John Gordon Miller's Blog

Rush to print?

John Miller — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:09:11 -0400

So this is what passes for "news judgment" in the age of instant information? Give us a break.

Beneath an advertising wrap-around for President's Choice proclaiming "Get fired up for the weekend," the Toronto Star's front page today featured what it said was an "exclusive" -- Mayor Rob Ford in crack video scandal.

Except it wasn't an exclusive. News of the video was posted earlier on Gawker, a New York-based celebrity gossip website.

Reporters for both organizations claimed they had seen a video offered for sale by someone in Toronto that showed the Toronto mayor inhaling from a glass crack cocaine pipe and talking incoherently. Both stories indicated the Star and Gawker had been sitting on the story for a considerable time -- the Star for at least two weeks, for unexplained reasons, and Gawker for an undetermined time so it could line up a news partner with the resources and inclination to pay six figures for the video.

Is the story a matter of public interest? Of course it is. If the video is legit, trafficking and possessing crack cocaine are criminal acts, and this is the mayor of North America's fifth largest city. It may explain why Ford has been misbehaving in public lately. Also, Ford is already campaigning hard for his re-election next year.

But was it good journalism? Not in my opinion.

I have no issue with how or why the Star decided to pursue the story. From the account of its reporters, they appear to have done so diligently and responsibly. But the paper's editors obviously decided they didn't have enough to publish. That changed late on Thursday night. What changed? Somebody else was onto the story, and it didn't seem to matter that "somebody else" was a website with limited resources and a questionable record for deciding what news the public should be interested in. It's clear to me that the Star only decided to publish because Gawker did, at 8.28 p.m. on Thursday. The Star put its story on its website shortly before midnight. It slapped a "Star exclusive" label on it and made only an incidental reference to Gawker publishing the story in the fifth paragraph. That's misleading, but the long Star story was missing something even more significant -- why the paper changed its mind and decided to publish.

Here's what the Star's editorial principles say about using material from the Internet: "For journalists, the Internet is a treasure trove and a minefield. Proceed with caution. The Star does not grab and publish material from the Internet. Any information from web sources such as Facebook, chat rooms, MySpace, Twitter feeds, personal websites or blogs must be verified to establish the bona fides of the sources....The originating source of the information must be identified."

Now, the Star might answer that its reporters had themselves viewed the video three times, confirming what it purported to show. That's true, and it obviously occurred before Gawker even knew about the story. But the paper does not identify the person who shot the video, other than to say he claimed (through a third party who also remained anonymous) to have supplied crack cocaine to the mayor (no details about how many times or what he allegedly paid for it). Nor is the Star's main contact identified, other than to say he described himself as "a community organizer in the Somali community."

Here's what the Star's editorial principles say about identifying sources: "The public interest is best served when news sources are identified by their full names. The Star should be aggressive in pressing sources to put information on the record and should seek independently to corroborate off-the-record information.

"The Star does not provide anonymity to those who attack individuals or organizations or engage in speculation — the unattributed cheap shot. People under attack in the Star have the right to know their accusers."

When anonymous sources are used, the Star says it will provide the following information: "Published articles must explain why sources have been granted anonymity and why the Star considers them authoritative and credible. Sources should have first-hand knowledge of the information and this must be conveyed to the reader. As much information as possible about the source — without revealing identity — should appear in the story. When possible, the Star will disclose the source’s motive for disclosing the information."

In my view, the Star skirted around the edges of these editorial principles by rushing into print, without anything but a last-minute attempt to get Ford and his people to tell their side of the story. It allowed at least two anonymous sources, both drug dealers, to attack a prominent individual without managing to get the other side. It did not explain why the sources were granted anonymity, or what their motive was to video a customer smoking their product. There was time to do all of that in the two weeks the paper has known about the video.

It's remotely possible the central figure in the video was not Ford, but a lookalike. It's possible what he was inhaling was not crack cocaine. It`s even possible the Star was the target of an elaborate hoax, designed to get it off the mayor`s case. Knowing all this, the paper, for whatever reason, chose not to approach the mayor's office for comment before late Thursday night. It never contacted the police, who now will be investigating. There is also the matter of which Toronto media outlet offered $40,000 for the video, as alleged by Gawker. If not the Star, which has policies against paying for news, then who? The Star only says it did not purchase the video; it does not say if it offered something and it wasn't enough.

In my view, publication of this story in a reputable newspaper should have been accompanied by a note from the editor justifying why he decided to do so today. What did the paper know, what did it not know, and what changed its mind?

At least Gawker was more honest about this point, and about its desire to purchase the video. In his story, reporter John Cook explains why he went with the story. Someone else, ah, was onto it. Cook says the asking price of $100,000 for the cellphone video was too high: "So if Gawker can't come up with enough money to ring this owner's bell, perhaps we can find a partner....When I emailed an acquaintance at CNN this afternoon ... he forwarded the email to his producer. The producer, in turn, asked CNN's Canada reporter about it. The Canada reporter—and this was a pretty fucking big mistake—called a source who used to work in Ford's office. Within 40 minutes, word had gotten back to me that 'CNN called Ford's office asking about a crack tape'."

So there we have it: You and I never would have heard about this unless someone had made a pretty fucking big mistake.

The Toronto Star, which has published a number of stories about Ford's questionable activities and ethics, had good reason to be cautious about letting its judgment be influenced by what appears on social media. It recently got egg on its face when it reported, on no other authority than a Facebook photo, that a former Ontario cabinet minister was living it up in Florida while on medical leave from her job. As anyone who uses Facebook knows (and the reporter admits he did not), when a picture is posted does not indicate when it was taken. The paper had to apologize when it learned the photo had been taken three years before. Currently the Star newsroom is undergoing mandatory social media training (and one of the teachers is a reporter whose byline is on the Ford story today).

But at least the Star didn't do the bonehead thing the Vancouver Province did.

It not only reported the story from the Internet, it invited readers to "Help the Province purchase the Rob Ford video." Here's what the link on its website said:

Help us buy the Rob Ford video
Gawker has published a post claiming a video exists of Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack. We do not know if this is true, but we would like to see it. Gawker claims to have seen it, but they did not want to pay the $100,000 being requested by the owner. Together, perhaps we can pay that. Surely there are 107,500 people who would be willing to pay $1 to see this video. (The extra $7,500 is to pay fees.)

Our promise
If we reach our goal, we will reach out to Gawker for their contact who has the video. If we are successful in obtaining it, and our legal counsel clears it for publication, we will publish it. If any of these things do not happen, your money will be refunded. You cannot lose.

But there's more than one campaign... which should I fund?
While our campaign will return your funds if we come up short, another worthy campaign will donate them to an addiction centre. We won't object if you choose that one!

By this morning, 654 readers had pledged a dollar each to the Province-- surely a low point in the recent history of yahoo ethics at Canadian newspapers.

I think it's safe to say that with this kind of news judgment at work, this story is going to get way crazier before it's over.

Drown the kittens

John Miller — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:07:17 -0400

It's official: Working as a reporter is the worst job you can get -- if you can get one, that is, and if you are lucky enough to keep it.

That's what the American-based career guidance website CareerCast.com says anyway. Thanks to shrinking newsrooms, dwindling budgets, the stress of deadlines, low pay and competition from online news organizations, newspaper reporter ranks last among 200 jobs -- behind enlisted soldier, lumberjack, dairy farmer, meter reader and roofer.

Some of us remember when being a reporter was considered daring and exotic. We need only look at the bad news swirling around Canadian newsrooms to understand how things have changed for the worst.

Even the publisher of The Globe and Mail says his newsroom is full of "too many skills that we don’t need any more." He'd be "happy," Phillip Crawley told his reporters and editors earlier this week, if 60 of them walked out the door and never came back. That number would represent about 8 per cent of The Globe’s 770 employees.

As if that wasn't enough to wreck anyone's zeal to work in a newsroom, now we have this remarkable letter to staff by Crawley's counterpart at the Vancouver Sun and Province, Gordon Fisher. It begins ominously: "The first note of a new publisher to staff is obviously one of significance (to the writer at least) and would normally be of good cheer and much hope. So how to begin this one?"

That's known in the business as a buried lead -- something Fisher says he learned as a young reporter not to do. Buried nearly half way down in his verbose four-page letter is news that not only will reporters and editors be encouraged to take a "voluntary staff reduction program," but that "it is likely that the program will be followed by an economic layoff of other employees."

The reason, he says bluntly, is that "these two wonderful brands are in serious difficulty. The situation is much more challenging than I would have anticipated."

This is where my finely tuned bullshit meter hits red. Fisher has for 30 years been a top executive at the paper's corporate owner, Postmedia Network Canada Corp., and its predecessors CanWest Global, Hollinger and Southam. He would have had first-hand knowledge of the challenges facing the Sun and Province. Moreover, he has a reputation as a corporate hatchet man, having presided over many staff-reduction programs starting with the mass firing he carried out as new publisher of the Kingston Whig-Standard in 1994. Twelve of the paper's best and most senior reporters and editors were summoned to Room 532 in the local Holiday Inn, where Fisher personally sent them packing (I describe this in my book, Yesterday's News, in a chapter titled "Drowning the Kittens." The circulation of the Whig-Standard today is about half what it was before Fisher swept his scythe through the newsroom).

It is usual when things like this happen that the publisher tries to polish the turd and say that the quality of the paper won't suffer.

Here's what Crawley said: "We have the brand, the content, the audience, and the ownership. That’s why we’re planning for the future by doing this now.”

Here's Fisher on the same point: "So please do your best to ignore the noise and put aside the fear of change. The mindset within our universe should always be consumer facing: we need to all the thinking of the reader and the advertiser as a first priority every day."

Fisher is wise enough to have absorbed the findings of the recent U.S. report on State of the News Media: Nearly one-third of poll respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to. The evidence seems to suggest that downsizing newsrooms is a strategy that has reached its limit. Any further cuts will cannibalize the audience and hurt the bottom line.

What I don't like about corporate bullies like Fisher is they're blaming the problems of the newspaper industry on reporters and editors, and not management's own failure to find a more sustainable business model. He ends his letter to employees this way: "Please understand that we need your help. And if you do anything every day of the week let it be this: ask yourself if you are part of the solution or are willing to be part of the solution. If you aren't part of the solution, ask yourself why that is."

Right. Not only are you in a shitty job, we want you to feel guilty about staying on.

It's executives like these who are leading Canadian newspapers down the garden path to oblivion, looking mostly for convenient places to bury the bodies.

Lopping off limbs

John Miller — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:46:17 -0500

As usual, Monty Python was way ahead of its time.

In 1975, the British comedy troupe created a fictional character called the Black Knight for its movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The movie featured a hilarious sword fight between King Arthur (Graham Chapman) and the Black Knight (John Cleese). One by one, the Black Knight's limbs are hacked off, but the stubborn combatant refuses to acknowledge any serious damage, insisting "Tis but a scratch." Finally, when the Knight is reduced to a writhing torso, he offers to "call it a draw" and then yells at the victorious Arthur: "Running away, eh? ... Come back here and take what's coming to ya! I'll bite your legs off!"

The Black Knight comes to mind as I read the justifications of the publisher and the editor of the Toronto Star for their decision yesterday to effectively decapitate their newsroom.

Canada’s largest daily newspaper said 55 employees would be laid off, half in its editorial department. That's about 9 percent of the paper's remaining workforce, but the real news lies in who's being cut: The people with the last set of eyes. The people who put the news in the paper and ensure it is accurate and fair. The people who write the headlines and size the pictures. The people who trim the stories to fit, who check the spelling and catch the typos. Some of the people who sell the ads and help reporters with their research. And almost all of the remaining page designers, who have won the paper numerous awards.

Memos from publisher John Cruickshank and editor Michael Cooke bravely insisted the cuts were strategic and carefully considered, but (according to Cruickshank) "the loss of valued, close colleagues will be challenging to all, and we will need to tap into our shared commitment to the Star’s mission and purpose as we navigate these challenging times."

That's corporate bullshit for the wheels are falling off the bus, and the only way out is to lighten the load.

Although there are rumours of even more cuts to come, the Star's key decision yesterday was to contract out the copy editing and design of its news pages to Pagemasters North America, a Toronto-based company it partially owns. I may be wrong, but I believe this makes the Star the first large Canadian daily to allow someone else to edit and design all of its news pages.

The move is entirely economic. The top rate for a Pagemasters editor is $48,000 while the salary for the same job at the Star is close to $85,000.

The paper tried to do the same thing three years ago but called off the plan after its editorial union protested and suggested other ways for the company to save money.

Not surprisingly, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers unit condemned yesterday's move as devastating and wrongheaded.

"Why fire the people designing and laying out the pages of the country's biggest paper while throwing good money after bad at money-losing in Star Content Studios?" the union's Stuart Laidlaw said. "Why cut ad staff when the thing we need most is more ads? Why choke its journalists' research abilities in an era when value-added content is king? Why cede control of online monitoring to an outside entity when one rogue comment can land us in court? The company also said it plans to contract out the radio room in the coming months "

Editor Cooke, who at least acknowledged the decison was painful, put on his best Black Knight act in proclaiming the Star's journalism, despite the loss of so many limbs, still shines.

