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.

Ottawa bureau chief-designate John Ibbitson

Replacing Laghi in Ottawa will be columnist John Ibbitson, who former editor-in-chief Ed Greenspon sent packing to Washington several years ago, despite Ibbitson’s dazzling work in the nation’s capital, where he frequently set the agenda for Question Period with his incisive and provocative columns.

Ibbitson has done yoeman service in Washington, covering American politics through the second term of George W. Bush, an intense and scrappy primary process and the historic election and inauguration of Barack Obama. But his posting to the U.S. capital seemed, to me at least, never to have generated the buzz or impact of his earlier stint in Ottawa, where he was a daily must-read. His return there bodes well for national political journalism.

Here’s editor-in-chief John Stackhouse’s memo to staff today:

I am sorry to announce that Brian Laghi, our Ottawa bureau chief, is leaving The Globe and Mail next month to pursue a new career.

Brian was hired in Edmonton in 1995 where he was the Journal’s legislative bureau chief. He was The Globe’s reporter in Edmonton and the north, specializing in politics and the creation of Nunavut. His experience as one of the first journalists in the country to understand and appreciate the grassroots Reform movement served him well when he moved to Ottawa and shone as an expert in the conservative movement. Along with politics, he covered federal-provincial relations, immigration and other issues. He has been bureau chief since 2004, helping direct coverage of two elections, budgets and major assignments and explaining federal politics to our readers. He won a National Newspaper Award in 2002 as part of a team on bank mergers and was nominated with Jeffrey Simpson last year for their profile of Stephen Harper.

Brian will start a new job in September as director of communications and public affairs for the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

At the same time,  I am delighted to announce that John Ibbitson will be the next Ottawa bureau chief. In this role, he will report to Sinclair Stewart, the new national editor.

For nearly two decades, John has been a front-row observer and writer of Canadian and U.S. politics. Along with his deep knowledge of politics and government, he will bring to his new role boundless energy and enthusiasm for our coverage of national affairs.

John started at The Globe in 1999 and has been Queen’s Park columnist, Ottawa political affairs correspondent and, since May 2007, our Washington correspondent and columnist. He’s also the author of the just-published Open and Shut: Why America has Barack Obama and Canada has Stephen Harper.

Born in the  Ontario town of Gravenhurst, John graduated from the University of Toronto in 1979 with an Honours B.A. in English and from the University of Western Ontario in 1988 with an M.A. in Journalism.

Before joining the Globe, John worked as a reporter, columnist and Queen’s Park correspondent for Southam papers. He’s also published three works of political analysis: Promised Land: Inside the Mike Harris Revolution; Loyal No More: Ontario’s Struggle for a Separate Destiny and The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream. In his spare time, he writes plays and young-adult novels. His latest, The Landing, won the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. John’s writing has been nominated as well for the Donner Prize, the National Newspaper Award, the Trillium Award and the City of Toronto Book Award.

John and Brian will be in the bureau together for a formal handover early next month. Please join me in thanking Brian for his great contributions to the Globe, congratulating John on a brilliant run in Washington and wishing them both well in their new roles.

John Stackhouse

Lieutenant William Calley Jr. became the central figure of the My Lai massacre

Anyone old enough to remember the Vietnam War will recall the infamous My Lai massacre. It was a seminal event in the history of that war because of its effect on public support for U.S. involvement there. Millions of Americans who, until My Lai, had supported or wavered in their support for the war turned against it — so stunned were they by the atrocities committed by American troops.

The destruction of the village and the massacre of its Vietnamese inhabitants occurred on March 16, 1968. Although the official U.S. tally puts number of dead at 347, other estimates of the death toll exceed 500. Most were women, children and elderly people. Many were raped, tortured and mutilated. The soldier in charge of the U.S. Army platoon that invaded the village was Lieutenant William Calley Jr.

