investigating the death of a mobster

MEDIA
T HE C A N A D I A N A SSOCIAT ION OF JOURN A LIS TS • L’A s s o ciatio n Ca n adien n e des J o u r nali st e s
2015 SPRIN G ED ITIO N • V O L.16, N O . 4
I N V E S T I G AT I N G T H E
D E AT H O F A M O B S T E R
The Hamilton Spectator dug
into a case
that went cold
2015 SPRING EDITION • VOLUME 16, NUMBER FOUR
MEDIA
Table of contents
6 THE DEATH OF A MOBSTER
The Hamilton Spectator digs into the 1983 death of a Toronto mobster and finds police incompetence -- and much more .
10 INVESTIGATING PATIENT SUICIDE IN CANADA
Annie Burns-Pieper, an associate producer with CTV ‘s W5, explains why she researched patient suicides in Canadian hospitals.
12 SUN MEDIA’S TAKEOVER
Postmedia is poised to absorb Sun Media’s print and digital network.Who will survive? By Mark Burgess
14 THE POLITICS OF BUDGETS
Budgets are among the most important documents governments produce. Alan Freeman helps make sense of the numbers.
16 THE POLITICS OF POLLS
They’re a staple of political reporting. But how do we know which ones are reliable? Eric Grenier has some pointers.
18 PEELING BACK THE LAYERS OF THE NATIONAL CAPITAL REGION UNION
Warts and all, the National Household Survey is still useful for stories about your community. By James Bagnall
A PUBLICATION OF
THE CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF JOURNALISTS
L’Association Canadienne des JournalisteS
EDITOR
David McKie
1-613-290-7380
LEGAL ADVISOR
Peter Jacobsen, Bersenas
Jacobsen Chouest Thomson
Blackburn LL P
ART DIRECTION and DESIGN
David McKie
THE CONTRIBUTORS
James Bagnall, Mark Burgess, Annie Burns-Peiper, Alan Freeman, Eric Grenier, Mary Gazze, Adam Hooper, Dean Jobb,
Fred Vallance-Jones, Glen McGregor, Lucas Timmons, Kelly Toughill, Stephen Ward, David Weisz
PHOTO AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE: WITHER THE SUN AND A SENSE OF DEJA VU: With the Sun News Network gone, the tabloid newspapers are poised to be swallowed up by Postmedia. Paul Godfrey, then president of the Toronto Sun, is pictured on the phone in 1998 following the
merger of Quebecor. Ironically, he’s now part of the mega deal that will fold the newspaper chain into Postmedia.
PHOTO CREDIT: REUTERS/STAFF
20 LEARNING LESSONS FROM THE OTTAWA TERROR ATTACK
Social media played a key role during the unfolding drama. Practitioners explain what they could have done better. By Mary Gazze
22 SPENDING QUALITY TIME WITH THE CBC
The corporation’s mandate is impossibly unrealistic. By Kelly Toughill
24 FINDING STORIES IN DATA
Governments are making more data available. Glen McGregor explains how to turn the numbers into stories.
26 SHOULD JOURNALISM SCHOOLS TEACH CODE?
Fred Vallace-Jones argues yes.
28 ETHICS FOR THE FOURTH ESTATE
With more people calling themselves journalists, it’s important to establish clear ethical guidelines. By Stephen J.A. Ward
30 TWISTED MAPS
Maps distort reality. So the one you use, depends on the story you’re trying to tell. By Adam Hooper
33 FREELANCING
David Weisz explains how he has learned from his mistakes.
34 DEGENAIS AT 20
The ruling in Dagenais v. Canadian Broadcasting Corp. was a game-changer for journalists. By Dean Jobb
COVER PHOTO: THE DEATH OF A MOBSTER: It may be 31 years since a commuter noticed Domenic Racco’s bullet-riddled body strewn across
the railroad tracks, but the police are no closer to solving a murder that resulted in two wrongful convictions, questions about the police, the Crown
-- and Ontario’s privacy commissioner.
PHOTO CREDIT: THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR/BARRY GRAY
35 MAPPING WITH TILEMILL AND TILESTREAM: PART TWO
Building on his first tutorial, Lucas Timmons explains how to export your map tiles and create a map server.
2MEDIA
2015 SPRING
3
2015 WINTER EDITION • VOLUME 16, NUMBER FOUR
The First Word
Exploring death and hope
The stories in this edition run the gamut
By David McKie
I
t certainly wasn’t by design, but the
theme of death runs through the first
portion of this edition, beginning with an
extensive interview with the Hamilton
Spectator’s Steven Buist, whose work
should be familiar to readers of Media.
The case in question could be mistaken for a mini-series or Hollywood
movie filled with secretive cops, a dubious
Crown attorney, and two unlovable “ bad
buggers” who spent seven years behind
bars for a murder they didn’t commit.
It’s a cold case that goes all the way
back to 1983 when a commuter discovered
the bullet-ridden body of Domenic Racco,
the mobster you can see on this magazine’s cover.
Add to the mix, a damning police investigation that was subject of a cover-up, and
you have a case ripe for the right kind of
treatment.
Enter Steve Buist and the Hamilton
Spectator, a paper that has been featuring
his award-winning work for a long time.
In an age of news cycles populated with
short, snappy breaking-news stories, and
viral pet videos, the Spectator chose to, in
managing editor Jim Poling’s words, go
“long and deep,” in recounting an incredible tale that is still unfolding.
Media magazine had a chance to sit
down with Buist and Poling to hear them
explain why and how they chose to tell
“Railroaded”, and the resources they
needed to do it.
Death is also the unfortunate subject
matter of a research project that consumed
almost of a year in the life of Annie
Burns-Pieper, an associate producer with
the CTV’s investigative magazine program
W5. As is frequently the case with long
investigations, Burns-Pieper was motivated by a tragedy that hit close to home:
the suicide of a high school friend who
killed herself while on a day pass from a
Vancouver hospital in 2010.
“Her death made me wonder about the
care of other suicidal patients in hospitals,” Burns-Pieper writes.
“Suicide Watch” features stories of loss
and disbelief that a patient can take his or
her own life while in a place that is supposed to be the safest possible refuge: a
hospital.
Filing freedom-of-information requests
to obtain a national picture became an
exercise in frustration and perseverance,
a lesson in the importance of sticking to a
game plan.
The legwork turned up an eye-popping
number: 300 inpatient suicides over the
past ten years. One family featured in
“Suicide Watch” is suing. Others may do
the same.
Death’s shadow also hovers over the
newspaper industry. In this case, Quebecor’s 175 Sun Media publications. Postmedia is poised to swallow them whole,
pending the approval of the Competition
Bureau, which may impose conditions
to foster more competitive environments
for the sale of advertising -- not editorial
content!
We all know that the Sun News Network
is now history. Whatever you thought of
the television network’s content, the sad
fact is that a lot of people are unemployed,
something this industry should never
celebrate.
The newspapers, on the other hand,
will survive. But in what form? And more
importantly, what will happen to the news
coverage in markets where the dailies
share the same owner? Not to worry,
assures Postmedia president and CEO
Paul Godfrey, ironically the same executive who was the Toronto Sun president
in 1998 when it merged with Quebecor.
Godfrey points to the Vancouver market as
proof that common ownership can get out
of the way of unfettered competition: in
this case between the Vancouver Sun and
The Province.
Of course, it remains to be seen how
the media landscape will evolve. Mark
Burgess interviewed experts. They have
their doubts.
Along the same vein, we take a look
at the CBC’s saga, certainly not a tale of
death, rather one of survival.
As it gears up for a future where radio
and television take a back seat to digital
content, the public broadcaster is attempting to cater to a general and dispersed
audience, swimming against the tide of
niche marketing.
Though the public broadcaster receives
slightly more than a billion dollars a year
in federal cash, that budget has failed to
keep pace with forces such as inflation.
Add to this absorption of budget cuts that
began in 2012 and ramped up to an annual decline of about 10.5 per cent a year,
plummeting add revenue, and the loss of
4MEDIA
hockey, and you have a corporation fighting for relevancy.
It’s almost as though the powers that be
didn’t see it coming.
At a particularly tumultuous meeting,
a CBC employee asked the corporation’s
president Hubert Lacroix why he didn’t resign. Though the future is uncertain, Kelly
Toughill argues eloquently for its preservation as a venerable entity that can bring
people together, just like her grizzled and
much-loved aunt Honey, whose holiday
dinners she fondly remembers.
While casting a critical gaze at the
industry is important, it’s also crucial to
aggressively explore ways to get better at
what we do.
Thankfully, this focus is the opposite
of death, and is based on the assumption
that the media landscape is changing in
ways that journalists and the schools that
produce them should – no, make that must
-- embrace.
Fortunately, there are a number of
columns that achieve this goal, beginning
with James Bagnall’s explanation of
how he used data from the 2011 National
Householder survey data to paint a picture
that ran counter to the conventional wis-
dom that viewed the nation’s capital as a
withering, one-industry town.
Using income and pension data, he demonstrated that Ottawa’s economy has thus
far survived the federal budget cuts to civil
servants. Journalism that bucks conventional wisdom is worth pursuing.
In this case, the Ottawa Citizen was also
able to map the results, showing readers
the hot spots for government workers and
political staff.
“The map instantly explained so much
about the Region – its commuting patterns, the presence of very large civil service bedroom communities in the suburbs
of Aylmer and Orleans, and the intensity
of government in the square kilometre
around Parliament Hill.”
It’s no wonder that “Capital Reckoning”
was the most popular story online for four
consecutive days.
And speaking of online, social media’s
importance continues to increase (cabinet
ministers are more likely to tweet their
new policy or political reaction to a critical event, before issuing a news release),
and at no time was this more evident than
last October’s shooting at the National
War Memorial, minutes away from Parlia-
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2015 SPRING EDITION
ment Hill.
The death of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the
hands of an assailant who turned out to
be Michael Zehaf-Bibeau unfolded in real
time on social media.
While some Canadian media outlets
were praised for their even-handed coverage, there were still many lessons to be
learned. In an intriguing conversation
with some of the social media bosses for
the country’s largest news organizations,
Mary Gazze strings together an impressive list of do’s and don’ts, an essential tip
sheet in these days when the talk of terror
both home and abroad dominates the news
cycle.
Fortunately, journalists have other
places to turn to find stories that are not
part of anyone’s agenda.
Increasingly, governments at all levels
are releasing data online. The city of Toronto issues more than two million parking
tickets a year.
Journalists with knowledge of MySQL
can download this data, and analyze it for
story ideas that can keep you going for
months. Federally, journalists can download data sets that track everything from
contracts, to vehicle recalls to access-toinformation requests.
And if anyone thinks that data is unimportant, just check out the job board at
the recent National Institute for Computer
Assisted Reporting conference in Atlanta
where postings for journalists with data
skills provided a welcome antidote to
the doom and gloom enveloping on the
industry.
There are also encouraging signs that
these kinds of jobs will also become more
abundant in Canada.
So it is against this backdrop that Glen
McGregor’s explanation of how to find
stories in data takes on more relevance,
leading him to conclude that “it’s a great
time to be data journalist.”
So let’s end on that positive note.
David McKie is an award-winning journalist based in CBC News’ Parliamentary
Bureau, and a journalism instructor at
Algonquin College, Carleton University
and the University of King’s College.
He has co-authored Digging Deeper:
A Canadian Reporter’s Research Guide,
Third Edition; Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Comprehensive Primer; and Your
Right to Know: How to Use The Law to
Get Government Secrets.
He also edits Media.
5
FEATURE
The story behind Railroaded
T
he award-winning Hamilton Spectator has a rich history of innovative investigative stories. In 2012, the paper’s “BORN: A Code Red
Project” won the Canadian Association of Journalists overall award for investigative journalism. The year before, it earned the CAJ’s top prize for
the similarly titled Code Red, which also “combined a scientific approach
to investigative journalism” to delve into hidden aspects of Hamilton’s
poverty.
This time, the newspaper set its sights on murder, injustice and cover-up.
Its investigation into the 1983 killing of a Toronto mobster, the wrongful convictions of two local men who police called ‘bad buggers’, and the
subsequent investigations by the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner was storytelling at its best.
Media magazine recently sat down with investigative reporter Steve
Buist and the paper’s managing editor, Jim Poling, to discuss how the
project came together, how they obtained a damning confidential Ontario
Provincial Police report, why the province’s information commissioner neglected to force the province to officially release the report, and why they
decided to tell the story in the form of a “journalism book”.
Q: WHAT IS THIS STORY ABOUT?
STEVE BUIST: “It’s a story that goes
back as far as 31 years that’s still timely
today because elements of the story that
involve the murder of a Toronto mobster
still hadn’t been fully brought to light. So
we had a dead mobster, found in 1983.
We had four men charged with first degree
murder, but convicted with lesser charges.
That seemed to end the case. And then
out of the blue, we had these gentlemen
charged with first degree murder who
had never been connected to the crime.
They’re found guilty, sentenced to life in
prison. Years later, they win an appeal. A
judge looks into the case and is horrified
to discover that an overwhelming array of
evidence that should have been disclosed
to them was never disclosed.
So that brings the OPP into the picture.
They are asked to conduct an investigation
into the Hamilton and Halton police forces
and the Halton Crown attorney. The judge
said, ‘virtually every piece of evidence
that could have helped them defend themselves had not been turned over to them.’
It was an incredible injustice.
So the OPP conducts this investigation.
They interview 11 people. They have five
investigators on the case. Eight months
later, they issue a three-page press release
that basically says ‘no problems here.
