MEDIAT H E C A N A D I A N A S S O C I AT I O N O F J O U R N A L I S T S • S P R I N G 2 0 1 3 • V O L U M E 1 5 , N U M B E R T H R E E

EDIOTORIAL BOARD

LEGAL ADVISOR

ADVERTISING SALES

ART DIRECTION and DESIGN

CONTRIBUTORS

2 MEDIA

David McKie

Chris CobbCatherine Ford

Michelle MacAfeeLindsay Crysler

John GushueRob Cribb

Rob Washburn

Peter Jacobsen, BersenasJacobsen Chouest Thomson

Blackburn LL P

David McKie

David McKie, Don Gibb, Hugo Rodrigues, Anja Karadeglija, Kelly Toughill, Scott White, Stephen J.A. Ward, Simon Doyle, Lauren Rosenblum, Susan Clairmont, Fred Vallance-Jones, Stuart A. Thompson, John C. Osborne, Chad Skelton, Glen McGregor, Karen Li, Jim Bronskill, Lee Pitts

MEDIAA PUBLICATION OF

THE CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF JOURNALISTS

THE FUTURE OF

COVER PHOTO: ENCOURAGING DISSENT: Conservative MP Mark Warawa speaks about Motion 408, the anti-discrimination motion against sex-selection, on Parliament Hill Wednesday December 5, 2012 in Ottawa. A recent Globe and Mail series broke down the number of times MPs voted against their parties. The results were surprising. Read the behind-the-scenes account on page 33THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

What will it look like?What content will sell?

Will quality matter?

JOURNALISMIN THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE

MEDIASPRING 2013 • VOLUME 15, NUMBER THREE

http://www.caj.ca/?p=391SPRING 2013 • VOLUME 15, NUMBER THREE

http://www.caj.ca/?p=391

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Table of contents5 The First Word: Uncertain times should prompt journalism schools and employers to think outside the box. By David McKie

7 Writer’s toolbox: Don Gibb dispenses some parting wisdom in his last column for Media magazine.

9 A Letter from the CAJ president: The CAJ marks its 35 anniversary with a history of ups and downs. Hugo Rodrigues looks back.

11 Feature: The Wild West that is the digital universe: With an increasing number of publications trying to make a buck online, there are few guarantees of success and even fewer role models to lead the way to profitability. By Anja Karadeglija

16 Behind the Numbers: Kelly Toughill introduces us to some recent assessments of journalism business models.

18 The business of journalism: What’s wrong with forging closer links between marketing and editorial content? Cana-dian Press editor-in-chief, Scott White, suggests that it’s worth having a conversation.

19 Net tips: People should not have been surprised by the last election in Alberta. Lucas Timmons explains why.

21 Ethics: The recent developments in journalism have prompted a new and radical discussion about ethics. By Stephen J.A. Ward

23 The future of news: The Sun News Network faces more uncertainty if the country’s broadcast regulator doesn’t cut it a break. By Simon Doyle

25 Photojournalism: A recent gathering of top investigative journalists was captured through the lens of a hard-working photojournalist. Lauren Rosenblum tells the stories behind the photographs she chose for Media magazine.

29 Publishing: The Hamilton Spectator’s Susan Clairmont explains how she used an ebook to breathe new life into a case that went cold more than 30 years ago.

31 Data journalism: There are many tools to help journalists analyze and display data, and for the most part, they’re free. By Fred Vallance-Jones

33 Data journalism: How often do MPs vote according to their conscience? In light of the recent controversy about the muzzling of Conservative MPs, questions surrounding voting are increasingly newsworthy. The Globe and Mail’s Stuart A. Thompson explains his research, and the surprising patterns it uncovered.

35 Data journalism: Journalism schools must do a better job of producing students with data-journalism skills for a job market that’s heating up. By John C. Osborne

37 Book Review: A new ebook makes it easy to learn web scraping. By Chad Skelton

39 Mapping: Glen McGregor shows us how he used mapping software to demonstrate how a federal law seemed to favor bodies of water in certain Conservative ridings.

41 Mapping: Learn how to create maps online in a matter of minutes. By Karen Li

43 The story behind the story: Canadian Press reporter, Jim Bronskill, sheds light on the letter that got the federal finance minister in trouble with the ethics commissioner.

45 The story behind the story: Lee Pitts of CBC Television Newfoundland recalls the story about a flagman that seemed too good to be true -- because it was.

Photo at the top of this page: While attendees at an investigative journalism symposium in Berkeley, California, were asking panel-ists questions, photographer Lauren Rosenblum thought it might be more interesting to get the audience reactions to some of the more interesting answers. This is one of eight photos Lauren chose for Media magazine. You can see more of them, along with her explana-tions, beginning on page 25

Don’t believe the polls: NDP Leader Brian Mason, left, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, Conservative leader Alison Redford and Liberal Leader Raj Sherman wait for the Alberta Election Leaders Debate to start in Edmonton on Thursday April 12, 2012. An Edmonton Journal story dispelled some myths about campaign contributions. Read Lucas Timmons’ explanation on page 19

PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson

FIRST WORD

SPRING 2013 6

Jobs and the digital universe

5 MEDIA

For more exclusive content, stories, interviews about journalism turn to Media by visiting

http://www.caj.ca/?cat=4You can also find issues that go back to the spring of 1998

The universe for journalists is unfold-ing in a way that is sending mixed

messages: news outlets are struggling to make money as an increasing number of people are migrating to the web for their information. That migration means lost jobs in traditional newsrooms and new ones in what are becoming digital content factories that tell stories with words, pic-tures, sound, video, maps and interactive graphics.

Unfortunately, the traditional jobs seem to be disappearing at a faster rate than new ones are being created. Still, navigating the path forward is difficult, in large part because news executives, journalists and investors are searching for ways to build audiences they can sell to advertisers, sub-scribers, sponsors of content, and donors.

I had an intriguing conversation with a representative from Google at a recent conference for investigative journalists in Berkeley, California. David Gehring suggested that there’s an emerging body of evidence he’s been studying that sug-gests that people are more interested in quality content that we think, and not just the trivial material that seems to dominate cyberspace.

If this is true, then digital newsrooms will be able to grow their audiences which they can deliver to advertisers. Of this, Gehring seems sure and is determined to study the evidence more closely, and then spread the word.

But that digital world that is the subject of so much study these days is a work in progress, and promises to be so for the foreseeable future. While the digital content at venerable outlets such as The

Wall Street Journal and The New York Times is attracting advertisers, such is not the case for others like Canada’s own iPolitics, which is still struggling. And bold experiments like OpenFile seem to be yesterday’s news.

Where this leaves us is anyone’s guess. Far from being pessimistic, some of the best thinkers merely suggest that unlike the world of traditional media, the digital universe offers few templates, leading to the suggestion that this new frontier is like the Wild West. It’s a question of learning what works and what doesn’t.

Amid all the uncertainty, there is good news: an expanding market for journalists who possess the ability to work with data. That is, journalists who can analyse data using tools like Excel, Google’s Fusion Tables, mapping software like Qgis and ArcGIS.

And there’s even more demand for the small-but-growing cadre of journalists who can take this knowledge many steps further by using technical skills to present that data as interactive graphics and maps.

In many instances, the two skills sets of analyzing and presenting are distinct, meaning that journalists can either know how to look for newsworthy patterns in data, or write programs to display those patterns.

“The Venn diagram of those two worlds does overlap,” Steve Doig told me when I caught up with him in France during his swing through Europe to preach the gospel of data journalism. “There are people who can do both of those things and they`re real wizards, says Doig, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who is

a professor of journalism, specializing in computer-assisted reporting, at Arizona State University.

He says that it is, indeed, a seller’s mar-ket. However, “organizations are realizing that they also need the analysis types of people like me. There’s no point in having a crack, interactive graphics team for your paper if you’re not producing content that requires that. If all you’re writing is one-source-interview-kinds-of-stories, then that doesn’t lend itself to interactive graphics. You need to have stories that have been generated out of some analysis of data that can form the basis of those kinds of applications. I think we go hand-in-hand.”

I couldn’t agree more. There are count-less examples of projects that have fallen flat due to weak content, as well as other projects that have impressed with their breathtaking research and storytelling prowess.

Doig says the demand for journalists with a breadth of data-journalism skills means that more journalism schools must re-structure their programs to adapt to this new job-market reality, something he and other educators concede is challenging.

“I’m not arguing that all students have to take an upper level, precision jour-nalism course, spreadsheets, database programs, mapping and things like that,” he says.

“Only some will want to go to that level. But every program needs to be of-fering that and ought to be at least finding some ways to insert some of it parts of the curriculum that’s already there. There is considerable inertia built into the aca-

A future filled with uncertainty and promise should prompt journalism schools and employers to be more nimble and willing to experiment

By David McKie

demic process.”If that conversation I had with the

Google’s David Gehring is an indication that the digital market could indeed heat up, then we all better get cracking and improve our skills.

Journalism schools may want to think-ing about teaching a broader range of data-journalism skills from basic numeracy (be-ing afraid of numbers does the profession a disservice and makes us more suscep-tible to spin), to tools that crunch, analyze and display data. And if the task proves to be too difficult, then schools might want to forge strategic partnerships with facul-ties that specialize in business, computer programming, statistics and mapping.

As for journalists, we must find inven-tive ways to tell stories while learning, at the very least, some basic data-journalism skills, including knowledge of Excel, data-visualization tools like Google’s Fusion Tables and some simple coding. These tools are easy to learn.

The good news is that an increasing number of news outlets in the United States and Canada are beginning to do this kind of journalism. My employer, the

CBC, The Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, Global News, are wonderful examples of outlets using data to push the storytelling boundaries. As a matter of fact, this edition features journalists from those outlets explaining how they used data to get their stories.

Some journalism schools are also forg-ing ahead by shedding some of the inertia to which Steve Doig alluded.

But these schools and news organiza-tions are in a minority, a growing one, but a minority nonetheless. Historically, jour-nalism has always been slow to adapt to change. But change must happen in order to ensure survival.

And change cannot happen without a kind of experimentation that may call for closer cooperation with the folks in mar-keting, or new ways of selling thematic content.

We also explore all those options in this edition, and our columnists will weigh in with some of their thoughts.

Finally, I’d like to end on a special note. This edition will feature Don Gibb’s last writing column. Don’s elegant prose

has graced many of our editions over the years. He has used wisdom and gentle hu-mour give us cumulative and unforgettable list of do’s and don’t’s: use tighter leads, employ more verbs, give the audience a ense of place, avoid the warm-body syn-drome by resisting the temptation to put people in your stories who have nothing interesting to say, and refrain from using many words to describe something when one will do.

Don’s wise words are always in my head when writing. I continue to pass along his wisdom and columns to my stu-dents, and have cited his examples in the textbooks I’ve co-authored. Though I tried to talk Don out of it, he has decided to “retire”, and make room for someone else who he believes might have some fresher things to say about storytelling.

On behalf of all the readers who have appreciated Don’s column, I want to say thank you. Your advice has helped us become better at what we do. After all, there’s little sense of possessing new data-journalism skills if we can’t use words to bring life to our stories.

Best of luck, Don. We’ll miss you!

This edition will feature Don Gibb’s last writing column.

Writer’s Toolbox

By Don Gibb

7 MEDIA SPRING 2013 8

A last list of do’s and don’t’s

Never. Assume. Anything. When you do, it affects your credibility and

that of your news organization. Rewrite often. Your first draft should not

be your final draft.Take notes to complement your digital

and video recordings. I realize there are circumstances where it is difficult or im-possible (scrums, for example), but I fear note-taking skills are being smothered by technology demands. Notes help reinforce the story, hone listening skills and prompt follow-up questions.

Prepare a brief outline before you begin to write. It doesn’t take long and it offers a road map for your thoughts. Organization is so important to clear writing.

Keep quotes short. Too many stories contain long-winded, boring and gram-matical incorrect quotes. Paraphrase more often, especially factual and routine details. Live by the rule that sources have to earn a quote.

Avoid editorializing or forcing read-ers to reach the same conclusion as you. Readers are smart enough to figure things out for themselves.

Ask lots of follow-up questions. These are usually where the details lie. Actually, these are where the story lies.

Ask challenging questions. Why? How do you know that?

Be a healthy skeptic. Remember Ernest Hemingway’s advice: Every reporter needs a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.

Never write a one-interview story. Al-ways provide balance.

Revisit your ledes before filing your sto-ries. Think shorter rather than longer. Too many ledes try to include more informa-tion than readers can digest in one gulp.

Get it right. Double-check/triple-check everything – names, streets, job titles, phone numbers, specific addresses. Such errors may seem small, but they are a big reason readers figure if you can’t get these

things right, what about the rest of the story?

Learn basic math skills – please. It’s not a badge of honour to tell people you suck at math. Numbers are part of so many stories. As a start, you need to know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide and work out a per cent. You need to question numbers the same way you question what sources say. If your numeracy skills are truly shaky, search out experts who can help you translate numbers.

Write down your observations and use them just as you do quotes and comments from sources. What you see, hear, smell, touch or taste can be important elements of any story.

Do a 360-degree turn on every assign-ment. Your story might be right behind you. Look up and look down for the same reason. Take in everything and everyone.

Appreciate a good editor. They can catch your mistakes, offer advice, and save

you from yourself. A good editor is to be treasured.

Learn to write tighter. Be your own best editor before turning in your story. Accept the challenge of putting your writing on a word diet.

Get out of the office. Go see people and things in their natural environment. It makes more stories come alive.

Avoid clichés. Avoid jargon.Use e-mail and other social media as

last resorts in “talking” to people. Aim for face-to-face or telephone interviews first.

Know why you do things. Why you’re doing a story. Why you’re asking certain questions. Why you need to talk to some-one. It helps you to avoid intimidation and bullying, especially from those who aren’t happy about seeing you or talking to you.

Admit your mistakes. Show rather than tell. An easy thing to

say, but a much harder concept to achieve. Showing takes readers and viewers along on your journey.

Take readers and viewers to the scene. Let them see what you are seeing.

Tell yourself no story is routine. The moment you consider a story routine, you will write it in a routine way. Be open to the challenge of taking a little story to great lengths.

Never assume you won’t be able to get the story.

Respect deadlines. Plan accordingly based on the time you need for research, interviews and writing.

Don’t make promises to sources that you can’t keep.

Be careful with off the record. Don’t grant it lightly. Your job is to get informa-tion on the record.

Push to get names. Don’t allow people to hide behind anonymity unless there is a good reason you can explain to your readers. Don’t allow them to hide behind such general labels as “spokesperson,” “official,” “source”.

Find your voice. Once you do, your writing becomes distinctive and more confident.

Strive for a conversational approach to your reporting and writing.

Challenge yourself. Take risks in your writing. Even when it doesn’t work, fail-ure is a wonderful teacher.

Teach and coach others. It makes you a better reporter or editor.

Be willing to learn new tricks, even if you’ve been writing for 40 years. Fresh is good. Formulaic isn’t good.

Be passionate about reporting and writ-ing. Ignore the whiners.

Be honest. I can’t remember where I heard this, but I like it: You can’t lie your way to the truth.

Refresh your grammar skills annually. Re-read The Elements of Style by Wil-liam Strunk and E.B. White. Or your own favourite grammar book.

Listen. Listen well. It leads to better questions and helps avoid those moments back in the newsroom when you say, “I should have pressed for more detail on that topic.”

Read writers whose work you respect. Not to copy them, but to see what wonder-ful devises and tricks can comfortably fit into your own writing style.

Be wary of technology. Use it wisely. Turning on a camera, video recorder or voice recorder does not make a story. You need to be listening and thinking to pro-duce good questions and search for a good

story angle.Be curious. About everything. It often

leads to a better story with a different or unusual angle.

Short versus long sentences. A writing coach once said if you give readers a long sentence, treat them to a short one. Makes great sense. It also adds rhythm to your writing.

Keep it simple. It makes for richness in your writing.

Don’t readily take “no” for an answer when sources deny you an interview. Find out why they are saying “no”. See if you can negotiate, allay their fears, or explain why it is important they talk to you.

Context. Show readers and viewers the necessary background to understand a story, the current situation, and what might lie ahead.

Explain the complex. It’s tedious work, but it not only helps readers and viewers understand things, it helps you understand the story.

Beware of the Internet – not only what you say on social networks, but what you read as fact. Just beware, that’s all. Remember -- healthy skeptic.

Accuracy trumps speed. No contest.

Don Gibb was a reporter and city editor at The London Free Press from 1968-1988. He taught reporting at Ryerson University from 1988-2008. He has been a visiting writing coach at The Globe and Mail since the 1990s. Retired since 2008, he still conducts writing seminars and one-on-one coaching sessions at newspapers and community news organizations across Canada. He can be reached at dgibb@ryerson.ca

This is my final column for Media magazine. I can’t remember exactly when I began the Writer’s Toolbox col-umn, but I’m going to guess I’ve been writing it for at least 12 years.