The events of My Lai may have escaped media and public attention entirely if not for the fact that several U.S. soldiers were so shocked and disturbed by the conduct of their own troops that they wrote letters to President Richard Nixon, the joint chiefs of staff, officials at the Pentagon and others about the incident. The horrors of the My Lai massacre surfaced publicly more than a year later, when, despite official secrecy about the letters, independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story on Nov. 12, 1969. In the months that followed, My Lai remained a major story in newspapers, radio and TV. Calley and more than two dozen of his men were charged, but only the lieutenant was eventually convicted. He was sentenced to life in prison, but served only three and a half years under house arrest in his quarters at Fort Benning, Ga.

Since then, Calley had remained silent about My Lai. Until yesterday.

At a Kiwanis Club in Columbus, Ga., he offered an apology. Read the Associated Press story here; the Telegraph story is here.

A footnote: The My Lai massacre occurred one month after Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett filed a story, on Feb. 7, 1968, in which Arnett reported, “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a U.S. major says.” The town in question that day was a Vietnamese provincial capital, Ben Tre. Since then, this type of statement has become known as “Ben Tre logic.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hergé's graphic novels are most popular in Europe.

To say Tintin inspired me to become a journalist would be an overstatement. He was, after all, merely a cartoon character who lived inside the covers of my favourite books at the local public library. As a child, I checked out those volumes again and again.

But it probably was Tintin who established the notion in a young, impressionable mind that some people were, by vocation, reporters. Tintin was such a person, even though, throughout his “graphic novel” existence, he never filed a story, content to criss-cross the globe solving mysteries and pursuing crooks, accompanied by the colourful cast of characters that were his friends. Illustrator Georges Remi, who adopted the pen name Hergé (the French pronunciation of his initials, reversed) had me in his spell.

It hasn’t yet made many waves in North America, but in Europe, anticipation of Steven Spielberg’s 3D treatment of the young reporter’s adventures is already arcing upward. The Spielberg project is in post-production, slated for release in the fall of 2011. It stars Jamie Bell as Tintin, Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock and Daniel Craig as Red Rackham. Given that Spielberg’s first Tintin film follows the plot of The Secret of the Unicorn, speculation is already rampant about a sequel, which would naturally be Red Rackham’s Treasure.

Born in Brussels in 1907, Remi’s first drawings appeared in a scouting magazine when he was only 14. Six years later, he’d been hired by the daily newspaper Le Vingtième siècle to be editor-in-chief of Le Petit vingtième, its children’s supplement. The Tintin series was launched in 1929.

Remi managed to spin nearly two dozen tales of intrigue and adventure featuring Tintin, his mostly incompetent allies and a notorious collection of villains, before the illustrator’s death on March 3, 1983. As remarkable as the stories, however, were Herge’s illustrations. At a time when newspapers were just beginning to grasp the reader appeal of the funnies, Tintin’s creator took the art to new levels. Scenes were rendered in great detail compared to the work of his contemporaries; foreign landscapes, besides being vividly appealing, were topographically correct. The plots, too, were fairly complex: spies, arms merchants, smugglers, capitalists and communists, thieves, traitors and assassins abounded, always to be exposed by our hero and his pals.

Today, Hergé’s legacy is carefully guarded by his estate and its conservators in Belgium, who operate the official website. A small band of Tintin enthusiasts worldwide collects trivia and monitors developments, including the international team of bloggers, programmers and moderators at Tintinologist.org, among them Simon Doyle (@tintinologist on Twitter), and British webmaster Chris Tregenza (@TintinMovie on Twitter), who runs TintinMovie.org. An Hergé museum in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, opened earlier this year.

Below, a short clip in which Hergé draws his famous hero and dog Snowy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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?

