Queen’s Parade ushered them into Niagara-on-the-Lake, Upper Canada’s first capital, a tourist town of 12,500 people, 20 kilometres from Niagara Falls. They stopped their car under a dark red maple and stared up at the 125-year-old Prince of Wales Hotel. “We were stunned by Niagara-on-the-Lake,” says Tuula. “I thought it was something out of this world.”

Back home in Scarborough, John and Tuula subscribed to The Niagara Advance. They spent Christmas that year at the Prince of Wales, seduced by Niagara-on-the-Lake’s friendliness, charmed by the Christmas carols piped onto the main street. In summer they picnicked in town, explored the side streets and prowled the lakeshore for homes for sale. “We just absolutely fell in love with the town,” says Tuula. In June 1988, they collected a down payment and bought a white clapboard house with a green high-peaked roof on Shakespeare Avenue, a little street running from the back end of town right up to Lake Ontario.

It’s a 15-minute walk from their house on Shakespeare Avenue to the office of The Niagara Guardian, the newspaper Tuula and John started 15 months after moving to town. Sandwiched between the Country Krock Deli and Towne Health Foods are their lift~savings. “We made a decision and we put everything we had into it,” says Tuula. “If the business went under we’d be moving back to Toronto and living with my parents. Our life hinges on this.” It is a gamble inspired by their love for a newfound home.

The Canadian Community News paper Association reported 22 new member papers taking similar gambles in 1988, a healthy increase after five years of no growth. There are about 900 weeklies and biweeklies in Canada. In the old days community newspapers were run by families who belonged to the community and faithfully chronicled small-town life, often bequeathing the job of observing and reporting to successive generations. But after a decade of corporate interest in their sound money-making ability-community weeklies captured seven per cent of total advertising revenue spent on the media in 1987-more than half are now group-owned.

Though conflicts arose between old editors and new owners, many established editors were left to run their papers in the same-profitable-way. Ironically, it is new computer technology that may be taking the community newspaper back to the days of individual ownership. A newspaper can be created with a couple of PCs, a laser printer, an art scanner and page making and typesetting software. And, of course, the crucial mix of the right town, and enough energy and love for the town to make it work.

The Niagara Guardian is tucked away in one of the brand new one storey malls springing up in Niagara-on-the-Lake, catching the businesses that can’t afford Queen Street rents, just where Lakeshore Road curls away from the lake and heads into the old town. The office, still smelling of paint, is white and blue, not cluttered yet. A glass case displays baby-blue Niagara Guardian sweatshirts and baseball caps for sale and up for grabs as prizes in The Guardian’s photo caption and short story contests designed to raise and gauge reader interest. Now The Guardian’s task is to woo readers and advertisers away from The Niagara Advance, which has cornered Niagara’s media market, unchallenged, for 70 years.

A kid lets the office door slam behind him. His promised paper route was cancelled when John and Tuula decided to mass-mail . 1,000 weekly copies, and he has to refund some potential customers. Tuula, her long blonde hair pulled back with a barrette, writes out a cheque. John walks to the back to grab another cup of ‘coffee. He is a small man, thin and wiry, and walks stiffly because of rheumatoid arthritis he developed as a seven-year-old in Orillia. His electric-blue tie matches the color of the walls. He plays with his pipe, talking too much to get it puffing. It’s obvious he runs on nervous energy, fuel required in quantity and consumed voraciously by the hungry, money-grubbing, time-consuming business of running a small, independent newspaper.

When the McPhees first moved to Niagara-on- the-Lake, John, a Ryerson journalism graduate and eight-year veteran of newspaper circulation, was self-employed, writing advertising copy. He was commuting four times a week to work in The Toronto Star’s circulation department. Tuula, who had worked in human resources at Prentice-Hall where she met John, and in accounts receivable at The Toronto Sun, hunted for a job. They began renovating their house, and Tuula landed a job at the town offices. One afternoon in October John called The Niagara Advance to advertise his copywriting business and the editor, Shirley Dickson, answered the phone. Ready for ~ more change in his life, John impulsively offered to freelance for her: one ;;! week later she called back to offer him a nearly full-time reporter’s position. He d accepted the paper’s sole reporting job at $13,000 a year because, after concentrating for so long on journalism’s business side, he wanted to write.

At The Advance John covered the usual local events-sports, fires, cats stuck up hydro poles- and in the process met a lot of townspeople. Tuesday night’s council meetings were a highlight in a town as fiercely opinionated as Niagara-on-the-Lake, and on Wednesdays people stopped John on the street to discuss his coverage. His writing style became an irreverent blend of reporting and editorializing: “Not the straight dope,” says Tuula.

About one council meeting he wrote, “The expected sparks did not rekindle. The combatants were more interested in clearing the smoke with final summations than igniting another round of rhetoric.” Shirley Dickson says people liked the way he wrote: “It was friendly and intimate and amusing.”

In July 1989, John took on the editor’s duties for one month when Shirley went on holiday. His reporting skills honed, his writing style fluid, he found he liked an editor’s control. He joked to Tuuia about starting their own newspaper. And one day over a beer, a local businessman granted his wish: he wanted to start a second newspaper in Niagara, and he wanted John to be the editor. The partnership didn’t work out, but by the end of August John was so anxious to quit The Advance-“So much work for so little money”-that John and Tuula decided to do it alone. Their plan was to focus on tourists, a group not served by The Advance, by delivering to hotel rooms and townsfolk alike with a mix of local news and views. After some legal wrangling they paid off the partner’s initial investment, borrowed money from Tuula’s parents, took a second mortgage on their house, sniffed out the advertising, rented the office space, leased the computer equipment and in early September, set up shop.

They spent the whole month at the office, their house renovations halted in mid-kitchen.” The intense work of setting up operations, attracting advertisers, developing the paper’s look and mandate, always spurred on by the spectre of that second mortgage, took 16-hour days, litres of coffee, and huge doses of adrenalin. They labored together, dividing the work. The week before the first paper hit the newsstands, John slept a total of 12 hours. Exhausted, he delivered the paper to Economy Web Printing Co. in St. Catharines and, bleary-eyed, scraped $1,000 worth of damage off the side of his Chevy Corsica when he drove into a metre-high wall by the loading dock. “John has always been an extremely hard worker,” Tuula says, smiling. Her smile is already a real small-town smile, welcoming, slow and steady. She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and laughs. “Sometimes it drives me crazy as a child [with arthritis] he wasn’t allowed to do a lot of things. He was held back. I think he came out with a vengeance, making up for lost time.”

A perfect complement, Tuula is cool: she is steady where John is not. She is the general manager of the paper, the calm centre in the craziness of running an independent newspaper.

The Guardian made a profit in October, but lost money in November. Tuula and John make enough money to pay the mortgages and the groceries, a part-time secretary, two delivery people and two advertising sales staff who earn over $20,000, including commission. But advertising revenue often comes in after deadline, slowing the flow of payments. John still commutes to The Toronto Star once a week to supplement their income. The enormity of their investment scares Tuula sometimes, but she remains confident. “We work well together,” she says. “Some people say that husband and wife aren’t supposed to be able to work “together, but that’s a myth to usWe’ve become risk-takers in the last couple of years. We took a deep breath and dove into this business. The whole thing is based on the foundation of our relationship. That’s the only reason we’re able to do [this].”

On the other side of town The Niagara Advance is tucked into the bottom floor of a two-storey brick building just off Queen Street, across from the clock tower, nestled between the historic Court House that serves as mayor’s chambers, and some tourist boutiques. Since 1919 The Advance has reigned over Niagara, observing the town’s evolution from an elegant summer resort for Toronto’s wealthy, to a small town, poor and down on its luck in the fifties and sixties, into the tourist mecca and real estate paradise it has become. One of seven Niagara Peninsula weeklies owned by Rannie Publications Ltd., a subsidiary of The St. Catharines Standard, The Advance has a paid circulation of 2,822 and a solid advertising base in Niagara-on-the-Lake, St. Catharines and surrounding towns. The Advance’s office is crowded. Smaller than The Guardian’s it houses six fulltime staff and is cluttered with back issues and current issues spilling out of displays, forms and rate cards bulging out of their holders and bits of ad copy littering the floor.

Like a puppy, the upstart Guardian has been barking around the fat ankles of the dowager Advance and, truth be told, The Advance has looked sprucer lately. It’s trimming down, becoming leaner. It features more reporting, highlights local ,voices, encapsulates bites of council news and the obits have been pushed to the back of the paper. In a surprise move, The Advance started publishing a free supplement called Niagara This Week-clearly aimed at tourists-one day after The Guardian’s first issue hit the hotel rooms. Roddy Heading is a freelance artist who draws editorial cartoons for The Guardian. He speculates The Advance was worried about the new competition: “Here’s a guy who blows into town with a Web Press contract, a word processor and a camera and he’s ready to do business. The Advance has immediately thrown together a supplement where they’re hoping to buffer anything John is doing.”