Move along. Nothing bad happened.’
What isn’t disclosed is that there is a 318page report compiled by the OPP that, to
this day, has never been fully made public.
And for 16 years, that document has been
the subject of a fight that’s gone all the
way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
And the Ontario Ministry of Community
Safety and Correctional Services has been
fighting to keep that document from public
view. We obtained an unredacted version
of that document, and it basically shows
6
MEDIA
THE DEATH OF A MOBSTER: It may be 31 years since a commuter noticed Domenic
Racco’s bullet-riddled body strewn across the railroad tracks, but the police are no closer to
solving a murder that resulted in two wrongful convictions, questions about the police, the
Crown -- and Ontario’s privacy commissioner.
PHOTO CREDIT: THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR/BARRY GRAY
Jim Poling
that the OPP’s investigation was inadequate, virtually inept, and almost comical.
It raises some serious questions about the
ability of the police to investigate other
police and the Crown attorney in this case.
Q: WHEN YOU SAY YOU OBTAINED IT. WHAT DOES THAT
MEAN?
STEVE: Sources. There have been
some decisions that made portions of that
document publicly available. Nobody has
ever reported on it until this series. And
I don’t even think that a lot of people
realize that, 16 years later, there is still
a fight going on. And there were also
a number of pieces of information and
evidence that had never been made public
before, dating right back to the murder
of Domenic Racco in 1983. And so this
was just a story that wraps up everything
from the murder of a mobster, to the
wrongful conviction of two men, to ac2015 SPRING EDITION
Steve Buist
tions of the police and the Crown, to the
inability of police to investigate other
police, to what has happened to these two
men since the 25 years they were arrested
for this crime. I had everything.
They were wrongfully convicted. They
spent seven years in jail for this crime
before they were freed. And neither one of
them has ever received an apology. Neither has received an explanation as to how
this could happen to them. One of them
was deported, and for the past 17 years
has been living in England and has never
been allowed to return to Canada, in part
because of this crime.
JIM POLING: They didn’t receive an
apology from police, from court officials
or from politicians. I find that shocking. If
we were talking David Milgaard, Steven
Truscott, and the list goes on (it would
have been different.) I can’t figure that one
out.
STEVE: The involvement of Dennis
Monaghan and Graham Court didn’t come
into play until 1989 (six years after the
mobster’s death). Basically, we’ve run the
gamut of all three (provincial) parties. The
Liberals, the NDP and the (Progressive)
Conservatives have all been in power at
various points during this exercise.
JIM: It hits (Ontario Premier) Kathleen
Wynne’s dedication to social justice. I
don’t even know why there hasn’t been
an inquiry. Now, to be fair, police rules of
evidence, evidence-gathering and Crown
testimony have changed. We have what’s
black-and-white. Two people in our community were wrongfully convicted of a
murder. And it becomes, ‘Oh, well that’s
interesting.’ The only thing that I can put
my finger on is police who we have since
talked to off-the-record have said ‘Well,
they were bad buggers. They were mean
bastards and they deserved what they got.’
I understand the sentiment. I don’t agree
with it. That’s not who we are in Canada.
I can’t understand politicians, opposition
included, not taking this to a higher plane.
Nobody’s ever bothered to figure out why
and how this happened. There doesn’t
seem to be any interest in figuring out
what went wrong here.
Q: DID THAT LACK OF INTEREST
MAKE DELVING INTO THE STORY
DIFFICULT?
STEVE: I don’t think so. There’s one
element that we haven’t talked about
yet. This fight has ping-ponged between
Information and Privacy Commission
(IPC) going to the (correctional services)
ministry and saying ‘you’re not exercising
your discretion properly.’
Q: WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO
USE THE LAW TO GET?
STEVE: Access to this 318-page OPP
report.
Q: AND YOU TRIED TO GET IT
THROUGH ONTARIO’S FREEDOMOF-INFORMATION LAW
STEVE: Technically, that fight is still
under way. It started in 1998, The Spectator and the Criminal Lawyers’ Association
both filed access requests for that report.
JIM: At the time a judge deemed these
were wrongful convictions. He issued a
scathing indictment from the bench of
how police and the Crown conducted
themselves. And the two police forces
involved, Halton and Hamilton, said ‘well,
we better look into this.’ The OPP came on
7
Dennis Monaghan spent seven years in jail before being allowed to walk
A hand-cuffed Graham Court shields his face while
free because of the Crown and police’s shoddy handling of the investi-
sitting in the back seat of a police car. He was
gation. Police told Buist off-the-record that Monaghan and Court were
eventually deported to England. He and Monaghan
“bad buggers” who “deserved what they got.”
never received an apology for their wrongful con-
PHOTO CREDIT: THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR/BARRY GRAY
viction.
PHOTO CREDIT: FROM SPECTATOR FILES
as a third party, neutral investigator to look
at this. They conducted a criminal investigation. So charges could have been laid.
The judge had the strongest words of all
for the behaviour of the Crown attorney.
The judge said there was a lot of potential
evidence that never made its way to court.
STEVE: On Sept. 25, the Information
and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario issued a final order in this case. They threw
up their hands and they said “we’re walking away from this, and we’re closing the
file. We’re not going to make any further
orders of the Ministry of Community and
Correctional Services, because there’s no
sense in ordering the ministry to comply
with our legislation because they have not
been listening to what we’ve been telling
them. Most astoundingly, the information
commissioner said there’s no legal mechanism that we have, that we can use, to
force the ministry to do what they’re being
told to do. ‘So we’re just going to close
the file and walk away’. So, basically, it’s
an acknowledgement by the commissioner
that they don’t have any legal remedy to
force someone to do what they’re told.
Any other ministry would be looking
at this and saying, “Perfect, if we just dig
our heels in enough, eventually, we don’t
have to do anything.” The commissioner’s
office has just set a precedent by saying
“if you don’t listen to our rules, we’ll just
close the file and walk away”.
The Criminal Lawyers Association has
launched another application for a court
review to go back to this on the principle.
To us, it’s immaterial. We’ve got the full
document. We published a 32-page report
on it.
Q: HOW DIFFICULT WAS IT TO
COMMIT RESOURCES TO THIS
JIM: Yes, it’s challenging. In my role as
managing editor, I spend a lot of my time
overseeing the newsroom. It’s challenging. It’s also massively important. Good
content is what good newspapers and journalism sites provide. The question is how
do we do it? Our paper has a long history
of enterprise and innovation. Newspaper
as a novel is a term that we’ve been using for several years. Look at the whole
Code Red series and what it has done for
conversations around public health, social
determinants to health, income inequality,
education, and cancer. It’s deep and it’s
important.
Q: SO HOW DID YOU DECIDE
TREATMENT, THEN?
STEVE: We knew it was going to be
a very large story. There was no wrong
way to do it. We could have done it as a
multi-page, per day type of ongoing serial.
Those are quite common in the newspaper
business. You run it like a chapter a day.
We could have done it as larger pieces
spread out over weekends to reach your
largest audience. And that would have
been fine, too. But this was a story that
was going to be complicated for people to
understand. There were a lot of moving
parts, a lot of characters. And if you serialize it, every time you run a new piece, you
have to catch them up and that wastes a lot
of time, energy and space.
JIM: The magical moment for me was
when we met with the circulation-marketing director. He threw out the idea of
publishing this as a one-shot deal that he
would charge readers a premium for. And
that’s where the conversation got interesting and it influenced the shape and form of
how we told the story.
It was an interesting conversation
because a department other than editorial
was involved in how we portrayed it to
readers. So what we ended up doing was a
32-page tab section. Readers got a roughly
20-thousand word story in one sitting.
STEVE: It was designed, essentially,
like a book with a cover that looked like a
book cover.
JIM: It has a table of contents, cast of
characters, front cover and a back cover.
STEVE: So on that day, the cost of the
paper was bumped up for a single copy.
JIM: And we printed an overrun and
it was sold at stands separately for weeks
following. There were single copies of just
that section they could buy for a dollar.
We also had support from the publisher.
Because the publisher knew what the story
was and believed in it. We had a lot of
buy-in throughout the building that helped
make this happen.
JIM: It was an affirmation that all roads
lead to good content.
Q: HOW DO YOU MAKE THAT
HAPPEN IN A 24/7 NANO-SECOND
NEWS CYCLE?
JIM: You have to pick your spots. We
knew that as we got into this, and Steve
started to report it, that it was fundamentally a good story. It was an important
8MEDIA
story. There was a strong element of public service to it. And we had to tell it long.
This was not a 20-inch story. You don’t
have that with every story.
Q: WHAT ABOUT ONLINE? ANY
THOUGHT OF HAVING AN INTERACTIVE VERSION?
JIM: We had a strong online presence.
We locked down our website on this.
People paid for it in paper and online. So
it remains locked. We knew we couldn’t
do this as an ebook. The turnaround was
not quick enough and it would have been
drastically expensive. We knew what we
could do with print. We have a strong
online model, but we’re not at the point
where we can optimize it for different
tablets or interfaces.
STEVE: One thing that we did is we put
it on a visually different platform online.
JIM: We had an outside server. But it
was tagged with omniture codes so that
the Spec site still got credit for it.
STEVE: It looked a lot nicer. It was
cleaner. More like you were reading an
online book. It was broken into chapters.
And what we could give people there was
not only a better visual way to read the
story online, but we could give them the
added content that they wouldn’t get on
the paper product such as interviews with
the subjects, a little documentary-style
video, things that add a little bit of extra
value.
Q: HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO DO
THIS KIND OF JOURNALISM?
JIM: What becomes difficult is marshalling the resources. It’s not just about
having a reporter commit a length of time.
It’s finding the editing. It’s finding the
2015 SPRING EDITION
copy editor, production, and photography.
So there’s a whole chain reaction. I have a
hard time imagining not doing this. Readers expect us to do these kinds of stories.
As much as people want viral cat videos,
they want long and deep. They expect to
be informed and they expect good context.
They want sense made out of complex
issues.
Q: HOW MANY EXTRA COPIES
DID YOU SELL?
JIM: The last report I have was in
excess of 2,000 copies at the stand. I
know the web hits on the weekend where
in excess of 5,000 for that story alone. It
generated considerable traffic. There was
a bump in single-copy circulation on the
Friday, by I believe is a couple of hundred,
which is not insignificant.
STEVE: And don’t forget, that was at a
premium price, too. The good news is that
we didn’t lose people. We added people,
and they were prepared to pay a premium
for that.
Q: DO YOU BUY THE DOOM AND
GLOOM ABOUT THE DEATH OF
NEWSPAPERS?
STEVE: There will always be a need
for information. And there will always be
a need for people to gather information, to
find information, to synthesize that information. The physical format that it appears
in, I guess that will change eventually. I
was a person not that many years ago who
said I can’t stand reading stories on my
computer screen. I can’t imagine not doing
that now. It’s amazing how fast you’re
able to change your behaviour. But that’s
a format thing. And so I’m back to, at the
end of the day, there’s always going to be
a need for information no matter how you
present it.
Q: WHAT ABOUT YOU, JIM?
JIM: It’s an interesting question. I wish
we had the answer. I tell young reporters, do not worry about the format. Worry
about your reporting and the information
you’re giving readers. I think too many
newspaper editors are too concerned about
things that they needn’t be. I still believe
there’s a strong culture of print newspapering. There’s a thirst for it. People picked
this 32-page story and carried it around
with them. They accessed it like they
couldn’t access a tablet. It was portable,
handy, well-written. We had a good story
and we told it well. It’s too easy for people
to bail out. A good story will bring them
back.
Related links
Ontario (Public Safety and Security) v. Criminal Lawyers’ Association (2010) – Freedom of Expression and Access to Government
Documents
http://ualawccsprod.srv.ualberta.ca/ccs/index.php/constitutional-issues/the-charter/
fundamental-freedoms-section-2/676-ontario-public-safetyand-security-v-criminal-lawyersassociation-2010-freedom-ofexpression-and-access-to-government-documents#_ednref6
9
FEATURE
Prashant Tiwari took his own life while under psychiatric care at Brampton Civic
Hospital (pictured below). His family is calling for a coroner’s inquest and is planning to sue the hospital, pictured below.
PHOTO CREDIT: PROVIDED
Investigating patient suicide in Canada
One of the keys was filing lots of
freedom-of-information requests
By Annie Burns-Pieper
T
his past June a family in Brampton,
Ontario thought they had done the
right thing.
When Rakesh Tiwari arrived home and
saw his eldest son, Prashant covered in
blood after a failed suicide attempt, he
rushed him to Brampton Civic Hospital’s
emergency room. Prashant was transferred
to a unit for mentally ill patients and
placed under suicide watch.
The advice given to families with loved
ones in crisis is to get them to the hospital,
and get them help. The Tiwaris are like
many Canadian families, they trusted the
hospital to care for Prashant and prevent
him from further harming himself. He was
on suicide watch, after all.
Yet, just 10 days after Prashant’s admission the Tiwaris got news they never
imagined possible. Prashant ended his
own life at the hospital while he was supposed to be under strict observation.
W5 uncovered that the Tiwaris are
not alone: approximately 300 patients in
Canadian hospitals or health facilities have
committed suicide in the last 10 years
alone.
While talking about suicide generally
has become more common in Canada,
little is known about suicides in hospitals.
Unlike in the United States and the United
Kingdom, research on this topic in Canada
is limited. Information on how frequently
these deaths occur, and at which facilities,
has been kept out of the public domain.
