Oddly, the Report on Insurance that ran in The Globe and Mail on May 10 last year ignored the problems at Confed Life. In fact, the company received only a passing reference in an article headed “Surviving Shakeout Becomes Top Goal.” The story focused on how the smallish but cash-rich Great West Life was bidding for control of giant Confederation Life. The writer concluded that “the Confederation Life-Great West Life relationship creates a relatively massive insurance company suited to a rapidly changing Canadian market.” Three months later, the 123-year-old company was pronounced dead.

According to Globe promotional material, the Report On supplements contain “timely surveys of many sectors of Canadian business and finance, as well as in-depth assessments of investment opportunities and developments in foreign markets.” And David Pyette, one of the two editors who oversee the sections, says they “are held to the same editorial standards as the rest of the paper.” But stories tend to be relentlessly upbeat, a tone that hardly characterizes most pieces in the paper.

Articles in the Report on the Maritimes have included such don’t worry, be happy headlines as “It’s Not All Fog in the Fishery” and “Living on Less and Liking It in the East.” Kimberly Noble, a Report on Business writer, recalls a piece she did for a mid-eighties Report on Alberta that reflected the economic slump the province was going through. After 10 inches of negative reporting, Noble optimistically said, “things are looking up…,” a line that became the lead when Ian Carmine cut the not-so-positive beginning.

It was Carmine, then editor of Report on Business, who launched the Report On sections in 1981. Trading on the prestige of ROB’s name, the supplements were added to attract more advertising to the Globe, and have been successful in that respect; they have grown from 12 to 16 sections a year to a projected 62 in 1995, with the ads sold at ROB’s top rate. As Noble explains, the special reports are a throwback to “the way the newspaper business was run, where you’re delivering a certain kind of reader to advertisers.”

Today’s Globe staff have little time or desire to contribute to the sections, and at best see them as a necessary revenue-generating evil. One staffer recalls how after he wrote something under protest for a Report on Insurance, he requested in writing that he never be asked again. This means that most of the articles in the sections are done by freelancers, who receive about $300 for each piece. Many of these reporters are generalists without specific knowledge of the subjects they cover, which may explain why some articles lack the depth normally expected of the Globe.

But the main reason for the overly positive slant in the special reports is the lack of editorial independence. Not only are ad reps given a list of stories slated for the sections, they actually suggest many of the topics, although Pyette says that not all these recommendations are accepted. For example, he once turned down a section about multilevel marketing, or what he calls a “Report on Pyramids.” But Pyette has approved “timely surveys” of such under examined topics as couriers, the multichannel universe, fine cars and ethnic marketing. Editorial staff also propose topics, though they may not have enough sales appeal. In the early nineties, Noble suggested as section on forest products, but advertisers balked at its environmental focus. In the end, few ads were sold, and the section was cut down to two pages.

The Northern Ireland report that ran on November 17, 1990, had the elements of a successful supplement: lots of ads and a positive focus. The article “Discover the True Ulster” captured the section’s sense of optimism about the area: “It hardly seems possible to reconcile the quiet, compelling beauty with the visions of violence projected by the media. Visitors respond to the setting and find out how pleasant and secure travel is.” One article that didn’t make the section was John Gray’s feature “Conscious of the Troubles,” which looked at how violence has affected the people there. Gray’s piece would have died had senior editors not liked it enough to put it into the Focus sections. In 1991, “Conscious of the Troubles” won Gray (and the Globe) a National Newspaper Award for feature writing.

There was only one catch: Toronto Life magazine wasn’t offering enough pay for a cappuccino at the Toronto Life Cafe, located two floors down from its offices. In fact, it wasn’t offering any pay at all. The “job” was an unpaid “internship.”

Using recent college graduates as unpaid labour is common in the U.S. consumer magazine industry. Not only do such worthy but perennially money-losing titles such as Harper’s and The Nation use interns, but also more profitable magazines like New York magazine and Details. “There is a kind of arrogance about New York that students are so desperate for work there that magazines can get away without paying them anything,” says Carol Holstead, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Kansas and a member of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Now it seems this money-saving practice is being adopted by a growing number of Canadian consumer titles, although so far Toronto Life’s use of interns is the most extreme example.

Many magazines have traditionally co-operated with journalism schools that require their students to get some experience as part of their program. What’s different about the recent trend is that there is not necessarily a connection to course work. In late ’94 and early ’95, 14 major English-language consumer magazines were surveyed as to their use of interns. Only Toronto Life had an advertised program, but three others used unpaid interns: Flare, Modern Woman and Homemaker’s.

In addition, both Chatelaine and Saturday Night are considering the idea, with Chatelaine experimenting with it by taking on interns from community colleges. An of the remaining publications (Canadian Business, Canadian Living, Financial Post Magazine, Maclean’s, Reader’s Digest, Report on Business, TV Guide and Western Living), two (Maclean’s and Report on Business) have unions that prevent the use of interns.

The distinction between course-related co-ops and unpaid internships is an important one. Whereas one is an integral part of the student’s education, the other is offered in addition to the education. And while editors at the magazines point out that they are giving “great experience” to the people who participate, it is clear they are not solely motivated by a desire to help the younger generation of editors. So what is their motivation?

“Free labour, to be honest,” says Liza Finlay, assistant managing editor at Flare. At her magazine, interns fact check, proofread and copy edit—tasks traditionally done by staffers in entry-level jobs.

The use of unpaid interns in Canada didn’t start until after the recession hit in the early ’90s. Flare, which struggled during that time, started its policy of bringing in interns in the summer of ’91. The recession forced Flare to turn to any method available to get the job done. “If you open Flare and you open a copy of Elle, you’ll see that we’re half their size but with a quarter the staff,” says Finlay. The downsizing the magazine went through forced staffers to double up on positions, making the addition of interns extremely helpful.

Homemaker’s, which began using interns in September ’91, had no such financial burden. According to Mary McIver, the managing editor, the magazine remained profitable throughout the recession and earned more than expected last year. And yet she maintains that there is no room in the budget to pay interns, since they are not essential to the magazine’s operation. “We could manage without them,” she says.

In the case of Toronto Life, editor John Macfarlane started the three-month program in the spring of ’93, a year in which his magazine lost roughly $500,000; 1994 wasn’t any better for Toronto Life. But despite this, Macfarlane says finances play no part in his decision to not pay interns. “I don’t think that’s really the issue here,” he says. “Even if the magazine were profitable I’m not sure we would pay the interns.” As he sees it, the unpaid workers are getting “good value, in terms of what they learn and what they come out knowing. The whole notion of an internship,” he explains, “is that a different kind of bargain is being struck. The interns give us whatever they are able to give us—and instead money, we give them a practical grounding in magazine journalism.”

Many in the industry don’t believe this bargain is fair. “I think it’s exploitive,” says Mary Doyle, the professor in charge of print internships at the University of Western Ontario journalism school. “I’m sure the management at Toronto Life would not agree to work 40 hours a week for nothing.” And Equinox editor Jim Cormier says of the practice, “I’m not sure I like that. It doesn’t reflect well on the industry.” Fina Scroppo, now associate editor of CA Magazine, who graduated from Ryerson’s magazine journalism program in 1991—and went straight to an entry-level job at Maclean Hunter’s trade division—raises a pertinent question. “How,” she asks, “do these people who take the internship make a living?”

Macfarlane doesn’t see this as his problem. “Whether or not a student can or can’t afford to do it is not a problem that Toronto Life is responsible for, or can do anything about.”

Steven Trumper, the managing editor of Toronto Life until last year, agrees the issue is a difficult one. “For a student who’s already paid $10,000 in tuition to give up time to work to nothing, that’s a lot to ask. But that’s up to them. I don’t’ think it’s up to them. I don’t’ think it’s up to the industry to decide a policy for those matters, “You should pay people for work.” And Ian McGugan, executive editor of Canadian Business, agrees. “It’s much fairer on both sides that way,” he says. “The intern doesn’t feel ripped off and it imposes a work ethic and discipline on both sides because money is involved.” Canadian Business, says McGugan, won’t offer an internship unless it can find some way to pay.

As Macfarlane sees it, though, hiring interns and employees are two different things. “When I hire people who are skilled, I hire them on the same basis that I’m hired. They give me a week’s work and I give them a week’s pay. But here we’re hiring people who aren’t yet in that position, being just out of school.” Still, they are graduates. “But that doesn’t make them useful at all!”

Two Ryerson magazine journalism graduates who have proved themselves useful at Toronto Life are Leanne Delap and Angie Gardos, now both associate editors. They were hired shortly after they graduated in 1989, initially for the summer. Would Gardon have been able to take the summer position had it been unpaid? “Probably not,” she admits.

Joanna Shepherd, a broadcast major in her final year at King’s College in Halifax and an intern at Toronto Life last summer, enjoyed her experience. And she also doesn’t have a real problem with the idea of unpaid internships. Like many students, she has accepted the notion that she may have to do some volunteer work to get experience. “A lot of internships are going to provide references,” she says. “If you haven’t done one, I would recommend it.” And in some cases, it has led to employment. Another inter, Andrea Curtis, was hired on as a full-time copy editor after her three months were over. And of the remaining six interns who have gone through Toronto Life since the program began, two have done freelance work since then. It is this chance for employment that helped sway Gardos and Delap. “I was sort of against it at the start,” says Gardos, “but the way we’re working it here, I don’t feel guilty.” Delap echoes Gardos: “I no longer personally feel bad.” She also defends the decision not to pay the interns on the basis that unpaid programs are common in the United States.

Students there seem resigned to this situation. As Fernella Saunders, who’s taking journalism courses at Duke University, says, “Whether we like it or not, some form of unpaid work is necessary in order to gain the experience to prove that you are not only qualified, but serious about doing the work.”

And so graduates on both sides of the border are volunteering their present for a chance at a job in future. Sara Curtis, a Ryerson magazine student who graduated in 1992, went south in the fall of ’93 to work as an intern at Harper’s. While she describes her time at the renowned magazine as “amazing,” she found herself back in Canada in three months looking for a job in a tough market. Working at Harper’s opened doors; impressed by her experience, Ken Whyte at Saturday Night met with her to chat once she came back in spring 1994. Although she has since done some contract work at Maclean’s, she has yet to find full-time work.

But that doesn’t mean she thinks the internship wasn’t worthwhile. “I don’t have one regret,” she says. At Harper’s, she compiled research and did fact checking for the magazine’s opening sections. She also had lunch with each of the magazine’s editors. For Curtis, the “job” was a joy from the beginning. “I’d wake up in the morning and want to go to work.”

For Tyrone Newhook, who graduated in ’94 from Ryerson and also interned in the U.S., the trip was less enjoyable. Newhook spent three months last summer at New York magazine. His co-workers were a collection of well-to-do students, including the daughter of Regis Philbin. “They saw us as free labour, not as real journalists,” he says. “We were treated as the children writers, the journalism wannabees.”

And while his duties were similar to Curtis’, he sometimes felt taken for granted. One time he proposed a story idea only to see it assigned to an established writer. On another occasion, a special project came up that required the work of two freelancers. It was good that Newhook was there, he was told, because now the magazine would only need to hire one. These incidents left Newhook questioning the value of the intern program.

It is stories like Newhook’s that worry graduates and unions alike. But neither group has much control over the situation. In Canada, only Maclean’s and Report on Business are unionized, and thus don’t allow the use of unpaid labour. The only other organization involved with magazines, the Periodical Writers Association of Canada, can do little but bemoan the practice of using interns. “Magazines are looking for any way they can to save money,” says John Mason, a PWAC vice-president. “It just lacks the professionalism that this industry used to have.”

Doug Bennet, editor of Masthead magazine, sums up the situation for students. “It’s the law of the jungle. It’s a difficult situation, but it’s the law of supply and demand.” And in this jungle, graduates will have to look for jobs any way they can, regardless of pay. It is this situation that angers many.

“If you’re getting people to do work that would normally be paid, and you’re not paying them, then that’s not fair,” says Paul Rush, the director of magazine journalism at Ryerson. “What you’re doing is you’re taking advantage of somebody else’s need.”

To executives at the paper and to the ad agency staff who were involved in its creation, the billboard’s message was simple and perfectly logical: illegal immigrants who are criminals should be deported. To others, though, the ad unmistakably linked immigration, racial minorities and criminality. In the view of Antoni Shelton, executive director of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, the ad would “have a harmful effect on racial minorities in terms of their acceptance in society, and reinforce the notion that immigration and crime are associated with people of colour.” Samson Okalow, managing editor of The Metro Word, a 30,000-circulation biweekly paper that serves Metro’s black community, was more blunt: “That ad is just racist, period.”

