Visitors to The Globe and Mail’s Toronto headquarters often comment on how sedate the place is—nothing like the frenzied, shouty bullpen newsrooms of pop culture. It’s more akin to a mid-sized corporate office; a grey and workmanlike place where serious people are engaged in serious work, putting together a very serious newspaper. So by Globe standards, the tempest gripping the office on May 25, 2009 is comparatively high drama. It’s mid-morning in the cubicle maze that’s home to the Review, Life and Report on Business sections. The loudest sounds are the click-clack of keyboards and hushed conversations. Suddenly, a gasp. And another. And another. The entire newsroom goes still for a few seconds as employees read the memo that’s just appeared in their inboxes.

“Eddie’s been fired,” one colleague explains hurriedly to another. “Stackhouse is the new boss.” Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief for seven years, is out. John Stackhouse, a 48-year-old Globe lifer, is in. A few hours later, the paper’s writers and editors assemble in a meeting room, spilling out of doorways and into the halls, to hear his first pronouncements. The crowd is expectant and uncertain. Publisher Phillip Crawley gestures to the back of the crowd and chuckles because reporter Siri Agrell, who’s on maternity leave and came in just to hear Stackhouse, has brought along her baby. Agrell responds dryly, “I figured she wouldn’t be the only one shitting her pants.”

Everyone laughs and Stackhouse lets his face break into a brief smile, but it vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

The new boss has been at the Globe for more than 20 years, as a reporter, editor of the Report on Business section and editor of the national and foreign desks. Most of his colleagues assumed he was headed for the editor-in-chief ’s chair, but no one thought it would happen so abruptly or at such a turbulent time. In February 2009 the paper went through a huge round of layoffs and buyouts, cutting 10 percent of its staff. A few months later, tension was building between the union and management over contract negotiations and a strike appeared likely. Needless to say, the mood in the office wasn’t exactly buoyant. Reporter Michael Valpy, who’s been with the Globe off and on since 1966, says the last months of Greenspon’s tenure were a time of “tortured morale bruising” as the paper suffered one bad management decision after another.

After the switch came the gossip, all sotto voce, all focused on what led to Greenspon’s hasty departure. Possibilities included an overemphasis on Parliament Hill stories, Greenspon’s unpopular reassignments of several editors and columnists, his reluctance to confront the challenge posed by the internet, and even controversy over the Airbus affair. (The going rumour had it that Crawley was upset after Greenspon took it upon himself to fire off a letter to the Oliphant Commission. In it, he accused Brian Mulroney of offering to provide information to the Globe—on the condition the paper not reveal the former prime minister’s relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber. This came after Mulroney testified that the paper had suppressed a story sympathetic to him.)

But no one knew for sure what happened. The newsroom descended into as much chaos as the well-oiledGlobe possibly could—which is to say, barely perceptible to the average reader. “Reporters look to editors to tell them that everything’s going to be okay,” one former staffer says of those first few weeks. “No one had any idea who John was going to keep or let go. So you had reporters scared, editors who were scared, and everyone out for themselves.” And all that was on top of the general industry malaise. After all, Globejournalists aren’t the only ones shitting themselves these days. As the news business spirals deeper and deeper into uncertainty, everyone is feeling a little jumpy.

Not that Stackhouse will admit to any worries. In 2008, the Globe signed a $1.7-billion deal with Transcontinental Media, which includes access to the publishing and printing giant’s presses from 2010 to 2028. With a risky redesign in the works for the paper, Maclean’s senior writer Anne Kingston suggested the move could either be seen as shrewd, or “investing in state-of-the-art buggy technology at the turn of the 20th century.” But Stackhouse says he doesn’t buy the histrionics about the death of print. “The internet has been the best thing to happen to newspapers,” he insists —before quickly adding, “To good newspapers.” He’s convinced the way to confront the future is with a dramatic overhaul, and his vision is bold, especially for a 166-year-old institution: to become a multimedia news organization with a powerhouse web presence able to compete with industry leaders such as The Guardian and The New York Times, and a print edition that looks and reads more like a magazine- newspaper hybrid. It will be a high-end product for the paper’s high-end audience, and the stakes are enormous: The Globe’s business model is successful, if dated, and Stackhouse is betting the paper’s immediate future on an experiment. A carefully planned and calibrated one, but an experiment nonetheless. But in the face of the industry’s waning fortunes, he really has no other choice.

***

“I’ve been grooming John for this opportunity for a long time,” says Crawley. He’s less upfront about why the change came so suddenly, allowing only that it was time for a change after Greenspon’s seven-year run. “If you allow an editor to go on and on, it’s not good for the paper.” Rumours circulated that Greenspon appeared oblivious to what was coming as late as the National Newspaper Awards the Friday before his departure. Others reported seeing Greenspon leaving the newsroom holding his belongings in a bag and looking distraught. “You don’t want endless weeks and weeks of discussion and so forth,” says Crawley. “You’ve got to make a quick change and then move on with the new people in place.”

Historically, the Globe has always targeted Canada’s affluent “thought-leaders and tastemakers,” as its ad sales department boasts. Under Greenspon, there was a sense that the paper had been drifting by trying to appeal to “the whole reader.” The launch of the fluffy, faddish Life section in 2007 is an obvious example. But even the paper’s Ottawa coverage, traditionally one of its strongest suits, became softer, publishing whatMaclean’s columnist Paul Wells dismisses as “High School Confidential crap about which cabinet ministers weren’t talking to each other and what were the designs of the pumpkins at 24 Sussex at Halloween… Increasingly, the Globe decided it had to be stupid.” And unlike the National Post, he says, “It’s not even interesting when it’s stupid. It’s just stupid.” (Wells thinks that the paper has begun changing for the better under Stackhouse—though it still published a story about 24 Sussex’s pumpkins in 2009.)

Greenspon also made some deeply unpopular personnel changes. In November 2008, he moved features editor Cathrin Bradbury to news, hoping to jazz up the front section. But she was out of her element and left suddenly in August 2009. Queen’s Park columnist Murray Campbell, who had served the paper in one way or another since 1977, resigned last April after Greenspon killed his Ontario politics column and reassigned him to features. (He’s now director of corporate communications with the Ontario Power Authority.) He was an influential voice on provincial affairs and his departure wasn’t just a blow to the Globe, but also the press gallery at Queen’s Park. The move even earned Crawley a rebuke from Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty. Then long-time Toronto city hall columnist John Barber, who’d been covering the beat since 1993, asked for reassignment. He was hugely respected, and any replacement was bound to pale in comparison—but Greenspon chose Marcus Gee. It wasn’t just the former international affairs columnist’s conservatism that worried critics, but also his lack of nuance. (In February, for example, Gee entreated the blustering, buffoonish Toronto city councillor Rob Ford to run for mayor.)

