By Bilbo Poynter

It’s official: all performers in adult films will have to use condoms  on set if they want to work in the City of Los Angeles.

A city ordinance to require condom use on porn sets passed 9-1 by City Council in January, and was signed into law by L.A. Mayor     Villaraigosa the next week.

It’s a move that has members of the adult film industry reeling and threatening to pull up stakes from the cradle of the industry, the San Fernando Valley, sometimes known as “porn valley”.

The industry maintain that they do a good job self-regulating themselves for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s), and view the push that led to the ordinance as vendetta politics by groups that want to see the industry shuttered.

“I don’t have a problem with that,” said Shelley Lubben, an ex-porn performer who now runs the Pink Cross Foundation, an organization that helps women to get out of the industry and views pornography as violent, and its producers as sex traffickers.

“I want them to use condoms right now, at least it’ll save women from getting STD’s .  . . If I can’t shut this industry down then at least I’ve protected their health. At least I’ve done something positive in the lives of these workers.”

The issue of mandatory condom use on porn sets dates back to 2004 when there was an HIV outbreak among performers. The California state Occupational Health and Safety Administration fined two production companies for allowing unprotected sex  on the basis that they failed to “protect workers exposed to blood or body fluids on the job”. That’s when the L.A.-based Aids Healthcare Foundation took up the cause.

“They weren’t very successful for a number of years, and just within the last two years they’ve been building momentum,” said Rhett Pardon, who writes for industry trade publication, XBIZ.

According to Lubben there were as many as 25 unreported HIV infections among porn performers in 2004.

The porn industry did have their own clinic to test seasoned porn stars and would-be actors. The Adult Industry Medical clinic, run by Sharon Mitchell, herself a veteran of the industry, ran from 1998 until it closed last year. Newcomers to the industry would get tested for sexually transmitted diseases before their first shoot, while all performers were supposed to get tested once a month in an act of industry self-regulation.

Despite this, there was another HIV outbreak in 2010. And sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes, Chlamydia, and Gonorrhea in porn are “rampant,” according to

Lara Roxx, from Montreal contracted HIV on her second porn shoot in 2004. source: Lara Roxx Foundation

Lubben – a fact borne out in the industry’s own chat rooms.

So why would an industry, predicated on sexual intercourse between adults, fight laws in place to protect  against sexual disease transmission?

The answer it seems comes down to attitude and economics. “The porn consuming public doesn’t want to see condoms in porn. . . there’s more production, more money when it comes to condom-less production,”  said Pardon.

Pornography is worth billions every year. How much? Few in the industry will say, or seem to know, but what is known is that even with the threat of online piracy cutting into profits in recent years (something the “renegade” industry has fought mightily) annual revenue sits at around $8 billion worldwide, according to Pardon.

Few industries today can count on those kinds of profits. And like the great industries of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, such as oil and steel, porn in the 21^st century goes largely unregulated.

“The adult community, from my perspective, doesn’t like to be told what to do,” said Pardon.

“People keep saying its consensual adults having sex and I’m like, ‘In a workplace’,” stressed Lubben, “if you’re in a workplace you have to obey the law, you have to protect workers.”

To make her point Lubben has produced a video, available on YouTube, showing  several young women brought to tears, in obvious pain, or refusing to continue to do extreme sexual acts, mid-act, on porn sets. The images are hard to watch.

“They’re being forced into sex acts they would have never agreed to, they have no advocate, they have no one on the set, to say, ‘you know, you can’t do that.’

The bigger companies look the other way at the abuse on porn sets by the smaller online outfits that make up the majority of porn productions, according to Lubben. For the entire industry, it’s, “anything goes”.

Though neither Lubben or Pardon feel the industry threat to pull up stakes and move elsewhere is a real one, “Good luck bringing the porn stars to Europe. They want to live by the beach, and near Hollywood,” said Lubben.

“It’s kind of hard to flee, when you have all the infrastructure here,” said Pardon. “What’s really going to matter is enforcement.” Pardon has heard that any inspections of porn sets to make sure they’re in compliance with the ordinance may need to be done by health professionals.

According to Paul Audley, the president of FilmL.A., the organization responsible for issuing permits to all film shoots – including adult films – in Los Angeles, the city hasn’t figured out how it’s going to enforce the law, and is struggling to put a taskforce together.