Ariela Friedman, who has since quit to travel in Europe, got the editor’s job in July 1989 when Shirley Dickson retired after 15 years at The Advance. Ariela says her housecleaning had nothing to do with The Guardian’s arrival on Niagara’s media scene. She’s 24 years old, a first-time editor after a year reporting for another Rannie paper, The Lincoln Post Express, and a recent graduate of Carleton University’s journalism program. “Obviously a new editor will come in with changes,” she says, furiously smoking a cigarette. “We weren’t running scared of John McPhee. He didn’t scare us or cause us to go into a panic. I was just a new editor with some new ideas. The changes happened before John showed up. They had nothing to do with him.”

A battle between the independent Guardian and the chain -owned Advance is romantic, but unrealistic. The Guardian, billing itself as the “newspaper that delivers,” is the challenger which has to prove to the town that The Guardian deserves, if not total attention, at least equal billing. The Advance, with its paid subscribers, is still the medium of choice for advertisers, many of whom buy space in both papers, but more space in The Niagara Advance. Some businesses, however, are conspicuously absent from the pages of The Guardian. Kevan O’Connor Real Estate is sticking with the “tried and true” over the “brand new.”

Other local businesses appreciate the double exposure, though chartered accountant Ken Bridgman doubts it will double his business. “I like to support local businesses,” he says. “That’s part of being a good citizen.” Bridgman likes the perspective a second newspaper brings to news coverage: “There’s still a great belief that what you read is the truth. When you read the: truth as seen by two different eyes, it’s fun to compare the different coverage.” Judy Dick, who manages the Chamber of Commerce says, “Competition forces them to be a little more aware of what’s going on in the community. They’re being more aggressive and we’re getting a lot more information.”

Though John McPhee boasts three scoops in the first eight issues, he hopes to distinguish The Guardian with “community brainstorming.” He plans to present some of council’s biggest issues directly to readers and ask for their responses. Then he’ll present the best ideas to council. He wants to be a liaison between the town and its government, to provide an avenue for change in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Ariela doesn’t think that’s the job of a community’ newspaper. “My goal as [an] editor is to reflect this community,” she says, “to inform the people about what’s going on in council1f council makes a mistake we let the community know: we’re the watchdog. But I’m not here to take complaints to the mayor. People can write a letter to the editor or they can talk to their alderman.”

Winter is a slow season in Niagara-on-the- Lake, traditionally a time when businesses tighten their belts. The Guardian will also feel the downturn. But John and Tuula are betting that when the clouds of peach blossoms color the Niagara Parkway pink in May, they’ll be in town, working toward their first anniversary, certain of their newfound niche in Niagara-on-the-Lake. “This has become our life,”
they say.

“The media have for the most part accepted responsibility for avoiding terminology that sustains harmful stereotypes,” wrote Shirley Collins, Ontario Minister Responsible for Disabled Persons, in a letter to the editor. “People with disabilities ask that you accept the same responsibility when dealing with their issues.”

The Globe published eight letters to the editor, four criticizing the article and four commending Wong’s use of “vivid, concrete language.”

Hard realities, one reader insisted, require hard words.

The hard realities in the village Wong visited are such that one third of the population is mentally disabled. Abject poverty, intermarriage among close kin and other factors perpetuate debilitating conditions in Gansu province, and it was only at the request of local officials that Wong was allowed to witness the plight of these people.

Shortly after Wong’s article appeared, John Allemang published his response to the debate in his weekly column at The Globe, Word Play. He admitted that while some of the terminology used (cretins, cripples, imbecility) was questionable, the suggested euphemisms (persons with mobility disabilities, otherly abled) were unfit to print. “I dislike the word cretins,” Allemang wrote, “but I think it is even more harmful to impose the genteel phrase ‘persons with developmental disabilities’.”

Lew Gloin, who writes a similar column for The Toronto Star called Words, took the same position. Without mention of the controversy sparked by the Globe article, he discussed the issue of what to call special interest groups on December 17.

He took aim at Word Choices, the “lexicon of preferred terms” published by the Office for Disabled Persons. Gloin acknowledged in his column that “sexist language, obviously, has to go,” but the terms preferred by disabled persons rubbed him the wrong way. “It goes against the grain for newspaper people to use more words than they have to.” Period.

Back at The Globe, assistant managing editor Earle Gill sought to end the debate by circulating an internal memo. “We owe it to our readers to convey information accurately,” he wrote. “At the same time, we should respect the particular sensibilities of other readers.”

Gill offered guidelines for the use of medical and nonmedical terminology in articles about people with disabilities and suggested that editors ask themselves whether they would like to be described by the potentially offensive language in question.

The debate over word usage obscured a greater offence, however, one which Allemang and Gill did not address. Even if all the offending adjectives were replaced by the politically correct alternatives, the tone of Wong’s article would remain the same. Readers are still left with Dante’s Inferno.

Wong’s defenders claim that the purpose of the article, ostensibly to bring international aid to Gansu, justifies the means; the detractors say that sensationalistic methods designed to solicit charity are insulting.

It all stems from a “warped view” of people with disabilities, says Sandra Carpenter, manager of the Handicapped Employment Program with the Ontario Ministry of Labour. The media reflect a deeply rooted ethic, she says, that mythologizes people with disabilities either in terms of “hero worship or human tragedy.”

Widely held misconceptions of the disabled will die hard, but stigmatizing language can be eliminated. “People can’t call us anything they want and get away with it,” says John Feld, Legal Communications Coordinator at the Advocacy Resource Centre for the Handicapped in Toronto. He believes that in the wake of the recent Globe controversy progress has been made.

“There was a reaction [to Wong’s article ],” he says. “It’s a sign that people who are disabled are standing up for their rights.”

Journalism. It was going to be your way of changing the world. You soon discovered that wasn’t part of your job description. You could look, but you couldn’t touch.

Always on the outside looking in that was the price you paid for the byline and the sign-off. But neither makes up for the frustration, the disillusionment and the stress anymore.

You’ve played Heat the Clock for too long and now you’re exhausted.

Look in the mirror: you’ve become another statistic for the American Institute of Stress. On the top-10 list of most stressful occupations, the institute ranks journalism seventh.

Decide now whether to hang in and hope the byline blahs pass, or drop out before you burn out. As Sara Procopio writes in “Dropping Out,” it’s a choice that has led many journalists into the public relations field. But for others, the thrill of chasing fire engines dies hard, and the price is paid in ulcers, addictions and frustration. Caroline Butler examines the symptoms and the solutions for those who have clung to the fire truck ladder for too long in “BurningOut.” The Editors Dropping out.

“Look around,” laughs Eric Evans, vice-president and corporate secretary for Unicorp, as he scans his dark woodpanelled penthouse suite. “Newspapers don’t have offices like this.”

Evans, who is now in his early 30s, was once a rising star at The Financial Post. He was fascinated by business. So much, in fact, that it soon replaced his fascination with journalism. He grew tired of being a “voyeur,” he says, “tired of always looking in the window and reacting to what other people were doing. I wanted to be causing things rather than reacting to them-and it didn’t look that hard.”

After only four years at The Post he began questioning his future. “I started asking myself, ‘Where will I be in five years?’ There just didn’t seem to be much chance of advancement,”

Evans admits that he thought about the money when making his decision to leave. “For the first few years the money at The Post was pretty competitive with those of my peers who had gone on to do other things, but what was happening was I was starting to get left behind and I knew I was going to get left way behind.”

The impediments to advancement, the triviality of some stories, and, more importantly money, forces many journalists to leave the profession. And many find themselves in the public relations field. After all, the skills acquired and perfected during their journalism careers, such as finding facts fast, handling pressure and meeting deadlines, are essential in the communications business. Journalists who decide the profession isn’t what it used to be find PR is an area where they can easily adapt their skills,

Marjorie Wallens, once host and anchor for Global’s early morning news and public affairs program, “Daybreak,” turned to public relations when she decided to end her 10-year career in television news. Wallens, now the director of public affairs for the Toronto Transit Commission, earned her bachelor of arts in journalism at the American University in Washington D.C. in 1972. Shortly after, she came to Toronto, “dying to be a journalist and wanting to be in television news.”

Her first job in Toronto was as a freelancer with Citytv. In 1974 she joined Global to become researcher and story editor for its business show, “Global Post.” Because of several financial reversals, Global was forced to let her go. Her career took her to CJOH- TV in Ottawa as a reporter then back to Global as parliamentary correspondent. Her career in journalism ended in 1982 after “Daybreak.”

“I left the profession,” she says, “because I started getting restless and I started to see that the economic climate for news and public affairs was changing. I could see down the road that there wouldn’t be a lot of money spent on new programming and so I saw no opportunity for professional growth and development.”

