Three former Star interns win National Newspaper Awards

By Adrian Morrow

Three former Star interns were among 22 journalists honoured with Canada's top journalism prizes Friday night.

Photographer Steve Russell, investigative reporter David Bruser and designer Jason A. Chiu picked up National Newspaper Awards for work at the Star and the Globe and Mail.

 

Steve Russell's award winning photo.

The first time I worked with Steve, we were sent to Union Station last summer to cover a strike by Via Rail employees. The whole morning, Steve worked the scene thoroughly, capturing numerous candid photos of stranded travellers, shooting from every angle and even helped me find some people with the best anecdotes. This same candid shooting and spontaneity had paid off big for him the previous April.

Russell was assigned to get some night shots in the entertainment district for a feature on the effects of the recession, when six men spilled out of a bar and began a vicious brawl on the street.

"I was standing on a stoop so that I could stack up pedestrians and party people on my side of the street, traffic and a busy bar as a background," he says of that night. "I saw something starting to happen at the door of the bar and dropped my camera with a wide angle lens in favour of the camera with a long zoomer (70-200) on it."

The fight was broken up quickly, but Russell managed to snap a vivid action shot of the fight. In his photo, every detail pops, from the ripple of the mens' unbuttoned shirts, to the agonized look on the face of one young man who had been knocked to the ground.

The photo won the NNA for news photography, Russell's second.

Russell, a Sudbury native who grew up party in Peru, studied photojournalism at Loyalist College and cut his teeth as an intern at the London Free Press and the Toronto Star. The Star hired him permanently in 1998.

He remembers trying to learn from every photographer during his summer as an intern.

"The way they can smell the story amazed me. The lessons I learned in how to approach a variety of situations and stories are tools that I carry with me every day," he says.

From Nannygate to Jaffergate, it's been a big year for the Star's investigations team, and one of their own was feted Friday.

David Bruser won his second career NNA for "The War at Home," a series about the mental toll the war in Afghanistan has taken on Canadian soldiers. The investigation was at once a series of intimate portraits of men with deep psychological scars brought on by the horrors of the war and an indictment of the army's seeming indifference to helping them overcome their trauma.

Bruser, who studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spent two years at the McComb Enterprise-Journal in Mississippi before joining the Star's one-year reporting internship program in 2003. As an intern, he covered the fatal hostage-taking at Union Station. Subsequently, he worked as a business and transportation reporter before joining the investigative team in 2007.

"Because the Star under editor Michael Cooke provides support and resources to the investigations team, I and my colleagues have the great opportunity to try to do stories like the War at Home series," he says, who credits investigations editor Kevin Donovan more his mentorship, the staff of the Star library with their research help and multimedia guru Randy Risling (himself the recipient of an NNA Friday) for putting together a web component for the series.

When I worked at a student newspaper at Ryerson University, there was one campus paper, out of the hundreds from across the country, that always stood out for its design. With visually arresting covers and creative, magazine-style layouts, the art in the University of Ottawa's La Rotonde always seemed a big step ahead of the rest of us.

It wasn't until I started working at the Star that I met the guy behind it: Jason A. Chiu, a veteran of campus journalism. In addition to La Rotonde (where he served as co-editor-in-chief and production manager), he worked as a designer at student papers the Fulcrum and the Ryerson Free Press, and spent a year as the head of the Canadian University Press's graphics bureau. He came to the Star in 2008 for a year-long design internship.

Chiu, now at the Globe and Mail, won the NNA for presentation with David Pratt for the layout and design of "Decoding the Decade", a Saturday Globe package analyzing the first 10 years of the 21st century. He describes the project as a team effort, with input from editors across the paper.

"Being nominated was a great feeling, being recognized as the winner in your category is a step above everything, few things can compare," he says of his NNA win.

Chiu credits his Star internship with helping him move from small weeklies to major dailies. He says it also taught him the endurance and focus on deadline that helped him put together big projects like the one that garnered him his first NNA.

