LJR 2009

J L A N G A R A

JOURNALISM

R E V I E WR L2009 Number 13

Langara Journalism Review

Silencing satire Canada’s laws leave criticism in the crosshairs

This is not a Game

Simma HoltAs feisty as ever, the ‘loose cannon’ tells all

CautionThe dangers of reporting in conflict countries

Journalists on the Olympic beat struggle to get the full story

2 Langara Journalism Review 2009

It’s good toknow who

your friendsare.

The media is an important andexciting field. But especially inthis economic climate, it’s toughto go it alone.

When you belong to a union,you’re not alone. And when youbelong to the Canadian MediaGuild, you are part of a group ofmore than 6,000 media employees across Canada, andthousands more across NorthAmerica.

The Guild represents employ-ees at some of Canada’s biggestand most important media organ-izations, including CBC/Radio-Canada, The Canadian Press,Thomson Reuters, and theAboriginal Peoples TelevisionNetwork.

If you want to know moreabout what you should expect inthe world of media work, we’dbe happy to help. The more youknow, the better off you are.And if you think it might be

time for you and your colleaguesto form a union in your work-place, we’d like to hear fromyou.

Together, we can help renewthe promise of this vital industry.

1-800-465-4149www.cmg.ca

Langara Journalism Review 2009 3

ContentsNowhere to go.........................................................5Journalism graduates are on the hunt for employment, but are there any jobs?

By Sarah Douziech

Juggling journalists.................................................8Multimedia is making a hard job even harder.

By Brenna Temple

The incredible shrinking newsroom.........................11Economic uncertainty and the shift to online news are causing massive job losses.

By Sam Smith

Bombs, bullets and bravery.....................................12Foreign correspondents risk their lives to tell the stories of war-torn countries.

By Sarah Massah

Protecting their own..............................................15A news embargo may have saved a reporter’s life, but did the CBC act ethically?

By Nafisa Kaptownwala

Glossed over.........................................................19Advertorials disguised as journalism are plaguing magazine stands across Canada.

By Marina Shevchuk

Irrelevant editorials...............................................21Newspapers’ political endorsements in a world of blogs, web news and voter apathy.

By Janaya Fuller-Evans

Instant news or immediate headache?.......................26As the blogosphere expands, journalists and politicians weigh in on the revolution.

By Alex Moser

More than meets the eye.........................................27Images can be altered in mere seconds, but where do photo editors draw the line?

By Justine Leung

Contract controversy..............................................29Canwest’s freelancing agreements have some writers taking their work elsewhere.

By Brenna TemplePenny for your thoughts.........................................34Online news readers get a chance to voice their opinions—for better or for worse.

By Kristen Douglas

A world away........................................................35A recent journalism grad shares her first foreign reporting experience.

By Jessica Barrett

The tangled web we weave......................................37News outlets are ramping up their web presence to meet growing online demands.

By Jeremy Stothers

Playing games..............16The hurdles facing Olympic reporters.

By Matthew Aitken

No laughing matter.......22Canwest strikes back at satirical critics.

By Andrew Weichel

Reminiscing reporter.....30A look at the vibrant life of Simma Holt.

By Melissa Smalley

JR L2009


An annual review of trends and issues in Western Canadian journalism

EditorMatthew Aitken

Managing EditorMelissa Smalley

Art DirectorCharlotte Brown

Photo EditorJustine Leung

Chief PhotographerStefania Seccia

News EditorJeff Lawrence

Production EditorJanaya Fuller-Evans

Assistant PublisherRachel McHollister

Advertising ManagerStefania Seccia

Copy ChiefAndrew Weichel

Copy EditorsAshleigh McIvor, Jeremy Stothers,

Sarah Massah, Kristen Douglas

Page EditorsAlex Moser, Nafisa Kaptownwala,

Sam Smith, Brenna Temple, Marina Shevchuk, Rachel McHollister,

Kristen Douglas

IllustrationsAlex Cho

Instructor/PublisherRob Dykstra

Produced by second-year journalism students at:Langara College 100 West 49th AvenueVancouver, B.C. V5Y 2Z6Telephone: 604-323-5415www.langara.bc.ca/ljrEmail: [email protected]

Printed in Canada on 30 per cent post-consumer paper by Nathen Printing, Burnaby, B.C.

LJR staff and Langara journalism diploma class of 2009

Back row: Sam Smith, Jeff Lawrence, Jeremy Stothers, Andrew Weichel, Matthew AitkenThird row: Sarah Massah, Brenna Temple, Janaya Fuller-Evans, Charlotte Brown, Marina Shevchuk, Melissa SmalleySecond row: Justine Leung, Nafisa Kaptownwala, Stefania SecciaFront row: Kristen Douglas, Rachel McHollister, Ashleigh McIvorMissing: Alex Moser

A letter from the editor

The Langara Journalism Review

Like everyone else in the world, I’m trying to stay positive about the current economic situation. Not that I have much to complain about. I haven’t watched my life savings go up in smoke on the world markets. Heck, I haven’t even lost a ten-cent piece—not that I had anything to lose anyway.

I have spent the past two years in a journalism program watching a once-proud industry in an uncontrollable tailspin. Conglomerates bleeding money, newspapers folding, layoffs—something is wrong. The world is grappling with a recession, but belt-tightening and restructuring have plagued the news industry for years.

In the ’90s it became clear the Internet was going to have a huge impact on information sharing, and its impact on the journalism industry has been gargan-tuan. The information age has put a publishing licence in everyone’s hand. Talk has always been cheap and online it’s free. But newspapers and magazines can’t pay staff with a doing-the-world-some-good sentiment. While the industry is downsizing and the blogosphere is growing, we need real journalism now more than ever.

This edition of the LJR is a bit darker than past issues. Perhaps the economy of the day is influencing our rather bleak take on the journalism industry.

But everyone knows a sharp journalist with a barrel of ink can still change the world. Good journalism challenges the status quo, which would otherwise never be questioned. It tells the stories of people who would not otherwise be heard.

We need good journalists and good journalism. We don’t need smaller news-rooms. We don’t need a cacophony of opinions masquerading as news—a typical feature of the blogosphere.

The recession might be tough on everyone, but it will be a harder slog for those of us in an industry looking to redefine itself in a brave new world.

This magazine is a testament to everything we respect about journalism, and everything that needs to change.

—Matthew AitkenCover: Reporter Bob Mackin, 24 Hours

Photo by Stefania Seccia


Working hard but hardly working

By Sarah Douziech

When I enrolled in journalism school, I thought I was making a practical choice. Here was a

way to combine a love of writing with a secure, paying job.

One month into the program and I was questioning if I could handle it. Deadlines were demanding, the volume of work seemed cruel and any inclina-tion I had toward flowery narrative was systematically forced out by a pointy in-verted pyramid.

Months later, that question of capa-bility seems irrelevant.

Jeff Gaulin operates the journalism job website, Jeffgaulin.com, and he says the industry has been in decline for the last three to four years.

“I’ve been running the website since 1995 and this is probably the worst time for job prospects for journalists that I’ve ever seen.”

In January 2008, Gaulin posted 150 jobs on his website. The same month this year he posted only 50.

More than 1,200 jobs were cut in the last three months of 2008: 600 at Sun Media, 150 at CTV and 560 at Canwest. These cuts have The Canadian Associa-tion of Journalists saying, “journalism in Canada is reaching a tipping point where the decline in the quality of news content will lead to an industry death spiral of less content, smaller audiences and yet more cuts.” Read: fewer opportunities than ever before for young grads enter-ing the market.

Facing this doom and gloom as a journalism student can be disheartening and has made me wonder why anyone in his or her right mind would be pursuing any amount of education in journalism, let alone a career.

So why are we still here?Well, it might not as bad as it seems.

Sherisse Szymczak, a 29-year-old Mount Royal College graduate, has been in a full-time TV broadcast job running on five years now.

Szymczak entered school deter-mined to get her dream job. “If one per-son [was] going to make it, it [was] going to be me,” she says. In some part the sta-bility of her husband’s career freed her to pursue journalism. “It’s not an industry that makes a lot of money, so you really do have to love it to do it.”

Meanwhile, 27-year-old King’s University-College grad Sarah Hoyles found herself moving across Canada and abroad to find satisfying work. She had to be creative and flexible to secure meaningful employment.

Hoyles eventually found the daily news grind to be too much, so she tran-sitioned into public relations jobs with non-governmental organizations and now has moved to project management.

“It’s a very adaptable skill set that you learn in journalism school,” Hoyles says. Though she’s moved away from traditional journalism, Hoyles says she’s never had trouble finding work.

Enter Noa Glouberman, a 2004 Ry-erson grad who worked for magazines in Toronto after graduating. She is now freelancing in Vancouver and her passion for journalism overshadows the low pay, long hours and limited opportunities.

Despite her current success, Glou-berman does admit it may be pretty un-common in this industry.

“My major concern for myself and other young journalists is that there just don’t seem to be those nine-to-five steady jobs anymore.”

Aaron Eccles, a 2003 Langara College grad, has been working at the BBC in London for five years and feels the jour-nalism industry in Canada is saturated. There are “just more jobs to be had” in the U.K., he says.

“If you’re passionate about what good journalism can do, there will always be opportunities,” says Eccles, though he admits, “the hardest thing to do is to stay positive in this business.”

Eccles concedes that many of his fel-

low grads have gone into public relations or pursued jobs in other industries.

While some view the Canadian me-dia as being in a state of crisis, others see the transition away from traditional journalism as a huge opportunity.

“New journalists will have to be far more entrepreneurial,” according to Al-fred Hermida, a journalism professor at the University of British Columbia.

Hermida’s areas of expertise include virtually every new journalism buzz-word out there: multiplatform journal-ism, blogging, podcasting, interactive journalism and user-generated content.

Business skills not usually taught at journalism school are the foundation from which young journalists will launch their careers, according to Hermida.

“You need to develop your own per-sonal brand,” he urges, and the way to start is with a website or blog; multi-media skills are indispensable to a new journalist’s survival.

A personal website or blog can help journalists generate income through ad revenue, and offers an accessible portfo-lio for potential employers.

“The issue here is not journalism in crisis, it’s the way journalism has made money that’s in crisis,” Hermida adds. Stable, nine-to-five jobs with benefits are becoming increasingly scarce, if not completely extinct.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he says. “Young journalists entering the market are entering at a time of tremendous change with tremendous challenges.”

How we deal with those challenges in the coming years will influence the course of journalism in a profound way.

Perhaps we’re naive to hope we’ll not only survive but thrive—as one of my classmates put it, maybe we’re not in our right minds.

But for those with an entrepreneur-ial spirit, work ethic and a love for adver-sity, there lies the immense privilege of shaping the future.


Canwest can’t shake debt

The biggest media company in Canada is in dire straights after its creditor capped lending at

$112 million in February, down from a promised $300 million.

Winnipeg-based Canwest Global Communications, which owns news-papers and television channels across the country as well as media stations in Australia and Turkey, is sitting on about $3.9 billion of debt.

But the company’s outlook re-mains rosy, saying that by trimming spending, it will be able to pull through this tough financial situation.

“Based upon current cash flow projections, the company believes that access to the reduced facility will enable it to continue to operate normally through this period,” the company said in a February news re-lease.

Canwest’s shares have dropped to about 30 cents, down from a high of about $7 per share at the beginning of 2008.

Canwest-owned Australian news network Channel 10 has been on and off the market for the last two years. While it is up for sale, Canwest has no serious offers for Channel 10.

—Jeremy Stothers

Honey, I shrunk the newspaperMedia outlets are cutting

costs left and right, but the Globe and Mail is taking

cutbacks to another level.In 2010 the national newspaper

will shave 1 by 1.75 inches off its margins. This is the second time in three years the newspaper will reduce its size. In 2007, the Globe shrunk its page sizes by 1.5 inches as part of a major redesign.

“We saw cost savings of several million dollars immediately by just reducing the size of the page,” Globe and Mail CEO Phillip Crawley told

the Canadian Community Newspa-pers Association in February.

Crawley said the reason for the size reduction was to take ad-vantage of new high-speed colour presses. No doubt there is an eco-nomic motivation for the move as well. It’s a trend, he said, that is catching on.

“Because newsprint is continu-ing to be more expensive...more and more papers are going to be looking fo these solutions,” he said.

—Jeff Lawrence


Global Toronto says goodbye to morning and noon news

Canwest TV stations are cutting jobs across the country as the ailing company seeks to cut

losses.Morning and noon newscasts

have been cut from Global TV’s To-ronto station, and cuts are expected in Montreal, Hamilton, Red Deer, Kelowna and Victoria.

“In the current economic en-vironment, we believe that our ef-forts are best focused on the areas of greatest return,” Canwest CEO Leonard Asper said.

Vancouver is not a target for this round of cuts. But as Canwest faces a loss of $30 million in the first quarter of 2009, more jobs may hit the chop-ping block before the economic cli-mate improves.

Canwest will focus on profiting from 18 specialty channels it owns, including Showcase, BBC Canada and Fox Sports World. The conglom-erate is anticipating a change in au-dience viewing habits.

—Jeremy Stothers

Magazine money on the wayAiling newspapers and maga-

zines are getting help from the federal Conservative

government as part of a stimulus package aimed at keeping Ca-nadian publications in the black during dark economic times.

The Publications Assistance Program, a government-funded organization that subsidizes mail-ing costs for small publications, will get $30 million over the next two years. The program helps about 1,200 publications across the country.

The money will replace funds that used to come from Canada Post, which is scheduled to stop contributing funds this year.

The federal government’s budget this year shows a deficit of about $34 billion, much of which is allocated to stimulate the econo-

my. It is expected Canada will owe lenders $522 billion by 2012.

New government ad cam-paigns may also help struggling publications find important ad-vertising money, up to $1 billion over five years, according to the Canadian Community Newspa-pers Association.

—Jeremy Stothers

B.C., Vancouver nearly fail FOI test: CNABritish Columbia and the City

of Vancouver barely make the grade when it comes to disclos-

ing information requested through the Freedom of Information Act, a Ca-nadian Newspaper Assocation audit revealed earlier this year.

B.C. is the second-worst province in Canada for responding back to FOI requests in a timely and complete

manner, coming in with a C-, while Vancouver is among the worst munic-ipalities in Canada for FOIs. Vancou-ver received a C, tied with cities such as Winnipeg and Hamilton.

The results mean B.C. journalists have it tougher than most other Ca-nadians when requesting information on Crown agencies in their province.

“What’s going on in B.C. truly

is a shame and a tragedy for people who believe in open, accessible gov-ernment,” Darrell Evans, executive director of the B.C. Freedom of Infor-mation and Privacy Assocation, told The Vancouver Sun.

Saskatchewan and the city of Saskatoon both passed the CNA audit with A- grades—top of the class.

—Jeff Lawrence


Photo illustrations Stefania Seccia


A reporter sprints out of the news-room’s front doors, knocking them open with a barrage of

bulky bags dangerously swinging from her shoulders. She carries a digital cam-era in one hand, a voice recorder in the other, with a video camera case slung across her back. She’s clutching a tripod under her arm. Her BlackBerry buzzes incessantly in her pocket, while she tries to remember which case she’s thrown her laptop into.

She will need these items to gather information that will immediately be posted to her newspaper’s website. At the same time, she will have to put together an in-depth story for the morning edition of her newspaper before 6 p.m.

