Credit where credit is due: The visit was largely arranged by Waterloo Region Record reporter Jeff Outhit, who teaches computer-assisted reporting in Conestoga’s postgraduate New Media: Convergence program. Outhit contacted one of his former Record colleagues, Lianne Elliott (@cbclianne on Twitter), now a producer at CBC.ca; she met our group and arranged a discussion on the future of online media with Kim Fox (@kimfox), CBC News’s senior producer for community and social media.

CBC Online reporter Amber Hildebrandt is currently covering the disaster in Japan.

Following that session, online reporter and producer Amber Hildebrandt (@cbcamber) spent some time describing her use of new media in various reporting assignments, including the trial of serial murder Russell Williams last year. (Read Hildebrandt’s reflections on that experience here.) The morning wrapped up with demonstrations by Elliott of the software and other tools CBC.ca uses in its online reporting, as live coverage of the final landing of the space shuttle Discovery was underway. It included an interview with former Canadian astronaut Roberta Bondar, who had flown on Discovery, on a set nearby.

Along the way, there was also a quick introduction to CBC Radio weekend news anchor Martina Fitzgerald, another of Outhit’s former reporting colleagues, this time at the Kingston Whig-Standard.

Hats off to CBC Online’s staff, who went above and beyond the call of duty in challenging and inspiring our students. The trip was a stimulating and potent reminder of the power of a well-organized field trip to leave an indelible impression.

The first few moments of the June 15 press conference, featuring Péladeau and Teneycke, follow below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Media watchers have already dubbed the Quebecor venture “Fox News North,” given its declared intention to be decidedly colourful and provocative in its news coverage, along with a political orientation that will sit to the right of centre. As if to fire a shot across the bows of news channels operated by the CBC and CTV, Teneycke said he’s leave the “boring” and “condescending” approaches to news to his competitors.

Quebecor faces some difficult challenges in getting its proposed venture off the ground. The first is regulatory: The Category 1 licence required from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to compel cable operators across the country to carry the Sun TV signal on at least one of its tiers is by no means a lock. The second lies in the way of infrastructure: Although Quebecor runs newspapers and cable systems across the country through divisions such as Osprey and Sun Media, it has no video newsgathering apparatus with which to feed a beast as voracious for moving visuals as a specialty news channel. Finally, the experience of the National Post — at its inception, a national newspaper dedicated to serving readers with a conservative, right-of-centre orientation — has been less than a runaway success. Some media experts have speculated about the wisdom of building a TV news channel on the same down-market sensibilities on which much of Canadian talk radio depends.

And what of the Fox-News-North moniker? Here I find the Canadian media establishment just a little condescending. Yes, Quebecor publishes newspapers in which Sunshine Girls make daily appearances and in which reporters, columnists and editorial writers sometimes seem slavishly committed to the political right, no matter what the issues or the nuances within them. And yes, U.S.-based Fox News often seems to revel as much in its ability to provoke anger and controversy as in its ability to unearth and cover a great story with balance and integrity.

But let’s concede two things. First, another national news organization determined to aggressively compete with existing TV news franchises can be a very good thing, both for citizens and journalism. Second, let’s not pretend existing news channels don’t have their own political biases. The test of good journalism and public service should be on the quality of the stories they deliver: in their accurancy, balance and impact. Let’s not deny that the CBC sits slightly left of the political centre, and that CTVglobemedia tries to cover the great yawning middle ground, so long dominated in the political sphere by the federal Liberals. And that’s to say nothing of the Toronto Star, where the Atkinson principles and a left-of-centre sensibility still guide the newsroom — and produce some truly great journalism.

We should not allow political orientation to prejudge the issue of whether or not a new enterprise could make a significant contribution to Canadian journalism. Let the test be its performance.

Ontario Morning host Wei Chen interviews a guest during the show's visit to London.

CBC Radio’s regional morning show Ontario Morning made a rare field trip to London this morning, escaping the confines of the studios at the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto to get out among its listeners. The occasion: this year’s Doors Open London, a weekend of opportunity for those interested in seeing behind the doors and walls of some of the city’s most interesting edifices.