Now it’s time for a younger writer to offer advice in the fast-changing world of the print, broadcast and online journalist – a world that involves blending basic writing and reporting skills with the newest technology that seems to change hourly.

Still, the basics of journalism are now and always will be crucial. While speed appears to be an unavoidable necessity of the never-ending news cycle, it must be tempered by values that respect the need for accuracy, fair-ness and balance.

So, on my way out, I’m offering snippets of advice – all in the name, I hope, of producing great reporting. Journalism is an incredible calling and one that should be conducted with passion and honesty. In spite of the

naysayers, it is an honourable craft – that of the scribe recording the daily history in an increasingly difficult, dangerous and divided world – locally as well as globally.

Do not take your responsibility lightly.

Tell yourself no story is routine. The moment you consider a story routine, you will write it in a routine way. Be open to the challenge of

taking a little story to great lengths.

9 MEDIA SPRING 2013 10

Depending on where we mark it, what we know of the beginnings

of the Canadian Association of Journalists stretches back to 1978-79.

Quoting from a summary prepared by former CAJ president Stephen Bindman 25 years ago, it was a chance encounter between investigative journalist and author Henry Aubin and CBC-TV journalist Jock Ferguson in early 1978. That encounter, aided later in the year by CBC Radio’s Nick Fillmore and Le Devoir’s Jean-Claude Leclerc, led to an organizational meeting of sorts in October 1978.

In the coming months the Centre for Investigative Journalism hosted its first conference in Montreal, attended by some 300 journalists.

In the late 1980s, enthusiastic discussion led to a decision of the membership at the 1990 conference in Winnipeg to change the name to the Canadian Association of Journalists. When supplementary letters patent were issued, we officially took on the full name of Canadian Association of Journalists / L’Association Canadienne des Journalistes— a name that has lasted since.

Over the years, I’ve heard stories of the CIJ days, when chapters of the organiza-tion existed from coast to coast to coast. They existed in provincial capitals and large metropolitan media markets to medium-sized cities like Kitchener, Ont. Those were heady days in media—a daily newspaper in each urban centre, over-the-air television broadcasters in an era where cable companies were still locally owned in many markets.

It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that in some newsrooms, television crews would still have been using film, editing with razor blades similar to the way their radio

colleagues would have done until well into the 1990s. It was a time when the print newsrooms whose composing rooms weren’t yet coated with leftover wax may still have been using a linotype or two. A time when, regardless of production method, the newspaper was likely printed in the same building as the people who wrote the articles and took the photos that appeared within.

The reality we live now as journalists is

so markedly different.It’s digital. Multi-platform. Con-

solidated. Converged. Changing. Smaller newsrooms, bigger footprints.

The Canadian Association of Journalists has lived each of these changes along with its members. Along the way, we’ve grown to a peak of almost 1,500 members in 2007-08, tied to the CAJ’s hosting of the Global Investigative Journalism Confer-ence in Toronto in 2007.

Then came a series of rude awaken-ings for our industry and our associa-tion. Through the period of 2007-10, we

counted over 2,000 announced job losses in media across Canada. No chain and no medium was left untouched as owners struggled to maintain their bottom lines and profitability in the face of drastic changes in revenues.

As it always has, the CAJ bore the impacts of that era along with journalists working in newsrooms across Canada. In 2009-10, our full-time executive direc-tor of the day and Ottawa-based office

moved to part-time hours based in a home office. Despite a fantastic line up, the 2009 conference in Vancouver failed to meet enrolment expectations and the CAJ lost money on the event.

As quickly as we could, we became a much nimbler organization, but at the cost of the service we had been providing to members and could no longer sustain. We dropped the smaller but popular National Writers’ Symposium, holding our last one on a tropical-storm whipped Moncton, N.B. Our 2010 conference in Montreal pulled in about 60 delegates, but still made

a small profit. As our long-time executive director left

the CAJ to pursue other projects in 2011, our membership had dropped to under 600. Renewal notices – by mail or as they are now issued by email – hadn’t been sent out in almost two years. Printing member-ship cards had been stopped due to time and costs.

However the ship started to turn around.

Looking forwardOur 2011 conference in Ottawa, or-

ganized by a group consisting of many journalists on a federal election campaign trail until a few weeks before the first day, drew more than 100 delegates.

The buzz of networking and enthusiasm over sessions and workshops returned to the corridors of the Sheraton Hotel Ot-tawa.

Later in 2011, we hired a part-time administrator based in Montreal to focus exclusively on membership renewal, retention and growth.

We started planning for a first—a joint conference with Newspapers Canada at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto in

late-April of 2012. Never before had we partnered with an established conference and added our own flavour—melding ses-sions of interests to all on the final day of a conference aimed primarily at the business and advertising side of print media.

On that Friday, it was exhilarating to watch almost 500 journalists and media staffers network and mingle.

For the first time in memory, on the night of our awards gala – the third con-secutive night of galas honouring the best in Canadian journalism – we had all but one of the recipients of CAJ Awards at the banquet in person to accept their award.

We’re doing it again this year, hold-ing our conference in conjunction with Newspapers Canada’s Ink&Beyond and the National Newspaper Awards in Ottawa May 3-5.

In late 2012, we kicked off new perks to offer CAJ members that offer discounts and group rates for a variety of products and services. We’re still working on add-ing to this list, so members feel they’re getting a fair return on the investment of a membership.

We’ve re-tooled our membership rates,

offering new fee categories for first-time members and retired journalists and slash-ing the price of a student membership by a third. Membership cards returned in January 2013.

We moved submission of entries for the 2012 CAJ Awards entirely online. It’s had its growing pains, but entries were up by a third over the previous year.

Happily, for the first time since I stepped into this role in May of 2011, our member-ship numbers are turning around. From a low of just over 400 in September 2012, our last quarterly count was the first time membership numbers have grown since 2008.

Through it all over 35 years, we’ve stayed true to our mission and goals. We’re still the largest national organiza-tion exclusively for journalists. We’re still advocating for the conditions needed to produce the highest-quality journalism. We’re still providing some of the best, cost-effective training for working journal-ists available anywhere in Canada.

Hugo Rodrigues is the CAJ’s president and a multimedia journalist at the Brant-ford Expositor.

A letter from the CAJ president

By Hugo Rodrigues

A 35th anniversary celebration

It has been a rich history full of highs and lows

The reality we live now as journalists is so markedly different.

It’s digital. Multi-platform. Consolidated. Converged. Changing. Smaller newsrooms,

bigger footprints.The Canadian Association of Journalists has lived each of these changes along with its

members.

SMILE FOR THE CAMERA: Scott White (closest to the left) and Bruce Cheadle (front right) are joined by the other members of The Canadian Press at the 2011 award banquet in Ottawa at the Sheraton Hotel. We have entered another awards season.

11 MEDIASPRING 2013 12

It was an email from a friend in White-horse that alerted Tracey Lindeman to the fact that the Montreal Mirror – the alt-weekly she’d been writing for since her Concordia University j-school days – had been shut down.

It was June 22, and the 28-year-old freelancer had been working at the Just for Laughs comedy festival when she got the startling news.

“So I went online, of course, I went on Twitter and Facebook, because that’s how people find out stuff,” Lindeman recalled.

“And I was surprised. At first I was a bit hurt that they hadn’t told the writers, but then I understood later that everyone had found out in the same horrible way, for the most part.”

The staff were already preparing for up-coming issues of the paper when Quebecor made the announcement, citing economic challenges brought about by the “growing popularity of digital media and commu-nications” for shuttering the last English-language weekly left in the city.

But if the future of journalism neces-sitates moving from print to online, the former Mirror staffers and freelancers who found themselves out of a job wasted no time in making the leap.

That same day, they started talking about creating an online outlet that would cover Montreal’s arts and culture scene; the new website would be both a continu-ation and an expansion of the now-defunct paper.

They knew they wouldn’t be the only ones working on a successor, so speed and silence were keys.

“We kept it really, really top secret. We just didn’t want anyone to know, because we didn’t want to be scooped,” Lindeman explained.

And July 16, three weeks after the Mir-ror closed, Cult MTL was launched with an editorial board comprised entirely of former Mirror journalists, who had used their own money to fund the project.

Another member of the digital clubCult MTL joined hundreds of other

online outlets vying for audiences and advertising dollars. Many are struggling to design a profitable business model.

Because online ads deliver fewer dol-lars than those in print, digital outlets are relying on other sources of revenue to stay afloat.

For instance, some are making their content subscriber-only and publishing print newspapers, while other outlets are opting for more creative sources of rev-enue such as organizing public events and soliciting donations.

And although some successful strategies are emerging, digital startups face an

unclear future. Still, print outlets are also turning to the Internet for revenue.

Behind the paywallPaywalls are taking over Canadian

newspapers, with Postmedia, Sun Media, the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star charging for access. However, not every-one is convinced paywalls will turn out to be the newspaper industry’s white knight.

Lucas Graves, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Com-munication at the University of Wiscon-sin-Madison says while paywalls could work for newspapers that offer a unique selling proposition, they won’t serve as a universal solution.

“In many cases, instituting a paywall has only helped to hasten a decline in readership and further erode advertising revenues,” he explains. “There’s a danger of getting into a vicious cycle where every effort to try to drive more revenue from your user base ends up shrinking that user base, making it even harder to be sustain-able.”

David Ryfe, an associate professor

and academic chair at the University of Nevada, Reno, who authored the book “Can Journalism Survive? An Inside Look at American Newsrooms,” says that the biggest newspapers, like The New York Times, are the ones who will benefit the most from paywalls.

“The numbers are murky, because they are difficult to get, but from what we can tell, the paywall seems to have at least stopped some of bleeding at a place like The New York Times,” says Ryfe, who spent five years studying newspaper news-rooms for his book.

He noted that for most general-interest newspapers, the problem is that there aren’t enough readers online to replace lost print revenue – and while paywalls may bring in a bit of income for smaller companies, “they’re not going to impact the trend lines.”

Going against the grainWhile newspapers turn to the Internet to

help them survive a steadily deteriorating financial situation, some online outlets, perhaps surprisingly, are doing the reverse.

After its mid-summer launch, Cult MTL faced the same problem forcing newspa-pers to build paywalls: online ads earn less revenue than printed ads.

And so, the outlet that came into being because its predecessor was a newspaper too unprofitable to survive, began publish-ing a print edition.

“Print is still unfortunately where any and all money is, for the most part,” Lindeman says. “Unless you’ve got consistently viral content or really famous people writing for you, sometimes it’s just really hard to get the numbers that you need to generate a lot of money off the advertising, because it’s all on a per-hit basis.”

Lindeman had initially planned for the outlet to be online-only, and still maintains that a strong web component is necessary for its future.

“But we also need the money to do it. When you sell a web ad for compara-tive pennies to a print ad, you know, that doesn’t make any sense,” she explained.

Still, even with the challenges of making money, journalism is evolving towards an increasingly digital existence. However, as a 2011 study at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, “The Story So Far,” discovered, there are many obstacles.

“Of the news organizations that we

interviewed, the great majority were not profitable,” explains co-author Lucas Graves.

He notes that small or large publications are those most likely to make it in the new digital landscape. Production costs at mid-size organizations are more likely to outweigh revenues.

“So the real giants like Huffington Post or Google News, they just aggregate so many eyeballs, such vast numbers of users, that they manage to turn all those digital dimes into a real revenue stream,” he says.

“At the smaller end of the spectrum, where outfits can keep costs really low and deal with local advertisers who are some-times willing to pay a slight premium… it actually becomes more possible to thrive.”

Making enough money to stay in business

Although online ad revenue is expected to increase (a 2012 Pew Centre report expects that between 2011 and 2015, digital ad revenue will grow 40 per cent in the U.S., becoming more important than revenue from other platforms by 2016) whether it will ever be enough to support journalism remains uncertain.

Kelly Toughill, director of the School of Journalism at Halifax’s University of King’s College, studies business models used by online outlets and has little hope that online news will ever be able to rely solely on advertising.

“It used to be that journalists assembled audiences and sold (them) to advertisers… the simple fact of assembling an audience is… of less and less value to advertisers,” she says.

“I think the days of relying solely on advertising are done.”

However, there publications are making it work by keeping their operation small-scale and expenses even smaller.

The Columbia report Lucas Graves co-authored examined Baristanet, a hyperlo-cal site in New Jersey, which made money from digital ads alone.

Through relying on freelancers, who earned about $50 a story, and three edi-tors, who also had other jobs on the side, the site brought in $20,000 a month in ad revenue while spending only $5,000 to $6,000 on editorial costs.

But how do you make digital advertis-ing profitable on a wider scale?

The answer to increasing online ad profits lies in the realization that online

is a different medium, which requires a different approach, says Alfred Hermida, who helped found BBCNews.com in 1997, and is now an associate professor at the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Advertising departments at news outlets have to innovate the way that companies like Google and Facebook have, Hermida argues.

“If you think about things that way, would you take a print ad or a display and put it on television for 30 seconds? No, of course not. And would the audience respond? No, they wouldn’t. But in a way, that’s what we’ve done with online,” he says.

Many sites had built their business models on the assumption that CPM rates (CPM is the acronym for Cost-Per-Thousand, meaning the cost to the advertiser for every thousand times the ad is displayed) would increase. But in the past year those rates began falling, forcing many sites to look for other sources of revenue, explains Taylor Owen, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism.

“What the online ad example taught everybody is that you can’t just depend on one revenue stream…so people are trying all sorts of things,” he said.

For a number of them, that has meant building a subscriber base.

It’s all about the nicheThat’s the strategy chosen by The Wire

Report, one of three online news services owned by Hill Times Publishing. While The Wire Report carries some ads, most of the publication’s income comes from subscriptions. Editor Simon Doyle says the site is making money.

Focusing on the telecom, broadcast-ing, wireless and media sectors, The Wire Report counts government departments, regulators, companies and public interest groups among its subscribers, employing Doyle and two full-time reporters.

“I think we succeeded because we es-tablished ourselves as the authority within a niche, and we provide something to our subscribers that they can’t get anywhere else,” says Doyle.

The Wire Report’s strategy of carving out a niche is an approach shared by other successful online outlets, which have found that a specialized focus gives them a competitive edge. As Kelly Toughill from

FEATURE

By Anja Karadeglija

Going digital in the “Wild West”

What this new frontier will look like is anyone’s guess

STARTING OVER: When Quebecor closed the Montreal Mirror, that city’s last English-lan-guage weekly, the former staff worked quickly to create an online equivalent. “We kept it really, really top secret,” recalls Tracey Linde-man, one of the creators of Cult MTL, the new digital publication. “We just didn’t want anyone to know, because we didn’t want to be scooped.”

13 MEDIA SPRING 2013 14

the University King’s College’s school of journalism notes: “online is all about niche.”

When people go online, where they spend their time is generally based on what their interests are, and this tendency means niche sites are attractive to adver-tisers.

“It’s far more effective for an advertiser to reach the people who are actually inter-ested in what they’re selling, than a broad site where maybe one-in-a-100 people are interested in what they’re selling,” she explains.

For instance, the U.S.-based Politico, she notes, has “been quite successful in charging very large amounts of money because lobbyists want to reach a very well-defined elite in Washington. “

However, though it may be a big name in online journalism and a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Politico boosts its income in the same way as the start-up Cult MTL does. The University of Nevada’s David Ryfe notes that most of Politico’s rev-enue comes from a free Washington, DC, newspaper.

“It makes money through advertise-ments in print,” he says.

But the example of Canada’s iPolitics, a site inspired by Politico when it launched in 2010, shows that even with a defined niche and a subscription-based model, turning a profit requires time and patience.

The idea for iPolitics was born when political reporter James Baxter returned to Canada after a year as Neiman fellow at Harvard. He was at dinner with friends in Ottawa when someone asked him where he’d like to work next.

“And it was the most awkward 45 sec-onds because I went - ‘I don’t think any-

one is going to be here in 10 years,’” he remembered. “And I said, ‘there’s nobody doing what Politico does.’”

His friend responded: “I guess you’ve got your answer.”

Baxter, the founding editor and publish-er, devised a business plan and provided the initial funding until he found an inves-tor – a family who provided $2 million, with more to come if he was able to prove the market.

The outlet has eight full-time report-ers, three full-time editors, and “about a half dozen regular contributors” paid and unpaid columnists, plus three employees working in marketing and a business staff of one.

It also has a runway of four to five years to start turning a profit and so the business model “hasn’t fully taken shape yet,” says Baxter.

Ideally, he would like to see 60 per cent of revenues come from subscribers, and 40 per cent from advertising. At the moment, iPolitics is still mostly relying on investor funding, while between 75 and 80 per cent of revenues come from ads.

The site is still losing money, but “it’s less than we had anticipated at this point.”

It’s been able to do well from advertis-ing because of its specific audience, he adds.