I originally became interested in learning more about this subject after reflecting on the death of a high school friend.
Suffering from bipolar disorder, she took
her own life while on a day pass from a
Vancouver hospital in 2010. Her death
made me wonder about the care of other
suicidal patients in hospitals. I was surprised to find so few stories about patients
taking their own lives while in hospital. So
I wondered how big an issue this was in
Canada.
Search for data
To try to find a national number of suicides in hospitals I started in the obvious
places for national health statistics, but no
organization kept this information. Next,
I contacted provincial health departments.
Most told me they didn’t keep information
on suicides in hospitals. I did, however,
learn that in most provinces, a coroner or
medical examiner is required to investigate when someone dies by suicide in a
hospital.
Initially, I tried to get this information
without going through freedom of information, but only a few provinces provided
information without a formal request. I
began filing requests around January 2014.
It took months to receive full responses. In
one case we got full information just days
before our airdate on October 4, 2014.
The response from the provinces varied.
While some jurisdictions provided the full
data requested -- hospital name, year of
death and number of suicides in full -- half
the provinces withheld this information.
The most common reason? that releasing
a year of death and a hospital name where
the death occurred would identify an
individual.
Even though most Canadian provinces
have almost identical sections in their
freedom-of-information laws relating to
personal privacy, some jurisdictions used
these clauses to withhold records, while
others released the information requested
without mentioning privacy concerns.
Given the disparity of responses, the
question that continued to run through my
head as I encountered roadblocks was this:
Did withholding data at which hospitals
suicides occurred in Canada really protect
the privacy of the deceased, or did the
secrecy protect hospitals from having their
patient safety records scrutinized?
What seemed clear was that there were
no formal methods for tracking these
deaths. Which prompted me to ask another
question, if no one was monitoring, then
how often were these deaths occurring?
Where were they taking place? What was
being done to prevent them from happening?
Our team found further evidence of an
absence of data when we interviewed the
Fraser Health Authority. We asked officials
for statistics on in-hospital suicide over
the past 10 years. After waiting weeks
for an official response, it wasn’t until our
team arrived for our on-camera interview
that their communications representative
could confirm a final number. Andy Libbiter, Mental Health and Substance Use
Services for the Fraser Health Authority
told W5 that he only knew of two other
suicide deaths at their hospitals. However,
our research through the coroner’s office
revealed five others beyond the case in our
story.
Kathleen Stephany, a nursing instructor
and a former British Columbia coroner,
told us that the lack of data prevents hospitals from taking steps to avoid suicides.
“You don’t make policy changes, you
don’t retrain staff, you don’t do anything
10MEDIA
progressive without the data. The data, the
facts are what teaches us how to change
things, how to do things differently.”
In the end every province, except
Saskatchewan, provided us some kind
of number for suicide deaths in health
facilities over the past 10 years. Because
we were missing data from Saskatchewan
Sander Hitzig, a senior research associate at the University of Toronto analyzed
our data to come up with our final national
number of approximately 300 inpatient
suicides over the past decade.
Talking about suicide
The Mindset Guide on Reporting on
Mental health was a resource that I relied
on a great deal. Both the guide and the
CTV policy urge caution.
However, we believed that stories that
included the means of suicide were in the
public interest. Relaying how people took
their own lives in hospital is critical when
questioning the care they received. In the
case of Prashant Tiwari, a chair was left in
the bathroom. The chair allowed Prashant
to hang himself from a weight-bearing
ceiling grate using his bath robe. The head
of psychiatry at the Brampton Civic Hospital admitted in our interview that leaving
a chair in the bathroom was a mistake.
Tips for others looking to do similar
stories
1) Give yourself lead time in making access-to-information requests: This
investigation wouldn’t have been possible
unless we had started early requesting
records.
2) Build a relationship with information
officers: In at least one case, a particular
access officer really made the difference
in providing the requested records. At the
last minute, he provided me with the full
2015 SPRING EDITION
information I requested
after months of negative
responses from his colleagues.
3) Appeal responses: In
a couple of cases we were
able to get closer to the
information we requested after we filed an
appeal.
4) Publish information on transparency
of public bodies: This encourages the
release of records next time.
5) Second-guess primary sources of
data: I have repeatedly had problems with
government sources of data giving me
incomplete or wrong information. Finding
out as much as possible about the data can
help ensure you are getting what you think
you are getting.
6) Find compelling personal stories to
make the data you collect have an impact
7) Be persistent in getting interviews
from public bodies and institutions: When
asking for on-camera interviews with the
health care facilities where these suicides
occurred, we provided them with at least
two weeks to respond to our initial request. At first, one of the institutions was
reluctant to accept an interview request. It
took a few days of emails and phone calls
to secure the interview. When it comes to
publicly funded organizations, it’s important to emphasize how a lack of participation and transparency about the issue in
question will appear to viewers or readers.
This report aired as part of W5’s season
premiere, and also ran on page A1 of the
Toronto Star’s Saturday paper that same
weekend. After our broadcast, we received
a large response by viewer mail, many
people writing in to tell their own stories
of friends and family members lost to
inpatient suicide. (EDITOR’S NOTE:
The Tiwari family recently announced that
it plans to sue the Brampton Civic Hospital for $12.5 million.)
Annie Burns-Pieper, is an associate producer with W5. This story was produced
by Litsa Sourtzis and reported by Kevin
Newman.
RELATED LINKS
Family suing hospital for $12.5M in
suicide of supervised patient
http://canadaam.ctvnews.ca/familysuing-hospital-for-12-5m-in-suicideof-supervised-patient-1.2252637
Map of suicides in health facilities
across Canada
http://www.ctvnews.ca/w5/w5-mapof-suicides-in-canadian-hospitals
Transparency lacking in patient safety
data on suicides across the country
http://www.ctvnews.ca/w5/transparency-lacking-in-patient-safetydata-on-suicides-across-the-country1.2037565#ixzz3HZ1jmZIv
11
Digital storytelling
THE TALE OF THE TWO GODFREYS
Surviving the takeover
How many Sun Media newspapers will remain intact
once they’re folded into the Postmedia chain?
By Mark Burgess
A
s the Competition Bureau reviews
Postmedia’s acquisition of 175
Sun Media newspapers from Quebecor,
observers are hopeful about the survival of
most of those titles in an age where media
concentration is no longer the bogeyman it
was even a decade ago.
On Oct. 6, Postmedia Network Canada
Corp. announced a $316-million deal with
Quebecor for Sun Media’s 175 Englishlanguage newspapers, trade publications
and digital properties, as well as 35 real
estate properties. The deal was financed
with a mix of $140-million in new debt
and $186-million in equity from U.S.based hedge fund Golden Tree Asset
Management.
The Competition Bureau is reviewing
the deal.
If approved, the company would have
both major dailies in Ottawa, Calgary
and Edmonton. Postmedia would also get
Sun’s English-language Canoe website
portal outside of Quebec. This would be in
addition to Vancouver, where Postmedia
already owns The Vancouver Sun and The
Province.
Postmedia president and CEO Paul
Godfrey said in October that Postmedia
and Sun Media would maintain their separate networks and that he’s not planning
to close any of its publications, though an
internal memo to employees said the deal
would lead to $6-$10 million in savings
over two years.
The new papers would organize their
coverage like Postmedia, he said, with
national, international, business, entertainment and travel news the same in all communities. Local papers would still generate
sports and local news.
The new scale would allow for bigger
traditional cross-country ad buys. More
importantly, it would also permit the
use of analytics for targeted advertising to specific readers across markets.
Godfrey said this is the only way to compete with digital giants like Google and
Facebook for advertising dollars. Postmedia’s unique monthly online
visitors would rise to 12 million, and
Godfrey said the company would continue to focus on digital products, though
“there will always be ink on paper.”
Kelly Toughill, director of the University of King’s College journalism school,
said the different papers could survive
by remaining niche brands. Newspapers
sell readers to advertisers, she said, and
those advertisers increasingly want to
be able to know who those readers are.
“I suspect it will continue to be valuable to advertisers to segregate those
audiences because they sell different
kinds of things to [Ottawa] Sun readers
than to Citizen readers, and as long as
that’s true you’ll have two papers. But if
they start to meet in the mushy middle,
then you won’t”.
In an Oct. 6 statement announcing the
bureau’s review, Competition Commissioner John Pecman said that while media ownership concentration can raise
public interest concerns, the bureau’s
mandate under the Competition Act is
“to review mergers exclusively to determine whether they are likely to result in
a substantial lessening or prevention of
competition.”
The bureau’s reviews traditionally
only cover advertising rather than getting into editorial voice. While diversity
of voice could be considered if it’s cast
as reduced consumer choice, the bureau
will likely stick to advertising.
Transcontinental bought 74 Sun Media Quebec community papers in 2013
for $75 million and the bureau made it
put 34 of its 154 newspapers up for sale
for a period of 60 days. The company
sold 14 of them, 11 of which became
online-only services. All but one of the
remaining papers that didn’t find buyers
was closed, along with two of Transcontinental’s own papers.
Pecman said at the time that the bureau had done “everything in its power
to test the market to determine if there
was a possible alternative to Transcontinental owning all the papers.
“Unfortunately, in some cases like this
one, where many newspapers are in
financial distress owing to the ongoing transformation of the community
newspaper industry, the market dictates
that there are limited alternatives,” his
statement said.
Toughill said this financial distress
has changed the conversation around
consolidation.
“I’m struck by how much the world
has changed,” she said, referring to the
outrage over the consolidation of edito-
12MEDIA
Postmedia president and chief executive officer Paul Godfrey attends a
press conference in Toronto Monday, Oct. 6, 2014, announcing Postmedia’s purchase of Sun Media Corp.’s English-language operations.
PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Hannah Yoon
rial voices that would have followed
such a deal 20 years ago.
The change is partly due to the plethora of alternative information sources
today, but the newspaper industry’s
struggles also play into it.
“The people who care about these
sorts of things probably have more tolerance for extraordinary measures than
they would have five, 10, 20 years ago,”
she said.
Scott Doherty, assistant to president
Jerry Dias at Unifor, the union representing most of the workers involved in
the deal, also said it’s probably harder
to make an argument against concentration, although the industry’s turmoil
shouldn’t be the reason.
“[Postmedia is] saying all the right
things at this stage of the game, at least,
and I think most people are hopeful,” he
said.
Godfrey said the competition bureau
would probably focus its review on
communities like Ottawa and Calgary
where it would own both major dailies.
J-Source reported in December that
Godfrey had “courtesy meetings” with
mayors in Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton after the deal was announced.
The Financial Post reported in October that Godfrey did considerable political due diligence before the announcement, notifying the Prime Minister’s
Office, federal opposition leaders, sever2015 SPRING EDITION
Toronto Sun president Paul Godfrey talks on the phone following its deal
to merge with Quebecor Inc., in Toronto on December 9, 1998.
PHOTO CREDIT: REUTERS/STAFF
al federal ministers, premiers in Ontario
and Alberta, and several mayors.
Godfrey said Postmedia would point
to Vancouver as a case study.
“We keep the newsrooms separate
and I would say the vast majority of
content is independent of each other.
They often take opposite stands on
public issues at all levels of government,
and yet they have a common advertising department and a common circulation department,” he said in an October
interview.
“The reader’s got choice. The reader
doesn’t care who drops the paper off on
their doorstep. And the reader doesn’t
care if the papers are produced in the
same printing plant. But the readers
do care if they can get some variable
opinion.”
National Post political columnist John
Ivison viewed the transaction positively.
“We’ve suffered a lot of cuts over the
years and I don’t think we foresee anything bad particularly coming of this,” he
said in October. “At ground level, there’s
no trepidation that we’re going to see
merged newsrooms or anything like that.
The people who are running this company know newspapers. I would not have
said that in every iteration of this company… and they know that any attempt to
integrate the editorial products would be
self-defeating.”
Carleton University journalism profes-
sor Chris Waddell said he doesn’t think
Postmedia will be operating all of the 175
papers it’s buying a year from now.
“Part of any sort of takeover like this is
you look for opportunities where there’s
duplication and you try to eliminate duplication,” he said, adding that much of this
would take place in back-end operations
like printing, advertising and design. Unifor’s Scott Doherty said the union is
still in wait-and-see mode, with few developments since the deal was announced.
“Really nothing is going to take place
until the Competition Bureau has made its
decision one way or the other,” he said.
The union probably isn’t intervening in
the bureau’s review, he said. It’s looking
to protect its membership, which includes
those working in printing, advertising,
accounting and other back-end services,
where he said the union is willing to talk
about some “synergies.”
“More importantly, I think, for us, it’s
about the fact that you can’t consolidate
all the newsrooms and lose your local
news aspect of the papers. We need to
maintain in these communities, whether
it’s small papers or the dailies, we need
to make sure that we’re getting local and
different reporting so there’s a broad kind
of perspective on the news in the communities and for Canada,” he said.
Mark Burgess is the acting deputy editor
of The Hill Times, an Ottawa newsweekly
covering Parliament Hill.
13
Reading the numbers
Ten tips for deciphering government budgets
A government budget is a political document that can
be understood by anybody who takes the time
By Alan Freeman
R
elease of the budget, whether it’s
at the federal or provincial level,
has increasingly become the most important date on the annual political calendar,
except for an election or a party leadership convention.
The budget is no longer simply a document where the government sets out its
spending plans, details how it intends to
pay for it all through taxes and borrowing and also forecasts the state of the
economy.