I’ve been a stalwart Ontario Morning listener for many years, because I believe the program does what more media organizations should be doing: journalling the distinctive cultural and political landscape that is Ontario, beyond the shortsighted vistas of Greater Toronto.

I had this discussion several times (to no avail) with editor-in-chief Ed Greenspon when I was a page editor on the night news desk at The Globe and Mail. The Globe, which possesses the capacity to produce up to 10 distinct editions across the country each day, is content to distribute its GTA edition, printed in Mississauga and containing the early Toronto pages, to subscribers from Guelph to Kitchener-Waterloo, through to London and on to Windsor. As a result, readers in those cities get basically the same content, usually consisting of two pages midway through the paper’s A section, as do readers in the GTA — columns and stories derived from the (mostly) Toronto police, politics, education and urban culture beats. With minimal effort, I told Greenspon, those pages — in the Ontario region beyond the GTA — could be converted to “Ontario” pages that would gather in the most important developments of the day from the great rural-urban mix from Windsor to Guelph. It’s home to more people than live in all of Atlantic Canada, billions of dollars in annual research budgets, and a key piston in the country’s economic engine. Alas, I never did manage to sell him on the idea.

Unfortunately, the CBC gives residents of Southwestern Ontario similar treatment in the late afternoon, when it sends the signal of its Toronto-centric Here And Now, hosted by Matt Galloway, to transmitters through the region. Some of the discussion on that program is all but irrelevent to anyone beyond the sightlines from the CN Tower’s observation deck.

All of which makes Ontario Morning, with its strong provincial emphasis and regional correspondents, a unique and valuable pleasure.

Suaad Haji Mohamud (CBC photo)

Kudos to the Toronto Star for going the extra 7,500 miles (about 12,000 kilometres) to cover firsthand the extraordinary plight of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, the Canadian citizen and Toronto resident detained in Kenya for three months after she was falsely accused of passport fraud. The Star’s national security reporter, Michelle Shephard, was in the courtroom in Nairobi today to file a story minutes after Judge Stella Muketi dismissed all charges against Mohamud.

The Globe and Mail, by comparison, hired freelancer Zoe Alsop to cover the story from the Kenyan capital, splicing her prose with Canadian Press wire copy. The National Post assigned a domestic staffer to assemble the story. Canadian Press, likewise, cobbled together their reports using its staff, member news organizations and other wires as sources. Both CBC and CTV used wire services and other news sources to put together their early stories.

The Nairobi assignment must have been a mixed blessing for Shephard, who has been staying on top of the Omar Khadr story for years and has authored a book on him, titled Guantanamo’s Child. In dropping into Nairobi from another assignment in Europe, Shephard was forced to miss this morning’s ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal, which affirmed an earlier court decision compelling the Harper government to press for Khadr’s release. In an age of instant communication, however, she may well weigh in on it and share a byline before tomorrow’s editions.

Three other things to note about this story of bungling by Canada’s foreign affairs department:

• It was originally broken by The Star’s John Goddard last month, based on information fed to him by sources.
• Today’s events demonstrate how agile and multidimensional some large newsrooms have become. In what may be a Canadian first, a broadcaster today aired video on a breaking foreign news story shot by a newspaper. This morning, the CBC aired video of Mohamud’s release, shot by The Star’s Lucas Oleniuk, who accompanied Shephard to Kenya.
• It takes the reach and pocket depth of major news organizations to do some stories. With apologies to diehard fans of social media who claim that a paradigm shift has rendered big legacy media mute, impotent or irrelevant, no amount of Twittering, Facebooking or crowdsourcing would have permitted this story to be told with urgency, context and depth it needed. Some stories require trained journalists in agile boots on far-away ground.

Update: Turns out Shephard was, in fact, on assignment to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, when the call came to make the side trip to Nairobi. She was working on her amazing visit with Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the former Guantanamo Bay prisoner famous for having been a driver for Osama bin Laden. Shephard’s feature, accompanied by Oleniuk’s photography, appears today (Aug. 17).

