Dan Smith, chief steward, editorial, for the Toronto Star, and Kathy Vey, an active member of the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild, are handing out black-and-white stickers to staff on December 3, which SONG has declared Core Values Day. Some of the stickers say, “Star to the core!” or “Editors are core!” or “I’m hard core!” Others are blank for people to fill in. The “core” theme comes from the bombshell memo Star publisher John Cruickshank sent to staff via e-mail on November 3: “The Star’s strategic plan calls for a fundamental transformation from a newspaper company into a multi-platform news and content organization. We must find the best way to operate our business at the lowest possible cost, including contracting out non-core functions where there is a sound business case to do so. Changes will affect every job in every corner of the organization.” Ironically, the date was the 117th birthday of the paper whose history is strongly rooted in the Atkinson Principles, a set of values articulated by Joseph E. Atkinson, the publisher from 1899 to 1948, which include a commitment to help the common man and support the rights of workers.

Cruickshank’s message suggested that workers’ rights perhaps didn’t extend to its editors: “[W]e are exploring the contracting out of some or all of copy editing and pagination work, and the scopeïmay expand to include other editorial production and related activities.” In other words, editors aren’t “core.” In total, theStar may eliminate 78 of approximately 390 editorial staffers, who perform such jobs as copy editing, web work, pagination and photo assigning. The plan is to either outsource the work to Pagemasters North America, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Canadian Press, or have the work absorbed by remaining staffers, or some combination of the two options.

Pagemasters North America, launched this past August after nearly two decades of success in Australia, handles any aspect of editorial production a newspaper wants. When articles appeared in the Star saying the company was launching in Canada, staff became nervous. Their anxiety only grew on November 23 whenStar editor Michael Cooke sent a memo saying the paper might contract out jobs to Pagemasters. Whether it ultimately does this, the Star hopes to save between $3- and $4-million annually. Some staff members bitterly compare that sum to the controversial $9.6-million-plus severance package paid out to former CEO Rob Prichard earlier in 2009.

The same day the November 3 memo was sent, Smith held two meetings for newsroom staff about what was going on at the paper. Reporters, photographers and editors streamed into the old smoking section of the fourth-floor cafeteria at 1 Yonge Street, overflowing into the next room. A somber Smith explained the union had until December 23 to present plausible alternatives to outsourcing—otherwise, the jobs would be eliminated. The team appointed to come up with this alternative consisted of Vey, page editor John King and Bill Dunphy, a former columnist for The Hamilton Spectator who is now working on a new content management system for Torstar papers. Since the meeting, 166 Star employees—12 percent of its 1,350 total staff—have accepted a voluntary severance package. In mid-December, Vey and others printed T-shirts for those targeted by the layoffs, enough for all of the editors and page editors, of whom there are about 150. The front of the black, long-sleeved T-shirts read either “Dead editor walking” or “Dead pre-press walking” with a “-30-” encircled by crosshairs on the back. The plan was to have the “core” editorial staff buy the shirts for their “non-core” coworkers, a sort of adopt-an-editor program, in hopes of reaffirming that they are a vital part of the Toronto Star ecosystem and show solidarity in the newsroom. The editorial shirts sold out in less than a day, and that afternoon the newsroom was overrun with black T-shirts.

Stewart Muir, managing director of Pagemasters North America, currently one of two full-time employees, would not divulge what its staff might be paid or whether any Canadian papers are in active negotiations with the company, but said a number of papers are considering the possibility. While some Star editors believe Pagemasters jobs would be filled by people with limited experience, Muir says employees will have the same level of training and skills as those in newsrooms. On the wage issue he becomes coy, saying Pagemasters will save papers money because “it’s about specializing and centralizing and focusing on just the act of production and leaving the creation of content for newsrooms, where it belongs.”

The idea for Pagemasters North America arose after Eric Morrison, president of The Canadian Press, spoke with the president of the Australian Associated Press, which acquired the 11-year-old Pagemasters Australia in 2002. In September 2008, Morrison took a trip to Oz to see how the company worked, and any skepticism he had about the company performing quality work was dispelled. What he found were enthusiastic, well-trained employees who impressed him.