"We cover the ebb and flow of the news and we're the best in the country at that. We have exclusives that leave our opponents choking on our dust, we have investigations that expose astonishing wrongdoing, and we get action for changing lives and making our town a better place.

"We can be proud. The thousands of journalists who came before us here and whose legacy we inherited would be proud, too, if they could see our work today. We owe it to them to keep going and to keep getting better at what we do on all the platforms on which we now place our work."

And that is corporate bullshit for we'll give you a light pat on the back as we frogmarch you out the door.

Like Cooke, I spent my career at the Star writing headlines and laying out pages and checking stories other people wrote for fairness, accuracy and completeness. I founded and edited the Sunday Star and innovative sections like What's On. A special section I edited on the death of John Lennon was singlehandedly responsible for the Sunday Star overtaking the Sunday Sun as the largest Sunday paper in the country. That was a long time ago, but good editing increased circulation and added to the paper's profit and readership.

That's what the Star is throwing overboard. The things it needs most right now.

God help quality journalism when the Star, which once sent Ernest Hemingway to cover wars, Milt Dunnell to cover games, Peter C. Newman to cover politics and Gordon Sinclair to cover life, is short-sighted enough to let $25-an-hour strangers dress up the news every day and shove it on stage.

Freedom in blinkers

John Miller — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 16:09:20 -0500

You are about to read about a case of government secrecy so outrageous that few Canadians will believe it could ever happen here.

It's a cautionary tale, illustrating how badly we need to fight back against the Harper government's determination to keep us in the dark about how it spends billions of dollars of our money.

The story begins in May 2008, when I made what I thought was a reasonable request under Canada's Access to Information Act. I wanted to know how much the Department of Natural Resources was planning to spend to clean up my hometown. I live in Port Hope, ON, which happens to be the site of the largest clean-up of radioactive contamination in our country's history. More than 1.2 million cubic metres of low-level waste will be dug out of backyards and streets over the next 15 or 20 years and buried in a safe containment mound. It's a legacy of when a federal crown corporation, Eldorado Nuclear, refined uranium for use in the Manhattan Project bombs that were dropped on Japan in 1945, helping to end the Second World War. Canadian taxpayers are footing the bill for the clean-up. Estimates at that time said it would cost at least $260 million, but I knew it was going to be many times that amount.

Under the information act, the department must respond within 30 days. It did, but only to inform me that it was extending the time period for 90 days. I could expect an answer to my questions by Sept. 23, 2008. This delay is so commonplace that almost everyone who files for information has come to expect it.

So when Sept. 23 came and went, I wrote again to ask what was happening with my request. One thing led to another and, on Nov. 21 -- just two months late -- I got my package of documents in the mail. Or so I thought.

All I received was a manual prepared by Atomic Energy of Canada titled "Communications and Community Involvement Program, Port Hope Project." It was not restricted in any way, so I probably could have received it just by asking at AECL's local office. Sixty-four pages of cost estimates for the project were withheld, on grounds that they were either cabinet documents or contain information "which could reasonably be expected to be materially injurious to the financial interests of the Government of Canada." Ironically, AECL's communications manual states that "accurate and fair information ... can contribute significantly to the success of any project."

If I wasn't happy with this (and I wasn't) I was told I could appeal to the Information Commissioner of Canada. My letter of appeal was dated Dec. 2, 2008.

What happened over the next four years explains why Canada ranks so low on an international index that measures the strength and effectiveness of laws intended to guarantee citizens access to information about their governments. On the list of 93 countries with such laws, the Centre for Law and Democracy ranks Canada 55th, well behind countries like Liberia, Mexico, Serbia and Ethiopia.

The centre explains the reasons this way: "As a country that was once among the world's leaders in government openness, it is unfortunate that Canada has dropped so far down the list. Partly, this is the result of global progress, with which Canada has failed to keep pace. Canada's Access to Information Act, while cutting edge in 1983, has not been significantly updated since then, and reflects many outdated norms. Canada's lax timelines, imposition of access fees, lack of a proper public interest override, and blanket exemptions for certain political offices all contravene international standards for the right of access. Canada's antiquated approach to access to information is also the result of a lack of political will to improve the situation."

This should be a wake-up call to Canadians to participate in the current review of our 30-year-old Access to Information legislation. There is an online survey here that will enable the independent organization Canadian Journalists for Free Expression to intervene on the public's behalf before the public comment period ends on Dec. 21. Please add your voice.

Now back to my story. I argued that the the Port Hope clean-up is being paid for by taxpayers and the updated cost estimates are "information that the public -- and especially the people who live in Port Hope -- have a right to know." I said I was not asking for cabinet documents, just correspondence between Natural Resources Canada and the federal Low Level Radioactive Waste Management Office, which is AECL's agency managing the clean-up in Port Hope.

Weeks went by. I was finally phoned by Eric Murphy of the information commissioner's office, warning me that the average time to resolve an appeal was one year. Did I still want to go to the trouble? Yes, I said, I did. I'm a patient man, but I know I have a constitutional right to information, and am determined to fight for it.

This took place in late 2008. The next I heard (and I admit that this appeal had almost slipped my mind) was February, 2010, more than a year later. Donna Billard, who carries the title "chief of operations, strategic case management team, complaints resolution and compliance, Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada," wrote with the results of the investigation. She said it's still ongoing, and "you will be informed of the results of those investigations upon their completion." She was able to confirm that some of the information I apparently asked for -- she couldn't say which -- is denied because it constitutes "confidences of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada." Okay, okay, I don't really want any state secrets, just how much the taxpayers of Canada are on the hook for. So I sat tight and waited.

And waited.

Finally, nearly two years later, on Nov. 2, 2011, out of the blue, I got a follow-up letter carrying the logo of the Office of the Information Commissioner. I was excited but had to remind myself of what it might be about. Oh yes, the final results of my appeal! I rip it open, only to be confornted with the bureaucratic prose of Pierre Dupuis, who informs me "I have recently been assigned to investigate your complaint against NRCan." Oh dear. He adds: "In order to proceed with the present process, it would be necessary to contact you to discuss the present status and obtain necessary information. Consequently, I must advise you that in order to continue this investigation, it will be necessary for you to contact our office by Nov. 22, 2011, or provide this office with the appropriate contact information. Otherwise, we will consider the complaint abandoned, and close the investigation file."

Now I'm starting to get really angry. The investigation file appears to have been closed for a couple of years, you twit. You have my freaking phone number and my email address, and you mail me a letter? I phoned Pierre Dupuis and gave him an earful about the inefficient office he works at, and added a rocket to get him to expedite my complaint. He archly informed me that he's a temp, brought in to clear the backlog of complaints, and I should be more understanding. He's now working on it and giving it his full attention.

Another four months go by without any word. Frustrated, I phone Pierre one morning to find out whether he's forgotten about me. "Oh, Mr. Miller," he says. "I have good news. I've think we have convinced NRCan to release more information. I'm just writing you a letter."

Three months later, no letter. Even for a person with M. Dupuis' work ethic and attention span, that seems overdue. But when I phone his number, I get a recorded message: "I will no longer be taking messages at this line. If you have questions, please phone 1-800-267-0441."

I rightly deduce I'm back at square one, especially when I phone the number and am put through to the cumbersomely titled Donna Billard.

"What happened to Dupuis?" I ask. "He said he was writing me a letter with good news."

"He's taking some time off," she replies. A few minutes later, she confides "Mr. Dupuis no longer works here." She knows nothing about a letter.

"Are you managing my case now then?"

"I, uh, haven't reassigned his files yet."

"You know, this is unacceptable. I filed my appeal in 2008."

"Oh, we're still handling appeals much older than that. I have one from 2003." She attributed this to "staffing and volume issues," and let slip that "we're still working on paper here."

Still pressing, I secure a promise from her. "I will check Monday and get back to you."

That was on June 1, 2012. I hear nothing, of course, and leave a few messages for her the following week, then give up. Five months later, a letter arrives from NRCan containing a remarkable document, which is end the result of years of sporadic negotiation spearheaded by Dupuis and Billard and prompted by my complaint. It's a spreadsheet headed "Cost estimates, Port Hope Project" and listing the various categories of expenditures the taxpayers of Canada will be committed to spend to clean up Port Hope. There are several pages of this, covering the next several years. But every one of the boxes containing actual dollar figures has been methodically whited out.

I angrily toss the lot in the garbage and curse the Harper government which chooses to deny the public its information, and the Canadians like me who tend to take for granted that the freedom of expression granted by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms means that we have the ability to hold our government to account.

On Nov. 20, an email arrives from Donna Billard. "As a result of your complaint, NRCan reconsidered its application of the Act, resulting in the disclosure of more information to you under cover of its supplementary response dated October 2, 2012... I wish, first, to confirm your receipt of the supplementary response and, second, to obtain your final representations regarding NRCan's continued application of exemptions to withhold some information pursuant to sections 18 and 21. Your input on/by end of day Friday, November 30, 2012, would be appreciated."

This is what I wrote back to Billard and the horse she rode in on:

"This is surely a bad joke. Almost four years ago I filed an appeal to your office because NRCan refused my request for any cost estimates for the Port Hope Area Initiative. All you could achieve in that time was to persuade NRCan to reconsider. They did. What they released was a list of spending categories WITH ALL THE FINANCIAL INFORMATION BLOCKED OUT. What a colossal waste of time!"

Canada was once hailed as a world leader in openness. Now, without public outrage, we risk being seen as a laughingstock. Please act now before it's too late.

By the way, since then the federal government has publicly committed $1.2 billion to clean up Port Hope. If you think that may or may not be the final amount, sorry, you'll just have to take the government's word for it.

The worst is here

John Miller — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 17:29:03 -0500

Warren Buffett, whose portfolio includes newspapers, once said: "Thirty years ago if you had an idiot nephew, you bought him a newspaper to run, but it's not that easy anymore.”

Wait a minute. Can't idiots still become publishers? Based on recent evidence, Buffett may have been wrong -- it still seems ridiculously easy enough. And it usually has disastrous results.

We take you now to Niagara Falls, NY, where a man named Frank Parlato is publishing a suburban weekly called the Reporter.

It used to be a respected local newspaper. But since Parlato, a developer, took it over earlier this year, "suddenly the pages of the Niagara Falls Reporter ... were filled with sexism, racism, the mockery of immigrants, the condemnation of gay men and lesbian women, crude demeaning political tirades, and poorly-written, loopy cultural points-of-view."

That's the verdict of the paper's long-standing film critic, Michael Calleri, who has resigned and gone very public with his indictment of Parlato and the kind of people who seem to be gaining control of the press these days -- people with little interest in their public responsibility to the truth, little commitment to foster responsible journalism, and absolutely no ideas to make society better than it is. They're either interested in making money or, like Parlato, using newspapers as a bully pulpit against his enemies or things he doesn't like.

What doesn't Frank ("I believe in manliness") Parlato like? Well, um, for starters ... modern women.

In an amazing email he sent Calleri, who wondered why his film reviews were not making the paper lately, Parlato said "I have a deep moral objection to publishing reviews of films that offend me. Snow White and the Huntsman is such a film. When my boys were young I would never have allowed them to go to such a film for I believe it would injure their developing manhood. If I would not let my own sons see it, why would I want to publish anything about it?"

"I don't want to publish reviews of films where women are alpha and men are beta," he said. "If you care to write reviews where men act like good strong men and have a heroic inspiring influence on young people to build up their character (if there are such movies being made) I will be glad to publish these.
I am not interested in supporting the reversing of traditional gender roles."

Now I am tempted to leave Parlato and his Neanderthal views to the more enlightened readers of Niagara Falls to sort out, except that he -- albeit with all his cartoon-like deficiencies -- represents a disturbing trend in newspapers these days. Gone are the days when every smart publisher knew enough to keep the advertising salespeople out of the newsroom and his or her own nose out of reporters' notebooks. Newspapers have been taken over by the counting house people.

Witness the recent upheaval in Canada at Sun Media, where regional publishers have been replaced by people whose only function was to sell ads. They are the geniuses who failed to see the Internet coming. Hopefully none of these new people turn out to be Parlatos, but what happens when push comes to shove over something their paper prints that offends someone? How will they react? Will they patiently explain the function of a free press in society and allow, say, a film reviewer to continue to write about new films with modern ideas? Or will they side with the money and cut out the offending reporting as a surgeon might amputate a tumour? I'm afraid I don't know the answer for sure, but I fear the worst.

And speaking of the worst, Parlato won't ever get it. He struck back at Calleri's blog with his own, accusing his former writer of unethically publishing his email, which he understood to be off-the-record, and claiming that he intended parts of it to be "tongue-in-cheek."

He didn't say which parts were tongue in cheek but he did own up to wanting to publish only material "which promotes traditional family values and, at the risk of offending many, supporting the traditional roles between a husband and wife, where, for the welfare of their children, a mother can stay at home to raise her children and a father goes out to work damn hard."

And he had the gall to boast about his business success and take a gratuitous shot at his tormenter. "We owe a hearty thanks to our growing ranks of readers who are, for the most part, as far removed from the values and morals of Hollywood as Calleri is from being a legitimate, full-time, working writer. "

Goodnight Frank Parlato and we leave you with further wisdom from Warren Buffett. Explaining why he invests in newspapers, Buffett once quipped: "I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."

Can we change?