Update 2 (Aug. 21): Mohamud has filed a civil suit against the federal government for $2.5 million in damages and is demanding an inquiry be held (see the Toronto Star story). Can you say Maher Arar?

In the case of CBC Television News, the pressing need for such a review coincided earlier this summer with at least two other factors: continuing budget pressures and the probability of a federal election campaign within a year. The result is a series of personnel moves and reassignments that will take effect in the coming weeks.

Terry Milewski

The most noticeable for regular CBC-TV viewers will be the installment of Vancouver-based Terry Milewski as the parliamentary bureau’s chief political correspondent in Ottawa, replacing Keith Boag. Milewski has developed a reputation for boldness and courage in the face of political and social pressure. A veteran of CBC reporting from Washington, Jerusalem and elsewhere, he was the target of a complaint of bias from Peter Donolo, then an aide to prime minister Jean Chrétien, during the 1998 Asian Pacific Economic Conference. A subsequent investigation by CBC Ombudsman Marcel Pepin found the complaint to be unjustified and praised Milewski for his “aggressive and critical journalism.” Milewski has also delivered hard-hitting reports on the politics within the Sikh-Canadian community and the tasering of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski. He’s the kind of reporter that managers love to have in their stable, despite the fact that he’ll give them his share of administrative headaches from time to time.

Maclean’s senior columnist Paul Wells agrees Milewski’s assignment to Ottawa will help reinvigorate the network’s journalism on the Hill, praising him for his ability to “jump onto the back of a complex, significant story” and “sink his teeth in up to the gums.” Even the departing Boag told the Hill Times that dramatic change is ahead and that Milewski’s impact will be felt.

I confess I don’t quite understand the CBC’s decision to move Boag to Los Angeles. Informal chatter indicates the City of Angels will be as much a staging ground for assignments to places such as Mexico and the western U.S. as it will be the locale for reports from Hollywood and California. I’m skeptical about that kind of journalistic investment, but hope I’m wrong.

Other significant moves, according to the CBC announcement: Evan Solomon replaces the retired broadcasting giant Don Newman on the talk show Politics. It’ll run two hours daily on Newsworld. Meanwhile, Susan Bonner will go from the Ottawa bureau to Washington, to be joined there by Paul Hunter, and David Common will head to New York from Paris.

Update (Aug. 4): This morning, CBC announced additional reassignments, effective this fall. Peter Armstrong will return to Toronto from Jerusalem to anchor the morning news program World Report on Radio One. Meanwhile, Mark Kelley, who has been a correspondent for The National, occasionally also filling in on the anchor desk, will host a two-hour evening news-talk program focused on the day’s breaking news stories. (Sounds a bit like CNN’s Situation Room or Anderson Cooper’s AC360°, no?) Kelley has also been a contributor to the investigative program Disclosure.

CBC News senior correspondent Brian Stewart

Though he’ll be back on the air from time to time to help cover major events, today marks the last day on the job for CBC News senior correspondent Brian Stewart. After he anchors The National tonight in place of Peter Mansbridge, he’ll saunter off into semi-retirement.

Stewart is a journalist’s journalist and has had a remarkable career. Like so many others of his generation, the 1964 graduate of Ryerson‘s journalism program started in print. He was a reporter and columnist at the Montreal Gazette in the late 1960s, winning a National Newspaper Award in 1969 for feature writing. From there, it was on to a current-affairs show on CBC-TV’s Montreal affiliate, CBMT, and then to Ottawa as a political reporter in 1973. It was while Stewart was in the nation’s capital that he honed his skills and broadened his knowledge in foreign and military affairs — a specialty that would shape the rest of his career.

After a three-year stint as the CBC’s foreign correspondent in London, Stewart joined NBC News in 1985. However, he returned to the CBC two years later to become senior reporter with the CBC’s The Journal.