Audley’s office issues about 40 adult film permits a month, roughly 500 a year, but the actual number of adult films being shot in Los Angeles is hard to quantify, “because under a single permit, a single day, they may make several movies.” Audley estimates that the porn industry was responsible for about $300,000 of revenue to his office a year.

It’s been reported that the City of Los Angeles saved $4 million dollars by passing the ordinance now, to avoid it becoming a ballot initiative.

Despite the adult industry’s flexing over the new ordinance, Pardon thinks the condom requirement may have little impact for another reason, “Most of the shoots aren’t actually done by the studios themselves, but are contracted out.”

This was confirmed by one porn producer (outside of Los Angeles), who explained to CCIR Investigates that when they want hardcore content they outsource the work to Romania, because female performers there, “work for peanuts”.

Still, for Lubben,  a law requiring the L.A. porn industry to wear condoms during filming is a victory because,  “[the industry will] never be able to live again without being regulated.”

Toor Jan was clearly nervous when he arrived at the guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan. “If my boss found out I did this, he will shoot me,” the young heroin dealer told the Georgia Straight in an interview.

Toor Jan (not his real name) described last March how he sold large amounts of heroin to Afghan translators working at two NATO bases in Kandahar who, in turn, resold the heroin to NATO soldiers.

(from CCIR documentary ‘Poppy: Afghanistan’s Deadliest Weapon’)

Toor Jan said he and his partner were selling from 270 grams to one kilogram of heroin weekly to the translators working at Kandahar Airfield—until recently headquarters of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan—and at Kandahar City’s Camp Nathan Smith, former home of the Canadian provincial reconstruction team.

It’s enough to get 2,700 to 10,000 users high. The street value in Vancouver would be $54,000 to $200,000.

It works out to about 14 to 52 kilograms annually, worth up to approximately $10.4 million. (Toor Jan said his boss employs two other teams of dealers who sell similar amounts of heroin to translators at the NATO bases.) In comparison, Canadian police seize only about 70 kilos of heroin in an average year in all of Canada.

Toor Jan said he had heard that some foreign contractors also buy heroin and are involved in smuggling it through Kandahar’s airport but that they “normally deal with other people, not with small guys like us”.

A Kandahar district official who has extensive knowledge of the heroin trade also said some foreign contractors and NATO military personnel are involved in trafficking heroin by plane to North America out of Afghan airports that are under NATO control.

“They have Afghan people who go through the process and purchase the drugs for them. Once it is acquired, they bring it to them, and they smuggle it to North America,” the official said in an interview in a Kandahar guesthouse. “They use the airports.”

(It is Georgia Straight policy to include anonymous sources in stories only in exceptional circumstances, such as when sources’ safety or employment could be jeopardized if their names were revealed. Wherever possible, their identities are confirmed with editors, and—to the extent possible—the Straight corroborates their information with named sources.)

The accounts give a rare glimpse into how some NATO personnel and contractors seem to have gotten ensnared in Afghanistan’s multibillion-dollar narco economy, which supplies 90 percent of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient of heroin.

Canada and other NATO powers have long been accused of turning a blind eye to a 15-fold increase in Afghan opium production since 2001 (according to UN figures) and cozying up to Afghan warlords and officials reputed to be involved with drugs.

But these new accounts suggest NATO’s presence helps fuel the gigantic Afghan drug trade.

The accounts are reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when U.S. forces befriended opium-dealing warlords in Southeast Asia and many U.S. soldiers became addicted to heroin, with some smuggling it back home.

A Canadian military historian said the notion that NATO soldiers are buying heroin in Afghanistan and smuggling it out is “completely plausible”.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all. That’s the way things are there,” Sean Maloney, associate professor of history at the Royal Military College, said by phone from Kingston, Ontario.

“In an environment like that, anything is possible.”

With between 200 and 700 daily flights, the Kandahar Airfield is the world’s busiest single-runway airport. The airfield/NATO base is the size of a small city, home to 30,000 NATO troops and contractors and, until recently, headquarters of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.

The last Canadian troops left KAF on December 12 as the military assumes its new role training the Afghan army, mostly in Kabul, near the country’s border with Pakistan.

