Our special 2012 year in review issue is now in stores. This newsstand-only special issue is available for a limited time only so get yours today. TODAY!

You can also order a copy online (leaving the house is hugely overrated). Just visit and we’ll send you your copy today.

This is our first ever year in review issue and it’s unlike anything you’ve read before. You won’t find any stories on baby bumps, fashion trends or celebrity couples (take that, Brangelina!). We promise no Hollywood weddings, break-ups, binges or trainwrecks (take that, Lohan!). Ditto for so called newsmakers, trendsetters and endless hot or not hot lists.

What you will find inside are the top 25 stories you missed in 2012–but shouldn’t have. These are the stories that matter. They are the stories big media often overlooks, doesn’t delve deep enough into or sometimes just refuses to cover. They are stories about standing up for the environment and in opposition of irresponsible development. They are stories about fighting against decisions based on fear mongering, profits and corporate buddy benefits. They are stories about rights and people that don’t have them, but should.

We hope you enjoy the issue and look forward to hearing your thoughts. We’re already started working on this year’s list.

Readers, friends, and supporters: It’s with a lot of excitement and pride that we announce This Magazine‘s first-ever Year in Review.

This magazine, a special seventh issue, will be unlike anything you’ve read before. There won’t be articles on celebrities, trends, or the top newsmakers. Instead, what you’ll find is the top 25 stories you missed this year—but shouldn’t have. These are stories that matter. They are stories on equal rights, environmentalism, national transit, suicide, and more. Simply put: these are stories you need to read.

That being said, This Magazine is a small, independent publication, so we need your help to get this issue off the ground and into newsstands. For more information on how you can contribute, where your donation will go, and what we’ll give you in return, check out our campaign page. Thank-you for taking the time to read us, enjoy us, and support us.

The Shameless editorial collective. Photo by Robin Hart Hiltz.

Flip through the pages of Shameless, a feminist magazine for teen girls, and you’ll find a debate about the value of corporate social responsibility titled “When Oppressive Corporations Do Progressive Things” alongside a first-person call for self-acceptance, “Shame, Beauty and Women of Colour.”

It’s not exactly Seventeen, and that’s the whole point — or at least it was. “When we started, we defined ourselves as what we aren’t,” explains Sheila Sampath, the magazine’s editorial director. “Now, we no longer have to do that. It’s more about what we are.”

Shameless was born out of a Ryerson University classroom seven years ago, founded by students Nicole Cohen and Melinda Mattos to redress the deficiencies in mainstream teen magazines. Sampath, who joined the team as art director early on, is now running the show — and providing day-to-day continuity within the all-volunteer team. The magazine’s 10 or so editors are joined by outreach volunteers, including those who run the Wire, a journalism training program for high-school girls.

“I wish I’d had Shameless when I was a teen,” says Sampath, pointing out that, refreshingly, it doesn’t assume its audience to be straight, white, and middle class.

Shameless is overtly activist, with a mission statement that reads, in part, “We understand that many of the obstacles faced by young women lie at the intersection of different forms of oppression, based on race, class, ability, immigration status, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

Its target demographic — vocal in its appreciation — usually finds the mag in school libraries, but Shameless is also available on newsstands and finds many fans in older age groups, too.

The indie title aims to provide a sense of community for those who are “different”—in viewpoint or ethnicity. “It really is validating to see yourself reflected in print,” Sampath says. “We’re trying to redefine what’s normal.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed watching Josh Koschek’s antics on the last season of The Ultimate Fighter. Sure, that was some good fun, but it’s also not far removed from bread and circuses.

Poynter’s idea of a non-profit centre that would provide financial support to investigative projects was also timely: it came just as North American media were swan-diving into their biggest crisis in ages. The recession put several badly managed media empires into bankruptcy, while the internet was siphoning off readers.

Some out-of-work journalists thought they could make new careers for themselves with non-profit, web-based news start-ups, but that model is about as solid at this stage as Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first flying contraption.

But to get it off the ground? The challenges were big. Lots of people have good ideas, but those who have the perseverance, luck, and courage to get anywhere are rarities.

Today, the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting may be Canadian journalism’s best-kept secret. It is Canada’s only non-profit registered charity with an exclusive mandate to produce investigative journalism. (I joined the CCIR as a founding board member and am now its president.) Drawing on a U.S. tradition of similar non-profits like the Center for Public Integrity, we’ve started bringing to light important stories.

Our first major piece was picked up across Canada in 10 Postmedia Network dailies: an investigative feature that Poynter and I co-wrote on how Canadian officials have ignored an explosion in Afghan opium production, which has caused a surge of heroin addiction in Canada and worldwide.

