Feature
Globe and Mail justice reporter Kirk Makin likens maintaining a beat to tending a garden. “There’s only a certain period where there’s fruit in the trees,” he says, “but you have to do a whole lot of gardening in between.” Beat reporting remains the lifeblood of newspapers. So why is the Globe clogging its arteries with marquee columnists, a glut of Ottawa coverage and so much “news you can use”? Julia LeConte of the Ryerson Review of Journalism investigates.