Barbara Brown squats close to the pavement outside the Ontario Courthouse, General Division, at 361 University Avenue in Toronto. Her left arm is straight up in the air, clutching her Sony microcassette tape recorder. Her arm is aching beyond belief. Brown, 43, who describes herself as a “tough-chick crime reporter,” has been on the crime beat for The Spectator, Hamilton’s daily newspaper for seven years. It’s September 1, 1995, and she is one of 50 or 60 reporters forming a circle around Doug French. French is about to comment on the conviction of Paul Bernardo, the man who raped and murdered his daughter. Brown has to keep low to the ground so she doesn’t block all the television cameras at the back of the media scrum. When she looks up, all she sees are heads and microphones-it’s as if she’s caught in a human tent.

Her arm continues to ache. She’s tired from four months of 12-hour workdays, covering Canada’s most sensational murder trial. Tired from filing stories and from meeting early deadlines. But most of all, tired from listening to the most horrendous testimony and evidence she has ever heard.

Minutes after Paul Bernardo is found guilty on nine charges, including two counts of first-degree murder for the slayings of Kristen French, 15, and Leslie Mahaffy, 14, Brown switches on her recorder as Doug French begins to speak. “Finally and as always,” says French, “our final words, for our daughter, with the trial over: Kristie, you can’t be hurt anymore. We love you.”

Brown’s eyes begin to swell with tears. She lowers her arm and crawls out of the media scrum on her hands and knees, then rewinds her tape and plays back French’s message. This time she bursts out crying. She cries and cries and cries. Fellow Spectator reporters Wade Hemsworth and Paul Legall give her a hug and try to console her. Suddenly, Brown hears a clicking sound. As she turns around from the group hug, she notices a photographer snapping pictures of the trio. She can already see the caption: “Spectator reporter collapses at Bernardo trial…”

“I had never cried before. I considered it to be a weakness for a crime reporter to cry,” Brown says now. “But crying is the one thing the Bernardo trial changed in me. Now I feel comfortable doing it. All the other reporters at the trial were crying. I know I’m not alone.”

From May 18 until September 1, 1995, Brown, Hemsworth and Legall witnessed 52 days of testimony at the Bernardo trial. Fifteen or more times they heard videotapes of Bernardo and his ex-wife, Karla Homolka, drugging and sexually assaulting Kristen French, Leslie Mahaffy, Tammy Homolka and another teenage girl identified only as Jane Doe. They saw autopsy pictures of Kristen’s dead body. They heard how Bernardo used a saw to cut Leslie Mahaffy’s body into pieces and how he allegedly strangled Kristen French. The Court evidence and testimony affected their reporting, their emotions and their lives.

“It was a terrible assignment and a great story,” says Hemsworth. “I was pleased to have been asked to cover it, but it was also incredibly upsetting to be in that courtroom.”

The Bernardo trial was one of the biggest and most expensive stories The Spectator has ever covered. The paper spent over $200,000 in salaries, overtime, expenses and computer equipment. Among the costs was rent on a furnished apartment three blocks away from the courthouse.The apartment served as an office for all three reporters and as a home for Brown during the trial.

Managing editor John Gibson hand-picked the Spectator staff to cover the trial based on their experience and ability. In addition to Brown, he chose Legall, 53, a 22-year newspaper veteran now covering courts in Burlington, and Hemsworth, 30, an editor of Ego, a weekly entertainment pull-out section. In 1991, Hemsworth had covered the trial of Steven Olah, who, along with another teenager, beat a 44-year-old man to death with a fire extinguisher because he wanted to experience killing a man; Hemsworth later wrote Killing Time, a book about Olah’s thrill murder. Mr. Justice Patrick LeSage had presided on that case as well, so Hemsworth knew how he operated. Features editor Dan Kislenko coordinated editing the project and served as his liaison between the reporters and Spectator management. Brown and Legall alternated writing a front-page account of each day’s proceedings and a more detailed inside story that put the day’s testimony into the context of the whole case. Hemsworth wrote an emotional reaction column daily. The Spectator was filing to 16 other Southam Newspapers across Canada, from The Vancouver Sun to The Gazettein Montreal which meant additional pressure. “We were going head to head with The Canadian Press,” says Brown. “CP were very aware that we were filing for Southam. But CP filed every half an hour. We were coming home with a full day’s notes. Sometimes we would only have an hour to write the story.” There was also the factor of pack journalism. “We couldn’t get too creative or find a different angle,” recalls Legall. “There was a pressure from management to report what the Toronto papers did.”

The pressure was something the experienced reporters could handle. But being a part of the media covering such a huge event in Canada made them feel uncomfortable at times. “We had to wear these yellow badges to get into the court,” says Hemsworth. “At the beginning of the trial, they felt like a scarlet letter. You could feel the people staring at you like you were a vulture. It felt awful.”

Covering the trial filled the reporters with a guilty pleasure. They were enhancing their careers by following one of the most famous Canadian trials, but at the expense of the victims. “There you are on a very hot national story, and you’re sitting in the courtroom listening to these horrible tapes that are hurting the families of Leslie and Kristen,” says Brown. “It’s like you’re profiting by their loss.”

Hemsworth says he also felt a certain loyalty to the families of the victims since both live within The Spectator’s circulation area. “We wanted people to see that we were treating the story seriously because we live in the broader community where it happened,” says Hemsworth. “It was our story and we felt a greater responsibility for it.” Gibson agrees: “We never wrote a story or published a picture without thinking about the Mahaffy or French family. They’re not 3,000 miles away, but 15 minutes from my office. We were very conscious of that throughout our coverage” .

The Mahaffy and French families were successful in their fight to ban the public from seeing the videotapes of their daughters’ torture. However, Judge LeSage permitted the public to hear the tapes. For the reporters, that was enough-or even too much. Toronto Sun sketch artist Pam Davies wore earplugs during the playing of the tapes.

Brown felt a lot of conflicting emotions: “I believe very strongly in an open court system where the public should see all the evidence,” she explains. “But I felt guilty after I heard the tapes. It was like revictimizing the girls. I think that all the journalists covering the trial were branded by the tapes.” Legall, who has also covered the police beat and has seen horrific things, felt the same way. “Hearing the tapes was pretty chilling. This is the sort of stuff that you are not usually exposed to as a court reporter. It was about as close to a murder as you could possibly get without actually being there. They repulsed and horrified me.”

At times, Hemsworth found himself torn between his human emotions and his obligation to work. “Seeing Bernardo sitting there and knowing what he had done was tough,” he recalls. “You as a person want to go and beat the shit out of him, and you the journalist says, wait a second, write that down. If you keep thinking about how much you hate that bastard, your notebook will be blank at the end of the day.”

One thing that surprised and disturbed Hemsworth was how associations from the trial would crop up in his everyday life. “One night I went over to visit my parents, who live in the west end of Hamilton,” he says. “My mother had just pulled in the driveway with a carload of groceries and decided to go and help her carry them in. When my mother popped the trunk of her car, I saw a car blanket next to the groceries. The blanket was the exact same one as Bernardo used to roll Kristen French’s dead body into before he dumped it into a ditch in north Burlington. I was just so overcome when this happened. I wasn’t prepared for it. It was weird because the moment owned you, you didn’t own the moment.” Hemsworth also can’t listen to “Superman” by R.E.M. on the radio. The song is one of many that Bernardo had playing in the background as he sexually assaulted Leslie Mahaffy on video. Hemsworth says he doesn’t hear the song anymore, just her screams.

All three reporters even dreamed about Bernardo during the trial; Hemsworth still does. In one of his dreams, he is sleeping in a hotel room with Bernardo and his lawyers, John Rosen and Tony Bryant. Hemsworth is sharing a bed with Bernardo while Rosen and Bryant share the other. Hemsworth wakes up to find Bernardo holding a lamp over his head. Instead of smashing it on him, Bernardo says, “Ha ha, just joking.”

But Hemsworth’s most symbolic dream reveals the struggle between being a detached observer and an average person. He is working at his desk when the French family arrives and asks to see him in the reception area of the Spectator newsroom. The family is in tears and Hemsworth notices the other reporters are looking at him oddly. He feels he has to choose between sympathizing with and joining the French family or not crying and joining his colleagues. Hemsworth chooses to cry and hugs the Frenches. “We’re not machines, and part of not being a machine is that you will always be affected by the things you cover,” he says now. “You should let yourself be affected, as long as it doesn’t keep you from seeing the truth.”

None of the Spectator reporters sought any psychiatric help because of the trial, although management made it clear help was available. instead, they relied on their friends, family and each other to express their frustrations and feelings. “I heard The Toronto Star had some couch sessions, but I didn’t see a need for it,” says Brown. “Sometimes Paul, Wade and I would just sit around and talk about the trial. Part of our bond was that we talked about it for five months. Our outside friends and colleagues would find it obsessive, boring and disgusting, but to us it was an endless source of interest.”

Although Hemsworth felt relieved, he was also a little upset that the trial was over. “It was a hateful thing, but you became attached to the process and people you covered it with, and in a strange way, you kind of missed it when it was done. I felt like a soldier who came home from war and couldn’t talk about it with anyone who wasn’t there because they wouldn’t understand. I have a different relationship with Barb and Paul now than before because of the experience we shared.”

However, three days after the trial was over, Barbara Brown needed to be alone. She returned to her apartment in Hamilton, where she lives by herself, and refused to answer her phone. For three days, she watched Little Women and sentimental, black-and-white movies. Sometimes she found herself sobbing. “I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, this feels good-it feels good to cry.’ Normally I would just get misty-eyed, but now I was having a really good cry.”

From the Guildnet BBS, an electronic hangout for journalists of the Canadian Media Guild, the first message for August 25, 1995:

From: COLIN PERKEL

To: ALL Subject: Microsquish I’ve been feeling a tad uncomfortable with the way we’ve all reported the Win 95 launch-and can’t help feeling the line between editorial, advertorial and advertising became seriously blurred. Were we sucked in by the simple launch of a new product that is hardly revolutionary? Did Billy G.et al buy us?

After the headlines, after the photos, after the previews, the reviews, the interviews-after all the commotion surrounding the launch of Windows 95, journalists like Guildnet’s Colin Perkel, an editor and reporter for CP’s Broadcast News, asked themselves, Good grief, what have we done?

In a later message on the same subject, Perkel wrote: “It’s us I’m faulting. We tend to be so proud of our skepticism of the press release, so sensitive to being manipulated by big business or government. Yet here we are getting sucked in to the point where respectable media outlets become an extension of that PR….Ironically some of the real stories, such as yesterday’s MS slump on the stock market, were buried!” Instead, front pages contained scenes from Microsoft’s publicity test: a death-defying rappel from the CN Tower, jugglers, balloons, face-painting-talk about your media circus!

Win 95 was indeed a much-anticipated product and maybe even a news story. But the release of this software-an upgrade, actually-became one of 1995’s top stories, able to hold its own against O.J., Paul Bernardo and the Toronto subway crash. Did it really warrant reaching B-movie proportions as The Software That Swallowed the Planet?

Geoffrey Rowan, technology reporter for The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, was one of many journalists covering the launch of Windows 95. “It deserved a lot of attention,” he stresses. “It was and is an important product in terms of the fortunes of Microsoft, which is an important company.” Nevertheless, Rowan believes the product got more than its fair share of publicity. “Whether or not people need to be talking about operating systems at cocktail parties, probably not,” he says.

(An operating system, if your kid was too busy getting his face painted at the launch party to tell you, doesn’t really do much itself; it acts as a go-between, allowing you to give commands to your computer so that you can perform tasks like loading a word processor or deleting a file. The OS is an important factor in how easy a computer is to use.)

Windows 95 does not perform too badly as an OS, especially when compared with previous versions of Windows, which did. Microsoft had fallen far behind the competition in an industry where staying ahead is supposed to be essential. Nonetheless, the old Windows ruled the PC market. That gives millions of computer users permission to get reasonably excited over this significant upgrade.

But even Microsoft Canada’s own PR consultant, John Swimmer from Hill and Knowlton, could not believe the amount of coverage the Canadian media gave Windows 95. “It was amazing,” he says. “The number of clippings was more than I had ever seen on any one product.” The Globe and Mail confessed to having mentioned you-know-what in 234 articles in 1995.

And although everyone is entitled to an opinion, some journalists may have gotten a bit carried away in their excitement. Take, for example, an August 20 story in The Toronto Star by business writer Art Chamberlain, which reads, “What Win 95 promises, and mostly delivers, is breathtaking: that it will take [all your computer components] and assorted programs and turn them into a harmonious unit even the most hopeless computer dolt can run.” Chamberlain later admitted to me that he wrote the piece (which was primarily about the marketing hype) without ever having used the software himself. His one-paragraph review, therefore, has a couple of flaws: one should never underestimate the hopelessness of any computer dolt, and the only thing breathtaking about Windows 95 is the hyperbole used to describe it. Graeme Bennett, managing editor of Vancouver based The Computer Paper, agrees. “I spoke on CBC several times the week of the launch,” he says. “And each time, before I spoke, they introduced the story by categorizing the software as ‘the Superman of software’ and other such drivel. Microsoft never categorized it that way, and-in my view-the software largely does what they claimed it would. ‘Spin’ is something that the mainstream media are very susceptible to.”

Amid all the hype, a reaction formed at many media outlets. The product itself was no longer the story, but all the attention it was getting was real news, worthy of even more attention. Words like “hype,” “hoopla” and “much-ballyhooed” were used in article after article on the subject, and scores of columnists commented about what a pathetic lot those media people were to be jumping on that Windows 95 bandwagon. By the date of the software’s launch, Microsoft’s publicity machine had achieved perpetual motion, fuelled by its own momentum.

Microsoft wanted Windows 95 to be something that conipeting operating systems weren’t: a household name. Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse, Windows 95.

People who never used computers, who couldn’t care less about operating systems, who couldn’t tell an Aptiva from an adding machine, had heard about Windows 95 and knew it was important. Comic strips such as Sherman’s Lagoon poked fun at the phenomenon (“What is this world coming to when the cultural event of the year is new computer software? Nobody cares about O.J. anymore”). Even the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto piggybacked on Windows’ marketing success by promoting its special exhibit on spiders as “Widows 95.” It’s not hard to see how Microsoft pulled off one of the greatest publicity campaigns in history. CEO Bill Gates is among the richest men in America and a celebrity figure. Whether by fluke or design, the Windows upgrade was delayed until the perfect time, when the PC really took off as a consumer item. Microsoft’s nine-figure budget for marketing and advertising Windows 95 made it difficult to ignore the product’s launch anywhere in the world. In England, Microsoft bought the day’s entire run of The Times of London and painted farmers’ fields with the Win 95 logo. In Toronto, a 160-metre banner was hung from the CN Tower. In Australia, a barge floated into Sydney harbour carrying a giant Windows 95 box as dancers celebrated its arrival.

The Australian dancers weren’t the only ones celebrating. The entire computer sector had reason to rejoice. You’d have to rush to your local computer retailer to buy Windows 95 and the new software to make it complete and the new hardware to make it run better and the instructional books and videos and-what the heck-as long as you’re jumping into this with both feet, Internet access as well. Everyone, from Microsoft’s so-called competitors to various spin-off industries, saw dollar signs in Win 95 and invested big money to advertise their supporting products. The total cost of promotion across the computer industry was estimated at $1 billion (U.S.). Is it ally wonder the conspiracy theorists had a field day, saying that Bill Gates and friends had bought the press?

But let’s humour them for a moment. Let’s try a little test, a simple game of word association. When I say Microsoft, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? Is it Windows 95? Or is it antitrust allegations by the U.S. Justice Department? Both were in the news at the same time.

This shouldn’t surprise you or the conspiracy fans, but the media people I spoke to, and Microsoft as well, all denied that the press was being controlled by Big Brother Bill. Rather, Windows 95 is more interesting to more people than antitrust motions. What’s interesting for us as journalists is that the Windows 95 craze gives us a great chance to analyze the phenomenon of pack journalism. Martin Slofstra, editor of the trade mag Computing Canada, says his staff joked about ignoring the launch altogether-but that as pure fantasy. “Just by virtue of the fact that everybody is talking about it, you have to deal with it.”

As for how the story became inflated to the point of nearly bursting, Slofstra is somewhat reluctant to point the finger at Microsoft. “Sometimes,” he savs, “these things just develop a life of their own.”