John Miller — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 13:40:10 -0500

Why are newspaper publishers so obsessed with shooting themselves in the foot? The Toronto Star's John Cruickshank performed the feat wonderfully the other day when he announced a new subscription plan to deliver "exclusive long-form journalism" to readers on-line.

Here is exactly what he said about it: "Each Star Dispatches eRead will take about 30 to 40 minutes to read and offers more insight and in-depth journalism than can be contained in our daily printed newspaper."

Hold on a sec. The man in charge is admitting that Canada's biggest newsroom cannot deliver 30 minutes of insight and depth in its news pages any day of the week? Why the hell should readers pay $2 or more to buy it then?

Cruickshank added insult to injury by setting the price for this new digital subscription at half the price the Star charges for its print edition, which by his own admission delivers less depth and insight. Is this a glimpse at legacy media's idea of a new economic model that can stop the bleeding -- charging less and less for more and more?

Got news for them: You need to work harder at getting more quality and depth into everything you do, or the end may be near.

That's not just my opinion. Media observers have been saying this since the Internet ate newspaper classified advertising sections. The difference now is that a growing number of knowledgeable critics are starting to doubt that journalists are capable of changing what they do.

The latest is Robert Picard, a consultant and author who is director of research at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University. He was quoted approvingly by Mathew Ingram, one of Canada's most perceptive observers of the new media landscape and a former student of mine.

Here is some of what Picard said in his blog titled "Many journalists can't provide the value-added journalism that is needed today":

"To survive, news organizations need to move away from information that is readily available elsewhere; they need to use journalists’ time to seek out the kinds of information less available and to spend time writing stories that put events into context, explain how and why they happened, and prepare the public for future developments. These value-added journalism approaches are critical to the economic future of news organizations and journalists themselves.

"Unfortunately, many journalists do not evidence the skills, critical analytical capacity, or inclination to carry out value-added journalism. News organizations have to start asking themselves whether it is because are hiring the wrong journalists or whether their company practices are inhibiting journalists’ abilities to do so."

He's talking about more than just skills; he's saying we need to change our concept about what news is.

I estimate that, in any newsroom, roughly 80 percent of what reporters are assigned to cover fits someone else's definition of news. Actually, I'm being charitable. It may be 90 percent. It certainly was 20 years ago when I measured the content of Toronto's daily newspapers in an early research project at Ryerson School of Journalism. The percentage of so-called "agenda news" -- news that stemmed from a press release or scheduled event -- dwarfed what I called "initiative news," which stemmed from the newsroom's own determination of what its readers might be interested in. When I asked each paper's managing editor how much initiative they thought their newsrooms used in determining assignments, they all vastly overestimated what I actually found.

I doubt much has changed since. It's probably even worse, following staff cuts, the increasingly sophisticated publicity being put out by government and corporations to further their own interests, and the 24/7 publishing cycle. The hunger for "something new" has increased, and most on-line and print newsrooms have emulated what I call "the camera lens equation" that broadcasters have always used to determine where to send their camera crews: Cover the sure thing, something that will produce visuals.

Covering the sure thing means hanging out at city council meetings and legislatures, monitoring the police radio, attending annual meetings and press conferences, covering everyday news like a change in the weather or a traffic tie-up, previewing events that are upcoming.

That's what Picard says media need to spend less time doing, for the following reason:

"Today such routine information has little economic value because the original providers are now directly feeding that information to the interested public through their own websites, blogs, and Twitter feeds. Additionally, specialist topic digital operators are now aggregating and organizing that information for easy accessibility.... All of these are stripping the value from newspaper redistribution of those kinds of information and making people less willing to pay for provision of that news."

Reporting with enterprise is something I tried to teach my students at Ryerson, with varying degrees of success. Those who were good at it did not have any more luck getting jobs in large newsrooms, in large part because those newsrooms in the 1990s started coming under increased pressure to churn out agenda news like everyone else. This situation is even worse in smaller newsrooms, which employ fewer journalists and seldom allow them out of the office. Those reporters often only have time to gather their news by phone, which puts a further damper on initiative.

From my perspective as an educator, I know that journalists are capable of change.

I'm just not sure their newsrooms are.

Circling the wagons

John Miller — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:52:01 -0400

Maybe it's time for The Globe and Mail to change its motto. Maybe Junius really meant to say "The subject who is unintentionally loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to oversight."

First Margaret Wente unintentionally forgot a quotation mark. Then she remembered that she must have unintentionally copied something another columnist wrote. Then -- oopsy -- Globe and Mail editors let another columnist sell her own home by featuring it in Home of the Week, but of course that was "an unintentional oversight" as well.

Just try to use that excuse the next time you're in court fighting a speeding ticket.

Maybe this is how the legacy media lets the little moral crisis of Wentegate go, though: By denial and obfuscation. Standards? Ethics? Sure, we have 'em. But we're so busy putting out the paper we haven't gotten around to training anyone and, well, you can't expect to be perfect every day, okay?

No apoloigy to readers. No further internal investigation. Onward and upward. There's even a backlash starting. Just look at Terrence Corcoran writing in the National Post:

"But there’s a bigger story here, and it’s this: Newspapers and journalism in general, once bastions of press freedom, are now under the thumb of throngs of second-rate moralizing “experts” and outsiders who like their press freedom tightly controlled and monitored. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing writers, but there is a problem when outsiders can use artificial structures to suppress and control those writers."

And what are some of those "artificial structures," good sir? Oh, yes ... public editors. Ombudsmen. Press councils. All those terrible social media sites. And of course "a burbling academic community, whose members have emerged as a cheering section for the public humiliation of Ms. Wente."

I think he may be talking about moi.

Sure enough. "There’s also John Miller, former Ryerson Journalism chair and now a blogger who calls himself The Journalism Doctor," Corcoran writes.

Corcoran calls me "a creative soul," and says I have the effrontery to treat Wente's cheating "as if it were a major story."

Here's where he's going with all this:

"Are newspapers (and other media), once free to run their own operations in the context of freedom of the press, now running scared of these outside watchdogs?

"What journalists do should be determined by the people who run and own the media, and readers/viewers. Nobody is expected to produce truth or perfection. The exchange of ideas, from the craziest to the sanest, should not be in the hands of government regulators, nor self-righteous academics who have axes to grind, ideas to sell and their own ideologies to propagate."

The particular axe I'm supposed to be grinding? He doesn't say. He just wants all of us to back off. Wente's only sins, he claims, were "petty, insignificant allegations that are mostly matters of technique and perhaps sloppiness on her part." They "look to me like a trivial bit of laziness that deserves nothing more than a reprimand from her editor."

So there you have it. The Titanic is sinking and the officers on the bridge are busy debating the "agenda" of icebergs and why they shouldn't be allowed in the ocean on busy shipping lanes.

Tune in: TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin on Monday is looking in depth into "The Truthiness of Journalism." Perhaps we'll get some intelligent discussion there of what is shaping up to be an epic clash between new and old media.

What we learned

John Miller — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 12:21:07 -0400

One of The Globe and Mail's recently disaffected readers writes in his blog about getting a rather snarky email back from editor-in-chief John Stackhouse when he cancelled his subscription. Stackhouse told him: "You seem to prefer the smaller world of the blogosphere. Sad."

Well, it ain't that sad, folks. And it sure ain't so small.

Less than a week after the paper got embroiled in a scandal I playfully dubbed Wentegate, I get an impressive 69,900 hits (and still counting) when I Google "Margaret Wente plagiarism."

Suddenly, more than half of her Wiki page bio, outlining her career highlights, is an account of how blogger Carol Wainio found evidence that she might be a plagiarist.

The uprising of the blogosphere against one of Canadian journalism's most prominent authority figures has been a learning experience for me, and I suspect it has been one for the country's legacy media. (I hope so. If The Globe and Mail hasn't learned from this something beyond public editor Sylvia Stead's lame online mea culpa, I would say it deserves to be doomed to oblivion.)

To paraphrase Stead, what have we really learned from this?

The internet is more powerful than you, Big Media.

This astute column by Christopher Bird at Torontoist sums up why:

"The internet—as the Globe has discovered—really, really hates plagiarism, and really, really hates entitlement. And this response by Wente and The Globe seems as if it will inevitably provoke a response from the internet that is more substantial than silly pictures and catcalls in comments. Wente has a long record as a columnist, and by her and her editors’ responses, the internet has essentially just been invited to start checking all of her work to see if she’s lifted more than just those incidents Wainio already noticed. If politicians don’t want to get in a war of words with someone who buys ink by the barrel, then journalists don’t want to get into a war of fact-checking against an infinite army of fact-checkers with a reason to be sceptical."

Lose the arrogance, have a conversation.

My old colleague at the Toronto Star, Tim Harper, has written the best thing about the relationship between old and new media here. Yes, scrutiny from bloggers threatens the authority of legacy media, but it is also good for journalism. The Globe doesn't seem to get that. It still treats its online readers as those pimply-faced nerdy kids it imagines wasting their lives gaming and spreading havoc on computers in their parents' basements. Just look at the febrile reaction to Stead's What We Need to do Better blog, in which she said "Our readers are very smart and hold us to account." A reader replied: "If you had any respect for your readers, you would not be writing this self-justifying drivel now."

"Legs" are much longer on the internet.

Journalists say some stories have "legs," meaning the ramifications and reactions of the event demand several more days of follow-up reporting. We've all seen stories like that. These days they include Canada's decision to twin some of its foreign embassies with those of Great Britain, and the reaction to Harper naming anti-choice advocate Rona Ambrose to be federal minister in charge of the status of women.

In the mainstream media, the Margaret Wente story does not have "legs." In fact, it took several days after it broke on social media for it to have any life at all. The Toronto Star made it a one-day wonder, and since then Wentegate has disappeared or been reduced to mere fluff in the printed world of commercial media. A good example is this feature in Toronto Life. Wente is rated only a 3 on the magazine's 10-point scale of misbehaving journalists, and the article inaccurately shrugs off what she was accused of: "We would have liked to see more contrition and fewer excuses from Wente, but it doesn’t seem that she deliberately set out to steal material."

In the online world, this story is really still beginning. Let's just say Sylvia Stead is going to be kept very busy in the coming days.

Civility is possible online, and enormously powerful.

We've all experienced (me more than many) the toxic language of discourse on the internet. Writers are emboldened by the anonymity and speed of communication, and often lapse into ad hominum invective. American writer Nicholas Carr says in his popular blog Rough Type: "For the news junkie, the net is a crack house that dispenses its wares for free. But if you look beyond the elite, you see a citizenry starved of hard, objective reporting. For the typical person, the net’s disruptions have meant not a widening of options but a narrowing of them.”

A week ago I would have agreed. Now I'm not so sure. Wentegate has shown us is that you can disagree with someone politically or ideologically, but still find common cause around moral issues of right and wrong. Suddenly, I find myself linking to writers like Chris Selley of National Post and Colby Cosh of Maclean's. Though I would never agree with them politically or ideologically, I found their take on Margaret Wente's misdeeds instructive, courageous and astute.

Instead of narrowing discourse, the Wentegate affair has largely been driven by an online dialogue that has been uncharacteristically factual, restrained and multi-dimensional. Debate has delved into wider areas like the meaning of plagiarism, the role of public editors, the accountability of legacy media, and the responsibilities of authority.

That dialogue began, let's remember, with Carol Wainio. Reading her blog, you are impressed by the depth of her research and the side-by-side evidence she has compiled, and the way she presents it for people "more knowledgeable than me" to interpret.

I got a message the other day that I like a lot. It came from someone writing under the nom de blog of Bebe Rebozo (like me, with an encyclopedic knowledge of Tricky Dick Nixon's pals). The email praised Wainio's "tireless archival spelunking."

That's it. Don't you love that phrase?

If we're going to get wiser as a society, we need to realize it's a partnership. We need lots of climbers scrambling down caves on their own, and we need someone we trust to aggregate what they find and explain why it's significant.

We just don't know who that someone is yet.

Still standing?

John Miller — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 21:09:50 -0400

The Globe and Mail is arguably Canada's most respected newspaper. But judging by how it is continuing to twist itself into knots over allegations of plagiarism levelled against its most prominent columnist, it may blunder itself into history as an object lesson in how not to polish the proverbial turd.

Moving to try and stanch a tsunami of derision toward his paper on social media sites, editor-in-chief John Stackhouse has admitted the performance of columnist Margaret Wente is "unacceptable," and she will be subject to disciplinary action, which he refused to spell out (Read: A small slap on the wrist).

Unfortunately, international media sources like the Poynter Institute and The Guardian's Roy Greenslade aren't buying it, and neither am I. Greenslade says that Stackhouse's statement to staff "certainly takes the biscuit" when it comes to incredibly bad judgment.

Wente herself issued a mea culpa of sorts in her regular column today, admitting that "I'm far from perfect ...but I'm not a serial plagiarist."

Right, and why wouldn't we just believe every word she writes right now?

It all seems to be good enough for The Globe. That ugly P-word still won't pass anyone's lips there, the paper is undertaking no further investigation of its own, and it's still allowing Wente to write three times a week. No doubt her readers will be left to decide for themselves (a) if she's just an incredibly sloppy klutz, or (b) hey, haven't I read that exact same argument somewhere before?

