The digital manipulation by The Economist for its cover, left, of a news photo taken by Reuters photojournalist Larry Downing, right, is a recent example of the ethical challenges posed by imaging technologies.

Since the advent of digital photography in the early 1990s, there have been hundreds of cases of manipulation of news photographs by newspapers and magazines for editorial, artistic and cosmetic purposes. The practice, of course, preceded Photoshop and its competitors: Airbrushing, touchups and other forms of darkroom sleight-of-hand have been in use for decades, especially at magazines. But the arrival of digital photography software in the newspaper industry and at the consumer level introduced a new set of ethical questions within journalism.

The current debate over the use of an image of President Barack Obama at the Gulf of Mexico, with an oil platform in the background, is only the latest. In it, a cover version of the Reuters photo, manipulated by The Economist, has local resident Charlotte Randolph digitally scrubbed away, while another figure in the original shot, U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, was cropped out.

An article yesterday by Jeremy W. Peters in The New York Times cogently presents the arguments for and against such treatment. It’ll be a good case study for discussion at my journalism ethics class at the University of Western Ontario tonight. Reuters, meanwhile, has issued a statement saying the edit at The Economist violated its policy.

For a good summation of the view commonly held in newsrooms, both in Canada and the U.S., see this essay by photographer Frank Van Riper in The Washington Post.

The Canadian Press has a long and distinguished history in the annals of Canadian journalism. The news cooperative was formed in 1917 by Canada’s newspaper industry as a means of sharing news across the broad expanses of an emerging country which, only a dozen years earlier, had grown to stretch from sea to sea to sea. The real catalyst for its creation, however, was the First World War and the growing appetite among Canadians for news from the front. Information was relayed via telegraph wires.

Over the ensuing decades, CP, as it became known, became the mainstay of print journalism in Canada. It was maintained by member newspapers, which also contributed stories to the service to supplement CP’s own national staff and news agenda. A photo desk was added as transmission of pictures over great distances became feasible, and broadcast news services were added as television took hold in the early 1950s.

As might be expected in an enterprise where the public interest and corporate interests frequently conflict, The Canadian Press has been close to collapse several times in its history. Canwest pulled out of the cooperative on July 1, 2004, to form its own news service to feed stories to both its newspapers and Global Television outlets. Quebecor Media Inc. formed QMI Agency last year for similar purposes; its participation in The Canadian Press ended on July 1 of this year. The agency’s pension plan continues to be hugely underfunded and needs urgent attention.

If the three-way deal gets Ottawa’s approval, it will be interesting to see how the new owners (currently, the three largest members) integrate the news service into their operations and what impact that integration will have on jobs at all four entities. Of national concern should be the extent to which the Canadian Press news service will make its content available to other subscribers — and at what price. Will small, independent or start-up news operations in small communities be able to afford the news services offered up by Canwest, QMI or The Canadian Press? How will information flow across the country be affected? Will competition between the three major companies improve national news coverage or will a narrowed focus by the three corporate news-service owners, as they seek to service the needs of their own properties and divisions, constrict that flow? If, as playwright Arthur Miller said, “a good newspaper is a nation talking to itself,” is a robust news service, or a series of them, vital to the conversations of a nation?

Far less important, but esoterically interesting among those who teach journalism, will be the question of how The Canadian Press’s new owners deal with the question of style at their operations. The Canadian Press Stylebook differs in many respects from The Globe and Mail’s Style Book, which is different again from Toronto Star style. In classrooms and labs, the importance of learning to adapt one’s news writing to some style standard — whether it be The Canadian Press (the standard at most Canadian schools) or some other — is the bane of many a j-school student’s existence. Some additional consistency here might actually be a good thing, though there are strong arguments for the differences between the news organizations on niggling points. And the style purists won’t be easily persuaded.

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.

Reporter Graeme Smith introduces the Talking to the Taliban series on the Globe and Mail's website.

The Globe and Mail, however, has raised the bar once again. Last night’s win at the 30th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards is an extraordinary accomplishment for reporter Graeme Smith, multimedia producer Jayson Taylor and interactive designer Chris Manza. The Emmy recognizes the Globe’s landmark Talking to the Taliban project in the category of New Approaches to News and Documentary Programming: Current News Coverage. Talking to the Taliban had already won an Online Journalism Award for best investigative piece by a large website, an Editor and Publisher (“EPpy”) online journalism award, and an NNA in the best multimedia feature category.

The Globe beat out entries from the New York Times, Washington Post and Reuters for the Emmy honour; the award was accepted at New York’s Lincoln Center ceremony by Smith, who expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to work for a Canadian news organization that could compete with the world’s best.

In winning the Emmy — an award most widely known as one that honours television arts and sciences — the Globe has emphatically underscored the reality of what used to be called “convergence” in days when the notion of legacy media delivering information through a variety of platforms was considered novel or prescient.

The Globe’s story on its Emmy honour is here; it properly acknowledges the work of a large team of journalists in bringing the project to fruition, including foreign editor Stephen Northfield. One name notably absent from the list of contributors is that of Christine Diemert, the former managing editor of globeandmail.com who was sent packing earlier this year and who fairly quickly found work at MSN.ca. Diemert put hundreds of hours into the Taliban project, and no doubt is taking some quiet personal satisfaction in the accomplishment.

Update: The Waterloo Region Record followed up with its own story on Sept. 23. Smith is a native of New Hamburg, Ont.

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.

Inside a North Korean train car, shot by Sean Gallagher for The Globe and Mail. Gallagher is a freelancer based in China.

I’m finding the current series of articles, diary entries, photographs and video clips by Globe and Mail foreign correspondent Mark MacKinnon and freelance photographer Sean Gallagher on life in North Korea absolutely fascinating. It’s undercover reporting at its finest — illuminating, revealing, well-written and robustly illustrated.

I had the pleasure of getting to known MacKinnon on the days, during my tenure at the Globe, when I acted as a substitute assistant foreign editor. He was always a pleasure to deal with and his prose was unfailingly well-crafted and accessible. At that time, he was stationed in Jerusalem; he had earlier served as the newspaper’s correspondent in Moscow. MacKinnon is currently The Globe’s eyes and ears in Beijing.

I plan to make the series compulsory reading for my journalism classes this week. In addition to discussions about the qualities of feature writing, the series will undoubtedly provoke debate about journalism ethics, especially the uses and abuses of deception.

Watch for the MacKinnon-Gallagher series on the list of this year’s National Newspaper Awards nominations, as well as various online journalism competitions.

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

And if that banner looks rather retro, well . . . exactly. It’ll be a bit of a throwback to the heady days of afternoon newspapers, gone lo these many years, complete with news hawkers on street corners squawking out the day’s top story. And that crescent moon — a little reminiscent of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, no?

The publication’s investors, who include St. Joseph Communications (publishers of Toronto Life, Wedding Bells, etc.), Richard Costley-White (owner of Blackburn Radio Inc. and a former publisher of The London Free Press) and a number other private individuals, think they’ve spotted a marketing opportunity here: Deliver to advertisers the option of a glossy product that can be held in one hand by the hordes of commuters exiting Toronto’s downtown on weeknights, thinking about the evening ahead. The initial press run will be about 100,000.

T.o.night editor-in-chief Jodi Isenberg

Whether T.o.night’s target audience will indeed roll their eyeballs over the pages of a print product, instead of scrolling the latest headlines on their BlackBerrys, iPhones or other handheld devices, remains to be seen. But editor-in-chief Jodi Isenberg, a veteran of both staid and scrappy forms of newspapering, is naturally excited by the startup’s prospects.

A graduate of Ryerson University’s journalism school, Isenberg spent 12 years in various editorial capacities at the Toronto Sun before joining the Toronto freebie Metro in 2001. She rose to the post of that tabloid’s EIC, helping launch its Vancouver and Ottawa editions in 2005, as well as Calgary and Edmonton editions in 2007. Within weeks of leaving Metro in 2008, she landed a one-year contract at The Globe and Mail, most of it spent as deputy production editor alongside night news editor Ryan MacDonald. When that contract expired, she was picked up by the Toronto Star on a summer contract, where she could be found until about a week ago. Now, she’s working alongside publisher John Cameron, director of operations Tom Hyde and director of distribution Gareth Smith to ensure the success of T.o.night’s launch.

Detractors of the new venture are eager to point out that afternoon freebies in Hogtown have been tried and failed before; that the time lag between editorial deadlines and distribution through boxes at subway stops and hoarse street hawkers, no matter how tight, is no match for electronic information delivery to handheld devices, and that Toronto’s downtown commuting sophisticates will be easily bored by hours-old Canadian Press copy, TMZ-type newsfeatures and the occasional column.

None of which fazes Isenberg, who envisions a companion website down the road. For now, though, she’s focused on the impending rollout. “It’s a really great concept. I think we’ve got a really good shot at reaching people who, just like the morning commuters, are captive. They’re sitting there, they want something to look at,” Isenberg said. “It feels really right. It feels like it’ll be a great success.”

Update (Sept. 29): See CBC Metro Morning business analyst Michael Hlinka’s commentary on T.o.night here.

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.

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.