“The fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.” That quotation from Edward R. Murrow is a favourite of Internet journalist K.K. Campbell. He often cites it in relation to reporters whose wisdom and understanding are found lacking when they cover the Internet. Campbell is a sort of curator of stupid Net coverage. He collects different species from around the world as if they were butterflies.

Not that they’re rare, mind you. The amount of coverage the Net has garnered since coming out of virtual obscurity less than three years ago has been simply monstrous in quantity and too often, it seems, in quality as well. One minute, the media were hyping the Internet as the greatest medium for telecommunication since television-perhaps even greater; the next minute, they were portraying it as a sinners’ den teeming with anarchists, Nazis and perverts, oh my! The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Internet users are nowhere close to being that interesting, and the Net itself is neither the saviour of the human race nor the agent of its destruction, but something in the middle. The Internet, after all, is a complex entity, and when the bandwagon is zooming down that superhighway, it’s too dangerous for journalists to be carelessly hopping on.

Internet coverage is just one aspect of technology reporting, which recently has exploded in importance in the mainstream. People are buying computers in unprecedented numbers; Canadian hightech firms are making it big internationally, and people want-need-to know about these things because their lives are being affected by them and they require constant updates on new developments. But repeatedly, the media, in their excitement, their fear or their ignorance over reporting high-tech issues, lose touch with the most basic journalistic virtues of truth and balance.

K.K. Campbell wants you to know the truth about the Net. He uses his columns in The Toronto Star andeye, a local alternative weekly, to crusade against mistakes and misunderstandings about the Net by all four estates. You can visit his site on the World Wide Web and see the Media Moron Awards archives ( dedicated to educating journalists and consumers of the media about bad Internet reporting through real-life examples. A clipping from the archives illustrates an all-too-common faux pas, made, in this case, by CBC reporter Jeffrey Koffman in 1994, when he posted the following in the ont.general newsgroup:

“Have you discovered the limitless range of computer porn? Have you discovered your kid/student discovering the same? I am a CBC TV journalist preparing a report on computer pornography and I am looking for people who are prepared to talk about their own experiences. I’d like to meet some teenage kids who can navigate through the world of computer porn and who can show me what they’ve found. I’d also like to meet parents and teachers who have come across their kids/students exploring this world.”

The readers of the newsgroup were not impressed with Koffman’s preconstruction of the story. Justin Wells, then an undergrad in the University of Waterloo’s math program, publicly posted this mocking response:

“I am a yellow journalist preparing a sensationalistic story on the information superhighway, and I am looking for people prepared to provide me with shocking and unrepresentative anecdotes from their own experiences.”

Campbell should consider updating that entry in the archives, since a different group of CBC journalists didn’t do much better a year later with an episode of Witness entitled “Wired for Sex.” Titillating ads for it had been broadcast frequently; thus, days before the show even went to air, it was being criticized on the Internet for its hypocrisy in using sex to sell a documentary that portrays the Net and computer users as immoral. The show’s introduction featured (I swear I’m not making this up) Knowlton Nash announcing that “computers are changing our love life.” Over the next hour, viewers were introduced to more cyberpornographers than you ever thought existed, plus an S&M bulletin board system, people who’d fallen in love over the Internet, not one but two stories of Internet child molesters and some “viewer discretion advised” examples of what there is to see in “the red-light district of cyberspace”-shown purely for journalistic purposes, I assure you. Not surprisingly, almost all the subjects were American because it’s too difficult finding enough sensational Canadian ones to fill an hour’s programming.

Campbell’s least favourite example of Canadian Internet reporting is a Calgary Sun article from March 1995 about a Victoria, B.C.-based World Wide Web site supposedly distributing suicide how-to manuals to troubled teens. He wrote all about it for the May 11, 1995, issue of eye in an article called “The Little DeathNet Story That Grew.”

DeathNet, the Web site in question, is actually a research site offering the latest news, court reports, parliamentary debate transcripts and bibliographies pertaining to dying with dignity and euthanasia issues. It does not distribute suicide kits to teens. According to Campbell, Calgary Sun managing editor Chris Nelson saw John Hofsess, the right-to-die advocate who founded DeathNet, talking about the site on TV on March 5. Nelson mistakenly believed DeathNet was offering suicide tips to anyone over the Internet. He immediately assigned Steve Chase to cover the exclusive story, seeing as how he knew something about the Net. (Chase had a freenet account.) An expert on euthanasia very familiar with DeathNet was contacted by the Sun regarding the Web site. She later told Campbell she had made it clear what the site was all about, and as for helping teens kill themselves, “DeathNet does nothing of the kind.” Chase also e-mailed Hofsess posing as a depressed teen; he asked where he could find information on the Internet to learn how to kill himself. Hofsess replied that, as far as he knew, no such information is available anywhere on the Net.

Many journalists see the Net as a sinners’ den teeming with Nazis and perverts. In spite of the facts, the article ran March 12, with a single paragraph admitting that the Sun was not actually able to obtain proof of wrongdoing, but otherwise leading people to believe DeathNet was indeed helping kids die. The story also ran in The Toronto Sun, but without that confessional paragraph. From there, the story was picked up by Canadian Press, and then Associated Press passed it on to the world. Even The Times of London carried it.

A little journalistic vigilance by any of the news outlets could have stopped the story from spreading. All anyone had to do was visit the Web site to check it out. Besides Chase, no one bothered.

Campbell warns editors: “You’ve got to get on the Net. The more you use it, the more aware you become of the way it works, and you can no longer get sucked in for dumb stories.”

Like when The Globe and Mail printed the infamous Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe story. The amusing tale, widely circulated by e-mail and long known by veteran Netters to be an urban legend, goes like this: A Neiman-Marcus customer asks to buy the recipe for the store’s delicious chocolate chip cookies. The price agreed upon is “two-fifty.” When her credit card statement arrives, she’s shocked to see the charge is $250, not $2.50, as she had thought. Her revenge: give away the secret recipe to as many people as possible, hence the Internet distribution. Globe Focus editor Sarah Murdoch ran the story and recipe on November 11, 1995. A disclaimer followed the article, saying that it could not be authenticated, but that didn’t protect Murdoch from the ribbing she received the following week. “Frankly,” she says, “I don’t mind getting caught out. The readers had a laugh, perhaps learned something about the perils of the Internet and we had some fun. And a couple of days later, William Thorsell, editor of the Globe, dropped by my office with a brown paper bag. Guess what? It contained Neiman-Marcus cookies baked by a friend of his.”

But not every blunder can so easily be laughed off.

Perhaps the lowest example of Internet journalism ever is Time magazine’s “Cyberporn” cover story of July 3, 1995. It’s particularly disturbing because it was not the work of someone who didn’t know what he was talking about, but Philip Elmer-Dewitt, Time’s senior technology editor. Elmer-Dewitt’s tragic flaw was not ignorance-he was writing about computer sex back in 1983, virtually the dawn of time. Rather, the crime was good old-fashioned yellow journalism.

The cover featured a picture of a young boy gaping at a computer with the cover line: “Cyberporn. Exclusive: A New Study Shows How Pervasive and Wild It Really Is. Can We Protect Our Kids-and Free Speech?” The sensational article led many to believe that credible research had shown that the Internet was a vast storehouse of digital images that were harder than hard-core-deviant-and that children were in danger of being corrupted. As soon as the article was published, the study was exposed as a mockery of good scholarship done by an engineering student with no credentials. But besides being based on spurious data, the article misrepresented the given “facts.” Anyone unfamiliar with the Net would not have realized that most of the article dealt, not with the Internet, but with adults-only BBSs, which are far less accessible to minors than adult videos or magazines.

When the story’s flaws were brought to light, Net users were outraged, and they lynched Time’s and Elmer-Dewitt’s reputations on-line. The Internet community is not very forgiving in such cases, and it has great power to spread information. The international scale of the Net means that it’s being reported, often badly, around the world and that blunders get ridiculed in front of an audience much wider than that reached by the offending medium. As one British Net user, irate over a stupid Net story by the BBC, put it, “Welcome to the information age, ladies & gentlemen, and learn what the Internet really means-it means you’re talking to an audience that can bite back when you abuse them!!!!!”

How can a journalist avoid getting bitten? One way is to create technology beats where reporters know enough about their field and are well enough connected to do a good job. Already that’s beginning to happen, thanks to the surge in popularity of computers. In April 1994, The Toronto Star started devoting a weekly section, called Fast Forward, to high-tech issues and service articles, and it may just be a glimpse of the future of technology reporting for the mainstream press. By using highly specialized freclance writers, editor Robert Wright is confident of the quality of information in the section.

Unfortunately, not all papers can afford such a stable of experts. Even the Star’s A section has to rely on general-assignment reporters to cover high-tech stories from time to time, so the dangers and inefficiencies of ignorance are always present. The reality is that tight deadlines and staff cutbacks make it even tougher these days for the average journalist to do the necessary research to understand a high-tech story he’s reporting.

As a result, there is a great temptation to accept corporate handouts of information. Before coming to Ryerson Polytechnic University to study journalism last fall, Jessica Goldman worked both as a reporter for The Toronto Sun and as a public relations consultant with high-tech companies among her clientele. She knows how difficult it is for a general assignment reporter to cover a high-tech story. To a techno-illiterate reporter with a tight deadline, any sufficiently advanced technology press release is indistinguishable from real news copy. Hoping above all else for its press releases to be related verbatim by the media, especially the wire services, a PR firm can take advantage of reporters inexperienced with technology. “Very often,” recalls Goldman, “the firm would set up interview appointments beforehand. We have our own list of who knows what. And if a reporter didn’t match up to our list, we knew we were in for an easy ride.”

So what’s a techno-illiterate reporter to do? According to veteran technology reporter Geoffrey Rowan of The Globe and Mail, remember one thing: “The basic rules of journalism.”

That’s pretty much the advice from all the pros. Ask the right questions. Don’t cut corners. Don’t believe everything you hear. All the stuff they teach on day one of journalism school. “View things skeptically, and always have them prove it to you,” says Rowan. “I’m from Missouri, and the state motto is ‘Show Me.’ And that’s what it’s gotta be.”

Back when multilingual radio was still young in Toronto, there were three travel agents. The first, Franceska Starchev (a Slovene), also had an import business. The cost of advertising on a number of ethnic programs on CHIN was, she figured, equal to the cost of creating her own program, and so Caravan of Friendship was born. The second travel agent, John Loncaric (a Croat), was also in the entertainment business. He approached CHIN Radio about buying advertising. Instead, he was offered his own program and Sounds of Croatia was born. The third travel agent, Mike Milicevic (a Serb), another dabbler in the entertainment business, was frustrated with trying to promote his events through the existing programs at CHIN. The station told him if he could round up enough sponsors he, too, could have his own program and Sounds of Yugoslavia was born.

Years passed. The programs-amalgams of expedience, commerce and homesickness-became established. Legions of loyal listeners tuned in to hear community news, sports scores and music in their native tongues. Then, across the sea in the land where they were born, war broke out, and the country that was once called Yugoslavia split apart. For the three travel agents, life was not so simple anymore.

In 1992, after a quarter century on the air, Franceska Starchev announced to a surprised audience that theCaravan of Friendship was finished. The hour-long program, which ran weekdays and featured the music and culture of all regions of Yugoslavia, was an early casualty of war. “The program was very well accepted,” Starchev says. “Everyone felt comfortable and welcome. We never questioned what anybody was.” Her program was enjoyed by immigrants who just wanted to hear the sounds of home without the political baggage that loaded down other, more narrowly nationalist and political programs.

But the war erased any neutral ground. “People were confused and unsure of themselves,” says Starchev. “They lost confidence and trust in each other. You would have Serbian and Croatian families living in the same neighborhood and it didn’t matter. Then suddenly it did matter.” It mattered to her sponsors, too; after war broke out it was no longer acceptable to be nonpolitical. They expected Starchev to pick sides. But to support one side would mean losing the patronage of the other and she refused. “I would rather give up than give in to one group.” Advertising revenues shrank and she could no longer afford to go on. Business self-interest and the forces of exclusionary nationalism had won. The caravan of friendship broke apart as each group circled its wagons.

Mild-mannered travel agent and entertainment promoter John Loncaric suddenly found himself centre stage in the Croatian encampment. Fortunately for the Croatian community, Loncaric did not suffer from stage fright. Six days a week for the past 30 years Loncaric’s smooth, even-toned voice has welcomed listeners to his hour-long program, Sounds of Croatia. Similar in tone to Caravan,Sounds of Croatia had attracted a large audience of sports fans and Croatian-music lovers. Still, Loncaric had already demonstrated his preparedness to do more than entertain the Croatian community. During “Croatian Spring,” when Tito clamped down on rising Croatian nationalism in 1971, Loncaric hooked his listeners right into the news on Radio Zagreb to keep them informed.

While Yugoslav army tanks were approaching Zagreb in 1991, about 2,000 Croatians anxiously charted their progress in the Croatian Club in Toronto. Newly independent Croatia was struggling for its life and the community was mobilizing to do everything in its power to ensure the new nation’s survival. Loncaric’sSounds of Croatia became a central reference point for southern Ontario’s Croatian community. People tuned in at lunchtime, some even leaving work to listen on their car radios, to hear the latest news and commentary, fundraising appeals and suggestions about what they could do or where they could go to help the war effort. Because of the immediacy of radio and its potential to reach a broad audience, it was possible to organize demonstrations-to protest the war or lobby the Canadian government for formal recognition of Croatia-with just 24 hours’ notice.

Croatian Canadians are quick to praise Loncaric for his role in the war effort. “Without him, we wouldn’t have been able to help as much as we did,” says Drago Geoheli, who is known both here and abroad for spirited, forceful editorials that used to be aired regularly on Loncaric’s show. The money, medicine, food and clothing raised by the community have been credited with helping Croatia survive. Jakov Cosic, a former member of the Croatian National Fund, estimates that since 1991 $13 million-75 percent of which he says came from southern Ontario-was sent to Croatia. Loncaric estimates that through his travel agency alone $500,000 was raised for medicine.

But the power of radio to reach a broad audience reaped more than just praise for Loncaric. “If I say something against the Serbs, they automatically call in,” he says. “Once I said something that I shouldn’t have on the radio and the radio station received 3,500 calls in protest. “I guess,” he adds, with an ironic grin, “the Serbians are listening more than the Croatians.”

It was not an isolated incident. CHIN Radio was inundated with complaints from both Serbs and Croats about each other’s programs. Carl Redhead, vice president of operations at CHIN, particularly remembers problems with “a selection of musical pieces written in the last three to four years. The patriotic lyrics included innuendo that was injurious to the other side or could be perceived as a slap in the face.” In meetings with the producers of the Serbian and Croatian programs, Redhead reminded them that they were “under contractual obligation to refer controversial matters to management,” and when they didn’t, callers certainly did. Redhead told them that, while it was “permissible to express one’s point of view and politics, insults and things that could be interpreted as having a double meaning were out of place”-the station required “decency, respect and that any statement can be proven regarding its factuality.”

“Factuality,” however, was often in the ear of the listener. Drago Geoheli’s frequent editorials on Loncaric’s program raised the ire of Serbs. While Geoheli claims they were factual, the Serbs found them insulting and hateful. For example, he used the image of an old, grief-strickcn Bosnian Serb woman in a black scarf cradling the skull of her son-a Serbian icon of suffering and victimization-as the heart of an editorial illustrating Serbian “backwardness and barbarity.”

After a few such pieces aired, Loncaric was required to submit controversial editorials in both English and Croatian a day in advance to Redhead. This turned out to be “too much of a headache” for him and after two years, despite listener protests, Loncaric discontinued them.

The pressure on Loncaric to provide the community with news is not just because people are worried about family members still living in Croatia or because they wish to argue politics in their local coffee shop. All Croatians, regardless of what country they reside in, have the right to vote in Croatian elections and are represented in the Sabor (parliament) by their own diaspora members. Some groups in the community are also linked to the powerful emigre lobby headed by Gojko Susak.

Like many Croatians who left their homeland for political reasons after the Second World War or the Croatian Spring, Susak took the dream of an independent Croatia with him. A wealthy Toronto pizza proprietor, Susak was willing to put his money behind the man he believed could lead Croatia to independence. Prior to the pivotal 1989 elections in Croatia, when all the parties made overtures to the diaspora community, Susak led a group that threw considerable financial support behind the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and its leader, a retired general named Franjo Tudjman. Today Susak, who has been called the “Canadian king-maker,” is Croatia’s defense minister and a member of Tudjman’s inner circle.