The rest, as they say, is history. Quite literally. What motivated Stewart in the decades that followed were the things that drive all great journalists: to satisfy one’s curiosity about the world and why things happen the way they do; to bear witness to the unfolding of history at home and abroad; to tell meaningful and important stories in compelling and interesting ways; to find out, firsthand, what will happen next in some of the greatest historical and human dramas of our time.

Like many others, I’ll remember Stewart best for his unparalleled coverage of the famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s. He and fellow CBC journalist Tony Burman were the ones who, almost singlehandedly, alerted the world to the unfolding human crisis in that part of eastern Africa, prompting a massive aid response.

As a foreign correspondent, Stewart was on the front lines of other big international stories too. He reported extensively from Beirut on the Lebanese civil war; he filed gripping accounts of child slavery in Sudan. When the international coalition drove into Kuwait to wrest it from Saddam Hussein’s grip in the Gulf War of 1991, Stewart was the first Canadian reporter on the scene. He witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and filed extensively from the war zones of El Salvador, Iraq and Afghanistan. In all that time amid the dangers of the field, Stewart’s greatest fear appears to have been that he’d somehow get the story wrong.

The CBC has, fittingly, built a special Web tribute page in his honour; several compelling interviews are there, including chats with Burman and Mansbridge. Also available there is the profile that aired last night as part of The National.

Though he’s already past the traditional retirement age of 65, Stewart’s departure from the CBC is part of the public broadcaster’s efforts to downsize through attrition and buyouts. He lives in Toronto with his wife, former broadcaster Tina Srebotnjak, who now works in the communications and marketing department of Toronto Public Library. They have a daughter, Katie.

Al Tompkins

Digital media have made everything a lot simpler and more accessible to the average consumer. When it comes to shooting video, however, a few laws still apply for those who plan to take raw video and audio into some form of post-production.

At a seminar this week for college educators, Al Tompkins, left, on faculty at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., offered up his own version of the Ten Commandments — not a moral code but series of laws for those who want to shoot video, especially the kind that provides coverage of a person or event. Tompkins is Poynter’s broadcast and online team leader, and a highly regarded practitioner and consultant. I fully expected what was the cardinal rule of videography when I was in J-school to be high on his list: Don’t ever “cross the line” (an imaginary line that runs through the spatial plane on which your subject is positioned). Alas, it wasn’t there at all, although I suspect it’s still important for many types of video photography.

Here, then, is his list for those still fairly new to shooting video:

1. Thou shalt not zoom or pan. When these techniques are used, they must be motivated — there for a reason. Otherwise, stay clear. Don’t use those buttons just because they’re there.

2. Thou shalt compose thy shots in thirds. Frame your photos in interesting ways by keeping your subject in one of the screen’s “thirds.” Forget your mother’s commandment to centre the subject in the frame.

3. Thou shalt keep each and every shot steady for a least 10 seconds. Otherwise, you’ll kick yourself in the editing process.

4. Thou shalt seek subjective sound bites. Get your subjects to open up and talk.

5. Thou shalt shoot cutaways, sequences and transitions. Again, they’re invaluable in the editing process.

6. Thou shalt focus thy story into three words. Who did what? Noun-verb-object. Unless you can express it that way, you don’t yet have a clear idea of what the story is.

7. Thou shalt always wear thy headphones. Otherwise, you don’t know what sound you’re recording — or if you’re recording any at all.

8. Thou wilt seek great natural (or ambient) sound and wilt shut up while shooting.

9. Thou shalt honour great natural lighting and put the shadow side to the camera.

10. Thou shalt look for a strong open and a memorable close.

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite hosts coverage of a Gemini space mission in the mid-1960s.

There were many influences on my choice of journalism as a career, but one of them was surely Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite was the avuncular, articulate and dispassionate TV news anchor who, for an entire generation of North Americans, acted as narrator and guide through the most momentous events of their time. During an era when television networks held enormous sway over how Americans understood the world and their own republic, Cronkite was literally the face of CBS News. He personified — and helped define — the term “anchorman.” He was there behind the anchor desk through both Kennedy assassinations, America’s manned space missions, Martin Luther King’s March of Washington and his death years later, the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, Watergate, the Vietnam War and many other seminal stories, his tenure spanning almost two decades (1962-81).