Typical of The Globe's prickly reaction to criticism of any sort, Stackhouse says he stands solidly behind Wente's right to free expression -- as if that has anything to do with it -- and Wente of course immediately felt she had the freedom to pick up a bat and go after her accuser again:

"And now, some necessary background. The current firestorm started with a blogger named Carol Wainio, a professor at the University of Ottawa and a self-styled media watchdog. She has been publicly complaining about my work for years. Her website, Media Culpa, is an obsessive list of accusations involving alleged plagiarism, factual errors, attribution lapses and much else. She has more than once accused me of stealing the work of other writers with whom I happen to share an opinion."

Yes, Margaret, and why don't you tell us she's nailed you for it -- to your paper's satisfaction -- four times in the last few months?

Wente's apology reads: "I'm sorry for my journalistic lapses ... But I'm also sorry we live in an age where attacks on people's character and reputation seem to have become the norm."

Oh, right.

Isn't this the same Margaret Wente who has made a career of intellectual cheap shots, pleading for a return to civility?

At least The Globe has taken my advice and resolved the reporting lines of its beleaguered public editor, Sylvia Stead, who I rather unkindly suggested in my last blog should resign. Having her report to the editor-in-chief, as she has for eight months, was a dreadful sign the paper didn't get, you know, this whole Accountability Thing. Now she will report to the publisher. It may allow Stead to feel she can still be effective, but the damage to her credibility caused by trying to sweep plagiarism charges under the rug will surely linger.

Under the circumstances, this doesn't help: A mea culpa from Stead. "I erred in not being more forthright in saying that the work in this complaint was unacceptable and failed to meet Globe and Mail standards. It was not acceptable. In my haste to respond, my earlier blog post was not well considered. I didn’t have all the information I required to make a proper assessment last week and should have taken more time and probed more. For one thing, Ms. Wente said she did not recall reading a piece by the Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner or the other sources before writing the column. She now says she did read Mr. Gardner's article. Had I known that information at the time, I would have been much stronger in pointing out serious problems."

Really, they're not making this stuff up.

It's instructive to compare how The Globe handled Wente to how the Montreal Gazette handled a very similar case last spring. Oh, there was one wee difference: The transgressor there was a lowly freelance soccer columnist, not her royal highness.

Paul Carbray was fired after three columns were found to contain "extended passages (that) were taken from articles and blogs that had been published online by other media outlets."

(ED: Hey, isn't that exactly ...? Never mind.)

According to Craig Silverman of the Poynter, the Gazette published an apology to readers "for this lapse in our professional standards and our integrity." Plagiarism -- or what Stackhouse called problems "in terms of sourcing, use of quotation marks and reasonable credit for the work of others" -- is an offence against the reader, but The Globe has not moved to issue any apology to its readers.

It may well be that its inept handling of this will only serve to paint a larger target on the back of its franchise columnist. Carol Wainio won't be intimidated. If I were her, I'd intensify my efforts. But now there will be scores of Wainios scrutinizing everything Wente writes. Just stay tuned. The day isn't even over yet and National Post's Chris Selley has already offered two more.

The Globe is also sending a peachy message to anyone who still craves a career in mainstream journalism. Listen up, class: There are these different standards if you're a marquee name, see. The Wentes get a free pass and their paper goes after their accusers. The Carbrays get a pink slip and a hot poker up their ass.

Welcome to Journalism Ethics 101 with the big boys.

The right thing for The Globe to do -- now, before it has to apologize for a fifth time -- is to call in an independent journalist to investigate Wente. That person would have a free hand to examine everything she has written for the paper, sleuth out where she found her facts and phrases, see how far back this goes, and recommend what to do.

If not, something tells me there's a time bomb waiting to go off out there somewhere.

Wentegate

John Miller — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 09:40:07 -0400

Carol Wainio is an artist who has exhibited widely in Canada, including at the National Gallery. She teaches Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. In her spare time she blogs on matters of journalistic integrity. She specializes in detecting plagiarism.

Sylvia Stead is the newly named public editor of The Globe and Mail. The paper says it created the position earlier this year in "an effort to make the organization more transparent and accountable to its readers and the general public." Sylvia is a Globe insider, having held a number of senior editing positions at the paper since she started her career there in 1975. I know her and believe she cares about journalistic integrity, too.

These people should be allies, but they're not.

Their clash over whether Globe columnist Margaret Wente is guilty of plagiarism has gone viral on the internet in the past few days. In contrast, so-called mainstream media outlets -- to their great shame -- have not yet reported a word of what's going on.

The charges are serious. Plagiarism is journalism's capital offence and the penalty is usually dismissal. Wente is not only the Globe's three-times-a-week featured op ed columnist, she has won two National Newspaper Awards and once served as the paper's managing editor. She is on anyone's list of the country's top journalists.

Incredibly, from my own analysis of the evidence so far, it seems to be the hobbyist blogger, not the journalist of 37 years, who is taking the high and principled road.

Wainio convincingly documents Wente's plagiaristic tendencies on her blog, Media Culpa. She cites passages from one 2009 column, and compares them to nearly identical material in seven other sources, including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs and the Ottawa Citizen. Wainio includes examples of what she calls attribution errors, migrating quotes, using someone else's quoted words as if they were her own, and lifting entire quotations and passages out of other publications as if she'd interviewed the speakers herself. You can read Wainio's critique yourself and judge whether this constitutes plagiarism.

According to the Globe, several journalists and others used Twitter to bring Wainio's blog to Stead's attention. And on Friday, she quietly put the result of her findings up on the Globe's website under the headline "We investigate all complaints about our writers." I'm letting you read it here because nothing appeared in print and there happens to be no direct link to the public editor's column on the Globe's website.

Stead chooses to characterize Wainio as "an anonymous blogger," whereas she describes Wente more favourably as a "high-profile columnist." The one column in question, she notes archly, was written "three years and two months ago." Stead writes: "I investigated the matter, spoke with the columnist, Margaret Wente, and her editor, endeavoured to find all of the original documents and read all but one. (I’ve ordered the last one.) In the end, there appears to be some truth to the concerns but not on every count."

The penalty for all this? Stead treats it as a minor misdemeanor, a bit of temporary carelessness over one single attribution, worthy of only an editor's note in the paper's electronic archives. She doesn't even mention the word plagiarism.

This is a shockingly inadequate response, one that I believe has irreparably compromised the integrity of the Globe and Mail's new public editor, and also tarnished the reputation of the newspaper itself.

For one thing, Stead's "investigation" appears to have been perfunctory. She writes: "The concern was that seven different sources were reproduced. That seems highly unlikely." A proper investigation would have taken each allegation seriously, and investigated how it got into Wente's column. That did not happen.

In fact, Wainio's blog takes issue not with just one column but with several others written by Wente between 2009 and 2012. Stead alludes to that by saying: "We have looked into all of the complaints raised by the anonymous blogger regarding Ms. Wente and other writers at The Globe and Mail and made corrections or clarifications where information was incorrect or unclear."

Wait a minute: This has happened before? Well, um ... yes. What Stead does not mention is that the Globe ran three previous corrections or clarifications, all involving Wente's appropriation of material written by others and not properly attributed. All were raised by the intrepid Carol Wainio on her blog.

In other words, the charge is that Margaret Wente isn't just an oopsie one-off careless plagiarist, she's a serial offender. Alarm bells should have gone off a long time ago. Judging from the public editor's column, the newspaper is going to do very little about it.

This defies belief.

Says Wainio in her blog: "It’s interesting to compare the growing list of attribution questions in Ms. Wente’s writing (three of which have resulted in corrections/Editor’s Notes in the last several months) with other journalists who have apologized or been been fired for plagiarism. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could explain how they are they different?"

Good question. This is what the website www.plagiarism.org says: "Many people think of plagiarism as copying another's work, or borrowing someone else's original ideas. But terms like 'copying' and 'borrowing' can disguise the seriousness of the offense. According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to 'plagiarize' means:

to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
to use (another's production) without crediting the source
to commit literary theft
to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.

"In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward."

Okay, let's take a short step back from this. You'd think that Canada's national newspaper would have the resources to either sue Carol Wainio for libel (if it felt she was wrong) or if right (which it appears she is) at least find out who she is and credit her helpful work. Stead's description of her as just "an anonymous blogger" seems lazy, adversarial and unkind.

In actual fact, Stead knows perfectly well who Wainio is.

Wainio has weighed in with the facts on her blog: "Ms. Stead was aware of who I was... because all, or almost all, of the issues identified here over the past year and more were sent to The Globe under my name, almost always before they were posted."

She says she received a response from Stead (at the time associate editor) on May 26, 2011, addressed, "Dear Ms. Wainio and Media Culpa." It began: "This is a private letter, not for publication."

I think Wainio is entitled to make part of it public now. She does so on her blog: "Ìn brief, it chided me because I 'hide behind a faceless blog site to very publicly defame Canada's best known columnist Margaret Wente' with 'single-minded zealotry.' It said the attribution problems I'd identified (straightforward side-by-side comparisons) were 'defamatory of Ms. Wente, misguided and wrong.' "

This surely belongs in a Hall of Shame of public editor/ombudsman hypocrisy.

The real problem here may be the way the Globe's public editor position was set up. It is not supposed to be a job for anyone who has drunk the KoolAid. The public editor is an independent representative for the public in the newsroom. Choosing a newsroom veteran and making her report through the editor-in-chief (who after all, is responsible for the content in the first place) is a terrible conflict of interest.

Most news organizations in the U.S. that have public editors or ombudsmen look outside for candidates as a matter of policy, and most report directly to the publisher or president. Papers like the New York Times and Washington Post prefer outsiders because they are not bound by longtime friendships or blinded by the prevailing newsroom culture.

Not surprisingly, Stead's column triggered an outraged response on the public editor's comment forum, where public opinion is running 100 percent against The Globe. I invite you to read them and add to them here.

One reader takes a cynical stab at what actually might have happened during Stead's investigation: "We investigate all allegations against our writers. What that means, in practical terms, in this instance, is this: Confronted with overwhelming, irrefutable and thoroughly documented evidence of repeated plagiarism by Margaret Wente, I asked my old pal Peggy if she'd ever plagiarized anything. "Gosh, no," said Peggy. "Good enough for me," I said. "You're free to continue doing whatever it is we pay you to do."

So why is the mainstream media saying nothing about this? Another good question. Sabrina Maddeaux, who is managing editor of the online Toronto Standard, has a short answer: "We're all scared shitless." She confesses that when she saw the outrage about Wente building on her Twitter feed last week she thought: "Holy f**ck this is going to be big tomorrow."

But it wasn't. Maddeaux speculates that "the days of copyeditors and fact checkers at every publication are long gone," and there's no one there with any time to check anything; horror stories like Margaret Wente are only a Google step away, and everyone knows it's an accident waiting to happen.

So what should the Globe and Mail do now?

The newspaper has itself a big, big problem. The Wente Affair makes the Globe -- and the rest of mainstream journalism -- seem hopelessly out of touch with the internet-savvy hordes who seem to enjoy circling around the decaying corpse of authority these days.

Wente must be carefully investigated. This cannot be done internally now. Here is the mindset Globe publisher Phillip Crawley needs to adopt, according to plagiarism experts. Bring in a respected outsider to subject Wente's writings to a rigorous analysis, and act on the results. There are many candidates I could suggest but the most appropriate might be Jeffrey Dvorkin, a U of T professor who is executive director of the international Organization of News Ombudsmen.

I'm afraid Sylvia Stead needs to resign. I would have to, if I found myself in her position. She has either chosen to ignore convincing evidence of plagiarism, or has been told to. Either way, she has outed herself as a vindictive partisan of her newspaper instead of an impartial reader's representative, and she will have no absolutely credibility left with readers after this.

And Publisher Crawley needs to carefully rethink the position of public editor and decide if he really wants one. If so, it needs to be completely independent of the news operation and the Globe's rather prickly newsroom culture. Under the circumstances, choosing a qualified, independent outsider to fill the vacancy would be a good start.

When Stead was appointed to the job last January, editor-in-chief John Stackhouse said: "The Globe and Mail is among the most respected names in Canadian media, because we've always been held to the highest standards. Credibility is our currency and we want to protect its value."

That currency has taken a fast plunge. One reader addresses it in a comment attached to Stead's column: "As questionable as I find Wente's lapses of journalistic integrity, the greater blame falls to The Globe for being so irresponsible as to give her this space and lending her an air of credibility by virtue of their (former) reputation. I stopped subscribing to the Globe years ago when it became apparent they were abdicating their responsibility to the public as a source of responsible journalism. This gutless editorial downplaying and excusing Wente's abuses has made me lose any remaining respect I had...No accountability = No subscription."

The only hero here is Carol Wainio, and the bloggers who are keeping this issue alive like those here and here. Keep up the pressure, I say. You are right to question The Globe's credibility, and you deserve honest answers.

NOTE: I have sent several follow-up questions to both Carol Wainio and Sylvia Stead. If and when they answer, I will post them here. While my website unfortunately is not set up to allow comments, email me if you like and I will add your thoughts to this conversation. And, of course, you're welcome to add to the outrage building at publiceditor@globeandmail.com

Bill Taylor writes: I'm following with great interest the sorry plagiarism saga over at the Globe. There's a good deal of thought/outrage being expressed on Facebook. Surely, the Star or Post must pick up on it soon? Or Maclean's, perhaps. We can only hope. Meanwhile, I'm surprised that none of the blogs so far appear to have mentioned the fact that the Star has a very active public editor, admittedly appointed from staff but answerable to the publisher. Don Sellar, in particular, was mustard in the job (I say that, having been on the receiving end a time or two). If this had happened at the Star, (public editor) Kathy English would have been all over it. And in print rather than an on-line hole and corner.

