The Aboriginal Multi-Media Society (AMMSA) building stands two stories tall, sandwiched between warehouses in one of Edmonton’s many light-industrial areas – a far cry from the Heritage Canada boardroom that served as its first home 21 years ago. It’s an average, stand-alone building, occupying an innocuous piece of Alberta real estate, but make no mistake – the society’s place on Canada’s media landscape is anything but innocuous. AMMSA is a success story in a tale of Aboriginal newspapers that includes sabotage, burning effigies and at least one near-death experience.

AMMSA’s editor-in-chief, Debora Steel, meets me in the bright, airy reception area and suggests a tour. She leads me down a long corridor as sales reps, reporters and editors wave from their offices. We’re on the second floor – the print area. AMMSA publishes five monthly newspapers, and Steel oversees them all. “Here’s the production area,” she announces as we enter an open area at the hub of the long hallways. “We’re in production once every two weeks,” she explains. “The four regionals are done at the same time, and Windspeaker is done on its own.”

Windspeaker is arguably one of Canada’s most respected national Aboriginal newspapers. It has attracted prominent columnists like the award-winning Ojibwa playwright Drew Hayden Taylor and National Magazine Award winning journalist Dan David. Windspeaker’s senior writer is the very white Paul Barnsley, who many describe as one of Canada’s best Aboriginal-affairs investigative reporters. “I’ve had a lot of other job offers, but I choose to stay here,” he says. “It’s a hell of a privilege for a non-native person to be involved in this – it’s a day-by-day way of learning about other cultures.”

Almost half of AMMSA’s staff is non-native. “I’ve been described as ‘the white editor,’ and I find that very dismissive,” says the blonde, green-eyed Steel. “I run five papers, and that takes a certain level of skill. I’ve worked here for 10 years now. I’ve never not got a story because I’m white.

“I approach news from a news point of view,” Steel continues. “Where it becomes an issue for me is on cultural and spiritual matters – I make a conscious effort to not let the message be filtered through me. I’m not here as an interpreter of cultural and spiritual matters.”

Yet matters cultural and spiritual are very much a part of AMMSA’s mandate. Down one floor, Steel introduces me to Denise Miller, the cultural liaison and reporter for AMMSA’s radio station, CFWE. Miller spends a lot of time travelling to communities and interviewing elders. Her pieces contribute to CFWE’s traditional culture content. I ask if it’s difficult getting elders to open up to the microphone. Miller nods, and Steel elaborates. “You learn a lot about patience, especially with traditional people,” she explains. “But if you put in the time, they learn to reach out.”

Not everyone appreciates AMMSA’s attempts to reach out. According to Steel and Barnsley, life at Windspeaker is full of intrigue. The office occasionally receives anonymous phone calls from bureaucrats appalled by their departments’ treatment of Aboriginal issues. Yet, says Steel, this is part of the attraction to working at Windspeaker. “We get brown paper bags with documents slipped under the door,” she says with a smile.

The next day I’m treated to another tour, this time with AMMSA’s head honcho Bert Crowfoot. The man behind what some call the society’s “media empire,” Crowfoot is AMMSA’s founder and chief executive officer. He has a nondescript boardroom for taking care of business, and an office furnished to keep him in touch with his spiritual side. A smudging area sits on the floor next to his desk for his morning ceremonies, and he has sweetgrass on hand for his guests. His bookcase is filled with awards, gifts and sentimental items, including his son and daughter’s first pair of moccasins. Crowfoot’s office feels more like a living room than the office of a big-time publisher.

Crowfoot describes his management style as “hands-off” and believes good, solid journalism sells papers. He’s never killed a story, and has allowed Windspeaker to run unflattering stories about his friends and even his brother. “The key is having a reputation for being fair and objective,” he says. “We get calls from the Edmonton Journal and CBC to pick up stories. You know you’ve arrived when you get calls like that.”

It’s Thursday night, and the sound of bingo balls rumbling and popping echoes throughout the first floor of the AMMSA headquarters. The twice-weekly show, Radio Bingo, brings in cash for AMMSA. Listeners can buy AMMSA bingo cards from stores on their local reserves, then play along at home as the game airs live. The station has one phone line to determine the first caller to claim bingo; the winner then mails in his card to claim the cash prizes. But tonight things are not business as usual. The bingo line is ringing non-stop. The calls are mostly from Fort Chipewyan, but not to claim bingos – they’re reporting poor reception. “I don’t buy it,” grumbles station manager Alan Standerwick. “They’re deliberately tying up the lines.” Standerwick halts the game, then paces back to his office as a recording telling listeners to stand by fills the airwaves.

