The newspaper medium is an easy mark for ridicule. Itscaricature consists of the inverted pyramid, the 5 o’clock deadline and a strict adherence to “just the facts, ma’am.” Yet for a half-decade Jon Wells has worked within the supposedly rigid confines of his daily newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, and repeatedly tested the limits of long-form journalism. Since 2003, thedailyhas published six of the diligent reporter’s oversized features.

These stories aren’t mere double-page spreads appearing in hefty Saturday editions. The first, “Poison,” weighed in at 160,000 words and ran over five weeks and 31 instalments. Wells won a National Newspaper Award for that one. The other five serials — “Sniper,” “Heat,” “Post Mortem,” “Emergency” and “To the Grave” — have all been published at similar lengths.

Review online editor Sara Chappel sits down with Wells to talk about his ideas, his research and the writing process for such large-scale projects.

Sara Chappel: What kinds of ideas are you drawn to?

Jon Wells: I wanted to be a sports writer when I was a teenager. I used to write stuff at home when I was 11, 12 years old, on my own, just kind of making up stories. Every game has a built-in, natural narrative: there’s a beginning, middle and an end, and there’s a winner and a loser. That’s the real basic skeleton of a sports narrative.
Most of my series are crime stories, but I don’t think I’m drawn to crime stories themselves. I’m drawn more to writing about people who encounter great challenges in life. Certainly in crime cases this manifests itself in the detectives who investigate these horrible murder cases and the families of victims who have to cope with loss.

There’s always some kind of hook that gets people into the narrative and tunes them into the plot and what happens at the end. But in between are the profiles, so I’m getting into the minds of different characters and what makes them tick — good or bad. Crime stories are filled with extreme examples of people behaving very badly. Criminal Minds and CSI are about people trying to get at the core of what makes an evil mind work, and I’m also interested in trying to show for readers what makes someone tick, who’s operating beyond the pale of what we would term to be civilized or humane behaviour.

In the one I did on the firefighters — “Heat” — the main character dies of cancer. That wasn’t a crime story per se, but it was about a family dealing with the horrible loss of its father and husband.

SC: Do you come up with the ideas or are they proposed by your editors?

JW: “Poison” was suggested by former editor-in-chief Dana Robbins. He had the idea that I could do something big with the story about Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon [who had been convicted of poisoning his friend, Ranjit Khela in 2002, and his first wife, Parvesh Dhillon, a year before that], but no one told me how big. To take chances, to stretch my legs and to try to write the best thing I’ve ever written were pretty much the only instructions Dana gave me.

The second, “Sniper,” again was Dana’s idea. The third, “Heat,” was mine. I suggested writing about this huge Plastimet fire that happened in Hamilton [on July 9–12, 1997] from the perspective of the firefighters — a real human drama, like the television series Third Watch. The fourth, “Post Mortem,” was an idea I got from going through our files of trials and stories we’d written and finding one that had a heavy CSI feel.

“Emergency” was my idea as well. I was trying to see if I could write more of a live narrative — something happening in the here and now. It was one of the most challenging concepts I’ve attempted because I didn’t know how it would end. That was stressful — hoping that it would come together as a narrative. The last one, “To the Grave,” another crime story, came about when I was researching the “Post Mortem” crime series. One of the detectives said, “You know, the one case that was really horrible was this one.” And I thought, “Oh, I should come back to that sometime and see if I can do the full treatment.”

SC: When you get an idea, what do you do then? What’s your research process?

JW: The first thing is to outline the general narrative arc of the story. It will certainly go through changes when I start writing — what do I want to show off the top, what do I want to hold in my pocket until later in the narrative and that kind of thing. But in terms of the general arc, I’ll write a timeline of events to help me develop the skeleton of the narrative. The rest of the process, no matter how long it takes, is putting meat on the bones and filling in the blanks. It’s a matter of determining the characters and then interviewing like crazy everyone who might be a character.

If it’s a crime story, I’ll gather court transcripts and read the stories that have been written about it so I can start to accumulate this volume of detail. Every tiny bit helps when you’re trying to fill out a narrative that’s going to last for at least 30 chapters. Through doing that, I conceptualize how the plot will progress. You’re trying to write a plot that’s sustainable, so you don’t want to splurge with all the great stuff in chapter one — or you’re in trouble.

One of the things Dana was telling me about doing long features was “over-report and under-write.” I always have this temptation to include every voice I interview so I can show the reader, “This is what I did, here’s the work I did.” But that’s not helping the reader.

