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.

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?

First, CTV backtracked on an earlier decision (or was all this mere strategy?) to close A-Channel’s Windsor station, saying it would apply to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for permission to convert Wingham’s A-Channel station to a rebroadcaster for its London station. As for CTV’s Brandon, Man., outlet, the network will continue to seek a buyer.

Second, congrats are in order for magazine-stream students and faculty at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, where the Ryerson Review of Journalism has won six awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC). See the details from J-Source.ca here. The awards are testament to the strong leadership and teaching of Ryerson faculty members (and former colleagues) such as Bill Reynolds, Lynn Cunningham and Tim Falconer.

To brighten the day, I took in a short performance at London’s Covent Garden Market during the noon hour by the cast of Stomp.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Globe and Mail's second-floor newsroom

It was great to hear that representatives of The Globe and Mail and Local 87-M of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union reached a tentative agreement just before midnight last night, averting a painful strike. A ratification vote is scheduled for Monday.

Both sides had a lot to lose. The Globe, owned by CTVglobemedia Inc., is trying to hold its own in a soft economy against a resurgent Toronto Star, still the country’s biggest paper by circulation. Meanwhile, the moribund National Post, owned by Canwest, is hanging onto life by its ink-stained fingertips. Globe executives faced at least a couple of additional challenges. The first was the prospect of expecting its newsroom managers, many of whom are razor-sharp journalists but less than technologically savvy, keep both the newspaper and website operations alive and credible during a work stoppage. The second was that the union had a firm grip on the company’s workforce: A single contract bundles all of its unionized employees — advertising, circulation, operations, editorial, etc.

Employees, too, faced difficult circumstances as the journalism job market adapts to new delivery platforms. Details of the new deal aren’t yet public, but pensions, wages and working conditions had been major stumbling blocks. How bitter the pill will likely be known after Monday.

Nevertheless, it’s a good-news story for Canadian news junkies and the task of Canadian journalism. But it raises the question: If the Globe and its union can manage to reach a deal amid a complex, quickly changing media environment where nothing is a sure thing anymore, why can’t Toronto and its outside workers find common ground and get the city working again?