"These skills, while they might seem arbitrary, were key in the long hours it took to conceive the Decoding the Decade package, the countless late nights I spent working on the weekly Saturday Globes and of course, that time Bob Geldof and Bono were in the Globe newsroom skedding stories and rewriting ledes," he says.

Russell, meanwhile, offers some advice for incoming Star interns that applies aptly to young journalists anywhere, whether behind the lens, holding a notepad or laying out pages late into the night:

"Dive in, commit to it, get your stories/pictures looked at by as many of the writers and editors you can," he says. "Don't find a mentor -- find two or three. Develop a thick skin! Ask for critiques and don't shut down then you hear something negative about your work, listen hard, that is when you learn!"

Adrian Morrow spent the past two years in the Star's radio room. This summer he will report for the Globe and Mail.

Toronto Star's Daniel Dale, Spectator's Nicole O'Reilly picked top young journalists

By Ann Hui

Two young journalists, Daniel Dale and Nicole O'Reilly, were awarded Friday morning with the Hon. Edward Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists.

The recipients were selected by a panel of senior editors with the Canadian Newspaper Association, and given their awards at the CNA's annual luncheon during the Ink + Beyond conference in Toronto.

Daniel Dale, the winner of the 25,000+ circulation category, is a general assignment reporter at the Toronto Star. Dale joined the Star in 2007 as a summer reporter after interning at the Guelph Mercury and in the Washington bureau of the Houston Chronicle.

His winning entry package included an in-depth look at Darcy Allan Sheppard, the bike courier who was killed after a collision with former attorney-general Michael Bryant. Dale was the first reporter to speak with an eyewitness to the collision, and went on to speak with numerous friends of the victim (after messaging every single contact on Sheppard's Facebook page).

After he received his award, Dale thanked his editors and coworkers at the Star. He also thanked his mother but admitted he has yet to send her a Mother's Day card.

The winner of the under 25,000 circulation category, Nicole O'Reilly, won for her work covering municipal affairs and environmental issues for the Guelph Mercury. O'Reilly has since gone on to her current position as crime and security reporter at The Hamilton Spectator. A graduate of Ryerson University's journalism program, O'Reilly interned at the Globe and Mail, Waterloo Region Record, before working at the Woodstock Sentinel-Review.

One of O'Reilly's winning entries for the Guelph Mercury was a story that looked at staffing levels and staff salaries in the City of Guelph, analyzing and comparing these numbers with population growth.

Ann Hui has worked in the Toronto Star radio room since September. She is covering the Canadian Newspaper Association annual conference in Toronto.

Good news for people who love bad news

By Ann Hui

Journalists are used to bad news -- both on the job, and about their jobs. But this year's Canadian Newspaper Association Ink + Beyond conference ended on a positive note, with good news coming from the keynote speaker, Angus Reid.

As CEO of Vision Critical, an online market research firm, and founder of Angus Reid Group, Reid knows a thing or two about what people want. And one of his messages at Friday morning's event is that people still want traditional media.

"The idea that there's a zero-sum relationship between old media and new media isn't true," Reid said, before revealing the results of two major media studies his company performed last year. He explained that though there is a growing category of people he deemed "media maniacs" -- those who consume social media, online media, mobile media, etc. -- that this consumption of media is on top of the traditional media that they're already consuming.

Reid said that part of the reason people continue to want traditional media is because they feel they can trust it. To prove this point, he showed results from a study also performed by Vision Critical, which showed people's trust levels depending on the source of information.

The study showed, in part, that people rate information received from traditional media much higher than information from new media. Highlights of the study:

• Family: 78%
• Friends: 66%
• Broadcast and radio: 45%
• Print: 41%
• Social networks: 13%
• Blogs, forums, chat rooms, etc.: 8%

What this adds up to is good news for newspapers. But Reid emphasized several times throughout his speech that going forward, the reader -- and newspapers' knowledge about the reader--will be key to their success.

The importance of market research about newspapers' audiences: who they are and what their preferences are has never been more important, Reid argued. Traditionally, audience measurements for media have been inaccurate, mired by politics, and clumsy. Luckily, he said, new technology and the efficiency of online surveying will help to combat this.