Standerwick comes back into the room. “The RCMP and security have been notified,” he announces, referring to the problem with AMMSA’s satellite dish in the Fort Chipewyan area. There have been problems with the dish all day, prompting him to request a security presence. He later explains that the evening’s sabotage was likely orchestrated by a community radio station operator on a reserve in the Fort Chipewyan area, acting in the belief that CFWE takes listeners away from his station. Standerwick suspects the man coaxed friends into calling the AMMSA line to tie it up and halt the game. “You will make note that the crew is demonstrating grace under pressure, eh?” Standerwick winks.

The next morning, Crowfoot and Steel smile wearily when I ask if such sabotage attempts have happened before. “That’s why all our big towers are off reserve,” Crowfoot says. He explains that they’ve had a few incidents of vandals shooting out antenna bases, misaligning satellite dishes, and even unplugging dishes. Steel nods, and then laughs as she relates a less sinister problem. “Sometimes kids use the satellites as a slide – we have to put machine grease on some of the dishes so they can’t get up.”

That AMMSA even requires satellites is one testament to how far it’s come since its origins in 1983 – 10 years after the Trudeau government established the Native Communications Program (NCP) in 1973 to support Canada’s few struggling Aboriginal newspapers. The feds wanted to make funds available for Aboriginal groups to start new papers, enabling communities to raise their profile and help them pursue citizenship rights. The Alberta Native Communications Society (ANCS) was the NCP’s pilot project. The ANCS publication The Native People was Canada’s first modern-day Aboriginal newspaper, founded in 1966. Crowfoot joined the team in 1977.

After the ANCS folded in 1982, Crowfoot picked up the pieces and founded AMMSA with help from the NCP and the Alberta government. AMMSA’s first paper was published in March 1983, and was whipped up in the boardroom of Edmonton’s Heritage Canada office. Circulated across Alberta, the weekly paper was temporarily called AMMSA, “A new dawn in Aboriginal communications.” Three years later, it became Windspeaker.

Meanwhile, the NCP got the media ball rolling across the country – Aboriginal communities in Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and the Northwest Territories started papers, each of which made substantial contributions to Aboriginal journalism. The Saskatchewan Indian placed second in political reporting at the Unity Awards in Media in the U.S. Many credit The Micmac News in Nova Scotia for breaking the Donald Marshall story. And in Yellowknife, The Native Press often set the news agenda. “The mainstream covered things they knew The Native Press would be covering to avoid looking stupid,” says former editor Lee Selleck.

By 1989, the NCP was pumping $3.4 million a year into Aboriginal media societies. It wasn’t a perfect system, though. The NCP stipulated that the media societies it funded must be non-profit organizations, which required boards of directors. “The big failing [of the NCP] was the government allowed political people to sit on these boards,” says Dan David, who writes a media column for Windspeaker. Crowfoot agrees: “Writers would write about leaders, and all these guys you wrote about were on the board. They’d fire all the people who wrote bad things about them.”

By the late 1980s, the Progressive Conservatives were in power, and the Mulroney government faced opposition over funding not just one, but two Aboriginal media programs – the NCP and the Northern Native Broadcast Access Program (NNBAP, which supported Aboriginal television and radio stations in the North). In 1990, without explanation, the Tories abruptly cut the NCP. Media societies were given six weeks notice. There was a public outcry against the cut, and many Aboriginal media societies lobbied the government to reverse the decision. Protesters in Iqaluit burned an effigy of Secretary of State for Multiculturalism Gerry Weiner.

“When the government cut the NCP, I don’t think they realized just how much damage they did to the development of Aboriginal communications,” says David. “They were just developing a sense of independence, a sense of purpose.” The Native Press’ Selleck argues the government knew exactly what it was doing. “The aim of cutting the NCP, in my opinion, was to be rid of them [Aboriginal papers] altogether,” he says. “The government should have done it in a businesslike fashion. Turning off the tap overnight didn’t give us enough time.” He believes some Tories saw Aboriginal media as a thorn in their side that fostered communication and strengthened the land claims movement.