This response surprises Tom MacMillan, executive director of marketing for the Sun, and Lynda Schwalm, the paper’s marketing director. Asked whether he could see how the ad’s intentded message might be misconstrued, MacMillan responded flatly: “Immigrants who are criminals should be deported. Period. New paragraph. That’s all the board said.” Schwalm was equally dismissive: “Not for a moment did I look at that board and think, ’Gee, that’s racist,’” she says. “If you’r enot an illegal immigrant, why would you have anything against it?”

Mike Strobel, the Sun’s managing editor, is the only one of the three to admit that the board’s message might be taken to be that all immigrants shoul be deported. “You could see it was going to be controversial in that respect,” he says. “I can ses why people might not get the messae if they don’t see the numbers linking illegal immigrants and crime.” His suggestion for people who dien’t get the intended message the first time: drive by and take a second look.

Gary Watson, the copywriter at Ambrose Carr Linton Kelly who conceived the billboard, believes the board carried a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-it message. “It’s realy saying, ’Let’s get serious with this issue and make something happen.’” Was he uncomfortable with the implications? “I guess if I didn’t agree with the message I never would have come up with the idea.”

The “Deported” ad, which featured models from a Toronto boxing club, was the eighth in the audacious and clever “We’ll Be There” campaign that the Sun launched in 1991. Earlier ads depicted such amusing but improbably events as Brian Mulroney and Jacques Parizeau embracing, and Ontario Premier Bob Rae and his finance minister, Floyd Laughren, neither of them big favourites of the paper, busking in the subway. The only other ad in the series that didn’t have a playful tone was in 1993 busboard that showed a trash can full of guns, which was designed to complement a “turn in your guns” campaign the paper was running at the time. As Watson points out, “We couldn’t’ come off with a light-hearted approach [for these two ads]. These serious, in-your-face approach.”

Not surprisingly, the Sun’s stance on the immigration issue is highly critical of current policies. The paper’s editorials argue that too many undeserving people are being allowed into Canada and then permitted to stay because of shortcoming in the immigration system. That’s why Lael O’Brien, the Sun account supervisor from Ambrose Kelly, felt the deported board was a good one for the paper: “The Sun is very passionate about the immigration issue. This billboard is a little bit more passionate and angry because the issue has really come to a head.” As for the possibility of the ad being misconstrued, she says, “With any message that’s half-intelligent you run the risk of having it misinterpreted.”

The issue of criminal noncitizens dominated the news last summer after two high-profile murders. On April 5, 1994, 23-yar-old Georgina Leimois was shot and killed during a robbery at a trendy Toronto cafe. Her accused killer, Jamaican-born O’Neil Grant, 22, had been granted a five-year stay on a 1992 deportaion order, partly because he had been in Canada since childhood. Then, on June 16, a 25-year-old police officer, Todd Baylis, was fatally shot in the head during a struggle with a suspected drug dealer. Twenty-five-year-old Clinton Gayle, also Jamaican-born, was charged with Baylis’ murder. Legarlly, Gayle should have been deported in 1991, but his deportation order had not been enforced.

The two murders supported the Sun’s contention that the immigration system was a mess. If examining and exposing problems in the immigration system were part of the Sun’s message before, after the Baylis and Leimonis murders they became gospel. Columnist Christie Blatchford herself said in an August column: “I was then, as I am now, devoting three-quarters of my columns to immigration matters.” Her pieces bore such scathing headlines as “Rot Remains,” “Disgrace” and “Bloody Fools.” The sadness, anger and fear the Leimonis and Baylis murders aroused were still raging when the “Deported” billboards went up across the city on September 26. Of course, that was the point. “We were looking at the ad in August when it was a hot topic,” recalls Lynda Schwalm. “It seemed like a very obvious thing to do.” Both she and MacMillan say there was little debate before the billboard was approved. The ad took a tout of the Sun executives, and although the final official approval was up to Jim Tighe, the publisher at the time, Schwalm and MacMillan say that because the billboard met with their approval, it never came down to a question of Tighe having to accept or reject it.

The fact that such an ad was so easily accepted is troubling to Okalow. He feels the media are partly responsible for this because they have largely exaggerated the magnitude of the problem with illegal immigrants and crime. “The context of this ad is what has been happening in this city over the last year and a half, and that is to whip up a general hysteria against immigrants and people of colour, and then blame them for everything except World War III.”

Linda Szeto, president of the Toronto chapter of the Chinese Canadian National Council, agrees. She feels that in hard economic times, immigrants are the first ones found responsible for any social ills or criminal activity. “It is a convenient way for the Sun to sell papers. They need a scapegoat, and people tend to blame certain groups of immigrants—immigrants who are black, Asian or Arabic, not what they consider suited for Canada,” explains Szeto. “When I saw that ad, I saw hate. It could easily be my picture up there. It is not a very welcoming message.”

Or a very accurate one: according to a recent study by senior immigration department researcher Derrick Thomas, people born outside Canada are less likely to commit crimes that land them in penitentiaries than native-born Canadians.

What about the fact that the board depicted whites as well as minorities? “It’s really damn obvious when they are talking about immigration they are not talking about people who are white,” says Samson Okalow. “They are talking about people who are not white.” Michael Hollett, the publisher and editor of NOW magazine, who is white, thought so too. He was so disgusted with the ad that in a November issue he ran a photograph of one billboard that had been defaced to read “Racism hurts us all.” “There has to be room in journalism for different viewpoints, but they’ve really crossed the line,” he explains. Especially to have that kind of billboard in a country so clearly built on immigration—it is just such an impossible viewpoint to put forward.”

However, MacMillan emphatically denies that the ad was even remotely offensive. As proof, he cites the few formal complaints the paper has received. “We had six calls in a city of three million people. Six calls. More people would complain if the crossword puzzle didn’t make it in,” he argues.

Shelton has another explanation for the apparent lack of response: “This is The Toronto Sun,” he says wearily. “It is a paper that digs into the darkest corners of our minds and builds on our worst fears. You stack up all they’ve run over the years and people just say, ’There they go again…’”

Exactly what had caused the two white, middle-aged women on their way home from a shopping trip to be swarmed by 30 to 40 teenagers was unclear, although some, reports hinted the assault might have been sparked by racial tension. And besides the fact the women had been surrounded, screamed at and shoved, exactly what else had happened also remained unclear.

But however murky the facts, the fear caused by the incident was plain to see. Report after report on Toronto’s Citytv, CFTO and CBLT Evening Newscasts feature clips of nervous subway patrons. “No, I don’t feel safe anymore,” one young woman said anxiously, standing with her pigtailed daughter in the station where the attack occurred. “There’s usually lots of crowds of young people hanging around, and you never know, if you look at them the wrong way you could get jumped.”

Similar scenes were played out over the next few days on all three newscasts. CBLT even devoted several minutes of its newshour the day following the assault to discussing the causes of swarmings with a group of about 20 high-school students. And a few nights later the station ran a report on the fact the Guardian Angels, an urban crime-fighting organization, had begun patrolling the subway system at night to stop the “terror.” Typical of much of the coverage, a story that aired on Citvtv briefly described the Toronto Transit Commission as one of the safest subway systems in North America, then abruptly switched gears with: “But the question is, do you feel safe?”

Predictably, every interviewee said no.

Asked that same question, many Canadians would also answer no, a Statistics Canada report released last June found that 46 percent of those polled feared more for their safety today than they did five years ago. Yet, ironically, that same report concluded Canadians were no more at risk of becoming victims of violent crime in 1993 than five years earlier,

So why is it Canadians are increasingly afraid of crime even though statistics say we’re not seeing more of it on our streets? Partly, it may be because we are seeing a great deal of it on our television sets and in the news in general. Reporters and producers generally agree that today crime stories constitute a larger part of the news package than they did a few years back. This increase, coupled with television’s tendency to focus on dramatic crimes like the TTC swarming, may be casting a distorted, larger-than-life shadow on the reality of crime.

How distorted? While Canadian statistics are unavailable, an American study conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, based in Washington, D.C., found that in 1993 Americans were hit by “a wave of crime news.” Evening broadcasts on the ABC, NBC and CBS networks aired nearly 1,700 crime stories that year-double the number that appeared in 1992. Astonishingly, this increase occurred despite the fact the U.S. Justice Department registered less a two percent increase in crime over that same period.

And the media mayhem that surrounded the TTC swarming may be a small but ominous indication of a similar trend throughout the Canadian news business. Metro Toronto Police Sergeant Lisa Hodgins argues that heavy coverage of the incident left people needlessly second-guessing their own safety. After all, “swarmings,” a specific kind of assault typically committed by a mob of teenagers, had been absent from the city’s crime scene for more than a year. What’s more, assaults on the TTC were actually 13 percent lower than in the previous year. “The fear is absolutely out of proportion. Absolutely,” says Sergeant Hodgins.

Time seems to have proved Hodgins right. just a few days after the swarming, four teenagers were arrested for having started the attack. Since then, virtually no similar random acts of violence have occurred on the TTC, nothing to indicate that, despite its terrifying nature, the swarming was more than an isolated incident on an otherwise safe transit system.

But the public may not have been getting that message – a notion that would hardly surprise Anthony Doob. The University of Toronto criminologist says he’s long believed that television news, and news in general, distorts people’s perception of crime. Doob co-authored the Statistics Canada report that concluded the country’s crime rate hadn’t changed over the past five years. After interviewing 10,000 Canadians, he found that almost one quarter had suffered a personal or property crime. “There’s little doubt that’s a high crime rate,” Doob says, “but it’s no higher than it was five years ago, so there’s no real reason people should be more concerned.”

Besides pointing at fear-mongering politicians, Doob drops a sizable part of the responsibility for skewed public perception of crime onto the news media’s lap. “If I ask people why they think crime is increasing, they sort of stand back and say, ‘Well, what a dumb question. Everybody tells me it is, and all you have to do is open a newspaper or turn on the television to see it happening.” Confirming this link between the news and individuals’ views of crime isn’t difficult. When the Ryerson Review stopped 10 Torontonians last fall, it found that eight believed crime in their city was on the rise. And when asked why, all mentioned the large number of crime stories they saw or read about every day. Several, like 26-year-old registered nurse Helen Rezendes, also pointed to specific stories of “senseless” crimes, including the highly publicized shooting of Georgina Leimonis, a 23-year-old woman, gunned down during the robbery of a trendy Toronto eatery late last winter, and the TTC swarming. “Ever since the story on the swarming,” Rezendes explained, “I don’t feel safe on the subway. And when I’m riding I’m careful to stay away from large groups of teenagers. Anything can happen nowadays, to anyone, anywhere.”

It’s not surprising Rezendes feels that way. A 1991 survey conducted by U of T’s Centre for Criminology monitored two nightly local newscasts (CBLT’s CBC Evening News and Citytv’s CityPulse), and found that crime stories constituted roughly one-third to one-half of the programs. And a random seven-day content analysis of CBLT, CFTO and Citytv six o’clock newscasts, conducted by the Review found the following: on average, 36 percent of CBLT stories, 37 percent of CFTO stories and 48 percent of Citytv items dealt with either a specific incident of crime or an ongoing investigation of that crime.

Anthony Doob has an unlikely ally in Jojo Chintoh. Chintoh has worked in the news business for the past 17 years, and spent the last five as Citytv’s crime specialist. Much like the criminologist, he asserts that television news “tends to play up trivial incidents” and “scares people unnecessarily.” Chintoh says he’s often covered stories in which there seemed to be “nothing there”: “I have to fill a spot on our news show of about a minute to a minute and a half. Sometimes, there’s not much happening. So what do I do? I pick an incident and end up making more out of it than I should. We all do it.”

Chintoh points to a story he put together on a 100-year-old man who had been robbed of his pension cheque. “Now, if you were sitting at home, watching my report on this man,” says Chintoh, “you’d think, ‘my God, what is this city coming to?’ But in fact, nothing has changed. It’s not that more of these crimes are happening, it’s just that I chose to report it because there was nothing else to do a story on.”

Like Chintoh, Sophia Voumvakis is no stranger to the news media’s Chicken Little-like ability to create a climate of what she terms “moral panic” when it comes to crime. Back in 1982 Voumvakis was working on her master’s thesis at U of T’s Centre for Criminology when she began to notice a marked hysteria in the news coverage of the tragic rapes and murders of seven young women. Voumvakis became so intrigued with the nature of this coverage trial that she left off researching her then-current thesis and instead took up analyzing the way in which these incidents were reported by the city’s three daily newspapers.