In Ottawa and the provinces, the budget has become the key priority-setting
document for government. The growth of
omnibus budget bills has meant the federal
government not only maps out its economic plans in the budget, but also uses
the opportunity to announce changes to
policies as varied as immigration and the
environment that have only the slimmest
link to economic policy.
The reason for the popularity of the
budget as a priority-setting document for
governments is simple. Because it’s a
confidence measure, the budget has to get
passed, or the government faces parliamentary defeat and an election. Once
locked in a budget, a measure is almost
guaranteed to become reality. And by
packaging a disparate number of measures in one giant omnibus bill, individual
policy changes get scant attention from
MPs in committee and can slide through
with virtual no oversight. So ministers
and outside lobby groups anxious for a
particular tax change, spending program
or policy pronouncement, will pressure the
finance minister to include the measure in
the budget.
The upshot of this budget mania is that
it’s no longer sufficient to send a business
or economic journalist into the budget
lockup and hope it will get adequately
covered. It’s the job of every political
reporter to find out what’s in the budget
and how it affects their particular beat and
the broader political context. Particularly
for journalists who hate numbers and actively avoid anything vaguely financial or
economic, this can be a daunting prospect.
But in the end, the budget is above all a
political document that can be studied and
understood by anybody who takes the time
to prepare in advance and reads the document carefully and thoroughly.
Based on experience covering seven
successive federal budgets in the 1990s for
The Globe and Mail as a journalist, and
on supervising the communications for
four budgets between 2008 and 2011 as
an Assistant Deputy Minister at Finance
Canada, here are 10 pieces of advice for
journalists as they prepare to cover the
budget in 2015:
Read the document and ignore the
spin. Use all the time made available
during the lockup to read as much of the
budget document itself. Don’t depend
solely on the pre-cooked spin provided by
the government. If you read the “budget in
brief” or the news releases provided with
the budget, do so merely to get a quick
overview of what the government has
deemed it important for you to know. But
make your own judgments on what are its
most important elements by reading the
full budget document.
Do your homework. In the days or
weeks before the budget, review the most
important issues likely to arise in the budget. Make sure you bring previous years’
budgets and fall updates with you into the
budget lockup, as well as other documentation you think will be relevant. Comparing the government’s latest forecasts,
numbers and pronouncements with what it
said in the past can be very revealing.
Be wary of pre-budget leaks. While
budgets were once kept top secret until
release, the government now strategically
leaks most measures in advance. But you
can be played. In advance of the 2013
budget, the Harper government leaked the
“good news” that it was going to cut tariffs
on imported hockey equipment in a quest
for positive headlines. It proved to be a
diversionary tactic aimed at hiding a much
wider increase in tariffs included in the
budget that raised the costs of hundreds
of consumer products. Journalists who
swallowed the hockey tariff cut story were
used by the government for political gain.
Speak to experts. The budget is followed closely not just by journalists, but
by economists, tax specialists and provincial officials, all of whom participate in
their own version of the budget lockup.
Line up experts whom you know will
attend the lockup and speak to them after
they emerge. They’ll be better informed
that an expert who gets budget news at 4
p.m. with the rest of the public. Also try
to speak to former Finance officials who
14MEDIA
Finance Minister Joe Oliver, middle, makes his way to the podium with Minister of State (Finance) Kevin Sorenson, right, and Parliamentary Secretary to the Finance Minister, Andrew Saxton, prior to the finance ministers’ meeting in Ottawa on Monday, Dec. 15, 2014. The 2015 federal budget
won’t be delivered until at least April.
PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
understand the process and the contents of
a budget.
Ask dumb questions. The government
staffs the budget lockup with dozens of top
officials from Finance and other departments to explain budget measures. Don’t
be intimidated. If you don’t understand
something and find the language vague
and indecipherable, insist on an explanation. There should be a plain-language
answer to most questions.
Watch for earmarks. U.S. legislators are famous for adding money for pet
projects, like “bridges to nowhere” in
legislation brought before Congress. Canadian budgets include similar measures,
one-off decisions to fund projects dear
to the finance minister or the ruling party
that get slipped into the budget. In 2011,
for example, the federal budget included
$7.5-million for the Royal Conservatory
of Music, while the 2012 budget included
money for a future Rouge Valley urban
national park in southern Ontario.
2015 SPRING EDITION
Read the annexes. Some of the most
important measures in a budget, particularly where tax changes are concerned, may
be buried deep inside the budget’s annexes
and won’t be detailed in the officiallysupplied budget synopsis. So find some
time to dig into the annexes. You may find
some hidden gems.
Listen to the actual speech as delivered in Parliament. Most reporters
are desperately trying to get their stories
filed when the budget speech is delivered
in the House of Commons at 4 p.m. But
find somebody on your team to listen
to the speech and check it against the
authorized text. In 1991, Michael Wilson,
finance minister at the time, announced the
decision to move the headquarters of the
National Energy Board to Calgary from
Ottawa in his speech to the Commons,
catching everyone by surprise. Not a word
of the move was contained in the speech
text circulated in the lockup.
Watch for day-after stories. Some of
the juiciest stories about a budget emerge
only a day or two later. The document is
so dense with measures that the importance of some only becomes apparent a
day or two later when interest groups and
experts plumb the depths of the budget.
Read the actual budget legislation.
Legislation implementing the federal
budget usually comes in two chunks, one a
bill introduced shortly after the budget and
a second more technical bill that follows
several months later. The Harper government has developed the habit of changing
budget measures in the implementing
legislation or even adding sections that
weren’t in the original budget so budget
bills deserve a close look.
Alan Freeman is a Senior Fellow at the
University of Ottawa’s Graduate School
of Public and International Affairs. After
more than 30 years in journalism, Alan
served as Assistant Deputy Minister for
Consultations and Communications at the
Department of Finance from 2008 to 2011.
15
Reading the polls
The keys to understanding polls
Before reading the latest political poll,
ask yourself some basic questions
By Eric Grenier
T
he results of the latest poll have
just come across your desk. The
numbers are surprising. The headline will
be great. This poll will make news.
But what questions should you be asking the pollster – and yourself – before
you publish?
Where did the poll come from?
The poll might have been conducted by
a national pollster you’ve heard of before.
But if it wasn’t, it is important to know as
much as possible about this new organization. Has it publicly released polls before?
What kind of track record does it have?
What expertise does it have to conduct
these polls in the first place?
Another important piece of information
is whether the poll was commissioned by a
third party. Most polls that make the news
today are either commissioned by a media
outlet or are undertaken by the pollsters
themselves for free. Polls are a chance
to promote the research capabilities of a
company. Nailing an election is the best
kind of advertisement for a polling firm.
But if the poll was conducted for a political party or organization, that can throw
up some red flags. The data itself may be
reliable. But has this party or organization
commissioned polls that have not been
made public? Imagine a scenario where
a party has commissioned a poll every
month for the last year, but you have not
seen one before today. Are you being fed
just the information that a political party
wants to be made public? How bad were
those polls that have not seen the light of
day?
How was the poll conducted?
There are some basic methodological
questions that need to be asked. Was the
poll conducted via telephone, interactive
voice response, or online? If it was over
the telephone, were the numbers dialed
randomly and were cell phones included?
Were attempts made to contact people
who did not pick up when initially contacted? And if the poll was done online,
how were respondents recruited to take
part? Are they representative of the entire
population? What kind of weights were
applied to the raw data? What questions
were asked in the poll, and in what order?
Might the wording of the questions, or the
order of them have influenced the results?
How does the sample look?
If the pollster is willing to provide
you with both weighted and unweighted
sample sizes, then you can take a quick
look to see how close these are. If they
are relatively close, that means the sample
was probably a good one. If they are not,
however, there could be problems. Many
polls have difficulty reaching younger
people. To ensure that young people make
up the appropriate proportion of the entire
sample, their results would have to be
inflated. But a smaller original sample
size means errors can creep in, magnifying that error when the weighting formula
is applied. If the results that were derived
from these smaller samples are counterintuitive, it may skew the poll. What does
the pollster think about this?
Has the pollster been transparent?
These are a lot of questions, and you
may not know the right answer. You’re not
the expert, after all – the pollster is. But
if the pollster has been willing to answer
these questions directly, you probably
don’t have much to worry about. A good
pollster will explain the limitations of his
or her own survey, and any caveats that
should be included with the results. A bad
pollster will evade and deflect. If he or she
is not willing to answer these basic questions, you should probably think twice
before publishing.
Does this poll make sense?
Now that you’ve gotten through the
methodological questions and are satisfied that the poll is worth reporting, take
a look at the results. Place it within the
context of current events, but also within
the context of other polls. If this poll is
showing results that are wildly out of step
with what other polls have been showing,
this is something that should be mentioned
when you are reporting on it. Readers
need to know that these results are out of
the norm.
What has changed since the last poll?
But don’t directly compare the results
of this poll to the results of a survey done
by a different pollster. They use different
methodologies, so any changes that have
taken place between two polls by different pollsters might have everything to do
with how the poll was conducted. Instead,
compare the poll to the last poll published
by this pollster. Have any shifts occurred?
If so, are they significant?
This can be difficult to determine. The
margin of error, usually included with
a poll, refers to the entire sample rather
than, for example, the sample of decided
16MEDIA
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau speaks at a press conference following a twoday caucus meeting in London, Ont., Wednesday, January 21, 2015.
PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Geoff Robins
Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes an announcement at Framecraft Ltd. in St. Catharines, Ont., on Thursday, January 22, 2015.
PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
NDP Leader Tom Mulcair reads to children at a daycare centre in
Toronto on Tuesday, January 20, 2015.
PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
voters or the sample of respondents among
one demographic or within one region.
And a shift in support is not necessarily significant just because it is outside
the stated margin of error – there is also
the question of the margin of error of the
previous poll to take into account. As a
rough rule of thumb, if a change in support
is 1.5 times the size of the margin of error
of the sample you’re reporting on, it is a
statistically significant shift. Anything less
than that cannot definitively be said to be
something real.
Is this part of a wider trend?
What is perhaps the most important
thing to look at when it comes to the
results of a poll is whether or not it is part
of a wider trend. A jump of five points
may be outside the margin of error, but
if support had dropped five points in the
2015 SPRING EDITION
previous poll,
you may be
looking at
just a wobble
back and
forth. Look
for longerterm trends,
and here you
can evaluate
the poll next to ones conducted by other
pollsters. If one pollster is showing a consistent drop in support for one party over
the last three polls, and another pollster is
showing the same thing, you have a trend
that is worth noting. If two pollsters are
showing support levels heading in opposite directions, this is again something that
may be worth mentioning.
Everything looks good. Now what?
The methodology seems solid. The
shifts appear significant. The numbers are
part of a trend, but this new poll is particularly eye-popping. Rather than take it as
fact, it is important to couch your coverage
of the poll in caution. You might have no
methodological reasons to discount the results, but that does not mean the results are
beyond reproach. The margin of error is
always stated with 95 per cent confidence,
or 19 times out 20. Prepare your readers,
viewers or listeners for the possibility
that this could be that 20th poll. When the
results of a poll are unusual, it is a good
idea to see what future polls show before
coming to any definitive conclusions. And
when those new polls emerge, start the
process all over again.
Éric Grenier is the CBC’s polls analyst
and founder of ThreeHundredEight.com,
a website dedicated to political polling in
Canada and electoral forecasts. He has
previously written for The Globe and Mail,
Huffington Post Canada and The Hill
Times, and has worked with Le Devoir
and L’actualité during the most recent
provincial and federal election campaigns
in Quebec.
Related links
Fundamentals of Polling-Glossary of
Terminology
http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/
education/polling_fundamentals_glossary.
html
Sampling, weighting, and transparency
in public polls
http://www.threehundredeight.com/
search?q=unweighted+sample+size
17
Tools of the trade
I kept the focus on a series that compared the number of government employees to the
total workforce within each census tract. The date of the survey coincided with the alltime peak for federal government employment.
Peeling the layers of the National Capital Region onion
The Ottawa Citizen – Source: Statistics Canada
Using Statistics Canada’s census data to tell
stories in your community
The national data showed just how different Ottawa and Gatineau really are compared to other
large cities.
PHOTO CREDIT: Pat McGrath/OTTAWA
By James Bagnall
I
’ve lived in Ottawa for 34 years and
thought I knew the town. But that was
before last spring.
At the time, the Harper administration
had cut 34,000 federal civil servants from
the government payroll in the National
Capital Region, a drop of 22 per cent.
While not unprecedented, it was a swift
and significant downsizing. I wanted
to understand how it was affecting the
region.
The research proved anything but
straightforward – every line of inquiry
led to another. Combined, however, they
produced an unexpectedly rich portrait of
the capital area through the prism of its
biggest employer.
The first cut – which involved tracking
employment and salary trends through
Statcan and other databases – was pretty
clean but left a lot of questions unanswered. The exercise told me what was
obvious – that Ottawa was a government
town and civil servants were well-paid
compared to employees in retailing and
other sectors.
The data lacked context. So I added
two dimensions. The first was national – I
compared Ottawa and Gatineau to other
Canadian cities. The second dimension
was intensely local.
The national data showed just how
different Ottawa and Gatineau really are
compared to other large cities. Jobs in
public administration made up more than
20 per cent in Ottawa and nearly 25 per
cent in Gatineau. Even in a provincial
capital such as Edmonton, just five per
cent of the workforce depends on govern-
ment paychecks. In Calgary and Toronto
the ratio is three per cent.
This suggested government downsizing
on a large scale should have been hitting
the nation’s capital much harder than it
appeared to be doing.
