On an otherwise uneventful Wednesday last September, Kimveer Gill, dressed in a modified goth uniform of black trench coat, studded black pants and combat boots, arrived at Dawson College, a CEGEP in Montreal’s Westmount neighbourhood, armed with a semi-automatic Beretta Cx4 Storm carbine, a Glock 9 mm handgun and a Norinco HP9-1 short-barrelled shotgun. After opening fire outside the school, he entered the building and continued shooting randomly, hitting 19 students and killing another. Finally, having been wounded in the arm by police, Gill shot himself in the head.

The day after the tragedy, Globe and Mail editors knew that the burning question on readers’ minds would be, why did this happen? To help answer it, they sent Jan Wong, one of their star writers and a native Montrealer, to Dawson College to research and write a 3,000-word “magazine-style” piece “with analysis” for the high-profile Saturday edition.

To turn around a feature of that length in little more than 24 hours is a challenge, but it’s what newspapers pay skilled reporters to do (even those who, like Wong, are at their best when given more time). With help from her younger sister, Gigi, a teacher at Dawson, Wong conducted her reporting and, by Friday evening, filed the finished piece.

Most of it was a well-reported reconstruction framed around a terrified Dawson College teacher whose son studied there. But about a quarter of the way in is a section comparing Gill to Marc Lepine (the half-Algerian Muslim who, in 1989, killed 14 women and wounded 13 others at the University of Montreal’s École Polytechnique) and to Valery Fabrikant (an engineering professor and Russian immigrant who killed four colleagues and wounded another at Concordia University in 1992). “What many outsiders don’t realize,” Wong wrote, “is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city. It hasn’t just taken a toll on long-time anglophones, it’s affected immigrants, too. To be sure, the shootings in all three cases were carried out by mentally disturbed individuals. But what is also true is that in all three cases, the perpetrator was not pure laine, the argot for a ‘pure’ francophone. Elsewhere, to talk of racial ‘purity’ is repugnant. Not in Quebec.”

The following morning, the story ran on the front page, under the headline “Get Under the Desk.” What happened next would soon have Wong, her editors and the Globe’s senior management ducking for cover themselves. Wong’s “pure laine” comment drew a firestorm of criticism, and the paper, in a misguided attempt at damage control, let one of its biggest-name writers take the fall. Wong’s treatment—the reason her byline disappeared for eight months—reveals not only the hazards of daily news reporting, especially in the era of celebrity columnists, but also exposes the culture of mistrust that exists at the country’s most venerable paper.

In a city with four dailies, editors need to court controversy to sell papers. But some controversies cross the line from attention-getting to embarrassing. Almost immediately after the Dawson article appeared, outraged letters began pouring into the Globe. The paper published more than a dozen of them—bearing such headlines as “Narrow-Minded Analysis” and “Absurd Viewpoint”—including ones from Prime Minister Stephen Harper (who described Wong’s article as “grossly irresponsible” and “prejudiced”) and Quebec Premier Jean Charest (“Ms. Wong’s article is a disgrace. It betrays an ignorance of Canadian values and a profound misunderstanding of Quebec”).