Ultimately though, Greenspon simply didn’t fit with Crawley’s vision for the paper. The editor was an old-school newspaperman who believed editorial, advertising and promotion shouldn’t cross paths; the publisher wanted the entire organization to work together on a common mission and to share ideas and staff across departments. Crawley said as much in a jargon-filled memo he sent to employees just after Greenspon’s departure: “Reimagination-inspired teamwork during the last four years has reinforced the value of a more collaborative way of managing our business. By drawing on the collective strengths of the team, we are all better able as individuals to contribute to the success of The Globe and Mail.”

***

Enter Stackhouse: a sober, serious journalistic workhorse who’d long seemed destined for the top job. (His first gig with the Globe was as a nine-year-old newspaper carrier. He saw an ad for the job at school one day and, since he was saving for a new bike, decided he wasn’t going to let any competition get in the way. He walked around tearing the remaining ads off utility poles outside the school.) His father was a professor, Anglican priest and Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament in Scarborough, Ontario; his mother was a public school teacher. Stackhouse grew up in what he remembers as a “mature environment,” a house full of books and politics. Even as a teenager, “there was nothing mischievous about him,” recalls Chris Liboiron, who worked alongside Stackhouse as a Queen’s Park page.

At Queen’s University, Stackhouse served as editor-in-chief of The Queen’s Journal, where he oversaw a major redesign, met his future wife and started on the path that would lead to the Globe. After one year in marketing and government jobs, he landed a summer gig at the Toronto Star. From there it was on to theLondon Free Press, The Financial Times of Canada, Report on Business magazine and finally to the newspaper itself in 1991, where he spent eight years as the development reporter in India. He’s also a two-time author (a hitchhiking journey from Saint John, New Brunswick to the west coast forms the narrative spine of his 2003 book Timbit Nation). He’s won a National Magazine Award and five National Newspaper Awards (NNAs)—including one for his “Living with the Homeless” series in 1999, for which he spent a week living on the streets in Toronto. The stories were controversial, earning praise but also condemnation for being gimmicky and demonizing the homeless (he wrote about alcoholism, the drug trade and panhandlers who maximize their incomes by fighting over lucrative begging spots). But it was also classic shit-disturbing Stackhouse.

Columnist Margaret Wente remembers her first impressions of him 20 years ago. “He was amazing,” she says. “He was exactly what you would expect. He was intense, committed and really, really smart.” FormerGlobe A-section editor Larry Cornies says, “John’s highly collaborative and very demanding of his staff.” He recalls that when Stackhouse worked as senior editor on weekends “the front-page lineup would be changing several times through the evening, to the great consternation of the copy editors, production editors, et cetera. We would tear down those pages and build them up again. It was frustrating, but it almost always resulted in a better paper.”

Stackhouse’s work ethic is legendary—as is his reputation for pushing others to similar extremes. Senior reporter Jacquie McNish remembers when he was in Indonesia in 1997, covering the Bre-X scandal (in which a Canadian mining company defrauded investors by claiming it had discovered vast quantities of gold). “He literally rented a boat to reach the mining site where this great gold scam was perpetuated,” says McNish. “He has that same drive as an editor. He expects all of us to get in that boat, to get into the heart of darkness and get that story.”

Things can be more difficult for those who don’t share his drive. One high-ranking former Globe staffer says that Stackhouse, for all his smarts, “has a problem dealing with people. He could make people feel like shit.” The same former employee says the editor lacks the empathy needed for leadership. “He can have trouble making up his mind. He lets the system produce stuff, then passes judgment on it.” Another former reporter describes Stackhouse’s around-the-office persona as that of a “scary, brilliant person who has won a bunch of NNAs.” Stackhouse’s reputation precedes him, and his office demeanour is a bit solemn, but let him warm up and his long, affably boyish face crinkles easily into a grin—especially when the topic of discussion is the future of the Globe. “A great newspaper needs to appeal to the brain, the eye and the hand,” Stackhouse says. “It’s got to be intellectually stimulating. That’s why we read it. It’s got to have a visual appeal that makes the eye dance when you turn a page. And it has to feel good.” His burning ambition, he says, is “to come in every day and say to my editors, ‘How can we destroy The Globe and Mail today?’”

***

Taking charge of the Globe’s most ambitious redesign in recent memory, Stackhouse must rework both the form and content of “Canada’s National Newspaper” in print and online. He jumped into the thick of it as soon as he took the top job, conducting a series of meetings with newsroom staff and flying out to the bureaus. Ottawa, for instance, now focuses more on policy issues and less on gossip. And the editorial department has been restructured so that business, features and news/sports are now the three pillars of the paper, each led by a section editor (Elena Cherney, Jill Borra and David Walmsley respectively). There are also three new groups— digital innovation, presentation (the redesign group), and recruiting and training—to break down the walls between the paper’s formerly divided departments.

But Stackhouse isn’t on a slash-and-burn mission. He’s a company man, after all, and he has a reporter’s approach to dealing with staff: curious and refraining from judgment until the time is right. An editorial meeting from November 2009 exemplifies it: Stackhouse arrives a few moments late to the boardroom. Inside, more than a dozen senior Globe editors fiddle with BlackBerries and shuffle through their notes. It’s a young, exclusive group, hand-picked by their new boss after he pushed out a number of old-guard senior managers to make way for “that sort of innovation we need desperately.” The new team includes Sinclair Stewart, a hotshot former business reporter and New York correspondent whom Stackhouse picked to be his national editor. Walmsley, formerly of the Star, CBC, Post and Daily Telegraph, is the new managing editor of news and sports. And Anjali Kapoor, just hired from Yahoo! Canada, is managing editor of digital operations.

This morning’s meeting begins with a presentation from Kapoor. She displays a spreadsheet on the projection screen at the front of the room, a compilation of the website’s most successful stories from the past weekend. Stackhouse listens carefully, taking notes occasionally, asking questions along the way. Tracking online readers is one of Stackhouse’s top priorities: who’s reading these stories, where the hits are coming from, when they’re coming in and from what kind of reader? While the redesign will move the print product in a more analytical and contemplative direction, the website’s mandate will be broader: breaking news, multimedia, archives and, yes, some balloon boy stories. One of 2009’s most-read stories was a piece about Natasha Richardson, the English actress who died while skiing in Quebec. (An editor called people.com and asked if it would like to link to the story.) Partnerships, formal and informal, are a major part of the new digital strategy: to get stories into the hands (and onto the screens) of “millions of new readers.”

Indeed, online readership is the only reason the Globe’s audience isn’t stagnating. The print numbers have been declining, as they have at most newspapers. The flagship Saturday edition, for example, lost 27,000 readers between 1998 and 2008.