To help me better understand the community of civil servants I was dealing
with, I turned to the National Household
Survey, which complemented the 2011
national census.
The survey divided the National Capital
Region into more than 270 census tracts,
a small enough sample to include in an
Excel spreadsheet. I manually entered
10 variables such as income levels and
language spoken at home. But I kept
the focus on a series that compared the
number of government employees to the
total workforce within each census tract.
The date of the survey coincided with
the all-time peak for federal government
employment.
I shipped the calculations to Dennis
Leung – the newspaper’s longtime graphic
artist – who created a map of where civil
servants lived. I was surprised to discover
we had never done this at The Citizen. The
result was an eye-opener. Dennis colourcoded the census tracts that contained unusually heavy concentrations of government workers. This meant anywhere from
27 per cent to 50 per cent.
The map instantly explained so much
about the Region – its commuting patterns, the presence of very large civil service bedroom communities in the suburbs
of Aylmer and Orleans, and the intensity
of government in the square kilometer
around Parliament Hill.
As a bonus, the census tract data offered
rich insight into the various government
communities. For instance, the vast majority of these commuters owned their homes,
providing a sharp contrast with Parliament
Hill area residents, who preferred renting
– reflecting the more transient nature of
politics. House prices revealed that three
of the most concentrated civil service
enclaves were home to the top echelons of
the bureaucracy – with the Anglophones
in the Glebe and Francophones in Chelsea,
Quebec. Top foreign affairs employees
preferred New Edinburgh.
This snapshot told us a lot about which
parts of town were likely to be most affected by a shrinking government.
And yet, despite the dramatic downsizing, the economy of the nation’s capital
didn’t seem to be hurting that badly. I
turned to the Conference Board of Canada
for insight. The Ottawa-based independent
think tank publishes detailed forecasts for
metropolitan areas – and its calculations
suggested that the economies of Ottawa
and Gatineau continued strengthening despite a shrinking government. The capital
region was growing more slowly, to be
sure, than the country’s other large cities.
But there was still improvement.
Something else was happening. Low
interest rates were helping the housing
sector and a series of large construction
projects, including light rail transit, had
stabilized the building trades. The hightech sector was strengthening. But these
alone couldn’t account for the capital’s
relatively stability.
18MEDIA
This led me to yet another area of inquiry – public sector compensation. While the
Conservative government has been making headlines with its moves to bring civil
service pensions and other benefits into
line with private sector experience, the
pace of reform is actually quite measured.
Government workers will contribute more
towards their pensions and post-retirement
health benefits until at least 2018.
But even then, federal employees will
do very well compared to retirees in other
industries. I located a Statcan series that
calculated the average pension obligation
owed to each federal government worker
in 2012 was nearly $500,000 – compared
to $209,000 for all employees with a pension plan. Then, for details about how the
federal government pension plan worked
in practice, I relied on multiple interviews
with the office of the chief actuary. There
I learned that the average male civil
servant still working in 2011 had a salary
of $76,100. This made him eligible for a
fully-indexed pension of $53,270, which
would jump to roughly $60,000 when he
began receiving old age security payments
at age 65.
When the Conservatives launched their
downsizing program several years ago,
many government workers were part of
the baby boom and already close to retirement. Leaving was not a difficult decision.
And because their pensions and other
benefits did not drop significantly, they
continued to spend in the Ottawa area. The
short-term economic damage was blunted.
Longer term, it will be a different story.
Once the baby boomers finally exit government, those remaining will pay more
2015 SPRING EDITION
for their pensions and benefits. And they
will likely remain fewer in number. They
will never have it as good as their predecessors did.
When we published Capital Reckoning
outlining all these trends, it was the most
popular story online for four consecutive
days, most unusual for a daily newspaper.
It was a good reminder that when we follow our journalistic instincts in a story that
matters to local readers, the result can be
very edifying.
James Bagnall an author and awardwinning journalist. He’s the associate
business editor at the Ottawa Citizen,
where he has worked since 1993. He began his journalism career in 1978 at The
Financial Post and was a senior writer
at The Financial Times of Canada from
1989 to 1993. Bagnall was a member of
the Parliamentary Press Gallery for more
than 20 years.
Related links
Information about employment:
Statcan Cansim database 282-0111 - job
sectors by city, such as public administration()
Cansim 282-0116 - total employment
by city
Information about salaries:
Cansim 111-0008 - Median income by
city, % of taxpayers with income in excess
of $75,000
Cansim 202-0001 - % of total city income earned by top 1 per cent of tax filers
Cansim 202-0107 - median salaries by
job sector and city
Information about pensions:
Statcan cansim database 280-0012 –
pension assets per member by industry
Public Accounts of Canada -
Includes breakdown of pension and other
benefits for multiple plans held by federal
government workers.
Actuarial report for the Public Service
of Canada - the largest of the government’s pension plans.
Detailed data about residents in each
census tract:
National Household Survey
Information about the economy, city
by city:
Conference Board of Canada, Metropolitan Outlook bi-annual survey
19
Social Media
Lessons learned from the Ottawa shooting
Three editors reflect on how they could have
done a better job
By Mary Gazze
T
he shooting at the National War
Memorial in Ottawa that left Cpl.
Nathan Cirillo dead and storming of
Parliament at the hands of Michael ZehafBibeau were part of a day of violence, fear
and uncertainty rarely seen on Canadian
soil.
But level-headed Canadian-style reporting was praised around the world for being
calm, clear, shying away from speculation and avoiding those heavily-produced
breaking news stings. Mother Jones said
it “Put American Cable News to Shame.”
Several reviews cited CBC’s Peter Mansbridge in particular for consistently reiterating what was confirmed, and keeping
speculation out of his narrative.
With more Canadians using social media, Media magazine surveyed a few news
organizations about what they learned
from one of the biggest stories in Canada’s
history, and how to bring top-notch reporting to social media. Here are their biggest
do’s and don’ts:
Do Remind People About The Facts
Andrew Yates, former Senior Producer,
Community and Social Media at CBC
News says that while his team had some
great coverage that day, they could have
periodically reminded viewers that things
are changing fast.
“I think we could’ve taken a page out of
Peter Mansbridge’s book in a sense,” he
says.
“We’re telling you what our reporters are hearing from police and hearing
from the scene, but be mindful that we
still don’t have the full picture. I think
that kind of information could’ve been
reflected on our social media channels as
well.”
Both Yates and Jennifer Wilson, the
Toronto Star’s Senior Editor, Social Media, say their most popular social media
posts were simple bullet-point rundowns
of the facts.
Wilson says these types of posts got the
most click-throughs, retweets, likes, or
replies.
“When news is breaking, it’s not so
much about dragging people through to
more information. They really just want
to know what’s happening in a really bitesized chunk, so we found that that stuff
really resonated on both the day of and the
day after,” says Wilson.
Andrew Yates says these types of posts
are becoming more important as more
people are accessing news intermittently
on mobile devices, and may not have
context.
Don’t Be A Tease
While cliffhanger-style headlines are
the bread-and-butter of websites such as
Buzzfeed (and the reason their stories often go viral), major breaking news stories
are not the time to tease, says Wilson.
“You don’t want to say ‘you won’t
believe what happened next.’ You want
to give people information they need in a
really easy way so they understand it, even
if they don’t click through. You can say a
lot in 140 characters.”
Andrew Lundy, Vice President, Digital
at The Canadian Press adds that it’s important to be transparent about where the
information is coming from.
“Who told you from the police? An
officer from the street? Police scanner?
Chief of police? Or their media liaison?
Ask them ‘how do you know that?’” he
says. Reveal this information to the news
consumer.
He added that teams should stick to
information from their own reporters and
official sources such as police to keep
rumors out of coverage. “We did not go to
Twitter and say ‘we’re hearing this.’”
Do Coordinate And Call Reinforcements
At the time of the shooting, the Star
happened to have a sports reporter already
in Ottawa who had travelled with the
Toronto Maple Leafs who were staying at
a hotel near Parliament Hill.
“All of a sudden (he) starts tweeting
from Ottawa and “I’m like, wait, is he actually there?” recalls Wilson. She says that
lack of coordination was a lost opportunity
to get a great eye-witness account from a
trusted source.
The basic idea of social media is to get
people talking, but with a major story like
this one, there is so much publishing that
has to be done, that sparking conversation
falls to the back burner. Looking back,
Yates says when a huge story breaks, he’d
like to call in reinforcements.
“We didn’t have horses to engage with
the audience to the degree I would’ve
liked — actively and proactively answering people’s questions and responding to
their concerns, and sort of be more part of
the two-way conversation.”
Don’t Forget Basic Principles
With social media giving anyone a plat-
20MEDIA
This was one of the many vigils for slain soldiers Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Cpl. Nathan Cirillo (left). A lot of the coverage of their deaths
unfolded in cyberspace. The basic idea of social media is to get people talking, but with a major story, there is so much publishing that has to be done,
that sparking conversation falls to the back burner.
PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz
form, it’s important for mainstream media
to act as a filter, verify and use credible
sources, the managers say. Lessons about
verification that were learned from one of
the more famous celebrity death hoaxes
still apply.
We learned our lesson with lots of
events. I used the Gordon Lightfoot hoax
as one of our key stones. (We as an industry) can’t do that again,” says Lundy.
Everyone we interviewed agreed that
even though the technology is new, it’s
important to hang onto basic journalistic
principles to avoid losing credibility.
“Trying to confirm things and taking
our time with that, not being as reactive
as social media as a platform is — I think
that’s what separates more of a trusted
journalism outlet from the noise that’s out
there,” says Lundy.
In the end, all three social media managers said they review their social media
2015 SPRING EDITION
policies at least once a year, and will
review events like the Ottawa shooting
and last August’s murder of three RCMP
officers in Moncton to see what can be
learned.
“I think tweaking is a good word,” says
Yates. “I feel quite proud actually of the
coverage we did (in Ottawa) and a lot of it
was really good… but as you know, social
media is still in its infancy and certainly
news gathering and live blogging are practices that are evolving.”
Wilson boils it down to a message that
you’ve heard a lot, but may sometimes
forget.
“Nothing on the Internet can really go
away. So if you do something wrong, you
need to be very transparent to clear it up,”
she says.
Tips for the next real-time story:
1) Check with other departments to see
if they already have staff in the area on an
unrelated story;
2) Coordinate with local bureaus or
other departments on coverage;
3) all backup staff to actively respond to
comments;
4) Display the facts in a bullet-point list;
5) Give context in snippets. Remember
that audiences come and go, and may not
have the full picture;
6) Be transparent about where you got
the information (e.g. “police are telling
us”);
7) Teaser headlines don’t work;
8) Try Storify. It will help you create a
visual social media rundown that is easyto-insert into webpages;
9) Debrief later and review what you
can learn for next time.
Mary Gazze is digital producer at The
Canadian Press.
21
Behind the numbers
Spending quality time with the CBC
We need a better way to measure the
public broadcaster’s less tangible impact
By Kelly Toughill
T
he CBC might be gone in a decade.
We’re used to grousing about the
CBC – the parade of job cuts, the tilt-awhirl management ride, the strategic shifts
so abrupt that they can induce whiplash.
But this time it is different. The CBC
is being forced to adopt a dying business
model that other media organizations are
fleeing as fast as they can.
The advertising-supported business
model for news and current affairs is on
its last legs. Some news organizations will
survive through subscriptions, subsidies
from their telecommunication corporate
parents, moving to niche markets, becoming PR organizations or by selling customer data. None of this is going to work
for the CBC.
The problem is not technology and the
Internet. The big problem is fragmentation: the move to niche marketing.
For most of the last two centuries,
advertisers wanted the biggest audience
they could get. Newspapers and broadcasters sold readers and viewers to advertisers.
The audience was the product and broadbased news was one of the ways to hook
that audience.
In the 20th century, advertisers began
marketing to smaller and smaller segments. This was very bad news for mass
media – including CBC. Specialty channels grew as conventional TV shrank.
The audience for conventional television in English Canada dropped from
60 per cent of all viewing at the turn of
the century to 40 percent of all viewing
in 2013. Ad revenues for conventional
TV are actually lower today than they
were a decade ago, even though the total
amount spent on advertising in Canada has
skyrocketed. Only conventional networks
were hammered; ad revenues doubled for
specialty channels in the same period.
Obviously the Internet accelerated
the trend to niche marketing. Digital
advertisers can reach customers without
assembling an audience at all. The bulk
of online and mobile advertising dollars
go to Google and Facebook, which use
information and key words in profiles,
emails, search terms and social posts to
send targeted ads.
Media companies used to sell access to
the total audience that watched a show or
bought a magazine. Now they are offering
different slices of that audience to different types of advertisers, not based on the
editorial content that someone consumes,
but based on personal information gleaned
from his or her digital footprint.
So, what does this mean to CBC? The
public broadcaster is being told to increase
“other” revenues at a time when mass
media advertising is in decline.
How are other media companies responding, and why won’t that work for
CBC?
Many broadcasters developed a roster of
specialty channels. Those channels generate more advertising than conventional
television and also charge subscription
fees to viewers. Then broadcasters were
absorbed into distribution companies –
telecoms, Internet and cable companies
that had the ability to profit from content
partners.
CBC is not going to develop profitable
niches because its mandate is to serve all
Canadians. Nor is it going to be taken over
by a private telecom or cable company.
Some content companies are experimenting with native advertising – doing
PR gussied up as editorials. That isn’t
going to fly from a public broadcaster,
and would be strongly opposed by private
competitors. (EDITOR’S NOTE: for a
discussion of native advertising, please see
the Spring 2014 edition of Media.)
