SPRING 2017
When I Was 11, My Dad Killed My Mom Journalists made my private tragedy public. Now I’m talking to them about what they wrote
APTN’s Groundbreaking Coverage | What’s Next for Podcasts? What My Editor Taught Me | Sexism in the Newsroom Quebec’s Hot Talk Show | Georgia Straight at 50 $12.99 Display until Spring 2018 Inside the Busy Brain of Jon Kay
SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 34, NUMBER 1
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30 ILLUSTRATION: JEANNIE PHAN
ILLUSTRATION: AMANDA DUFFY
PHOTO: SKYE SPENCE
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FEATURES 20 Indigenous First Why APTN won’t stop covering the kinds of stories mainstream Canadian media once regularly messed up or ignored––and often still do
72 Tongue Tied Trolls have been holding comments sections hostage for too long. Now news outlets are fighting back BY STEPHANIE HUGHES
BY KAREN McCALL
30 The Podcast Evolution Top producers reflect on what’s coming soon to an ear near you BY ERICA NGAO 38 Everyone Is Talking About It How one Quebec TV talk show is changing the way a province experiences the news
78 Up Against It Three ambitious women photojournalists and their struggles for great shots—and greater acceptance
54 When I Was 11, My Dad Killed My Mom Journalists made my private tragedy public. Now I’m talking to them about what they wrote BY JOHN-MICHAEL SCHNEIDER
60 Secret Solidarity For women in journalism, mentorship is creating alternative pathways to opportunity BY FARNIA FEKRI
54 W hen I Was 11, My Dad Killed My Mom 20 APTN’s Groundbreaking Coverage 30 What’s Next for Podcasts?
BY SIERRA BEIN
112 What My Editor Taught Me
86 All Work and No Pay Why freelancing is more precarious than ever
92 Sexism in the Newsroom
BY BRENNAN DOHERTY
108 Georgia Straight at 50
BY MAIJA KAPPLER
46 Game On! All the right (and wrong) moves with Walrus editor Jonathan Kay BY JUSTIN DALLAIRE
ON THE COVER
92 Why Is This Still Happening? Jian Ghomeshi and other high-profile cases are a bleak reminder that sexism in the newsroom still exists and will take years to eliminate––if we ever do BY CATHERINE PHILLIPS
38 Quebec’s Hot Talk Show 46 Inside the Busy Brain of Jon Kay
98 From Print to Digital and Back Again On and off the assembly line in an era when technology has changed the process of journalism in profound and surprising ways BY DEVIN JONES 103 The Conversations A three-part docu-poem on the life and death of Amber Tuccaro, who went missing in August 2010 BY KAREN McCALL
66 Trouble at 1 Yonge A look back at the Toronto Star’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year when the cracks grew bigger and bigger BY ABBY PLENER SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 1
BULLETINS EDITOR’S NOTE
TIMELINE
3 Watchdogs or Watchpuppies? Our year at the RRJ BY JUSTIN DALLAIRE
14 Follow the… Canadian investigative journalism through the ages BY ABBY PLENER
EDITOR’S NOTE
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Watchdogs or Watchpuppies? Our year at the RRJ B Y JUSTIN DALL AIRE
HAUNTS
6 Parliament Hill, After Dark Watching politicians and journalists mix and mingle through the bottom of a glass BY GREGORY FURGALA
FIGURES
ADVICE
GUIDE
8 Found in Translation A second language can be a reporter’s most valuable tool BY MAIJA KAPPLER
17 Be Sensitive And other suggestions for reporting on Indigenous issues BY EMMA POISSON
TIPS
INGREDIENTS
9 Bootstrap the News Starting a local news venture could take you from journalist to entrepreneur BY KAREN McCALL
19 Cooking with Karon The Toronto Star’s food writer on tapping into community, culture, and identity from the kitchen
AS I SCANNED a Chapters magazine stand in Ottawa a few years ago, my ILLUSTRATION: ALYSHA DAWN
16 Archives Canadian journalism by the numbers BY STEPH WECHSLER
FIELD NOTES ES SAY
106 Dude, Where’s My Car? As the way journalists get around changes, so does the way we tell stories BY DAVID RUDIN
BY CATHERINE PHILLIPS INSIGHTS
10 Secure Your Data Protecting sources in the digital age BY ABBY PLENER
NAVIG ATION
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Q & A
12 On the Pitch For Shireen Ahmed, the space in which soccer meets justice is where you confront the male-dominated world of sports journalism
107 Peddling Stories How bikes benefit journalists BY CLAIRE McFARLANE RETROSPECTIVE
108 Straight Edge Vancouver’s once-radical weekly turns 50 BY GREGORY FURGALA
BY SARAH DESABRAIS
PHOTO: ERICA NGAO
REVIEW
110 The Good, the Bad, and the Awkward BuzzFeed Canada’s Scaachi Koul’s debut collection of essays on growing up in Calgary, body hair, and (not) fitting in BY ERICA NGAO
had. Over the course of the year, we discovered that magazine editing is much harder than many of us had anticipated. The challenge came from a thousand necessary mini-decisions: should we brand ourselves as the RRJ or the Review? Should we use 60 lb. or 70 lb. paper stock? Should we chase after corporate sponsors? Use serif or sans-serif fonts? These things may seem trivial, but as every magazine editor knows, they matter. The challenges extended beyond our individual responsibilities as editors. This year, we were also business managers, advertising sales agents, podcast producers, website designers, and conference planners. Of course, we were also reporters, tasked with covering both an industry we hope to work in and professionals we hope to work for. I was reminded of the tensions inherent to our work every time a friend or colleague asked me if, at the end of the year, I planned to apply for a Walrus fellowship. Could writing a profile of its editor, Jonathan Kay, somehow kneecap my chances of writing for The Walrus? As students, we hope that the quality of our work—no matter how critical the story—will impress those who matter. Industry veterans are sometimes quick to point out that we are only students. A hammer dropped early in September, as we discussed the results of our audience research survey. “I don’t think that the Ryerson Review of Journalism can be the citadel, the guardian of Canadian journalism, because the people who write for it are children,” responded a prominent figure in the industry. When a senior editor reminded him of our founding mandate—to be the watchdogs on the watchdogs—he replied: “You don’t have any fucking watchdogs. You have puppies! You have watchpuppies.” For the rest of the year, these words served as a much-needed reminder that our duty is, above all, to understand and serve our readers. It is you who decides if we have failed or succeeded.
eyes landed on the winter 2013 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism (RRJ). On the cover, a small, pale-blue circle announced a milestone: “30 years of watching the watchdogs.” I was intrigued to find a student magazine showcased alongside Maclean’s, The Atlantic, and The Economist. I read the issue from cover to cover and, after that, searched for the magazine every spring. I often pictured the authors as confident, experienced journalists, the kind to whom writing came easily. I thought, “Should I ever do the RRJ, I could be as good.” The idea excited me, eventually prompting me to apply to Ryerson’s journalism program and, subsequently, to sign up for a spot on the masthead. I was ready to play a central role. Just like every masthead member before me, I had paid my dues in class, agonizing over ledes and nutgrafs. At our first meeting in September, students huddled in a boardroom intended for a group half our size—at 25, we were the largest RRJ masthead ever—and teased apart what we liked and didn’t like about the work of our predecessors. At that moment, it was easy to overlook their successes. Last year, RRJ editors led a campaign to prevent the magazine from going online-only, launched a podcast and a newsletter, and made headlines for their coverage of the lack of diversity in newsrooms. Still, there was a lot we felt could be improved on, and we loudly made our opinions known. That’s when instructor Stephen Trumper chimed in: “Just remember, you may want to piss all over what they did last year. But next year, the new group of editors will be pissing all over what you did.” One of the boldest ideas we had that day involved dropping the “watchdogs” label altogether. Who cared that it had been around since the founding of the magazine? Our early talks revealed the arrogance of students entering their final year of j-school. Many of us had never worked for a professional magazine, yet our conversations suggested we could do better than those who
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ILLUSTRATION: NICK CRAINE
NOTEBOOK
2 RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM | SPRING 2017
112 What My Editor Taught Me Lessons learned by Allen Pizzey, one of Canada’s most storied foreign correspondents BY ANGELA LONG
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RRJ.ca
Spring 2017 Volume 34, Number 1 Editor Justin Dallaire Managing Editor, Print Steph Wechsler Managing Editor, Digital Gregory Furgala Managing Editor, Audience & Business Development Farnia Fekri Production Editor, Print Catherine Phillips Production Editor, Digital Abby Plener
Digital Senior Editors Keith Capstick Maija Kappler Michael Ott (Fall term) John-Michael Schneider Chiefs of Research Stephanie Hughes Emma Poisson Chief Copy Editor Thomas Boyer Copy Editors Brennan Doherty Karen McCall Claire McFarlane Display Editor Sarah Desabrais Visual Editors Sierra Bein Devin Jones
Art Director David Donald
RRJ.ca features online exclusives from our spring 2017 writers.
Research Consultant Veronica Maddocks Story Editors Jason Anderson, Ryan Bigge, Dawn Calleja, Haley Cullingham, Lynn Cunningham, Tim Falconer, Katherine Laidlaw, Lauren McKeon, Bill Reynolds Lawyers Ryder Gilliland, Peter Jacobsen, Brian MacLeod Rogers, Sean Ward Special Thanks Angela Glover, Sally Goldberg Powell, Gary Gould, Blake Lambert, Jaclyn Mika, Leslie Salvadori, Lindsay Smith Publisher Janice Neil Business Manager Aseel Kafil
Dylan Freeman-Grist profiles Vice Canada reporter Ben Makuch, whose year-long legal battle with the RCMP may set a new standard of press freedom in Canada.
Advertising Sales Trevor Battye Founding Editor Don Obe Founding Art Director Jim Ireland Printer Maracle Inc.
Audience & Business Development Dylan Freeman-Grist Melissa Myre David Rudin Published annually by Ryerson University’s School of Journalism. To subscribe or donate, visit rrj.ca. Cover price: $12.99 (one year), $32.99 (three years), $57.99 (five years). Ryerson Review of Journalism, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3. Ryerson Review of Journalism is a member of Magazines Canada. ISSN 0838-0651 Canadian Publication Mail Product Sales Agreement Number 40065112
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With archives going back to 1984, RRJ.ca is the place to go for the long view of Canadian journalism. Enjoyed Karen McCall’s “Indigenous First”? (p. 20)
PHOTO: SIERRA BEIN
Print Senior Editors Kieran Delamont Angela Long (Fall term) Erica Ngao
Instructors Stephen Trumper Angus Frame
Dig Deep into RRJ.ca
Investigative journalists in the United States have more resources and are producing better work than ever while their Canadian counterparts have a fraction of the support. Steph Wechsler looks into what we’re missing out on north of the border, and why.
RRJ.ca
From 2011, “APTN Is Breaking Big with a Small Team of Dedicated Journalists” APTN and the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of investigative journalism, and on finally winning the respect it deserves.
Intrigued by Justin Dallaire’s “Game On!”? (p. 46) Spring 2004, “The Walrus Loses Its Carpenter” The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. Of ad sales, circ, and lofty goals—and management re-shufflings.
Eager to read more about reporters’ run-ins with the law? Spring 2005, “The Wrong Arm of the Law” How three investigative reporters, Stevie Cameron, Andrew McIntosh, and Juliet O’Neill, got so close to the story that they became the story.
Listen to the spring 2017 season of RRJ.ca’s podcast, The Markup, featuring Robyn Doolittle, Susanne Craig, and Ann Hui. And for the news of the day, online features, and incisive commentary, visit RRJ.ca. SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 5
BULLETINS SU SS EX DR
Métropolitain Brasserie
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Wednesdays between 1997 and 2007.” Wells didn’t describe any surreptitious meetings, or tell of any manila envelopes passed in shadowy EL . corners. (“I never carried a beer in one hand and GI ST N ST ON T a notepad in the other.”) Instead, he networked. . G N I LL . E T Few MPs settle in Ottawa, he says, because they D’Arcy S W S RK McGee’s A have to constantly go back to their constituencies P Watching politicians and S Irish Pub to justify their re-election. Plus, for that handful of journalists mix and mingle Brixton’s days in the capital, they typically don’t have a suite British Pub of domestic responsibilities that might otherwise through the bottom of a glass keep them home. A simple and singular logic takes B Y GREGORY FURG AL A shape: “While they’re in Ottawa,” says Wells, “they might as well be at Brixton’s.” CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, a noted carouser and authority on journalNot every staffer and MP makes the rounds. Nor does every journalism, pubs, and the happy marriage of the two, called his era’s Fleet Street ist, but it doesn’t hurt. Sit down with one well-known MP for the evening, the “very pattern and mould of every type of squalor and venality.” Of Wells says, and you could meet 10 others over the course of a night: a dilapidated reporter driving a dilapidated car, “It took little imagina“Parliament Hill after dark is like a huge Air Canada departure lounge. tion,” he admiringly recalls, “to see where he was bound.” Unsurprisingly, Wander in, see whether the food’s any good. ‘Oh look, there’s so-and-so, Hitchens credited this pub-bound reporter for inspiring him to take up where’ve you been?’” So-and-so occasionally offers valuable insight. In 2011, Conservative staffers congregated at Hy’s, a noted Ottawa hangout, to celebrate the recently passed budget. It was celebratory, or at least was supposed to be. “I was talking to some pretty senior Conservatives,” Wells says, “who were starting to despair of the whole Harper project.” They felt the latest budget was proof that Harper was as tax-and-spend as the Liberals. Instead of a rejoicing majority, Wells saw cracks forming in the Tory-blue facade. “That was the first sign that people who had signed on with Harper were starting to be dissatisfied.” Those stray comments reframed Wells’s view. It changed the questions he’d ask. Absent these encounters, social rust grinds the machinery to a halt. After staking out a minority of Parliament seats in 2006, the newly minted PMO famously discouraged party members and staffers of a certain rank from frequenting the bar scene, and it hurt reporters. Vice News features HAUNTS
Parliament Hill, After Dark
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the trade. Parliament Hill is no Fleet Street, but the adjacent Centretown neighbourhood comes closest to capturing its spirit. Its streets are dotted with bars famous for hosting Ottawa’s political class, from low-level staffers to the occasional prime minister, who’ve made Brixton’s British Pub (historically NDP), D’Arcy McGee’s Irish Pub (historically Liberal), and Métropolitain Brasserie (Conservative after 2006) their post-caucus, post-event, and post-party homes. Those party lines are blurrier now— split generationally as much as ideologically—but it matters little. Partyaffiliated or not, the pubs are still filled with nattering politicos, which is reason enough for any political journalists drop in. “Lord knows I spent a lot of nights in those places,” says Toronto Star political columnist Paul Wells. “I must’ve been at D’Arcy McGee’s most
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ILLUSTRATIONS: TARYN GEE
editor Justin Ling says that dealing with staffers during the Harper years was nearly impossible. “You couldn’t pick up the phone and talk to them,” he says. “You didn’t have a personal email address, you didn’t have a personal phone number. It was virtually impossible to get a hold of them because you had no rapport.” Ling’s list of contacts dried up. “The best relationships I had in the Harper government were those folks who would come out and have a beer and talk to me.” Over pints, Ling says subjects ran the gamut from the government’s reasoning behind certain decisions, to their own frustration, to information off the record. Like Wells, Ling was able to trawl background noise to understand the behind-the-scenes politicking that informs and animates Parliamentary debate. On occasion, reporters can also simply ask, What the hell happened? Debating the Fair Elections Act, Conservative MP Brad Butt claimed to have seen discarded voter information cards stolen out of the trash, handed over to an opponent’s campaign office, and ultimately used to commit voter fraud. His story was quickly debunked and widely reported, and Butt retracted the statement during debate a few weeks later. His office opted not to grant media access. Butt did, however, venture over to Brixton’s. That’s where Ling happened to run into him. “We sat and had a great chat about why he said that,” says Ling. “You can go straight to the source. Brad Butt’s office refused every single interview request, every single info request we sent for a week, and I just happened to catch him over a pint at Brixton’s.” The PR apparatus was in full swing, the brick wall was up, and comment was not on offer. Happenstance, though, rounded out Ling’s understanding of what transpired, why, and—often lost in the thick of political reporting—how the actors felt. The meeting was impromptu and innocuous, but it enriched Ling’s understanding of what transpired. Democracy works, but works best when it’s lubricated. SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 7
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BULLETINS ADVICE
Found in Translation A second language can be a reporter’s most valuable tool B Y MAIJA K APPLER MARINA JIMENEZ THINKS that all reporters should learn a
second language, whether they’re covering a foreign country or their hometown. “It’s invaluable,” says Jimenez, a foreign writer for the Toronto Star. “You can read the papers, eavesdrop on conversations, travel, and walk around alone, feel more confident, understand the cultural nuances better.” The ability to speak a second language offers journalists access to communities they might not otherwise reach. But interviewing someone in a different language than the one
Name
Occupation
Employer
Languages spoken
Marina Jimenez
foreign writer
Toronto Star
English and Spanish
Sobremesa “In Spanish, it literally means ‘over the table’ or ‘after-table’ and refers to the time after the meal where you sit around chatting and laughing and drinking coffee. There isn’t really an English equivalent. Perhaps that is because we don’t spend as much time doing this as Latinos!”
Ann Hui
national food reporter
The Globe and Mail
English, Cantonese, and Mandarin
or Xiao Long Bao “It’s a Shanghainese type of dumpling, and there just isn’t an English word for it. Because I work in the world of food now, often I can get away with using a Chinese word translated phonetically into English.”
Ahmed Najdat
multimedia producer
Sky News Arabia
English and Arabic
Tu Thanh Ha
national reporter
The Globe and Mail
English, French, and Vietnamese
or Qaba Qawsayn Aw Adna “It comes from a verse in the Quran, and it is widely used in Arabic writing. It literally means ‘the two edges of a bow, or closer,’ and it’s used to imply that someone was so close to reaching or achieving something, but they were just short. The metaphor comes from archery: when a warrior prepares to throw an arrow, they pull the bowstring back and the edges of the bow get closer together. It’s difficult to translate to English, but is widely used in Arabic journalism writing.” Ti-coune The term references the name of a developmentally delayed character from the RadioCanada drama Le Temps d’une paix. Ha observed this culturally specific insult baffle anglophone media in the early 1990s, when PQ politician Guy Chevrette called former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, “Ti-coune.” No one could figure out how to translate it.
Shree Paradkar
columnist and digital editor
Toronto Star
English, Hindi, and Marathi
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Word or phrase you had trouble translating into English or another language
Percentages “Someone from India might say, ‘She’s 80 percent okay,’ or ‘It’s 90 percent certain’ or ‘Something happens 75 percent of the time.’ They are not being specific with the number, it’s just an indication of certainty. But in the West, that percentage makes it a mighty specific number. So if someone says, ‘I’m 80 to 90 percent sure,’ and you’re looking at it literally, what the heck does that even mean? They are not statistical numbers, just a figurative style of speech.” ILLUSTRATIONS: ALYSHA DAWN
their outlet uses can lead to miscommunications. Jimenez frequently reports on Latin America and often conducts interviews in her second language, Spanish. Politicians in particular prefer the precision that comes from using their mother tongue, she says. When she interviewed Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, she had a translator in the room, just in case she missed any linguistic nuances. Ann Hui, national food reporter for The Globe and Mail, mostly interviews English speakers, but her competency with Cantonese and working ability in Mandarin have helped her at unexpected times. When she was a Toronto City Hall reporter, she impressed her colleagues during a press conference held by then-mayoral candidate John Tory and a Chinatown grocery store owner involved in a high-profile act of vigilantism. The grocer was expected to support Olivia Chow for mayor, and his defection toward Tory was a big deal, but Hui recalls that it was clear from the press conference that he didn’t speak any English. “I remember jumping in there with a Chinese question and kind of surprising everyone,” she says. “I don’t even think most of the other city hall bureau reporters realized that I could speak Chinese.” Like Jimenez, Hui says it’s usually best to interview someone in their first language, even if that means her questions are imperfectly worded in her second or third language. “I have a tape recorder,” she says. “If there’s anything that I’m not 100 percent sure about after the fact, I can always play it for someone else. If the person who’s being interviewed doesn’t have full capacity of a language, I wouldn’t want that to be lost at the gathering stage.” In many cases, interviews like these will involve both parties switching back and forth, using a kind of cobbled-together linguistic hybrid, until everyone can be sure they’re being understood.
TIPS
Bootstrap the News Starting a local news venture could take you from journalist to entrepreneur B Y K AREN McCALL AFTER YEARS OF NEWSPAPERS CLOSING, merging, and
downsizing, journalists are setting out on their own. Karen Unland, one of these new entrepreneurial journalists, was a reporter and digital editor at the Edmonton Journal for 14 years. She quit to build Taproot Edmonton, a site for local journalism, because the industry wasn’t changing fast enough. “I was willing to trade security for control,” she says. Unland started the site in May 2016 with co-founder Mack Male, a software developer, entrepreneur, and social media expert. They met on Twitter when she was still at the Journal, and a mutual interest in journalism planted the seed for Taproot. The name “Taproot” comes from the largest, most dominant root of a plant. After growing downward, it then produces smaller lateral roots. The gardening metaphor works well because the heart of Taproot is the Story Garden, a forum that looks like Reddit, where members discuss issues they want investigated. “We encourage members to share with each other what they are curious about. They indicate on a sliding scale how interested they are,” says Unland. Members pay $10 a month (or $100 a year) to suggest, vote, and comment on local story ideas. If an idea is popular, freelancers (who must become Taproot members) are asked to pitch. Writers are paid $50 for proposals and, if accepted, a further $450 for the story. A recent story looks at Edmonton’s effort to use its Indigenous heritage to find culturally significant names for city buildings. With 98 members, Taproot’s pace is slow but steady. In order to bring in extra money, Unland also works as a media strategy consultant. “This is a lean start-up,” she says. “When introducing a new impetus for journalism, it changes everything.” Unland shares what she’s learned so far about being an entrepreneurial journalist: 1. Test your idea. “Get reliable feedback before you launch. Think about where your potential customers are (in-person and online), and then develop a landing page outlining your vision and offering an opportunity to pay or sign up for updates. Attracting traffic means going to conferences, buying Google ads, or targeting Facebook posts to get reliable feedback.” 2. Be smart about business. “This will be a fun but gruelling hobby unless you figure SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 9
BULLETINS out where the money is coming from and you dedicate a big chunk of your time to pursuing it. Find a partner with complementary skills who will give you time to concentrate on the business of journalism. Don’t rely only on people buying ads, subscriptions, or merch out of the goodness of their hearts. You’ve got to sell, and you do that by solving your customer’s problem, not your own. We sell the ability to participate in the story from the beginning.” 3. Build a community. “Be sure you are using social media to build your reputation and that it’s all connected. A lot of my audience is on my personal Twitter account, with 9,000 followers (mostly in Edmonton). They are the people I want to talk to. I have a podcast and a local media blog called seenandheardyeg.com, and Mack Male has his civic issues blog, mastermaq.ca. We use those to promote Taproot. If you draw attention to what other people are doing, they are more likely to pay attention to you. This is the currency of social media, and it can help you fill the top of your funnel toward paying members or advertisers or contributors.” 4. Make time for face-to-face networking. “What converts people into members the most is a face-to-face meeting. A few hours every week, I’m either going to events or having a one-on-one coffee with someone. If you’re not an extrovert—and I’m not—you have to speak the language of extraversion and get out there. I sit on a few boards, attend entrepreneurial events, speak on panels, moderate panels, and use my journalistic ability to ask questions in order to insinuate myself. The more we talk, the more people sign up. Every time we publish a story, it gets more people to sign up.”
INSIGHTS
Secure Your Data Protecting sources in the digital age B Y ABB Y PLENER J.M. PORUP is a freelance cybersecurity reporter whose
work has appeared in Motherboard, Slate, The Economist, and CBC. His background as a computer programmer has served him well in an age when journalists need to think about their vulnerability to online attacks and surveillance. Tackling one’s own digital security can feel overwhelming, especially for journalists who may lack the knowledge of reporters like Porup. Luckily, there are an increasing number of tools and resources that can help. We’ve compiled a few sugges-
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tions to get you started with insights from Porup, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Centre for Investigative Journalism. Encryption: If your devices or files are hacked, encryption will make them more difficult to decode and access. Install HTTPS Everywhere for web browsing, use the Signal app for messages and calls, download Symantec’s Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software for email, and FileVault, TrueCrypt, or BitLocker for your computer. Anonymity: A journalist with a cell phone in their pocket—a device that can be easily turned on, bugged, and tracked— can’t truly promise anonymity. Your online identity and cell phone habits tell a story about who you are—where you go, who you contact, and what your routines are. Think carefully about how the information you share online connects you to your sources. Prioritize: Focus first on the stories that may be the most vulnerable to online attacks. Do you communicate with these sources through secure methods? If you have information that could put your source in danger, is it securely stored through password protection or encryption? The Basics: Use secure passwords and turn on two-factor authentication for all your accounts, including email. Use the Tor Browser for work so you can search the Internet anonymously. Alternatively, connect to the Internet through a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to prevent others from identifying your location. Like any technology, digital security software will continue to evolve. Connect with other journalists to keep abreast of best practices. To read more on the topic, see “Journalists in Distress: Securing Your Digital Life” from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, “Journalist Security Guide” from the Committee to Protect Journalists, and “Information Security for Journalists” from the Centre for Investigative Journalism. ILLUSTRATION: ALYSHA DAWN
BULLETINS
Q & A
On the Pitch For Shireen Ahmed, the space in which soccer meets justice is where you confront the male-dominated world of sports journalism B Y SAR AH DESABR AIS
Before she was a contributor to The Globe and Mail and Vice and the author of her blog, Tales from a Hijabi Footballer, Shireen Ahmed was a frontline worker at a settlement agency for newcomers to Canada. Today, she’s a freelancer and sports advocate who has made her mark in an overwhelmingly male and white field. A regular contributor to Muslimah Media Watch, a site for women-identifying writers to critique representations of Muslim women in mainstream media, Ahmed won a 2016 Best of Contemporary Writings award from the Goalden Times, an online football and culture publication, for her reportage on the media’s poor coverage of sexual assault in football. For Ahmed, sports are more than scoreboards and sweat—they’re a lens on the world’s tensions, relationships, and politics. She’s written about myriad topics, including the Paralympics, the politics of fasting in football, and her own family’s experiences on the no-fly list. We sat down with her to talk about getting started, the politics of games, and the need for inclusion in sports journalism.
Racialicious. So the wider mainstream Canadian media is supposed to be representative of all of Canada, and it’s not. Why did you feel it was important to start talking and writing about your experiences? I’m a soccer player. Around 2012, there was discus-
sion of the FIFA hijab ban being lifted. I thought it was an interesting story. When I’m on [the pitch], there’s a lot of attention and focus given to me because of what I look like and what I’m wearing. I am the only Muslim woman in my league who’s identifiably Muslim, because of my hijab. I started telling those stories on my blog and some other sites. At that point, I didn’t charge, because I didn’t think that anyone would pay me to write about Muslim women in sports. Sports have always been so political. Exactly. Using sport as a tool of
resistance has always been there. An early example of an athlete fighting fascism was a Turkish fencer––a Muslim woman named Halet Çambel— who was at the Berlin 1936 Olympics. She was at the Games where Jesse Owens won the 100-metre and Hitler was enraged. She was invited to meet him and refused because she disagreed with him politically. This is one of the first times we see an athlete using their platform like this. So it’s been there. We just don’t always hear about it, because there’s been a tremendous whitewashing of history. We hear about Muhammad Ali, but we don’t like to talk about how he was anti-imperialist, because it makes people uncomfortable. It’s not new to use sports as a vehicle for exchanging ideas and thoughts, but it’s much more common.
Why write about sports with such a distinct, socially minded stance?
I’m a believer that sport can be used as a vehicle, a tool to empower. It’s such a common language, whether you play or not. It can be used as bridge-building, as cultural understanding. You take a ball anywhere, you automatically get 22 people who can play soccer. It’s something very small––a couple of soccer balls and a gym in the winter time. I worked with a group of Syrian refugees last winter, when they were hosted at the Toronto Plaza Hotel, running a session for kids to play soccer every Wednesday. These kids had survived trauma and PTSD, and it was a way of literally seeing children blossom, and engage, and sweat it out. They played each pick-up game in this gym of a mosque like it was the World Cup final. There were tears, there was frustration, there were arguments with me, who was not really an official ref, but just sort of managing. For a situation that someone might construe as bleak, it was wonderful. And I was very honoured to be a part of that.
12 RYERSON PHOTO: ERICAREVIEW NGAO OF JOURNALISM | SPRING 2017
How do you carve out success in a crowded, homogeneous field? You
have to fight really hard to get your foot in the door and then prove how great you are. People ask me what I do for a living, and I tell them: “I write pitches and get rejected.” But I’ve been really lucky that I’ve had some really cool mentors and that people have given me a chance, and said, “Let’s see what you can do.” What ends up happening in sports writing is you create ally-ships with other women. I try to surround myself with people that identity as female or non-binary or femme-presenting. I feel safer in those spaces. What is it about your perspective on issues that is so distinct? This
What can be done to improve the way women are represented in sports? Right now in Canada, we don’t have specialized websites for
is not my first career. I started off working frontline in social services, so that experience I always take with me. What does justice look like? What does inclusion look like? What does fairness look like? I’m not looking at statistics and match reporting only. I’m not looking at trade rumours. I’m always looking at, how does this affect human beings? How does this affect Canada? How does this affect us globally? How can sports be used to benefit us in a holistic way?
women, like ESPNW. We don’t have The Undefeated, or The Shadow League, which are places specifically for people of colour. We don’t have
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 13
BULLETINS TIMELINE
Follow the… Canadian investigative journalism through the ages B Y ABB Y PLENER
1983: The federal Access to Information Act is implemented.
CANADIAN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM is
at a crossroads. Jobs are scarce, the price tag is high. Revenue streams have changed dramatically since Google and Facebook began to dominate ad sales. But nothing about these looming realities has changed the fact that Canadian reporters continue to produce groundbreaking exposés. Some of this year's biggest investigations are rooted in practices that have a long history, from the sweeping data excavation of the Panama Papers to the discovery that the RCMP and Quebec police agencies are spying on Canadian reporters. The tools of the trade have been part of the landscape for more than half a century. Take a look back at some of the most significant moments in the history of Canadian investigative journalism.
1978: The Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) is established at its founding convention in Montreal. In 1990, the CIJ became the Canadian Association of Journalists.
1975: The Fifth Estate premieres on CBC, earning a reputation for quality investigative documentaries.
1975: The RCMP sends an internal memo about the rise of investigative reporting in Canada and how the force should interact with the media.
1972: The Globe and Mail creates an investigative unit. 1950s: Canadian reporters begin using investigative techniques—such as the use of hidden camera footage and the analysis of public records and financial documents— more frequently.
1960: Frank Drea’s investigation for the Toronto Telegram into the treatment of immigrant workers building the city’s subway system leads to the strengthening of provincial labour laws.
1964: This Hour Has Seven Days premieres on CBC, producing several in-depth documentaries and introducing ambushstyle interviews to a Canadian audience. The pitch for this current affairs program includes one of the first Canadian references to “investigative reporting.”
1966: Isabel LeBourdais publishes The Trial of Steven Truscott, a book revealing that the accused murderer’s trial had been mishandled. Though her initial findings were rejected by several Canadian publishers for their controversial claims, the book’s success led to former prime minister John Diefenbaker demanding a royal commission to explore the case, and inspired other journalists to pursue stories of wrongful convictions.
1966: W5 premieres on CTV, airing in the time slot used by Seven Days. The CBC show had been cancelled just four months earlier. W5 went on to become the longestrunning newsmagazine program in North America and continues to be one of the most-watched shows of its kind in Canada.
