Announcing: Benefit for Newly Formed Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting

So you wanna see more investigative journalism in Canada. So do many of us sluggos. Now, a bunch of like-minded journalists have gotten together to try to make it happen. We've formed the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting. The advisory board includes such illustrious names as author Julian Sher, CBC Manitoba managing editor Cecil Rosner, journalism professor Maxine Ruvinsky, author Stevie Cameron, author Paul McKay and CBC investigative unit senior producer Susanne Reber. The executive director is Bilbo Poynter, a CBC investigative journalist who came up with this idea and brought all of us together. (I am the centre's vice-president.)

The new nonprofit centre, which has applied for charity status, will support Canadian investigative journalism projects in collaboration with other media along the model of U.S. outfits like the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica.

The centre invites you to join us for a benefit on Saturday, Sept. 27, in Hamilton's Skydragon Centre (27 King William St.) Susanne Reber will be on hand to speak about her book, "Starlight Tour: 'The Last Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild," an investigation of Saskatoon cops who drove First Nations kids far out of town to die in the freezing cold. The benefit starts at 7 p.m. For information, contact canadiancentre@gmail.com.

Investigations: Regulators Slept Through Market Mayhem

The market crisis - most recently, the failure of giant Lehman Bros. - is the direct result of a failure of regulation going back years, says this ProPublica round-up of various new investigations into the financial hurricane hitting Wall Street.

TAGS: market, investigations, subprime

Investigations: Universities May Lose Grants Over Secretive Pharma Ties

The U.S. Senate finance committee and the National Institutes of Health are threatening to yank grants from universities that fail to disclose ties to pharmaceutical companies, according to this Wall Street Journal story (available by subscription only). It's the latest in a growing chorus of concern about secretive ties between the medical community and drug marketing reps. See more in this story I just did for Vancouver's Georgia Straight weekly, titled The Pill Pushers, as well as this follow-up story on how pharmacies sell doctors' prescription info to pharma-research firms, plus this one on the reaction from British Columbia health minister George Abbott and newly elected Canadian Medical Association president Robert Ouellet.