The need to report using all these tools is hitting big and small newsrooms across the country. Now, a journalist’s ability to multitask is more than just an asset. It’s required.

This means there is less time than ever for the “kind of door-knocking that journalists of another generation might have done, and that could be not great for journalism,” says Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists.

A Winnipeg Free Press newspaper reporter, Welch says juggling tasks is a skill that’s still developing.

“It’s the way newspapers have to go but I don’t think any newsroom has quite figured out how to get reporters to do all that stuff and still produce [quality] news coverage everyday.”

The Terrace Standard, a commu-nity newspaper in the Northwest of Brit-ish Columbia, requires its reporters file news to the web along with their usual reporting tasks. These days, it’s not un-usual for any small paper to do the same. However,the paper’s editor and publisher Rod Link doubts its efficiency.

“There’s only so many hours in a day and so many hours in a week, and your

brain can only do so much. Sometimes it hurts your ability to gather the news as opposed to producing it,” he says.

Although web-filed news is neces-sary, he says journalism doesn’t mean what it did before.

“Since the advent of this web thing, I spend more of my time doing online things than I would like to do, but in the old days I had more time to do journal-ism. Now you spend more time being a technologist.”

The Daily Bulletin, the smallest dai-ly newspaper in Canada located in Kim-berley, B.C., is also beginning to focus on web news. Newly-hired reporters are ex-pected to juggle many different tasks.

“I guess for this job, yes, you do have to be a jack of all trades. Not only do you have to be able to write, you have to be able to edit,” says Daily Bulletin editor Carolyn Grant. “You have to be able to do page layout and design and take pic-tures and be pretty good in Photoshop.”

While Grant says writing skills are still very important, “someone with web-writing skills would be very, very use-ful because a lot of us who have been in the business for a long time can’t write HTML code.”

Web-focused newsrooms are even more important at larger papers. Twen-ty-five-year-old Glenda Luymes, a re-porter at The Province and a recent grad of University of British Columbia’s school of journalism, has felt this de-mand since The Province’s change to web-filed news.

According to Luymes, the scramble to file news for the web while simultane-ously putting the story together for the evening deadline could mean there’s less time for in-depth reporting.

“When you have to put it on the web as soon as you get it, there’s a little bit less time for verification, so you have to be kind of choosy about what you decide to put on the web, or else you get into

ethical dilemmas,” Luymes says. She says reporting alongside a photographer comes in handy.

“Having more than one person there is definitely an asset. The photographer might see something that I’m missing be-cause I’m focusing on the police officer, and he might notice the grieving family member. If I don’t see it, then he can say, ‘hey look at that,’ and then you totally work together.”

Like other dailies, The Vancouver Sun has a web-first priority for its re-porters. Managing editor Kirk LaPointe describes the Internet as a cultural tran-sition that has resulted in web-filed news taking priority over the newspaper’s eve-ning deadline.

“It’s been a really strong cultural shift to a web-first culture. We now file routinely all of our local content, and all of our wire material, photos, all of our audio files, create video, all of it with an expectation that you need to publish it as soon as it’s ready.”

According to LaPointe, multitasking is bringing both positive and negative reactions from reporters, many of whom are still adjusting to new web demands.

“The challenge is that a lot of journal-ists are being asked to multitask and to do a lot of additional things, and I think that we’re in a period of adjustment of what that really entails,” LaPointe says.

“If I’m asking a journalist to go blog at a conference all day long and to write a piece at the end of the day, I think there’s wear and tear that happens.”

Some like the opportunity to do some blogging, because it almost serves as the first and second drafts of their sto-ries that later end up in the newspaper.

For others, it serves as a great dis-traction. “It keeps them from thinking and researching ... neither one is neces-sarily the better of the two, it’s just that some people are responding in different ways to it,” LaPointe says.

Juggling Journalists

By Brenna Temple

News gathering is now based on how much equipment a reporter can carry


Union officials are concerned about the new multitasking require-ments in Canadian newsrooms.

Darrell Brownlee, western region treasurer for the Communications, En-ergy and Paperworkers (CEP) Union of Canada says that such expectations have made journalists less productive.

“I just ran into an employee from The Winnipeg Sun. He’s a sports jour-nalist, and now he has to hold a digital camera at the same time as trying to take notes for his sports story. So he’s trying to do two things at one, and you can’t do both at the same time,” Brownlee says. “When you look at it with one person go-ing out doing everything, they also come back with less.”

Wendy Sol, CEP Western region administrative vice president, says that with pressure to multitask, the impor-tance of factual details has been dimin-ished, meaning journalists don’t have as much time to ask questions that may be essential for the full story.

“Mathematically...one person cannot do the same amount of work as two,” Sol says. “There’s no more time for investi-gative journalism.”

Some journalists are cautiously op-timistic about newsroom staff’s ability to adapt to web demands and new media programs.

“New reporters have a more natural tendency to understand special media, or they’re more familiar with digital gad-gets, but you have to keep some degree of humility and realize that just because you know technology, doesn’t mean you know about the reporting side,” says Vancouver Sun reporter and recent UBC school of journalism grad Catherine Rolfsen.

“People here have been really, really fast to catch on, and go crazy with all this new technology...it’s not always about age and generation.”

LaPointe says that when it comes to teaching older journalists skills for filing news to the web, it’s all about changing the way they think.

“The bigger issue is to retrain, and to make sure that people who viewed themselves as working for a newspaper view themselves as working for a multi-platform newsroom, and that they adapt into this new era,” LaPointe says.

He also says that adaptation is not a question of age.

“This is not like playing hockey in the NHL, where at a certain age you just can’t do it any longer. Some of the best adapters in our business are people who have had two or three decades of journal-istic experience, so it’s not an age thing.”

Like Luymes, Rolfsen says filing to the web makes her work more difficult.

“I think there is more pressure, so I guess the other way it’s changed is that we’re expected to file to the web all the time. Most of us have BlackBerrys now, so when we’re out on a story they always want a couple of quick paragraphs from your BlackBerry right away,” Rolfsen says. “That adds to immediate pressure... it can be a real juggling act of whether you’re going to write your quick news stuff or whether you’re going to keep in-terviewing and getting more of the con-text ultimately that will be in your print story.”

Mark Briggs, author of the book Journalism 2.0, advises journalism stu-dents on how to survive and thrive in the digital age. Briggs was the assistant managing editor for the News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington, until October 2008. He regularly leads seminars about jour-nalism and technology, and is currently

building “interactive web platforms for local news publishers.”

The demand for multitasking report-ers has increased as “a direct result of the fact that there are fewer jobs at news-papers,” he says. Journalists, he says, can take advantage of such technology since facts can be gathered easier than ever before.

“I think that there’s a tremendous opportunity to use new technology to do as much, if not more, investigative jour-nalism,” Briggs says. “Even if there are fewer people... because we’re entering an age where technology allows for easier collaboration. Journalists are starting to open themselves up and actually enter-tain the idea.”

Whether or not multitasking is em-braced or resisted in newsrooms, it’s clear that reporters need to learn how to deliver and feel comfortable with the new demands of news gathering.

Discussion of these issues may help to determine the balance between the new technology phenomenon and old-fashioned quality journalism.

“When I talk to people in my news-room or people of union leadership, when they have an open mind...great,” LaPointe says.

“Let’s just keep thinking about this. Let’s just keep exploring, because we’re going to need all of the available brain power to tackle the huge challenges that we have in the time ahead.”

“I think there is more pressure ...we’re expected to file to the web all the time. Most of us have BlackBerrys now, so when we’re out on a story they always want a couple of quick paragraphs from your BlackBerry right away.”


More than a paper cut

By Sam Smith

The economic recession has the media industry under the knife.Corporate surgeons are perform-

ing critical cuts, but will the patient sur-vive?

Sun Media Corp. recently cut 10 per cent of its staff—600 jobs. Canwest Global Communications Corp. cut five per cent, or 560 jobs, in the last two months of 2008 and put five of its television stations up for sale.

The Globe and Mail had 60 voluntary buyouts by the end of January and 30 people have been laid off.

One hundred-sixty jobs are gone from the Torstar Corp., owners of The Toronto Star newspaper. Seven full-time reporters are gone at the Winnipeg Free Press, not including a handful who took early retirements.

Cuts are also expected to hit the CBC later this year. While the number of job cuts is unknown, insiders have speculat-ed there could be up to 700 layoffs.

Rogers Publishing, the company that owns Maclean’s and Chatelaine, has asked its full-time staff to take a 20 per cent pay cut by shortening their work week to four days.

Despite these cuts, the same quality of product is still expected to come out.

“I think the paper will continue to be a top-class product and the best news-paper in Canada,” says Phillip Crawley, publisher and CEO of the Globe and Mail. “It’s one of these situations where nobody likes having to go through these periods; it’s unsettling for everybody and people here are smart and intelligent. They’re connected to the world and we have to adjust to these economic times.”

Crawley explained that with smaller staff, the Globe will have to make adjust-ments to maintain the same efficiency as before, such as reducing copy-editing desks from eight to three, making each desk more universal and taking in more work from every section.

“Pretty much throughout the build-ing there’s a sense that we need to work more smartly because we have less peo-ple than before,” Crawley says.

But not everyone agrees that the quality will stay the same.

“Fewer people gathering the same or more amount of news automatically reduces the time and depth,” says Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and a report-er for the Winnipeg Free Press. “When you go in there as a reporter, you need time to do in-depth and investigative re-porting. Fewer bodies, plus this need to kind of embrace new technology, [such as] video takes time as well.”

“For me, the most fun part about be-ing a reporter is getting to really sink your teeth into a story,” Welch says. She believes the opportunity for creative, in-vestigative reporting is becoming lost for many reporters. “The ability to be the ‘watchdog’ is going down and down.”

And it’s not only reporters who are getting the axe.

“All are being cut—copy editors, photographers. At the Winnipeg Sun a photographer became a reporter,” Welch says. “He’s just completely freaked out. I’d be freaked out if I had to take pictures tomorrow.”

Karen Wirsig, communications co-

ordinator of the Canadian Media Guild, agrees that quality is going down in con-junction with the cutbacks.

“There’s less and less likelihood of the profession being able to reach out to those people in the younger age groups,” Wirsig says. “People are rightfully cyni-cal about the type of news they see. We know it’s good when it really does make us think and it does make us challenge public policy and think about changes to what they’re doing. When’s the last time you read something that got you think-ing?”

Wirsig questions why people should still read the news if the quality of jour-nalism continues to go down.

“When the media isn’t challenging authority, being the watchdog, it’s espe-cially not being inspiring to the younger audience,” Wirsig says.

However, Wayne Moriarty, editor-in-chief of Vancouver daily The Province, believes that journalism still makes the grade.

“If anything the quality has gone up over the last 10 years,” Moriarty says. “And I would probably attribute the sharp rise to the quality of journalism schools. Young journalists are coming out today far better equipped than I ever was.”

Moriarty does concede the newspa-per has changed its approach since re-sources are being depleted. Three years ago, editors would get a press release and decide to either go out and develop a story based on the release or trash it. Today, the lack of resources sometimes leave editors without that option.

“In the past we go out and shoot pic-tures and do a follow up story. Today we might not have the resources for that so let’s just use them and rewrite the press release for the newspaper the next day.”

Referring to the New York Times motto, ‘All the news that’s fit to print,’ Moriarty believes that’s no longer realis-tic in today’s newsrooms.

Does cutting quantity mean losing quality?

“Fewer people gathering the same or more amount of news automatically reduces the time and depth.”


Unscrew the lens cap, check the po-sition and straighten out the tri-pod. Take a deep breath and look.

Bombs are exploding, tanks are rushing through the city and barely metres away there is a woman with blood pouring from her wounds. Take a step back from the carnage and focus, the lens and the mind, and start recording. Deadline is in a few hours.

“It’s absolute chaos,” says Russ Froese, a journalist and former television anchor whose assignments have included coverage of the Lebanese-Israeli war and the removal of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. “It’s hell. I mean, you can’t even imagine.”

Hell. Many journalists use that word when describing their time in conflict countries. Working as a foreign correspondent for the CBC and travelling the world as a freelancer, Claude Adams has seen atrocities that can only be imagined in nightmares.

“In Rwanda, I was wandering through the church at Nairobi with hundreds of bodies lying in the sun,” Adams says. “We hadn’t expected to come across it and one’s first reaction is to be horror-struck and run away, but we knew we had about an hour to film, so we did and then we dealt with it later on.”

Death and abductions are realities that journalists must face when stepping into a war zone. Scarier still, the majority of journalists’ deaths do not occur during crossfire; rather, journalists are hunted down and murdered, “often in direct reprisal for their reporting,” according to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization.

CBC correspondent Melissa Fung made headlines in 2008 when she was taken hostage while working in Afghanistan. It is not unusual for a Canadian journalist to encounter trouble

while overseas, but the way Fung’s story was kept from the public caused controversy.

Editors and news directors agreed to block the news of Fung’s abduction from print and broadcast media in an effort to ensure her safety. Many viewed the media blackout as journalists protecting one of their own.

“It was a big debate on whether or not it was a good thing to embargo the

information on the news because on the one hand we’re giving special treatment to reporters because we’re not going to report on this but on the other hand we’re saving lives,” Adams says.

Fung’s story is an example of how journalists are used as pawns in a conflict. Journalists have become valuable hostages because they are the media and therefore they will garner more media attention, Adams says.

“Reporters are in more danger than they were before because there are more of them out there and because the bad guys are much more aware of the headline-grabbing potential of doing things to journalists.”

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of journalists killed worldwide between January 1992 and October 2007 is 722. This does not include the hundreds who have gone missing.

Amanda Lindhout, a freelance journalist from Alberta, was taken hostage in Somalia with Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan and Somalian journalist Abdifatah Mohamed Elmi on Aug. 23, 2008

She was abducted while doing a piece on refugees for French television station France 24. The kidnappers, who called themselves Mujahideen of Somalia, demanded a $2.5 million ransom or the journalists would be executed.

The deadline passed with no payment.

On Jan. 15, Elmi was released but said he had no knowledge of Lindhout or Brennan’s condition. Subsequent reports indicate they are fine. On Jan. 25 the ransom was lowered to $100,000.

While there was no news embargo in Lindhout’s case, there is very little coverage likely because she is not connected to a major media outlet.

Overseas horrors

By Sarah Massah

Violence, abductions and death are realities journalists face when reporting in conflict and war zones

“In Rwanda, I was wandering through the church at Nairobi with hundreds of bodies lying in the sun... one’s first reaction is to be horror struck and run away but we knew we had about an hour to film, so we did and then we dealt with it later on.”


“It’s natural that there should be some kind of double standard in regards to that because no one wants to take re-sponsibility for that and no one wants to come up with the millions of dollars that are required to free someone,” Adams says.

Adams recommends that journalists working abroad should hire a reliable “fixer,” someone who will act as a guide and a translator.

“It’s so important to hire someone who knows the ground, the dangers,

the players, who knows the people, who knows where to go and where not to go,” he says. “The two most important things: blend in and don’t try and save money by getting a cheap fixer.”

But he says some journalists suc-cumb to what is known as “hotel roof-top journalism”—when they stay in the safety of a hotel and rely on the fixer to bring back information. This is a com-mon practice in Iraq, as Adams saw first-hand.

He notes this kind of reporting may

be easy and relatively safe, but damages reporters’ reputations because they rely too heavily on second-hand information.