SC: Where did you learn to report?

JW: I went to University of Western Ontario for my undergraduate degree in political science, and wrote sports for the student paper, The Gazette. Before I started my undergrad degree I was encouraged to take something that required a lot of writing, which for me was politics. I did a lot of big essays and stuff like that. Then I went to Carleton for the Master of Journalism program. Although I already had a pretty good grounding in writing, you can always learn more. That was two years and a great experience. Then I worked for the Guelph Tribune, a weekly paper, for five years. That was a great learning experience, too, because there were only three reporters. So there was a lot of chance to write features — not six-page features, but 20-inch profiles of people. That really helped me for the long-form journalism.

SC: How do you pace yourself when you’re in the middle of an enormous project?

JW: I just try not to fall behind. Once I started gathering information for “Poison,” even before it was coming fast and furious, I was trying to develop a rapport with the investigators. If you want them to open up to you with the kind of detail that you want for a narrative, you really need people to trust you. So there’s this process of just getting to know them, and that takes a while. So a month or two in I feel a little panicky because I don’t think I have all that much. And the editors come over to my desk and say, “Well, what have you got?” And I go, “Well, not much.” You have to be patient.

SC: So what do you do to get people to trust you?

JW: I always think if I can just get my foot in the door, if I can just sit down with them, it’s a lot friendlier. There’s an intimacy that comes from sitting down with anyone. That can provide some trust, and then it’s a case of getting them to see that you’re — hopefully — a person who’s not out to get them. And maybe you tell them that: “I’m not out to trick you.”

Word of mouth helps as well. If you’re doing your first interview, you have no track record. You’re relying on your sales skills. My father was a salesman, a great golfer and just a really personable guy. I’m not nearly as extroverted, but maybe some of that salesmanship rubbed off. You have to be able to look someone in the eye and believe what you’re selling — in this case, your integrity. You’re selling your ability to write something that’s not going to make them look like an idiot.

SC: Is there anywhere in particular you like interviewing?

JW: I like going to the person’s house. A coffee shop is okay. A cafeteria’s not very good — you have colleagues coming in and out. An interview room is cold and empty. I’d rather be in a person’s house if for no other reason than you can see what books are on the shelf and photos are on the wall. I was doing a long profile of [Hamilton Tiger-Cats running back] Jesse Lumsden a few weeks ago and by the end of it he was showing me the artwork on his wall. So I led with that.

SC: Do you sit down to write once you’ve got your research done, or do you write as you research and then piece it all together?

JW: I try to write as I go as much as I can — that’s easier when you’ve got a lot of time. With “Poison” and “Sniper” I took about a year to put each of those together. When I did “Poison,” for example, early on I interviewed the forensic pathologist who did the autopsy on this poisoning victim, and then I went to the library and researched poisoning cases, and wrote this chapter I called “The Autopsy.” It could have been a stand-alone feature. I wrote about 60 inches just on the autopsy mixed in with a profile of this pathologist, and then just shuffled it away and moved on. By the end I had almost a series of segments or chapters, and I started fitting them together. That’s how I stayed ahead of the game with “Poison.”

With the one I did last year, “To the Grave,” the deadline was tighter. I had about three months, which probably sounds like a lot, but not when it’s a 13-part series with 60 inches a day. And that was a difficult story. It was a case I wrote about and it never went to court, so it took a lot of arm-twisting for the police to talk to me. It was a matter of being quicker on my feet to try and figure how the story was going to go. As I was interviewing, I wrote the timeline. I couldn’t write it in scenes. Basically, I sat down: Chapter One. Even as we were laying out the pages for the series, I had a great interview with a cop who had arrested the killer at the hospital. They’d gotten into a big fight there and I didn’t even know that. So a one-liner that read, “He was arrested at the hospital, read his rights and taken to the jail,” changed to a detailed scene that read, in part, “He fought like a wild animal and was kicking and screaming against the glass doors of the emergency room….”

At a certain point, you do have to say, “Okay, I’m going to leave it alone, I’ve got to move on, I’ve got to polish what I have,” but it’s an ongoing process with the research and the writing. I never really say: “Now I’m done researching. Now I’m going to write.”

SC: Did you find out something that made you say, “Oh no, I wish I’d been able to put that in?”

