By
Ivor Shapiro

Part 1 – So, how’d we do this time?
Part 2 – The year of the blog
Part 3 – Enter the truth squads
Part 4 – Interactive journalism? Not so much, yet
Part 5 – Style 2.0, substance 1.0 
Take Our Poll – Who had the best coverage?

Andrew Coyne said it best, blogging half way through the campaign:

“In one respect every election is the same: the press coverage. It’s always an embarrassment, and always in exactly the same way. Politicians learn from their mistakes, sometimes. We just go on repeating ours. … After every election we retire, defeated, to our newsroom post-mortems, and each time we vow: never again. Never again will we sit up and beg for our “Gainsburgers,” the little meaningless morsels of news the parties dole out each day to keep us complicit in their charades. Never again will we chase after every fleeting poll, salivate over every minor “gaffe.” Never again the gotcha question, the silly photo op, the constant search for “defining moments” and “turning points,” the investing of trivial campaign mishaps with symbolic import — as if the great river of events were just naturally teeming with metaphors for us to fish.”
 
Six short weeks ago, J-Source launched its campaign coverage page by asking, “How’d we do last time around?”We went back at the recriminations and resolutions following the 2006 federal election and highlighted challenges such as the media’s addiction to horse-race coverage (especially poll stories), and our habitual failure to subject party platforms and promises to rigorous analysis.

This time, it could be different. Mainstream media were faced by a continuing slump of audiences, and a heightening realization of the Web’s huge potential to win those audiences back through interactive journalism that put politicians directly under voters’ own microscopes. Global warming was targeted by the official opposition, a minority parliament’s alleged dysfunction by the government, and a worldwide economic crisis arrived from nowhere mid-campaign. There would be the usual flood of polls, sure, and the inevitable spin of photo-ops and sound bites. But this time, maybe, substance would rule. This time, maybe, reporters would sniff out more stories that politicians had no interest in leaking; this time we would probe the backgrounds of people who wanted our votes, and subject their promises to the test of hard analysis.

Newsroom executives sounded optimistic notes in the early going. “Welcome to Election 2.0,” wrote Globe and Mail EIC Edward Greenspon at the bell. “Our political website will … be able to dig deeper and tell stories through text, photos, interactive graphics, podcasts and video. But the part that excites me the most is that the reader gets to participate: with the journalists, the newsmakers and with each other.”

“The horserace polls will, I hope, be few and far between,” wrote J-Source contributing editor and Vancouver Sun ME Kirk LaPointe , more cautiously, a week later, “but I have hoped for that for six or seven campaigns now and somehow, with weeks to go, journalism gets drawn into the breathless vortex of who might win…. But the next number of weeks will be instructive on the degree to which Canadian journalism is adopting available tools to reach audiences immediately and deeply.”

No one thought the transformation would be easy. J-Source commenter Claude Adams expressed the challenge this way:

“Why do mainstream news organization abandon their essential news principles when an election is called? … Every major party leader’s speech of the day is news. The airplanes they fly are news…. Their cooked-up squabbles, and their televised debates, are 20-point headlines, content notwithstanding. Editors struggle to achieve “balanced” coverage for the parties, which means a rough equity in column inches or newscast minutes. Reporters are assigned to campaigns; that’s an expensive enterprise, so the expectation is that they file every day. Often, they are reduced to taking dictation: what did Stephen, Stephane and Jack say today, how many were there, and how does it square with what they said yesterday?….”

Well, now another campaign has come and gone, and it’s all over bar the navel-gazing. So the time has come, yes, again, to ask: How did we do this time?
Part 1 – So, how’d we do this time?
Part 2 – The year of the blog
Part 3 – Enter the truth squads
Part 4 – Interactive journalism? Not so much, yet
Part 5 – Style 2.0, substance 1.0
Take Our Poll – Who had the best coverage?

The year of the blog

Ten days ago, I sat down with associate editor Regan Ray to plan our day-after-election coverage. We wanted to focus our campaign look-back on what Canadian journalists achieved, not what they missed. And we decided that the logical starting point was to solicit exemplars from top editors coast to coast. So Ray contacted editors in the newsrooms of 25 daily newspapers in
Canada’s 20 largest metropolitan areas – first by email, and following up by phone. “What element of your newspaper’s coverage of this election campaign,” she asked, “are you most proud of?”

It was, we recognized, as soft-ball as a question could get. But really, that’s what we wanted to know. (We excluded from our poll both the smaller community papers–too few resources, surely, to expect much–and the big nationals, for whom the question was surely too easy.)

And what were the answers?

Harold Munro, deputy managing editor of the Vancouver Sun, wrote that he was proud of the “insights and analysis” provided by his team, which, he felt, had lifted coverage above partisan rhetoric to “focus on the policies of the major parties and identify trends.” As an example, he sent a column by the Sun’s Barbara Yaffe on the politics of personality in the Canadian and U.S. elections.