The online numbers tell a different story: The year-over-year increases are dramatic. But more online readers won’t necessarily equal more money, as anyone who’s been paying attention to the news industry’s struggle with the web knows. That’s where high-end print advertisers come in—and faith that a viable online advertising model is forthcoming. What isn’t coming, at least in the short term, is anything like the paywall plan The New York Times announced in January. On the contrary, Stackhouse wants to develop more content-sharing partnerships, like the one with People. It’s all designed to push the Globe into a future that Crawley and Stackhouse are certain exists, the print-is-dead crowd be damned. “There are a lot of ideas from people who’ve never worked in the business,” says Crawley. “Many people have opinions and get some currency for them by putting them on their website, but a lot of them have never run a sweets store.” He adds that American and Canadian newspapers aren’t really comparable. “If you’re Clay Shirky in the U.S., you’re surrounded by a lot of papers that are not very good.”

***

Stackhouse’s strategy, simply put, is to be good. Maybe it’s premature to judge the Globe of the future based on the Globe of today, but there are hints as to where things are going. Any recent issue will do: say Saturday, January 30 of this year. On that day, the A section is solid—reporter Kirk Makin has a lengthy and intelligent dissection of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Omar Khadr case, and Afghanistan correspondent Sonia Verma writes a detailed piece about the difficulty of negotiating with the Taliban. Report on Business is strong, with a lead piece on why Canadians have access to so little information when house-hunting. Focus & Books provides the brain food and think pieces, and Sports is looking good, no doubt due to a glut of Olympics coverage, but also thanks to Stackhouse’s concerted effort on that front. (He brought Roy MacGregor back to the sports beat, with an emphasis on hockey, and several other staffers have recently been moved to sports, including Hayley Mick, who came from the Life section; and Darren Yourk, now the paper’s first online sports editor.)

But the front page is only so-so, leading with an above-the-fold story by Gloria Galloway and Daniel Leblanc about the prime minister’s grip on the Senate. Below that is a stand-alone photo of Canada’s Olympic flag bearer, speed skater Clara Hughes (the idea being that the Vancouver Olympics are a more female-friendly event than past Games). At the bottom of the page is a story on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder by Anne McIlroy. At first glance it resembles Stackhouse’s “reflective and analytical” paper of the future, but on closer inspection it’s not a very attention-grabbing front page, and it’s not necessarily any more interesting or thoughtful than the competition. The same day, the Star runs a front-page story on the government’s handling (or mishandling) of the Omar Khadr case and a feature story on child kidnappings in the aftermath of the Haitian earth- quake. In Montreal, The Gazette goes with a think piece on Haiti’s decline from wealthy colony to destitute post-colonial emergency state. At least the Globe beats The Vancouver Sun, which has a similar photo of Clara Hughes and no stories on A1 at all, just teasers.

In the Toronto edition, Globe T.O. runs a lead piece by Greg McArthur on the city’s recent spate of car-pedestrian collisions. The paper calls it a “data crunch”—six little charts with info on six different factors in collisions including age of victim, time of day, etc. The piece highlights the strengths and weaknesses of experimenting with new story formats. It makes crucial information much more explicit than a traditional story—in this case, a reader can see from a simple graph that the January accidents usually killed elderly people, not reckless jaywalkers. What’s missing is the meaning behind the figures. Three days earlier, city police had launched a ticketing blitz, issuing fines to pedestrians. Nowhere does the story take this raw data and use it to suggest that such a strategy might be ineffective. But to McArthur’s credit, he does make the point that the media blew the car-pedestrian story out of proportion.

Over in Focus & Books the presentation is better, but once again there’s ample evidence of the Globe’s struggle with non-traditional story formats. Some work well, including John Allemang’s Q&A with an American journalist and media critic explaining why coverage of the Haitian earthquake was off-base. Less successful is “The Matrix,” which very closely resembles New York magazine’s almost identically named back-page feature and places various current events on a grid of significance and media attention. It’s funny but forced, as if the paper is trying too hard to be irreverent and youthful. And the Globe, for all its strengths, is neither irreverent nor youthful.

What it does have is an imposing roster of brand-name reporters and columnists to ensure the blood is still pumping through its grey old veins. Christie Blatchford’s writing, especially on crime and justice, inspires both loathing and devotion, but her opinions are confrontational and her writing is powerful (although less so when she writes at length about her beloved dog). Ian Brown’s idiosyncratic musings make him one of the paper’s strongest and funniest voices, while his wife Johanna Schneller’s honest, down-to- earth celebrity profiles inject some intelligence into an arts department that too often seems like an afterthought (though it also includes some excellent writers, including TV critic John Doyle and architecture critic Lisa Rochon). London-based Doug Saunders, charged with covering European affairs almost single-handedly, seems to be everywhere at once as he dispatches his lucid missives from Britain and continental Europe. Elizabeth Renzetti is equally adept at covering European arts. Stephanie Nolen and Geoffrey York have earned near-universal acclaim for their work in Africa, and Nolen continues to bring the same award-winning standards to India. Graeme Smith is the paper’s bright young star on the international scene, earning both an NNA and an Emmy for the multimedia series “Talking to the Taliban.”

Rex Murphy recently decamped to the Post, a closer ideological fit for the world-class curmudgeon. (The move means less colourful crustiness on the Globe’s editorial pages, but also less amateur climatology. Murphy made climate change skepticism a favourite hobby-horse—redundant, since the popular and provocative Wente already has that beat sewn up.) Less happily, Rick Salutin is in danger of becoming the anti-Murphy. A younger left-wing voice might be in order, one not beholden to the 20th century’s brand of ossified socialism. In April 2009, the otherwise-intelligent Salutin lamented the lack of alternatives to global capitalism—a fair point, until he expresses nostalgia for the 1930s, when Stalin’s Soviet Union “was socialist and the bloom wasn’t yet off that rose.” Maclean’s senior writer Michael Petrou excoriated the column as “deeply creepy.” Meanwhile, Leah McLaren continues to write lighter-than-air puff for the Style section, including recent columns on “butt obsession” and why she won’t be reading any of the books nominated for Canadian literary prizes, a backhanded way of complimenting herself on all the classics she’s devoured lately.

The overall talent is enviable, but it’s not a panacea for the paper’s challenges. “The best thing the Globe has going for it is its reputation,” says Murray Campbell, who nonetheless fears it’s resting on its laurels and in danger of becoming a second read. “Foreign coverage has become episodic,” he says, “and it’s hard to follow a story that way. The tendency now seems to be to have a big feature from Doug Saunders or Stephanie Nolen, with a big display, and then everything else becomes a brief. That strikes me as a change. You used to be able to follow stories day in and day out.” He also believes that if management pushes news to the web, it will have to re-evaluate the competition. “On Ottawa coverage, is it going to measure up to the Ottawa-centric websites and blogs that are out there? For international, will it match the BBC?”