"I think there is a good future out there for your industry," he closed his speech by saying. "I really believe this."

Ann Hui has worked in the Toronto Star radio room since September. She is covering the Canadian Newspaper Association annual conference in Toronto.

Newspaper lessons from Motor City

By Ann Hui

What do the newspaper industry and the automotive industry have in common?

A lot, apparently.

There's the obvious fact that both industries have taken a huge hit in the recent recession. Plus, the fact that both have been the unfortunate subjects of gloom & doom "the end is near" predictions.

But on top of the commonalities, the industries have historically been, to an extent, interdependent. This relationship -- the dependence of newspapers on automotive advertising -- was the subject of "Under the Hood," a presentation at the Canadian Newspaper Association's Ink + Beyond Conference Friday morning. Because, as the CNA's Susan Down put it in her introduction, "When the car industry has a cold, we're the ones blowing our noses."

At the session, auto experts Dennis Desrosiers (auto industry analyst) and Stuart Payne (former director, Toyota Canada)  compared notes with Jon Wolman (publisher, The Detroit News) and Paul Anger (editor, The Detroit Free Press), discussing possible solutions for the current challenges.

From the auto industry standpoint, Payne and Desrosiers stressed the importance for newspapers to "think outside the box" when trying to attract auto advertising. Consumers and advertisers are looking for an interactive, on-demand and customizable experience, something they argued newspapers are not doing well enough. After all, Desrosiers argued, "why would we spend $2 billion on a new model, and then launch and advertise it in exactly the same way every other car has in the history of the automotive industry?"

But despite this, the two were optimistic about the ability of newspapers to come through, and don't believe that a digital-only future is near for newspapers. "It's still wonderful to open a paper and see a double-page spread ad," Payne said. "It's much nicer for a consumer than seeing a teeny little box online."

Surprisingly, the speakers from the newspaper industry were a little less optimistic about the future of print.

Wolman and Anger discussed the papers' joint decision in 2008 to launch the "Detroit Plan," a move that saw both papers cutting their home delivery to three days a week to save on fuel and print costs. The majority of their papers' ad revenue was already clumped on the three days (Thursday, Friday and Sunday), they said, so the decision made sense. The papers still appear on newsstands seven days a week, but in smaller, "express" versions. An e-edition, on top of the paper's website, is also available.

Wolman explained the move by repeating, throughout his presentation that "Newspapers in Detroit are actually living the stories we cover." He described the parallels between the newspaper and auto industrys as "torturous," and argued that, unlike the auto industry, newspapers are without bailouts.

The early results of the Detroit Plan have seen some small successes: 96 per cent of the papers' subscribers, they say, have stuck with them. But the real success, they argue, has been that revenue saved by cutting print costs has allowed them to devote more resources to digital, which is where they see their future.

"Do you believe that newspapers will be back to normal after this economic blip is over?" Anger asked the audience. His sombre tone suggested that he certainly didn't.

"Don't shed tears for print," he said. After all, it's the journalism that's important not the newspaper.

"Look at it this way. At least in the States, the milk man doesn't deliver fresh milk anymore. Doctors haven't made housecalls for decades. But we still get milk, and we still get medicine. It all comes down to the journalism. It all comes down to the product."

Ann Hui has worked in the Toronto Star radio room since September. She is covering the Canadian Newspaper Association annual conference in Toronto.

The radical road to recovery: charge more for the paper and hire more reporters

By Adrian Morrow

It's a simple equation that guides most newspapers: more readers equals higher advertising rates equals more money.

A second equation has become ever-more prevalent as newspapers struggle to hold onto ad dollars in the age of the internet: advertising migrating online equals lower revenues equals fewer reporters.

But there's a newspaper that's making more money with fewer readers and a larger newsroom. And today, its head honcho was in Toronto to give us a glimpse of this looking-glass world and explain how it works.