Over the next few years, at least six of the 10 papers funded by the NCP stopped publishing as a direct result of the cut (see sidebar). AMMSA’s reaction to the cut was not jubilant, but Crowfoot knew his paper could recover from near death. Because he wasn’t comfortable depending on unstable government funding, he’d been working on a five-year self-sufficiency plan for the society. But the sudden cut caught him off guard. At the time, AMMSA was getting the biggest chunk of the NCP. Crowfoot acted quickly, and immediately cut his staff in half and published Windspeaker biweekly instead of weekly. AMMSA had a $250,000 nest egg that got it through the lean times. Crowfoot didn’t waste any time lobbying the cut – he put his energy into preserving his business. He changed his advertising strategy to target more “whales” – big companies with large advertising budgets. “AMMSA is very business-minded,” he explains. “We turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.”

Crowfoot also saw an opportunity in the NCP cut’s aftermath. As Aboriginal papers went under, AMMSA slowly expanded. Windspeaker went national, and in 1993 AMMSA launched Alberta Sweetgrass to cover local events – the graduations, the bake sales, the regional band politics – events Windspeaker abandoned when it broadened its market. In 1996, AMMSA established Saskatchewan Sage, followed by Raven’s Eye in 1997 in British Columbia and the Yukon, and Ontario Birchbark in 2002.

Crowfoot says government funding is not necessary for Aboriginal publishing. He believes government money breeds a “welfare mentality” among publishers, and can make them lose their drive. Roland Bellerose, publisher of the Calgary-based aboriginaltimes magazine, agrees. “I don’t believe entrepreneurs need government funding,” he says. “If not done properly, it destabilizes free enterprise’s ability to weed out the weak.” Both publishers acknowledge they would accept funding if it was available, but say it’s dangerous to become dependent on handouts.

It’s taken Crowfoot 21 years to build his empire, and it continues to grow. Steel describes AMMSA’s tentative plans to team up with the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) and eventually run a hands-on training program for journalists on site. “It’s still just a shiny object, it’s so early,” she says. “We’re still in the idea stage.”
As Steel leads me back upstairs, we pass announcer Levi Lefthand in the on-air booth. The powwow singer smiles and greets us during a commercial break. “I’m very much into my culture, and very proud to be Aboriginal,” he says earnestly. “I’m very proud to be part of this team.”

Elm Street founding editor Stevie Cameron snaps, “Oh, for Christ’s sake! That’s the kind of jealous sniping I don’t accept. What’s the matter with food and fashion? Vanity Fair has fashion!”

Cameron is reacting to post-mortem comments on the reasons for Elm Street’s demise in January 2004. She’s not buying the prevalent suspicion that the seven-year-old magazine’s mix of serious journalism, recipes, fashion spreads and cheeky tidbits contributed to an identity crisis.

A journalism instructor once explained the concept of magazines and personality with this analogy: “If Cosmo came to dinner, it would be a sex-and-relationship crazed flibbertigibbet. If Elm Street came to dinner, I’d probably expect an earnest person who meant well and tried hard but whose personality was a little on the bland, boring and unfocused side.”

Lack of personality aside, there’s at least one other reason why Elm Street’s run ended after 48 issues: the dramatic change in the way the Print Measurement Bureau gathers data for its readership numbers – the numbers that determine advertising rates.

Multi-Vision Publishing Inc. wanted to create a traditional women’s magazine – one that would instantly attract lucrative advertisers like fashion designers, makeup companies and food manufacturers – but Cameron always saw this model as patronizing. “We banned all of the ‘ummy’ words – yummy, tummy. And we never put anything like ‘Hot! Hot! Hot!’ on the cover – that was the one I hated most!” Cameron says. She also threw out all the “good gal” stories. “No trailblazers,” she says. “We’re beyond that. Bring me stories of rich and dysfunctional people – that’s interesting!”