In examining the hundreds of stories that had been published about the women, who had been attacked in separate incidents over a five-month period, Voumvakis confirmed her initial suspicions. In a year when the number of reported rapes had actually dipped-to 167, down from 174-the city’s dailies, particularly The Toronto Star and The Toronto Sun were busy creating the impression of a sudden torrent of violence against women.

The papers were well aware of these statistics. Voumvakis herself was present at a press conference where police officers and a psychologist presented those tape numbers and said women didn’t have to fear for their safety any more than they did previously. It’s disturbing that none of the papers present chose to include those statements in their reports. “I imagine it wasn?t reported by them because it just didn’t fit into their theme,” Voumvakis says. “This hard evidence would have destroyed the premise they had worked on – that the city was under siege.”

The very idea that the news media hypes crime out of proportion with reality strikes Jim Poling as inane. As vice-president of Canadian Press, which provides news to 100 of the country’s daily newspapers as well as TV and radio stations, Poling agrees that crime makes up a larger part of news reports today than it did a few years back. But the 32-year veteran of the news business argues this is simply because there’s more crime to report.

Poling believes that it is organizations like Statistics Canada and criminologists like Doob – not the media – that are out of touch with the biting reality of crime on city streets. He holds that crime statistics are hardly convincing, since numbers can be “played with” and made to show almost anything. “They can fill this whole goddamn building with reports. But you go out and you tell real people in coffee shops and on the streets that crime is down and they’ll laugh in your face. Reality tells them it isn’t.”

Police statistics would seem, superficially at least, to support Poling’s view that crime is up. For example, Metro Police registered 1,056 more violent crimes in 1993 than 1992. But Doob and other criminologists point out that most of these new incidents, 828 to be exact, were minor assaults that would not even have been recorded by police a few years ago. “When I was a kid and there was a fight in the schoolyard, it was the school that would discipline the kids involved,” Doob explains. “Today, when a fight breaks out, schools normally call the police. Well, if you’re reporting these assaults which have never before been reported to the police, you can’t then turn around and say police statistics on assaults have soared, so more assaults must be happening. More are just being reported.”

A study conducted by criminologist Peter Carrington confirms that more investigations in Canada, especially of less serious offences, are ending in charges than ever before. Carrington’s research focused specifically on young offenders and found that before 1985, police laid charges in roughly 24 percent of the minor assaults they investigated. Since 1985, that number has shot up to 56 percent.

But Poling holds firm. He maintains that crime coverage is up because crime is up. “It’s just not the case that newspeople are running around spending a lot more time and resources covering crime. I don’t believe that for a second.” And Poling is right on that count: Citytv, CBLT and CFTO continue, as they have for at least the last five years, to employ a single crime reporter each, with general-assignment reporters taking on smaller crime stories as they come up. Moreover, neither CBLT nor Citytv news producers (repeated requests for interviews with CFTO producers were ignored) believed that crime reporting did or should receive a larger proportion of the station’s time and resources than in other of the city’s beats.

Like Poling, reporter Sheila Manese, who has worked the CBC Evening News police beat for the last seven years, maintains that television news only reflects the increasingly violent society in which we live: “A few years back every television station used to swarm to a schoolyard fight. Now, we only go if guns are involved. We used to swarm a building if shots were fired. Now, shots are fired almost every second day.” Since the 1980s, Manese says she has noticed a gradual but marked change in what she tags the “style of crime.” Guns and knives play a part in a greater number of the robberies and assaults that she covers. Sexual attacks and even schoolyard fights have become more brutal.

Criminologists won’t argue there have been changes in the nature of crime over the past few years, drive-by shootings, for instance, are certainly a relatively new phenomenon. But some say the news media are often too quick to interpret these changes as telltale signs of a “crime epidemic” without setting them against a larger reality. With an unprecedented four million people living in the Greater Toronto Area, for instance, it is almost statistically impossible to go for more than a day without a shooting, stabbing or other serious offence. So while Manese is quite right to say that these sorts of crimes now occur almost every other day, this assertion must be viewed against the backdrop of the city’s growing population density.

But any accurate reflection of the crime reality isn’t jeopardized solely by the extravagant number of crime stories that get reported. The types of crimes most covered are just as important in shaping individuals’ perceptions of their community. After all, if your favourite TV news show offers up a selection of petty thefts, assaults and only a few stories of rape or murder, you’ll probably be less afraid of taking an evening stroll than your buddy whose news show puts a little more chaos on its menu.

As well, the kind of media attention that more and more these days is lavished upon “celebrity murders,” like the O.J. Simpson saga and the killing of basketball star Michael Jordan’s father, can’t help, but sharpen the general sting of fear.

Thus, it’s worth noting what share of TV crime stories actually focus on violent incidents such as murders, rapes and robberies. A predominant share, says Professor Richard Ericson, who teaches sociology and law at the University of British Columbia. In 1991, Ericson contributed to the research and writing of the previously mentioned U of T study, which found that roughly one-third to one-half of the CBLT and Citytv newscasts focused on crime. What’s more, Ericson’s research also found that a substantial portion of each station’s total number of crime stories?19.8 percent in the case of CBLT and 31 percent in the case of Citytv centered on “interpersonal deviance “including individual acts of violence such as rape and murder.

Ericson contends that these types of crime stories simply seem to fit TV’s format: “Dramatization and personalization are a big part of the medium. So I wasn’t surprised to find that television largely reports in terms of dramatic, individual cases of violence. You ain’t exactly go into long abstractions when all you’ve got is a few minutes.” Jeannie Lee, an urban affairs reporter with the CBC Evening News, agrees, “A lot of television news happens because you have the pictures for it,” she explains. “You say, ‘Yeah, we got a great shot of this guy being arrested, his head down on the cement, officers all around him,’ and so you do a story on it.”

Recently, Lee took on the issue by producing a news report that looked at television’s, and the news media’s, underreporting of white-collar crime. In it, she argued that too often stories on “virtually invisible, yet very widespread” corporate crime are frequently skipped over, not only because it’s harder to match them with interesting visuals, but also because they’re more difficult to flush out. “The companies certainly aren’t going to cooperate with you, so you have to spend more time digging on your own,” Lee explains. “Whereas if you’re reporting on a murder, you can get most of the information in a couple of hours from the officers at the scene.”

Jojo Chintoh concurs that television news tends to cover “scarier, titillating” crime stories, and only rarely devotes time and resources to corporate crime. “Visuals are the power of television. The more graphic and dramatic, the better. A mother crying over a coffin is like a kick in the gut. An interview with a computer expert explaining how some guy stole $10,000 with his boss’ computer isn’t even a pinprick.” As a result, Chintoh believes, viewers are often left with an exaggerated fear of violent crime, a fear that Dr. George Gerbner, a professor and dean emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania?s Annenberg School for Communication, has labelled “mean world syndrome.”

For close to 30 years, Gerbner has monitored television violence with an eye to studying the relationship between viewing habits and general attitudes toward crime. Although focusing principally on violence in fictional TV programs, Gerbner also concerns himself with crime and violence on television news, arguing that the real-life context of news heightens the fear it can spark. “Violence on the news ” he says, “provides confirmation of a cruel and violent world, and a general sense of insecurity.”

Gerbner has concluded that the more television that people watch, the more likely they are to believe their neighbourhoods are unsafe and to assume that crime is on the rise even if statistics don’t support this. Heavy viewers (the definition of which varies by socioeconomic class) are also more likely to buy locks, watchdogs and even guns to protect themselves from perceived evils.

Both Gerbner and Doob contend that this type of fortress mentality reaches beyond the personal realm to enter that of public policy, spawning larger-scale but equally dangerous and ineffective “quick fixes.” Thus, the inspiration for lock-’em-up crime bills (like the policy passed in the United States by President Bill Clinton late last year, calling for all those charged with a fourth felony to be put away for life) and the public outcry for fewer immigrants, more prisons, more police and even for capital punishment.

Yet if reporting on violent crime is so natural to the visual demands of television, is it possible to balance this coverage by presenting it against a larger, less-sensational context? Further, is it even the news media’s responsibility to provide this context? Rose Dyson says the answer to both of these questions should be yes. Dyson is chairwoman of Canadians Concerned About Violence in Entertainment, a grassroots citizens’ organization that monitors and lobbies to curb the amount of violence broadcast over the nation’s airwaves, While C-CAVE is primarily concerned with entertainment programming, Dyson says the organization’s mandate has in recent years broadened to include violence in news programs because of “a growing lack of distinction between information and entertainment.”

Dyson has been one of the first to call on Canadian broadcasters to adopt a policy of providing “family-sensitive” newshours during peak viewing times, a concept winning over many local stations south of the border. The driving force behind these toned-down broadcasts, in which graphic images of body bags, daring arrests and bloody pavements are left in the editing suite, came from American citizens concerned with the violent and pessimistic image of community their children absorb from watching the news.

“Violence in real life can and should be reported,” says Dyson, who would like to see cuts in both the number of crime stories on the news and the graphic video that often accompanies them. “But it’s not necessary to report violence in a violent way,” Indeed, several American news programs that have embraced the family-sensitive philosophy now simply have the anchor read copy on many of the reports of violent crimes, rather than splashing images of the scene, complete with trembling victims, across the screen.

Besides working to cut the number of frightening images and stories on the news, the family-sensitive impetus also calls for broadcasts to be injected with a larger perspective by infusing them with reports on positive stories about their communities, along with the all-too-familiar negative ones.

Family-sensitive news hasn’t caught on in Canada-not one of the nation’s news organizations has adopted the policy. Some, like Citytv and CBLT, say there’s little need to, since they already restrict the graphic nature of images allowed on their suppertime broadcasts, reserving explicit footage for the late-night news, when children are less likely to be watching.

What’s more, producers like CBLT’s Jill Troyer of the CBC Evening News say there are other ways to keep crime in context. To that end, at the start of the city’s municipal election campaign, which saw several candidates throwing themselves onto the law-and-order bandwagon, CBLT ran a report challenging the very perception that crime in the city was up. Moreover, Troyer says she regularly monitors the nature and the number of crime stories the newscast will contain, to ensure “the overall context of the show” remains balanced.

Stephen Hurlbut, Citytv’s director of news programming, says he too aims for context, both within the newscast and within each crime story. “Fear-mongering is not something we’re comfortable with,” he explains.

Hurlbut says that Chintoh often goes for days without putting in a story, simply because other issues related to the day’s events are “more worthy” of the newscast’s attention. “But some days,” Hurlbut explains, “you’ve got shootings and stabbings. These things happen, we don’t make them up and they’re important. But we don’t give these stories any kind of precedence or lead our newscasts with them all the time.” Still, when the Review monitored CityPulse for seven days, it found that the show lead with a crime story on every day but one.

Hurlbut and Troyer agree that no matter how careful and rigorous they are, TV news can only provide so much context. Both producers say that viewers are responsible not only for processing what they see on the news, but also for the type of stories that are covered. And it is true that crime has popular appeal. In two small focus group sessions conducted by the CBC in the fall of 1994, 77 percent of interviewees indicated they would be “very interested” in a story about a murder that took place in their own neighbourhood. This was the highest tally of all the categories. By comparison, 52 percent said they would be very interested in a story outlining where the city’s newest garbage dump would be located, and only 33 percent were very interested in a story about the municipality’s election campaign. Although this vas only a small and by no means scientific study, Troyer says it does demonstrate “the strong interest people have in crime stories.”

No doubt stories like the TTC swarming are watched with wide-eyed intensity. And why not? Crime remains a serious national problem that’s not going to vanish if we close our eyes to it. But opening our eyes to the kind of crime-heavy newscasts being offered up won’t help either. Too often, the media just don’t concern themselves with bringing the bogeyman of crime out of the bushes and into the light. Canadians are as safe today as they were five years ago. But if that’s the kind of reality check you’re after, you’ll rarely find it in the news.

Foster, who is black, says he’s not the only one to have experiences like this, that others feel excluded too. It’s not surprising when you look at the newsrooms. “There are so few minority reporters in the mainstream media that they are almost unnoticeable,” he says. “Although they do some very good work, it is almost impossible for them to break the barriers that would allow others to follow.”