We’ve had challenges, to be sure. While the U.S. has a rich history of donating to non-profit causes, Canada seems to have no such tradition. We’re still working hard to secure a stable stream of individual and institutional donations to support work on the numerous stories waiting to be unearthed and brought to the attention of Canadians.

But thanks to hundreds of largely unpaid hours on Poynter’s part, we’ve also had great success in building an advisory board of leading Canadian reporters (among them Gillian Findlay, Linden MacIntyre, and Stevie Cameron) and securing help from several generous donors who believe in our vision. We’ve had the satisfaction of going back to the roots of reporting and working on the kind of exciting stories that drew us into journalism and that are vital to any democracy.

And through it all, we’ve had more fun than a bare-knuckle brawl in the Octagon.

Truth and lies flourish equally online. Exhausted readers are in retreat. Illustration by Matt Daley.

Though you might reasonably condemn the modern internet for a variety of reasons—ruining attention spans, turning all public discourse into a shouting match, or insulting your sexual prowess with badly punctuated mass emails—one thing the medium could always reasonably claim was its potential for spreading truth. Decentralized and egalitarian, the web seemed to herald the end of the coverup: with no authority to stop the spread of information, facts would inevitably slip the bonds of corrupt politicians, crooked industrialists, and tyrannical generals. Sooner or later, we believed, the real facts would always come to light. The Truth Is Out There.

It turns out that’s not, uh, true.

That’s if the results of a recent study from the University of Michigan are anything to go by. The researchers found that people are remarkably resistant to facts that deviate from beliefs they already hold; the phenomenon is particularly acute in those with strong political leanings. This is the “truthiness” that satirical news anchor Stephen Colbert famously named—a trust in gut instincts instead of documented facts. That intuitive concept has now, somewhat ironically, been scientifically proven. In other words, The Truth Is Out There, But Nobody Can Be Bothered To Go Looking For It.

We already know that falsehood, distortion, and bullshit flourish online just as much as fact. The internet is home to climate-change deniers, 9-11 conspiracy nuts, and fringe politics of all sorts—in part because it is so easy to find “facts” that support whatever you believe. The sheer glut and variety of information online has made it difficult to distinguish fact from invention and truthfulness from truthiness. The result, for many people, has been to retreat into the comfort of the mainstream media.

Canada experienced this during the G20 summit in Toronto in July. After some protestors caused property damage early in the weekend, many journalists found themselves at the centre of what they believed to be an excessive police reaction. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were central to this real-time reporting, and people who were following the demonstrations and police actions online had a very different experience than live-TV viewers—who mostly saw sensational footage of a burning police car on a continuous loop for two days.

TVOntario’s Steve Paikin—a man who has built a career on measured neutrality—told of what seemed like an illegitimate round up of legal protestors and the beating of a reporter from the U.K.’s Guardian. The Globe and Mail’s Lisan Jutras wrote of her experience being detained in the rain for hours and taken into police custody.

New media seemed to finally be fulfilling its promise: coverage that was richer, more immediate, more diverse, and faster.

Yet a few days after the summit, an Angus Reid poll revealed that a full two-thirds of Canadians not only supported the police action, but were also “disgusted” with the protestors, despite the fact that the majority of them did nothing more than walk down streets holding placards. Images of anarchists breaking windows dominated big media, and the fact that there was plenty of information online offering a different interpretation mattered little, if at all.

The problem is that, unlike TV, you have to choose what you view online. That means that unless you’re already looking for an alternative take, it’s unlikely to find you. But more than that, the web is full of so many different versions of the truth, from the legitimate to the lunatic, that their very existence undercuts the medium’s validity for many people. When it is as easy to stumble upon a cogent, well-researched critique of global capitalism as it is a raving theory about “the moon-landing hoax,” the tendency is to discount the medium altogether.

By allowing anyone to publish and disseminate information, the web broke the historical link between power and publishing. Many people cheered that change, and for understandable reasons. The web embodies the contemporary collapse of all the things that once seemed beyond question: truth, fact, authority. But when nothing is objectively true, it also means nothing is objectively false. Presented with an almost infinite mass of options, most people, rather than diving in, simply retreat into what they already know—and for the majority, that’s still television.

Tremendous excitement accompanied WikiLeaks’ July release of 91,000 military documents related to the conflict in Afghanistan. Perhaps it’s justified. But earlier this year, when the same organization released “Collateral Murder”—a video that showed an American helicopter crew killing unarmed civilians in Iraq—excitement and controversy produced nothing lasting.

Despite the video’s incendiary content, and the clip’s seven million YouTube views, almost nothing changed. In the face of the official story and people’s faith in the authority that stood behind it, the clip was nothing more than a grain of sand, like those blown about by that helicopter’s blades—one more “fact” among millions, lost in the roar of a rushing, directionless storm.