Both Stead and Wente have been at the Globe for decades and have friends in the highest places there. So where is Stackhouse in all this, I wonder.

Journalistically, the Globe is a shadow of what it used to be. I think Leah McLaren's extremely self-serving column on Saturday, basically marketing her house to the readership, speaks volumes. The comments on-line were fascinating. Freelance or otherwise, had something similar found its way into the Star, Kathy English would have been all over that, too!

I replied: I agree with you. The Star would have handled this much better. They have a much longer tradition with ombudsmen/public editors than anyone else in Canada (Borden Spears was the first). In the meantime, this is shaping up as a David and Goliath clash between old and new media, UFC-style. And so far, it looks like David is all over Goliath.

............

Professor Amir Attaran is Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy at the University of Ottawa. He sent me a copy of a letter he sent to Globe editor-in-chief Stackhouse:

As a university teacher and medical journal editor, I know what constitutes plagiarism, and I have experience with the investigation and adjudication that is supposed to ensue when the charge is made.

Which makes it all the more shocking to me that the Globe has entrusted the matter to Sylvia Stead, and appears satisfied that she has done a judicious, thorough, equitable job in hearing from one of the parties (Ms. Wente) while disparaging the other party (an "anonymous blogger"). Ms. Stead personally knows the blogger is named Professor Carol Wainio—there is correspondence between them—so her pretence of anonymity is dishonest and itself not up to journalistic standards.

Further, Ms. Stead appears to overlook the long tradition of trenchant, anonymous authorship. I do not speak of satirical or samizdat journalism only. There are no bylines in The Economist, in print or on their blogs. I guess those scoundrels of St. James, anonymous bloggers all, had best mend their ways according to Ms. Stead.

Appearances are not helped by the fact that the Globe decided to sneak Ms. Stead's correction onto its website on a Friday afternoon. That's the cowardly wheeze of publicists with bad news everywhere.

I believe the credibility of both the Globe and your editorship is now at issue, John. It would be presumptuous and wrong of me to say how this debacle should be solved, but certainly you must exercise leadership, and be seen by the Globe's readers to do so.

............

Sylvia Stead emailed me in answer to several questions I asked: Dear John. I was off Saturday. Thanks for giving me time to respond before you wrote.

I replied: Hi Sylvia. To be fair, I waited a day before posting (which I'm learning is an eternity on social media), hoping you'd respond. In the meantime I found answers to all my questions to you except one: It's not clear whether you regard this as a case of plagiarism. If not, why not? If you'd like to respond, I will post it.

Stead just replied: Here’s a surprise. I’m off Sunday too. I don’t read my email. So much for responsible journalism.

I replied: Hi Sylvia. To be fair, the timing was not mine. It was yours. You chose to post your findings on a Friday. Given what I know about you, and admire, you cannot have been oblivious to the reaction. Given the seriousness of the issues at stake, I don't think it was in the cards for me to hold off posting until 4.26 p.m. on Monday, when you finally responded but didn't choose to answer any of my questions. I do not think this merits your charge of irresponsible journalism on my part.

..............

Carol Wainio told me this: Except for a few lines I gave HuffPo today, I'm turning down everything - including As it Happens and TVO - I've suggested they talk to experts and forwarded names like yours. I have no qualifications to discuss these things, and never wanted the attention. It's not a 'human interest' story, it's an ethics story, and best to talk to people who know that field.

............

Loreena McKennitt writes: This is much greater than a mere matter of plagiarism. It touches on the broader subject of media ethics, accountability, competency, fairness, and straight dealing with the public. At its core is the question of whose interests are being served: the public's, or the publisher’s commercial interests? Those who study the media (connection technology) landscape are not unmindful that one cannot separate market conditions or business models from the good or bad behaviour of the foot soldiers who undertake their superior’s bidding or who personally set out on their freedom of speech/democracy crusades with polarising flair.

As the demands and expectations grow of those asked to deliver an ever increasing amount of content, yet with fewer resources, one can be somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the contemporary journalist/reporter trying to stay employed. And yet, when it comes to factual accuracy, balanced reporting or in this case, plagiarism, the double standard which seems to prevail across a great deal of the media landscape, is perhaps one of the most unsettling and difficult for the public to accept... nor should they.

Due to a regrettable resistance from many in the media to admit or address certain wrongs or criticisms, and a propensity to look after their own, one must be incredibly tenacious as Ms Wainio has been ... Regrettably, Mr Stackhouse and Ms Stead exhibit the all too familiar and contemptible response by framing the complainer in a derogatory way , in this case "an anonymous blogger" or as someone who was "obsessive" rather than dealing with the issue squarely.

I have read most of Ms Wainio’s blog on this subject, and I personally find her restrained, measured and thorough. I am ever so grateful for this, for even though she may not be an accredited journalist, her case is well laid out and allows the public to decide for themselves without being told what to think...an approach many working in the media may want to revisit....

As a member of PEN and as a creative artist, I am a strong proponent for free speech. However, those holding the "pen" need to appreciate that they have a duty of care to the public when it comes to are fair, balanced and accurate reporting and commentary. When caught out they need to undertake the same courtesy as any responsible business does, which is, at least to respond to the offended subject or the concerned customer rather than treating them with contempt, and to exhibit the same transparency of consequences as they demand of the rest of society. Otherwise, freedom of speech becomes freedom to bully where nobody wins.

.............

Dan David writes:

I've been reading about Margaret Wente, the complaints of plagiarism against her, and the way the Globe and Mail has been (mis)handling it all. I knew sooner or later I'd wind up at your blog. This email goes to ethics, responsibility to uphold journalistic standards, and the cost to the reader when news organizations like the Globe fail to do so.

As you know, I'm Mohawk, a writer, a journalist, a consultant. As such, the Globe and Mail was a "must-read" if only so I might follow its reporter in Ottawa. He frequently wrote stories on Aboriginal affairs. One day, Bill Curry had a story about some policy development. I clipped it. The very next day, I picked up a copy of a native community newspaper on the Six Nations of the Grand River territory near Brantford. There, I read the same story, with the same dateline, but with the local editor's name instead of Curry's. This wasn't a case of lifting a few words or a quote - it was word-for-word the very same story.

I made photocopies of both stories, wrote a letter notifying the Globe and Mail that one of its journalists had been plagiarized. I also asked what action the Globe intended to take? I mailed separate packages to the journalist in Ottawa (Curry), the Globe's editor-in-chief (Stackhouse), and Publisher (Crawley) both in Toronto. I also sent a copy to the editor of that native newspaper at Ohsweken. I waited for a reply from the Globe. After a week, I phoned the editor-in-chief's office. I was told to leave a message. I did, reminding Stackhouse about my package, my letter and asking what action I might expect his newspaper to take?

I never received a reply in any form from anyone at the Globe and Mail. A friend in Ottawa, a journalist for a native broadcaster, said he'd spoken to Curry shortly after this. He said Curry found the incident amusing. I never heard anything more about it.

As a journalist but more importantly as a consumer of news, I'd believed the Globe and Mail, then known as "Canada's national newspaper," shared a similar role as CBC News in broadcasting - setting the bar for ethics and excellence in Canadian journalism. That incident a few years back shattered my faith in the Globe and made me rethink my trust in Canadian journalism.

...........

Four libel myths

John Miller — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 14:07:33 -0400

It's been 30 months since the Supreme Court reformed Canada's libel laws, allowing the "public interest responsible communication" defence.

Has that much really changed?

At the time it was hailed as a victory for freedom of expression and of the press. Journalists worried about libel chill celebrated it. But has the "responsible communication" defence actually served to protect media accused of defamation, or has it backfired and proved to be a weapon for plaintiffs?

In Grant v. Torstar and Quan v. Cusson, the court shifted the focus of defamation litigation away from the truth of the publication and placed it squarely on the process reporters and editors go through to produce a story. Was it in the public interest? Did the journalists act responsibly?

The ruling was widely expected to lead to courtroom tussles over what constitutes "responsible" reporting, perhaps involving independent experts retained by either side. Has that actually happened?

The short answer is that it's too soon to say. Most defamation claims are complicated and take a long time to work their way through to trial -- often as long as six years. Many others are settled before trial, and we never hear about them.

But there's enough evidence -- from the few court rulings we know about, and from my own experience as an expert witness acting for both media and plaintiffs --to challenge several popular myths, and we should keep them in mind as we move forward.

Myth #1. Journalists are their own best advocates.

Yes, the best journalists can justify what they do very well. But libel cases do not always involve the best journalists. In two recent cases where I have offered opinions to plaintiffs, the journalists involved have claimed in sworn documents that:

(a) Editors are too busy to actually read and verify what they put into the paper;

(b) It's okay to repeat damaging and anonymous allegations again and again, even after the person in question has been cleared by police and sworn under oath that there was no truth to them;

(c) It's responsible to ignore the other side of the story for weeks after being told -- once by his secretary on the phone -- that the subject of defamatory allegations was unavailable that day.

Those journalists would have a hard time convincing any court that they acted responsibly.

Most of the times I act for plaintiffs I am able to determine that reporters made little or no effort to get the other side of the story, even though the obligation to do so figures prominently in every code of ethical practice that journalists are supposed to abide by. They either were not aware of those standards, or chose to ignore them.

Even in cases where journalists do act responsibly, judges often try to cast doubt on whether they are really acting in the public interest. Aren't they in the business of attracting readers and maximizing profits for their employers? Experts who are seen as objective and independent can go a long way to assuage those doubts, and I have gladly done so when I offer evidence on behalf of responsible media clients.

Myth #2. Experts are unnecessary. Judges do not want to hear their testimony. They feel able to decide themselves.

That has not been my experience. Any time my credentials as an expert on journalism have been presented to a judge, they have been accepted and I have given testimony. Each time, my evidence was cited favourably by the judge in delivering the verdict. Most courts agree with a statement that appears in Mathew v. Canada (2001) T.C.J. No. 491, Paragraph 30: "The only requirement for the admission of expert opinion is that the expert witness possesses special knowledge and experience going beyond the trier of fact."

Judges are experts at deciding what is reasonable and what is lawful. They are not experts at deciding what is good journalism and may not be aware of its commonly recognized standards, such as fairness, use of anonymous sources, and methods of verification. They are not necessarily going to get them from a media defendant arguing a weak case.

Expert evidence can be instrumental in getting favourable settlements before any trial occurs. This happens more often than not with mine.

Myth #3. Experts tend to be just hired guns, doing their clients' bidding rather than acting objectively.

I once was retained by a media client after its lawyers received a damning opinion written by an expert acting for the other side in a multi-million-dollar libel suit. Upon reading the story in question, the legal submissions and the transcripts of the examinations, I determined that the story had been reported responsibly when measured against commonly recognized standards. I was baffled by how the other expert had determined otherwise. Unfortunately for him, he had written separately about the same topics and reached wildly different conclusions. I pointed those out in my opinion, effectively discrediting his testimony. The case was settled quietly out of court. That expert, I believe, compromised his own principles in order to help a client.

My interest is in defending good journalism, and exposing the shoddy variety. I have turned down several clients, both plaintiffs and media, if I didn't feel the case would achieve that, or if I could not offer an objective and independent opinion. The ethics of delivering expert testimony are explored in an interesting academic paper written by Sandra Troster, a student in U of T's investigative and forensic accounting program. Titled Court Critique of Expert Witness Testimony (2005), it examines reasons given by 10 judges in rejecting testimony offered by expert witness accountants. It is sober and instructive reading.

"Adverse judgments," the paper asserts, "can damage or end an expert's career." If you are thinking of retaining an expert witness, ask for references. How many times has that person's opinion failed to help a client?

There are almost certainly bad expert witnesses testifying in defamation actions, just as I'm told there are bad lawyers. The key is to choose an expert who is experienced in court, who has appropriate qualifications (including frontline newsroom experience), who has a reputation for objectivity and independence, a good methodology and no conflict of interest.

Myth #4. The "responsible communication" defence gives journalists the right to be wrong.

Not true. The Supreme Court set up several hurdles to help courts determine what is "responsible" journalism, and it set them high. Sloppy journalism cannot meet the test. Journalist and legal expert Dean Jobb in 2009 analyzed three cases that had involved the "responsible communication" defence (the media lost two of them). He concluded the following:

"What are the lessons for journalists tackling stories that could attract a libel suit? Stick to the facts and avoid trumped-up words and descriptions. Report that unproven allegations are just that – unproven. Be fair and present all sides of the story. Make every effort to contact the target of an allegation and keep a record of each attempt. That’s the kind of advice you can get from any textbook on journalism ethics. And it’s clearly the level of professionalism the courts expect of a responsible journalist."

When news sucks

John Miller — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:20:52 -0400

"Sucks. No news. What are you people thinking?" That's a pretty devastating initial reaction to the news website just relaunched with much fanfare by Postmedia Network Inc. But you don't know the half of it.

