business environment, excellent investigative journalism can still be done, and be done across borders of employment, medium, and nationality.

But the Panama Papers are also bad news because the rise of consortiums like the ICIJ (itself a project of the Center for Public Integrity), are the result of mainstream news outlets suffering under rapidly declining revenues and being unable to fund large-scale reporting ventures by themselves.

The success of the Panama Papers represents the failure of a business model, and it’s the model that has paid for most of the serious journalism we in North America have relied upon for most of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Here in Canada when Postmedia slashed 90 jobs and merged competing newsrooms in Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, the word everywhere was “business.”

Implicitly or explicitly, we heard: It’s a business decision. Specifically, Postmedia must think of its bottom line.

The situation in Canada’s broadcast world is similar. As viewership declines, television newsrooms are cutting staff. For

reasons of economic efficiency, Global News now routinely partners with the Toronto Star for investigative pieces.

So broadly speaking, the news business is in trouble.

But we need to stop having this discussion, as if the only thing at stake is company profits.

Yes, journalism is a business. For most of our recent history, it has been a part of a capitalist enterprise. However, a true democracy needs tough, independent, outspoken media—regardless of platform—to hold publicly elected officials, and publicly funded institutions, to account.

Journalism is more than big business; it’s a sacred trust.

To subsidize Or Not To subsidize Many Nordic countries have subsidized newspapers for most of the 20th century because they recognize that papers play a unique political and social role that’s invaluable to their democracies.

Instead of throwing up their hands and expecting the market to solve the printed press’ waning readership, countries like Sweden are actively searching for effective ways to maintain support of news media and the social benefits they provide.

Over the last year, the Swedish government held an inquiry into the conditions of its daily press, and introduced a new bill to its Riksdag. To be clear, it’s not that Sweden supports only its newspapers; public broadcasting had a monopoly until

the early 1990s, but the current focus of inquiry is on newspapers.

Riksdag’s website outlines how the bill contains proposals aimed at creating greater incentives for daily papers with operational subsidies to increase readership revenue, while promoting technological development and the innovative business models, so the functions vital to democracy are sustained over the long term.

The Way Forward The kind of journalism that ICIJ is doing, through the Center for Public Integrity, is paid for by donations from foundations and individuals. The ICIJ does not accept money from governments. Generally, these journalists publish their work on ICIJ’s website, and distribute to NGOs and other interested outlets.

Because of the size and impact of the data from the Panama Papers, the Center interested a consortium of newspapers and other media outlets, including the CBC, which were willing to commit staff and resources, and publish the results of the investigation.

While the Panama Paper collaboration offers one positive model, and a future for investigative journalism, it’s not without its drawbacks. Because of the project’s magnitude, Robert Picard of the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford noted that many people and media organizations were interested in being involved, and in funding this particular work.

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“But for work that’s theirs and theirs alone,” he said, “they [ICIJ] need more funding. Until you have endowments in place, and they are earning their own income, you have to spend money on what your funders want you to spend it on.”

This might mean that stories that are equally important, but less popular, may not get covered.

Again, the model is one that can be motivated entirely by profit and not by considerations of what is in the best interests of the public in a democracy.

Here at home, we need to stop blaming the Internet and harkening back to a golden age of consumer support for news that never was. Given media’s singularly indispensable role, we must acknowledge that other factors besides media demand can influence their profitability and stop pretending that they’re just another business. We need a policy whose purpose is not to shore up existing enterprises, but only the ones that ensure our democratic needs are met.

While newspapers are on the decline, journalism doesn’t have to be.

This is an idea that those of us who teach journalism need to push because declining newspaper and legacy media opportunities have led to declining enrollments.

While none can predict the future, the Reuters Institute published a study in 2014, outlining the results of what a sample of news professionals from the U.S. and Europe imagine their profession will look like in years to come. Picard notes sadly, “There is a lot of fear.”

The report itself suggests that as institutional employment diminishes, there is a 2016 SPRING EDITION

rise of entrepreneurial journalism—where journalists establish small or medium-size enterprises that produce and distribute their own content through websites, or sell syndicated material to other outlets.

Usually, these undertakings support one person, or a small co-operative of people, and are focused on local coverage or highly specific topics.

While this model is clearly having some success, as J-Source outlined recently in a piece titled, “journalism startups carve out niches for themselves,” there are concerns about the precarious nature of this labour.

“Many people believe the future of journalism is one that will be practised part-time, or by people who have a partner or a spouse with benefits,” said Picard, about the musings of those in the Reuters study.

So What Are Journalism Schools To Do? For those teaching journalism, how can we best prepare our students to face this emerging and unpredictable new news terrain?

Picard believes that first and foremost, we must still teach students to “be good journalists.” Linked to this, in his opinion, is that future employment will be better for those who are specialists rather than generalists. So he encourages students to come to the profession with a background in something like economics, medicine, health, or political science. “These positions will pay better.”

Second, Picard urges journalism schools to train flexibly, and not teach approaches based in the singularity of any one me-

dium. The journalists of the future “must understand how to manage in all forms, and they will usually work in two or maybe three media in the course of their careers,” he said.

Finally, while entrepreneurship is a good approach, Picard thinks it’s more important for students to consider what life is going to be like in the likelihood they are not employed by a single company for thirty years. How do they prepare their finances or plan for retirement, given this different reality? “And,” he ponders, “do we need a course for that?”

At the University of Western Ontario where I teach, we refocused the Master of Media in Journalism and Communication degree we launched in September 2015 to include some of what Picard outlined.

Since ours is a graduate program, students are encouraged to develop or hone their specialized skills and expertise by taking courses in areas like health and information, international affairs, and data mining. Also, we maintained the central notion that our students must be excellent storytellers across all media, but we set aside the ‘silos’ of television, radio, and print, and now teach from an integrated platform from the outset.

In addition—and likely most contentious—we moved to combine teaching journalism skills with those required in communications positions, because many of our graduates work in both fields, or transition from one to the other, and acknowledging this employment reality seemed wise.

On a personal note, I don’t think we’ve gone far enough.

I believe that the study and eventual 9

While the Panama Paper collaboration offers one positive model, and a future for investigative journalism, it’s not without its drawbacks.

practice of journalism ought to be for the smartest and best-educated amongst us because to my way of thinking, journalists ought to be public intellectuals.