Surprisingly, Paul Tolich, senior national industrial officer of the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union in New Zealand, seems equally positive. He says that in 2007, when Pagemasters took over 70 copy-editing jobs for papers owned by APN News & Media, including The New Zealand Herald and smaller papers like the Wanganui Chronicle and, Bay of Plenty Times, the union was concerned there would be a decrease in quality. But he says those qualms have disappeared, and, in fact, the approximately 70 Pagemasters employees, who are now unionized by EPMU as well, are paid about the same as staffers at the papers involved. The total number of jobs has dropped, though: savings came from fewer doing the same jobs as there were before, and maximizing efficiency. The fact that papers such as The Daily Telegraph in Britain,The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, and The New Zealand Herald are all Pagemasters customers may suggest that jobs integral to a polished finished product may be destined to leave Canadian newsrooms, if not the Star“s specifically.

It’s unclear what Pagemasters North America will charge for editing services, but according to an August 2009 article in The Guardian, it billed a minimum of 45 per page, about $77. No one seems to know what the current rate is at the Star, but the team working on alternatives to is trying to figure out a way to reduce costs without decimating staff. (Editors in the full-time positions that may be eliminated started at $55,848 as of January 1, 2009; the same scale gives a page editor with four years’ experience $86,840.)

Outsourcing editorial work isn’t new in Canada. Canwest has been running its own centralized editorial service in Hamilton since 1997, where employees provide full pagination services for papers including theVancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen.

Is that outsourcing? Is that what the Star may be planning? Pagemasters sets up custom centres that can be as close to a paper’s location as the paper wants. Pagemasters calls this “nearsourcing.” While the Canadian Association of Journalists doesn’t really have a definition for outsourcing, from its perspective, once jobs are sent out of the newsroom, to Mangalore or a location 20 minutes away, that counts as outsourcing. Mary Agnes Welch, a Winnipeg Free Press reporter and president of the CAJ, adds while the association knows there is a need to cut costs, ripping apart the team that puts together the paper leaves room for err ors. In a newsroom you can yell over four desks to the copy editors and say, ’What’s the style on this?’ or ’Anybody remember this?’ That kind of teamwork disappears when you start sending those jobs out. This cohesive team that kind of miraculously puts the paper out every day begins to disintegrate.

Another kind of team was the main preoccupation for Cooke, Muir and a Pagemasters Australia representative the night of the November 3 announcement. From the Torstar corporate box in the Air Canada Centre, they watched the Maple Leafs disintegrate against the Tampa Bay Lightning, losing 2-1.

In the summer of 1994, David Macfarlane was among eight journalists at the Banff Centre in Alberta for the prestigious, month-long literary arts journalism program. A freelancer since the late 1970s, and, he jokes, notorious for missing deadlines, Macfarlane had managed to get his draft in on time after warnings from Barbara Moon, his editor. To submit his story, he went right to Moon’s room. He knocked, waited, but no one answered, so he slipped the piece under her door.

Macfarlane remembers Banff that July as generally grey, but the day after he handed his manuscript in, the sun finally came out. He and some of the other writers decided to celebrate making their target by enjoying the nice weather on a rooftop patio. A tape deck played music, someone brought up a pitcher of vodka and orange juice, and they just relaxed.

Then Macfarlane realized someone new, and not very happy, had arrived—he could feel the chill. There, standing before him, was Moon, glaring. He had gotten the wrong room.

That tense moment passed quickly, but working with Moon was seldom without drama and, not infrequently, friction, a combination that often resulted in both author angst and award-winning writing. (The next year, Macfarlane would win a silver at the National Magazine Awards for his finished piece, “A Fan’s Notes,” a profile of jazz musician Bill Grove with a memoir component, which was published in Saturday Night.)

For decades a highly regarded writer herself, in an era when women were as rare in creative positions as sunny days were that Banff July, Moon’s later career was devoted to wresting excellence from authors at a number of magazines, but primarily at Saturday Night. As she told the Ryerson Review of Journalism in 2008, for her, the craft of editing was “rich and fulfilling and different every day and marvellous.” To her admirers, her skills were almost preternatural. After Moon’s death at 82 from viral encephalitis in April 2009, writer Eileen Whitfield wrote on the Toronto Freelance Editors and Writers listserv: “No one could give as fast and intelligent a ‘fix’ to a long piece as Barbara Moon.” Journalist Peter Worthington, in an article for the Toronto Sun, described Moon as a talented editor “who specializes in rescuing writers from themselves.” But others remember her as overbearing and “discouraging.”

In all, her fierce commitment to quality beyond everything and her love of working on long, meaty features for extended amounts of time would likely render her unemployable today. And with her death last year, the industry lost someone who symbolized a time when stories weren’t rushed to be posted online, edits weren’t made in “track changes” and it wasn’t uncommon for writers to spend months on a story.

* * *

Moon undeniably had a number of quirks. She distrusted technology and would seldom accept manuscripts sent by fax in the days before e-mail. Hand delivery was her preferred method of receiving copy, no matter if it was time-consuming. She decreed writers were entitled to “three exclamation marks a year.” If you turned a draft around quickly, odds were she wasn’t impressed. Speed was not her imperative; quality was. As she once advised a writer with whom she was working, “Let it ferment. What stays with you are the critical things.”

The critical things about Barbara Moon herself are these:

Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1926, to an engineer and a homemaker, Moon was the second daughter and last child. She attended the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, the High Anglican factory that manufactures leaders and thinkers, whose students still wear academic gowns to dinner; at the time, just over a fifth of all bachelor’s degrees in the country were awarded to women. Moon played on a basketball team, was an assistant editor on The Trinity University Review and won several prizes during her four years studying English. After graduating in 1948, she got a clerk-typist job at Maclean’s, where she became girl Friday to Pierre Berton, then an assistant editor. Moon saw the edits he made to copy, learning exactly what he looked for in a story. Soon, she was offering her critiques of stories to Berton and, in 1950, she became one of 10 assistant editors, and one of only a few women who did anything other than type and file at the iconic bimonthly.

The first article Moon produced for the magazine was in 1950, called “The Murdered Midas of Lake Shore,” about millionaire Sir Harry Oakes, a native of Kirkland Lake, Ontario, who had been found murdered seven years earlier at his home in the Bahamas. Moon only used a single quote before the final paragraphs of the 3,700-word story. Instead, the piece offered meticulously phrased detail and engaging narrative: “He spent more than half his life in rawhide boots and lumberjack shirts, slept in caves and lean-tos and pup tents, trenched and single jacked and swung an axe, shared quarters with rattlesnakes and fought black flies. Before he died he bought his suits on Savile Row and his underwear from Sulka, had mansions in Kirkland Lake, Niagara Falls, Bar Harbor, London, Sussex, Palm Beach, as well as the estates in the Bahamas.” It read like a short story. She was 23 when she wrote it.

In 1953, Moon left Maclean’s and soon was editing at Mayfair, a high-end general-interest title. In an obituary for Maclean’s,Robert Fulforddescribed meeting her there:“It was as if a bird of paradise had alighted among sparrows.” He also observed, “[She] looked like one of nature’s Parisians, a woman who made chic self-presentation seem easy and inevitable.”

Within a couple of years, Moon was back at Maclean’s as a staff writer, and stayed until 1964. Her forte was hard-hitting profiles—among them, actor William Shatner and drama critic Nathan Cohen—but it was a different kind of piece that won her the 1962 University of Western Ontario President’s Medal, for best magazine article of the year. “The Nuclear Death of a Nuclear Scientist” explored the accidental radiation poisoning of a young Winnipeg-born physicist and biochemist, reflecting her new-found interest in science writing. Over the next eight years, she wrote various features at The Globe and Mail; was part of a blue-ribbon team that produced a “storyline” for the Ontario pavilion at Expo 67; turned her flare for science journalism into scriptwriting for the nascent The Nature of Things and other documentary shows; and was commissioned to write The Canadian Shield. Published in 1970, the finished work was an unabashed paean to the rugged landscape and its place in our collective imagination: “Bedrock, tundra, taiga, boreal forest, deranged drainage, muskeg, mosquitoes, black flies: add to these a climate that at its worst is arctic and at its best offers only four frost-free months a year. Even as far south as Timmins the yearly average is a mere forty frost-free days. And that is the Shield.”

A quarter century after it first appeared, writer Greg Hollingshead wrote about Shield, saying, “This is not only personally charged nature writing of a good kind, but it gives you a sense of what is so difficult and so magnificent about this country.” The craft and passion that imbued the text also hinted at another facet of “nature’s Parisian”: she was an enthusiastic birdwatcher, a member of Friends of Point Pelee, an association dedicated to ecological preservation, and was so entranced with the Far North that on a trip there, she somewhat jokingly suggested to her husband, Wynne Thomas, that they move there.

It was in 1968, during one of her freelance periods, that Moon met Thomas, a Welsh-born journalist, who was editor of a trade magazine covering the advertising industry. He had noted her byline, and assigned her a story analyzing TV ads. It was, he recalls, “a crackerjack piece.” They had drinks. A few months later he proposed, and they were married in a small ceremony in St. Catharines. Very small. Moon’s long-time friend from the Globe, Sheila Kieran, wasn’t invited. Fulford, with whom she had become close, didn’t learn of the wedding until someone said in passing, “Well, Barbara and her husband….” As a later colleague would note, “She wasn’t a person you were casual with. You know, there are folks you can call up to chit-chat. Well, I never felt I could do that with her.”

* * *

If Moon was your editor at Saturday Night during her 13 years there, your experience with her might have gone like this: You feel as if you had been summoned; you might even dress up, at least by freelance writer standards. She worked in a real office, with a door, four walls and a ceiling, not the ubiquitous cubicle in which all but the most senior editors toil these days. If it was the Saturday Night offices at 36 Toronto Street, there would be a dictionary on her knee, a typewriter before her and neat piles of manuscripts on her desk. Chances are the story you were meeting about was one you had proposed, perhaps as short as 1,000 words, but more likely it was a 6,000-word piece on a lawyer’s fight against a company that had implanted faulty heart valves in patients, or a look at how murder methods change over time, or, say, a piece on the disappearance of a Canadian woman in the U.S. 27 years prior. Essentially, the kind of articles there is almost no home for today, pieces that involved a month (or two or three) of research, often including travel, and another month of writing. You had handed in your draft a week or so previous and were understandably anxious to get a sense of how much more work you needed to do before you could finally finish the story and submit your invoice. Saturday Night was one of the top-paying magazines at the time, with writers earning $5,000 or more per feature. Plus, being published there was considered a coup.

But first: “This is a mess. You’re not telling me what I want to read. Bring it back.” Or, “But what point are you trying to make?” Or, “What do these things”—tar ponds, perhaps—“look like? You haven’t described them in a way for me to understand just yet.” Or, “I will not tolerate that sentence in this magazine.” These frank, even cutting, critiques would be delivered in Moon’s distinctive husky voice—some liken it to Carol Channing’s—tuned by years of heavy smoking.

The dissection of the piece could last several hours and would not likely be punctuated by much leavening conversation or gossip. It would culminate in your taking away a draft heavily annotated in spidery handwriting, and maybe a typed fix note, too, offering comments like, “That word isn’t working hard enough in this sentence” or, “There’s too much bulk at the opening of the story,” or, maybe a kinder-sounding request for more research. If you were lucky, each subsequent draft would contain fewer and fewer notes.