As the father of an independent Croatia, Tudjman is also staunchly supported by a large majority of the diaspora community. Recognizing this, and in a bid to guarantee a three-quarters majority for his party in the Sabor, Tudjman passed an unprecedented law that enfranchised diaspora Croatians to vote in the October 1995 parliamentary elections.

To keep the community current on events and issues in Croatia, Sounds of Croatia features a daily newscast. From 1 to 1:10 p.m., Loncaric hooks into either the evening broadcast of Radio Zagreb or airs prerecorded news from the Croatian news agency HINA. National news is augmented by five to 10-minute regional reports prepared for Sounds of Croatia by correspondents of Radio Pazin on the coast (Mondays), Radio Sarajevo (Tuesdays) and Radio Karlovac in the hinterland (Thursdays).

Providing all this news does not come cheaply, but Loncaric claims no lack of sponsors. “I don’t even have to go out and get advertising anymore, they come to me,” he says. This is partly due to the longevity of the program and the level of trust Loncaric enjoys in the community. “I think the reason I’ve lasted so long,” he says, “is because the program is for all Croatians, regardless of religion or political affiliation.” But it is also likely due to the fact that, from a Croatian perspective, Loncaric’s show is not controversial. Like the majority of his listeners, he is a supporter of President Tudjman and his party; Loncaric boasts that he was one of the few Canadians to receive an audience with Tudjman when the leader first went to Washington. The news onSounds of Croatia has a pro-government bias. While there is limited freedom of the press in Croatia, the broadcast media, which are Loncaric’s source, are either controlled or voluntarily act as a government cheerleader. In Croatia, opposition parties charged that some of their political ads were suppressed by the media while Tudjman’s party received blanket coverage.

Even in Canada, any Croatian media that oppose or criticize the official line must face certain intractable realities. “Croatians by nature tend to be pro-government,” says Srebrenka Bogovic, producer of Voice of Croatia, a radio program sponsored by the Croatian Soccer Club and broadcast Sundays from CJMR, a small radio station in Oakville. “Croatians don’t take kindly to criticism,” she adds. “They rise on their hind legs and complain and boycott.” Bogovic speaks from experience. Two years ago, she helped produce a Croatian community newspaper, Nase Novine (Our Paper), and an opposition radio program. She learned a number of lessons-among them, not to rock the boat and that “there are more ways than one to skin a cat.” Her former radio show, she says, “was terribly controversial and, in retrospect, it was a bit destructive. It was too harsh, too forward; it was obnoxious. A small group was very happy while a larger group was very unhappy.” (The reverse of Loncaric’s situation.) Still, she continues to believe that a Croatian “should be able to say certain things, voice disapproval and not be seen as a fifth column or folding the country.” Her current program, Voice of Croatia, tries to persuade the community that “there are more ways than one to look at a situation. If we have a sponsor we will put anyone on.” But Bogovic is using a “softer sell” approach this time.

Bogovic’s aim is one that mainstream Canadian media take for granted: provide a plurality of views and leave it up to the listeners to decide what they want to believe. But the question remains, is this what the Croatian community wants? Bogovic realizes that some views may not be accepted by the whole community, but if she sandwiches opposition views between official ones, the opposition views stand a chance of being heard by a larger audience. “For economic reasons (sponsorship), we have to be always careful, but we try not to be terribly servile if we can help it,” she says. Ultimately, Bogovic is striving for acceptance (even if it is without respect) for what Voice of Croatia stands for. As long as members of the community continue to view the situation in Croatia as precarious and any criticism of the government as unpatriotic, Sounds of Croatia will continue to glide smoothly over the calm waters of orthodoxy while Voice of Croatia struggles to remain afloat.

In the choppy waters surrounding the Serb community, Mike Milicevic has had no trouble staying afloat. For years, Milicevic, the producer of Sounds of Yugoslavia, was dismissed by nationalist Serbs as a “communist” because his program accepted and even celebrated Yugoslavia as it existed. Sounds of Yugoslavia appealed to a wide, nonpolitical, non-nationalistic audience-people more likely to refer to themselves as Yugoslavs than Serbs or Croatians. When war came, however, Milicevic renamed his program Sounds of the Old Country, and transformed it into the Serbian equivalent of Loncaric’s show.

But Milicevic’s program does not share the same stature in the Serbian community that Loncaric’s does in the Croatian. Sounds of the Old Country is but one of three competing Serbian programs on CHIN. There is an old saying-“Two Serbs, three parties”-which hints at the divisions within the Serb community. And each political, regional and church faction has its own voice. In addition to the radio programs, there are at least four well-established nationalist papers, each with its own loyal audience.

About the only thing all Serbs agree on is that, in this war, they alone have been “demonized” and their side of the story has not been fairly told by the media.

They claim that their efforts to correct what they perceive to be obvious falsifications are refused and their letters of protest to media outlets are rejected. The Serb community speaks with one voice in denouncing mainstream-especially American-media coverage of the war in the former Yugoslavia as distorted, biased (against the Serbs), manipulative and sensationalized. As a result, the Serbian community has turned inward to its own media to get a “truer” version of the news.

At the end of each program, Milicevic hooks into the recorded news of two Belgrade-based news agencies: AVALA, which is independent of the government and tends to have a pro-Bosnian Serb bias, and Radio Beograd, a government mouthpiece. Milicevic claims that many of his listeners prefer the news from AVALA, but he continues to provide them with both perspectives. Milicevic recognizes that this news component is important to his listeners: whenever it is shortened or dropped from a show, he gets numerous complaints. But Sounds of the Old Country is only broadcast Sundays between 6 and 7 p.m. And the eagerly awaited week’s worth of news is only five minutes long, delivered with the speed of an auctioneer.

The other two programs, Bora Dragasevich’s Sumadija and Bill Djurovic’s Ravna Gora (which proclaims itself “the voice of free Serbs”), are virulently anticommunist and anti-Yugoslavia as it existed. Each program is the personal fiefdom of its founder/producer and combines the news with exhortative commentary. From these shows, listeners hear about the anti-Serb but pro-Croatian and Bosnian Muslim policies of the Americans and Europeans; how the Sarajevo breadline and market massacres were actually orchestrated by Bosnian Muslims to force military action against the Bosnian Serbs; of the wild exaggeration surrounding Serb rape and prison camps. The gripping image of a skeletal man staring vacuously at the camera from behind a chain-link fence-which has come to symbolize the brutality of Serbian prison camps-is, the Serbs claim, actually an incarcerated petty Serb criminal ravaged by tuberculosis. When Serbs, living with the memory of the genocide perpetrated against them during the Second World War, are victims of ethnic cleansing, rape and other atrocities, Dragasevich and Djurovic complain that the world doesn’t seem to notice or care.

Unlike the Croatian community, which gets its news almost daily, the whole Serb community has to wait until the weekend. These programs are only broadcast once a week: Suadija on Saturdays (6 to 7 p.m.) andRavna Gora on Sundays (5 to 6 p.m.). With the imposition of sanctions on Yugoslavia in the spring of 1992 the availability of newspapers and magazines from back home became limited and another source of information for the community dried up.

Seeing this news vacuum, a small group of Yugoslavian journalists living in Canada conceived the idea of publishing a newspaper twice a week to inform members of the Yugoslavian community about what was happening in their former homeland. The first issue of Novine (The Paper), published in Cyrillic script, came out in November 1994. Novine attempted to be neither political nor nationalist. And while two-thirds of its readers were ethnically Serbian, according to its first editor, Zivko Cerovic, it was also read by Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims and even Croatians.

The philosophy behind Novine was to provide readers with a wide range of information and viewpoints. Articles about the situation in Yugoslavia were drawn from a variety of sources (independent, professionally staffed news agencies in Yugoslavia, pieces by wellknown Yugoslavian journalists and correspondents, the international press and Internet-derived reports of “independent” institutes with expertise in the Balkans). The paper didn’t editorialize but left the readers to draw their own conclusions. Sensitive to the Serb perception of bias in the media, Novine provided Serb readers with serious articles that recognized the complexity of the situation in Yugoslavia and considered the Serb side of the story.

Under Cerovic, too, there was a commitment to professionalism, both in content and appearance-Novine was staffed by five journalists and two graphic designers. Ljubomir Medjesi, a non-Serb (Ruthenian) reader, agrees that, in its early days, Novine did try to be independent of a (wholly) Serb perspective. “It had a good style of journalism,” he says, “that heralded back to that of the best journalism in the former Yugoslavia.”Novine was unique.

But in August 1995, the original founders sold Novine to Mirko Stokanovic. Stokanovic, not a journalist, brought with him a new vision of what Novine should be. “The basic [thrust of the paper] was good,” says Stokanovic, “but a paper has to stand on one idea.” What he meant was that Novine would no longer be politically neutral. Under Stokanovic, who had been beaten by police during the 1991 riots in Belgrade, the “idea” behind Novine was to oppose and expose Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. To the disappointment of non-Serb readers such as Medjesi, Novine became an explicitly Serb paper, its tagline changed to “The paper of Serbs in Canada.”

Stokanovic’s grand vision is to make Novine the paper of the entire Serbian community, not only in southern Ontario, but all of Canada and, ultimately, North America. Novine should be “a connection between all Serbs in the diaspora,” he says. Old-timers, newcomers, communists and anticommunists-everyone is welcome as long as they are Serbs. Stokanovic sees Novine as a forum to present all their ideas. “People should read about everything in Novine,” he adds with conviction.

From its inception, however, Novine has tended to appeal mostly to a recent immigrant audience. Labouring to establish themselves, the newcomers complain that at $1.50 a copy ($2 outside Ontario), Novine is too expensive. And since they are struggling to make ends meet, they are not a lucrative source of advertising revenue.

Making Novine more interesting to the established community by moving the paper in a more Serb-nationalist direction may have seemed a shrewd way to increase circulation and ad revenues. But the question that Stokanovic didn’t ask was whether these new readers and advertisers-mostly political immigrants who had fled communist Yugoslavia would support the airing of views they disagreed with. The newcomers’ culture, their bastardized sense of Serbian history and political views are not readily compatible with their own.

Stokanovic’s simple vision of creating a paper that represents all the views in the community and is widely accepted by the community may be more ephemeral than sustainable. Srebrenka Bogovic (the producer ofVoice of Croatia) tried to do the same thing in the Croatian community and failed. For a year and a half in the early nineties, the weekly paper Nase Novine, which she helped produce, provided a cross-section of articles, critical analysis and a variety of viewpoints. She found that depending on advertisers for an economic base affected the paper’s editorial content. “You put your integrity in jeopardy,” says Bogovic. “You have to pussyfoot around-can you say that or not? You are always looking behind your shoulder at who you may offend who will then withdraw their funds.” And even more telling, she found that the community itself was “not strong enough to support all the views [published in the paper] ‘ “

One of Novine‘s editorial platforms has been to provide readers with balanced coverage of events. Stokanovic claims to remain committed to this policy. He is prepared to publish “bad things” about Serbs that the community may not want exposed or want to know. So far, the bad stuff-about Milosevic and his regime-plays to the mood of a broad segment of the Serbian community, both old and new, that views Milosevic as a traitor ever since he severed ties with the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs in August 1994. And Stokanovic boasts that he provides his readers with information not readily available to their compatriots in Yugoslavia. Novine stories about the exodus of the Krajina Serbs from Croatia and their plight as refugees-an event that devastated the Serbian community here-received minimal coverage (it was a political embarrassment to Milosevic) in the government-controlled media in Yugoslavia.

But in the community, the other side of being anti-Milosevic is being pro-Bosnian or Croatian Serb. Milosevic is seen as helping to destroy the Bosnian Serbs and as having “sold out” the Krajina Serbs. To expose and criticize Milosevic is acceptable. To expose or criticize Radovan Karadzic or General Ratko Mladic, both champions of Serb interests outside Serbia, however, is a different story and “balance” becomes a liability.

“We are trying to provide balance,” Stokanovic says, “but it is very difficult. We have to measure our words, because there are so many opinions in the Serb community.”

Dragan Ciric, a recent political immigrant who used to publish a paper in Serbia and now helps produce the news on Ravna Gora, has also struggled with the problem of balance. “For every journalist to be a member of one nation is never to be objective,” he says. “You’re not looking from outside, you’re inside.” Neither community wants to hear the “bad stuff ” about themselves, he adds defensively.

“If I put in one sentence that the listeners don’t like,” says Ciric, “it’s like I’m betraying them. They see me as a traitor. Because of that one sentence, they don’t want to listen anymore.”

The question of how far Stokanovic is prepared to compromise editorial policy to retain advertisers and readers may be eclipsed by that of whether Novine-which Stokanovic admits is largely “self-financed”-will even survive in the short term. When Stokanovic took over Novine, most of the original staff, including Cerovic, quit. Attention is still paid to putting out a professional-looking paper, but the quality (from a journalistic rather than nationalistic perspective) has declined. The content of Novine is now derived almost exclusively from agency news, and the paper reads as if it is written by only one or two writers. In the last few months, Novine‘s masthead has shrunk even more and there are rumours that circulation is dropping.

While they may be sworn enemies, to an outsider, the Serbian and Croatian communities share a certain symmetry. Internally, the communities are divided and intolerant of dissention. Externally, the united face they show the world is that of victim-the other side is the aggressor. There is a stark simplicity to the “truth” as each side perceives it. They-the other side-started it and we’re only protecting ourselves. Arguments that there have been victims on both sides fall on deaf ears and an “if you’re not with us, then you’re against us” mentality prevails.

Courageous Croatian and Serbian journalists overseas who have tried to show both sides of the story have not been praised for their journalistic integrity in reporting the truth as they have found it. Many of them have been labelled traitors. Back here, far away across the sea, no one has dared to be a “traitor.” Instead, the communities are blessed with a number of travel agents-cum-broadcasters who are willing to give them what they want. And the travel agents will live comfortably ever after.

For a blitzkrieg in the making, it was announced in innocent-enough language. On August 9, 1995, a modest advertisement in the Report on Business section ofThe Globe and Mail stated that editor Margaret Wente was searching for “several outstanding journalists to help expand ROB’s business coverage.” For years, newspapers had been laying off staff. Now Wente was saying that she had 13 new positions open, and that as of October 3, 1995, ROBplanned to increase its daily news space by 50 percent (to about 40 pages). Industry insiders immediately saw the move as a show of strength, speculating that Report on Businessintended to crush the only other national business daily, The Financial Post. The editorial director there, Maryanne McNellis, responded to Wente’s ad by saying that changes at ROBdidn’t worry her. They should have. Within a couple of weeks, six of her staff had defected to the ROBexpansion team.

The Postwas shell-shocked by the six casualties, which included four reporters and two copy editors. The initial word around the Post was that no one would jump to the Globe. When six did, they caught everyone by surprise, even their closest friends among the tight-knit Poststaff. “That was incredibly depressing,” says Postreporter Scott Haggett. “It came across as a vote of nonconfidence in the paper from a lot of talented people.”

Speaking a month and a half later, Tim Pritchard, managing editor at thePost, puts on a confident face and dismisses the damage done by the Globehires. “I guess there’s a feeling that they tried to deliver some kind of knockout blow by taking six pretty good people,” he says. “But if that’s what Globemanagement was thinking, well, that would be silly.” There is evidence that that’s exactly what they were thinking. ROBeditor Margaret Wente doesn’t believe that Canada can support two business dailies. “I don’t think that in the end there is the circulation base to justify the advertising base that a second paper needs for revenue,” she says.

Even so, Wente says that she didn’t set out to raid the Post, but merely to find good, experienced business journalists, and “a lot of those folks happen to work over at the Post.” The Post’s McNellis sees it differently. “I see it as a raid,” she says. “I mean, they recognized they had a problem and they’re trying to fix it, and so they went and hired from the best-what can I say?” she adds with a laugh. While neither editor would characterize the whole episode as a clear competitive victory or defeat, one thing is clear: it’s not common for six journalists to desert all at once to the direct competition. One or two, maybe. But six? The scrap between Canada’s two leading business dailies for audience and advertisers has clearly reached a state of all-out war.