The idea that journalism is a public trust, not just a way to make a living, or a business, is paramount. The acceptance of this public service standard and its links to the highest degrees of professionalism cannot be overstated.

As traditional newsrooms wane, and the inverted pyramid style of reporting and related ‘objective’ methods of storytelling go the way of cassette tapes and printed newspapers, audiences want to cultivate relationships with people whom they admire, respect, and trust to do some of their knowing and thinking for them.

I’m not talking about mindless ‘opinionjournalism’ of the kind that Fox news has made notorious. I’m suggesting we need more thinking-communicators like Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, or Joan Didion.

To that end, I’d like to see us take fewer students and base admission on intellectual capacity, not ability to pay tuition. I’d

While newspapers are on the decline, journalism doesn’t have to be.

like us to step away from a funding model where the requisite number of ‘bums in seats’ drives all else.

Rather than focusing heavily on skillsbased courses, we ought to expand our academic offerings and raise the bar: read more; write more; think more; critique more; repeat.

In today’s and tomorrow’s world, we need journalists who can do more than ask tough questions: we need some to offer some great answers.

Romayne Smith Fullerton is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and the current ethics editor for J-Source. Along with Chris Richardson, she is the editor of Covering Canadian Crime: What Journalists Should Know and the Public Should Question (University of Toronto Press, 2016).

At present, she is working on a book that compares crime coverage practices in North America with those of select Western European countries.

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2016 SPRING EDITION

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The Future of Journalism

Cuts to news organizations like Postmedia are forcing journalism schools to ask tough questions. Mount Royal University engages in a technique used by some professors to take stock of their teaching, asking students three simple questions: What should I keep doing?

What should I stop doing? What else should I do?

Do cuts make students think twice about studying journalism?

PHOTO CREDIT: Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

The answer may have something to do with their detachment from legacy media

By Brad Clark

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hen I first heard about the latest round of cuts, layoffs and newsroom consolidation at Postmedia, I was staggered by the depth and magnitude, though not really surprised. Around this time, it was an ill-kept secret that Rogers was also about to cut a broad swath through its media operations as well. Of course I felt just awful for the skilled and respected journalists laid off, people I used to work beside and often shared a laugh with at corporate annual general meetings, city hall, or the courthouse. But as the chair of a journalism program, I also worried about the implications, and the optics, of more downsizing. Our students, and likely their parents, had to be questioning their chosen field of study.

And yet, not a single student mentioned it to me. I asked other faculty members if their students had commented on the industry’s latest gutting, and the answer was no. Our students are neither delusional nor oblivious to the economic forces wringing Western journalism into a crumpled version of its 20th Century self.

Legacy media aren’t really on their radars.

That might explain why our own research shows students are actually optimistic about taking their journalism skill-set into the workforce.

They see themselves practicing journalism, or at least taking the critical thinking, research, verification and communication skills they’re learning in our program to other fields. Some are familiar with the ominous Communications Management Inc. report released last year predicting

that by 2025 “there will be few, if any, printed daily newspapers in Canada,” and that “there might be no broadcast television stations.” But our students know legacy media offer limited opportunities, a reflection of the revisions we’ve made to our curriculum, and a signal that more change should come.

While journalism programs have, by and large, kept pace with changes in the industry, the fact remains that most curricula still have strong foundations in the old print and broadcast news traditions; where most journalists plied their craft as employees, and their employers earned profits almost entirely through advertising.

But as digital evolution gains momentum, it’s unclear which business models will thrive, which ones can adapt, and which ones will die. That’s where the challenge for journalism educators begins.

Today’s journalism programs are in a constant state of review and revision. On a macro level we engage in a technique used by some professors to take stock of their teaching, asking students three simple questions: What should I keep doing? What should I stop doing? What else should I do?

At the program level the answers tend to come from observation of the industry, conferences and think tanks, other journalism programs and emerging academic research. The answer to the first question, what should we keep doing, includes core skills such as interviewing, research, verification, and clear communication in multiple media formats. Whatever the fu-

ture of journalism, these fundamentals will endure. Coincidentally, these outcomes have also emerged as highly valuable skills in a variety of fields outside journalism proper.

The next question, what should we stop doing, is more challenging, and often a reflection of the evolving technology (e.g. when was the last time you developed a roll of Tri-X?). Resources can also influence the discussion. For example, is there any point in going to the expense of printing a student publication when “everyone knows” print is dead? That’s a debate we’ve also had at our school. While circulation for print media is generally on a downward slope, the racks at newsstands are still full of magazines, and many trade publications continue to thrive.

To be clear, we’ve dived deeply into online platforms, with “ways in” for studentjournalists in every year of our program, but we do still publish The Calgary Journal. Yet, it’s evolving too, away from a newspaper format into more of a niche magazine, and it’s published less frequently. The changes are consistent with the industry today. We believe the print piece still has value for students, especially in the revised format we’re targeting.

One of the biggest challenges comes from considering “what else should I do,” particularly as it relates to trends driven by changes in technology. They include social media integration, data visualization, mobile (smart phone) content delivery, the rise of the documentary, non-profit news/ investigative journalism organizations,

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Internet-delivered services (like Netflix), the delayed, but happy rise of podcasting, the surprising durability of radio (terrestrial and digital), successful online-only news ventures, and the steady presence of public broadcasting. To remain relevant, journalism educators need to make bets on at least some of these developments.

Data journalism is one of those emerging models that has quickly drawn support from industry as it bolsters the arsenal required by the journalistic mission to reveal, interpret, corroborate and add meaning (though a deep disdain for working with numbers is still an often-cited reason for coming to J-school). Over the last several years we have increasingly incorporated elements of web design into our senior courses, as it allows our students additional creativity to tell rigorous, contextual stories. In fact, projects coming out of our capstone digital courses have consistently won major student awards.

But should we be teaching our students coding? HTML? Or is that the preserve of university electives and minors, like computer science, or graphic design? And then there’s the truly technological, “journalism’s next frontier,” Virtual Reality. It takes point-of-view video to a new level, and the cost point keeps coming down. At our institution these sorts of innovations start out as fun experiments for students and professors within the confines of an existing course, such as “Visual Journalism II”. That buys time to measure the uptake and impact of the innovation, and to allow some development of the legal and ethical implications (see the use of drones for a trend getting ahead of best practice).