* * *

Moon arrived at Saturday Night in 1986, after knocking around the mag trade, spending six months atCanadian Business here, 18 months as editor of a doomed city book, Toronto Calendar, there. Fulford first hired her as a senior editor at Saturday Night, though later she would become an editor-at-large. But her tenure at what was arguably the country’s top writers’ title and certainly the most award winning extended through the reigns of John Fraser, then Ken Whyte.

George Galt, who was also on staff during the Fraser years, recalls her distinctive presence: she was, he says, straight out of a film noir. “She would come to editorial meetings wearing her dark glasses, sitting at the very end of the table. She had a certain heft in the place. She was much older than any of us, including Fraser. She had decades on me and John, even. She was a very powerful presence and with her voice, her deep growly voice, she was an impressive figure.” Moon at that point was in her 60s, whereas many of the team had small children, and although she was interested in her colleagues’ lives, as Fraser remembers, when staff would bring their kids into the office, her door would always quietly close.

It was the prose appearing in the magazine that had her full attention. Ernest Hillen, another fellow editor from the Fraser period, says, “Nothing got in the magazine, if she could help it, that wasn’t as good as it could be.” If something did happen to appear that she felt was substandard, “For a certain length of time, there would be lots of caustic remarks about that particular piece or a particular writer.” From his perspective, what drove her was “an anchored idealism. She really believed in the trade of journalism, and how good it could be.”

What that sometimes translated to, though, was an exasperating disregard for time constraints—both the writer’s and the magazine’s. For some years, Charlotte Gray contributed a monthly national politics column toSaturday Night. As her editor, Moon would still be asking her to fix passages or do more research for what Gray felt were final drafts.Gray admits Moon was a thorough and an “absolutely brilliant” editor, but says, “There were other editors I preferred because she was so demanding and, when you’re doing a monthly column, it’s hard to keep up the rhythm if somebody is putting so much pressure on you.” After awhile, Hillen took over from Moon.

Sandra Martin also experienced the less-practical side of Moon’s editing style. In the mid-1990s, Saturday Night commissioned a story on employment equity based on a trip Martin had taken to South Africa. After seeing the first draft, Moon wanted Martin to re-research the piece and come at it from a different angle. Martin protested there was no way she could do that—she had already gone to South Africa and it wasn’t feasible to return. The story never made it into the magazine.

A piece of Martin’s that did get published was the 1,700-word obituary of Moon in the Globe. Moon would likely have approved—it was neither sentimental nor purely laudatory. The accolades it did contain, though, were lavish. Fraser, now master of Massey College at U of T, said simply, “I loved her.” Anne Collins, a one-time Saturday Night colleague, remembered, “She was outsized in character and glamour, elegant, ferocious, witty. When it came to language, she had a finely calibrated internal Geiger counter that registered the slightest tremor of bad thinking and bad word choice….I can see her handwriting in the margins of a manuscript even now, delicately suggesting six exquisite word choices in place of your inept one.”

Back in 1997,Anita Lahey worked with Moon on “Black Lagoons,” a story on the possibly carcinogenic tar ponds of Sydney, Nova Scotia, which won an honourable mention at the National Magazine Awards. Lahey still has the notes from her conversations with Moon about the story. In one case, Moon’s advice was, “Go to a present day scene, maybe November day, trotting around the pond. Look one way at Eric’s house, the other way at Jane’s. Doesn’t need to be long. Think about any brilliant, 30-line poem.” Lahey, who is both a journalist and a poet, says, “I can’t think of another example where someone I’ve worked with on a magazine piece has brought in other genres of writing to help illustrate how to structure a piece.”

It’s not hard to imagine this kind of editorial direction arising from Moon’s own outsized writing talent. In Martin’s obit, she called Moon “our Joan Didion,” and quoted Peter C. Newman’s observation that she was “justifiably considered one of the half-dozen best Canadian magazine writers in the trade.” He adds now, she was one of the “best read,” as she was always very controversial. “People would read her to get mad.”

* * *

If Barbara had one maxim when she worked with writers, it was, “Everyone has a secret. Your job is to find out what it is.” Of course, she, too, had a secret: Why, after her early and demonstrable success as a writer, did she suddenly stop writing in 1984?