JW: I’ve rarely felt that I’ve missed the hook or the potential payoff that would have made the story so much better. It’s more the little things. You become so obsessed with getting the little details that make it sing. For example, with “Heat,” the firefighter story, I’ve kept in regular contact with the widow and the son of Bob Shaw, the firefighter who died, and every so often — once or twice a year — we’ll get together for dinner. They’ll start telling old stories about Bob: “Oh, this is the place he used to come — we used to eat here all the time.” And I think, “Well, why didn’t you tell me that?” For the book [Heat: A Firefighter’s Story (Lorimer 2006)] I went back and used some of these extra details.

SC: Do you need anywhere in particular to write?

JW: It’s not the most peaceful place, but I’ve written most of my stuff at my desk at the Spectator. For the last series, when I was really under deadline, I spent some solid time at home, where I had total silence. I could write for a free half hour without checking email and without anyone bugging me and without listening to ambient noise. It’s amazing what you can get done. You feel like you’ve worked for three hours and think, “Okay, that’s a day for me, but you’ve only worked half an hour.”
SC: Do you keep a notebook?

JW: I use a notebook for reporting, but I find myself scribbling on little pieces of paper in my car as I’m driving — which is not recommended! As soon as I finish an interview, I’m writing in my head in the car on the way back. I’m thinking aloud about what they’ve said and what they’re like. I’m already starting the process of developing a portrait. Even driving to work, I’ve called my own voicemail if a thought comes to me about something. If I have my tape recorder, I’ll tape myself talking to myself. The process of writing never actually stops. Even when I’m watching TV or movies I pay attention to what the show’s writers are doing to the viewer: What’s the device they’re using? What’s keeping you locked in? You can have the most lyrical writing in the world, but if no one wants to read the whole story it’s not much use.

SC: Thanks for speaking to the Review.

For some people, home smells like baking bread, apples and cinnamon, maybe even hay and manure. For David Estok, it smells like ink. When he arrived for his first day as editor-in-chief of The Hamilton Spectatorand climbed up the back stairs, boxes in hand, the smell of the ink from the presses down the hall hit him in the face like summer heat. It was March 5, 2007, one day before his 50th birthday.

The ink told him he was home: back to Hamilton, back to journalism and back to the Spectator. It had been a long time: 12 years since he’d worked in journalism and more than 20 years since he’d worked at theSpectator. In the last 25 years, his career has balanced out pretty evenly between public relations and journalism.

Those on the outside found it strange that a job-jumping PR flack could be out of daily journalism for a long, long time and suddenly land a plum job at one of the country’s healthiest newspapers. But those on the outside don’t know David Estok, a Hamilton boy from a blue-collar family who carries the pride of the city in his heart like a brand. After two highly publicized, controversial redesigns in 2003 and 2006, the Spectatorneeded Estok. Public perception was that the paper, once as much a part of the fabric of the city as the steel mills and the Tiger Cats football team, had lost touch with Hamilton.

Although the Spectator has resisted decline better than many other North American city dailies in the Internet age, readership has suffered. Since Torstar Corp. bought the paper in 1999, circulation has declined by roughly five per cent, trimming revenues and profits in the process. There has also been something of a revolving door for senior management, with five changes of editors-in-chief and almost as many publishers in the past eight years.

For Estok, who was born and raised in the city’s east end, the job was to put the Hamilton back in theSpectator. Local news would be the only thing to help his paper stand out from the clamour of media competing for Hamiltonians’ attention. “You can go on the Internet and get The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Independent,” Estok says. “You can look at all the best reporting, nationally and internationally, in a moment. But what you can’t really get is local news.”

In a recent news meeting, Estok—a man whose simmering energy is barely contained by his five-foot-six frame—is a model of restraint. For most of it, he sits quietly, his dark hair and eyes made even darker by the low lights of the room, and listens to his staff hash out details. But there’s no doubt he’s engaged with the discussion: his eyes never stop sweeping the room, moving from editor to editor like searchlights.

It’s a slow news day, and everyone’s a little punchy, trading sarcasms across the boardroom table. Definitely going on the front page is a story about the Oriental Blood Brothers, an east-end gang that has recently graduated from petty crimes to Mafia-style shakedowns. There’s a throw from A1 to the Go section—a story all about bagels. Art director Bob Hutton riffs off the proposed caption: “What’s in a cinnamon raisin bagel?”

“It’s like, who’s buried in Grant’s tomb!” he says. “Are we really going with that?”