When you consider it was supposed to be a key step in what CEO Paul Godfrey called an attempt to "create a new company for a new time,” it's a pretty sad commentary on how newspaper companies have continued to bungle the transition to online culture.

When readers linked up to the new state-of-the-art canada.com at the first of July, they expected to find the best of the news from Postmedia's 10 metropolitan newspapers, including the National Post, Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette. Instead, they got celebrity gossip, skimpy reporting and bizarre online polls, allowing viewers to vote on the burning questions of the day, such as "Is it okay for Oscar Pistorius to be in the Olympics?"

These were the choices for that one:
(a) No way. The carbon fibre legs are an unfair advantage.
(b) Yes. He has earned the right.
(c) Not sure

Is it any wonder readers didn't like it? One said: "Where's the news? Discussions, comments, twitter crap, voices, photos, contests...where's the news? The new site looks sharp but did you actually study your audience before making changes? People were coming here for news."

It was so dreadful a debut that Rob Granatstein, the site's senior producer, went online to try to explain. "Thank you for your comments. We know this is a big change. We understand why you're hesitant. We have put the news back a little, but we still have all the strong reporters bringing you what you expect. We've just moved it back a little to focus on the big - and fun - issues of the day. We won't ignore news, but hope you'll come here and get involved in the stories, talk to the people making the news, and get more out of the story."

Getting more out of the story included canada.com trying to explain the complex scientific discovery of the Higgs boson particle in one paragraph. Then it invited readers to vote on whether it had changed their understsanding of the uriverse. Oh, really, yeah. These were the possible answers, and it's not surprising that few of us participated:

(a) Yes! This is the greatest moment in science in a lifetime!
(b) No. My daily life will continue as it did yesterday.
(c) Could be. I'm definitely reading more about this.

In the days since this inauspicious start, canada.com has scaled back the lame gimmicks and tried to present news in a more staightforward way. Today it sort of looks like any other news website. And that may be even worse.

Postmedia, you see, is supposed to be radically reinventing itself. It is pursuing a digital-first agenda in an effort to reduce its reliance on print. The deep freeze in the advertising market is affecting all print media, and a recent study estimates that for every $7 publishers are losing on advertising in their print editions, they are only earning $1 of digital revenue -- a losing proposition in anyone's books.

Godfrey has literally torn Postmedia and its newspaper newsrooms apart in an effort to stem the losses. The company lost $12 million in its third quarter even as it announced a number of restructuring measures, cutting jobs at a number of papers, imposing paywalls on some of its newspapers’ websites, suspending a number of Sunday editions (or Monday, in the case of the National Post), and moving editing and production to a centralized newsroom in Hamilton. More cuts are on the way. Godfrey said: “The status quo just doesn’t work anymore.”

Well, neither does what comes next.

Part of a digital-first strategy means innovating and moving away from using the web as merely a platform on which newspaper content is displayed. If the troubled relaunch of canada.com is any indication, the news-hungry public isn't quite ready to accept it.

Info blockade

John Miller — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:34:19 -0400

Canada's information commissioner made headlines this week when she handed out low grades to most federal government departments for how they respond to requests for information from members of the public.

Of the 18 departments Suzanne Legault rated, four received Cs (average), four received Ds (below average) and three gots Fs (failure). Legault warned that budget cuts could make the situation worse next year.

Good. She is right to be concerned. But the problem may be deeper than she thinks.

Why doesn't the information commissioner investigate the information commissioner's office? Why doesn't she perhaps have a chat with my good friend there, M. Pierre Dupuis?

Last November I got a letter from M. Dupuis under the letterhead of the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada. He wanted to know if I was still interested in his office investigating my complaint about problems getting information from Natural Resources Canada.

Fine. That's what his office is supposed to do under the Access to Information Act: Investigate complaints. In fact, it is the central clearing house for all complaints against federal departments and agencies that stonewall requests, or else release so little information that it is frequently useless.

Only trouble was ... I'd filed my complaint three years earlier, on Dec. 2, 2008.

"I must advise you," M. Dupuis wrote, "that in order to continue this investigation, it will be necessary for you to contact our office by November 22, 2011, or provide this office with the appropriate contact information. Otherwise, we will consider the complaint abandoned, and close the investigation file."

So I phoned up M. Dupuis. I asked him in a calm voice what, exactly, was the difference between "closing the investigation" and not doing squat about my complaint for three years.

"Sir," M. Dupuis replied. "I have only recently been brought in and assigned to follow up on your complaint. I am not responsible for any delays that might have occurred."

"Delays have definitely occurred, M. Dupuis," I said. "So it's your office, not you, that has the problem, is it?"

Unfortunately, the subtleties of sarcasm and irony are lost on someone as stalwart as M. Dupuis, and his voice turned distant and bureaucratic. "Re: the matter at hand, Mr. Miller. Do you wish us to investigate, or shall we close the file?"

"Knock your brains out on it, M. Dupuis," I said. "I am glad my three-year-old complaint is now on your front burner, so to speak, and I look forward to its speedy resolution."

I did not tell him that I'd forgotten what information I was trying to get out of Natural Resources, it had been so long. I doubted that I or anyone else would be remotely interested in learning what Natural Resources had spent on a certain project TO DATE, when it was now 2011 and they were going to provide me with numbers from 2008. But something perverse made me rise to the challenge of trying to light a little fire under M. Dupuis, just to see if the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada was worthy of its name.

M. Dupuis promised to "get right on it," and we both made hopeful sounds on the phone before we disengaged. I believe I said that he had rekindled my hopes, and that I wished him good speed with the new wind now at his back.

Three months passed -- well past the time that such complaints are supposed to be handled. No friendly phone call from M. Dupuis to advise on the progress he was making, even though my original complaint had been sitting in that office for three years. So I phoned him again.

"Mr. Miller," he said, after I'd given him the cumbersome 3207-07599/113320/001 file number he had assigned me. "What a coincidence. I was just drafting a letter to you. There's good news, I'm happy to report. They are willing to release more of the information you asked for."

"Hot damn, M. Dupuis. I believe I am in your debt. When do you suppose I can actually receive it?"

He was just drafting the letter, he said. Why had this taken so long? I asked. He reminded me he had only recently been assigned to my file, and couldn't answer for three years of inaction.

That conversation was March 2. Now it is June 1, a rainy Friday afternoon. I have received nothing, not a phone call or letter from M. Dupuis, nor the information from 2008. I have the same feeling I often have when dealing with the federal government -- a mix of vague concern, grating anger and grim resignation. Time for another call to the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada, although it is difficult to write those words now without inserting "ironically named.".

Alarmingly, a recorded message greets me when I dial his direct line. It's his voice, saying "I will no longer be taking messages at this line." He gives another number, and I am routed through to a Mrs. Billard.

"I don't want you to feel that I am hounding you," I begin. "But what happened to Dupuis? "

"Mr. Dupuis is taking some time off," she says vaguely. "We haven't reassigned his files yet."

"But I've been dealing exclusively with Dupuis. Three months ago, he told me he'd made a breakthrough."

Mrs. Billard says she doesn't know anything about the letter he said he was writing to me. I ask her to check but she says she can't. "We're still working on paper here." She alludes to "staffing and volume issues," and a large backlog of complaints.

I say I know. My complaint is from 2008.

"Oh," she says, "Don't feel bad. One of my colleagues is working on a complaint from 2003. We're almost at the 10-year anniversary!"

Mrs. Billard promises to get back to me.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

End of dailies?

John Miller — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:38:48 -0400

The North American newspaper world came one step closer to its new business model this week -- one that might be described as "Unfit to Print."

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, a Pulitzer Prize-winning daily published since 1837, will slash its staff and scale back to three days a week beginning this fall. Although it says it will step up its online presence, at least one-third of its editorial staff will be fired.

The paper, owned by Newhouse Newspapers, leaves New Orleans as the biggest city in the United States without a daily newspaper. It will only publish on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays -- the three days of the week that are traditionally most profitable for daily papers.

It will be missed. The Times-Picayune won two Pulitzer prizes in 1997 and two more in 2006 for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Former staff members include William Faulkner and O. Henry.

With newspaper profits plunging and readers migrating to news-on-demand on the internet, print media organizations in the U.S. and Canada have been scrambling to survive. According to Newspaper Death Watch, a website that tracks such things, 13 U.S. dailies and one in Canada (the Halifax Daily News) have closed since 2007, and the Times-Picayune joins eight other papers (including the Detroit News/Free Press and Christian Science Monitor) that have moved to a hybrid print/online model. In an effort to increase revenue some have even moved their online content behind pay walls, most notably the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in the U.S. and The Globe and Mail in Canada.

Me? I'm old-fashioned. One of my great pleasures in life is to find my morning paper at the end of the driveway, liberate it from its blue plastic bag, and discover a world of serendipitous surprise as easily as I turn the pages. I like that I stumble on news that I had no idea I was looking for -- a process that, when you think about it, is the exact opposite of how you go about finding news online.

Alas, I appear to be in the minority.

LinkedIn's Business Insider recently analyzed five years of data to calculate the fastest growing and fastest shrinking businesses in the United States. Newspapers came last, with a rate of contraction of 28.4 percent. Online publishing, on the other hand, grew 24.3 percent.

The trick is to make online pay. No less an authority than Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is one of the few buyers of daily newspapers these days, declared this week that offering news for free on the internet is an "unsustainable model." At the august New York Times, the company's fourth-quarter earnings showed that revenue from digital sources surpassed editorial operating costs, making it theoretically possible for the paper to think about getting out of print entirely without affecting editorial quality. Fewer than a quarter of the 1,350 daily newspapers in the U.S. have built paywalls, but some are starting to show success. Example: Nearly 20,000 people have signed up to pay $1.99 a week for the online Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Gannett plans to expand paywalls to all 80 of its small-market newspapers by the end of the year. That move, combined with circulation pricing increases, could add $100 million in annual profit.

The news is changing, my friends. But I for one will feel myself the loser when there's no longer that paper at the end of my driveway every morning.

Update: As sometimes happens, I was ahead of the Canadian news with this blog. Today (May 28) Postmedia announced that the Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal would lose their Sunday papers and that the National Post would stop printing on Mondays through the summer for the second year in a row. The chain will also stop publishing on holidays such as Victoria Day and Canada Day.

Hurting our brand

John Miller — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:13:44 -0400

I know of no Canadian journalist who has gotten more blowback on a story than Jan Wong.

Nor have many of us paid such a steep price: Prime Minister Harper condemned her publicly as "grossly irresponsible" and "prejudiced," the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion demanding that she apologize to the people of Quebec, she got racist letters and a death threat, her newspaper turned against her, she lost her job and she very nearly lost her mind.

Thankfully, she lived to write about it, and it's wonderful to see her emerge with her customary courage and determination intact.

Her self-published book Out of the Blue is an account of her plunge into deep depression after the backlash to a story she wrote for the Globe and Mail in 2006. She was sent by the paper to analyze what happened at Montreal's Dawson College when Kimveer Gill shot 20 students before committing suicide.

It included these sentences: “What many outsiders don’t realize is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city. It hasn’t just taken a toll on long-time anglophones, it’s affected immigrants, too. To be sure, the shootings in all three cases were carried out by mentally disturbed individuals. But what is also true is that in all three cases, the perpetrator was not pure laine, the argot for a ‘pure’ francophone. Elsewhere, to talk of racial ‘purity’ is repugnant. Not in Quebec.”

You can argue that her analysis was unwise and unsupported, but the Globe decided to publish it. The editor-in-chief at the time, Eddie Greenspon, read the story and approved it, and so it was a betrayal when he was the first to hang Wong out to dry when the backlash reached its peak. That episode was ably told in this story by David Hayes in Toronto Life.

What happened next is the subject of Wong's own book. She fell into helpless moodiness and crying fits and eventually was diagnosed as clinically depressed by her doctor. The Globe, instead of giving her time off, turned the other way and let its disability insurer, Manulife Financial, do its best to prove that Wong was faking it. It hired sleuths to film her shopping or making public appearances, then turned it over to a psychiatrist of their choosing who declared Wong perfectly healthy, without ever meeting her. She was ordered back to work or her benefits would be cut off. How, we might ask, could the Globe ever trust her journalism if it couldn't trust her? She was terminated in 2008.

We are reading about this now because Wong fought back. She got a settlement from the Globe and refused to sign the confidentiality agreement that employers always demand in such situations. She has even put the surveillance video used against her here on YouTube.

What she tells is what could happen to any loyal employee in today's business world that is increasingly dominated by bean counters, actuaries and accountants. The late Doug Creighton described the newspaper industry best in that vein when he called it "a Wizard of Oz world -- with no brains, no heart and no courage."

Wong manages to tell her own story as well as she often tells stories about others -- with meticulous research, journalistic resourcefulness and edge. Perhaps the Globe forgot who it was dealing with -- a superb investigative reporter who refuses to be intimidated.

(I can attest to that, having written an expert opinion in defence of her reporting in an invasion of privacy case brought by a family that said it was taken advantage of when it employed Wong as a maid, not realizing that she was working undercover to write a series on what it's like to work for minimum wage. The series, Maid for a Month, exposed deplorable conditions and made the argument for higher minimum wages. I had no trouble determining that her reporting met the highest standards of investigative work. The impression I was given was that the Globe would fight the lawsuit tooth and nail, but it didn't, no doubt wanting to rid itself of any connection with the reporter after their parting of the ways).