“We’ve developed a reputation within Ottawa that we’re read by deputy minis-ters, that we’re read by senior government staff. We’re talked about, and every so often, we’re out ahead of the curve. That has made it so that lobbyists and govern-ment relations-type advertising, corporate positioning - CEO’s of banks and large firms see the value in presenting not their product, but their corporate entity to Ot-

tawa,” he says. iPolitics might be inspired by Politico,

but it also has to deal with different market dynamics than its counterparts down south due to the presence of a large and well-funded competitor.

“As long as CBC is out there pump-ing out news for free, it’s kind of hard to compete against them. But we’re getting there,” Baxter says, noting that he’s had to account for this in the business model, and make a decision to focus on stories the CBC isn’t covering, or cover them differently.

Audiences and readers seek out outlets that are the best at covering the topics they want to know about, he says.

“So it used to be you bought the Globe and Mail or the Montreal Gazette and it gave you a little bit of sports, a little bit of business, a little bit of front page news and some fluffy entertainment,” Baxter explains.

“In the modern world, if you want busi-ness, you go to the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg, if you want Montreal busi-ness, there’ll be a niche publication that is really good at Montreal business…. So you go to what is best for your interests.”

Offering information about specific interests may not be enough on its own, however. Toughill from King’s College School of Journalism notes that online success rests on identifying and servicing a need.

“We have been protected from the eco-nomics of journalism for a very long time for very good reasons, but if journalists want to start controlling the journalism of the future, they have to think about what people need that they’re willing to offer,” she explains.

The case of OpenFileNot every online outlet that has popped

up in Canada in recent years has aimed at a small and specific niche. OpenFile cov-ered local news and operated in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Halifax, Calgary and Vancouver.

Last September, it abruptly stopped publishing after two and a half years in operation and is now still on hiatus; CEO Wilf Dinnick says the shut-down was related to “serious” accounting problems, which led to an audit and the freezing of its accounts.

As of mid-February, some freelancers were still waiting for payment, and the restructuring effort was on hold while the accounting issues were being resolved, but Dinnick said he planned to start working on the restructuring of the site in a few weeks.

While he wasn’t certain exactly what OpenFile would look like when it came back, he said the company had been successful in engaging audiences and audience participation, like suggest-ing story ideas, and planned to leverage that strength in its next iteration, which remains uncertain.

“We discovered that when somebody did suggest a story, when we engaged it on our platform, it actually did really well, and the vast majority of those stories were actually copied, matched, by mainstream media,” he says.

The plan is to find partners, like other media outlets or corporations, and produce content for them, which would make up the bulk of the company’s revenue under that business plan; the partners would pay OpenFile to produce stories or content at a cheaper price point than they could do themselves.

“Advertising was always 20 per cent, 15 per cent of our revenue – it was never going to be long-term revenue,” Dinnick says.

While in the past, OpenFile had editors and staff in different cities and cre-ated a lot of its own content, that will likely change when, and if, the site is re-launched. Dinnick says the original investor has been supportive.

“I’ll have to come back to them once this is all done and say ‘here’s where I think we should go, what do you think’?”

He explains: “I’m not going to predict what is going to happen next. We have some ideas of what we’re going to do, but

until this accounting stuff is done… the people who are involved are not going to commit to anything.”

Dinnick adds that while big media com-panies like Yahoo and The Globe and Mail may get enough hits to earn the money they need from advertising, that’s not the case for smaller outlets like OpenFile.

“That’s a model that works for them, but for everyone else, it’s very difficult and you’ve got to think of other interesting ways to do it,” he says.

And many other outlets are doing exactly that, as they realize that successful business models in these digital times may have to not only go beyond advertising, but come up with more creative ideas than print editions and subscriber revenue.

The possible way forwardFor instance, the general interest The

Tyee, based in B.C., obtains a portion of its revenue, up to 12 per cent, from partnerships and collaborations with different organizations. Social-justice-focused foundations supported a series on affordable housing. The Tyee also holds initiatives like its master classes, weekend workshops that offer “immersion training in specialized disciplines designed and taught by acclaimed industry experts.” The site also asks for monthly donations from readers.

Other sites are experimenting with subsidized or sponsored content, like the Atlantic’s recent and controversial Sci-entology advertorial.

Others are holding conferences and events, Taylor Owen research director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism says. The companies behind outlets like the Atlantic, Foreign Policy and The New Yorker “see their authors and their access to thought leaders as being one of their core attributes,” and are attempting to use the events sources of profit.

“The European,” an online magazine in Germany, focusing on commentary and analysis, obtains half of its income from organizing public events and social-media consulting (advertising and advertorials make up the other half). It’s one of the cases analyzed in a study at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, which looked at online-only news start-ups in Germany, France, and Italy. The study concluded that all nine outlets they analyzed “strug-gle to break even.”

“The journalistic start-ups most likely to thrive are those that deliver a distinct, quality product, operate with lean orga-nizations, have diverse revenue streams, and are oriented towards niche audiences poorly served by existing legacy media,” the authors found.

Given the challenges, perhaps it’s not surprising that some organizations are getting out of the profit game altogether. Owen, who is also the senior editor of the non-profit OpenCanada.org, says that the numbers of non-profit outlets are growing.

In Canada, Rabble.ca is a registered non-profit that operates on a borderline foundation model, and has been sustain-able for more than ten years, Toughill notes. It’s supported by other organiza-tions, like the Council of Canadians and a number of unions, and takes individual donations as well.

A notable non-profit success story is ProPublica, the American website focus-ing on investigative journalism, which has twice won the Pulitzer Prize. Its newsroom numbers 38 journalists, and though it runs ads, most of its income comes from phil-anthropic donations.

Others are hoping to follow its example, though some of the American news outlets that applied for non-profit status face waits of up to two years, while the IRS deals with an apparent backlog of applications, Poynter reported last year.

However, David Ryfe, the professor who spent five years studying newspaper newsrooms, argues that there is no real business model for online journalism at all.

“There are online-only outlets that are sustaining. In other words, they can keep themselves afloat, through some combi-nation of foundation money, advertising revenue, donations from readers, subscrip-tions – it’s a more heterogynous revenue stream,” he says.

“But they’re not able to grow very much. And they’re always in a state of, sort of, of impending crisis.”

He says there’s no model for making a profit through online journalism that can be copied across different organizations – unlike in decades past, when a newspaper in one part of the country could grow and prosper by copying what a newspaper in another part of the country did.

READY FOR TAKEOFF: iPolitics has a runway of four to five years to start turning a profit. The business model “hasn’t fully taken shape yet,” says James Baxter, the publication’s founding editor and publisher. PHOTO CREDIT: Anja Karadeglija

Continued on page 15

15 MEDIA SPRING 2013 16

Online, a company can’t “expect to be successful” by copying what another is doing. “Everyone is experimenting with different variations, and we’ll see if one of them ends up working… and if they do, everyone will copy what they’re doing,” Ryfe explains.

He says that online outlets can only grow so much – while you might be able to make a living as a blogger, you won’t be able to grow into a 75-person news-room. For instance, the Huffington Post “is profitable, but it’s not growing by leaps and bounds. In other words, if you look at the numbers, it’s not wildly successful and it can’t sustain an organization of any size.”

While it may be possible to survive, “whether you can thrive is an open ques-tion,” he adds. For online journalism, it’s still the Wild West out there, Owen says, but he argues that there’s such a wide range of publications – from personal blogs to start-ups to giants like The New York Times – that one business model definitely won’t fit all.

“So there’s not going to be one model that works for… the BCC and also works for a foundation in California funding

journalism,” he says. “There’s such a vast array of organizations in this space, producing such a vast array of types of content that by necessity there’s going to be hundreds of financial models… it’s a real period of creative destruction.”

Alfred Hermeida of UBC, though, main-tains there’s one very good reason to look at the future of online journalism with a great deal of hope – we’re still in the early days of a brand-new medium, and in a period of transition. CNN, which revolu-tionized TV news and created the 24-hour news channel, ran at a loss for its first 10 years.

“And that was TV, which was still a fairly familiar format at the time,” he points out. There was also a long history of development until we arrived at the modern newspaper, he adds.

“When we think about news start-ups, the problem that they face is not how to make money but how to last long enough until they get enough traction with their audiences, enough traction with their ad-vertising and businesses, and have time to develop different ways of making money so they’re still around when they can actu-ally be profitable,” he says.

And six months after its launch, Cult MTL is still around, both online and in

a monthly print edition. The outlet has selected an editor in chief, and has held events and helped present concerts; the editors are still working from home, but the site was set to start paying web con-tributors the same month, Tracey Linde-man said in January.

“Six months in, it feels like a lifetime ago and just like last week at the same time, that we started,” Lindeman ex-plained. “It’s a sharp learning curve, but I think we’ve been handling it reasonably well as a collective, so, we’re still sorting things out. We’re still working on a long-term plan.”

Anja Karadeglija is a Montreal-based freelance reporter. A graduate of Car-leton University’s Bachelor of Journalism program, she also works part-time for the Canadian Association of Journalists.

Related links:Newspapers Turning Ideas into Dollarshttp://www.journalism.org/

analysis_report/newspapers_turn-ing_ideas_dollars

Look, you’re right, okay? But you’re also wrong by Jay Rosen

http://pressthink.org/2013/02/look-youre-right-okay-but-youre-also-wrong/

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If you love the spine-tingling thrill of a good horror flick, read The Filter

Bubble.Author Eli Pariser suggests journal-

ism is about to be ravaged by the same algorithms that will radically polarize our economics, culture, education and politics.

The Filter Bubble is a key read for those curious about where journalism is headed. It is one of several new books, reports and studies that offer new ways to think about the evolution of our craft.

The news industry has been in full crisis for five years, and in serious decline for more than a decade. Many early attempts to explain the crisis didn’t make sense, or were quickly proven wrong. Many simply chronicled the destruction, but groped blindly for a framework to help us under-stand the forces at play. That’s what the new crop of reports offer. Here are some of the best:

1) Robert Picard was one of the first scholars to tease meaning out of the chaos of twenty-first century journalism. A media economist who currently heads the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journal-ism at Oxford University, his research is the foundation for much of the excellent recent work published elsewhere. One good summation of his research is in a 2010 essay published as a chapter -- “The Future of the News Industry” – in Media and Society, by James Curran. Picard identified five trends driving the chaos: abundance, fragmentation, portfolio devel-opment, the erosion of media firms and a power shift in communications.

“Journalism is not a form of media; it is not a distribution platform; it is not an industry; it is not a company; it is not a business model; it is not a job. Journalism is an activity, a body of practices by which information and knowledge is gathered,

processed and conveyed . . . journalism will adapt because its functions remain significant for society.” Read the full chapter here.

2) A group of New York scholars picked up on Picard’s point in Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present, pub-lished last fall. C.W. Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky argue that the journalism industry has been replaced by a journal-ism “ecosystem” made up of individuals, crowds and machines.

“Many producers of the kind of material we used to regard as news won’t be news organizations, in any familiar sense of the word,” predicts the report.

This is a comprehensive view of what is happening both to traditional journalism organizations and to the flow of informa-tion in society, coupled with very practical advice about how to survive the transfor-mation. Its analysis of workflow at new startups versus legacy media is particu-larly useful, as is its surprising discovery about how content management systems stifle change. The report is published by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and can be found here.

3) Clayton Christensen is a Harvard professor who developed a key theory about disruptive innovation. His theory explains how small start-up companies regularly destroy powerful established companies and industries. Basically, Christensen points out that companies fall into the trap of worrying about the things they make, instead of the service they pro-vide. He urges all companies to consider the “job-to-be-done” by their customers.

Last year the famous scholar teamed up with Canadian editor David Skok to write Breaking News, an examination of disrup-tion in the news industry.

The failing of this report is that it

focuses almost exclusively on the “job-to-be-done” by the audience. For most traditional media, advertisers pay the bills, not readers. This report gives little thought to where and how the advertising market is being disrupted and how advertisers fit in the news ecosystem. Breaking News is published by Nieman Reports and can be read here.

4) Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble sug-gests advertising will vanish completely as a source of revenue for journalism.

The Filter Bubble is about the impact of personalization on the web. Google tailors search results for geography, but also for individual interests, education, personal-ity, age and economic status, based on past searches, email content, online purchases and other factors.

Facebook, Yahoo and others use similar filters. Big data companies can now use that information to tailor marketing to in-dividuals and find those individuals wher-ever they happen to be browsing online.

The Filter Bubble is mostly about what this means to society and how personal-ized search will magnify inequities and shield us from the ideas, needs and reality of our fellow citizens.

If Pariser is right about the future of so-called “big data,” the audiences assembled by newspapers and online news sites and magazines will soon be worthless. For more than a century, most journalism outlets have paid the bills by assembling an audience and charging advertisers a fee to reach that audience. Though advertising revenues have been plummeting, few have thought about a world in which journalism can’t rely on advertising at all. Listen to a Ted talk by Pariser here.

5) Two other reports offer a glimpse of how the journalism crisis is playing out in the rest of the world.

Behind the numbers

Thoughts about our future

New studies delve into the new universe journalism

By Kelly Toughill

Continued from page 14

Continued on page 17

Disruptive News Technologies: Stake-holder Media and the Future of Watch-dog Journalism Business Models, by Mark Lee Hunter and Luk Van Wassenhove, looks at how sources are now primary providers of investigative reporting. The report includes three case studies of Euro-pean outlets and an examination of the po-tential journalism function of Greenpeace.

Chasing Sustainability on the Net examines 63 journalism start-ups in nine countries in Europe, the United States and Japan. It divides entrepreneurial journal-ism into two camps: those that focus on creating content and those that focus on services. The report is a useful overview of the creativity of emerging business models. It is also a useful overview of

how differently journalism is evolving in Europe, Japan and North America.

Kelly Toughill is the director of the Uni-versity King’s College School of Journal-ism and J-Source’s business of journalism editor. The next school year, Kelly will use a sabbatical to deepen her study of busi-ness models for journalism.

CREATING A FALSE COMFORT ZONE: In The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser argues that algo-rithms for search engines like Google create your “own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online,” content he equates with “information junkfood”

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When Ivor Shapiro worked for Chatelaine magazine, the rules

of algebra were not followed when nature called.

The shortest distance between the edito-rial department and the washroom was a straight line that took journalists through the department that sold advertising for the magazine. But there was an under-standing that a more circuitous route was the proper way – the ethical way – to go to the bathroom.

“At Chatelaine, there was actually a door, a physical door between the editorial department and the business department,” says Shapiro, chair of Ryerson Univer-sity’s School of Journalism. “The editors literally were not allowed to go through the door. It might be the fastest way to the washroom, but we would go the other way. The editor (of Chatelaine) actually used to freak out if she saw editors going through that door.”

Eventually, that editor who watched to make sure her staff didn’t walk through that door was fired, Shaprio says. And when the next editor came in “that door was opened a lot, literally. And now I’m sure there ain’t no door.”

And if that door is gone, is it a bad thing? It’s a question being asked more and more as media companies are reas-sessing a sacrosanct rule of journalism: that there must always be a “church/state” separation between the newsroom and the part of the organization that makes money.

No journalist would ever suggest that

commercial interests should override editorial independence. But some editorial managers are saying the time has come to reinvent and re-examine everything – in-cluding knocking some holes in the meta-phorical wall between those who produce content and those who sell it.

David Skok, Acting Director of Digital at Global News, was the 2012 Martin Wise Goodman Canadian Nieman Fellow. While attending Harvard Business School during his fellowship, Skok collaborated with Prof. Clayton Christensen – an in-ternational expert on business innovation and disruption. They applied Christensen’s theories on strategy and innovation to the news industry and suggested there are lessons for the media to learn from other businesses that have gone through techno-logical disruptions.

In the Fall 2012 edition of Nieman Re-ports, Skok wrote the following provoca-tive statement: “Our traditional newsroom culture taken in aggregate has blinded us from moving beyond our walls of editorial independence to recognize that without sales and marketing, strategy, leadership and, first and foremost, revenues, there is no editorial independence left to root for.”

Asked to expand on his thoughts about the integration of marketing and editorial departments, Skok said he is not suggest-ing the walls of editorial independence be broken down.

“Original journalism should continue to have no place in marketing or sales for the obvious reasons of editorial integrity,”

he said. “What I mean by my comments is more high level. First, we need to expand the definition of what news is. By that, I mean, what constitutes the jobs-to-be-done that traditional news organizations are called upon to fulfill. For example, if one of the jobs to be done is to provide a platform for discussion around a particular issue, then why not involve the marketing and sales teams in co-ordinating an event around a particular issue?’”

Marketing, says Skok, must become far more aligned with editorial.

“What I always say to the reporting team here (at Global) is that publishing the story is only the beginning of the job. The other half of the job is making sure that people can actually read and interact with your work. This means pushing it out on social media – not just by tweeting, by perhaps by paying for sponsored Face-book/Twitter posts, engaging with your readers who leave comments and work-ing on publicity with radio stations and broadcast. In the same vein that authors are now their own publishers and market-ers, journalists should also be marketing their work.”