The problem of invisible is discouragingly familiar. Foster recalls that when he came to Canada from Barbados in 1979, members of the black community were already sensitive to this issue. “People were even auditing Sears and Bay catalogues to see how many models there were, and I remember people saying if I saw a black person on television it would be an American station.” However, 10 years later, when he left The Globe and Mail, he was the last black person in the newsroom. “That was six years ago and there has been another. When I left, 100 percent of the black staff went out.”

In 1993, when the Canadian Daily Newspaper Association finally studied the racial composition of member papers’ newsrooms for the first time, the results confirmed Foster’s experience. At the 41 papers that responded to the poll, only 2.6 percent of newsroom staff, or 67 people, were nonwhite. That number looks bad compared to the roughly 13 percent that visible minorities represent in Canada’s total population. It looks far worse when you realize that many of the dailies surveyed published in large cities, where the percentage of minorities is much higher. For example, more than a quarter of Toronto’s and Vancouver’s populations are nonwhite. But Foster says the tiny number of minorities on staff is just one of the problems in newspaper newsrooms.

The other is news decisions. He points out that there are very few stories about minorities, and the ones that run often reinforce stereotypes: Jamaicans afoul of the law, poor blacks. “Why does it have to be a black woman? What’s wrong with using an English person as the example in some of these stories? Aren’t there whites on welfare? ” Foster asks, frustrated.

“The Imperfect Minor,” and April 1994 study by John Miller, chair of the School of Journalism at Ryerson, and his assistant, Kimberly Prince, substantiated Foster’s view about how minorities are represented in news stories. Miller and Prince audited a random week’s editions of six major daily papers: The Vancouver Sun, the Calgary Herald, the Winnipeg Free Press, The Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun and the Montreal Gazette. They were assessing the amount and tone of the coverage of visible minorities.

Only one paper, The Gazette, carried a higher percentage of photos and local news coverage of visible minorities than those groups represent in the local population. While visible minorities and aboriginals make up almost 13 percent of the population in the Montreal area, The Gazette devoted 21 percent of its photos and 18 percent of its news coverage to them. The Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun and the Winnipeg Free Press came close to matching their communities in percentage of photos, though none carried a similar percentage of local news stories.

Stereotyping and negative coverage were common. In all papers, photos of visible minorities were rare in the business and lifestyle sections (three and six percent respectively of the photos featuring minorities) and common in the news and sports sections (43 percent and 36 percent). And, overall, the local stories were 49 percent negative, while 42 percent were positive and the rest neutral. The overall impression was that nonwhites are athletes, entertainers or criminals.

Because the number of visible minorities in Canada is growing quickly, these two problems—underrepresentation in newsrooms and the poor reflection in coverage—will only increase. In a 1992 study, Carleton demographer John Samuel projected that Canada will be 18 percent nonwhite by 2001. He also estimated that the proportion could be as high as 45 percent in Toronto, 39 percent in Vancouver, 25 percent in Calgary and Edmonton, and at least 20 percent in Montreal and Winnipeg. As Monika Deol, a Canadian South Asian who is an on-air personality at Toronto’s Citytv, says, “I am the face of mainstream.”

That is increasingly true, but what are papers doing to reflect the changing colour of Canada? So far, not much. And most don’t even seem very interested in the issue. In a 1993 poll conducted by the CDNA, publishers ranked diversity only 19th among their concerns, after such issues as computerization and competing with Canada Post for flyer business. Miller, chair of the CDNA diversity committee, says he hasn’t heard anything since to make him think things have changed. Members of his committee made suggestions on how the papers could improve their coverage of visible minorities. The points are pretty motherhood. “Every editorial staff member should know that the paper is committed to reflecting its community” is one. “Newspapers should always hire on merit….[But] a network of contacts in a minority community or a different life experience…are also assets that should be counted on the merit scale” is another. Enlightened self-interest underlies one suggestion: “If minorities don’t see themselves represented in newspapers they will see us as ’the other’ and won’t trust us with their business.” But after addressing a meeting of publishers last September, Miller said, “They just aren’t listening.”

At least most news executives aren’t. On exception is Ian Haysom, editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun. He serves not only on the CDNA diversity committee, but also on its counterpart in the U.S., created by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “I’ve spent some time speaking to people on diversity,” he says. “It makes good business sense and it’s the smart thing as well as the right thing to do.” He think there’s some improvement in publishers’ attitudes, but not enough: “Now at least it’s becoming part of the agenda for a lot of newsrooms in this country, but whether it’s top of the agenda is debatable,” he says. He recalls one publisher asking him if diversity would help him sell more papers.

Selling more papers was exactly what the Montreal Gazette had in mind when it set out to improve its coverage of visible minorities several years ago. “We have a huge cultural population in Montreal,” says city editor Catherine Wallace. “For us it’s a source of future readers. Because most cultural communities in Montreal are bilingual, they could read either the French paper or they could read us.” The Gazette set up a committee two or three years ago that assessed content and recommended ways to improve diversity coverage. As a result, says Wallace, “I think that our coverage is a lot better than it was five years ago.” Today the paper has two reporters on the immigration, refugee and cultural communities beats, and all departments strive to represent minorities; for example, the business department has been doing more on visible minorities businesspeople, while entertainment now covers a wider variety of cultural groups and special concerts important to certain ethic communities.

The Gazette has managed to achieve a good level of coverage even though its approximately 200 newsroom employees include only five nonwhites. In the Miller study, The Gazette’s local news stories affecting minorities were 72 percent positive. By contrast, the Calgary Herald’s coverage of visible minorities was judged 75 percent negative. Editor Crosbie Cotton says content audits have some value but he is skeptical of this particular one, based as it was on a one-week sample. And while he does admit the Herald still has quite a way to go in terms of serving visible minority needs, he feels his paper is doing a much better job than it used to. He notes the Herald was honoured by the Hindu community last year for its extensive coverage and that the Asian community voted the paper its corporate citizen of 1994. He also points out that the paper recently expanded its religious coverage beyond Christianity in response to requests.

Cotton says the Herald is very conscious of diversity issues, but with the Ralph Klein spending cutbacks dominating Alberta news these days, diversity is not a major concern. “I hold the theory that issues that are important are important to all members of our community, and they are not segmented along lines of race or colour of religion. They are very important issues: how to make a living, how to raise a family, how to be a good citizen, how to prosper and grow.”

Still, Cotton believes that “newspapers should be as diverse as their community and we will attempt to get there.” But like many dailies, the Herald isn’t doing much hiring. Its staff has shrunk from 215 to 140 in the past three and a half years. Cotton estimates there are 10 to 15 visible minorities on the news side, including three Asian graphics staffers.

Hiring limitations are commonly cited as the reason papers have put their diversity plans on hold. Haroon Siddiqui, editorial page editor at The Toronto Star, says that for the past five or six years, his paper has been hiring visible minority students for at least a quarter of its summer internships. Traditionally, the paper kept on half of the interns. Since the recession, however, no students have stayed on. At present, of the Star’s 331 full-time editorial employees, 19 are visible minorities. Dorothy Whiteside, the Star’s employment administrator, will only speak cautiously on this issue. All she’ll say is, “There is much groundwork to be done with the unions about visible minority hiring, especially on the issue of promotion and seniority.” Whiteside says the Star only hires on merit, and the massive newsroom downsizing has already stressed union members.

Gail Lem, president of the Southern Ontario’s Newspaper Guild, is equally circumspect. She will only say that as a union, SONG supports the principle of employment equity. “It’s important that the people who write the city’s, province’s and nation’s news come from a diverse pool,” she says. But Zuhair Kashmeri, a former editor of the SONG newsletter and senior editor of NOW magazine until January, says the union hasn’t offered enough support. “When it comes to actually doing things, I don’t think the union members feel it’s a big priority. Minorities got the shaft in terms of employment equity and minority hiring when the union of women. There was so much emphasis given to that, there was virtually no time left to look at minorities and minority hiring.”

Improving minorities hiring is one of the principal goals of Ontario’s Employment Equity Law, which came into effect last September. Private-sector companies with 50 or more employees must now file action plans, then show progress by meeting specific deadlines. Cecil Foster welcomes the new law, but wonders if it has the strength to enforce minorities hiring: “Where you have the legislation and you don’t have the political will to carry it out, nothing will be done.” Meanwhile, at the Star, Siddiqui says he is pleased with the new law, and adds that a recession is a good time to start planning minority hiring. The newsroom employees who lost their jobs during the downsizing may not agree. As Ian Haysom says, “You can’t just fire half your newsroom to make way for more diversity.” That’s why, despite his strong interest in the issue, only seven of The Vancouver Sun’s 174 editorial staffers are visible minorities. “Far too white,” in Haysom’s view.

In the opinion of Lorrie Goldstein, senior associate editor at The Toronto Sun, journalism schools’ enrolments have only recently begun to reflect the numbers of visible minorities in the general population. While the Sun newsroom has about 3.5 percent visible minorities, a bit higher than the national average, he says it’s important to hire more qualified people now. Otherwise, he fears that equity laws will force newsrooms to hire less qualified people, to meet a quota.

The six university-level journalism courses across Canada, whose total population is roughly 1,500, currently have about 150 visible minority students. Crosbie Cotton, however, thinks journalism schools are already turning out too many graduates. “The industry is shrinking. The number of openings for junior-level reporters is minimal.”

Yet, amid all the talk about shrinking newsrooms, there is still some hiring going on. So is it just dumb resistance to diversifying that makes papers choose whites for these few positions? Are papers too busy or too lazy to search out talented minorities? Or, as Cecil Foster suspects, is it racism?

Staffing is one part of the issue. The other is coverage. Here the problem is negative reporting, although some communities say they are simply ignored. For example, Raynier Maharaj, editor of The Caribbean Camera, a weekly Toronto tabloid, is also a columnist at The Toronto Sun. Last December, in a Sun column titled “Brown: The Invisible Colour,” he discussed how the Indian community feels about being overlooked by media: “When ethnic origins are being discussed, you only hear and see white, black and Oriental, no browns even though they’re everywhere in town.”

Tony Ku, editor-in-chief of the eastern Canadian edition of Sing Tao Daily, feels the same. He says sometimes the mainstream newspapers completely miss an event that is very important to his community. He understands the mainstream newspapers have a different viewpoint, but he says the country has been changing.

Other communities resent the way they are represented in papers. Franz Leung, news editor at Ming Pao, a Chinese daily published in Toronto and Vancouver, says the mainstream newspapers still don’t understand his community. “Take crime stories, for example. There is almost a cliché in all news stories whenever an Asian has been killed or shot. You will always see a line in the newspaper saying that ’police are investigating whether this is gang-related.’ To me this is a leading statement. It’s maybe money related, or family-conflict related or maybe it’s an accident,” he points out.

But resentment is strongest in the black communities. Jules Elder, the Tobagoborn managing editor of Share, a Toronto weekly, says what coverage there is of his community is overwhelmingly negative. He accuses The Toronto Sun, for example, of making no attempt at balanced coverage. The Toronto Star’s coverage is a bit more sensitive since it hired more visible minority reporters, he believes. Fennella Bruce, a newswriter for Breakfast Television on Toronto’s Citvtv and former senior editor of Pride, a Toronto weekly for the black community, says she can’t even bring herself to pay money for The Toronto Sun. “I think a lot of times they try to push that sentiment that immigrants are doing crime or are a burden on our social policy, [that] immigrants are doing all the ills in society.”

Lorrie Goldstein admits some black people boycott his paper, and that some black writers are discouraged by their communities from writing for the Sun. But he says it’s hypocritical to tell the Sun to change and then criticize it when it tries by adding other voices. According to Goldstein, his paper doesn’t believe in diversity committees or content audits. In fact, Goldstein objects strenuously to the audit done by Miller, partly due to its small sample. When asked if the Sun has a minority contract list, he answers scathingly: “We do and all the wrong people are on it.” He does admit, however, that management asked all editors a year or two ago to try to diversify their voices.

As one of those voices, Raynier Maharaj says the Sun is trying to bring in more ethnic minorities. He thinks the paper realized its market niche was too narrow and is making efforts to become more sensitive. While Maharaj acknowledges The Toronto Sun’s racist reputation in his community, he says “a newsrooms that is mainly white has difficulties being sensitive—it doesn’t know better.” He admits he expresses reservations to the paper from time to time over what it does in its editorials. But he also believes his fellow columnists, even the ones with controversial views on minority issues, are entitled to their opinions. “I prefer to know what someone is thinking,” he says. Maharaj predicts that when change comes, too slowly for some, it will be driven by economics.

Other visible minority journalists say their jobs are harder than those of their white colleagues. They say whites of their white colleagues. They say whites can simply do their work, while they find themselves defending minority sensibilities at news meetings, struggling to avoid stereotyped coverage, and then going home to criticism from their community about how their paper covers certain stories. Several visible minority journalists refused to be interviewed on this topic. Some were worried about insulting their employers and jeopardizing their jobs. Others said the topic was too stressful. One would only talk off the record about the relatives and friends who had berated her for working in what they called a racist environment instead in her own community.

Cecil Foster believes this pressure of never just doing your job and always representing your community causes many people to burn out. And he believes this will only increase with employment equity. He fears minorities will feel they have to prove they got their jobs on merit, not on quotas.

Haroon Siddiqui, who has served for many years on various diversity committees at the Canadian Advertising Foundation, the CDNA and at The Toronto Star, has felt the pressure too. He is seen as an ombudsman for visible minority people, although he really just wanted to go ahead and do his job. Instead, he has appeared on many panels, written articles and made countless diplomatic speeches about diversity. One result of this is that he has been ridiculed by Frank magazine as a PC crusader.

There’s nothing silly, though, about the rapid growth in the number of ethnic publications, growth that’s partly due to how badly mainstream newspapers are covering visible minorities. In 1986, according to Fidelis Ifedi, project manager of periodical sand newspapers at Statistics Canada until very recently, there were 81 minority newspapers in Canada. By 1989 there were 131 and Ifedi believes that number is much higher today, although StatsCan does not yet have those figures. Even during the early nineties these publications were expanding while mainstream newsrooms were cutting back. There are now three Chinese-language dailies that published in Vancouver and Toronto, each with a circulation of roughly 45,000. In Toronto, Ming Pao and Sing Tao both struggled to bring their ad/edit ratios down from 80/20 to 70/30 throughout the recession.

It is that sort of success that will capture the attention of mainstream papers. As Jules Elder says, “Don’t let anybody fool you: newspapers are all business and they’re trying to lock into a niche in the market. I doubt there are people at the head of corporations that run newspapers like The Toronto Star and The Toronto Sun who aren’t paying attention to what’s happening. Oh yeah, they’ll change.”

This is one point on which Elder might agree with Lorne Goldstein. “If you’re trying to be the community talking to itself,” Goldstein says, “you gotta go out and cover things that interest them. If the community has changed, never mind all this concern about being sensitive. If you don’t change and reflect things your readers find interesting, you die.”

The result was Kamehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, a 120-minute journey into the heart of the standoff. The film starts just after the ill-advised police raid that resulted in the death of an officer, moves into the army’s arrival and all the carefully rationed misery that created for both sides, and ends with the “surrender” of the Mohawks 78 days later.

“The support that I got from the film board was just incredible,” says Obomsawin. Toward the end of the crisis, she directed two crews by phone while she filmed and recorded alone inside the last Mohawk holdout, the Kanehsatake Treatment Centre. “I remained until the middle of October, after the people had come out from the treatment centre. It was a very difficult job to do in the circumstances—in every possible way.”

Released in 1993, the finished product received 10 domestic and international film awards, was nominated for a Genie in the best feature documentary category, and has sold close to 3,000 copies on video. Other recent NFB productions and co-productions have also won awards, praise from critics and warm public response. Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick’s Manufacturing Content: Noam Chomsky and the Media was Most Popular Canadian Film in 1992 at the Vancouver International Film Festival and played to three packed houses at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival. Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman’s Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbians Lives won the 1993 Genie for best feature documentary and was aired on CBC last November to positive reviews. It also achieved wide acclaim in international lesbian and gay circles, winning the 1994 Media Award from both the New York and Los Angeles chapters of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for its honest portrayal of the lesbian experience.

Despite these recent successes, even supporters of the film board are asking if the NFB is still an integral and viable part of the Canadian filmmaking community. Not surprisingly, many private-sector producers actively back the scrapping of their government-funded competition. Still others believe that the NFB remains a vital institution—the revised National Film Act of 1950 declared that it existed to “interpret Canada to Canadians”—but feel that it must somehow evolve to better serve both the filmmakers who create the films and the public, which for the most part is indifferent toward the NFB. Unless the film board can stop the recessing charges of irrelevance, Canada might very well lose one of its most thoughtful forms of journalism.

As freelance writer and Globe and Mail columnist Bronwyn Drainie says, “The film board takes it as its mandate to allow good filmmakers to make their statements, whatever they may be, as long as they can back them up. I just don’t see any other organism in the country that’s willing to take on the kind of subjects they take on—whether it’s pornography, or wife abuse, or abortion. The popular media are getting safer and safer in the things they will approach, and the film board has a very special kind of mandate that would drop out or disappear or be, at least, diluted.”

The current debate over the NFB’s survival began when a government report, commissioned two years ago by the Mulroney Tories, was leaked last September. The report, prepared by the Montreal consulting company Groupe Secor for the federal heritage department, recommended a variety of options the government could pursue if it wished to cut funding for the 56-year-old institution. The most potentially devastating one was cutting production completely and dividing all the film board’s documentary and animation production facilities between CBC and Telefilm Canada. The NFB would remain, but only as a film school. Around the same time, in response to the Liberal government’s request that all government agencies submit a list of budget cuts they could make over the next few years, the NFB prepared a 40-page report of its own in which it requested that it not be subjected to further cuts, having already been chopped by $7 million over the previous four years. (Of the NFB’s $81.3-million budget for 1994-95, $30.3 million is allocated for roughly 50 English films, and another $19 million for 30 French films.)

Heritage Minister Michel Dupuy has yet to act on Secor’s report, either by dismissing it outright or passing it along to parliamentary committee for review, so in the immediate future the worst that can happen is that the film board will lose some of its funding. While the budget had not been released at press time, the assumption at the NFB was that its money would be cut, like most other programs’ and institutions’.

What makes the NFB an easier target for government cuts than most cultural agencies is the obvious assurance that Canadian film will still be made. The difference, however, is qualitative. The Secor report suggestion that CBC and Telefilm Canada (essentially a bank to which private television and film producers apply to obtain grants to produce the films they propose) take over all the NFB’s documentary production would please private-sector production companies, which often grumble about government-run competition. But the reality is, most documentaries produced by the NFB would never be touched by the private sector. As Barbara Janes says, “It comes down to a question of whether or not it’s still valid to have an organization in the country that sees its role as cultural as opposed to industrial, and says, ’We think it’s important to make a film on this subject because it is an important subject for Canada.’ Or, ’It’s important to make this film thi sway, because we know the filmmaker, we have confidence in the filmmaker, and he or she is trying something off the beaten track, but we’re going to take the risk.’ As opposed to an organization that says, ’Throw me your treatment and your distribution plan, and if it makes sense from a business point of view, we’ll finance it.’ That’s the difference.” In the case of Kanehsatakbe, says Janes, “W have no idea how long that standoff was going to be, or if there was going to be a film. You can’t go to Telefilm with that kind of concept; it would be crazy for it to finance something like that.”

“I’ve done quite a bit of work with the film board,” says Howard Bernstein, a producer at Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions and a part-time Ryerson broadcast journalism instructor. “They’ve been tremendous in that they are willing to fund, and fund properly, stories that a lot of other people wouldn’t put money into. You go to the film board, they give you $300,000 and you can do a proper job; they don’t rush you and you can do a good job or journalism. The more TV networks are involved,” he notes, “the more mainstream all documentaries will be. And let’s face it, the last thing mainstream people need is to have their point of view sold.” Colin Low, an NFB producer and director who joined the film board in 1945, also dismissed the ability of private-sector production to take over from the NFB. “What Telefilm ends up doing is putting bad Canadian copies of American programs on television. Bad copies. That’s what it does.”

Harold Greenberg, chairman of Astral Communications, which own a large post-production laboratory in Montreal, disagrees. As he told The Toronto Star last fall: “The private industry is capable of mass distribution and of providing high-quality technical services. The NFB must become a school and a research centre exploring the emerging multimedia markets to the benefit of the Canadian cultural industries.” This type of argument perplexes Low. “Back at the end of Applebaum-Hébert I wrote quite a large paper on the subject of the film board and why it had to exist,” he says patiently. (The “Applebert” report of 1982, the product of the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee, contained criticisms and recommendations remarkably similar to those of the Secor report.) “Things haven’t changed much, we’re still back talking about the same things. The detractors of the film board are the same: the people who think they will make more money if the film board gets out of the way.”

In February 1967, the NFB launched a new program called Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle. Its started purpose was to help people acclimatize themselves to permanent change in their lives. Colin Low had an additional objective: “To redefine the documentary.” Early on, Low directed a series of 26 short films centring on the plight of the residents of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, who were impoverished because their island fishery could no longer provide them with a livelihood. Low’s purpose was to provide the poor and the authorities with what he called a communication loop. Author Gary Evans, in his book In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989, wrote of Low’s work: “Unlike most films, which depend on an adversarial relationship to be effective, these were meant to show that it was in the provincial government’s interest to help solve the economic problem of the citizens of Fogo Island.”

One of the many young filmmakers to join Challenge for Change in 1971 was Peter Raymont. “It was a studio that had been created specifically to provoke and promote social change,” he recalls. “They were making a lot of terrific films; they had a native filmmaking unit, they were making film with poor people’s organizations all over the country. And they were on the cutting edge, I would argue, of the social-change-type documentary. They were really renowned throughout the world and throughout the country as the centre of filmmaking excellence.”

Raymont worked in Challenge for Change first as an editor, then as a director and producer. He left in 1978 to freelance, in part because of a growing frustration all of the filmmakers were having with getting their films actually seen. “They never figured out how to co-exist with television. It seems an insane thing to say almost 45 years after television came to this country, but they never figured it out. Unless you’re on television, regularly, you’re irrelevant. It doesn’t mean you can’t make quality stuff, it doesn’t mean you can’t have films that win things at film festivals all over the world. But you’ve also got to get the best of that stuff, in a regular way, in front of the public. Otherwise, you’ll lose that constituency, you’ll lose your political base and you’ll slip into insignificance, which is what’s happened.”

These days, the film board does actively pursue television exposure for its work, with a modicum of success. Last November, for example, 59 NFB productions or co-productions, including 40 documentaries, were broadcast on Canadian television. Of course, the timeslots weren’t always ratings-grabbers: Vision TV aired The Great Canadian History Series at 5 a.m. However, Vision does have a regular Saturday night show, NFB Cutting Edge, that starts at 8 p.m. Some of the new specialty channels, with their low budgets and vast amounts of time to fill, are turning to the film board for programming. Bravo!, for instance, has acquired over 180 NFB arts-related titles.

Peter Wintonick, who along with Mark Achbar directed and produced Manufacturing Consent, agrees that television is essential to maintain public interest. “With the new licencing, the specialty channels are buying up the backlog of those NFB-produced films. Traditionally there hasn’t been any room on the public broadcasting system in Canada for films, documentaries especially. It took many years of lobbying to get a slot on CBC, a weekly documentary slot.”

Not everyone loves the idea of the NFB serving television. “Television is interesting,” says Worf Koenig, who, like Colin Low, started at the film board as an animator in Norman McLaren’s studio in the forties and has since been everything from soundman to executive producer. “It’s one way of getting things out. But I find it’s a paradox, because apparently television is the medium which is actually fragmenting our community.” Low is equally suspicious of TV: “Television has never matured the way film has, partly because it’s not very reflective, not very thoughtful.” Another NFB filmmaker, Paul Cowan, views television as a necessary evil. “We are always at the mercy of television. Sure, we make some films that aren’t meant for television and never could get on television, but more and more we are making films for television because you have to have those types of audiences to justify the expense of the product that you’re making.”

The National Film Board’s production headquarters in suburban Montreal is a sprawling complex of drab brick buildings built in the postwar style remarkable only for its stunning plainness. The place is huge: walking through it for the first time is bewildering—like the first day of high school, when you wander around unable to find your homeroom. Any similarity to a high school stops here, though. A universal criticism of the film board is its lack of young filmmakers. The NFB imposed a hiring freeze last September in a bid to lower costs. “Imagine a car company that couldn’t redesign its cars, or couldn’t adapt to market forces,” explains Cowan. “Or couldn’t decide to upsize or downsize or any other factor. The NFB can’t do that, and it can’t do that for all sorts of reasons.” In a defence of the film board last November, Bronwyn Drainie wrote in the Globe: “Unfortunately, the NFB is not perfect all the time. Some of the films it has produced over the years have been boring or self-indulgent or both. The board is also saddled with a creaking staff-heavy structure that makes it feel like a doddering elderly uncle; it definitely needs a shot of adrenaline.”

In an attempt to provide that shot, last year the NFB introduced a program called Fast Forward, to which aspiring filmmakers apply in the hundreds. Of these, four are chosen each year to work at the film board for a period of four years, after which they must set out their own. While Fast Forward gets some young blood into the place, it also means the NFB has become what it resists being called: a training centre for new talent.

Whatever the age of the staff, to Colin Low the NFB is still vital: “I don’t think philosophically, at the filmmaker level, this place has changed much,” he says. “I see good years and I see bad years. I see people working on the wrong thing, but you have to tolerate a certain amount of that; otherwise, you won’t get anything that’s unique and new and different. You’ve got to tolerate the people who are taking chances, even if it’s kind of weird.”

Taking chances on questionable ideas and allowing filmmakers to turn them into significant and powerful documentaries is a hallmark of the National Film Board. For five years, Wintonick and Achbar worked to create a film that would chronicle the life and views of Noam Chomsky. The NFB’s producer of Manufacturing Consent was Adam Symansky. “The value of this place is it’s a community of filmmakers,” he says. “You can talk to people here. Filmmakers can get other filmmakers into the cutting room to look at their stuff and talk. In the end the appeal is that you can say, ’Is this film working, is it a good film or not?’ It’s not, ’Sorry, guys, time’s up,’ or ’Money’s up, it’s going out.’

“It’s one of the few places where, first of all, you can sit down and say, ’Is this film worth doing? Never mind if there’s a huge market for it. Is this a subject people should know about? Is this a filmmaker who has such a unique vision that we should take a chance on it?’ Peter Wintonick wants to make a film about Noam Chomsky. Well, I don’t know. But he’s willing to mortgage his house to do it? Well, maybe we should think about that—and we’ll give him money, we’ll give him a home, we’ll give him cutting room, we’ll give the lab, maybe we’ll give him some money.

“Right now in the country it’s the only place that will do that. With all its faults, it’s the only place that will do that.”

Throughout the next week, he kept checking the Whig to find out how many copies had been sold, but he found nothing. “They’re one of Canada’s best bands, and they’re from Kingston,” he says. “There was not even a boo in our own paper.” Elsewhere, he learned that Day for Night was on top of the national record charts after only one week in release, having sold 300,000 copies, the fastest-selling Canadian album ever.

For Colby, the case of the unreported success of Day for Night illustrates a larger problem at his paper-and most other English-language dailies in the country. “We don’t do that good a job appealing to the younger set,” he says. Colby often tries to pitch stories, like the cost of getting an education, that he feels are important to the young. Last fall he interviewed human resources minister Lloyd Axworthy about the proposed university tuition hikes, but he doesn’t think his paper is very interested. He also tries to promote other subjects that are important to the young, including the environment, unemployment and entertainment stories on TV shows and bands. But Colby is one of only four full-time staff members in their twenties out of a total of 46, so the odds of survival for these subjects are pretty slim.

It’s a problem not unique to the Whig. A fall 1994 survey of 14 major dailies across Canada revealed that only six-the Montreal Gazette, New Brunswick’s Telegraph Journal and Evening Times Globe, the Calgary Herald, The Ottawa Citizen and The Toronto Sun-had more than 10 per cent of their staff under the age of 30. The other papers surveyed were The Edmonton Journal, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald,The Vancouver Sun, The London Free Press and the Whig. The two papers with the largest newsrooms-The Toronto Star, with 359 staff at the time, and The Globe and Mail, with 247 had the worst showing: less than four per cent of staff under the age of 30. The average at all the papers was nine percent, while according to the 1991 census, 16 per cent of Canada’s population is between the age of 20 and 29.

What you find in our country’s newsrooms are middle-aged journalists working and drinking coffee with other middle-aged journalists-an environment Colby operates in every day. Periodically he tries to give his stories a spin to make them appeal more to the young. For example, when he interviewed Ontario Premier Bob Rae in January, Colby asked him what some of his favorite television shows were. In the final story, the mentions of NYPD Blue and Murphy Brown were gone. Colby objected to these cuts because he believed this information would help younger readers relate to the premier. “I think that young people don’t have as an acute awareness of politics. If you can humanize the news, they might have more of a tie.”

Putting aside whether that’s the approach to take, middle-aged reporters tend not to worry whether today’s youth can relate to the news. When a youth-related story presents itself to a typical editorial team of the nineties-assuming its members recognize it as a story-chances are it won’t be covered adequately. And an entire generation of potential newspaper readers is largely being ignored, just at a time when most papers are worrying about dropping circulation. As Colby says, “I don’t think most older journalists are doing a good job writing about issues affecting people under 30. The older ones tend to be complacent.” Michael Valpy is a reporter and columnist at The Globe and Mail. Like 96 percent of the staff, Valpy is over 30-52, to be exact. But he doesn’t think that stops him from being a good journalist. “I love what I do for a living. I’m good at it and I’m very energetic, and I have a sense of professionalism, so I won’t turn in something that I think is a piece of crap.” On the other hand, he recognizes that he risks becoming out of touch. “As I grow older, eventually my perspectives will become less and less relevant. I am no longer sure what makes my society tick. I don’t know wheat people under 30 are doing any longer. I don’t have conversations that often with anyone under 30.”

Valpy can understand why younger people have difficulty retailing to the news. “Look at the Globe,” he says. “It’s loaded with reports from institutional politics, institutional business.” He recalls watching a national affairs program with a 23-year-old intern, Amber Nasrulla. “It may have been about the Dupuy letter to the CRTC. I asked her, ‘Is this relevant to you?’ and she said no. My perspective of Canada is different from Amber’s.”

It’s also different from Naomi Klein’s. In 1993, Klein, then 23, was hired at the Globe for the summer, then her contract was extended for another three and a half months. During her time there, she wrote features on such topics as a production of Romeo and Juliet being staged by street kids underneath a Toronto bridge, and a young woman who had set up a booth on the city’s hip Queen Street West where she sold psychiatric advice for $1. The pieces were eye-catching in a paper that’s usually a more austere read. Klein’s stories were different in that they showed a reporter who was in touch with a younger community, one who used the same contacts as she did when she was writing for a campus paper at the University of Toronto.

But like virtually all the students the Globe recruited during 1993 and 1994, Klein wasn’t kept on at the end of her internship. Of the Globe’s current editorial staff of 220, 212 are over the age of 30. In an article entitled “Give Us a Break: Generation X and the Boomer Media Shut-out” that appeared in the June/July 1993 issue of This Magazine, Klein criticized the youth shortage in Canada’s newsrooms. “Young people are being laid off from media jobs across the country, silencing what few post-boomer voices have made it into positions of influence over perspective and content,” she wrote. “Moreover, hiring freezes at almost every Southam and Thomson paper and at the CBC, combined with cutbacks in summer internship programs at most of the major dailies, are making sure nobody slips through the cracks.” Because most news is filtered through the baby boomers’ point of view, she argued, youth can’t relate to it.

Twenty-four-year-old Pauline Tam was hired full-time as an entertainment writer at The Ottawa Citizen at the beginning of this year. She believes the Citizen uses haphazard methods to attract a younger market. She points to a page in the City/Life section called High Priority, published five days a week, which contains “teenage perspectives” written by high-school students. Tam gives credit to Deborah Richmond, the editor of High Priority: “What she tries to do is get high-school students to write. It is one of the more structural ways the paper has tried to attract a younger readership.” But Tam suspects that Richmond’s section may be a token gesture, asking: “Are they committed in the long run?” It is beginning to look as if they aren’t-the Citizen is taking steps to make the paper smaller, causing Richmond to worry that High Priority’s days are numbered.

Tam questions whether such “pandering” to younger readers was ever the best way to attract them. “Young readers don’t have to be enticed to read the paper,” she says. “All issues should be of interest to readers. Don’t ghettoize certain issues. With youth writers, to me, it’s sort of like singling out a group in a way that’s more exclusionary than inclusive.”

In her This Magazine article, Klein also criticized tokenism. “Then there’s the requisite bi-monthly feature, ‘Generation XYZ: They have no future, they’re really shallow and they dress funny.'” Ironically, last June she herself was given her own weekly column in The Toronto Star, the first of which detailed her fears of the column being entitled My Generation or, worse, The X Column: “It seems nobody under 45 can get a word in these days without that stupid letter cropping up along with at least a passing reference to bike couriers,” wrote Klein, who has used the space to discuss everything from Red Dog beer’s recent marketing campaign (she thought it was dumb) to her reluctance to cruise the information superhighway. She now juggles her column at the Star and her duties as the managing editor of This Magazine.

Petti Fong, a 23-year-old reporter for The Vancouver Sun-one of five reporters under 30 out of a newsroom of 174-shares Klein’s sentiments about the letter X. “I think people can get trapped in Generation X labels. Advertisers have this image of what a young person is.” She also worries that older journalists buy into that image. That stereotype is more often than not the apathetic Slacker, and 23-year-old Shawn Ohler, whose contract at The Edmonton Journal is up for renewal this October, thinks the older members of the newsroom tend to accept that stereotype without question. “The powers that be in the newsroom seize upon the stacking,” he says, “and see it as a defining characteristic.” But Ohler disagrees with Klein’s belief that the news is filtered through the baby-boomer perspective. “She sounds like a prof, he says. “People don’t come up to me and say, ‘This angle is good. The baby boomers will like it.’ There’s lots of freedom at the Journal.”

These days, however, not many young journalists are able to experience that freedom. Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild president Gail Lem sums up the problem. “Reporting used to be a young person’s game, and I think largely because of the economy we have seen that change in two ways. First, people weren’t leaving the newsroom because jobs weren’t easy to find, and secondly, the newspapers weren’t hiring. And the newsrooms have definitely shrunk.” Colin Mackenzie, the Globe’s deputy managing editor, remembers different times. He estimates the median age of the editorial staff at The Ottawa Citizen, where he started out 20 years ago, to be 23, and remarks on the number of people he worked with back then who are now in charge of newspapers across the country. The Globehas chopped 40 positions over the past six years, and no vacancies are opening up for young, aspiring reporters to fill.

Of all the papers surveyed, the Montreal Gazette has the highest population under 30: 28 out of 219. Raymond Brassard, the Gazette’s managing editor, says, “When we hire, we hire under 30. We won’t hire a veteran reporter. The composition of the staff is going to affect the voice of the paper.” He can’t remember hiring an older reporter in six years. But the overwhelming majority of the Gazette’s 28 younger staff were hired before 1991. The Gazette began cutting back on hiring in 1990, and introduced early retirement packages in 1992. The fact that the Gazette youth level remains high can be attributed to the hiring policy that has been in effect for the past eight years. Student reporters are employed to work on the Gazette’s three community inserts. When a vacancy opens up in the newsroom, it’s filled by a student from one of those inserts, and a new student is hired at the insert. Nineteen ninety-four was a big year for movement at the Gazette, with the first staff vacancies in years. “Last summer, I do believe, was the first time in four years we kept summer students on at the end of the season,” Brassard says.

There isn’t a newspaper in Canada that doesn’t want more young people in the newsroom. But many managers, such as Phil Bingley, the assistant managing editor of The Toronto Star, see their choices as extremely limited. At the Star, where last fall only 14 people were under the age of 30 out of an editorial staff of 359 (now 331), no hiring is taking place. Bingley doesn’t feel the Star, with its youth shortage, is aware of what is happening on the streets, at universities or in after-hours clubs. “I don’t think too many people at the Star could find an after-hours club,” he says.

Jim Rankin could. Now a staff reporter/photographer, the 29-year-old recalls a time in 1993 when he was on contract at the Star as a photographer. He and another young staff member, reporter Lisa Wright, went out with their own idea to do a feature on S & M clubs and another about the rave phenomenon. They conducted interviews and shot photos, staying out night after night.

“These were different stories for the Star,” says Rankin. “I think the advantage of having young general-assignment reporters is they go the extra length to get a story. They’re still trying to make a mark for themselves. They don’t have a family. They don’t have a kid. How are you going to get a 50-year-old reporter to chase fire engines when that’s what that 50-year-old reporter did 30 years ago?”

Gord Walsh, associate managing editor of The Toronto Sun, agrees. He only has 11 people under 30 out of an editorial staff of 96, but when a student at a local high school shot two guidance counsellors last October, Walsh found the younger reporters useful. “I know if I were in the situation those students were in that day, a 22-year-old interviewer would make me feel more comfortable than somebody old enough to hang out with my parents,” says Walsh.

The Globe’s Colin Mackenzie uses young reporters in much the same way. “Your kids tend to be your general-assignment people,” he says. “Your go-to folks.” To cover the same shooting for the Globe, he sent Amber Nasrulla to the scene along with crime reporter Henry Hess, who is in his early forties. Clearly there are times when it serves the papers well to have an Amber Nasrulla on staff. But what about younger readers? Are they being served bv the newspapers?

Evan Solomon, the editor of Shift, a Toronto-based magazine that focuses on the impact of new technologies on the media, feels newspapers have failed young people on a number of key stories, the underplaying of Kurt Cobain’s death by major dailies being only one example. “Newspapers have no ongoing coverage of the information age,” Solomon continues, pointing out that it dawned more than a decade ago. “They just missed that story completely, and they’re struggling to catch up.” Solomon also feels that for young people, issues don’t fit neatly into left and right wing anymore, and the mainstream media fail to notice. To Solomon, there is a cynicism among young people that becomes stronger with every such failure by the mass media.

Petti Fong of The Vancouver Sun has a different view from Solomon. She reads many stories in newspapers that can be seen as important for young people, but does not think they are presented in a way that would interest younger readers. She uses the federal deficit as an example. “Young people should care right now,” she says, “because it’s in direct relation to their tuition hikes”-an angle that she doesn’t feel the media focus on.

Television news is usually blamed for low newspaper readership levels among the young, but Klein believes that the entire mass media have grown stale. While young people may be the group affected the most by the youth shortage in newsrooms, Klein believes “it affects the whole live nature of news. The media get too comfortable, and everybody gets turned off.” Evan Solomon and his partner in Shift, Andrew Heintzman, have their own solution to the youth shortage: “Young people have to look outside of traditional companies,” says Heintzman, the 27-year-old publisher of the magazine. “You have to try to create your own kind of work.” Gord Walsh of the Sun is skeptical. “Starting up your own publication is fine if you can pull it off,” he says, “but if readership of newspapers is down among the young, how feasible is it?”

Well, Shift is still alive after two and a half years, and it looks as if it will hang on for more. But how secure is the future of our country’s newspapers? How can they have any future if they don’t rejuvenate themselves by employing young people on a regular basis? They can’t effectively target a younger audience without employing writers who are young themselves, and if you don’t target a younger audience, you run the risk of dying out with your readership.

As Naomi Klein bluntly wrote, “If you are aging along with the boomers, won’t you die with them too?”

In another life, Paul says, before the street, “I was a pig farmer, so I’m used to being poor.” He has also worked as a machinist, in construction and carpentry, and as a high-rise window washer. He looks to be in his forties, is five foot nine and carries 180 pounds on his very solid frame. He has the rugged, weathered good looks of someone used to working out-of-doors. He says he doesn’t drink or use drugs, and his exceptionally clear blue eyes support that assertion. He is intelligent, engaging, presents an aura of self-confidence and discusses news and current affairs in an articulate and informed manner. Yet, despite his attributes and experience, he cannot find regular full-time work.

Paul is not unique. According to a Metropolitan Toronto Community Services Department report, in 1992, 27,216 different individuals were admitted to one of the 3,000 beds offered by the hostel division. And in February 1994 George Chester, the co-ordinator of a church program called Out of the Cold- which offers food and shelter to the needy-told The Globe and Mail that there may be as many as 47,500 homeless in the city. Keeping track of the number of homeless in any given urban centre can be a difficult task. Those who don’t use government-sponsored shelters and do not collect social assistance don’t get counted. And there is also a large group of uncounted out there who barely survive in single room occupancy hotels or rooming houses and are constantly moving in and out of the swelling ranks of the street. While there may be some fuzziness surrounding the actual figures, all involved agree that the problem is growing: the number of people describing themselves as transients upon admission to Toronto hostels doubled between 1988 and 1992 and continues to grow. And, according to Metro hostel services director John Jagt, over the last five years Toronto has experienced a 40 percent increase in homelessness. Of that growing number, at any given time about 150 individuals sell homeless newspapers on the streets of Toronto.

The reduction of government money being directed toward the poor presents an obvious need to creatively address the growing problem of homelessness, and so the intrinsic worthiness of enterprises like The Outrider is beyond question. But something has gone very wrong with the execution of the homeless paper concept in Toronto. Operational mismanagement, a thinly veiled culture of violence and a very public father-son feud have permanently driven the best volunteers and employees away from these enterprises, and have led to a steady erosion of public acceptance. the future of the homeless newspaper in Toronto, it seems, is in jeopardy.

Newspapers intended to create employment for the homeless and needy are not new. They exist in major urban centres like Paris, New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Vancouver. In London one such publication, The Big Issue, claims a weekly circulation of over 200,000 and has been providing employment for up to 800 street vendors at a time for more than three years. It is sold to vendors for 25 pence, and they sell it on the street for 60 pence, pocketing the difference. Saddle-stitched and printed on quality newsprint, The Big Issue averages 44 pages and has taken on the look of a mainstream consumer magazine. The Christmas 1994 issue was a record 80 pages.

Along with news, the arts, feature-length stories, regular vendor profiles and classifieds, the magazine runs sections called Capital Lights, which offers “informed insights” into the plight of the homeless and marginalized, and Missing, which searches for four missing people weekly and offers a toll-free telephone service to help street people keep track of each other. The magazine sponsors retraining programs, provides drug-, alcohol-, and general-counselling referrals, offers an employment advisory service and has established a housing and resettlement unit. The Big Issue has attracted a number of established writers and artists, and has won mainstream acceptance. In 1993, editor A. John Bird was voted Editor’s Editor of the Year, and the magazine was a runner-up in a national competition for the best medium of the year. About the same time that Bird was being honoured by his contemporaries, Jim Mackin was busy launching Ontario’s first homeless paper.

After seeing a television documentary about the London paper, Mackin decided Toronto could use something like The Big Issue. Without money or newspaper experience, Mackin, a retired high-school teacher who had declared personal bankruptcy in 1990 as a direct result of the failure of the private computer school he founded in Pickering in 1979, set out to create The Outrider. He posted Help Wanted notices on telephone poles and light standards around the University of Toronto campus, advertising for an editor. That ad caught the attention of Jack Mersereau, an unemployed young man with some computer and graphics experience. He met with Mackin and discussed the concept of a paper aimed at helping panhandlers earn money and build self-esteem. While he was hoping to find a paying job, the thought of helping the needy help themselves appealed to Mersereau’s natural altruism, and by the end of the meeting he agreed to volunteer his time and energy full-time to help get the paper launched.

The two, using Mackin’s kitchen as an office, laid out the premier issue. The Outrider hit the street in July 1993, proclaiming in a front-page headline “We Are New-We Are You.” The first editorial offered the definition of an outrider as “the person whose task is to determine the direction of a group, by way of scoping opportunities or dangers.” It also explained that “The Outrider is a newspaper which is committed to leading its readers into careful consideration of the news and issues of our times.” Its mandate is to provide an informational forum which is non-discriminatory and therefore, socially unifying….Besides the unique narratorial stance, The Outrider is also a project designed to create work in Toronto and surrounding areas. The Outrider is distributed by the Homeless and Needy who, in turn, profit from their enterprising, and get off the streets. We, at The Outrider, wish to create a relationship between all social groups which is positive and fruitful.”

That first issue, an eight-page black-and-white tabloid, was an uneven collection of movie, music and restaurant reviews, news, “narratorial,” essays and humour. While the content didn’t really reflect the issues of poverty and homelessness, the paper attracted volunteers concerned about the plight of Toronto’s poor. A few weeks after the first issue, retired Toronto Star senior editor and ombudsman Rod Goodman, a regular volunteer at the Daily Bread Food Bank, sought out Mackin and offered his services free of charge. Goodman brought his wife, Jan, a senior copy editor with The Globe and Mail, along with him and set out to recruit volunteer writers, editors and designers. With Goodman as editor, Mersereau took on the unpaid position of associate publisher.

Under Goodman’s guidance the paper grew to 12 pages, colour appeared in the banner and the paper gained a reputation as a place to find quirky news stories and offbeat features. The volunteer pool grew. Jack Granek, who had worked with Goodman at the Star, started writing a column called News from Here, There, Everywhere, a collection of odd quick hits from around the world. Chris Simpson, who had worked in advertising, started writing a humorous column called Ad Nauseam. Centennial College began placing co-op students with the paper, and in January 1994, 26-year-old journalism student David Paddon, who was working at a marketing firm to finance his education, joined the growing staff. He served as assignment editor, but also applied his marketing know-how to the operation.

Among his many contributions, Paddon, along with some other Outrider volunteers, crafted $98,000 jobs-Ontario grant application that was approved in December 1994. “The Outrider’s vision,” according to the application, “is a society without homeless or destitute.” The paper would be a vehicle for job creation, a means of fostering dignity among the poor and a tool to help integrate the disparate communities of Toronto. These lofty ideals were well received by the media.

In the early days of The Outrider, the paper garnered considerable attention. Citytv, Cilobat, CBC (both television and radio), CTV, The Globe and Mail,The Toronto Star and The Toronto Sun all provided, as expressed in an Outrider brochure, “overwhelmingly positive coverage. From day one the media community jumped in to familiarize Canadians with our cause.” It was through a Star profile of The Outrider in August 1993 that David Mackin became reacquainted with his father.

After the story appeared, David, who hadn’t seen his father in nearly a year, showed up at The Outrider. Jim and David Mackin have had a rocky relationship. David was 11 years old when Jim moved from the family home, leaving David, his brother, sister, and mother without financial or emotional support. Despite their turbulent history, David hoped that the two, by working together on The Outrider, could somehow reconcile. He gave his father $5,000 to finish and equip the paper’s office, and set about recruiting vendors.

David felt that his investment made him a partner in the venture. Jim saw things differently. He says the money was a repayment of $2,000 David had stolen from him some years before. The rest, asserts Jim, was a straightforward business loan. David admits that he did steal money from his father, but disagrees with his father’s belief that the money is still owing, insisting, “I stole off him about 10 years ago, I stole a couple of grand … but in the meantime I gave him a car and a printer. He says I owe him? Jesus Christ!” That at least some of the $5,000 was originally a loan is no longer an issue to Jim: “If David wants the money back, he’ll have to go through court channels to get it.”

David’s involvement with The Outrider ended as suddenly as it began. As the junior Mackin told Toronto Life’s Robert Hough, after a couple of weeks at the paper Jim said, “It’s not workin’ out between the two of us, so why don’tcha leave?” Once again David and Jim parted on bitter terms.

Instead of returning full-time to his work as a landscaper, David decided to set himself up in direct competition with his father. The next time Jim heard of his son was in October 1993, when he learned David had launched Toronto’s second homeless paper. The younger Mackin called his enterprise The Outreach Connection.

When The Outrider was the sole homeless newspaper in the city, Jim Mackin charged the vendors 40 cents a copy. They, in turn, sold the paper for $1. When David Mackin opened The Outreach Connection he also set a cover price of $ 1, but sold the paper for 25 cents per copy, thus luring away many of his father’s sellers. Jack Mersereau says The Outrider took a financial beating as a result.

The first issue of The Outreach Connection, an eight-page black-and-white tabloid nearly identical to early editions of The Outrider, contained a letter from the publisher. David Mackin’s letter outlined goals very similar to those of his father’s paper. The Outreach Connection would offer dignity to panhandlers, help put an end to homelessness and give distributors warm meals. David’s earliest issues lacked editorial focus. He relied on volunteer writers, and published whatever he could get, including features ranging from a rambling look at the collapse of the Soviet Union to an utterly bizarre advice column called Dear Prudence.

Despite his originally pious declaration of Outreach Connection principles, David later told Enzo Di Matteo of Toronto’s Now magazine the real reason he had launched his paper was to get at his father: “I started it out of total anger as well as helping the poor. I just wanted to go after him and stab him in the guts.”

Jim says he’s not surprised by David’s actions, but insists there was never a father and son partnership. “David has no morals and doesn’t possess the intellect to run such an operation,” he says. Jim also suggested that David was reacting out of a deep-seated sense of anger. “He felt rejected 20 years ago when I divorced his mother, and he felt rejected again when I wouldn’t give him a piece of The Outrider.”

While Jim may not have wanted to go into business with his son, he was most certainty interested in keeping his son out of the business. In October ’93, when Jim heard that David had neglected to register The Outreach Connection’s name, he sent Jack Mersereau out to claim it before David got around to it. Jim explained that he wanted the name as a form of insurance: “If this young man ever got to the point where he was making any kind of money he’d be suable on many reasons.” Jim’s plan hit a snag when his registration of the name was cancelled by the Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations a few days later. It seems most likely that the $60 cheque for the registration fee bounced. That November, David registered the name for himself,

The Outreach Connection managed to hang on and grow. In January 1994, Patrick White, a self-described prairie businessman from Allan, Saskatchewan, began working as The Outreach Connection’s business manager. He helped the paper expand to 12 pages, hired an editor and a bookkeeper, brought in a Centennial College journalism co-op student and put colour into the paper’s banner. The editor, Massimo Commanducci, a recent Ryerson journalism school graduate who had worked at Canadian Press and had interned at Harper’s, started narrowing the paper’s focus to issues of poverty and social welfare, and by the spring of 1994 David Mackin had positioned The Outreach Connection as a serious rival to his father’s publication. After adding a sports page, a movie column and a crossword puzzle, David became confident that his paper would soon eclipse his father’s.

David Mackin’s bubble burst in April 1994 when it became evident that Patrick White wasn’t the saviour Mackin took him to be. On April 4, White didn’t show up at the office. At first Commanducci worried that White, who claimed to have had a heart attack while living in Saskatchewan and who regularly showed staffers a scar left on his chest after bypass surgery, might have suffered a second heart attack. But as a growing number of creditors showed up or phoned complaining about bounced postdated cheques White had issued, Commanducci began to fear that they had been conned. By the end of the day they realized that White had bilked the paper of close to $18,000. To date, White, who police believe worked the con alone, has not been apprehended.

Jim Mackin, sensing victory over his son, stepped up the campaign of harassing phone calls he had been waging since David had founded The Outreach Connection. Staff at The Outrider had heard stories about, Jim’s telephone antics, and one night in early May Outrider volunteer David Paddon received a phone call that confirmed the rumour. Paddon’s phone rang at about l1 o’clock that night. He picked up the receiver, and before he could utter a word, the voice on the other end of the line started yelling, “You’re goin’ down-you and your paper are goin’ down!” Paddon recognized the voice as Jim Mackin’s, and when there came a lull in the yelling, he said, “Jim, this is David Paddon, not David Mackin.” After a brief pause Jim Mackin said, “Oh,” and hung up.

It was not unusual for Jim to leave 20 belligerent messages on David’s answering machine in the space of an evening. Last summer David took one such answering-machine tape to his local police station, and, according to his mother, had a peace bond issued against his father. Not to be outdone, a few months later Jim convinced a justice of the peace to lay assault charges against his son.

The very public father-son feud made the front page of The Outreach Connection last August 3. Mackin Pere, David wrote, wrought “tremendous violence in my home …. My older brother got a broken nose too …. I vividly remember my father coming home drunk in an ugly rage.” David’s mother, Marina, adds that during her marriage to Jim she received frequent hearings from her husband. In a phone interview David expanded on the story, stating: “I was so afraid of my father that I would piss myself when I saw him. He’d come in drunk and I’d piss myself out of sheer fear. You just don’t realize how evil that son of a bitch is.”

One day in July 1994, when the jobsOntario grant to The Outrider seemed to be a sure thing, Jim flagged David down on the street and, referring to the cost-per-paper charged to the vendors, asked, “How are you gonna compete when I go to a nickel?” That barb sent David flying down to the grant office. “We went there and we just told them the way it was. I said to the grant people, ‘This bastard is gonna use your money to put me outta fuckin’ business.”‘ For a while it seemed that David’s visit to the office had derailed the application, but by December jobsOntario had decided to give The Outrider $98,000.

As the feud escalated, the positive media coverage of Toronto’s homeless papers evaporated. And by the spring of 1994, when the general media reported that David Mackin’s Outreach Connection had been pushed to the brink of collapse by the actions of office manager Patrick White, the honeymoon was over. (A thorough treatment of the Patrick White saga, written by Robert Hough, appeared in the November ’94 issue of Toronto Life.) A side effect of the White affair was a series of rumours that grew from the theft. Paper vendors were quick to offer various and conflicting theories to just about anyone who asked: David Mackin and Patrick White were in on the scam together said one; the whole thing had been cooked up by David and his father to solicit public sympathy and generate greater circulation revenues claimed another; Patrick White had really been an agent for Jim Mackin in an elaborate plot to put The Outreach Connection out of business maintained a third. The most bizarre of the stories suggested that all three were in on the theft together and had used the money to set up a third paper in Halifax. While none of the turnouts proved true, they further damaged the credibility of all concerned.

Mixed in with the various rumours is the persistent story that the Mackins tend to solve some of their problems violently. Both, as part of a strategy of delving deep into enemy territory, would send vendors to sell in areas considered to be the other’s domain. David, who is six foot three and weighs over 300 pounds, would respond by trying to persuade competing vendors to stop selling The Outrider and commence selling The Outreach Connection. But David, who happens to have a slight hearing impairment, which he compensates for by talking loudly and leaning into the personal space of whomever he is speaking with, tends to alienate those he is trying to win over. With his close-cropped hair, booming voice and tendency to use “fuck” as noun, verb, adverb and punctuation, he seems better suited to a WWF cage match than a newspaper war.

For his part, Jim Mackin employed a fellow named Wayne McKenna, who showed up on The Outrider masthead as a distribution manager for May, June and July 1994. Mackin disregarded numerous reports that McKenna was getting tough with vendors who were threatening to sell for the competition. Chris Simpson, the assignment editor, described McKenna as “a real loose cannon. Despite the complaints, Jim kept him around for the longest time. I think he was muscle for him.” Mackin acknowledges that McKenna was a “bullyboy,” but says, “I had him on the masthead for an issue or two, then I took him off-I said, ‘Wayne, this isn’t workin’ out.'”

The ongoing nastiness was affecting the staff at both papers. David’s relationship with Commanducci, the editor who had been hired by Patrick White in January ’94, had soured by the early summer. Commanducci felt that Mackin didn’t have the skills to pull the paper out of the financial mess Patrick White had left them in.

After White disappeared, David fired the Outreach bookkeeper (who had also originally been hired by White) and, according to Commanducci, dispensed with “real bookkeeping” altogether. Commanducci estimates that between April and July ’94 the average circulation of the paper was slightly above 8,000 copies a week. At 25 cents per copy, that meant the weekly revenue being stuffed into David Mackin’s desk drawer should have been about $2,000. But when pressed, David could only account for between $1,300 and $1,700 per week. Commanducci demanded David institute basic bookkeeping practices, but he refused. One heated argument concerning financial accountability climaxed with David screaming, “I don’t care about the books! The books don’t make me money “‘ He claims he now keeps regular books.

To help get the operation back on track, to pay off the debts left behind by White, and to finally bring about much needed financial accountability, Commanducci offered to set up a management company consisting of himself, assistant editor Jason Boardman and former Outrider assignment editor David Paddon. Paddon, who had helped put together The Outrider’s successful jobsOntario application, suggested to David Mackin that, as part of the management team, he felt certain that he would be able to negotiate a similar grant for the Outreach organization.

According to Commanducci, David Mackin initially accepted the offer, but when the time came to hand over control, he reneged. Finally, in early July, it became apparent that he did not intend to let his paper be controlled by anyone but himself. Commanducci, his concerns over accountability pushed to the limit, resigned. A week later Boardman followed.

David Mackin says he turned down the management offer because the paper wasn’t making enough money to pay even one salary, let alone three, and “I didn’t want to be in a position where I’d be obligated to them.” (That the shoestring operation doesn’t make much money is obvious. David rents a car once a week to pick his papers up from the printer, brings them back to a cramped one-room office, and then uses public transit to deliver bundles to vendors.) He also indicated that there were too many rules and controls associated with granting agencies, and he had no desire to have anyone breathing down his neck telling him how to run his operation.

Though losing an editor and assistant editor at the same time would throw any small paper into a tailspin, David’s July was nothing compared to Jim’s August.

During his first year of operation, Jim Mackin had managed to attract top-quality volunteers like Rod and Jan Goodman, David Paddon, Jack Mersereau and Chris Simpson. These people helped give The Outrider focus and character, and seemed to put the paper on the verge of stability. But, according to Rod Goodman, the Mackin family competition had become a blood feud: “They both seemed obsessed with beating the other.” And the battle was wearing thin on Jim’s volunteers.

Yet, except for David Paddon, who left in May 1994 because he was “fed up with the way Jim did business, and Jim’s obsession with beating his son,” and Jack Mersereau, who resigned in June of that year because he was “disenchanted with the fierce competition” and could no longer stomach the Mackin feud, The Outrider’s dedicated group of volunteers was on hand to help the paper celebrate its first anniversary in July 1994.

The August 16 issue, a 12-page edition with the eclectic mix of columns, humour, sports and entertainment that had become the trademark of Goodman’s Outrider, boasted a masthead of nearly a dozen individual volunteers. On August 31, when the next edition hit the streets, the paper was down to only eight pages and the masthead to five names. The Outrider’s incredible shrinking masthead contained no editor, no copy editor, no assistant or assigning editors, and no co-publisher. The only name left on the masthead, excluding one volunteer and a handful of “consultants,” was Jim Mackin.

The Outrider’s staff exodus was sparked by Jim’s treatment and eventual dismissal of three workers being sponsored by a federal social-services program, Summer Employment/Employment Development. Chris Simpson explains that as part of the SEED sponsorship, office visits were scheduled by a social-service representative. One of those visits was set for a Friday afternoon in late August 1994. The rep arrived, only to find that Jim had decided to take a trip to Fort Erie, leaving Simpson to answer the questions.

As most of the questions concerned the proper distribution of funds, Simpson, who had little to do with office finances, felt uncomfortable dealing with the situation. He wrote Mackin a letter in which he outlined his editorial responsibilities at the paper and requested that he be asked to perform only those types of duties in the future. He indicated in the letter that his own financial situation was dire, and he had decided to actively pursue part-time work to help keep his head above water. He also emphasized his strong desire to continue working at the paper in a part-time capacity. He gave Mackin the letter on Monday morning. That afternoon, Mackin, who never met with the SEED representative, announced that he had decided to fire all three SEED employees.

One of those employees, a layout artist named Geordie Telfer, became the focus of Jim’s ire: “This young guy, Telfer, he created some havoc. He was trying to lead a revolt against me so I decided to clean house and that was it.” Jim says money was not an issue in the dismissals, but does agree that the three, who were being paid out of newspaper receipts while the paper awaited the arrival of social-services funds, were owed at least $340 in total when they were fired. Simpson approached Jim and asked him to reconsider, or at least fully pay the SEED employees to avoid any future problems. Mackin responded by firing Simpson.

When the Goodmans heard about the firings, they decided they’d had enough of Jim Mackin. The day after Simpson’s dismissal, Rod and Jan Goodman resigned from The Outrider.”Jim believed he alone could make the paper run. He let go of some very talented people who didn’t deserve to be let go. So I decided I couldn’t work with him anymore,” explains Rod Goodman. In the space of one month, Jim had fired half of his talented staff and the other half had quit.

Jim Mackin did more than drive Goodman away from The Outrider. He actually drove him away from the concept of newspapers designed to serve Toronto’s homeless. Asked if he would consider editing a homeless paper staffed by his choice of volunteers, Goodman’s response was an emphatic no: “Not the way things are going on that street. People would see another paper and say, ‘Oh no,’ and not buy it. Even if the others were to shut down, people are going to feel less accepting of homeless papers in Toronto.”

Goodman is not alone in his pessimism for the future of Toronto’s homeless papers. Commanducci, Boardman and Paddon briefly discussed the viability of starting their own paper, but decided it was unlikely that even the most scrupulous of operations would he able to eclipse the growing shadow of public mistrust. Even The Outrider’s former associate publisher, Jack Mersereau, whose dedication helped Jim Mackin’s idea grow into Toronto’s first homeless paper, says the Mackin competition has, for him, soured the concept: “The idea,” he laments, “has lost its charm.”

While Mersereau’s comment is an understatement, the truth is Jim and David Mackin have taken a once laudable concept and twisted it into an almost laughable sideshow. Almost laughable, except that caught in the middle of this perfectly charmless family feud is a group of paper vendors trying to make a buck.