In my view, face-to-face meetings of world leaders are a useful thing, both to promote discussion of foreign and fiscal policies and to advance rapport and understanding. Multilateral summits have always required extensive security preparations, but the large-scale protests that began to accompany them in the latter 20th century increased the costs enormously. For more than 20 years, anarchists have used large and well-meaning protests as cover for their own destructive and criminal activities. Any legitimate protest group or movement that thought things would be different in Toronto was simply naive. Essentially, large-scale protests and demonstrations provide the cover and anonymity anarchists need to operate. The Harper government, the province of Ontario and the integrated security force operating before, during and after the summit understood this; hence, the $1.2-billion security tab.

Given these realities, meetings such as the G20 ought either to go virtual (a severely limiting option) or be permanently located at purpose-build venues that can reasonably accommodate leaders and their accompanying delegations and hangers-on (which can number into the many hundreds per country). The United Nations comes to mind; in the world of graphic novels it might be a Fortress of Solitude. In any case, to spend more than a billion dollars on security for a one-off set of meetings is unsustainable and borders on immoral.

A few critiques of the news media, which on the whole provided fair and balanced coverage of events inside and outside the security perimeter.

First, the use of social media and new technologies as part of the news-gathering process added another dimension to reporting of events, especially on the streets of Toronto. Tools such as Twitter provided an immediacy in reporting that approached real time. Yes, some tweets and posts were inaccurate or misleading, but the work of journalism behind the scenes has always consisted of a process of sorting accuracy from fiction in the context of fast-moving events. With social media, it merely happens more publicly.

But there’s a downside too. Any reporter who has ever covered a rally or strike knows that the mere presence of a still or video camera can alter events. Where a picket line might be peaceful before the arrival of news media (or even after the arrival of a print journalist), it becomes noisy and agitated with the arrival of radio or television. The ubiquity of cameras in cellphones and webcams — in the hands of thrill-seekers, protesters, police and others — raises the stakes and exponentially distorts the event itself, as various actors in the unfolding drama seek their million hits on YouTube or an adrenaline rush they can take away as a virtual souvenir.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Second, the degree to which news media, mainstream and otherwise, provided any type of historical context for the mayhem that began to spill out onto the streets of Toronto was at first remarkably low. Not until Sunday did coverage more frequently begin to include mentions of multilateral meetings and their accompanying protests in places such as Seattle, Quebec City or Kananaskis (the latter as a setting where nature and geography did part of the work of security). Again, background and context seemed more afterthought than preparation.

Finally, there was a bit of a “homer” element to some reports, as national Toronto-based news organizations, with Toronto-centric news sensibilities, staffed by Toronto residents, wrung their hands in distress and worried aloud about the impression their coverage of violence in the streets of Toronto the Good was leaving on the rest of the world.

Equally interesting, however, was a discussion titled “In Harm’s Way,” moderated by Cliff Lonsdale, a professor at the University of Western Ontario’s graduate journalism program. The panelists were Rodney Pinder, director of the International News Safety Institute, based in Britain, Dr. Anthony Feinstein, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder on journalists, and Lorne Motley, editor-in-chief of the Calgary Herald.

The session was fascinating, given each of the unique perspectives present. Pinder argued forcefully for the need for journalists to report on the casualties among their own — something we’re often loath to do. More journalists die each year around the globe in the line of duty than do aid workers, he said, yet journalists do not often report on deaths or the threat of death within their ranks. Feinstein discussed the prevalence of PTSD among journalists who cover war and conflict, but also made the point that reporters who cover the police, crime and court beats over many years can also suffer from the disorder. Motley provided a glimpse into the emotional journey within his newspaper’s newsroom in the hours, days and months after Herald reporter Michelle Lang was killed in Afghanistan (see my previous post).

To promote awareness of these issues in Canada, Lonsdale and veteran journalist Jane Hawkes have co-founded the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma, which “promotes the physical and emotional safety of journalists in Canada and abroad. We also address the impact of coverage on people caught up in violent and traumatic stories as well as the effects that covering violence and trauma may have on news consumers.”

One of the Forum’s goals is to make hazardous-environment training — the kind provided by large news organizations to their journalists ahead of risky assignments — more widely available to freelance journalists and others who may not be provided with such preparation. Though many Canadian journalists and their employers agree with that notion in principle, fundraising for it has been a challenge.

My own view is that Lonsdale, Hawkes and the rest of the board of the fledgling Forum are onto something here. As news organizations and their distribution platforms change, and as those companies divest themselves of full-time staff in favour of additional part-timers and stringers, the numbers of freelance and unilateral journalists are likely to swell. And the need for better preparation for dangerous situations will grow too.

Citizen journalists commandeered the front of today's Globe and Mail

Like CITY-TV, they’re everywhere. The grainy photographs of dozens of “citizen journalists,” such as those that appeared on last night’s Toronto-area newscasts and websites, as well as today’s morning newspapers, are often touted as the harbingers of a new form of journalism that will eventually displace the less agile mechanisms of legacy media.

Perhaps. One need only look at the front page of today’s Globe and Mail to recognize the impact that hundreds of thousands of cellphone-toting Canadian consumers are having on the daily record of local events, especially weather. Aggregated into a whole, they’re doing what traditional media could only have hoped to do as recently as a decade ago.

The difference is the proliferation of relatively inexpensive cameras, either tucked into cellphones or standalone units. They’re cheap, they’re within easy reach and they’re everywhere. (The latest iPhone 3GS, for example, can shoot stills or video, though at only three megapixels.) Combine that with Canadians’ enduring fascination with extreme weather and the result is the kind of pervasive storm coverage Ontarians have witnessed in the past 24 hours.

The increasing reliance of Canadians on citizen journalists, however, also brings risks, the most serious of which is digital manipulation of sound, video and still images. Photo enhancement and editing software now makes altering photographs as simple as, say, moving the image of a photo-crashing squirrel into an existing shot. Which, I suppose, raises the question: Were any of the photos among the plethora of images that swamped media outlets last night fakes instead of the real thing?

The most memorable case in recent Canadian journalism history of a hoax of this nature is, arguably, the 1985 case of the Toronto Star and a front-page photo of a tornado that its editors believed had swept through central Ontario. Given that good photographs of tornadoes were still relatively rare, the Star paid a teen hundreds of dollars for the photo. Only later was it revealed that the teen had photographed an image of a U.S. tornado from a back issue of the Barrie Examiner. Red faces abounded in the Star’s newsroom.

The proliferation of tools for journalism among tech-savvy citizens has enormous potential for democratizing and popularizing information flow. But it also comes with risks. And in an age of pixel-by-pixel manipulation of video and still images, to say nothing of audio and text, spotting the pretenders will be much more difficult than it would have been for the The Star to spot the phony handed it. Sadly, even some “professional” journalists have given in to the temptation to manipulate and fabricate information, in text and in images. With the rise of citizen journalism, news consumers will have to be even more cautious and aware of the growing risks.