The Globe may have come after her again. She had just finalized the manuscript of Out of the Blue with her publisher, Doubleday, when top executives there suddenly got cold feet. They insisted on deleting all mention of the paper. Wong refused, and made the financially risky decision to publish it herself -- on her own terms, naming names, with no holds barred.

She is betting $35,000 of her own money that enough Canadians will buy Out of the Blue to make it a best seller. Let's hope we do.

In it, she quotes Globe publisher Phillip Crawley as delivering the ultimate bean counter's response, telling her after her story drew flak that "you have hurt our brand in Quebec."

No, Mr. Crawley, I think you've got that wrong. Your own cowering in the face of controversy has hurt your brand ... with everyone who values journalism.

Ford vs. Star

John Miller — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:53:16 -0400

Somebody -- either the Toronto Star or Mayor Rob Ford, it's not clear who -- declared war on the other some time ago, and now things are getting very, very silly.

The latest shot in a campaign that has escalated into farce came when the mayor detected a "trespasser" behind his house after 7 p.m., and ran out to find it was Daniel Dale, one of the Star's city hall reporters. Tempers ran high, police were called to investigate, and Ford followed it up by demanding that the paper reassign Dale -- or else he will cut all media off from all news about city hall. "I will not be talking to any reporters if he's part of that scrum. They have to take him out of City Hall," Ford told a radio program.

That's not likely to happen but, really, this has already gone way too far.

It's hard at this point to know who's telling the truth -- the accounts of the protagonists differ widely. Ford says Dale was trespassing, but the Star denies it and says Ford came running at Dale on public parkland with his fists clenched. Dale went online with his own explanation of the confrontation and said: "Usually, it is the media chasing Mayor Rob Ford. I never expected Mayor Ford to chase me. Nor to fear for my safety in his presence."

It does raise the serious question of where today's news media should draw the "line" between the public interest and the right of an elected politician to have a private life. But, really, picking the winner in this contest is like deciding who's the second most obnoxious bully in the schoolyard.

The Star claims Dale (who has won a number of awards for his reporting) had a legitimate news reason for being there, although I think that is debatable. Earlier that day, he learned that Ford and his wife, as private citizens, had asked the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority to sell them a parcel of TRCA land adjacent to their house. Ford said he wanted the land so that he could erect a better fence to prevent young people from trespassing on his property and to protect his children.

Ford claimed the land was vacant, although a conservation official told Dale it was actually a sliver of city-operated parkland that had mature trees. Dale then did something that's all too rare in this age of downsized newsrooms -- he went to the site to verify what he was told. "I decided that I needed to visit the property to see what it actually looked like. I also wanted to see if Ford’s home already had a fence. And I wanted to see where the land was actually located; the TRCA’s map was confusing."

Is that newsworthy? It's unusual for any private citizen to try to buy conservation area land, and Ford's position as mayor raised possible issues of improper influence. But it's not clear anyone other than the Star was concerned about that.

Dale's problems started when he went to the wrong part of the park -- directly behind Ford's backyard. He said he arrived sometime after 7:30 p.m. "I walked around the parkland toward the mayor’s property. I took note of the trees, then, standing perhaps 10 metres from his wooden backyard fence, emailed an additional two sentences to my editor at 7:47. My phone died as I tried to snap photos of the trees and the fencing....I can say this with certainty: I never came close to entering his backyard."

That's when Ford, who appeared to Dale "extremely agitated," accosted him. The fence at the back of his property is 6 feet high, and Ford admits that he didn't see Dale himself but was alerted by his next door neighbour and ran around to investigate.

According to Dale, Ford yelled: “Hey buddy. What are you doing? Are you spying on me? Are you spying on me? Are you spying on me?”

Here is what Dale says happened next:

"I shouted, astonished, that I was not – that I was writing about his attempt to buy TRCA land. He began to approach me at a brisk walk, asking again, at an escalating volume, if I was spying. I continued to plead that I was writing about the land. At some point, perhaps 10 or 15 seconds into the encounter, he cocked his fist near his head and began charging at me at a full run. I began pleading with him, as loud as I could, with my hands up, for him to stop. I yelled, at the top of my lungs, something like, 'Mayor Ford, I’m writing about the land! I’m just looking at the land! You’re trying to buy the TRCA land!' Instinctually, I also reached into my pocket to grab my dead phone. I then fiddled with my voice recorder, trying fruitlessly to turn it on so that I would have a recording of any physical violence.

"At some point, perhaps two metres away from me, the mayor did stop moving toward me, but his face remained menacing, and he continued to cock his fist and shake it. 'Drop your phone!' he demanded, shouting louder than I have ever heard him. 'Drop your phone! Drop your phone now!' ... I became more frightened than I can remember; after two or three attempts to dart away, I threw my phone and my recorder down on the grass, yelled that he could take them, and ran."

Here is Ford's version:

"I ran around and I caught him. He just went nuts, he dropped his cellphone, he dropped his tape recorder. I said, 'What are you doing here?' He started screaming, 'Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!' I think he thought he was going to die but I didn't touch him. (But) I'm not going to tolerate people taking pictures of my kids and my family in my backyard."

(Ford later took reporters behind his property and said the Star journalist was standing on cinder blocks outside his rear fence. He said the reporter was leaning over the fence taking pictures towards his house.)

I think I believe Dale's account of what happened, and that no trespassing was involved. Ford would be more convincing if he made public any video or audio evidence, especially any from the equipment Dale left behind, but the mayor's brother, Councillor Doug Ford, says that's not going to happen. “As far as we are concerned, the police have seen it, we don’t need to prove that he was there, Daniel Dale admitted he was there, Rob caught him there, the neighbours saw him there."

Pressed on that point, Doug Ford said a curious thing, apparently describing either what some of Dale's footage showed, or what the mayor's own household security camera (apparently he has at least one) filmed: “You can see his head bobbing up and down behind the fence, it’s a distance from the cameras to the fence, but you can see distinctly his head bobbing.”

How, I wonder, is it possible to see Dale's head bobbing up and down behind a fence on a video that he shot himself from the park? On a cellphone he says was out of juice?

Or, if it was from the mayor's own security camera, why would he not make it public to prove exactly where Dale was standing?

Based on the available evidence, it is very unlikely that the Star did anything illegal. I doubt police will find any reason to lay charges. But the Star, in my opinion, was deliberately provocative in choosing to snoop around the mayor's home after dinner when he was likely at home. Given the bad blood between the paper and Ford, it probably knew the thin-skinned mayor's reaction would be violent, but went ahead with it anyway. That's bad judgment. That's picking a fight. And for what? A minor story that probably could have been held until the paper sought answers to its questions from someone during office hours.

There was no reason for the paper to provoke a confrontation or to invade the mayor's privacy.

The Star-Ford affair is now distracting us from far more newsworthy civic issues and, more importantly -- especially if Rob Ford is serious about his irresponsible threat to cut off the media -- it threatens to deny the public needed information about what's going on at city hall.

Ford has battled with the Star since the 2010 election campaign. The paper has filed a complaint against Ford with the city's integrity commissioner, alleging the mayor's office has refused to share press releases and other basic media information with its reporters. Ford has refused to speak to the Star since it printed a possibly erroneous story about a physical altercation between him and a football player he coached.

I have blogged about this before, saying this trivial feud has turned into the worst kind of tabloid journalism. The paper and the mayor need to stand back and take deep breaths.

Instead, the Star devoted most of its front page this morning to a minute-by-minute analysis of the incident involving Dale. It also spread the news across two pages inside and added a lead editorial and an over-the-top editorial cartoon. That, my friends, is tabloid overkill. Move on.

I'm afraid the only worthwhile lesson from this is a simple journalistic one: If you want to snoop out the mayor's house, send a bigger reporter, try to do it in broad daylight, make sure his BlackBerrry is fully charged, and order him to hang on to the sucker at all costs.

The other side: If you disagree with me and want to read someone who strongly argues the other side, please read this column by the great Royson James.

He'll be missed

John Miller — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:53:01 -0400

I can accept a CBC without Battle of the Blades. I suppose I can even enjoy listening to CBC Radio without Dispatches. But I cannot imagine a CBC without Dan Henry.

The latest round of government-ordered budget cuts hit the national network this week, and if J-Source is right, one of them was the bean counters declaring that Henry, CBC's senior legal counsel since 1978, is redundant.

Danny Henry? Redundant?

That adjective does not belong with this man's name.

It's hard to think of another Canadian who has done more to peel back the legal restraints to good journalism, or to get good journalism on the air, than Henry, who one colleague calls a legal "rockstar."

His name has been associated with most of the landmark Canadian legal decisions about freedom of the press in recent years, including the important Dagenais decision of 1994, which established freedom of the press as equal to the charter's other protected rights, not automatically subservient to them. No longer can judges bar media coverage of court cases just because the accused has a right to a fair trial. Today, that judge must carefully weigh it against the value to the public of contemporaneous coverage of the case by the media.

Allowing the media to scrutinize the justice system is a passion of Henry's, and it is sadly ironic that I am posting this news of his demise on World Press Freedom Day.

It was Henry who spearheaded CBC's appeal of a court decision barring the network from airing a fictional movie, The Boys of St. Vincent, because it might affect the trial of some Catholic priests in Cornwall who were facing charges of sexual abuse. CBC took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, and won. Henry worked closely with lawyer Ian Binnie, who argued on behalf of the CBC, impressed the court with his arguments and later was named a Supreme Court justice himself.

It was a great pleasure to see both those great lawyers perform at last fall's convention of the Canadian Media Lawyers Association. Binnie was being honoured upon his retirement from the Supreme Court, and the straight-laced Henry at one point took the stage fronted by a raucous rock band and belted out a hearfelt musical tribute. Binnie, who probably believes that Henry is so obsessed with Section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which guarantees freedom of the press) that he must have it tattooed on his chest, beamed in surprise and appreciation.

No one has greater respect for what Henry has done than fellow media lawyer Brian MacLeod Rogers, who attended Osgoode Hall law school with him. He told J-Source: “The side of Danny that isn’t as public but is hugely important has been inside CBC, where he’s been utterly indispensible in providing advice about the news we get to hear, the documentaries we get to see, the insights that are shared with the public.… They’ve broadcast some of the most important programs that world television has seen, much less Canadian television.”

CBC has made a dreadful decision here. I can't help but feel its programming will be less courageous in the future without him there, for the first time in 34 years, even though the meticulous and driven Henry will surely have trained his successors well.

Watchdogs needed

John Miller — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 14:19:33 -0400

In a new questionnaire about the future of press councils in Canada, we are asked, "In your opinion, how accountable are news organizations to the publics they serve?"

I suspect almost no one will answer "very accountable."

About the only useful thing you can do if you object to something published in a newspaper these days is (a) write a letter to the editor, or (b) sue them. Success depends on (a) whether they decide to publish it, and (b) whether you've got a lot of time and money and don't mind getting crushed by a small army of $800-an-hour lawyers.

I also suspect that few would be able to answer yes to a question that surprisingly isn't even asked on the survey being done for Newspapers Canada: "Are you aware of the existence of a press council in your province?"

In fact, there is a press council -- and has been for at least 20 years -- in every Canadian province except Saskatchewan, and very recently Manitoba. If you don't know that, it's not your fault. They are not very active, they don't publicize themselves, they take forever to render a decision and, although all appoint a majority of public members to their councils, the public is never told if there's a vacancy or how to apply.

They are such a closed shop that, if no one does something quickly, press councils are doomed in this country. They may actually commit mass suicide, as they just did in Manitoba. And, truth be told, almost no one but a few folks like me would lament their passing.

Just look at the recent pattern of publishers turning their backs on them. The country's largest publisher, Quebecor, withdrew all its papers from the Quebec Press Council in 2010, and its Sun Media papers pulled out of the Ontario Press Council last year. The Manitoba Press Council ceased operating this January, after its members cut off funding. And in Alberta, the province's largest paper, the Edmonton Journal, withdrew from the Alberta Press Council. Almost no one complained, in part because the Journal didn't bother to even report on its decision.

This exodus of members is probably what prompted Newspapers Canada to commission the Ryerson School of Journalism's research centre to find out if the public cares about press councils, and if so what might make them relevant. I urge you to fill it out here, but I suspect something much stronger needs to be done.

Don`t get me wrong. I am a strong advocate of the need for press councils, which are supposed to be independent panels set up to resolve readers' unsatisfied complaints about inaccuracy and unfairness in newspapers. I used to sit on the Ontario body, as a representative of the Toronto Star, and once later filed a complaint to it about unfair newspaper reportage (I lost, my complaint took five long months to resolve, and the publisher who successfully argued against me was duly appointed to the council at the same meeting that dismissed my complaint).

Press councils exist because almost every inquiry into concentration of ownership has advocated that they should exist, and in the 1970s and 1980s publishers rushed to join the voluntary, provincial councils that were set up to ward off any action by the federal government. That era is now over, and in some jurisdictions like Ontario, the majority of daily newspapers have dropped out, raising real concerns about their usefullness and future. The new research by Newspapers Canada was in fact funded personally by John Honderich, chair of the board of directors of Torstar Corporation and son of Beland Honderich, who as publisher of the Star was instrumental in creating the Ontario council in 1972.