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The “what else should we do” criterion extends beyond trendy new ways to get or tell stories. The emerging cultures of digital media are varied and often distinct from legacy news. The relationship between journalist and employer, or between journalist and advertiser, is often quite different. Young journalists are likely going to need to be entrepreneurs and innovators in ways previous generations were not.

When educators then take into account social trends, such as globalization and migration, context courses – ethics, law, regulation, diversity – grow in complexity. At the same time, the context classes are likely more important than craft-based production courses as new media forms gain currency.

In the end, journalism educators are no different from students, and media executives and journalists: We’re all trying to figure out what it means to be a journalist in the digital era. In the academy, the discussion can get quite esoteric, swinging from one end of the practice-theory binary to the other.

Some support a deep commitment to the public watchdog role and the techniques – established and emerging – associated with seeking accountability and informing citizens in a democracy. Others call for a deeper theoretical, less vocational approach, focusing more on critical thinking than production skills. There are calls to both narrow and broaden the focus of journalism education, some even taking into account the rise of native advertising, a decidedly less “journalistic” approach, but one that might have the appeal of wider employment opportunities. At a time

when careers in “old media” journalism are clearly on the wane, curricula focused narrowly on practice are hard to justify to potential students and administrators.

In the midst of the upheaval in the industry, perhaps that’s the big lesson for journalism programs: that legacy media should have less and less influence on our curricula. It seems our students have already made this shift, at least as consumers, if not as budding practitioners. Our incoming students rarely say they want to write for a newspaper or anchor the TV news. More often they tell us they entered the program because they “want to make a difference.”

Our recent graduates are doing just that, using their journalistic skill-set to run photography and videography businesses to create media-rich stories for big corporations and small start-ups, to manage social media, to conduct ground-breaking research in the name of advocacy, to drive efforts to preserve First Nations language, to write and edit for vibrant weeklies, and on it goes.

And still our curriculum evolves, as it must.

Brad Clark is the chair of the four-year Bachelor of Communication, Journalism program, as well as the new, fouryear Broadcast Media Studies major.

Before entering the academy, he spent 20 years working as a journalist in print and broadcast, including six years as a national reporter for CBC. Brad has a Master’s degree in Journalism Studies from the University of Wales (Cardiff) and a doctorate from Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia. His doctoral dissertation examined network television news representations of Aboriginal peoples and ethno-cultural minorities in Canada.

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The Future of Journalism

New technologies are still struggling to find their audiences. The Toronto Star’s Touch app was launched on Sept. 15, 2015, as “an exciting and powerful new way for the Star to combine its award-winning journalism that readers know and trust with a sense of fun and entertainment.”

Sacrificing the message for the medium It’s time for journalism schools to get the balance right

Indeed, while our country’s news media circus has been trying to entertain audiences with

By Sean Holman

C

anada’s mainstream news organizations often seem to pay more attention to the medium they use than the messages they send. I believe that’s likely contributed to the recent declines in audience we’ve seen at those organizations.

But if journalism schools in this country want to help reverse this decline, they need to reverse the focus on medium over message.

The tendency to do the opposite is as understandable as it is regrettable. Most of the recent, highest-profile innovations in journalism have concerned how reporters tell and share their stories rather than how they find them, from putting news online to putting it in virtual reality headsets. In response, Canadian news organizations have attempted to capitalize on and monetize those innovations. During an earlier age, this would have been the equivalent of assigning journalists to spend more time on creative writing or newspaper design and less time on actual reporting. The results have been predictable failures.

For example, in May 2014, Postmedia Network Inc. launched its “four platform strategy.” That strategy meant the newspaper chain’s stories would be published in print, as well as on “responsive-designed websites,” a smartphone app and in a “new 6 p.m. news and current affairs tablet magazine” that would provide a “feature-driven, animated, vibrant approach to storytelling.” A year and five months later, Postmedia discontinued the magazine, which had been published by the Calgary Herald, the Ottawa Citizen and the Montreal Gazette, but too often

bigger and better videos, photographs and interactive graphics, fewer people are interested in not read.

Despite that failure, since in 2015 competitor Torstar Corp. had a net investment of $14 million and counting in an even more ambitious tablet app for the Toronto Star. That app was launched on Sept. 15, 2015, with the company boasting it was “an exciting and powerful new way for the Star to combine its award-winning journalism that readers know and trust with a sense of fun and entertainment.” But chief executive officer David Holland recently told shareholders “audience progress has been slower than we anticipated.”

Indeed, while our country’s news media circus has been trying to entertain audiences with bigger and better videos, photographs and interactive graphics, fewer people are interested in buying tickets to their big top. According to Statistics Canada, the percentage of Canadians who say they follow news daily, declined from 68 per cent in 2003 to 60 per cent in 2013.

During the same period, the percentage of Canadians who say they rarely or never followed news almost doubled, from seven to 13 per cent.

An absence of civic literacy and political efficacy in Canada is at least partially to blame for this decline. After all, if Canadians don’t understand the news and can do little about it, what reason do they have to pay attention to it? Better to tune out than tune in.

But isn’t it also easier to tune out if broadcasters and publishers spend time packaging and repackaging the news rather than finding and breaking news? I think the answer to that question is yes,

with journalism schools having sometimes inadvertently contributed to rather than curtailed that tendency – meeting the demands of industry rather than society.

After all, we now teach our students to tell their stories in all four media (print, television, radio and online) using numerous formats – from inverted pyramids to infographics. Undoubtedly, this makes those students more employable, both inside and outside newsrooms. But does this actually make them better reporters?

Back when journalists nearly monopolized the mass media, it may have been enough for them to be little more than ciphers for the individuals and institutions they covered. That’s because their news stories were often the only way Canadians could find out what those individuals and institutions were saying and doing. But now that the Internet and social media have democratized the mass media, that’s no longer true. Those individuals and institutions can now easily, cheaply and directly communicate with Canadians, just as Canadians can do with one another – no reporters required.

As a result, the modern journalist needs to be more than just a master of the news media that anyone can use. Journalism schools need to spend more time teaching their students how to find untold truths.

This means, rebalancing our curriculum so students spend, for example, more time learning how to use search engines and spreadsheets rather than video microphones and cameras.

It means spending more time learning how to come up with good stories than

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buying tickets to their big top. simply how to tell them.

It means spending more time learning how to think critically about the world than just recording and publicizing its goings-on.

It’s not that all of that learning isn’t already happening. It is. But it’s a question of how much weight we give teaching medium versus teaching the message.