In managing the Spectator’s newsroom, Estok has leaned more toward evolution than revolution. For the first few months, his changes were minor, and invisible to outsiders. The 3:30 p.m. news meeting used to start at 4 p.m. Estok changed it to give the day a sense of urgency, and to get people to think earlier and faster about major stories of the day. He did the same thing with the 10:30 a.m. meeting, which used to get going at 11, jump-starting the journalistic juices before the Tims have a chance to cool off.

Then editorial team members saw their responsibilities shuffled, and suddenly everyone had a new job. News schedules were changed. Estok’s management style emphasized decision-making from the bottom up. “In a smaller newsroom, you have to push the decision-making down,” he says. “At the beginning, some said, ‘Tell me what to do.’ I’d just push back and say, ‘What do you think you should do?’”

For a newsroom used to sweeping, rapid transformation—the hallmark of Estok’s predecessor, Dana Robbins—the slow pace of change to the paper itself was initially a little stressful. Some staffers scratched their heads and wondered what exactly their new editor was going to do. Bill Dunphy, manager of Metroland’s web training programme, remembers thinking, “Why is he waiting? Come on, let’s see what you want to do here!”

Estok began to deliver in September 2007, starting with a Saturday editorial titled, “Putting the Hamilton Back in the Spectator.” The following Monday, readers opened a redesigned paper with a renewed emphasis on local news: a front page “heavily tilted” towards local stories, and a local section that started on A2 and continued from there. On the op-ed page, the paper requested columns from readers. In the Go section, there was a Local People page, anchored by Paul Wilson and Suzanne Bourret. The Sports section now featured a Game Day package for Ticats games.

Beefed-up local coverage has been anchored by more ambitious projects. One of the largest to date is a continuing series called “Hamilton Next.” Under Robbins, the Spectator had run the three-year “Poverty Project,” an inquiry into poverty in the city and what could be done about it. “Hamilton Next” was the next logical step, says Wade Hemsworth, a member of the series’ reporting team; it is an effort to “determine what Hamilton should do differently to achieve the kind of prosperity that appears to have passed our city by while it has lifted other cities in the Golden Horseshoe.” Along with compelling articles, the project included a multi-section stand-alone publication that was distributed with the paper in late October. There was also a Hamilton Next blog, and a SimCity-esque game called Future City in which readers could log on and choose initiatives for the city while watching the results of their decisions through the course of the game. And with that, the Hamilton was definitively back in the Spectator. “The revolution was a brilliant, brilliant thing,” Estok says, diplomatically. “The trick is to find ways to improve the paper without reversing what had been done in the past.”

Estok grew up on Martin Road, the middle child in a Slovakian Catholic family of five kids. He had two brothers, two sisters, a father who worked for a die-casting company, and a mother who was a secretary for a local developer and was active in church life.

Estok read the Spectator as a kid, particularly the sports pages, but it wasn’t until he went to Carleton University in 1979 to study journalism that he developed an all-consuming passion for news. After school, he interned at the Spectator in the summer of 1982—with Dana Robbins, among others—and quickly became known as a crackerjack reporter who made up for what he lacked in, as he puts it, “natural abilities,” with sheer dogged hard work. Robbins recalls that Estok was “so much better than the rest of us,” and veteran reporters regularly asked him to work on projects that, as a student, “he had no damn right being involved in.”

The Spectator hired him full time later in 1982 and he quickly became a city hall reporter, working with the man who would become his friend and mentor, Jerry Rogers. Together, they regularly skewered Hamilton’s dysfunctional city council, their efforts culminating in a municipal election where fully half the councillors lost their seats. Later, Estok became the Spectator’s labour reporter, winning the Journalist of the Year award in 1988 from the Western Ontario Newspaper Association (now the Ontario Newspaper Association).

It may have been tempting to hunker down and get comfortable on those laurels. “It’s very easy to be mediocre,” he says. “You hit your five years, you’re a veteran reporter, you make the calls and you punch out the stories.” But easy never interested Estok. That year, he jumped ship to work at the Financial Post where he covered the steel and automobile industries. The business paper had just gone daily, playing David to The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business’s Goliath, and needed a stable of hard-assed general reporters with daily news experience. Estok joined other young reporters such as Eric Reguly, James Walker and Andy Willis—all now established business journalists—in the aggressive, scrappy, underdog’s newsroom, and quickly established himself as a boundlessly energetic idea machine. Willis remembers Estok coming in “every day with 20 ideas that he thought up in the car.” Others noticed Estok’s talents and he quickly moved on to the assignment desk and then to a senior editor’s job.