"I am so sick and tired of listening to people tell me our industry is over and done and stick a fork in it," Jim Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told a session of the Canadian Newspaper Association's Ink + Beyond conference on Thursday.

The Morning News, he explained, had adopted a two-pronged approach to raise circulation revenues. The first part involved upping the price of the paper by 40 per cent. This might sound like suicide for a newspaper desperate to retain readers. But as the Morning News discovered, the rise in revenue (about 23 per cent) more than compensated for the loss of subscribers (12 per cent).

The second part of the plan was to do what few papers in North America have done recently: hire more journalists and make the paper bigger. The rationale is that a higher-quality newspaper will naturally hold onto more readers by providing news -- especially local news -- that people can't find anywhere else.

"We began to put more pages in the Dallas Morning News, we began to hire more writers," Moroney said. "We have more reporters on the street than the local ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates combined."

The paper is pushing forward, with plans to deliver the News on wireless devices for a fee. There are also plans to make readers pay for much of the paper's regular website, too.

The whole project was coupled with an overhaul of the way the paper sells advertising. Instead of simply selling space in the paper for a fixed fee, the paper's advertising department asks for a per centage of customers' sales, shifting the risk (and higher ad revenues) to the paper. Most importantly, the strategy is designed to build advertisers' trust and loyalty to the News by better serving their needs.

Shannon Kinney, of consultants the AIM Group, reinforced the idea later in the session, summing it up as "asking the advertiser questions" on how the paper can meet his or her needs, rather than simply pitching them the idea of buying space.

Adrian Morrow is a veteran of the Toronto Star radio room. He is covering the Canadian Newspaper Association annual conference in Toronto.

Hyperlocal 'news cafes' are taking the Czech news scene by storm

By Teri Pecoskie

While newspapers scramble to figure out how to turn a profit in a quickly evolving industry, a small group of Czech publications might just hold the solution:
Hyperlocal news.
A year after the successful launch of a hyperlocal journalism project in the Czech Republic, Roman Gallo, director of media strategies for Amsterdam-based investment firm, PPF Group, told more than 200 delegates at the annual Canadian Newspaper Association conference Thursday how his company is bucking the trend.
Last June, PPF launched four pilot publications across diverse districts of the country. The ventures, called Nase Adresa or “our address” have three components: weekly newspapers distributed every Monday, interactive websites and news cafes.
While web and print platforms are typical fodder for Ink + Beyond delegates, the idea of news cafes may be a bit less familiar.
The idea is to create a newsroom environment where as little separation as possible exists between those reporting the news and those consuming it. To break down that wall his company developed news cafes – newsrooms containing public cafes, where community members are encouraged to drop in, share their ideas and even contribute to the publication.
“We use these cafes as community centres,” he said. “There’s a much better understanding of community life for our editorial staff because there are no barriers.”
The cafes don’t just quench caffeine cravings, either. Each newsroom frequently holds community events like concerts or dance lessons, often attracting hundreds of people from the area.
The novel newsrooms create a unique connection between consumers and the Nase Adresa brand, said Gallo. “It creates trust.”
Once that relationship is established, Gallo added, the publications are able to produce stories with a distinctively local tone – all without ever having to make room for international, national or even nearby regional news, all of which can easily be found elsewhere in more traditional print and web formats.
Rather than dilute coverage with non-local issues, Nase Adresa’s publications focus on generating content for four news pillars: sports, community events, service listings, such as movies and restaurants, and quality journalism that includes investigative reports on issues like local corruption.
And in these newsrooms, community members aren’t just encouraged to give news tips. Reporters are required to be “community editors”, tasked with helping the local people develop the tools they need to take part in stories – whether that is the subject of a story or one of its producers.
The newsrooms aren’t just unique in this sense, though. In addition to functioning as a communal gathering place and local news hub, the cafes help generate essential, albeit nonconventional, revenue for the publications as well.
Gallo says this new revenue model also relies on the funds generated by Futuroom, PPF’s training and knowledge facility that develops infographics and interactive models for multimedia publications in larger markets.
Nase Adresa’s four pilot projects have been so successful under this new model, in fact, the company is planning to roll out an additional 150 weeklies, 1,000 websites and 89 cafes throughout the Czech Republic over the next 18 months.
But even with the success of the pilots and the launch of hundreds of new hyperlocal publications on the horizon, Gallo doesn’t anticipate the ride will be bump-free.
One challenge he foresees could come when PPF introduces 10 news cafes in the country’s capital city and largest market, Prague.
Unlike the current hyperlocal model where news doesn’t cross over between communities, the Prague publications will contain some overlap, Gallo said.
“There’s more migration, so it might be based not only on location, but also on demographics,” he said. PPF could, for instance, create a news cafe devoted strictly to interacting with students and covering student affairs.
Whatever the look of the new publications, Gallo is certain of one thing: Nase Adresa’s success proves there is a way for newspapers to thrive in the 21st century, although it’s not the only way.
“This is only one example of how it can be done,” he said. “I think there are thousands of other examples of how you can do this.”