When Cameron was invited to helm the new title in 1996, she was reluctant. “I’ve never hidden my dislike for women’s magazines,” she says. But the promise of editorial freedom and a chance to assemble her team was too good to pass up. Some memorable stories were: Daniel Woods’ groundbreaking piece on the missing women of Vancouver’s east side; Bonnie Buxtons’s “Society’s Child,” a deeply personal account of Buxton’s hardships raising a child who suffered from Fetal Alcohol Effects; and “My Battle with Depression” by broadcaster Rafe Mair. “That was an incredibly honest piece – he even wrote about how it affected his sex life and his kids,” Cameron recalls. “And Bonnie now runs an international organization that sprung from her piece.”

But you can’t please everyone. The March 1998 issue featured a dishy cover story on Michael and Marlen Cowpland, Ottawa’s premier rich and dysfunctional couple, laced with glitzy photos. Annoyed readers balked at pages being devoted to a couple they saw as frivolous. In another case of a strange reader response, the November/December 1997 issue was filled with letters from readers outraged that Canadian heartthrob Paul Gross was pictured smoking.

Media critics are mixed on the personality verdict. “I don’t think it ever found its niche – it never really knew what it wanted to be,” says Toronto Star media critic Antonia Zerbisias. Masthead magazine editor Bill Shields disagrees: “Elm Street certainly had a unique personality. Just because you’re eclectic doesn’t mean you don’t have a personality,” he says.

Elm Street was never on newsstands. It was distributed to affluent postal codes through many papers over the years, including The Toronto Star and the National Post. Most recently, 400,000 Globe and Mail subscribers were the chosen recipients. “When you’re falling out of a newspaper, you’re landing in homes with males in it,” Shields continues. “Elm Street was a general interest magazine targeting a gender. I’m not going to be interested in a story on how to dress a turkey, but I knew each issue might contain content on the so-called serious side of journalism.”

Some point to the magazine’s layout as a potential culprit for sparking claims of personality drought. Elm Street didn’t follow the traditional set-up of a feature well sandwiched by gossip and fashion. For many years, fashion spreads were given the prime real estate. But Shields is convinced the change in PMB methodology is the guilty party. (For more information on the PMB changes, see article by Michelle Gaulin.) Shields says Elm Street was hurt by its abnormal publication schedule of eight issues a year. “The field reps would ask if people had seen the magazine in the last seven weeks or so,” says Shields. “The mind skips when you ask seven weeks – it’s a harder time frame to wrap your head around than a week or month.” The new methodology also hurts magazines not available on newsstands. “People are shown a logo,” says Shields, “and they say, “Oh, I saw that on the newsstand.”

The PMB shift in methodology was financially devastating for Elm Street. “The women’s category showed a 3.5 per cent increase in ad pages from 2001 to 2002,” he says, referring to run-of-press ad pages, not inserts. “Elm Street, including The Look, was down 7.4 per cent. Not including The Look, they were down 30.7 per cent.”

Elm Street The Look, a fashion spin-off of the main title launched in Spring 2002, continues to publish. Its frequency has even been bumped up from twice to four times a year to compete with Fashion Quarterly. Most Elm Street staffers have been moved to The Look, contrary to a Globe report saying most had been moved to Saturday Night.

“We gave it a wonderful go, we won lots of awards,” says Cameron. “I would have liked to have seen it on newsstands, where everybody could pick it up – not just rich people.”

“It’s possible to be socially responsible while maintaining high journalistic standards,” muses Alex Lockwood from his temporary post in Italy. “The two aren’t incompatible.”

Lockwood is the content and networking manager for the “online media gateway” called OneWorld International. OneWorld has ten locations around the world, including a Canadian centre. OneWorld sites cover international news – both breaking and in-depth contextual stories. The sites are updated daily by OneWorld editors, who often pick up and edit stories from partner sites. Lockwood estimates that OneWorld employs about fifty or sixty trained editors and journalists around the world. It also has a series of stringers in countries including Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Fifteen hundred partners based in 90 different countries fund OneWorld. The partners are non-profit organizations that share OneWorld’s goal of promoting human rights and sustainable development. Partners contribute financially to OneWorld based on a sliding scale according to the size and income of the organization. Current partners include Greenpeace International, UNICEF and the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Because the service is supported by the partners themselves,” OneWorld Canada’s English content editor, John Hall, explains from a coin-op terminal at the Vancouver airport, “it will be sustainable as long as the partners feel it’s worth supporting.”