Most interestingly, it appears that the ROBsection of theGlobe, which pioneered and long monopolized serious daily business journalism in Canada, has finally been forced to acknowledge the true threat posed by The Financial Postdaily, launched in 1988 as an upstart challenger. Granted, the recent raid has left the Post staffers licking their wounds and Globestaffers preening their feathers. And some Globe reporters see the arrival of Postdefectors as a confirmation that the ROBis really the place to be. “Just look at it,” says ROBreporter Casey Mahood. “Greg was the Washington bureau chief for The Financial Post, and he came back to Toronto as a general assignment reporter for The Globe and Mail. I mean, what does that tell you?” But Mahood is ignoring one critical question. Why is ROBexpanding?

Ask people from The Financial Postand watch the blood creep back into their cheeks. In their view, the Globeis expanding because it is running scared. And the evidence? In the spring of 1995, the Globe received some survey results on the views of approximately 1,500 of its readers. The responses about the Report on Business section were alarming: readers felt that ROB’s business coverage was as good as, but not better than, that of The Financial Post. Even worse, a large portion (rumours put the number as high as 80 percent) of respondents named the Post as their preferred source of daily business news. By comparison, back in 1989, in the last such Globesurvey, the Posthad not even been mentioned. The dramatic shift over five years was quite a blow to ROBegos, and it started turning the wheels for the ROBexpansion. Clearly the Globehad slept through the rise of its flashy, fast-paced, tabloid-sized competitor. “We let the daily Postbecome the paper that broke news,” says David Olive, editor ofReport on Business Magazine, distributed monthly with The Globe and Mail. “They have created a loyal daily audience. Some business people buy the Postin the morning or have it delivered and they read it over breakfast. The Globethey put in their briefcase and they may or may not read it when they get home.”

Maryanne McNellis leads me into her large, bright, glass-walled office. She wears a cherry-red suit that is as loud and brassy as the tabloid-style newspaper she has been editing since 1994. For four years previous to that, she was the editor of The Financial Post Magazine, but she likes to emphasize her earlier background in “hard news”: at Business Week Magazine, where she worked between 1972 and 1983 as a correspondent in New York and Los Angeles, as well as bureau chief of the Canadian and Pacific Basin bureaus, and as founding editor of Investor’s Business Daily. At the Post, McNellis is in charge of the newsroom while editor Diane Francis oversees the paper’s columnists. McNellis’ strengths are reportedly more in product development than editing. She leaves the day-to-day newsroom operations to Pritchard and concentrates on FP’s overall coverage and layout strategies. Almost a year after her arrival, the paper was revamped to emphasize business news as it relates to investing.

McNellis speaks emphatically and confidently about the Post’s mandate. “We only really have one focus,” she says. “It’s on business and finance, and people making money. Our readers read us because they care about business issues.” Implicit in this is a criticism of her rival. She believes that the ROB, as a section of the Globe, has to please a general audience of readers of “Canada’s National Newspaper,” whereas the Postcan focus strictly on business readers. She emphasizes that her tabloid format serves that mission well. “Most of our readers are business people who are rushing off to work,” she says, and they don’t have a lot of time, and philosophically that’s where we’re coming from.” In fact, the word “feature” is not even in the vocabulary of The Financial Post managers. “We call them the big reads,” says McNellis, “because they’re not really features. Features to me is something warm and fuzzy, and that’s not what we’re after.”

Sitting in the Globe’s dimly lit offices, Margaret Wente (known to her friends as Peggy) stares at me through conservative, steel-rimmed glasses. She is dressed in a grey suit and black shirt, and her manner is friendly but formally so. Her subdued appearance, combined with the gloomy atmosphere of the Globeoffices, bring to mind the Globe’s nickname, “Old Grey.”

Wente came to her job in 1991 without any daily newspaper experience. She spent the 1980s mainly as a widely respected magazine editor, of both Canadian Business and Report on Business Magazine, and also worked for two years as senior editor of Venture, a CBC television program that deals with business themes. Critics of her newspaper work at ROB mainly attack her for favouring analytical feature journalism over hard news-a natural outgrowth of her magazine experience.

When Wente discusses the recent expansion of her section, she is most enthusiastic about the addition of softer kinds of journalism. “We added a new page called ‘Managing,'” she says, “which deals with matters close to my heart, but it also deals with many issues that you can’t get at very well through event-driven coverage.” This new page covers management issues by way of features, profiles and columns. Picking up on her enthusiasm, I ask whether the expanded ROB generally emphasizes analysis. The severe, emphatic tone of her response makes me feel she is not just answering me, but also her critics. “It’s part of it,” she says, “but ROB is still very hard-news oriented, and that hasn’t changed. And it won’t change because the very first information need of our readers is to find out what happened yesterday and why it mattered.” It sounds like an official mandate, all right, but her words seem forced, as though memorized.

In elaborating on the ROBapproach to business journalism, Wente repeatedly refers to abstract virtues such as value, content and quality. For instance: “Everything that we sell is content, and the value of the content that we offer readers is really the only thing that we offer readers.” Overall, I am left with only a vague impression of what the ROB is trying to accomplish editorially.

Ultimately, the battle between The Financial Post and Report on Business is being fought editorially. The Post has entrenched itself as the authority on investment news that provides concise stories in a tightly organized format. ROB is perceived as a broader, analytical newspaper that emphasizes the quality of its writing as opposed to the friendliness of its format. While there are obviously readers loyal to both styles, recent trends indicate that the Post is winning the war for readers who don’t have time to go in-depth with ROB.

Consider the views of Paul Goldstein, a chartered financial consultant who reads both Report on Business and The Financial Post. He used to read ROB throughout the work week and the Post on Saturdays. He felt the Globe was the stronger paper until a couple of years ago. “I kept hearing of things that were in The Financial Post that I needed to know. I was having to run to the library to get stuff the Globe should have had.” The Globe’s lacklustre performance eventually persuaded Goldstein to subscribe to The Financial Post daily.

Goldstein’s kind of complaint is common among ROB detractors. Over the past couple of years, they argue, the analytical style has hampered the effective communication of comprehensive business news. As the reader survey showed, many of them are turning to the Postas the authoritative source for business news. “The Post was whipping us on scoops,” says David Olive. “The ROBshould be a definitive, comprehensive journal of record of business activity. That is the franchise that was created in 1962, but we moved away from that. That’s the kind of minutiae that we stopped,” says Olive of the pre-expansion ROB. A number of factors contributed to the migration away from news coverage. One was the recession’s effect on ROB news space, which decreased to almost a third of its 1987 size. The other was editor-in-chief William Thorsell’s hiring of Wente, whose new ideas tended toward analysis and paralleled his own. Wente could not both introduce her initiatives and maintain extensive coverage of the news. Although reporters were still reporting on the news, analysis was awarded the limited ROB space.

The recent ROBexpansion is an attempt to bridge the gap with readers whose first need is business news, while at the same time maintaining the good writing featured in other, less newsy forms of stories. Ads for the expansion use the catchphrase “more,” and so does Wente when she outlines the expansion. “We added more Canadian news; we added more international news; we added a page of Wall Street Journalnews as part of our international coverage; we added more investing news.”

Such additions may not solve every problem. Goldstein says he finds the new Globelayout confusing. He does not like the divisions between international and national business news, as he feels the business community transcends national borders. He finds that there is too much paper to wade through and is disturbed rather than satisfied by the expansion. “You don’t know what to read. You don’t know what you’re missing,” he says, “It’s very unsettling to read the paper with all these sections. The Financial Postis very, very clear.’ The story of how ROB and The Financial Post got tangled in their current fight for business readers really begins back in February of 1962, when the Globe launched Canada’s first full-fledged business section. Initially, ROB ran only on Tuesdays and Fridays, but by 1967 it was appearing every day. Through the 1970s, ROB editor Ian Carman headed up the expansion of the paper’s business coverage; the writing was dry and noncritical, but ROB was respected as a news-driven journal of record. In 1983, Tim Pritchard, who had worked under Carman since 1974, took over as editor. He doubled the number of ROB reporters from about 15 to about 30, started including more features and worked to liven up and improve the quality of writing in the section. Even so, ROB largely avoided the kind of analytical journalism that characterized the rest of The Globe and Mail. In the 1990s, under editor Peter Cook, followed by Wente, ROB began to include more background, features and analysis-fulfilling Thorsell’s vision of the paper as a daily magazine.

Meanwhile, over at The Financial Post, a new era began in October 1987. After an 80-year history as a weekly, the paper was sold for $46 million by owner Maclean Hunter, which owns 60 percent of Toronto Sun Publishing, to media mogul Conrad Black, CEO of Hollinger; Douglas Creighton, then Toronto Sun president; and The Financial Times of London CEO Frank Barlow. They formed The Financial Post Company, owned by The Toronto Sun (60 percent), Hollinger (15 percent) and The Financial Times of London (25 percent). The plan to go daily was risky and expensive. After all, in 1987, Report on Business was at the peak of its success, and there were no guarantees that readers and advertisers would accept another business daily.

To define its own niche, the new edition of The Financial Post was completely redesigned as a tabloid, which was a radical approach in business journalism. And the editorial focus was strictly on business news, leaving the weekend edition to cover the broad political social and economic issues that had given the original weekend Post its reputation as a “thinking man’s paper.” By an unfortunate fluke of timing, the Post announced the plan to go daily on October 2, 1987-a mere three weeks before the worst stock market crash since Black Monday in 1929. After the ’87 crash, advertising dried up, placing the new Post in an extremely precarious position. However, the Post launched as planned on February 2, 1988. Competitors figured that the daily, was doomed and adopted the view of the Post as the underdog. “But the underdog is not an underdog,” says David Olive. “The Globe and Mail has revenues of about $200 million, and our rival, The Financial Post, is part of a company worth a couple of billion dollars.”

Not only does it have the financial backing, but the little tabloid, which just celebrated its eighth anniversary, has proven itself to be a feisty competitor. It survived the recession and now threatens The Globe and Mail in the battle for advertising dollars. In this area, the two papers are fighting over a similar set of clients. Many advertisers, including Bell Mobility, Lexus, Fidelity Investments and American Express, find that both papers deliver the audience demographics they desire. On any given day, 60 percent of the readers of both papers are what industry trade jargon calls MOPEs-managers, owners, professionals and executives. They’re the readers most attractive to advertisers because they have the high disposable incomes and the decision-making power over the purchase of many office products and services.

So far, Report on Business is winning the war for advertisers. (And a good thing, too, as the Globe officially admits that 50 percent of its total ad revenues are generated by ROB.) The Globe is particularly strong in career ads, averaging 120 pages every month, despite the fact that it charges almost twice the rates of The Financial Post Careers, which averages 35 pages every month. ROB has the advantage because it has a higher primary circulation. The Globe estimates that 70 percent of all Globe buyers, which works out to approximately 220,000 people, read ROB every day. This compares to 75,000 who buy the daily edition of The Financial Post (Tuesday to Friday) and 194,000 who buy the weekend Post.ROBhas also been traditionally seen in the business community as the “first read” in business news. But to charge its premium advertising rates, Report on Businessmust maintain its front-running position with readers. The Post’s apparent gain on the Globe is threatening ROB’s status as the number one business read and jeopardizing ROB’s share of the advertising market. Who will win out in the end? Circulation numbers will decide. The complicating factor here is that it’s not easy to make a direct and fair comparison of the two papers’ circulation performance. For starters, most statements of ROB circulation are estimates based on research into the general Globe audience and involve some guesswork. And even general Globe numbers can’t be compared directly to general Post numbers, as the two papers are audited by different agencies-The Financial Post daily by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the weekend Postand the Globeby the Print Measurement Bureau.

Given this situation and the high stakes of the competitive game, the publishers of both papers show distinct bias in their interpretation of various figures-and are quick to attack the credibility of the other guy’s numbers. Douglas Knight, publisher and CEO of The Financial Post, does not accept the Globe’s PMB-generated paid circulation of 313,627 copies-even though this is an audited number and even though PMB audits the Post’s weekend paper. “They aren’t part of ABC,” says Doug Knight, “which is really important because they then count stuff as paid circulation that the rest of us aren’t allowed to count.” The “stuff” is what the Globe refers to as its “blue-chip corporate subscriptions”: 51,211 copies sent to airlines, corporations and hotels at a sharply reduced rate. Knight feels that the Globe won’t join ABC because it wants to continue to pad its readership with the corporate distribution.

So Knight feels that PMB is a crutch for the Globe-but his paper is willing to use PMB figures to its own advantage. The Financial Post daily (audited by ABC) has about half the circulation of the weekend paper (audited by PMB). However, an aggressive 1995 Financial Post advertising package announced that “PMB now shows The Financial Post with its highest readership ever-709,000!” The number quoted is the pass-along circulation (which the PMB calculates by assuming that 3.5 people read each copy of the paper sold) of the weekend edition, but the text conveniently fails to specify that the PMB only audits the Post’s weekend paper, thus creating an impression that 709,000 is the Post’s daily circulation. After this advertising went out, the Globe received advertiser complaints about its high rates. ROB retaliated by putting together information for its advertisers that tactfully accuses the Post of lying. Grant Crosbie, general manager of The Globe and Mail, feels that the Post daily won’t join PMB because that would only dilute the numbers it now claims for the PMB-audited weekend edition-and, by sly manipulation, for the daily as well.

The Globe and Mail’s publisher, Roger Parkinson, also uses audited numbers as ammunition for advertisers. He tells me that 1.1 million people read the Globedaily. This audited number, which averages the PMB’s figure for paid circulation of the paper from Monday to Saturday and factors in a pass-along circulation of 3.5 people per copy, is the circulation figure used to attract advertisers. But Parkinson stretches the number even further when he tells me that by the end of the week, the cumulative Globecirculation is 2.1 million readers.

Perhaps the persistent inflation of circulation numbers is symptomatic of both papers’ desperate need to retain advertisers. ROB advertising is so crucial to The Globe and Mail that the paper has decided on the major expansion of that section while committing no new resources to the rest of the paper. Wente and Parkinson say that the ROB expansion aims to cement the paper’s current circulation lead in the business community and build it up some more. “Strengthening our bond with the core business readership is extremely important to us for a of different reasons,” says Wente. She also mentions that the results of the 1995 reader survey showed that readers rated ROB’s business coverage fairly highly. “So their opinion of us hadn’t changed,” says Wente, “but we have more competition in the marketplace; that’s the factor that had changed.”

And this has become a direct competition, playing out right down at the level of day-to-day reporting. “Inside, we think we have to beat them,” says reporter Casey Mahood. “Inside, there’s a mandate to beat them on every single story every single day. When Parkinson announced the expansion, he said he wanted us to blow the Post out of the water. I don’t know whether we believe that’s possible.” Whether it’s possible or not, the aggressive tone is new to the Globe, which has historically dismissed the threat posed by the Post, mainly because of the fact that the Post has not had a profitable year since going daily. Although publisher Doug Knight reports that his paper logged several profitable months in 1995, Wente laughs off the suggestion that the Post has reached a stage of stable profits. “They’ve been saying that for the last five years,” she says.

Until the Post can prove itself long-term profitable, ROB will be able to argue that it is winning the war. Profitability is the key to determining whether or not Canada can support two business dailies. It may also be the key to building a loyal staff at The Financial Post-who won’t jump ship in future raids. “Every day you used to come into work and you’d never know if the padlocks were going to be on the door,” says Post reporter Scott Haggett. Now, he says, confidence is increasing and morale is improving. Staff has recovered from last summer’s raid, and the vacancies at FP were filled quickly by senior journalists. Post managers are confident that their readers won’t be impressed with the expanded ROB.

At Report on Business, it’s too early to tell whether “more news” and “more content” will attract “more readers”. But clearly a lot is at stake. “This is a battle we can’t lose,” says David Olive, “because the whole paper dies if we fail.”

The wire machines flash bells-the sound that signalled the biggest stories had been ringing all afternoon. The high-pitched noise penetrated every corner of the crowded Toronto Telegram newsroom. The area where the machines were located, just off the big, high-ceilinged newsroom, was packed with reporters smoking and staring silently at the the four teletypes. There was no sense of panic but the atmosphere was tense and electric-everyone knew that the biggest story of their lives had just occurred. Editor-in-chief Doug MacFarlane shouted to his new assistant city editor, Jerry Pratt, “Go down and stop the presses.” “How do I do that?” Pratt asked. “Stick your goddamned fingers in it if you have to!” MacFarlane yelled. It was late afternoon, November 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald had just been arrested for the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy.