Wallens started feeling that she, like Evans, had been an observer for too long. “I wanted to be more active,” she says. After 10 years in the profession she decided it was time to get out. “My whole professional career had been consumed by the news business and I had no personal life to speak of. It’s a lot of commitment, and I was getting tired. I started thinking that there was more to life than working around the clock and what side Joe Clark parts his hair on. I saw it as a young person’s game.”

“News papering is definitely a young person’s game. The hours, the lifestyle, responsiveness and everything are for young people,” says Anne Moon, who is now directing the communications activities of the Toronto health department. She graduated with a journalism diploma from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in 1961. She worked for a series of newspapers including The Oakville Record Star and the Hamilton Spectator before moving to Toronto with her husband and landing a job with The Toronto Star in 1969. There she took on the education beat and later was entertainment editor for three years before finally becoming senior editor with page-one responsibilities.

But, after 21 years in the business, Moon left The Star. “I was going to be a writer from the age of eight. It wasn’t until I became senior editor that this great flash of consciousness hit me,”she says. “I was having a whole lot of ethical concerns about journalism, such as the blowing up of trivia, the lack of attention to serious social issues, especially at The Star,” she recalls. Although she accepts that newspapers have an important role to play, she also feels they exploit people’s misery.

Because of these ethical concerns, Moon does not regret the decision she made seven years ago. “The only regrets I have are when I see idiotic mistakes in the paper which I know I wowd have caught had I been there. Occasionally, I have regrets when there’s a really big story happening and I miss being part of the action and I miss having the inside scoop. There was always that sort of seductive feeling of being in the middle of everything.”

However, these regrets do not out weigh the number of times when she, like other reporters who were beaten by the system, found herself asking, “Why are we doing this?” She says that too much time was spent on non-stories, “on silly stories, stuff that wasn’t put into the context of people’s lives.” It was this feeling that convinced her she should leave her chosen profession. She’s not alone.

Bob Purcell quit journalism for similar reasons. His first job was reporting for the Vancouver Sun in the mid-sixties. He later relocated to Toronto and worked for The Star as reporter, editor and political writer. “I left the field in the mid-seventies because what I considered the fun aspect of journalism was fading fast. The newsroom camaraderie, the enthusiasm for valid and prompt news coverage seemed to be less than it had been in previous years,” he explains. After 12 years, Purcell felt he had had enough of being a “down and dirty journeyman” and sold his sow to public relations. Today he occupies a comfortable office as manager of corporate public relations for INCO Limited.

“I was ready for something new and different. The Star had been kind to me, giving me a myriad of assignments but I had run out of new and different things to do and decided I wanted to try private enterprise..”

Feelings such as these, unfortunately for the profession, lead some journalists to drop out of their chosen careers and into more promising fields. For others, however, the decision is one that is made for them.

Stuart Allen was drinking in those days. A lot. It took an ulcer and a failed marriage to make him realize that he had a problem and needed professional help. That was 20 years ago. Now, after finding the right psychologist and three years of “just talking,” he’s okay again.

Today, the former CBC Radio producer has found happiness in a new marriage and two new businesses: a consulting firm and a production company. The scenario might not have ended so happily. Allen could have ended up an alcoholic or a drug addict, could have sunk into a deep depression or, like four others he knew, could have killed himself.

Instead, he learned to control the stress and to accept his limitations. “When I realized I didn’t know it all,”

he recalls, “I stopped yelling, I stopped screaming, I stopped, quite frankly, drinking as much as I drank.” He says that it’s not easy for a journalist to accept the fact that he does not know everything and that there are things he cannot do. One thing Allen couldn’t do was deny that he had opinions. “One of the hardest things all of us have to learn to deal with are those biases, those personal feelings,” he says. “It’s impossible to go out and report on a story without becoming personally involved with it, without having some kind of conclusion which you may not put into print or broadcast on radio and television.”

Allen says that journalists are expected to deal so dispassionately with events they cover that they can forget they have emotions. He says this is just one of the reasons journalism is such a stressful occupation. “That kind of feeling you keep inside yourself, that kind of tension builds up because you’re writing a story about a group that you might hate,” he says. “A lot of people don’t know how to deal with it.”

Therapy alleviated some of the pressure and he became more honest with himself. “If I felt strongly about something,” he says, “I learned to speak up. If I disagreed with something, I disagreed with it and I didn’t hold it inside.”

Cindy Clegg was with CBC Radio for 13 years as reporter, senior news editor and producer. She finds that one of the more stressful aspects of the field is its very nature-objective reporting rather than active participation. She says that journalists are “forever outside looking in.”

What makes this particularly hard, she believes, is that the people drawn to this career are those who want to change things, people who “care intensely about so many things.” Nevertheless, she says, “you are relegated to the role of watching.”

A career counsellor (who wishes toremain anonymous because of client confidentiality) agrees. “I think people go into this field with great expectations and with high hopes and certainly a desire to change something.”

There are many other pressures on journalists, notably the competition to get not just the story, but the best story-on time. This kind of stress may sometimes twist a reporter’s ethical arm and consequently facts are tampered with. CBS News, for example, was recently criticized for faking footage from the Afghanistan war. Allen says that living with the guilt that goes along with bending the truth puts an even greater strain on journalists.

If bending the truth carries a high penalty of conscience, the temptation to lift someone else’s words under pressure to produce can end tragically. More than one lost job or lost life has been linked to plagiarism. Ken Adachi’s suicide last year followed a charge that he had plagiarized in his Toronto Star column. Timothy Pritchard, managing editor of The Globe and Mail, thinks plagiarism is “an illness and a desperate calling for attention.” It’s a symptom of a greater problem. Another threat to a journalist’s peace of mind is the hurry-up-and-wait syndrome. Journalists often rush to an assignment just in time to sit around for what seems like an eternity waiting for something-any thing-to happen. Clegg remembers one assignment when she was covering the Pope’s visit to Fort Simpson, NWT. After days of waiting the visit was cancelled due to fog. A small, unrelated incident later that evening triggered tears. “I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed,” she says. Not because she was upset by missing the Pope, but because she had been so worked up, only to be so let down.

Clegg paid the price for her dedication to a career in journalism-60-hour work weeks, stress-related health problems and a divorce. But she doesn’t place all the blame on the business: “You can be your own worst enemy. I could never walk away from a story.”

Journalists are “high-drive people and I think it’s a self-selecting profession,” says the career counsellor. Pritchard agrees. He says the nature of the work appeals to the people who are temperamentally suited for it. The stress acts as a drug for these people. Getting high on deadlines might be what pushes them on.

But sooner or later, this non-stop, one-sided life can get to be too much. “It’s very hard to be a journalist,”

Clegg says, “and lead a balanced life.” Many have family problems because of the long hours, the travelling and the unpredictable nature of the profession. Clegg recalls rushing from the family dinner table to cover breaking news.

Her desire to lead a balanced life led Clegg to walk away from the CBC. Now she’s the communications advisor to Christine Hart, Ontario’s minister of culture and communications. She says she still works long, hard hours but believes it was a good career move. She’s participating and not just watching. She realizes she can do more than write, and, “for the first time in a long time, I’m learning again.”

Still, Clegg loves the thrill of reporting. “It’s exhilarating, but it’s also demanding,” she says. “It’s like hanging off the ladder on a fire truck. And how many years can you do that?”

Today, journalists on the verge of burning out have a safety net. Employee Assistance Programs (EAP), which help staff deal with personal and professional problems, have become more and more popular among Canadian businesses. Though they have been around since the 1940s, their numbers have increased by 54 per cent since 1980. EAPs are strictly confidential. In the case of the CBC, employees call a Resource Centre line that puts them in touch with counsellors. There’s no intervention from management.

The career counsellor finds journalists open and sensitive in discussing their problems. “When they’ve put their finger on the fact that they have a problem,” he says, “they want to find out what the truth is.” Psychologists, social workers and career counsellors are within easy reach.

Along with stress management, counsellors are trained to deal with alcoholism and drug abuse. And even though journalism is changing, the image of the boozing reporter is still not far from the truth. “The nature of journalism is such that stresses are recurrent on a daily basis,” says Martin Shain of the Addiction Research Foundation. Alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and gambling too often provide an escape from the daily grind.

But as more companies make an Employee Assistance Program part of the modern newsroom, journalists on the verge of burning out are more likely to recognize the symptoms before they begin to feel like Clegg often did: “like you’re at the bottom of the bathtub and somebody’s pulled the plug.”

Journalism. It was going to be your way of changing the world. You had great expectations. A desire to change something. But now it might have to be your attitude. Even your job.

It wasn’t.

Readers of The Toronto Star’s Saturday edition-and there are close to 800,000-awoke the next morning to an account of the trial in which District Court Judge Ted Matlow’s partial comments, to the effect that the victim of the assault “should have known better than to get involved in this situation” and that the circumstances “were about as marginal as can be,” were highlighted. Also included were the angry statements of a women’s group representative and a female member of the Metro Police Commission.