For example, in the first semester of my second-year reporting course at Mount Royal University, I spend 60 per cent of my class time on how to find and research stories, and the remaining 40 per cent on how to actually tell them.

I think that’s about the right balance, since teaching someone to think well is tougher than teaching someone how to, for example, write well – although that later has its difficulties. And, by doing more to teach those critical thinking skills, Canadian journalism schools won’t just be saving themselves. They’ll be helping to save our profession from a preponderance of style over substance and medium over message.

Sean Holman is an assistant professor of journalism at Mount Royal University where he teaches first- and second-year students, and researches the history of freedom of information in Canada. Holman joined the university after spending 10 years as an investigative reporter covering provincial politics in British Columbia.

2016 SPTING EDITION

Mount Royal University second-year, fall semester news reporting course

- Week one: Course introduction

- Week two: How to find information and sources using search engines

- Week three, four and nine: What makes a story and how to find it

- Week five and six: How to arrange and conduct interviews

- Week seven, eight, ten and eleven: How to write news stories

- Week twelve: Course debrief

15

The Future of Journalism

At the same time Spotlight was in theatres, Canada’s largest newspaper chain was laying off dozens of experienced journalists, and then squeezing the ones that were left into one newsroom where there had been two.

“I never thought it would end like this:” veteran Edmonton Journal reporter Will the golden years of Canadian newspapering ever return?

By Gillian Steward

W

atching the hit movie Spotlight was a bittersweet experience for many journalists.

Here was a movie that made us salivate for the days when publishers and editors actually gave reporters time and money to dig into hidden injustices and produce stories that their readers would talk about for months and years afterwards.

But the movie also left a bad taste in the mouth. At the same time it was in theatres, Canada’s largest newspaper chain was laying off dozens of experienced journalists, and then squeezing the ones who were left into one newsroom where there had been two.

Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa still have two daily newspapers, but really there is only one, and a small one at that.

And given Postmedia’s perilous financial situation, most media watchers believe it is only a matter of time before there are none.

In Calgary the staff that were left at The Calgary Herald moved into the Calgary Sun newsroom to work under a Sun editor.

In Edmonton, the Sun staffers moved into the Edmonton Journal’s newsroom.

Once fierce rivals, the tabloids and broadsheets are now completely cozy with one another.

There are still two daily newspapers in each city but they are virtually the same – the same stories, the same bylines. In fact,

all four of Alberta’s largest daily newspapers are mostly the same. A couple of different columnists are the only thing that distinguishes them.

David Climenhaga a former journalist and now a blogger in Edmonton calls them “the four-headed Franken daily” Each newsroom has about 25 to 30 people.

Hard to believe that when I was managing editor at The Herald in the 1980s, there were 185 people in the newsroom.

And Calgary was a much smaller city then.

“I never thought it would end like this,” said Sheila Pratt, a veteran Edmonton Journal reporter who accepted a buyout after the Edmonton newsrooms were combined.

Not that long ago, the future looked so bright that both the Herald and the Journal built new multi-million dollar plants.

It was 1981 when The Herald moved into a palace of a new building in Calgary’s industrial area because it needed bigger printing presses. Also, the snarled traffic in its old location in the heart of downtown made it impossible to get the afternoon newspaper to subscribers’ doorsteps on time.

In those days the newspaper was so fat with advertising a small child could hardly carry it.

Today. that building is empty and up for

sale.

The reasons for the move seem so antiquated now. Not only so last century, but completely oblivious to the notion that the future might not be as profitable for newspapers as the past.

It also serves to show how fast the changes came upon us. Twenty-four-hour news channels. The Internet. The tsunami of personal computers, mobile phones, and tablets that would forever change how we distribute and receive the news of the day.

In 1985 The Herald became a morning newspaper because it became more than apparent that by the time an afternoon newspaper was delivered, the news in it was so stale no one needed to read it.

But even with that dramatic change, those of us paying attention in the mid1980s, and if you were in management you couldn’t help but pay attention, certainly knew that subscription numbers were flat even though the city was growing.

I can’t remember exactly how many consultants were brought in to boost the newspaper’s ratings. But there were lots.

And they always focused on content. We should do more human interest stories.

We should write shorter stories. We should pay more attention to working mothers etc., etc.

Neither the people in Southam’s head office, nor the consultants, nor newsroom

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journalists had any inkling of what was about to hit us.

In the meantime, The Herald newsroom was an exciting place to be.

Patrick O’Callaghan was the publisher at the time. He was a feisty Irishman who came up the ranks via journalism, and he wanted a feisty newspaper. The Herald was among the most profitable newspapers in the Southam chain. And O’Callaghan used that money to hire strong reporters, photographers and editors. He wasn’t afraid of unleashing reporters on investigative pieces and then hiring the necessary lawyers if anyone threatened to sue.

He sent entertainment writers to world capitals so they could keep Calgarians informed of the latest trends. The fashion writer went to shows in Paris and New York.

Money was no obstacle when it came to thorough coverage of the 1988 Calgary

Winter Olympics, a project that spanned two years.

But by 1990 the Golden Years were over. O’Callaghan had retired. Conrad Black was in the wings.

I left in 1990 because the Southam head office was insisting on layoffs, even though The Herald was very profitable.

They wanted it to be even more profitable, so employees would have to go, although they would never be told the real reason for their dismissal.

We still had a strong newsroom at the time. Most newsroom employees were confident they didn’t need a union because pay and working conditions were good.

So I was shocked in 1999 when the majority voted for a union and then walked out on strike.

The Herald was never the same after that.

After Black made cuts at The Herald

In the 1980s, The Herald was so fat with advertising a small child could hardly carry it.

Today, its building is empty and up for sale.

2016 SPRING EDITION

and The Journal, as well as other newspapers in the chain, so he could pour money into his pet project, the National Post, his successors, the Aspers and CanWest, shrunk the newsroom even further. And then Postmedia and its hedge funds got in the game. Everything just got worse and worse for journalists trying to earn a decent living and produce a product worth reading, whether it was in print or online.

Postmedia is in deep financial trouble.

But then most newspapers, even the ones that have a strong online presence, great investigative work, and lively columnists, aren’t what they used to be when it comes to profit margins.

Despite all that, journalism will always be with us. It’s an irrepressible force. But journalism is much weaker without money to pay journalists for their work and to provide them with the necessary resources to do their work.