Always the consummate professional, Cronkite only occasionally allowed glimpses of his personal feelings about the stories he covered. The most memorable were his anguish over the death of U.S. President John F. Kennedy (see the clip below, at about the 5:18 mark), his exhilaration at the success of America’s first attempt to land an astronaut on the moon, and his famous editorial on the Vietnam War.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In terms of his influence on history, Cronkite will probably be best remembered for the series of reports he personally filed from Vietnam in 1968, and the editorial that followed on the heels of those reports, in which he declared that war essentially unwinnable (see the clip below). After hearing of Cronkite’s editorial, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” In later years, Cronkite modestly played down his influence on Johnson, saying that his stories and the conclusions he broadcast were probably only one straw in an already heavy load the president was bearing, and that Johnson had probably already reached the same conclusion himself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With the arrival of cable television, VCRs and audience fragmentation in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, the reach and influence of venerable news anchors such as Cronkite steadily diminished. The simultaneous rise of the “shock jock,” news-talk radio and television, and the cult of personality in journalism has rendered figures such as Cronkite as anachronisms. For me, however, his work characterized precisely what good journalism should be: informed, knowledgeable, trustworthy, courageous, considered, balanced and, ultimately as a result of all these, influential.

Cronkite was the gold standard.

Fortunately, he was also a philanthropist. A number of important causes and institutions will carry on thanks to his inspiration and generosity. Among them is the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Ray Anderson performs "Lazy Afternoon" at Sunfest

Sunfest, the annual festival of international music in downtown London, Ont., is on again. Over the past decade, it has steadily grown to the point where it now eclipses what used to be the city’s headline summer music event — the Home County Folk Festival. Sunfest is more culturally eclectic and diverse than Home County, though both have their charms.

During the years I lived in Toronto, I became an ardent fan of the Toronto Jazz Festival. And so when I heard the sound of an amazing jazz ensemble emanating from the northwest corner of Victoria Park this afternoon, I wandered over to have a look.

It was quite a discovery. On stage were The Félix Stüssi Quintet and Ray Anderson, fresh from an appearance at the Montreal Jazz Festival on Friday. Tomorrow, they’ll appear at the Atlantic Jazz Festival in Halifax.

Anderson was the most accomplished trombonist I’ve ever heard. His range was incredible and his improvisation exhausting just to watch. As an amateur hack on the trombone, I was mesmerized.

Anderson and the Stüssi Quintet were a delightful find on one of those warm, muggy Southwestern Ontario summer days — the kind that portends a thunderstorm from morning till night but never actually delivers. Just as well for the Sunfest crowd, which packed the park again.

On the way downtown to Sunfest in my car, I caught Shelagh Rogers’ interview with author John Ralston Saul on her show The Next Chapter on CBC Radio One — a repeat from last November. Saul focused on what it is to be Canadian, the reasons we should celebrate the nation’s complexity, Arctic sovereignty and the role of story in understanding our country. Because of aboriginal roots, Saul said, our national story is much more oral than that of, say, Europe.

The aboriginal way of thinking is actually the inspiration for our national identity, he said. The more quickly we embrace that notion — and the oral tradition that accompanies it — the more easily we’ll embrace the fact that “the aboriginal reality lies at the heart of what we are.”

It all got me thinking about the way we do journalism in this country, and the way a thousand “stories” (in the journalistic sense) contribute to the telling of our national story. What should we be doing differently, if we were really to embrace the aboriginal bias, which, according to Saul, lies at the heart of our identity? Are we too “European” in our storytelling? Do we employ the “orality” of our founding aboriginal civilizations to full effect? Can Canadian media and their news organizations leverage that rich heritage to become even better at the journalism they produce? Lots of food for thought.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I didn’t know then that I’d spend most of my career in print. Sigh.