The first wire reports had been confusing and contradictory. An almost overwhelming number of stories needed writing: the reactions of Robert Kennedy and Prime Minister Lester Pearson; the stock market’s plummet before its early close; Lyndon Johnson’s swearing-in. Time was running short: many east-coast papers had been putting together their final editions when Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Doug Creighton, then an assistant city editor, remembers that day: “MacFarlane grabbed the city editor, Art Cole, and said, ‘I’m going to help you.”‘ Translation: Get the hell out of my way. “He put on a marvellous performance. He was saying this and doing that. He remembered everything he’d said and checked back a couple of minutes later to make sure it was being done.”

MacFarlane tore out pages and pages of the paper’s previous edition, even the usually sacred ads, and laid out and constantly revised the final. He had already ordered three or four replatings by the time of Oswald’s arrest. In the end, he filled 12 pages with the story. More importantly, the Telegram beat its hated rival, The Toronto Star, to the street by 20 minutes. Telegram reporter Jock Carroll called it “one of the last great virtuoso performances of its kind.”

It was also MacFarlane’s last virtuoso performance at the paper. Since taking the top editorial position in 1952, he had made his name as the toughest, smartest, loudest editor in Canada. His initials, JDM-James Douglas MacFarlane-were the most famous in the business. He led the Tely in the country’s final newspaper war, and for a while it seemed his underdog paper might actually upset the bigger, richer, more arrogant Star. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination, though, MacFarlane’s legend was beginning to fade. He would be at the paper for six more years, but his glory days were behind him. When the publisher, John Bassett, realized this and fired him, MacFarlane was almost destroyed.

Creighton remembers that day as well. It was October 14, 1969, and MacFarlane had just returned from a convention in Bermuda when Bassett walked into his office. “Bassett told him this was the end of the game,” recalls Creighton. “Everyone was in shock.” The most shocked was MacFarlane. For 20 years he had been at the Tely; he had put in 12-hour days, sacrificing his health for the paper. Bassett did not return the loyalty-the severance was $15,000 per year when MacFarlane turned 65 (still a dozen years away), but only if he agreed never to work for any Toronto paper or The Canadian magazine. “That ends my career here,” MacFarlane protested. “That’s the way it is,” Bassett calmly replied, then turned and walked out.

MacFarlane had been fired in a similarly high-profile way a quarter of a century earlier. In 1940, he had volunteered for the army and gone overseas as an officer in the public relations department. The top brass decided in 1944 that the troops in Europe needed a newspaper to boost morale. Twenty-eight-year-old Major J.D. MacFarlane, by virtue of having seven years’ experience as a reporter at The Windsor Daily Star and The Toronto Star before the war, was made managing editor of The Maple Leaf-a position for which he was awarded the MBE in 1946.

At war’s end, the army began returning men by unit, meaning that some who had been in Europe six months were going home before soldiers who had been fighting six years. Outraged by the obvious unfairness, MacFarlane wrote a page-one editorial slamming the policy. Within hours of the paper’s distribution he was called to headquarters to explain. As he left the Maple Leaf offices, he handed a second editorial on the subject, equally as damning, to a reporter and ordered that it also go on page one. By the time it ran the next day, MacFarlane had been fired.

When MacFarlane returned to Toronto, the Star offered him his old Queen’s Park beat at the same pay. Thinking his Maple Leaf experience should have earned him something better, he rejected this job and headed half a block west to The Globe and Mail. He started as copy editor, but just three months later was made city editor. In 1949, Globe publisher George McCullagh bought Toronto’s third-place daily, the moribund Toronto Telegram. His first move was asking MacFarlane to come to the Tely as city editor; MacFarlane said yes after McCullagh agreed to pay him a managing editor’s salary. McCullagh’s next move was bringing in another former army major, John Bassett, as advertising director.

The paper needed all the talent it could get. As MacFarlane later recalled, “The whole weight of the news coverage at the Telegram then was way out of balance. They were still clinging to the idea that the Orange Order was the important force in the world and devoting pages and pages to things like the July 12 walk.” MacFarlane changed that. On one of his first days, he entered the newsroom and saw reporters eating lunch and playing cards while a fire burned in western Toronto. “If, within five seconds, I see one person in his chair, he is fired!” MacFarlane roared. The room emptied in four.

Six months into MacFarlane’s reign, circulation had risen from 200,000 to 260,000. The growth was in part due to the Tely’s coverage of stories like the Boyd Gang. Since 1949, the city had been captivated by the antics of the bank-robbing foursome. Three members were arrested in 1951, but quickly escaped from the Don Jail. While on the loose, two of them shot and killed a police officer. The police captured them a second time in March 1952. The first newspapermen on the scene of the second arrest were a Tely photographer and its police reporter, a young Doug Creighton. Amazingly, the gang escaped from the Don Jail again, and as former Tely and Star reporter Val Sears recounts in his book Hello Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite, “Doug MacFarlane ordered everyone in the city room,’Get the hell out and find Boyd.”‘ The Telegram got an exclusive interview with the leader Eddie Boyd’s wife. When the gang was finally arrested in a North York barn, the Tely scooped the Star again: the story in Eddie Boyd’s own words.

When McCullagh died in 1952, Bassett set up a trust to buy the Tely. He became publisher and MacFarlane managing editor. So began what MacFarlane would remember as “the days of whoop-de-do.”

In August 1954, the city was scandalized following the bloody murder of a 17-year-old girl. No one was arrested; the local and provincial police were stumped. MacFarlane’s decision was genius: the Tely brought in the former chief of Scotland Yard murder squad, the legendary sleuth Robert Fabian. Everyone in Toronto was soon talking about “Fabian of the Yard,” but the Star couldn’t cover the story without publicizing the Tely. It ran small stories that predicted-correctly, as it turned out-that Fabian wouldn’t solve the murder. However, he succeeded in boosting circulation: two days into the story, it leapt to 60,000. When Fabian returned to Britain, the paper held on to 10,000 of those readers.

A month later, MacFarlane was even more brilliant. In September 1954, 16-year-old Marilyn Bell was attempting to become the first person to swim Lake Ontario. The Tely was late to realize how big the story would be, and by that time the Star had signed Bell to an exclusive contract. “The Star had the girl,” MacFarlane recalled years later. “The best way I had of competing is what is now called probably over-reacting. It was to blanket the story, take over the story, and make everybody feel it really is ours. In line with this, I figured that if we could get every reporter that was anywhere involved in this, and they would contribute whatever they heard Marilyn say yesterday or today or at any time during the swim to [reporter] Dorothy Howarth, who would do an overall first-person story. But we had to do something to make it reasonably authentic.” MacFarlane ordered a reporter to Bell’s school to get her signed name from the inside front cover of one of her text books. “We didn’t say’By Marilyn Bell’ on the article, we just ran her signature ‘Marilyn Bell’ and then with Marilyn’s own story. In the meantime the Star was so exhausted in protecting her that nobody got around to writing the real story that they paid a lot of money for.” (Years later Bell told MacFarlane, “I liked my story better in the Tely than I did in the Star.”) Late in life MacFarlane would say of that signature, “I had no trouble justifying it at the time, but I sure as hell do now.” He was probably very relieved in retrospect that another part of his plan didn’t succeed. He sent Howarth dressed as a nurse in the back of an ambulance to the spot Bell was to come ashore. The idea was to trick Bell’s aides into putting her into the Tely ambulance, then to spirit her away. In essence, to kidnap her. At the last moment a Star reporter recognized Howarth and foiled the scheme.

A month after that, the city was being ravaged by what is still the worst natural disaster in Toronto’s history. On October 15, 1954, both the Tely and the Star carried only small warnings about Hurricane Hazel. But that evening MacFarlane left the office only to have the pounding rain and wind force him back. He didn’t get home for three days. All Toronto’s rivers were flooded, sweeping dozens to their deaths. Cars and houses were picked up and carried for miles. Lake Simcoe overflowed and swamped Holland Marsh, north of the city. When the storm subsided, MacFarlane, envisioning a great headline, sent Sears out in a helicopter with orders to “rescue someone” from the floods; the Star had Buck Johnston out in a plane trying the same thing. Neither succeeded, but the Star, with more reporters and more money, didn’t match the coverage of the Tely’s Creighton, Sears and Philip Murphy.

In style, MacFarlane was the stereotypical tough newsman mixed with an ex-army officer. “He had a kind of military attitude about running things,” says Toronto Sun columnist Bob MacDonald. MacFarlane could be physically intimidating?he was six-foot-two, with the shoulders of a Dallas Cowboy lineman and the temper to match. As John Downing, now the Sun editor, recalls, “He didn’t suffer fools gladly. A reporter who didn’t use his head would be something that would infuriate him.” Many times MacFarlane reduced lazy reporters to tears. A favourite of his was the intercom system, known as the squawk box. If MacFarlane found something in the paper he didn’t like, the managing editor would hear the machine scream. “He’d say, ‘There’s a story on page 12 of the Star, why haven’t we got it?”‘ remembers Andy MacFarlane (no relation). “I’d say, ‘On page one we got an exclusive, the Star didn’t have that.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, that’s what I pay you for.’ MacFarlane compared what we’d done with what they’d done and complained bitterly if we hadn’t done as well.”

Another device he used was the daily assessment notice, which he pinned to the newsroom bulletin board. The notices critiqued the day’s paper, sarcastically pointing out what MacFarlane felt was missing; occasionally he might compliment a reporter on a good story. (MacFarlane knew someone leaked the notices to the Star, so he intentionally misspelled the name of that paper’s top columnist, Pierre Berton, whenever it came up.) A reporter who was a target of MacFarlane’s wrath might find it hard to believe, as Doug Creighton does, that MacFarlane’s bullying style was in part an act. “He read somewhere that fear makes it work. He practiced that from time to time, although actually it was contrived on his part because he was quite warm-hearted once you knew him.”

Which is what you might expect of a minister’s son. MacFarlane was born in Ottawa on October 4, 1916, the third of four children. (The youngest, George, worked at the Tely and helped get the Bell story.) The family moved to Chatham when MacFarlane was a child. In high school he was a great athlete, particularly in football, but classes bored him and, after twice failing Grade 13, he left school when he was 17. He volunteered at the Chatham bureau of The Border Cities Star (now The Windsor Star), although soon the other reporters were paying him $2 a week out of their own pockets. In the late thirties he got a job with The Toronto Star covering the provincial parliament. In 1940, MacFarlane married Kathleen (Kay) Kendrick, a Chatham girl, to whom he would stay lovingly devoted until her death more than 50 years later.

His other great object of devotion was his job. “What always motivated him,” recalls Downing, “was to get the news right and to get it first and to fuck the Globe and the Star.” During these years, he was at the paper 12 hours each day and he expected others to work as hard as he did. It was characteristic of him that, when he suffered a debilitating stroke in his office in 1960, he demanded the attendants take him out the back so the staff wouldn’t see him. He was seriously affected: for a while afterward he was unable to write his own name, which depressed him greatly; when he went for a stroll around the neighbourhood, he needed the help of his six-year-old twin sons. Yet just four months later he was back on the job, working as hard as ever.

By the middle of the decade, though, MacFarlane’s fierce drive wasn’t enough to keep him ahead of the times. A former Tely staffer, then in his 20s, recalls sitting with Andy MacFarlane one day when JDM’s voice boomed out of the squawk box. “Andy, I see we have a picture of Marilyn Monroe on page one.” “Yes, sir.” “Someone has cropped it at the neck. In the next edition, make sure that photo is uncropped.” In the whoop-de-do fifties, cheesecake had been just the thing to keep the Tely competitive. Now it was passe. Readers were more sophisticated-they wanted substance. The Tely’s circulation began to slide, as did its reportorial edge. In 1966, the paper was humiliated when the Star broke the story of Gerda Munsinger. She was the former German prostitute who had had a long-term affair with a minister in John Diefenbaker’s cabinet and who was rumoured dead. The Star’s Bob Reguly and Ray Timson tracked her down quite alive in Munich. In 1968, the Tely, which had always been profitable under MacFarlane, lost $1 million. The loss was similar the next year. Bassett didn’t wait to see if MacFarlane’s edge would return.

MacFarlane may have been devastated, but a number of his colleagues-including some people he had personally hired-were not. “I was quite happy when he got fired, because I got promoted,” recalls John Downing frankly. “And I remember a celebratory party-it wasn’t to say ‘the wicked witch is dead,’ but we all got together in saying, ‘Isn’t it nice that we’ve now got better jobs.'”

MacFarlane spent the next year organizing a diamond jubilee for his sons’ private school, Appleby College. (Neither Richard nor Robert, now 41, has chosen to follow their father’s path in journalism. Richard is a records clerk with Metro Toronto and is currently writing a biography of his father. Robert is a Kitchener lawyer.) MacFarlane was then saved from underemployment by one of the former Tely men who had toasted his firing. In early 1971, John Downing was heading a committee to find a new chairman of the Ryerson journalism school. The member felt that the applicants were okay but wished they had someone with a larger reputation. Downing approached MacFarlane. JDM’s pride was still intact: he told Downing that with his stature he shouldn’t have to go through the normal application process. The committee readily agreed and offered him the job. Some of the faculty were less enthusiastic about the arrival of the legendary JDM. At their first meeting with him, they told him he was not to deal with them as he had dealt with his reporters. “They figured they better get Doug MacFarlane before he got them,” recalls Downing. They needn’t have worried. Miriam Maguire, MacFarlane’s secretary at the time, recalls that he always brought her a present when he got back from his yearly cruises. When her son was born, MacFarlane threw a surprise baby shower. “He always made me feel good,” she says. “He was a real gentleman with wonderful manners.” Joyce Douglas, an instructor since 1969, recalls that MacFarlane sent her a handwritten note of condolence when her husband died. “I’ll always remember the gentleness with which he treated me.”

MacFarlane was a different man with the students too. One day when he was being visited by an old colleague from the Tely, student Mark Bonokoski (now the Ottawa Sun editor) walked into MacFarlane’s office. He slapped MacFarlane on the back and asked, “How you doing, sir?” MacFarlane smiled and the two began chatting. The old visitor couldn’t believe that some young punk would be so familiar with the ferocious JDM. “He seemed to be able to generate a respect, reaching to affection, even almost to love,” says Downing, “as much as you can ever get in love with journalism professors. I was quite proud of what our search committee did.” MacFarlane’s presence immediately boosted the school’s reputation. He changed the theoretical program into a more practical one. Current Toronto Sun columnist Christie Blatchford remembers, “He was intimidating. Kind of scary at first. He set high standards for doing journalism properly. I think he enjoyed working with young people. I think he found it inspiring to be with some of us.” At Ryerson MacFarlane influenced, among others The Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno, Dave Perkins and Alan Christie, CityTV’s Jojo Chintoh and CBC TV reporters Tom Kennedy and Paul Workman, just as at the Tely a generation earlier he had mentored the likes of Creighton, Sears and Peter Worthington.

They were no doubt on his mind when the Tely folded in October 1971. MacFarlane was genuinely saddened by the death of the paper. “I can’t say how badly I feel about the death of the Telegram. You can replace a lot of material things, but a metropolitan newspaper is irreplaceable.”

When MacFarlane’s five-year contract at Ryerson expired in 1976, he fully expected to sign a new one. Then Doug Creighton, publisher of The Toronto Sun, called and asked him to join that paper in a senior editorial position. MacFarlane accepted. The irony was that he had been asked to replace Creighton as publisher two years earlier. Some inside the Sun felt that Creighton wasn’t keeping a tight enough rein on the newsroom, and big JDM was the man to do just that. Eddie Goodman, a lawyer who had arranged a lot of the money to launch the Sun in 1971, took MacFarlane out for lunch in 1974. “Would you consider being publisher of the Sun?” “You’ve already got a publisher,” MacFarlane replied sternly. “What if we didn’t?” Goodman asked. “I’m not prepared to deal in ‘what-ifs,'” MacFarlane said. He had never liked connivers and backstabbers and was not going to do to Creighton what he felt was done to him at the Tely five years earlier.

The Sun in 1976 had Creighton at the top, with three men just below him, each of whom saw himself as second-in-command: editor Peter Worthington, news director Hartley Steward and managing editor Ed Monteith. Creighton believed a war with the Star was rapidly approaching, and he felt that none of the three could see the Sun safely through. He reached back 20 years and hired JDM as editor-in-chief. Monteith, who had been a junior editor at the Tely under MacFarlane, offered the least resistance of the three. But Steward, who is now the Sun ‘s publisher, quit and eventually ended up at the Star. Worthington was more canny: as soon as he learned of MacFarlane’s hiring, he hurried to the composing room and had the masthead changed to read “Peter Worthington, Editor-In-Chief.” MacFarlane settled for the title “editorial director” and put his name at the bottom of the masthead, purposely outside the paper’s hierarchy.