The focus on American politics also seems to come at the expense of national coverage. Between December 2, 2009 and February 2, 2010, the Globe mentioned Barack Obama 21 times in front-page headlines. Stephen Harper had his name dropped only 12 times. And the American president appeared in four front-page photos while our admittedly less-photogenic prime minister showed up just twice.

In the Globe’s favour, Stackhouse brought John Ibbitson back to Ottawa from Washington. (Ibbitson had been the paper’s political affairs columnist in Ottawa from 2002 until 2007, when Greenspon moved him to Washington despite what Cornies calls his “dazzling work in the nation’s capital.”) National affairs columnist Jeffrey Simpson continues to weigh in with his temperate, intelligent perspectives on national affairs, and the paper’s Ottawa Notebook blog boasts eight contributors. Michael Valpy thinks that the overall quality attracts a “strong, progressive, intellectual audience,” though he thinks the paper could do a better job serving it. (As it is, the Globe’s editorial mandate is to focus mainly on advertiser-friendly mopes—managers, owners, professionals, entrepreneurs.) Despite all the strengths, the creative energy seems scattered. The paper certainly chugs along well enough, but the Globe’s focus seems to be elsewhere these days.

***

Mounted on the wall in Crawley’s office is a World War II–era poster that features a svelte blonde woman and three men leering over her. “Keep mum, she’s not so dumb,” it reads. “Careless talk costs lives.” Crawley and Stackhouse are indeed playing coy on details of this fall’s redesign. Different examples of what the new paper may look like have been tacked up on walls in the newsroom, attracting yays and nays from staff who have marked them up with comments and criticisms. And here in the privacy of his office, Crawley flips through the latest sample of what the redesign might look like. It’s a glossy, colourful sheet, a little shorter and a little narrower than today’s paper. A full-colour cosmetic ad takes up one whole page. “This is the kind of ad theGlobe typically wouldn’t get,” Crawley says. “Magazine-type quality and magazine-style print will enable us to attract advertising from sources that would normally go into a magazine.”

The Globe that readers can expect to see in the fall will have a variety of shorter and longer stories alongside more analytical pieces. It won’t deliver so much of what Stackhouse calls “classic institutional news.” Instead, it will assume readers already know about the basic issues of the day. It will embrace alternative story formats—charts, graphs, Q&As, lists, maps.

The idea, says Stackhouse, is to provide a “daily pause” of analysis and explanation, “that one time in a 24-hour period when we all need to stop and make sense of what the hell just happened in our world, our country and our economy.” He knows his paper increasingly competes on a global level, as Campbell suggests, and he’s also receptive to criticisms that the paper should broaden its audience. He maintains that “educated, affluent and influential consumers” are still the target market, but he’s also added a number of new beats—Jessica Leeder will report on global food, Valpy on ethics, Joe Friesen on demographics and McIlroy on neuroscience and learning— with the intention of widening the Globe’s appeal and offering that more analytical approach he speaks of so passionately.

And there may be other, more urgent reasons to widen the scope. Mathew Ingram, the paper’s former online communities editor, says “the whole concept of mass media is antiquated.” He praises the Globe for being “near the front of the pack” in terms of journalistic quality and internet savvy, but is unsure about the narrow demographic focus. “It makes no sense to think about our readership as having any common denominators at all.” Ingram’s work as communities editor—using the tools of the web to better engage readers—was innovative for the Globe. The policy wiki, a reader-edited website created in partnership with The Dominion Institute that invited readers to debate policy issues and propose solutions, was one attempt. Ingram also put together a more easily navigated site for mobile devices such as iPhones and BlackBerries. But he left the paper in January to work as a senior writer for an American technology blog network called GigaOm, and the paper has yet to fill his position. “I don’t think the Globe is mentally where it needs to be, and that’s one thing I regret about leaving,” he says. “I still feel as if we’re trying to pave cart paths, like we’re taking all the stuff we did before in a totally different medium and doing it online, and that doesn’t work. We have to fundamentally change the way we think about what our job is online.”

Ingram is far from alone in that assessment. Paul Sullivan, a Vancouver-based new media expert and strategist (as well as former managing editor of The Vancouver Sun and a former Globe western editor who still writes a regular column for globeinvestor.com), praises the paper for its journalistic excellence, and for being more progressive online than any other Canadian newspaper. But he says the people who run it haven’t really accepted the new reality of the news business. “They’re crazy about presses and buildings… They think of themselves as a newspaper based on Front Street. If they could just stop thinking that way, and think of themselves as an information wellspring based anywhere, they might find it a little easier.”

Maybe. The only things in greater supply than uncertainty in the newspaper business these days are cocky predictions about how the future will play out. Dilbert creator and occasional tech blogger Scott Adams predicted in 1997 that newspapers would be basically extinct by 2002. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in 2008 that within a decade, “there will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form.”

But it’s probably far too early to really know whether experiments such as the Globe’s will succeed or merely stave off the inevitable; whether the $1.7-billion Transcontinental Media deal will indeed look like an investment in “state-of-the-art buggy technology” a decade or two from now, or whether the medium can be adapted, tweaked and made relevant for the future.

***

On a rainy evening in downtown Toronto, Stackhouse is a few minutes late for a panel discussion called “What’s Next For News.” Onstage, Clay Shirky compares journalism to ice harvesting—his point being that both are obsolete professions. Ingram and web critic Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, round out the panel. There are a couple of VIP seats cordoned off for Stackhouse and Crawley, but the editor slips unobtrusively into a seat near the darkened back of the room. Stackhouse is expressionless, balancing a small pile of paper on his lap and occasionally checking e-mail on his BlackBerry. He rests his head in his hand, rubs his chin, stifles a yawn or two. “My advice for young journalists?” Shirky booms from the stage. “Don’t work for The Globe and Mail.” Stackhouse looks up, the corners of his mouth lifting. A brief smile plays across his face. A few minutes later he rolls up his notes, tucks his BlackBerry into his palm, and makes for the exit.

With reporting from Ann Hui.

Only three people know what happened on that Toronto street on the night of August 31, 2009. One is dead, and the other two aren’t talking publicly until the trial is over, if they ever will. The best version of events the rest of us can put together is this: At about 9:45 p.m., the stretch of Bloor Street through Yorkville—a chic downtown neighbourhood and shopping destination—is quiet. A black Saab convertible heads west, a man behind the wheel and a woman at his side. They approach a cyclist, also heading west, and there’s some kind of minor collision. An argument ensues, escalates, and the cyclist ends up hanging off the side of the car as the driver hits the gas. The convertible veers wildly around a crew of workmen in the centre lane and into the eastbound lanes, with the cyclist still clinging to it. The Saab smashes against roadside objects—first a tree, then a mailbox. The diversion may have been intentional or maybe the driver lost control, but eventually the cyclist falls into the path of the Saab’s rear wheels.

Paramedics rush him to hospital, where he soon dies. The driver, meanwhile, sits in the back of a police car a block from the accident site; he looks bewildered, dismayed, disbelieving. He knows the storm that’s coming.