“They send out their people with cameras and notebooks and tape record-ers to do the leg-work. That’s where the fixers become the most important part of the news operation. It’s not such a great idea to lay off the danger to the locals, even though they would not be in as much immediate risk as we would be. It’s really not fair to get them to take all the heat.”

Photo by Marina ShevchukClaude Adams, foreign correspondent for the CBC and freelancer, has seen his share of atrocities overseas.


And even though fixers are usually locals, being associated with Western media outlets is reason enough to be tar-geted.

But because of the United States’ history of involvement in international conflicts, American journalists may be targeted more than Canadians.

While Froese was reporting on the Israeli-Lebanese conflict, active U.S. military presence spurred animosity to-wards Americans.

“The Canadian passport had more sway—particularly in Middle Eastern countries—than the American passport because the American marines had oc-cupied and invaded,” Froese says. “There was a lot of anger against the Americans. Being a Canadian journalist helped.”

For a Canadian woman working as a journalist in post-invasion Iraq, the bal-ance between staying safe and reporting can be increasingly difficult, as Hadani Ditmars, international journalist and author of Dancing in the No Fly Zone, found.

Prior to the American invasion she had been able to leave her hotel alone be-cause Iraq functioned as a secular police state; however, this was not the case dur-ing her last trip.

“It was quite dramatically different. Suddenly I was told that I couldn’t go any-where on my own as a woman, because I could get kidnapped,” Ditmars says.

Journalists need to have every bit of knowledge about the feuding sides in or-

der to protect themselves and sometimes it’s as simple as picking a winner.

“You try to go in with the winning side so you have a little more safety when you’re caught in the middle, when you go somewhere where an active con-flict is going on,” Froese says about his experience in Beirut.

But in a country like Iraq with many different religious factions fighting for power, it’s hard to know which side is winning.

“It’s become such a fundamentalist society now,” Ditmars says. “It was much safer when it was a police state. Under Saddam you were being watched con-stantly as a foreigner but you knew who was watching you. Now you don’t know. It could be various factions, sections or militias.”

On Ditmars’ last trip to Iraq, while interviewing women at the al-Gaylani mosque, she met three sisters who begged her to make their plight public.

“One of them had a terrible story. Her husband had gotten shell-shocked during the invasion and had started beat-ing her,” Ditmars says. She left him. “He kidnapped their daughter, and said he was going to sell her in the market un-less she came back.”

Ditmars and her translator went to the woman’s home in Karkh (a working class neighbourhood in central Baghdad) and in the midst of the interview Ditmars heard the sound of gunfire.

“I ask my translator, ‘What is that?’ And she asks the women and they got nervous because Karkh is somewhere that has very open gun markets,” Dit-mars says.

“Basically they were suspicious that I had been sent by the Americans to crack down on some of their immediate male relatives who were gun-sellers.

“Out of nowhere, this photographer came and took my picture, which is a thing that a lot of people did if they were going to kidnap you. I was like, ‘I want to finish this interview’ and my translator was like, ‘We’ve got to get the hell out of here, right now!’ So we jumped in the car and drove away, past open gun markets, with AK-47s hanging down.”

Knowing when to leave is important for a journalist to remember, but even simple things can make a difference in ensuring safety.

“The most important thing is try and adapt the local colouration. In other words, don’t stand out,” Adams says. “One of the things that we learned was that if you were driving a car, and it gets covered in dust, don’t clear the dust off

because with dust on a car you can see very quickly if someone’s been tamper-ing with it, trying to put a bomb in it, be-cause you can see streaks in the dust.”

Froese suggests journalists should have a proper understanding of interna-tional humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions because they provide more tools to work with.

For example, embedded journalists—reporters directly attached to a military unit in an armed conflict—do not count as civilians under Protocol I of the Ge-neva Conventions, according to George Chandler, manager of the Humanitarian Issues Program with the Canadian Red Cross. This is because they are travelling with the military and are under the rules of the military.

“If someone attacks a tank and a journalist is riding in [that] tank then there’s no recourse for that because a tank is a tank. I’m wearing a helmet, I’m wearing a flak jacket, well, looks like a soldier, talks like a soldier, must be a sol-dier,” Chandler says.

But taking precautions can be costly. Reporters Without Borders offers life in-surance for freelancers costing roughly $10 a day. They also loan equipment such as bullet-proof vests—with a $1,600 de-posit, of course.

But in order to receive the insur-ance, the freelancer must be a member of Reporters Without Borders, which re-quires citizenship from a country in the European Union.

For those who aren’t eligible, life insurance for an assignment in Iraq can cost thousands of dollars a day, which has deterred journalists from working in the war-torn region.

“I don’t think the world will ever give special protection to a class of people like journalists,” Chandler says.

Despite the inherent dangers, jour-nalists abroad will continue to risk their lives to bring the stories of conflict and suffering to Canadians—and the rest of the world. Sometimes a single flash of the camera, a two-minute video clip, or a compelling story can capture the raw emotion of an entire country in turmoil. For those reporters, it takes a lot of guts, and there’s very little glory.

“It was much safer when it was a police state. Under Saddam, you were being watched constantly as a foreigner, but you knew who was watching you. Now, you don’t know.”

Embedded journalists are not civilians...


Don’t do as I do

It is vital for journalists to abide by a code of ethics and provide infor-mation in the publics’ interest. But

is it acceptable to risk a person’s safety to provide the public with their news?

Last October, CBC reporter Melissa Fung spent 28 days in a hole a few feet underneath Afghani soil, writing letters to her loved ones while lying on a bed of dirt. She was beaten, stabbed in the arm and shoved into a mysterious vehicle and the CBC knew almost immediately after it happened.

The public broadcaster made a de-cision not to inform Canadians that its foreign affairs reporter had been ab-ducted. This choice may have saved her life, according to CBC spokesperson Jeff Keay.

“It’s the kind of thing that goes against the grain of any news person to get the story and not make the story public,” Keay admits. “Having said that, we also recognize that her life was at stake. Under the circumstances, our primary priority is to ensure her safe return.”

Guidelines provided in the the Ca-nadian Association of Journalists state-ment of principles refer more to privacy, but suggest that journalists “...will seek to minimize any harm done to people, especially the vulnerable, the trauma-tized and the young.”

Each situation should be judged in the light of common sense, humanity and the public’s right to know.”

The CBC chose not to publicize Fung’s case based on the corporation’s own journalistic standards and prac-tices.

“It was the view of the experts in-volved that it was less risk to her per-sonal safety and a greater likelihood of affecting her return without publicity,” Keay says. “Given the same set of cir-

cumstances and the same practices—whether or not it was a CBC employee — would have handled it the same way.”

Nearly every national news orga-nization knew about the abduction but chose to honour the CBC’s request not to report it.

“We had conversations with news organizations throughout Canada, North America and around the world seeking their co-operation in maintain-ing a news blackout which was frankly offered immediately,” Keay said. “They made a considered decision to co-oper-ate out of her personal safety.”

However, the story was leaked through new media.

“We noticed stories on the Inter-net,” Keay says. “You can’t tell people to do anything—you can ask and seek their co-operation. It’s up to the news organization whether or not they are going to co-operate. The vast majority did. We appreciated that very much.”

By not reporting the story, the CBC had to sacrifice its duty to the public in order to ensure Fung’s safety, says Uni-versity of British Columbia journalism ethics professor Fred Fletcher.

“It’s a close ethics case. It’s com-peting principles of publishing news in the public interest and doing no harm,” Fletcher says. “Seems pretty clear there was a reasonable chance of harm, es-pecially with the Melissa Fung case. Whether major news sources acted dif-ferently with private citizens is a differ-ent story.”

Fletcher says this decade has been the most dangerous one yet for foreign correspondents. Abductors target jour-nalists because they generally expect a big ransom from the news organization or because they want Western media at-tention.

Fortunately, news organizations are

taking a greater level of responsibility for their employees reporting abroad.

“Last time I was reporting in a dan-ger zone was 45 years ago and there was no [insurance] coverage,” Fletcher says. Now correspondents are given ex-pensive health insurance and extensive training.

Although it wasn’t the responsibil-ity of other news organizations to main-tain Fung’s privacy, Fletcher says they chose to do so out of respect for Fung’s safety.

“[Other news sources] did know and chose not to report. It’s reciprocal, you look after [my reporter] and I’ll look after yours,” Fletcher said.

Jas Johal, South Asia correspon-dent for Global National, said via e-mail that journalists in Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia are walking targets. However, no responsible news organization would, nor should, walk away from a reporter in danger.

“If you’re there on behalf of your company to report on events, and dur-ing the course of your duties you’re kidnapped or in trouble the company is obligated legally, ethically, and morally in my opinion to do their utmost to help their employees,” he says.

Johal added his extensive prepara-tion included war safety training cours-es prior to reporting from war zones.

“It’s an intensive one-week course you can take in London or Washington, D.C.” Johal says. “It’s almost become a requirement now. It would not have been 10 years ago.”

Johal believes Global would have handled it the same way had Fung’s situation happened to him.

“Situations like Melissa’s are very fluid and to jeopardize that over the public’s right to know would have been a mistake, in my mind.”

The CBC’s decision to spike the Melissa Fung abduction story raises an ethical dilemma

By Nafisa Kaptownwala


Going for gold

By Matthew Aitken

Standing on the north shore of False Creek, close to GM Place in downtown Vancouver, it’s hard to

imagine the tarpaulin-draped buildings on the other side of the water could end up costing Vancouver taxpayers close to $1 billion.

With a little more than a year to go, a world economy on life support left the city and its taxpayers in a bind. The de-veloper building the Olympic Village on the south shore of False Creek was in fi-nancial trouble, and its New York-based financier decided to pull the plug. There were two options: let the project go unfin-ished or keep the wheels turning on the public dime. Image-conscious Vancouver chose the latter.

And it’s Vancouver’s image that’s up for scrutiny when the 2010 Winter Olympic Games begin Feb. 12. Some 10,000 media representatives —2,800 reporters and 7,000 technicians—will be officially sanctioned to cover the Games. Members of the media will outnumber athletes by about 3,000. But the 10,000 comes from the Vancou-

ver Organizing Committee’s website and Olympic numbers, whether they be headcounts or dollar figures, need to be looked at twice. Other estimates regard-ing the number of journalist are much higher—VANOC apparently doesn’t want to acknowledge those who are not certified—the indie journalists, the blog-gers, the activists—who will be sending their own messages and images around the world.

Likewise, the city’s—read taxpay-ers’—financial involvement in the Olym-pic Village has grown from an original $65 million commitment, primarily for social housing, to $429 million, which includes buying out the developer’s loan. As of this writing, the city is on the hook for a total of $875 million, backing the project’s entire financing. And then there’s the anticipated security bill. Cost estimates have ballooned from an origi-nal $175 million to $900 million.

Bob Mackin has been trying to make sense of the numbers—not to mention other information involving the Olym-pics—since the mid-’90s. Working for

various publications, he has followed the Olympic bid from its inception, and, as an accredited journalist with Sun Me-dia’s 24 Hours, he will cover the Games up close in 2010. His efforts to tell the Olympic stories today, he says, are of-ten stymied by the people at VANOC. “Covering an organization like VANOC is both frustrating and fun. It’s a very in-sular culture on the inside. They’re very worried about what gets out into the pub-lic about their operations.”

Mackin predicts that commuting in the Lower Mainland is going to be chal-lenging during the Games, but the trans-portation story is one he can’t seem to crack. Initial transportation plans have been announced, and Vancouver can ex-pect to see some major routes in and out of downtown—the Georgia Viaduct, for instance—completely closed. A number of other streets will have priority lanes for Olympic motor coaches. VANOC has suggested to Vancouverites that carpool-ing, tele-commuting and ditching the car for public transit are their best travel op-tions during the Games.

When

Illustration by Alex Cho

Chasing the Olympic story can be frustrating and fun


Photo by Stefania Seccia Jeff Lee has been working on the Olympic beat since 2002.

This information isn’t enough for Mackin, but he gets the run-around ev-ery time he tries to obtain more details.

“The City of Vancouver won’t talk about Lions Gate Bridge or Second Narrows. They say, ‘talk to VANOC,’ and VANOC says, ‘talk to the Ministry of Transportation and Highways,’ and the ministry says, ‘talk to VANOC.’” Mackin says forcing reporters to jump through five hoops before getting any answers isn’t doing Olympic organizers any favours.

“I think they’ve missed the boat on community relations. I don’t see them out in the community very often,” he says.

So when I spoke with a VANOC pub-lic relations representative for this story, his reaction was no surprise. He told me he couldn’t be quoted. My questions re-garding some journalists’ concerns about obtaining Olympic information were met with a “no comment.” Questions about how the both the accredited and the non-accredited media will be forced to oper-

ate during the Games were directed to the Canadian Olympic Organizing Com-mittee.

“I think if we do see protests during the Olympics next year, VANOC should look in the mirror itself because it has not set up a watchdog or allowed a watchdog on the inside,” Mackin says.

Jeff Lee, a senior reporter for the Vancouver Sun who was assigned to the Olympic beat shortly after Vancouver was short-listed as a host city in late 2002, says he also has to work hard at getting the Olympic story, sans hype or spin.

“VANOC is the toughest organiza-tion I’ve ever had to cover in 30 years of news reporting,” Lee says.

There are many stories he’s like to write, but they require time, a commod-ity in short supply in most newsrooms these days. He says the internet has made it somewhat easier for him to convey in-formation to readers because he can post unedited, unfiltered information quickly.

For example, last January when the story broke that the City of Vancouver

had bailed out Millennium Develop-ments, builders of the Olympic Village, after a New York-based investment firm pulled its financing, Lee ended up with a brown envelope. It contained the min-utes of the closed-door meeting where councillors approved a $100-million loan.

“In the past, I would not have had the forum to post them, I would have had to refer to them,” he says.

Some in the non-mainstream media claim that the Lee’s coverage is soft, due to a sponsorship agreement between VANOC and Canwest, Lee’s employer. The Vancouver Sun’s coin boxes have been getting a five-ring facelift and this show of Olympic boosterism suggests the Sun’s coverage of the Games isn’t as critical as it should be. Lee says this couldn’t be further from the truth.

“We get a lot of flak right now from people who think we’re being soft on VANOC,” Lee says. “All they [editors] have said is, ‘make sure you’re accu-rate.’”

Chris Shaw, a keen observer of the


Olympics and a self-described “hobby journalist” says he is amazed at how the story of the Games has been presented to the public. “I think the [mainstream] media have utterly failed this file,” he says.

Shaw started his blog 2010 Watch because he guessed from studying past Olympics that Vancouver’s show wasn’t going to be any different. He didn’t like it from day one and, “I don’t do neutral,” he says.

By day, Shaw is a professor of oph-thalmology at the University of British Columbia. He says he has no particular motive in digging up Olympic informa-tion. He is simply interested in informing the public. “I made a commitment to the people of Vancouver and the people of British Columbia to be a watchdog and that’s what I did.”

Some journalists have described Shaw as an oracle and an enigma be-cause of his voluminous research on the Olympic story. Despite his lack of formal journalistic credentials, a close look at his work reveals he is almost right on the money when the money isn’t right. In his book about the Olympics, Five Ring Circus, Shaw estimated the cost for security for the 2010 Games at $1.4-bil-lion. Compare that to the $175-million estimate in 2002, when the Games pitch was first being made to the public. Last February the updated security figure involving all the agencies involved—the RCMP, the Vancouver Police Department and the Canadian Forces—was pegged at $900 million. Shaw may not have won on The Price is Right—his estimate was over —but he was certainly closer than the original $175 million.