Kate Dubinski

Reporter Kate Dubinski, the journalist most often assigned to Twitter duty at the Dundas Street courthouse, provided some answers in a post on her blog late yesterday. The trial, already into its sixth month, is cutting into the summer vacation season — a period when the paper is trying to accommodate holiday requests while still getting some semblance of a news report out onto the streets and up online. Language in the newsroom employees’ CEP contract with Sun Media’s London division stipulates that each staff member has the right to take two weeks of his/her annual vacation allotment during the summer months. The result is a managerial scramble to fill reporting, copy editing, photo and other duties in a vigorous attempt to keep the machine running. During the high vacation period, it can feel like the entire operation is being held together by duct tape and baling twine.

Dubinski also explains the additional difficulties posed by an order from the judge regarding media coverage during the appearance of the Crown’s star witness, who may only be referred to as “M.H.” Tweets from the overflow courtroom — the place from which earlier Twitter dispatches originated — were forbidden. Reporters were permitted to send tweets only from outside the main courtroom. This poses an additional challenge for journalists, but is not really an issue in terms of the decision on whether to double-team the trial coverage with a Twitterer.

The credibility of M.H. could have an important bearing on the outcome of the trial. Having broken important journalistic ground through the use of Twitter in the courtroom setting, it’s unfortunate that the Free Press couldn’t follow through with consistent Twitter coverage during the latter part of this particular witness’s testimony.

I’m guessing there are at least two additional issues here.

First: Dubinski’s “followers” on Twitter number about 850. Pinch-hitting reporter John Miner has about 350. Sims, not generally concerned with Twitter updates as much as she is about the newspaper’s main trial stories, has fewer than that. The bottom line is that, regardless of the novelty of the tool and complaints by some far-flung Twitter users that the paper is letting them down, the potential readership of courtroom tweets tops out in the hundreds. With stories on city-worker absenteeism, traffic fatalities, storm damage and a string of downtown arsons (or any other such set of calamities on any given day) to be doled out to a mere handful of reporters, any assigning editor at a regional newspaper will redeploy staff to yarns that will appeal to readers in the thousands or tens of thousands instead.

Second: While I was a page editor at The Globe and Mail, the newspaper made an interesting discovery during the case of Robert Pickton. Like other national media, it had planned for a year’s worth of wall-to-wall, witness-to-witness coverage of the trial of the Vancouver-area man accused in the homicides of six women and the suspected in deaths of 20 more. The Globe provided saturation coverage during the first week of proceedings, then surveyed its readership. The results were somewhat surprising and illuminating. To simplify, they showed that readers were intensely interested in the start of the trial and the Crown’s opening account of what exactly had happened. Readers wanted to know that someone was on trial for the horrors that had become evident, and they wanted to be kept abreast of developments. They certainly wanted to know the end result of the trial. But they said a clear no-thank-you to daily detailed accounts of a gruesome case that was expected to run for many months. The Globe, as well as other national media, revised their plans accordingly — and somewhat drastically. Public curiosity and tolerance, even in sensational cases, appears to have its limits.

Long story short: I’ve never stopped. Through most of my tenure at The London Free Press, I continued teaching “service” courses in journalism history and communication theory to Western’s undergraduate students, as well as courses in municipal reporting, business reporting and journalism ethics to graduate students. When I left the Free Press for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, I simultaneously accepted an endowed chair at Ryerson University’s journalism school, where I taught journalism ethics. When an offer arrived last year to teach journalism full-time at rapidly expanding Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Kitchener, one of the finest community colleges in Ontario, I accepted the challenge.

Although teaching certainly wasn’t new, I’d never before taught foundational newswriting courses. And it had been a long time since I’d dealt with undergrads fresh out of high school. Despite that, my first full-time year went well. I quickly located my undergrad “legs” (though I continued to teach a journalism ethics course to grad students at UWO as well) and found teaching this type of student to be extremely rewarding.

Journalists will have to learn to write for mobile platforms.