Other staff members didn’t welcome MacFarlane either. “Some of the senior editors had worked with Doug MacFarlane in the old days and really didn’t like him,” Downing says. “They were determined not to let him make their life hell again. I was writing a column on page four, and I wasn’t about to take orders from Doug MacFarlane on anything. I was reporting directly to the publisher. And [page-five columnist Paul] Rimstead was out of control, no editor could tell him what to do. So Doug arrived at a newspaper where the first two columnists in the paper didn’t pay any attention to him.” The Sun newsroom split into pro- and anti-JDM factions, although Creighton was pro-JDM and that was all that really mattered. MacFarlane won over young reporters by speaking with them personally about his appointment. The anti-JDM group was made up of senior staff who considered MacFarlane a rival and resented having him parachuted in. “I’m sure he was one of the great newspapermen but his time was past,” Les Pyette, then the Sun’s city editor, told Jean Sonmor for her Sun history, The Little Paper That Grew.

Like at the Tely, MacFarlane wrote an assessment notice. The first began, “Before I was so rudely interrupted….” Some of the Sun staff, among them Bonokoski, began mocking MacFarlane with an “alternate” assessment notice. Whenever he read one, he would laugh-MacFarlane was a different man. And one who was no longer on his form.

“I didn’t notice until he got to the Sun, but he was not the tough operator that he was at the Tely,” says Creighton. “I think he professionalized the paper. I think the paper when he left was better than the paper he arrived at. But I thought he would be more dynamic.”

When MacFarlane turned 65 in 1981, he retired from the Sun. In Sonmor’s book, after pages and pages on MacFarlane’s arrival, his name comes up just twice, and his retirement isn’t mentioned at all. For the next five years he did PR for Royal LePage. MacFarlane was apparently glad to have a job, but he didn’t like all the paperwork and bureaucracy. And for someone who had headed a major paper, it was clearly a comedown. A year before he left, he suffered the further indignity of a position change that was in effect a demotion. It may have been some consolation that that same year he was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame. After retirement, MacFarlane stayed involved in the industry, judging the National Newspaper Awards and the Sun’s Dunlops. He filled his time playing golf at the Mississaugua Golf & Country Club or strolling down the veterans’ wing of Sunnybrook Hospital visiting the old soldiers.

But the man who used to storm into the Telegram offices was walking at a slower pace, with a measured step. On April 28, 1991, his beloved Kay died. MacFarlane had had a minor heart attack at the Sun in 1979; in February 1995, he suffered one that kept him in hospital for two weeks. The next attack, on April 27, killed him.

All three Toronto papers ran lengthy obituaries; two of them contained serious errors. The Star claimed he was survived by a daughter. The Sun wrote that his initial “J” stood for “John.” As editor, MacFarlane’s favourite saying had always been, “Get the news first, but get it right first.” The writers of these obits are lucky they didn’t have to face the anger of The Toronto Telegram ‘s legendary JDM.

John Miller’s phone rang on the morning of November 1995. The chair of the journalism school at Ryerson Polytechnic University picked up the receiver and found himself speaking with Toronto journalist Judy Steed. There wasn’t any small talk. Steed had something on her mind.

“Is it true that Gerald Hannon teaches journalism there?” she asked. “Yes,” replied Miller.

“Do you know he’s a well-known advocate of pedophilia?”

“I know he’s a gay activist. What’s your point?”

“I’m very surprised you hired such a person. Would you hire Ernst Zundel to teach journalism there too?”

“Ernst Zundel is not a journalist.”

“Yes he is. He publishes a newspaper.”

“He’s a pamphleteer. What’s your point? Hannon’s teaching journalism. Do you have any evidence that his personal views enter the classroom?”

“No….”

And Miller hadn’t received any student complaints about the part-time instructor.

Recalling that Steed had recently written a book, Our Little Secret, about the horrors of child abuse, he dismissed the call as a “personal thing.” He didn’t think he needed to investigate Steed’s concerns. No evidence, no student complaint, no problem, right?

Wrong. Miller didn’t know it, but his school was on the verge of a national scandal-a scandal sparked by Steed and fueled by Toronto Sun columnist Heather Bird, who not only shared Steed’s suspicions but decided to write about them. In a series of columns that ran from mid-November to early December, Bird systematically sought to portray Hannon not as a teacher of journalism who has radical personal beliefs, but as a dangerous peddler of perversion. Her crusade, enthusiastically supported by her right-wing newspaper in true tabloid style, cast Hannon and Ryerson into disrepute, launched a police investigation and triggered a public outcry. The question is, did Bird’s convictions uncover the truth or cause her to distort it? Thanks to her and the Sun’s relentless coverage, Gerald Hannon’s alleged misconduct became one of the year’s biggest stories. But perhaps the story that needs more scrutiny is whether that should have happened.

THE MAN AT THE CENTRE OF THE SCANDAL BEGAN HIS journalism career in 1972, when he started writing for a newly founded Toronto-based gay publication, The Body Politic. In 1977, Hannon penned an article for The Body Politic called “Men Loving Boys Loving Men,” arguing that man/boy sex isn’t always bad, but in fact can be based on mutual consent. Toronto Sun columnist Claire Hoy angrily drew attention to “Men Loving Boys” and as a result, Hannon and the publication wound up in court defending the decency of the article. It was almost six years before they were fully exonerated.

After The Body Politic closed down in 1987, Hannon embarked on a career as a magazine freelancer. He’s written about everything from Rita MacNeil to dog shows, has been published in Toronto Life, Saturday Night and Canadian Living and has won two National Magazine Awards. Almost five years ago, he began teaching magazine writing to night-school students at Ryerson. Then in January 1995, he switched to instructing a class for senior day-time students. But his views on man-boy sex and that article from 1977 weren’t forgotten by Judy Steed, now a Toronto Star reporter, who interviewed Hannon by telephone while researching Our Little Secret. It wasn’t until last November that she learned, from a student who contacted her on a student project, Hannon was teaching at Ryerson. She was surprised, to say the least. “He struck me as a nonjournalistic person because of his extreme views,” she explains. So, on November 9, she made that phone call to Miller.

Two days later, Miller attended the Toronto Women in the Media conference, at which Steed was speaking. As one of a panel examining how female journalists can overcome negative male attitudes, Steed said she’d felt bullied by Miller in their phone conversation about Hannon. She then took advantage of her public forum to mention that Hannon is an advocate of pedophilia and should not be teaching and influencing the minds of students. When the floor was opened for questions, Miller stood up and told Steed it was wrong for her to accuse Hannon if she didn’t have evidence of wrongdoing.

Their heated exchange, although cut short by the seminar’s mediator, was enough to pique the interest of Heather Bird, who happened to be in the audience. She approached Steed, told her she thought Hannon would be a good subject for her column, made a few calls, and three days later, on November 14, turned the writing teacher into “the professor of desire.”

“Should adults have sex with children?” her column began. “The answer, of course, is no. However, there is a Ryerson journalism teacher who begs to differ.” Introducing Hannon as someone who believes pedophilia can be healthy and “holds those beliefs out to his students as an example of how your convictions can make you a better journalist,” she quoted from a 1994 essay Hannon wrote for Xtra, a gay and lesbian newspaper. “I could never understand…how children’s hockey differed from an organized child-sex ring…Both involved danger. Both involved pleasure. Yet we approve of children’s hockey and deplore child-sex rings.” Bird said she confirmed with Hannon that he had indeed mentioned the subjects of child pornography and intergenerational sex in class. Hannon told her, “I don’t think any of my students were shocked. They are friendly and continue coming to class.”

Yet Bird claimed otherwise, insisting that, in fact, Hannon’s students were “profoundly unsettled by his beliefs,” and she quoted one anonymously as saying, “Teach me what you have to teach me and let me get out of here.” Not only were students “revolted” by Hannon’s views, wrote Bird, but “at least one of his colleagues has grave reservations.” Unable to draw those reservations from any active faculty members, however, Bird turned to Kathy English, a Ryerson teacher on a year’s sabbatical, who said, “I don’t think academic freedom gives you the right to spout off about anything.” On the basis of this evidence, Bird leaped to the conclusion that Hannon was using his position to persuade students to adopt his beliefs. She wrote, “There will be those who cite academic freedom to defend Hannon’s right to proselytize…The issue is whether the institution should grant him the platform to influence young minds.”

The words “proselytize” and “platform,” however unfounded, were too inflammatory to ignore. Bird’s column forced Ryerson to investigate Hannon’s classroom behaviour. Vice president of faculty and staff affairs Michael Dewson launched an investigation two days later, explaining that a formal complaint wasn’t needed-the Sun column was complaint enough. Hannon was surprised and upset by Bird’s attack. Sure, she’d called him a few days earlier, asking if he had brought up the issue of pedophilia in his class. But Hannon, just back from a trip to New York, was tired and unaware of Miller and Steed’s conversations. He understood that Bird was a Sun reporter; he didn’t know she was a columnist or think to ask what her story angle was. Trying to be honest, he stretched his mind back to recall a few instances in which he might have raised his views in class, but he had told Bird that all had been used strictly in the context of journalism, showing how people’s convictions-in this case, his-can help make their writing more compelling. (She obviously subscribes to the same policy.)

After reading Bird’s interpretation of the interview, Hannon flatly denied her allegation that he was trying to make converts of his students. He said it smacked of McCarthyism because she was attacking him for his personal beliefs and not for any inappropriate action he had taken. In fact, he thought her column could be used as an example for his students of the kind of journalism not to do. Hannon wasn’t worried about the Ryerson investigation. He said, “They’ll discover that what I allege and what my students allege is true-that my views do not enter the classroom and that I’m a good teacher worth keeping on.”

The majority of Hannon’s 26 senior students, all taking his class for the first time that year, apparently agreed. Nine students signed and sent a letter to the Sun and Bird, complaining about her column’s inaccuracies. Efforts were then made by the campus paper The Ryersonian to find out if some members of the class did have problems with Hannon but were afraid to go public, and if any students had talked with Bird. Of the 23 students contacted and offered anonymity by the newspaper, only one admitted to feeling uncomfortable in class because Hannon made numerous sexual references and talked openly about being gay. However, the student did not feel any pressure from the teacher to adopt his views.

The rest of those contacted had no complaints. Some had trouble remembering when, if ever, Hannon mentioned pedophilia; others recalled how he’d used it in reference to articles he’d written and the need to have a strong journalistic voice. Hannon once pointed out that he could write a good article to prove kiddie-porn isn’t always so bad, student Nicole Mortillaro told The Ryersonian. “We all did a double take of what he’d said. But he just mentioned it in passing.”

Only two students, Dan Brown and Christine Donnelly, said they’d spoken to Bird. They both gave her positive comments about Hannon, reflecting the general class opinion, but as Donnelly put it, “She wasn’t too interested in what I had to say.”

Bird says she tried to talk to 10 students and got through to five, three of whom were pro-Hannon and two were negative. Yet in her column, she chose to use only a negative quote and to leave the impression that many students were offended by Hannon’s views. Bird both defends and contradicts her selective use of the facts: “He’s not universally popular. There were students who were revolted by him and I did speak with two of them, but by and large, I mean, there’s no question he had a wide base of support.” Why didn’t his wide base of support get mentioned in that first column?

HEATHER BIRD WAS ONCE A RYERSON STUDENT HERSELF. SHE graduated from the journalism program in 1980 and has been a working journalist ever since. She’s spent time at The Toronto Star and The Ottawa Sun, written two books and, she’s quick to add, has never been sued. For the past year and a half, she’s been writing her opinions three times a week in The Toronto Sun. Her column is wide-ranging, well written and, like all Sun commentaries, it springs from an unquestioning sense of right and wrong. She defends the Little Guy and denounces things she feels are morally repugnant, such as Keith Legere, whom she has described as “an incurable pedophile who has been convicted of manslaughter.” Of course, Legere is a criminal. Gerald Hannon is not. He is just a freelance writer and journalist whose opinions go against Bird’s standards of decency. Even so, she wasn’t what anybody would consider a genuine “crusade” journalist until she targeted him again.

Four days after her first Hannon column, Bird wrote about an organization called the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). She stated that NAMBLA’s motto was “Sex before eight or it’s too late,” adding that the association’s views on adult child sex coincide with Hannon’s. Unfortunately, she hadn’t bothered to confirm these facts with him. If she had, she’d have learned that the motto she credited to NAMBLA actually belongs to an obscure pedophilia group, the Ren? Guyon Society. She would have also found out Hannon doesn’t agree with the credo. “It always struck me as such a ludicrous phrase. It’s prescriptive, and I don’t like prescriptive attitudes toward sex.”

Bird blames her motto mix-up on an unidentified source. “If you’re telling me it’s wrong,” she says, “I take responsibility for it. That was taken from some documents which were sent to me…It came from people who work in the field, and they were professionals, and I took their word for it, and clearly that was wrong.”(Oddly, Judy Steed made the exact same error, attributing the motto to NAMBLA in a letter she wrote to The Globe and Mail. Steed’s letter and Bird’s column both appeared on November 18.)

Lorrie Goldstein, the Sun’s senior associate editor, who oversees much of the editorial content of the newspaper, finds no fault with Bird’s Hannon coverage. “There are certain rules-get your facts right and then write what you think and say it honestly. On this one, I thought we did an excellent job.” Okay, but what if you don’t get your facts right and still write what you think?

Rosie DiManno, a columnist for The Toronto Star and a good friend of Bird’s, doesn’t criticize Bird’s columns on Hannon. But she does advise all journalists to do some thinking before they dive into a story. “Are we just going after somebody without proof?” she asks. “Is that fair? Are we falsely keeping a story alive instead of admitting that we were wrong in the first place?”

Seven days after accusing Hannon of proselytizing when the majority of his students denied it, three days after linking him to a pedophilia credo he doesn’t support, Bird reached back two decades to find a fresh angle to her story.

Bird questioned a passage from “Men Loving Boys” that describes a sexual encounter he’d overheard between a 12-year-old boy and an older man. She asked Hannon, during a November 18 debate on CBC Newsworld’s On the Line, if he’d written the truth. “I don’t write fiction. It happened,” replied Hannon. Bird’s next column, on November 21, reported that Hannon had “confessed to participating in a child sex assault,” and therefore could be charged with aiding and abetting, inciting a minor to participating in sexual acts and conspiracy. She also said that without a complainant, it would be hard to make criminal charges stick.

She was right on that front. Although the police did launch an investigation (which, interestingly, the Sun was first to report-in the very same issue as Bird’s column), they dropped it after less than a week, concluding that pursuing the issue without sufficient evidence was not in the public’s best interest.

Perhaps Heather Bird reached the same conclusion. Having cast suspicions on Hannon’s past and present (suspicions that were echoed across Canada on television, radio and in other papers), even she could not think of anything more to say. On the day of her third and, she thought, last Hannon column, she went to the Toronto neighbourhood of Forest Hill to do an interview for an unrelated story. She finished around six o’clock and started driving south to the Sun building. She was going a little too fast when she rounded a downtown corner and, to her horror, saw the front wheel of a bicycle. At the last minute, she swerved, missing the cyclist by less than six inches. Her heart racing from the close call, Bird looked at the cyclist she’d almost run down: it was Gerald Hannon.

A week later, it was Hannon’s bad luck to cross the Sun’s path again. Rosemary O’Connor, secretary to Sun editor John Downing, was sifting through the mail on November 24 when she noticed something a little out of the ordinary. Inside a local arts magazine, Fuse, that had come addressed to Downing, O’Connor saw a picture of Gerald Hannon. He was naked and in bed with a young man (who the Sun reported, was 21 years old). She approached Bird about the picture. “Heather,”she asked, “isn’t this the guy you’ve been writing about?” “Yeah,” said Bird. “It is.”

From the Fuse article, Bird learned that the photo was a still from a low-budget art film in which Hannon played a prostitute. The story was turned over to Sun reporter Thane Burnett, who, in turn, called Gerald Hannon about the film. During the interview, Burnett asked him if he worked as a prostitute.

And Hannon said yes.