In a recent post on his influential Press-Think blog entitled Look, you’re right, okay? But you’re also wrong, New York University’s Jay Rosen cited the historic disconnect between newsrooms and the business part of newspapers as one of the things that’s wrong with the industry today.

The business of journalism

Why shouldn’t newsrooms work with the

marketing department?

It may be time to knock down the walls between the sellers and producers of content

By Scott White

17 MEDIA SPRING 2013 18

Continued from page 16

Continued on page 47

19 MEDIA SPRING 2013 20

Prior to the 2012 Alberta provincial election there was a lot of specu-

lation there could be a change in gov-ernment coming. The upstart Wildrose Alliance was threatening the Progressive Conservatives, a party that had been in power for more than 40 years.

This unprecedented challenge from the far right built a nice narrative for politi-cal reporters. Polls conducted leading up to the election, like this one from Leger Marketing predicted a Wildrose win. Columnists and pundits alike were already writing about what a new government would bring.

I wasn’t convinced. While the polls said the Wildrose was on the rise, an investiga-tion into the money said something else. When election day came, the PCs kept a healthy majority, only losing five seats and still controlling 72 out of 87 in the Legislative Assembly.

What did the money say? And how did we make it talk?

What the money saidFrom a story published in late March

2012 under the headline: “Just 31 donors switch to Wildrose from Tories”.

The story lead with this sentence: “While recent polls suggest the Wil-

drose is closely tailing the Progressive Conservatives going into a spring election, an Edmonton Journal analysis of political donations shows that by 2010 the fledg-ling right-wing party hadn’t managed to win over a majority of big-spending Tory donors.

“Between 2004 and 2010, only 31 donors switched allegiance from the Pro-

gressive Conservatives to the Wildrose, taking nearly $75,000 with them between 2008 and 2010. Up to 2009, those donors had contributed nearly $112,000 to the Progressive Conservatives.”

Our analysis showed that despite what the polls were saying, few supporters had abandoned the PCs for the Wildrose. That analysis held true on election day.

How did we make it talk?In addition to the stories about the dona-

tions, a database of all political donations (http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/donations/database.html) and a look at the top 70 donors (http://www.edmontonjour-nal.com/news/donations/top_donors.html) in the province were created.

Creating the database was a long and complex process.

The first step was to get the data from the province. Elections Alberta has the annual financial statements for each party available as PDFs on its website.

Any year with a general election or by-election also had a report of the dona-tions during that campaign. Those reports included all donations from writ drop until two months after polling day.

All in, there were annual reports for 2004-10, campaign reports for 2004 and 2008 elections and reports for the 2007 and 2009 by-elections.

The data was trapped in several PDFs. It was also formatted in a manner that made data extraction very difficult. But clever use of Xpdf (tutorial here: http://journal-ists.org/2012/03/15/liberate-your-data-from-the-pdf-police/) was able to give us a starting point. The data was moved from

csv into an Excel file, and then cleaned and standardized. This had to be done for each year and all four elections for each party. Since 2004, Alberta has had eight registered political parties. That’s 11 reports for eight parties.

Thankfully some of the parties had fewer donations than others.

Once in Excel, the donor was matched with the dollar amount and the type of contribution -- personal, corporate, union. From there the data was imported into Google Refine.

Refine is free software that is used to clean and standardize data. Check previous issues of Media for a tutorial on its use. It helped correct mistakes that occurred through inconsistent data entry and poor formatting of the original source files. Once this process was complete for one party, the process was restarted for the next party.

When this process was complete for each party, the data was imported into a single database and run through Refine again, a valuable step. Refine searched for spelling mistakes and extra characters.

It also looked for company types: For instance, “Inc.” vs. “Incorporated”. Both spellings showed up in the data. And while they are the same donor, they wouldn’t appear to be in a database be-cause of the difference.

In the end, the database accounted for 15,669 donations and $23,075,705. The PCs made up the bulk of that with 10,787 donations for a total of $14,984,504.68.

From there we were able to combine the data from the PCs and the Wildrose

Net tips

into one spreadsheet. Because the data was cleaned in Refine, we were able to run a fusion table analysis on it. That gave us a clear picture of individual and party donations.

What did we discover? In addition to finding that only 31

donors had switched from the PCs to the Wildrose, we calculated that they had donated $75,000 to the Wildrose.

The dollar amount was a pretty good indication that the groundswell of sup-port the Wildrose was expecting, and the polls and pundits suggested was happeningwasn’t.

Sadly, most, if not all, political colum-nists continued to believe polls and refused to follow the money. If they had, perhaps the media would have kept a bit more credibility on election day.

The database keeps giving too. From it we also found that the largest

donors across all parties were the Encana Corportation, Transcanada Pipelines Ltd., Suncor Energy Inc., Enbridge Pipelines Inc and Nexen Inc.

Encana being the most generous benefactor donated $45,000 to the Liberal Party, $50,000 to the Wildrose Alliance and $106,710 to the Conservatives for a total of $201,710 in political donations. Transcanada gave $134,370, Suncor gave $124,768, Enbridge gave $115,600 and Nexen gave $103,900.

The largest donation to any party was

made by Transcanada. The pipeline builder has donated $115,470 to the Con-servatives since 2004.

This is important to know as all those companies have a financial stake in the future of energy in Alberta and an interest in who is elected to run the province.

ConclusionThe work that went into building this

database was significant. It took a long time, but in the end it proved to be a very valuable resource going into the future. A better appreciation for data journalism in the pundit and columnist community would also lead to better election cover-age, as would a larger suspicion directed at polls and polling companies.

Lucas Timmons is the Special Editor for Data Journalism and Data Visualization at the Edmonton Journal, a news appli-cations developer, a former journalism professor at Grant MacEwan University and a 2011 Online News Association MJ Bear Fellow. He also likes baseball.

By Lucas Timmons

Big oil, big donors

The polls told one story, the money told a different, more accurate one

NDP Leader Brian Mason , left, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, Conservative leader Alison Redford and Liberal Leader Raj Sher-man wait for the Alberta Election Leaders Debate to start in Ed-monton, Alta., on Thursday April 12, 2012.

PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson.

21 MEDIA SPRING 2013 22

Media technologies have trans-formed journalism into a global,

interactive enterprise practiced by an unusual cast of characters. Every day, net-works of professionals, citizens, bloggers, politicians, activists and others commit a million acts of journalism. This new media ecology questions the scope of traditional principles, while calling for new norms.

Journalism ethics, once the somewhat sleepy domain of mainstream codes of eth-ics, too often presumed to be invariant, is now a dynamic, chaotic space of contested values.

The task for a future journalism ethics is clear: We need to create a new, more complex, and conceptually deeper ethics for responsible communication. But what would such an ethics look like? Given the pace of change, predicting the future is hazardous. Nevertheless, I venture to say what we need to do if journalism ethics -- clinging to traditional ideas -- is not to sink into oblivion.

Going ‘radical’To begin with, we need to engage in

what I call “radical media ethics.” The changes in media and society are so revolutionary that we must be radical by rethinking the purposes and principles of responsible journalism. We need to real-ize that a non-radical (or conservative) strategy of trying only to extend existing norms, or creating ad hoc policies for each quandary created by the evolving universe of media, is not enough.

We need to systematically re-think jour-

nalism ethics from the ground up. Non-radical ethics was still in force

when I chaired the first ethics committee for the Canadian Association of Journal-ists at the turn of this century. Our aim was to create the CAJ’s first code of ethics. It seemed that “journalism ethics” meant normative thinking which was: (1) professional: codes were for professional journalists and journalism associations. (2) mainstream and parochial: codes were (mainly) guides for newspapers and broadcasters, spelling out how they were to serve their parochial publics, whether their public be the citizens of their city or of their nation. Journalism ethics did not cross borders; (3) traditional and non-rad-ical. There was still some confidence that long-existing principles of professional journalism were adequate and generally agreed upon. For the founding ethics com-mittee, online media was on the horizon. But it loomed as a future challenge for code makers.

Note how things have changed over a decade or more. Journalism ethics is becoming part of a larger media ethics which deals with norms of media usage by almost everyone. Ethics is more open and inclusive, bursting out beyond the walls of newsrooms and mainstream practice. At the same time, journalism ethics is going “global,” redefining its norms for a global world.

The task of a radical media ethics, then, is to invent principles and practices that integrate old and new media, and expand

our vision of journalism ethics beyond one’s borders.

Future code of ethics What does being radical in one’s

ethical thinking mean in the concrete? Let’s use our moral imaginations. Let’s imagine what future ethics codes might look like.

Future codes will not jettison principles of good communication such as the obligation to seek and verify the truth independently, without bias or conflicts of interest. But the new codes will have to be much more precise about how those prin-ciples can co-exist (and guide) the many new forms of journalism. Moreover, the new codes will have to add entirely new sections dealing with emerging ethical issues. Some of the new components of future codes will be:

Ethics of new media ecologies: Future codes will have sections on the ethics of doing journalism according to alternate economic models. These areas include (a) nonprofit journalism based on foundations and donors; (b) brand journalism: corpo-rations that do their own journalism to “brand” their company and products; (c) journalism within academia: Increasingly, new and inventive forms of journalism are located within the walls of academia, and therefore may be subject to the inescap-able politics of academia. What does independent journalism mean in these environments?

Ethics of how to use new media: Future codes will provide clear

rules for guiding journalists in what they should (or should not) say on their own web sites, Twitter feeds, and social media pages? They will clarify the acceptable limits of commentary by reporters who also represent newsrooms committed to impartial reporting? Codes will also pro-vide detailed guidelines on how and when newsrooms should use material from the Internet.

Ethics of interpretation and opinion:

The era of news objectivity as “just the facts” is dead and gone. Interpretive and point-of-view journalism grows. Tradi-tional ethics has had little to say about how editors should evaluate interpretation and opinion. New codes need to fill this gap by re-defining objectivity and giving journalistic meaning to “informed com-mentary,” “insightful analysis,” and “good interpretation.”

Ethics of activism: New codes will need to recognize that activist journalism in its many forms will continue to be one of the many ways to use media. But, when are journalists ‘agenda-driven activists’ and when are they ‘investigative journalists with a valid cause’? What are the types of activist journalism? Many NGOs, academ-ic web sites and community organizations are engaging in what I call “media ethics activism.” These groups, unhappy with mainstream coverage of certain issues, create their own forms of ethical journal-

ism, from hyper-local community web sites to blogs that monitor human rights abuses. Rather than dismiss all forms of activist journalism as biased, how can we think more subtly about the values of activist journalism?

Ethics of global journalism: The new codes (and new thinking in ethics, gener-ally) will need to reconstruct the role of journalism in global terms, including new sections on how media should cover global issues so as to avoid bias due to patriotic feelings or nationalism.

Ethics of democratic media: The ‘democratization’ of media implies falsely that the spread of publication tools entails greater democracy and more democratic forms of journalism. ‘Democratized’ journalists may engage in ranting and in-tolerant broadsides, exacerbating tensions within plural societies.

Therefore, how the news media discuss-es issues, encourages multi-perspectival dialogue, and informs citizens is crucial to deciding whether one’s media system is not just free, but also democratic. Jour-nalism ethics needs to think more deeply about the meaning of democracy and democratic media.

Radical media ethics, therefore, means a willingness to adopt a new attitude to-wards media ethics, including journalism ethics. It means a willingness to engage in philosophical questioning of principles, to consider new norms, and to look at media

from a cosmopolitan perspective.Already, a large number of journalists,

scholars, associations and news organiza-tions appear to be willing to think radi-cally.

For example, the CAJ’s current ethics committee has been leading the way in formulating guidelines for journalists’ per-sonal use of new media and other issues. News organizations, from the New York Times and the BBC to nonprofit investiga-tive centers, are creating guidelines for doing journalism in a digital world.

Finally, radical ethics has implications for the teaching of media ethics. We need to teach a ‘media ethics for everyone’ across the university and not confine media ethics to a course in journalism schools.

Moreover, the teaching of media ethics should not be the static examination of ac-cepted principles; nor should it be the dis-missal of mainstream standards. Instead, radical teaching should be an exploration of how a new ethics can emerge from the ashes of a previous ethical consensus.

Students should explore the possible integration of ideas. They should con-sider how old and new ideas might come together to create a dynamic and relevant media ethics that is badly needed by jour-nalists and citizens.

If we do all of this, we will be truly radi-cal.

Stephen J. A. Ward is the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the Uni-

versity of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Ethics

Going radical

We need a substantial change in the way we talk about ethics

Stephen J. A. Ward

New codes will need to recognize that activist journalism in its many forms will continue to be one of the many ways to use media. But, when are journalists ‘agenda-driven activists’ and when are they

‘investigative journalists with a valid cause’?

23 MEDIA SPRING 2013 24

The Future of News

Sometimes it’s not entirely clear whether Sun News Network chases

controversy or controversy chases the channel. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

The all-news network’s latest campaign for a “mandatory distribution” licence from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission was framed to supporters as us versus them. In January, the channel launched a website called Canadiantvfirst.ca and a campaign letter intended to mobilize support.

“Our enemies are trying to stop us from getting a new broadcast licence,” the letter claimed. “Just like when Sun News launched, the left-wing propaganda ma-chine is in overdrive spewing out attacks, raising cash, and doing everything in its power to shut us down. We can’t let them get away with it. We need your support.”

It has worked, to some degree. In Febru-ary the CRTC website was filling up with letters of support for Sun News, which, of course, already has a broadcast licence. The channel is seeking a special licence that would require all TV providers like Bell and Rogers to put it on all subscrib-ers’ TV packages, and in the broadcast regulator’s new world of “consumers first” and “market forces work best,” it’s not an easy sell.

This is Sun News’ second crack at it. The channel, owned by Quebec media giant Quebecor Media Inc.—owner of the QMI news agency, the Sun newspaper chain, the TVA network, and the Videotron cable system and mobile phone network—

filed its CRTC application to operate Sun News as a regular specialty channel in 2010, with a special request for “manda-tory access” to TV providers’ systems. It was a temporary request, for up to three years, to help the station get off the ground by making it available to TV subscribers.

That request faltered after controversy enveloped the application and the new channel. It didn’t help that the project was headed by Kory Teneycke, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former direc-tor of communications. Critics viewed the special request a potential favour from the government. It was the extension of politi-cal pressure on an arm’s length regulator for a licence exception to help a “Fox News North” channel succeed in Canada, they said.

At the height of the controversy, in Oc-tober 2010, international advocacy group Avaaz.org delivered 21,000 hard-copy letters to the CRTC’s offices in Gatineau, Que., in opposition to the application.

Teneycke resigned, saying he contribut-ed to a controversy that had “gotten out of hand,” and Sun News dropped its special request. Instead, it applied for a standard, “Category B” specialty channel, for which the broadcaster must negotiate commercial carriage agreements with the TV provid-ers. The CRTC approved it without delay.

As quickly as Sun News had created the controversy with an improbable regulatory application, it snuffed it out. In April 2011, the channel launched, and Teneycke was back on the job within half a year.

The episode, even if it wasn’t awarded the special licence, brought national atten-tion to the channel and rallied its political supporters. It was kind of like watching Teneycke tap into his experience in wedge politics.

Sun News’ newest application has about as much chance of success. The latest ef-fort for a mandatory distribution licence, this time for a duration of five years, became public in January when the CRTC published 22 applications for what broad-casting folk call 9(1)(h) licences.

Few of them will be approved because receiving 9(1)(h) carriage is now rare. The regulator has taken steps in recent years to emphasize carriage under market forces and commercial terms, not regulations. It’s under this approach that the CRTC deregu-lated the news and sports specialty channel genres, saying they are now competitive and that market forces are working.

Effective Sept. 1, 2011, channels like CBC News Network, CTV News Chan-nel, TSN and Sportsnet, were deregulated. CBC’s and CTV’s news channels no longer receive the mandatory distribution they benefited from for decades, and TSN and Sportsnet, two of the most valuable specialty channels in Canada, can now re-new their carriage terms with TV provid-ers at higher, market-based rates.

When the CRTC announced it had re-ceived 22 mandatory distribution applica-tions (some of them renewals), it reminded the industry of its policy that it will only consider 9(1)(h) licences for channels that

make an “exceptional contribution to Ca-nadian expression” and Canadian content. According to its policy on 9(1)(h) car-riage, Canadians must have an “extraordi-nary need” for the channel.

These are considered “public interest” channels like the Aboriginal Peoples Tele-vision Network, which serves Canada’s aboriginal communities, or CPAC, which covers Canada’s parliamentary proceed-ings, or The Weather Network, which has a red alert system for national emergen-cies. Anyone in Canada who subscribes to basic cable receives these 9(1)(h) chan-nels.