It’s easy to see how drugs could flood into KAF. A reporter from the Straight experienced only a cursory security check at KAF’s outer gate in a visit last spring. Inside is a large area housing thousands of Afghan and foreign contractors.

A second, more heavily guarded, gate controls entry to the NATO compound, but NATO troops and contractors can easily mingle between the two gates.

An Afghan source who works at KAF said Afghan contractors are widely known to bring in heroin for their own use and for use by NATO troops.

“It is dangerous and stressful work. They are in constant fear. So they use heroin to feel invincible and calm,” he said in an interview in Kandahar City.

He said some Afghan shopkeepers with stalls at the weekly base bazaar also bring in heroin.

“You’re dealing with a frontier town,” Maloney said of KAF. “I call it Deadwood.”

Maloney is an adviser to Canadian Forces chief of the land staff Lt.-Gen. Peter Devlin and has travelled to Afghanistan 10 times. The army has commissioned Maloney to write the history of its involvement in Afghanistan.

Maloney stressed that he was speaking as an RMC professor, not for the Canadian military.

He said KAF seems to have become an important new smuggling waypoint in recent years. The new route emerged as Afghan heroin barons sought to seize more profits by circumventing Pakistani middlemen who traditionally processed opium into heroin and smuggled it abroad through the Pakistani port of Karachi.

“They realized that with an airport [in Kandahar], they can cut the Pakistanis out,” he said.

Toor Jan said his Afghan translator clients smuggle heroin into KAF in their shoes. He said he charges them US$20 to $25 for a package of three or four grams of heroin (locals pay the equivalent of only about $6), which they resell to NATO soldiers for $40 to $50. (Each package would have a street value of $600 to $800 in Vancouver.)

“Since the foreigners are not allowed to drink liquor, they use heroin and other drugs,” he said.

Also, one in four samples exceeded the Food and Drug Administration’s lead limit for bottled water. (No arsenic or lead ceilings exist for juice, so the group used the water ceilings as a guideline.) Scientific evidence is mounting to show that exposure to arsenic or lead even below the federal limits is a health risk, the group says.

Arsenic has entered the ground water in many areas from agricultural insecticides, poultry-feed additives, coal-fired power plant emissions and wood preservatives. The report also says arsenic is present in many foods, including baby food. The group also recommends eating organic chicken.

The CCIR has signed up for the Aviva Community Fund challenge, for a chance to share in $1-million that will be distributed by Aviva to the worthwhile charitable projects that get enough votes. The semi-finalists will be announced at the beginning of December and the winning ideas will be decided in early January 2011.

We’re asking you to vote for our ‘Canadian Investigative Series Project’, where we’ll use the funds to develop multimedia investigative series on topics important to Canadians. Please vote by clicking on the banner above and following the few easy steps, but also spread the word by linking our project page to your facebook, twitter, and other social media accounts. You can vote for the CCIR once every 24 hours!

If you would also like to donate directly to this project, simply click on the ‘Donate’ button to the right of your screen, and include in your subject line: ‘for the Canadian Investigative Series Project’.  and, we’ll make sure that your donations are directed to this work specifically. All your contributions are tax-deductable. The CCIR is also proud to offer tax credit for U.S. donations over $1000!

Please help, vote for the CCIR at the Aviva Community Fund  challenge today!

Thank you for supporting public interest journalism!

All the best,

Bilbo Poynter,

By Jacob Kushner
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

Franco Coby, who grew up in Fort Myers, Fla., looks out of the cell at the Haitian jail. (source: Jacob Kushner/FCIR)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The United States has deported more than 250 Haitians since January knowing that one in two will be jailed without charges in facilities so filthy they pose life-threatening health risks.

An investigation by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting found that the Obama administration has not followed its own policy of seeking alternatives to deportation when there are serious medical and humanitarian concerns. 

“What’s distinct about the situation in Haiti is that, unlike in other countries, people are immediately jailed, and the conditions in Haitian jails are condemned universally for violating human rights,” said Rebecca Sharpless of the University of Miami Law School Immigration Clinic, which helps immigrants appeal deportation orders.

The health risks for incarcerated deportees have increased significantly since October 2010, when a cholera outbreak began that has infected about 470,000 people and killed more than 6,500, including some prisoners.