That’s why Spotlight means so much to journalists. It is a potent reminder of what journalism was, or what it could still be.

As for those of us who experienced the Golden Years of the 1980s at The Herald: we know without a doubt that under the right circumstances journalism will once again flourish, just like it did then.

Gillian Steward has been fascinated by journalism for over 40 years. She was a reporter, assistant city editor, and managing editor at The Calgary Herald. She also freelanced for Canadian Business, The Financial Post, Maclean’s Magazine, and CBC Radio. In 2014, Gillian was awarded The Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy and wrote a series of articles on the Alberta oilsands. She currently writes a regular column for the Toronto Star’s op-ed pages.

17

Tools of The Trade

As the trial progressed, Judge Bonnie (left) Warkentin increasingly challenged the Crown’s case, all out of view of the jury.

Eight months in courtroom 36 On April 27 – day 93 of the trial – the jury foreman intoned “not guilty” 60 times – a complete evisceration of the Crown’s case.

For Sue Laycock (right) and the other defendants, it was a complete vindication.

Lessons from covering an epic business trial by jury

By James Bagnall

T

he first clue was the noise. I had been covering a criminal trial into alleged bid rigging by nearly a dozen Ottawa defendants off and on for seven months. The proceeding had featured hundreds of hours of detailed testimony in a sparsely attended courtroom. The hall outside was often empty.

But on April 7, 2015, the atmosphere changed profoundly as the corridor suddenly filled with journalists, spectators and other interested parties. Three doors down, the trial involving suspended Senator Mike Duffy had begun.

The juxtaposition of the trials was jarring. I understood the intense public interest in the Duffy show. He was a celebrity, and his trial would include testimony about how the Prime Minister’s Office worked under former Conservative Leader Stephen Harper. Ottawa Citizen colleagues who covered that trial were practically guaranteed solid play in the newspaper and online.

Yet, oddly perhaps, I didn’t regret having pushed for the job of covering the bid-rigging affair.

Making the case to my editors for covering it wasn’t that difficult – the issue was always how much time should I allocate for it. For an Ottawa-based newspaper, the story had all the essential elements. It involved many firms and individuals based in the capital region. And it featured a vital economic sector – the $1 billion-a-year business of selling computer services to the federal government.

The trial and related interviews of-

fered deep insight into the operations of multiple federal government departments and introduced me to experts who have since pointed me to many other stories.

The proceeding taught me how to mine procurement documents for news. And it shed much light on the business of government, which is usually conducted far from Parliament Hill.

The trial also offered a surprising amount of drama. Federal investigators appeared to have locked themselves into a criminal case that looked unwinnable.

Prosecutors in 2009 charged 14 companies and seven individuals with rigging $60 million worth of computer services contracts, mainly at the Canada Border Services Agency. The Crown alleged the accused had improperly colluded on multiple bids for computer services contracts, giving themselves an unfair advantage over competitors. The evidence would show those charged had not only made their teaming arrangements known to government officials, but they had won the bids by cutting their profit margins.

Adding to the drama, the accused had elected to roll the dice. In business cases such as this, defendants almost always opt to be tried by a judge alone – not least because judges are apt to be less swayed by emotional arguments where large amounts of money are concerned. But, for the first time in the history of the Competition Act, the accused elected to be tried by a jury.

I had covered several business trials before this one – criminal and civil – and all

were argued before a judge. The presence of a jury meant I would have to change my usual approach to reporting.

This was particularly true in the months leading up to the trial. I had to be careful not to publish stories that inadvertently poisoned the potential jury pool one way or the other. This required much judgment.

To determine whether or not this trial was worth covering, I had talked informally with lawyers, defendants and experts in competition law. A judge at a preliminary proceeding had already considered much of the evidence, but the latter was covered by a publication ban.

My setup feature for the jury trial carefully laid out the opposing cases, the relevant law, the history of the proceeding and its major players.

After the jury was selected, Superior Court Judge Bonnie Warkentin instructed its members to ignore anything they read or saw in the media. “This is not evidence,” she said. From this point on, I was free to report and interpret what I saw in court – within certain limits.

For instance, I could not report on anything that took place when the jury wasn’t present. There were frequent breaks during which the jury was ushered out of the courtroom as lawyers and the judge considered points of law and whether certain bits of evidence should be included. As the trial progressed, Judge Warkentin increasingly challenged the Crown’s case, all out of view of the jury.

Nor could I identify jury members – or speak to them about anything having to

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do with the case. It’s illegal in Canada for jurors to discuss deliberations. Although the jury entered and exited the courtroom through separate doors to minimize contact, we occasionally passed each other in the hallways or underground parking garage. Sometimes there would be nods of recognition. But most jurors stared into the distance.

The contrast with the U.S. system is stunning. Years earlier, I had covered a civil trial involving the theft of a key piece of Nortel technology. When the verdict was announced in favour of Nortel, I interviewed the jury forewoman who told me in detail how her jurors had come up with their decision.

The trial into alleged bid rigging would eventually consume 93 days of testimony and jury deliberation – and featured thousands of pages of exhibits. Accessing the documents was straightforward. The judge granted my request during a jury break and her assistant downloaded them onto a memory stick.

I covered about 30 days of the proceedings, concentrating on the key witnesses.

To my editors, even that much seemed excessive. On the other hand, they didn’t press the issue. A year earlier, the Citizen had redesigned its newspaper edition in favour of politics. The business section vanished. The upshot was that I had lost a playing field. I was also reporting to a city editor whose interest in business was somewhat marginal. (A newly appointed group of editors is more enthusiastic about business and finance).

During this period, oddly for me, nearly all my stories appeared online only.

After nearly 40 years as a print journalist, this took some adjusting, but I grew to appreciate the arrangement. No longer constrained by the print edition’s early deadlines and tight spaces, I could take a bit more time each day distilling what was 2016 SPRING EDITION

often complex testimony.

It was also quickly apparent that thousands of people – especially from the computer services industry and legal community – were finding me online. Since I wasn’t covering the trial every day, I received many emails querying when the next columns would appear.

The interest was high in part because many computer services experts had long been puzzled about why the competition bureau and the Crown had targeted TPG Technology and the other firms involved in the bid-rigging trial. Very unusually for a criminal trial, dozens of individuals were willing to discuss – off the record – the events that led to the procurements in question. I could not report information gleaned from these sessions until the trial was over.