Sun News argues that its channel is distinctly Canadian. It says it also needs mandatory carriage because some TV providers in Canada, namely Telus and MTS, refuse to carry it. If that’s the case, the CRTC is not likely view 9(1)(h) as a solution. The regulator would probably point to its complaints process and dispute resolution mechanisms, which deal with situations where two sides can’t reach a commercial carriage agreement under “reasonable terms.”

And if the CRTC had solid reasons to give Sun News a 9(1)(h) licence? For better or worse, the political optics of that are terrible: Teneycke, a former PMO guy, leaves the Tory government to start up a new conservative news channel, which receives a favour from the regulator to help it become viable. It would be seen as tainted.

One of the priorities now at the CRTC, under new Chair Jean-Pierre Blais, is to build public trust and a constituency of everyday consumers. How does the optics of the Sun News application help Blais achieve this? It’s politically toxic, and for the same reason, Harper won’t touch it.

What Teneycke and Sun News really want is not mandatory carriage. In prin-ciple, they oppose broadcast regulation as much as Canada’s western rebel, the hands-off- everything Shaw Communica-tions Inc.

What Sun News covets is more view-ers and more subscribers, particularly all those viewers who they haven’t gotten through to. The channel points out in its CRTC application that only 38 per cent of

Canadians have heard of Sun News. More viewers would mean a rise in

revenues—from more subscriber fees and higher advertising value—for a channel that is currently losing money. Pierre Karl Péladeau, Quebecor’s chief executive, doesn’t like unprofitable business ven-tures.

Mandatory carriage would help the channel achieve this but so would a higher national profile. The channel and its TV personalities like controversy because, op-posite all those detractors, are Sun News supporters. In the United States, Fox News takes the same divisive approach to issues, quite successfully.

Sun News’ mandatory distribution ap-plication may not receive a “yes” from the CRTC, but that doesn’t mean it’s fruit-less. It may generate as much controversy and national profile as the channel’s first attempt.

Simon Doyle is the editor of The Wire Report in Ottawa, covering Canada’s media and telecom sectors.

Fighting for survival

The Sun News Network asks the country’s broadcast regulator for a life line

By Simon Doyle

STAYING ALIVE: Quebecor Media Inc. CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau addresses a news conference in Toronto, Tuesday, June 15, 2010, to launch which was at the time the proposed Sun TV News Chan-nel. Since that event, Peladeau has stepped down as CEO, and Sun News is depending for survival on a regulatory system that is has frequently criticized.

PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

25 MEDIA SPRING 2013 26

As a student of Journalism at Berke-ley, I was excited at the chance to

be the staff photographer for the Logan Symposium. The 7th annual gathering of great minds was as insightful as it was dif-ficult to photograph. Symposiums involve a lot of sitting and listening, and I tried my best to find the unique moments that look place during the April 12-14 weekend in Berkeley, California: the connections be-ing made; the moments happening behind the scenes; and the quirkiness that comes with a hoard of journalists descending on one place.

Increasingly, I am seeing more of my world though a Canon viewfinder, and I often get asked to explain my shooting process. This is challenging to put into words. It’s like explaining how I use my arms. Still, I will try to describe how it is for me when I am really in the moment.

I lift the camera to my eye and take in

the entire scene within my frame. I see balance, focus, foreground, background, and action. More often than not, I move myself to make the image more meaning-ful. I get closer to get more detail, and farther to get a better sense of place. I take in where my light is falling, and what I need to do to make my camera capture it better.

My fingers, in some weird dance with my mind, click the aperture and shutter speed to where I want it almost immedi-ately. I decide when the moving things will move where I want them too, and I wait until all the stars align, and then I take my picture. This seems like a lot, and maybe it is for me right now, as I have only been seriously studying photojournal-ism for less than a year, but it mostly all happens within the span of a second.

The things in my pictures happen so fast. For me, photojournalism is about cap-

turing the moments people miss, or simply can’t see and should. I photographed the symposium with all this in mind. I wanted to make sure I got everyone, and didn’t miss a thing. I have provided just eight photographs I believe captured the flavor of the weekend.

I was born and raised in NY and began my Journalism career with print media in NY after college.

Last year I decided to go on an adven-ture, and move to the other side of the country to pursue my masters degree at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where I am studying photo and broadcast journalism.

I mostly shoot sports, but as long as a camera is in my hand, I am happy. If you would like to contact me, please email me at Laurenkaterosenblum@gmail.com, or through my website http://laurenkat-erosenblum.wix.com/home.

Photojournalism

A lens-eye view of investigative journalists

By Lauren Rosenblum

Editor’s note: On the second weekend in April, the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program in Berkeley, California, hosted its 7th annual Reva & David Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium. I was fortunate to be invited to this gathering of an impressive group of investigative journalists who talked about an array of stories, including The New York Time’s piece on corruption at the highest levels of the Chinese government, to CBS News 60 Minutes’ profile of the man whose dogged pursuit led to the downfall of disgraced cycling hero, Lance Armstrong.

I was joined by my CBC colleague, senior investigative producer, Harvey Cashore, to form a small Canadian contingent. As I sat and took notes during one interesting panel discussion after the other, I noticed an extremely hard-working photographer snapping photos every few minutes from odd angles and distances.

I have always tried to use Media magazine to promote photojournalism, an arguably under-appre-ciated art in the age of digital cameras. Lauren Rosenblum seemed to be at one with her camera, as you can see in the picture above. She snapped almost 1000 photos during the two-and-a-half days. So impressed was I with Lauren’s work that I asked her whittle down her collection to a few photo-graphs and explain what made them interesting, and what story about the weekend they helped to tell.

This was a connection being made on

Sunday morning between David McKie and

David Gehring who’s in charge of news

industry business development strategy

at Google. It was before people had fully

filed into the outdoor seating. Decorations

still hung from the night before. It gave

a sense of place, and helped explain why

this symposium was so great.

As the sun set on Saturday, I caught

three attendees kicking back and en-

joying cigars. I just thought the photo

captured the personalities, and gave

you a sense of who was there. It was

not an uptight group of people.

Journalists are funny people. Sometimes

we get a bad rap. The word intimidating

is thrown around a lot, and is probably

one of the nicer terms. As I sat next to

this panelist, I happened to glance under

the table and see the most wonderful

socks. I think it speaks to this greater

importance of not taking yourself too

seriously.

27 MEDIA

Megan Walsh was also a student working

at the symposium. In this photo she’s do-

ing double duty, handing the microphone

to people questioning panelists and turning

the lights off during videos. This picture of

her adjusting a light, microphone in hand,

student name tag pinned crookedly, showed

the work that helped the event run smoothly.

While attendees questioned panelists, I

thought this photo would serve to tell what

really happened. The audience reactions

to the answers they got were at times the

most interesting part of the exchanges.

Lowell Bergman, an extremely accom-

plished journalist, the director of the Investi-

gative reporting Program, and the modera-

tor of this panel, was one of the most-seen

faces that weekend. This shot captured

Bergman’s behind-the-scenes shadow as

he set up for a panel.

As everyone in the photo is super concentrated on the panel discussion, this cool-and-collected man, walks against the grain.

Portraits were my best friend that

weekend. They’re a great way of

showing characters. At first I hated

this photo because I had not realized

when I took it that I was in it as a

reflection in the sun glasses. I tried

to angle myself so that wouldn’t

happen. However, my mistake wasn’t

enough for me to trash this photo

because it had too much personality.

SPRING 2013 28

29 MEDIA SPRING 2013 30

For years I’ve wanted to give the Robert Badgerow murder case the

attention it deserves.I’ve covered its twists and turns and was

waiting for the right time to do a long-form narrative. One of the roadblocks I faced was a legal one – publication bans have kept much of the story under wraps. A window of opportunity opened up last autumn when the first degree murder charge against the man accused of killing nursing assistant Diane Werendowicz was stayed.

If a fourth trial is ordered by the Court of Appeal for Ontario, those bans will certainly be in play again. But for a few months anyway, I would have the chance to tell readers everything.

Another roadblock was one of resourc-es. A shrinking news hole at our paper – like all newspapers – meant we have less space now for long reads.

But managing editor Jim Poling had an-other idea. We would make the Badgerow story The Spec’s first ebook.

We teamed up with the Toronto Star which was already doing its weekly Dis-patches series, offering readers a deeper look at stories their journalists were work-

ing on. I would become the first writer outside of The Star to be published in the Dispatches ebook line-up.

I stepped away from writing my regular

column for the month of December to focus on Badgerow. I dug through court documents and photo archives, read trial transcripts, talked to legal experts, ar-ranged new photos and – most significant-ly – interviewed key players in the case, some of whom had never spoken publicly before.

By early January a rough draft was done and I was back to my usual column, cover-ing a new murder trial well into March.

Lunch breaks, evenings and weekends were all about Badgerow.

I began working with a stellar team of Star editors to whip the ebook into shape as well as write related news and first-person pieces to run in The Star and The Spec.

At the same time, there was marketing to be done. Like most journalists, being the subject of photo shoots and in-house ads made me uncomfortable, but the buzz it generated was immediate, particularly on social media sites.

There were some growing pains along the way. For instance, the technology between the two newsrooms at some points wouldn’t allow me access to my own story.

Now that Unsolved is published, I’m al-ready thinking ahead to updating it, adding fresh interviews with witnesses and rela-tives who have contacted me since it came out. And also a whole new chapter that will reflect whatever decision the court comes to on the prospect of a fourth trial.

It was the nail polish that got me.A 30-year-old bottle of Revlon. Red. A vibrant shade chosen with great care,

perhaps. Or maybe on a whim. It was tucked into her bag along with the other sorts of things a woman keeps there: a yel-low hairbrush, sunglasses, nail files, some coins.

And a one-dollar bill, a testament to the time that has passed since that bag was last flung over her shoulder on the way to a nearby bar for a few beers.

These are Diane’s things. As I viewed these intimate objects in

a nearly empty courtroom, they had a profound effect on me. Even more so than the actual pieces of Diane Werendowicz — strands of her blond hair, drops of her blood — that had been passed from juror to juror as if they somehow held the key to finally solving her murder.

By comparison the items from her bag are so mundane. So real.

Diane was murdered on June 19, 1981. I moved to Hamilton and began working at the Spectator in the autumn of 1997, just as a police task force was struck to find Diane’s killer.

Diane, a pretty nursing assistant, was three days shy of her 24th birthday the night she died. She had been out at Ma-larkey’s bar in the Stoney Creek area with some girlfriends and left around midnight, alone, to make a short walk home that would prove fatal.

Her partially nude body was found a day later in a creek by children playing in the ravine. She would have been able to see her own apartment building as she took

her last breaths.I was just a few years older than Diane

when I wrote my first story about her. I have written many more since.

I was in a Kitchener courtroom for months in the fall of 2011 as a former steelworker named Robert Badgerow was tried for the third time for Diane’s murder. It was not lost on me that the only people in that courtroom were those who were either paid or subpoenaed to be there.

Diane’s parents have died. Her brother, who attended Badgerow’s first trial, did not come to the ones that followed. Diane never married. Or had children.

As a journalist who has written about crime my entire career, there are many things that intrigue me about this case. The forensic science that unlocked the DNA mystery lurking in the semen inside her body. The clue buried years ago by a shoddy police investigation into an attack on another woman, who was stabbed through the ear with a screwdriver.

The disturbing number of sexual preda-tors all living in one neighbourhood. The legal complexities of interconnected police investigations and trials.

And the possibility that this may be the case of first-degree murder in Canada to go to a fourth trial.

Badgerow, now 54, is already one of a small number of first-degree murder cases that have been tried three times. While a few have even been ordered to have a fourth trial, none has actually done so — the accused has generally pleaded guilty to a lesser offence or the charge has been stayed.

The case is currently before the Court of Appeal for Ontario. But what intrigued me most of all about this case, was Diane.

She never had justice. In the eyes of the law, Diane’s murder

remains unsolved.Badgerow was convicted at his first

trial, but two juries after that could not come to a unanimous decision, resulting in mistrials. In September 2012 the first-degree murder charge against him was stayed. That means he is still an innocent man. A free man.

Badgerow and his lawyers will tell you that for him, justice has been served.

Publishing

If you’ve got a longer story to tell, try

writing an ebook

With the dearth of general interest magazines, ever-shrinking news holes, and the prolif-eration of more online bite-sized stories for an apparently attention-span-challenged read-ership, the odds against long-form journalism would appear to be stacked. Well, not so fast. Enter ebooks and edispatches.

The Toronto Star’s Dispatches provides space for award-winning, investigative or simply interesting pieces such as the behind-the-scenes look at Justin Trudeau’s successful campaign to become the new leader of the federal Liberal party.

Postmedia’s Stephen Mahr, he of the robocalls fame, has used the ebook to display his fiction writing skills. A political thriller , no less.

Space is definitely is what Susan Clairmont needed for her real-lie crime story. So the ebook became a viable option for the Hamilton Spectator’s award-winning columnist. In this piece, Clairmont explains how the ebook allowed her to breathe new life into a case that went cold more than 30 years ago.

By Susan Clairmont

THE LAST WALK HOME: Diane Werendowicz, a pretty nursing assistant, was three days shy of her 24th birthday the night she died. On June 20, 1981, she had been out at Malarkey’s bar in Hamilton’s Stoney Creek area with some girlfriends and left around midnight, alone, to make a short walk home that would prove fatal. At least nine sexual assaults are related to this case, spanning over the past 18 years.

PHOTO CREDIT: Supplied to The Hamilton Spectator on Jan. 27, 1998. Story by Ken Kilpatrick

A FREE MAN: In the eyes of the law, Diane’s murder remains unsolved. Robert Badgerow, pictured here outside the court house Kitchener, Ontario, was convicted at his first trial, but two juries after that could not come to a unanimous decision, resulting in mistrials. Badgerow and his lawyers will tell you that for the former steelworker, justice has been served.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ron Albertson/The Hamilton Spectator

Continued on page 47

Data journalism

Fred Vallance-Jones

31 MEDIA

Oh, how times have changed.When I first started working

with data in 1995, there were really just a few tools available for what was then the emerging field of computer-assisted reporting. I remember going down to the Future Shop on St. James Street in Winni-peg to buy a copy of Microsoft FoxPro, a database management program that was at the head of its class at the time. But there were very few tools to go with it, beyond the perennial favourite, Microsoft Excel, then in version 5.0. You could manipu-late text files in a word processor, but that was about it. ArcView 1.0 was released that year, but it would be a while before mapping would become a mainstream data skill.

Fast forward to 2013, and the available options for the data journalist seem as limitless as the Prairie sky. In fact, while in 1995, you had to be ready to shell out a few hundred dollars for commercial software, today there is a free, open-source version for just about any task you might imagine. The open source tools aren’t always as easy or convenient to use as the commercial products, but because they are constantly being developed, they evolve and get better surprisingly quickly.

So what would the core toolset be for someone wanting to get started with analytical data journalism? By analytical data journalism, I mean data reporting that seeks to find patterns and stories in data before creating visualizations and other final products.

It has come a long way from the 5.0 days, but Excel is still pretty much a must-have for anyone who regularly works with data and wants to find the numbers

that help define a story. It’s the standard tool for importing, sorting, filtering and summarizing data in a single table. These days, Excel can accommodate a million rows, and with the PowerPivot for Excel plugin, you can do some seriously heavy duty data crunching. Because it is part of the standard Microsoft Office suite, Excel is also pretty affordable, especially if you buy it by itself or as part of a home or student edition. If you are at a university, you can also take advantage of academic prices that provide the complete Office suite for about $100.

If you can’t or don’t want to pay for Ex-cel, the free LibreOffice suite offers much of the same functionality at infinitely less cost (math joke!). In actual practice, I find LibreOffice a bit crash-prone when you start to have a lot of windows open, or when you work with very large data files. However, for most routine tasks, it does a pretty good job. It even has its own version of Excel’s popular pivot tables feature.

Both Excel and LibreOffice are avail-able for PC and Mac, while LibreOffice can also be installed on a Linux machine.

If you want a platform-independent alternative, there is always Google Drive. If your needs are basic and you don’t mind entrusting your data to Google, then the spreadsheets in Drive may be for you. For ease of use, they can’t be beaten, and you have access to your work from any com-puter connected to the Internet. Google spreadsheets are particularly useful for collaborative work because many users can share and update the data. You can also create online forms that can be used to populate a Google spreadsheet. This is

particularly useful if you want to gather data from a great many people, such as in crowdsourcing.

If you want to work with multiple, re-lated tables of data, or if you simply prefer working with a database manager, there are many options available in relational database managers. In my own opinion, the current champ in terms of cost and relative ease of use is MySQL. Like Libre-Office it’s free. There is no compromise in terms of power. It can slice through queries summarizing millions and millions of rows of data, and if it’s on a reasonably powerful machine, it does it with ease. It’s also available for multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows and Mac, so you can use it no matter which hardware and OS you prefer.

While some had feared that Oracle Corp. would want to eliminate its open-source rival when it purchased MySQL, that hasn’t happened. If anything, it is easier to use and install than ever. A Mac install, which used to be tricky, to say the least, now goes smoothly on OS X.

Of course, MySQL is a server data-base, and that makes it a little trickier to work with than a desktop program. You’ll probably have to learn some basic SQL, but this is not an enormous barrier for the technically minded. MySQL provides its own front end called MySQL Workbench that is a pretty powerful tool for managing databases and querying data. Many other front ends are also available for MySQL, including the popular phpMyAdmin.

Each database program has advantages and disadvantages. Other free options in-clude PostgreSQL and SQLlite. SQLLite is what is called an “embedded database

engine” in that it does not run a server pro-cess on a computer. It definitely requires a higher degree of technical knowledge, but is renowned for its small size and adapt-ability, and is used a lot on mobile devices. But that’s another column.

There is, of course, the old standby, Mi-crosoft Access. It’s part of the pro-version of the Office suite. Access has an easy-to-learn graphical querying interface, and handles relatively small datasets (under a million records if the records aren’t too long) relatively easily. But it still maxes out pretty quickly, so is better for working with smaller amounts of data than enor-mous datasets of millions of records. It’s also relatively cheap if bought on its own, though infinitely more expensive than the free options mentioned above. Access can also be used as a front end to server databases, using an ODBC connection. So, you can have the familiar user interface of access, but run your queries on a powerful MySQL server.

Back in ’95, mapping was in its in-fancy, but today there are lots of options available, and the open-source QGIS (for Quantum GIS and available for free at http://www.qgis.org/) is rapidly gaining on that old standby ArcView. Arc is now into version 10.1 and is the standard for pro-level GIS. It has a well-refined inter-face, and even the standard versions have a huge array of geodata processing tools. If you want to try it for non-commercial, individual use you can get a year-long li-cense from ESRI for $100. Otherwise, for commercial or ongoing use, it can become

an expensive proposition, even for the most basic edition.

That’s one reason why QGIS is becom-ing increasingly popular. Even a couple of years ago, it really wasn’t a viable alterna-tive; too many key, core mapping features were missing. But while it still lacks Arc’s refinement and some of its power features, it has a lot of tricks up its sleeve with no expensive outlay. It also has an active user community, so answers to most problems are easy to find online.

There are also cloud-based GIS options. If your needs are limited to geocoding (determining latitudes and longitudes) for a few hundred points, or creating a colour-coded map to display geo-related data online, your needs may well be served by the features available in Google Fusion Tables and Tableau Public.

More advanced users can take advan-tage of the Google Fusion Tables API, which like the Google Maps API, allows much greater control over the look and functionality of your online maps. Keep in mind that sites that generate a lot of traffic could hit Google’s usage limits, and you’ll have to pay Google for usage beyond the limits if you consistently exceed them. The limits are generous however, and you are unlikely to hit them except for the most popular sites.

Beyond the basic tools I have outlined here, there are many others available to data journalists. They include utilities for extracting data from PDF files, browser plugins such as iMacros for Firefox that can be used to automate data downloads,

scripting languages such as Python, Ruby and Perl that can be used to “scrape” data from the web, and much more. These days, you are more likely limited by your technical prowess than by the lack of available tools.

It is a very different world from 1995, and for those wanting to make a start in data journalism, the horizons are almost as limitless as I used to enjoy on the Prairie around Winnipeg.

Fred Vallance-Jones is an associate professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax and co-author of Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Com-prehensive Primer, from Oxford University Press.

Related links: MySQL: www.mysql.orgphpMyAdmin: http://www.phpmyad-

min.net/home_page/PostgreSQL: http://www.postgresql.org/PowerPivot for Excel plugin: http://of-

fice.microsoft.com/en-ca/excel/powerpiv-ot-for-excel-2010-features-and-benefits-HA101810445.aspx

LibreOffice suite: http://www.libreof-fice.org/download

SQLite: http://sqlite.org/download.htmlQGIS: http://www.qgis.org/ARCGIS: http://www.esri.ca/en/content/

arcgis-home-use-programTableau Public: http://www.tableausoft-

ware.com/public/Google Fusion: http://www.google.com/

Mining for the best tools

The available options for the data journalists are limitless So what would the core tool set be for someone wanting to get started with analytical data journalism? By analytical data journalism, I mean data reporting that seeks to find patterns and stories in data

before creating visualizations and other final products.

SPRING 2013 32

33 MEDIA SPRING 2013 34

As part of The Globe’s series “Rein-venting Parliament,” we decided

to investigate how often Members of Par-liament voted against their own party. The project came together just as backbench MPs started fanning new flames over abortion legislation. Was Harper’s caucus out of control? How did opposition parties compare?

The undertaking took weeks of number crunching, programming and visualizing to assemble. The end product showed sev-eral clear trends: MPs rarely break ranks, with most voting along party lines more than 97 per cent of the time; Conservative MPs are overwhelmingly more likely to break rank than members from other par-ties; no NDP MPs dissenting after Thomas Mulcair came into power; and former NDP MP Bruce Hyer (now an indepen-dent) had the lowest party unity.

The resulting journalism (two stories and one interactive) helped engage readers in new discussions about Parliament and pushed the topic of party discipline back to the forefront across Canada.

How it came togetherThe project began by scraping 600

pages of parliamentary voting data. We designed a scraper in Python that crawled through these pages, scraping the MP’s name, party, riding and vote. Python is a power, diverse language you can deploy in many phases of your data project, from gathering to organizing, cleaning to interviewing. But it’s also rather technical, requiring at least a preliminary knowledge of computer coding.

After the scrape was completed, we had 162,280 votes between June 2, 2011 and Jan. 28, 2013.

The next step was determining whether MPs voted with or against their party. We first believed we could check this against the whip’s vote. But we ran into trouble when we realized the party whip was sometimes (unsurprisingly) absent. We decided to measure each MP’s vote against the majority of their party instead — a measure of 50 per cent plus one.

This was a two-step process. First, we ran another Python script on our scraped data to count the number of yeas and nays on each vote. We ran the resulting spread-sheet through another Python script to compare each MP’s vote. The script added a column to the original dataset indicating whether they voted the “same” as or “dif-ferent” from the party.

This spreadsheet gave us the first us-able data to measure party unity. We used Microsoft Access to run queries, starting by calculating the number of times an MP voted differently from their party. We ran another query to find the total number of votes for each MP. (While there are 600 votes total, each MP has a different attendance record.) Combined, we had a percentage score for party unity.

At each step of the process, we spot-checked and confirmed our results against the original raw data to ensure there were no irregularities. We found a few errors along the way and re-designed our queries or adjusted the Python scripts until we were confident the final data set had no errors.

Then we began the analysis. We started with a few questions. What was the most contentious vote? (It was No. 466, a mo-tion to study the beginnings of life.) Who broke ranks most often? (By percentage, it was former NDP MP Bruce Hyer, who later became an independent MP. By raw total, it was Conservative MP James Bezan.) Did votes change with party lead-ership? (A few NDP MPs voted against the party before Thomas Mulcair became leader. Afterward, there were no dissenting votes.)

We supplemented this analysis with more parliamentary data. We scraped the information on each motion, which gave us more context like the purpose of the motion or who sponsored it. This made it easier to cross-reference party unity scores and explain the outliers. We also scraped information on all sitting MPs to add information like riding and title.

Finally, we created a short Python script for scraping MP photos from the Parlia-ment website for use in the interactive. An arduous element of this step was correct-ing the file names for each MP, since they had to match MP names stored in the data-set so they could be dynamically added to the page when needed.

We identified the MPs who broke rank most often and contacted their offices. Conservative MP James Bezan and Gov-ernment Whip Gordon O’Connor insisted dissention was a sign of democracy. Mr. Hyer and former NDP interim leader Ny-cole Turmel acknowledged some strenu-ous history, especially the gun-registry debate.

Visualizing the data Then the process of visualizing the data began. We had three main goals with the visualization: 1) showing how many Conservatives voted against the major-ity of their party compared to MPs from other parties; 2) showing the high levels of party unity, despite the occasional dissent-ing vote; 3) allowing readers to see more detail about each motion or bill that the MP dissented on.

We settled on using D3, a JavaScript library that uses new web technologies to animate individual nodes in unique and in-teresting ways. The library also allowed us to re-arrange the data across several views. By colour-coding each node and separat-ing MPs with some dissenting votes from

those with none, we could immediately show the number of Conservative MPs who registered lower party unity scores.

D3 is a powerful library but it comes with one major caveat: its more advanced animations don’t display in Internet Explorer, which remains a pervasive browser among our readers. Other news organizations like the New York Times have previously not supported IE for these visualizations.

As a fallback, we decided to try Ra-phael, a fantastic JavaScript library that works in every browser but doesn’t have the more complex “force collision” capa-bilities of D3. We were able to export X and Y co-ordinates for each node and each view in the D3 visualization, giving us

three sets of points from which we could build an entirely separate visualization. If a user visits the page in Internet Explorer, the code directs them through a Rapahel version of the script with animations and interactivity intact.

We believe the final product was an engaging series of stories made possible through data journalism techniques. It revealed a compelling yet rarely-discussed aspect of Parliament and allowed readers engage with the data with an interesting and unique interactive experience.

Stuart A. Thomson is as a multimedia editor at The Globe and Mail. You can find more about him at: www.stuartathompson.com.

Data journalism

The Globe and Mail’s data investigation into party discipline

Breaking rank

A DISSENTING VOICE: Conservative MP Mark Warawa speaks about Motion 408, the anti-discrimination motion against sex-selection, on Parliament Hill on Wednesday, December 5, 2012. His concerns about the right to speak prompted a wider discussion about the independence of MPs and led to stories about how those MPs vote.

PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

By Stuart A. Thomson

We identified the MPs who broke rank most often and contacted their offices.

Conservative MP James Bezan and Govern-ment Whip Gordon O’Connor insisted dis-

sention was a sign of democracy.

35 MEDIA SPRING 2013 36

Data journalism

With less than two months to go un-til I graduate from the UC Berke-

ley Graduate School of Journalism, I’ve been looking back at my experience over the past two years. I’m among a handful of students at the school who are really inter-ested in data journalism and making pretty and functional online news packages. It’s made me think about how J-schools need a more structured and thorough track for us computer-assisted reporters, for lack of a better term.

This isn’t to say I was disappointed with my grad experience — quite the opposite; if it weren’t for dedicated faculty like Jer-emy Rue and Len De Groot, other CAR-passionate students and a responsive atmo-sphere at the school, I wouldn’t be where I am now: already gainfully employed as a Web Manager at EdSource, which has big plans for education reporting, and chosen as one of the first-ever AP-Google Schol-ars. But I would like to see more J-schools nationwide seriously consider the need for more structured CAR programs, especially as data and interactive online apps become increasingly popular.

Let me make this clear: I was far from a coder before the started grad school. My undergrad experience at Humboldt State was mostly focused on print. I knew just enough HTML to know how to mess around in the Wordpress code editor. And although I always had an interest in code, it felt so far removed that I thought it was impossible to learn; like learning Latin.

I was always interested in data though, and in my early years of journalism I bare-ly managed, manually translating cam-paign finance forms into an Excel spread-sheet (now that’s how to waste many hours on something you could automate) or playing around in Illustrator making graphics. If anything, the experience made me hate the experience; there had to be another way to do this, right? And there is, of course, but it wasn’t until I was in the right environment that it became tangible. That environment was J-School.

But J-School does two things well: it shows you all of these really cool projects that you could maybe do, but it does little to actually help you get there in practical terms. I’ve talked to many students who come from different areas in journalism who would rather not spend hours doing tedious data entry when there are automat-ed solutions that could do it instantly. You don’t have to be a journalist who wants to solely focus on code or data to appreciate the classes journalism schools could offer to help in this area. You just have to be interested in data, and I can think of few journalists who aren’t working with data at some point in their career.

If I had my way, a computer-assisted reporting track would introduce or rein-force core skills like data analysis, data visualization, Python for scraping and automation, front-end development to cre-ate awesome interfaces to explore data and other media, and web design aesthetics.

It would also prepare student journalists to be critical consumers and presenters of data, while recognizing that a project is best served with the assistance of others.

Learning how to work with data, how to clean it, what to look for in order to judge its accuracy or analysis it in a fair and proper way, this all takes training and experience. Then there’s visualization. Whether you want to be the person creat-ing incredible javascript-driven graphics, or someone who works with non-coding solutions like Google Fusion tables, hav-ing more structured instruction on how to implement visualizations as journal-ists is needed. Some newsrooms have the luxury of having even a small team where a reporter can report and somebody else can translate a portion of the project in code. That’s why, I think, it’s important for a journalist to know the basics of coding and data reporting, so they can at least navigate both worlds if necessary. At the least, they know the language.

This curriculum would also focus on collaboration and open source as core principles, enlisting the help of program-mers, designers and others from within the school and in the community (think hackathons). One of the barriers I know I had coming into this was thinking I had to create all these visualizations from scratch. But that’s not the case. There is a strong and vibrant open-source community whose members have produced amazing frameworks to use from pretty much any

basic solution. Really, all that’s needed is a basic proficiency in front-end languages, like CSS or javascript, to manipulate these frameworks to whatever purpose you need. Journalists who want to create new frameworks would also gain value from learning what exists and what is needed.

There is an economic argument for this. While journalism jobs are in a general de-cline, it was made abundantly clear at NI-CAR’s recent Computer Assisted Report-ing conference that the demand for data and interactive journalists outweighs sup-ply; it is essentially “raining jobs.” I doubt that will change anytime soon. When writing this article, AP, Al Jazeera,NPR, the McClatchy Company and the Seattle Times all had job openings for either data-centric or news-app development positions. And that’s just a brief survey. It seems likely that the starting pay for these jobs will be higher than for the more typi-cal journalism positions. The Columbia Journalism Review also recently weighed

in on the growth in data journalism jobs at both large and small media outlets.

Based on how well data-driven projects share on social media, people really seem to enjoy them. Whether it’s consum-ing data on homicide rates or exploring the warming of the Earth due to climate change, these projects help cut through the noise and reach eyeballs.

Every journalist, no matter the primary media, should know the basics of HTML/CSS and data analysis. In this day and age, these are critical assets as media continue to transition to the digital realm and data gains more importance and interest. Not every journalist may want to be a web developer or focus completely on data journalism, but this niche in our industry demands more serious consideration at the J-school level to effectively prepare student journalists for the real and digital world.

This is an article that John adapted from his piece for the Online News Association

at: http://journalists.org/2013/04/11/osborn-j-schools-invest-in-car/

John C. Osborn is the Digital Com-munications Manager at EdSource, an Oakland-based non-profit, reporting and researching key issues in education. He recently graduated from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he was one of the first recipients of the Google-AP Scholarship for projects at the intersection of tech and journalism. A dataphile to heart, John enjoys finding new digital ways to communicate impor-tant information to readers, including gaming and interactives.

Links: http://oaklandnorth.net/2012/12/17/

analyzing-gun-violence-in-oakland/

http://www.gimmeprops.us

http://www.shineinpeace.com

By John C. Osborn

A seller’s market

Job listings for data journalists are increasing, but journalism schools aren’t training

enough of them

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS: It’s an uncommon refrain these days, but for journalists with certain skills, it’s a bit of a seller’s market.

37 MEDIA SPRING 2013 38

If you’re interested in doing data journalism, there’s no end to the cool

online tools you can build: maps, search-able databases, interactive graphics. But before you do any of that, you need one essential ingredient: data.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the infor-mation you’re looking for will already be sitting in a spreadsheet on a government open-data portal. Sometimes, if you ask politely, agencies will email you the data in a nicely formatted spreadsheet. Occa-sionally, you have to get tough and file a freedom-of-information request, explain-ing -- over and over and over again -- that, no, when you say you want records in spreadsheet format, a PDF will not suffice.

Increasingly, however, the data you’re looking for falls into another, odder cat-egory: data that is technically public, but not available in the format you need.

Maybe your city has a searchable data-base of campaign contributions to munici-pal candidate, but you have to search each candidate individually and the city refuses to give you the whole thing in a single spreadsheet. Perhaps your local health au-thority publishes a list of every restaurant it has ever shut down for health violations, but only in monthly PDF reports archived on its poorly designed website. Or maybe you just want to figure out which MLA in your in your province has the highest number of Twitter followers without hav-ing to call up each politician’s profile, one by one, in your web browser.

That’s where web scrapers come in.Web scrapers are tiny programs that

make your computer mimic a person

surfing the web, grabbing data from web pages and putting it in a format you can actually use, like a comma-delimited text file.

For programmers, web scrapers are simple: a couple dozen lines of code they can whip off in a few minutes. But for journalists with no experience in program-ming (like me), they can be very intimi-dating.