International health experts say deportees in Haiti’s jails are at risk of contracting cholera, which can spread rapidly in overcrowded cells that lack clean water, soap and waste disposal. Once exposed to cholera, victims can die in less than 24 hours.

In January, 34-year-old deportee Wildrick Guerrier, whose Florida criminal record included convictions for battery and possession of a firearm, died from what doctors described as cholera-like symptoms two days after being released from the holding cell where he became ill –one of the same cells where deportees are incarcerated today.

Haitian authorities said they place about half of all deportees in jails to monitor what they term “serious criminals” — a largely arbitrary determination. These detentions, which have lasted as long as 11 days, violate Haitian law and United Nations treaties when deportees have not been charged with crimes in Haiti.

One day after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake destroyed much of Haiti’s capital, the U.S. government suspended deportations. Since then, the United Nations and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have lobbied countries to halt deportations due to worsening conditions in Haiti.

“The crisis has not gone away,” said Michel Forst, the U.N. independent expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti. “The most important help the international community can give to Haiti is to suspend the forced return of Haitians.”

Still, the Department of Homeland Security resumed deportations to Haiti on Jan. 20 — the very same day the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning urging Americans to avoid Haiti due to health risks and lawlessness.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said deportations to Haiti resumed because a U.S. Supreme Court decision required detainees to be released after 180 days. That requirement, they said, would have placed “some detained Haitian nationals with significant criminal records into U.S. communities, which in turn poses a significant threat to the American public.”

Barbara Gonzalez, ICE’s press secretary, said in an email that the agency would “prioritize those who pose the greatest threat to the community.”

But FCIR found at least three deportees arriving in August and September were convicted of non-violent drug offenses, and three-quarters of all Haitian deportees in recent years had no criminal convictions at all, according to immigration records.

“The hypocrisy is stunning,” Sharpless said. “U.S. officials have known for a long time that it’s dangerous to send people back to jail in Haiti. They also knew that the cholera outbreak raised the stakes even higher because cholera and Haitian jails are a deadly combination. Yet they decided to resume deportations anyway.”

Detention — an unexpected homecoming

Haitian judicial police fingerprint Wilberle Vereus, a 22-year-old deportee from California, on the morning he was deported to Haiti. (source: Jacob Kushner/FCIR)

 On the morning of Aug. 9, Franco Coby, a 24-year-old who was born in Haiti but grew up in Fort Myers, Fla., stepped off a plane in  Port-au-Prince. He served nearly two years in a Florida prison for selling cocaine to a police informant, followed by four months in an immigration detention center. Haitian police loaded the 43 deportees on two white buses.

“To me, I’m in a foreign country even though it’s my birthplace,” said Frantz Fils-Aime, 29, a deportee from New York City who was convicted in 2008 of selling cocaine.

Florence Elie, the head of Haiti’s Citizen Protection Ministry, entered one of the buses and explained that deportees must report weekly as part of an 18-month probation — although no Haitian law allows for such preemptive supervision. She also addressed a rumor that circulated among the deportees: Some will be briefly put in “administrative retention,” meaning jail.

The next morning, Coby was at the Commissariat Petionville, a jail across the street from one of Haiti’s 900 post-earthquake displacement camps.

Haitian police placed Coby in one of the jail’s two cramped 20-by-10-foot cells, along with Filis-Aime, another New Yorker and deportees from Georgia and Michigan. Over the next seven days, they shared the cell with two to 15 others. At times, there wasn’t enough space for everyone to sleep on the bare concrete. A strong odor of feces wafted from the broken toilet in the back.

 “I got bumps growing all over my skin, man. I don’t know if I’m allergic to something or what,” Coby said, after his first night in jail. “I been feeling sick; my stomach is tearing me up. Today I ate some rice, and it ran straight through me.”

Dr. John May, president of Health Through Walls, a North Miami nonprofit that works to improve jail conditions in foreign nations, travels frequently to Haiti. He visited the facility where Coby and the other deportees were held four weeks after their release.

“This is what we see everywhere,” May said. “Tuberculosis would thrive in this environment, certainly skin conditions like scabies, which we see often. And most seriously and concerning in Haiti recently is cholera, and it would just take one person with cholera here and it would quickly spread to the others.”