Within hours, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star run brief online stories about the incident, describing it as a hit and run. Neither names the driver, though speculation about his identity is already making the rounds. Just after 5 a.m. the next morning, 680News takes a chance and goes with the circulating rumour—the man in police custody is Michael Bryant, former Ontario attorney general and then-CEO of Invest Toronto, an agency that promotes the city as an international business centre. He’s a political showman—a former “cabinet rock star,” according to the National Post—who’d been returning from a night on the town when he was involved in a confrontation that ended with the death of cyclist Darcy Allan Sheppard, a 33-year-old bike courier. It was a dramatic culmination of the increasingly angry, occasionally violent conflicts between drivers and cyclists that had dominated city streets and headlines all year.

As night turned to day in Toronto’s newsrooms, phones rang and inboxes pinged, a journalistic reveille rallying the incoming army of editors and writers. “It got pretty exciting pretty fast,” remembers Post reporter Matthew Coutts. National editor Scott Stinson roused him from bed at 7 a.m. and told him to get down to the police station where Bryant was being held. “Right off the bat it was all hands on deck,” says Coutts. “A lot of people get into journalism for that rush.”

Editors felt the same rush as reporters. “I shouldn’t call it a great day,” says Kelly Grant, then-Toronto editor for the Globe. “But when a story breaks that everyone wants to read and I have this stable of incredibly talented reporters I can throw at it, that’s not a bad day. That’s a great day.”

Unsubstantiated rumours quickly percolated through newsrooms—the dead man had been homeless, Bryant had been cavorting with a mistress, Bryant had been drunk. The pop culture allusion on everyone’s lips wasThe Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s satirical novel about a Wall Street investment banker who runs down and seriously injures a young black man. “The dream was, let’s find the ritzy restaurant in Yorkville where Bryant ate and count how many bottles of expensive wine were on the table,” says Star city editor Graham Parley. “It would have been very sensational to find him drinking with some mystery woman before jetting off in his luxury convertible. You know, ‘What a story! Mmm, yeah!’”

The working theory was that Bryant, drunk on power and privilege (and booze, of course), possibly cavorting with a mistress, had killed a down-on-his-luck cyclist in a fit of road rage. “Newsrooms are famous for putting together a working theory,” says Larry Cornies, a former editor of the London Free Press. “We drive a story forward and make guesses as to what the next development will be. Ninety-five percent of the time we’re right. But not always.” Not this time. “In a crude way,” says Parley, “you could say we went looking for dirt and didn’t find anything.”

***

Over the next few days it became apparent that Bryant had actually been on an unexpectedly modest anniversary date with his wife, lawyer Susan Abramovitch, eating shawarma before grabbing some dessert and heading home. They consumed no alcohol. It wasn’t a hit and run, either. After Sheppard fell to the street, Bryant drove a block or so and pulled into the driveway of the nearby Park Hyatt hotel, where he called police.

And Sheppard, the Alberta-born Métis initially seen as a “merry warrior in the often intense subculture of bicycle couriers,” as Globe columnist Judith Timson described him, became more complicated as well. A friend told reporters he’d been drinking on the night in question and had ended up in the back of a police car after an altercation at his girlfriend’s apartment. He was also wanted on dozens of outstanding arrest warrants in Alberta.

Within a day, the Bonfire narrative looked shaky. Within two, it was pretty well discarded. Some observers attributed the story’s 180-degree turn to the machinations of Bryant’s communications firm, Navigator Ltd., hired just hours after the accident and almost invariably referred to in those first days as a “blue-chip” PR firm. (Senior partner Robin Sears was Brian Mulroney’s spokesman during the Oliphant inquiry.) Online, citizen journalists and cycling advocates worked to counter what they saw as a mainstream media smear campaign against Sheppard, boosted by Navigator. But reporters insist that the story’s turnaround was the result of old-fashioned shoe leather, good luck and nothing more.

Either way, the Bryant-Sheppard story proved that complicated, sensational stories don’t have to be journalistic debacles. That’s reassuring, considering that the mainstream media’s tendency to exploit flimsy leads, go-nowhere speculation and internet gossip (all rife in this case) has resulted in some appalling journalism. There are plenty of examples of what media pundits call “confirmation bias”: the readiness to report a story based on preconceived assumptions, accurate or not. In this case, it was new media outlets (YouTube and blogs, mostly) that twisted themselves into paranoid, judgmental contortions and did more to distort the story than to clarify it. Old media (print and broadcast) journalists made mistakes too, but by and large they kept up with the twists and turns. Most of the reporting unfolded in a credible and nuanced way. The biggest question in the aftermath is whether the success was thanks to good reporting, good luck or the guiding hand of a public relations firm.

The morning after the accident, 25-year-old Star reporter Robyn Doolittle received a wake-up call from her editor at around 5:15 a.m. She made it to the scene of the tragedy before 6 a.m. After poking around and talking briefly to some witnesses, Doolittle hailed a cab to the Traffic Services police station farther downtown, where Bryant was being held and would eventually make an appearance that afternoon. Doolittle remembers many of the reporters not-so-surreptitiously trying to dig up some dirt, probing for the name of the unidentified woman in Bryant’s car.

With only a small corps of reporters, the Post and the Toronto Sun were hampered during that first day, but the Star and the Globe were able to take a more aggressive approach. Parley deployed reporters to as many places as possible. They filed stories to the web while feeding extra information to Star reporter Cathal Kelly, who was writing a front-page feature.

By the afternoon, journalists were following three main threads: Bryant, Sheppard and the incident itself. Predictably, the papers with the most reporters on the story—the Star and the Globe—broke most of the new information. The Post, with fewer reporters, was unable to cover the developments as closely and adopted a more analytical approach. Navigator had shut down information from Bryant’s camp following a press conference the morning after the accident (for which the PR firm had Bryant change into a crisp new suit). Reporters then shifted their attention to Sheppard, who was turning out to be a far more complex character than anyone had anticipated.

“Not to boast at all,” says 25-year-old Star reporter Daniel Dale, “but I think I was the first to get a lot of stuff on him, and a lot of it was sheer luck. I messaged his entire Facebook list, and it was one of those days where people just get back to you. We also got stuff from his courier friends. They gave me his address.”

That address turned out to be a run-down apartment building on the east side of downtown, directly across from Seaton House, Toronto’s refuge of last resort for up to 434 destitute men. Rooming houses and smaller shelters cluster around it, while out on the street it’s a free-for-all—arguments, fights, drug deals. Few places in Toronto provide a starker contrast to Yorkville’s upscale environs.

Dale says Sheppard’s friends also volunteered that he was a heavy drinker. They thought it would make the courier seem more sympathetic, shifting blame to the police, who had come to his girlfriend’s apartment to investigate an argument, found he’d been drinking, and let him ride away. (Police said he’d been drinking but wasn’t drunk.)

The Globe’s chief librarian, Celia Donnelly, dug up a 2002 Edmonton Sun story mentioning dozens of outstanding arrest warrants for Sheppard. “Some days you get a name and it takes you nowhere,” saysGlobe reporter Kate Hammer. “Other days you get a name and it just keeps adding layers.” She  and veteran crime reporter Tim Appleby raced to verify that the Darcy Allan Sheppard in the Sun story was the same Darcy Allan Sheppard they were hunting. The crimes were minor. Sheppard was alleged to have cashed bogus cheques in small amounts to himself at local Money Marts.  The Star’s Parley says he wouldn’t have used that information even if he had it first. “The fraud charges have nothing to do with the Bryant incident. Why bring that up? To prove what?”

The Star scooped the Globe right back on September 3, with a story piecing together Bryant’s evening before the accident. This was yet another turning point. The story revealed that Bryant hadn’t been gorging on charcuterie and fine wine at a Yorkville boîte, but had been chowing on shawarma at a downscale take-out joint. His bill came to around ten bucks.

Most of the early reporting also included reconstructions cobbled together from eyewitness testimony, police reports and security camera footage. This is where the mainstream media did engage in some irresponsibly speculative reporting—none more so than CTV affiliate CFTO, which led the 6 p.m. news on September 2 with an absurdly hyperbolic reconstruction of the incident.

After playing some fuzzy security camera footage showing Bryant driving the wrong way down Bloor Street, reporter Tom Hayes wonders aloud, “Why did the luxury convertible cross over into oncoming traffic? Was the driver trying to shake the man holding on to the car, or was the driver forced?” Next, the broadcast cuts to a wide shot of Hayes in a parking lot, crouching beside a white convertible of his own. The handheld camera rushes in on Hayes as he barks, “There were reports that the cyclist was hanging on, possibly to the steering wheel.” Hayes clasps the wheel of the car. “Could this have made it difficult for the driver to turn right…instead having to go left into the opposite lane?” Here, Hayes jerks the wheel back to the left, pointing accusingly. There’s a cut back to the security footage as Hayes announces conclusively, “And that’s where the cyclist struck the mailbox and later died.”

The way the segment strings together fact, speculation and unsourced reports is awkward enough, but Hayes hardly even bothers to specify which is which. And eyewitness testimony, the source of all the reconstructions, is no silver bullet anyway. “Witnesses are unreliable,” says Carleton University journalism professor emeritus Joe Scanlon, whose research focuses on rumour dissemination after high-profile disasters. “They reconstruct what they think must have happened. Every time you talk to someone they change their story a little bit.”

The public appetite for new information was voracious. The following week also saw stories about whether or not Bryant had received a “VIP stay in custody.” There were reports on the hazards of urban cycling. TheGlobe’s Christie Blatchford wrote a column titled, “In a city of drivers and cyclists at odds, the one on the bike is always right.” In it, she argued Bryant “may well have a solid legal defence, [but] it is trickier to see how he will be able to muster a moral one.”

And increasingly, there was a focus on Navigator. Rick Salutin, a freelance columnist for the Globe, is disdainful of PR. He fears that with spin doctors involved, the reporting becomes dubious. “It’s grossly unfair that if you have a lot of money you can hire people to spin your case,” he says, “and if you don’t, you’re largely at the mercy of those who do.” But reporters and editors insist they had no contact with the PR firm and respond to any suggestion otherwise with incredulous denials—of course we didn’t talk to Navigator, they say. Maybe someone else did, but not us.

On September 3, Star reporters Kenyon Wallace and Nick Kyonka put together a detailed chronology of Bryant’s evening. Someone, described only as “close to the family,” told Parley that Bryant and Abramovitch went for shawarma, then drove over to the east end for a walk, before finally getting dessert and heading to Yorkville. Kyonka and Wallace visited every destination, quoting one waitress who refused to be named, and another who gave only her first name. Both reporters were interns at the time, and neither knew who the original source was. (Parley won’t disclose the name.)

At first glance their story is indeed suspicious—unnamed sources, an angle sympathetic to Bryant, coming just as the weight of public sympathy was beginning to shift. “I just think it was a plant from the PR firm,” says Peter Kuitenbrouwer, Toronto columnist at the Post and acting Toronto editor at the time. “It was really frustrating because they obviously had access to Bryant. And with an unnamed source, how do you even know it’s true?”

But Parley refutes any suggestion of Navigator’s involvement. “If I were [Navigator chair Jaime] Watt I’d be delighted, because he’s getting credit for a lot of shit I don’t think he had anything to do with.” Parley says the original source didn’t approach the Star. Instead, editor-in-chief Michael Cooke came into the morning news meeting on September 2 and insisted on learning everything Bryant had been up to before the accident. So they started making calls.

Plan B was to deploy reporters around Yorkville to suss out Bryant’s whereabouts, an approach that obviously would have turned up nothing. “It would’ve been a better story for us if he had been drinking,” says Parley. “No question we were going out there with a bit of gotcha in mind, and the facts were the opposite of gotcha.”

On the morning of Tuesday September 1, Bryant was the villain and Sheppard was a near-innocent victim. By Wednesday evening, they’d almost switched roles. Sheppard’s image had been tainted by stories of a troubled past, police encounters and reports of alcoholism. Bryant’s image had been burnished—mainly in contrast to Sheppard. And though no one will admit to speaking with the PR company, Watt tells a different story. “Things were being reported that were not true,” he says. “That Bryant left the scene of the accident, that he was drunk, that he would be in court on October 19 when it was just an initial appearance by his lawyer. If we’d let them go they would’ve set like cement.”

Watt is unabashed. Of course the agency spoke to journalists. And it did so because the working theory, as Cornies might call it, was leading reporters down a distinctly one-sided, anti-Bryant path. “We did what we needed to do to change the dimensions of the story, and then we stopped talking,” Watt says. “We know that journalists and newsrooms have been the subject of huge cutbacks. We have more general reporters working on more topics, and we have a huge pressure to file quickly. So there are lots of examples of pack mentality setting in.”

Navigator was most interested in what would make its client look good. But that may not have been too far from the truth. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that the story became more accurate after the PR people got involved,” says Ira Basen, producer of CBC Radio’s Spin Cycles, a documentary series about the intersection between PR and the press. “That would only surprise you if you thought they were there to be untruthful. And sometimes they are. Not outright liars, but they speak through what I call a sort of managed truth. But sometimes that’s very close to the absolute truth. Hopefully journalists don’t need PR people to turn them in the right direction,” he says. “But we all have our blind spots.”

Within 24 hours of the incident, members of the cycling community rallied hard to correct what they saw as a smear campaign against Sheppard. Donald Wiedman, a PR professional and cycling advocate who took up Sheppard’s case pro bono, says the public was “duped with Navigator’s help.” He even set up a Twitter feed called Bryant Truths, a counter to Bryant Facts, Navigator’s feed that operated alongside a blog of the same name. (Navigator rarely updated those accounts, though for the rest of the year there was predictable hyperbole about Twitter’s importance—the December 2009 issue of Toronto Life even included “political damage control by tweeting” as one of the “25 Ideas That Are Changing the World.”)

Mess Media, an activist website that claims it “corrects media reporting errors” in stories on bike couriers, set up the Bryant Watch blog, featuring posts about Watt’s own 1985 fraud conviction. The site strongly alleged that Navigator was feeding the press with anti-Sheppard information. Mess Media complained about biased coverage, but much of what the site reported was impossible to prove and patently libelous. “Bryant lost it,” reads a post from December 7. “He was overtaken by complete rage. If he had a gun he may have shot Al in the back. If he had a bat he may have bashed Al’s head in from behind.” Another blog, The Bike Joint, dubbed Bryant the “butcher of Bloor Street.”

Wiedman was also in touch with another, more mysterious activist, who goes by the moniker “honestedits” and who will only describe himself as working in the “information technology sector.” “Who else would risk speaking against the powerful than the anonymous?” he asked via e-mail. He alleges that television reports chopped up the security camera footage and presented it out of order. His “improved footage” YouTube videos, complete with annotation explaining what’s happening onscreen, were posted days after the accident and received over 40,000 hits.

Some bloggers were more scrupulous. In Torontoist’s year-end round up, Hamutal Dotan wrote, “It would behoove us all to sit down, shut up, and let that justice system do its job. None of us knows what precisely occurred that night: the specifics…ought not to be a matter on which we speculate, theorize, emote, or onto which we graft explanations as they suit our world views.”

***

The Star’s Doolittle has another theory as to why the Bryant-Sheppard coverage, after a shaky start, turned out relatively well. She thinks the story of Victoria Stafford, an eight-year-old girl kidnapped in Woodstock, Ontario, made reporters and editors a lot more cautious about jumping the gun on breaking news. “I think Tori Stafford was a teachable moment in newsrooms across this country.”

On April 8, 2009, an unidentified woman kidnapped Tori as the girl walked home from school. A security camera at a nearby high school captured her leaving with the abductor. It was the last time Tori was seen alive—three-and-a-half months later, police found her remains. The abduction created a speculative bubble that imploded in an especially embarrassing and appalling way. “We always do our best to avoid preconceptions,” says Doolittle, “and we know the dangers of them, and we sometimes get these reminders of those dangers.”

Though estranged, Tori’s parents Tara McDonald and Rodney Stafford came together to appeal to the media and the community for their daughter’s safe return. As the days and weeks went by, there was little news about Tori’s whereabouts or the perpetrators, but there was still plenty of public interest. So attention shifted to Tori’s parents—their strained relationship, McDonald’s OxyContin addiction and a trust account she set up, which some speculated was an attempt to profit from the tragedy.

“It’s seldom that you have a parent like Tara McDonald making herself so available,” says Cornies, now a columnist for the London Free Press, one of the major newspapers closest to Woodstock. “Most people in that situation are shell-shocked and grief-stricken into hiding, but Tara was inexplicably almost brave and in front of the cameras and microphones daily. And because that was such a departure from standard behaviour amongst parents of missing youth, all the alarm bells start to go off among reporters: ‘Why is this parent so different?’ And then the theories begin to spin out.”

In the Stafford case, the working theory was that Tori’s mother was losing her grip on sanity and was maybe even the kidnapper. In the information vacuum that enveloped the case, there was little to substantiate that, but little to disprove it either.

The nadir of the Stafford story came on April 21, when police released a composite sketch of the woman in the school video. Some comments on a Facebook page speculated it resembled McDonald. The flimsily sourced rumours made it into newspapers across the country, which reported the allegations and McDonald’s denials.

This whole sordid soap opera continued until police arrested Michael Thomas Rafferty and Terri-Lynne McClintic on May 20. Cornies wrote an editorial for the Free Press after the discovery of Tori’s body that concluded with the news of a funeral. “We’re not invited,” he wrote, referring to the media. “Nor should we expect to be. But…it seems right that we should encircle McDonald and Stafford now—in solidarity, in sorrow and in abject apology.”

Montreal-based media critic Craig Silverman thinks it was a textbook case of pack reporting, exacerbated by the expectation that public interest must always be met with more coverage, whether there’s anything new to report or not. “It is so intense when something happens and the details are sketchy, but you’ve got to write about it,” says the author of Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech. “The idea that we could stay silent when the competition is out there reporting things takes an incredible amount of self-control because you want to beat your competitors.”

After all, says Kelly Grant, the goal when reporting a breaking story is, “To report the hell out of it, to talk to as many people as humanly possible, to take any suggestion that could be controversial and just report the shit out of it.”

Silverman thinks the Stafford case is an example of “confirmation bias,” as were the early stages of the Bryant-Sheppard story. “Once you’ve decided what’s happened, you’re going to write to that,” he says, “and if something is reported without due diligence, it’s going to spread because people will not have the self-control to stay away from it, and because the news cycle is so quick right now.”

In 2006, for example, the Post reported that Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians living in Iran would have to wear ID badges reminiscent of those worn by Jews in Nazi Germany. The paper ran the piece on the front page even after a rabbi at New York’s Simon Wiesenthal Center said he couldn’t confirm it, though he believed it to be true. The New York Post picked up the story, but it turned out to be a complete fabrication. “It seemed like it could be true. It fit certain perceptions of what Iran might do, so it was believed easily,” says Silverman. “But it was entirely made up. They went with it because they wanted the scoop.”

***

Reporters chased down a lot of scoops during the first week of the Bryant-Sheppard story, and in the beginning they were thrown off by a lot of glib assumptions and false innuendo. In the end, though, a more complicated and probably more truthful story emerged. Maybe it really was just diligent reporting. Maybe it was simply that reporters kept finding new information and didn’t have the time to report idle speculation.

More troubling is the suggestion that the PR spin may have inadvertently kept them honest. Even if Navigator wasn’t behind the story about Bryant’s night on the town, it’s possible that it was behind some other reported details, or that the move to shut down communication from Bryant’s camp forced reporters to look into the other side to keep feeding the public appetite. “That made a lot of people turn toward Sheppard,” says Matthew Coutts. “It didn’t take much to find out about his past and family in Edmonton, and you had Bryant’s story coming out in a far more controlled manner.”

The coverage wasn’t an unqualified success. There were those initial reports of a hit and run. There were too many irrelevant, salacious stories about Sheppard’s past, too many dubious reconstructions of the accident and there are still too many questions. There are also hints of PR meddling on the day Bryant emerged from Traffic Services. The Globe’s Tim Appleby says that an unidentified man insisted photographers turn their cameras so the police station would be out of view and Bryant would appear against a bright blue morning sky instead. (“I don’t know anything about that,” says Watt.)

But the mainstream media’s missteps pale next to the blogosphere’s. “When I started doing this, the media controlled information,” says Appleby. “People got their information from the mainstream, and that’s absolutely not the case anymore.”

He believes that civilian journalism is both good and bad. “Probably more good than bad,” he says. “But the bad thing is that everyone has an opinion. And it’s harder and harder to separate the real from the imagined.”

Much has been made of the new Canada Periodical Fund, which Masthead calls the “biggest shake-up” to hit mag-funding in a long, long time.

We all had a fun time parsing the politics behind the changes the feds were making to magazine funding: Artsy, small circulation mags were upset to learn that they may get their funding cut off completely, since publications now have to meet a 5,000 minimum paid circulation to qualify for funding. Some larger magazines may actually get more money. Magazines aimed at minority groups will not have to meet a minimum circulation requirement, but, gay and lesbian-oriented titles will. No one will be able to receive more than $1.5 million in funding. Except farm publications. Hmm…what could it all mean?

Well, American mag-lovers should be doing some parsing of their own, according to David Westphal of the USC Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism. In a just-released study, he writes that funding and postal subsidies are “a matter of life and death” for many publications and that they’ve been quietly shrinking for years—since 1792, in fact.

Late this spring, the editorial team at Reader’s DigestCanada (circulation 936,000, founded 1948) gathered in the magazine’s offices on Montreal’s René Lévesque Boulevard Ouest and listened to a two-hour spiel about how to bring the staid old brand up to date. The insight came courtesy of Derek Webster, founding editor of the award-winning but reader-starved Maisonneuve (circulation 5,000, founded 2002).

Webster’s suggestions—ranging from minor (choose less boring pull quotes) to major (reducing word counts, more visual pieces)—went over well. He was so impressive, in fact, that editor-in-chief Robert Goyette subsequently hired Webster away from his urbane journal of “arts, opinions, and ideas” and brought him on as the managing editor ofReader’s Digest‘s flagship English edition, the ultra-mainstream, 800-pound corporate gorilla of Canadian magazine publishing.

Thirty-nine years old, with a Master of Fine Arts in poetry and an almost non-existent profile outside the Canadian magazine intelligentsia, Webster seems an unlikely choice for RD, probably the biggest and most tradition-bound magazine in Canada. The scion of a wealthy Montreal family—his father Norman is a Rhodes scholar and a former editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail and Montreal’s The Gazette—he’s been running his own show since 2002, when he founded Maisonneuve, which advertised itself as a magazine of “eclectic curiosity,” a tagline that couldn’t be less apt for Reader’s Digest. Even Webster admits that he rarely read RDbefore being hired, though he’s delicate with criticism, offering diplomatically that he “did not necessarily feel it was relevant.”

A single father with a young daughter, Webster took the job partially because he needed something a little more dependable (and profitable) after seven precarious years with a small magazine. Friends and colleagues say he relishes the new challenge, and he sounds excited, but he’s working in an alien corporate structure with a long institutional memory. And he doesn’t technically replace former editor Peter Stockland, who was laid off this March along with eight percent of the parent company’s global workforce. For now he’ll be working under Goyette, who is editor-in-chief of RD’s English and French language editions—though Webster expects to take over the English magazine eventually.

For now, he’s just hoping to update the famously fusty old brand. RD’s age-old formula is yielding diminishing returns, and the question remains whether a few nips and tucks will be enough to revitalize it. “It’s not a sexy job. But I didn’t start Maisonneuve for those reasons either,” he says from his office on the ninth floor of a sleek but characterless glass-walled office tower in downtown Montreal (a far cry from the west-end apartment that was home to Maisonneuve). “There’s some adjustment I’m going to have to make—it’s a corporate culture, not an entrepreneurial one, but it’s a team with huge resources that reaches millions of Canadians.”

True enough, but Webster and Goyette still face enormous challenges. In 2005, the magazine sold more than a million copies per issue, with a readership of 7.5 million. Since then, it’s lost 100,000 subscribers and almost one million readers, according to Print Measurement Bureau statistics. And the American parent company recently declared bankruptcy, though Webster says the Canadian outfit hasn’t been affected. More worrisome is the magazine’s relatively piddly $20 million from ads. Compare that to Chatelaine’s $50 million, achieved with a readership almost half the size.

Then there’s the small matter of the magazine’s bathroom-reading reputation. Street cred might not mean much to the bottom line, but that rep can’t help but bruise the egos of Webster and Goyette. Even John Ibbitson, The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa bureau chief who recently penned a wistful paean to RD—arguing that most the magazine’s detractors couldn’t meet its “standards of clarity, brevity and focus if their careers depended on it”— doesn’t actually subscribe. The 54-year-old author and journalist prefers to read it while nostalgically nibbling Velveeta cheese at the home of his 80-something parents. He feels that a general interest magazine conceived in the early 20th century is a quixotic proposition in a niche-oriented, 21st century marketplace. Carmine Starnino, co-founder at Maisonneuve (and now its editor-in-chief), says, “Reader’s Digest can basically get any writer it wants to write about any topic it wants, and yet it’s stuck peddling the same shit that it does month in and month out.”

For now, Webster sounds bold but is vague on specifics. He does say he’d like to inject a little more style into the magazine’s features. He acknowledges that RD’s research department has historically re-phrased passages, in pursuit of accuracy but at the expense of literary flair. He proposes spending more time re-sprucing the prose after the research stage. And there’ll be fewer original pieces and more pick-ups (the condensed articles for which the magazine is best known), though they’ll come from a broader range of sources, possibly including literary quarterlies such as Fiddlehead and The Antigonish Review. The originals that do get commissioned will be “worked harder,” with “more resources put into them.” Webster also talks about being more hard-hitting and investigative and about wielding the editorial cudgel of a big budget and a high profile, but offers few specifics. But, as Stockland says, Webster won’t be able to “rip up the carpets and set the chesterfield on fire.”

Still, some people think that’s exactly what’s needed. Marco Ursi, former editor of Masthead, says that the magazine needs a “Maclean’s-like reinvention” to revitalize the brand. And Matthew Fox, an associate editor at Maisonneuve until 2006, suggests that the magazine needs a major re-think, noting that Webster “has a clear sense of what he wants a magazine to be. I don’t know how that’ll play at the Digest but that’s what they need right now.” Meanwhile, veteran industry watcher and consultant D.B. Scott is more cautious, though probably more realistic. “I don’t think that one hire is going to make that big a difference,” he says. “I don’t think that RD is in such perilous circumstances. I may be wrong. But I think the likelihood is that Reader’s Digest will change Derek more than Derek will change Reader’s Digest.”