Classes begin in a month and, once again, I’ll be teaching basic newswriting to both the first-year print and broadcast sections. But I plan to tweak my course content and teaching style slightly to better equip students for a rapidly changing job market and the expanding toolbox with which they’ll do and deliver journalism. (I always resented profs who trotted out the same course outlines and presentations year after year, distributing handouts that were a decade old, and promised myself I’d never become one.) So here are a few of the changes:

1. Encouraging “high performance”: Even more than last year, I’ll emphasize the importance of a fast start as the first step toward a “high-performance” career. It’s language borrowed from education consultant Don Fraser, whose seminar I attended in the spring. My students will have to compete — and compete hard — for journalism jobs. The best way to boost their chances of success will be to encourage them to develop a track record of excellence, beginning in their first year as journalist-trainees. They should aim not just to be capable journalists but high-performance journalists, fully competent in the many skills and tools they’ll need by the time they graduate. And it begins on orientation day.

2. Making corrections tangible: Last year, as I graded student assignments, I marked errors, omissions, style mistakes, etc., and handed them back next class, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation on the most common errors. I provided examples of the right way and wrong way to present information. Then I hoped they’d incorporate what I’d said into future stories. This year — though it may sound “old-school” — I’ll ask them to make the necessary corrections in their stories and resubmit them. Sounds archaic, I know, but I’m beginning to think there’s no better way for them to learn from their mistakes than by seeing corrected versions on their screens and feeling them through their fingers.

3. Platform agnosticism: I’ve bought into the notion that our print and broadcast “streams” or programs are quickly becoming anachronistic. While college administrators work on revamping programs to produce more fully flexible journalists for integrated newsrooms, I hope to get ahead of that curve by placing greater emphasis on story, then expecting wide-ranging discussion on how best to gather information, what tools and media to use, and what platforms might be best suited for final delivery. Conestoga’s curriculum in the first year is common to both the print and broadcast streams anyway. And in addition to writing traditional hard-news ledes for print and broadcast, they’ll practise writing news for blogs, screen crawls, mobile devices and Twitter posts.

4. Adding a little low-tech: As in most journalism programs, our students learn to use modern tools in their newsgathering, writing and presentation. Most have laptops. Wi-fi is readily available across campus for free. They use Zoom H2 recorders and edit audio with Audacity or Audition. They shoot digital photos and edit them in Photoshop. They learn pagination software such as Quark or InDesign. We have plenty of high-def cameras to lend out, and they edit their video using Final Cut. But late last year, I began to worry about . . . well, whether they could effectively use a reporter’s notepad and a pen. I noticed they were using their laptops and smart phones for note-taking in many classroom and newsgathering situations. But could they cover a story with nothing but a pencil and paper? At crash sites, demonstrations and the like, they may not have access to their precious digital technology. So I’ll look for ways to incorporate manual notetaking. And if it’s raining, snowing, cold or windy outside, so much the better.

5. Getting off campus: To improve their grasp of how journalists function in the real world, I’ll look for opportunities to get them out — already in the first semester — into newsgathering situations and functioning newsrooms off campus. Faculty have sometimes arranged for class trips to news organizations in Toronto, for example, some time in the second semester. I’ll push for that kind of thing to happen early on, in order to give students an early peek at the realities of the vocation and to beef up their sense of being journalists in training. This is more difficult than it sounds, because of the part-time jobs students hold down, their life situations, and their general lack of transportation aside from mass transit. But with some creativity, we should be able to provide a more robust real-life experience.

One month to go; time to put some meat on these bones.

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.

Photo by Frank_BB on Flickr

“She really wants to be a food editor — but it’s hard to tell her that print is dead.”

That was the final line of an email message I received today from a longtime friend. He was asking my advice on how to counsel a female acquaintance, younger than both of us, who harbours a dream of becoming a journalist.

First, I don’t believe print is dead. Print journalism, as we’ve known it over the past half century, is morphing. It is moving from a position of supremacy and influence to a much more egalitarian position with respect to other journalistic platforms. Some futurists have speculated that “ink-on-dead-trees” newspapers may soon be the preserve of a small but affluent minority; I prefer to think its future applications will be more classless than that.

If we apply the principle of “platform agnosticism,” in which I’ve been immersed over the past week, we begin by asking what news consumers will demand from gastronomic information and journalism in the years to come. Food, of course, is a sensual experience. It wants to be tasted, touched, smelled and savoured. What journalistic platforms deliver those best? Still photography, certainly. Perhaps also text. Audio, if a great chef or restaurateur is being interviewed. Illustration or video, if the task is to communicate food preparation techniques. Maps and mobile applications, if the story concerns the movement of a coffee bean from plant to percolator — or the location of the nearest Starbucks. The new journalism will permit the story to drive the delivery platform and allow users to participate in the story itself, not have the delivery platform dictate the terms of the story — and some monochromatic treatment of it — to the user.

My advice to my friend: Suggest to his acquaintance, who already has a degree in food sciences, that she broaden her communication skills in order to be able to tell food-related stories in as many ways and through as many media as possible. Whether she eventually seeks work with an established news organization or as a freelancer, she’ll need as many tools in her toolbelt as she can fit in there alongside all those spatulas and spices.

Coincidentally, a blog post earlier this week by British multimedia journalist Adam Westbrook titled “Introducing: the journalist of the future,” heavily retweeted in the Twitterverse, speaks eloquently to the precept that more journalists will soon be information entrepreneurs rather than desk-chained drones of large corporations. The next generation of journalists, Westbrook posits, will be entrepreneurial, adaptable, multitalented, courageous and collaborative individuals whose great thrill will be to tell stories and tell them well, with all the tools at their disposal.

They may not all be wearing gear-filled backpacks, but they’ll certainly be required to be proficient at delivering information in a variety of ways. In that fact lies a lot of food for thought as I contemplate the arrival of a new class of aspiring journalists at my office door within about a month.

Today, that trial moved into high gear with the appearance of the Crown’s star witness — a man who says he was present the night of the deaths.

The Bandidos trial, as the London Free Press has come to refer to it, has provided ample evidence that you can indeed teach an old heritage news organization new tricks. It has effectively deployed new media technologies to augment its traditional print coverage and the results have been outstanding.

During the trial’s most critical phases, a reporter has been dispatched to the London courthouse’s overflow courtroom (on a floor apart from where the trial takes place, but connected via video link) to file short Twitter dispatches. (Today, it was John Miner, who tweets under the name JohnatLFPress; often it’s Kate Dubinski, who is KateatLFPress on Twitter’s servers.)

First thing this morning, however, Superior Court Justice Thomas Heeney imposed a temporary halt to the use of laptops and other devices in the overflow courtroom, as well as a publication ban on the full name of the witness, though it could be used inside the courtroom. I suspect it’s to offer an additional margin of protection for the man, who the Crown hopes will nail down their case for them.

Inside the courtroom proper, justice reporter Jane Sims, recently nominated for a National Newspaper Award for beat reporting, provides the bulk of the daily reportage for print. However, she and other reporters such as Randy Richmond have also produced videos on various aspects of the trial.

These include a video, part of trial evidence, from a gathering of Bandido club members; a video on the trial’s background and the victims of the massacre; and an orientation video to the specially equipped courtroom that is home to the trial, which became required viewing for my journalism students shortly before classes ended in April.

When Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien went to trial in May on charges of influence peddling, the national media were ecstatic over a ruling by Justice J. Douglas Cunningham that would permit smart-phone users to text and tweet the proceedings from the trial in real time. News organizations rightly proclaimed the importance of the breakthrough they’d achieved in justice reporting. They were oblivious to the fact, however, that the Free Press in London had been reporting in exactly that fashion from the Bandidos trial, under the watchful eye of Judge Heeney, for weeks.

Coverage of these criminal proceedings by the Free Press illustrates what can be done, even with modest means, as a 157-year-old news organization creatively deploys a range of technologies across a variety of delivery platforms to cover an important national story. The familiar problem, of course, is how to monetize it all. As is the case with nearly all news organizations with a newspaper at its centre, print subsidizes everything else. At least for now.