The brouhaha created by this front-page account lasted nearly a month. It was the subject of at least II articles and two editorials in three Toronto dailies -six of them in The Star- and it culminated in the mock trial, by outraged women’s groups, of Judge Matlow and five other judges on the steps of a downtown Toronto courtroom. All six were found guilty of sexism.

Rarely do newspaper accounts of judicial proceedings incite such a furore. But when they do, they raise the question of just what the record of the press is on criminal trials. To many members of the legal profession, that record is less than sterling. Often sensationalist, often distorted, press coverage of criminal cases is, they charge, irresponsible and ultimately unreliable.

Two weeks after the “trial,” The Star ran a more detailed analysis of the case. The account revealed that the victim, while hitchhiking, had accepted a ride from the accused and his friends; had agreed to kissing one of them; was not forcibly restrained; was never threatened; was not injured; did not once tell the men to stop and did not try to get out of their vehicle. Besides acknowledging that “Critics, some of whom were contacted by The Star before they had read the transcript and become familiar with the details of the case” (emphasis added), the article devoted six full paragraphs to the judge’s deliberations.

Suddenly, with his comments put into context, Judge Matlow’s attitude began to seem less cavalier. The same, says Toronto criminal lawyer Bridget Lynett, cannot be said of the journalists.
“They had no difficulty running off and seeking that kind of response knowing full well the women’s groups weren’t [in the courtroom], and I think that was inesponsible,” says Lynett, who acted for the convicted man. “They were out for a reaction: they got it. They didn’t care they were getting it from an ill-informed source.”

Examples substantiating this charge are not hard to find. Some are the result of what Lynett calls “gross sloppiness,” as in the two front-page accounts of the conviction of an Owen Sound man for murder which appeared in The Globe and The Star on October 21,.1989. Ac cording to The Globe, “A jury of ten men and two women deliberated eight hours before returning the verdict that lawyer Michael McLachlan said later his client had been expecting.” Conversely, The Star’s version read: “His lawyer, Mike McLachlan, said later his client ‘never expected the verdict he got,’ the Canadian Press reports.”

According to both lawyers and journalists, problems in the reporting of criminal trials often arise because of the manner in which the trials are covered. Reporters who must attend more than one court in a day find it impossible to watch a trial from beginning to end, so the public may be reading chunks of testimony taken out of context..

“The problem is that they [reporters] haven’t heard what’s gone on before and they haven’t heard what’s gone on afterwards,” says Earl Levy, former president of the Criminal Lawyers Association. “A witness may give evidence through questioning by the Crown prosecutor that can sound very damaging. The cross examination, however, could blunt the inflammatory evidence that came out earlier, but the newspaper reader may never read that. “The result,” he says, is “a distorted view of what actually happened in the trial.”

Kirk Makin, a former court reporter who now writes on legal affairs for The Globe and Mail, agrees that the “chopped-up” nature of a trial, in which the prosecution often testifies one day, the defence the next, can hamper the writing of a balanced report. But the newspaper reader might also remember that reporters choose which facts are to be included according to their own sense-and that of their newspapers-of what is important. Makin believes reporters at times approach court reporting in the vein they approach sports reporting, “where it’s sort of this game that’s being played for you and, in a very impersonal way, you choose the most colorful part of the game and build your angle around that.”

Editing may also distort the truth by altering the reporter’s intent. Lawyer Brian Greenspan, president of the Criminal Lawyers Association, says one of the “greatest flaws” in court reporting is the reporter’s lack of control over the headline. Editors, Greenspan says, tend to “sensationalize the story and sensationalize the headline.” Last summer, Greenspan says, a police investigation in Nova Scotia into a series of rapes had led to the arrest of a male suspect. Before the suspect came to trial, Greenspan says, a local paper had emblazoned across its front page the headline “Dartmouth rapist caught.”

Similarly, this past January, The Toronto Sun ran a full-length, front-page photograph of a man suspected in a series of crimes across southern Ontario including murder, assault and rape. Beneath the photo, in two-inch red letters, ran the headline, “The beast kills again.” The suspect had not yet been captured. The Sun’s managing editor, Mike Strobel, stands by the headline: “It’s a situation where we have the mug shot, he’s wanted by the police, [so] you have more latitude in that case than in most criminal cases.” He adds that other media and the police were also referring to the suspect as the “beast.”

Contempt of court laws, which stipulate that a newspaper must not, through its coverage, influence the proceedings of a trial, ensure that such blatant violation does not occur on a regular basis. However, the boundaries of good taste are often straddled, as in this Montreal Gazette headline from September 21, 1988: ” ‘Sick’ and ‘twisted’ wife-beater Inwood gets month in jail.” At other times, the boundaries are crossed altogether: “A woman’s nightmare ride to hell: how Rhea Brochu went from pleasant caring daughter to tortured corpse” (Montreal Gazette, November 18, 1989).

The Star’s Harold Levy, a former criminal lawyer who currently sits on The Star’s editorial board, says big headlines do not sell papers: “I don’t think there’s an economic interest in devastating somebody’s reputation. I don’t think you’ll sell 10,000 more copies.” Makin says that headlines can misinterpret a story’s meaning, depending on how much or how little care went into their construction. “But,” he says, “anyone who only reads headlines shouldn’t be reading a newspaper.”

Headlines, however, play only a part in the process of sensationalizing. The angle a story emphasizes, the actual words used and even the play it receives in the paper all contribute to the process. Sooner or later nearly every news~ paper is guilty of it.

The degree of sensationalism is ultimately determined by the editorial policy of the paper, but some lawyers believe sensationalism plays a deliberate part in every newspaper account of a criminal trial. “The bottom line is, they have to sell their newspapers,” says Bridget Lynett.

While factual errors or errors of distortion do little to enhance the credibility of an individual newspaper, in the end it is the reputation of the press as a whole, and not of the individuals involved in the trial, which suffers most. More disturbing is the power with which, some lawyers maintain, the press interferes with the very process of justice.

“We often go on the supposition that newspaper reports affect the justice in the court,” says Harold Levy. “But I have never seen that demonstrated empirically.”

Others say they have.

In October 1988, two weeks after Kirby Inwood received a 30-day sentence for assault, the Crown appealed his sentence. When the appeal came before the bench, there were five judges appointed to it, two more than usual. It was a circumstance that, according to Greenspan, was as bizarre as it was “unbelievable.”

In 16 years of practising criminal law, Greenspan has handled roughly 600 appeals, and he has appeared before a five-man appeal panel only once, in 1988. That case, he says, involved a re-evaluation of a point of law concerning assault. “Generally they only sit five on major constitutional issues or when they want to re-evaluate one of their own decisions. There was absolutely no reason as a matter of law [to do so in this case ]… there was no important issue or principle. All there was was media attention and media pressure.” Greenspan believes the Crown was influenced to appeal as a result of public pressure, which in turn “was precipitated by the perception that the press provided of that case.” It was an instance, he says, where “the press even affected the court’s perception of what was happening.”

Lynett agrees. She says the decision to sit a five-man appeal bench was “ludicrous if [the case] had not received that kind of publicity it would have been just another ‘who cares?’ case. There was nothing extraordinary of interest, legal or otherwise, in this case.”

Not all members of the legal community agree. Says Earl Levy, “I don’t know why it would be outlandish to have five people sit on a court it maybe that they wanted to make a statement about domestic assault.”

Whatever one thinks of the Inwood case, however, other cases attest that the press can and does influence judicial proceedings.

In November 1988, District Court Judge Edward Wren declared a mistrial ten days into the trial of four businessmen charged with running an illegal gambling house in Toronto’s Chinatown. The judge ruled that a Globe and Mail account of a voir dire-proceedings that take place while the jury is excluded-had led to the “appearance of justice being compromised.”

(Canada’s Criminal Code states that “no information regarding any portion of the trial at which the jury is not present shall be published…before the jury retires to consider its verdict.”) The judge criticized the paper for publishing information which he said he had no intention of communicating to the jury, and said that because of the mistrial, the prior court proceedings amounted to a “two-week waste” of taxpayers’ money. As Lynett points out, such disruptions also cost the accused, who must meet the expense of legal fees which increase the longer the trial continues.

But perhaps no concern over newspaper coverage of criminal trials bears greater consideration than that of the individual charged with a crime, who comes up against what Greenspan calls the “unfettered power” of the press. “The terrible thing about the way the press operates,” he says, “is the allegation is page one [and] the acquittal, if it’s published at all, is page 30.”

The question of whether a newspaper should be allowed to publish the name of a person accused of a crime before that person comes to trial raises a stormy response among members of the legal community and the press alike. Earl Levy calls it “one of the thorniest issues that affects the fairness of trials,” and it brings to the fore the long-standing conflict between the public’s right to know and the right of the accused to be presumed innocent. Many lawyers feel that to publish a person’s name in connection with a criminal offence, before that person comes to trial, at best stigmatizes the individual in the eyes of the community; at worst, establishes guilt in the eyes of the jurors.

To do so seriously endangers a fundamental tenet of our court justice system: that a person is innocent until proven guilty. It’s called “trial by headline,” and one of the most conspicuous examples occurred nine years ago in the matter of the infant deaths at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.

Susan Nelles, a registered nurse in the hospital’s cardiac unit, was charged with the murders of four infants in March 1981. The charges were dismissed at a preliminary hearing in May 1982, but by that time Nelles had already been branded in the press.

“We overdid it. It was awful. Absolutely. It was terrible,” is how Harold Levy describes The Star’s coverage of the murder investigation. A 1987 report looked at the Grange Inquiry into the deaths [covered in the 1985 Review]. The document, published by the Registered Nurses’ Association of
Ontario, concluded that “it would be naive to believe the media were merely impartial reporters. Indeed, their assumptions often reflected and reinforced public bias.”

Indeed, so extreme was the treatment meted out to Nelles in the press-front page stories with pictures; interviews in both The Star and The Globe with friends and relatives expressing shock and disbelief-that she has come to stand as a symbol for many who believe that bans forbidding publication of the accused’s names should be mandatory.

The concern that publication bans and similar restrictions will lead to what Harold Levy in a 1987 article called “pockets of secrecy” in the justice system is contrasted with that of the legal profession, which maintains that a person’s life can be shattered by the publicity surrounding a charge.

“I don’t see what public interest is served [by publishing names],” says Lynett. “It can do incredible damage to an individual and he’ll never be vindicated.” She adds that people are often “overcharged,” in the sense that they are convicted on a much lesser crime than that with which they were originally charged. “But what’s left in the mind of the public is the name and the fact that they’ve been charged.” Others maintain that the right of the press to report the names of the accused is vital to its role of watchdog. Any attempt to curtail that right “deprives the public of an important vehicle for holding the administration of justice to account,” says Alan Borovoy, a lawyer with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Although the argument may never be settled, some think a possible solution lies in the voluntary adoption by the press of rules of conduct that would make “equal play”-equal prominence for both the acquittals/dismissals and charges-a given. “If we’re going to permit the press to publish the names when they get charged, then we should insist on the balance of equal prominence to an acquittal,” says Greenspan.

Paul Palango, former national editor at The Globe, says the paper’s long standing policy is not to print the name of the accused unless they are “fairly certain” they will cover the trial as well. The Star’s policy regarding coverage is similar: “If you’re going to run a story about somebody being charged with something, you’re also going to make sure you publish the results of his or her hearing,” says Star ombudsman and senior editor Rod Goodman. The Toronto Sun’s Anita Elash says her paper’s policy is “to try to give the criminal trial as much playas the arrest would have received.”

None of the three, however, is willing to guarantee equal play.

A court reporter since 1988, Elash says it would be “impossible” to ensure that the charge, the verdict and/or acquittal receives identical coverage: “Quite often [play in the paper] depends on how it stacks up against other stories that come in that day.”

The same holds true for The Globe and The Star. Verdicts or acquittals jostle with all the other stories competing for space on a page, and newsworthiness, such as an unusual sentence or quote from a judge, must be considered. “Then,” says Goodman, “it’s up to a news editor to place [the story]. But he doesn’t automatically guarantee-and no paper can, really-equal play.”

Palango says it is unlikely The Globe would playa charge across the top of page one; any charge that warranted such attention would be likely to have the verdict treated with equal prominence. But neither can he guarantee equal coverage. The Globe strives for fairness, he says, “but circumstances change, staff changes on a given day-you just try to stay on top of it.”

Makin believes such guidelines will evolve natulrally as an outgrowth of the Ontario Press Council, which monitors complaints about the newspaper industry.

Meanwhile, sloppiness, bias, distortion and sensationalism are factors worth considering in any examination of the record of the press. Until newspapers treat court proceedings as accurately-and trial participants as sensitively-as if they themselves were on trial, the charge of unreliability will stick.

Lynett says that her experience of press coverage of criminal trials has made her skeptical of any newspaper account she reads. At all times, she says, “a grain of salt is required.”

And that doubt in her mind-and perhaps in the minds of thousands of readers-is the most telling indictment of newspaper trial reporting.

The young writer had been commissioned to write a l6-page supplement on the Canadian retail jewelry business, a subject he didn’t care about. But that hardly mattered. He picked up his notepad and interviewed 15 members of the Canadian retail jewelry community, and easily filled his 16 pages.

It wasn’t the stuff of award-winning journalism, nor was it supposed to be. “The thing was just to put out the copy,” he recalls. “You wouldn’t tell any actual lies, but you also wouldn’t say anything very interesting or controversial: nothing with an edge on it, no irony, no drama, no conflict. Nothing. None of the things that make writing worth reading.”

That baby-faced young writer was Robert Fulford. He would later distinguish himself as the editor of Saturday Night from 1968 to 1987. The author of six books, he is now a columnist at The Financial Times and an instructor at Ryerson’s School of Journalism.

Advertorials, as those supplements are known today, haven’t changed much over the last three decades. Theyb don’t stun you with hard, cold facts. They don’t make you think. They don’t cover all sides of an issue. All they do is fill ~p space between paid advertisements. But now they are more prominent than ever in magazines and newspapers across Canada and the US. “Advertorial is to journalism what Muzak is to music,” Fulford says today. “Muzak fills up the dead air in elevators. Advertorials just fill up the empty spaces between the ads-so you don’t have a lot of ads running side by side.”

Although they are clearly lacking in journalistic substance, it is the form of advertorials which the magazine community sees as the biggest danger. Advertorials are designed to look like editorial copy, and they carry only a small disclaimer across the top or bottom of the page telling the reader that they are, in fact, advertisement. “It’s essentially an advertisement masquerading as an editorial product,” says Marq de V illiers, editor of Toronto Life magazine. A staunch opponent of advertorials, de Villiersrefuses to allow them in his magazine. “It’s a fraudulent medium,” he says.

Despite the opposition of editors like de Villiers and Fulford, advertorials seem to be a trend that won’t go away. They have become a fixture in many American magazines, and here in Canada they are the staple of controlled circulation magazines such as Goodlife. They have also found their way into the pages of Canadian consumer magazines, notably Saturday Night and Canadian Business. But the most frequent perpetrator of advertorials is Maclean’s, which runs 10 to 12 advertorial sections a year.

Donald Ladkin, Maclean’s advertising sales director, introduced advertorials into the magazine in 1980, but he says, “We’ve only become fairly serious about it in the past two years.”

The reason for the upsurge is clear. According to Ladkin, the advertorial sections alone bring in $2 million in revenue a year. A page of advertorial sells for $23,000. Multiply that by an average of 16 pages a section, 10 times a year, and Ladkin’s estimate seems conservative.

In describing his operation, Ladkin says, “We simply build a theme that we think is important and that can be supported by a group of advertisers. In this way, we introduce new advertisers to the magazine that we feel could have long-term f6tential.” In the last year alone, they’ve covered such topics as allergies, home renovations, luxury cars and physical fitness. The advertising department oversees the layout, design and editing, and they hire freelancers to write the copy.

Paul Partland, whose sole job at Maclean’s is to conceive, design and sell advertorials, says that he and his staff go out of their way to ensure that the readers won’t be confused. “We use a different type-style than in the magazine’s real editorial,” he says. “We also use a different format. We only use two columns, while the rest of the magazine uses three.” He also cites the disclaimer at the bottom of each page and ~ the fact that they are not listed on the ~ contents page. But he concedes that the ~ body copy separating paid ads is some~ times called “editorial” and paper used ~ for advertorial sections is the same ~ stock used in the rest of the magazine.

Canadian Business ran its first internally produced advertorial section under editor Wayne Gooding in the December 1989 issue. The advertising department wanted to attract more car advertisers and an advertorial section was the chosen means of accomplishing this. Gooding went along with this approach, despite some misgivings. Although he is not as adamantly opposed to advertorials as de Villiers, he nonetheless says he wants to be cautious and careful about them. While he is aware of the potential for confusion, he also recognizes the importance of advertising revenue. “You have to be realistic “about the world,” he says. “Editors only spend money-we don’t generate money. We depend on advertising to do that.”

Still, Gooding believes it is necessary to take all possible steps to minimize the confusion. Canadian Business has taken Partland’s measures one step further and has actually devised a set of guidelines to deal with advertorials. The guidelines call for a different typeface and column design, as well as a disclaimer. But they also state that the editor must be consulted to ensure that the advertorial topic is “suitable for inclusion in the magazine.”