By 1991, he had tired of business reporting (“Dow was up, Dow was down,” he remembers thinking), and moved into public relations, becoming the director of communications for the Workplace Health and Safety Agency. Four years later, he stepped into the associate business editor role at Maclean’s, but he was now living in London, Ontario with his wife, Kathy, and two small daughters, and the commute to Toronto was wearing. In 1996, Estok made a second move into public relations, this time to the communications and public affairs department at the University of Western Ontario, with a sideline job teaching business journalism and newsroom management to bright-eyed j-schoolers. “David ran our PR shop like a newsroom,” says Malcolm Ruddock, one of the department’s communications directors. “I don’t think the newsroom ever really got out of his blood.”

He stayed at Western for 10 years, until the siren song of journalism called him back to Hamilton. Someone Estok would rather not name phoned to ask if he’d let his name stand for consideration as editor-in-chief of the Spectator.

The newspaper Estok heads was first published in July 1846, the same year the city of Hamilton came into being. In 1877, the Spectator was the first newspaper William Southam bought; his family would go on to form one of Canada’s leading newspaper dynasties for more than a century.

However, the venerable past has given way to a sparse present. Like other daily newspapers, the Spectator’s circulation declined in the face of alternatives, particularly the Internet. This gradual falling away of subscribers had an attendant effect on profit margins. A spring 2007 article in Biz, a Hamilton-based business magazine, estimated that annual gross revenues at the Spectator had dropped from approximately $78 million in 1996 to $70 million in 2006. The magazine also speculated that profit margins had shrunk from 20 to 25 per cent to 12 to 15 per cent.

In response to the Internet and other threats, cost-cutting has become a permanent discipline at most papers. In the Spectator’s case, regular ownership changes in the late 1990s, culminating in the sale to Torstar, did not help staunch the bleeding of journalism positions. Since the Toronto-based corporation took over, the newsroom has shed at least 22 reporting and editorial jobs through buyouts, and has undergone periodic hiring freezes.

From a reader’s perspective, the biggest upheaval at the paper came on October 1, 2003 with then-editor-in-chief Dana Robbins’s “revolution.” Robbins and the Spectator’s senior managers had been impressed by the groundbreaking Impact Study released by Northwestern University’s Readership Institute in April 2001. Sparked by slow and steady circulation declines in the United States, the study outlined strategies to reverse the trend, including increased local content, lifestyle news and feature writing. The study also spoke of making newspapers easier to read and navigate, and changing the culture of newsrooms to encourage adaptability and innovation. Change became the official religion of the Spectator, and the study was its Bible.

By 2003, Robbins had initiated the Spectator’s first revolution, collapsing the paper’s six sections into four, eliminating separate sections for business, entertainment, and national and international news. Sports went tabloid. Baby boomers and suburban women between the ages of 25 and 49 were targeted with a new section, a broadsheet “magazine within a newspaper” called Go, that covered health, fashion and lifestyle news, in a graphic and photo-heavy format. Regular news stories got shorter, but there were also much longer series, usually heavy on crime and drama, which according to the study, were of interest to female readers.

The reaction was initially positive. Readership went up 6.3 per cent in the first year, with even higher gains among boomers and women. The Spectator won a 2003 National Newspaper Award for Special Projects, and favourable attention from the Newspaper Association of America and the Associated Press Managing Editors website. The paper was even featured in a May 2006 presentation by the Northwestern Readership Institute, the very author that encouraged the changes in the first place.

The second phase of the revolution, in 2006, was less dramatic. There were no more turns off the front page. The news mix in the front section was shuffled, with a photo montage of major international stories at the beginning of the section followed by wire stories on national and international news. Local news, opinion and business made up the last half of the front section.

The relegation of local news (and its overemphasis on crime) didn’t sit well with readers. “The paper had gone into a lot of negative coverage,” says Ron Foxcroft, a Hamiltonian and CEO of Fluke Transportation Group and Fox 40. “It had deteriorated to a National Enquirer kind of paper.” Steve Petherbridge, a former managing editor at the Toronto Star and Estok’s former boss at the Financial Post, who reads the Spectator“in spasms,” says that the page-three photo montage looked like “a child had cut up a number of tabloid pages and stuck them together in a scrapbook.”