Other mass media organizations are
going behind paywalls online, counting on
readers and viewers to pay for the creation
of the news and entertainment content
they consume.
That won’t work for CBC because it is
in direct conflict with the corporation’s
mandate, which requires it to create programming that “informs, enlightens and
entertains” and “contribute(s) to a shared
national consciousness and identity.” That
mandate has to include all Canadians, not
just those who can afford a subscription on
top of cable and/or mobile fees.
The mandate of CBC is mass, but the
business model of mass media is dying.
Mass media builds society and feeds
democracy, particularly through journalism. It is the dialogue of the public sphere.
When we lose that, we end up talking
to ourselves. Internet-search algorithms
reinforce our own biases by drawing on
our own past history to guide results. In
a world without mass media, we aren’t
exposed to the views of others or to the
range of experience in our own community.
A Senate committee is currently studying the CBC, preparing recommendations
for its future. The committee has listened
to unions and managers, past presidents,
22MEDIA
An unidentified man is pictured outside the CBC building in downtown Toronto. The corporation is scaling back its conventional television programming as part of a five-year shift toward more web and mobile broadcasting. The CBC’s mandate is mass, but the mass media busniess model is dying.
PHOTO CREDIT: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
academics and advertisers. Almost all of
the discussion has focused on television,
even though the digital arm of the broadcaster reaches nine million Canadians a
month and polls show that Radio One and
Radio Two are popular across the country.
Just about everyone agreed that RadioCanada is doing well, and no wonder; it
doesn’t have to compete with American
programming and has much higher per
capita funding from Ottawa.
English television is another story. It attracts on only five per cent of the viewing
hours of Canadians.
For some of the senators, that tiny figure
is evidence that CBC-TV is done.
But perhaps we shouldn’t value CBC
solely on the basis of ratings. Perhaps we
need to figure out a way to measure its less
tangible impact.
The family analogy is irresistible when
talking about an institution that is supposed to help forge our collective identity
and bring us together as a nation. We don’t
measure the value of parenting by the
number of hours we spend with our children. Those of us in tough, full-time jobs
often spent a mere five per cent of our 24hour day actually playing with our young
children. We called it quality time.
Talking about the CBC reminds me a
bit of going to visit my Aunt Honey for
Thanksgiving. Honey would bitch and
moan and complain that nothing was ever
2015 SPRING EDITION
as it should be, or as it used to be; the
Butterball was shot with chemicals, the
chestnuts were wizened, Uncle Morgan
was a deadbeat and the pumpkins were
too ripe for pie. But then she would pull
this steaming, succulent creation out of
the oven, a king of meals followed by a
trail of adoring side dishes. She made the
best stuffing in New Jersey, and there were
people I genuinely loved at the table. She
always pulled it off, and she always pulled
us back – all of us – every year.
CBC as we know it will not survive the
cuts planned for the next three years. Ottawa must either shrink the CBC mandate,
or dramatically increase funding.
There is a business model out there that
works, but it requires a commitment from
the nation. Canadians pay roughly $30 per
capita, per year for the CBC. That’s the
same funding the corporation received 30
years ago. The BBC, which operates in
one language on a small island, receives
almost $100 per capita per year from
taxpayers.
Many Senate witnesses urged Ottawa
to adopt a tax, levy or programming fee
that is clear to the public and not easily
manipulated by the ruling government of
the day. This is the system used to fund
many public broadcasters, including the
BBC. Several witnesses suggested the
telecommunication companies pay the tab,
since they are generating big profits in the
re-organized media world.
We can only do this if we take advertising out of the equation. It is fundamentally
unfair to subsidize CBC while urging the
public broadcaster to compete with private
broadcasters for advertising dollars.
I miss those holiday dinners with my
grumpy Aunt Honey. I miss spending
hours in a small, overheated bungalow
with a yappy dog, the world’s ugliest
cuckoo clock and a dozen people I barely
knew. That’s because Aunt Honey built
family. It wasn’t the amount of time we
spent with her, or each other, it was the
commitment to be there. We knew it
wouldn’t last forever. Honey did what we
will all do. She got old and died. There
are relatives I haven’t seen since her last
Thanksgiving dinner.
The CBC forces us to recognize our
own family, even the members who aren’t
like us. When it is gone, we won’t have
that reason to get together. Something will
be lost.
Journalism is a vital public service. It
needs public funding. We have an easy
way to do this in Canada. It’s called the
CBC. We should use it. Instead, we are
trying to kill the infrastructure designed to
deliver the information we need to sustain
Canadian democracy.
Kelly Toughill is the director of the
University of King’s College School of
Journalism.
23
Data journalism
PET NAMES
You can always get a fun story about the most popular dog and cat names in
your community by requesting a copy of your municipalities pet licence database. “Brandy”? “FiFi”? “Rex”?
Source: The city of Port Coquitlam
Tips for finding stories in data
Public institutions we cover create data with virtually everything they do
SUSPENDED DOCTOR
By Glen McGregor
S
o you’ve learned how to sort, sum
and average data in Microsoft Excel.
With practice, you’ve become a PivotTable ninja, finding trends in thousands of
rows of numbers.
You can create beautiful data maps
in Qgis or ArcGIS and export them to
Google Fusion Tables to post online.
The interactive data visualizations you
build in Tableau Public are things of great
beauty.
You’ve even learned to write structured
queries and can handle datasets with millions of records in MySQL.
In short, you’ve mastered the technical
skills you need to become an award-winning data journalist.
Now, one problem: Where do you get
the data?
For Canadian journalists, obtaining
electronic records to work with is often the
biggest hurdle to turning data into news.
Our American cousins are swimming
in data we can only dream about. Consider, for example, the online sex offender
registries in most states that give not only
the name and age of every offender, but
also the street address. Overlay their addresses on a map of, say, day-care centres
and elementary schools, and you’ve got a
bang-up story for A1.
Here, with our national obsession with
privacy -- the Correctional Service of
Canada won’t even tell you in which
prison an offender resides -- we have to be
more creative.
Fortunately, the public institutions we
cover create data with virtually everything
they do. Almost every official interaction
between government, industry and the
public is logged electronically. No one is
writing things down and stuffing paper
into folders in steel filing cabinets any
more.
And because of open-record laws at the
federal, provincial and municipal levels,
you have a legal right to obtain these electronic records.
That means it’s a great time to be data
journalist.
The key, though, is figuring out what
datasets public institutions maintain, and
which will make good news stories. You
need to think data.
Some starting points:
Inspections: Whenever I get on an
elevator and scan the ceiling to avoid
eye contact with other passengers (admit
it: you do, too), I invariably land on the
inspection certificate posted on the wall.
That certificate, I imagine, is just one
data point stored on hard-drive full of
inspection reports for every elevator in the
province.
Elevators, like any device, service
or industry that is regulated by government, will be subject to inspection, and
those inspections get logged in a database
somewhere. Industry Canada keeps a comprehensive database of inspection reports
from fuel pumps at gas stations that will
show which are short-changing consumers. They also check the scanners used to
weigh produce in groceries stores.
So, too, does the Canadian Food Inspection Agency log data on meat and poultry
plant inspections. In larger cities, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario
sends inspectors into bars and nightclubs
every weekend to check compliance with
liquor laws. The data they collect shows
which bars sell booze to minors and which
“overserve” drunk customers.
We’ve all seen news stories about the
cockroaches uncovered through municipal
restaurant health inspections, but municipalities also inspect massage and tattoo
parlours, strip clubs, city-run social housing buildings and countless other regulated
entities. There are potential news stories in every
one of them. Some questions your data reporting can
answer: Who fails inspections most often?
Why do they fail? Is there a risk to the
public? Is the government agency inspecting often enough?
Licencing: Whenever someone asks
government for a license or permit, an
application is filed and stored in a database. You can always get a fun story about
the most popular dog and cat names in
your community by requesting a copy of
your municipalities pet licence database.
“Brandy”? “FiFi”? “Rex”?
Your newsroom colleagues will laugh,
but the story will be devoured by readers and if -- hopefully not --- a child is
mauled by a pit bull, your database becomes a serious and useful tool for reporting on dangerous breeds in the city. A database of marriage licences will tell
you the most popular day for weddings.
Health Canada’s database of applications
for medical marijuana permits shows
which postal code in the country has the
most legal pot smoking per capita. (Hint:
it’s not in British Columbia, as you might
suspect.)
Aggregated building permit data has
24MEDIA
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario “suspended the certificate of
registration of Dr. Sharif Tadros which means that Dr. Tadros is not allowed to
practice medicine effective today”, read the part of the summary that appeared
in the Toronto Star’s Nov. 8, 2014, story. The college’s news release goes on to
explain that the doctor is facing a “discipline hearing on allegations of professional
misconduct related to sexual abuse of two patients and breach of restrictions on his
certificate of registration.”
You can use different methods such as scraping to assemble disciplinary data from
the websites of self-governing bodies.
Source: Toronto Star
long been used as a measure of economic
growth, but drilling down into the list of
actual addresses for permit applications
can show important trends in the changing
face of your municipality. With licensing and permit data, the
names and addresses of license application
may be protected by privacy law, but the
data will show the date, type of application, whether it was granted, and possibly
other aspects that can make news.
Complaints: Handling grievances
from the public takes up a lot of government time and, thankfully for us, creates
a lot of data. When a government agency
takes a public complaint, it is usually
logged in a database somewhere. Again,
privacy laws will likely exempt the name
of complainant, but other key data won’t
be. Sometimes, the narratives of the
complaint -- “The Jones family next door
is playing death metal in the backyard at
4 a.m. again” -- will be severed, too, but
the databases set up to log the complaints
often have general categories of the type
of complaint.
Sometimes, obtaining a database of
complaints will be only the first step in a
2015 SPRING EDITION
longer dance using open-records laws. You
can find the type of complaints that interest you the most in the data, and then file
more open-records requests for specific
complaints in the data that will give you
more narratives to write into your story.
Contracts: No other component of the
work government does on your behalf
should be scrutinized as closely as the way
our tax dollars are spent. The public has
a right to know whenever a contract or
standing offer is issued to a private supplier. Every contract is logged in a database somewhere, and some governments,
including the federal government, proactively post their contracting records online. Which companies are winning government
work? Where are they located? Were the
contracts tendered competitively or “solesourced”? Contracting data can generate
an enormous number of stories. At The
Citizen, we found a disproportionate number of contracts issued by the department
of Public Works were valued between
$24,900 and $24,999 -- just below the
$25,000 threshold required for a tendering
process that generated a lot more work for
bureaucrats.
Certification: What do architects,
teachers, dieticians, nurses, massage
therapists and veterinarians all have in
common? They’re just some of the professions whose credentials are certified by
self-governing professional bodies that
are required to provide information to the
public on the status of their members.
Increasingly, these bodies provide data
on their members through searchable
online databases that can be used to check
whether the professional has ever been
sanctioned for misconduct.
Because self-governing bodies aren’t
covered by freedom-of-information laws,
you can’t get these datasets by filing a
request. But if you learn a bit of programming, you can sometimes “scrape” the
data on members off their webpages.
Glen McGregor is an award-winning
Ottawa Citizen national affairs reporter,
covering government and politics on
Parliament Hill. He specializes in data
journalism and social-media evangelism.
Follow Glen on Twitter at@glen_mcgregor or email him at gmcgregor @
ottawacitizen.com.
25
Data journalism
The code question
The debate about journalism schools teaching
code is heating up
By Fred Vallance-Jones
S
hould journalism schools teach
code?
It’s a question that has resonated on social media and in the halls of the academy,
with little real consensus (for example,
see http://ajr.org/2014/09/24/shouldjournalists-learn-code/).
Some argue urgently for teaching code;
others counsel teaching a few basics; still
others say journalists should know about
code, but leave the actual coding to others.
So who’s right?
Depending on the students, their
aptitudes and their goals, they might all
be. But one thing to me is clear, journalism schools need to teach code, or risk
irrelevancy.
There’s no doubt that journalism has
changed forever. The rise of the Internet,
social media and mobile technologies
ensured that. Even the most traditional
journalist in the most traditional newsroom is probably at least filing for the
web using a content management system.
At the other end of the spectrum, some
journalists work entirely with data or on
the web, using programming languages to
create interactive news applications.
With all this change has come a technological shift at least as profound as the
arrival of broadcasting in the 20th century.
Suddenly the ability to write in language
that computers can understand has become
central to a great many jobs in journalism.
Of course, the complexity of those
languages varies greatly, as does the complexity of teaching them. As used now, the
term “coding” can refer to understanding
the relatively simple HTML and CSS that
govern how web pages are structured and
look, to writing JavaScript, a programming language used to create web pages
that change dynamically with user interaction, to creating scripts and programs using full-featured languages such as Python
and Ruby, right on up to writing complex
applications using compiled languages
such as C.
There is no question to me that if by
“coding” we mean using HTML and CSS,
all journalism students should be learning
the basics. As tagged markup languages,
they are straightforward in concept and not
difficult to grasp. These are the foundation of web design and web storytelling,
and are in my mind as important in today’s
journalistic environment as knowing how
to properly use CP Style. They are also
pretty straightforward to teach, and are
at least introduced in most journalism
schools now.