Cholera is spread primarily through feces and can result in severe vomiting and diarrhea. “Any situation that doesn’t have a lot of good hygiene is a great setting for the spread of cholera, which is what we have here,” May said.

When asked if such conditions pose life-threatening health risks, Chairman of Haiti’s Commission in Charge of Deportees Pierre Wilner Casseus said only that deportees who appear ill are released immediately.

Medical care denied

Sometimes jailhouse conditions in Haiti complicate existing medical problems, as they did for Jeff Dorne, a longtime Boston resident diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Dorne served six years in prison for a 2003 rape conviction in New Jersey.

Haitian authorities immediately imprisoned him — without charge — in the same cell where Coby later would be held. Dorne’s illness required him to take four medications daily, so U.S. immigration officers sent a one-month supply of the prescriptions to Haiti’s judicial police. But jails in Haiti do not have medical personnel and Haitian police are not trained in basic medical care.

On Dorne’s first night in the Petionville jail, the municipal police gave him the medication, and then, according to Dorne, held onto — or lost — the remaining pills.

 “The prescription said every night. So Saturday night I asked the chief officer, ‘Can you get my medication for me?’ ” Dorne said. “They told me they can’t find it. Every day I asked them for it. After two, three days, I stopped asking.”

During his next few days in jail, Dorne said some of the symptoms that had subsided after he began psychiatric treatment in the New Jersey prison returned.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “My hands started shaking.”

Dr. John May said mentally ill inmates face grave risks because they are often unable to negotiate for themselves.

“A person who requires antipsychotic medications … could rapidly deteriorate without having them,” May said.

The police officer in charge of that jail said he was not familiar with Dorne’s case.

An April 1 ICE memorandum explaining the decision to resume deportations said alternatives would be considered in cases where medical and humanitarian concerns exist. Yet, as in Dorne’s case, Haitians with documented medical problems continue to be deported from the United States.

Immigration attorneys in the United States are fighting deportations of individual Haitians under the 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture, which forbids governments from deporting people to countries where they will undergo “severe pain or suffering.” In April, a mentally ill Haitian immigrant in Miami had his deportation deferred on the grounds that the conditions in a Haitian jail could meet that standard in his case.

Freedom roulette

Haiti’s Commission in Charge of Deportees includes representatives from four government ministries and the independent Office of Citizen Protection. Once the deportees arrive in Haiti and are transferred to the judicial police holding station, commission members decide who will go free — and who will be incarcerated.

The process is largely ad hoc. No written policy exists, and there is little consensus among members of the deportee commission about the primary purpose of the detentions.

Aramick Louis, secretary of state for public security, said detentions are meant for deportees’ protection during the “vulnerable” transition to Haiti.

Frederic Leconte, the commissioner of Haiti’s judicial police, said the detentions allow the state time to understand each individual’s situation — even though the U.S. government provides detailed files on each deportee two weeks prior to arrival, and FCIR was unable to document any instances in which detained deportees were interviewed or even observed directly by officials.

Haitian law does not allow someone to be jailed based on the possibility he may commit a crime in the future.

“This is what I fought against,” said Privat Precil, the director general of Haiti’s Ministry of Justice from 2002 to 2004. “It is just a police policy that is not legal under Haitian law.”

Reporter Jacob Kushner produced this story for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. His research was supported in part by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund and the Investigative News Network.

The CCIR is a member group of the Investigative News Network.

Sean Holman

Over the last seven years anyone wanting to know more about who was pulling the levers of provincial politics in British Columbia inevitably turned to Public Eye, a unique online news source, created and doggedly maintained by journalist Sean Holman. After thousands of stories and many exclusives, Holman has now called it a day for Public Eye. Here he tells us in five lessons what worked and, ultimately, what failed.  This article is also available on J-Source.

Journalism might not be a cause worth donating to for most Canadians

It’s tough to convince Canadians that good journalism, in and of itself, is a cause worth contributing to.

In part, I think that’s because there’s no guarantee they’ll like the resulting coverage.

In my eight years covering British Columbia’s legislature, I have investigated both sides of the political aisle – exposing controversies within government and the opposition, as well as the Greens and the Conservatives.