After two weeks of inaccurate, sensationalized reporting, the Sun finally had a story. The next day, the frontpage headline gloated “Ryerson Prof: I’m a Hooker.” Bird’s fourth column called Hannon a “provocative old bugger” and “the chief architect of his own misfortune”(as if she hadn’t laid the groundwork for his fall). With the Sun’s startling discovery, Ryerson suspended Hannon, pending a second investigation into his conduct. Even some of Hannon’s most ardent supporters began to lose faith, feeling he lacked discretion, first by answering the question, and then by entering the media limelight to discuss his prostitution. John Miller, who’d backed Hannon from the beginning, began to waver. He told The Ryersonian, “I feel that the journalism department is being used as a platform for Gerald’s views, and that is unfair.” He also felt betrayed that Hannon never told him about being a prostitute. Atleast two other faculty members already knew. Some of Hannon’s students also felt betrayed by his admission. Under the university’s suspension, Hannon was unable to attend his last class, was banned from campus, was told to have no contact with his students and was asked to hand over all the students’ unmarked assignments. “It’s selfish for me to say that he could have thought of us first,” says student Nicole Mortillaro. “But he could have refused comment and he chose not to.”

So why in the world did Hannon tell the Sun he was a prostitute? “It was clear in my mind where Burnett was going to end up,” says Hannon. “Finally, he just came out and said, ‘Are you in fact a prostitute?’ and I made the decision to be truthful. If I denied it or no-commented on it there could have been a huge amount of innuendo in the paper about what does this really mean. When the Sun is going to run with my personal life, I’m not going to let them.” Later he offered further explanation, “Prostitution is not something I’m ashamed of. I’d rather be remembered as foolish than a liar.”

Bird doesn’t buy Hannon’s explanation of his candour. In fact, in her next column, she described his admission as “gratuitous.” When Thane picked up the phone, we didn’t know Hannon was a prostitute,” she says. “If there had been a no-comment, there would have been no story. At that point we didn’t have anything to prove that it was true other than, at best, a secondary source [the magazine].” But lack of proof hadn’t hindered Bird’s earlier columns. After two weeks of hounding the man, would the Sun really have ignored the picture of Hannon naked in bed with another man? After Hannon held a press conference on November 27 to answer questions about his suspension from Ryerson, Bird wrote a fifth column, saying he’d “adopted the demeanor of a wounded virgin.” Then came her sixth column, on December 2, which she said would be “the final word (one hopes) from this space on Ryerson’s philosophical pederast (or, if you prefer, peddle-your-ass) professor.” Sun readers could have found “pederast” listed in the dictionary as a synonym for “pedophile.” Bird went on to mock a pro-Hannon opinion piece written by one of his students, Adam Hunt, in The Ryersonian, calling it a perfect example of how a student can be swayed by a charismatic teacher.

In all, between November 14 and December 21, when Ryerson concluded its investigation, the Sun ran 13 news stories by 10 different reporters, one editorial, one “You Said It” streeter piece and seven columns talking about Gerald Hannon. (To balance Bird’s six Hannon diatribes, there was one by Christie Blatchford in his defense.) By contrast, the Star ran five Hannon news stories plus four opinion pieces; the Globe ran five news stories and three columns. Both papers published an editorial on the subject. The Sun’s coverage of Gerald Hannon was more than double that of the other Toronto dailies. Why?

Lorrie Goldstein would have us believe that “there’s an old rule of journalist: the other guy’s story-ignore it as much as you can.” Right. Check out the cat fights between the Sun and the Star to “get the story” during the infamous Karla Homolka publication ban.

Heather Bird would have us believe that “when any organization breaks a story, you’d tend to have more stories on it.” Not necessarily: Steve Tustin, deputy managing editor of the Star, says a newspaper that breaks a story simply gets a head start, not ownership of coverage.

Mike Strobel, city editor of the Sun, would have us believe that his paper “handled it pretty fairly…all we did is take the story and report it.” But in the beginning, there was no story. There were only Heather Bird’s suspicions and The Toronto Sun’s underlying agenda.

“Heather Bird does the kind of thing The Toronto Sun does,” says Michael Valpy, a columnist for the Globe. “It smokes out perversion wherever it can find it. It’s going to appeal to its redneck audience and that’s what it does. It’s horrible, a lot of it.” Valpy wrote one column defending Hannon’s right to teach.

Don Obe, director of the magazine stream at Ryerson and the man who recommended Hannon (a friend) for his Ryerson job, says the Sun’s coverage was “a smear campaign. It was a non-issue until Heather Bird’s column.” He still contends that Bird’s columns were “horseshit.” Bird has heard worse since she launched her anti-Hannon campaign. She’s been called a “gutter journalist” and told she’s got no integrity. “The left-liberal media elite has scorn for the right-wing, populist views the paper espouses,” she says. “And the people who don’t read it diss it.” Her editor does not care about the paper’s critics. “People have a right not to like us,” says Goldstein. “But they do take us seriously. Damn it, we’re saying things that maybe aren’t being said in the halls of academia a lot but are sure being said out on the street.” That doesn’t necessarily translate into good, accurate or fair journalism.

Five days before Christmas, Ryerson finished its two investigations into the activities of Gerald Hannon. First, it was found that he had not raised his views on pedophilia in class, and second, that his prostitution constituted behavior unbefitting a faculty member. Basically, Hannon got a slap on the wrist for talking about his prostitution with the media and was otherwise cleared of any wrongdoing. He returned to teach at Ryerson on January 8. The Toronto Sun was there too.

Heather Bird continues to believe, despite the results of the university investigation and the denials of Hannon and his students, that he was proselytizing: “The way that Gerald Hannon used his views and the way he described it to me in that original interview is that he was slipping them in,” she says. “He used the classroom as a chance to raise his views inappropriately and out of context.”

And what about Hannon? Does he wish he’d done anything differently during the scandal? He pauses, then slowly answers, “I don’t think so, other than maybe not talking to Heather Bird in the first place.”

Would it have made a difference?

Hoy Hating “Men Loving Boys Loving Men”

Gerald Hannon is no stranger to Toronto journalist Claire Hoy. “My good ol’ buddy, Gerry,” says Hoy sarcastically. Now a host on CBC Newsworld’s Face Off and one of the nation’s most outspoken right-wing media personalities, Hoy, not Heather Bird, was actually the first Toronto Sun columnist to take a bite out of Gerald Hannon.

It was 1977, a time when gay activists were pushing to change the Ontario Human Rights Code to include “sexual orientation,” and a time when most of the public was still shocked and angered by the sexual assault and murder of a 12-year-old shoeshine boy by four Toronto men. Claire Hoy was enjoying the second year of his 13-year stint as a columnist for the Sun when a friend showed him a copy of The Body Politic and pointed to a story by Gerald Hannon-“Men Loving Boys Loving Men.” The article infuriated Hoy. On December 22, The Toronto Sun’s front page read “Homosexual Horror Story”; inside, Hoy’s column centered on Hannon, his “vile” article about man-boy love, and why The Body Politic was receiving government funding to promote homosexual relationships with children.

“It’s sick,” says Hoy, 18 years later. “It’s a twisted view. It’s screwing little kids, pure and simple.” He’s glad Sun columnist Heather Bird brought Gerald Hannon to light again, questioning his fitness as a journalism instructor at Ryerson.

Ironically, each of Bird’s and Hoy’s first columns sparked a media frenzy and public debate on freedom of speech. More columns and intense Sun coverage also followed.

The Sun was the first in 1995 to announce a police investigation by Metro’s Special Investigation Services (formerly the morality squad) into the “sexual assault” Hannon had written about in “Men Loving Boys.”” The same thing happened in 1977-the Sun was the first to announce a police investigation by the morality squad into The Body Politic after the publication of “Men Loving Boys.” The Sun followed with coverage on how The Body Politic offices were eventually raided by the police and charges for publishing obscenity were laid. Although last year’s investigation was dropped after a week, it took until 1983 for the first set of charges to be finally dismissed.

Hoy explains the coincidence as “what goes around comes around” for Gerald Hannon. He feels his first column on Hannon contributed to The Body Politic raid and the eventual charges.

“The media is so candy-assed now;” says Hoy. “Most of this stuff you read that passes as columns is soft commentary. The Sun used to be a lot feistier and gutsier, and it’s gone soft. I’m happy to see the Sun is doing something noteworthy again. I think Heather should be commended for what she did. There are too many journalists who don’t have the balls to do it.” -C.P.

Heading south from Montreal, the slick and stylish downtown core gives way to a swirl of highway and then to the Mercier Bridge. It’s a long, concrete, well-trafficked link from the island of Montreal to the south shore of the St. Lawrence. The bridge passes over the river, a strip of land, then the deep blue of the artificial canal. On the right sits a village of small clapboard houses, a visual contrast to the texture and size of the city, not to mention a cultural one. The village is a reserve called Kahnawake. Historians know it as the oldest Mohawk territory in Canada. Journalists have characterized it as one of the most militaristic reserves in the country. Most people know it as a community of Mohawk Warriors who blockaded the Mercier Bridge during the summer of 1990 in support of the protest against the expansion of a golf course onto native land in nearby Oka.

On Highway 207, the road that leads into Kahnawake, there is a dark red shack with an arrete sign out front. A concrete barrier beside the shed and a Warrior Society flag painted on the wall, red with a traditionally garbed Mohawk against a large, yellow sun, are the only reminders that this was once a checkpoint to keep police out and control who came in.

Through the unnamed streets of the village, into the physical centre of the community, in a garage beside an unnumbered house, is the office of a small native newspaper. The paper, which was four years old in January, is called The Eastern Door, so named by its 48-year-old editor and founder, Kenneth Deer, because in the Longhouse of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawks are the keepers of the eastern door, and Kahnawake is the easternmost Mohawk territory in Canada. The name and the editor are both traditional; Deer is a member of the Longhouse, with strong ideas about what it means to be Mohawk. The paper’s strength lies in Deer’s keeping his own opinions from dominating the paper while retaining traditional Mohawk values that all in Kahnawake can relate to. The result has been a strong paper that has encouraged unity in a changing community and attracted the attention and admiration of journalists, native people and experts from beyond the small reserve.

Deer has only been a journalist as long as he’s been editor of The Eastern Door. He spent most of his working life in education as a principal and a high-school counsellor. His wife, Glenda, continues to work as a Mohawk-language teacher, but Deer left education in 1987 to work as a coordinator between the Longhouse and the Mohawk Nation Office. By 1990, however, the politics there changed, and Deer quit to devote his time to a deckbuilding business.

That summer, a group of Mohawks from Kanehsatake set up a camp to protect an ancestral pine forest from the town of Oka, which wanted to cut it down for the expansion of a golf course. On July 11, police advanced on the barricades and a Surete du Quebec corporal was killed in the gunfire between police and Mohawks. As soon as news of the raid made it to nearby Kahnawake, Warriors in the community barricaded the Mercier Bridge in solidarity. It was an effective but costly move, generating attention but also anger, especially from the neighbouring suburb of Chateauguay. It also created economic problems for businesses, including Deer’s, whose supply lines were cut off. The barricades were lifted in the fall, but soon after, his deck business folded.

As Deer looked for work, it became clear to him that the community needed a quality source of information. “After the crisis, there was a lot of tension, a lot of anxiety, and people were getting all their information from the mainstream press,” he says. “The community was living on gossip and hearsay, and people didn’t know what to believe and were believing all kinds of things.” Eventually, Deer got together with a group of people who were interested in volunteering on a newspaper, provided it was unbiased and not just a Warrior newsletter. The director of the Kanienkehaka Raotitiohkwa Cultural Center in Kahnawake, Wendall Beauvais-who goes by the Mohawk name Kanatakta-was there at the paper’s conception and felt Deer was the best person to be editor. “I’ve always found that he’s been a very fair person, and we knew the paper was something we would be judged on in the community.”

The people of Kahnawake have seen their share of newspapers over the years. Most were more like partisan fliers, and none of them ever lasted long. The Eastern Door has not only outlived them all but has gone on to win awards from organizations like the Quebec Community Newspapers Association. Allan Davis, executive director of the association, gives most of the credit for the paper’s success to Deer: “Ken is particularly gifted as a publishing editor and has struck exactly the right balance between daily bread and butter and national bread and butter’ “

Most people who know Deer agree that, besides running the paper virtually on his own and being articulate and well informed, he is also quite simply a nice guy. He speaks softly and laughs easily. Around the office he wears jeans, a plaid shirt and an Eastern Door baseball cap over his long, grey ponytail. Enn Raudsepp, the director of the journalism department at Concordia University, who did a study of native publications in 1985, notes that while the political beliefs of an editor often bias a newspaper and alienate parts of the community, Deer’s ideals of responsibility and family, along with his knowledge of native history and language, are just what Kahnawake needs in its paper. “These are the kind of values that the whole community can coalesce under. Factions don’t develop under this kind of traditionalism.”

Deer’s even-handed approach and benign nature don’t just work well on the small reserve but travel successfully to Geneva, where he’s been working with the UN’s Working Group of Indigenous Populations for about 10 years, creating a draft declaration on indigenous rights. Besides yearly trips to Geneva, he’s been to Australia, France and would have gone to Peru if the country hadn’t rejected his Iroquois passport. “It makes it a bit more difficult to travel,” he admits, “but it’s my way of expressing my nationalism.” He expresses his ideas in the community as well, through active membership in the Longhouse-he has served as a chief, worked at the Nation Office and acted as a negotiator in the first days of Oka.

By the end of 1991, Deer had a house, two sons and an ill mother-in-law but no job to help support them. “I was desperate now. I had to think of a way to make a living. So I did it, I calculated costs, found a printer, got access to a computer and got people who said they’d write for free.” In two months he sold enough advertising for five issues, and he launched the first paper on January 31, 1992. That began a difficult year: Deer had few staff, little money and only minimal acceptance from the community. He only sold about 600 copies per issue to a wary Kahnawake, which believed, thanks to Deer’s past, that The Eastern Door was a traditional paper. But Deer kept the promise he prints in each issue’s masthead, that The Eastern Door serves “the Mohawks of Kahnawake regardless of birth, sex, age, language, politics or religion. The paper strives to be a factual, balanced, authoritative source of information with access to all segments of the community.”

By the beginning of the next year, Deer had moved the paper out of his dining room (“When it spilled out into the kitchen, my wife said,’Time to get out”‘) and into his renovated garage, and he was selling 1,000 copies an issue. His circulation peaked in 1994 at 1,500 copies. The Eastern Door switched from biweekly to weekly in February 1995 and the circulation settled at 1,350, an impressive total for a community of only 1,600 homes. The paper sells for $1 in shops on the reserve and is shipped to Kanehsatake, the territory at Oka, and to Akwesasne, a Mohawk territory near Cornwall that bridges Ontario, Quebec and New York state. And every week, copies of The Eastern Door are sent out to 162 mailboxes in Canada, 78 in the U.S. and eight overseas.

The current office hardly looks like a newsroom at the heart of native politics. It smells of wood and has an unfinished wall here and an absent doorknob there. But to Deer and his staff, who are always short on time and money, the finishing touches on the week’s paper are far more important than the building’s. One fall afternoon, Charleen Schurman, the office manager (who currently is away on maternity leave), is discussing story ideas with Kim Delormier, the layout editor. While Schurman’s job is supposed to be running the office-looking after staff, answering the phone, balancing the books-she usually spends a lot of her time assigning stories, editing and helping with layout. “We’re pretty heavy on administration,” says Deer. “But we’re pretty light on the reporting end, and that scares me.” Before Tom Dearhouse joined the paper last fall, The Eastern Door had trouble keeping a full-time reporter; most either couldn’t handle the work or had other commitments. While the paper is now fully staffed, with Deer, Dearhouse and freelancers doing the writing, it is still up to the small office staff to take care of the rest. While Schurman and Delormier make sure the paper won’t have any blank spaces this week, Deer is heading out to a meeting. “That’s him, in and out, in and out, all the time,” says Schurman. If he’s not off to Geneva for a UN conference then he’s attending a community meeting or doing an interview or delivering the papers around Kahnawake on Fridays, a task that takes him several hours because, according to Schurman, he stops to gab along the way.

Almost everyone in Kahnawake loves The Eastern Door and rushes out every Friday to pick up a copy in town. It’s a clean, attractive little paper, with no advertisements on the first three pages, something Deer has insisted upon from the start. The flag, printed in a different colour each week, is topped by a drawing of eagle’s wings, giving the paper a distinctly native look.