If by teaching code we mean programming languages, I think they have a place,
too, but probably at a more advanced
level, as electives in the last couple of
years of undergrad, or in graduate programs. While they won’t appeal to all
students, nor will all students have the
aptitude for them, JavaScript and its
popular JQuery library are important tools
for those who would tell stories that are
native to the web. And for those with an
eye on the most challenging “coding”
jobs, languages such as Python and Ruby
are essential. They are more challenging to
learn in-depth, so will probably never be
for everyone, but proficiency in these languages opens up enormous opportunities.
As the excellent article linked to at
the top of this piece points out, some
argue vehemently that journalism schools
shouldn’t bother with this kind of code
because students won’t want to learn it.
Some believe it is easier to train a programmer to be a journalist than vice-versa.
But these arguments make what to me is
a flawed assumption that there is but one
variety of journalism student.
It’s true that journalism schools have
been attractive to, and have marketed
themselves to, people primarily interested
in the core skills of 20th century journalism, writing, editing and presenting.
Journalism school was often seen as a
refuge from math and science, a place for
the more artistically inclined who wanted
an exciting and engaging career. Those
with more technical or mathematical interests enrolled in other faculties. As well,
the destination for journalism students
was usually the “factory floor” of mass
production journalism. Schools needed to
turn out “job-ready” graduates who could
immediately start being productive in
traditional mass media.
But with the shift in the journalism
away from the dominance of traditional
media, I see a new breed of student arriving in journalism school, very different
from the student of even a few years ago,
who was quite often trying to avoid anything technical or mathematical.
This new breed wants to use the wealth
of online and data tools to find and tell stories in ways previously unimaginable. And
far from being uninterested or incapable
of working with more advanced program-
26MEDIA
Reporter for the weekly in Bay Roberts, Newfoundland, Nicholas Mercer, and King’s master’s student,Terra Ciolfe, take part in a data-journalism
boot camp.
PHOTO: FRED VALLANCE-JONES
ming languages, this group is arriving
demanding to work with them.
Here at King’s, we now have students
who come here specifically because they
can learn data journalism. To wit, when
the latest crew of students in the investigative data stream of our master of journalism program arrived last summer, the first
thing some asked was when the programming classes started.
For those students, in order to prepare
them for the kinds of careers they are going to want, exposure to more advanced
coding is not just a nice idea, it’s a necessity. I don’t think this will ever be the
mainstream for J-schools, and it may be
accomplished partly through partnerships
or joint ventures with schools of computer
science, but I see it as something we have
to do, if we are going to remain relevant.
This is not to say schools will change
overnight into coding academies.
The basics of reporting, interviewing,
writing and editing are as important as
ever. And many of the people tradition2015 SPRING EDITION
ally drawn to journalism schools, those
primarily interested in the craft of writing,
or a career in broadcast journalism, will
continue to come. And those people will
still find opportunities.
But the world in which I came of age,
in which a small assortment of powerful,
conventional media players dominated
journalism and set the rules for entry, is
waning. It is being replaced by a more
chaotic world of conventional payers,
startups and independents, in which the
definition of journalism is being inexorably changed, and the definition of journalist with it.
If we accept that journalism is about
finding, researching and telling stories,
then teaching code has to be part of the
mix. Just as J-schools adopted broadcast
methods in the 20th centuries, moving
from being completely print-centric, and
adopted basic online journalism at the
start of this century, the emergence of data
journalism and web development as recognized fields in journalism means J-schools
need to adapt again.
A journalism school exists to teach
journalism, using whatever tools are current at the time. It is the intellectual skills
involved with using the tools, how to spot,
see and tell stories, whether using a word
processor to type words, a digital voice
recorder to capture voices, or a computer
program to scrape data from a government
website, that sets the journalism school
apart.
At their finest, journalism schools are a
crucible of vigorous, intellectually driven
practice, where technology and critical
thinking meet daily to produce generations of journalists equipped to tell stories,
today and far into the future.
And that means we must teach code.
Fred Vallance-Jones is associate
professor of journalism at the University of King’s College, where he teaches
advanced data-journalism skills, including basic programming, in the master of
journalism program.
27
CODES TO GOVERN BEHAVIOUR
Ethics
Journalists in the United States and elsewhere created their
first explicit public ethics — codes that applied across the new
profession. Their familiar principles –– impartiality, verification, accuracy — were justified in a public manner, in terms of
the democratic function of journalism.
There’s No Such Thing As ‘Personal’ Journalism Ethics
Journalistic principles must promote
the common good
By Stephen J. A. Ward
H
ow should we reconstruct journalism ethics now that a media revolution has left a pre-digital, professional
consensus in fragments?
Some journalists are skeptical about
any attempt to forge a new practice-wide
consensus on aims and principles. There
are too many practitioners, too many
platforms, too many conflicting values.
Journalism, it seems, is irrevocably fragmented.
Therefore, there is a trend toward a
“personalized” or “Do It Yourself” approach. Journalists construct their own
ethical guidelines.
In many cases, the underlying justification for personalized ethics is subjectivism or relativism: Each person or type of
journalist has her own values. Journalism
ethics is not a public ethic that applies
across a practice. The justification of
norms seems to be reduced to: “Because
these values are mine.”
The idea of journalism ethics as largely
(or only) personal, or subjective, is misleading in two ways. First, it misconstrues
how we justify moral claims for practices
such as journalism. The justification is
public, not personal. Second, it is out of
step with the history of journalism ethics
and with trends in global journalism ethics.
Why Is Ethics Public?
An ethics can be public in two ways —
in terms of topic and in terms of justification.
An ethics is public in topic if it evaluates conduct and policies with significant
public impact, such as guidelines for allowing terminally ill patients to die.
An ethics is public in justification if it is
required to justify its norms by reference
to some conception of the public good, not
individual goods. Typically, the ethics of
practices, professions and institutions are
public in topic and justification. The ethics
of law and medicine are not grounded
in rules determined by each practitioner,
subjectively. These disciplines are governed by practice-wide codes that promote
public goods such as a fair justice system.
The more a social activity takes the
form of a practice, profession or institution, the more society demands explicit
public codes concerning transparency,
conflicts of interest and other matters. For
example, few people would doubt that a
tough public ethic should govern the office
of the public prosecutor. For hobbies and
social activities with little impact, from
stamp collecting to attending cocktail parties, calls for a special public ethic are out
of place.
I call this view of ethics “publicism”.
It is the belief that society legitimately
demands important practices to articulate
and follow an ethics grounded in serving
the public good.
Publicism asks practitioners to develop
codes that supplement the common morality of society, such as telling the truth
and keeping promises. The codes contain
additional rules that apply specifically to
the practice in question. The codes define
professional ethics, from business and
medical ethics to research ethics.
Impact of Journalism
My claim is that publicism applies to all
forms of journalism, new or old, online or
offline. Journalism is a prime example of
a practice that, given its impact on society,
cannot avoid grounding its primary principles and aims in a special public ethic.
Historically, journalism ethics increasingly took on the burdens of publicism.
Journalism changed from a hobby and
social activity in the 1600s to a social
practice in the next century. New political constitutions in revolutionary America
and France recognized the press as a
“fourth estate” and as an institution which
deserved constitutional protection. By the
late 1900s, a powerful mass commercial
press raised concerns whether journalists
served the public interest.
In response, journalists in the United
States and elsewhere created their first
explicit public ethics — codes that applied
across the new profession. Their familiar
principles –– impartiality, verification, accuracy — were justified in a public manner, in terms of the democratic function of
journalism.
Has the media revolution undermined
the idea that journalism ethics are based
on journalism’s public role in democracy?
The answer is no. Journalism’s over-all
impact increases, not decreases. What is
different is that many citizen journalists
do not fall under professional codes. But
such difficulties do not invalidate the idea
that some public grounding for journalism
ethics is needed. The task is to reinterpret
public journalism ethics for digital media,
not abandon it.
28MEDIA
Ethics Belongs to the Public
These points lead me to my main
conclusion — journalism ethics does not
“belong” to journalists. Journalism ethics
belongs to the public.
Responsible journalists must formulate
principles that meet the “media needs” of
citizens in self-governing democracies.
There are at least six media needs:
Informational needs: Citizens cannot
be vigilant and informed without access
to a rich informational soup of facts and
reports about their world.
Explanatory needs: Citizens need more
than facts. They need context and causal
explanations for properly understanding
facts and events.
‘Perspectival enrichment’ needs:
Citizens need informed commentary, criticism, and multiple points of view on the
information they obtain, and on the state
of their society.
Advocational and reform needs:
Citizens should be free to go beyond
commentary to use media to advocate for
causes, and push for reforms, or to hear
the positions of advocates.
Participatory needs: Citizens should
have the ability to participate in a meaningful fashion in the discussions and
debates, and the sharing of facts and
analysis.
Dialogic needs: Citizens should have
the opportunity to be part of reasonable
and informed dialogue on common concerns, and not be subject to disrespectful
attacks.
Therefore, journalists have no special
authority to announce ex cathedra what
values they honor or what ethical restraints
2015 SPRING EDITION
they will accept. They must show how
their values are well-grounded in the six
media needs.
Of course, journalists can make announcements ex cathedra, but their assertions will lack any social force unless they
show how their principles promote the
public good, and not just their subjective
or idiosyncratic aims.
There is, then, no such thing as personal
journalism ethics, if this means that the basis for its values are the beliefs or interests
of individual persons or particular groups.
The only plausible journalism ethics is a
set of values justified by the public good.
Journalists must face the tribunal of
the public, not just their own conscience,
when their conduct comes into question.
They need to provide reasons that other
citizens would accept.
Subjectivism as Negative Force
Subjectivism in journalism ethics can
damage a free journalism. If journalists
say they make up their own ethics, citizens
may conclude that tougher press laws are
needed. Also, “ethics as subjective” makes
a hash of the idea of journalistic selfregulation.
The latter refers to a practice-wide
accountability for conduct. The “self” in
“self-regulation” does not mean that each
journalist regulates his own conduct.
Ethics as subjective and non-public
also runs counter to the development of
a journalism that is global in reach and,
therefore, incurs global responsibilities.
We need to engage in a public dialogue
across borders on journalism and on global
society. The public principles of a pre-
digital journalism ethics are transposed
into a global key.
Practices, such as reporting on global
issues, are evaluated by principles of universal human rights and the flourishing of
humanity as a whole. Here, subjectivism
cuts little ice.
A public ethics does not mean ethics
lacks a personal side, e.g. when we consult
our conscience. It does not mean there
cannot be differences in the practices of
journalists.
For example, satirical journalism differs from objective reporting. Yet, both
approaches are justified by the need for a
diversity of journalists in an open society.
Nor, does rejecting “personal journalism ethics” mean that journalists cannot
interpret principles differently.
Broadcasters interpret the public principles of accuracy and verification in a way
that makes sense for news broadcasting.
Newspaper editors may interpret the
principles differently. Online journalists
may interpret the principles differently
when blogging a court case.
A public approach to journalism does
not require a code of absolute principles
applied in the same way across time and
place.
It only insists that differences in application and interpretation are not just asserted, or said to be valid because they are
“mine” or personal.
It should be possible to justify differences from a public point of view.
Stephen J.A. Ward is a Halifax-based,
independent media ethicist. You can learn
more about his work at Media Morals.
29
Mapping
Twisted maps
If your story comes with a map,
you’re distorting the truth
By Adam Hooper
I
t doesn’t matter whether you include Tibet in China, where
Israel’s border is, or what colour you choose for Quebec.
Even excluding politics and people, a map twists reality.
So ask yourself: “how shall I distort my map?”
Longitude and Latitude
Distortion comes from a projection. That’s the math that
converts longitude and latitude to pixels on a screen or dots on a
printed page.
Here is the simplest projection possible. It’s called equirectangular.
This is Canada – as computers see it. It spans longitude -141
to -52 (negative means “west”) and latitude 41 to 83 (positive
means “north”). I just placed each point of Canada on a Cartesian
plane.
It looks wrong. The lines of longitude and latitude on the map,
spaced five degrees apart, show why it’s broken.
In reality, lines of longitude (vertical) touch at the North Pole;
on this map, they don’t. If you fly five degrees east from Toronto,
you’ll move 400 kilometres; if you fly five degrees east from Iqa-
luit, you won’t reach 250. Five degrees south from either would
take you 550.
The lines of latitude and longitude shouldn’t be squares. On
this map, towards the south, Canada appears about 40 per cent
wider than it really is. Towards the north, it becomes two times
wider still.
Driving directions, Sailing directions
Here’s a map you probably use daily.
Don’t recognize it? Browse to https://maps.google.com and
zoom out completely.
This projection solves a problem that dates back to the Age of
Sail.
If a ship is heading exactly northwest, its path on an equirectangular map curves leftwards. But 16th-century navigators used
rulers, not computers. Curves were not an option.
Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer, invented a
simple solution: double the distortion. If an acre of land in Whitehorse would appear twice as wide as an acre of land in Panama
City, then make it appear twice as tall, too. Straight bearings turn
30MEDIA
into straight lines: “Northwest” on both parts of a Mercator world
map would point 45 degrees from horizontal.
Mercator’s projection is great for driving directions because it
makes straight roads straight. That’s why it’s ubiquitous online.
But Mercator wasn’t Canadian. Back in Mercator’s day, nobody had discovered oil up North. Heck, nobody had discovered
the North. And it shows.
Mercator maps approach infinite distortion close to the poles,
so Google crops its maps at 85 degrees north and south. That
excludes parts of our globe that matter today. And the distortion
on the remaining northern area makes Nunavut appear larger than
every province.
The North Pole and Aliens
Let’s try a different approach.