There are several theories, but no clear answer. The most common is that Moon had, as Fulford says, “a writer’s block the size of Mount Kilimanjaro.” Moon wondered how Fulford and other writers were able to turn around drafts quickly. Hillen endorses this notion: “It’s not as if you reach a certain level and then you can relax, because you’re always trying to top yourself and you’re expected to top yourself.” He also wonders if her punctilious editing style might have been due to the “idle writer” syndrome—the tendency of an editor to tilt a little too much to the writer role. As Martin says, “The point of editing is for you to ask questions of the material and of the writer, but there’s a certain point where it’s the writer’s piece and I’m not sure that Barbara always felt that way.”

Dianna Symonds, another editor who worked with Moon at Saturday Night, has another suggestion: “Maybe when she met Wynne and they got married, that relationship meant more to her than writing.” Certainly her approach to writing was all-consuming. When she worked on the story about TV ads that brought her and Thomas together, she spent a week locked up in her apartment watching countless hours of ads a day. Wynne seems to confirm Fulford’s take. “We were very much in love with each other,” he says, “but I think Barbara had discovered editing. She found writing incredibly hard work. She was a perfectionist to the nth degree. And when she started editing for Saturday Night, she felt she had discovered her true métier, and in editing she could contribute to the development of other writers and at the same time could have her own satisfying career, without perhaps all those agonizing days of looking for the right word and the right lead and the right sentence.”

Certainly Barbara and Wynne seemed to find the right life after she left Saturday Night in 1998. They moved full-time to their country home in Prince Edward County (a decision made even though Wynne jokingly pointed out there was no Holt Renfrew there) and freelanced via their consulting company, Editors-at-Large. Less than a year before Barbara’s sudden death, they bought a house overlooking the Bay of Quinte, with Barbara declaring, “I think I have one more reno in me.” They were due to move in a few weeks after she died.

After the couple’s relocation to the countryside, no one was too surprised to not hear much from Barbara. “She always predicted that when she retired she would disappear like the Cheshire Cat,” Symonds remembers, “And all that would remain is the shadow of her smile.”

According to Advertising Age, Maxim is joining GQ and Esquire by making its issues available as an app for your iPod Touch or iPhone. The GQ and Esquire app each cost $2.99 per copy. With that price, and the convenience of not having to stuff one more item in my bag, I’m definitely interested. Imagine videos, slideshows and more embedded within your articles, exactly where you want it.

But, put a longer article on there and (for me) the appeal is gone; there’s only so much time that can be spent reading on those screens before my eyes burn out. Still, I’d like to read a magazine on there at least once. With a screen so small, I don’t know how appealing the layout design can be, but, perhaps, that doesn’t matter to everyone else. If having these apps makes a magazine more accessible, and more read, then maybe more mags should put some or all of its content in an app form. Now if only I had an iPod Touch to try it out myself.

No one wants to hear about Tiger Woods anymore, but I have to bring him up. Taiwan’s Apple Daily published a video animation of what happened the night of Woods’s car accident. It was based on information found on the web and from other news sources (part of a new world Noam Cohen of The New York Times calls “Maybe Journalism“).

What scared me were links on Twitter to the video, without mention of its lack of credibility. The animation may not be more accurate than original reports by other news outlets, but that doesn’t mean it should be condoned.

Reconstructed scenes should be put together after thorough research. CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices says simulations “must coincide as closely as possible with the event that it purports to portray.” In November, CBC’s the fifth estate aired a documentary explaining what happened when Vince Li beheaded Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus travelling across Canada in July 2008. Scenes from the bus were reconstructed based on witness accounts. An interview of Li by a psychiatrist was also dramatized with actors, using lines from the original transcript. The word “re-creation” was flashed on screen at one point, too.

News outlets need to be transparent and must explain what reenactments are based upon. Otherwise, the naive will trust the information as accurate. Simulations should be used to help a story be correctly told, not to perpetuate rumours.