But Gooding’s participation in creating the first advertorial was more extensive. Although the advertising department footed the bill and the pages didn’t come out of the editorial budget, Gooding and art director Anna Janes collaborated with the advertising department to ensure that the section was first-rate and distinct from the rest of the magazine.

Gooding himself hired Bob English, a freelance writer with a special interest in cars to write the copy. He also took on a freelance editor and an art director and gave them a free hand in creating the advertorial. After that, he didn’t see the product until the final stages, when he made a few more changes. He moved the disclaimer from the bottom of the page to the top, where it is more visible, while Janes recommended some alternatives to the illustration to make sure that it was different from any illustration style ever used in the magazine. He then placed the section at the back of the magazine, after the regular features, and ensured that the pages weren’t numbered.

But whether they run in the middle of the magazine or at the end, they are still part of the book, printed on the same stock as the other pages. Such subtle distinctions as a different typeface and a different number of columns might just go unnoticed by the untrained reader.

De Villiers cites these reasons for his stand against advertorials. The reader, he says, could easily mistake the sections for journalism, and hold the magazine responsible for turning out material that doesn’t meet the usual journalistic standards: “If your readers are drifting away because they no longer believe what you say, then they won’t buy the magazine. Advertorial is by its very nature counterfeit, because it’s trading on a currency in which it has no residing value. It’s trading on the trust that the editors have built up with their readers without subscribing to the kind of morality that has led up to that trust.”

Still, de Villiers is plagued with letters from potential advertisers who will advertise only amid favorable editorial. “There are always those expectations,” he says. “It’s quite common.” He responds to these expectations by writing the prospective advertisers “a very polite letter explaining that we keep the separation between advertising and editorial absolute in this magazine, and editorial decisions are made regardless of whether you advertise or not. We might write about you even if you don’t advertise. Similarly, we might or might not write about you if you do..” He thinks that in the long run, this benefits both the advertisers and the credibility of the magazine.

Unfortunately, advertisers are not so readily convinced. Partland finds it easy to attract advertisers to advertorial sections in Maclean’s because he guarantees them close proximity to favorable copy. “Advertisers often wake up at 3 a.m. wondering if anybody saw their ad on page 72 of Maclean’s,” he says. “But an advertising and information supplement creates an island of interest. If people are reading it, it’s because they have some interest in the topic. So that way the advertisers feel, ‘Hey, people will be more likely to read my ad, not only to see it and to notice it, but to actually read it because they’re in the frame of mind to absorb it.’ “

However, even this doesn’t guarantee that they will read the ad. As with anything else in the print media, the reader can ultimately decide not to read it and just turn the page. “It does give the advertisers a worry-free environment,” says Fulford, “but I’m afraid it would also be a reader-free environment. Most people I know are so busy that they only have time for that journalism which is compelling, attractive, entertaining and important to their lives-some combination of those qualities. Well, none of those qualities describes advertorial.”

Unlike straightforward journalism, in advertorial the interests of the reader are all but ignored. “In any editorial conference,” says Fulford, “no matter how highbrow or lowbrow or tasteful or sexist it may be, the reader is sitting there all the time at the editorial meeting. But in advertorial, it doesn’t come up. The reader is absent from the editorial table. The reader is the forgotten person.”

Even Partland and Ladkin agree. “They’re definitely more ad-driven than readership-driven,” says Ladkin. Partland explains that there are two criteria for choosing topics for advertorial sections. The first is, Do we think we can sell a lot of ads? The other is, Is it going to be of interest to the reader? which Partland admits is “a very distant second” in priority.

The attitude toward the reader is what separates editors from advertisers. Yet advertising people will argue that this difference is outweighed by a basic similarity: they are both in the business of selling a product. Advertisers pitch consumer goods, while editors produce a magazine that they hope will sell on the newsstand. For that reason, they g should cooperate and look after each other’s needs. De Villiers disagrees: “Our product is not the magazine, but the information contained in it. There is a different social purpose to that. If you start tampering with that in any fundamental way, you get into propaganda, and away from journalism. You start to lose your basis for any credible social discourse. And I think that is a much bigger problem than simply telling lies about Kleenex. Journalism is a different kind of product, because you’re trading in information that is essential to the functioning of society. I think that’s the point we have to keep throwing back at the people who want us to publish advertorials.”

Toronto Life is a successful magazine. It has managed to turn a profit and attract advertisers without resorting to advertorials. They’ve done this by employing what de Villiers calls a “preemptive approach.” He says, “You do it first. You do it before the advertisers make demands on you.” Like advertorials, the preemptive approach involves the use of supplements. During the course of a year, Toronto Life runs supplements on food, homes, cars, men’s fashion and Christmas gift ideas. Unlike advertorial section producers, de Villiers insists on bringing a journalistic sensibility to his supplements: “We give credible reviews of the new cars. We say this one works and this one doesn’t work and why we think so. This year, we’re not even reviewing cars. We’re doing a Drivers’ Survival Guide to the City. But it’s about cars, and people who drive cars will read it. So car advertisers will go into it because they know they’re going to reach their market. They don’t go into it because we write nice things about their product.”

Canadian Living is another magazine that has succeeded with the same preemptive approach. Publisher Robert Murray is also an outspoken opponent of advertorials. “I think advertorials are dangerous. They’re a form of prostitution. Our editorial is sacrosanct,” he says. But he doesn’t mind cooperating with his advertisers when he sees a direct benefit for his readers. Canadian Living runs two special sections a year, Kids for Summer and Kids for Winter, which help mothers deal with the pressures of having their children home from school for an extended period of time. “It tells mothers how to cope through the summer and winter weeks. The advertisers just jump right in on that because their stuff is right there. There are hot dogs and crayons and buns. It makes for a great combination, but it’s not an advertorial. It’s an editorial piece designed for the use of our readers that the advertisers are using.”

Cooperation between advertisers and editors is crucial to the survival of a magazine. “You can’t do a magazine unless it’s commercially profitable,” says de Villiers. “You can’t afford to. Good journalism is expensive. You have to pay good writers good money to do it. But unless the magazine is making money, you can’t. So that’s the trick-to try and do a successful magazine without compromising journalistic principles.”

The very nature of the business means that editors and advertising people are at cross-purposes. “There’s always a tension between the editorial and advertising departments,” says Wayne Gooding, “and that tension is that the ad people’s incomes depend on the number of pages they can sell. We understand where their priorities lie.”

De Villiers agrees: “There’s some tension built into that relationship. It has to be that way. On the other hand, I think that an editorial position that says that all sales people are whores is wrong. It’s totally counterproductive. We’re all on the same side.”

Bob Murray is one publisher who understands the importance of keeping everyone on the same side. “We go out and we pay top dollar for the most creative people we can find,” he says, “and we let them do their job. That’s what a publisher is all about.

“Yes, we look after advertising and circulation and production, but the product has got to come together before you can do anything with it. My responsibility is for getting and keeping a great creative team. I can’t crack the whip. It doesn’t work for hockey teams or baseball teams. Why would it work in a magazine?”

Unfortunately, Murray is not like most publishers. More typical are the people that Bob Fulford dealt with at Saturday Night, where the publisher and the editor had clearly separate responsibilities. Saturday Night did publish the occasional advertorial, but because of this division of duties between the two departments, Fulford felt there was nothing he could do about it.

“I did not ever see it as part of Saturday Night, although there it was, bound up in the magazine, ” he says. “It was the publisher’s responsibility. I had enough trouble worrying about my pages without worrying about his pages. If we were making a lot of money and I had exactly the staff I wanted and things were moving along, I guess then I’d start worrying about those things.”

After all is said and done, the bottom line is still the bottom line. Advertorials make money, so they’re here to stay. As Paul Partland says, “With all the extra money we bring in, maybe the magazine will be able to bring in a correspondent in Russia that we wouldn’t otherwise have had.” Gooding agrees: “It probably pays for stories we want to do.”

For Canadian Living, the addition of advertorials may have meant more space for editorial and less for advertising. Murray says that is a sacrifice he’s prepared to make for the integrity of the magazine. But Murray is the exception and not the rule. Most editors, like Fulford, find themselves in strained relationships with their publishers. In that case, says de Villiers, the fight against advertorials “may be a losing battle, but I still think it’s the proper approach.”

It is a battle that requires constant vigilance on the part of anti-advertorial crusaders. Toronto Life gave up the vigil and lost the battle when it printed an advertorial in its January 1990 issue. Though it wasn’t a full-blown advertorial section, it was a one-page ad about skiing in Quebec. The body copy was lined up like editorial, complete with a headline and photograph. There was a disclaimer across the top, and even a writer’s byline.