Testimony at trial – from the Crown’s own witnesses – would reveal that federal contracting officials controlled how the accused submitted proposals for work. The accusation was that the defendants had failed to notify Public Works in writing about teaming arrangements – but the law in question doesn’t actually spell out the procedure. The defendants argued convincingly that Canada Border Services Agency officials knew about their collaborations – which were necessary to fulfill the technical requirements of each bid.

The Crown brought charges involving 10 procurements. As I watched its case weaken, I prepared a major feature – about 10,000 words – that explained the genesis of this unprecedented legal proceeding, and how it ballooned out of control.

It drew upon trial testimony, evidence, court sessions when the jury wasn’t present and interviews conducted outside the courtroom. The feature explained why the accused were not guilty and why none of this should have gone to trial.

Because the article included information not privy to the jury, I couldn’t publish it until the jurors were sequestered to consider their verdict. Since I would have little notice about when this would happen, this feature would have to run online only.

We couldn’t accommodate such a lengthy piece in the newspaper – which would have required several days of preparation, during which time the jury might have returned.

I considered a separate problem. What if the jurors returned a verdict of guilty on some or all of the 60 charges being considered?

I was comfortable with that possibility – precisely because the jurors had not been privy to all the facts. That’s how it goes in criminal trials: the objective for Crown attorneys is not to tell the story, but to present a convincing case. The two are not the same thing.

On April 27 – day 93 of the trial – the jury foreman intoned “not guilty” 60 times – a complete evisceration of the Crown’s case. The Crown would later decline to appeal. It also decided not to proceed with the judge-only trial.

An unexpected side benefit for me emerged later. I received unsolicited calls from computer services contractors who had read the Citizen’s coverage of the trial – and wanted to share insights about ongoing federal projects, not least of which involved Shared Services Canada.

It was a useful reminder that we write rarely stands in isolation – and that our work is always being judged.

James Bagnall is associate business editor of The Ottawa Citizen, where he has worked since 1993. Previously, he worked at The Financial Times of Canada and The Financial Post. He is the author of 100 Days: the rush to judgement that killed Nortel.

19

The Fine Print

Rebel Media has been a relentless critic of the Notley government.

Ezra Levant’s brand of news coverage is strident, provocative and loaded with opinion. Is it journalism? Of course it is.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff McIntosh /THE CANADIAN PRESS

Who is a journalist?

A controversy in Alberta put that question to the test

By Dean Jobb

A

re you a journalist? Chances are the answer is yes – after all, you’re reading the magazine of the Canadian Association of Journalists.

But as technology transforms the way people receive news – and as mainstream media outlets struggle to survive in an online world awash in information and opinion – anyone with an Internet connection and a keyboard can report on what’s happening and what it means. Anyone, in other words, can do what journalists do.

The question of who should be considered a journalist in this changing media landscape was at the heart of the recent showdown between Ezra Levant’s online news site, Rebel Media, and the Alberta government. In February, provincial officials decided that the Rebel’s representatives were not journalists and, as a result, were not entitled to attend press conferences and news briefings.

It was a heavy-handed attempt to make life difficult for Levant, a right-wing rabble-rouser and vocal critic of Premier Rachel Notley and her NDP government.

And it was an attack on freedom of the press. Faced with a media backlash (a Globe and Mail editorial condemned the move as “beyond deplorable”) the Notley government quickly backtracked and lifted the ban.

It was ironic that this battle over media rights erupted in Alberta, where another administration tried to silence its critics in the 1930s. Social Credit Premier William Aberhart, under fire for controversial financial policies introduced to lift the

province out of the Depression, introduced “An Act to Ensure the Publication of Accurate News and Information.”

The name was Orwellian doublespeak – the legislation was designed to deliver propaganda, not truth. Newspapers would have been obliged to publish official statements refuting the government’s critics; journalists could have been forced to reveal their sources. Media outlets that failed to comply could be shut down.

A challenge to the so-called Alberta Press Bill went before the Supreme Court, which struck down the law in 1938.

“Democracy cannot be maintained without its foundation: free public opinion and free discussion throughout the nation of all matters affecting the State,” one judge declared. “This right of free public discussion of public affairs” said another, is “the breath of life for parliamentary institutions.”

For almost 50 years this was the definitive pronouncement on press freedom in Canada, until the Charter of Rights and Freedoms embedded “freedom of the press and other media of communication” in the constitution.

So the failed attempt to ban Rebel Media showed Alberta officials were as ignorant of history as they were of the law.

Some good has come from this debacle.

The Notley government commissioned Heather Boyd, a veteran journalist and former Western Canada bureau chief with The Canadian Press, to recommend new policies to govern media access to government announcements and news events.

Her report, released in March, made it clear that no government should decide who gets to question or report on its actions and policies.

She sought input from journalists and academics across the country and undertook a province-by-province survey of how political reporters operate. The legislature press galleries of several provinces operate without formal rules or constitutions, she discovered, and most are only beginning to grapple with how to deal with independent bloggers and citizen journalists.

The model Alberta should emulate, she says, is the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa, which receives administrative support from the Speaker’s Office but controls who is accredited to cover Parliament and federal media events, without government interference.

Practical considerations – from room size and fire regulations to decorum and security concerns – may restrict who can attend press briefings and news conferences. But no government can use these concerns as excuses to play favourites or punish critics.

Press galleries in some provinces have refused to accredit lobbyists, union officials and political parties, Boyd noted, but “media organizations and individuals should not be denied accreditation strictly on the basis of their point of view.”

And accreditation policies must take into account “the evolving realities of new media.” As mainstream news outlets cut back on staff and political coverage, more

20 MEDIA

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s attempt to ban Ezra Levant from attending news conferences and press briefings was a heavy-handed attempt to make life difficult for Levant.

PHOTO CREDIT: Dean Bennett /THE CANADIAN PRESS

online journalists – freelancers and reporters working for start-ups such as Rebel Media – will be seeking access to government media events.

The law is on their side. “These new disseminators of news and information” on public affairs, the Supreme Court of Canada noted in a 2009 ruling, “should … be subject to the same laws as established media outlets.” Journalists publishing online should be encouraged to take up the challenge of scrutinizing government actions, not shown the door.

Rebel Media has been a relentless critic of the Notley government. Levant’s brand of news coverage is strident, provocative and loaded with opinion. Is it journalism?

Of course it is.

2016 SPRING EDITION

It was ironic that this battle over media rights erupted in Alberta, where another administration tried to silence its critics in the 1930s.

“Freedom of expression is a concept that means all voices get to be heard,” Edmonton lawyer Fred Kozak, who acts for Rebel Media, told an Alberta newspaper, “even the ones that are disagreeable or express views that are directly opposed to your own.”

Boyd’s recommendations offer the Notley government – and governments across Canada – a blueprint for respecting journalistic independence as they face a changing media landscape.

Dean Jobb is an associate professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax and the author of Media Law for Canadian Journalists (Emond Publishing) 21

Food for Thought

Example four:

I Take My Journalism Seriously – Really!

We should ban the practice of publishing canned government responses

By Andrew McIntosh

L

ike all CAJ members, I take my investigative and enterprise reporting seriously. Really.

That is why I think far too many Canadian journalists – print, online, TV and radio - publish or broadcast one especially useless scripted “media line” that our governments and their legions of spin doctors and media flacks supply far too frequently.

You know it: the one where they say the government take things “seriously.” It goes like this. “The department-service-agency-government – or Minister takes his-her-its ….responsibilities, the privacy of Canadians, cybersecurity, public safety, allegations of fraud, allegations of wrongdoing, oversight responsibilities (whatever!).....seriously.’’

We must all push for answers Many scribes are happy to catch this sort of spit from a minister in a scrum, or cut and paste it from the flack’s email and run with it, instead of pressing elected and public officials to go off-script and answer questions and provide meaningful, useful information.

How do I know? Seriously? Google, of course.

I cite several examples, not to embarrass or criticize colleagues, but merely to illustrate how far and wide this insidious cancer has spread into our daily news coverage.

As for me, I no longer accept nor print such statements. I shun email exchanges that contain them as well.

Here are some quick examples I pulled up in two seconds.

Example one: The Toronto Star, May 8 2014:

“The government of Canada takes the privacy of Canadians very seriously.

The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat is looking into this issue, in collaboration with the office of the privacy commissioner,” spokesperson Heather Domereckyj said in an email.

You would hope so Example two:

The Globe and Mail, July 29, 2014: In a report about how state-sponsored hackers for China had penetrated computers and the network at Ottawa’s premier scientific research agency, then-foreign affairs spokesman Adam Hodge wrote: “The government takes this issue very seriously and we are addressing it at the highest levels in both Beijing and Ottawa.”

You don’t say!

Example three:

CBC New + Toronto Sun: Jun 17, 2015 : “The cyberattack and cyber security is an issue that we take very seriously,” then Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney said following a question period in the House of Commons after the online hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on federal government websites, in protest against the passage of the government’s anti-terror Bill C-51.

Two for two in two years. and that’s all you got?

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December 30, 2013. My all-time favourite was this gem in a story about how the Harper Conservatives deletion of the “we take this seriously” message from its own media lines drafted to help handle climate change questions.

Amazingly, there was a repitition of that very line about the deletion: “Our government absolutely takes climate change seriously and our actions and results demonstrate this,” wrote Leona Aglukkaq’s (pictured above) spokeswoman Amanda Gordon in an email.

Nearly peed myself.

There are literally dozens of examples of this, including as many on the French Canadian media side. We’re all guilty.

Not just a Conservative affliction But lest you think this is a recent disease that afflicted only former Conservative ministers and governments, I traced several examples back to Liberal Justice Minister Anne McLellan (pictured below).

2016 SPRING EDITION

I no longer accept nor print such statements. I shun email exchanges that contain them as well.

This example is from April 22, 1999, at the National Post: “We as a government take the resolutions of the Canadian chiefs very seriously,” Ms. McLellan told reporters after the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs’ board recommended that Ottawa decriminalize simple possession of marijuana and hashish.

Government officials and elected politicians are paid enviable salaries and receive attractive perks and pensions to take their job and responsibilities seriously. We often call them for explanations, information or responses when they actually don’t perform.

So, let’s hold their feet to the fire a little more – and get some real answers. Seriously.

Andrew McIntosh is the former Investigations Editor-Chef des Enquêtes at Agence QMI-Quebecor Media’s Investigative Unit, a Certified Fraud Examiner, and a proud six-time CAJ Award winner for outstanding investigative journalism.

PHOTO CREDITS:

Photograph of former Liberal Justice Minister Anne McLellan:

Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

Photograph of former Conservative Environment Minister, Leona Aglukkaq: Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

For exclusive content, stories, interviews about journalism turn to Media.

Visit http://www.caj.ca/media/ Issues date back to the spring of 1998

23

Ethics

The Rise of Global Media Ethics There’s a powerful motivating ‘spirit’ behind new journalism work of global impact

By Stephen J. A. Ward

A

decade ago, I started writing about the future of journalism ethics, having completed a book on the history of journalism values. I said the future was global media ethics, or global journalism ethics. In recent years, I have argued that this development is not a gradual extension of existing norms. A global approach will radically reinterpret our principles.

Looking back, I recall how many journalists and academics thought the idea of a global media ethics was a philosopher’s fantasy, a utopian goal never to be realized in the practical world of media work. Why teach it? Why write about it?

Today, some of the skeptics are not so sure.

We see the rise of global media ethics as a powerful motivating ‘spirit’ behind new journalism work of global impact.

A global consciousness is emerging among practitioners. Global networks of journalists are being formed. Guidelines for global practice are being written and endorsed, especially where global issues, from terrorism to climate change, are part of the coverage.

Some of these journalists may not call what they do “global journalism ethics.”

But their work does embody the values and aims of global ethics.

Here come the networks Consider, for example, the Panama Papers. It is a massive leak of documents from a Panama-based law firm on how the rich and powerful hide their offshore money and avoid taxes. News stories based on the leak implicate dozens of world leaders and powerful people. They were constructed by a global network of journalists, led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The inquiry had

Canadian connections, such as the work of investigative reporter Rob Cribb of the Toronto Star, and Radio-Canada’s Frédéric Zalac.

Other networks exist. There is the Global Investigative Journalism Network, led by Brant Houston of the University of Illinois. The network consists of more than 90 non-profit newsrooms world-wide. The network had its most successful conference ever in Rio de Janeiro in October, 2015, with more than 1,200 attendees from dozens of countries.