Many in the newsroom weren’t happy. “Reporters never thought the revolution worked,” says veteran columnist Susan Clairmont. “The integrity of the journalism we were doing was compromised by the design of the paper.” Writers stopped wanting their stories to land on the front page, since stories there were more likely to be severely cut to fit the space. Reporter Wade Hemsworth also says reporters were “a little uneasy that local news was pushed farther back in the section.”

Readers made their voices heard, too. Their letters, phone calls and emails argued for more prominent local news. Estok points out that there was an industry-wide push towards local content—sparked in part by that same study that inspired the revolution—and the Spectator needed to follow suit.

Robbins left the Spectator in December 2006, shortly after the second phase of the revolution began, to become publisher of both The Record in Kitchener-Waterloo and the Guelph Mercury. Any changes made during his tenure could never be considered definitive, he believes. “We always need to be evolving to meet the needs of our readers,” he says now. “If I’d stayed, it would have changed.”

Robbins left a list of people he thought would be ideal to help the paper readjust its sights. One of them, according to then-publisher Ian Oliver, would not only bring a much-desired outside perspective to the newsroom, but was “passionate about journalism and passionate about Hamilton.”

Estok says that working at the Spectator is a “great privilege and a special joy,” although he admits he had no intention of getting back into daily journalism. But he jumped at the opportunity. “How many times does someone call you up and say, ‘How’d you like to run one of the best local newspapers in Canada?’” he says, the glee fairly making him dance. “I was just a bit surprised they would consider someone like me.” But those who know Estok say the move was a natural choice, both for the paper and for Estok. His PR and academic experience was a plus, according to Ian Oliver. “He always stayed in touch with Hamilton, but brought back a bigger world perspective, which shows in the paper,” he says. “By having David there, you expanded the role and the knowledge of the newsroom.”

It wasn’t just the bosses who were happy to see Estok assume the top chair. Those who knew him, both from his work at the Spectator 20 years earlier and in other positions, thought he’d be ideal too. Nicole MacIntyre, the Spectator ’s only city hall reporter and one of Estok’s former journalism students at Western, says that when a few staffers spotted him in the lobby during the selection process, rumours started and there was “a real energy of people really hoping that he was going to get the job.”

The way ahead will be hard. The Spectator ’s circulation has grown 1.4 per cent in the past year, to 106,530 for weekdays and 117,172 on Saturday according to audited figures released by the Canadian Newspaper Association, but that increase is overlaid on a decade-long decline. Telemarketing, which once accounted for 75 per cent of new subscriptions, has been severely limited by privacy laws. Increasing or even maintaining ad sales, which account for 80 per cent of the paper’s revenue, is a constant challenge for the paper’s ad execs. According to Kelly Montague, the Spectator ’s vice-president of advertising, local advertising is strong, whereas the paper’s national ad campaigns, which are arranged partially by Torstar and partially by Metroland, are “flat,” and classifieds are “a mixed bag.” As in editorial, the payoff for the ad department is local. Following the example of community-oriented parent company Metroland, which has managed better than most news outfits to resist the shrinking revenue epidemic, the Spectator highlights local advertising through a variety of means—calendars, consumer magazines, the website and even a banner on the building’s outside wall—as well as in the daily paper itself.

Of course, the great conundrum for the future is the Internet and how to profit from it. No one seems to have figured that out yet, but like other papers, the Spectator is working hard at developing its website with video footage, blogs and breaking news. Spectator staffers go through a week of training at WebU, Metroland’s Internet training centre. There, reporters learn how to file stories to the web and how to shoot video to lend their stories the requisite online visual appeal. Blogs from reporters go behind the scenes and take an in-depth look at issues concerning Hamilton. Estok hopes to get readers interested in the fate of the city. More eyeballs looking at the website’s ads wouldn’t be a bad thing, either.

With the reader jury still out on his changes, Estok is getting ready to reduce the width of the paper to save on the cost of newsprint. The weekend paper was retooled in mid-February. So far though, his critics are giving him passing grades. “With the previous publisher and editor, you got the sense that he drove in from Burlington or Oakville, got off the highway, went into the Spectator ’s parking lot, and then operated from inside that environment,” says Ryan McGreal, editor of Raise the Hammer, a magazine devoted to urban issues in Hamilton. “Estok seems to identify with Hamilton in a way that management hasn’t necessarily in the past. He identifies with Hamilton as an urban environment, not as a bedroom community.” For Naomi Powell, who covers Estok’s old steel beat and sits at his old desk, the changes are logical. “We’re a local newspaper, right? Local news is our bread and butter.”