Newspapers have given various reasons for dropping out. The Sun Media and Quebecor papers disagreed with several Ontario and Quebec council decisions that criticized their journalism, and claimed press councils were following a left-wing agenda. The Edmonton Journal's publisher, John Connolly, said his paper simply saw no value in belonging to the Alberta council that it had been part of for 40 years. Manitoba publishers pointed to a lack of complaints as a reason for winding up that province's press council, leaving the impression that all that province's papers are doing a splendid job.

Deeper and more disturbing reasons for the lack of public interest were identified in a little-noticed speech given in 2008 by Ed Kamps, former chair of the Alberta Press Council. "While newspapers might suggest the decline in complaints is due to higher quality reporting and writing, it's more likely because readership levels continue to decline, the vast majority of readers to not know about press councils, or if they do they do not feel it's worth their time and effort," he said then.

Kamps went on to add: "When times are tough, the news media, like any industry, looks at all costs quite critically. This is especially the case with new publishers who do not have the context or history of press councils."

In fact, none of the reasons publishers have given for quitting press councils stands up to scrutiny.

It's not expensive to belong. The Manitoba Press Council had a barebones annual budget of about $17,000, with the Winnipeg Free Press providing $14,000 of it.
Many publishers spend that much in business lunches.

The fact that some council decisions go against you is also no reason to quit in a huff. "You know, discipline isn't always agreeable," former Quebec Superior Court justice John Gomery said when Quebecor pulled out of the Quebec council. Gomery, who is chair of that council, called the decision "a blow to freedom of expression."

The shrinking number of complaints to some councils is not necessarily due to public apathy. It's more a product of the length of time it takes to adjudicate, a lamentable lack of publicity, and some weird exclusions. The B.C. Press Council, for example, has this bizarre qualifier on its website: ""The press council will not deal with matters out of the control of the member such as letters to the editor, commentary, blogs or member content that is republished by others." How is a decision to publish a letter to the editor or an opinion column out of the control of the member? Try telling that to a judge in a libel case.

The B.C. council did not hold a hearing in 2008, 2009 or 2010, and only one last year (when it upheld a reader's complaint about unfairness in the Similkameen Spotlight). That does not mean that no one complained. The council fielded between 23 and 28 complaints in each of those years, but either dismissed them out of hand or the complainant got fed up waiting and abandoned them.

Here's my prescription for how to revive our provincial press councils:

Make membership mandatory: The Quebec government is moving in this direction, as part of a controversial proposal to set up a status of "professional journalist." Newspapers have shown themselves to be incapable of making voluntary membership work, and there is a public interest in making them more accountable. Consideration should be given by provincial governments to drawing television and radio stations under the umbrella of provincial media councils.

Speed up the complaint process: No one wants to wait six months or more for a complaint to be resolved. Much of the delay is due to infrequent meetings and a requirement that each complaint must be accepted by all members before any hearing is scheduled. That decision can and should be made unilaterally by the executive director.

Allow press councils to investigate on their own: Now, councils must wait for someone from the public to complain. Some issues -- such as newspaper mergers that result in closing down competing newspapers in small communities -- are so important to the public's interest that press councils should be able to investigate immediately without waiting for a complaint.

Fine transgressors: Now, the only sanction is that member newspapers must publish adjudications involving themselves. That is not enough. If papers were forced to pay a fine for adverse rulings, the financial pinch that press councils find themselves in would be mitigated and there would be real incentive to discontinue troublesome or unethical practices.

Name them: Now, complaints are considered against the newspaper, not the journalist. If the complaint is against a columnist or reporter, that person is not named. There needs to be more transparency, particularly for repeat offenders.

Publicize vacancies: When the press council is looking for public members, all member newspapers should be required to advertise for candidates and there should be an open search process. What happens now is that public appointments simply tend to go to friends of the newspaper.

Legendary broadcaster Walter Cronkite was originally dead set against the National News Council, which existed in the United States for 10 years before it folded in 1983. Eulogizing his former boss, Dick Salant, at a memorial service in 1993, Cronkite said: "In the '70s, I thought it was the worst idea I'd ever heard in my life, that we should put judgment as to the kind of job we did in the hands of another group somewhere outside our immediate profession, outside our immediate workplace. But I think now, as I look back on it, that Dick Salant was probably right."

Cronkite's colleague, the late Mike Wallace, also fought against it, but also later changed his mind. "I believe a revived News Council is worth a second shot," Wallace said at Harvard University while receiving an award. "What I'm suggesting is what Dick Salant had in mind: reasonable, qualified people sitting down and considering whether or not they perceive a given piece of reporting warrants holding it up to public scrutiny as flawed, as dishonest. And if it is, then let the public know about it."

Sounds like a good idea to me too. Given the plunging public confidence in the mass media, strong provincial media councils are needed in Canada now more than ever. It's time for us all to speak up for them.

Is anyone home?
The website of the London Free Press announces that the paper is a member of the Ontario Press Council. It gives an address for people to write to if they want to lodge a complaint about something that appeared in the paper. Well, the information is wrong. The Free Press is not a member of the press council. It withdrew along with Sun Media's 26 other Ontario dailies last year. In any event, the press council has moved and is no longer found at the address given on the Free Press website. No one at the paper seems to care.

Plagiarize THIS!

John Miller — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:40:52 -0400

The Anchor Weekly calls itself an "alternative" newspaper, published and distributed for free in the suburban Chestermere area of Calgary. Its motto is "credible news east of the city." More ironically, its website claims that "to reach out to unique people, you need a unique newspaper."

For its 10,000 or so readers, the newspaper may or may not be "unique," but its owner, publisher and editor, Steve Jeffrey, certainly is.

Thanks to a curious American humour columnist, and the prestigious Poynter Institute, Jeffrey has been unmasked as not only a plagiarist but a serial plagiarist.

Forty-one of the Sittin' in the Lighthouse columns he published under his byline the past year were almost identical to those written by 14 other writers across North America. He simply changed a few lines to eliminate references to other places, slapped his byline on someone else's work, and ran it under his photograph as if it was his own.

Confronted by an investigator from the Poynter Institute, a leading academy for journalism ethics based in Florida, Jeffrey denied "plagiarizing anyone," although he had conflicting explanations about the similarities. The columns in question were about human interest topics and humour, although Jeffrey claimed Sittin' in the Lighthouse was actually about local politics (it's not). Asked if the columns that ran under his name weren't his, he replied: "I would say yes because I don't like humour." Later, in an email to the Calgary Herald, Jeffrey claimed "“I really don’t have any way to defend myself. I did use articles for inspiration, but thought that I had changed the content enough to comply.”

Guilty as hell, I say.

According to one report, Jeffrey has apparently resigned from his positions at the paper, although it's unclear what that means since he happens to own it. He hasn't said whether he will continue writing his now-discredited column.

The evidence against him is indisputable. It was gathered by George Waters, a humour columnist and blogger whose work appears in various California publications. He explains here why he decided to randomly Google phrases he had written to see if anyone was using them for publication. Bingo. One of his columns, titled "Sick of standardized testing? Bubble THIS in," originally posted in 2008, turned up under Jeffrey's name in the Anchor Weekly on May 19, 2011.

That column copies many sentences, word for word, from Waters including this one: "My kids, before their schooling is done and they begin their inevitable careers as underpaid but highly esteemed bloggers, will have endured, at a minimum, the STAR test, CAT/6, SAT, CAHSEE, and quite possibly the TACHS, COOP, SSAT, ISEE, SHSAT, the FAB 4 and the Dave Clark 5."

Now just think about that for a second. Why would anyone be so stupid, if they did decide to steal another person's humour writing, as to leave in references that would allow any reader to discover his fraud? If Jeffrey actually does have kids, and if they are Albertans, they certainly wouldn't ever have to take a CAHSEE test, which is an acronym for the California High School Exit Exam.

This does not say much about the intellectual prowess or critical thinking skills of the Anchor Weekly's readers, now does it? At least no one seemed to notice that Jeffrey never seemed to be as funny in person as he was in print.

What's remarkable about Waters is that he kept digging and Googled for references to a whole year of Jeffrey's columns. Of the 52 of them, 41 were fakes, simply copied from 14 different writers as far afield as Newfoundland. Actually 42 of them were fakes, since Jeffrey -- no doubt too busy to search for something else to lift -- simply reprinted one column that he'd stolen a few weeks later.

Little is known for sure about Jeffrey, except that he has been president of the Strathmore and District Chamber of Commerce since 2011. He appears to have had no journalism training or experience. In his LinkedIn bio, he lists himself as a board member with the Alberta Weekly Newspaper Association but his name does not appear on the AWNA website as either a present or past board member.

Jeffery declined to answer my questions when I emailed him, saying he was travelling. Officials of the Alberta Weekly Newspaper Association, which the Anchor Weekly belongs to, seem to be running for cover too. The St. John's Telegram in Newfoundland asked the president of the association's board of directors, Ossie Sheddy, for comment because three of the writers Jeffrey was found to have copied wrote for that paper. Sheddy wouldn’t say if the association is investigating the matter, and asked not to be quoted.

“I don’t give quotes for fear of being misquoted,” he said. When pressed by The Telegram about why the president of a newspaper association wouldn’t say if it plans to investigate plagiarism — and whether his refusal to be interviewed suggests a lack of confidence in newspaper reporting — Sheddy, the editor and publisher of the Drumheller Mail, said, “I can only say I have confidence in my newspaper reporting, not about anybody else’s.”

The Alberta Press Council, however, admitted it had received a complaint from one of the U.S. writers Jeffrey is accused of plagiarizing. It is still deciding what to do about it.

I'd like to give that sleuth George Waters the last words.

"If Steve Jeffrey had an employer, he would have been sent on his way already with a cardboard box full of family photos off his desk. But Jeffrey runs the paper. Best I can tell, he has no board of directors or a boss. A person of conscience, caught in so clear a violation of journalistic ethics, would resign.

"If you were an editor and you were caught plagiarizing other writers, would you resign? Give me a number. Would you only resign if you were caught five times? Twenty? O.K., 40. Let's go 40. How about then? Give us a number, Mr. Jeffrey. Show us that conscience."

I'm afraid it's not another great moment in Canadian journalism, folks.

Bravo, McMaher!

John Miller — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:56:12 -0500

"McMaher," the unlikely team of journalists whose hard work uncovered what might become Canada's Watergate, first met in the Parliamentary Press Gallery’s Hot Room, a large office space for news agencies from across the country on the third floor of Centre Block.

They worked for different news organizations. Ottawa Citizen reporter Glen McGregor had been covering Parliament since 1998. Stephen Maher came to Ottawa representing the Halifax Chronicle Herald in 2003. For two such competitive colleagues to team up, McGregor says, is "pretty rare" in Canadian journalism.

It happened because Maher, for the Chronicle Herald, had been analysing Nova Scotia ridings to track the federal government’s Economic Action Plan spending. As McGregor recounted in this story in the Hill Times, "we had a conversation saying it’d be cool to do it for the whole country." Maher contributed his extensive sources and McGregor, a self-styled info geek, knew sophisticated computer techniques like web-scraping and electronic mapping. Once their editors agreed to let them work together, they produced an explosive story which earned them a Canadian Association of Journalists award for computer-assisted reporting in 2009.　

But that story pales in comparison to their latest scoop.

Maher, 46, joined Postmedia News last summer, meaning he and McGregor, also 46, at last belonged to the same news organization. Last month they teamed up to reveal that Elections Canada, aided by the RCMP, was investigating fraudulent phone calls, or "robocalls," made during last fall's federal election that misled voters.

It has since exploded onto the front pages, and Elections Canada's investigation has grown to include an astounding 31,000 complaints from across the country, including -- most chillingly -- evidence that rogue phone calls directed hundreds of voters to non-existent polling stations. The scandal has the potential to be a political nightmare for Prime Minister Stephen Harper if the trail leads, as many suspect it could, to some of his campaign workers.

The story started during last May’s election campaign when Maher was told about a supporter for Egmont, P.E.I., Liberal candidate Guy Gallant, who had received a call asking if he supported Gallant’s campaign. But the voice on the phone sparked suspicion because the caller pronounced Gallant’s name in a way that no Atlantic Canadian would.

"The idea of someone making mischief in this way and purposefully trying to confuse and deceive voters in order to dissuade people from voting, it sort of stuck in my craw, the idea that someone would get up to that," Maher told The Hill Times.

He turned again to McGregor, who happened to be looking into harassing phone calls being made in another riding, held by long-time Liberal Irwin Cotler (Mount Royal, Que.).

Though both reporters scoff at Watergate comparisons, their dogged work in uncovering evidence of vote-rigging and "dirty tricks" is an outstanding example of public service reporting. Given the sorry state of the Canadian news media, with corporate downsizing shrinking the ranks of those who regularly cover federal politics, they are a shining example of what can redeem mainstream journalism in an era of political blogging and spin-doctoring.

Investigative journalism.

Dogged, experienced reporters who can find out who benefits and editors who allow them time to follow the trail.

News organizations who believe in holding the Prime Minister to the same standards of truth-telling as any other source.

Bravo McMaher and Postmedia News. Keep working on this story.