As a result, I wasn’t able to make a partisan or ideological appeal for donations. And, when my reporting hit hard, I lost donors.

For example, between October 2010 and May 2011, I provided in-depth, market-leading coverage of the New Democrat Party of British Columbia’s internal struggles – from caucus infighting to the aftermath of that revolt.

During the same period, 16 of my monthly contributors cancelled their donations – a big loss for a publication that never had more than 60 at any given point.

But I think getting Canadians to donate to the media might also be hampered by the fact we don’t have a history of providing that kind of support.

By comparison, many media outlets in the United States – where the societal role of the fourth estate appears better established and is aggressively championed – have long had their hands out for donations.

Even unsolicited advertising can create problems for small media outlets

While most of Public Eye’s more than 200,000 unique visitors last year didn’t donate to the site, some of them vigorously complained when Public Eye ran paid advertisements they disagreed with.

Among the most controversial was a campaign that promoted cabinet minister Kevin Falcon’s bid for leadership of the BC Liberal Party.

“Your claim to be unbiased would look a lot better without Kevin Falcon’s face all over your front page,” one reader complained, even though all of Public Eye’s ads were unsolicited – except for banners on the site promoting the availability of that advertising space.

“How do you maintain any kind of semblance of a creditable [sic] non-partisan Legislative reporter and website with Kevin Falcon ads all over the place?” another questioned, despite the fact political parties and interest groups regularly purchase space in bigger media outlets.

My answer was to continue covering Mr. Falcon just as a rigorously as any other leadership candidate, exposing a number of his campaign’s missteps in the process.

But the complaints prompt another question: if the public doesn’t want to donate to the media and if some of its members believe advertisements can compromise an outlet’s coverage, how exactly should online journalism – especially of the watchdog or independent variety – be funded?

Perhaps subscriber pay walls, which force the public to pay for news stories, are the answer? But, so far, their success has been limited.

Investigative reporting can be done on a daily basis.

Investigative reporting is often thought of as the most time consuming form of reporting, precluding the possibility of daily publication.

That can often be the case. Certainly, one of my biggest stories took five months to break while another was four years in the making.

But I’ve also written more than 6,000 stories suggesting investigative reporting doesn’t have to be a drawn-out process.

Almost all of the articles published on Public Eye were exclusives, with usually three to six articles posted each day, five days a week.

The secret behind that quantity was twofold: first, I became the journalistic equivalent of a lint roller on my beat.

I would report about anything that hadn’t already been reported on and wasn’t in a news release – even stories that might otherwise have been written-off as being “inside baseball.”

Sometimes those stories led to bigger stories, occasionally years later. Sometimes they wouldn’t.

But they would always lead to more tips and more stories by reinforcing my reputation as a reporter who was willing to dig.

Second, I serialized many of my investigations, publishing major elements of them as they were confirmed rather than waiting to write a 1,500 word plus feature piece.

This resulted in the news equivalent of a soap opera.

“Remember, what I was telling you about yesterday. Well, you’ll never guess what I’ve found now” was the approach I took.

That kept the needle moving on Public Eye for seven years.

It allowed me to break countless stories that had a substantive impact on public policy and governance while driving daily traffic to the Website.

Show the public how reporting works

I believe the public isn’t just interested in consuming the sausage that results from the reporting process. I believe its members are also interested what ingredients went into it.

That’s why, from the very moment I launched Public Eye’s Website in 2004, I started publishing leaked documents, as well as those obtained via freedom of information requests, alongside the stories those records resulted in.

That now happens at many media outlets.

But, in early 2009, my audience had donated enough money that I could add an additional feature to the site – raw footage of interviews and scrums with MLAs and other officials.

Recorded using a Canon Vixia HF20, a Rode NTG-2 shotgun microphone and a Litepanel Micro, that footage allowed me to bring to bear an extra level of accountability to the politicians I was covering.

As every reporter knows, public and private officials are trained to do anything but give a straight answer to our questions, sticking to their message box at all costs.

That dodging and weaving is often inadvertently obscured from the public due to the space, time and narrative constraints of traditional print, radio and television outlets.

Indeed, politicians rely on the compression of the 15-second sound bite to hide the fact they’re giving the media non-answers.