Teri Pecoskie is a Humber journalism school graduate and works in the Star radio room. She is covering the CNA annual conference in Toronto.

Hyperlocal reporting, mobile technology key to community building

By Wendy Gillis

People are desperate to connect, even as there is less time to do so.

That's what John Futhey, managing director of community and specialty sites at Metroland media group, told delegates Thursday at Ink + Beyond, the annual conference hosted by the Canadian Newspaper Association, the Canadian Community Newspapers Association and the Canadian Circulation Management Association.

While the ways people connect are constantly changing, the human desire to feel part of a community has remained constant, he says.

"Everything we are hearing and everything we're doing reflects the fact that community building is more important than ever, people are desperate to engage to, feel part of something good, something relevant."  For newspapers, that means it's crucial to build communities

One way to do this is to provide journalism at an extremely local level, says Robert Washburn, coordinator of the e-journalism program at Loyalist College. Washburn points to the emerging trend of hyper local sites, which have been gaining in popularity over the past two years particularly in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. The current reporting model used by most newspapers begins at the regional level, something Washburn says is a mistake.

Readers want to know about what's going on down the street, in their block and around the corner.   "Local news is what makes people passionate," he says. "Mainstream news fails to connect with people where they live."

He cites  blogTO, Ossington Village, and Windsorite.ca as successful hyper local sites that create community. For newspapers, the question that should be asked is whether they are filling a need—Washburn says if a need is being met, a community can be built.

Currently, there is a need for localized news, and it's an opportunity for newspaper to foster online communities. Newspapers can also create a technological community through mobile phones, says Marlon Rodrigues.  Rodrigues is a mobile specialist and director of business development for Polar Mobile, a cross-platform smartphone application producer now in its third year of business.

The company has created smartphone applications for Maclean's,Time, Canadian Business, and even the Toronto Maple Leafs, among other clients.

"You can't ignore mobile. Mobile is in fact a leading platform, it has grown to a point where you can grow a reasonable business out of it, and it can amplify all the other work you're doing," he says. Smartphones, such as the iPhone, Blackberry or Google's Android, make content available to users, many of whom may not be accessing a newspaper in any other medium, Rodrigues says. 

Mobile devices are also proving a viable way to make a profit through active usage, something Rodrigues says makes ad banners a profitable form of advertising. "Our job is to make sure that the content that we're given is mashed with an awesome user experience that encourages active usage over time, and that's... what really allows you to make money."

Wendy Gillis is an MA student in the Ryerson Journalism program. This summer she will work as a reporter in the Star newsroom.

Newspapers challenged to ditch print bias

By Madeleine White

The biggest investment newspapers are going to have to make to transform is in IT support. At least that's what more than 200 Canadian newspaper editors, publishers and CEOs  heard during John Paton's address at the opening panel of CNA's 2010 conference, Ink + Beyond -- the national annual gathering of close to 300 daily and community papers to discuss the future of the industry.