I still remember the first time the Ot-tawa Citizen’s Glen McGregor showed me the raw code behind one of his web scrapers. The code, written in a program-ming language called Python, looked like completely gobbledygook to me. I was both very impressed and utterly convinced I would never be able to build one myself.

Still, a couple of years ago, I thought I should give it a try. So I bought myself a mammoth, 1,000-page tome -- Learning Python, by Mark Lutz -- and decided I would teach myself Python, and then be able to build scrapers just like Glen.

It didn’t work.As it turns out, trying to learn an entire

programming language in order to com-plete a specific, simple task is not a very effective strategy. The Lutz book (or, at least, the first hundred pages, which is all I ever finished) both contained too much information for me and too little. It cov-ered a lot of programming skills I could see no use for given my simple needs. And it didn’t cover enough scraping-specific techniques to let me figure out how to do what I wanted to.

I resigned myself to the fact I would

probably never learn web scraping. But then, a few months ago, I stumbled across a $13 ebook by UK journalist and journal-ism instructor Paul Bradshaw: Scraping for Journalists.

What the hell, I thought, let’s give this one more try.

I’m so glad I did. While grinding my way through Lutz’s book felt like a chore, I breezed through Bradshaw’s 27 brief chapters in a couple of weekends -- and can now build my own web scrapers, in Python, from scratch.

For any journalist serious about building web scrapers, or just curious about how they work, I can’t recommend Bradshaw’s book highly enough.

One of the great things about Scraping for Journalists is that Bradshaw obviously knows how intimidating programming can be for journalists. So he doesn’t make you face raw code until Chapter 12.

His first chapter is titled: “Start scraping in 5 minutes”. And he’s not kidding.

In just a few pages, Bradshaw shows how journalists can build simple web scrapers using nothing more than a Google Docs spreadsheet and a couple of simple formulas. That MLA Twitter follower ex-ample I gave above, for example, could be solved using nothing but these methods.

As it turns out, the types of web scrap-ing you can actually do with Google Docs are pretty limited. You can’t cycle through pages of results, say, or scrape a bunch of PDFs. For that, you need to learn some code.

But by starting simple, Bradshaw builds

the reader’s confidence, as well as getting across some key scraping concepts -- like how to isolate parts of a webpage using something called Xpath -- so that when you hit the later chapters on scrapers built in Python, you don’t feel quite so over-whelmed.

Like any good teacher, Bradshaw ends each short chapter with a quick recap section as well as a series of “tests” that let you check and make sure you really understood the concepts that came before. The book is also full of links to scrapers built by Bradshaw so can you get a sense of how things really work.

In addition to being a great resource for journalists who want to learn scraping, Bradshaw’s book also illustrates three key points about data journalism skills.

The first is the importance of having journalism-specific teaching tools. There are tons of free tutorials out there for pretty much any technical skill you might want to learn, from writing JavaScript to creating data visualizations. But like the Python book I tried to work my way through, they’re often a poor fit for data journalists: teaching too much of what we don’t need and not enough of what we do. Luckily, a group of top data journalists in the U.S. recently embarked on a crowd-funded teaching project -- For Journalism -- specifically designed to help fill this gap.

The second lesson of Bradshaw’s book is a crucial one for me as I prepare to

teach my first Data Journalism course at Kwantlen Polytechnic University next spring. That’s a reminder of how tough technical skills can be for journalists more comfortable with words than numbers. Google Fusion Tables, Tableau Public and Excel Pivot Tables are likely to be just as intimidating for my students as Python was for me. I need to remember that. And I hope I can do as good a job as Brad-shaw did of starting out simple and letting my students experience initial successes before moving on to the next level of

complexity. Finally, the book shows that while learn-

ing an entire programming language may not be the best way for journalists to learn scraping, learning how to build scrapers may in fact be a great way to introduce journalists to programming. By learning how to build a few simple web scrapers in Python, I was forced to learn some basic concepts of coding, like if statements and for loops. And I saw how learning code could have real, practical benefits to my work as a data journalist. Where once I was intimidated by programming, I’m now eager to learn even more.

At The Vancouver Sun, we’ve already started using our new scraping skills to gather information we couldn’t access before -- information that will be included in upcoming stories in the coming months.

Chad Skelton is an investigative re-porter and data journalist at The Vancou-ver Sun and a journalism instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Book review

Why you should learn web scraping

and the ebook that can help

By Chad Skelton

For any journalist serious about building web scrapers, or just curious about how they work, I can’t recommend Bradshaw’s

book highly enough.

LEARNING HOW TO SCRAPE: In just a few pages, Bradshaw shows how journalists can build simple web scrapers using nothing more than a Google Docs spreadsheet and a couple of simple formulas.

39 MEDIA SPRING 2013 40

The Conservative government angered environmentalists last fall

when it introduced changes to a law that protects lakes and rivers from develop-ment, the Navigable Waters Protection Act, one of the oldest statutes in the country

The law required federal approval for construction on any body of water large enough to float a canoe. Changes to it were introduced with some stealth through the federal omnibus budget bill.

The government argued that the law needlessly constrained development of small projects like bridges or docks by wrapping them up in federal paper-work. Environmentalists charged that the rescinding the key provisions of the law effectively shed a key level of environ-mental protection for Canadian lakes and rivers.

The bill removed the requirement for federal approval from all bodies of water except for a select few that were listed in a schedule in the bill.

It itemized 97 lakes and 62 rivers and canals to which the federal oversight would continue to apply and gave the ap-proximate longitude and latitude of each waterway listed.

At first glance, there seemed to be little logic to how these bodies of water were chosen.

The list of exemptions included three oceans, massive Great Lakes, but also doz-ens of small lakes in the cottage country.

I had an idea to see if there was any political pattern in the decision to choose only these lakes for special protection.

To find out, I used an electronic map-ping program called ArcGIS – a “Geo-graphic Information System.”

ArcGIS is an extremely powerful com-mercial product that has long dominated the GIS software sector. It is used by city planners, geographers, demographers and, increasingly, data journalists to develop stories.

GIS programs such as ArcGIS allow analysis of data based on their spatial location. The software can take census data and match it to provincial election voting results. It can compute the average distance between Tim Hortons franchises, highlight the neighbourhoods with the highest rates of residential break-ins, or show the correlation between city blocks with low incomes and the number of syringes found in nearby parks.

I chose to analyze only the lakes named in the budget bill because the rivers tended to flow through so many ridings that the data would not show any trend. If there was an attempt to protect certain bodies of water for political purposes, I reasoned, it was more likely to show up in the selec-tion of lakes.

I began by downloading an electronic map that contained thousands of Canadian lakes. The map, in the standard “shapefile” or .shp format, can be downloaded from GeoGratis, a website the provides free base maps of Canada.

The next step was to identify which of these lakes on the map were named in the bill. I cut-and-paste the list from an online version of the legislation and imported it into ArcGIS.

The software then converted each of the

longitude and latitude coordinates from this list to a point on the map. The points appeared as single dots that were over-layed on the map of the lakes.

Using an ArcGIS function called “spa-tial join,” the software selected only the polygon lakes that had matched up with a dot representing a named lake.

In theory, this should have perfectly selected from the map of lakes only those that were named in the budget bill. Un-fortunately, as most data journalists come to learn, things rarely unfold so smoothly with these kinds of projects.

The longitude-latitude coordinated listed in the budget bill were inaccurate. ArcGIS matched some of them to the wrong lakes based on these fuzzy locations.

I exported this list of matched lakes to Microsoft Excel, and wrote a quick formula to look for errors in the matching process. Where the name of lake from the map didn’t match the name from the bud-get bill, I flagged the record for review.

This began a laborious process of manually checking the location of each of these records by entering the coordinates in Google Maps and comparing the result with the map ArcGIS.

Once I was confident I had the selected the correct lakes from the map, I imported another map into ArcGIS that represented the federal ridings. This map is available for free from Elections Canada.

I use this map a lot and had already matched up each riding on it with the name and political affiliation of the MP that held the seat.

With both the lakes and ridings on screen in ArcGIS, I ran the spatial join

function again, this time selecting options that would identify the ridings that were contiguous – immediately adjacent to – each of the lakes.

Many lakes, particularly the larger ones, had shoreline in more than one riding. The program generated a tidy list of all the lakes with the names of every riding it touched, along with the MP and party affiliation.

To better analyze this data, I exported it from ArcGIS back to Excel.

Using an Excel function called Pivot-Tables, I generated a breakdown of this data based on party affiliation.

The data showed that 90 per cent of the lakes had shoreline in ridings held by Con-servative MPs, but only 20 per cent were contiguous with NDP ridings and six per cent with Liberal ridings. (The numbers did not add up to 100 because many lakes are adjacent to more than one riding.)

Another analysis based the same data showed that 68 protected lakes were lo-cated in Ontario, but only four in Quebec.

Odder still, a disproportionate number of the lakes fell within two Ontario rid-ings, both held by Conservatives. Many were in Treasury Board President

Tony Clement’s riding of Parry Sound –

Muskoka, which boasts some of the most expensive cottages in the country.

Some of the lakes protected in Clem-ent’s riding have $5-million cottages perched on their shores and count Hol-lywood stars and NHL players as regular visitors. Under the new law, these lakes surrounded by affluent cottagers would continue to enjoy federal protection, while the vast majority of Canadian lakes would not.

The government said it had used freight-movement statistics to determine which lakes to add to the protected list and also said it did a further “qualitative analysis” to consider the historical importance of each waterway.

The GIS analysis paid off with a front-page story (LINK TO STORY) and questions in the House of Commons.

Journalists who want to learn more about using mapping software are encour-aged to attend workshops at the Canadian Association of Journalists convention in Ottawa on the weekend of May 4-5.

Glen McGregor is a reporter with The Ottawa Citizen who specializes in data journalism.

By Glen McGregor

Protecting playgrounds of the rich

The Conservative government’s omnibus budget bill gave “cottages” in certain Conservative rid-ings special treatment

PLAYGROUNDS OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS:Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s riding of Parry Sound – Muskoka has some of Canada’s most expensive “cottages”, which routinely sell forbetween $2.5 million and $5 million. Actress Goldie Hawn, pictured here on March 7, 2012, signing a copy of her book ‘10 Mindful Minutes’, has one of those cottages.

PHOTO CREDITS: AP Photo/Joel Ryan/The Canadian Press/Justin Tang

The data showed that 90 per cent of the lakes had shoreline in ridings held

by Conservative MPs, but only 20 per cent were contiguous with NDP ridings,and six per cent with Liberal ridings.

Mapping

41 MEDIA SPRING 2013 42

Mapping

The federal budget has just been announced and you’ve been tasked

to report on how the budget’s expenses will be distributed throughout Canada. In another assignment, you’ve been asked to cover Canadian participation in Earth Hour and how people across the country celebrated the event.

While you have no experience in build-ing maps, you understand the importance of using maps to help properly tell these stories. You may have access to numer-ous location-specific data. However, your organization has no mapping department or software to create maps.

Esri, the leading provider of geographic information systems (GIS), makes the process of building maps easy with its ArcGIS platform. It’s a complete solution that allows you to integrate numerous data

and present it as compelling maps. ReNew Canada, a business magazine

that focuses on infrastructure manage-ment, used the technology to create top100projects.ca, a Web-mapping app that brings its yearly report on the Top 100 Infrastructure Projects in Canada to life.

The interactive app allows users to research projects by dollar value, sector, location or funding type. Clicking on an icon representing a project on the map opens a popup window that shows details and photos of the project, making it easy and quick for users to find the information they need.

See this case study on ReNew Canada’s Top 100 Projects app.

Leverage the best mapping technol-ogy

For more than 40 years, Esri has set the

direction for mapping technology and has developed a GIS platform with the most advanced and complete functionality for mapping and analysis. ArcGIS not only allows you to present your data using beautiful, content-rich, interactive maps, it also enables you to intersect and analyze numerous types of information – big data, open data and your own data – to find stories.

Ottawa Citizen’s Glen McGregor complements traditional news-gathering techniques with ArcGIS in support of investigative reporting. He has used the technology for several years to assist with his stories, including a recent article ex-ploring revisions to the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which seeks to remove federal protection from much of Canada’s waterways. (Read his write-up on page 39)

Using ArcGIS, McGregor merged the geographic information of electoral districts with thousands of shorelines to determine the percentage of protected waterways within each federal riding. He then combined this data with election results from 2011 to calculate the break-down by MP, riding and party. Based on the analysis, he reported that after federal changes to waterways rules, 90 per cent of protected lakes lap on the shores of Conservative ridings.

“Maps are only as meaningful as the data behind them. GIS provides the abil-ity to extract meaning from enormous amounts of information both quickly and accurately. As a result, it serves as a valu-able springboard for stories that would simply be impossible to pursue without the use of this technology,” says McGregor.

Mapping made easy with ArcGIS Online

ArcGIS Online, Esri’s cloud-based map-ping platform, represents a quick-and-easy way to get started with mapping. It allows you to access free maps, data and tem-plates; create your own maps; and share and publish them so they can be viewed on multiple devices. You can also use ArcGIS Online to investigate and analyze data, and uncover stories. Browse the Esri Story Map Template Gallery.

Here are some examples of maps that use Esri story map templates:

Canada from the International Space Station – This story map uses the Story-telling Map Tour template and shows a selection of tweets by Commander Chris Hadfield from the International Space Sta-tion. It is based on a Web map created by Dave MacLean from Nova Scotia Com-munity College’s Centre of Geographic Sciences (COGS).

Toronto Crime Map – This story map uses the Storytelling Text and Legend template to show the total number of an-nual crime occurrences in each Toronto neighbourhood from 2004 to 2011. It was built using multiple Web maps, featuring a time slider that animates the changes over time. Readers can click on a series of tabs to view thematic maps containing data for different types of crimes.

Canada’s Changing Political Landscape – This story map uses the Storytelling Compare template and shows an effec-tive comparison of federal election results from 2004, 2008 and 2011. The Globe and Mail posted this Web map on its Web site as part of its election coverage. The Tele-gram in St. John used these side-by-side maps to provide a compelling visual for its front page story about the election results.

See more examples of story maps at:

storymaps.esri.com/partnerstories. Getting started with ArcGIS OnlineWith ArcGIS Online, you can easily cre-

ate maps to tell stories of various depths – from simple ones that show a location of a subject or event, to more complex stories that examine cause and effect, compare two or more themes or places, show change over time and movement patterns, as well as reveal interrelationships.

To get started, all you need is to sign up for a free ArcGIS Online Public Account. Download this Tutorial that walks you through the steps of creating an account and building a simple Web map.

CBC News’ David McKie used the data to tell a story about some of the country’s most problematic federal contaminated sites in advance of the Environment Com-missioner’s report, which pointed out that the Harper government was on the hook for billions of dollars in clean-up costs. Download the csv file he used here.

To continue with the rest of the tutorial, sign up for the Data Journalism Workshop at the CAJ 2013 Conference on May 4 by sending an email to conference@caj.ca. A sign-up sheet will also be available at the CAJ Registration desk on Friday, May 3.

For more information, visit esri.ca/caj.

Creating a map in minutes

Esri’s leading mapping platform allows you to build in-teractive story maps easily, quickly and at no cost

By Karen Li

43 MEDIA SPRING 2013 44

Leaving early on a Friday afternoon is always risky for Ottawa reporters.

Everyone knows that’s when real news breaks out — the stuff the government would like to see disappear into the Friday night ether, squeezed out of largely pre-printed Saturday newspapers and already recorded political shows.

And so it went on a recent mid-February Friday afternoon, just before a parliamen-tary recess week. Indian Affairs Minister John Duncan announced he had resigned from his portfolio. The reason? A letter he had written 20 months earlier to the Tax Court of Canada on behalf of a constitu-ent — inappropriate ministerial meddling, however well-intentioned, with a judicial body. Some wondered whether Duncan’s departure had more to do with his troubled portfolio. That’s up for debate.

But his resignation was tied to a story that had broken weeks earlier and, in many ways, the events of another wintry Friday afternoon in Ottawa more than 18 years before.

For me, the episode was a reminder of the continuing relevance of old-fashioned political reporting — determining what the rules are and asking whether public of-fice holders are living up to them. Several reporters are doing just that kind of work in scrutinizing the entitlements of senators.

The Senate is not the most transpar-ent body in Ottawa — checking senators’ attendance still involves arranging to look through paper logs.

But as many government agencies put more of their holdings online — or at least in computerized databases — the re-

porter’s task becomes a little simpler. We can apply new methods to help answer the age-old question, are politicians behaving on the up and up?

The day Duncan quit, reporters were told his Tax Court letter turned up as a result of a cabinet-wide review ordered by the Prime Minister’s Office. The PMO sent ministers scurrying to their correspon-dence logs after I reported that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty had written to the federal broadcast regulator in support of a radio licence application from a company based in his Ontario riding.