Despite Shaw’s inherent biases against the Olympics, Mackin acknowl-edges he is doing important work. “He has done his research from past Olym-pics and I think he’s someone people should listen to,” Mackin says.

Skepticism of VANOC and its plans for the big party in 2010 is most evident in the many other Olympic-critical blogs based in Vancouver. Olyblog.com, Spec-tacle Vancouver, No Olympics on Stolen Native Land, and others are tying the Olympics and the massive amounts of money involved to the city’s social ills such as poverty, lack of adequate hous-ing, and one more universal scale, hu-man rights.

Everyone agrees the worldwide In-ternet forum will change the way big events like the Olympics are covered from the street. While the rigid structure of reporting on the actual sporting events

will be tightly controlled by Olympic officials—for example, television broad-casters get first dibs on interviews with medal winners; print reporters go to the back of the line—other stories involving Olympic matters, including those on the inevitable protest actions, will be freely disseminated via the Internet, not fil-tered through the Olympic information machine.

Even now, protests are being planned and many of the activist groups want to cover these events themselves, or with the help of journalists expected spe-cifically for the larger anti-globalization movement. Some organizations are al-ready holding meetings about how to

best organize such coverage, setting up an anti-Olympic newswire, likely protest venues, and where to billet these visit-ing journalists for free. These groups are sketchy with details, and prefer to remain nameless.

During the Bejing Olympics, the world saw how a host country can come under scrutiny from a group with a par-ticular agenda. Activists for a free Tibet used the 2008 Games as a podium for airing their grievances with the Chinese government. There is nothing to suggest that protesters won’t take advantage of the spotlight on Vancouver to showcase to the world the city’s income disparity and significant social problems, particu-larly on the city’s shame—the Downtown Eastside.

Robert Scales, CEO of Vancouver’s Raincity Studios, is trying to bridge the gap between the Olympics and indepen-dent journalists. Raincity is a web devel-opment company dedicated to building online communities.

An accredited 2010 Olympics jour-nalist himself, Scales hopes to host his own media centre during the Games where individuals can use the facility to tell a variety of Olympic stories, includ-

ing those of a more social nature. “We want to bring attention to Van-

couver and its needs,” Scales says. “We want to cover stories not covered by mainstream media.”

Raincity will have a 15,000 square-foot space as its own media centre dur-ing the Games, complete with computers so independent journalists can write and upload their stories quickly.

The B.C. government is hosting an international media centre in downtown Vancouver at Robson Square. To access this facility, journalists will not be ac-credited through Olympics organiza-tions but will have to apply to the provin-cial government. The province expects some 1,500 journalists to use the centre and its services, including the provision of scenic backdrops and prime rooftops for television broadcasts sending shots of the city’s spectacular scenery around the world.

For journalists who want a backdrop a little more down to earth, the W2 media centre project in the Woodward’s build-ing aims to provide a 22,000 square-foot space to include radio and television facilities, and wireless Internet access. The space is designed to facilitate Olym-pic-related coverage from a street-level perspective, and is expected to remain open to the community afterwards as the “newsroom” for the Downtown Eastside.

“It will be a community media centre with the capacity to support dozens of community-generated media practitio-ners,” says project organizer Irwin Oost-indie. The artist and social activist also sees it as a future training facility for people looking to break into the world of journalism. Aspiring journalists will re-ceive training, “to put them in entry-level positions,” he says.

So with the cranes still swing over the Olympic Village, construc-tion crews are working smart to

meet its November deadline. The City of Vancouver, now bankrolling the project, may reduce the number of units desig-nated for post-Olympic social housing. In doing so, the city would be reneging on its original commitment to the less-fortunate—part of the so-called Olympic legacy. But this is the type of story that VANOC, the city and the provincial gov-ernment don’t want journalists to dwell on—it doesn’t fit with the feel-good spirit of the Big Event. To be sure, such information doesn’t fit into the positive, albeit somewhat narrow view. But when the Games begin, these stories will be will be hard to suppress.

“We want to bring attention to Vancouver and its needs. We want to cover stories not covered by main-stream media.”


Despite all the hype about journal-ism’s migration to the web, maga-zines are everywhere, and cover-

ing every topic from dirty wars to pricey cars, from haute couture to cattle ranch-ing, from bicycles to the bubbly world of beer. There are some 1,250 magazine titles in Canada today, compared to 860 a decade ago. But does this signal a public thirst for more and better journalism, or are magazines becoming tools for slick marketers?

Look at any major newsstand and you’ll see a vast array of magazines con-taining stylish artwork surrounded by stories with enticing hooks, interesting characters and entertaining quotes. But the content often reads more like an ex-tension of advertising than informative journalism. The articles tell the reader of the latest trends and then subtly work in brand names, subliminally inviting us to buy.

This form of advertising has been around for decades, but is appearing in magazines more and more with labelling that is becoming subtle. Referred to in the industry as “advertorial” they work like this: A potential advertiser agrees to buy a full-page colour ad—but only if the magazine agrees to publish an accompa-nying story, either on the organization, or the products it is trying to sell. Noth-ing critical, of course. That’s understood.

A decade ago most magazines frowned upon the practice, or editors

outright refused to participate in this cheque-book style of journalism. Publish-ers—and certainly editors—understood that doing so would damage editorial integrity, and taint the magazine. Today, the practice seems to have infiltrated the magazine publishing business to the point where boundaries between mar-keting and journalism are blurred, and even reputable publications are forced—or want—to play the hucksterism game.

“[Advertiser] demands are getting stronger across the board—advertisers are starting to feel more powerful and are making more demands and encroaching into editorial space,” says David Jordan, editor of Granville, a magazine that fo-cuses on environmental trends and sus-tainable living in Vancouver.

Even if the material is identified as being something other than editorial, misleading labels combined with layouts that mimic editorial material make it dif-ficult for readers to identify exactly what they’re looking at. Jordan notes there are various euphemisms for such adver-tising material, for example, “special fea-ture” or “information supplement,” and the tags are sometimes placed in obscure locations.

“You’re not fooling anybody by put-ting paid content in a format that looks like editorial,” Jordan says. “The reader is going to read a few lines and see that there’s something funny here. It’s not re-ally a news story. And then your credibil-

ity is lost and the reader is upset. Nobody comes out ahead. Advertorial is fine as long as it’s labelled very prominently,” he says.

Four pages into the Globe and Mail’s December 2008 Report On Business magazine are nine pages of back-to-back advertisements for luxury wristwatches. Four of the pages are stories and photos.

“A special information supplement” is written above the material in small plain black font on a white background. It is easily overpowered by the title “Timeless trendsetters” on a bold red background.

“If you label it anything, why not la-bel it advertisement?” Jordan asks.

“That’s what it is. That’s just going out of your way to mislead people by la-belling it ‘information supplement.’ We know there are all these fly-by-night community magazines and newspapers that have misleading advertorial and you can brush those aside, but when the Globe and Mail starts labelling advertis-ing as information, then I think we’ve really got a problem with journalism in Canada.”

Inside the same Report on Business issue is a two-page article on the late Ted Rogers, former CEO of Rogers Com-munications. The article is a flattering reflection on his accomplishments and the future of the corporation, all framed around Rogers’ 75th birthday celebra-tion and autobiography launch. It seems

By Marina Shevchuk

Advertisements disguised as editorial content are blackening magazine pages, but at what cost?


innocent enough but several pages later there is a full-page advertisement for Rogers. In this case there may not have been an advertising-for-editorial deal but the ad’s obvious contribution to the magazine’s revenue raises questions for the reader about the article’s objective.

Advertorial guidelines are outlined in the British Columbia Association of Magazine Publishers—Canadian Maga-zine Publishers Association nationally— which promotes professional editorial integrity and production standards. The guidelines stipulate advertisement-ed-itorial ratio, labelling, placing and fre-quency. The 80-plus magazines that are members must follow the guidelines, but those that are not members are not obliged to follow the rules, and can make up their own.

“We need to have some sort of standard in place just to ensure when we’re promoting our members we can stand behind them,” says Heidi Waechtler, project co-ordinator at BCAMP. “Just to ensure the integrity behind the editorial content, that nobody is doing advertorials without clearly marking them as such. That’s our main concern when we’re looking at potential members.”

Members are required to send three copies of every issue published for re-view by BCAMP. Waechtler says appli-cants have mainly been rejected based on their editorial-advertising ratio.

“We really want to be inclusive and help grow and represent the industry,” she says. “We don’t want to be accused of having members whose existence is based solely on advertising-based edito-rial. We want to ensure that we’re put-ting out quality, original content. It’s to maintain an industry-wide standard…and to help the magazines themselves, so that the editors and ad-sales teams can understand them and communicate them to their customers. And to under-stand what they’re producing as well. They look to us for what’s appropriate.”

Advertising, of course, is the life-blood of any magazine, unless it is in-dependently funded. Business or trade magazines rely on advertising for 84 per cent of their revenue, while general interest magazines get 56 per cent of their revenue from advertising. The rest comes from subscriptions or other activi-ties, such as selling circulation lists. The competition for scarce ad dollars means

publishers sometimes are tempted to lower their editorial standards just to keep the revenue flowing.

“We’re in one of those markets where the advertising is not very robust,” says Marco Ursi, editor of Masthead, Canada’s magazine about magazines.

Lack of advertising has, ironically, killed the print version of Masthead, which was launched in 1987. But overall, Ursi doesn’t see magazines going extinct anytime soon.

“Now the economy’s in bad shape, but people are still coming out with new launches,” Ursi says. “Despite the prob-lems magazines are having right now—because they are having problems—and despite a lot of closures, there are always people who continue to give it a shot and want to do it. It’s really an exciting thing

to come out with a magazine and…get people reading it, and writing in to you and saying how much they love it or even how much they hate it.”

The intimate nature of magazines makes them a popular marketing tool for companies. Bell Canada Enterprises, the country’s largest telecommunica-tions company, until recently published a monthly called Vu Magazine covering entertainment choices available to Bell’s ExpressVu channel subscribers.

“It’s a different kind of marketing because it’s one-to-one,” Ursi explains. “It’s not so in-your-face, it’s more subtle, it’s ‘Hey, you like TV, don’t you? You like to watch these shows and you like these people? Well you’re a subscriber to our Bell Satellite TV and we thank you for that through the magazine and we hope you’re going to stay a customer.’”

It is evident that Vu Magazine was trying to persuade readers to stay loyal to Bell. But when general interest maga-zines with the goal of providing good journalism are competing in the same market, the pressure to increase revenue by providing editorial support to adver-tisers can undermine that goal and turn magazines into nothing more than mar-keting tools.

“The idea of magazines not having editorial integrity or selling out to adver-

tisers… that’s happened forever and it’s going to continue happening,” Ursi says.

“There are people out there who get into this business with the inten-tion of making money and they will take shortcuts to do that, but in the long run it doesn’t pay off because you don’t have the trust and authority you need with your readers to get them to really believe in your magazine.”

But do readers even care about which form advertising takes? Magazine advertising is not something readers have come to hate. In fact, they have ac-tually come to expect advertising as part of the magazine experience.

Sixty-one per cent of Canadians held a positive attitude to advertising in mag-azines and 48 per cent felt that it added enjoyment to their magazine reading ex-

perience, according to a Dynamic Logic AdReac-tion survey conducted in 2005. While advertising interferes with nearly half of Canadians’ en-joyment of media such as the Internet, radio, or TV, only a quarter felt the same way about magazine ads, accord-ing to a 2005 Roper Pub-lic Affairs survey.

“A common argument I hear from people when they’re trying to tell me how great magazines are, is that the ad-vertising is not intrusive, that readers like it just as much as editorial,” Ursi says. “Personally, I don’t. I don’t look at advertising in magazines. It’s weird for me to say that because I’m the editor of Masthead and I understand the business is based in advertising.”

But as Masthead abandons its print version and sets sail in the treacherous online world, Ursi will be forced to look at web advertising revenue to keep Mast-head’s website afloat.

“People are experimenting online,” Ursi says. “Online is the Wild West of publishing right now and everyone is just trying things and killing things, starting new things and closing old things, faster than you can track it, both in terms of editorial and advertising.”

As more publications face financial hardships, the pressure on publishers to sacrifice editorial integrity for adver-tising revenue grows. New competition from online publications compounds the problem even further.

“Publishers are letting [advertisers] get away with more. Sales reps are prom-ising them more. I see publishers really caving,” Jordan says.


Insignificant commentary

By Janaya Fuller-Evans

It is election night in Vancouver. People trickle into St. Augustine’s Anglican Church in Marpole to vote

for their favourite candidate—and elect a federal government. It is the same scene in churches, school gyms and commu-nity centres across Canada.

In the weeks before voters make their selections, editorial boards from the country’s major newspapers announce their choices in eloquent editorials. The editors weigh and ponder the political is-sues of the day in an effort to convince and cajole their readers, all in the name of what’s best for the country.

The question is, do these editori-als have any impact on election results? Deborah Jones, a former member of the editorial board for The Vancouver Sun, now a freelance journalist, believes they don’t. She says endorsements really only concern folks in the industry.

“The percentage of people who read editorials is so tiny,” Jones says. “I think the people who read editorials tend to be possibly the policy makers or people who are more informed anyway, and the politicians themselves. I’m not sure that it has a big effect on the public.”

Jonathan Kay, managing editor of content for the National Post, agrees that most voters pay very little attention to endorsements.

“In the United States they’ve done some studies on whether journalistic en-dorsements of political candidates sways political races and I think the conclusion they came to was that it doesn’t,” Kay says.

Only 37 per cent of newspaper read-ers read editorials, compared to the 73 per cent who read local news, according to a 2007 study conducted by the Newspa-per Audience Databank, Canada’s daily newspapers’ research arm.

One possible reason is that readers now have a variety of sources for opinion pieces that did not exist when the edito-rial section of the local newspaper was first created.

Web blogs, in particular, are becom-

ing more popular with those looking for a new perspective on any given topic.

But Jones says blog writers do not have the same credibility as an editorial board does when endorsing candidates.

“I don’t think blogs have the same voice of formal authority as a newspaper, but that may change in the future,” Jones says.

According to Kay, reporters who blog for newspaper websites, such as the Na-tional Post’s, showcase the risks inherent in this new medium.

“Blogging is an exercise in quick-reflex reactivity: Good bloggers tend to get their posts up within hours, or even minutes, of breaking news—not enough time for decisions to be run through newspapers’ normal editorial chain of command,” Kay writes in an article for Newmajority.com.

While editorializing in newspapers is going in a new direction—online—it is only within the past 50 years that a line was drawn dividing news from opinion in the paper itself.

Newspapers have historically pro-claimed political and economic positions, urging readers to adhere to the same val-ues. In the past, news stories carried the reporter’s or the paper’s opinions. But in recent decades, newspapers separated the two areas in an attempt to maintain the appearance of objectivity. The politi-cal slant of the local paper was once so obvious that, during the 1936 presiden-

tial election, the Chicago Tribune even suggested how people should vote over the telephone.

The paper was so against the incum-bent U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that 10 days before the election, the Tri-bune’s switchboard operators answered the phone with, ‘Hello. Chicago Tribune. Only 10 days left to save the American way of life.’