But, by posting the tape of those encounters in its entirety, my audience was able to see just how secretive – and downright amateurish – some of their elected officials are.

As an added benefit, it let my audience judge the fairness of my coverage by giving them an opportunity to inspect the ingredients that went into it.

And, in my life as an educator, it has proven to be an invaluable classroom tool for teaching my students how scrums and interviews really work.

Canadian media outlets need to be more generous

Most of the stories I wrote as a journalist covering provincial politics were exclusives.

Some of them were followed by bigger media outlets, while others weren’t.

But if they were followed, there was no guarantee the work I had done would be credited – an experience that isn’t uncommon in the Canadian media.

This long-standing tradition puts us out-of-step with what increasingly seems to be common practice in the United States, where the Associated Press’s policy is to credit whichever “organization that broke a story first, even when we match it – or advance it – through our own reporting.”

As a result of not adopting a similar gold standard, we are inadvertently undermining smaller and independent media outlets, depriving them of exposure along with the young and not-so-well-paid journalists who often work at them.

It is my hope that the Canadian media will revisit this practice and, in doing so, improve our industry as a whole, as well as giving journalism students a better chance at breaking into it.

Sean Holman, is a journalist and educator in Victoria, B.C. Public Eye radio will still run Sundays on CFAX 1070.

Bilbo Poynter is executive director of the CCIR.

It’s day three for the CCIR taking part in the Aviva Community Fund challenge. We’re looking good, and a number of you have signed up and voted — thank you. Now that you’ve signed up you can vote for the ‘Canadian Investigative Series Project’ once a day, up to fifteen times this round, round 2, of what is essentially a contest between many worthwhile projects, many of them community-based, all of them hoping to continue on and share in the $1,000,000 being offered by Aviva.

The CCIR is constantly looking for new and varied ways to raise enough money to pursue the complicated and often overlooked stories that cross our desks, that come from the tips that fill our voicemails and inboxes, and that cram our notebooks with ‘what-ifs?’

So far this year we’ve been able to show how trailers intended as emergency hurricane shelters in areas of Haiti  devastated by the quake were unfit for their intended purpose, and were being used as classrooms for school children. And we’ve kept on the trail of Afghan heroin as it makes it’s way into Europe and, in all likelihood, a Canadian community near you — and we’ve done all of this and more on a shoestring.

The reason that the overview for our project is a general one, where we promise simply to, “produce CCIR driven feature-length projects of an investigative nature on issues important to Canadians” is because, ideally, we’re building to a point where if a story seems important enough, we can ‘green light’ one of the hardworking investigative reporters we work with to pursue it, wherever that takes them. The way we see it every community has a story and everyone is connected.

The CCIR needs multiple sources of funding in order to do this — just as we need to continually prove that we’re up to the tasks we’ve set out for ourselves. What the Aviva funds would do is help us to tell these stories — in a big way.

There’s a whole industry that we couldn’t have foreseen even ten years ago that measures how we all interact online. We hit ‘like’, they tell us, but we don’t necessarily sign up. I’m here to ask that you sign up to the Aviva Community Fund page. It’s an easy couple of steps, and only takes a minute. Round 2 ends on November 9th. Semi-finals start in early December, where you’ll have more chances to vote. Winners are announced early in the New Year.

I plan to keep everyone updated on how the challenge is going, and would love to hear what you have to say about this, or anything else to do with the CCIR. Thanks for the votes!

Note: turns out the group of top cops I’m left pondering in the article made public soon after the fact that they would be live tweeting regularly from the coffee shop where the interview took place . . . so it wasn’t the ‘Big One’ I’d hoped for.

Although this story is supposed to be about Google’s unprecedented moves lately into multimillion dollar lobbying on Capital Hill — including lobbying right-wing legislators — something the bohemian seeming free-exchange-of-ideas stalwarts at Google haven’t been known to do previously, it really plays out as a story  about how the tech giants have carefully crafted, or ranked higher, their capacity to do good,  while still aggressively cultivating lucrative untapped markets — notably China. All while fending off anti-trust accusations and each other.

This is refreshingly thorough for a web feature and led me to wonder if this is an example of the HuffPo’s I-Fund being rolled into the Center for Public Integrity‘s operations?