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2002: The Toronto Star publishes its groundbreaking “Race and Crime” series, revealing evidence of racial profiling by Toronto Police Services and paving the path for a public conversation about “carding.” The series led to further reporting on the issue, as well as a seven-year legal battle in which the Star argued for access to police data on the basis that, under Ontario’s FOI laws, electronic databases are a form of public record.
2013: The Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting, a non-profit modeled after its American counterpart, shuts down after only five years of operation due to funding challenges.
2016: Global cancels 16×9 after eight seasons and re-assigns former host Carolyn Jarvis to be the chief investigative correspondent for several Global programs.
2017: The Canadian Journalism Foundation partners with the Globe to offer a new internship dedicated to investigative journalism.
2017: The Globe publishes findings from a 20-month-long investigation into the ways police across Canada handle sexual assault cases. The Globe report finds that one in five sexual assaults are dismissed as “unfounded,” or baseless. The investigation prompts the RCMP and over 30 police forces to re-examine cases categorized as “unfounded.”
BULLETINS FIGURES
$19
Archives Canadian journalism by the numbers
The median hourly wage of Canadian journalists as of January 2017
B Y STEPH WECHSLER AMONG JOURNALISM’S BIG STORIES this year: newsroom closures, digital growth, representation in the media, and more. What follows are some revealing facts and figures about the state of Canadian journalism in 2017.
nnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnn
nn
The number of newspapers sold to every 100 households in Canada in 1950
The number of newspapers projected to be sold to every 100 households in 2025
102
9 The percentage
of Canadians polled by Reuters who pay for digital news
11
2
0.3 The percentage of stories in Ontario generally related to Indigenous issues between June 2013 and May 2014
0.5 The percentage of stories in Ontario generally related to Indigenous issues between June 2015 and March 2016
$1.8 BILLION Display advertising revenue for the Canadian daily news industry in 2006
The percentage of Canadians polled by the Earnscliffe Strategy Group who say they completely trust newspapers and magazines
39
The percentage of Indigenous-related stories in Ontario between 2012 and 2013 that had a negative tone
$907 MILLION Display advertising revenue for the daily news industry in 2015
9
The percentage of Indigenous-related stories in Ontario between 2014 and 2015 that had a negative tone
$$$$$ $$$$$
172 The number
of Canadian community outlets, including print, online, TV, and radio newsrooms that closed between 2008 and January 2017
24 The number of CBC/Radio-Canada outlets with service reductions between 2011 and 2016
49 Canada’s rank out of 111 countries in a freedom of information audit assessing federal governments’ recognition of fundamental access to information
70
The percentage of Canada’s online ad revenue that goes to Facebook and Google
GUIDE
Be Sensitive And other suggestions for reporting on Indigenous issues B Y EMMA POIS SON THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION Commission’s final report, released
in 2015, called for media coverage more representative of the plurality of Indigenous communities, access to opportunity for Indigenous journalists, and education on Indigenous history and law in journalism schools. Editors and reporters at Ricochet Media’s Indigenous Reporting Fund (who, between them, have worked at outlets like APTN, CBC, and Indian Country Today) share their collective knowledge on improving Indigenous story reportage. 1. Decolonize the language
“Indigenous people protecting their unceded territory from resource development projects they didn’t consent to aren’t ‘protesters’ and their actions are not ‘protests.’ Decolonizing the language in the media landscape and considering the meaning behind words is so crucial.” 2. Use the right terms
“Remember that the term ‘First Nations’ does not include Inuit or Métis. If you’re referring broadly to Indigenous communities as a whole in Canada, don’t refer to reserves; Inuit and Métis peoples don’t have them.” 3. Listen more than you talk
“Be respectful and attentive. Listen more than you ask questions. You may also want to tell a story of your own. By sharing a piece of yourself, you are giving instead of just taking, which builds trust. This reflects Indigenous concepts of reciprocity.”
Most of these figures come from three significant, recently released journalism research reports: Journalists for Human Rights’ “2016 Buried Voices,” the Public Policy Forum’s “Shattered Mirror,” and the latest data from the Local News Research Project.
4. Sensitivity
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ORIGINAL PHOTO: MICHELLE CARON (WIKIPEDIA)
Indigenous people is that smaller communities have a lot more to deal with interpersonally; there are complex relationships, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities. If, at any point in developing your story, someone wants to be taken out of it, you must heed the request. An outsider may not understand the impact, risks, or long-term consequences that publication could have on the person’s life.” “Remember that Indigenous cultures are based on face-to-face communication; sometimes phoning and emailing doesn’t work, so you need to show up at the band office. It’s not always comfortable, but hard work and reputation-building are part of the beauty of Indigenous journalism. It’s up to journalists in many ways to break down long-standing barriers like these.” Nahka Bertrand and Leena Minifie (editors with Ricochet Media’s Indigenous Reporting Fund) as well as Ossie Michelin, Cara McKenna, and Jerome Turner (writers supported through the Indigenous Reporting Fund) contributed to this guide. Ricochet Media is a multi-platform media outlet, and its Indigenous Reporting Fund aims to improve the representation and coverage of Indigenous people in the media.
Additional Resources Reporting in Indigenous Communities This online guide by CBC reporter Duncan McCue assists journalists in pitching, researching, and presenting stories on Indigenous peoples. “Reporting in Indigenous Communities: 5 Tips to Get It Right” CBC’s Angela Sterritt, who’s worked with Journalists for Human Rights to facilitate a newsroom-based course for journos, presents five tips (with examples) to get it right. Find it online at CBC Radio’s The Doc Project. Native American Journalists Association The association offers infographics and guides for specific reporting situations (for example, how to cover the Dakota Access Pipeline) on its website.
“One of the most important considerations when working with SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 17
BULLETINS INGREDIENTS
Cooking with Karon The Toronto Star’s food writer on tapping into community, culture, and identity from the kitchen B Y CATHERINE PHILLIPS “WHAT IS CANADIAN FOOD?” Karon Liu asks, chopping broccoli and
red pepper into bite-sized pieces. “We’re a country of immigrants, not a monoculture.” We may call poutine—or, even less glamorously, Kraft Dinner—our national dish, but pinpointing what fare is truly “ours” isn’t easy in a country as diverse as Canada, where borscht, spaghetti, and pho are all folded into the palette. For many, the most familiar artifact of the country’s multiculturalism manifests in the many different foods we eat. Underneath it all, cooking is storytelling—and everyone has a story to tell. For Liu, food writing means more than showing up to restaurant openings and gorging on good food. It’s an entry point into conversations about politics, economy, and geography, a way to share history, identity, and culture. Even a list of ingredients can evoke nostalgia—just as apples and cinnamon bring back memories of baking Apple Brown Betty with my mother, chewing on apple peels and licking the sugar-filled Pyrex while she followed her own mother’s recipe. Cooking, in other words, keeps memories alive. I meet Liu in the lobby of the Toronto Star’s 1 Yonge Street headquarters before heading up to the fifth-floor test kitchen, located just a few steps from the newsroom. On this grey, January morning, Liu is preparing rice noodles and veggies in a spicy peanut sauce for his biweekly column, “Single Adult Diner,” in which Liu cooks up meals for one—ranging from Sloppy Joes to vegetable carbonara. The Toronto Star test kitchen looks and feels like a clean, white laboratory. The walls are peppered with shelves holding colourful dishware and eclectic cookbooks like Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty. It may well be Canada’s only newspaper-based test kitchen, where every recipe the paper publishes is tried and tested—a part of Liu’s job since he took over for award-winning food writer Jennifer Bain in January 2016. Liu looks right at home as he begins telling the story of how he found himself here, whisking creamy peanut butter, ginger, garlic, lime juice, soy sauce, and brown sugar into a spicy peanut sauce. He may have gotten his start in Ryerson’s bachelor of journalism program, but Liu credits being in the right place at the right time for most of his success. “I thought I was going to be a national reporter,” he admits. “The idea of being a food writer never entered my mind. But just because I wasn’t thinking about it doesn’t mean it wasn’t possible.” Before landing his job as the Star’s food writer, Liu wrote for a string of publications, including the National Post, Toronto Life, and The Grid. The same week he started working as an intern at Toronto Life, the magazine launched its food blog, The Dish. Eager to prove himself (but clueless about cooking), Liu thrust himself into the world of food, asking tons of questions and squeezing as much as he could out of the chefs and restaurateurs he met along the way. PHOTO: MARCUS OLENIUK (COURTESY TORONTO STAR)
Liu prepares cacio e pepe in a friend’s kitchen.
Many Canadian food writers have built their careers around the country’s diverse culinary landscape, including Ricardo Larrivée in Quebec, Vikram Vij in British Columbia, and Lynn Crawford in Toronto. Julia Child once said, “If you can read, you can cook.” But in an industry where a writer can break the next scandal or play a hand in political accountability, why write about food? “The job of a good food writer is to make food accessible and give people a sense of control and empowerment,” Liu says, mentioning the closure of a No Frills in the gentrifying neighbourhood of Parkdale, Toronto, that left residents without access to affordable food close to home. It’s issues like this that make culinary journalism about more than restaurant openings and exotic ingredients. “There’s a misconception that food writing is superficial,” Liu says. “But we also look into health, science, and policy—because it affects our job.” He pinches chili flakes from a bowl on the counter and sprinkles them onto the sauce. A small pot of water comes to a boil on the stove, ready for a single portion of vermicelli noodles. Hungry Star staffers peek in as the chopped vegetables are tossed with chickpeas in a saucepan. While he stirs, Liu recalls discussions with countless chefs, restaurateurs, and home cooks about the meals that season their lives. Many of them, he says, are trying to preserve their cultures through food. “Like any type of art, food is a fantastic way of getting a glimpse of a culture,” he says, as the vermicelli is strained, combined with the vegetables and chickpeas, and perfectly coated in the sweet and spicy peanut sauce. “You don’t have to know a lot about history,” he says. “You just have to eat.” SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 19
Indigenous First Why APTN won’t stop covering the kinds of stories mainstream Canadian media once regularly messed up or ignored— and often still do B Y K AREN McCALL
ALL PHOTOS BY SKYE SPENCE
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“APTN’s perspective is crucial in this time of reconciliation.” Cheryl McKenzie, host/producer of InFocus talks with Mike Sutherland, land and resources coordinator for Peguis First Nation.
SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 21
“ I thought, where do I feel this story in my body and what is it really about?”
Karyn Pugliese Executive director of news and current affairs
I
T WAS A WARM EVENING IN AUGUST 2016. Karyn Pugliese
gazed at the campfire she’d built after a day of canoeing on Lake Temagami in northeastern Ontario. She wasn’t thinking about the crackling flames or the stars hanging low in the sky. She was thinking about work. Something was bothering her. Pugliese, executive director of news and current affairs at the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), wanted to tell a story but didn’t know how. The story was child welfare, an issue that reporter Shaneen RobinsonDesjarlais suggested two months earlier at a training session. The reporters held the belief that child welfare should be covered every day along with water, hunger, healthcare, and housing. Pugliese looked at them, puzzled. “Guys, we are television, and the legalities of child welfare will be huge,” she said. People would come to them with stories that were difficult to verify. She knew that her team wouldn’t be able to identify young children or parents on camera. For two months, Pugliese procrastinated, wrote down ideas in the middle of the night, and tossed and turned, until she found herself talking it out with a friend by that campfire. “I thought, ‘Where do I feel this story in my body and what is it really about?’” In her Winnipeg office the following month, she expanded the topic of child welfare to what she considered the most under-reported Indigenous story in Canada: the breakdown and rebuilding of families. The bigger picture came to her in part from watching the scenes outside the office window. “I see people drink and laugh and wave at us in that window, I see people drink and fight in that window. Sometimes they see us watching and they move away looking ashamed,” she says. “I think, ‘That’s someone’s parents. They’ve been through something and they are not doing very well.’” Pugliese wanted to explore why some people are resilient and recover from abuse while others can’t, as well as the supports that exist to help families in crisis. “We know there are some communities, because of residential schools and child welfare removing children, where no one has raised their own child in three generations,” she says. “Who would you call if you don’t have a mother or a sister to ask for help about your kid?” She soon set up the child welfare assignments. Robinson-Desjarlais posted a call-out on her personal Facebook page looking for parents who had been through the system. APTN’s Vancouver video journalist Tina House helped reporters develop stories about parents keeping their children out of the social services system. Reporters interviewed a daughter of a residential school survivor. A woman with addiction issues, she grew up in the child welfare system and was trying to understand parenting with support from Sheway, a Vancouver community program. “Her own mother died young,” Pugliese says. “She had to learn how to hug her children.” By October, APTN was ready to launch a new season. The schedule included a call-in segment about child welfare on the analytical news
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show InFocus, a dedicated family feature on APTN National News, and an interview on Nation to Nation with Cindy Blackstock, an activist who had recently won a case against the federal government for giving lower funding to First Nations child welfare. “Residential school feeds child welfare that feeds prostitution that feeds missing and murdered Indigenous women,” Pugliese says. “If we start putting the stories together, we’re going to get a pretty good idea of what’s happened to our families.” APTN’s greatest strength is telling those in-depth stories. It’s the nonprofit channel on which First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people share their lives with one another and the rest of Canada. APTN offers a window into the culture and politics of Indigenous Peoples with programming that includes documentaries, investigative news, dramas, comedies, cooking shows, children’s series, and an annual live multi-city stage festival celebrating National Aboriginal Day. Throughout its near-18-year history, the network has changed the ways Canadians perceive Indigenous Peoples by providing a multi-dimensional vantage point. If awards are any indication, APTN is succeeding. Last year, the nine-person team from APTN Investigates was up against much larger network shows like CBC’s The Fifth Estate and CTV’s W5 when it was nominated for four Canadian Association of Journalists awards; it took home two, for its human rights and labour reporting. With strong local sources, balanced coverage, and community trust, APTN journalists break stories before the issues become part of the national narrative. Mainstream news, such as CBC Indigenous and The Globe and Mail, have started providing stronger coverage of major stories emerging from Indigenous communities, but APTN goes deeper by including more context and detail than viewers will find anywhere else. THE UPWARD-SWEEPING ARCH of copper brown metal shimmers like
faint northern lights and curves to the top of APTN’s head office and studio in Winnipeg. The architecture provides a dramatic touch, and APTN’s Indigenous garden next to the building gives a sense of growth and renewal to the section of Portage Avenue just west of Main Street, close to the old, sprawling Portage Place mall, Dollarama and Money Mart stores, and an imposing concrete-and-glass Rogers tower. Once inside, I pass through the heavy front doors and a security checkpoint, and I get buzzed through another door before taking the elevator to the sixth floor. The drifting scent of blackberry sage and sweetgrass candles on the boardroom table in APTN CEO Jean La Rose’s office hits me right away, but it’s his barely contained energy that fills the room. Outside his door, an open mousetrap attached to a blue sign reads, “Complaint Department. Press Button for Service.” (“There haven’t been any complaints,” he says.) Inside the large office, three walls painted warm burnt orange, pale red, and deep blue are backdrops to a collection of Aboriginal art, wildlife photography, and a large Tribal Nations map. SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 23
“ According to everything we’ve read, and what the producers and young people tell us, it’s actually the best representation they’ve seen of their community.” There’s also a framed hockey sweater signed by players and coaches from the APTN series Hit the Ice, and posters of APTN-produced movies like Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian—a film detailing cinema’s history of degrading Indigenous stereotypes. Standing at the end of the table and wearing his black APTN baseball cap, La Rose looks like a sports coach pumped to bring his team to victory. These days, his mind is on expansion plans, so he’s knocking on doors in the United States, looking for opportunities to launch a new service. La Rose says that APTN is moving up the chain of command in the interview process to the people who make the decisions. “If we do anything, we have to be self-sufficient from the beginning.” That’s crucial, especially since APTN receives no government funding, unlike the CBC. This keeps the network independent, but to be profitable in a new country is another story. Wearing a short-sleeved khaki brown shirt and black jeans, with a thick black Fitbit and silver bracelet on one arm and a wide-band Casio sports watch on the other, he’s definitely not dressed in the usual executive attire. But then, he’s not the usual CEO. La Rose is someone who speaks his mind, and he’s never shy to criticize external entities that cross him. A member of the Abenaki First Nation in Quebec, he studied journalism at Algonquin College in Ottawa. La Rose became CEO of APTN in 2002 after working as director of communications for the Assembly of First Nations, a national advocacy organization. It was a position that gave him a deep understanding of the country’s 634 First Nations. The experience makes him uniquely qualified for the job—with 1.4 million Indigenous people in Canada who speak 60 different languages, there’s a lot to cover. With such a broad scope, it seems inevitable the network would face criticism from its viewers. Anyone who thinks APTN takes the side of the Aboriginal communities it serves, doesn’t understand their complexities. Even the comedy-drama Mohawk Girls—which has been described as Sex and the City, Mohawk style, and is one of the network’s biggest hits—garners complaints from older viewers and the Mohawk community. “They say it’s not representative of our community,” La Rose says. “According to everything we’ve read, and what the producers and young people tell us, it’s actually the best representation they’ve seen of their community.” The same is true of Blackstone, a show that ran on APTN and then moved onto Netflix due to its popularity. La Rose shakes his head and explains how one First Nation chief blasted him, calling the show “horrendous” and saying he was insulted—people might think the chief on Blackstone was meant to be him. “I thought to myself, ‘I wouldn’t say that if I were you, because everything that is wrong about being a leader is in that chief,’” he says. La Rose has learned that you can’t please everyone, particularly when trying to accurately represent Indigenous communities that have been misrepresented for so long. But it doesn’t stop him from trying.
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Jean La Rose Chief executive officer
APTN IS THE FIRST INDEPENDENT, national Aboriginal network in the
world and, in 2016, it broadcasted in English, French, and 20 Indigenous languages. But the channel’s story begins 25 years before its inception, when a young woman named Lorna Roth was working in Frobisher Bay (later named Iqaluit), Baffin Island, for the National Film Board. In her book, Something New in the Air, where she charts the development of Indigenous television, Roth recounts a time when she accompanied an Inuit student while he visited his grandfather. She arrived at the small house, constructed of Ski-Doo–crate wood patched with snow, to find the student’s grandfather intently watching The Edge of Night on a 21-inch Sony television propped on a dresser. Five days a week at exactly 12:30 p.m., the town looked deserted as almost all of its residents tuned in to the long-running soap opera. Roth realized that the northerners, many of whom couldn’t understand English, were using television as an anthropological field site “to learn about the ‘qallunaat,’ or ‘white people.’” At the time, broadcasting only went one way: from south to north. After a few attempts to create a northern TV network, an application for a service known as Television Northern Canada—APTN’s original form— was approved in 1991. Roth, now a professor in Concordia University’s communication studies department, says that the Broadcasting Act of 1991 legally recognized for the first time that Aboriginal broadcasting was an intrinsic part of the Canadian broadcasting system. “It made a strong argument going forward for a licence, even though it didn’t have the total support of everyone in Canada. Most people didn’t even know about it,” she says. APTN’s licence approval and subsequent launch took place in 1999, expanding the network nationwide. Initially, the channel number was placed high on the spectrum, making the network difficult to find and having an impact on advertising revenue. Still, Roth says, APTN is here to to stay. “Obviously its idea is to provide a perspective that is absent from the larger broadcasting system,” she says. “That’s what it is doing very well and that’s why it was put on the air.” APTN’s perspective is crucial in this time of truth and reconciliation. National newspapers, magazines, and radio and television networks have all told stories of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). But the APTN documentary series Taken, which launched last September and is now producing its second season, offers a purely Indigenous view. Each 30-minute episode focuses on one or two women’s stories and recreates the last moments before they disappeared, using realistic storytelling. “It’s as true a reflection of the events as possible without us trying to steer the viewer in any direction,” La Rose says. “That’s what pure journalism should be.” Taken was created and developed by Lisa Meeches, Kyle Irving, and Rebecca Gibson from Eagle Vision, a Winnipeg-based independent film and television production company. “Three years ago, other broadcasters didn’t think there would be an audience for this, but Jean La Rose got SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 25
“ The familiar accusations that mainstream journalists leave a community immediately after they get the story don’t apply here.”
Paul Barnsley Executive producer
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behind Taken and made it happen by bringing CBC to the table,” says Irving. CBC plans to broadcast the program this summer. Inspired by America’s Most Wanted, the show asks viewers to call Crime Stoppers if they have tips. On Taken, Meeches (the show’s host) introduces each segment with comments from the families, law enforcement, experts, and academics to give a deeper perspective. “We tell stories from all regions to properly represent the fact that this issue affects a cross section of people,” Irving says. Female writers penned each of the first season’s 13 episodes, and women directed half of them. JJ Neepin, a member of the Fox Lake Cree Nation and the owner of JJNeepinFilms, directed two of the upcoming season’s episodes, which were written by her sister and creative partner, Justina Neepin. She says it sometimes takes an Aboriginal woman to tell such a story: “As a Cree First Nations woman, I face mild racism every day. When I talk to the families, I almost feel it could have been me, but I didn’t go to that party or I looked over my shoulder at the right time and made it home.” The familiar accusations that mainstream journalists leave a community immediately after they get the story don’t apply here. The show’s producers and spiritual advisors stay in touch with families directly, on the phone, and through the show’s Facebook page. A memorial page on takentheseries.com displays the names of over a thousand MMIWG, which move like stars floating toward the screen. When users click on a woman’s name, her age and last-known location appear with an invitation to honour her by burning sage in an e-ceremony. When Taken launched last September, Irving complains, it was almost impossible to get entertainment reporters to promote it. “They all said, ‘We’ll wait for the CBC premiere.’ But anytime I put a video on our Facebook page, it gets 10,000 views within 24 hours and up to 27,000 within a few days. So we spread the word that way,” he says. John Doyle of the Globe and Mail is one of the few television critics published nationally and his influence is as mighty as the acerbic sense of humour he uses when he can’t find anything good about a program. According to Doyle, it is difficult to give niche shows like Taken much attention from September to early November because of the concurrent avalanche of major premieres, ranging from HBO dramas to Netflix documentaries. “There is a basic problem with APTN and other Canadian channels that don’t get a lot of attention and it may be in the marketing and publicity for shows,” he says. “People who are shrewd enough on subjects not immediately popular will hire an individual publicist. If these publicists are good, they know how to approach me to let me know this is important to view.” Doyle was one of the first critics to promote Mohawk Girls, which got his attention because the producers contacted him at a time when there wasn’t a lot of competition. Another show Doyle likes is APTN Investigates, a hard-hitting news program whose stories change lives. “I’ve seen some of the episodes and they are very good,”
he says. Nick Taylor-Vaisey, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), says the show has high-quality reporting, and he believes that it will be just a matter of time before the rest of Canada figures it out. “APTN Investigates’ reporters have windows into communities because they have built up trust and proven their storytelling can make a difference.” The man behind APTN Investigates is executive producer Paul Barnsley, who has been reporting in the Aboriginal community for 24 years. When I met him for lunch at Winnipeg’s Feast Cafe Bistro, Barnsley was preparing for a trip to Toronto to accept a lifetime achievement award from Journalists for Human Rights. Short and wiry with a head full of tight red curls streaked with grey, Barnsley lights up a Colts Mild cigarrillo while we wait in the cold for a taxi. He laughs, recalling the early 1990s when he worked for the now-discontinued Tekawennake newspaper in Ohsweken, Ontario, near Brantford. “Back when the Six Nations Warrior Society was involved in the cigarette trade, someone approached me and said, ‘You white guys come and get what you want and then leave and forget about us,’” says Barnsley. “I knew I wouldn’t have any credibility if I did that.” He never left. The episode that, at the time, garnered APTN Investigates its largest national attention was its coverage of the Bruce Carson scandal in 2011. The story was full of sordid details about an aging bureaucrat’s sex life and his connection to a company selling water systems to First Nations— gumshoe detective work at its best. It started when, outside a gas station in Kingston, a source gave Ottawa freelancer Kenneth Jackson a box sealed with duct tape. It contained dozens of emails about Carson, a senior advisor to former prime minister Stephen Harper. Barnsley, Jackson, and APTN journalist Jorge Barrera pieced the emails together and discovered that Carson was using his government connections to open doors in First Nations communities for a water treatment company called H2O Professionals. Mainstream journalists wrote about the scandal but didn’t go deep into the First Nations water treatment side of the story. Instead, they focused on the part about Carson’s fiancée, Michele McPherson—a former escort decades his junior—having a lucrative contract with the company. “Mainstream went for the hooker angle,” says Barnsley. Carson’s on-camera interview is difficult to watch—he boldly promotes the water company and then tries to skulk away after realizing APTN has the information to sink him. “I felt like Ben Bradlee,” says Barnsley with a laugh. “Every journalist should have one story like that.” Carson was found not guilty in 2015 because it was determined that officials he approached in 2011 within Indian and Northern Affairs Canada didn’t have authority to approve or purchase water treatment systems on behalf of First Nations. However, that acquittal was overturned by the Court of Appeal in February 2017, and Carson was convicted and found guilty of criminal influence-peddling. SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 27
“ We are having a conversation among ourselves and inviting the rest of Canada to have a look.”
Who’s Watching?
The challenge of measuring impact in remote communities
APTN journalists break stories before the issues become part of the national narrative.
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SHOE-LEATHER REPORTING in far-flung communities isn’t cheap. In 2015, APTN’s expenses and revenue totalled $39 million and $45.4 million, respectively. The latter was generated by advertising, strategic partnerships, and 11 million guaranteed subscribers, each paying 31 cents monthly. But APTN doesn’t know how many people are actually watching. Getting accurate ratings from Numeris, the industry association that compiles them, is an ongoing irritation in Jean La Rose’s life. “We have serious concerns about the way it records our numbers,” he says. “It’s all about the ratings, and our population isn’t measured by Numeris.” Ian Gill, president of Discourse Media in Vancouver and the author of No News Is Bad News, agrees that using ratings to justify advertising dollars for APTN is flawed because the channel performs a vital public service. “If you’re in a remote community and 100 people see a story, it’s just as important as 100,000 people seeing a story in southern Canada,” he says. Numeris, made up of Canadian broadcasters, agencies, and advertisers, determines ratings by using an inaudible code in the channel signal to record television viewing in about 4,500 Canadian households (about 11,000 people) in six major markets and assorted regional samples. Written diaries are also used to measure viewership for 105,000 people per year. But it doesn’t measure the North, where APTN viewership among Indigenous Peoples tends to be higher. “Numeris would have us believe that its extrapolation from [written] diaries tells us what every Canadian is doing every minute,” La Rose says. Tom Jenks, director of communications at Numeris, defends the non-profit association’s methodology. “If APTN feels it’s important for us to start measuring the territories, that’s something it needs to bring up through our committee and board structure,” says Jenks. —KAREN McCALL
BACK IN WINNIPEG, the nightly APTN National News is wrapping up
in the station’s studio, a cone-shaped, chrome-and-Plexiglas teepee. Baseball caps are pulled low and heads are down in the quiet control room across the hall. Pugliese is watching the small screen, ensuring every second of the show goes off perfectly. Afterwards, her loud, infectious laugh fills the newsroom as she returns to her office, where papers are piled up high on her desk, on her chair, and in boxes all over the floor. In the interview for her position at APTN, when the inevitable question about her biggest weakness came up, Pugliese let the interviewers know right upfront. “I’m a messy desk person. You’ll never fix it. People have tried,” she says, laughing. Although keeping her desk tidy is not her first priority, she is just as concerned with the meticulous details in her work as she is with the big picture. “Primarily, we are having a conversation among ourselves and inviting the rest of Canada to have a look,” she says. “We are trying to open it up.” Pugliese is of Algonquin and Italian descent and a member of the Algonquin First Nation of Pikwàkanagàn in the Ottawa Valley. She joined APTN in 2012 with over 15 years of broadcasting, communications, and investigative reporting experience. She is clear on her view that APTN also tells stories that uncover corruption in their own communities. At a CAJ conference last year, APTN sponsored a panel called “Following the Money in Indian Country.” The panel discussed the Aboriginal-owned Tribal Councils Investment Group, which made millions of dollars in profit intended to help impoverished members of Manitoba First Nations. An APTN story exposed how the investment group blew the money on strippers, booze, and exotic trips. “Journalists were asking me, ‘What about us going into Native communities for those kinds of stories—do we have the right?’ And the answer is, of course you do,” she says. This editorial approach is what keeps APTN relevant. In the end, Pugliese always comes back to the five topics her reporters decided the station should be covering every day. For example, water: Indigenous people are at the forefront, involved in everything from protesting dirty water to protesting the construction of oil pipelines in places where a spill could be devastating. Last August, APTN reporter Dennis Ward and two camera operators were the first and, at times, the only national journalists at the Standing Rock protest site in North Dakota. APTN Investigates presented Ward’s documentary, “Clash at Standing Rock,” at the end of November, showcasing exclusive footage. The network continues its coverage of the Dakota Access Pipeline in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to move forward with its construction. Now, the whole world is watching. “Mainstream media moves in when it looks like it’s going to be a flashpoint, but the stories we did about North Dakota got the highest online hits we’ve ever had—more than a million views,” Pugliese says. “Everything we do has a deep story because everything has context.” SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 29
The Podcast Evolution Top producers reflect on what’s coming soon to an ear near you B Y ERICA NG AO ILLUSTRATION BY JEANNIE PHAN
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HE SALTY SCENT OF POPCORN and a brisk November draft filter through the dim theatre of Toronto’s Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema as people stroll in, most clutching coffee cups. A daybed-turned-sofa is onstage in front of the screen, elevated high enough to see from the back. Hot Docs is known for its annual international documentary festival, but on Friday, and all weekend long, the space is dedicated to the power of the human voice. The inaugural Hot Docs Podcast Festival is designed to be an all-access pass to the top Canadian and American podcasters, making the familiar voices that accompany long commutes or tedious chores no longer disembodied. On stage right now is Hannah Sung, one of the morning panelists. She co-hosts and produces The Globe and Mail’s Colour Code, a podcast launched two months earlier. The newsroom had put out a call for special project pitches and video journalist Sung, along with life section editor and columnist Denise Balkissoon, proposed a podcast on race in Canada, a topic they felt was not being covered adequately. Neither had done a podcast before, but for the next eight months they focused extensively on it, with Sung working on the show full-time and Balkissoon contributing to it in addition to her regular duties. The resulting 11-episode series explored sensitive and sometimes uncomfortable conversations about
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race, from how Indian Status resonates in Indigenous communities today in “Race Card,” to the complexities of mixed-race relationships in “First Comes Love.” When the show premiered, it ranked at the top of iTunes’ New and Noteworthy podcasts list. Later in the evening, a long line forms around the corner for a recording of Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids, during which two additional mics are pointed toward the audience to catch every gasp, laugh, and shriek. The weekend concludes with a live, Degrassi-themed episode of The Imposter, complete with guest Stefan Brogren reading dirty fan fiction and Toronto band Germaphobes covering songs from the show at the side of the stage. The success of Colour Code was clear from its metrics, but it was made tangible from listener response. Each episode is embedded on The Globe and Mail’s website for direct listening, along with supplementary pieces that accompany each episode. An ad for the show was printed on the front page of the newspaper the day it launched. Listeners tweeted using #ColourCode, and both Sung and Balkissoon would respond. The show was designed as an experiment, but media organizations beyond the Globe are adopting podcasts in an effort to lure new audiences. Initially, podcasting was defined by tightly knit communities of hobbyists looking to share common interests. The intimacy of podcasting, combined with a blend of journalism and the fictional elements of storytelling made the medium particularly suited to long-form investigations into sensitive or controversial topics. The popularization of mobile devices made it worthwhile for media organizations to experiment with the form. The barrier to entry is low, making it difficult for a podcast to stand out because listeners can choose from thousands of shows. When podcasts make an impact, though, they create an empathy not easily found in other mediums. It’s easy to forget just how young this technology is. In 2000, software developer Dave Winer created a new version of RSS that enabled listeners to access and subscribe to audio content automatically over the Internet. Early adopters began to experiment with this new distribution system, including former MTV VJ Adam Curry, who in 2004 launched Daily Source Code, a mix of Curry’s takes on life, music, and other podcasters. It is widely considered one of the first breakout podcasts. Guardian journalist Ben Hammersley coined the word “podcasting” that same year while reporting on the growing trend of amateur Internet radio. A hybrid of “iPod” and “broadcast,” it became the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2005 Word of the Year. Ten years later, in 2015, Apple upgraded iTunes to version 4.9, the first to include a directory allowing users to search for and subscribe to podcasts. The number of podcast subscriptions grew to over one billion. But the popularity of podcasts wavered after an initial surge in 2005, as other emerging mass media like video streaming gained favour. If podcasting has never been embraced by mass audiences, it has nevertheless experienced slow, steady growth. According to Edison Research, 21 percent of Americans aged 12 or older said in 2016 that they listened to at least one podcast in the preceding month, compared to 12 percent in 2013. While there are no widely accepted numbers in the United States, the Pew Research Center’s “State of the News Media 2016” report says that publicly available data from Libsyn, one of the largest commercial podcast hosting companies, indicates an increase in both the number of shows and download requests. The second wave of popularity began October 3, 2014, with NPR’s Serial. Its runaway success created a buzz, indicating that podcasting might grow beyond its indie roots to become a bona fide mainstream industry. A spin-off of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, Serial’s first season investigated the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee in Baltimore, and her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, who was arrested and convicted of the crime. Sarah Koenig, a former newspaper reporter and producer at This American
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More than ever, podcasting is a way for journalists to engage with audiences. They are no longer just bylines, the audiences are no longer just clicks, and the potential to create a relationship that gives stories resonance is real.
