If you want a behind-the-scenes look at stories about bad prescription drugs, crooked federal bureaucrats, Mennonite drug lords, unscrupulous scientists, and military families being torn apart at times when they should be coming together, then this online edition of Media magazine is for you.

For the second year in a row, we have asked the award winners to explain how they got their stories, to describe the obstacles they faced, and to offer hints for journalists who want to conduct similar research. Each behind-the-scenes account will also have a link to the actual stories that were aired and published.

In their effort to shed new light on the misunderstood area of adverse drug reactions, the CBC News team, to which I belong, used Health Canada’s adverse drug reaction database to tell the story of the effects certain drugs are having on kids. On the first day of the week-long series, we told the stories of three little girls: one who had died; one who was born with terrible birth defects; and one who was so drugged up on anti-psychotics that she tried to stab her mother in the neck with a pencil.

In his story about Paul Champagne, a bureaucrat who used to work with the Department of National Defence, Andrew McIntosh used information from tips, corporate filings and court documents to lift the veil off an "an elaborate fraudulent scheme which involved creating false invoices." For those who thought that corruption ended with the so-called billion-dollar boondoggle at the federal department of Human Resources and Development Canada, Shawinnigate (also Andrew’s story), and the ad scandal, the case of Paul Champagne is as intriguing as it is disturbing.

In his journey into the murky world of drug dealing, Andrew Mitrovica ended up in a surprising place: a Mennonite community. It seems that even Mennonites are not immune from the temptation of easy money, which comes from the sale of drugs. The story is one that he had followed for several years, and demonstrates why it’s important for journalists to always be thinking of follow-ups when the initial story is done. In his piece, Andrew also urges journalists to practice the art of listening, a skill that is not always developed as keenly as it should be. He writes: “First, investigative journalism is very much a people business. If you don’t know how to establish trust, be polite, generous and simply listen to people, you should immediately abandon this trade.”

Ann Lang did a lot of listening in her story about military wives coping with the return of their husbands and partners from the arenas of conflict in places such as Afghanistan. Ann’s story came about because she was surprised to learn that one of the biggest challenges for many wives is dealing with their husbands after they have returned from their tours of duty. She recalls meeting Anne Marie Benoit, one of the protagonists in her radio documentary. "That poor woman," writes Ann. “How can she handle this all by herself? She must ache for her husband. When I asked her how she coped with him being away, she said, ‘Well, you know, it’s really not that bad. You want to know when it’s really tough? When he comes back.’ ”

Another radio documentary explored the disappearance of a singer of Newfoundland folk songs who became a household name throughout Atlantic Canada half a century ago . In his hour-long documentary, Chris Brookes tells the tale of Omar Blondahl, who at the height of his career “ suddenly disappeared. Most Newfoundlanders (including his family) had no idea where he went.” Brookes set out to answer the question that immediately comes to mind: “Why would a successful musician who performed all his life suddenly abandon his career, never to sing again?”

From the life of a disappeared crooner, we move to convicted terrorist Rabei Osman el Sayed Ahmed and his role in the March 11, 2004, Madrid bombings that Bruce Livesey “describes as the worst terrorist attack ever unleashed on European soil.” In his account of the piece that aired on CBC Television’s the fifth estate, Livesey explains that “the Italian police caught him confessing on wiretaps to planning the Madrid attack. We spent months building a profile of his movements across Europe, as he traveled from Germany to Spain, France, and then onto Italy.” What was also interesting about the story was the collaboration with PBS and The New York Times, an example of non-competing media outlets pooling their resources to tell important stories.

Another collaborative effort involved the Ha-Shilth-Sa newspaper and CBC Radio in Victoria. This disturbing story involved the misuse of blood samples taken from the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples of the west coast of Vancouver Island. In his account, David Wiwchar, the newspaper’s managing editor, tell us that Dr. Ryk Ward collected the samples in the “1980s as part of a $330,000, Health Canada-funded study of the high incidence of rheumatic disease in Nuu-chah-nulth people.” Ryk ended up using the blood to study something else, which was a breach in ethics. But even worse, the research was a contravention of the consent forms the Nuu-chah-nulth people signed, prompting the former Chief Councillor of the Ucluelet First Nation to hope that “the day will come when we can put it all behind us, but we’ve unfortunately learned a lot about the dark side of scientific research ... Our eyes are wide open now.”

Bill Good must have felt that he was a victim of some mad experiment, when in the fall of 2003 the Cameco Corporation’s McArthur River uranium mine, situated in northern Saskatchewan, flooded. Good and his fellow miners were working underground at the time. Six months after the accident, they were still left in the dark about the potential health problems they faced from having been exposed to radon gas. In his piece for CBC Television in Saskatchewan, Dan Zakreski dug deeper to find answers, but not before tackling a steep learning curve. “We faced a tremendous challenge in figuring out the science of uranium mining. What are the protective measures in place for workers? What are the risks? How does someone measure whether an individual has been exposed to dangerous levels of radon?”

Given that the mine was so far away from Zakreski’s newsroom, he couldn’t visit the mine for a first-hand look. However, for photojournalists, this kind of ready access to events as they unfold is crucial. The right photograph taken at the right moment can capture a moment the way words, sound or moving pictures can fail to do. The Edmonton Journal’s Brian Gavriloff has been plying his trade long enough to know that good photojournalism is impossible without persistence ("No is not a final answer, just an inconvenience") and patience to let events unfold before capturing the moment. Gavriloff’s award-winning entry included 15 photographs that tell some extraordinary stories.

We hope you enjoy these stories. Please feel free to contact me (at either davidmckie@rogers.com or david_mckie@cbc.ca) with any feedback you may have.

Happy reading. And congratulations to the award winners.