The lapse was not caused by a change of heart on the part of de Villiers, but rather by an oversight. In fact, de Villiers was not even aware of the advertorial until it was brought to his attention several weeks after publication. Since he doesn’t decide which ads will run in the magazine, de Villiers only looks at them in the final vandyke stage, the last stage before the magazine is sent to the printers. In this case, he says the film for the Quebec ad arrived late and was not ready at the vandyke stage.

If it had been ready, de Villiers says he wouldn’t have allowed it. “My view hasn’t changed. It won’t happen again, not deliberately anyway.”

Publishers say they are eager to begin using recycled newsprint once existing paper contracts expire and as soon as they can be guaranteed a steady supply of high quality recycled paper. As it stands now, the newsprint industry is ill-prepared to meet any increased demand for recycled newsprint, and any commitment by publishers to use it puts them in an awkward position: If they’re to use more recycled newsprint, where and when are they going to get it?

The problem begins in what most would consider an unequivocal recycling success story: the Blue Box program. Almost half of the nearly 650,000 tonnes of newsprint distributed in 1989 will be collected again at curbside as used newspaper. But not all that is collected is being recycled. Quite simply, there aren’t enough recycling mills.

Q & O buys 200,000 tonnes of old newsprint annually for its plant in Thorold, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, but according to Vince Benvenuti, the company’s planning director, Q & O could not recycle all of Toronto’s paper. “That’s about 250,000 tonnes a year -and that’s just Toronto.”

Owned by the Chicago Tribune, the company has borne the brunt of a huge surplus of old newspaper created by the success of the Blue Box program. It is a problem tikely to continue until well into 1990 when a second recycling plant -being built by Torontobased Atlantic Packaging Ltd. -opens in Whitby, Ontario. General manager, Bob Nelson, estimates the mill will require about 160,000 tonnes of old newspapers, but until it is up and running, and as long as the Ontario government keeps pushing the Blue Box program, the glut of old newspapers will continue to grow. Recent meetings between the provincial government and a committee of Ontario publishers headed by Toronto Star publisher David Jolley focussed on how the newspaper industry could contribute to the recycling program, and according to John Foy, president of the Canadian Daily Newspaper Publishers Association, the industry is putting up $10 million toward the purchase of more blue boxes throughout Ontario.

“The efforts to date have focussed on the collection and processing of recycled materials,” says John Hanson, executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario which, formed in 1978, sponsors Ontario’s recycling week. And “in their enthusiasm to make it work they overlooked one side of the equation,” he says.

“We’ve concentrated on the supply side,” explains George Currie, a management consultant with Coopers and Lybrand, appointed by Ontario publishers to define the problem. “We haven’t done anything about the demand side.”

In Ontario, the provincial government seems to want to let the demand for recycled newsprint develop on its own. In the United States, however, burgeoning landfill sites and an embarrassing dependence on Canadian virgin newsprint have led 14 state governments to propose various forms of newsprint-recycling legislation. Already in Connecticut and California, laws require publishers to use increasing amounts of recycled newsprint.

But publishers and newsprint producers alike-particularly in Ontario-insist legislation is not only undesirable, it is also unnecessary.

“With public pressure on the publishers, who have publicly said that they are going to use more recycled newsprint when they can get it, we feel that things will fall into place without legislation,” says Nelson.

“You’ve got to go with the forces of the market,” adds Foy, “and that is what is being done. The worst thing to do is have government involved it screws everything up. So you try to get private enterprise to do it for you-any smart government does.”

Already in the US, 25 to 30 per cent of all newsprint produced is recycled newsprint, and as American publishers become less dependent on Canadian virgin newsprint, most foresee Canadian manufacturers responding to meet the increased demand for recycled newsprint-but not right away.
Coming off perhaps its best year ever, with mills consistently operating at 99 per cent capacity in 1988, the industry is in the midst of a global oversupply of newsprint. Five new mills came on stream in North America in 1989 and another seven are to follow by the end of1991. This in creased capacity (expected to reach 17.2 million tonnes in North America in 1990, up from 16.1 million tonnes in 1989) has pushed prices below the break-even point for many Canadian producers, and some US suppliers are offering discounts of 15 to 19 per cent. Over 200,000 tonnes of productive capacity was shut down across the continent in the first nine months of 1989, most of that in Canada, and Abitibi-Price Inc., world’s largest supplier of newsprint, reported that its profit plunged 52 per cent over the same nine-month period.

So, the likelihood of new recycling operations appearing over the next two or three years is slim: the price tag for a de-inking system now runs at around $80 million; a new mill close to $400 million.
“It’s a real dilemma,” says Benvenuti of Q & O. “One way or another, they are going to have to adjust, but it’s a decision that in economic terms does nothing for them but protect their market.”
Everyone seems to have adopted a wait-and-see approach. Although the glut of old newspapers is considered temporary, things won’t change unless Atlantic Packaging gets its old newspaper from Ontario municipalities. So far there are no guarantees. And as for the need for legislation, Bob Nelson says the Whitby mill should open before the government decides whether to step in.
“We will have to earn our way into this market, and if we don’t get the support that we need, then by all means if you want to get involved and start making legislation, then do it. But don’t do it now.”

Publishers, meanwhile, remain waiting in the wings. It’s clear newspapers are willing to use recycled newsprint-if for no other reason than to avoid mandatory recycled newsprint legislation.

Politically, the leak spelled yet another scandal for the Progressive Conservative government. Journalistically, it ignited a debate over how the story was handled. As the government circled its wagons around its beleaguered Finance Minister Michael Wilson, journalists across the land.
devoted ink and air time to weigh the ethical implications of how Global broke the story: did Small go too far when he reported not only the leak, but also the ‘country’s budget details?

A sideshow to the journalistic wrangling was the startling testimony last November in which an RCMP sergeant told an Ottawa courtroom that he suspected the nation’s police force had it in for journalists in general, and Doug Small in particular. During the political firestorm which blew through the House, Opposition attempts to grill the Conservatives about allegations of political interference had already been stymied by the government. With the matter before the courts they could say nothing. The public expressed themselves through letters to newspaper editors. They chastised Small for the way in which he scandalized the government.

Small-and several major newspaper columnists across the country-defended Global’s broadcast of the leaked ~ budget details. Small admitted to a fellow journalist, shortly after being charged,” that he was not surprised at the public’s outcry over what he had done. “It may have something to do with my own demeanor, the fact that I looked a little smart-alecky because I broke a big story. There is some sense among people that I’m paying for what I did.”

With the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of being able to sit back and analyze, journalists formed reasoned arguments vindicating the man who scooped them. But Small simply says he acted on instinct. “It never occurred to me, as a matter of fact it still doesn’t occur to me, that I did anything unethical. I would have felt unethical if I had kept the stuff to myself and tried to make a quick buck from it.”

That’s not all there is to it though. Small faced some tough criticism from his peers, including Ottawa’s CJOH which had passed up the chance to break the budget story by refusing to pay an anonymous caller for the document. The station argued that Small should have broadcast the leak without disclosing the details; it was difficult to see what public interest was served in broadcasting the budget highlights.

CJOH’s first chance to break the story came on the afternoon of April 26, 1989. An unknown caller offered CJOH the contents of the federal budget. Senior reporter Michael O’Byrne turned down the caller. He said the man wanted the station to pay him for the scoop. In retrospect O’Byrne mused that maybe he could have talked the man into handing the story over free of charge, but he says the station handled it the best it could under the circumstances: “It was just another phone call. I didn’t give it another thought until I received a telephone call at seven o’clock that night with ‘Guess what Global just came on the air with.’ Well you get an initial feeling of panic: My God, did I miss the biggest story of the year? Could I have done anything differently?”

Journalists at CJOH were faced with that question again and they decided not to air a leaked Auditor General’s report but simply report the leak. The station’s managing editor, Dave McGinn, said the decision not to air this report was made in consideration of the Global leak. “We determined-after a discussion I might add-that the story here was the fact that there was a breach in the Auditor General’s security, not in the fact that there was a leak in his report and content of the report itself. So we opted for just pointing out that, hey, somebody screwed up and left the tape in the machine, but it’s not the end of the world. We really didn’t think it was necessarily in the public interest to leak the information early.”

In the Kingston Whig-Standard, editor Neil Reynolds wrote, “Mr. Small served no public interest objective in broadcasting the contents of the budget book he had been given. He would have served a public interest objective had he instead broadcast only the fact that a pirated copy of the budget book was getting passed around on street corners. The government would still have been embarrassed; Mr. Wilson would still have been in trouble. But Global and Mr. Small would have emerged from it all as straight-shooters with the correct target in their scopes.”
Don McGillivray, longtime syndicated columnist for Southam, says there’s an uncomplicated division of labor in dealing with secrets in Ottawa: governments keep them, journalists expose them. Simple.

However, Andrew McFarlane, a journalism professor at the University of Western Ontario, says the argument that Small was obliged to divulge the contents of the budget is demeaning to journalism. “To attribute the decision to a force outside yourself is like saying, news happens and we report it, which isn’t true. Everything a journalist prints or broadcasts is the result of a conscious decision, or at least it should be. Everything is a decision-what you put in the story, what you don’t put in the story, whether you do the story or whether you don’t do the story.

“So, anybody who says, well, he had it therefore he had to publish it, is missing the point.”

The chubby 42-year-old proudly claims that more than 1,000 articles about him have appeared in local papers during his 15 years as a lawyer.

In Kopyto’s study, where he keeps part of his collection, huge framed photographs of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin glare down from the walls. Another picture shows Kopyto standing on the edge of a rocky shore, his black gown flapping dramatically in the wind.

For reporters, this avowed socialist is a quote machine on fast forward. Every sentence is powered by indignation, and blasts at the judicial system jump effortlessly from his mouth. “Most judges are so conservative, they’re just to the right of Attila the Hun.” Or his most famous line: “The courts and the RCMP are sticking so close together you’d think they were put together with Krazy Glue.”

Harry Kopyto makes colorful copy, but his outbursts aren’t just witty metaphors aimed at getting smothered giggles in courtrooms. He is ever conscious of the media’s usefulness. And judging by his library walls insulated with clippings and audio and video tapes of his media coverdge, it’s a game Kopyto knows well.

As a lawyer championing the cause of the poor, Kopyto i has doggedly phoned reporters, invited them to his rallies and called news conferences to vent outrage over his court battles. Recently, though, in a controversial bout with the Law Society of Upper Canada, the outspoken Kopyto lost. The self-governing body for Ontario lawyers disbarred him for overbilling the Ontario Legal Plan by $150,000 between 1985 and 1986. Kopyto has appealed the decision and is waiting for a hearing date to be set.

Gord Doctorow, a longtime friend, considers Kopyto an expert at manipulating the media. “He’s not trying to do it to make Harry Kopyto a cult figure. He always educates people, always draws political and social connections to the class-biased system.”

Globe and Mail reporter Kirk Makin also acknowledges Kopyto’s skill at getting his name in the paper. But, he adds, Kopyto is losing his sense of perspective because of all the publicity He notes that Kopyto’s “outrage at his cases has become louder, more frequent and more provocative.”
Donn Downey, another Globe and Mail reporter, says Kopyto’s constant stunts make him a bit of a joke among the media. But Kopyto counters, “I have a better track record than most lawyers. I’ve won cases that other lawyers wouldn’t even take on.”

Ironically, the announcement of his disbarment signalled the height of Kopyto’s media coverage. Although he has appealed the Law Society’s decision, his successful relationship with the Toronto media may nearly be over.

Kopyto brandishes another article, a tongue-in-cheek story written during his disbarment hearings. The lead paragraph rings with his favorite theme: “Harry Kopyto, lawyer for the poor, the unwashed and the dispossessed” Kopyto was so pleased with the story that he plastered it on the back of a pamphlet he handed out to encourage supporters to come to his hearing.

He missed the subtle irony of the article, just as some may miss the self-effacing humor tucked into the cracks of his heroic language. “Without them [his supporters],” Kopyto says, “there’s no Harry
I’m the reincarnation of their own spirit and determination. “I don’t need articles about me,” he says. “I don’t need to be on TV: I do what I have to do. If it attracts attention, so be it. By the way, would you like to see another biography of me?

As an English student at the University of Toronto in this period I had written a few articles for The Mike, the student publication of St. Michael’s College. Some of these articles were fairly conventional efforts at journalism, others ponderous essays on the great issues of the day. A fellow student -who later became a distinguished Canadian poet-seriously warned me that if I kept writing these articles I might end up doing that kind of stuff for the rest of my life. I knew what he meant. If one was going to do any sort of writing, one should do real writing-and real writing was not journalism but poetry or fiction or drama.

I attempted fiction while still at university. Later, as a reader for McClelland & Stewart, reporting on manuscripts sent the firm by hopeful novelists and poets, I saw my own fatal weaknesses as a fiction writer reflected in the work of others. These hopeful authors might have been perfectly intelligent; they might have had a genuine sensitivity to language, perhaps even a flair for imagery, and for small and large perceptions about life. But there was something airless in their work. One could sense how proud they were of their metaphors and their apercus, studded throughout narratives which never came alive. Myown short stories, often featuring a protagonist bearing a striking resemblance to myself, laden with existential despair, were no different.

After I was fired by McClelland & Stewart I had leisure to explore existential despair more thoroughly. But it was also in this period of unemployment that I came across an article in Life magazine about the “Jesus Freaks,” as they were then known, and decided to try my hand at writing about them in the manner of Wolfe and Mailer. As a subject, they were perfect for a new journalistic approach. These born-again ex-hippies, it was clear, lived a rather colorful life, following Jesus and fighting Satan amidst apocalyptic visions and the squalor of Toronto street life. Following them around would, I figured, afford many opportunities for catching dramatic moments, confrontations between believers and non-believers, revelations of doubt and despair within their own ranks. Whether they were deluded or not, these people were playing for high stakes, and that always makes for good journalism.

With a great deal of nervousness, I showed up at their commune at Roch-dale College in the spring of 1971.They ~ received me enthusiastically. The man ‘who appeared to be their leader warned me they were interested in my soul, but no serious efforts were made to convert me and I felt reasonably comfortable in the following weeks following them around. The result was a lengthy piece, influenced stylistically more by Mailer than Wolfe-apocalypse, after all, was then Mailer’s specialty. Eventually Saturday Night, at that point a quirky, almost amateurish operation, but very hospitable to new talent, published the first third of it. My poet-friend’s warning proved justified – I was on my way to a career foreshadowed by all those Mike articles.

The New Journalism, however, made it seem very different. The New Journalism made it possible to be a writer as literary as any good novelist and yet never get stuck in lifeless narratives about young, overly sensitive protagonists wondering what their place was in this absurd universe. The New Journalism struck me then as an immensely liberating force. It liberated in me something I had never quite realized was there, a love of observing the world and the way humans lived in it. Sometimes it seemed to me worth being alive just to notice, for example, the way high school students dressed. I had made boring fiction out of my inner psychological conflicts, conflicts which bored even myself. I thought I could write some decent journalism out of all the things I noticed that had nothing to do with myself.

For a few years in the early seventies I wrote several articles for Saturday Night which ‘”,ere obviously New Journalistic. By then, I had switched from Mailer to Wolfe. Mailer’s style was an invitation to verbosity and high seriousness, vices I was too much prone to anyway. Wolfe’s prose was sharper, livelier and more dependent for its effect on sheer observation, an activity always wholesome for a writer. In the early seventies, Wolfe’s prose was much imitated by younger journalists in Canada. I modestly make the claim that I wrote the best imitation Tom Wolfe prose in Canada, perhaps in North America.

Later, as a magazine journalist, I dropped that style and wrote much more conventional profiles. For one thing, in my Wolfean pieces I often bent the rules-the characters I wrote about were anonymous, and sometimes “comp05ite.” This technique, based on reportage and associated, perhaps unjustly, with the New Journalism, lowered the repute of the New Journalism. And it represented a serious weakness in those pieces.

Nevertheless, for many years I kept alive in my mind the notion of writing that definitive knock-’em-dead article based on the techniques of the New Journalism. These techniques, quite independent of the particular prose styles of Mailer, Wolfe, Didion or any of the other exemplars of the New Journalism, really were based, as Wolfe pointed out, on saturation reportage. One immersed oneself in whatever scene one was covering, to be there for the spontaneous moments of revelation, the snatches of conversation, the gestures not made with the thought of the press in mind. One looked for the same things a novelist looked for: action and dialogue with a dramatic shape that somehow summed up people’s characters. Was the subject of one’s profile insincere or not forthcoming during interviews? Well, then, one hung out with that subject long enough to be there when he chewed out the waitress, and that’s what showed up in the article.

As the American writer Roy Blount once put it wryly, you hung out with your subject until you found out what kind of fool he really was. And of course all these techniques lent themselves to abuse. Nor was it always possible to use them. But it seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that the marrying of literary techniques with reportage produces the best form of journalism.

I never wrote that knock-’em-dead article, or any article that really satisfied me. And eventually I turned to other things, to literary biography and then to my present occupation, literary criticism. (Canadian magazine editors, for one thing, became less and less interested in the New Journalism in the eighties, but that’s another story.) What I write now bears more resemblance, in a way, to my first articles for The Mike than it does to the New Journalism. But I am still challenged by the notion of the New Journalism, I still feel that the intensive reporting and the eye for revealing details of dress, speech and gesture which it calls for are the proudest accomplishments of a journalist. A man or woman, it seems to me, who writes a good piece of New Journalism has demonstrated not only literary ability but a certain nerve-he or she has gotten further into other people’s lives than anyone has a right to.