Paton challenged newspaper leaders Thursday to drop their print bias and embrace a new direction. He argued that to become a multi-platform news agency newspapers need to give up the privileges they've bestowed on the print product. Digital thinkers -- not print-centric thinkers -- need to be placed at the helm of the newsroom transformation so that online priorities are first and print demands are last, Paton said as more delegates scribbled notes onto paper than fidgeted with smartphones. 

Paton's multi-platform news "ecology" is based on the legacy he built at impreMedia, where he transformed a newspaper into a network of instant messaging, social networking, videos, audio clips and website. He boasted that impreMedia, a national Hispanic news organization in the U.S., started off with nine products on two platforms and now has nearly 100 products on seven platforms. 

 

Paton argued that the radical change impreMedia underwent was necessary to make it prosperous and all newspapers should consider similar newsroom revolutions if they plan to keep their doors open. 

 

But transforming to multi-platforms is difficult. 

 

"The word transform seems to connote a smooth transition from one thing to the next," he said. "But I think what our industry is going through is a bloody battle for survival."

 

And there will be blood shed. One harsh piece of advice Paton gave was to fire reporters and editors who can't adapt to a digital-first approach and learn to multi-task in their coverage of the news. His staff at the Journal Register Company, which he just took over in January,  are all being trained in video reporting with Flip cameras and blogging. Since the training begun, the organization's video output went from 117,000 streams to around 2.2 million.

 

Asking reporters to multi-task is just one change. Paton also said that pre-print work, page make-up, and workplace infrastructure -- things like mail delivery -- ought to be outsourced. His newsroom is a leaner machine with the sole aim of delivering news through multiple conduits. Despite downsizing, Paton maintains a strong belief that the news being delivered ought to be high quality. He noted several news projects ImpreMedia took on to help advocate issues in Hispanic communities across the US as examples of powerful journalism from this new multi-directional approach.

 

"The business models are only a way to preserve and enhance real journalism," Paton said, reminding delegates that having a handle on the business of journalism is the only way to make sure news organizations are able to produce strong, investigative news coverage and fulfill their duty in a democracy. 

 

Paton's transformation is also a costly one, he warned. Newspapers must be willing to invest money in research to understand what platform their audience is using. He spoke about his surprise at discovering that the Journal Register Company also included a bridal magazine, whose audience was largely women in their 20s. His marketing research told him that these readers were in fact viewers and the publication would be more successful if it supplemented the magazine with online video.

Paton still produces newspapers. But they are different than the newspapers he was familiar with as a journalism student at Ryerson University years ago. In an interview with Jeff Jarvis, Paton describes his print products as packed with thoughtful long-form journalism and fiery opinion pieces meant to spark an online debate. His news outlets work together and are stronger for it.

Madeleine White is a Toronto Star radio room reporter. She is covering the Canadian Newspaper Association annual conference in Toronto.

Toronto Star interns covering newspaper conference Ink + Beyond

The Canadian Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspapers Association are pleased to announce that writers from the Toronto Star will be providing coverage from the Ink + Beyond conference in Toronto.

Starting on Wednesday, May 12, the writers will post stories about the events, sessions, and the speakers attending the annual conference.

For a little more about the contributors, please read their biographies below.

Wendy Gillis
Wendy Gillis is a student in the Master of Journalism program at Ryerson University. She was the editor-in-chief of The Sheaf, the student newspaper at the University of Saskatchewan, was a reporter for the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, and will intern in the Toronto Star newsroom this summer.

 

 

Ann Hui
Ann Hui is finishing up a year of reporting in the Toronto Star's Radio Room. She's also achingly close to completing her masters in journalism at Ryerson University. This summer, Ann will be reporting for the Globe and Mail. Follow her on twitter @annhui.

 

 

Adrian Morrow
Adrian Morrow is graduating from the Ryerson journalism program this year. He has spent the better part of two years at the Toronto Star, and he is headed to the Globe and Mail this summer. His interests include investigative reporting, crime and  feature writing.