Fred Kuntz, editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star, spotlighted the “breadth” of his paper’s coverage—the sheer number of reporters, columnists and photographers dedicated to the campaign. A staff reporter had been assigned to each of the 47 ridings in the Greater Toronto Area, and major resources devoted to “extra pages of newsprint, costs of travelling across Canada with the party leaders, election website development and local stories.”

Winnipeg Free Press editor-in-chief Margo Goodhand sent along, without comment, five examples of the paper’s election coverage, including news stories (“Battle of images underway” and “Green fades to black”), opinion columns (“Harper’s image may trump Tory troubles”) and a mapped item providing a “political primer” on the leaders.

And the other 22 big-city papers we contacted, from the St. John’s Telegram to the Victoria Times Colonist and all points between? Nada: no response at all to our notes and calls.

Does this mean that all those editors are proud of nothing at all about their coverage of Campaign ’08? That surely can’t be true. Maybe our question required too much thought at a busy time, and they’ll get back to us this week. Meanwhile, the horse’s mouth being mostly closed, here’s what J-Source’s election team and other friends have spotlighted (not just in the city dailies but on all platforms) as the campaign progressed.

First of all, as suggested by the Yaffe example, the Canadian op-ed sphere is healthier than ever, because the print column has been supplemented by the j-blog. The Star, for instance, added to its impressive range of print columnists by assigning veteran David Olive to blog with daily analysis of the campaign. Maclean’s offered its vast slate of columnists with blogs representing many shades of political opinion. Favourites of Carleton j-school chair and long-time political junkie Chris Waddell included the Globe‘s Jeffrey Simpson and the National Post’s John Ivison – but of course we could go on and on.

The trouble is, opinion was never the problem. The proliferation of printed and electronic commentary could, if anything, become a distraction from the glaring gaps that have been identified in election reporting. The question is not whether voters are exposed to enough opinions, but whether they are getting the facts.
Part 1 – So, how’d we do this time?
Part 2 – The year of the blog
Part 3 – Enter the truth squads
Part 4 – Interactive journalism? Not so much, yet
Part 5 – Style 2.0, substance 1.0
Take Our Poll – Who had the best coverage?

Enter the truth squads

A small but growing point of light is the rise of the “truth squadding” reporter. CBC’s reality-check team, in particular, won wide praise through swift, thorough and even-handed fact-checking of politicians’claims.

But generally in the media, the opportunity for political fact-checking was one more missed than hit, as pointed out by J-Source columnist and former NPR ombud Jeffrey Dvorkin and our Town Hall editor, Vancouver freelancer Deborah Jones.

What big stories were broken by the Canadian media in this election season? The only one that changed the landscape (and, conceivably, some voters’ minds) was provided on CTV-TV with Steve Murphy’s celebrated and reviled  “gotcha” on the Dion “do-overs.” No one would call it a Watergate moment, and it came to Murphy as a gift, rather than through investigation, but at least it was a story that was broken by the media, not the spin rooms.   

As for enterprise reporting, Jones, never easy to impress, gave a nod to CBC Radio’s The Current for a documentary about a “Quixotic” independent candidate, part of its series, “The Supercommitted.” And over at Carleton’s Campaign Perspectives blog, Paul Adams singled out strong political features by the Ottawa Citizen’s Don Butler (on the political cult of the “ordinary guy”) and by the Globe’s Brian Laghi on the Liberals’ leftward tilt. J-Source contributing editor and King’s journalism professor Fred Vallance-Jones cited background digging by CBC’s Susan Ormiston for her “blogger bios” piece, for introducing “people I wouldn’t otherwise have met” and providing an inside look at “this emerging part of the electioneering landscape.”

There were other standouts, of course, and it needs to be said that the difference between what can be offered by a big national news organization and by a strapped midsize daily or local TV  has become clearer than ever. But overall, rigorous independent analysis of the parties’ platforms – especially, in this crisis time, of economic plans– seemed most notable for its absence.
Part 1 – So, how’d we do this time?
Part 2 – The year of the blog
Part 3 – Enter the truth squads
Part 4 – Interactive journalism? Not so much, yet
Part 5 – Style 2.0, substance 1.0
Take Our Poll – Who had the best coverage?

Interactive journalism? Not so much, yet

Unsurprisingly, this was the year for launching unprecedented multimedia online election sites, especially at the major national papers and networks. All the national majors put serious work into their web campaign homes. The CBC’s self-styled “vlog,” Ormiston Online, deserves a special mention for originality, as do the Globe’s substantive “interactives” such as open editorial-board discussions and a daily update on platform costs. If little of the vast potential of web journalism is so far trickling down to the underresourced layers of local publications, J-Source contributing editor Rob Washburn identified some impressive examples at the community level, including Metroland Media’s Inside Toronto Votes site.