Life, hosted and produced the 12-part season (along with three follow-up episodes about Syed’s hearing). The combination of true crime, new reporting, evidence, and Koenig’s narration accelerated the podcast to an unheard-of level of success for the medium. Within four weeks, the show reached a million downloads per episode and, a year later, “the Serial effect” yielded over 90 million downloads. Parallel to America, podcasting had also taken hold in Canada. In 2005, early CBC Radio experiments simply involved making segments of programs like Quirks and Quarks, The Current, and Definitely Not the Opera available as downloadable files. CBC then moved beyond digital extensions to launch the CBC Radio 3 Podcast in June 2005. Hosted by musician Grant Lawrence, each weekly episode featured the best in new Canadian independent music. The show was an instant hit. The first year’s 54 episodes attracted more than two million downloads and 40,000 to 60,000 weekly subscribers. The podcast format resonated with Radio 3’s younger, tech-savvy audience as an accessible, portable broadcast alternative. On its one-year anniversary, a letter to the National Post stated, “The national and international success of the podcast makes it clear that the CBC has succeeded where others have failed, and has done what this paper has said was impossible; it has popularized Canadian art and entertainment.” In recent years, as the podcast’s popularity appeared to wane and its production cycle was extended from weekly to monthly, CBC began to experiment with original series in 2015. The first show, Campus, reports on the lives of post-secondary students. Three more podcasts followed: Love Me, Back Story, and Someone Knows Something. Leslie Merklinger, senior director of audio innovation at CBC Radio, says the shows are aimed at a broader, more diverse audience. “Our goal is to share the stories with as many Canadians as possible and to reflect Canada as best we can,” she says. Merklinger says that CBC, in the wake of Serial, wanted to make original podcasts that were both popular and innovative. In 2016, CBC News launched two new podcasts: Secrets of The Fifth Estate, a behind-the-scenes look into the investigative program’s most memorable stories; and Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams?, an eight-part investigation into the 1989 unsolved case of a murdered Indigenous woman. The latter was based on CBC journalist Connie Walker’s reportage of Williams’s death, which she began after receiving an anonymous tip from Garry Kerr, a former RCMP officer and the lead investigator on the case. According to CBC, the RCMP acknowledged that it has received new information because of the podcast, and that the case is active. While CBC has a strong tradition of audio storytelling and broadcasting, the rest of Canadian media are catching up. The Edmonton Journal’s legislature reporter Emma Graney has hosted more than 150 politics podcast episodes, while politics reporters at Maclean’s round up the week’s parliamentary news in Maclean’s On the Hill Politics Podcast. The Toronto Star and Postmedia have launched sports podcasts, including I’ll Have Another—where Star reporters Doug Smith and Laura Armstrong discuss the latest sports news—and the hockey-focused Off the Post, hosted by the Toronto Sun’s John Matisz. At Chatelaine, editor-at-large Rachel Giese conducts intimate conversations with notable personalities on UpTalk. More than ever, podcasting is a way for journalists to engage with audiences. The former are no longer just bylines, the latter are no longer just clicks, and the potential to create a relationship that gives stories resonance is real. “It’s a format that breaks down the walls between the journalist and the audience,” says Balkissoon. “That’s something people want in the social age.”
HITTING THE KEYBOARD TO PAUSE, Lindsay Michael asks, “Did that intro make SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 33
sense to everybody?” Three producers sit around her desk, facing the computer. They nod and keep listening, occasionally jotting notes. The chatter in the next cubicle doesn’t bother them. They’re reviewing episode 67: “Must Hear Podcasts of the Season.” It tells five stories they’ve selected, from the founding of America’s largest African-American–owned broadcasting company, to a fictional live radio variety show broadcast from atop the Eiffel Tower. Before each episode is released, the team conducts a “listening session,” during which they play the full segment out loud to do last-minute edits of production blips or inappropriate content. The team runs through the hour-long show, chuckling at humorous moments, heads down in thought during the serious segments. Behind them, two whiteboards are scribbled with plans for the next two months’ shows. Michael co-hosts (with Metro Morning host Matt Galloway) and produces Podcast Playlist, which curates an eclectic mix of podcasts. The idea was to introduce new content to the portion of CBC Radio’s audience that doesn’t listen to podcasts, as well as to introduce new podcasts to seasoned listeners. Although not all podcasts work on radio and vice versa, the common denominator is storytelling, and for Michael the mediums are complementary. “What’s happening in podcasting is innovative and exciting,” she says. “It brings a different energy to terrestrial airwaves.” When Michael started the show in 2015, Canadian podcasts generally dealt with lower production values. Now, she’s seeing a shift to more sophisticated and creative productions. This is partially due to the fact that there are more opportunities for people to produce work in the medium. The technology is easily accessible, and there are more ways for independent podcasters to reach an audience. Before, CBC was the only Canadian avenue for someone who wanted to create audio stories. Now, anybody can do it, meaning that quality and creativity have become the main differentiators. “The thing that everybody can be doing better, independents and legacy broadcasters and media organizations, is to push the boundaries of what podcasting does,” Michael says.
Podcasters’ Picks
JP DAVIDSON’S INTRODUCTION to podcasting came in 2010 in a friend’s kitchen. They spent their free time working on a dating-and-relationships show called I Like You. With no previous training, Davidson initially taught himself the basics of interviewing and production before enrolling in a formal workshop for beginner radio producers. He enjoyed it so much that he pursued freelance audio production full-time. “For a long time, I only got a few things on the radio,” he says. “But, slowly, I built up a portfolio.” Davidson turned his attention to podcasting as more opportunities became available. For the past five years, he’s made a living as a freelance producer, creating The Risk Takers—a five-part series about the stories of small business owners—for the Globe. He’s also been producing branded content for RBC and Greenpeace USA. As the media organizations take note of podcasting, so do other brands. One company that’s leading the charge in branded podcasts is Pacific Content. Founder Steve Pratt calls it “the weirdest business in the history of niche businesses.” Pratt started the Vancouver-based company in 2014 after spending a decade at CBC Radio, where he co-created the CBC Radio 3 Podcast. He’s recruited experienced journalists and producers, many of whom have worked at CBC. Pacific Content’s first client was Slack, the workplace communication tech startup. Slack Variety Pack, which featured a mix of stories, sketches, and journalism on modern work culture, launched in 2015 and garnered over three million listens by the year’s end. Pacific Content was fea-
HANNAH SUNG Producer and co-host, Colour Code Hannah recommends Media Girlfriends: “Nana aba Duncan’s personal podcast, Media Girlfriends, which is just as it sounds—she chats with her girlfriends in the media (I’m one of them) and episodes revolve around the kind of themes that come up in conversations in real life, including ambition, career, courage, and cultural appropriation.”
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Five audio shows you’ll enjoy WITH SO MANY PODCASTS to choose from, it can get overwhelming. Often, the best shows find popularity through word-of-mouth, and who better to recommend podcasts than the people who make them? Five Canadian podcasters share their favourite journalistic and storytellingbased shows. KATIE JENSEN Freelance podcast producer, formerly of Canadaland and The Imposter Katie recommends Campus: “Candid, heart-warming, and often sad, Campus shares intimate firstperson retellings of post-secondary experiences from all walks of life.” JP DAVIDSON Freelance podcast producer, The Risk Takers JP recommends Cited: “Cited should be boring, but isn’t. Its beat is academic research, but it really brings the stories and people involved to life through snappy documentary storytelling and great production values. And naturally, it provides a bibliography with every episode.” LINDSAY MICHAEL Producer and co-host, Podcast Playlist Lindsay recommends The Lapse: “Very creative and solid storytelling. A great listen.”
“ Everybody has for years predicted the death of radio,” says Pratt. “It never goes away because spoken-word audio is really powerful.”
DAN MISENER Creator, Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids Dan recommends The Sniffer: “Short, bite-sized episodes full of trend-watching and smart analysis.” —ERICA NGAO
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tured as one of Entrepreneur’s 100 brilliant companies of 2016. The following year, it again formed a partnership with Slack to launch Work in Progress, a podcast about how people find meaning in work. Companies create podcasts with Pacific Content because they reach consumers directly, rather than purchasing ad space, during which listeners are liable to skip ahead, in other podcasts. As with blogs and video, podcasts can ideally promote a brand without resorting to heavy-handed marketing messages. “Everybody has for years predicted the death of radio,” says Pratt. “It never goes away because spoken-word audio is really powerful.”
EPISODE 155 OF CANADALAND OPENS with its signature catchy jingle, which fades as host Jesse Brown begins. Usually, his voice is clear as he introduces the topic of the week’s episode, but he sounds flustered and worried. “Guys, we’re having some problems.” It’s mid-October 2016 and the outlet has lost almost half its staff. In the 28-minute-long episode, Brown speaks earnestly about the departures, both to listeners and with departing staff. He makes a plea to listeners for their support and lists the highlights that their support has enabled Canadaland to achieve over the preceding three years. One of the country’s most well-known podcasts since its inception in 2013, Canadaland has grown into an independent news site and podcast network that includes three other shows: Commons, The Imposter, and Canadaland Short Cuts. Launched by Brown, a journalist who had previously worked at CBC Radio and Maclean’s, Canadaland is supported primarily through crowdfunding on Patreon. As of February 2017, over 3,000 patrons contributed $16,100 per month. Since that episode, it has raised enough for a pay increase (for all staff except Brown), an investigations fund, a paid apprenticeship program, a podcast development fund, and a new desk. Former Canadaland producer Katie Jensen can confirm that they really did need another desk. While completing a postgraduate program in radio production, Jensen discovered Canadaland and wrote to Brown. She scored an interview and started interning part-time the following week. She eventually worked full-time on the flagship show and became the founding producer of The Imposter. Her acquaintance with radio began at CFMU, McMaster University’s campus radio station. A biology major, she developed a passion for audio while curating her show Indie-licious. Since leaving Canadaland at the end of January, after producing 139 episodes, Jensen has been focusing on multiple freelance projects, including a podcast for Motherboard and a branded show for a Toronto tech startup. She believes that it’s just a matter of time before more journalistic outlets release podcasts in Canada, and thinks that the medium presents a chance to bring more diversity to the conversation. “Journalism in podcast format has an obligation to put different-sounding voices on the air,” she says. “Voices that maybe are accented, maybe in a different language, maybe have a pattern of speech that would be considered unappealing—anything that would normally prevent somebody from being on the air.”
RYAN MCMAHON HAS ALWAYS had a soft spot for radio. Growing up in Manitoba, he listened to it constantly while hunting and fishing. The Winnipeg-based Anishinaabe comedian later translated this into his podcast, Red Man Laughing, which is now in its sixth season. What started as a way to keep his comedic skills sharp as a stay-at-home father expanded into the first listener-supported Indigenous podcast network, Indian
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“ There’s that old idea that a medium never really finds its voice until a generation of people have grown up consuming it,” says Misener.
& Cowboy, in 2014. “I fell in love with the potential of having Indigenous stories on the Internet forever,” he says. Stories From the Land, a podcast about Indigenous communities, followed that same year. Despite his success, he’s wary of legacy media potentially diminishing the independent roots of podcasting. “These mainstream institutions are in such a panic about how to save their own businesses,” he says. “They’re turning to the new, cool, hip thing.” McMahon joined Canadaland in February as one of three new hosts on Commons. After working in public radio for decades, Jeffrey Dvorkin doesn’t think McMahon has anything to worry about. Now the director of the journalism program at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Dvorkin was previously a managing editor at CBC Radio. He also worked at NPR as its vice president of news and information and later became its first ombudsperson. He worries that media organizations are over-investing in digital and under-investing in talent. “There’s clearly a market for this but, in Canada, we seem to not be very good at figuring out how to move forward,” he says. “There’s a fearful media culture that’s not willing to be experimental.” Dan Misener, a radio producer who worked at CBC for a decade, is willing to experiment. Since 2007, he’s been running a podcast and live event series, Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids, with his wife, Jenna. CBC Radio began to run the program in 2014 as a 10-part summer series. Two years later, Misener left CBC to focus on the podcast and pursue other opportunities, including Pacific Content, where he is the head of audience development in addition to being a producer and host. Having been an independent podcaster and producer for a legacy institution, he believes that there has never been a better time to work on audio storytelling. “There’s that old idea that a medium never really finds its voice until a generation of people have grown up consuming it,” says Misener. “I’m excited to hear new shows built especially to take advantage of the podcast medium.”
THE USUAL SET-UP in the Globe’s old video studio is replaced today by a small round table and two condenser mics. Sung and Balkissoon take a seat across from each other, both scanning over the show notes. The room is quiet as the technical producer sets up the recording equipment. It’s been over two months since Colour Code premiered. Today, Sung and Balkissoon are recording the last episode, “Your Turn.” Throughout the season, they asked listeners to send in their thoughts via voice memo. Now, they’re allowing the audience to be a part of the final episode by playing the best of what they’ve received. As Sung and Balkissoon run through the first half of the episode, they converse with ease, laughing at times, pausing at others. Unlike previous episodes, this one is unscripted and reflective, and the hosts are honest and thoughtful with their words— something that listeners have come to appreciate. “Making a podcast is a lot more work than I thought,” says Balkissoon, laughing. Sung jokingly chides her: “Don’t break the illusion!” The episode is released a week later—a triumphant end to the season. It features interviews with listeners across the country, including Ian Campeau—DJ NDN from A Tribe Called Red. “It’s not just that there’s something like [Colour Code],” he says, “but there’s as many people thinking the same things that I am that it demands a podcast.” Sung and Balkissoon aren’t sure if they want to do a second season. It was an experiment, after all, albeit one that demonstrated what could be done. As the episode comes to a close, Balkissoon thanks the audience one last time for listening. “Yes,” says Sung. “What more can we say?” SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 37
Everyone Is Talking About It How one Quebec TV talk show is changing the way a province experiences the news B Y MAIJA K APPLER
1.7 million people watched Julie Snyder’s May 2016 interview.
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ORIGINAL PHOTO: COURTESY RADIO -CANADA
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In Quebec, Julie Snyder is a superstar. She’s been on TV for over 30 years and has hosted her own talk show in France. She’s worked on the mega-popular Quebec reality shows Star Académie, La Voix (Quebec’s officially licensed version of The Voice), and Le Banquier (the Quebec Deal or No Deal). But many outside Quebec know her primarily as the now-ex-wife of Pierre-Karl Péladeau, who ran the media giant Quebecor until March 2013 and was elected Parti Québécois leader two years later. The uncomfortable intersection between media ownership, power, and public service that makes up Péladeau’s résumé is a story in itself. But for Snyder’s part, she and Péladeau had been together for 14 years and had raised two children before deciding to marry in an elaborate Quebec City ceremony in the summer of 2015, only to announce their divorce five months later. Initially, neither discussed the split openly. But in spring 2016, when she presented a prize at the Gala Artis with Guy A. Lepage, host of the popular Radio-Canada talk show, Tout le monde en parle (TLMEP), Snyder finally relented. In the 12 years since Lepage’s popular talk show first came on the air, he had been campaigning to get Snyder on as a guest. She had always refused, reportedly out of loyalty to TVA, the Quebecor-owned channel that aired most of her shows. But that tie was now severed. As they stood together onstage—Lepage dressed in black and navy, Snyder in a kicky, colourful Gucci dress with pink sleeves and a high yellow collar—Lepage said, “You know, next Sunday is the final episode of Tout le monde en parle. It might be fun if you wanted to come on.” The audience reacted with cheers even before he finished the suggestion. Snyder feigned ignorance, insisting that she had no new projects and wouldn’t have anything to plug on the show. “Frankly, I don’t know what we would even talk about,” she said. The audience laughed enthusiastically, and both TV personalities smiled mischievously at the camera. “We might be able to think of something,” Lepage deadpanned. On May 1, 2016, 1.7 million people watched as Snyder finally appeared on Tout le monde en parle’s season finale. After a jokey reference to those awards, she launched into one of the most candid, reflective interviews that Tout le monde en parle had ever broadcast. The cameras remained fixed on Snyder almost the whole time, even as she sat silently listening while Lepage and his co-host, Dany Turcotte, asked questions. Part of her candour seemed to come from the familiarity that existed between her and the interviewers; despite the rivalry between their networks, there were frequent references to people they had both worked with, to shared experiences in the tight-knit world of Quebec media. Even when Lepage and Turcotte’s questions were intimately personal—what’s it like being in mediation with someone whose reputation as a union-buster gave him the nickname, “King of the Lockout”?—she responded in a way that felt honest. Lepage and Turcotte shared the interview, but it was Lepage—approachable but shrewd, with a high forehead and a neat goatee—who asked most of the questions. Turcotte, smaller and more jovial, tends to provide levity. Undeniably, the stage belongs to Lepage; he always begins and ends the show. But Turcotte is more integral than the sidekicks on American late-night shows. The two have an easy rapport, frequently addressing
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“ The Tout le monde en parle interview was like a nuclear explosion.”
each other with comfortable shorthand and occasionally trading goodnatured barbs. As interviewers, they know when to ask probing questions, but they usually also know when to hang back. The Snyder interview featured more than a few long pauses as she searched for the right words. Lepage and Turcotte treated her with warmth in a way that went beyond the kind of amiability that’s expected of TV hosts. It felt like they were on her side in the contentious personal and professional relationships she was describing. At one point, they jokingly suggested she get into politics and run against her ex: “You’re more popular than him, you know.” Still, they were willing to press her on the finer points of her contract, of her divorce mediation. Snyder had clearly shown up ready to talk, and the TLMEP interview gave her a prime opportunity. The response the next day was bombastic. Le Journal de Montréal published a list of her top 14 “citations à coeur ouvert” of the night—quotes from an open heart. “It’s a historical moment on the show,” Huffington Post Québec reported. It was all over that day’s editions of big papers like the Montreal Gazette and La Presse, as well as free dailies like Metro; it was a top story even on English-language CBC radio. Then, that afternoon, Pierre-Karl Péladeau—a man so thin-skinned and single-minded that a comedian who once mocked him in a two-minute-long sketch was immediately fired and allegedly blacklisted—stepped down as Parti Québécois leader. He cited family reasons. Péladeau’s retirement didn’t last long; he returned to Quebecor as CEO less than a year later. But after winning the PQ leadership race by near-record numbers and vowing to “make Quebec a country” in his first speech, the sudden withdrawal from politics was a shock. There’s “no question” that Péladeau’s resignation was the result of Snyder’s interview, says Brendan Kelly, an entertainment columnist for the Montreal Gazette. “Look at the timing. The Tout le monde en parle interview was like a nuclear explosion.” On that same episode, Quebec filmmaker Xavier Dolan gave a breezy interview, occasionally pausing to joke around with the other guests or to take a drink from the glass of champagne in front of him. But one of the questions posed by Lepage gave Dolan pause: did he think his new movie, Juste la fin du monde, deserves the Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival’s top prize? Dolan took some time before answering. “That’s a trick question,” he said. Lepage fixed Dolan with a cajoling look, urging him to give a good answer. “On est entre nous,” Lepage told Dolan in a placating tone. It’s just us here. He’s joking, of course. An average episode of Tout le monde en parle draws in 1.3 million viewers. But, like a lot of Quebec media, the show is made for an eager and a specific audience. It doesn’t have to try accounting for the difference in opinion between Nova Scotians and Albertans; it doesn’t need to try to be all things to all Canadians. In a way that’s rare in this country’s media, the show is made for an “us” that’s clearly defined. Kelly says that anyone with a little knowledge of French can learn a lot about Quebec culture and politics by tuning in to TLMEP; he even thinks that the rest of the country might do well to try out a similar program. The panel show is a common format for news and comedy in the United Kingdom, but English-speaking Canadian TV has never seriously tried it—at least, not as successfully as TLMEP. “I see no equivalent forum in English Canada,” La Presse columnist Patrick Lagacé wrote in a 2014 piece about Tout le monde en parle for The Globe and Mail. The show, which has aired Sunday nights since
September 2004, dominates Quebec’s media landscape. It has a simpleenough structure: Lepage and Turcotte sit at wide tables in the middle of a studio, with audience members seated across from them. Drinks are served. Guests come out for individual interviews but often talk to one another as much as they talk to the hosts. They discuss the week’s news, promote their work, and consider current events—cultural, social, political. It often hosts Quebec stars like Marie-Mai and Jean Leloup, and occasionally international ones: Taylor Swift, Monica Bellucci. In the weeks leading up to the October 2015 election, Tom Mulcair, Gilles Duceppe, and Justin Trudeau all made stops on the show. Over the last decade, it’s been a place where Quebec public life has played out. In an increasingly relevant way, it’s also an outlet that’s significantly affected the news it comments on.
Toward the beginning
of Jack Layton’s second TLMEP interview, which aired four weeks before the 2011 federal election, the then-NDP leader misused a French expression. In response to a question Lepage posed about the French language outside Quebec, Layton described NDP Member of Parliament Yvon Godin as un Acadien féroce. It translates literally to “a ferocious Acadian,” but the French adjective carries a more savage, animalistic meaning than in English. It’s rarely applied to a person. “Un Acadien féroce?” Lepage repeated, as the audience laughed. “Is [Godin] allowed to go outside, or do you have to tie him up?” Layton quickly accepted Lepage’s suggestion for an alternative word choice (batailleur, or fighter) and moved on. For the rest of the interview, Layton, who made his career in Toronto but was raised in Hudson, a mostly-anglophone Quebec community outside of Montreal, spoke in accented but solid French. He talked about his health, about the possibility of a coalition government in the upcoming election (he respected the Bloc Québécois but preferred to live in a united Canada that works for Quebec, he explained), and about his granddaughter (who, it turned out, has the same name as Lepage’s daughter: Béatrice). He was charming, affable. It would be easy for an anglophone politician to lose the audience after a French-language gaffe, but Layton didn’t; perhaps because Lepage laughed warmly and not maliciously through the entire segment, the crowd stayed with Layton the whole time. But there was also a certain irreverence, a spirit of fun that felt distinct from other interviews Layton gave during that election cycle. Even when Lepage and Turcotte were asking tough questions, it felt accessible in a way that interviews with politicians often are not. Media commentators from CBC, Le Devoir, and Rabble have credited Jack Layton’s 2011 appearance as a significant reason why the NDP did so well in Quebec at that year’s election. The party won an unprecedented 59 seats out of 75; under Tom Mulcair in 2015, they held on to only 16. “It was considered decisive,” says political reporter Philip Authier, who writes for the Montreal Gazette. “That’s where people decided he was un bon Jack”—a good guy. TLMEP is sometimes overtly political—federal party leaders will plead their case in election years. Candidates from the Liberal Party, the NDP, and the Bloc, as well as PQ leaders gearing up to replace Péladeau, all showed up in the fall of 2016. “When elections come around, every politician wants to be on that show,” Authier says. “You cannot expect to win without going on that show.” And outside of election campaigns, SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 41
it’s fairly common for politicians to appear on TLMEP, or for the hosts to tackle political topics with their guests. “There’s more of a range than people might expect,” Kelly says. “They do entertainment stuff, but they also have politics, social stuff. They’ll bring on academics. And it does sometimes change the discourse.” The Layton interview featured several of the show’s trademarks. There’s the “question qui tue,” the question that kills. The room goes dark and the lights dramatically sweep the studio before settling a spotlight on the guest’s face. (In response to the question—did he consider the Liberal party or the Bloc Québécois to be his main adversary in Quebec?— Layton answered that he had to watch out on both sides. “We’re playing two different games at the same time,” he said.) At the show’s end, Turcotte, in his role as “fou du roi”—court jester—presents guests with jokey message cards. In Layton’s case, the particularities of the show’s routines allowed audiences to process his message in an accessible way. Layton “gained a lot from that interview,” says Richard Therrien, a TV columnist at the Quebec City newspaper Le Soleil. “TLMEP played a major role in that, definitely. He was clearly someone who had prepared, but it didn’t seem calculated in the way many political interviews do. It seemed very sincere, very natural. That setup was favourable for him.”
Stéfanie Trudeau (left), Patrick Huard (center), and Philippe Falardeau (right) on TLMEP.
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ORIGINAL PHOTO: COURTESY RADIO -CANADA
Therrien credits the success of that interview to Layton’s charisma—but also to a deliberate choice made by the show’s producers. “They weren’t aggressive,” he says. “They didn’t trap him in the way they’ve trapped other politicians in the past.” One such ambush happened during a disastrous 2007 interview with Mario Dumont, leader of the right-wing provincial party Action démocratique du Québec (APQ). The interview was slightly challenging but fairly pleasant for the first 10 minutes. Dumont outlined the parameters of Quebec’s relationship to the federal government and remarked on a member of his party who had recently been criticized for racist comments. But the interview suddenly shifted after Dumont demurred on a question about the provincial budget. From backstage, a producer wheeled out a blackboard with budget categories as the hosts encouraged Dumont to lay out his party’s financial plan. At first, he was amused, although he didn’t engage. “I have a good memory, but not good enough for this,” he protested. Lepage, facing him at the table, pressed him: “You said your budget was better than the opposition’s, why not prove it?” Turcotte walked up to the blackboard, comically exaggerating his boredom. “Am I the only one working here?” he asked. The audience laughed. The conversation between Dumont and Lepage quickly grew uncivil, heated. After a commercial break, the next guest, journalist Chantal Hébert, joined the fray by declaring that Dumont demonstrated he “wasn’t ready to be premier and wasn’t ready for his exam.” After Dumont’s poor showing in the 2008 provincial election, his party accused Radio-Canada of being in the bag for the Liberal party, with TLMEP at the forefront of its complaints. For Therrien, Dumont’s treatment is an example of the show’s heavy-handed attempts at editorializing. On that episode, Hébert “was extremely severe, extremely hard on him,” Therrien says. Tout le monde en parle’s stage provides politicians and entertainers alike with a platform that’s wide-reaching and influential. But as Dumont learned, those statements aren’t always received in the way they’re intended. In the days that followed Julie Snyder’s interview, the respect SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 43
In the Press
A brief rundown of the dramatic and bizarre saga of Julie Snyder and Pierre-Karl Péladeau IT’S HARD TO HAVE A CONVERSATION about media in Quebec that doesn’t at least tangentially involve Quebecor CEO Pierre-Karl Péladeau or his ex-wife, prominent TV host and producer, Julie Snyder. The two have deep ties to the province’s journalism and entertainment communities, and their lives have been chronicled by Quebec newspapers, radio stations, and TV shows, both francophone and anglophone. Their lavish wedding and subsequent divorce, her TLMEP interview, and his political resignation all got a huge amount of press—but what played out in Quebec newspapers afterward was even more bizarre and dramatic.
July 2, 2016 La Presse reports that a man followed Snyder as she waited for a flight at Quebec City Jean Lesage International Airport. After she files a complaint with the Quebec police, La Presse discovers that the man in question works for a private investigation firm, hired by a person identified to the public as “John Doe.” Péladeau publicly denies any involvement. July 17, 2016 After a ruling from the Superior Court of Quebec, the private investigators give Snyder “John Doe’s” name, the Canadian Press reports. She chooses not to reveal it publicly. August 2, 2016 The Gazette reports that conservative pundit Éric Duhaime has announced on his radio show that the ex-wife of a man Snyder is seeing is the one who hired the detective. Snyder’s lawyer tells the paper the claim has “no grounds whatsoever.” August 3, 2016 Duhaime apologizes for releasing what he calls an “unfounded hypothesis.” (In a statement to La Presse, a representative from the radio station says, “Éric Duhaime is a host, not a journalist.”) Duhaime claims he now knows “John Doe’s” true identity: Péladeau. Snyder refuses to comment, and still has not publicly released the person’s name. December 13, 2016 Quebecor-owned Le Journal de Montréal is the first outlet to break the story that Péladeau has launched a lawsuit against Daniel Lacombe, the ex-husband of Marie-Christine Couture, Péladeau’s former girlfriend who committed suicide in October 2016. Péladeau accuses Lacombe of threatening him and harassing his family, and of teaming up with Snyder to form a “relentlessly vengeful” plot to make his life intolerable. Later that day, Snyder denies the charges. In a statement to La Presse, she accuses Péladeau of “psychological harassment” and of “attempting to harm her career, her reputation, and her image.” December 14, 2016 At a press conference, Péladeau calls Snyder’s accusations “serious, false, and defamatory.” As of RRJ press deadline, a date for Péladeau’s trial against Lacombe had not been set. —MAIJA KAPPLER
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and adulation that had been so widely expressed for her began to give way to more critical takes. On May 4, Therrien reported that Snyder had been granted access to the tape of the interview before the show aired, access that would typically never be allowed. Therrien still doesn’t have a definitive answer as to whether that decision was justified. “If I were Guy A., I probably would have accepted,” he says. At that point in time, having Snyder on the show would likely be worth almost any condition her team imposed. Therrien says he has enough faith in the show’s process to believe it would not hand the reins over to an interview subject, even a powerful one. “Knowing Guy A. Lepage, he’s ... how to say it ... he’s fairly convincing, let’s say. There would have been negotiations,” Therrien says. “He’s going to stick to a certain standard of quality. So I don’t think Julie would be able to control the narrative the way she could on her own shows.” Still, he says, “Julie Snyder is someone who prepares enormously. She’s a TV pro, she knows how it works. It’s evident that this interview was prepared for.” Kelly agrees with Therrien. “Looking back, it’s hard to see it as anything but a carefully staged PR coup for Julie Snyder,” he says. Before her appearance on Tout le monde en parle, police officer Stéfanie Trudeau was publicly reviled. Known by her badge number, “Matricule 728,” she gained notoriety during the spring 2012 student protests, when cell phone footage showing her pepper-spraying demonstrators was circulated. In the video, Trudeau’s movements are swift and surprising. She doesn’t warn the mostly calm group of protesters, one of whom is yelling but not moving, that she’s about to strike. After it happens, the man who had been yelling remains in the same spot, repeating the same words over and over: “Est-ce que je t’ai touché?” (“Did I even touch you?”) Behind him, two people offer handkerchiefs to another affected protester, who’s crouched on the ground, coughing as she rocks back and forth in pain. It would be a damning video even if the protests didn’t have widespread support within Quebec. At the time of Trudeau’s appearance on the show, in September 2015, she also was facing unrelated assault charges. (She was later found guilty.) When she walked out onto the Tout le monde en parle stage, Trudeau was greeted with tepid applause; the room was actively hostile. Lepage and Turcotte asked provocative questions, but largely took the backseat. Trudeau fielded questions from other guests, including actor and comedian Patrick Huard (star of the 2011 film Starbuck and 2006’s crossover hit, Bon Cop, Bad Cop), who glared at Trudeau and anxiously tapped his fingers against the table during the segment. Filmmaker Philippe Falardeau, director of Monsieur Lazhar, asked a politely worded question about police protocol that Trudeau answered tersely. Soon, the two were openly fighting. “I’m asking if you think at all about the reasons behind social disruption,” Falardeau said. Trudeau was disdainful. “We’re not there to—” she started, but he interrupted, jeering: “To think?” The audience reacted with surprise and glee; many people clapped. Trudeau continued to point out that the law must be respected, even if people disagree with it; Huard pointedly asked her if she would respect the rule of the law when her trial is decided. Lepage ended the interview by asking Trudeau if she has an anger management problem. It was a thrilling, heated exchange—it was great TV. But many viewers didn’t think it was a fair interview. Even though the hosts, the guests, and the audience exhibited behaviour that was largely an expression of public sentiment, its severity on such a public stage struck many viewers as overly harsh. An uproar about Trudeau’s treatment erupted on social
media, and the movie Huard and Falardeau were there to promote was threatened with boycotts. The appearance of a pile-on was likely what caused such a big public upset. “That’s one of the things you have to be very careful of in broadcast media,” Kelly says. If a guest appears to be under attack—even an unpopular guest—“the public is always going to sympathize with that person.” Therrien sees the Matricule 728 interview as an unsuccessful attempt at the kind of editorializing the show attempted with Mario Dumont. “People have accused the show of wanting people to fail,” he says. “But if that was the intended goal, it wasn’t the goal that was achieved.” Lepage told La Presse that they would have invited leaders of the student protest onto the same episode if their intention had been to attack or humiliate Trudeau. Falardeau and Huard have mostly avoided talking about the incident, and it hasn’t come up on TLMEP since.