 

 

Teri Pecoskie    
Teri Pecoskie studied philosophy then switched her focus to journalism at Humber College - a field better suited to her adventurous nature. She has just finished her last year of a post-graduate print journalism diploma at Humber. She is also passionate about photography and loves shooting landscapes on her Canon Digital SLR. Teri also enjoys shooting and editing video. She would love to travel abroad for a wire service or newspaper.

 

Alex Posadzki
Alexandra Posadzki is just finishing up a hectic year as a radio room intern at the Toronto Star and the editor-in-chief of Excalibur Publications, York University’s community newspaper. Alex will be starting as the Ontario Bureau Chief for the Canadian University press in the fall. You can follow her at twitter.com/alexposadzki or www.healthshocks.com.

 

 

Maddie White
Madeleine White is a journalism masters student at Ryerson University. This fall she'll be reporting on the experiences of female candidates running in the Toronto municipal election as part of her final thesis, a series of features examining political life for women in Canada.She has also been covering breaking news in the GTA out of the Toronto Star's radio room for the last year. Outside of the newsroom, Madeleine teaches spin classes and enjoys running.

Should reporters be allowed to protect whistleblowers?

By Fabiola Carletti

The Supreme Court has ruled that the media cannot guarantee unconditional anonymity to sources.

The decision was nine years in the making and at its heart were the contents of a brown envelope and a tenacious journalist who refused to hand it over.

In 2001, Andrew McIntosh of the National Post received a package. It contained information about prime minister Jean Chrétien and his alleged involvement a controversy that came to be known as “shawinigate.” 

Police suspected forgery and wanted to include the reporter’s documents in their investigation. McIntosh refused, choosing to protect his source. 

In the court battle that ensued, both his newspaper and the police claimed that the public interest was in their corner. 

The situation raised the question: who speaks for the good of the people?

Friday’s near unanimous Supreme Court ruling means that journalists cannot, unconditionally, say that they do.

"The public has an interest in effective law enforcement," wrote Justice Ian Binnie. "The public also has an interest in being informed about matters of public importance that may only see the light of day through the co-operation of sources who will not speak except on condition of confidentiality."

Importantly, the judges acknowledged some of the great work investigative reporters have done. Still, instead of assigning immunity to the media -- which they noted now includes a much broader range of bloggers, tweeters, etc. -- the judges ruled that journalistic privilege should be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Some reporters say the decision is a de facto loss, others see it as a potential gain. Personally, I think the ruling is nuanced. 

Yes, the Supreme Court decided not to grant the media blanket immunity.

Yes, the onus is on individual journalists and media organizations to demonstrate that protecting
confidentiality is, in their situation, more beneficial to society than police access to their secret sources.

Yes, this opposes the view that the onus should be on the police to prove that they really need the information, especially since whistleblowers often have so much to lose.

… however, the Supreme Court judges did not assert that police investigations should always trump the
 protection of sources. They also formally acknowledged the importance of the reporter-informant relationship in matters that affect citizens.

Wrote Binnie: “The law should and does accept that in some situations the public interest in protecting the secret source from disclosure outweighs other competing public interests — including criminal investigations.”

Maybe it’s because I’m not a fan of absolutes -- though I don’t say this absolutely -- but I think judicial discretion based on the situation isn’t necessarily bad or good. It is, however, a new challenge.

The challenge is for journalists to explain why specific instances of confidentiality are in the public interest, and this means we have to be introspective, genuine, and convincing. We can't offer anonymity to reluctant sources as a first resort. 

Don't get me wrong: we must do everything we can to adamantly protect our informants, but since we cannot make them iron-clad promises, we have to make good notes, thoughtful arguments and closely watch our own decisions as watchdogs. 

In short: we must be ready to make our case.  

Fabiola Carletti is a Toronto Star radio room reporter and graduate student at the UBC School of Journalism. She recently graduated summa cum laude from York University, having earned an honours double major in Professional Writing and Communication Studies. Her digital footprints are all over the internet, but you can learn more about her by reading her blog, or chasing her around on twitter.

Photo: The statue representing truth ("veritas") in front of the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa.