“And everyone laughed. It was so preposterous, as if I said to you that the world is flat. People don’t realize how unanimous and overwhelming the conventional wisdom was.”
– Michele Landsberg, recalling an incident in the 1950s as a first-year student at the University of Toronto. She had told a group of students that women were the intellectual equals of men. (The Ottawa Citizen, November 13, 1992)

That quote hit me right in the forehead when I first read it. Landsberg was talking to a journalist at a Women in the Media conference, explaining the foundation for sexist attitudes that women still confront in the newsrooms and on the front page. But I saw parallels in that quote with attitudes towards aboriginal peoples.
A few years ago, a radio producer from the Maritimes told me, with no sense of embarrassment, that he didn’t think people in his region were interested in aboriginal stories. Furthermore, he promised to dump stories about aboriginal people into my lap. After all, I was the aboriginal affairs broadcaster for CBC Radio at the time.
I’ve heard it all, from the local producer who didn’t cover a breaking story because they “just did an Indian story last week,” to the editor who thought it wasn’t worth visiting an Indian caucus on election night because “they’re probably all drunk.” But the absolute best was the editor who told me her newspaper didn’t do Indian stories because “Indians don’t buy advertising.”
Things are improving. The coverage, overall, is more balanced, more knowledgeable and more insightful. The media seem to acknowledge that, in the past, they routinely overlooked important stories-not because they lacked time, money or expertise, but because the stories were about aboriginal peoples.
Like the attitudes about women, the most persistent vehicle for attitudes about aboriginal peoples has been the media, through their use of misleading or demeaning stereotypes. Rudy Platiel, who’s covered aboriginal issues for more than 20 years in The Globe and Mail, says Canadians have a “schizophrenic view of native people.” People may recognize parallels with the “super-morn” and “bitchy feminist.”
“The public image of native people is very unreal. It’s very Hollywood,” says Platiel. “On the one hand, there’s the noble redman, the saintlier-than-a-saint, environmentally conscious, more spiritually-in-tune-with-the-earth native person. Then there’s the drunken, bloodthirsty savage that we’ve been taught to fear, on the other.” This latter stereotype, of course, has evolved into the radical or militant warrior.
Since Columbus, Europeans have regarded aboriginal peoples as either simple children of nature, needing the guiding hand of civilized whites, or as dangerous renegades, needing the controlling hand of civilized whites. These two themes, Platiel adds, are still predominant when the media interpret aboriginal stories.
Take a column by William Johnson of the Montreal Gazette. It used the inquest into the suicide of a 13-year-old Indian boy in Manitoba, Lester Desjarlais, to buttress his arguments against self-government.” For those who think aboriginal self-government a panacea,” he Wrote, “one might recommend as remedial reading the inquest report.”
The father, Johnson alleged, “beat the mother and the boy before the parents separated. The boy complained that he had been raped anally by his uncle, Joe Desjarlais, [a relation] of the chief of the Sandy Bay reserve… those people and institutions who and which should have protected the young from the adult abusers instead protected the abusers, especially when from a politically powerful family.”
The corruption of an aboriginal child welfare agency, the “abuse of power and gross violation of rights” in this case was an example of the “chaos” people might expect if aboriginal peoples regained self-government, Johnson hinted.
He goes further. He says that the aboriginal-run agency “was founded amid accusations that the existing children’s aid society, staffed by whites, did not understand native culture and so made terrible decisions” affecting native children and families.
It wasn’t quite that simple. A provincial inquiry in the early eighties found white social workers routinely took aboriginal children from their families and placed them in white neighbourhoods with good, white middle-class values. Aboriginal parents, their homes and their families were deemed deficient because they were aboriginal.
So many aboriginal children were taken from their parents and placed in white foster homes outside the province, the judge concluded that the effect on aboriginal communities was nothing less than “cultural genocide.”
Johnson made it sound like a minor cultural misunderstanding. He was glossing over the facts, and echoing the sentiments of many Manitobans who saw the inquest report as a chance to further their views on self-government.
The facts are: when the province rushed to dump responsibility on the new aboriginal agencies, it failed to give them enough money or time to train workers or give them the experience they would need to deal with the tremendous problems in their communities. It created a ticking time bomb for disaster.

Joanne Ramondt thought she had found a good example of male bias in the pages of the Calgary Herald. In a photo of a husband and wife business team, the husband was standing in the foreground, clearly the focus of attention, while the wife sat off in the background with the children.
Ramondt is a member of the gender monitoring committee at the Herald, which has been surveying the paper for such biases since last May. Although the photo indicated to Ramondt and other committee members that something was wrong, they agreed one photo wasn’t enough proof. But it took just a few more weeks to confirm their instincts: in almost every photograph of a family, the husband was the dominant image and the wife was in the background with the children. When the photo department was presented with the series of pictures, it realized its unconscious bias. Coverage immediately improved.
This was just one example of what the committee saw. “Whole days went by and we found our section fronts presented men only, even with the entertainment and life sections,” said Ramondt. “When you have day after day of this, you start to understand why women aren’t reading the paper.”

The Herald isn’t alone among Canadian papers, either in its lack of female presence or in its skew to a higher male readership. About 63 per cent of Canadian women say they read a newspaper yesterday, compared to 75 per cent of men, a gap which translates into hundreds of thousands of papers not read each day. And newspaper articles refer to women as subjects or sources only 19 per cent of the time, according to a Media Watch study of 15 Canadian papers.
Newspapers are no longer the main source of news for most Canadians, who turn to television instead. Merge that with the fact that women-the main audience advertisers want to reach-have stopped reading newspapers in alarming numbers in the past two decades. This explains why, over the past few years, newspapers have seriously committed themselves to regaining this lost constituency.
The women they’re seeking are too busy with careers and families to read anything not interesting or relevant. Weekday readership dips to its lowest levels, at 57 per cent, among women in their late 20s and early 30s, 75 per cent of whom are in the work force.
The most direct approach to the problem has also turned out to be the most controversial: the creation of a special section for women. The concept aims to reflect the lives of women in the 1990s, but evokes memories of the fluffy women’s sections of the past. The approach has been called “condescending” by some and “liberating” by others. The Montreal Gazette became the first, and so far, only Canadian newspaper to try it when their weekly five-page section, called WomanNews, debuted in March, 1992.
At worst, it’s seen solely as a gimmick to attract advertisers. The first of these new women’s sections was the Chicago Tribune’s, which appeared in 1991. In its first year, the Tribune’s Womanews drew a 21 per cent increase in ad lineage over the previous section, launching a women’s-section trend in the United States. But the biggest concern is that these sections will become a ghetto for stories about women, excusing editors from improving women’s coverage elsewhere.
“My first choice is to have those stories all through the paper,” said Patricia Graham, a senior editor at The Vancouver Sun. That is, in fact, what the Sun and other newspapers, such as the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, The Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald are attempting. But it’s tricky. Not only must papers implement changes quickly, they must market them aggressively, or they won’t convince women to start reading newspapers again.
That’s why the new women’s sections, though not necessarily the best answer to the problem, shouldn’t be readily dismissed. Unlike previous women’s sections, they have a more dynamic feel, with articles such as how feminism excludes minority women, advice on being a pregnant working professional and opinion columns by freelancers from across the continent.
But newspapers still need to make a strong and vigilant commitment to improve coverage overall, in order to dispel the perception among many women that newspapers are for men. Women obviously aren’t going to start reading the paper regularly just because of a few pages once a week. A special section, however, may be a starting point to draw them in. And The Gazette’s WomanNews, although it hasn’t attracted much advertising, does seem to please its target readers, including busy working women.

The new women’s section works because of the simple premise on which it is based: find out why women are reading papers less, understand who they are and give them what they want. Then they will read. This idea came out of the experience of Colleen Dishon, a senior editor at the Chicago Tribune.
As a manager, she heard stories from women who worked for her complaining how difficult their lives were. Dishon thought that the newspaper was not meeting the needs of these women and others like them. “There was nothing in the paper that showed them they weren’t alone in their struggle, that others were in the same boat,” she said, “How could the paper serve these women? With the affirmation that this was a large group.”
And so, in 1985, Dishon created Tempo Woman, a section aimed at working women. Over the next six years, following extensive research, it changed three times and broadened its target audience. Its final version, called Womanews, appeared in April, 1991. “The male reporters thought it was a terrible idea,” said Dishon, “but they would think that any special thing for women would be.”
Womanews uses all the paper’s bureaus and has a large freelance budget to produce a mixture of in-depth news stories, features, profiles, a calendar and classifieds. Distributed in the 7ribune’s Sunday paper, it goes to more than two million readers.
Almost three-quarters of the 7ribune’s female readers say they read it regularly, and it has the strongest appeal to working women, particularly under age 35. In less than two years, Womanews has been syndicated to more than 60 newspapers. It was a model for The Gazette’s WomanNews as well as similar ventures in Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma and Kentucky, to name a few, with names like Every Woman, Accent on Today’s Woman and You. Its critics no longer complain.

“Women-food” reads the big banner headline of The Gazette’s women’s section from 1960. A glance at any such page of the time shows what editors thought women were interested in: weddings, social gossip, cooking, fashion and not much else.
It wasn’t always so. In 1889, Kit Coleman started writing a column for The Toronto Daily Mail called “Fashion Notes and Fancies for the Fair Sex.” She soon renamed her column “Woman’s Kingdom”-perhaps sarcastically-and started filling a page with political commentary, literary criticism and short stories along with the lighter items. Coleman had thousands of fans, male and female, including Wilfrid Laurier.
The women’s pages survived into the 1960s, but they had their critics. In 1963,Christina Newman wrote in Macleans condemning their content. “In the collection of cliches and
claptrap, of syndicated syrup and trumped up trash they call the women’s pages, the editors and publishers of newspapers are apparently trying to reach some long since vanished female who measures out her days dispensing kindliness in tea gowns and sandwiches on silver salvers, preoccupied mainly with the length of this spring’s skirts or the content of this Sunday’s supper menu,” she wrote. The sour attitude toward the new women’s sections may well be rooted in memories of these old sections.

Lucinda Chodan of the Gazette was skeptical when the male managing editor mentioned the idea of a woman’s section to her in the summer of 1991. Chodan, assistant managing editor, immediately thought “ghettoization.” That August she visited the women’s section editor at the Tribune to study the idea. “I came back converted,” said Chodan. The success of the Tribune’s section as well as Dishon’s extensive research convinced her that a new women’s section might work in Montreal.
The research considered, for instance, the startling fact that American papers lost about a quarter of their female readers in the 1980s. In Canada, the losses have been similar, but not so dramatic. In 1992, there was a 12 per cent gap between the number of men and women who read newspapers, compared to 1968 when 82 per cent of women and 81 per cent of men said they read a newspaper on an average day.
Yet a U.S. study found that women between the ages of35 and 44 find time to read three hours a week, compared to 2.7 hours by men the same age.
“These women are reading magazines,” said Donna Nebenzahl, editor of WomanNews at The Gazette. “The reality is that there isn’t anything in the paper they want to look at.”
The committee on women’s coverage at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix found that women “will make time to read gripping, intelligent writing, even longer pieces as well as humorous articles and practical, well-organized features that help them cope with their complex lives and demanding roles.”
When they do pick up a newspaper, women are more prolific readers than men. They have a wider range of interests and will look at or read more sections and pages. This makes them appealing to advertisers. Women control 85 per cent of consumer spending, and advertisers believe they are responsible for most household decisions (including the cancellation of newspaper subscriptions).
The research from the Tribune, The StarPhoenix and The Gazette also showed that women want information relevant to them in one place, so they don’t have to search for articles of interest.
Unlike the Lifestyle or Living sections which followed the women’s sections in the 1970s, WomanNews at The Gazette is targeted exclusively at women and based on a “news you can use” philosophy. “There’s nothing in the section about how to cook, how to parent or how to clean,” said Nebenzahl. And unlike most women’s magazines, it examines harder news stories. The section has published an infographic on dealing with stress, a story on the low percentage of women working in the sciences, a fashion piece on briefcases, and every week it carries news briefs and a calendar of local events.

Still, some women are offended by the idea. Where is the guarantee that male editors will still worry about coverage of women’s issues, or about male bias in the rest of the paper? Will this hinder more than help women in the long run?
“It’s insulting to give women 10 pages and say that’s enough,” said Linda Hawke, who conducted Media Watch’s survey last year. “Is that what we’re aiming for? I don’t think that 10 pages in a newspaper is what we’re aiming for.
“We’d like to see things more evenly distributed throughout the paper, and dealt with in a comprehensive way. There has to be more of an effort to get women’s opinions and voices in the rest of the paper.”
Nebenzahl says the section isn’t intended to replace the news, but to put a new spin and local angle on items of particular interest to women, with more context and depth than the typical news story. “We don’t cover issues that are deemed news for the A or B sections,” she said. ‘~nd there’s a concerted effort to not make it a repository for stories about women.” Chodan says having the section has sensitized others in the newsroom to women’s concerns.
Most importantly, WomanNews is satisfying its readers. “The best experience was the reaction I got from people I interviewed,” said Frances Bula of her stint as Woman News reporter. “There were professionals, businesswomen, immigrants, educators, a diverse range of women. They were excited about [WomanNews] and told me they read it every week.”
According to The Gazette’s research, 59 per cent of women who read WomanNews say it increases the value of the paper for them, and three-quarters say it’s useful in their lives. What they like most are health and lifestyle articles and news stories affecting women. Advertisers have reacted with much less enthusiasm. In some weeks, the section has had just one ad. This may be because they’ve committed themselves to other well-established sections in the newspaper where they’ve always bought ads. For now, though, the section will remain as long as it continues to satisfy its target readers.

At other newspapers, the process of balancing coverage has been neither smooth nor quick. Editors at The Vancouver Sun had a mandate to reserve page three of the first section for stories of interest to women. The plan lasted less than a year because of other changes to the newspaper, but there were problems with the approach. Patricia Graham, a senior editor at the paper, said some of the articles were too featurish, which broke the pace of the news section. And sometimes it had too many stories about serious issues, such as breast cancer and rape, on the same day. The approach now is to ask section editors daily whether they have stories of interest to women or multicultural communities.
“We worry sometimes whether we can move fast enough before we lose more readers,” said Graham. “We still haven’t come to grips with the content question. It’s not just what’s covered, but the angle. For instance, women are more concerned about sexual assault, while men are more interested in stories about false accusations. It affects coverage. “
At the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, the idea of a woman’s page was first mentioned at an editorial meeting in the fall of 1991. It was only considered seriously after a task force created to deal with the issue of women’s coverage recommended it as part of its report.
The idea wasn’t popular in the newsroom at first. The task force circulated a questionnaire among newsroom staff to ask what they thought the problem was with coverage. Some of the responses they got were “women are using the paper for their own agenda” and “there’s nothing wrong.”
With the support of senior editors, two pages called Access became part of the Saturday paper’s Prism section last September. Women’s issues editor Deanna Herman worked with the Prism editor to find space for Access. They moved some columns into the Sunday paper, and cut back on space for books, art and the cover story. To combat potential ghettoization, Herman attends news meetings and assigns stories to reporters in other sections.

Despite the initial problems, the pages are now accepted in the newsroom and women readers seem to like them. In contrast, a few months previously, The StarPhoenix’s auto section increased in size without the backlash or commotion surrounding the women’s page.
This sort of reaction happens because the problem is so deeply entrenched. A study by Gannett newspapers in the United States found that papers allocate beat reporters in favour of male interests. For instance, 19 per cent of reporters cover sports while only 8 per cent are assigned to family or lifestyle issues.
Yet 74 per cent of women say they read family or lifestyle sections frequently compared to 67 per cent of men who say they read sports just as often.
“If there were more women in higher positions, part of the problem would start to take care of itself,” said Hawke of Media Watch, “and they have to be in positions where they can make decisions about how information is presented.” In addition, an eight-month study of the readership gap by The Edmonton Journal said there should be more female reporters and columnists, more stories about women, more women experts quoted in stories and the creation of a special page to cover women in the workplace.

As editors rely more on the opinions of focus groups, and as society becomes more diverse with more people from different cultures, it’s difficult to foresee how newspapers will adapt.
“There’s an argument to be made that the newspapers of the future will be highly targeted,” said Nebenzahl of The Gazette. “In the past there was a captive market. It was easy to say, ‘Let’s give them blank section.’ It’s more difficult now. Resources are limited and you need to consider the market. But this has to blend with the fact that you’re still a newspaper.”
At the Tribune, Dishon now works full-time developing sections. Her latest creation was a section called KidNews which started last August, and she’s exploring the idea of a section for baby boomers of the Clinton generation. The Tribune is also looking at ways of unbundling the paper so that readers can get just the parts they want. At an extreme are papers like USA Today, which are highly market-driven. Although it may be criticized for its short, superficial reporting, USA Today is considered a leader among American papers for its coverage of women and minorities. Each section has stories which reflect the diversity of its readers. It also has a mandate to have a photo of a woman or member of a minority on page one, above the fold, every day.
Canadian newspapers are headed in different directions. Joanne Ramondt of the Calgary Herald is involved in a project to merge the city and life sections. Back in 1972, when she worked as a summer student at The London Free Press, female interns were obligated to spend a month working on the women’s pages. “We all hated it, and cheered when the section died,” she said. She sees the disadvantages of the new sections, but won’t completely reject the idea. “Now I’m coming full circle. I’m thinking that these sections may be good.

My first unfavourable review hurt more than I let on. It was 1989. I had been The Toronto Star’s national affairs columnist for four years and I was beginning to feel comfortable in the job.
“No one expects her to persuade or entertain,” wrote Charlotte Gray in Saturday Night. “Were a strong opinion or a bitchy comment ever to sneak into Goar’s column, it would set off the press building’s sprinkler system.” In public, I smiled or shrugged. In private, I asked myself a thousand times where I had gone wrong and what I should do about it. In the end, I didn’t do anything. To have changed my style would have been to change me. I don’t shout. I don’t dazzle. I don’t skewer. And I don’t think you have to do any of those things to write a lively, independent-minded column.
The truth is, I don’t want to be a pundit. I want to give people the facts and background they need to make their own judgments about national politics. I want to tell both sides of a story as fairly as I can, so people will understand that governing means making tough choices. I want to make Ottawa seem like a
human place, where dedicated and not-so-dedicated public officials find their way in a world of variegated greys.
Occasionally (in spite of what Saturday Night says), I do lost my temper. When Finance Minister Don Mazankowski announced last December that he was cutting unemployment insurance benefits, I wrote with considerable passion that any ~ government that would C5 punish the jobless during a devastating recession was both heartless and dangerously out of touch with its electorate.

I did this not to convert or impress anybody, but to force the ministers sitting around Brian Mulroney’s cabinet table, earning $135,600 a year, to see their policies as Canadians see them. Whether I succeeded, I don’t know. I at least provoked Mazankowski into writing two irate letters to the Star.
I seldom use my column as a soapbox this way because I think my first obligation is to my readers. They are smart enough to figure out for themselves that chopping unemployment benefits when one out of every eight workers is jobless is profoundly insensitive.
What they look to me for, I hope, is some explanation of why the government made the choices it did, what options it had and how its behaviour fits into an overall pattern. If I see flaws in the government’s approach, I’ll point them out. If I believe the government is trying to manipulate or confuse electors, I’ll do everything I can to strip away the artifice.
What I will not do, except in the rarest of circumstances, is attack an individual, make blanket assumptions about any group or impugn a person’s motives on the basis of guesswork or hearsay.
If this makes me less than entertaining, so be it. But I have yet to be convinced that a columnist has to be bitchy to be entertaining. I don’t like reading diatribes. And I’m sure there are readers out there, like me, who prefer subtlety to a sledgehammer.
A columnist who is always angry, dismissive or negative becomes predictable. People know what she is going to say before they open the paper. They stop paying attention and they stop thinking about important public issues.
By being understated and a bit unpredictable, I believe I can draw people into what I write. They may not be seething or cheering by the time they get to the end of one of my columns. But they have been involved. They have been treated like intelligent participants.
I don’t claim to be objective. I don’t think any journalist can be. My perspective is affected by the fact that I am a woman, I am white, I was born in the 1950s and I grew uF in a middle-class community in southern Ontario. I worry a lot that my background, plus the fact that I have spent 19 years in Ottawa, cuts me off from potential readers. I try, but probably not hard enough, to step outside the cloistered world I inhabit.
My closest friends aren’t journalists. I spend part of every weekend in a place like Tim Horton’s, drinking coffee and talking to non-politicians. I ask members of Parliamen1 what their constituents are telling them. I phone allover the country
Readers help, too. My column is syndicated in more than a dozen newspapers
and a surprising number of people take the time to write and offer their views of my work, government’s performance or events in their own lives. Ultimately, though, I am the product of my upbringing, my education, my genes. I can struggle to be fair and open-minded as hard as I like, but I can’t stop being me.
My latest unsolicited performance evaluation came in Marjorie Nichols’ book, Mark My Words. Nichols, who died of cancer just over a year ago, was my counterpart at The Ottawa Citizen. “She’s not a columnist, she’s an essayist,” Nichols wrote. “The last serious political columnist they had was Richard Gwyn, before he went off to Europe.”
Apparently I still haven’t made the grade. But now I know what to do about it: fight to change the grading system.

Coral Goor has been the notional affairs columnist for The Toronto Star since 1985.

When Canadian Living published its 150th issue in 1989, Norma Taylor of Summit Lake, British Columbia crocheted a blanket and sent it to the staff to mark the occasion. Taylor isn’t a former Canadian Living staff member and she’s not the editor’s mother. She’s just one of thousands of loyal readers across the country who feel their favourite magazine is part of the family.
While many Canadian magazines are cutting staff or folding, leaving a hole in the industry like a run in cheap pantyhose, Canadian Living just had its two best years ever. Last year, in the darkest days of the recession, while other publishers were choking on GST and disappearing postal subsidies, it even raised the price and increased circulation. And, after almost 20 years of quietly winning over readers at supermarket checkouts, Canadian Living is now aiming to dethrone the once undisputed queen of the Canadian magazine industry.
Founded in 1928, Chatelaine was the only one of many Canadian women’s magazines to survive the 1950s, when United States giants Time and Readers Digest took home more than 50 cents of every Canadian advertising dollar. In the 1960s, it became the largest paidcirculation magazine in the country. Today, ~ Reader’s Digest is the § leader but Chatelaine is number two, with a paid circulation of more than 900,000.
When Canadian Living hit the supermarket racks in 1975, it was no match for the sleek, glossy glamour of Chatelaine. The first issue featured stories like “Leave me alone-I’m stuffing the turkey,” in which former gym teacher Sally Armstrong explained why she doesn’t have time for fitness, and “The fastest gun…” an illustrated two-page spread on staple guns. Next to Canadian Living, Chatelaine looked like a million bucks, professionally turned out by top designers and the best photographers. Writers that year included Margaret Atwood, Marian Engel, Germaine Greer, Joyce Carol Oates and Morley Callaghan.
Canadian Living, however, fueled by the same can-do enthusiasm that characterizes the magazine’s editorial, made the best of its resources and became the Cinderella story of the 1980s, transforming herself from a local rag to a magazine with a national readership of almost two million by 1985. In the past four years, Canadian Living has grown up and, with the sophisticated marketing muscle of Telemedia behind it, is now challenging Chatelaine for readers’ loyalties and advertisers’ affections.
According to statistics published by the Print Measurement Bureau, Canadian Livings paid circulation has risen about three per cent over the past two years, while Chatelaine’s has gone down slightly. And although Chatelaine sells almost twice as many magazines, more people read each copy of Canadian Living. This closes the gap in terms of total readership, with Canadian Living at 2,178,000 and Chatelaine at 2,695,000.
For Canadian Living readers, their monthly subscription is like an extended letter from home complete with photos, treasured family recipes and advice on how to raise the kids. “Basically, we feel the readers own the magazine,” says editor-in-chief Bonnie Baker Cowan. “We just run it for them and, if we do something they do not approve of, they let us know. I think they feel they have a personal relationship with us.”
One woman wrote to say she had to think long and hard about renewing her subscription, but then she realized she couldn’t afford to be without Canadian Living. “I need it to help me get through bad times.”
Some letters go directly to other names on the masthead. Food director Elizabeth Baird often receives letters with photos enclosed from people who’ve enjoyed Canadian Living recipes as part of family occasions. Readers also phone the test kitchen for advice in mid-cake. “Can you substitute cocoa for baking chocolate in this recipe?” Or: “I just put my cake in the oven and I have to go out in 20 minutes-what should I do?”
The Canadian Living test kitchen is the heart of the magazine. Beyond the door, the cluttered maze of office space looks like any other successful, yet unpretentious, enterprise. Inside, however, it’s just like home. The test kitchen is designed to duplicate the conditions under which most readers are probably working-its only commercial equipment (a recent addition) is a single high-speed dishwasher that can turn around a load in just three minutes. It’s just like home, only at nine on a Wednesday morning, probably a hell of a lot tidier.
Most days, the kitchen is cooking four to six months in advance-Christmas is in July, and while the rest of us are baking shortbread, Canadian Living cooks are firing up their hibachis. Today, however, it’s October and the staff is preparing almost-seasonal treats-a brandied mincemeat ring and shortbread for Baird to take to the Ottawa Food and Wine Show, where she’ll be promoting the latest Canadian Living cookbook, Desserts, the eighth in a hugely successful series.
Over the whir of mixers and clatter of stirring, Jan Main, a freelance food writer, caterer, cooking school proprietor and mother of two, offers her explanation for the success of Canadian Living. “Everybody works together,” she says. “Everybody’s opinion is valued. And they really care about the readers. There’s no arrogance or patronizing.” Main offers her opinion ”as an outsider,” but people inside the magazine, writers past and present and even former employees all agree: Canadian Living is as warm and friendly as its editorial voice. Many of the staff have been there 10 years or more and there’s little turnover.
Writers like Susan Pedwell and Marcia Kaye edited at Canadian Living, then quit to raise families and now freelance for the magazine. Kaye says the people there are a pleasure to work with. “The editors have such a clear idea of what they want, it’s really rare to need a rewrite.” Lindalee Tracey says her stories are usually finished in a couple of drafts. Editing at Canadian Living “is not nail-biting, fussy stuff.”
Judy Stoffman, former assistant managing editor, credits the uniquely cooperative environment to the fact that Canadian Living began as an all female enterprise. Former editor Judy Brandow, who took control when Telemedia bought the fledgling magazine in 1977, had a peculiar management style that set the tone for the whole magazine. It was intuitive, feminine and, to outsiders, may have seemed amateurish and seat-of-the-pants. But it worked.
Since 1988, under Bonnie Cowan’s leadership, Canadian Living has started tackling serious social issues-domestic violence, child abuse, poverty and hunger. She’s taken the successful, happy, how-to formula and applied it to unhappy topics without significantly altering the magazine’s character. “Bonnie had the vision to see that times were changing and had the guts to go with it,” says senior editor Gilda Swartz.
In the past, editors sometimes waffled over running ground-breaking pieces. Nine years ago, Marcia Kaye wrote a story on talking to your kids about nuclear war. The magazine didn’t want to run it; it was too much of a downer. After similar stories ran in Quest and Chatelaine, though, the editors changed their minds. “By the time Canadian Living got around
to publishing it, it was old news,” says Kaye. These days, Canadian Living covers controversial topics while they’re still hot-the December, 1992 issue, for example, featured a story on the uproar over women baring their breasts in public.
Women’s magazines have long been viewed as publications of easy virtue, shamelessly in bed with their advertisers. One former editor at Canadian Living says she found the relationship with the advertisers “too close for comfort.” She recalls a story in the “Spend it Better” column at the back of the book comparing cloth diapers to disposables. Cloth was the clear winner. “We heard from the makers of disposable diapers,” she says. “They were not pleased and that carried considerable weight with the publisher.”
Still, the story ran as it was written and the editor qualifies her comments by adding that, with the recession, even newspapers are lowering their standards and bending to advertisers’ pressure. “The women’s magazines no longer seem so lacking in backbone.”
In fact, Canadian Livinghas demonstrated remarkable courage since Cowan took over. In 1989, it even braved the wrath of food advertisers with a feature on food contaminants. The story discussed dangerous chemicals in fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, dairy products and eggs, as well as coffee filters, cardboard milk containers and disposable diapers. In a magazine largely dedicated to the pleasures of eating, the story informed readers “an astonishing 86 per cent of our exposure to these toxic chemicals comes from the food we eat.” The story ran just as the Alar scare was hitting the media-headlined ‘~ is for Alar” to play up its timeliness. Predictably, food marketing boards were furious. Cowan says the magazine received between 50 and 100 angry letters.
Whether discussing fungicide-tainted grapefruit, the painful effects of divorce on children or the secrets of successful pastry, Canadian Living offers advice for coping. Under Cowan, however, the magazine’s perky tone has been refined. Today it’s less the voice of a well-meaning but not too bright friend and more like that of a realistic, well-informed peer. “There used to be a philosophy that you wrote to a grade six level,” says Cowan. “By recognizing that our reader is a welleducated, intelligent person, we added a different tone to our magazine.”
Still, former senior editor Anna Prodanou describes Canadian Living as a “good news” magazine, one reason she left after three years. “People wait for it to arrive on their doorstep and cheer them up. I find that a bit cloying.”
Nevertheless, she attributes the success of the magazine to the new bite of the features section. “It’s not because it has better recipes or a nicer Christmas angel this year than last, but what it says-and what it says is in the features section.
For writers, Canadian Living carries their voices farther than most other magazines, raising awareness and offering solutions to social issues they care about. “I think it empowers people and maybe that’s how the world gets changed-by women, hundreds and hundreds of women,” says Susan Pedwell.
Last fall, Cowan and her St2 launched the Canadian Living Foundation for Families, a charitable groups created to “sponsor programs designed to assist and promote the well-being Canadian families.” Their first project is to lend their expertise in nutrition and cooking to school and community breakfast and lunch programs across the country.

Former colleagues say one of Judy Brandow strongest skills was knowing her readers. Brandow didn’t care what other people in the publishing business thought of the magazine only what the readers felt. Lindalee Tracey says that holds true today, and it’s on of the challenges of writing for Canadian Living. “The point is not impressing buddies at the bar in Toronto. It’s got to impress the folks out in Red Deer.”
For many of these folks, Canadian Living is the only magazine they read They don’t read Chatelaine, they say because it’s too urban, too upscale ” Canadian Living is a more hands-or magazine, very Canadian,” says one senior media buyer. “Editorially,
think they’re more on the mark for the ’90s than Chatelaine.”
Besides sharpening the editorial Cowan says another major change she made was starting to run the magazine like a business. “We can’t put up a barrier between editorial and advertising anymore,” she says. “A good editor has to be a business person. That’s the difference between 1980 and 1990.” Running Canadian Living as a business means three-year plans, $125,000 a year in market research and constant attention to marketing.
Despite the magazine’s new boldness, advertising revenues are higher than ever. In 1990, Canadian Living attracted more pages of advertising than Chatelaine for the first time, a lead it has maintained since. The number of ad pages has risen 32 per cent from 1988 to 1992, while Chatelaine’s has declined by 6 per cent over the same period. Nevertheless, as Chatelaine publisher Lee Simpson is quick to point out, her book is still the leader in total advertising revenue.
For advertisers, one of Canadian Living’s many charms is Telemedia’s innovative packaging strategy. Big money advertisers can cut a better deal if they buy space in more than one of Telemedia’s family of magazines, which includes Homemakers and Select Homes and Food-ideal matches for Canadian Living advertisers. Both Chatelaine and Canadian Living purport to be aimed at the same audience: women ages 25 to 54. Despite Canadian Living’s slogan-“The Family Magazine”-and the editorial policy of carrying stories of interest to all family members, women in the age group of 25 to 54 comprise 67 per cent of their readers. And women are the ones buying the magazine and bringing it home.
Maclean Hunter’s efforts to promote their own Telemedia-style packaging have met with mixed results, in part because many Chatelaine advertisers just aren’t interested in reaching the readers of Flare or Macleans. The solution may be Modern Woman, launched at the end of January after almost two years of research and planning. Simpson says, “If Chatelaine is mass with class, MW is mass with sass.” Modern Woman is aimed at working women with jobs rather than careers, who bowl or go to the movies rather than attending the theatre or opera.
In the premiere issue, editor Charotte Empey described Modern Woman as “bright and breezy.” Cheap and cheerful, too, at 99 cents in certain markets, or free in others if you pick it up with the Sun newspaper, which carries the magazine as a monthly insert in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa. Empey promises a magazine for real women “in all our shapes, sizes and colours.” Stories are more personal-“my problem and how I solved it”-and sex is a popular topic.
If Modern Woman is this season’s sexy new debutante, City and Country Home is a down-and-out heiress with expensive tastes, sent to the typing pool to earn her keep. Last fall, Maclean Hunter announced that City and Country Home would be moving

back to the company’s 777 Bay Street headquarters and become a bi-monthly “gift” for a select group of Chatelaine subscribers.
At the same time, the magazine will readjust its Architectural Digest North image to include more practical stories on renovating, redecorating and adding on. The magazine has boosted its circulation from 60,000 to 100,000 almost overnight, and thanks to the miracle of modern database marketing, added the demographic cream of Chatelaine’s mailing list to its ultra upscale subscription base.
Simpson denies these moves are aimed at putting a hole in Canadian Living’s dance card, but admits the creation of Modern Woman will considerably boost Maclean Hunter’s efforts to package advertising. Patrick Walshe, vice-president of Harrison, Young, Pesonen and Newell, says the changes at Maclean Hunter mark a major escalation of the magazines’ long-standing rivalry. Walshe’s company is one of the largest buyers of media in Canada, with major clients including Unilever, one of the packaged goods manufacturers that are the bread-and-butter advertisers of women’s magazines. He describes Chatelaine and Canadian Living as “two battleships surrounded by destroyers lobbing artillery at each other.” As the economy heats up, the competition will intensify. “The magazine revenue base is not expanding,” explains Walshe. “It’s getting tougher and tougher to close the sale.”
For this same reason, Simpson denies she’s concerned about losing top spot to Canadian Living. “We can’t afford to scrap over a diminishing number of dollars,” she says. New books like Modern Woman will broaden the demographic scope of magazines, reaching a new audience instead of fighting over existing readers. Anyway, she adds, “We take the lion’s share of most [advertising] budgets, so Chatelaine is not threatened in that
sense. It also has a much larger circulation, so we have supremacy in terms of the things that would matter from a profit point of view.”
Robert Murray, former publisher of Canadian Living and now a Telemedia vice-president, also dismisses the idea that there’s a war on. While he describes Chatelaine as “very fine competition,” he says “we happen to think there are larger fish to fry.” Fish like television, radio and outdoor advertising. Telemedia’s newest frontier is magnetic media-specially-marked boxes of KAO brand computer disks now include a free sample of popular Canadian Living recipes conveniently stored on disk.
War or no war, the characters of the two magazines are strikingly different. If they were people, they probably wouldn’t be friends. Both can help you whip up a tasty, nutritious meal in five minutes flat, but in the features and profiles you’ll sometimes find a provocative, even antagonistic streak, in Chatelaine. Newsmaker of the year 1990 was Chantale Daigle, a woman who fought for her legal right to have an abortion, and had one even before the case was decided. Obviously, Chatelaine isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers in Red Deer. (Cowan, on the other hand, says Canadian Living won’t touch the topic of abortion even today because “we’d have to take a stand.” Alienating readers is anathema to Canadian Living.) Two years ago, Chatelaine riled readers with a story by Danielle Crittenden proclaiming “the war is over-let’s junk the feminist slogans.” Editor Mildred Istona says the story was intended to be provocative. “We try to get a debate going, so we present people like Danielle Crittenden, whose biases are well known,” she says.
Canadian Living is less glamorous and more sympathetic than Chatelaine,
more down to earth and less in-your-face. In fact, the magazine’s market research has discovered that readers really do see it as a member of the family. Robert Murray says in one exercise, people are asked to select magazines they would describe as their mother, or their aunt or their sister. “Time after time after time we come out as the aunt or the mother, or that wonderful person who has taken some time to do something with them but not enough, so Canadian Living has stepped in to take their place.”
Thelma McCormack, acting director of the York University Centre for Feminist Research, says that’s what women’s magazines are all about. “There is the feeling that these magazines are there to help you. They’re yours, not like Maclean’s or Time.”
They’re successful, she says, because they take women seriously. Still, the journalism community looks down its nose at books like Chatelaine and Canadian Living, even though they earn money in hard times, while Saturday Night, the epitome of Canadian journalistic respectability, looks back on more than 40 years of red ink, through boom and bust.
“It’s true in Toronto, it’s true in New York,” says Istona. “If you’re a women’s magazine, you don’t count for much.” When Rona Maynard went from Flare to Macleans, one executive said “Now you’re going to work for a real magazine.” Editors and writers who work on women’s magazines often come from or go to more “respectable” publications. Lee Simpson says she believes some of the best journalism in the country right now is happening in women’s magazines. She notes that Chatelaine bylines include National Magazine Award winners. “I doubt very much that they say ‘Gee, I’m writing for Chatelaine-I’d better lower my standards…'”
Maynard, a long-time Chatelaine writer, defended women’s magazines in the September, 1992 issue of Masthead magazine. She charged mainstream journalists, male and female, with sexism and double standards. “[Women’s magazines] were the first to blow the whistle on unnecessary mastectomies, first to publicize date rape and wife assault, first to explore the tangled politics of abortion-first to report on the so-called ‘women’s issues’ that get short shrift in the male-controlled media.
“Readers look to their magazines to learn how women like themselves are coping with everyday challenges,” wrote Maynard. “If you’ve lost a breast, will you feel awkward with a new lover? If your teenage daughter i turning tricks on Yonge Street, what will it take to bring her home Through women’s magazines, women share stories that are told nowhere else This vast country becomes as intimate as my kitchen table.” Writer Lindale, Tracey echoes Maynard when she call, Canadian Living “one of the onl) magazines all Canadians are reading.’ She agrees the magazine isn’t taken seriously by many journalists, “but] think their time is coming.”
Bonnie Cowan isn’t holding her breath. Instead, she follows the philosophy Judy Brandow set down at Canadian Living 15 years ago, gauging her success by the readers’ response and not by the opinions of magazine people. “Will we ever win magazine awards? Probably not. Is that important? Probably not. It’s more important for us to have loyal readers.”
(Canadian Living did win a National Magazine Award one year for its food coverage, but the category has since been eliminated.)
And giving the readers what they want is the secret to Canadian Living’s success. While some journalists snidely dismiss it as “a food book,” Canadian Living continues to serve up serious journalism in addition to service pieces on food, fashion and crafts. Readers know you can’t judge a book by its cover alone, and while Canadian Living has added inset photos to its covers to show off other features, at least for now, it will remain “the one with the food on the front.” Last year, market research proved that nothing attracts readers like food. Not even Wayne Gretzky.
Researchers also tested the age-old wisdom that the words “free” and “win” on the cover help sell magazines. Surprisingly, they discovered that’s no longer true. Readers were jaded; they’d seen the same gimmicks a thousand times on covers of American magazines. “All the same,” recalls Cowan, “Somebody said, ‘If Canadian Living said ‘free’ or ‘win’ or ‘save $1,200 in this issue,’ we’d believe it.”

In a recent column in Macleans, Barbara Amiel points to some of the seamier practices of the British “gutter” press, which not only delves into the private lives of the royal family but, as she says, lays siege for weeks on end to relatives of murder victims, invades hospital rooms and wiretaps conversations. Amiel suggests that growing public indignation over the way the press covers the House of Windsor is being “used as a fig leaf to try for new censorship controls,” something that she strongly opposes.
In defense of her argument against censorship of the press, Amiel says: “We either have freedom of speech or we do not. There is no such thing as an almost free press. Freedom is indivisible.” If Amiel is right, then perhaps we are deluding ourselves in thinking that we now have a free press. As it stands, press freedom is already limited. Financial constraints not only reduce the number of stories that get covered, but they act as a barrier to those whose voice never gets heard because they cannot afford their own presses. And laws that impose sanctions against the written word, such as libel and slander laws, also act to limit press freedom.
But perhaps we should be looking at the question of press freedom from a different standpoint. Freedom, as Jay Newman states in his 1989 book, The Journalist in Plato’s Cave, needs to be “weighed against other values, such as justice, wisdom, security, prosperity,…and so on.” Unless journalists take it upon themselves to consider these other values, the day may well come when society imposes greater limits on press freedom in an effort to force them to. But depending on the depths to which a gutter press is willing to stoop, such limits might even enhance press freedom. True freedom, according to Newman, is not the power to behave without regard for the interests of others; rather, it is the power to transcend our blind emotions, compulsive appetites and unconscious drives and act on the basis of intellectual and moral discipline.
Here at the Ryerson Review of Journalism, we value our freedom to take a critical look at the media. However, we realize that this freedom does not bring with it the absolute right to say or do whatever strikes our fancy. Nor should it. And as we worked on our stories, we tried to keep Newman’s vision of true freedom in mind. Granted, few of us can count ourselves among the truly free in terms of Newman’s definition. But we believe it’s an ideal worth striving for.

They were the lifeline between the city papers and the small rural communities across Ontario. Individually, they were mail carriers, housewives, teachers and journalists; collectively they were called stringers.
They could be counted on to report on events happening in their area. Some would call with tips and names of people to contact, while others were talented reporters who conveyed exactly what was happening with enough skill and style to rival the best international correspondents.
For the ambitious reporter, stringing provided the opportunity to be published in a larger newspaper, which sometimes led to a lucrative job offer at that paper, or one of equal size. For the non-journalist, stringing was a chance to participate in the newsgathering process. Along with it came a sense of importance, pride and perhaps a bit of cash.
But all this is a thing of the past. Stringers, for the most part, are a distant memory, replaced by wire copy and freelancers. Papers of all sizes across Ontario have virtually phased out the stringer, marking the end of a long-standing tradition in journalism.
The Kitchener- Waterloo Record is a prime example. The Record revamped its stringing system in 1978, doing away with all non-journalist stringers. In 1981, there were about a dozen stringers who contributed regularly. Today, there are four.
The same holds true for since it was never updated. By 1980, there were eight or 10 left, and today there are none. Judy Creighton, a correspondent at Canadian Press, worked at the rewrite desk at The London Free Press in 1967, when the paper still had a full roster of stringers.
There are stories that leap to the mind of anyone who has worked at a paper during the days of the stringer. Judy Creighton has stored away her fair share of those stories. One of her classic recollections is of a stringer in Listowel who called with news of a tornado approaching the town. When Creighton asked her to cover the story, there was a pause and she replied, “Oh, I couldn’t do that. I’m hosting a dinner party.”
And there was always excitement around the newsroom in the days before Christmas when one of the stringers, an elderly woman, would bring in bags of baked goods for all the staff. The amateur stringer’s devotion could also be profitable for the paper that employed their services. Creighton called them “circulation magicians,” because they ensured that every store in town sold “their” paper, and would encourage everyone they knew to read it. “They were the paper’s representatives in the town and everyone knew it,” says Creighton. This also stopped larger city papers like The Globe and Mail from gaining a foothold in the community.
Some of to day’s most prominent journalists got their start stringing from small towns. Toronto Star Chairman Beland Honde rich started his career stringing for the KitchenerWaterloo Record in 1935 from Baden, Ontario. His beat was “anything that happened in the area” that may have been of interest to the Record. He received 10 cents per inch of copy for every story he submitted.
But the money was secondary to the chance of being noticed by a larger paper. That avenue is now closed to journalists writing for small-town papers. The modern stringer is likely to have worked at a paper in the past, and become a stringer afterwards.
The Toronto Star is the only major Toronto daily that still uses stringers. Its four most prolific Ontario stringers are experienced journalists, who file their stories using computers linked by modem to the Star.
Paul Kidd, who covers Hamilton and the surrounding area for the Star, has a distinguished background, including stints as a bureau chief for Southam News in Buenos Aires, New York and Toronto. He has won several awards, including the prestigious Nieman Fellowship to Harvard. The other three Star stringers in Ontario are Paula Adamick in London, Chris Conway in Keewatin, near the Manitoba border, and Mark Bourrie in Midland. They contribute regularly to the Ontario page of the Star, but as Mark Bourrie points out, “there is so much that goes on in and around smaller towns that is never brought to the attention of people in the larger cities.” In his view, there is still nothing to compare with having a person there, on the scene, working only for one paper when something of major importance happens in the area.
Why are stringers a nearextinct species? Some think it has to do with the lack of interest in small-town news by anyone other than the residents of the town. There is also an increased interest in foreign news, especially televised news, which makes local events seem boring by companson.
John Ogilvie, district editor at the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, works with the paper’s four surviving stringers, and cites more tangible reasons-space and competition. Because space in the paper is “at a premium,” he has to be more selective with the news he pulls from the 17 communities the paper covers. As a result, most stringers found the quest for space in the paper too competitive and quit.

Smaller local papers also sprang up to provide news for their populations, reducing the need for the Record to do it.
While many editors, publishers and reporters say they miss the days of the stringer and lament their passing, most seem to feel it is no great loss to their papers, as they focus more on trends, and less on daily news from surrounding areas.
But London Free Press clusters editor Gary May says, “It would still be nice to have more eyes and ears to identify trends in small towns across our regions.”
It is difficult to dispute that kind of logic. There are things happening in Ontario that should not go unnoticed, such as what life is like on the eight native reserves near Keewatin, where Star stringer Chris Conway lives. He wishes the Star would devote more than one page to provincial news so he could communicate to readers what life is like on those reserves.
The stringer provided readers with the opportunity to hear concerns shared by people in towns across Ontario, and added touches of individuality and colour often absent in generic stories sent over the wire. As we edge closer to getting all our news from the same sources, and the stringer fades further into the mist, it is unlikely we will ever find that individuality or sense of community again.

ROLL TAPE: On March 7, 1991, George Holliday, general manager of a plumbing supply company, videotaped police savagely beating black motorist Rodney King. Though the videotape was fuzzy, the image was unmistakably clear: two minutes of brutality.
REWIND: Seven years ago, in 1986, ABC and NBC “‘ broadcast what they thought was footage of the fire after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. The pictures were actually of a ire at a cement factory in Italy, and were shot by an amateur.
PAUSE: In North America alone, there are more than 14 million portable video cameras, and their popularity is spreading worldwide. From the Kayapo Indians in Brazil to tourists in California, people are shooting everything in sight, and their footage is airing on newscasts with increasing regularity. Journalists are only now starting to examine the vast potential of amateur video-and the possible pitfalls.
David Bazay, the Toronto-based executive producer of national television news at the CBC, says there’s been an increase in the use of amateur video in the newsroom. “If there is an air crash and we have no professional footage, we start looking for amateur footage.” The CBC always informs viewers they are watching video shot by an amateur.
Bazay says one difficulty i verifying the authenticity of amateur footage. Walter Porges, the director of news practices for ABC, discussed the fake Chernobyl fire footage in a 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “Somebody contacted our Rome bureau, saying ‘I have pictures of the reactor showing smoke,’ and one of our people went to look at it, and from the pictures, you really couldn’t tell whether it was or was not. There was not a sign that said Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor.”
The visual quality of amateur footage is also becoming more professional. In 1987, when East German pilot Matthias Rust made a surprise landing in Moscow’s Red Square, an amateur video photographer was there. This footage was so well shot that Ted Koppel neglected to include it in his 1989 documentary, “Television: Revolution in a Box.”
In an interview prior to the documentary’s airing, Koppel said, “Frankly, I
did not realize that was shot on a home video camera.”
Large networks particularly like amateur recordings of natural disasters. On October 17, 1989, Oklahoma tourists Debbie and Thomas Kelly were in San Francisco when the earthquake hit. Their spectacular footage of a red car driving off the broken section of the Oakland Bay Bridge was replayed continually on networks and became the dominant image of that disaster.
A recent example of amateur video use in Canada was a CBC item about the attempted suicides among Innu youth at Davis Inlet. The amateur portion, showing youths high from sniffing gasoline, was given to CBC reporter Brenda Craig by an Innu leader. Its disturbing images focused worldwide media attention on this isolated community and forced the Canadian government to respond to the crisis. Even though all the networks use amateur video, the majority of the amateur footage we see is broadcast by local stations. This is the footage of four car pileups and two-alarm blazes. John Thornton,
chief assignment editor for “Citypulse News” in Toronto, says he will use amateur video “whenever it’s available,” as long as the “quality of the event and the quality of the footage is good.”
Some media organizations use amateur video in truly innovative ways. New York-based Globalvision is placing small portable Hi-8 cameras in the hands of local residents in countries across the world. Globalvision has already produced one Emmy-winning show, “South Africa Now,” shown on PBS in 1988. Soweto residents were given cameras-at a time when foreign news crews were restricted by censorship laws-that they used to tell the story of the townships from their insiders’ perspective.
Globalvision is planning a weekly television newsmagazine called “Rights and Wrongs” to air this spring on PBS. Don’t expect to see a Dan Rather signing off from the beaches of Somalia. Be prepared for unfiltered stories told by ordinary people in Bosnia, Kurdistan, Myanmar, Tibet and other places; in a rare departure from convention, the third eye of the reporter is being replaced by the activist eye of the citizen-controlled camera lens.
The difficulty in assessing the impact of amateur video is that there is so much of it out there, some of it benign, some of it brilliant and some of it brutal.
The Rodney King footage is a vivid example of the latter. It was a visual sledgehammer. Holliday’s accidental recording jolted consciousness and made them chew over the news rather than swallow it whole. It was also a catalyst, forcing news organizations, and all of us, to address the state of race relations in North America.
This is amateur video at its best: a recording of an important fragment of reality. At its worst, amateur video is voyeurism, littering tabloid news shows such as “Hard Copy,” “I Witness Video” and ‘A Current Affair.”
But all amateur videos, whether treasure or trash, create issues that news organizations must confront. Authenticity, the right to privacy and the ethics of using footage supplied by people who actually participate in the event, are all aspects of amateur video that are creeping into the fast forward world of television news. Maybe it’s time to slow the tape down and take a closer look at the big picture.
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This is a story of cliches. An interview with Norman Webster sounds like a journalism 101 class, or an introduction to journalistic ethics. Norman Webster is fair to the extreme and adamant in his belief that every point of view has a right to be heard. If there is a “Queen’s scout” of Canadian journalism, it is Webster. He acts and speaks in a way that is almost too good to be true. But I should begin before the “lecture.”
Norman Webster drives his Saab 9000 up the hill and pulls into his driveway. He is wearing a blue housecoat over his running clothes to keep him warm after his workout. He wears an Expos baseball hat. Today he drove to the canal and ran along the relatively flat path next to the water. “Just 12 kilometres today,” he says, as he opens the door to the house in the heart of Westmount. I follow him downstairs, chatting about his training. (Webster, a friend for two years, shares my passion for training.) The basement contains a stationary bike and a television. In the winter, Webster can combine two of his hobbies-training on the bike and watching hockey. Webster does a quick change into some “real” clothes. The Expos hat remains.
Norman Webster, editor-in-chief of The Gazette, is a very happy man. He has returned to Quebec, the place he will always call home. His father grew up just a block away from where we are now. His mother went to school just down the street. The Webster family has almost 150 years of Quebec life behind it, and Webster feels a definite sense of community here.
He has been good for the Gazette because of that sense of community. He is the first bilingual editor-in-chief for the paper this century. Just the fact that he can do interviews in French has eliminated a huge stereotype. This bastion of English Quebec now has a spokesperson who can communicate with the rest of the province on their terms.
Webster is a competitive man. Then is a saying in sports that you are only a: good as your last race. If you believe that, then you approach every race very intensely. It is a burning from inside-the rest of the world rarely judges so harshly.

Canada hosted the Triathlon World Championship on September 12, 1992, in Huntsville, Ontario. After; 1.5-kilometre swim, the athletes ran up a steep hill to a transition are where they discarded their wetsuit and hopped onto their bikes. After biking 40 hilly kilometres, the athletes hurried onto a 10-kilometr run course. Again it was hilly, and challenging. The athletes finished next to the transition area-exhausted, but exhilarated.
This was Webster’s latest race. The Worlds capped off a seven-year involvement with the sport for a man considerably better known for his talents as a writer. How did he do? “I finished in the middle of the pack,” he says. This undercuts the fact that he was racing against the very best the world has to offer.
On Tuesday nights, Webster hits the ice with the boys. He has been playing hockey for as long as he can remember. At 51, he is one of the “old guys” on the ice. The word is he holds his own with the younger pups. After the game, the gang heads out to a local pub. Webster is usually seen as a solitary man, but the camaraderie of those Tuesday nights is very important to him. “He misses the companionship as much as the hockey [when he can’t go],” says Pat Webster, Norman’s wife. Another cliche sports can bring out the true nature of a person. During competition a person’s soul is bared for all the world to see. Maybe through sport we can learn about Norman Webster.
“Norman likes to win,” says Geoffrey Stevens, a longtime associate and friend. Stevens was Webster’s pick as managing editor at the Globe when he became editor-inchief in 1983. What Stevens recalls of the young Norman Webster is that he was a good newspaper man “who always looked like he needed a new suit, and drove an ancient Volkswagen with a dent in the side.” How did it get the dent?
Webster continues: “This was back in the days when filing a story was always a problem. In ’74, I covered Trudeau’s whistle-stop campaign tour for the Globe. Each day I would have to call in a story to a rewrite man, which was incredibly frustrating. These guys used to ask questions like ‘How do you spell Trudeau?’ A year later I was working at Queen’s Park, covering Bill Davis during the provincial election. About 5:30 I found a phone, and called in the story. I got a rewrite man who seemed unable to understand basic English. All the frustrations of a year before came out. As I walked back to the car, I kicked in the front fender.”
Getting the best story is important to Webster. Beating the competition is critical. Being the best journalist he can be is paramount. An incompetent rewrite man could very easily jeopardize any competitive edge.
So the man is competitive. That does little to explain the drive he has to be a good journalist. No one in the industry would say that Webster got where he is through anything but his own talent. Even the fact that his uncle, R. Howard Webster, owned the paper when Norman got his first job as an editorial clerk is forgotten when it comes to his talent as a writer.
David Hayes writes in his book, Power and Influence, “No one dismissed his rise through the organization as a case of nepotism. Webster was simply too hardworking and talented a journalist.”
“Norman not only earned all his spurs, he proved himself in what we all thought was the deadliest assignment-Queen’s Park,” says John Fraser. According to Fraser, Clark Davey, then managing editor at the Globe, had a firm belief that rich men’s sons couldn’t be good journalists. The Queen’s Park assignment would either prove what Webster could do, or destroy him. In fact, it brought out the very best in Webster. “He basically set the benchmark for all subsequent journalists covering Queen’s Park,” Fraser says.

“There aren’t many things that commits to that he does halfway,” says Pat. They met in England. He was studying at Oxford, she at the University of London. Since 1966 they have been a team, with Norman making great grounds in the newspaper industry, she bringing up their five children. Pat has kept the family unit working smoothly throughout their many travels. She is an optimistic woman, and no challenge seems too much. The fact that the family timetable has been quite out of sync compared to the rest of the world has been a minor challenge. That there never were family dinners during a weekday doesn’t faze her. “You either accept it or not,” she says of her husband’s 11-hour-plus work days. The years of travel, while difficult, were ultimately exciting, she says. “Norman has done what he has as a journalist because he wanted to,” Pat continues. “He is an achiever.”

WEBSTER QUOTES FROM JOHN MILTON:
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue.” This is for Webster the classic statement of the need for freedom of expression. Rick Salutin, writing in This Magazine, describes Webster’s approach to the media as “noblesse oblige.” Salutin saw in Webster a “sense of responsibility to appear fair, or even possibly to be fair. It arose from a confidence that the authority of the ruling elites could not be damaged by exposure to competing views.” For Salutin, this sense was the reason that Webster was so open to conflicting views in the Globe.
Webster thinks that idea gives the whole concept far more sophistication than it deserves. He might not agree with something that is said, but it is important that it be heard. “For what it’s worth, I really do see public debate in this way.”
Webster leans towards publishing things. His roots are still very much tied to being a writer, and this dominates his theories on what should and shouldn’t go into a paper. Both sides of the story need to be told. Of utmost importance is being fair. The journalistic process is paramount. Robert Fulford, who worked for Webster when the Websters owned Saturday Night magazine, says Webster never interfered with the content of the magazine. “Our business is to put different points of view in front of people,” says Webster. It is this belief that allows, almost looks forward to, columns by William Johnson and Don Macpherson which were staunchly against the Charlottetown Accord. Webster was very much a supporter of the accord, but it would never occur to him to censor any conflicting views.
“In my time with Norman, I never knew him to interfere with news coverage because of his own opinion. He might not like it, but what the hell, it would go in the paper,” says Stevens.
Webster is almost apologetic as he says that he really believes what he is saying. The bottom line is that he likes to see an honest, balanced newspaper. It’s that simple. It is why Webster is doing all this.
“It’s worth doing. That’s the most important thing,” he says. “It matters to society that journalists do their jobs,” he continues.
He uses, as an example, a column he wrote in the fall of 1991 about a speech by Pierre Elliott Trudeau to the Young President’s Organization-“presidents of their companies by the age of 40.” During the off-the-record speech, Trudeau questioned what might happen if the number of French-speaking people in Quebec began to decline. The definition of “distinct society” during the Meech Lake debate hinged on there being a French-speaking majority. Webster reported Trudeau’s words: “It will give the government of this society the power to say: ‘Well, let’s deport a couple of hundred thousand of non French-speaking Quebecers we have a right to expel people, certainly to shut their traps if they think they can speak English in public.'” Even in the column, Webster made it abundantly clear that he had problems reporting an “off-the-record speech.” The peculiar circumstances of this speech made it different in Webster’s eyes. “This man [Trudeau], saying these things-dramatic, scary ideas about the major public issue of the day to one of the most influential audiences in the country, in their hundreds-1 felt, one way or the other, it had to be put on the public record.” Within days, Trudeau’s words would have scattered among Canada’s elite, and Webster felt the rest of Canada deserved to hear what was going on. (In fact, within hours, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa’s office was given a detailed report of the speech, as was the prime minister’s office, long before Webster’s column was published.) The column created quite a stir, but Webster is confident that it needed to be written. Like it or leave it, you have to respect his principled approach.
Robert Fulford chooses to leave it. “It was a mistake an athlete shouldn’t have made,” Fulford says. “You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game.”

It is now late on a Sunday night. We have adjourned to the living room. Norman Webster is trying to help me understand what makes him do what he does. He has been very direct, and words I might doubt from someone else (the importance of being fair could be a stock answer for some people) I am believing. Then comes the clincher. Webster sits back on the couch, the comfortable couch that fits so nicely in the comfortable living room, with its Chinese ceramics and Canadian paintings.
The clincher. “Cecil Rhodes puts a tremendous obligation on you. Whenever you might be tempted to say ‘to hell with it,’ you realize that you haven’t the right to sit on the sidelines.” Suddenly I begin to realize just how seriously Webster looks at this endeavour he has chosen. No wonder he works so hard to make it just right. With that burden on his shoulders, he would have to.
This would be too much coming from most people. Now the references to the “Hardy Boy,” and the “boy scout” begin to make sense. For many people, Webster must be too good to be true. There is a certain amount of contempt in those references, but probably also a grudging bit of respect. What else can you feel for a man who works so hard every day just to prove to himself that he can do it. Just to get the story right. This from a man who could live quite comfortably without that job.

“MY CAREER HAS BEEN A SUCCESSION of interesting tasks,” he says. The tasks began at university, but to tell the story properly, we have to begin a little earlier. On June 4, 1941, Norman Webster was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. He was the oldest of the three children-William and Margaret would follow. The family was raised in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Both Norman and Will went to Bishop’s College School, a boarding school in Lennoxville six kilometres from Sherbrooke. Webster grew up in a pocket of English Canada that was surrounded by French Canada.
Webster followed up his time at Bishop’s College School with a degree in Economics at Bishop’s University, just across the river. Webster was a good athlete at University-he played on the school’s hockey team. He was also a scholar-one of two Rhodes Scholars from Quebec in 1962. On top of all that, he was also a journalist. Webster served as the Sherbrooke Records stringer for the last two years he was at Bishop’s. He routinely wrote half-a-dozen stories for the paper each week, along with a column. Webster remembers himself as much as a journalist as a student in those days.
He really got the “bug;” as he calls it, in 1959. This was that editorial clerk job. But his love for newspapers really came a lot earlier than that. Webster remembers being fascinated with them at a young age. It began with keeping up with sports. From there it grew.
“What interested me then was the tremendous satisfaction with getting the story-it interested me then, and is still interesting to me now.”
Webster returned from Oxford to work for the Globe. His command of French made him a natural as the Globe’s correspondent at the Quebec Legislative Assembly. After a year there, he was moved to the Ottawa bureau. He edited The Globe Magazine, then worked as the assistant to the editor of the paper.
In 1969, Webster was stationed in Beijing, one of only three foreign correspondents in China at the time. After a two-year stay there, it was back to Canada where he worked as assistant to the “Brigadier”-Richard S. Malone, publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press. After a year in Winnipeg, he spent the next six years at Queen’s Park, first as Queen’s Park bureau chief and then from 1974-78 he wrote a daily column on Ontario affairs. “It was the best writing I’ve ever done,” he says.
Webster spent another foreign stint in London, where again he excelled, and was seen by many as one of the best London correspondents the Globe has ever had. He returned to Toronto in 1981 as assistant editor and became the editor-in-chief in 1983.
It was the culmination of almost a quarter-century involvement with the paper. It was the best of times, for a while, but somewhere along the line Webster’s relationship with his publisher went awry.
Possibly the most fundamental difference between Webster and his publisher, A. Roy Megarry, was their view of sports. Megarry was not a sports fan. In fact, on one occasion, when he was taken to a baseball game by some of the Globe staff, the rules of baseball had to be explained to him. Megarry had a disdain for the sports section of the Globe.
“He had a funny way of accounting,” Stevens says of Megarry’s approach. Megarry would break down the different parts of the paper, and do a cost analysis of each part-how much advertising was brought in, compared to how much it cost to produce. Sports was always a big loser. Megarry never understood why Webster and Stevens felt the sports section was so important.
Sports was but one of a number of differences the two men had. Webster, who even just a year ago was hesitant to speak much about the rift, is not nearly so hesitant now. “Megarry didn’t and doesn’t like journalists,” Webster says. There is no animosity as the words come out. Webster appears to have come to terms with his final break with the Globe.
If Webster had it in him to put aside what he thought was right, things might have been different. John Fraser says that Webster “could not prevent himself from saying what he thought.” His rigid belief in both rules and roles in the newsroom brought him to loggerheads with Megarry, since Megarry played the game very differently.
It was Boxing Day, 1988, when Megarry relieved Webster of his position as editor-in-chief. Webster looks back at that last year
at the Globe not with nostalgia, but as a very difficult time.
According to some, Webster’s apparent shyness prevented him from being good at staff relations. Mel Morris, the executive managing editor at the Gazette during Webster’s first year, remembers him as being “a bit remote.” Stevens says that “Norman’s door was always open, and people were in there” during Webster’s time at the Globe. That wasn’t the case at the Gazette, Morris reports-especially on a Friday when Webster prepared his Saturday column. “He was not as involved with the day-to-day running of the newsroom,” Morris says. “He preferred to let his managing editor run the newsroom.”
“Norman is probably miscast,” Morris says. “I say that for all the good reasons. I think writers are more valuable than managers, and Norman is an excellent writer.”
His shyness might be a managerial fault, but the most important measure of Webster’s popularity and respect from his fellow workers at the Globe must have been the “gift” he was given when he left: a scholarship in his name at Bishop’s University. According to Pat, it was the perfect present for her husband.
Webster sips a cup of tea in his at the Gazette. He is wearing a neat blue suit. The editor-in-chief of the Gazette is very much a public figure in Montreal. Webster dresses the part. The Gazette is well represented.
The office is crowded with newspapers. Webster apologizes for the mess. It is a week to the day that Canadians voted on the Charlottetown Accord, a missed opportunity, says Webster. In his view, the Meech Lake Accord was a tragically missed opportunity that came close to bringing down the country. He pulls out from one of the piles the special section the Gazette put together the day after the vote. “It was really well done,” he says with pride.
This is not a boast of anything he has done. He is quick to praise the work of the people at the Gazette. But the Gazette is a very different paper from the one that was the number one priority of his working life for so many years.
“I have moved on,” he says. Could it be that simple? Can I you go from being the “head honcho” at Canada’s National Newspaper, to I not, and Just move on? If anyone can, it’s probably Webster.
Pat expresses what most of us imagine her husband would say. “The whole Globe thing was tremendously difficult for me,” she says. In her eyes, though, Norman really has moved on. “He honestly doesn’t seem to mind. I think he’s giving you the honest goods about it,” she says from a different couch in the living room the next day. “Neither criticism nor praise seems to affect him. He doesn’t depend on other people for appreciation or blame.”
But even for Webster, there was anger. No Volkswagens this time, but anger. “The truth is that I’m a lot happier now than I was for my last year at the Globe. That last year was very unpleasant. I haven’t said these things to anyone-I really can’t emphasize enough that I’m a pretty happy man these days.” Webster has found a new place to ply his trade, to play hockey and to do triathlons. And boy is he happy to be here.

Through the static of Rob Lamberti’s police scanner, the calm, detached voice of a female dispatcher announces that a car has crashed and is on fire on Queens Quay West. “Maybe we’ll get a Pepsodent smile tonight,” The Toronto Sun reporter says with a wry grin as he floors his red jeep and heads for the accident. Lamberti’s words are intended to shock, as he explains that a Pepsodent smile refers to the pearly white death grin of a blackened body. The thrill of the chase suddenly loses some of its appeal, but for the seasoned Sun reporter it is the first hot story of the night.
Lamberti, 35, is dressed for the night in a black jacket, black jeans and black Dr. Martens boots. His glasses cover a weathered face that has seen many tragedies during his eight years on the beat.
At the accident scene, billowing smoke obscures the interior of a black Alfa Romeo as five firefighters in yellow rubber suits douse the smashed remains of the sports car. The acrid smell of the fire hangs in the cold air, but tonight it is from burnt plastic and leather, not human flesh. The driver has likely fled after crashing the stolen car, and without a victim, the accident is just a crime statistic to Lamberti. He returns to his jeep and heads off to find a better story.

Lamberti’s dark humour and his hunt for human tragedy at first seem disrespectful and callous, but this is the reality of police-beat reporting in an increasingly violent and crime-ridden city. While the tragic stories receive much attention, the effect on the people who cover them does not. The beat changes many reporters, making them more cynical, more detached and sometimes more paranoid. Nick Pron, 43, of The 1Oronto Star has been covering crime for nearly a dozen years, and says he has received five or six death threats during his career. He claims they generally don’t bother him much; he says he’s more afraid of the ones he doesn’t get.
But one threat did hit home. Pron was told he’d better look under the hood of his car by a disgruntled interview subject. Pron didn’t really believe there was ever a bomb, but he still keeps his door open when he starts his car-hoping he’ll be thrown out if it blows up.
Starting out on such a stressful beat can be difficult. John Duncanson of the Star says police-beat reporters go through a period of adjustment to the job. He was affected by one of the first murder stories he worked on. “You become deranged, you can’t sleep, you can only think about the one murder.” Rob Lamberti even has his own term for what happens to reporters on the beat. He calls it “cop-reporter syndrome.” The police-beat reporters are on 24-hour call, and there was one year when Lamberti was the reporter who lived closest to downtown, where the majority of incidents take place. To Lamberti, it seemed like he was out on a call every night. Finally, it started to get to him. “I couldn’t sleep, I was lying awake waiting for a call. It’s almost like being a homicide detective.”
The erratic, late night hours also took their toll on his marriage, which he feels broke up in part because of his job.
People close to crime reporters see the impact of the beat. Mary Ellen Bench still remembers the first gory story her husband John Schmied covered for the Sun. A young woman had been run over by a truck and Schmied says seeing the remains allover the road really shook him up. “It was all he could talk about for a while,” says Bench. Now she says he has seen a lot worse and can cope with it. “He’s lost a lot of that innocence.” Schmied says that now when he sees a body, he views it only as an object. Seeing children hurt or killed is one of the toughest situations to deal with. Schmied thinks that when he has kids of his own, these situations will likely be even harder to handle.
Writing about the victim’s life helps many reporters deal with the tragedies they routinely cover. Some say that adding the human element to a story and making the victim more than just a name is its own therapy. Many newspapers offer specialized programs to help reporters deal with stresses both in their working and personal lives. Ann McKeown is head of a counselling service used by The Hamilton Spectator’s employee-assistance program. For more than 10 years she worked at the Spectator, offering counselling for anything from job stress and marital problems to drug and alcohol dependence. She feels that while reporters don’t become completely inured to tragedy, they do learn to cope with the stress, because it is a part of their job.
Bryan Cantley, manager of editorial services at the Canadian Daily Newspaper Association, says he is unaware of any studies of job stress on police beat reporters in Canada, but describes it as one of many areas in journalism that could use further research. Tragedy and stress, however, are not always a constant part of the beat. More often than not, the job is to hurry up and wait by their scanners and radios. “It”s like a cop’s job. It’s hours and hours of boredom with about 20 seconds of excitement and then hours and hours of boredom,” says Jim, a former British policeman turned freelance reporter (who doesn’t want his full name used).

It is a Friday night, and Rob Lamberti has been tipped off that a drug bust is going down in the Scarborough neighbourhood around 41 Division. He pulls his jeep into the police parking lot half an hour early for a 9 p.m. meeting with the undercover cops in charge of the bust. Lamberti puts his hand-held radio on the dash and flips through channels on the scanner he’s tucked into the visor above his head. Several Marlboro cigarettes later, the cops still have not appeared.
The inside of Lamberti’s car resembles an office on wheels with its clutter of coffee cups, unopened notepads, loose change and cigarette butts. The inside of the driver’s-side door has been damaged, exposing its metal frame. While Lamberti waits, the chaos of the busy city squawks out of the scanner as it automatically flips from ambulance to fire and police frequencies. At 9:05 p.m. a police dispatcher is heard talking to an officer at Humber College investigating a crime. Lamberti uses a cellular phone to call the police station, but the police won’t give out details. He decides to keep waiting in the parking lot, gambling the drug bust is a better bet for a story-even if it is, as Lamberti acknowledges, something of a public relations exercise.
The scanner continues to flip: an ambulance attendant has injected potassium chloride into a patient; at 9:20 p.m. a building at Queen Street and Gladstone Avenue is reported on fire. Using his hand-held radio, Lamberti contacts the newspaper to make sure a photographer is on his way to the fire.
The police paddy wagon drives out of the parking lot of 41 Division and Lamberti grows impatient. “I wish they’d invited us to the fucking scene,” he mutters under his breath.
Finally, at 10:49 p.m. the paddy wagon returns and a sullen, rag-tag group of 13 men, women and teenaged boys are led out. They stand long enough for the Sun photographer to snap their picture and listen to the rules of the lockup before they’re led inside the station. Lamberti jots down details and learns that more than $100,000 worth of drugs were seized, then heads back to the office to write it up.

According to some policebeat reporters, city crime became noticeably more violent, and more guns began being used about five years ago. They relate the increase to the first appearance of crack cocaine on the streets. Metro Toronto police statistics show that there were 37 homicides in 1986, and 60 in 1987. In 1991, 83 people were murdered and at the end of 1992, 64 murders were recorded. Crimes involving weapons totalled 3,939 in 1990, and reached a high of 4,584 in 1991, before dropping slightly to 4,442 in 1992.
Witnessing so much of the city’s crime often makes reporters over-protective of themselves and their families. Mary Ellen Bench says she would love to live in downtown Toronto, but her husband refuses to. His family has never been the target of violence, but this makes him no less cautious. Schmied is aware of the good and bad neighbourhoods in Toronto. He says that people have called the police desk at the Sun before buying a house. His current house in Mississauga is only two blocks from a police station.
Schmied also admits that the job has made him much more cynical about the people who commit crimes. He describes himself as having gone from being a “bleeding heart Liberal” to believing that the death penalty is justified for some crimes. “I’d even pull the switch in some cases.” Pron, who spent time working on a Master of Social Psychology, has a similar outlook. “I’ve stopped thinking in terms of rehabilitation. Now it’s more like: lock the bastards up.” Pron feels his change in attitude comes from seeing the devastation crime can have on victims and their families.
For many beat reporters, doing pickups of victims’ photos and having to interview victims’ families can be the most heart-wrenching part of the job. Getting the pictures, though, is a source of pride for reporters.
Pron’s toughest pickup involved the families of six women who had been killed when a car ploughed into them during a bike trip in Hamilton. The story, he said, made his stomach turn. At the first house he visited, the relatives slammed the door in his face. At the second, he finally persuaded a victim’s husband to talk with him. He was there for almost eight hours, shared a bottle of whisky and a lot of tears. The husband knew all six victims and “it turned out he had pictures of most of the women,” says Pron. “Then they forgot to put my byline on it after all that.”

For some, constantly dealing with human tragedies and invading people’s private grief can be too much. Former Sun reporter Shelley Gillen questioned whether this invasion was worthwhile, despite finding that she had a knack for getting good “sob?’ stories. As a general assignment reporter, she often interviewed the relatives of victims. An interview with a man she described as “an emotional mess” was a factor in her decision to leave the paper. The man’s fiancee had been murdered the week before, and Gillen was unaware that her editor had made a deal with him. The paper agreed to leave him alone if he talked to a reporter.
“His sister brought him,” says Gillen. “She was propping him up while I asked questions.” His father arrived part way through and forced them to stop the interview. When Gillen later returned from a holiday in the fall, she learned that the man and a friend of his fiancee had been part of a murder-suicide. “I wondered, did my talking to him or anything else have an effect on this?” Gillen agonizes. She left the paper the following February with no job to go to. She simply had had enough.
If the job causes so much grief, why do reporters continue to cover the beat? Those who stick with crime reporting truly enjoy covering police, fire and ambulance calls, says Bill Duff, the Sun’s night city-desk editor for the past four years. He says a good crime reporter has a talent for moving quickly when a story breaks, being aggressive and listening to scanners.
Some reporters have been on the police beat as long as 10 years at the Sun, and Duff says a few have been on the beat too long. “They get jaded, but then they look around and ask, ‘Do I really want to cover City Hall or do I prefer covering police and fire?'” The veteran reporters have also built up good contacts, and the beat offers more independence than being on general assignment.
Most police-beat reporters feel that the public needs to know about the crime happening around them. Lamberti feels that stories that make the public aware of the atrocities a criminal has committed, or reporting on a sentence he feels is not tough enough, make the job worthwhile. He admits, though, that he got into the beat because of the excitement. And, it seems, that is the true appeal for most police reporters. Gillen says the beat can be a thrill for reporters. “For a lot of people there’s an adrenalin rush to tragedy and crisis.” Schmied has worked for the Sun for about seven years-first on the police desk, then as a general assignment and Queen’s Park reporter. He continued following crime stories even after he left the police beat by carrying a scanner in his car. Now that he’s back on the crime beat, he says he’s having the most fun he’s had in the past two years.
Pron feels the same way. “If there wasn’t an edge, I wouldn’t do it,” he says. Originally, he thought he was destined to be a political reporter but finally decided he didn’t like that beat. “It was like watching grass grow,” he says. “It took a while to realize that crime was my one true love.” After running through back alleys and climbing on a roof to cover a man threatening people with a gun, Pron was hooked. ‘~lot of us say being a reporter is like being a drug addict. You get a story on the front page and it’s like a shot of adrenalin. Then you start coming down and you’re in the dumpster, and you start looking for another fix.”

It’s 2 a.m. Friday, and Lamberti has been replaced by Jim on the “vampire” shift until about 8 a.m. As the tall, heavy-set freelancer drives up University Avenue, a soft, orange glow from his two scanners lights the interior, while a Bob Marley tape plays softly in the background. Suddenly, the calm is broken by the sound of sirens and excited voices as one of the scanners tunes in to a police chase. “He’s going north on Jane, he’s waving his arms out the window,” says a male police officer. The car’s speed is called out by the officers in pursuit: 100 kilometres, 120 kilometres. “There’s going to be a major pileup,” the reporter predicts. “Hope you haven’t eaten anything recently.”
The former British police officer makes a sharp left off Avenue Road and speeds along Dupont Street looking for the pursuit. The skill of his police training comes through as he stomps on the brakes for a stop sign and then instantly hits the accelerator. Stopping for a red light, he times the green signal with the precision of a drag car racer.
“He’s heading south, now east,” an exasperated sounding police officer reports. “He’s going in circles,” the reporter adds.
The flashing red lights of the police appear down another side street and the reporter’s blue Taurus follows. The police report speeds as high as 150 kilo metres an hour before they are ordered to call the chase off. “That’s no fun, sir,” a female officer replies.
Slowing down, the excitement level drops. The Ontario Provincial Police report that the blue mini van has finally crashed without injury into a median while heading south in the northbound lane of Highway 427. Driving east back along Eglinton Avenue, quiet returns to the car, but a feeling of disappointment that the chase is over remains.
The craving for another crisis is quickly satisfied: the glare of yellow crime-scene tape appears, and it’s time for another fix, investigating a hit and run.

Journalism has seen many evolutions-advocacy, gonzo, investigative and new journalism have all made their impact. But it’s precision journalism which may bring about the biggest change. Any journalist can join the movement. All it takes is a computer.
Finding the unfindable is one goal of precision journalists. Adept statisticians, they are motivated by calculating precise estimates and don’t flinch at terms like “null hypotheses”
or “chi-square.” These journalists realize that computers are not just glorified typewriters but highly sophisticated investigative tools.
You don’t have to be a math whiz to understand computer databases. Computer-assisted reporting, or CAR, revolves around the use of spreadsheets. This software lets users analyze numbers to locate trends or questionable figures.
But the onslaught of information circulating in the 1990s has caught many newsrooms off guard. Each day more numerical data is available. Polls, surveys and records offer lengthy details about legal, medical, economic, geographic, social science and technological areas, to mention a few. Knowing what to do with the data is the essence of precision journalism. Seven of the past 10 Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting were awarded to reporters who used CAR. “The Color of Money” was a 1988 series written by Bill Dedman for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. By using CAR, Dedman and his computer team cross-indexed federal computer records of home loans with federal census tapes and revealed racial discrimination in mortgage lending. Nine days after the series was published, Atlanta’s largest banks poured $77 million in loans into black neighbourhoods.
It was a big story. But where are Canada’s precision journalists? We’ve been slow to catch on to the wave of change. Our newsrooms haven’t used computers for very long, let alone for extensive investigation.
We have less access to information than in the U.S. Dean Tudor, Ryerson Polytechnical Institute’s information resource instructor, says it would be a “quick leap” for Canada to jump on the precision journalism bandwagon. But we need the data. It’s expensive to buy and interpret. Our government doesn’t like sharing computer tapes. Tudor believes we can push for tape access using American law as precedent.
Some people are pushing. Last November, a federal court judge rejected the federal government’s argument that their public opinion data on the constitutional debate should be withheld from the public. The Globe and Mail, Southam News and The Canadian Press along with access-to-information researcher Ken Rubin took the clerk of the Privy Council to court to release the data.
That’s one victory in a long battle for Rubin. Currently Canada doesn’t have what Rubin refers to as “democractic hardware/software capability.” He advocates the right of public inspection and the premise of open government. What we need in Canada is a monitoring agency like the Electronic Democracy Association in the U.S., Rubin says. CAR is about asking the right questions and knowing what to look for, according to Jock Ferguson, investigative reporter for the Globe. The first step would be to ask Statistics Canada for their “raw” data. To this point, no one has done that, Ferguson believes.
Sandra Ramsbottom, a Statistics Canada communications manager, believes that Statistics Canada’s raw data would not be clearly understood by the media. ‘Deadlines and the lack of practice at reading numbers inhibit most journalists. It’s this numeracy problem that hampers the discovery of many stories trapped in endless numbers.
Statistics Canada has a database called CANSIM, offering a range of subjects. “Dogbites, marshmallows, GDP, it’s all there,” says Ramsbottom. “There’s not a chance we wouldn’t have information on a story you’re working on.”
Trish Crawford, feature writer for The Toronto Star uses experts to help interpret data she uses in stories. Crawford is cautious around numbers. One story she wrote dealt with the most dangerous jobs in Canada. Figures showed that manufacturing had the most fatalities, but a closer look revealed that the forestry industry had the most deaths in proportion to the number of workers. Precision journalists never stop questioning the numbers. “All data is dirty,” says Dwight Morris, Los Angeles Times editor of special investigations. It’s not a comfortable thought to realize your story may depend on data punched into a computer by a clerk hired at seven dollars an hour.
The Montreal Gazette is one of the few Canadian newspapers that uses CAR. But Gazette reporters are “journalists, not sociologists,” says William Marsden, assistant city editor in charge of the investigation team. He sees the computer as a tool only and uses data as an aid to support the research, not as a source of stories.
All of Quebec’s court system is now on computer tape. The Gazette won the rights to the tapes after taking the Justice Department to the Access to Information Commission. Gazette reporters can now study trends in sentencing and frequency of crimes.
In time, Canadian reporters will become more familiar with precision journalism. As well, with a stronger commitment to freedom of information by Canadian media, more data will become available.
It’s time to catch up-to the past. Precision journalism actually began in the late 1960s as part of the new journalism movement. Maybe the journalists of the 1990s will embrace this computer technology, pushing buttons they’ve been avoiding, to better document the stories of our times.