Richard Stengel, writing in Time Magazine last year, questions the pur-pose of political endorsements in edito-rials.

“Sure, I know the history and the tradition, the fact that newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries were often af-filiated with political parties, but why do they do it now? Why do it at a time when the credibility and viability of the press are at all-time lows?” Stengel writes. “More importantly, why do it at a time when readers, especially young readers, question the objectivity of newspapers in particular and the media in general?”

While readers may not be directly influenced by newspaper endorsements, editorials about little-known or inde-pendent candidates can inform the pub-lic about the variety of political choices available. Unfortunately these are the politicians who are frequently ignored by editorial boards.

Peter Prontzos, a college political science instructor who ran for the NDP in the 2008 federal election, says endorse-ments can have a huge effect for lesser-known candidates.

“If you’re an underdog or you’re new or something and almost as a surprise a paper endorses you, again, it leads to credibility,” Prontzos says. “I think it makes a huge difference.”

Likewise, if the media does not take such candidates seriously, voters won’t either.

If newspapers do not provide infor-mation about unknown candidates, no one knows who they are.

“If it doesn’t get past the gatekeeper, it doesn’t exist,” Prontzos says.

Newspaper political endorsements may have little influence on readers

“The people who read editorials tend to be possibly the policy makers or people who are more informed anyway.”


Split on free speech

Photo illustrations Stefania SecciaGordon Murray (left) is being sued by The Vancouver Sun, a newspaper Kevin Bent (right) publishes.


The fine line between satire and defamation in Canada

By Andrew Weichel

The morning of December 7, 2007. Retired Simon Fraser Univer-sity sociology professor Morde-

cai Briemberg sat packed and ready to leave the country. His son Joshua, who co-ordinates water distribution efforts in Central America, would be expecting his arrival in Nicaragua that evening. Only one item was missing from Briemberg’s bundled travel bags: a new laptop sched-uled for delivery that afternoon.

A knock. Briemberg stood up from the table where he sat with his wife and shuffled to the door. He was met by a plainclothes man with a clipboard.

“Mordecai Briemberg?” he asked.“That’s me,” Briemberg said, signing

for his delivery. “I don’t see my laptop.” The man was confused; there was no

laptop. He extended his arm and instead handed Briemberg a sealed envelope.

“I’m here to deliver your writ of summons.”

As the deliveryman drove off, Briemberg opened the ominous envelope to unsettling news: At 70 years old he was being sued by one of the largest and most powerful media conglomerates in Canada.

I have been assured by a very know-ing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, wheth-er stewed, roasted, baked or boiled…

—Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y? Con-sonant or vowel? Make up your mind, we’re at war.

—Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

From Jonathan Swift’s ironic propos-al to end Irish peasants’ starvation in the 1700s to Stephen Colbert’s modern char-acterization of Bill O’Reilly-style political punditry, centuries of effective popular satire have cemented the form’s place in social criticism.

Once exclusively defined as a liter-ary device, satire’s provocative mix of mockery and critique is no longer bound to any medium —visual arts, film, TV, and particularly the increasingly popu-lar “fake news” genre all employ satire and parody to skewer everything from sacred cows to vapid socialites. Some

comment on broad social issues, like the satirical 2006 Onion newspaper article that grazed on America’s immigration debate as well as globalization (“Illegal Immigrants Returning To Mexico For American Jobs”), while others aim at more direct targets— among them, spe-cific corporate brands and logos.

While the former subdivision of satire may have managed to endure historically even under fascist regimes (Russian playwright Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical anti-revolutionary productions were mystifyingly awarded the full sup-port of Stalin himself), the difficult-to-define rights of the more direct targets leaves the latter form’s future lingering in a grey area of Canada’s legal system.

The evening of June 6, 2007. Pal-estine Media Collective support-ers gather outside of the Roman

coliseum-inspired architecture of the Vancouver Public Library for a rally. Stacked in piles on the ground were cop-ies of what at first glance appeared to be The Vancouver Sun. After inspecting the headlines, however, they proved to be anything but. Morecai Briemberg bent down and picked one up.

CELEBRATING 40 YEARS OF CIVILIZING THE WEST BANK

STUDY SHOWS TRUTH BIASED AGAINST ISRAEL

Taking an armful of papers, Briemberg headed home for the night. He had decided to take the papers to a SkyTrain station near his house in Burnaby the next morning to distribute to commuters.

And that’s what he did.

In a recent Walrus article titled The Last Laugh: Why Canadian Satire Can’t Measure Up to Stewart and

Colbert, Rebecca Addelman compares the current success—and general rele-vance —of American comedy shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Re-port to our own comparatively lame fare like This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Indeed, anyone familiar with our southern neigh-bour’s satirical programming would have to concede the recently retired Royal Canadian Air Farce to be milquetoast in comparison. Addelman, a Canadian-

born, California-based comedienne her-self, argues our nation’s strict libel laws stifle the humourist, and she’s not alone.

While some—generally, the person or persons making potentially insulting statements—frame the debate as a matter of free speech, others—typically the victim or victims of a scathing insult—opt to frame it as defamation. Who’s right? Is it an individual’s right to make fun, or to not be made fun of? While such a conflict between individuals may be open to legal interpretation case by case, our legislation is much more succinct when dealing with corporate interests—specifically pertaining to trademarked logos. Whereas the U.S. Trademark Act contains two “fair use” provisions that distinguish “parodying, criticizing, or commenting” from infringement, Canada’s Trade-mark Act lacks a specific provision for humour or social commentary. Instead, Section 22 states that if any trademarked intellectual property is used in a way that depreciates the value of the “goodwill attaching thereto” the logo, legal action is warranted.

In 1996 this led Canada’s federal court to rule in favour of tire manufacturer Michelin over its employees, who had used the Michelin Man mascot on union protest posters. Thirteen years later, that legal precedent, which has been accused of penalizing satirical criticism, may be paired and strengthened.

I decided to distribute them because they were funny,” Briemberg says. “And they provoked people to think

again about the kind of media they’re getting here.”

The decision would lead him to be accused of trademark infringement by none other than Canwest Mediaworks Publications, owner of 10 major Canadian daily papers including the National Post, The Province, and the Sun. Despite the size of the satirical publication (two pages), the phony-baloney names on the bylines (Cyn Sorsheep and P. Rupa Ghanda) and the ridiculous headlines, the unaltered masthead of The Sun provided grounds for Canwest to pursue legal action.

For his part in the paper’s distribution, Briemberg’s name was included on the writ along with the printer, three Jane

Does and three John Does—blank slates to be filled in as evidence was collected. Following protest support through the Seriously Free Speech Committee —which counts prominent dissidents Noam Chomksy, Naomi Klein and Linda McQuaig as honourary members—and the unveiling of the real culprits behind the parody paper, Briemberg’s name was eventually dropped.

The sour taste, however, remains. “We’re often very smug about how we’re so much better than the Americans,” Briemberg says. “But I don’t know.”

If anyone in Canada can sympathize with satire-borne legal woes, it’s Mi-chael Bate. Publisher of the now-de-

funct Ottawa edition of Frank magazine, Bate spearheaded the publication’s move from the Maritimes to the nation’s capi-tal 19 years ago. He also headed the mod-est, yet influential magazine through a myriad of legal troubles—and even willfully courted a few of them. When Canwest decided to sue Mordecai Bri-emberg, for instance, for distributing the fake Sun newspaper, Bate published the front page of the controversial paper on Frank’s cover.

Like Addelman, Bate faults Canadian legislation for the satirist’s difficulties. Trademark law aside, Bate says that libel laws in Canada unfairly default with the plaintif. Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, if a Canadian humourist

is accused of defamation it’s his or her responsibility to prove that the joke was based on fact.

“All you need to do in Canada to get a libel suit going is to get your feelings hurt. You call your lawyer and start the meter running,” Bate says.

In order to deal with the constant stream of complicated legal struggles, Bate decided to take sole responsibility for the authorship of each article published in Frank by providing his own byline for his reporters’ stories.

“The trouble is if you put someone’s name to it then they’re liable as well and nobody will write for you. In theory, I was the author of everything. I edited everything, so I was the author, so I was the target for the suits; the magazine, the holding company and me,” Bate says. “And I had no assets so there was nothing they could get.”

Former CTV political pundit Warren Kinsella, and journalist-cum-senators Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy have all taken legal action against Frank, though only Duffy’s case advanced far enough to even settle out of court—which is not to say each case wasn’t stress-inducing.

After nearly two decades of taking sole responsibility for the magazine’s content, Bates, currently penning his memoir tentatively titled The Frank Diaries, is burnt out.

“In retrospect of doing that for 20 years, I can’t recommend that for satirists or for future Frankians,” Bate says. “It’s a nerve-racking way to run a publication.”

Now that his name, along with his wife Carel Moisewitsch’s, ap-pears openly on the Canwest writ

in place of Briemberg’s, Gordon Murray has no qualms about taking responsibil-ity for the Vancouver Sun parody.

“I did it,” Murray confesses. “I designed it and wrote it.”

Donning a black t-shirt with an upside-down Canadian flag that reads “Canadian holocaust”, a reference to the exploitation of Canada’s aboriginal population, it’s clear that Gordon Murray is no stranger to controversy. After observing ongoing mass-media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which Murray perceived to be biased toward Israel, he and Moiseiwitsch made the decision to produce a parody.

“[Canwest’s] The National Post specifically has been studied, and their coverage of the death of children, Israeli children versus Palestinian children, showed that they were 80 times more


Illustration by Alex Cho


likely to report the death of an Israeli child,” Murray says. “When the bias is that outrageous, it’s difficult to talk about it in academic terms. Satire seemed to be a good way to deal with some of the issues.”

Despite their current candour, Murray and Moiseiwitsch left their names off the original parody paper, leaving the Sun no easy recourse—and no responsible party to communicate with—when it was distributed.

“Knowing that Canwest is very litigious, we knew there was a possibility that they would try to take legal action. We did it anonymously, and that was one of the reasons; we didn’t want to get involved in a SLAPP suit. The other being to focus on the issues, and let the parody speak for itself without getting involved with the personalities behind it,” Murray says. “It’s kind of impossible now, but that was the original intention.”

SLAPP suits, or strategic lawsuits against public participation, began in the 1980s as a corporate reaction to environmental groups that were speaking out against logging and urban development. SLAPP suits, according to their detractors, are not necessarily filed in the interest of collecting monetary damages; they may be filed with the simple intention of siphoning the resources of an opposing interest, a method available only to the wealthy and powerful, and most effective against groups or individuals with limited resources.

Today, 24 states in the U.S. have “anti-SLAPP” legislation in place to prevent these lawsuits from seeing trial.

“B.C. in fact had such legislation. It was passed in April of 2001 by the NDP government, and repealed in August 2001 by the incoming Liberal government,” Murray says.

“It was their very first act.”

Clean cut, confident and sharply dressed in suit and tie, Kevin Bent seems yanked off the cover of GQ

magazine—and like the perfect natural counterpoint to Murray. Bent is the pres-ident and publisher of Pacific Newspaper Group, which puts out both the Sun and The Province—the two largest papers in competition (more or less) for Vancou-ver’s readership. His perspective on the lawsuit is, of course, as contrary to Mur-ray’s as their appearances.

“This has been spun from their angle as a Canwest and Vancouver Sun issue in a sense, that this is about Canwest taking the pro-Israeli stance

versus the pro-Palestinian stance. This Seriously Free Speech group has been suggesting that we haven’t been fair, balanced and accurate in our coverage of what’s happening in the Middle East. And it’s not about that at all. In my mind it has nothing to do with that. This is trademark infringement.”

Bent compares the Sun to a Coke or Nike product, where the consumer’s trust in the brand is paramount.

“I came from another industry that made packaged goods and if anyone tried to damage our reputation, damage our product offering, essentially hurt the equity that we’ve spent a hundred years building in our brand, then we would take it seriously.”

According to Bent, people had been opening street corner coin boxes and wrapping the fake paper around real editions of the Sun, which—despite the obvious pun bylines and the extreme content of the parody—caused confusion among a number of readers as to whether they were reading a Canwest product.

“People actually did call me and e-mail me and said, ‘I can’t believe you guys are putting out this garbage. I don’t know if it’s you guys or if it’s somebody else, but you know, you shouldn’t stand on the sidelines.’ And this wasn’t one or two e-mails, this was quite a few.

“We’re all for satire and parody, but when it harms a business that’s when it crosses a line. It has harmed our business, and we’ve got work to do in that area.”

While asserting that Middle East coverage was inconsequential to Canwest’s lawsuit, Bent still refutes Murray’s claims of bias.

“They’re clearly off-base in suggesting that Canwest or the Sun or any of our products are slanted towards one direction or another from a coverage perspective. The newsroom’s task is and always has been to be fair and accurate, and if there was anyone giving any directive to me or to Patricia [Graham, editor-in-chief] or to Valerie [Casselton, executive editor] or to anybody, we’d have a revolt on our hands,” Bent says. “That’s not the way to run a strong media company in today’s environment.”

On the phone, speaking in a strong Slovak accent, University of Brit-ish Columbia Russian literature

and satire specialist Peter Petro is ami-cably eccentric. When the question of satirical defamation is raised, he muses on hurt feelings.

“How do we know that mocking is hurting the reputation of someone? How

can you prove that? I have been mocked a million times for example by my wife, and I am not hurt by that at all,” Petro says. “It’s for the better; she’s trying to set me right. She’s sort of frustrated, and maybe when she makes fun of me she’s going to achieve her purpose better than when she says it straight.”

When speaking about the current lack of legal protection for satirists, however, Petro’s tone becomes noticeably sombre.

“Well, not protected in my mind equals not allowed. I’m not an idiot to write a satire and find myself punished, or lose my job. So it’s no good to say that it’s not protected,” Petro said. “I think what we have to say is that satire is not allowed in Canada, because that is the consequence of not being protected.”

* * * * *

Satire dramatizes better than any other use of it the inherent contradiction of free speech: that it functions best when what being said is at its most outrageous. —Tony Hendra, satirist

Canada’s trademark law prohibits anyone from making “a false or misleading statement tending to discredit the business, wares or services of a competitor.” Did Murray and Moiseiwitsch mean to discredit the Sun with their parody? In a word, yes; it’s at the very least a discernable criticism. Whether Murray and Moiseiwitsch, who did not profit from the faux-paper’s distribution financially, can be credibly considered “competitors” is for the judge to decide.

What’s evident is that Canada’s trademark law in no clear terms even addresses the possibility of parody, a confusing scenario compounded by the parallel murkiness of Canada’s laws regarding free speech. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms merely states that freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression are guaranteed “only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

What’s missing is a sturdy legal precedent to either bar or embrace satire and deem it defamatory or protected, respectively.

For Murray and Moiseiwitsch’s trial, however, the question of satire is moot. The judge has barred any mention of biased reporting from their statements of defence, asserting that Canwest’s trial is to be determined on the grounds of trademark infringement alone.


Interactive journalismBy Alex Moser

Liberal candidate Lesley Hughes was asked by the Liberal Party of Canada to step down last year

after one blogger lead the way in alleg-ing she was “9/11 truther,” someone who believes the attack on the World Trade Center was conspiracy by high-ranking U.S. officials to provide justification for overseas wars.