Go to the centroid of Canada (southern Nunavut, north of Manitoba) and point straight up. Imagine there’s an alien in that direction, hundreds of light years away, with a fantastic telescope.
This map depicts what the alien would see. The projection is
called orthographic.
This is distorted, too. Manitoba bulges a bit because it’s at the
centre. Yukon and Newfoundland are smaller than they should
be. They’re also rotated and skewed, like rectangles turned into
parallelograms.
Despite these flaws, Canada looks better.
Lambert Conformal Conic
Swiss mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert was a pioneer in the field of curvy shapes. He proved that π is irrational in
1761. He went on to prove that any map projection must distort
either sizes, shapes or both. In 1772 he published several generalpurpose projections, including one that’s particularly important to
Canada:
During the Cold War, the United States
government favoured Mercator and similar
projections to make the USSR seem larger (and
thus more intimidating) than it really was.
2015 SPRING EDITION
This is what you saw in your elementary-school textbook.
Statistics Canada recommends it. For Canada, it fixes the
skews and bulges of an orthographic map.
Of course, it turns straight lines into curves and it distorts sizes.
But as Lambert proved, you can’t win ‘em all.
Why should I care?
A photojournalist seeks apt lighting. A filmmaker strives for
crisp timings. A writer chooses perfect words. Bad choices mislead and misinform.
During the Cold War, the United States government favoured
Mercator and similar projections to make the USSR seem larger
(and thus more intimidating) than it really was. The same trick
helped colonial powers assert themselves over equatorial nations.
Mapmakers chose particular colour schemes and labels, too; but
clearly, projections were part of the propaganda.
Every map distorts, and readers pick up on these cues.
Which areas should you distort? Should you make them larger,
smaller, or misshapen? Should the effect be obvious or subtle?
As with words, pictures and sources, you should choose a
projection your readers would agree is sensible.
How do I choose a projection?
If you’re zoomed in on one city, don’t worry: the projection
won’t make much difference. It only matters for broader maps:
provinces, Canada, or the world.
Use Lambert conformal conic when portraying Canada as a
country: that’s the standard. For an example, click here.
Lambert conformal conic is fine for any province or state in
Canada, the United States or Europe; but you can be pickier. The
United States prefers Albers, which is like Lambert, but preserves
sizes. Click here for an example. Every government has a favourite projection; search online to find it.
Continued on page 32
31
Continued from page 31
For a world map, Robinson is a safe choice. Click here for an
example.
If you’re mapping roads, use Mercator. Roads tend to follow
cardinal directions, which are straight lines on a Mercator map.
If you’re showing flight paths, use a conic projection. Flights
tend to follow straight lines on conic projections.
If you’re comparing sizes of large regions, or of small regions
from different parts of the world, try orthographic projections. Do
not use Mercator: it makes Greenland larger than Africa.
Do not attempt a conic projection: the math would be brutal.
You can also get artsy and choose a view from above. Click
here for an example.
How do I set a projection?
It all depends on how you’re making your map.
If you use Google Fusion Tables, CartoDB or MapBox, you’re
stuck with Mercator. That’s great for displaying population den-
sity within a city; it’s terrible for displaying population density
across Canada. (I admit: I’ve committed this faux-pas.)
Those sites all work by pre-rendering map tiles as images. For
custom projections, you need to build maps as polygons, using
geographic coordinates from Natural Earth Data and the Census
of Canada.
If you’re a beginner, try Tableau Public. It defaults to Mercator,
but Tableau has published a guide on choosing alternate projections.
If you’re a JavaScript buff, Leaflet and OpenLayers support
custom projections. D3 does even better: it includes a dozen projections with sample code for each. D3 is the library of choice for
web mapping experts; unfortunately, it doesn’t include widgets
for panning and zooming.
The next (or first) time you make a map, remember your story’s
focus. Be sure the map enhances it.
Adam Hooper is a Montreal-based journalist and software
engineer.
For exclusive content, stories, interviews about journalism
turn to Media.
Visit
http://www.caj.ca/media-magazine-archives/
32MEDIA
Freelancing
Selling the data-journalism story
David Weisz provides a tip sheet for maximizing success
S
elling that first freelance piece is
simultaneously the most rewarding and frustrating experience a journalist
can go through. Successfully selling, and
getting paid to write about is one of the
most rewarding experiences I’ve ever felt
as a journalist, and I’m sure many would
agree. Everything else that encompasses
freelancing -- getting in contact with editors, ever-shifting publication dates and
dealing with financials -- is as frustrating
as any scrum I’ve ever been in. Selling a
freelance data-journalism story ramps up
the agony and the ecstasy exponentially.
That’s because doing freelance data
journalism adds new complications to the
traditional freelancing model. In addition
to the added work of researching information, and calling sources, you’ve also got
to deal with scraping/cleaning/analyzing
data, and then relaying this additional
work to an editor. But with the added
frustration comes the chance for greater
professional rewards.
How do I get started finding a data
story?
Do you know how to do a pivot table?
If you don’t know the answer, then drop
everything and get comfortable learning
Microsoft Excel. Ten times out of 10, your
data work will involve a spreadsheet of
some kind.
If data management was one of those
high school courses you slept through,
take the time to understand basic statistics,
and I mean really basic -- when to use a
mean, median and mode.
After that, I would say the best thing
you can do is pick a project. Find a story
you want to tell and how you want to tell
it, and then work backwards. There are
many ways to tell a data-journalism story,
and many different ways to display data
-- what you choose to learn will depend on
2015 SPRING EDITION
your own computer savvy as well as the
stories you want to tell.
From there, it really depends on your
own personal preferences. One of the
hardest things that I continue to struggle
with to this day is a desire to add as many
data journalism tools to my skillset as possible. Though curiosity is fundamental to
being a good data journalist, and journalist
in general, trying to absorb too much at
once can be overwhelming and ultimately,
paralyzing. Focusing on a single project
will allow you to organically develop the
skills you need.
How much of a story should I complete before going to an editor?
This is what I understand to be one
of the bigger departures from typical
freelancing. But when it comes to data
journalism, showing a sortable spreadsheet
or rudimentary visualization beats a pitch
or query letter every time. Data journalism
is fairly demonstrative by its nature, and
you’d be surprised how far a simple tech
demo will go, even if it’s a simple Tableau
visualization.
How does traditional fact-checking
factor in?
When freelancing a piece for a publication, it’s a normal assumption that the
article will be scrutinized and fact-checked
. When interning at the The Grid, many
writers definitely took it for granted. Do
not assume that this is the case with your
freelance data story.
What I’ve found is that by presenting
yourself as a data journalist, you are given
the tacit benefit of the doubt, in that your
data is correct. Keep meticulous notes and/
or versions of your data, including the
very important “master” data file (the rawest copy of data you have before you start
tinkering with it). Write a methodology
to go along with your data. You should be
prepared to stake your reputation on your
data.
How can I learn from your mistakes?
This is one thing I wish I had done
sooner – because while I have been a
working freelance data journalist for several years now, my portfolio is fairly lacking. As someone who specializes more in
the granular, research-driven side of data
journalism, a lot of my work, frankly, isn’t
very conducive for a public gallery (for
example, my work for 16x9, for which I
gained a researcher credit, didn’t involve
any data visualization at all). Frankly,
given my fairly bare portfolio, I’ve been
pretty fortunate when it comes to landing gigs. I’m taking steps to rectify that
though, and so should you.
Also, while large, multi-faceted projects
are great for learning a variety of skills,
they often take longer and are a harder sell
to an editor, especially if you’re relying on
them to provide any front-end, back-end
support. Stick to smaller projects at first to
build up your portfolio, so you have something to back up your dream project with.
How much should I charge?
Keep track of your hours and take your
best guess. Every publication is different,
and the field is so relatively new that as far
as I know, there isn’t a standard pay scale
for data-journalism pieces. The best thing
you can do is outline everything you’ve
done, and impress upon your editors the
time and labourious nature of what you’ve
done, and as mentioned above, give them
a demo of the final product.
David Weisz is a Toronto-based freelance journalist, copywriter, educator and
self-described “data geek”. He specializes
web scraping, database querying, and
freedom-of-information requests. He can
be reached at davidaaronweisz@gmail.
com.
33
Lessons Learned
The Fine Print
Mapping with Tilemill and Tilestream: Part 2
Dagenais at 20
I
Why a landmark ruling on press
freedom still matters
By Dean Jobb
W
e can broadcast the video-recorded confession in which Justin
Bourque matter-of-factly describes how he
set out to kill RCMP officers in Moncton last June, leaving three dead and two
wounded. We can publish, in detail, the
evidence gathered as police probed allegations that former Toronto mayor Rob Ford
was obtaining and using illegal drugs.
And the public can see, hear or read the
details of countless other crimes, police
operations and court cases, all thanks to
a Supreme Court of Canada decision that
has opened the justice system to an unprecedented level of public scrutiny.
The ruling in the case of Dagenais v.
Canadian Broadcasting Corp. handed
down more than 20 years ago (in December 1994), was a game-changer for
journalists. Bans on publishing evidence
presented in court, it decreed, should be
the exception, and not be the norm. Judges
accustomed to rubber-stamping requests
for bans were told to consider the media’s
right, enshrined in the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms, to cover court proceedings.
“Dagenais was a watershed that forced
courts to re-examine whether bans were
really necessary,” Toronto lawyer and media law specialist Brian Rogers has noted.
“Contentious stories in the public interest about crimes and court proceedings
could be published without jeopardizing
fair trials. The question became ‘why not
publish?’”
The ruling overturned lower-court
orders that prevented the CBC from airing The Boys of St. Vincent, a fictional
account of child abuse at a Catholic boy’s
school. Dagenais and three other Ontario
priests accused of sexually abusing children argued the broadcast threatened their
right to a fair trial.
The Supreme Court declared, however,
that a defendant’s rights do not “trump”
the media’s right to report the news and
inform the public.
Evidence will be suppressed only if
there is a “real and substantial risk” that
disclosure will harm a victim of crime, a
witness or the trial process itself.
While publication bans were the issue
in Dagenais, legal challenges mounted by
media outlets have established the ruling
as a template for greater access to the
justice system.
In 2001, in the case of R. v. Mentuck the
Supreme Court overturned a ban on the
investigative techniques used in a Manitoba murder investigation, exposing the
controversial “Mr. Big” sting for the first
time.
Four years later, in Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. v. Ontario the Supreme Court
extended the Dagenais test to any court
order, issued in any court proceeding,
that limits freedom of expression or press
freedom.
“The administration of justice thrives
on exposure to light,” Justice Morris Fish
noted in the latter ruling, “and withers
under a cloud of secrecy.”
Dagenais is the wedge that pried open
the doors to our courtrooms and our justice system.
Evidence once off-limits to journalists –
information in search warrants, videotaped
confessions, crime scene photos, recordings of 9-1-1 calls – will be made public
unless there are compelling reasons to
prevent its release.
The ruling has not removed every
barrier to news reports. Dagenais does
not apply to most of the bans set out in
the Criminal Code and other statutes, so
evidence presented at bail hearings and
preliminary inquiries, to cite two common
examples, is usually kept under wraps
until a defendant stands trial.
And while the right of news outlets to
challenge other publication bans is widely
recognized, too many judges and court
officials err on the side of caution and impose bans that ignore the letter and spirit
of the Dagenais precedent.
Some provinces, with Nova Scotia in
the vanguard, have established procedures
to notify the media when bans are sought,
so the proposed restrictions can be challenged.
Too often, though, they are imposed
without warning and without consideration
of the impact on press freedom.
Publication bans can protect privacy
as well as the right to a fair trial, and the
interests of people caught up in court cases
are emerging as a major battleground. The
New Brunswick judge who released Justin
Bourque’s confession last December, for
instance, took into account the impact on
relatives of the slain officers, before deciding the public interest takes precedence.
Two decades years after Dagenais set
the rules, the media’s right to inform the
public rests on a firm foundation. And so
does the public’s right to know.
Dean Jobb teaches journalism at the
University of King’s College in Halifax
and is author of Media Law for Canadian
Journalists (Emond Montgomery 2011).
His latest book, Empire of Deception, the
true story of a 1920s American swindler
who escaped to a new life of luxury in
Nova Scotia, will be published by HarperCollins Canada in May. Details at www.
deanjobb.com.
34
MEDIA
n our last installment I showed you how to create a map in Tilemill by importing
Open Street Map data. This tutorial builds on that knowledge and will show you
how to export your map tiles, create a map server, and use them in your projects.
This process will export your map for you to use as a basemap for other projects.
Tilemill does this by creating a set of tiles for each zoom level. The tiles are simple
By Lucas Timmons .png files that are arranged together to create the map. Each zoom level will have
different levels of detail of features on the map. These details were set by you in the
.mss files in the previous tutorial. Tilemill does all the work for you and makes all the images you need.
PART 1: Making the tiles
To begin, open Tilemill and choose your project from those displayed on the main screen. The main map window will show the map you created before. The panel on the right will show your styles in the .mss files.
If you are ready to export your map click on the export button on the top right of the screen. Choose the MBTiles option from the drop down menu. You could choose a different kind of export, such as a svg file, but for
our purposes MBTiles work best.
In the dialogue window that appears, choose your settings. In the main map window you can choose which
area of the map you’d like to export. This will allow you to pick just the area of the map you will be using. If
you want to export the entire world, expect several gigabytes of data, based on the number of zoom levels you
would like. Remember, the more data you include, the more storage space you will need.
To download the entire tutorial, please click here.
2015 SPRING EDITION
35