It’s November 3, 2007, the first night of the year when snow is no longer a hypothetical consideration. At Ivor Wynne Stadium, smack in the middle of the north end, the Ticats play their last game of what’s been a dismal, 2-15 season.

David Estok sits in section 26, row D, seat 13—same as always. His brother and best friend sit with him, in the seats his parents bought when Estok was a young boy. He rarely misses a game, rooting for the team, cheering them on, hearkening back to the glory days when winning a Grey Cup wasn’t a distant memory and it seemed certain that great things were just around the corner.

Loving the Ticats these days is a little like loving Hamilton itself, a lunch bucket steel town with the highest poverty rate in Ontario. Appreciating the city requires a sure and unshakeable faith that its fortunes are bound to improve some day. Estok loves both.

Estok knows he’s come back to daily journalism at a challenging time, but he says he’s never been happier. Even his friends have commented that he looks 10 years younger. “What do you do on Saturday? You wake up, put coffee on, go get the newspaper, sit at the kitchen table and read the newspaper. On Monday, I come in to the Spectator, get my coffee, sit at my desk and read the newspaper.” He leans forward and grins. “In other words, they’re paying me to do what I do on my own time!”

When Daniel Girard stepped into the Leo Baeck Day School at Bathurst and Eglinton in Toronto, he wasn’t sure what to expect. Uniforms, probably. Reverence, maybe. He did notice yarmulkes adorned with the Maple Leafs logo andSimpsons characters, and shorts and T-shirts worn to Friday afternoon services in the Holy Blossom Temple next to the school. He also heard a profession of social and religious equality for women and homosexuals. But nothing in Girard’s own secular public education prepared him for the mixture of the sacred and the mundane he saw at the reform, small-l liberal Jewish school. “I went to school out west. I was in the B.C. system, which is a public system,” he says, a little sheepishly. “I didn’t know what a ‘religious school’ was like.”

Girard, an education reporter for the Toronto Star, visited Leo Baeck in early September as part of a three-reporter, three-article project quarterbacked, as Girard puts it, by fellow Star education reporter Louise Brown. When asked about the genesis of the project, Brown is quick to dismiss her brainstorm. “Well, it’s not rocket science,” she says, chuckling. “We knew that faith-based funding would be a huge issue. Even in the summer, Brown says she saw op. ed. pieces starting to appear as the media buzz around the issue gathered steam. From there, the coverage snowballed: Columns. Polls. Panel discussions. Briefs from the campaign buses. Carefully staged news conferences.

But what Brown didn’t see was coverage from the schools themselves, even as kids and teachers started trooping back to class in September. Worse, says Brown, few people actually knew what everyday life was like in a religious school, including her. “I’ve covered schools on and off for almost 30 years for the Star, and Ialways cover public education.” When the faith-based funding issue surfaced, though, Brown realized her own knowledge as a reporter was lacking. “I was poorly equipped to write about this because I never stepped foot in a private, faith-based school.” Embarrassment aside, the opportunity to tell a story about something new and unknown to most readers, and to the reporters themselves, became something that was too good to pass up.

So Brown proposed a series of articles. She, Girard and third education reporter Kristin Rushowy would go to three schools around Toronto, representing a trinity of the three largest religious affiliations in the GTA: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Brown got in touch with religious leaders from the communities, who in turn pointed her to three schools — Knox Christian School in Bowmanville, Leo Baeck Day School in Toronto and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) Elementary School in Mississauga — that would co-operate with her project.

The Star’s team’s willingness to put themselves at the centre of the action, so to speak, throws into relief a common problem in the coverage of religion by reporters whose beats may not regularly intersect with religious matters: ignorance. Ignorance about religious practices, ignorance about the finer points of religious doctrine and ignorance about the extent to which religious identity encompasses all elements of some people’s lives. Religion, in all its twining, tangled complexity, is simply outside many reporters’ realm of experience.

The roots of this lack of knowledge run deep. Lois Sweet, associate professor of journalism at Carleton University, is the author of God in the Classroom: The Controversial Issue of Religion in Canada’s Schools. Some of the difficulties in reporting on religion, she says, lie with the lack of awareness in society as a whole about the role of faith in people’s lives. She points out, “In a multicultural society it’s crazy that we don’t know enough about the practices and experiences of others and the extent to which religious faith informs their lives.” Journalists, she says, “have this fear about how we cover this without totally getting it wrong or

Stuart Laidlaw, faith and ethics reporter at the Star, agrees with Sweet. He says reporters need to be more willing to admit ignorance in order to get to the heart of their stories. “One reporter I talked to said, ‘I was never taken to church by my parents,’” he recalls. He says he told the reporter, “You just say, ‘I’m not that familiar with this type of church — can you explain it to me?’”