Peter Armstrong and Anuradha Vittachi founded OneWorld in the mid-1990s when the Internet was first becoming commonly used. Armstrong was the BBC’s director of human issues programming for over 20 years; Vittachi has worked as a writer and editor for The New Internationalist magazine, and was a producer for the award-winning BBC documentary, After Charity. They were unhappy with mainstream media’s tendency to use the same government and corporate sources over and over, while denying a “fair voice to people who cared about poverty, human rights, and sustainable development.” They saw the Internet as the first medium able to connect citizens around the world and reset the public agenda.

Naturally, the question has arisen whether a news organization with a mission can produce objective journalism. Those involved with OneWorld dismiss such concerns. “Saying we’re not objective is simple,” says OneWorld Canada’s centre manager Chad Lubelsky from his Montreal office. “I could very easily say that The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star are not objective, and I could make a very good case for that.” The Globe’s deputy editor, Sylvia Stead, counters Lubelsky’s claim. “It’s true that every writer and editor is shaped by their own beliefs and experiences, but everyone (at the Globe) also tries to remain as neutral and professional as possible.”

OneWorld board member Judy Rebick has faced similar concerns as publisher of Rabble.ca. “We had a lot of discussion about this when we (Rabble) first started,” she says. “But we had a Chinese wall between the journalistic side and the links side. No one’s ever accused us of not being fair.”

Lockwood points out that OneWorld has always employed trained journalists who know to get both sides of every story. “If you want to go to the philosophical level, nobody can be truly objective. But in terms of applying everyday standards to reporting, we are objective.” He also stresses that the editing is thorough: “Everything is checked and double-checked.”

OneWorld’s editorial guidelines emphasize transparency. It is careful to identify its news sources and clearly label opinion pieces. And it doesn’t hide its mandate. “We’re very clear that we only report on human rights issues,” Lockwood says. OneWorld has a board of trustees that guides the organization’s mission. Rebick represents Canada.

OneWorld aims to infiltrate the mainstream media through syndication. It’s distributed through Yahoo World News. “In the U.K., we try to promote OneWorld content through The Guardian by encouraging them to pick up stories,” says Lockwood. OneWorld staff recognizes the importance of the mainstream media’s ability to shape public opinion, and thus effect social change.

OneWorld Canada is run by Alternatives, a progressive Canadian organization that also sponsors Rabble.ca. Alternatives saw what OneWorld was doing and decided to get involved, and OneWorld was more than happy to oblige. “It was a mutual meeting of minds,” Lockwood says. OneWorld Canada needed an English language cohort, so Lubelsky called up Rebick and suggested Rabble join the team. Rabble is going through a financial crisis right now, and will be downsizing and merging its “In Cahoots”section with OneWorld. “There may be a little less original content for awhile, but we hope that won’t last too long,” Rebick says of Rabble’s cutbacks. Rabble will maintain its Web domain, and the sites will cross-promote each other. “The two sites have very different audiences,” says Lubelsky. “OneWorld appeals to the non-profit sector, NGOs and government agencies, while Rabble appeals more to activists.” Lubelsky and Rebick hope the merger will bring the two audiences together.
Not all OneWorld sites have sponsors like Alternatives. OneWorld International set up centres in Africa and South Asia. One of OneWorld’s goals is to bring more attention to issues facing Africans and South Asians and spotlighting voices typically ignored by the mainstream media. OneWorld International also has television and radio portals.

Bilingualism will be an important aspect of OneWorld Canada. “Not in the sense that everything is translated, but that there is content in English, and content in French,” Lubelsky emphasizes. “There’s not an overwhelming discussion between French and English progressive groups in Canada. We’re going to try to use OneWorld to stimulate discussion.” He also points out the difference in French and Anglo mainstream media. “There’s a reason French Quebeckers poll more socially conscious – French Canadian media is dramatically different. It’s a lot more progressive.”

OneWorld Canada has a staff of four part-time employees: Lubelsky, Hall, a French content editor, and a business manager. It has a variety of correspondents who contribute sporadically, and just under one hundred partners. Hall is optimistic about OneWorld Canada’s future: “As the online product grows, as the partnership pool grows, the audience should grow too. That means more value to both partners and readers, which should spur more growth, and so on.”