The G20 is less than two weeks away, and there’s a lot going on. You could just turn to the usual media suspects to get your news about the G20, but when it comes to the street-level collision of neoconservative colonialist plutocrats and anti-globalization activists (among many other blocs of interests), it pays to look off the beaten path for your news consumption. If previous G20 meetings and the demonstrations that accompanied them is any indication, you can’t trust big media to get beyond the usual hackneyed portrayals of anarchists in balaclavas and be-suited politicians doing photo-ops.

(We’ll be doing our very small part during the next two weeks by clipping and aggregating the best material we find on our G20 microblog — g20.this.org — and we welcome you to send us your photos, videos, blog posts, and links for sharing. Simply email g20@this.org and we’ll take care of the rest.)

Here are the indie news sources we’ll be following in the next few weeks. Respond in the comments section if you have further sites that people should visit!

rabble.ca

Our friends at Rabble have put together one of their “issues” pages that collects all of their G20 news and commentary in one easy-to-scan package. At a glance you can see any G20 related video on RabbleTV, submissions to the G20 Flickr group, what they’re tweeting and retweeting, and what their lively commentariat is saying on their message boards, Babble.

Toronto Media Co-op

The Media Co-op is a grassroots network of independent news reporting collectives based in different cities coast to coast. Together, the co-op publishes The Dominion. The Toronto branch of the Media Co-op has set up a spartan but information-rich aggregation page for collecting photos, videos, tweets, news reports, and their own original reporting.

G20 Breakdown

Darren Puscas started G20 Breakdown a few months ago and for a one-man operation, it features a lot of coverage. Puscas’ main areas of interest are economic and environmental issues, but he’s going to be on the ground in Toronto reporting directly on the People’s Summit this coming weekend, and the G20 itself the week after.

Toronto Community Mobilization

The Toronto Community Mobilization Network is the coalition of activist groups that is coordinating and publicizing the flood of social justice-themed events — demonstrations, concerts, panel discussions, parties, and more — in response to the G20. Their website won’t be so much a source of reporting as a place to keep on top of an ever-shifting schedule of stuff to do.

G20 Research Group

The G20 Research Group is an academic flying squad at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, a largely student-run group that collects and sifts through the massive piles of information that the G20 produces. The emphasis here is on data, though there is some academic commentary (from across the political spectrum). The research group also sends students to the summit proper to report on individual meetings and press conferences. The academic analysis doesn’t always make for the most exciting reading, but when you’re the kind of reader who wants footnotes, this is your place.

Here, the only assessment can be a failing grade.We remain bedevilled by the antics of those federal entities that invoke national security at the drop of a hat to restrict the dissemination of vital information to journalists and, in turn, the public. Perhaps this attitude is best exemplified by a recent exchange between a federal government lawyer and the Military Police Complaints Commission, in which the lawyer not only challenged the commission’s right to obtain certain government documents on detainee transfers but went so far as to indicate that he was not at liberty to discuss when those documents might be available. Add to this the countless delays and roadblocks put in the way of access to information and we are left wondering how the prime minister could praise the media’s attempt to hold government accountable while abandoning his own promises of access reforms so loudly trumpeted on the campaign trail.

We’re exceptionally excited to announce the launch of this year’s annual This Magazine tradition, the Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Now in its 14th year, we’re on the trail again of Canada’s best undiscovered poetry, short fiction and — drumroll! — graphic narrative. That’s right, we’ve added a third category to the contest, a visual category especially for short illustrated stories, like graphic novels but way shorter. So that’s kind of a big deal.

Aside from the fact that it’s 50 percent bigger and beautiful-er than it was before, it’s the same Lit Hunt you know and love. We’re asking for Canada’s new and emerging literary talents to enter their work into the contest for the chance to be published in the November-December 2010 issue of the magazine, and a shot at a $750 cash prize for first place. This is one of the oldest and most established such literary contests in Canada, and we think the new graphic narrative category is, in fact, one-of-a-kind in Canada (is that true? We think it is, but if you know better, please let us know).

The deadline for entries this year is July 2, 2010. Full details for entering the contest — including an all-new electronic entry option — as well as updates, frequently asked questions, and the judges’ bios (when we’ve finalized the judging committee), will all be kept in one place on the contest page. Keep checking there for updates, and happy hunting!

At least, this is the optimistic picture presented in a new book entitled Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media, and its accompanying blog. Authors and activists, Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark examine the recent surge of progressive media from 2004 to the present and envision a strong, continuous rise in popularity based on their observations.

This article published by alternet.org discusses the content of the book and makes reference to current media trends that have enabled independent liberal media to thrive. The article states:

In the old days, it was considered a big success when a progressive magazine had 200,000 monthly subscribers. But today, there are a dozen or more blogs, magazines and online news sites that have enjoyed more than a million unique readers in a month.