The 2016-17 season, the show’s thirteenth, continues to fea-
ture the province’s biggest stories. The premiere included an interview with anglophone businessman Mitch Garber, who had just made a public plea for English and French Quebeckers to make more of an effort to culturally understand one another. Patrick Lagacé appeared on the show after news broke about the Montreal police’s surveillance of his phone. So did former child star Jérémy Gabriel, whose human rights lawsuit against comedian Mike Ward for mocking his disability launched a public conversation about when and how limits should be placed on freedom of expression. The show discussed the American election, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, Montreal’s upcoming 375th anniversary party (which Lepage is hosting). And lots of people were watching; the season’s ratings were consistently above one million viewers. When a late November conversation about health care led several of the show’s guests to criticize provincial health minister Gaétan Barrette, he took to Twitter to instantaneously respond to his critics. In early December, Lepage and Turcotte welcomed Laval mayor Marc Demers to talk about Gilles Vaillancourt, one of his predecessors, who had just been sentenced to six years in jail after pleading guilty to fraud. This was great news for viewers of the show. It was a huge story, and Demers, a former police detective, had many insights about the case. But it was bad news for competing stations. The TLMEP team allegedly asked Demers for exclusivity, meaning he had to cancel all other scheduled appearances. This was particularly offensive to former ADQ leader Mario Dumont, who has worked as a TV host since exiting politics in 2008, and whose feelings toward the show haven’t warmed much since the disastrous chalkboard incident. (He currently hosts a show on the TVA-owned news channel, Le Canal Nouvelles.) On his show, an obviously frustrated Dumont apologizes to viewers for not airing the Demers segment. “We asked for an interview with Mayor Demers, and we got an interview, and we would have shown it at this time,” he says. “But imagine, if you can, that Mayor Demers, the current mayor of Laval, was offered ...” Here he pauses for effect, and leans into the camera, exaggerating his features, “a big show, a big talk show on another station. And they said, ‘Hey, you should only talk to us. Cancel everyone else.’” Then, silence: Dumont simply stares at the camera, without speaking, waiting for his words to sink in. He blinks. A beat, then another beat. “Ben, là,” Dumont says. “He said yes.” SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 45
Game On! All the right (and wrong) moves with Walrus editor Jonathan Kay B Y JUSTIN DALL AIRE ILLUSTRATION BY AMANDA DUFFY
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SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 47
JONATHAN KAY
is planning his attack on German forces in Meximieux, France, as his opponent, a talkative Bay Street accountant named John McDiarmid, describes the many intricacies of Advanced Squad Leader (ASL), perhaps the nerdiest board game ever invented. On the boardroom table is an old Harvey’s mug (their makeshift dice tower, to eliminate all odds of cheating) and a tiny spool of pink thread used for tracing soldiers’ lines of sight. Had Walrus staffers not already left for the weekend, they would sneer as he stops, midargument, to retrieve the ASL rulebook—a 600-page biblical tome—from his office. Kay competes in international ASL tournaments a few times a year. In October, upon his return from an ASL tournament in Cleveland, he bragged about having played for 14 hours in one day “with barely a nod to even the most rudimentary aspects of nutrition and hygiene.” The 48-year-old thinks of nothing else when he plays: “I don’t have this constant static of family, tennis, work, writing, social media, email, my boss.” Kay is an eminently distracted, nicer-than-most contrarian-turnedpublic-intellectual. He started the top editorial job at The Walrus in December 2014 and promptly transformed its digital presence, making it more relevant to the daily news cycle. He’s infused its pages with opinions diverse and, at times, offbeat. He’s fought to make the magazine less cautious, and has nurtured an office culture where disagreement is common. “I wanted ordinary, intellectually curious, educated people to open my magazine and go to my website and find all sorts of things that surprised them, and sometimes shocked them,” he says. “When The Walrus first came out, I felt like it was talking to intelligent people, but it wasn’t talking to intelligent people like me.” Kay was recruited from the comment pages of the National Post because The Walrus needed someone different, someone digitally savvy, to shepherd its operations onto tiny screens and infinite scrolls, and because it wanted to appeal to ordinary and opinionated readers like Kay. He was a far-from-obvious candidate, but also one determined to transform The Walrus into a clearing house for the most pressing and provocative ideas. It’s been over two years since he took over. There have been some successes, but hardly the revolutionary change he keeps talking about.
BETWEEN QUESTIONS, Kay sips his coffee and averts his eyes. Sitting at the Patrician Grill on King Street East in Toronto, where he eats breakfast three or four times a week, he’s wearing his usual grey, slightly wrinkled suit. Without warning, he lifts his empty plate over our booth and onto an adjacent table. Once outside, he tells me why he enjoys this quiet 1950s-style diner: “I’m a little bit anti-social.” Normally, he arrives around 8:30 a.m., orders eggs and toast with bacon or sausage, and grabs a booth near the windows. If he’s meeting someone, he’ll pay the tab
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before either has asked for the cheque. His first time at the restaurant, Terry Papas, one of the owners, recognized him as “that guy on CBC.” Intrigue turned into anger when Papas caught him cutting up what he thought was one of the restaurant’s complimentary newspapers with an X-Acto knife. It turned out that Kay had brought his own copy of The New York Times. During his first years at the Post, he constantly cited the Times during editorial meetings; to this day, he will circle, in black or red pen, “fantastic” or “useful” paragraphs from Times articles and tweet pictures of them to his more than 17,900 followers. Kay generally keeps to himself, but Papas can draw you a sketch: “He doesn’t like fancy.” In fact, he’s “like your grandfather.” Easily satisfied. Very utilitarian. He’s a Sears suits type of guy, the kind that devours power bars—not because he likes them, but because they’re the most efficient way of re-energizing. On ASL night at the Walrus office, Kay offers to order pizza, even though he doesn’t know of any nearby pizzerias. “You’re the one who works here!” McDiarmid says. “But I’m a member of the elite,” Kay quips. “I don’t eat mere pizza.” They eventually send a friend, who has arrived to watch them play, to fetch a few slices. When he asks if Kay prefers a fancy option, like three-cheese, he replies, “Look, if there’s an 11-cheese option and a seven-cheese option, go with the seven.” Once, Papas heard Kay mumble he prefers work over weekends. Those who know Kay personally wouldn’t be surprised. On the day of his ASL match against McDiarmid, the editor attended Google Canada’s Go North event in Toronto and filed a 1,200-word piece on Shopify. At some point, he bungled sipping coffee—a rubbed-out stain extended down his blue-striped shirt. After taking a seven-day, all-expenses-paid trip to Taiwan at the invitation of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs (with the intention of writing about it someday), Kay spent the following week attending the Giller Prize Gala, composing an election-themed limerick for the Washington Post, penning columns for The Walrus and the National Post, flying to Ottawa to interview Governor General David Johnston, appearing on The National’s “Sunday Talk” with Wendy Mesley, emceeing a charity event at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, hosting a book club talk on Justin Trudeau’s memoir, Common Ground, at Soho House Toronto, and leading a conversation on the dangers of prescription drug abuse at a Walrus Health Leadership Dinner. Wherever he goes, he brings his sales pitch: subscribe to our magazine and visit our website. “Editors never used to be so visible to their audience or intimately engaged with them,” says senior editor Jessica Johnson. “I don’t know who Jon’s equivalent would be.” She says The New Yorker’s David Remnick is of a different generation. “You know he’s there, but he’s not, like, tweeting about what he ate for dinner.” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, is Kay’s closest equivalent. A divisive figure in his own right, Goldberg writes as much for The Atlantic—if not more—than Kay does for The Walrus. More importantly, their successes reflect the changing role of magazine editors. When
“ There were some people who would have criticized The Walrus in the distant past for not having enough ‘good coffee.’”
David Bradley, owner of Atlantic Media, announced his decision to hire Goldberg in a memo to staff, he wrote: “The editor-in-chief of a great publication is asked to be a public figure, a live performer, a leader of talent, a driving news force, a culture commentator, a long-form editor, a cover story genius, a packaging genius, a digital strategist, a social media practitioner, a video producer, a new product creator.” In the end, “The selection of an editor becomes a question of which virtue to privilege.” When John Macfarlane announced his retirement from The Walrus in August 2014, he had spent six years as its editor-in-chief. During his reign, the magazine’s stories began appearing on platforms beyond print. His replacement, according to publisher Shelley Ambrose, had to be “an editor of all things Walrus.” She hired Searchlight Recruitment, a headhunting agency, and told them a digital mindset was imperative. “I got a call. Someone bought me lunch, told me to show up to an interview,” Kay recalls. “I was flattered, so I showed up.” He had never previously considered working for The Walrus.
KAY SHOWED PROMISE AS A WRITER in his early teens. When Barbara Kay, his mother and a columnist at the National Post, helped launch an annual contest called First Fruits at the Jewish Public Library, she encouraged “Jonny” to submit a piece; his essay on World War II earned first place. He spent his first four years of elementary school at Solomon Schechter Academy, a Jewish parochial school, before transferring to Selwyn House, an all-boys private school in Westmount, Montreal. At home, he was encouraged to engage in intellectual discourse. While young Kay’s thinking was more aligned with his mother’s, the more confident he became, the more they disagreed. “My family’s an acquired taste,” Kay says, noting that his father, Ronny, aspiring to casual dinner talk, bought an official three-fight boxing bell in New York to mediate their conversations. After studying commerce at Marianopolis College, he decided to pur-
sue degrees in metallurgical engineering from McGill University, followed by a law degree from Yale University. With friends from Marianopolis, he took road trips (or “dude trips”) that gave the bourgeoning intellectuals a chance to debate current affairs. These trips “were so formative in his development as a free thinker,” his friend Paris Valaskakis says. “He had an audience, and he could take risks with his positions.” At the time, Kay thought little about his future. He says he was lucky that his parents made a good living and paid for part of his education. “I had the privilege of being casual about this,” Kay says. That word—privilege—has clung to him and become injurious, even though, according to Ronny, his son’s “sense of entitlement is overwhelmed by his sense of responsibility.” In a 2015 interview with Canadaland’s Jesse Brown, in which he and Kay discussed the whiteness of voices in The Walrus, the editor argued that high-minded attempts to be inclusive by giving unqualified people a place in the industry “usually end up looking like ham-fisted experiments in affirmative action.” During his time at Yale, he made the same observation about efforts to address the racial imbalance on the Yale Law Journal’s editorial board. Kay once noted his fascination with “the way that public discussions of white privilege themselves become Exhibit A in how white privilege works.” His critics will point to his own comments about white privilege as exhibits A through Z. Even Johnson, who admires his kindness and open-mindedness, says, “My efforts to make Jon understand the plight of the disenfranchised have been very—not unsuccessful—but just not worth my time.” As a writer, he will pitch some stories, such as a profile of Kevin O’Leary, based on conversations with upper-middle-class friends and interactions at the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club, a private tennis club in a tony Toronto neighbourhood, where he’s a member of the board. His non-journalist friends, however, defend his social awareness. Jennifer Bishop is the president of the board at the club and Kay’s tennis partner; she won a provincial championship with him in 2014. On more than one occasion, she has threatened to email Jennifer Good, his wife and a SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 49
“ People who are dogmatic leftists will see me as a despicable right-wing zealot, and those on the right will see me as a left-wing Trudeau apologist.”
1. Kay’s Top 5 The Walrus editor picks the best board games If Jonathan Kay couldn’t write or edit ever again, he says he would devote his life to board games. Earlier this year, he built a prototype of Hexlandia—his own creation—which he hopes to sell at European trade shows. The precision-minded, WWIIbuff lists these as some of his all-time favourites:
lawyer he met at McGill, asking her not to let him wear certain clothes on the court. One shirt with an eight-inch alligator on its breast was particularly bothersome, but as a matter of principle—it was a gift from his Filipino nanny—he insisted on wearing it.
KAY’S FIRST JOURNALISTIC BIG BREAK, a review of the movie Independence Day, was published in Saturday Night magazine in November 1996 while he was working as a tax lawyer at Goodman Phillips & Vineberg in New York. When Ken Whyte, editor of Saturday Night at the time, became founding editor of the National Post, Kay’s name resurfaced as a candidate for its new editorial board. The interview was like nothing he’d ever experienced. After asking him about his journalistic ambitions, Whyte began reading the newspaper, presumably to see if Kay could comment on the daily news. “I came out of the interview thinking, ‘Not only did I not get the job, but the guy clearly regretted me even being in the same room as him.’” Shocked as he was to be offered the position, Kay said goodbye to his legal career and moved to Toronto. His father, a metallurgical engineer working in finance, worried. He penned a 10-page letter to his son, warning him of the risks. Law had the promise of money and stability, his mother says. “To Ronald, this was like running away to join the circus.” Kay says his father’s concerns stemmed from his immigrant anxieties—an interpretation that has led Jon to believe that job insecurity is responsible for the lack of diversity in Canadian media. As a child, Ronny fled from Russia to China and, soon after, to Canada. He feared his son would be downwardly mobile. “I read his letter with interest, but it didn’t shake my conviction,” Kay says. Thirty years old and looking to settle down, he was running out of time for risky career moves. He arrived at the Post with no journalism experience, matching the make up of his colleagues. “The bosses actively wanted non-journalists,” says Alexander Rose, a founding editorial board member. “Not having a
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journalism degree was a feather in your cap.” Later, when Kay became comment section editor, he hired in much the same way. “He was not looking for the newest group of j-school graduates,” says Matt Gurney, who studied military history at grad school and freelanced for Kay before being hired full-time. Like Kay, Gurney would eventually climb the ranks and become comment section editor at the Post. Kay was the moderate voice on the board, especially after the arrival of Ezra Levant, whom he describes as “the guy you hate, but you come to respect in some weird way, and then you hate again.” Frustrated by Levant’s presence, Kay complained to Whyte, who responded with three words: “Ezra’s good coffee.” The sentiment has stuck with Kay, who believes that “every newspaper needs people who are good coffee. The Walrus needs people who are good coffee.” He doesn’t like Levant’s brand, but “there were some people who would have criticized The Walrus in the distant past for not having enough good coffee.” His ambivalence toward perhaps the most controversial voice in Canadian media bespeaks his general two-mindedness. Kay worked as an editorial assistant on Levant’s 2009 book, Shakedown. Five years later, Kay helped Prime Minister Justin Trudeau write his memoir, Common Ground. A framed and signed portrait of Kay and the prime minister hangs conspicuously in his bare-bones Walrus office. “People who are dogmatic leftists will see me as a despicable right-wing zealot,” he says, “and those on the right will see me as a left-wing Trudeau apologist.” In his own words, Kay is a “lapsed conservative.” He arrived at the Post an ardent believer in capitalism, and after the planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001, he wrote in his parting column that he had found his Spanish Civil War: “The fate of Western civilization was at stake. I was doing my best to save it, 750 words at a time.” But the failure of the Iraq War forced him to re-examine his cherished truth. In 2006, he penned “Confessions of a Misguided Hawk,” in which he renounced the “Bushadministration cheerleading” he had done over the years. He says, “That was the column that made me safe for left-wing dinner party society in Toronto.” It was the column that started getting him appearances on TV
1. Advanced Squad Leader (“This is the one
2.
I always love to play — and it is always #1. The other ones probably vary”)
2. Yokohama (Japanese Meiji-era worker-placement contest)
3. Agricola (17th-century farming simulator) 4. Ticket to Ride Pennsylvania (train-building game)
5. Rise and Decline of the Third Reich (a “grand strategy” war game covering the European theatre of WWII)
3.
—JUSTIN DALLAIRE
4. 5. SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 51
and radio. “I was seen as the guy who could give the conservative position, but to a certain extent in air quotes.” Rather than fasten himself to any one dogma, the former columnist says he renounces the dangerous "habit of mind” that leads people to ignore the facts that confront them. It’s a habit he saw play out at the Post; again, while researching Among the Truthers (his 2011 book on the 9/11 Truther conspiracy movement); and again, every time a reader writes him a disparaging rebuke—to say nothing of the recent U.S. presidential election. Today, as though caught in ideological tug-of-war, Kay occasionally finds himself on Team Progressive, writing about the virtues of Nordic socialism and sharing his work on Facebook as his “latest leftwing propaganda for Walrus.” After years of being called a shill, he has cocooned himself in disregard for his critics. As editor-in-chief, he believes that he must juggle recognizing his audience—latte-sipping urbanites who care about the environment, travelling, and the arts—with creating a balanced, “wingless” magazine—and he doesn’t care who disagrees. He wants to “have a lot of different voices represented in my magazine,” he says, “not just the voices of Queen Street West bien pensants who all subscribe to the same email groups and Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and produce an echo chamber around much of Canadian journalism.” Sometimes, this means publishing rebuttals to pieces that appeared in The Walrus days earlier, or direct challenges to his own views. After making controversial comments on The National about Trudeau’s gender-balanced cabinet—turns out, he favours merit over quotas—he published Karen Ho’s “Meritocracy Is a Lie.” A day later, Kay noted in his response to the piece that both his Walrus colleagues and Twitter had disagreed with his position. “It was good old-fashioned ideological beat down,” he wrote. “But that’s life as a public quasi-intellectual.”
ON NOVEMBER 8, 2016, the night of the U.S. federal election, Kay was distraught and unable to sleep. He says he and Ambrose had been “crying on each other’s shoulders electronically,” and he was determined to file something—anything—on Trump’s once-unthinkable victory, even though it was two or three in the morning. “I was horrified that Trump won,” he says. “But I was also horrified by the prospect of people coming to the Walrus website and not seeing something about Trump.” The editor’s column, “The Trumpocalypse That Destroyed Conservatism,” did exceedingly well online, but it would be eclipsed later that day when The Walrus published Stephen Marche’s “Canada in the Age of Donald Trump.” At over 210,000 online views, the latter ranks among the magazine’s most-read stories. Ambrose must have felt vindicated. She had hired Kay believing that it would be easier to teach him about magazines than to teach an old-school magazine editor about the necessity of filing
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within hours of a presidential election. “The kind of news gene, that current gene, about what’s happening,” she says, “that’s where a newspaper background really comes in handy.” A trained newspaperman, Kay arrived at The Walrus believing it had to live in the moment; making a “fetish of planning” would only get in the way. The idea soon crumbled under the realities of magazine publishing. In November 2015, Canadaland published a story containing a leaked email from Ambrose to Kay, dated September 10, 2015: “Dear Jon — I hate to do this by email instead of in person but we are in a bit of a melt down here … we have never been this disorganized and late shipping.” Further down: “I understand you are trying to build in flexibility and also to be as current as possible … but we seem to have thrown out the baby with the bath water.” In the same article, then-managing editor Kyle Wyatt claimed that Kay had killed more stories in 10 months’ time than Macfarlane had in four years. “I was embarrassed,” Kay says, “but it’s not like it was untrue.” Over a year later, he continues to be “ruthless” about killing stories in the name of protecting the Walrus brand. He doesn’t want editors “doing five drafts to save a shitty piece and turn it into a mediocre piece. I’d rather you do three drafts and turn a good piece into a great piece,” he says. “Editors are sometimes too hard-working.” In journalism circles, there’s chatter of his unorthodox editing style. At the Post, he would routinely rip into columns written by unintelligible talking heads who were fine with the heavy-handed editing. But with polished magazine writers, he says, “They’re like, ‘I spent three months on this article and you just took a day and rewrote 5,000 words. Fuck you.’” Early disagreements made him realize he shouldn’t be a handling editor, so he relies on the “green light/red line” approach. At weekly editorial meetings, where, according to deputy editor Carmine Starnino, he is a “rogue element,” he sits at the head of a long boardroom table— the one used for ASL on Friday nights—green-lighting story ideas. On occasion, he’s invited outsiders, such as Amanda Lang, to attend and pitch. Handling editors are responsible for shaping stories without him “looking over their shoulder,” Kay says. To the annoyance of both writers and editors, his last-minute “red lining” sometimes involves inserting his own editorial voice. He doesn’t always get away with it. “I’m not afraid to tell Jon that I think this is a dumb idea or that this is wrong,” says Johnson. “Anyone at the magazine will tell you that I do that on a daily basis—like, an hourly basis.” The senior editor says disagreeing with Kay is tiring, but, “If I can teach Jon, then we’ve gotten somewhere.” At other times, Kay pulls rank. On the day his now-infamous “Show Us the Suicide Note” piece was published, only Kay and maybe two other editors knew what was coming. In response to the Toronto Star’s decision to withhold publishing reporter Raveena Aulakh’s suicide note—a desire she had made explicit—Kay wrote that journalists should refuse to let suicide victims “impose control on the narrative of their broken life.” When word of the
“ Each issue now has at least one or two stories intended to enter the reader’s bloodstream right away.”
incoming bombshell got out, eyes rolled and staff members grumbled, but no one would, or could, do anything about it. The incident, and others like it, have led to questions about Kay’s influence on the magazine’s editorial direction. In a series of Twitter essays, author and journalist Jeet Heer captured the mixed feelings many have about his sway. “Well, there goes The Walrus,” he remarked on the day it was announced that Kay would be editor, adding that the former Post columnist was an “anti-anti-racist” who would have fit well at a far-right magazine like The American Spectator or National Review. Four days later, Heer was again tweeting—only, this time, he argued that Kay “could be a great, game-changing editor” for The Walrus. In the past, the magazine had been “so quintessentially middle-of-the-road Canadian centrist,” he wrote, that someone like Kay (“brash, not afraid of an ideological fight”) was “a necessary corrective.” Kay’s strength lies in his ability to spark conversations that Canadians may be otherwise too afraid to have. Often, he plays the role of a contrarian—a game that comes with win-big, lose-big results. “If a piece hasn’t upended some pre-established notion, then the piece is a failure,” Starnino says of the editor’s style. “Each issue now has at least one or two stories intended to enter the reader’s bloodstream right away.” Kay says his green-lighting of “The Highest Bidder” epitomizes the reason he was brought on. The May 2016 investigative feature identified the root cause of Vancouver’s soaring real estate prices: money was pouring into the market from China. Most Walrus editors at the table that day argued the piece would be perceived as racist. Kay didn’t care. He told The Globe and Mail’s Kerry Gold that he insists Walrus articles be “written in a candid style, without no-go zones.” She had to identify where the money was coming from. “My value,” says Kay, “is to be the guy who sits in this chair and says, ‘I don’t care who you’re afraid will be offended by that article, we’re running it because it’s a good article.’” Gold’s story was widely circulated online and is thought to have incited real change, since the British Columbia government introduced a one percent vacancy tax and a 15 percent foreign-buyer tax.
Despite its success stories, an onslaught of negative coverage has plagued The Walrus since Kay’s arrival—allegations of a “toxic work environment,” of editorial theft, of a push for “family-friendly” stories, and, most recently, of inflated circulation numbers. Canadaland reported in December that The Walrus’s paid readership has declined to below 40,000—much lower than the 60,000 the magazine reported in two government grant applications filed in 2016. (According to Ambrose, the Canadian Circulation Audit Bureau’s report did not account for “additional non-traditional circulation,” such as sponsored-paid copies distributed at Walrus events.) Nevertheless, online page views are up 170 percent under Kay, and he and Ambrose are eyeing opportunities for growth as Rogers Media rolls back its print operations. “Our web traffic is a reflection of the fact that a lot of people aren’t just reading us, but hate reading us,” Starnino says. “We want to be relevant. And there’s no other way to be relevant.” Even Heer, in a rare instance of support for Kay, has tweeted, “The undeniable fact is the Walrus is now much more a part of the conversation than it was, say, 5 years ago.”
THERE WAS A TIME when Kay could have a beer with friends, watch TV, read a novel. But now he is in the Walrus office on a Friday night, confined to his self-made prison of perpetual productivity. He realizes ASL is the antithesis of productivity, but it “feels productive because it’s so intellectually engaging.” He sits on the edge of his swivel chair, the pink thread always within reach, discussing the upcoming ASL tournament in Albany, New York, until McDiarmid calls it quits, their scenario unfinished. During these bouts of intense game play, “My phone is beeping and buzzing and I don’t even notice it. I’m hungry, I don’t notice it. I’m thirsty, I don’t notice it,” he later tells me. In his writing, his choice of reading, his intellectual banter with colleagues, Kay is a man of ineffable intensity. “I always have to have my brain turned on 100 percent,” he says. “That has become my baseline for how I engage with life.” SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 53
When I Was 11, My Dad Killed My Mom Journalists made my private tragedy public. Now I’m talking to them about what they wrote B Y JOHN-MICHAEL SCHNEIDER
A house in Ajax, Ontario, where a man was arrested in 2001 for the slaying of his common-law wife.
AT AROUND 8:30 P.M. ON JUNE 7, 2001, POLICE
in Ajax, Ontario—a small commuter suburb east of Toronto—received a 911 call reporting an abandoned car in a nearby plaza parking lot. The caller was on probation and terrified of returning to jail for the act he had just been asked to commit. He said that a friend had asked him to dispose of the car, which he knew contained the body of a dead woman. When police arrived at the parking lot, they checked the licence plates and discovered that the car belonged to a woman reported missing earlier that day. She lived with her husband and three kids in a new subdivision two kilometres north of the plaza. When police opened the trunk, they discovered the woman’s body. Her face and head had been injured by what a forensic team later determined to probably be an axe. Within an hour, police assembled at least six armed officers and converged on the dead woman’s two-storey house. On their arrival, two boys, aged 11 and 6, were sitting in the back of a green minivan parked in the
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driveway. They thought they were going to their grandparents’ house. The officers grabbed the children and carried them down the sloping crescent to safety. A neighbour across the road was watching through her window when, a few moments later, a man emerged from the house carrying his disabled seven-year-old daughter, unaware of the surrounding officers. Police came up behind the man, took the girl from his arms, and arrested him. The father of three was later charged with the murder of his common-law wife.
I WAS 11 YEARS OLD WHEN THIS CRIME TOOK
place, and my mom—the woman whom police found in the trunk of our car—was 38. Her name was Andrea. She commuted every day to her job as a secretary at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. She often returned home exhausted, only to start working from home to get a head start on the next day. The man accused of murdering her was my stepdad, but to me he was just my dad. My biological father left me and my mom when I was a baby, and my parents met two years later. They had been together for nine years before my mom was murdered, and had two kids of their own: my sister, Stephanie, and my brother, Thomas. My stepdad, in part due to his previous criminal record, struggled to hold down a job. He was a butcher at St. Lawrence Market in Toronto for a while, and was a window washer before that. Following the birth of my sister, our dad stayed at home to take care of her. She had a genetic disease that slowly destroyed her brain. She died in October 2004, one month before her eleventh birthday. In the 16 years since my mom died, there have been days when the feelings of emptiness and loss have overwhelmed me. The public spectacle during the year after her death was especially difficult, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I wondered for years why this disgusting event, this stain on my family history, should become a part of the public record, and why journalists were so interested in it. In the years that followed, my family moved on with our lives. I graduated high school and finished a bachelor’s degree in English. I don’t know if my experiences as a child influenced my decision to pursue a master’s of journalism, but I know that I’ve always had a skeptical view of the world. At the start of my second year of graduate school, I realized that I had not turned that skepticism onto my own past, and I started to contemplate learning more about what happened when I was a child. Doing so has been as much a lesson in the dangers of prying deep into an unquestioned past as it has been about the process of journalism. One of my colleagues at the RRJ was worried about me being “re-traumatized” by what happened, and I initially dismissed the concerns. I was mostly just curious about what was written in the newspapers 15 years ago. I wanted to know how journalists approached the story of what happened between my parents, of my mom’s death, and of the murder trial a year later. So I started going through old clippings from the Toronto Star, the Toronto Sun, and The Globe and Mail, and found dozens of stories about my family. I realized that I was stirring up something inside myself that had been dormant for many years. The old news clippings were a record of what
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happened, and they tell a story that I barely seem able to accept, let alone understand. There are some stories that are difficult to write about in a way that captures the truth of their inexplicable pain. In the pages adjacent to articles about my parents were ads for what to buy dad for Father’s Day. Where some people see a wound ready to be torn open, I see a wound that can be mended, the pain of which can be alleviated by meaningful day-to-day purpose. My understanding of the importance of crime coverage has changed. With that has come an interest in discovering the motivations of the journalists who wrote about my family. I understand that violent incidents demand an immediate explanation to the community, but that there are also long-term implications for families dealing with the aftermath. My interest is both professional and personal—I wanted to talk to people as a fellow journalist, but also as a family member trying to fill in the gaps of my memory.
WHEN DURHAM REGIONAL POLICE SERVICE
officers interviewed me after my dad was arrested, I didn’t know my mom was gone. One of the detectives questioned me for what felt like hours. He asked me to name the Great Lakes, I think partly as a test of my general knowledge, but also to ease me into more difficult questions. He asked if my parents ever argued. I said yes. He asked about the words they used when they yelled, and I remember feeling nervous about using the “f-word” in front of a police detective. It was only after the interview that the detective said the words that he had to withhold: “Your mom died.” I couldn’t breathe. Or maybe he said, “Someone killed your mom.” I don’t exactly remember. But I do remember imagining a scene—a foggy corner behind a building in the dangerous part of some nameless metropolis. They were random villains who lurked in dark alleys, behind dumpsters. That’s what my 11-year-old self thought a murder looked like. And then it was my turn to ask a question: “Where’s dad?” I don’t remember how or when I found out that my father had killed my mother in our garage and stuffed her body into our car, but it was probably my grandmother—my mom’s mom—who told me, after my brother and I went to live with her in Burlington, Ontario. My grandparents’ house was normally where we went to have fun and to give my parents a break from taking care of us. We visited often on weekends, but could not have imagined living there permanently. Unable to take care of my sister, my grandparents placed her in a group home. I remember my grandmother yelling while reading the newspaper one morning not long after, and I quickly realized that what happened was bigger than my sadness. She was upset at how the news was portraying my father as a loving, caring man. There were conflicting accounts of what we were like as a family. Were we happy? We had a nice house, food, clothes. People read in the newspaper about the family they thought they knew, and were shocked to hear about a group of angry, frustrated people. “Couple in ‘Vortex of Stress, Secrets,’ Murder Trial Told,” read one Toronto Star headline. My family’s private life was being dissected and laid out for everyone to see. Factions formed. Friends of my father seemed to sympathize with him, and could not conceive of him doing
A photo of the family at a New Year’s Eve party at their old house in Toronto.
The last known photo of Andrea Schneider in her kitchen, shortly before her death.
something so violent. Others felt as though their quiet suspicions about my father had been confirmed, and that his prior criminal record had reached its inevitable conclusion. The Crown argued in court that my dad had attempted to cover up the crime by paying his friend, the man who contacted the police, $80 to help dispose of my mom’s body. The defence lawyers argued that my dad had learned my mother was having an affair and snapped. This “snapping” theory became central to the distinction between the second-degree murder charge he faced, and the lesser charge of manslaughter the defence wanted. My siblings and I fell somewhere in the middle of all of this. We were in the “kids’ faction.” We passively accepted everything that was happening to us, because we didn’t know how to go on without mom and dad. Our need to carry the fire was kept up by accepting everything that was happening. The reality of what my father did became background noise. The people who surrounded me, including my grandparents, told me that my mom was in heaven looking down, and I nodded along. Meanwhile, they were so engrossed by the details of the trial that they lost sight of the fact that the man they read about was still my father. The man who played street hockey with me, who let me watch scary movies, who had earned my love and trust, had taken it all away. Seeing his picture in the newspaper—his face turned away from cameras as he entered a police car—was real, but seemed like a distortion. For months after deciding to write about this event, I struggled with the question of which details to include. I knew that there might be people who would wonder about how my mom died, about my father’s defence in court, and perhaps even about small things like the colour of the car. To some extent, I can understand why writers and editors instinctively search for details that draw readers’ attention. Open questions are distracting, and they can make “scenes” weaker. But where I saw a possibility for describing the “sensationalism” of violent crime in the news, I also saw a risk of reproducing that sensationalism here. A day after Durham police announced criminal charges against my father, our neighbours across the street held their annual summer barbecue. This family included the woman who watched as a police squad arrested my dad on our front lawn just a few days earlier. Elaine O’Connor, a reporter in the Toronto Star’s summer intern program, travelled to our house in Ajax and interviewed neighbours, aware of the contrast between the balloons on one side of the street and the police tape on the other. She talked to one man who worked at a local clothing store. “This was pretty close to my work … and close to my home,” he told her, adding, “That’s why it scares a lot of people.” The silence of Ajax never struck me as safe, but the stereotype of a town shielded from harsh realities existed anyway. O’Connor, who went on to work at the Ottawa Citizen and the Vancouver Province, says going out and interviewing people in the aftermath of violence was just part of the job, but one which she disliked. “I have seen and written about some very ugly things, and covered some heartbreaking stories that really affected me,” she told me. “This was one of them. I live with the details of some cases still, and I hated having to delve into people’s pain—almost all journalists do. It takes a toll, nothing compared to the victims, but a toll.” When I first talked to O’Connor for this story, she was supportive. When I forwarded her the clippings from 16 years ago, she said she was SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 57
shocked and sorry to hear about all of this, and that she thought about her own children. I realized that even though we seemed to have only this terrible event in common, our interests as writers also converged. Her description of that small corner of that quiet crescent resonates with me more deeply than she knows. Just as I was being whisked away from my home to live with my grandparents, O’Connor was being sent to a crime scene that I could only imagine. The image of our neighbours going ahead with the annual party—trying to maintain a sense of normalcy despite living in the immediate aftermath of unexpected violence—is not what I expected to read. I had always wondered what those days immediately following the murder looked like for our neighbourhood, and reading news articles has helped fill in this small, empty part of my family history. The neighbours told O’Connor that my father was a caring man who worked tirelessly to take care of his disabled daughter. People wanted to know how it was that someone who cared so deeply for his family could do something so horrible. This was not the way I would have liked to have introduced myself to a fellow journalist years later, but it couldn’t be helped. In the case of Toronto Sun court reporter Sam Pazzano, the introduction wasn’t the first. I met Pazzano in 2015 during a class at Ryerson University on court coverage, for which he was invited as a guest speaker. We gathered at the University Avenue courthouse in downtown Toronto. Pazzano showed us the docket, gave some advice, and led a handful of graduate students to the courtroom where Everton Biddersingh was being tried for the first-degree murder of his teenage daughter, Melonie Biddersingh. (He was later convicted.) I sat and took notes, pausing while the jury left the room, in awe of the violent history being explained in court. I remember thinking, how could someone do this to their own family? I didn’t know at the time that Pazzano also covered my father’s trial for the Sun back in 2001. It wasn’t until I reviewed the archives that his name came up again. When I contacted Sam nearly a year after our crash course, and as a student asking to speak to him about a piece he wrote nearly 15 years ago, I’m not sure he expected that the conversation would play out the way it did. Perhaps Pazzano forgot that I was a student, or maybe he was just being callous, but I was at first surprised by how matter-of-fact he was when he laid out his memory of the trial: “This is the one where the accused killer bludgeons her to death after some kind of exchange where she says, ‘Don’t you know I’ve been having an affair?’” he began. “Yes,” I told him. “So she had some kind of affair with this guy, what was his name, Colin?” “I think so.” “And your stepdad—you had a severely disabled sibling? And he would take good care of the sibling, and his world revolved around that child, right? And he snaps and kills her and puts her in the trunk of the car?” “Yes, that’s right.” Whether Pazzano intended to or not, he gave me his version of what happened, without euphemizing. His initial words seemed to be aimed at a fellow adult journalist writ-
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ing a story, and that’s all I could have asked of him. It wasn’t the language presented to me as a child, even though I am grateful that my grandparents tried to protect me from the gruesome parts of my father’s trial when I was younger.
can’t imagine that pain, or even having to have those feelings.” My grandmother still believes, 16 years later, that my father planned to kill my mom, that he mulled everything over a week and a half in advance, and was hoping to get away with it. She blames herself for what he did to her daughter and looks for any excuse to see herself as the cause of the problems in our family. I told Tracy that my grandmother looks back and sees it as a travesty that my father was convicted of manslaughter. I added that it is difficult to have a meaningful discussion because, when I start trying to talk about why a premeditated murder is difficult to prove in court, my grandmother breaks down. “If you look at it from a legal point, yeah, but if you’re a family member who lost someone they love in a horrific way, then you would be shocked, and that would be a fair reaction, because they aren’t thinking about the law. They just want the person put away,” Huffman said. I am a family member who is trying not to let intense feelings get in the way of my research. It has meant looking at the facts of the court case, and considering them alongside what I have learned from listening to other people. It might mean one day interviewing my stepdad and, perhaps, the man with whom my mom was having an affair. It has meant negotiating my role as a journalist with my role as a brother, and as a grandson. It feels impossible to embody all of these roles without upsetting anyone.
APPROACHING THE STORY AS A JOURNALIST
has given me an excuse to talk to my family about what happened. We normally don’t talk about my parents or the trial. The topic is especially difficult for my grandmother, who lost her only child. When anyone brings up my father, the jury, or even my mom, my grandmother turns red and raises her voice. It is not my intention to cause her pain by having these conversations, but I can see how even the mention of our family history distresses her. “There were people who said they were a happy couple,” I told her after reading a passage from one of the archived articles in the Toronto Star. “Bullshit! Who said that they were a happy couple?” “You can go look back at these articles. There were people who said they seemed happy.” “They seemed happy, but they were not happy.” “That’s not in question, but the perception is that they were.” “We all put up good faces.” Faces have become a point of disagreement between us. After the trial, she went through old photos of my parents and cut my father out of them. People ask why the edge of one photograph is trimmed off, and I tell them that it’s where my father’s arm was when he hugged her. There are several boxes in my grandparents’ basement with intact photos of my mom and dad. When I look through them and remember the family we used to have, I wonder what good it does to meddle with reality by cutting it up. I have tried to pretend that my aversion to manipulating photos comes from some high-minded journalistic impulse but, really, it’s just because I’m afraid of what might happen to my own memory. It seems like my grandmother’s reasoning is the same—that she has cut my father out of photos because she, too, is afraid of the memories. I barely recognize my mom’s face in the photos, and my memory of my family 16 years ago has become more of a feeling than an image. We were stressed out, scared, uncertain about what would happen in the future, but we were together. We held one another and smiled, because that’s what families do, even when they’re just “putting up good faces.” Tracy Huffman, the Toronto Star court reporter who picked up the coverage from Elaine O’Connor once the trial started, told me that it doesn’t surprise her to hear that my grandmother’s reaction is so intense, even years later. Huffman, who left journalism in 2008, now owns two massage therapy clinics east of Toronto. I explained to her how my grandmother wished that Canada had the death penalty so she could see my father suffer the way my mom did. “That’s something that family members struggle with. That feeling is pretty common,” Huffman said. “I always tried to respect those opinions; I’m not in their shoes. For some people, those feelings change, and sometimes they don’t. The worst thing that happened to your mom happened, and I understand how her mom wouldn’t be able to move on from that. I
I STILL DON’T REALLY KNOW WHO MY MOM WAS, The Schneider siblings around the time of their dad’s trial.
and I would have liked to see our relationship evolve over time. But my father’s actions foreclosed on this undiscovered potential, and I am left here as an adult trying to make sense of it. That is ultimately what hurts the most—realizing the memories that could have been. Curiosity about the past 16 years has led me back to the journalists who wrote about one of the most turbulent moments in my life. They provided the public with an account of what happened, and have moved on to new stories, new professions. But their work is still out there, tucked away in boxes along with old photo albums. Memories are blurry, and there are children of victims who might someday be curious about what happened. They will look at the most reliable sources of information available to them to try arriving at an understanding of what actually happened. There are families across the country for whom old newspaper clippings are one of the few remaining ways left to learn about the past. I stopped by my old neighbourhood a few months ago, on that sloping street that Elaine O’Connor wrote about 16 years ago. The houses look smaller, and down the road, new shopping centres have opened up. The police tape is gone, but I can still imagine it there. I wonder if the people who now live in that house know what happened, and whether they would care. I also wonder if, one day, I might be called to a quiet neighbourhood just like this, in the aftermath of some horrible domestic crime. Maybe I’ll grab my voice recorder and notebook and, like journalists before me, start knocking on doors and asking neighbours what they saw. I wonder if I’ll be ready. SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 59
Secret Solidarity For women in journalism, mentorship is creating alternative pathways to opportunity B Y FARNIA FEKRI ILLUSTRATION BY HANNA BARCZYK
The dimly lit room is so crowded that I’m sharing
two seats with three women. A line of people less desperate for a seat stands in the back, having given up on finding chairs. It’s November 30, 2016, and Broadsheet is hosting a panel called Women, Power, and the Newsroom. “This is a great turnout,” says National Post reporter Ashley Csanady, who is moderating. Under the yellow and green stage lights, she begins with a description of Broadsheet, an informal group organized by a few women journalists—including Csanady and BuzzFeed Canada managing editor Lauren Strapagiel—shortly after Jian Ghomeshi was fired by CBC. Its tagline is, “An event for women in media to hang with other women in media.” Looking around, between sips of gin and ginger ale, I recognize women from Vice, BuzzFeed, and Chatelaine in the back room of Supermarket Restaurant and Bar in Toronto’s Kensington Market. On the stage beside Csanady, three notable women journalists smile at the crowd: Anne Marie Owens, editor-in-chief of the National Post; Christina Vardanis, executive editor of Chatelaine; and Piya Chattopadhyay, CBC radio host. The panel starts with an extended conversation about the U.S. election. It’s been three weeks since Hillary Clinton lost, but the wound is raw. “It’s folly for anyone to pretend that part of why she
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lost wasn’t because she’s a woman,” Chattopadhyay says. “That should be hard for all of us to take. Yes, we are people that are in leadership positions and have been firsts. It’s not only about firsts—it’s about seconds and thirds and all the people that follow. What I’ve learned from this is, ‘Goddamn, we’ve got a lot of work to do.’” The conversation switches to the topic of being women in journalism, but the tone stays the same. Whether it’s about motherhood, promotions, or just navigating the office as a woman, there is a sense of exhaustion, but also solidarity. I hear it as women introduce themselves to one another or laugh loudly at Chattopadhyay’s jokes. Until now, aside from isolated panels at larger conferences or conversations with classmates, I haven’t seen such a formal gathering of women in Toronto media. By many accounts, the highs and lows of being a Canadian woman journalist are discussed in closed Facebook groups, over dinner, or in private messages. Whether it’s third-trimesterpregnant Chantal Braganza from TVO looking to other women who’ve dealt with maternity leave, or AOL Canada’s Rashida Jeeva, who leads a newsroom that’s vastly different from the one she started in, or BuzzFeed Canada’s Scaachi Koul taking to Twitter to talk about safety—female mentorship is growing stronger. It’s small things like supporting one another’s work and being kind, but it’s also sharing secret looks and text messages about sexism and safety. The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media, every panel I attended for this feature, and four years of a journalism degree have taught me that women in the Canadian media industry have made less money, gotten fewer opportunities, and faced more safety concerns, all of which is daunting enough. Now, as newsrooms shrink and layoffs plague the biggest companies, female journalists must turn to their own networks and back channels to bridge the wide gender gap.
One of the earliest solutions was the Canadian
Women’s Press Club, formed in 1904. At a time when more than half the population was not allowed to vote, 16 women journalists created professional support to improve their gender’s lot in the industry. Its membership peaked in 1968 at about 700, but the club folded in the 1990s. Now, formal avenues for support for women are limited. A national organization that centres on the problems of Canadian women in journalism is nonexistent. When it comes to mentorship, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Canada program (open to all genders) is as close as it gets. “The mentorship program is open to everyone,” says Kayla Perry, CWA Canada’s associate membership coordinator, “but female relationships are so important.” Perry, who’s barely older than my 22-year-old self, admits she’s closest to her women mentors. In a newsroom, the added difficulties of sexism can be brutal, she says. But interactions on social media have recently transformed personal prob-
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lems into conversations about systemic issues. Women journalists who are strangers to one another find solidarity in swapping war stories about bad editors and threatening interviews. “Other women have had such a difficult time breaking into the field,” Perry says. “They understand the struggles. Especially now, it’s more back channels and making connections through Twitter.”
It’s the early 1990s, and Rashida Jeeva sits in the Toronto
Sun offices. The red brick building at 333 King Street East has become home since she immigrated to Canada from South Africa in 1989. The transition is going well—though she admits she didn’t take into consideration how cold it would be—but this day is one she’ll remember decades later, newsrooms later, as a hiccup in an otherwise rewarding career. She doesn’t remember the details, but the words still ring in her ear. Her male colleague turns to her, and tells her she’s lucky. “Lucky, why?” she asks. “That you’re a woman,” he responds, “a woman of colour. That’s probably why you were hired.” Cold anger ripples through Jeeva. She strides into the office of Lorrie Goldstein, an editor at the Sun, and demands to know why he hired her. “‘I hired you because you’re a good journalist. The fact that you’re a woman and a woman of colour is a bonus,’” she recalls the editor answering. From then on, Jeeva put her head down and worked. She was never pigeonholed, but she also didn’t look for help. She became the assistant lifestyle editor. She became the executive producer of lifestyle at canoe.ca. Then it was off to AOL Canada. And Yahoo! And The Globe and Mail. And then back to AOL as general manager of the then-newly founded Huffington Post Canada. She currently juggles this and another job as the head of content for AOL Canada. Twenty-five years since the Goldstein conversation, sitting in the Huffington Post office near King Street West and Spadina Avenue, she repeats my question about mentors, slowly turning over the words: “Was there one particular woman who was a guiding light for me in Canada?” The words hang in the air. Jeeva’s colleague, Andree Lau, managing editor of news, is equally as stuck on the question. She can’t think of an answer. I get an email from her on my way out, as the doors of Huffington Post Canada’s elevator close: “My ‘mentors,’” the subject line reads. “I’ve had a lot of people I look up to who have trained me,” she writes. “But I don’t really have mentors in the true definition.” The next time I see Lau, we talk about a shifting media landscape that has become difficult for even the most privileged. “When I started a lot of it was, ‘Well, suck it up and … build a thick skin,’” she says. “That’s changed—we realize that people need to be nurtured.” Lau and Jeeva are gratified by the diversity of the current Huffington
At every turn, I feel that I can find a woman journalist—usually a woman of colour—who is generous with her help.
Post newsroom. Jeeva says the most rewarding moments for her are when she’s able to grab the occasional coffee with the women she mentors. One of them, Lisa Yeung, is the managing editor of lifestyle. Yeung tells me she’s looked to Jeeva as a role model for 17 years. “Did you ever think it would be different for you?” I ask them. “That the path would be different for you, maybe different than for a white man?” Many women journalists understand that they’re still at a disadvantage, Yeung says, but the idea that women, or even women of colour, have to work harder to level the playing field didn’t bother her at the start of her career. Her first journalism boss at canoe.ca was a woman, after all. She looks to her left at Jeeva. They’re sitting on a couch in a small, tinted-glass room off the main HuffPo workspace: different newsroom, same mentor.
Selena Ross, Scaachi Koul, Stacey May Fowles, Andrea
Bellemare, and Carly Lewis face a packed room. On a January 2016 afternoon in Toronto, the second-last day of NASH78—the Canadian University Press’s (CUP) national conference—they are featured on a panel about women’s safety in media. The tone, like the reality, is depressing. Hours before, having talked to students in a post-panel huddle, Koul had tweeted, “It is a bad thing if [women of colour] students are more comfortable coming to me, a stranger and a real bitch, than they are their schools.” Eight months later, at BuzzFeed Canada’s office, I remind Koul of her tweet. Women, she says—especially younger women—talk to one another. In an industry that doesn’t protect them, they have to protect one another. “That’s the development of back channels women use when we start working,” she says. “So when the Jian Ghomeshi stuff came out, everybody was talking, ‘Well, we all knew!’ The week I moved to Toronto in 2008, I met somebody who told me, ‘Oh yeah, he’s [creepy].’ The week I moved here! I was 17, and then he gets arrested when I was 24.” The Twitter messages, Facebook chats, and private emails, born out of necessity, reveal a quiet acceptance of insidious problems. “It’s unfortunate,” Koul says. “We do it to keep one another safe and to stay working, and to keep ourselves mentally comfortable.”
On July 5, 2014, sitting behind her computer in Brooklyn, Leigh
Stein is on the brink of taking on a mammoth task. A few keyboard strokes and she’s done it—she’s committed. She’s going to organize BinderCon, borrowing the name of Anna Fitzpatrick’s Facebook group, Binders, for a conference in New York City that will bring female and gender-non-conforming writers together. “You know that’s a lot of work, right?” her boyfriend says. “I know!” she responds. (Later on she’ll admit she had no idea). SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 63
Finding New Voices Tips on inclusivity Having given a lot of thought to multiplying perspectives in journalism, here is my take on how to help amplify minority voices:
Stein had been obsessed with the group ever since she was added by her friend, Elissa Bassist (editor of Funny Women at The Rumpus), checking it several times a day to watch notable journalists and famous poets help one another. She had just woken up from a nap, jetlagged after a vacation in Budapest (where she took her laptop to keep up with Binders). She was in a fix-the-gender-gap mood. “I thought it was just going to be one conference—that was the extent of my vision,” she recalls. But then more than 100 people signed on to help, and then a cofounder stepped in, and then they raised $55,000 on Kickstarter. Within three months, the first BinderCon hosted more than 500 people and was featured on MSNBC. A Facebook group dedicated to non-male writers, Binders divides into subgroups such as Canadians, essayists, and millennials. Named after a 2012 quote by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Binders now has over 40,000 members and has become a springboard for ideas, support, and resources—such as contact information for writers wanting to pitch to magazines. The group also occasionally serves as a place for editors to solicit pitches, creating relationships with and opportunities for women and gender-non-conforming writers. Now, Stein lives in Connecticut. She’s become executive director of Out of the Binders, a New York state nonprofit, organizing two conferences a year—New York City in autumn, and Los Angeles in spring. The sixth conference, which I’m going to, will be held in April 2017. It has the same mission as the first, and will continue a BinderCon tradition: the Speed Pitch, where writers pitch editors and agents. Harper’s Magazine didn’t have a female editor available to send to the first conference, so it sent a man—the only man there, Stein told me. The magazine comes up again in our conversation when Stein talks about the industry’s gender problems as publicized by the VIDA Count, which has been publishing the share of bylines by gender in major magazines and literary journals annually since 2010. “This is one of the reasons I wanted to start this conference,” she says. “I thought, ‘What can I do to change these pie charts?’” Outside of Binders, BinderCon, and VIDA, several American organizations have addressed issues faced by women in media. One is The Establishment, a multimedia publication “funded and run by women.” Popular with Binders, it seeks to recreate the concept it’s named after. “If you’re the gatekeeper, you have power to allow for more voices to be heard,” Nikki Gloudeman, one of the co-founders, tells me. “The world is changing. It’s not okay that the media continues to share this limited perspective of our current reality. “I don’t think the opportunities are just opening up. You have to fight.”
On a warm October afternoon, in a well-lit office in
the City building at Victoria and Dundas streets in downtown Toronto,
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I meet Tracy Moore. She’s on the phone, ordering the dress Sophie Grégoire Trudeau has just worn—from Moore’s fashion line, because she has her own fashion line—to appear on her show. She hosts Cityline, the longest-running lifestyle show in Canada. The 42-year-old media personality bounced between CTV, CBC, and Breakfast Television before settling at City. She now manages an empire of clothes, TV, and family (husband, two kids, dog), and uses her show to celebrate beauty and unity among women of colour. She’s not shy about admitting that she didn’t get a lot of help becoming a notable journalist. Recalling her first shadowing experience at an internship with CTV, she says, “I was supposed to be shadowing a local reporter at CFTO. She didn’t really want me to come out with her on a story.” She met the reporter and the cameraman the next day anyway. Despite her excitement, she couldn’t break out of her shell. She wasn’t joining in on the conversations or jokes, and her discomfort showed. “I was supposed to shadow this person for two days,” Moore says, “and at the end of day one, she said, ‘No. We’re not doing this again.’” Heartbroken and ashamed, Moore used the experience to learn to be assertive. Almost two decades later, she admits that, though she is frequently approached by young journalists and wants to help, she doesn’t know what a real mentor-mentee relationship looks like. “There was no system in place for helping one another,” she says. “It really was getting by, the best I could, on merit and working really hard.”
As I begin the kind of steps Moore took at the begin-
ning of her career, the landscape for mentorship couldn’t be more different. At every turn, I feel that I can find a female journalist—usually a woman of colour—who is generous with her help. Whether it’s Jeeva giving me a tour of the Huffington Post Canada office, journalist Karen Ho emailing to compliment me on my latest article, or Moore telling me to reach out to her if I need career advice—I feel like I’m batting with a legion of supportive strangers in the stands. The game might be rigged against me (and it is from the moment I apply for a job, as a woman of colour and a young journalist), but their cheers often drown that out. It’s July 11, 2016, and I am focusing on the white lace on my kitchen table, hyperventilating. A Canadaland editor/near-stranger named Jane Lytvynenko has pitched me a story. I’m going to write my first paid freelance article. I’ve known of Lytvynenko for a few years. I’ve seen her from afar at conferences. I’ve even grabbed a beer with her. But for her to come to me with an idea seems incredibly generous; it disrupts the freelancer-pitch continuum. I have a vague understanding, at that moment, that someone has just taken an unsolicited bet on me. “Thank you for thinking of me!” I message her. “Smart. Lady. Journos,” is her response.
1. Mentor less experienced journalists. Share resources and contacts. Be kind. So many of my sources stressed the importance of one individual’s actions; by helping another voice find a platform, you’re not hurting yourself. There’s enough room at the table—just find more chairs. 2. If you’re not an expert, don’t share. We’d get a much more diverse range of voices if editors spent a few more minutes finding people who offer insightful perspectives, instead of calling up the usual “pundit” who’s actually never been affected by the issue at hand. And editors: if a piece you’re editing is out of your league, consider checking in with others who know more about the topic. 3. Many journalists from certain communities don’t want to report on that particular community. They just want to cover sports, or arts, or politics. Don’t pigeonhole. Period. 4. Don’t expect an education from people of colour and LGBTQ+ folks. Some of them might want to sit and unpack things with you. Some of them don’t. What might be a friendly discussion for you, could be a lot of emotional labour for them. Do your own research—they don’t owe you anything. 5. And of course, perhaps the best advice: hire people whose voices aren’t often heard. And of course, take them on as freelancers. Fill your staff with them. Here’s the best way to amplify minority voices: pay to hear them. —FARNIA FEKRI
When I meet Chantal Braganza for coffee—she
orders mint tea—at Balzac’s Coffee Roasters on Gould Street, she’s hugely pregnant. Braganza, now a digital editor at TVO, began her career as an intern at The United Church Observer, before moving on to another internship at the Toronto Star. There was no shortage of mentors in her career, she says, especially considering her bosses at the Star and the Observer. “Or someone like Denise Balkissoon, whom I met at the Star because we were both interns there,” Braganza says. “We stayed in touch, we became friends, and found ourselves working with each other.” The relationship between Balkissoon (who now works at The Globe and Mail) and Braganza isn’t uncommon. It also exists between Braganza and The Fader’s Anupa Mistry, and between Mistry and Balkissoon. I’ve recently started to notice this invisible thread, a sort of six-degrees-ofwomen-journalists-separation, especially on Twitter: between Koul and Ho and Strapagiel and Lytvynenko and Fitzpatrick and other women. Sometimes, it’s just a reflection of friendships in real life. But other times, I learned in my interviews, the women involved have never even met. They connect on social media, and, by virtue of being women in a struggling industry, they bond. “In industries where there are structural inequality issues that make it difficult to move into upper management, such networks are necessary,” Braganza says. “Journalism absolutely is one of these industries.”
On a crisp January
2017 afternoon, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, I sit with dozens of other journalism students listening to a NASH79 panel discussion about the disproportionate amount of harassment women in journalism face. On the stage of the Fredericton Convention Centre’s Pointe Sainte-Anne room sit Jan Wong, Shireen Ahmed, Lee Thomas, and Sarah Ratchford. “In Canadian media, which I often refer to as the mayonnaise factory, the people making the decisions are white men,” Ahmed, a freelance sports writer, says to a chorus of laughter. In the question and answer period, a female student steps up to the mic to talk about sports writing. She’s a sports journalist, she says, adding that she often feels she doesn’t belong in its hyper-masculine world. “How [do] you push back against that?” “First of all, I’m going to give you my card. I’m going to add you to a secret Facebook group that is for women sports writers,” Ahmed answers. Despite the laughter rippling through the crowd, she selects her next words carefully and says them seriously. She’s giving advice she wants remembered. “You love sports. You love what you do— you’re there. What we can do is support you, as much as we can as colleagues, and help you out if you need contacts—stuff like this is easy.” SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 65
Trouble at 1 Yonge A look back at the Toronto Star’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year when the cracks grew bigger and bigger B Y ABB Y PLENER PHOTO COLLAGE BY DAVE DONALD
T
HE TORONTO STAR BUILDING stands tall at 25 storeys high,
overlooking the waterfront. The address is 1 Yonge Street, punctuating the road that marks the division between the city’s east and west corridors. Its location seems apropos, given the Star’s longstanding history—a daily that evolved from its initial incarnation as The Evening Star in 1892 to become the most widely circulated paper in the country. Though the paper’s name is emblazoned on the building’s grey concrete exterior in its trademark blue script, only two floors and part of a third are actually used by the Toronto Star and its parent company, Torstar, while the rest are rented out to other organizations. The Star newsroom sits on the fifth floor. Exiting the elevator at floor five, guests are greeted by black-and-white portraits of the paper’s past publishers. The newsroom was designed to hold a much greater capacity than its dwindling staff currently requires. Jim Rankin, a staff reporter and photographer, estimates that when he started working there in 1990, the newsroom was home to approximately 450 employees, a number which he says is now down to 196. Rankin also serves as the vice-chair of the Star’s Unifor local. In 2016 alone, 61 newsroom positions were cut—13 in January, and 48 in August. Rankin leads the way to a set of leather chairs in the newsroom’s research library on this cool December day. The window faces south toward Lake Ontario, looking out over land that used to be owned by the Star and is now being developed for condo towers. As the reporter takes a seat, he reflects on the year behind him. “I’m excited for this year
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to be over. Everyone is.… We had a lot on our plates and it’s got to be better next year, right?” Despite the Star’s difficult 2016, his tone is calm and measured, as if he has been meditating on this desire for optimism all year long. Industry observers are prone to waxing poetic about the uncertain future of major newspapers like the Star. But to cast the Star as simply another footnote in the evolving story of Canadian newspapers dismisses the very real life experiences of the people affected by these changes. Certainly, many of the struggles the Star faces echo ongoing conversations in the Canadian news industry about layoffs, advertising revenue, and digital engagement. But a review of the seismic events that took place at the Star in 2016 reveals that the cracks in the structure at 1 Yonge are growing at an accelerating rate. In 2016, headline after headline described jobs lost and a grief-stricken newsroom, along with investigations into a toxic work culture and disagreements with the union about how to address it. Last year posed historic challenges for the paper. As the ink spills into 2017, how will the Star move forward? THE STAR IS IN A STATE of transition as it welcomes new leadership.
In March 2016, 62-year-old John Cruickshank announced that he would be stepping down from his role as publisher, noting that “it was time for generational change.” Outgoing Torstar CEO David Holland took on Cruickshank’s publishing duties, but just four months later, the 58-yearSPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 67
old executive announced that he would also be retiring. But while the search for Holland’s successor continued, he still held court at 1 Yonge. He met me at his office on the sixth floor—one floor above the newsroom—where the white elevator doors and wood panelling from floor five morphed into green marble and gold floral detailing. While Holland worked for Torstar for over 30 years, he took on the role of CEO in 2009 during the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Holland says the business never fully recovered from that downturn. In his estimation, just as the business was starting to stabilize, the speed with which advertisers shifted from print to other digital platforms posed another great challenge. “I can’t claim that we’ve cracked the code of what the sustainable position is for great brands like the Toronto Star. As much as I’m very proud of my time in the industry today, it’s been very hard to figure out how to develop a really sustainable position in the face of significant change,” he says. Holland admits that part of his motivation for retiring at this point is that, like Cruickshank, he feels his skill set no longer matches the reality of the business: “I think someone who has more DNA about the digital ecosystem is the right person to lead.” He says that maintaining reader engagement is one of the major challenges the Star is currently confronting. The development of the Star Touch tablet app was designed to address this hurdle. He admits that Star Touch has been slower to catch on than he had hoped, but contends that analytics for the app report high levels of engagement—some users are spending 30 minutes a day on the app, which he notes is much higher than the amount of time users spend on the Star website. Many of those laid off in 2016 worked in temporary positions that were originally created to support Star Touch. At the end of 2015, Holland set a goal: to gain 180,000 daily readers for the app by end of the following year. While Star Touch has failed to live up to the executives’ vision, Holland says he has “no regrets at all. Better to have tried than to have not tried.” He notes that legacy organizations are often criticized for being unwilling to experiment and he is proud that the Star took a risk, rather than maintain the status quo. While attracting users has posed a challenge, he still feels it was a useful experiment to inspire new thinking in the newsroom in terms of how to deliver the same content across different platforms. Looking ahead, Holland says that the Star is committed to its print product, which still maintains a high number of readers. “We’ll continue to publish and print because there continues to be demand. It may be demand from an older generation but, nevertheless, it’s still good demand.” The major task ahead is figuring out how to increase ad revenue on multiple platforms. “I think one of the big challenges that executives in newspaper organizations have to deal with is that [it] used to be quite a simple business 15 years ago. [Now], you’ve actually got multiple products … and the advertiser interest in those audiences varies,” Holland says. He’s also eager to see how the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage’s study of the Canadian news industry will unfold and whether the government will take an active role in supporting the newspaper industry. “There’s an important role for newspapers going forward and I think that’s part of the reason you see at least some level of interest on the part of the government.” Holland takes pride in working for a company that has the Atkinson
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While Star Touch has failed to live up to the executives’ vision, Holland says he has “no regrets at all.”
The Year at a Glance The numbers tell many stories
Since January 2016, there have been plenty of changes at 1 Yonge. Here’s the breakdown of recent events, by the numbers:
58
newsroom positions were lost in positions were on the Star Touch team. The Star’s website went through At least
2 rounds of layoffs. 36 of those
1 redesign.
3 employees in managing roles announced their retirement.
20 reporters have taken on new job titles in the wake of layoffs and newsroom restructuring.
Principles as part of its core mandate. Inspired by former publisher Joseph E. Atkinson, the Star refers to these guide posts as part of its editorial mission, reflecting its commitment to progressive values. Still, he admits the amount of change that has taken place does take a personal toll. “One of the hard things for me during my tenure is the substantial restructuring and how many people’s lives have been changed as a result of that.” As the executives on the sixth floor take the Star in a new direction, the newsroom on the floor below is trying to find its own way to move forward from the events of 2016. An independent, third-party reviewer has been appointed to investigate the paper’s newsroom culture. The review is being led by Glenn French, president and CEO of The Canadian Initiative on Workplace Violence, who began conducting interviews in February 2017. Staff will be invited to participate confidentially, and the recommendations will be shared with the company and the union once the report is complete. The review came in the aftermath of Raveena Aulakh’s suicide in May 2016. Aulakh was an award-winning environmental reporter at the Star. The paper’s union originally requested for this third-party investigation to take place almost immediately after her suicide. In a letter to the Star’s vice-president of human resources, Brian Daly, the union wrote: “The newsroom is heartbroken and angry. Employees want answers. Workplace health and safety is at stake.” However, the Star’s management rejected the union’s initial plea for a third-party review at first and opted to conduct its own internal investigation instead. The internal investigation, led by the company’s HR team, included a review of current workplace policies, relevant emails, and other correspondence, as well as interviews with staff. The investigation confirmed that Aulakh was in a relationship with senior editor Jon Filson, whom she then discovered was having an affair with their boss, managing editor Jane Davenport. Star public editor Kathy English outlined the complex relationships in a column published June 7, 2016. Both Filson and Davenport are no longer employed by the Star. Unifor filed a grievance, insisting that a third-party review was still
The paper won Award.
5 Canadian Online Publishing Awards and 1 National Newspaper 285
The Star closed its printing plant in Vaughn, leaving employees without work, and later sold the printing plant for $54,250,000. The paper’s printing needs are now outsourced to Transcontinental in North York. By the end of 2016’s second quarter, the paper’s combined digital & print circulation reached 2,321,000. The company reported that it would only spend $2 million to $4 million on the Star Touch app in 2017, compared to approximately $11 million spent in 2016.
180,000
At the end of 2015, Holland set a goal: to gain daily readers for the app by the end of the following year. As of press time, Holland confirmed via email that Star Touch is reaching 30,000 daily readers and 60,000 cumulative weekly readers. Star Touch readership is estimated based on the number of devices reached. (While the number of readers is not necessarily the same as the number of devices accessing the app, Holland says the number of devices is “a good indication of individual users.”) David Skok held his position as associate editor and head of editorial strategy for less than 4 months.
8 months. Throughout 2016, Torstar’s print advertising revenue fell 13 per cent and The search for a new CEO and publisher at Torstar lasted nearly
subscriber revenue fell by 7.1 percent.
In 2016, Torstar’s revenue declined about
13 percent.
—ABBY PLENER
SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 69
needed to examine the Star’s newsroom culture. An agreement was finally reached in October 2016, and the third-party review led by French is underway. The grievance has been put on hold for now, but Unifor reserves the right to proceed with it, pending the outcome of the thirdparty review. Rankin hopes that the review will provide staff with an opportunity to see their concerns addressed and, ultimately, be able to move forward. “The place will function better as a journalistic outlet if people are happy and proud and feel respected. It only increases the place’s ability to do what we’re supposed to do as journalists. I’m optimistic, I really am. And it’s easy when you’ve had a crappy year because, you think, ‘nothing could be worse than what we went through.’ And that’s kind of a common feeling, I think,” he says. Former Star reporter Paul Watson has a long history at the paper. He started as a summer intern in the 1970s but spent a large part of his career working remotely as the Star’s Arctic correspondent and as a foreign reporter—earning a Pulitzer Prize in the process. He publicly resigned in July 2015 following a tense disagreement with Star management over a story he was working on about a historic shipwreck discovery and its connection with the Harper government. Referring to a 2016 National Post story about the Star’s internal investigation resulting from Aulakh’s death, Watson says, “I’ve been hoping that someone would stand up publicly and say what those sources said. They didn’t feel safe to do that, but I’m sure glad they [spoke anonymously] because that exposes [what] I’m talking about. [Management] did exactly what the companies we go after do. They try to obfuscate, lie, and fool their way out of a bad situation.” During his time at the Star, Watson returned to 1 Yonge occasionally for meetings—but in recent years, he felt the newsroom had changed. “I was shocked at how quiet the place was,” says Watson. “[There was] a sense of fear.” As a young reporter, he recalls being a part of a vibrant, sometimes boisterous newsroom, where colleagues had passionate discussions about their work. “There was very much a Toronto Star culture; it was a rich place. We were encouraged to zig when everyone else zagged.” When asked whether he thinks the reputation of the Star has changed among fellow journalists, Watson says, “I lament the fact that more journalists are not speaking out. The public is under the impression that this is a matter of technology, that the death of newspapers is written in stone because they can’t compete in the digital world.” He continues, “The Toronto Star can be a successful news organization online if the people running it step aside and make way for people who know what they’re doing. There are many journalists who know that fact, but they are afraid to say so.” Despite his recent experiences and his very public resignation from the paper, Watson firmly believes that the Star is an institution worth saving, imploring that “the country needs the place.” On October 7, 2016, the Star announced that David Skok, formerly of The Boston Globe, would take on the role of associate editor and head of editorial strategy for its digital products. He spent the final months of the year meeting with Star staff individually and in larger groups, getting to know them and answering questions. Rankin sat down with him for an hour-long chat. Sitting in the Star library in mid-December, Rankin relayed his first impressions: “He really cares about the Star—I think that’s genuine.”
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“ There was very much a Toronto Star culture; it was a rich place. We were encouraged to zig when everyone else zagged.”
AS A FORMER REPORTER and vice-chair at the Star’s union, Dan
Smith was proud to see the union challenge management and demand a workplace culture investigation. It was a testament to the union’s ability to demand fair treatment of employees and promote a positive work environment. However, when it comes to protecting the staff’s financial interests, Smith says that there have been occasions when he felt the union should have fought harder. “I think they bought too easily into this notion that traditional media is dying, [and] it’s a matter of limiting our losses as the inevitable decline continues.” Smith was involved with the Star’s union for the majority of his career, serving in various capacities from 1988 until his departure in June 2015. “We’ve been cutting and shaving the value of our contract since the early 2000s.” With layoffs and buyouts, union membership is shrinking as the staff gets smaller and younger. Smith says that younger staffers have grown accustomed to precarious employment and temporary contracts and he fears that they do not trust the union’s ability to fight for their interests. He quips that he felt secure enough in his position at the Star that he would lead a union meeting while editor Michael Cooke was running a news meeting steps away. “There was no fear, in other words. [But with] a much younger cohort, especially one that doesn’t have experience in unionized workplaces, I’m sure it’s more difficult than ever.” While Smith cites the concessions the union has made over the last 15 years, Wayne MacPhail says the problem goes back even further. MacPhail formerly served as the director of Southam InfoLab, which provided research and development services for the Southam newspaper chain. In that role, he visited the Toronto Star newsroom in the 1990s to see how its online news was being produced. He was surprised to discover that the web team was mostly made up of non-journalists who were not members of the union. Today, the Star’s digital and tablet teams do consist of trained journalists, but MacPhail believes that the desire to keep web production staff out of the union in the 1990s “set newspapers back five years. They did themselves enormous damage by ignoring it and thinking it could be non-guild work. They’re still set back by that misjudgment.” MacPhail says that, in newsrooms, there is still an unconscious belief
that digital staff can rely on younger, more inexperienced talent. He says that if the Star was truly prioritizing digital strategy the way it claimed to be with the Star Touch app, the Star would place a greater emphasis on including seasoned journalists in that process instead of relying on new hires. In January 2015, the Star announced 60 new hires as it prepared to launch the tablet app. In a memo to staff, editor Michael Cooke said these new hires “will bring an explosion of freshness our newsroom has never before seen in such a concentrated time.” Many of these new hires were subsequently laid off by the Star in 2016. The 2016 layoffs prompted significant restructuring within the newsroom as the paper aims to produce the same level of content with less staff. Three broad divisions within editorial have been created, consisting of beats, bureaus, and columnists; a breaking news team combining city reporters and the digital desk; and a combination of teams involved with investigations, special projects, and features. The shuffling means that many reporters and editors settled into new roles in the final months of 2016. Jim Rankin says “a lot of the moves were well-received; there’s a lot of reasons to be positive moving forward. Good people got good jobs, that makes people happy to work for them.” While its digital strategy remains in flux, over half of the Star’s readership still comes from print. Rankin says that within the newsroom itself, there is a divide between those who believe there will always be a print newspaper and those who think the Star could become digital-only. He says he continues to be amazed by the high number of daily newspapers that still exist in Toronto, pointing to that anomaly as evidence that an audience for print still exists—but financial stability is still a big question. “It’s a big drag ‘em out, sock ‘em out war to see who drops first,” he says. He says that while 2016 was a tough year for employees, his peers’ perseverance remains unshaken. “That’s a real challenge for the managers, to keep everyone moving forward, because it can be really easy to say, ‘You know, why do we bother?’—but that’s not happening. People, on a daily basis, do their jobs the best they can [and] you have to focus on that.” For deputy digital editor Shree Paradkar, 2016 marked the year that she began a regular column at the Star, covering race issues. Paradkar had contributed occasional op-ed pieces about race in the past, but she doubted that there was sufficient interest within the newsroom for it to become a regular feature. Yet, when the newsroom was reorganized in fall 2016, staff were encouraged to speak up about potential changes. Paradkar was pleasantly surprised to learn from managing editor Irene Gentle that many staff wanted to see increased coverage about race. The first installment, published on November 4, was dedicated to Raveena Aulakh. “She wanted me to do this column,” she says. “Her last email to me was that she was very happy that I was writing about these important topics. So when the column became real, I wanted to dedicate it to her. It’s something she wanted and I’m doing it for her.” That first column called out newsrooms, including the Star’s, for their lack of racial diversity. Paradkar says it was well-received by fellow staffers and managers, and the fact that many of her peers have been discussing the issue is a positive step. Yet, she insists that newsrooms like the Star’s need to keep pushing forward and should never become complacent. “We’re losing out on talent and opportunities to expand because people are not aware,” she says of the cost of not diversifying. As the Star carries on into 2017, the foundation at 1 Yonge stands
As the Star carries on into 2017, the foundation at 1 Yonge stands on shifting ground.
on shifting ground. Many of the paper’s staff are taking on new roles in the wake of their colleagues’ departures, awaiting the results of the newsroom culture review. Staff are eager to hear more about the Star’s evolving digital strategy as they welcome new leadership whom they hope will help expand its future digital footprint. “Maybe 2016 was the year at the Star when we were open about the need for change,” says Paradkar. The future is anything but clear, but it is certain that 2016 has left its mark on the Star’s collective memory. POSTSCRIPT:
With its most recent report, it’s evident that Torstar’s confidence in the Star Touch app is clearly shaken. Its investment in the app for 2017 is expected to reach between $2 million to $4 million—a significant cutback from the approximately $11 million it spent on the app in 2016. Rankin says that since the initial launch of the app, the editorial approach to Star Touch has shifted: “We have to care about every platform equally and that means we don’t put all our eggs into one digital product.” On March 3, 2017, Torstar finally announced Holland’s replacement after almost eight months of searching. John Boynton, a 53-yearold loyalty marketing executive and former vice president of Rogers Communications, was to begin on March 31. With the announcement of his incoming tenure as CEO and publisher, Boynton noted that while he envisions Star Touch will play a role in the publication’s future, it’s clear “that smartphones are volumetrically the bigger medium right now.” While the Star welcomed a new CEO in March, the preceding month saw Skok’s abrupt departure. On February 3, 2017, a memo was sent to staff announcing it was Skok’s last day at the Star. His parting words came in the form of a message posted on Twitter: “When I left The Boston Globe after three years to come back to Toronto for my hometown paper, it was a dream come true…. But the fit is not what I’d hoped and so after mutually respectful conversation with my colleagues here, I have decided to leave the Star.” As 2017 moves ahead, it’s yet to be seen how this turnover will impact the paper’s future. SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 71
Tongue Tied Trolls have been holding comments sections hostage for too long. Now news outlets are fighting back B Y STEPHANIE HUGHES ILLUSTRATION BY ALEXEI VELLA
It turns out that even trolls have hearts.
Sometimes. That’s what Katelyn Verstraten, an online reporter for CTV Vancouver, discovered in April 2016 when she posted an article about David Pennington—a local runner who was planning to jog from the Mexico-U.S. border to Vancouver to raise awareness and funds for ocean protection and conservation. Once the story went live, Verstraten waited for her Twitter nemesis, known to her as @baabaa, to surface. A few hours later, @baabaa and his black sheep profile photo appeared in the comment section. But rather than his usual anti-media tangents, this time he only said, “I literally can’t say anything bad about [Pennington].” What makes @baabaa, and thousands of other black sheep, bleat online? Behavioural scientist Mark Timms believes it’s the spotlight effect—the idea that some people believe they’re noticed by a wide audience when, in reality, they aren’t. This web celebrity belief helps
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explain why people participate in online discussions so vigourously. Susan Weinschenk, a behavioural psychologist, argues that the Internet reduces empathy: “There are certain norms in place when we are having a normal conversation that are not in place when we’re having online conversations.” The result is that all those trolls erode online communities along with digital journalism itself. In response, many overwhelmed news sites, led by Reuters and Popular Science, removed their comment sections due to insufficient moderating personnel. Others soon followed, including the Toronto Star, Huffington Post Canada, Motherboard, and all CTV news sites. Users cried foul over infringement of free speech, but editors are tired of defending researched articles from unfounded and ignorant jibes. Sexist and racist remarks also alienate a significant portion of the audience. And, of course, advertisers don’t like paying for ads that appear near toxic reader commentary. If online comment sections attract trolls, then publishers need to redesign them.
Back in 1997, viewers submitted questions
to the staff of PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer via email. Greg Barber, who was the desk assistant on NewsHour that year, remembers this era fondly. “It was not a live experience—the Internet was very young back then,” he says, “but what I could see straight away with that experience was how exciting it was to be able to connect questions that came from folks not in the media industry, people who were experts in whatever field.” For Barber and everyone else on the staff, engaging with the audience on a personal level was good for journalism—and a constant connection with the customer was also good for business. Barber, now the director of digital news products at The Washington Post, would eventually watch online comments devolve into a raging dumpster fire. To address the problem, the Post began collaborating with the New York Times and Mozilla, a company that encourages a community approach to software design through an open source philosophy, as demonstrated by applications like Bugzilla. After a team was brought together, Kim Gardner, project manager for software developer Agile at the New York Times, joined them as they snowballed into a forwardthinking organization. The result of the Barber-Gardner-Mozilla collaboration is the Coral Project, one of the only organizations leading the charge to establish responsible commenting. It is armed with many years of research, a team of eccentric minds, and a grant from the Knight Foundation (an organization that invests in the future of journalism). Barber is now the head of strategy and partnerships for the Coral Project. He leverages 20 years of journalism experience to help the team navigate the nuances of commentary and the way it shapes newsroom engagement with audiences. Both the Coral Project and Civil Comments, an interactive comment moderation platform created by Christa Mrgan and Aja Bogdanoff, assume that the community wants to offer intelligent debate but lack the tools to keep troublemakers out. Another program, called Hearken, provides a service that helps news sites crowdsource story ideas by ask-
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Not all readers appreciate diversity in journalism.
Trollbusters
Who you gonna call? As the trolls closed in on comment sections, news sites needed solutions. Now, just about everyone has their own answer to the “comment question.” Here are a few of them: Traditional Solution Some sites are going with the idea that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” opting to keep the original section despite the trolls Social Media Solutions Websites like those of the Toronto Star and the National Post are off-loading their comment sections onto social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter Third-Party Solutions Some forward-thinking groups, like Civil Comments, the Coral Project, and Hearken, are developing their own ways for sites to connect to their audiences and for audience members to connect with one another Original Solutions Websites like Quartz and Motherboard are trying their hand at solving the problem themselves, whether through original coding or old-school methods like Letters to the Editor —STEPHANIE HUGHES
ing the public questions about what to investigate next. “Questions are the new comments,” says Hearken CEO Jennifer Brandel. The Coral Project created software called Trust in late 2015 to address the challenge of identifying types of users and storing the results in a database. The software was beta-tested last year. Bad contributions are instantly sent through pre-moderation while non-toxic contributions are highlighted. Trust works with two other products: Ask, which allows users to ask others in the community a specific question; and Talk, the platform that integrates Coral Project software to foster constructive commentary and help create an engaged reader community. Civil Comments asks every commenter to first review two other comments in the moderation queue. Comments are judged on quality and civility, based on how others evaluate them. “Our hypothesis was that our community would need to delete about 50 percent of comments,” says Mrgan, the vice president of design. The actual number ended up being a mere four percent. Civil Comments caught the eye of The Globe and Mail, where a trial is currently being conducted in its politics section. Cynthia Young, the Globe’s head of audience, decided to try the software after hundreds of Globe readers urged her to keep the comment section, saying they came to the Globe specifically to read the comments. Mrgan believes that Civil Comments will succeed because comment section quality is achieved through participation.
Not all publications need outside help with
the comment challenge. Unwilling to pay for outside help to moderate comments, Motherboard went the old-school route by creating a Letters to the Editor section, which offers engaging conversations without hate speech or personal attacks. It’s a slower process, with responses published a few days to a few weeks after the originating article appears, but the result is a more thoughtful debate. “Even if someone would write an email to disagree with the story,” says Motherboard weekend editor Emanuel Maiberg, “At least they’re sending an email. There’s just more thought that goes into it.” Readers were not pleased with the change, calling the decision cowardly. Is it possible to design comment sections that encourage readers to provide constructive feedback in the moment? Digital native Quartz launched its own comment feature, Annotations, in 2013, allowing users to comment on a specific paragraph in the article. Remarks are anchored to a single statement rather than criticizing (or praising) the entire article. The idea is also pretty intuitive, since the user only needs to hover their cursor over a paragraph (or tap on a paragraph with a mobile device) and click on the quote bubble to read what another reader said. Remarks must be concise, since commenters are limited to 280 characters, equal to two full tweets. The posts are immediately public without a review process, but some annotations are given a gold star and labeled a “featured” post if moderators think it’s a substantial contribution to the article. However, critics say it’s just putting the same problem on a different platform. Moderation is clearly key here. SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 75
Another attempt to improve comments involves eliminating anonymity. Tim Shore, the founder and publisher of BlogTO, switched to using a social media plugin because “we wanted a comment solution that required some sort of user login or profile so that users couldn’t comment anonymously like in our previous system.” BlogTO’s previous model allowed people to post under any pseudonym or email, which made it too difficult to track and ban problematic users. But asking readers to log in using their social media account is not without its own issues. After describing the relatively harmless shenanigans of @baabaa, Katelyn Verstraten notes that people can express hostility—not with the safety of a pseudonym, but with their real names: “With Facebook, you just have to be accountable, because it links back to your profile.” She says she is still shocked by the things people say, even without anonymity. There is also the issue of headline commenting. Some readers leave a comment after reading only the headline—despite the fact that the article may address some of their criticism. “People will make a mean comment based on [a headline],” says Verstraten. “Sometimes you just want to smack yourself in the forehead.” For Carson Jerema, one of the Edmonton Journal’s digital news editors, the issue is mostly technical. The change from a traditional site-run comment box to the Facebook plugin had comments funneling down through one multi-purpose tool. The plugin forces commenters to log in via Facebook—everything they post goes to both the website and Facebook. As with most newsrooms, there isn’t one staff member on constant comment patrol. While moderation is made easier, the publication is still exposed to hostile remarks as readers can comment on stories published days, weeks, or even months ago. Even when a publication believes it’s solved a problem in one article, another problem could pop up on another article and reflect poorly on the site’s readership at large. But not every publication suffers equally. “We don’t really have the same problem with our comment section that other mainstream news sites have,” says Kate Robertson, an online and social media manager at Now Magazine. Since it wasn’t experiencing the same level of harassment as other publications, it retained its comment section, deciding that the benefits of constructive commentary far outweighed the drawbacks of hate speech. Farhan Mohamed, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Hive, maintained its comment section out of loyalty to the reader: “If we are not giving our readers a chance to weigh in on anything and have their say, then I think that we are doing a bit of an injustice to them.” Moderation, while complicated, has often resolved itself with keyword searches to scope out toxic remarks, along with readers who report toxic comments.
“ If we are not giving our readers a chance to weigh in on anything and have their say, then I think that we are doing a bit of an injustice to them.”
“ Questions are the new comments”
A user named “Being human” responded: “People tend to fear from the unknown, but as Syrian who came to Canada few months back i’m very grateful. We want to adapt the Canadian culture, what all we are asking for is to give us a time. We did not intend to flee from our home by choice but we forced to take this path. Syrians are good people and i hope someday you could meet someone, Please do not judge us before knowing us.” In this case, the CBC article gave a refugee an opportunity to directly address criticism. It’s not clear why, but “wingman” went silent during the rest of the 5,161-comment conversation. CBC has since closed comments on most refugee stories to avoid hate speech. Senior director of digital news Brodie Fenlon admitted this decision occurred because the comments would affect the quality of journalism when reporters were afraid of the backlash their stories would have. But for every “wingman” who goes silent and every @baabaa who unexpectedly changes their behaviour, there are flocks of others who relentlessly slag diversity, immigration, and more. The emerging new solutions will never stop all of them—only their consciences can do that.
What started as a constructive debate about
Syrian refugees settling in Toronto, soon changed direction. A December 2015 CBC News Toronto article about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ambitious refugee policy inspired positive comments. But skeptical Canadians soon weighed in. “I would rather help my fellow Canadian,” said a pseudonymous user named “wingman.”
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Up Against It Three ambitious women photojournalists and their struggles for great shots —and greater acceptance
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Photojournalist Meredith Holbrook, then age 19, took this shot in East Jerusalem, her first foray into the field.
B Y SIERR A BEIN
M
EREDITH HOLBROOK has a very particular morning routine. Before heading out onto the streets of Jerusalem or nearby Gaza, the freelance photojournalist lays her clothes on her bed and chooses the ones that will best cover her body. Then she puts them on, layer by layer—first, a dark pair of pants, and then a tank top and two baggy shirts. Rather than the red lipstick she used to wear while shooting night clubs and concerts in Vancouver, she applies a shade of nude and a dash of concealer. A backpack and a sturdy pair of boots complete her ensemble. The idea is to subdue as much of her femininity as possible. In a part of the world where gender equality is still a novel concept, she doesn’t want to risk attracting undue attention. It’s happened to her before—show a little extra skin and, suddenly, she’s the story. “These are things that men don’t have to think about,” says Holbrook. “They don’t have to think about desexualizing themselves.” For Holbrook, “desexualizing” herself is worth it if it means she gets to tell the kinds of stories that no one else is telling. Today, she’s on assignment for Save a Child’s Heart, an Israeli NGO that gives free heart surgeries to children in need—often including Palestinian kids who feel particularly vulnerable across the border in Israel. The organization, founded in Toronto, also operates in other countries. Today, her subject is a little Tanzanian boy named Juma, who wasn’t expected to survive. But now he’s smiling, giving Holbrook a post-op thumbs-up as she clicks away with her camera and chats with his mother. Had Holbrook been back in the Middle East, this kind of moment with Juma’s mother might not have been granted to a male photojournalist. As far as Holbrook is concerned, stories with this kind of women’s perspective aren’t being told nearly enough. And no wonder: in September 2015, the Reuters Institute
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surveyed 1,556 international photojournalists, finding that “professional news photography is dominated by men.” In fact, just 15 percent of respondents in the Reuters survey were women. The 2016 report says that the divide is “almost identical.” Here in Canada, the situation is grimmer. Last year, the News Photographers Association of Canada (NPAC) conducted a survey of its own and found that just 12 percent of Canadian photojournalists identify as female. And yet, Canadian journalism schools are full of women. The 2015–2016 Ryerson undergraduate journalism class was nearly 75 percent women. At University of King’s College in Halifax, the 2016–2017 photojournalism program was 66 percent. At Belleville, Ontario’s Loyalist College, the photojournalism program has been about 60 percent women for the past few years. “It’s still a topic of conversation,” says Patti Gower, a Loyalist photojournalism professor. “Why do so many women study photojournalism and it doesn’t end up being their primary source of income?” For one thing, photojournalism has traditionally been considered a macho field. The dearth of women photojournalists means that, for those who are still determined to break into the business, there are fewer mentorship and networking opportunities for fellow women. Compounding the problem is the decline of staff journalism jobs in Canada. “There aren’t that many places for women to insert themselves, because there aren’t that many staff jobs,” says Gower. “I know quite a few women who have left the field.” More and more young women are going freelance, taking it upon themselves to get to where the news is happening and then trying to sell their photos after the fact. Nearly five years ago, that’s exactly what Holbrook did. Since then, she says, “I rarely ever see other females, and when you do meet them, they’re hard as fuck. They don’t take shit at all. I think that because you have to deal with so much more than just the job, it can be very, very discouraging because you have to break through this glass ceiling.”
For years, she didn’t tell anyone about the incident, afraid that they would blame her for putting herself in danger.
Think about some of the most iconic images of the twentieth century—photos that changed the way people see the world—and chances are they were taken by a male photographer: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” (Joe Rosenthal), “Napalm Girl” (Nick Ut), “Tank Man” (Stuart Franklin), “The Falling Man” (Richard Drew). Of course, there are exceptions, including Margaret Bourke-White’s haunting photos of Buchenwald concentration camp survivors and Dorothea Lange’s photos taken during The Great Depression. But ultimately, we have largely seen the world through a male gaze. You have only to look to pop culture to see a reflection of this reality: historical action and drama flicks like The Killing Fields, Salvador, The Bang Bang Club, Under Fire, and The Year of Living Dangerously—all focused on intrepid men venturing into danger zones, armed with nothing but a camera and a ton of guts. Holbrook knew that becoming a photojournalist wouldn’t be easy, not least because she failed photography while attending school in Vancouver. Growing up in Toronto, she was a bit of a tomboy—the girl who idolized Indiana Jones and always hung out with the “dudes.” “I love whiskey, I drink beer,” she says. “It separates you from a stereotypical female.” She got her start as an event photographer, shooting Vancouver’s nightlife and artists like Calvin Harris, Steve Aoki, and Rick Ross. “There were one or two other female photographers, but none of them were doing the downtown clubs in Vancouver,” she says. Holbrook knew she wouldn’t have been given the same access in these clubs had she been a man, and she used that fact to her advantage. “It goes both ways for event photography and when you’re doing news: a lot of people feel more comfortable around women.” But despite being able to “channel a certain masculinity,” as Holbrook puts it, she has still faced hurdles her male colleagues haven’t. It started when, at just 16 years old, she took her first trip to Israel—while on a guided trip in a touristy area, she narrowly avoided being kidnapped.
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EREZ CROSSING, ISRAEL MARCH 20, 2012 Three families return home to Gaza after checkups for the children in Israel, who had undergone surgeries a few years earlier. Meredith has worked with some of the families for years. MEREDITH HOLBROOK: “Many children have surgery before the age of three and then they go periodically to these free clinics. And depending on the relations between Gaza and Israel, sometimes they’ll be permitted into the country, and sometimes they won’t. “I was walking with them to the terminal for them to cross over into Gaza and one of the mothers said, ‘Oh! Why don’t you just come over with us and I’ll cook you dinner tonight,’ like it was the most casual thing ever. One of the things we overlook is that these are people living a life—and why not invite someone over for dinner? Whereas we look at that as a westerner like, ‘That’s so crazy, that’s a war zone, that’s so dangerous,’ that’s their regular life. I’m sure that, if I was a male, that would never have happened. I’m almost very certain that, if I was a guy, then there would be absolutely no way she’d be inviting me over for dinner at her house. “These women were probably only a couple years older than me. I guess, for me, taking this picture was like two worlds coming together in a very rare interaction.”
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Although she now walks past this area regularly, she remembers that day well. “I was walking down this alleyway, taking photos, not really paying attention, and this car pulls up in front of me,” she recalls. “They chased me down the street, and I basically just jumped into the crowd.” For years, she didn’t tell anyone about the incident, afraid that they would blame her for putting herself in danger. Once, Holbrook encountered a woman reporting who, while returning from an assignment in Africa, had put her video camera in her checked baggage rather than taking it with her on-board. Her camera was stolen—along with everything she’d shot while travelling on assignment. She arrived at her publication in Israel with no material. “You know there’s so much more emphasis on the fact you’re a female,” says Holbrook. “Obviously she shouldn’t have done that. But again, it becomes this representation of everyone, of all females, like, ‘Ah well, maybe she’s on her period.’” “It takes a lot to break that barrier,” she adds. Amber Bracken, a freelancer and the current president of NPAC, wonders if there are so few women in the business partly due to what she calls the “confidence gap.” “There’s sort of that social conditioning, where guys are more likely to have a little more bravado,” she says. “So even though they might be feeling the same things the women are feeling, they act like they have it totally figured out.” This bravado can be particularly daunting for young women who may not have any mentors to turn to for that boost of confidence. “It’s just little things,” Bracken continues. “Some guy assumes that he knows what I’m doing and whether it’s good or not. I’ve come far enough now to where I can be like, ‘Screw you, bud.’ I’m over it, but there was a time where I would have been like, ‘Am I doing something wrong?’” Holbrook knows the feeling. “I will definitely say that there are some cases that, as a female, you do get treated as a kid, like you don’t know any better.”
For women who choose to pursue a career in photojournalism, there are fewer routes
KIEV, UKRAINE JANUARY 26, 2014 Protesters guard the perimeter of the Maidan in organized groups, who rotate in shifts. Many used whatever protection they could find or make, including wooden shields, ski helmets, and wooden bats. MARTA IWANEK: “It was so long ago ... The protest was getting more heated and people were getting angrier, but it still hadn’t reached a critical clashing point. But you could tell that things were getting worse. So there was a sense of uneasiness, of course. But you just try to work around that and gauge the crowds and keep yourself as safe as possible.” Usually, clashes happened at night, and although Iwanek interacted with a lot of men, she says she noticed many women taking pictures of the protest. “I’ve always tried to make sure I was with people. I was with other photojournalists, Ukrainian ones who knew the area a lot better than me, so I made sure to take cues from them. It’s always safer to be with more people in situations like that. “I think that, in those situations, everyone feels danger.”