The networks include associations dedicated to media ethics. Take for example, the London-based Ethical Journalism Network (EJN). The network has released reports and guidelines for reporting on the emotion-charged immigration crisis in Europe, among other issues. Public broadcasters such as NPR in the United States are developing guides for news consumers – to help citizens evaluate and understand media coverage of global events from terrorist attacks to global epidemics.

Meanwhile, ethicists at universities and centers around the world are developing the conceptual basis for global journalism.

They articulate moral aims that express the new global consciousness of journalists.

They reinterpret principles, from objectivity to verification, so they make sense for a digital media that crosses borders. Also, global ethics centers are emerging, along with global media websites and journals.

In schools of journalism, there is an increase in courses on global media. In some cases, such as at the UBC School of Journalism, students travel the world to cover a global issue, from treatment of the mentally ill in India to the environmental degradation of the Brazilian rainforest.

Why global?

I do not contend that the motivations of global media workers are always ethical in spirit or beyond reproach. Not all global reporting meets the standards of good journalism.

Economics drives much of the networking. If journalism budgets are being slashed, and journalists laid off, partnerships that share the cost of coverage are an obvious alternative.

Economic reasons, in this case, can encourage healthy experimentation. Many journalists set up journalism centers and non-profit associations so they can do the sort of quality journalism no longer supported by their former newsrooms.

Another motivator is the complexity of the issues that confront journalists today.

In-depth and contextual coverage of global issues requires global contacts and sources, global knowledge of cultures and religions, and many other things. Global networks help here also.

Will the movement continue?

So far, I have stressed the positive side of global media ethics – the encouraging developments.

But I would be wildly utopian if I did not recognize – and worry about – the many parochial and non-global forces that could thwart further development of global ethics.

In the long run, insufficient numbers of journalists and newsrooms may show an interest in doing global journalism or in constructing a global ethic, for whatever reasons. Moreover, robust global journalism that is accurate and fair may be lost amid the many angry and manipulative voices in the global public sphere.

As terrorism continues to spread fear,

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The Panama Papers project is a recent example of an emerging global consciousness among journalists, who are are following guidelines for global practices.

nations (and their journalists) may retreat to a narrow nationalism that is wary of other people, other cultures.

The world offers no guarantees that good, vigorous and inclusive forms of journalism will prevail over bad, timid, or tension-creating journalism. The global media ethics movement could stall and remain an under-developed approach.

Educating global reporters Nevertheless, I am willing to stick my neck out and make another prediction for the future: Within five years these encouraging lines of development, from conceptual to practical, will converge. Global media ethics will have a substantial and 2016 SPRING EDITION

largely agreed-upon set of basic principles.

Approaching ethics from a global perspective will be a dominant way of defining responsible journalism.

If this prediction makes sense, then it places an onus on journalism education to teach not only skills but “global knowledge” journalism – journalism based on knowledge about the global world.

Basic and advanced journalism skills are important.

They are the bread-and-butter of most journalism programs. But skills will not be enough for good global journalism.

The next generation of journalists will need to know a lot about the state of the global media world – an understanding of

cultures, traditions, global communication, human rights, and global institutions.

The future global journalist will be as much an ‘anthropologist’ explaining cultures to other cultures, as she will be a well-trained reporter with a large “tool box” of skills.

Stephen J. A. Ward is an internationally recognized media ethicist whose writings and projects have influenced the development of the field in theory and practice.

He is an educator, consultant, keynote speaker and award-winning author. Ward has extensive experience in media both academically and professionally. You can reach him at: sjward2@wisc.edu 25

Lessons Learned

Lessons learned

Engage your readers with story maps

Working With Dates in Excel

By Lucas Timmons

By Esri Canada

I

f you’ve ever had to deal with dates while using Excel, you know what a pain they can be. Here are a few operations you can use to make them easier to use in your data analysis.

Before we start, it’s important to know how Excel deals with dates. For our purposes, we’ll use the 1900 date system. (Note: this article will deal only with dates from 1900-01-01 onward. There are many strategies to mitigate the lack of support from Excel for earlier dates. However, they will not be discussed here.) The system uses serial numbers for each date. 1 is Jan. 1, 1900. 2 is Jan. 2, 1900, and so on. So for example 42,518 would be May 28, 2016.

To find a serial number, you can use the date function. In an empty cell type =DATE(2016,05,28). Your cell should display 42,518.

You’ve serialized a date using date function. The first argument passed to the function is the year, the second argument is the month, and the third is the day. The output is the serial number.

Because the dates are stored this way, it is easy to do math to calculate the difference between dates. However, working with date serial numbers isn’t very practical.

You can download the tutorial, by going here.

Lucas Timmons is a Toronto-based reporter with The Canadian Press. You can reach him at: lucas@lucastimmons.com

It’s been said that the human brain decodes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. For many, sight is the dominant sense.

That’s why we’re seeing more and more journalists move beyond using text to answer the who, what, when, where, why and how in their stories to include images, charts, videos, infographics and maps. An effective way of bringing all these components together to tell a cohesive and compelling story is through a story map.

This new medium is very effective when you need to explain a story that happens across different locations and time periods. And it’s easy to make, too. With no programming required, you can quickly make a story map using templates in ArcGIS Online, Esri’s cloud-based geographic information system (GIS) solution. Let’s take a look at a few examples in this tutorial.

Lessons Learned More newsrooms are using Snapchat

By Mary Gazze

Y

our 15-year-old niece loves it, but you can’t seem to crack the mystery that is Snapchat. You might think it’s for teens to send each other funny faces, but you can’t ignore a platform that has 100 million active users who consume eight billion videos daily. With some news orgs reporting Snapchat, an independent company, is worth $16 billion (USD), business publications are dissecting its success, even featuring DJ Khaled, one of the first Snapchat celebrities.

You can’t ignore a juggernaut that’s able to command that kind of cash, just like you can’t ignore the 18-34 year olds who make up Snapchat’s biggest user base. No doubt, the app takes some learning to use. Tech reviewers speculate it’s designed to be difficult to use on purpose, to keep parents out and stay attractive to younger users. That doesn’t mean you should be afraid to give this hot-hothot social media app a try. To learn some tips to help you get started, please click here.

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This Ersi visualization allows users to zoom into key areas for a closer look at the damage that the wildfires inflicted on Fort McMurray.

2016 SPRING EDITION

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