“Durham Radio has a strong track record for providing excellent service for their listeners and this puts them in a solid position to offer this new service,” Flaherty wrote in his letter, dated March 30, 2012.

“As the MP for Whitby-Oshawa, I sup-port their proposal and their application.”

However, Flaherty’s signature on the letter noted he was not just an MP, but also finance minister and minister for the Greater Toronto Area.

The Canadian Press story, which ap-peared Jan. 17, 2013, pointed out that ethics guidelines issued by Prime Minister Stephen Harper prohibited cabinet mem-bers from trying to influence quasi-judicial tribunals like the Canadian Radio-televi-sion and Telecommunications Commis-sion. The guidelines made special mention of the dangers of political interference with broadcasting matters.

Federal ethics commissioner Mary Daw-son swiftly ruled that Flaherty violated the Conflict of Interest Act — the law govern-

ing ethical conduct of cabinet members — as well as the federal accountability guidelines for ministers.

Bill Curry of the Globe and Mail sub-sequently reported that two other Conser-vative MPs with duties as parliamentary secretaries had written letters to the CRTC on behalf of radio applications, actions that Dawson also ruled to be in violation of the Conflict of Interest law due to their status as public office holders.

But none of the three Conservatives was disciplined for their actions.

The PMO says the ministerial review of correspondence revealed just one other letter — Duncan’s plea to the Tax Court on behalf of his constituent.

But his exit from cabinet reignited calls for Flaherty to quit.

The first step in finding the Flaherty let-ter was an Access to Information request to the CRTC seeking correspondence from ministers and secretaries of state in the last year concerning licence applications.

I was prompted to make the request because the Conservative government had repeatedly challenged court orders on vari-ous subjects. It made me wonder whether this had emboldened ministers to flout the rules on dealing with judicial bodies.

And it was an approach that had yielded results for me in the past.

The CRTC response to my request said all interventions in broadcasting licence processes were already public documents — available at the commission’s public exam room in Gatineau, Que., and on its website — and therefore excluded from the Access to Information Act.

However, the CRTC also noted, interest-ingly, that its website search engine does not retrieve interventions, in order “to comply with privacy requirements” — meaning the record of each broadcasting proceeding would have to be searched separately.

I put the response aside but some days later set about searching through the thou-sands of intervention letters posted online, organized by year and licence hearing. Though it took less than 90 minutes to locate Flaherty’s correspondence, it was a typical exercise in journalistic slogging — the kind you rarely see in TV shows that glamourize the reporter’s craft.

Still, the digital revolution has made finding such needles in haystacks easier.

Back in 1996, colleague Stephen

Bindman and I used the access law to dislodge a letter from the Liberal defence minister to the federal immigration board. Like Duncan, David Collenette was in charge of a stormy portfolio and he, too, resigned when the letter surfaced. The request was one of several we made to quasi-judicial tribunals to see if ministers were respecting the rules.

We were following up on a story each of us had a hand in breaking on the same day two years earlier — though at the time we were competitors. Michel Dupuy, the Liberal Heritage minister, had sent a letter to the CRTC on behalf of a constituent’s radio licence application, the kind of error that would trip up Flaherty years later.

Acting on a tip, I asked the CRTC’s spokesman for a copy of the letter — there was no online database of submissions

in 1994, and searching through countless boxes of paper files in Gatineau seemed a little daunting. Sure enough, some days later he released a copy to myself and my competitor. We both pounced and had a story out within hours.

Dupuy survived a barrage of opposition pressure in the House of Commons question period, but was later shuffled out of cabinet.

The original tip about his letter had come from a trusty source during a chance end-of-week encounter in a hallway as I waited for a meeting to break up.

It was one Friday afternoon I’m glad I didn’t leave early.

Jim Bronskill is an award-winning reporter at The Canadian Press, specializ-ing in security and intelligence, the RCMP and justice-related issues.

The story behind the story

The federal finance minister’s

ethical conduct

Jim Flaherty’s letter supporting a constituent applying for a broadcast licence wasn’t hard to find – it was on the CRTC’s website

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty (left) and Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepare to enter the House of Commons to deliver the federal budget on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday March 21, 2013.

PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

45 MEDIA SPRING 2013 46

Sometimes the facts just get in the way of a really good story

We’ve got a Flagman at a construction site assaulted with a cup of coffee by a driver with road rage. But in the end, it’s the Flagman who comes out as the winner.

Who doesn’t want to hear that story?It apparently happened recently in St.

John’s, Newfoundland. After hearing him tell his story on a local phone-in radio show at a private station, I tracked him down at the worksite.

He had been slowing traffic all morning along a busy road, and the delays were too much for one driver. As he drove past, he threw his cup filled with coffee out the window at the worker.

It was a Tim Hortons “extra large,” the construction worker said.

The coffee missed him by inches, he said, and landed on the ground, coffee spilling everywhere. That’s when he no-ticed it was a Roll Up To Rim contest cup, since it’s that time of year again. He rolled up the rim and saw a big prize!

“A TV set,” he told me on-camera. “It made my day.”

A smile stretched across his face. He seemed overjoyed, genuine, sincere at how his misfortune had turned around so quickly.

“I like to say ‘thank you sir for throwing the coffee,’” he chuckled. “’But don’t do it again please. You might hit someone, you might hurt someone.’”

This man was charismatic, had an amaz-ing story, and I knew anyone watching would think “good for you!”

Every reporter and producer from St. John’s to Toronto, local and network,

every show on all the platforms wanted a piece of this story or, at least, wanted to see it on the air. A network producer for the CBC Radio flagship show As It Hap-pens based in St. John’s also met with the Flagman where she arranged the national radio interview recorded later that day. She also believed every word, thrilled for the man at his good fortune, and thrilled at the thought of putting this man on the air with such a heartwarming story of karma.

The local CBC TV suppertime news-cast and evening radio news wanted the story. Local radio current affairs programs planned to run my full interview with the Flagman. CBC News Network wanted the story, national radio and national televi-sion, too. It was the kind of story that would get people talking across the coun-try, one that would warm the heart.

TV needs pictures to tell a good story, especially one as good as this. I couldn’t wait to get the close-up shots of the win-ning cup and the prize revealed. So, you can imagine my disappointment to learn he no longer had the winning cup. He said he had already gone to the closest Tim Hortons to cash it in. He told me the employee accepted it, took his informa-tion and he’d receive the TV in a couple of weeks.

I didn’t have the pictures I wanted to tell this story. But I also didn’t have proof that he was telling the truth.

That was the first of my nagging doubts, but otherwise his story all made sense, so I pushed the doubt aside. Plus, his sincerity, charisma, and pure joy made up for the lack of pictures and proof. How could you not believe him?

Still, I needed something to work with to get this story on the air. I bought my own Tim Hortons coffee so we could use the cup in the story.

That’s when I noticed there was no TV pictured on the cup, showcasing it as a prize this year. In fact, there were no TV’s on any of the marketing material. That added to my initial nagging doubt, but I figured it must be one of the prizes the company didn’t brag about this year.

My senior producer had already checked the Tim Hortons website and noticed that TV’s simply weren’t offered this year as prizes. They had been offered last year. Then I noticed that the rules on how to claim prizes meant he’d have to mail his winning cup to the contest organizers, not hand it over the counter to an employee and then walk away.

That nagging doubt continued to grow. But could this man, a Flagman, a supervi-sor with a respectable company, be lying to us all? If so, why?

The idea of him lying made less sense to me than the idea of him winning a prize offered in last year’s contest.

By now, I’m getting emails and calls from the assignment desk in Toronto want-ing the taped interview so it could be put on the air, copy for the web, and more.

The push to get this story to air became stronger, but my doubts began to push back.

I now became my own flagman with my own flags, red ones. I alerted the network to put a hold on the story until I received more confirmation.

The pieces in this seemingly straight-forward “victim becomes victor” story

were no longer adding up. And I began to “double-double” check whether there was anything to this story.

I called the Flagman back to get more details. He repeated his story with no hint of contradictions, but acknowledged that his prize appeared to be one from last year’s Tim Hortons contest, so he figured it must have been a cup from last year’s contest too. Regardless, he told us, the Tim Hortons employee told him he’d still get the prize.

And if it wasn’t honoured?

“Easy come, easy go,” he said while acknowledging that the Tim Hortons em-ployee was confident he was a winner.

We all wanted this story to be a winner too. But it was starting to look like a loser.

I had already called the Tim Hortons head office in Ontario, but those calls tend to take a long time to get returned. I also called the Tim’s outlet where he said he submitted his winning cup and other loca-tions along the same street to cover all my bases. Typically, Tim Hortons staff don’t talk to reporters and direct all calls to the head office, so these calls often prove useless. I got the same direction this time, but I urged them to talk to me, even off the record.

The manager gave in and told me no one had come in that day to claim a TV.

“That’s last year’s prize anyway” she said.

This kicker story about coffee and kar-ma now required more fact-checking and phone calls than a brown paper envelope conspiracy story.

Deadlines crept closer.Producers from across the country

wanted status updates.And the thought that this sincere man

with such an uplifting story could be mis-leading us troubled me.

This light-hearted story was looking

more and more like a hoax. As the final deadline approached, Tim

Hortons returned my call. I could sense that the woman on the phone was now just as confused as me. Then she called this story “suspicious.”

As she walked me through the process of the Roll Up the Rim contest, I realized that for the Flagman’s story to be true, a series of unlikely coincidences must occur. Lightning would have to strike. More than twice.

In Tim Hortons Roll Up The Rim

contest, no cups or prizes from previous years remain in circulation. The contest runs “while supplies last.” If he found an unclaimed winning cup from last year, it wouldn’t be honoured since the contest has an expiry date. So, essentially, he didn’t win even if he had a cup.

Next, if you are lucky enough to win anything other than a coffee or a donut, a Tim Hortons employee won’t accept your winning cup. Instead, you fill out a form, make copies for yourself so there is proof, and send it in the mail.

So, here’s where lightning has to strike many, many times. The driver of the car needed to have a winning cup of Tim Hortons coffee sitting in his car from last year’s Roll Up the Rim contest, threw that old cup of coffee at the Flagman, which the Flagman “rolled up” to win. The Flag-man then brought that winning cup to a nearby Tim’s outlet where an untrained, new employee who doesn’t understand the protocol accepted the winning cup and promised him a TV when there was no TV to promise him.

Follow all of that? That’s a lot of lightning strikes. And the Tim’s manager proved that last part didn’t happen.

The network producer for As It Happens phoned the Flagman to tell him we didn’t think the story was truthful, but also asked

if he’d go back to Tim Hortons to get his “winning cup” since an employee doesn’t have the authority to accept it. Even after the story unraveled, we gave him the ben-efit of the doubt in that phone call.

He said he “won’t be doing anything about it now.”

And that, for me, was the proof I needed that he had made up the whole thing. If he had, indeed, won a thousand dollar TV set, he wouldn’t be giving up that prize so easily.

There was no longer any doubt. This

whole story had been a hoax. But why?The Flagman insists the story is true. So

I suspect a driver did, indeed, throw a cup of coffee at him. And the Flagman was trying to get even. So he called the local phone-in radio show, perhaps not realizing he’d ever get the attention of the CBC.

That’s just a theory, of course. We may never know the truth.

However, this chase became a reminder for us all in the newsroom to follow our nagging doubts, to give even the easiest, most straight-forward of assignments the same due diligence as a conspiracy story or one that’s taking down the government.

And a reminder that people we meet with in our business have their own agenda.

A reminder, too, that as the story be-came increasingly complicated and full of holes, perhaps the simplest answer was the right one - it was a hoax.

The Flagman’s story, from the begin-ning, seemed too good to be true. Perhaps that’s why it wasn’t.

Lee Pitts is a multiple award-winning and Gemini nominated TV and radio reporter with CBC News in St. John’s, Newfoundland. He was also a Southam Journalism Fellow at Massey College for 2011-2012.

The story behind the story

The flagman’s story that wasn’t

It turned out to be too good to be true

Lee PittsThe idea of him lying made less sense to me than the idea of him winning a prize offered in last year’s contest.

SPRING 2013 4847 MEDIA

Continued from page 30

I was there in court the day the charge was stayed. I interviewed Badgerow. We have always had a cordial relationship, beginning in 2009 when I showed up at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre hours after he’d been granted an appeal.

After the stay was handed down, I was in my editor’s office talking about an idea I’d had for a long time.

I wanted to write the story of Diane’s murder. The whole story. Everything three sets of jurors have and haven’t known over the years. I wanted to piece together a narrative that began long ago in a way that would make readers care now. I wanted to talk to those who had never talked before.

When I got back to my desk my phone rang.

It was Debbie Robertson calling. The woman Badgerow was alleged to have stabbed with a screwdriver, just a few weeks after Diane’s murder. From her hospital bed, Debbie had given detectives Badgerow’s name. But it took 17 years for them to charge him with her attempted murder. And to connect him to Diane.

Debbie — who I had never spoken to — was calling because she wanted to tell her story. I wish it was always that effortless.

Convincing Brian Miller to talk was another matter.

He is a convicted serial rapist, and the man Badgerow’s defence team has put forward as the alternate suspect in Diane’s

murder.He had never spoken to the media. I went to his place of work, but he

wasn’t there. I went again and left a letter in a sealed envelope. I told him I was writing a story and he would be part of it. I would like to give him a chance to tell me his side.

A week went by. Then another. I wasn’t surprised. Then, when I’d given up, Miller phoned. A tough decision for him to make, for sure. He had no reason to trust me and every reason not to.

We talked more than an hour. It was a candid conversation in which we each laid out what we hoped to get out of an interview. Miller is highly intelligent, extremely eloquent and the best example I have ever known of a serious violent offender who has turned his life around. He has not reoffended. He is extremely successful in his career. He is a productive member of society.

Still, his past cannot be erased or ig-nored.

After several long phone calls, he agreed to meet me in person. Not for an interview, but rather — at my own sug-gestion — to decide if he felt comfortable with me.

We met, incongruously, at a dainty tea shop. I had no notebook. We just talked.

That chat skirted around his history and focused on my story. On Badgerow. On

the murder trials that keep sucking Miller back into the justice system even though he had served his own time. By the time we parted, he had agreed to an interview.

Never have I taken such pains to find the right place to conduct an interview. It needed to be public. It would not be good for us to be alone together. But we also needed privacy. The things I would ask him about could not be overheard.

In the end I convinced a restaurant to allow us in before they opened, to conduct my “meeting.”

Miller was nervous. He said so. We talked for several hours.

I drove away from that interview utterly exhausted. Landing it had been hard work. Doing it had been harder.

New from Star Dispatches: Veteran Hamilton Spectator journalist Susan Clairmont has followed the case of Diane Werendowicz for a decade as it worked its way through the court system. In Unsolved: One Murder, Three Trials: The Robert Badgerow Case, she weaves together the threads of this fascinating story to offer us an insider’s take on one of the most unusual criminal cases to grip Southern Ontario.

Unsolved is available now. To get the full story, simply go to stardispatches.com and subscribe for $1/week. Single copies can be purchased for $2.99 at starstore.ca or itunes.ca/stardispatches.

newsroom. For all its strengths, separa-tion of church and state also meant no seat at the table when the big decisions were made. Anyone who doesn’t want to know what the numbers say should not be trusted with editorial decisions. Listening to demand is smart journalism, so is giving people what they have no way to demand because they don’t know about it yet. If you are good at one, the other goes better.”

At The Canadian Press, editors are now proactively working with the news agency’s sales and marketing team in discussing coverage of major events like the Olympics. As a news wholesaler, CP doesn’t face the same ethical dilemmas of working with sales staff as other news organizations that depend on advertising revenue. CP makes it money by selling its editorial services, so there should be a

natural affinity for the two functions to be integrated.

The editorial staff need feedback from clients about the type of content they want, says Charles Messina, CP’s vice-president of sales and marketing. Feedback and meeting the demands of clients doesn’t replace news judgment or impinge jour-nalistic standards, but it does help both the editorial and sales team at CP “understand where the puck’s going to be.”

Skok says sophisticated feedback through the use of digital metrics should be used intelligently.

“Obviously we shouldn’t stop reporting on the stuff that doesn’t get eyeballs, but having said that, if a story doesn’t have impact by targeting the right eyeballs, then we have to ask the difficult question: Was it worth it?”

This is an expanded version of an article that was part of an Executive MBA as-signment at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management about the integration of the Editorial and Marketing functions at The Canadian Press.

I worked on the assignment with fellow MBA candidates Arun Agarwal, Karen Chuk, Abid Kabani, Andrea Ng and Adolfo Uribe. I enrolled in the Execu-tive MBA program because of concerns I have about the challenges facing the news industry – and the potential impact on society if strong, independent journalism can’t be a viable business. The program is widening my knowledge of finance, mar-keting , change management and strategy – subjects that should now be part of any journalism school curriculum.

Continued from Scott White on page 18