Laidlaw sees an unwillingness to cause offence as only one reason reporters have trouble covering religious issues. Among journalists — and, by extension, the public at large — there exists the fundamental notion that communities and people of faith are, well, fundamentalist. He says this belief causes reporters to put up mental walls between themselves and their story, often preventing them from getting to the heart of the issue because of fear, real or imagined. “And as soon as reporters put a wall between them and their stories,” he says, “they’re lost.”

Laidlaw would like to see more reporters break down these walls by “getting into the heads” of people who are religious. He’d also like to see more done “to try to understand why they see religion as an everyday aspect of their lives, and to do that from a number of different perspectives.”

For Brown, religious expression in a schoolwas an unfamiliar experience. She says that the extent to which the Knox Christian School curriculum had God all through it was the most surprising thing about her two days observing classes and chatting with students. The classes she attended, the students she talked with, even the e-newsletter she read on the school website were, as she wrote in a follow-up column in the Star, “infused with Christianity.”

Each of the reporters spent a few hours preparing for his or her visit to the school, chatting on the phone to administrators and perusing websites. But the ability to research as much or as little as necessary to cover a topic as staggeringly complex as religion is something that is often difficult for reporters under tight time constraints and immutable deadlines.

For Larry Cornies, this is the crux of the matter. Cornies holds the Maclean-Hunter chair of communication ethics at Ryerson University and is a news page editor at The Globe and Mail. He has long held interests in religion and media, serving as associate editor of The Mennonite from 1980-1984 and publishing a study on religion content in Ontario dailies in 1986. For him, religion coverage is not constrained so much by a fear of causing offence — “Reporters aren’t generally afraid of offending people,” he says, grinning — but by a lack of time to fully investigate the context and history surrounding religious issues. “What reporters are afraid of is looking stupid and betraying the fact they don’t know what the issues are.”

This lack of time is perhaps the reason that coverage of the issue in most media outlets hasn’t exactly been groundbreaking. Opinion columnists like Murray Campbell for the Globe and Christina Blizzard for theToronto Sun have weighed in. Polls of all sorts have been published. Reporters on election buses have dutifully filed their reports. According to Jennifer Mossop, former Liberal MPP for Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, election columnist for the Sun and former anchor and producer for CHCH television, political coverage doesn’t really change, no matter what the topic. She knows first-hand, now that she’s been on “the other side of the microphone,” how much gets missed when reporters are concentrating all their energies on grabbing a 20-second sound bite. “Reporters need a headline, and they have to have something that’s a little sexy to talk about.”

There’s nothing sexy at the ISNA Elementary School, unless you count a notebook carried by a hijab-clad girl that read “I (heart) High School Musical.” Rushowy spent two “very long” school days at the Islamic school and found, as she wrote in a follow-up column, “kids will be kids.” Although she noticed big differences from the public schools she usually covers — girls and boys in Grade 4 and up sit in separate areas in the classroom, students are called to prayer at 1:30 in the afternoon — she describes the general chaos common to all classrooms everywhere: students pitching erasers at each other when the teacher’s back is turned, and mayhem in a Grade 2 classroom when the teacher, Sister Sadia, leaves the room, complete with a student guard at the door to warn of her imminent return.

Reaction to the September 22-24 series was mixed, judging from the letters to the editor. Some people took issue with the word “segregated” that appeared in the headline for Rushowy’s story. One reader was skeptical that students could be taught religion for one-third of their day and still have time to follow the official Ontario curriculum. And according to Brown, one reader was pleased that “for once, the media aren’t making fun of Christians.

For Girard, the purpose of the articles was to inform. “We wanted to break down the myths of what these schools were like,” he says. “We wanted to go in, to tell people what it was like, and let them decide whether they were surprised.”

Brown has an even more philosophical take on the project. For her, reporting from the religious schools goes to the heart of the purpose of journalism in the first place: to inform citizens so that they can make responsible choices. “This is something that presumably will be informing people’s vote, and how can you make a responsible decision if you don’t even know what the schools are like?”

Amen.