With well over a billion worldwide internet users, progressive online media outlets in the form of blogs, news sites and magazines are reaching and capturing larger audiences than ever before. This is great news for Canadian media organizations like rabble.ca, The Walrus, Adbusters and, of course, This Magazine. (It should be noted that even mid-size American media Clark and van Slyke talk about easily dwarf their Canadian cousins—200,000 subscribers in Canada would rank among the largest publications in the country—which we certainly are not.)

Yet, a larger audience isn’t the only advantage for progressive web-based media. Instead of relying on advertisers as a main source of funding during a time when budgets are tight, online independent media outlets also benefit from the support of government grants and reader donations. This, in turn, has allowed them to produce and remain consistent with the uncompromisingly lefty content that their readers crave.

The alternet article points out that:

… the new progressive media use a range of strategies and tactics that are far more hard-hitting and activist-oriented than the smaller print magazine universe that dominated progressive media for a long time.

While Clark and Van Slyke paint a flattering portrait of this new face of progressive media, they recognize that there are still a few flaws that remain to be fixed.  One, being its disproportionate demographic since the majority of audience members are primarily white, middle-aged and well-educated. Other weaknesses include its lack of funding from wealthy foundations and individual billionaires, as well as its tendency not to invest in major media and communication in order to challenge the power of corporate big-wigs like CTVglobemedia and Canwest.

Nevertheless, the solution the authors propose is simple, and one that progressive media is already beginning to undertake. The establishment of larger and more interconnected models of  social networking and an increased collaboration among independent media outlets should help alleviate the previously mentioned problems, increase its overall influence and allow it to continue to, quite literally, progress.

Gameplay in Critter Crunch for the Playstation 3. Image courtesy Capybara Games.

On May 5, 2006, 35 Toronto area video-game developers converged in one spot with a particular goal in mind: to create an entire game, start to finish, in just three days. It was a daunting task, but in the end 10 completed games were assembled, while seven others came just short of the deadline. The Toronto Game Jam—or TOJam as it is more commonly known—is now in its fourth year and is a superb showcase of the ever-growing independent game development community that has formed in Canada’s biggest city.

Canada has been at the forefront of the games industry for some time, but, in traditional Canadian fashion, has been rather quiet about it. Cities like Vancouver and Montreal are home to some of the biggest development studios on the planet; meanwhile a lack of major studios has made Toronto a hotbed for independent game developers.

One of the games to come out of that very first TOJam, titled Bubble Thing, was created in its entirety by just one man: Jonathan Mak. Mak followed this up with a game called Everyday Shooter, which he describes as “an album of games exploring the expressive power of abstract shooters.” In many ways it plays like a traditional arcade game, but its abstract visuals and organic sound design made people take notice. This included folks at Sony Computer Entertainment, who upon seeing the game at the 2007 Independent Games Festival (IGF), asked Mak to create a version of Everyday Shooter for the PlayStation 3, where it became a critical and commercial success.

This story isn’t unique. In fact, a Toronto-based developer is almost always in the running at the IGF. Metanet Software grabbed the Audience Choice award in 2005 for its game N, while Capybara Games snagged two awards in 2008 for their puzzle game Critter Crunch. Both studios have gone on to create new versions of these awardwinning games for traditional gaming platforms. “Toronto really doesn’t have any ‘large’ studios,” Capybara co-founder Nathan Vella explains. “There just weren’t a lot of opportunities to get a job in gaming here, assuming you go the traditional route.”

Because of this, Vella and several other members of the Toronto chapter of the International Game Developers Association eventually decided to forge their own path, and thus Capybara was born. They started out small, working mostly on projects for mobile phones, but have since expanded to create titles for the PS3, iPhone, and Nintendo DS.

Vella also believes that the early success of pioneers like Metanet and Mak has a lot to do with the current state of the city’s development scene. “They made awesome games that got critical acclaim and commercial success,” he says. “They helped put Toronto on the map, and inspired a lot of people who maybe didn’t think it was possible to survive as an indie here.”

It also doesn’t hurt that government programs like the Ontario Media Development Corporation help to fund just these sorts of companies.

“Metanet certainly wouldn’t be here without support from the OMDC, who have allowed us to travel to industry events and realize our ideas by providing us with funding,” co-founders Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns explain via email. “Other funding through Telefilm and the Arts Councils has also been important. It’s a great city to be a small games developer in—there is so much enthusiasm and support that makes it possible to get closer to success.”

The landscape may soon change though, as Ubisoft, one of the largest game publishers in the world, will be opening up a studio in the city’s downtown core by the end of this year. The studio is expected to create 800 new jobs over the next decade and is costing the Ontario government $263 million. What effect this will have on the thriving indie community remains to be seen, but it doesn’t seem to faze the Metanet duo of Sheppard and Burns.

“We indies will keep doing what we do.”