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to full-time, stable work than ever before, and fewer mentors to teach them how to make it in today’s freelance-driven market. But for many women, freelance is still a career option that allows them creative freedom and the ability to carve their own space in the industry. Marta Iwanek graduated from Loyalist College’s photojournalism program in 2013 after finishing Ryerson’s journalism program in 2012. She’s completed multiple internships, including at the Toronto Star, the Waterloo Region Record, and the Canadian Press. She also spent a summer on contract at the Star after one of her many trips to Ukraine. “I was the only female photographer working at the paper,” says Iwanek. She was replacing Tara Walton, who was on mat-leave at the time. “And I remember sometimes I would show up to an assignment and a reporter would be looking for the photographer, and then they’d realize it was me. And they’d be like, ‘Oh! Usually I’m looking for a man.’ It wasn’t like they weren’t supportive or anything—it’s just what they were used to.” For Iwanek, a full-time position never appealed to her. Newsrooms have been cutting staff positions for years, and more cuts are coming— which means that there’s no more ladder to climb from internship to permanent staff. In 2011, the International Women’s Media Foundation published the “Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media.” Among the 522 companies surveyed, women represented just a third of full-time journalists and only 23 percent of illustrators, designers, and photographers. The lack of regular gigs means many young photojournalists are turning to freelance—a world that is more competitive than ever before. “There are a lot of freelancers out there,” says Ron Hartwell, who recently took a buyout from the National Post after 12 years as photo editor. “Even among the freelancers we use, there are very few women.”
She was the last woman photojournalist on staff before she was laid off in 2014.
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Iwanek remembers standing in her kitchen after her Waterloo Record internship ended, wondering, “What do I do now?” Her answer: Apply for a few grants and then catch a plane to her family’s native Ukraine. Ukraine is still a patriarchal country, which means she got a lot of questions: “Where’s your man? How are you not travelling with a man?” She ended up working with Lana Šlezić, an award-winning photographer and filmmaker. Iwanek later shot the 2013 protests of the Euromaidan shortly before she was due to fly home. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t leave,’” she says. So she stayed for three months, selling her photos and videos to Maclean’s, Maisonneuve, and CTV. Last year, her work, “The Maidan,” published in Maisonneuve, helped her win two National Magazine Awards, for best new magazine photographer and best photojournalism essay. “I think it’s great to support female photographers and to highlight them and the stories that they do tell because, as a unique photographer, you’re attracted to unique things that are unique to you,” says Iwanek. Peter Bregg, her former Ryerson professor, lauds Iwanek for being a role model for other young photographers. “There aren’t that many jobs available for staff people. Newspapers would rather hire freelancers,” says Bregg. “Marta is in the best position.” Bracken was the last woman photojournalist on staff at the Edmonton Sun before she was laid off in 2014. “What I learned in two months at the Sun was probably worth two years in school,” she says. In hindsight, she says, the layoff was probably good timing—she was ready to be a freelancer. Between working on personal projects with Indigenous youth in her home province of Alberta, she now shoots for Maclean’s, the Canadian Press, and BuzzFeed, among others. In a Maclean’s spread published this past summer, she portrayed Fort McMurray evacuees and the objects they took with them in the wake of the massive forest fire that devastated the community. “As a journalist, when things are going down, you want to be there,” she says. “It was also really amazing to talk to all the evacuees and figure out a different way to tell that story.”
“ Everyone needs to see what their piece of the pie is and how they can bring gender parity to the industry.”
Visual storytelling is a tough gig, so much of it is about whom you know. This is why photographers like Bracken, Holbrook, and Iwanek have turned to the internet and social media to get their work in front of otherwise inaccessible photo editors and forge connections with other women photographers. There are over 5,500 members in the invite-only “Riot Grrrls in Journalism” Facebook group. The discussion board is filled with questions about everything from buying the best cameras to finding specific sources to persuading editors to create a gender beat. There have even been discussions about how to carry heavy photo equipment properly and how to quickly recover from a gear-related injury. Riot Grrrls is just one of the unofficial mentoring and support groups that have cropped up to help women photojournalists get their work into mainstream publications. Whenever Iwanek is back in Toronto, she tries to meet with a group of fellow women photojournalists to swap stories, help one another with grant applications, and help edit each other’s photos. When Iwanek returned to Toronto from working on a project in Poland and was scrambling to get ready for a New York Times portfolio review the following day, two other girls helped her edit, “and I was like, thank God I have you,” Iwanek says. Slowly, she’s seeing more women photographers, and her network is expanding. “You can see change—it’s just going to take time,” she says. Meanwhile, editors should be urging the process along; they stand to gain just as much as the photographers do. “Everyone can benefit from having a diversity of perspectives, whether you’re hiring someone in the newsroom or hiring for assignment,” says Iwanek. “Everyone needs to see what their piece of the pie is and how they can bring gender parity to the industry.”
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EDMONTON MAY 31, 2013 Jelena Mrdjenovich takes a moment to collect herself after sustaining a wound at KO Boxing's Double Jeopardy card at the Shaw Conference Centre. Mrdjenovich went on to win the WBC World featherweight title. AMBER BRACKEN: “The fight picture’s really good, too. There’s literally blood flying everywhere. And they’re both coated in it, like all over their bodies, and their sports bras, and their faces. It’s everywhere. But I like this because it captures a moment of her regrouping. I chose this image because I really like the quiet reflection of it; it’s like that mental regrouping after she just, like, poured out everything. She poured everything on the floor and, for just a moment, she’s alone in her thoughts. Even her trainer’s looking at the other fighter. I like that idea of mental resolve. She’s tough, obviously, she’s physically tough, but she’s mentally really tough, too. “I, personally, was inspired by the visual—seeing a woman kick ass so fast. The visuals of that are so dramatic. Blood flying everywhere, it’s very untraditionally feminine, a really badass presentation. I like quiet moments, and I like something that feels like it reflects some part of the human experience and some part of that person ... something universal that we can all relate to.”
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Why freelancing is more precarious than ever B Y BRENNAN DOHER TY ILLUSTRATION BY NICK CRAINE
A
S DAWN BREAKS ACROSS A DESOLATE FIELD east of Sarnia, three activists
slip into a fenced-off enclosure the size of a parking spot. A camera rolls as Vanessa Gray, one of the activists, cranks shut a steel valve wheel—separating Ontario from Enbridge Line 9 oil. She and her comrades, Sarah Scanlon and Stone Stewart, then tie themselves to the wheel and wait to be arrested. “We hope that we show that it’s easy for anyone to do,” Gray explains to the camera. By the time David Gray-Donald awoke in Toronto that morning—December 21, 2015—the video was already plastered across anti-pipeline activists’ Facebook pages. The bearded, long-haired freelance journalist and sometime tutor, who typically covers environmentalist and anti-racist activism, had a dilemma. While Vice Canada had assigned him to cover the story, the closest he was going to get was the video of Gray’s arrest. Speed was part of the issue—Sarnia is a three-hour drive from Toronto—but so was his meager check: as he says, “I’m getting paid $200 for this story.” Thirty years
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ago, Gray-Donald could have reasonably expected a major news organization to pay him considerably more, as well as cover his gas money, incidentals, and long-distance phone calls. He might have reused sections of his Vice piece in a book on Canadian anti-pipeline resistance; as a freelancer, he’d only sell Vice the rights to his work for a few months at most. Today, $200 for a digital-only piece—the content of which Vice owns and can replicate, in any medium, for two years—is commonplace. And that rate is expected to cover not just a day’s reporting, but all of the accompanying social media promotion, professional networking, and email correspondence of a twentyfirst-century freelance journalist’s life. “I think it’s become virtually impossible to earn a living just from freelancing, especially from digital journalism,” says Nicole Cohen, an assistant professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto. Her book, Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age, is the product of a decade spent researching the state of freelance journalism in Canada, post-advent of the Internet. “I seek answers to a perplexing question,” she writes. “In a digital age when more media forms and outlets exist than ever before and when all require written material, why is it so difficult for freelancers to earn a living?” It has never been an easy life. But, Cohen argues, “I think it’s pretty obvious that journalism has become a lot more precarious over the past few decades.” “Precarious” also refers to what lies between a freelance journalist’s $200 assignments. Without employer-sponsored EI or health benefits, security is a modified version of Blake’s advice from Glengarry Glen Ross: Always Be Selling Stories. Freelance work kills weekends, evenings, even family vacations. “For many freelancers, at least the ones I’ve talked to and studied, they certainly feel like they don’t have a choice,” explains Errol Salamon, a post-doctoral fellow at the Fonds de recherche du Québec— Société et culture, the co-editor of Journalism in Crisis, and the labour editor of J-Source. Burnout becomes (more of) a concern. “I don’t have any medical evidence to support this but, I mean, you can’t be working 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he says. And while freelancing is often a choice, experts say that it’s actually closer to a requirement for journalists caught between contracts. “It’s an unfortunate reality that people trying to get into the business now are being forced to be freelance,” says Carmel Smyth, the former president of the Canadian Media Guild (CMG). “It’s even spoken about as if it’s a choice.” What follow are some snapshots from the freelancing front lines.
The Pitch: Why it never ends For a year and a half, Aidan Johnston spent his Sunday nights prepping a weekly
barrage of pitches to editors at Vice, Now Magazine, Nylon, and others. He bartended Wednesday nights at a Parkdale restaurant and freelanced the rest of his week away. Those were long days. “Like, nine to midnight, just to fit it all in,” he recalls. “I had the energy for it. But it was just so jumbled, and it was hard to make plans all the time.” Journalists tend to be workaholics. The need to constantly pitch is part of the reason why. But staffers, leaning over their editor’s or producer’s cubicle wall, get actual face time. Freelancers must maintain a constant email bombardment to people they’ve likely never met, and they must score hits. “Your whole life becomes a pitch,
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“ Your whole life becomes a pitch, basically.”
basically,” Cohen says. Sometimes, Johnston got no responses. Or, he’d get calls from editors in the midst of a busy week asking something along the lines of, “What are you doing this Tuesday?” “Everything gets consumed with the need to constantly find work,” Cohen adds. Downtime becomes nonexistent. “It’s hard to draw any kind of line between a workday and free time,” admits Rhiannon Russell, a former Whitehorse Star reporterturned-freelance-writer. Her myriad projects—a bi-weekly rental article for Toronto Life, articles for magazines like Maisonneuve and The Walrus, reported pieces for websites like TVO.org—fill her free time. She’s trying to ease up on the quick hits. “I was just getting busy and working really hard trying to juggle all of these really small assignments,” Russell says. “And then [I just realized]—you know what, it’s not worth running myself into the ground for something that isn’t going to give me a good payoff at the end.” That reality finally drove Johnston to quit. “I just never got to the place where I was able to produce the quantity, or probably the quality as well, that was required to be at that level,” he says. Dollar-a-word assignments were never on the table. And while freelancing didn’t bankrupt him, it left nothing to sock away for long-term savings. When John St., a major ad agency in Toronto, advertised a full-time copywriting position, he got the job. “I love the steady paycheck and everything,” Johnston says, “but I miss the work I was doing when I was freelancing.”
The Sweat: Why you’ll never be paid enough When Matthew Braga quit his job as Motherboard Canada’s editor in January 2016,
he’d already done a stint at the Financial Post, contributed semi-regularly to The Globe and Mail since his j-school days, and even landed a National Magazine Award nomination for his Ryerson Review of Journalism profile of Adam Gopnik in 2012. For 10 months, he wrote about everything from the questionable viability of undersea drones (for Bloomberg Businessweek) to ReBoot’s prediction of the rise of CGI-TV shows (for BuzzFeed), and went on CBC as a paid tech commentator—and made a total of just over $30,000. “Pre-tax,” he adds. Very few freelance journalists make 100 percent of their living solely from reporting. “It’s super-hard to do. I don’t even know how you’d do it,” Braga says, eyes widening behind his round glasses, as he sits in the spartan office of his own safety net—a part-time teaching gig at Ryerson University. This arrangement isn’t unusual: according to Writers’ Rights, over 70 percent of freelance journalists have other sources of income. Braga landed assignments for major international publications—yet, he still found himself eyeing the odd copywriting job. So when a position for a science and technology reporter opened up at CBC last October, Braga left full-time freelancing behind. In 1979, three years after the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC) was formed, the average freelance writer earned about $25,000. A PWAC survey conducted in 2006 found that the average take-home income of a freelance writer that year hovered at around $24,000 before taxes—in today’s dollars. The haphazard pace of freelance cheques actually landing in one’s mailbox only makes it worse. “You might not get that money for months,” Braga says. And what you get might not
Mission Creep
The growing expectations on freelancers Mission creep is as much a plague for freelance journalists as low (or no) pay. Plenty of news outlets now expect their freelancers to report, write, shoot, fact-check, format, and promote their own stories without a corresponding increase in pay. Here’s what this looks like: LIBEL CLAIMS: Most reputable outlets—once upon a time—covered freelancers under their libel insurance as a matter of principle. Few outlets do so anymore, forcing freelancers to either avoid potentially contentious stories or lawyer their own pitches. The Walrus’s freelance contract is one such example, covering 50% of legal fees and 50% of damages. PROMOTION: Freelancers are increasingly commissioned for their followers as much as their reporting. Occasionally, outlets bank on this in order to fund freelance budgets—forcing prospective freelancers to double as promoters to earn a cheque. Torontoist did so to fund a freelance reporter covering LGBTQ+ stories last summer. PUBLICTIY: A freelancer’s obligations to their client ends with their contract. Vice Canada doesn’t seem to think so. According to an internal email sent by managing editor Josh Visser, Vice must clear any and all interview requests made to freelancers by another news outlets “relating to your article (or VICE) in general).” —BRENNAN DOHERTY
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The list goes on, and on, and on— threatening the very ecosystem of Canadian journalism, freelance or otherwise.
be worth the time spent on revisions, edits, and rewrites—as Aidan Johnston found with his own work. “You’d do two rounds of edits on it, and then you get a cheque for $150,” he says. “If I actually factor out the hourly rate for that, I’m going to be really depressed.”
The Momentum: When it’s easier to get more “This is the way freelancing works,” says John Lorinc, leaning forward in a chair
at one of his work haunts: a Starbucks around the corner from his midtown Toronto home. “If you ever find yourself in the position of being a freelancer, the most important thing is to deliver good first drafts, well reported.” He continues: Don’t fight editors. Show up for fact-checking. (“If they still do fact-checking, right?”) Say yes to absolutely every assignment. Be useful. The now-veteran freelancer learned the hard way: a “hard-ass” editor at The Kingston Whig-Standard fired Lorinc from his summer reporting job in the early 1990s. He had mis-attributed a quote. Dejected, he returned home to Toronto. Between three shifts a week at Book City, he hustled for freelance assignments. Twenty-five years later, he has become a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Toronto Life, and sources and co-edits nonfiction anthologies for Coach House Books, among other things. “The vast majority of what I’ve done in my career, I don’t plan, it just happens,” he explains. Momentum is critical for a freelancer. Landing a cover story for Toronto Life might lead to an offer from The Walrus, which might result in a regular web column. And momentum is handy, given how the industry works these days. As Salamon says, “I think more media companies are relying on freelancers now instead of full-time, permanent staff.” Those who already know top-notch editors on a first-name basis have a much easier time gripping the freelance ladder. But Lorinc rejects the idea that there’s a sparser freelance market today. “Like, there are lots of dollar-a-word opportunities, right? And $1.25 a word opportunities,” he argues. Momentum, experience, and age make freelancing a lot easier. But it also comes at a cost: Lorinc always has a project on the go. He must, in order to maintain his edge. His weekends are one day, tops, and often include a few hours of work. “When I was your age, I would not understand this notion—but, like, the long block of unprogrammed time doesn’t exist for me.”
The Unions: Why their hands are tied Last June, one of the longest organizing campaigns of Karen Wirsig’s CMG career
came to fruition. After six months, roughly two-thirds of 120 Vice Canada employees voted yes to a union. Unfortunately, not one of them is a freelancer. “We did exclude casual employees,” the staff organizer says—referring to short-term contract or freelance workers—“because part of the problem for organizing a union under current labour law is you need to have a majority of the unit.” Labour organizers and those
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The $26,000 Question
Annual freelance earnings through the decades Freelance rates—and average incomes— have failed to keep up with inflation over the last 40 years. Nicole Cohen points this out repeatedly in Writers’ Rights and her earlier articles about freelance journalism. Here’s a rough look at freelance salaries over the past few decades:
1976: $111,122 per year (or $26,000 in 1976 dollars)
1995: $39,627 per year ($26,500 in 1995 dollars)
2012: $26,000 per year —BRENNAN DOHERTY
who cover their efforts insist that improving the lot of freelancers requires them to band together and pressure employers in much the same way that unions do. “The ability to collectively bargain is the most important thing that freelancers can do,” says Salamon. Except they can’t: freelancers, as self-employed individuals, negotiate their contracts one-on-one without an intermediary. Members of unions like the CMG are doing their best to enshrine better protections for freelancers within their own collective agreements. Vice staffers brought the plight of the company’s freelancers to Wirsig’s attention during her organizing campaign. “Our own new members, working in there, were like: ‘We have got to figure out how to treat freelancers better,’” she says. Staffers, at least, have the capability to strike—and stand to lose if freelancers’ conditions erode further. “This is something that affects all media workers,” Salamon says of their increasing precarity. “Because if companies can increasingly rely on lower-paid freelancers, they’re going to continue to cut full-time, permanent positions.” The CMG does its best to cover freelancers at the news organizations it represents: CBC is a good example. Smyth’s team tries to bargain for minimum pay rates for freelancers there, as well as access to benefits and less restrictive contracts. The erosion of freelance journalism as a viable, semi-stable career has consequences for the industry’s vitality. Wirsig—and the CMG as a whole—is rallying freelancers as best as she can to avoid this. “Everybody knows that freelancers, often now, get the shortest end of the stick,” she says. WITH THE HYPER-ACCELERATION of freelancers’ issues—lousy pay, the blurring
of work and life, lack of security—the gap between sinking and swimming widens. “As it becomes riskier and more expensive to freelance for a living, writing will be transformed into work even fewer people can afford to do,” reads a particularly grim passage of Writers’ Rights. Among the consequences: the inability for traditionally marginalized voices (women, people of colour, Indigenous people, and others) to enter the field; the gutting of time-consuming and expensive investigative journalism; a narrowing selection of alternative outlets. The list goes on, and on, and on—threatening the very ecosystem of Canadian journalism, freelance or otherwise. “Freelancing itself isn’t new,” Salamon points out. “Freelancing precedes even the institution of journalism itself.” Until the mid-nineteenth century, most journalists were wealthy men and women who didn’t need to write—or work—to earn a living. Opening the ranks of the press required a stable class of career journalists capable of taking risks, developing sources, and keeping abreast of developments in their chosen beat. Freelancers today find it difficult to do this and, with a few exceptions, cannot devote themselves to journalism full-time. David Gray-Donald has been fortunate enough to do just that. In mid-March, he started working as the publisher of Briarpatch. It’s a salaried, full-time, unionized position in Saskatoon that has him overseeing the independent magazine’s array of freelance and contract copy-editors, fact-checkers, and writers. His own pace will likely slow, but he hopes to devote himself to nurturing the many freelancers that keep Briarpatch awash in words. The magazine pays between $75 and $225 per story—not bad for a not-for-profit publication with just two full-time staff members. But Gray-Donald believes Briarpatch could do better. “It’s no secret that we’d like to pay writers more,” he says. “We need to figure out ways to do that. That’s sort of my job.” SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 91
Why Is This Still Happening? Jian Ghomeshi and other high-profile cases are a bleak reminder that sexism in the newsroom still exists and will take years to eliminate —if we ever do B Y CATHERINE PHILLIPS PHOTO BY ROGER HALLET T
O
NE LATE OCTOBER 2014 AFTERNOON IN
Toronto, Lauren Strapagiel met with eight of her friends to revive their fizzling book club. They’d planned a low-key meeting to pick the next month’s read, but within minutes of gathering, the pinging of cellphones filled the room. Eyes widened. Most of them worked in the media, and this was a juicy media story: CBC’s radio darling, Jian Ghomeshi, had left Q. Nobody there knew why—yet. Book club forgotten, Strapagiel and her friends speculated about the reasons for Ghomeshi’s unexpected departure. Many had heard rumours of bad behaviour toward women, but nothing had been substantiated. And they wondered aloud: did it have anything to do with that? Hours after their meeting derailed, Ghomeshi published a Facebook post, blaming “a campaign of false allegations pursued by a jilted ex girlfriend and a freelance writer.” Initially, his statement was both lauded and derided. Then, on October 26, 2014, the Toronto Star published its first story about
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In newsrooms across the country, female staff and management alike wondered whether the old boys’ club had ever truely gone away.
three of the women who had come forward with allegations of abuse. Headlined “CBC fires Jian Ghomeshi over sex allegations,” the story detailed accounts of women who said Ghomeshi was violent toward them before or during sex. He would eventually be arrested and charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance to sexual assault by choking. He was acquitted of three counts of sexual assault as well as the one count of overcoming resistance to sexual assault by choking on March 24, 2016. On May 11, the fourth sexual assault charge was withdrawn after Ghomeshi apologized in court to his former CBC colleague Kathryn Borel for his “sexually inappropriate behaviour” in the workplace, and signed a peace bond. As the Star continued to break stories about Ghomeshi, conversations about sexism, sexual harassment, rape, and assault thundered through the public sphere—breaking free from the hushed spaces in which they were usually held. And in newsrooms across the country, female staff and management alike wondered whether the old boys’ club had ever truly gone away. For many women, that answer is an obvious “no.” Strapagiel had long shared stories over beers with her friends—stories of men with reputations that have gone publicly unquestioned. It’s these conversations that inspired Broadsheet, which debuted less than a month after the Ghomeshi story broke. Strapagiel, managing editor at BuzzFeed Canada, and National Post reporter Ashley Csanady launched a semiregular event to give women in media a place to discuss their work, make new friends, and openly talk about their experiences in the industry. “Everybody seems to know a guy or has worked for a guy who’s weird toward women,” says Strapagiel, “or dismissive of women, or angry with women, or threatened by women.” The first Broadsheet event was held on the evening of November 20, 2014, at the now-closed Victory Cafe in west Toronto. It was a relaxed event, with around 40 or 50 people visiting over the course of the night. Of course, they talked about Ghomeshi. But it quickly became clear that women felt the allegations against him weren’t isolated; they were part of a larger industry workplace culture.
WOMEN CAN FACE SUCH UNIQUE PRESSURES
in media that Vivian Smith, a 14-year Globe and Mail veteran turned sessional instructor at University of Victoria, even wrote a book about
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it. Released in 2015, Outsiders Still: Why Women Journalists Love—and Leave—Their Newspaper Careers, is Smith’s rewritten PhD thesis. It offers insights from women across the country on their experiences as journalists—both good and bad. Smith says that women have been in the majority at North American journalism schools for the past 30 years. At Carleton University in Ottawa, for example, women have made up 80 percent of undergraduate enrolment since 2001. Yet despite statistics like these, women still hold minority status, occupying only 35.3 percent of supervisory roles in journalism in the United States as of 2015. What’s more, women may not even be in the building. According to the “Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2015” report by Women’s Media Center— an American non-profit organization co-founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem that works to increase the visibility and power of women in media—women journalists made up only 37.2 percent of newspaper newsrooms in 2014—up a mere one-third of a percent since 1999. “You’d think,” Smith says, “that we’d dominate newspapers.” The most recent surveys on sexual harassment in newsrooms date back to the mid-1990s—two decades ago. A 1994 Newspaper Research Journal study found that 80 percent of women in the newsroom had experienced varying degrees of workplace sexual harassment, from degrading comments to physical sexual harassment. In 1997, a Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly study found that 60 percent had suffered the same. This wasn’t surprising to Smith, who says the need for research in the area was one of the reasons she wrote Outsiders Still. Recent high-profile cases in both Canada and the United States suggest that some of that culture lingers—if it ever really went away. After Toronto Star reporter Raveena Aulakh committed suicide in May 2016, public editor Kathy English addressed Aulakh’s suicide note. The tragedy revealed the Star’s unexpectedly troubling workplace culture, instigated an internal investigation, and highlighted a need for reformed workplace relationship guidelines. The following month, Roger Ailes, then chairman and CEO of Fox News, resigned after former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit against him, alleging sexual harassment. That September, New York magazine revealed allegations that Ailes’s workplace harassment had begun long before then, dating back three decades. And newspapers aren’t always on the side of women. Last year, when The Washington Post released a tape from 2005 in which Donald Trump blusters about groping women without their consent, it reduced
his actions to “lewd conversation.” A Globe and Mail tweet said Trump was “bragging about kissing and groping women.” One of The Boston Globe’s early reports erased the women’s experiences entirely by calling it a failed attempt at seduction. This should not still be happening.
“AN ALREADY STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENT,” SAYS
Smith, “is compounded for women by family issues, sexism, and the proverbial glass ceiling.” According to a 2009 study of 715 American newspapers, 21 percent of women journalists in the Western world say they are “burned out, frustrated, and thinking of leaving the field altogether,” compared to 16 percent of men. Women can face sexism and harassment, not only from colleagues and management, but also from their sources and even public bystanders. In May 2014, CityNews reporter Shauna Hunt confronted a group of men at a Toronto FC match who yelled “fuck her right in the pussy” at her on television—a form of harassment that’s become trendy for men who want to be seen disrupting live broadcasts. The video of Hunt standing up to her harasser went viral and shed light on one of the more public displays of harassment with which women in media are expected to put up. For many women journalists, these incidents can make it feel like the old adage is true: the more things change, the more they stay the same—and some women have faced sexist treatment their whole careers, from the subtle to the terrifyingly bold. For Jan Wong, fighting sexism in the newsroom was part of the job. Now an associate journalism professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Wong easily rattled off memories of discrimination from the years she spent at the Montreal Gazette, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and The Globe and Mail. Today, she heartily laughs about many of them—even if they’re not really funny. For example, when Wong started working as a business reporter at the Montreal Gazette in 1981, there were only a few women in the business section—maybe three in a staff of at least 12 writers. At lunch, Wong says that all of the men would go to a tavern where, as with most Quebec taverns at the time, women were barred from entering. “I know,” says Wong. “It sounds like the dark ages.” But she really liked her colleagues, and one day she decided she would go with them for lunch. For Wong, having lunch with colleagues
is an important time—it’s when writers network and talk over their work, their stories, and their ideas. Wong laughs while recalling the day she convinced her male colleagues she was joining them in the tavern. “We’re going to go, we’re going to walk in, and I’ll handle it,” she told them. “I sat down, I looked at the menu, and the waiter came over. I just looked at him and gave him my order, and he looked at me, didn’t say a word, and he brought me my food and that was it—I broke the barrier. And after that, I always went with my friends.” It wasn’t great, Wong admitted—the food sucked and the waiters smelled like urine—but her point was made. Today, discrimination may not be as obvious as an outright ban on women, but it still exists. In the 1980s, when Smith was in her 30s and, as she puts it, “up and coming” in a senior editorial role, the newsroom atmosphere was one of everyday sexism, although that’s not what they called it back then. Back then, it was just the way it was. More than that, the power imbalance was pervasive. It wasn’t lost on Smith, but she doubts that her male colleagues noticed it. After all, they were in the majority, and women were merely guests. Although she was never shunned, Smith says that she didn’t feel like she was on even footing with her male colleagues for promotion or advancement. Women in the newsroom were in a constant battle with sexism—an extra fight they had to wage in order to get the same benefits. Today, Smith senses a hangover from the type of blatant sexism Wong and others experienced—a sort of residue that lingers in newsrooms as a response to the history of male dominance in the industry.
JOURNALISM UNDOUBTEDLY INFLUENCES
public discourse. The way journalists report on sexual violence affects the way it is publicly understood—and it can get pretty messy when newsrooms themselves are mired in sexism. That’s where Femifesto, a grassroots, Toronto-based feminist organization that combats rape culture, comes in. Founded by Farrah Khan, Shannon Giannitsopoulou, and Sasha Elford in 2010 for the purpose of recognizing media’s power in shaping our understanding of sexual violence, Femifesto provides workshops, resources, and education on consent and gender-based violence to media outlets, journalism schools, corporations, and students. The organization’s media guide, “Use the Right Words: Media Reporting on Sexual Violence in Canada,” calls on the media to help transform the nature of their coverage on sexual violence. To help do that, it provides
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“ There are so many ways sexism can happen in a workplace, including a newsroom. It’s just more subtle now,”
resources to journalists, including its language checklist for reporting on sexual assault—which outlines, for example, that journalists should use phrases like “according to” and not overuse words like “claimed.” The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), a Toronto-based charity and non-profit run by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), also addresses the ways that media tend to err when telling women’s stories. The project has tracked the changing roles and representations of women in media since 1995. Twenty years later, evidence from over 100 countries shows how little progress has actually been made. Although there were more women reporting in 2015 than there were in 1995, women made up a mere 24 percent of people heard, read about, or seen in radio, print, and television news—unchanged from 2010—and the overall share of stories that primarily focus on women has hovered around 10 percent since 2000. One of the GMMP’s goals is to end media sexism by 2020. At this rate, the goal seems unlikely. “There are so many ways sexism can happen in a workplace, including a newsroom. It’s just more subtle now,” says Strapagiel from a boardroom in BuzzFeed’s Toronto office. “No one’s going to grab your ass—God, I hope nobody does that.” Strapagiel has felt sexism when being assigned certain types of stories with the expectation that women are better at covering the “soft stuff.” “There’s this weird divide between hard news and soft news, where hard news would be populated by men, and lifestyle, fashion, and beauty is largely women—incredibly talented, majestic women, who are just never taken seriously.” This bears out in the numbers. According to the “Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2015” report, women journalists were more likely to write about culture (42.2 percent), education (54.6 percent), health (49.3 percent), lifestyle (49.6 percent), and religion (49.6 percent) than politics (34.9 percent), criminal justice (32.5 percent), science (35.2 percent), technology (37.7 percent), and sports (10.2 percent). Women made up just under 40 percent of bylines at The Washington Post, 32.3 percent at The New York Times, and 40 percent at the Los Angeles Times. Bylines by men outnumbered bylines by women at the Associated Press and Reuters. The Huffington Post managed to not only reach gender parity, but overshot it, with 53 percent of bylines by women. Ryerson School of Journalism assistant professor Asmaa Malik has seen her fair share of workplace sexism in the years she’s spent in newsrooms across the country, from the Montreal Gazette to the Toronto
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Star. “There are so many micro-aggressions when it comes to being a woman,” Malik says, referring to the subtle verbal, behavioural, and environmental discriminations that intentionally and unintentionally convey hostility toward marginalized people on a daily basis. She remembers a particular male coworker who would rub her shoulders without her consent. “You think, ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ and then you wonder, ‘What am I supposed to do, report the guy for being ‘friendly’ and rubbing my shoulders?’” As an intern early in her career, she adds, she didn’t feel like she could speak up. Pinpointing the root of sexism is difficult for most women, but for Malik, identifying whether she has been discriminated against because she is a woman or a woman of colour is even more difficult. “It’s not like you can separate the two,” she says. “I don’t think I’m a woman and then the other part of me is of colour—I am a woman of colour, it’s my experience. So that kind of discrimination is insidious.” For women of colour, race and gender are two things that are intertwined, and discrimination has many different guises. But the difficulty in pinpointing it is part of what makes it systemic. “If it’s systemic, then you can never point to it,” Malik says. “You can say it’s a pattern, but some people will see the pattern and some people won’t.” Attention must be paid to how women’s experiences as journalists can be tethered with sexual harassment. Women who have experienced systemic discrimination and outright sexual harassment in the newsroom often feel like they lack institutional support—whether it’s a woman who is hit on or harassed while interviewing a source, or one who is forced to privately deal with online threats. Providing information about spotting sexual harassment and supporting women in the newsroom has become increasingly important. Training on respect in the workplace, human rights concepts, and bystander intervention was recommended in the “CBC Workplace Investigation Regarding Jian Ghomeshi” report. Meanwhile, resources like WACC’s Who Makes the News?, the Global Media Monitoring Project, and UNESCO’s Global Alliance on Media and Gender strive for gender equality in and through the media. We may have come a long way, but don’t let that fool you. Once blatant, now insidious, sexism festers in hidden cracks within newsrooms, where equal opportunity is often assumed. But sexism is also a part of our broader culture, and in a time when human rights are as tenuous as ever, we can’t assume we’re moving forward.
rom Print to Digital F and Back Again
On and off the assembly line
i n an era when technology has changed the process of journalism in profound and surprising ways AN ES SAY B Y DEVIN JONES ILLUSTRATION BY DAVE DONALD
W
E’RE A HALF HOUR INTO OUR INTERVIEW when Mathew Ingram likens journalism to a Ford assembly line. It’s a snaking process: the separate pieces of a car are completed in distinct stages by a specialized team. The name of the car may change—or, in this case, the words—but the process of putting everything together remains predictable. The visuals are a car’s coat of paint. The page layout, the grey interior of a Ford Focus. Ingram is the cool dad you wish had picked you up after school. He’s soft-spoken and articulate, his vocabulary plain but intelligent, the topics of Facebook algorithms and search engine manipulation punctuated with the occasional "fuck." A small hoop earring sits comfortably in his
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left lobe. A greying, well-maintained goatee shifts up and down with his frequent smiles. His résumé includes more than a decade at The Globe and Mail, where he was a digital-only journalist. In 2010, he departed for Gigaom, a tech blog in the United States, before finally landing at Fortune magazine in 2015. Ingram describes a newspaper’s print process: stories begin with a pitch to or from an assignment editor. Then follow the phone calls, the interviews, and the research. Much like an assembly line, a piece is typically submitted to an editor, who takes it to a senior editor, and then to an even more senior editor, a copy editor, back to a writer, and, finally, to a display editor. “That industrialized process works really great in the moment of total chaos. You don’t want everyone to panic … when they don’t know what they’re doing. You want a process to follow,” he says. “But in non-chaotic situations, it’s actually the worst, because it smothers any kind of innovation. If you want to try an iterative approach, you can’t, because you have to go through five editors before something hits. But it’s like Ford and GM scrapping the entire assembly line that’s worked for 100 years and, all of a sudden, just putting cars together randomly. It would be fucking chaos.” For decades, print news outlets have physically manufactured a complete product that gets shipped to newsstands daily. When the digital shift happened, our industry tended to start stuffing the same North American broadsheet page structure into a 13-inch computer screen. Paywalls, digital subscriptions, and content now labeled as premium emerged as the industry transitioned into the digital era—new methods to get audiences to pay for traditional reporting. But, as was realized by the late-2000s, digital audiences weren’t about to pay for what had been established as typically free-to-access. Even as the business models for print decline, strategies for digital subscriptions and advertising have not generated as much revenue as print has, causing a juggling act between two separate products and only some understanding about how to make either work. The emerging process for some news publications embodies a tight, solidified routine. The responsibility of finishing and polishing a story falls on one or two people, instead of five. It’s a mentality that Scott White, former editor-in-chief of the Canadian Press, has experienced. “At CP, it was usually, at the most, two editors who would touch [the story], many times one. But there was tremendous responsibility on the reporters to get shit right,” he says.
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The formerly dominant print model of daily news works toward a final product that is cyclical—important until tomorrow. Events are contained within the parameters of the paper, and the end result is disposable. But in the transition to a market that generally consumes digital content first, newsworthy events are no longer tied to the physical nature of the paper. Instead, news today is a cloud of information that spreads across the Internet. Think of Facebook: millions of people discuss a single event, often without emphasis on where they first read about it. “You open up a newspaper and engage with all of these stories and then you put the newspaper down and that’s that day’s news,” says ProPublica reporter Topher Sanders. “At ProPublica, we want you to engage with a topic for the next week-and-a-half. Even if there’s no new content coming out, there are ways for the organization to put it in fresh places and make people think about it in fresh ways.” A significant way of handling news on a digital platform is by viewing content as a one-stop compendium. Updating specific stories whenever new details emerge has become a way to keep old news relevant, of treating a specific event as a compilation that readers can return to as the story develops. This is a form of iterative journalism, wherein an outlet releases multiple versions of an article as the story develops. Print publications do this with stories surrounding annual events. Digital platforms, on the other hand, have expanded these methods for a more general use. The acronym ICYMI, or “in case you missed it,” has become a common way to re-social related, evergreen content. It’s interesting, though, because these iterative resources themselves have proliferated in the digital era and, in some cases, remain static longer than print news ever did. But the fact is that ad revenue—according to US-based statistics from the Pew Research Center—has declined substantially for print: a full 63 percent between 2003 and 2014. Digital ad revenue, meanwhile, remained steady between 2006 and 2014. After the 84-year-old magazine Newsweek was replaced by an online-only, subscription-based product in 2012 due to declining ad sales, IBT Media bought it and relaunched a more expensive print iteration in 2014, focusing less on advertising as a key factor in stabilizing the magazine’s revenue. When it relaunched, it had a circulation of 70,000—compared to 3.4 million at its peak. And as The Washington Post’s Michael Rosenwald suggests in the Columbia Journalism Review, one of the biggest assumptions publishers have made about readers—that they prefer the immediacy of digital—
Scoops quickly reverberate, with one outlet building on top of the other until the initial source is lost in the frenzy to pump out relevant information.
has now come into question. There’s a symbiotic relationship between print and digital that’s seeing online platforms look back to print models of distribution to supplement their online content. Treated as a premium product, the music-based publication Pitchfork sold its quarterly magazine, The Pitchfork Review, from 2013 to 2016. Showcasing long-form features and full-page photos, it was another iteration of our human obsession with collecting things, à la vinyl. Vice News reporter Hilary Beaumont believes that the tactile nature of print can be special. “I think it’s almost a product you would want to see on your coffee table or something you’d want to give to a friend, like a book. It’s almost more of a token, rather than something you would share on a friend’s wall,” says Beaumont.
IT’S EASY TO FORGET that the digital medium
has come a long way from where it began. Both the print industry and the computer screen have evolved, one much faster than the other. From the early to mid-2000s, some news outlets were focused on mirroring what was in their print edition. “It’s basically—can you replicate what you do in your traditional format into a website?” says Kenny Yum, managing editor of Huffington Post Canada. “There was no social media, it was just about a homepage, about having articles that we've put up, probably most likely repurposed from what your core product was, whether it was print or broadcast or whatever.” Back then, readers had 15 different bookmarked websites, each categorized by interest, that they visited every day. But Yum focuses on the last four to five years, when Facebook and Twitter drive our media consumption. “2016 versus 2000, the contrast is very stark—because if you talk to a newspaper reporter and they publish something, they’ll probably tweet it out first,” Yum says. “Sixteen years ago, there was no Twitter or Facebook, so social media accelerated how journalists of all stripes could be involved in live newsmaking. That was the first compelling draw.” When Beaumont wrote a story in November 2016 about hate speech SPRING 2017 | RYERSON REVIEW OF JOURNALISM 101
The Conversations spray painted on the walls of an Ottawa mosque and a predominantly black church, the conversation between writer and editor wasn’t about the text she had written. “We had a brief debate about whether we should use blurred photos or whether we should use photos that were uncensored. My editor made the call to use uncensored photos … and that story was up in less than an hour.” This is the quick pace we’ve come to expect from digital reporting. While the importance of being first hasn’t changed, the vast size of the Internet, and the speed at which news is learned, digested, and published, allows a lead time of minutes. Scoops quickly reverberate, with one outlet building on top of another until the initial source is lost in the frenzy to pump out relevant information. But then, readers find themselves on the subway with time to kill. Out comes the phone and Pocket—or any other read-it-later app—and they’re reading a 2,000-word feature on the direct correlation between earthquakes and tectonic plates. The nature of what people are reading may not have changed, but the distribution model has. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, phones have become the numberone platform for news consumption in the United States. Users spend roughly over two minutes engaged with articles a thousand words or longer, compared with about a minute for shorter articles. While the study found that 76 percent of the articles analyzed were fewer than a thousand words, long- and short-form content attracted approximately the same amount of complete interactions. Ultimately, the study suggested that long-form content can sustain regular engagement on phones. It’s the assembly line found within a new model of delivery. The content hasn’t substantially changed—it just has more photos, GIFs, embedded videos, and pull-quotes. It’s an evolution of the concept American journalist Jeff Jarvis coined as “process journalism” in 2009: the idea of constantly updating a story using, among other methods, digital tools. The news industry is cyclical in nature. It can be reactionary in how it does what it thinks it should be doing before actually figuring out what works. By around 2010, when the digital evolution of print was in full swing, uncurated content saturated the market. What publications have since realized is that digital content needs to be curated the way it is in print: carefully cultivating an audience through pointed content that fits the purpose of the outlet. Hazlitt, The Ringer, or even ProPublica, for that matter, are three examples of how long-form content can be packaged for a digital audience. And for Beaumont, it’s not about trying to meet
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content quotas or regurgitating the same information, hoping more readers will click on a story. “Sometimes, what I see is this push in other media. I hear that people need to have a certain number of stories per day, and a certain number of hot takes, and the news needs to be digested and pushed out as soon as possible,” Beaumont says. “And that’s really negative for the audience, because you’re not really considering other viewpoints, you’re not considering that there’s more information and there’s more to the story. You’re just kind of repeating what’s already out there.” The objective of finding a specialized interest for an outlet to work in is nothing new—trade magazines like Architect and American Cinematographer are prime examples. Meanwhile, digital platforms like Bloomberg have capitalized on finding niche markets, turning this strategy into a trendy way to run a successful publication in the era of social media. When publications began to experiment with posting traditional print content online, they saw promising results. At its best, digital content is engaging in ways print never was—not because print is a boring medium, but because of the opportunity to use multimedia. Photo galleries and mini-documentaries are the current incarnation of the original full-colour pages of Life magazine. Breaking news is still breaking news, just published hours sooner; nightly news anchors are complemented by 30-second news videos aimed at a different audience. Ingram looks down at the dregs of his cappuccino, searching for the right words to answer the unanswerable question: what’s next? He’s a rare type of journalist—one who takes his time to phrase his thoughts properly. Ingram transitioned to digital platforms in search of new opportunities while still occasionally writing stories for traditional magazines like Fortune. Despite a lengthy print-based career, Ingram prefers writing for a digital platform, citing the immediacy of his work, its rapid publication, and the connection with the audience. He looks up at me, a twinkle in his grey-blue eyes, as if he has all the time in the world before his next deadline. “I used to say at the Globe that I could see the day where the value of individual writers who knew their topic and were experts in that field, whether it was wine or stocks, would exceed the value of The Globe and Mail brand because people were looking for that personal guide … but I think they always have. Media companies just lost sight of that and started to think that the media brand was the thing that mattered, not those people.”
A three-part docu-poem on the life and death of Amber Tuccaro, who went missing in August 2010 B Y K AREN McCALL
AS NIEMAN STORYBOARD PUTS IT, “sometimes poetry can be a more direct vehicle for narrative journalism.”
Emotional and atmospheric nuance may not always make it into news reports. But by running primary source material through a poet’s filter, this mode of expression can offer a new perspective on stories that may not come alive on the page with a traditional news treatment. Docu-poetry shares some traits with literary journalism, the practice of writing non-fiction stories with some of the narrative strategies associated with fiction writing. Focusing on small slices of people’s stories through verse can reflect larger social issues—the themes made palatable through the creative expression of an individual’s or community’s story.
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The Conversations (i)
(ii)
Hitchin’ to Edmonton. Cool August night. She gets in. Black hair with blonde streaks. Where are we by? she asks. Nisku town lights flash fast behind. The male driver says, We’re just heading south of Beaumont, or north of Beaumont.
The road leads to dark pastures, woodland. Cool August night. Wild violets, trembling aspen. Serial killer’s dumping ground. Two years too late, Alberta RCMP release cell phone recording. Have you heard the voice? Can’t call him a suspect, they say, we’re calling him a person of interest.
Making people laugh. That’s what she was known for. 5-foot 6, 20-years-old. Everyone hitched back home in Fort Chip. Yo, where are we going? she asks. Back roads, he says. Are you kidding me, she says, where are these roads going to? 50th Street, he says. Absolutely.
Farmer’s field yields a crop of bones in Leduc County. A Mikisew Cree Nation woman, and four others within 8-kilometres, alongside pastures and rocks and stones. Amber, Corrie, Delores, Katie, Edna
She wasn’t the best singer, her mom said, but she really loved to sing. Her 14-month-old son, back at the Nisku Place Motel with a friend, waiting. You better not be takin’ me anywhere I don’t wanna go, she says. I want to go into the city. Okay?
(iii)
We are, we’re going, he answers. Voice reassuring like he’s done this before. Cell phone call, a false safety net she holds tight. Pretty tough that Mikisew Cree Nation woman. Dropping electronic breadcrumbs in the night. I want to open a time portal. Bend the speed of sound. Reach in and pull her out. But I listen to her voice. Where the fuck are these roads going to?
Amber would be like, ‘Mom, one of these days you aren’t going to be laughing. When I’m a big star, I’ll be on those big boards and stuff.’ But not like this. Two billboards, 141,653 YouTube views. Zero arrests. Have you heard the voice? My baby sounded so scared, her mom said. There’s somebody out there that recognizes the voice. Has to be.
This poem is based on the story of Amber Tuccaro, an Indigenous woman who went missing in August 2010. The source material comes from CBC News, the Edmonton Sun, Windspeaker News, the National Post, and Metro News Edmonton, among others. The first part of the poem weaves in snippets of a call made on Amber’s cell phone, a little bit of Amber’s life, and her mother’s comments. The second compresses two years and deals with the aftermath of the car ride, including the unprecedented action taken by the RCMP of releasing part of the cell phone recording to the public. In the third section of the poem, the focus is on her mother’s anguish and her need to keep the story alive so that Amber is more than just a statistic.
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FIELD NOTES ES SAY
NAVIG ATION
Dude, Where’s My Car?
Peddling Stories
As the way journalists get around changes, so does the way we tell stories B Y DAVID RUDIN
IN LATE DECEMBER of last year, the Toronto
Star posted a job listing for its summer reporting internship. Here, prospective candidates could learn that the publication was looking for “intelligent journalists with a strong work ethic, positive attitude, and passion for journalism who bring energy, ideas, and new perspectives to their work.” Those are foundational journalistic attributes. None of them, however, received the same emphasis as the Star’s final desired quality, which stood alone and was bolded: “A full, unrestricted Ontario driver’s licence is required.” Canada does not have a formal licencing scheme for journalists. Consequently, a driver’s licence can often be the closest thing to a required document when seeking employment in the field. Whereas the finer points of reporting are discussed ad infinitum, the importance of driving, along with other sources of mobility, goes largely unmentioned. Like a journalist’s preferred brand of ballpoint pen, transportation isn’t expected to meaningfully affect stories. But is that really true? Can a reporter’s chosen mode of travel affect how they interpret the world? The history of journalism is littered with intellectual traditions that emphasized the role of different methods of transportation. In his early journalistic work, Sketches by Boz, Charles Dickens chronicled scenes in London that he experienced while on foot. This ethos became part of the flâneur tradition, which emphasized the perspective of someone moving slowly through a city and taking in different scenes. Newspapers— including the aforementioned Star—still have flâneur columnists, but they are not considered reporters in a traditional sense. Likewise, in architectural criticism, the “architectural promenade” approach reinforces the idea that the way one physically approaches a subject affects how it’s covered. In Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, architecture critic Alexandra Lange notes that, at the start of her famous review of the Marine Midland Bank Building in New York City, Ada Louise Huxtable “stands on the sidewalk and points you east.” This conceit suggests that the story would be different if Huxtable simply drove up to the front door; her empathy is with the pedestrian. After the automobile’s rise to prominence, however, the perspective of drivers started to inflect news coverage. In covering highway design for the Los Angeles Times in 1956, A. E. Hotchner laid out the risks as follows: “A long straight road, sunlight reflection off the dash, the purr
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of tires and the engine can all be hypnotizers. It is up to the individual to anticipate these dangers.” Implicit in this framing was the conceit that both the author and their readers drive. Similarly, the ride-along, in which journalists sit in the front seat of a cop car, is not only a chance to see the world as a law-enforcement agent but also a chance to report from the perspective of a motorist. In popular language, however, the “drive-by journalism” epithet is perhaps the biggest signifier of driving’s effect on journalism—a figurative expression of the literal reality that a reporter can now be here today and very much gone tomorrow. Cars, and even some of what is considered drive-by journalism, are necessary concessions to the reality that journalists cannot be everywhere at once. This has not fully attenuated complaints that the Canadian news industry is disproportionately concerned with stories close to home—in Toronto, mainly. It is nevertheless worth considering how a complete reliance on public transit, bicycles, and walking might make geographic disparities more pronounced. At the same time, the way a reporter experiences the world—even in a putatively objective story—affects the distribution of empathy in their coverage. The flâneur tradition was on to something in that regard. In cities, where streets and public spaces are often contested between users of different modes of transport, driving is not always an apolitical activity. Much as a reporter’s economic or cultural life experiences can influence their work, it’s fair to suspect that a cyclist will cover traffic incidents differently than a driver. While many good-faith readers trust that reporters can overcome these differences in lived experience, cars and driving are an active front in America’s political culture wars. In the time preceding Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, American political commentator John Ekdahl managed to rile many of his peers with a seemingly simple question. “The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups,” he tweeted. “Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?” A gaggle of media types took the bait, variously suggestILLUSTRATION: NICK CRAINE
ing that pickup-owning acquaintances are a poor metric by which to measure the country’s journalistic bubble. To Sean Davis, co-founder of the conservative news site The Federalist, however, “all it took to reveal the durability of [the media] bubble was a simple question about pickup trucks.” Questions about pickup trucks and other vehicles will likely become harder to avoid in the years ahead. Canada is by no means a society that has freed itself from the shackles of car ownership, but the combination of car-sharing startups and young Canadians expressing indifference toward driving nevertheless reflects the beginning of a cultural change. In 2012, researchers from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute found that every Canadian age group between 16 and 54 had experienced a decrease in the share of licensed drivers between 1999 and 2009. In the 20-24 cohort, that number was approaching 80 percent; for 25- to 34-year-olds, it fell from 92 percent to 87 percent. What happens, then, to the members of these groups that become journalists? In the short term, one suspects that the Star will not struggle to find applicants with the requisite driving licenses. If the percentage of young Canadians interested in driving continues to decline, however, that line will stand out more by the year. Moreover, as driving continues to be fraught with cultural significance, aspiring journalists are damned if they drive and damned if they don’t. As with most objectivity norms, this problem demands a truce—a mutually agreed-upon re-evaluation of what affects objectivity. Many solutions to problems are now pitched as Uber-for-afield, but in this case the existence of Uber is a reminder of a longer-term problem. To the extent that a driver’s license is a prerequisite for journalism, neither profession nor transportation will ever be as neutral as some want them to be.
How bikes benefit journalists B Y CL AIRE McFARL ANE BEN SPURR HAS BEEN CYCLING in downtown Toronto for the past two years and considers his bike an asset to him as a journalist. A transit reporter for the Toronto Star, he often has to get from the offices at the bottom of Yonge Street to City Hall in a short amount of time. “It takes a lot longer to wait around for a streetcar or subway,” says Spurr. Occasionally, the commute yields stories of its own. Spurr says that his ride to work along the Martin Goodman Trail once inspired a story about the Queens Quay revitalization project and the effectiveness of its new design. “One of the great things about riding a bike is that you’re pretty much engaged in the streetscape, so you see how transit vehicles and all the other vehicles are behaving and performing,” says Spurr. With any luck, Spurr will have more Toronto bike lanes to scour. Last summer, the city installed a pair of high-profile bike lanes on a busy strip of Bloor Street West, a heavy-traffic corridor. In the meantime, Toronto City Council approved a 10-year cycling infrastructure plan. Every year, $16 million will be invested in everything from new trails to upgraded major corridors. It’s a lot to report on. For $128.9-million, Queens Quay, Spurr found, had become “beautiful. Confusing. Expensive. Dangerous.” From atop two wheels, Spurr’s also a political reporter, health reporter, and business reporter. It’s a lot of helmets—er, hats—for one journalist to wear. Even if Spurr runs out of road, he won’t run out of stories.
Practical Tips for Cycling Journalists
What to know before you hop on l Make sure your bag can properly secure your computer. l A journalist is nothing without a brain. Wear a helmet. l Lock up your frame, not just your wheel—you never know where your reporting might take you, and you may need to leave your bike secured for a while. l In the summer, bring an extra clean shirt for important interviews. You will sweat! —CLAIRE McFARLANE
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FIELD NOTES FIRST ISSUE: 1967
DECEMBER 2016
RETROSPECTIVE
Straight Edge Vancouver’s once-radical weekly turns 50
published Taras Grescoe’s “White Peril,” a provocative satire on white Vancouverites’ racist attitudes. The Straight had grown up. “It was serious journalism,” says Glavin. “Not hippie shit. It was a writer’s newspaper.” The Straight still publishes serious journalism, too. In 2005, current editor Charlie Smith wrote an award-winning feature digging into Vancouver’s new convention centre. In 2008, the Straight featured Alex Roslin’s investigation into pharmaceutical sales, and in 2013, it printed his investigation into the appearance of irradiated fish in British Columbia stores. “Institutions like the Straight are really important,” says Campbell. “I really hope— fervently hope—it survives the current upheaval in the media.” That upheaval, of
B Y GREGORY FURG AL A
IT WAS JUST SUPPOSED TO BE A SMOKE-IN. The Vancouver chapter
of the Youth International Party had organized it to protest drug laws and Operation Dustpan, the Vancouver Police campaign targeting drug use in the city’s thriving counterculture. Articles in The Georgia Straight beckoned people to Maple Tree Square in Gastown, less than a block from the Straight’s office. Thousands showed up. After four mounted officers failed to fend off the crowd, baton-wielding police in riot gear waded in. In response, some demonstrators hurled rocks, bottles, and chunks of cement. Newspapers dubbed it the Gastown Riot, and some, like the Vancouver Sun and Province, blamed the organizers. Later, some would blame the Straight, which caustically disagreed with the charge. The cover of its next issue featured a full-page comic chronicling the melee while, inside, writers blamed plainclothes instigators and declared, “The Law Will be Made in the Streets.” The Straight, more bluntly, called it the Police Riot.
course, is the implosion of ad-supported newspapers. “Shattered Mirror,” the Public Policy Forum’s 2017 report on the media, found that a sample of over 1,000 Canadian weeklies lost about a third of their revenue between 2012 and 2015—a fate that’s caught up with them after escaping the beginning of print media’s decline in the aughts. The report also agrees with Campbell—weeklies play a critical role in civic life. It’s a very conventional problem for the once-upon-a-time very unconventional Georgia Straight, which in the heady 1960s would’ve likely balked at being called an institution. But it grew up, and its youthful antagonism and politics gave way to respectability and responsibility. It changed, the city changed, and the industry has, too. Always, though, the Straight has adapted.
THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT TURNS 50 THIS YEAR. Its first issue was
printed on May 5, 1967, at a dime apiece. It was hawked mostly by street vendors, as well as Dan McLeod, its publisher and editor. The city granted it a business licence, revoked it, and reinstated it again in its first year. By the end of its second year, the publication had been charged with 27 counts of obscenity, one charge of counseling to commit an indictable offence, and one count of criminal libel. (One charge of obscenity was dropped because the presiding Justice judged that the word “muffdiving” didn’t exist, and could therefore not be obscene.) Since its heady days as an alt-weekly flipping off institutional authority, the Straight has become an institution itself, accumulating numerous National and Western Magazine Awards, as well as a Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award. Writer Terry Glavin started writing for the Straight at age 18, in the early 1970s. After working at several lower mainland newspapers, he began writing for the Straight again in the 1990s. Nowhere else, he says, could the Straight have emerged. “There’s something that happens when you cross the Rockies … everything becomes psychedelic.” In the late 1960s, Vancouver became the epicentre of western Canada’s hippie counterculture, a Haight-Ashbury North. The Georgia Straight became its voice. By 1979, following more than a decade of provocation, proto-environmentalism, and general civic antagonism, the Straight ceased to be. In an effort to shed its seedy reputation—and to survive—McLeod rebranded the newspaper as the Vancouver Free Press and dropped the scandalous personals. News and editorials, in particular, were verboten. In The Last Streetfighter, a 1997 documentary focusing on the Straight’s
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thirtieth year, McLeod explains his pivot. “I had a strict ban on news for many, many years, because I felt that’s what really got us in trouble— when we started giving opinions. That’s when the city would come down on us. As long as we stuck to entertainment, then we could build from that and eventually make the thing whole again.” The Vancouver Free Press lasted a scant two years before re-emerging as the Straight again in 1981, but the focus remained on arts and entertainment. A year after that, McLeod made it a free, ad-supported weekly. Charles Campbell, who took over as editor in 1986, credits the shift for finally putting the Straight on firm financial footing and did what he could to keep it there. “I was very particular about developing coverage in an area until we owned it.” By the late 1980s, Campbell had helped lay the financial groundwork for the Straight’s next hallmark: aggressive investigative journalism. The next decade, says Glavin, was the “glory days.” In 1994, the Straight published a lengthy investigation into the soon-to-be-scandalous PacifiCat ferries. The same year, it published a story about the presence of a potentially lethal parasite in Vancouver’s water supply. In 1995, it PHOTOS: COURTESY GEORGIA STRAIGHT
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FIELD NOTES REVIEW
The Good, the Bad, and the Awkward BuzzFeed Canada’s Scaachi Koul’s debut collection of essays on growing up in Calgary, body hair, and (not) fitting in B Y ERICA NG AO
MOST OF US FEEL LIKE OUTSIDERS at some point in our
lives. Scaachi Koul’s debut collection of essays, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, encapsulates those moments of dread honestly, with her trademark brand of dry humour and wit. Through stories of growing up in Calgary, figuring out her relationship with her parents, and navigating the media industry, Koul provides readers with an open and unflinching glimpse into her life. Entertaining and insightful, with a good dose of cynicism, her essays are a strong reminder that, even if we’re miserable, at least we’re all miserable together. Currently a senior writer at BuzzFeed Canada, Koul’s work has previously appeared in The New Yorker, Hazlitt, and The Globe and Mail. Known for her sharp—or, depending on which white guy you ask, controversial—observations on race, sexism, and culture, she explores these issues as they intersect with her experiences. Individually, the 10 essays in the book stand out as seemingly average moments in time—taking a family trip to India for her cousin’s wedding, moving to Toronto for university, waxing hair. Together, they represent the complexities and nuances of a life lived in the balance between cultures and expectations. Reading One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter is an intimate experience, just uncomfortable enough to keep the reader wanting more. On the time that she was stuck in a skirt and had to be cut out, her underwear accidentally getting caught in the process, she assures, “If you have never experienced the sensation of your naked labia rubbing up against freshly washed denim as you manoeuvre through a subway car with broken air conditioning, you have had more than your fair share of luck in this life.” Koul is unrestrained, detailing every thought and emotion with a certain confidence that persists, no matter how embarrassing or heartbreaking. Reflecting on feeling out of place while shopping for a wedding outfit in India, she writes, “Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or the children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you’re in.” It’s reminiscent of what the dog-eared, tear-stained pages of all diaries hold: a certain vulnerability
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in trying to make sense of the world. It’s why, even with Koul’s distinctive voice, we can all find a piece of ourselves in her book. It’s tricky to balance the personal with the big picture in a first-person essay, but Koul does so with ease and clarity. Those familiar with her writing know that she’s not concerned about filtering her opinions. This book isn’t for readers who dislike her sometimes-abrasive tone—and she probably doesn’t care. For a woman of colour, child of immigrants, and aspiring writer like myself, Koul’s experiences reflect my own. “It changes you, when you see someone similar to you, doing the thing you might want to do yourself,” writes Koul. “We are deeply afraid of making marginalized voices stronger, because we think it makes privileged ones that much weaker.” It’s part of what makes this book important: it gives voice to those who are too frequently denied it. Editor’s note: Koul is a former member of the RRJ.
RRJ Recommends: One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul, Published by Doubleday Canada
PHOTO: SIERRA BEIN
FIELD NOTES
Pizzey relaxes at his Haliburton cottage.
NOTEBOOK
What My Editor Taught Me Lessons learned by Allen Pizzey, one of Canada’s most storied foreign correspondents B Y ANGEL A LONG
HE STANDS IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA. Button-down shirt. Dark
blazer. A breeze ruffles his grey hair. “Allen Pizzey. CBS News. Rome.” Rewind 34 years to the streets of Beirut. Fast forward 17 to the jungles of Rwanda. Sometimes rows of corpses fill the background, sometimes the tendrils of a Michelangelo fresco. But Pizzey’s voice remains the same. His blue eyes look straight ahead. It’s the look of over four decades of experience distilled into a 90-second clip. It’s the voice of a man who has been called “one of the most respected foreign correspondents of his generation” by colleagues at CBS in a tribute marking Pizzey’s official March 2016 sign-off. When you see him sitting in shorts and a T-shirt on the deck of his Haliburton, Ontario cottage, it takes some getting used to. He offers you coffee. He leans back in a Muskoka chair. At first, it’s one of those cottage-country-July days where a lake glitters through a stand of white pine. Then, you’re in South Africa. A 26-year-old Brantford, Ontario native with a degree in business administration, a high-explosives license, and a stint as a soap salesman shows up at Cape Town’s Argus newspaper looking for a job. “He was mad,” Pizzey says of his editor, Humphrey Tyler. “He used to send you out to interviews and he’d say, ‘Can he break wind like a trumpet?’” In other words, get to know your sources. Tyler taught Pizzey about more than breaking wind: “He told me, ‘If you can find a heartstring, boy, pluck it.’” This could mean standing in front of your cameraman in famine-plagued Ethiopia while a woman trying to reach Sudan with a baby on her back sits down to die in the dust. An estimated million would die from 1983 to 1985. “The image
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was stunning,” Pizzey says. But you have to speak clearly. Look straight into the camera. “You’re not there to share their pain,” he says, or cry, like his cameraman did. “You’re there to make millions cry. Move other people. That’s our job.” Other rules kept Pizzey alive. He recalls his “first war” reporting for Argus Africa News Service —Angola, 1975—and the “little war wagon,” a bright orange Volkswagen Beetle, waiting for him at Luanda’s international airport. “We start heading into town and I see these things in the air, streaks of light, and I said, ‘What the hell is that?’” The war wagon delivered them safely through the firefight and, a few months later, through the machine-gun fire of FNLA snipers, when the wagon got stuck on a sandspit. The story appeared on the front page of the weekend edition, but editor Wilf Nussey wasn’t entirely pleased. Rule number one: you can’t file if you’re dead. “That was a really good rule,” says Pizzey, “and it governed my career forever after.” There’s really no point in getting killed, he says. “You become the story rather than report the story.” Besides, there were worse fates than dying. Rule number two: if you get killed on the job, you’ve already been fired. Getting killed was a very real possibility in the days Pizzey showed up at war zones without “so much as a Band-Aid.” No one thought about things like insurance. “You just did it,” Pizzey says. Things have changed. Death is less likely when you’re wearing state-of-the-art body armour and riding around in Land Rovers with bulletproof glass. But nothing can protect a journalist from the threat of missing a story. Nussey warned: If you can’t find a story between the airport and your hotel, you will never be or have the right to call yourself a foreign correspondent. “You’ve got your eyes to see, your nose to smell,” says Pizzey, pausing to listen to the birdsong, to the paddles of two kayakers breaking the surface of Drag Lake. “If you do it right,” he says, “then politicians and people can’t say, ‘We didn’t know,’ because you did. We told you so. You knew bad things were going on, you knew people were suffering and dying and unjust wars were being fought. You knew. We told you. We showed you.” Adapted from a story previously published in the Haliburton Echo. PHOTO: ANGELA LONG