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.

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

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Holmes, 45, has become the latest poster child for Americans hoping to stave off Canadian-style “socialized medicine.” She has appeared at press conferences on Capitol Hill and been interviewed on CNN and Fox News. She has repeatedly told the story of how she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and eventually had surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Ariz., when it became apparent that the wait for treatment in Canada would take months. She remortgaged her home to pay the clinic’s $97,000 bill and is suing the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) to recoup the costs.

(Holmes certainly isn’t the first media darling to be featured on U.S. networks on the issue of Canadian health care. British Columbia businessman Don Neufeldt, who went public earlier this year about lack of timely access to a cardiologist in Canada, forcing him to seek treatment in Oklahoma City, Okla., is another).

As one might expect, Holmes’s case is slightly more nuanced than powerful lobbies or ratings-driven newscasts care to reveal. In today’s Globe and Mail, columnist André Picard offers a piece that provides some background, balance and clarity. Holmes’s tumour was not malignant; it was a benign cyst that, yes, was impairing her vision, but was not life-threatening. Frightening as vision loss would be for any patient, Canadian doctors believed it to be temporary and reversible. They were doing what, in the Canadian and British systems, doctors must do: prioritize patient care.

Meanwhile, Holmes has come under personal attack by defenders of the Canadian system, including bloggers and Facebook users, who are giving the family mediator a little more grief than she’s accustomed to.

Having lived and worked under both systems, I don’t understand the overheated rhetoric deployed by both sides of the health-care debate. Each system has strengths and weaknesses. In the U.S., thanks to competition among hospitals and an abundant supply of health-care professionals, care is often more immediate, especially when specialists are involved. For those with health insurance, most trips to the doctor or operating room carry a cost in the form of a deductible or co-payment. For those without, the quality of care is less robust or comprehensive. Depending on the condition, it may even be absent. Long-term catastrophic illness, for either the insured or uninsured, can spell financial disaster.

In Canada, taxes are substantially higher to bear the massive burden of a national health-care system, but illness is seldom financially catastrophic. Everyone working in the system — from nurses to doctors to specialists — must ration and prioritize care, and that can mean long waits. (See CBC News correspondent Neil Macdonald’s open letter to Americans in the wake of the Neufeldt story.) The system is imperfect at best. Sometimes, wait times can get so long that they threaten Canadians’ right to personal security, as specified in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Remember the case of Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General [2005] in the Supreme Court of Canada? “Delays in the public system are widespread and have serious, sometimes grave, consequences,” wrote Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice John Major, as part of a split decision. “Inevitably where patients have life-threatening conditions, some will die because of undue delay in awaiting surgery.”

Picard’s final observation is a salient one, brimming with irony: Given her medical past, Holmes is now in a position where she would find it nearly impossible to buy medical insurance in the U.S. In Canada, she will continue to be covered and will get the same access to the system as any other Canadian.

A screen shot from the Globe and Mail's interactive graphic

It’s nearly impossible to escape mention today of the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s historic first step onto the lunar surface. Television, radio, newspapers and online portals are overflowing with anniversary stories and tributes to the men and women with the “right stuff” who made it possible — on Earth and in the skies. (By the way, one of the most magnificent media postings today on the anniversary is on the Globe and Mail website, assembled by the talented Tonia Cowan (she of the recent Emmy Award nomination; see adjacent partial screen shot).

As a boy and well into my teens, I was an unapologetic space geek. My own thoughts on America’s push to land a human being on the moon appeared in a column in the London Free Press last Saturday. The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions were noble efforts and demonstrated what could be done when a critical mass of human knowledge and invention is applied to a specific problem.

Accompanying today’s anniversary fanfare in many media is a lot of talk about what’s next for space exploration. More moon missions? A multi-year voyage to the surface of Mars?

Despite my continuing fascination with human endeavour in space, I’m not a big fan of either of the aforementioned projects. Given the reality of climate change and the fact that Earth is already in a state of warmth that scientists, only a few years ago, predicted would take a decade, we’ve got a substantial project much closer to home.

The lunar landing reminds me that it is possible — when knowledge, ingenuity, invention and determination are combined into a potent mix — to solve problems that might otherwise be considered unsolvable. The moon and Mars aren’t going anywhere. They can wait. Ensuring our earthly home is in good condition is the next “giant leap for mankind.”