The Black Rod—whose identity is unknown—prints his blog at Blackrod.blogspot.com and is proud of the accomplishment.

“If newspapers covered news properly, the bloggers wouldn’t exist,” he says. “Or news blogs wouldn’t exist.”

But his definition of “proper” is not the same as an accredited journalist.Hughes was not given the opportunity to respond in The Black Rod’s post, following the typically one-sided nature of blogs.

Hughes says The Black Rod’s anonymity allows him to speak his opinion with little recourse.

“I certainly wish he would disclose his identity,” she says. “The problem is bloggers are not really accountable if they slander you or misinform or disinform.

“The Black Rod made an unfounded allegation based on his personal opinion, which ended up being accepted in the mainstream media.”

National Post writer Jonathan Kay relied solely on The Black Rod’s blog when he reported on Hughes, calling The Black Rod “the MVP blogger of the election.”

“I haven’t spoken to The Black Rod. I’m not even sure I know who he/she is,” Kay said in an e-mail to the LJR. “Nor did I speak to Hughes.”

Kay says the story was picked up from one of his favourite blogs and he traced back the chain of links until he found the original source.

“This is a common task when you’re relying on blog sources,” Kay says. “You want to find out who was the first person who actually broke the story, even if dozens of other sites followed up on it.”

The Black Rod publishes his thoughts from Winnipeg, Manitoba, but his material is available instantly,

anywhere online.“You’re living through a revolution.

There’s no other way to say it,” The Black Rod says.

Blogging has become commonplace in a world that is virtually online all the time, and it’s changing the way people get their news.

“Blogs provide immediacy and they free people from dependency on the gatekeeper media,” says The Black Rod, citing his Hughes post as an example.

“A story appears, people comment on it, link to it, and follow it up in their own way. After the story was posted, we were spectators. It burned its way through the national consciousness within 48 hours and was gone. Welcome to the future.”

Sean Holman, prominent British Columbian blogger and recently laid-off legislative reporter for 24 Hours, believes that blogging’s biggest benefit is its interactivity.

“I think that blogging offers a different way to go about journalism than most mainstream media allow,” says Holman, who created his blog Publiceyeonline.com in 2004.

“By that I mean, when a story is published in a newspaper ... it’s as a stand-alone entity. Blogging allows you to have a conversation with your readers.”

Holman says the smaller, instant updates of blogging are popular for a reason.

“If you look at television... a lot of the really popular dramas right now are done in a serial format,” Holman says. “It’s what keeps the viewers watching, it’s the hook. I think that’s a really compelling format for journalists to use as well, and I think it’s a format that blogging encourages.”

Blogging has also had an influence on Canadian politics. Former Conservative MP Garth Turner was one of two MPs who kept a blog until January 2009. In 2006, he was turfed from the Conservative Party caucus for “breaching caucus secrecy” on his blog, Garth.ca.

Author and journalist Turner says the impact of blogging isn’t wide, but it’s growing.

“Blogging has had an influence on journalism [but] it hasn’t been

extraordinary yet,” Turner says.In his experience as an elected

official, he has noticed the effect of blogs, even in mainstream media.

“Blogging and blogs are used now as a [news] source,” Turner says. “My blog statements would appear in newspapers. Of course it was a substitute for people actually having to talk to me.”

Despite the cost to his career, Turner still praises the format.

“From a public person’s perspective, blogging is an indispensable tool of communications which allows one to actually go around mainstream media,” Turner says. One of the major problems with blogging is that “there are no ethics, there are no standards, and there’s no legality,” according to Turner.

“Anyone’s free in this country to start a website anonymously, to say what they want. You get lots of instances of shoddy reporting, where people pretend to be investigative reporters.”

One idea that Turner talked about on his blog was what he called “digital democracy”, whereby blogging would be a conduit for public figures to interact directly with the public.

“I did a lot of things. I had straw polls, asked what their opinion was on a number of issues. I calculated the results and passed them around to my colleagues as an instant snapshot of public opinion.”

In the larger picture, Turner says that while he thinks blogging as an MP was a worthwhile experiment, it has a long way to go before being a tool of “digital democracy.”

“Blogging undermines political parties, it undermines political leaders, it undermines their ability to control their message.”

Turner believes that political parties aren’t ready for another stream of communication to monitor and control.

“It opens up far too much accountability to the citizen, the taxpayers, and the voters,” Turner says.

Hughes says The Black Rod’s opinion of her was perceived as truth and is something she will never recover from.

“I’ll be a monster on the Internet until I’m dead.”

Blogs circumvent conventional news media, but disciplined reporting may be the victim


Digital deceptionBy Justine Leung

In the age of Photoshop, seeing isn’t always believing

The above photo by Kelli Cardinal is the original. The image below was altered by photographer Allan Detrich. He added foliage and removed the legs behind the Bluffton pennant before submitting it to the Blade newspaper.

Two opposing basketball players spring into the air side by side, arms outstretched, flailing to-

wards a ball floating in mid-air just out of reach. Photographer Allan Detrich was at the game to shoot the action. The University of Toledo women’s basketball team was playing against the Kent State squad and this photo could be a great ad-dition to tomorrow’s local paper.

Or could it? What if the basketball wasn’t in the picture and the photograph was of two women jumping? That’s all the photograph was, in fact, until Detrich digitally added the ball. And though this photo did not make it to print, other al-tered photos did.

In April, 2007 Detrich, a photogra-pher for the Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, resigned after confessing to alter-ing a photo that appeared in the paper.

After further review of his photographs it was found that Detrich, a newspaper photographer for 18 years and winner of hundreds of newspaper photogra-phy awards, had submitted 947 photos for publication in 2007. Ninety-seven of those had been digitally altered; 58 made it to print.

Detrich made changes such as re-moving people, tree limbs, utility poles and other background objects.

Images are powerful tools in story telling. They transcend language bar-riers, illiteracy, and can be viewed and shared in countless formats. They can also capture moments that are otherwise indescribable.

Strong images have the capacity to leave long-lasting emotional impacts and memories. But with the capability to manipulate photos digitally with off-the-

shelf software such as Photoshop, how trustworthy are they? Is what you see actually what happened?

Even when objects removed from a photograph seem inconsequential, Row-land Lorimer, a professor of mass com-munications at Simon Fraser University says they are important to the informa-tion a photograph provides. While fore-ground images affect people on a more conscious level, background images are equally as powerful.

“For instance you see a tree in a shot but you don’t sit there in your mind thinking about it,” he says. “You don’t really operate on it—not in words anyways—you don’t realize what enters your mind, but it sets reality and certain assumptions.”

He uses the example of a photo of a fire at a local building to explain the type


of information a reader would take away from the foreground of an image.

The action in the foreground of the photograph confirms the validity of the story on a conscious level, while back-ground objects inpact thoughts on a sub-conscious, less thought-provoking level.

“I certainly think images set up an overall context in which words are inter-preted,” Lorimer says. “Images are for people to make interpretations and add elements of what the story’s about. If a picture shows what a person is talking about, one gets a sense of drama and ex-tent.”

But when images are altered, so is the information they provide.

Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists says doctoring photos is easy to do. “It’s as simple as cropping something out of a photograph,” she says. “It’s like taking a quote out of context.”

She notes that altering photogra-phy affects the credibility of news media. “Every time it happens people lose a little more faith in the news.

“A photograph is a piece of news,” Welch says. “Changing or doctoring a photo is like making up facts or a quote. It’s unethical.”

She acknowledges that sometimes a photo is altered for creative reasons on a feature page. “It’s not a big deal, if it’s clear to the reader.”

But this brings up the question of how clear is clear to the average reader? And is that an assumption made by an editor?

Newspapers such as The Vancouver Sun and The Province alert readers to altered images, labelling them as photo illustrations, advising the readers of in-tentional discrepancies between what would have been the original image and the image that they are viewing.

But without the original, the reader is unaware of what has been altered and is left to speculate.

This has the potential to be a slip-pery slope in terms of ethics in news photography.

Bill Holden, photo and graphics edi-tor at The Province, says “Photoshop is a great tool and with varying types of quality some photographs need work. We never take anything out of a photo. We’re very conscious of that.”

He concedes the temptation could be there to alter photos, but notes that it is as important to trust a photographer’s judgment as it is to a trust reporter’s.

Problems can also arise when imag-es don’t come from staff photographers. With technology making sharing and

moving photographs faster and easier, news media receive images almost in-stantly from around the world.

Unverified doctored photographs have splashed across international newsmedia as a result of this connective convenience, and multiple websites dedi-cated to exposing altered photography in the news have risen up in their wake.

An image of an Iranian missile test in July 2008 was picked up and published by media worldwide. The photo was of four missiles being launched from a fenced, flat, barren strip of land. Rolling brown dust clouds blanket the launch area, as grey and yellow smoke pillars tail out of the glaring white flames firing from the back of the missiles.

A photo analysis later showed the picture was tampered with, but only af-ter the photo—which was originally re-leased by Sepah News, the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards—was picked up by media around the world, spreading false information.

In reality, only three of the four mis-siles launched successfully. A composite image of an extra missile was added to the photograph and the image of the un-fired missile still piggybacked to a white carrier truck was cropped out.

The photograph—and the truth—had been digitally altered, leaving read-ers with the wrong context for the arti-cles that accompanied it.

There was speculation that the pho-tograph was altered to exaggerate Iran’s military capabilities and news media were used as a tool to further an agenda.

This suggests the need for a fact-checking system for photographs and shows that scrutiny must be applied when considering the sources of news photographs.

Newspapers subscribe to numerous newswires because the logistics of each media outlet placing their own photogra-phers in every part of the world are not realistic. But newswires oversee them-

selves and set standards for the photo-graphs they supply.

One of the major photograph-supply-ing newswires is Getty Images. Getty has 120 employees and 300 contributing and freelance photographers spread across the globe.

Getty offers many services to dif-ferent clients all over the world. This includes not only an editorial feed to news media but also branding services for companies. The different branches might have been an ethical issue if not handled appropriately.

“As long as they keep the two divi-sions separated and a news photographer doesn’t take ad photographs as well, it’s okay,” says the CAJ’s Welch.

She adds newspapers do the same thing by selling ads and then sometimes having to write about the companies that placed them.

Cole Porter, Getty Images edito-rial ombudsperson, insists that editorial teams and commercial teams of photog-raphers and editors are sent out sepa-rately even if they cover the same event.

For example, Getty Images is the offi-cial photographer of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. The company plans to send a commercial team that has been hired by the Olympic committee, as well as a team to provide editorial content for news media.

For credibility reasons, Getty keeps news material separate from other pho-tography, Porter says. Occasionally, a commercial photo might make it as news.If a photographer on a commercial shoot, for example, takes photos of some-thing newsworthy and those photos are the best, or the only ones avalaible, Getty puts them on the newswire with a label alerting news outlets. After that it’s up to newsroom editors to decide what to use.

But commercial photographs will go on the newswires only if the commercial client agrees, Porter adds.

Today’s sophisticated cameras can lie, too, Porter notes, so Getty has stan-dards for shooting news photos. As for using software such as Photoshop, ma-nipulation is limited to cropping and colour adjustments to avoid damaging the editorial integrity of the image, as well as to maintain the principles of ac-curacy and honesty that news media need to uphold.

Photographs are a form of immedi-ate information. If readers get to a point where they can no longer trust the valid-ity of newspaper photojournalism, news media lose more than a story telling tool. It loses a language of information the en-tire world can speak.

“Every time it happens people lose a little more faith in the news.”


Self-employed journalists are criti-cizing Canwest’s freelance con-tract, an agreement they say takes

away their right to a liveable wage.Under the contract, writers are paid

a one-time flat rate, allowing Canwest to reprint their work elsewhere for free. It also allows for the byline to be removed and for the article to be edited without the writer’s permission.

David Johnston, the executive di-rector of the Professional Writers Asso-ciation of Canada, says besides the fact that freelancing rates have not recently increased, freelancers’ rights have also been diminished.

“Not only have they [Canwest] not raised their rates in decades, but they’re asking for more,” says Johnston.

“It’s a rights grab. In the electronic world they’re asking for rights that they didn’t have previously and they’re not paying for them.”

Because of the contract’s rigid rules, freelancers may be forced to find entirely different jobs, says Johnston.

“Fewer and fewer people are going to be doing that kind of work. They’ll turn to corporate work or government work, which pays better, because they can’t repurpose the material and sell it elsewhere.”

When asked to comment on the criticism of the contract, Scott Anderson, Canwest’s senior vice-president of con-tent, declined.

“You’d have to talk to our lawyers about what the specifics are around it,” Anderson says. He added the contract was just like any other.

“It was put in place to make sure everybody understands what we’re con-tracting for. It’s like any contract in a civil society.”

Keith Maskell, staff representative of the Canadian Media Guild, says the Can-west contract prevents freelancers from earning a living, unlike regular employ-ees who get job benefits and a liveable wage in return for their work.

“If you’re an employee of an organi-

zation like a newspaper, it’s true that the employer owns your work,” says Maskell. “In return for that you get a wage. There’s a certain amount of employment security—you may have employment benefits—and that’s the understanding. You own my work and in return, derive some benefit from that.

“The simplest way to put it is that Canwest appears to want to be able to treat freelancers’ work as if the freelanc-ers were employees, while at the same time denying freelancers any of the ben-efits or credits that flow from [being an] employee.”

Prominent Vancouver freelancer Daniel Wood says the contract is unethi-cal because it takes away the journalist’s rights over his or her own material.

“The writer is the creator of the material he writes. He subsequently, by writing things, earns the copyright. That’s what the law says,” Wood says. “But in the Canwest contract the writer relinquishes what is fundamentally his. No sensible person would agree to the stipulation of that contract.”

Wood believes it’s unlikely the con-tract will be changing anytime soon, so he advises freelancers to avoid Canwest altogether.

“Don’t write for Canwest. If you write for Canwest as a freelancer, you are dancing with the devil,” Wood says.

Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, hesitates to call the contract unethical.

“If they don’t take the contract then

someone else will, especially in this economy. I can’t say it’s unethical but it’s definitely mean-spirited and I’m disap-pointed. It’s the worst contract in Cana-da, basically,” Welch says.

“Companies have the right to do what they can to make money and save money. But I think there is a power and balance at work, and freelancers are an easy tar-get because they don’t have a union be-hind them and there is always someone out there who will do it cheaper.”

Shannon Lee Mannion wrote a col-umn for the Ottawa Citizen as a freelanc-er for 11 years. After refusing to sign Canwest’s revised freelance contract last year, she lost her column. Mannion says freelancing for small amounts of money under the contract is a matter of desper-ation that writers should resist.

“We all have to stick together and say, ‘No, we are professionals. We’re go-ing to work for an adequate and appro-priate amount of money,’” says Mannion. “But that’s not happening because people will just take whatever they can get.”

Margaret McMillan, a Winnipeg Free Press editorial administrator who handles freelance contracts, says the pa-per’s contract also seizes copyright from freelancers, but offers more advantages since the work will not be widely distrib-uted without additional monetary gain.

“We’re just buying it for this market. The freelancer benefits in that way be-cause we’re not spending a couple hun-dred dollars for one story and then send-ing it to 15 different papers,” McMillan says.

If and when the Free Press is con-tacted by another publication interested in the story, it’s up to the freelancer if he or she wants to sell the work again.