Amid this concerted (and needed) shift to online, the “2.0” approach to journalism gives pride of place to interactive approaches centred on user-generated content (UGC). In the United States, for instance, reporters at papers like the Raleigh, NC, News and Observer and the Fort Myers News Press team up with citizen volunteers to watch and even dig into local events, multiplying the papers’ newsroom resources. In like fashion, follow-the-campaign reports in Canadian cities could have been shifted onto the shoulders of happy volunteers from former “audience” members, while reporters used the release time to pursue more investigative paths.

UCG did rise markedly in this campaign, with questions posed directly to political leaders on The National and you-write-the-caption opportunities and all manner of other fun stuff at thestar.com. CTV’s “My Vote” page provided video space to help fringe parties gain air time on the web and for voters to identify underreported issues. Some city dailies, too, dipped toes in this water, with the Winnipeg Free Press offering a Daily Voter space that was essentially a collection of webbified “streeter”quotes.

But as UBC’s Alfred Hermida pointed out, it’s still early days for this type of thing, and journalists, rather than citizens, retain firm control as “gate-keepers” of the news agenda. Everywhere, the chief stream of user contributions continues to take the form of comments on staff-written stories.

As for alternative media, The Tyee’s Geoff Dembicki used the platform well by turning a non-story into a story-behind-the-story, blogging when denied entry to a Stephen Harper campaign event. On the other hand, citizen journalism site NowPublic proved content with providing yet another outlet for opinion and aggregation of mainstream-media stories, as J-Source contributor Joe Rayment pointed in his review of the site’s election section. In fact, the entire blogosphere had surprisingly little substantial impact on how the campaign went, with the highly notable exception of Michel Rivard’s ground-altering cultural-politics video in Quebec. ROC-wise, the closest thing to a standout moment was Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor’s posting of Elizabeth May reference to “stupid” voters – though the, um, stupid comment itself first aired on plain old television.
Part 1 – So, how’d we do this time?
Part 2 – The year of the blog
Part 3 – Enter the truth squads
Part 4 – Interactive journalism? Not so much, yet
Part 5 – Style 2.0, substance 1.0
Take Our Poll – Who had the best coverage?

Style 2.0, substance 1.0

If the 2008 campaign offered some flashy glimpses of “2.0”-style journalism, there were no signs of a breakthrough on the substantive reporting challenges that Canadian political journalists have themselves identified time after time. The anonymous political source and the horse race still reign supreme, and the jury is out on whether polling data was used more responsibly than usual. According to Paul Adams, media remained slow to recognize the significance of poll results: “in this election, this year, it may be that some voters go to the polls with old information on their minds.”

In fact, the accelerated flow of 24/7 content – multimedia content that needs to be managed and packaged on multiple platforms — probably makes it more difficult than ever for reporters and editors to step back and think about what it all means and what’s missing. So, far from the age of the Web proving a boon to strapped newsrooms, it may have exacerbated the problem, as predicted by Canada’s largest media union when the writ dropped.

The result: journalists once again largely left it to the politicians to determine what issues should dominate pages, screens and air time, so that issues they didn’t want to spotlight – such as health care, the Canada-Europe trade talks and education – barely saw light of day. Waddell’s mid-campaign list of forgotten issues included defence spending and Afghanistan, Canada-US relations, and ”civil liberties versus the risk of terrorism.” As contributing editor Sue Ferguson wrote, with her eye on the invisible federal child-care debate, journalists remained “news gatherers, filling their baskets with whatever apples the leaders pick from their campaign tree for the day… largely content to let the leaders determine how issues are covered.”

A healthy democracy needs vigorous, free-thinking, undauntable journalists – reporters and editors with a sense of mission and the imagination to fulfill that mission in trying times. Especially at election time. But J-Source commenter Rob Gilgan could be excused for asking whether Canadian media had “become incapable of covering an election.” Not that we’re alone. As you may have noticed, there’s another election happening on this continent, and three weeks from the close of that one, the New York Times public editor, Clark Hoyt, concluded that his paper “owes readers much more help than it has given them to understand what the candidates propose to do and how that squares with reality.”

Apparently, much the same might be said for campaign coverage up here.

Or, have we missed the stories that mattered around the country? What were the best stories of this campaign? Where were the biggest holes? How did we do? The “comment” link is staring at you: please chime in.

Ivor Shapiro is editor-in-chief of J-Source.ca and an associate professor at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism.

Part 1 – So, how’d we do this time?
Part 2 – The year of the blog
Part 3 – Enter the truth squads
Part 4 – Interactive journalism? Not so much, yet
Part 5 – Style 2.0, substance 1.0
Take Our Poll – Who had the best coverage?