“Out of courtesy we always ask. We say it’s fine with us, but contact the free-lancer and if they choose to charge for it, they can do that,” McMillan says. “We don’t pay by the flat rate, we don’t pay by word or anything. Each editor’s material is based on their budget and what they’re buying.”

Writer suggests boycotting Canwest’s freelance contract

Freelance flatliningBy Brenna Temple

“If you write for Canwest as a freelancer, you are dancing with the devil.”

30 Langara Journalism Review 2009 Photo by Stefania Seccia


Late last year, the Global Morning News welcomed a special guest to its show, Simma Holt, 87, who

was there to promote her new book, Memoirs of a Loose Cannon. Holt sat at the anchor desk with the two hosts, mischievously grinning from ear to ear, blue eyes sparkling as she told amusing stories from her book.

Toward the end of the segment, one of the hosts introduced me-teorologist Mark Madryga who was meant to con-tinue the show with his weather forecast. However, Holt took the op-portunity to scold Madryga for not returning his fan mail, a lecture that stemmed from a letter Holt had sent him 14 years ear-lier that went unan-swered. Holt never forgot about it.

While berating a weatherman on live television about mail from years ago may seem like a bold and bizarre move for some, for Holt it was something that came naturally.

“I just had to get it out of my sys-tem,” she says with a laugh. This loose cannon—a term she adores—has been unapologetically speaking her mind for decades. But while she may not hesitate to share her opinion with others, Holt is equally as kind-hearted and understand-ing as she is an offbeat loudmouth.

Holt is now reliving it all, touring the country to promote the book that chronicles her life as a reporter, a Mem-ber of Parliament and a member of the National Parole Board. It also provides an intimate look at the struggles of sex-ism and insecurity Holt faced through-out her career, as well as her marriage to Leon Holt, the love of her life. The book took more than 25 years to com-

plete, and spans eight decades of her exuberant life.

Holt caught the newspaper bug at an early age, growing up as one of eight children in the Milner family in Vegre-ville, Alberta. She can recall being 11 years old and peering through a window of the Vegreville Observer, excitedly w a t c h - ing the publisher set

the metal type for each weekly edi-tion.

At 19, she left the comforts of her hometown for Win-nipeg to pursue an Arts degree at the Univer-sity of Manitoba.

She de-scribes the experience as being the most frightening in all her life, super-seding her time spent in peniten-tiaries interviewing convicted killers, death threats she received from Sons of Freedom Doukabours and inter-viewing gang members on the streets of New York.

But her fear of leaving home soon faded and it wasn’t long before Holt worked her way up to the rank of man-aging editor at the university’s student newspaper, the Manitoban, also filling in as university stringer for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Holt graduated in 1944, and with a passion for journalism that blossomed during her time in Winnipeg, she im-mediately set out to start her life in the newspaper business at the Canadian Press in Calgary.

Her role in the two-person office was that of “editorial operator.” She was in charge of the ticker tape, a machine made up of an arrangement of 26 holes, each one representing a letter of the al-phabet.

CP bureaus across the country used the machine to pass along news from East to West, ending each transmission with the sender’s initials.

To say Holt was thrown into the deep end at CP would be an understate-ment; with little instruction from her

chief operator she was assigned to the tickertape on her first day, June 6, 1944—D-Day.

Though it was one of the biggest news days of the Second World War and Holt struggled with the tickertape to transmit even her ini-tials, she survived her first day at CP.

But as the weeks passed, things didn’t improve much for the aspiring reporter. Her only stories for CP were rewrites from the two major Calgary papers, and they were rarely longer than a few paragraphs.

Discouraged by the menial work, Holt began to question her dream of being a big city reporter. A friend from Vancouver encouraged her to write a letter to Himie Koshevoy, city editor of The Vancouver Sun, and although she thought it was a long shot, she sent it anyway.

To Holt’s surprise, Koshevoy re-sponded to her letter with a job offer, and her first day at The Vancouver Sun was Nov. 1, 1944. Her first duty

Forever feistyBy Melissa Smalley

Journalist Simma Holt reflects on a life of uncompromising unruliness


as “number three” on the city desk was to check in with the police, ambulance and firefighters and pass along potential news stories to Koshevoy. She was also in charge of the war’s casualty list pro-vided by the National Defence Depart-ment each day, and would follow up with biographies and human interest stories of those killed, wounded or missing.

Holt’s most important duty at the Sun, which she describes as “the fact of my life that gave me acceptance in a man’s world,” was to go out, escorted by a reporter or copy boy, and pick up her liquor ration book to be brought and dis-tributed to the men in the office. She re-calls it was the only assignment outside of the newsroom she had in her first year at the Sun, but was wasn’t discouraged. “It didn’t matter to me. I didn’t care what they thought,” she says. “I was careful be-cause I knew they resented the fact that I was in that office in the first place.”

Despite being more or less tied to her desk in the Sun’s office, it wasn’t long before Holt began to do what she did best—develop a long list of close con-tacts throughout the city. Initially, she was reprimanded by her superiors for being too “chatty” on the phone when speaking with sources from the police or fire department. But the scrutiny began to subside as her ability to get the stories no one else could blossomed. In her first official out-of-office story—covering a fire in Chinatown—Holt scooped the city’s top reporters simply by sticking around the scene long after the others had left. She ended up with an exclusive interview and photo-graphs of a man who had narrowly escaped the fire.

As Holt’s career as a journalist began to flourish, so did her personal life. She met Leon Holt in the sum-mer of 1947 and was immediately attracted to his caring, patient nature. Leon’s calm, quiet and thoughtful personality comple-mented Holt’s outspoken and lively character and the two were married on May 29, 1949. Leon worked as a Sun photographer for a brief period in the ‘50s and when a col-league asked him why he had stayed with

Simma for so long and he replied, “I stick around to see what will happen next.”

Holt soon became one of the Sun’s top reporters, covering a variety of beats and training newcomers to the newsroom in the ways of big-city reporting. One such reporter was Fred Cawsey, who joined the Sun as a summer intern in the late 1960s and recalls Holt’s tenacity above all else. “She was a great re-porter,” Cawsey says. “She would hang out until she got stuff that nobody else got. She would out-wait people, and she would out-smart people.”

Cawsey also bore witness to the sex-ism Holt faced as a woman reporter in a male-dominated industry. Jokes were of-ten shouted across the Sun’s newsroom about Holt needing to be “serviced” by a certain black football player. In another instance, male staffers started an office pool to see who could sleep with her first. But the only attacks that seemed to shake her confidence, and still do to this day, were the attacks on her writing skills. She experienced what she called “vindictive editing” on the part of copy editors who would often make it a point to hack her copy to pieces. One editor,

who Holt recalls displayed “overt re-sentment of women in the newsroom,” would praise her ability to find the story and then tell her, “If only you could write.”

Looking back, Cawsey finds it hard to under-stand her lack of confidence in her ability to write, especially after decades of suc-cess. “As talent-ed as she is as a reporter, as engaging she is as a human being, she’s always been

filled with self-doubt,” Cawsey says. “I’ve always sort of wondered if that’s what drives her, that insecurity.”

During her 30-year career as a Sun reporter, Holt also managed to find time

to freelance for magazines such as Ma-rie Claire and Chatelaine. She also wrote three books; Terror in the Name of God (1964), Sex and the Teen-age Revolution (1967), and The Devil’s Butler (1971). She would later write The Other Mrs. Diefen-baker, a biography of Edna May Brower, former prime minister Diefenbaker’s

first wife. Never one to sit

on the sidelines, Holt decided to run in the 1974 federal election as a Liberal, some-thing she refers to as a “change of ven-ue.” During Pierre Trudeau’s first term as prime minister in the ’60s, Holt was

never shy about expressing her astonish-ment and disapproval of the “Trudeau-mania” that had swept the country. While filling in for Jack Webster on CK-NW’s popular morning radio show, Holt told listeners she couldn’t understand the appeal of this “short, wiry man with a face with bumpy skin that was hardly Hollywood gorgeous.” However, shortly after an election was called in 1974, Holt met Trudeau for a photo op at the Hotel Vancouver, and she was unable to resist his warmth and charm. With pressure from other local politicians and digni-taries, she agreed to run as the Liberal candidate for Vancouver-Kingsway, and on July 8, 1974 became the first Jewish woman elected to parliament in Canada.

Though now on a national stage in the House of Commons instead of a newsroom in Vancouver, Holt contin-ued to follow her convictions, never shy about reminding her Liberal colleagues that her priorities as an MP were first to her constituents, then to her country and finally to the party. She was not afraid to vote against her party when she felt it was necessary, and once in the House of Commons even made a point of cor-recting a member of the opposition when he referred to her as “honorable lady” by reminding him she was an “honor-able member.” She developed a close friendship with Trudeau, which was perhaps her downfall in the 1979 elec-tion. Her NDP rival, Ian Waddell made a point of highlighting her friendship with Trudeau during a time when the West had soured on the prime minister.

Holt, along with many other Lib-erals, was defeated that year, and with another experience under her belt she returned to Vancouver.she had a hard time finding work in the

“Journalism is the most important profession, and I hope that it survives”


Vancouver media after her stint as an MP. CKNW wasn’t willing to hire her back despite the good ratings that fol-lowed her previous appearances. She spent the next few years writing, and in 1981 Holt was appointed a member of the National Parole Board. She only stayed on for one term because, she says, “the chairman knew I wouldn’t take any of his bureaucracy.”

After Leon died of a heart attack in 1985, Holt took a very different foray into politics, this time landing a research and writing position with the presidential campaign of George Bush Sr.

Although she did not fully agree with the politics of the Republican candi-date, Holt’s journalistic instincts couldn’t resist the insider’s look at the mechanics behind a presidential campaign. Howev-er, as the election neared and the extreme Christian and anti-feminist elements took the forefront in the campaign, Holt knew it was time to get out.

“Everything in which I was now in-volved was the antithesis of what I be-lieve in,” she writes in her memoir. Holt says the unfiltered access to behind-the-scenes election campaigning was invalu-able, especially for a reporter. “I don’t know whether I helped them or not, all I know is I saw a lot. It was like seeing into the volcano; you’re never the same after.”

Today Holt is as feisty and outspo-ken as ever, but she still exudes genuine kindness and empathy for others. She still regrets an incident that occurred de-cades ago.

“When I was on [Jack] Webster’s show, a man came on and he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about today, but I’d like to talk to you.’ And I said, ‘Well, you’re not listening so why should I talk to you?’ and I hung up. And to this day I’d like to say I’m so sorry, because that man needed someone to talk to.”

Journalism remains Holt’s true pas-sion, but she’s not optimistic about its future in a time of media conglomeration and massive layoffs.

“Journalism is the most important profession, and I hope that it survives. These egomaniacs who are running newspapers should remember that newspapers are the first things that are destroyed by tyrants. Nowadays, every-thing’s fast and everything’s small, and you can’t be fast if you’re going to tell the real story and get all the information.”

And after ranting about the state of newspapers and those who run them, she adds with a grin,“At my age, I’m enjoying being a bitch—certifiable.”


A quick comment

By Kristen Douglas

With online news gaining pop-ularity in the last 10 years, media outlets are finding

people coming to their sites in record numbers — not just to get the news but to let the world know what they think.

Most news sites offer comment boards allowing everyone to discuss the latest event or issue and offer a point-of-view. Posters can sound off about politi-cians, the police or a poorly performing sports team. They can also bash each other. Hurling insults and name-calling are common place. On some comment boards it seems anything goes. Or does it?

Not so say those who oversee media sites. Most pre-screen posted comments to ensure they adhere to a strict set of guidelines.

At the CBC, comments are moder-ated 24 hours a day by an outside com-pany called ICUC Moderation Services, because of the volume of comments the CBC’s website receives.

Tim Richards, senior news editor at the CBC in Vancouver, says the number of posts per day is growing, depending on the story. “It’s not uncommon to have 100 comments on one story. We have had 3,000 posts on stories before.”

When opposition parties threatened to form a coalition to overthrow the Con-servative government last November, online stories covering the issue drew about 1,000 publishable comments each day.

Those that exhibit hate or slander or don’t follow the CBC’s guidelines are supposed to be deleted. Those guidelines also state that anyone who posts to the website gives the CBC permission to use the material, for free, on any of the CBC’s platforms and agrees to waive all moral rights in any submission.

Sometimes material that readers post even turns into a news lead.

“For example we’ll find someone who will say ‘oh, my brother took a flight on that plane’ and we’ll follow that up,” Richards says.

In the event something offensive or libelous does get through, there’s no set

rules for the media outlet to be held ac-countable.

But a precedent-setting decision may be on the way. In early spring, Manitoba First Nations leaders were outraged by comments posted on the CBC Manitoba’s website that they perceived to be hate-ful and racist. Swan Shannacappo and Chief Russell Beaulieu, members of the Sandy Bay First Nation group, urged the Manitoba government to investigate the CBC for violating Canada’s hate laws. If charges are laid and the case goes before the courts it is possible any media outlet caught publishing slanderous comments could be held legally responsible.

“It’s very new terrain—a bit of an un-known. It still needs to be tested in the courts,” Richards says.

Erik Rolfsen, online news editor at The Province, agrees that there’s no clear answer. “There’s no case law as to whether the paper would be held legally responsible.”

We don’t know. If something gets by the editors people will call or e-mail, and it’s easy to take stuff down.”

Rolfsen says The Province’s website receives an average of 250 comments a day but of those one in 10 are removed.

“Anything that is slanderous or is just name-calling or off topic is deleted,” Rolfsen says. So is spam.

But, he says, “there is some stuff published that’s just ridiculous” because there is more leniency in what can be said online as opposed to what can be printed in the newspaper. Which is partly why online comment boards are much more appealing to readers than writing a let-ter to the editor.

“There’s immediacy [online] and if

you post online you can argue back-and-forth. There’s a standard for letters to the editor; they’re much more eloquent,” Rolfsen says. Letters to the editor are also edited extensively.

The Vancouver Sun’s policy is simi-lar to that of The Province. Postings are not edited for grammar and spelling but profanities and anything deemed libel-ous is removed.

“The rules for the Internet are still being established and we’ve been in dis-cussions with our legal advisors,” says Paul Bucci, the Sun’s deputy managing editor responsible for multimedia.

Up for discussion is whether or not pre-screening is the right route to take.

Unlike most media outlets, Black Press does not pre-screen comments on its news websites.

Instead, comments go through a word filter containing about 6,000 taboo words.

“Our legal advice is that liability is heightened if you moderate. It’s saying if you’ve seen them, then you’ve made the determination that they’re okay,” says Rob DeMone, Black Press’ online media editor.

Black Press also follows a set of rules regarding libel.

“Basically I tell the editors to tell people that you want to be able to have the discussion with your mother,” De-Mone says.

So far, he says Black Press online has not had a libelous comment.

People also post complaints about stories or specific reporters. Richards says when the CBC makes a mistake peo-ple will comment on it.

At The Province, Rolfsen notes post-ers often complain about the writer of a particular story. “People will take issue with our journalism or our writers and we will freely publish it.”

For now, most media outlets want to remain as freewheeling as possible, let posters have their say and not discour-age them from engaging with their sites. The case in Manitoba may provide some more concrete answers on how far those comments can go.

Voicing opinions online has never been easier but how do news sites keep out the riff-raff?

“It’s very new terrain—a bit of an unknown. It still needs to be tested in the courts”


A stranger in Sri LankaRecent journalism graduate shares her first experience reporting overseas

The phone rang. It was a sunny April Saturday and the Canadian International Development Agen-

cy was offering me the opportunity of a lifetime. I had won the 2008 CIDA-Lang-ara journalism development scholarship for foreign reporting and would soon be heading off to Sri Lanka, a small island nation off the coast of India best known for its legendary teas, pristine beaches and epic 25-year civil war.

I would be reporting on a project run by the World University Service of Cana-da [WUSC], a non-governmental organi-zation that was training women in male-dominated trades, occupations such as plumbing, carpentry and mechanics.

Working within Sri Lanka’s tradi-tional patriarchal society, WUSC had managed to average around 30 per cent

female enrollment in their trade pro-grams—a number that far outstrips simi-lar apprenticeship programs in Canada.

But Sri Lankan tradeswomen had their work cut out for them. Many were now the breadwinners of their families, with much of the male labour force di-verted to aid the war effort. Some families were still reeling from the 2004 tsunami, while others struggled to deal with pov-erty brought on by rampant inflation.

I was headed there to collect their stories for a radio documentary I would produce for The Current on CBC Radio One in Vancouver.

Thrilled by my impending adven-ture, I immediately set to work planning and researching.

I imagined myself a hard-nosed for-eign reporter, deftly flirting with danger

while crafting beautiful radio features. As the date neared, however, my antici-pation gave way to abject terror. I was just months out of school and not entire-ly sure I had the chops for what seemed like a mammoth task.

Sri Lanka is a country where jour-nalists are not only unwelcome, but fre-quently kidnapped or killed. And you don’t have to be a journalist to find your-self in harm’s way. In Sri Lanka’s current political climate it’s all too easy to wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The war between the Liberation Ti-gers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan government officially started in 1983. But tension between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority had built for centuries, stoked by a series of colo-nial rulers who played favourites with

By Jessica Barrett

Jessica Barrett based her radio documentary on Nelum, a Sri Lankan woman working in a motorcycle repair shop.


one or the other. The LTTE—considered a terrorist organization in Canada—has launched ground and air strikes in the North and East of the country in its cam-paign for an independent Tamil home-land. Meanwhile, their insurgent offen-sives have hit nearly every part of the country. The group is also responsible for inventing one of the grizzliest tactics in modern warfare: suicide bombing.

So far, the war is estimated to have claimed more than 70,000 lives. No one knows just how many more since the government refuses to allow indepen-dent journalists inside the conflict zone. Each side gives vastly different numbers of casualties.

The fighting had escalated through-out 2008 with the government vowing to quash the rebellion by military might alone. They also started cracking down on journalists, even inciting public ha-tred against them after reporters started inquiring about the well-being of hun-dreds of thousands of civilians caught between the warring factions.

One Sri Lankan journalist was hacked—repeat: hacked—to death a few weeks before my July visit.

It was one thing to apply to go. Now I actually had to do it. I proceeded with my checklist: gather recording equipment, make flight arrangements, purchase comprehensive life insurance. Gulp.

I landed in Bandaranaike Inter-national Airport—a sterile, utilitarian building with a barracks-like feel—after roughly 30 hours in transit via Hong Kong and Singapore. I was jet-lagged, disoriented and in unfamiliar territory. A small force of bored-looking young men brandishing AK-47s casually roamed the airport halls.

I started to get nervous in the secu-rity clearance line. Ahead of me a man calmly watched as his luggage was quite literally torn to pieces. If mine befell the same fate, the guard would discover sev-eral feet of cable, two microphones and myriad other recording paraphernalia and I’d have some explaining to do. I’d neglected to reveal the fact that I was a journalist and I doubted my cover story (that I was a “communications and re-search intern”) would sufficiently justify my gear. But when my turn came the guard blithely looked me up and down before waving me through with a shrug and a toothy grin.

There are different standards for westerners in Sri Lanka. That goes dou-ble for western women.

I didn’t know it yet, but my pres-ence—a young white woman travelling

alone and claiming to be “on business”— was anomalous to much of the country. I had prepared for the challenges of re-porting from a conflict zone, but it hadn’t occurred to me that my gender would become a determining factor in where I went, what I did and how I was treated.

Outside of the few large urban cen-tres, Sri Lanka is a nation of villages where women working outside the home are rare. If they do, most are con-fined to domestic or factory work. After dark, women all but disappear from the streets, leaving the shops, restaurants—even night club dance floors—the exclu-sive domain of men.

While in the company of WUSC staff I was given honourary male status, which is to say I was treated as an authority figure. Rolling up to project sites in the marked NGO 4x4 with a throng of mostly male WUSC staff, the students seemed spooked. It was as if they thought I held the purse strings funding their humble training centres, which I would yank away at the first unfavourable comment.

Without being able to disclose that I was a journalist, the local NGO staff didn’t quite know what to make of me, or my project.

Eager to show their “intern” as many project sites as possible, they handed me a packed itinerary to be executed at a break-neck pace. It took a solid week of diplomatic visits and constant needling to negotiate my way out of the scheduled ceremonial-style receptions.

When I finally gained permission to hit the road with a pared-down company of two (a driver and my translator, Asan-ga) I promptly hit another roadblock.

I had hoped that without the WUSC entourage I would be on even keel with my interview subjects, able to talk to them woman to woman. But there were still language and cultural barriers to break through.

Most of the women preferred to focus on the positive aspects of their difficult situations, a tendency I truly admired but got in the way of my story. I wanted to know how these burgeoning tradeswom-en were regarded in their traditional ru-ral communities—places where women wore saris and saffron-robed Buddhist monks led nightly temple chants.

Here I was, a stranger with a mi-crophone asking these young women to open up about their personal challenges, not only to me but to my male transla-tor as well. Getting past the polite veneer took significant prodding.

Then I found Nelum at work at a motorcycle repair shop. She wore baggy

jeans covered in grime and answered my questions with an honesty and can-dour I hadn’t found elsewhere. Here was someone willing to let me tell her story. I began to build my documentary around her.

With my time winding down and my main story under wraps, I seized the op-portunity to break off from the NGO and explore. I didn’t have to venture far to find other stories.

There were the fishermen who had lost their ancestral lands after the tsuna-mi when the government forbade them to rebuild within 100 metres of the coast-line. There was the school for the deaf whose students communicated with their hearing relatives for the very first time by text messaging. There were the Tamil women who plucked tea high in the hill country who were gaining independence with the help of Canadian funds.

I wandered around in search of inter-esting leads but found there were limits to what I could do on my own.

While perusing markets or writing notes over lunch, my daylight hours were punctuated with interruptions from im-promptu salesmen hawking guided tours or hotel packages.

However, nightfall brought about a shift in the market for human services and I soon realized that, lacking a male companion, it was I who was perceived to be for sale.

After one particularly frustrating ex-perience, a hotel manager explained that Sri Lanka’s growing sex trade, imported from Eastern Europe, was to blame for the misconception. There was another story to add to my queue of freelance ideas.

This irritating reality factored into the remainder of my travel plans. I start-ed booking hotels with restaurants ei-ther in house or nearby, knowing I faced a de facto curfew of 7 p.m. It’s not that I couldn’t go out after dark, but with fa-tigue setting in toward the end of my trip the extra vigilance required was an en-ergy expenditure I made selectively.

Still, I used the remainder of my time wisely, taking in every piece of information I could. By the time I lumbered on to the plane for the long haul home, I had reached my saturation point.

Exhausted, I plunked down in my seat, clutching the precious stories chronicled in my tattered notebooks, their pages puckered and ink smeared from humidity. I tried to jot down some last-minute reflections but fell asleep before plane left the ground.


Internet media is growing and newsrooms are scrambling to keep up

The Internet is revolutionizing the news industry faster than any other invention in nearly two cen-

turies. Every advance since the invention of the telegraph in 1837 has launched journalism into uncharted territory. Ra-dio was supposed to trump the newspa-per, and television was supposed to get rid of them both. This never happened—every new medium has coexisted hap-pily with the previous ones. Until now.

News websites have burst on to the journalism scene like a drunken relative at a family dinner; surprising, head turning, and as off-putting to established media as they are welcomed by the newer ones.

Since the Internet’s arrival, some sites have posted ceaseless inane com-mentaries. Others are finally sobering up and being taken seriously by readers, academics and news corporations. Inter-net news sites are breaking stories faster than their print counterparts, and with greater depth than either TV or radio.

News websites are here to stay, but they have a few major hurdles to jump before web-based journalism becomes sustainable. The first is funding. Few—if any—news websites are posting a profit. The reason lies squarely in the engine-room of profit-making, the advertising.

Advertising in print, TV and radio in Canada is a multi-billion dollar in-dustry, but Internet ads aren’t ready to fuel major websites, which is a problem that will need to be swiftly addressed.

While both print and broadcast media are putting more weight on Internet news, the majority of jour-nalists file for print, radio or TV.

The Internet is still often treated as more of an after-thought, a place to throw articles or raw interviews that are destined for newsprint. It’s not known when the balance will switch, but some say it may happen soon.

Canadian newspapers are in trou-ble. Canwest, which owns 12 ma-jor newspapers across Canada

and most of the local papers in every major city, is facing serious financial difficulty. Since November 2007, it has laid off about 760 of its 2,171 employees across the country. And that was be-fore Canwest stocks started plummet-ing. At the beginning of 2008, its stocks sold for $7.29 per share. Now, the stocks are hovering around 30 cents per share. Newsprint is in such short de-mand that paper giant Catalyst has

permanently shut down one ma-chine in a Creston, B.C. paper mill.

“The slowdown in newspaper adver-tising along with restructuring by pub-lishers in key paper markets is unprec-edented, and conditions are expected to remain very challenging in the foresee-able future,” Catalyst president Rich-ard Garneau declared earlier this year.

But while ad rates are falling in print, radio and TV, advertising on news websites is steadily growing. In the U.S., Internet ad revenue rose 11 per cent in 2007 to nearly $5.9 billion by the end of the third quarter of 2008, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and ac-counting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Vancouver-based news website The Tyee is leading the way into exclu-sively internet-based journalism. It was the first for-profit news site in North America, according to The Tyee’s ad-vertising director Allison Bauman. It’s financed by what Bauman calls “angel investors,” people, businesses or unions that financially support the site, but keep their hands off the site’s content

“Many of us are sort of fumbling towards a workable solution, one that allows you to work and be profit-able at the same time,” says Bauman.

By Jeremy Stothers

News dot comnew business model


“I don’t really know of any one orga-nization either in Canada or in the States that’s found the golden key, the way to do it that ensures profit-ability, viability and sustainability.”

Since Bauman started at The Tyee in 2007, advertising revenue has risen from “very minimal,” to covering almost 10 per cent of the site’s costs. The end goal, she says, is to cover about 30 per cent of the site’s budget. Angel investors will contin-ue to provide the bulk of the site’s operat-ing costs. She doesn’t see that figure ever passing the one-third mark. “I don’t know if that’s possible on the Internet,” she says.

Bauman says The Tyee won’t have any invasive ads, pop-up windows or an-noying banners, even if they may bring in more revenue. She says The Tyee prefers a low-key ad presence. “You have a limited number of ads that you can put on a page before it started get-ting too ad-heavy, and it looks like junk.”

But from an advertising perspec-tive, the ad-heavy pages don’t look like junk; they indicate a bigger cash flow.

Thomas Stringham, a Vancouver advertising executive who started Hot Tamale Advertising a little more than 10 years ago, says his company has fo-cused on the Internet since its inception. And even after a decade, he says the web is still a very under-used medium.

“There’s a lot more opportunity. It’s a place that’s somewhat uncharted in terms of territory. It’s pretty exciting, I think.”

Stringham, who calls Internet ads non-traditional, says, “The big-gest shift has been away from creat-

ing an ad for a mass market to trying to tailor things to a specific consumer.”

The companies that have used Hot Tamale spend less than 10 per cent of their advertising budget on the web, while the other 90 per cent goes to traditional forms. This ratio was echoed by Bauman, as well as the U.K.-based ad company ZenithOptimedia.

Advertising rates are usually de-cided through a bidding contest. When more of a company’s ad-

vertising budget is directed towards the Internet, the rates will go up because firms will outbid each other for prime banners. But what will it take to do that? Stringham says he doesn’t know.

The low percentage of Inter-net spending may be because Inter-net ads are still comparatively cheap.

According to the Canadian Advertis-ing Research Foundation, a 6cm by 6cm square in a Canadian newspaper such as The Vancouver Sun costs about $1,300 for six issues, while 30 seconds of prime-time television for five days in a row on a major channel costs around $200,000.

Radio lags behind at about $100 per 20-second time slot, while an outdoor billboard will cost up to half-a-million dollars for four months in a prime neigh-borhood, like Vancouver’s West End.

An ad on the web costs about 60 cents per click on average, or roughly $1,400 for about a month of “invasive advertising,” a term that refers to ads that move about the screen or make noise to attract the reader’s attention.

According to a report by the Small Business Development Cern-er, advertisers in North America see many downsides with Internet ads.

The first is a small number of view-ers per ad; each ad is only viewed by people accessing that specific web-page, and viewers can click away at any time. In contrast, a full-page ad on the back cover of a newspaper is seen by everyone who picks up that paper—while the web has nothing like that.

Also, the narrow demographics of people who see the ads and the fact that the audience controls the expo-sure are downsides to Internet ads. The biggest drawback is that Inter-net ads are the only form of adver-tising that is seen as being “rela-

“The biggest shift has been away from creating an ad for a mass market to trying to tailor things to a specific consumer.”

tively low-impact” by the SBDC. Space-wise, websites have very

little room for ads. Most news sites have one banner across the top of the page and a couple of skyscrap-er ads down the right-hand side.

It is impossible for news web-sites to duplicate a full-page ad in the front section of a newspaper, or 30 seconds of the audience’s time that can be sold at will on a TV station.

While The Vancouver Sun’s front section of the newspaper is more than 53 per cent advertising, the news site appears to be about 10 per cent.

But Elliott Pap, a sports reporter for The Vancouver Sun who has been posting to the Internet for four years, says that in spite of it’s flaws, news websites can be a powerful tool. And they are here to stay.

“I think the Internet’s great,” he says. “We’re going head-to-head with radio and TV … before, radio would kill us. Now we’re getting the stories out there. But there’s still a role for newspapers, some people still love them, and I’m one of them.”

The key to ensuring profitabil-ity has not been found, but it seems that most companies are on the right path, or at least they’re surfing the right wave—one that’s changing quickly, and getting bigger every day.

An obvious question still hangs in the air: How will web journalism sus-tain itself if nobody has figured out how to make money from doing it?

Nobody has yet come forward with the answer, but when somebody does, he or she will probably find fame quickly, because the industry is ready for that golden key.

“We’re going head-to-head with radio and TV … before, radio would kill us. Now we’re getting the stories out there.”

Creative & Applied Arts

Health & Human Services

Liberal Arts & Languages

Management & Business

Science & Technology

Social & Cultural Studies

Langara College

University, Career, and Continuing EducationVisit www.langara.bc.ca for a list of upcoming information sessions.

Creative & Applied Arts

Health & Human Services

Liberal Arts & Languages

Management & Business

Science & Technology

Social & Cultural Studies

Langara College

University, Career, and Continuing EducationVisit www.langara.bc.ca for a list of upcoming information sessions.

LJR 2009

Documents

Transcript of LJR 2009