The most popular sections inside are those that can be found in almost any community paper: local news, local history, police reports and announcements. Joseph Montour, chief of the Kahnawake Peacekeepers, says that people often read the “Police Blotter” column, both to make sure they’re not mentioned in it and to clear up the half-right information that weaves its way through town each week. “Oftentimes an incident will happen, and what you hear on the street or in the coffee shop is only a version of what happened. The Eastern Door presents the facts.” On the lighter side, readers love seeing their neighbours in the “Nosy Newsbabe” section. Reaghan Tarbell, the paper’s intrepid student reporter, corners local people willing-and many are not-to be photographed and answer a question that relates to the news, like “Do you agree with using images of Indians as mascots?”

By far the easiest and most profitable part of The Eastern Door is the birthday section. Deer printed a birthday photo for a reader once and, according to Schurman, “It caught on like wildfire. It’s our most popular feature in the paper only because everybody knows everybody here.” Now the paper charges to print birthday and memorial photos, and the section, which can take up over two full pages, generates enough revenue to pay one person’s salary in the office.

However, not all of The Eastern Door is just for fun and profit. Deer has higher goals for the paper: “We try to produce a newspaper that is a mirror of the community-if you look at The Eastern Door, you see Kahnawake.” The most literal example of this is the “Golden Eras” column, where Johnny Beauvais writes about the history of Kahnawake and old photographs show the community as it was. Many of these stories had never been written down before. Selma Delisle, a prominent member of Kahnawake, says: “The young people love it. They’re getting to know what it used to be like.” Perhaps not as popular, but equally important to Deer, was the Mohawk-language story and game page. It appeared for two years, but after running through most of the school curriculum and tiring out volunteers, it had to be discontinued. At the office, the only person with any previous newspaper experience is Schurman, who was a secretary for six years at the New York Post. When she arrived at the new office in November 1992, there were no books, files were in cardboard boxes and invoices had yet to be sent out. The paper had been surviving, just barely, on advertisers who paid without being invoiced, a local donation at the start-up and a series of grants. With self-sufficiency as a goal, Schurman got the books in order, a few more grants came along and the paper joined the Quebec Community Newspapers Association and changed to a weekly to increase advertising revenues. These efforts have paid off, and now Schurman says, “The last six months I can say we’ve been totally self-supporting.”

Unlike many native papers and the majority of radio stations on reserves, The Eastern Door has received grants with no strings attached. Enn Raudsepp says that of the 30 native and Inuit publications he studied 11 years ago, few are still running because most “never did establish a sound financial foundation.” The Eastern Door, Raudsepp says, is special because it is “not beholden to anybody-that’s a remarkable thing for a native newspaper.”

Many native publications that do survive are tied to a benefactor, and that can affect editorial content. Before 1970, three-quarters of publications were produced by non-natives or the government. Today, many papers and magazines are owned and published by native people, but only a handful are as financially independent or as journalistically objective as The Eastern Door. Since funding often comes from the local band council, papers have trouble covering their council’s activities. The Tekawennake, from the Six Nations territory in southern Ontario, covers life on the reserve as if it revolves around council. Traditionalists who used to find their viewpoints unrepresented now turn to the Turtle Island News, launched in 1994.

Those native papers that have been able to retain editorial control still suffer, as The Eastern Door does, from a tendency to report the news on a superficial level. Analysis, context and criticism of current issues and events are virtually absent in even the best native papers. Windspeaker, a highly respected newspaper out of Edmonton, covers national native news and politics with a focus on Western Canada. However, when it was discovered that there were pot fields growing in Kanehsatake last summer, Windspeaker ran a front-page story that made no mention of the dramatic internal conflicts in the community or the fact that many people, including band council members, knew about the pot long before the media found out. Wawatay News from Sioux Lookout in northern Ontario also does an excellent job of covering not only politics, but the social issues of the area. But its report on funding for a solvent abuse centre focused on the political debates and mentioned some details about treatment but offered no analysis of why such abuse exists in the community.

Akwesasne Notes, which had its heyday in the 1970s and early eighties, used to provide high-quality investigative journalism. It began as a cut-and-paste of native stories from mainstream papers across North America and developed into an idealistic paper with volunteer writers submitting hard-hitting native-issue pieces. By the late eighties, though, Akwesasne Notes had become one-sided and got so heavily involved in the politics of the reserve that the paper’s office was actually set on fire twice. It eventually closed in 1992, but in early 1995 it was resurrected, this time in a glossy magazine format as slick as it is safe, featuring articles about the good deeds of band council chiefs and the perseverance of native people.

What the old Akwesasne Notes had-and The Eastern Door does not-is a comfortable distance from readers. Gerald Alfred, a political scientist at Concordia and a resident of Kahnawake, says he thinks it may not be the role of The Eastern Door to provide a tougher kind of journalism: “People want harder stories but not from a local paper. They want it from an anonymous paper.” Writers at the paper have often wanted anonymity. Reporters in the past have asked to be taken off sensitive stories, and occasionally they have not wanted to sign their name. “ED Staff” was frequently used as a byline in the first years of publication, especially in the trial coverage of Mohawks involved in the 1990 Oka crisis. Often it is Deer who writes the paper’s front-page stories, and he always signs his work. “I don’t shrink away from it,” he says, admitting that certain stories are easier for him to write, thanks to his extensive knowledge of the issues in the community and his little black book full of contacts.

It is rare that there’s a story in Kahnawake that is too hot to handle, but there are many in nearby Kanehsatake: the pot fields, legal problems with the size of last summer’s Super Bingo jackpot and the alleged corruption behind a proposed casino. Susan Oke, a young writer from Kanehsatake who freelances for Deer, covers town meetings and certain political stories, but didn’t write about the pot fields, even though she knew about them. “It would have been, I think, dangerous to write about it,” she says. People who have spoken out against the band council there say they have been threatened, and one woman says her car was blown up. When the existence of the pot fields was revealed to the media at a press conference last August, The Eastern Door’s cover story-written by Tarbell, not Oke-focused on how some women in the community had organized the press event, rather than on the pot fields.

Selma Delisle is a big supporter of The Eastern Door and a friend of Kenneth Deer. “I love the paper,” she says. “I think it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to this community.” Her family often makes a few trips into town on Fridays, waiting for the paper to arrive. But Delisle thinks the paper’s coverage of social issues in the community is poor. Stories about substance abuse and violence are written almost exclusively by social workers. The Eastern Door doesn’t carry journalistic pieces about, for example, the effects of alcohol in the community, or the discovery of abuse in a local family or the faults of a popular treatment for drug abuse-stories that people like Delisle feel are important for the community to read, despite how difficult they are for local reporters to write.

Along with community news, Deer’s paper focuses on national news and native politics. But like many other native newspapers, The Eastern Door rarely provides analysis in its stories. For instance, the paper’s coverage of the Mohawk Roundtable negotiations between the chiefs of Kahnawake, Kanehsatake and Akwesasne explained the meetings and their purpose but neglected to question the motives of the people involved or note the larger impact of the Roundtable on native self-government initiatives.

Lately, however, Deer has been making the paper progressively tougher. One of the biggest stories in Kahnawake last year was the policing agreement between the Mohawk Peacekeepers and external police forces. Initially, the paper’s reporter at the time, E.J. Diabo, wrote stories that basically followed the public-relations statements of the Peacekeepers and the government.

But Deer took over the coverage after September 11, when the agreement was signed amid protests and vandalism. His cover story attempted to put it all in perspective. “The impact of the agreement, the vandalism and the images of violence in the media, have caused the community to take a hard look at itself,” he wrote. “Those opposed to the agreement say … that it erodes the jurisdiction and authority of the Mohawk People…. The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake say that the agreement only recognizes what is already in place.”

The article is not only the kind of clear, in-depth story that The Eastern Door needs more of, it also shows how Deer’s writing has matured. The editorial on the next page bluntly begins: “All the justification and rationalization in the community just doesn’t wash…. Violence is insidious.” This is a major shift from Deer’s very first editorial, where he took a safe middle line on the tradition shooting guns off to celebrate New Year’s Eve, suggesting that blanks be used instead. In other recent editorials, Deer has taken a stronger stand on such topics as the mainstream media and the image of native people outside the reserve.

While the effectiveness of The Eastern Door and other native publications may be up for discussion, their necessity is not. Both native and non-native critics of the mainstream media say that not enough coverage of native issues, but what is printed and broadcast usually portrays native people as violent, unlawful and dependent on government. Gerald Alfred thinks most coverage is implicitly negative, and while “the important things are development in our capacity to govern ourselves, resolution of land claims and peaceful accommodations made between whites and Indians, these things are never heard about unless- they go wrong, unless they cost people money.” Susan Oke has watched non native journalists at work in Kanehsatake and noticed that “they don’t know what the real issue is, they don’t know what questions to ask and whom to ask, and that’s why their coverage is not really accurate.”

Covering world, national, provincial and local news for Kahnawake has always been Deer’s goal, but with his limited resources, it has never been easy. The paper has fallen short of critical expectacations from both inside and outside the reserve. Deer and his staff also think the paper could be better. “I’d like to see more news,” Deer says. “I want to carry more news from the Internet, network more with other the outside.” He thinks of TheEaster Door should get connected to native papers and cover more stories in Kanehsatake and Akwesasne. But he is also very proud of his paper.” The Eastern Door is special because the Mohawks are special. Because Kahnawake is unique, the newspaper has to be unique. Kahnawake is on the cutting edge of a lot of issues. People look at it to see what Mohawk people are all about.”

Deer’s leisurely drive around Kahnawake on Friday mornings creates a weekly tide of excitement. “Did you see what was in The Eastern Door?” is echoed across the reserve. The delivery of the paper marks the end of a week of rumours about who was responsible for the car crash in the middle of town, what the chief thought about a local conflict or how federal legislation will affect native people. Deer has tried to make the paper a mirror of the community, and has succeeded also in reflecting his own ideas not those of an opinionated activist-but of the fatherly, traditional peacemaker that is the best of Kahnawake and the best part of himself.

Charles Campbell, managing editor of The Georgia Straight, is checking the final on-screen version of the Vancouver weekly’s Christmas issue. Outside the huge picture window of the second-floor office, located above a Regency Lexus dealership, two men are scrubbing and vacuuming luxury cars in the December rain. They test-drive the cars, says Campbell, and tell the newspaper’s staff which are the best models to buy. “As if I could ever afford to buy one of them,” he quips.

Then Campbell gets serious, asking if I knew that John Cruickshank, former managing editor of The Globe and Mail and now editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun, had talked to him a few months back about the city editor’s job. Why did Campbell turn down a job that probably would have given him, by his guess, a 20 percent pay increase, including benefits? “I’m not a daily news guy,” he shrugs, downplaying the significance of the Sun’s gesture and his own apparent lack of ambition. Besides, he adds, he didn’t like the idea of being the boss to “a bunch of calcified lifers” who would resent an upstart newcomer. Having worked part-time at the Sun before, Campbell knows what he isn’t missing: the dread he felt going to work each day, the daily deadlines, the ego clashes, the politics of the Southam chain. “I like working here,” he says simply. “I like what the Straight represents. I like working for an independently owned paper.”

Campbell comes across as unassuming and casual, looking boyish at 36 with his short hair and wide grin. But from his attitude (a combination of earnest professionalism and youthful rebellion) and his attire (a white shirt, open at the collar, and Gap trousers), you can detect traces of his private-school past, perhaps explaining how this laid-back editor with stalling speech and a crackling laugh had the confidence and savvy to turn a flagging alternative weekly into a successful rival for readers, critics’ awards and profits to the city’s struggling dailies.

The Georgia Straight has survived more than a quarter of a century, starting its life as Vancouver’s original anti-establishment “hippie rag.” It’s grown up along with its readership since the sixties and has tapped into a unique formula for success, combining the kind of muckraking journalism that appeals to an urban boomer audience, with a hip entertainment component that attracts younger readers. The Straight is now so successful, it’s outdistancing more conventional newspapers in attracting and keeping a healthy share of the market, hardly the fate you’d imagine for an underground paper that once suffered circulation so low it almost folded. Clearly, Campbell’s doing something right. These days, the weekly is even outscooping both the tired Vancouver dailies, the Sun and The Province.The Georgia Straight has become, for many Vancouverites, the only newspaper in town worth reading.

Last summer, the Straight abandoned its cramped downtown office and moved into a concrete building with gold-tinted windows in Kitsilano, an upscale Vancouver neighbourhood. Although the new headquarters may strike some as a bit too corporate for the funky Straight image, the move could be viewed as partly a symbolic gesture that the newspaper was ready to live up to its reputation as a successful, multimillion-dollar media operation.

At the entrance of the Straight’s new office is a dazzling, industrial-looking Georgia Straight logo bolted to the wall. Down the hall, there’s lots of joking and camaraderie among the Straight’s 19-member editorial and production team, most of whom are thirtysomething or younger. In the words of Naomi Pauls, 36, who was assistant editor until last summer, when she left to study publishing at Simon Fraser University, the Straight staff is “young, a bit alternative and incredibly committed. They aren’t always paid the most, but they really believe in the paper.”

These days, they have reason to be upbeat. The paper made enough profit in 1995 to pay bonuses to all 47 employees. An impressive feat, considering that 10 years ago, staffers had to wait weeks or months for their paycheques because the money just wasn’t there. “For a long time our wages were pretty low,” recalls Campbell, who made $6 an hour during his first year as managing editor in 1986.

Making money is clearly not the motivator, but today’s Straight definitely has a buzz. Even during the Christmas rush, when two issues are put out in one week, the atmosphere is surprisingly unhectic except for the evening dash to get free pastries, courtesy of the cafe downstairs. Chocolate croissants, apple fritters and blueberry muffins provide a sugary boost to help the staff work late into the evening.

Their sixties predecessors probably got by on other substances. Born in the Summer of Love, the original 10-cent underground tabloid carried radical stories on civil liberties, freedom of the press, native land claims and racism. Back then, the Straight was as likely to announce a groovy Stanley Park be-in as a serious political demonstration in front of the Vancouver courthouse. Beneath crooked headlines were hard-hitting political articles about the Black Panthers and student activism set on amateur, typewritten pages. The paper’s in-your-face tone meant news bulletins were written in an expository style, with a healthy dose of satire, while hippiesque designs of flowers, clouds and stars ran along the margins. Often, in those early glory days, an entire cover would be dedicated to a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers or Acidman cartoon or, better still, a scandalous nude photograph.

Then-editor (and now publisher) Dan McLeod was a grad student and a poet who strongly advocated press freedoms. He opened up the pages of the Straight as a forum for alternative opinions, which often got him in trouble with the law. Within the first two years of publication, McLeod and his paper were charged with 27 counts of obscenity, one charge of “counselling to commit an indictable offence” (for publishing tips on how to grow marijuana) and one count of criminal libel for comparing a judge to Pontius Pilate.

When the paper was suffering financially-part of a general post-sixties slump experienced by most alternative papers-McLeod turned it into an entertainment weekly that earned a reputation as “the Rolling Stone of Canada” for its extensive music coverage. By 1985, the Straight was a flimsy 20-page tabloid with little to offer its readers besides rock reviews and interviews.

Now, The Georgia Straight is the only remaining paper of the Underground Press Syndicate, which once boasted some 400 members and spanned four continents. To survive, the paper has evolved considerably-the new weekly bears little resemblance to its sixties namesake. Once regarded as one of the feistiest underground publications in Canada, The Georgia Straight went straight long ago. Some say a little too straight.

Today’s Straight combines hard news, entertainment reviews and magazine-length features. Bright covers and retro fifties cartoons make the Straight a lively piece of pop art itself. Inside, long, essay-style investigative articles tackle serious subjects like Canada Customs censorship, the exploitation of garment workers, parasites in the water supply and death in the logging industry. More mainstream now, the Straight never publishes the kind of extreme partisan journalism traditionally found in many alternative weeklies.

Still, some critics wish the Straight had more of its old edge. Stan Persky, Globe columnist and former media critic for The Vancouver Sun, laments the fact that the Straight has gone a bit soft: “It started out as an alternative political paper. It wasn’t conceived of as an entertainment weekly with movies and rock concerts and the like.” Persky, who wrote for the paper in its early days, argues that by the Straight’s 20th anniversary, the paper wasn’t anything to be taken seriously. “It’s gotten better by virtue of publishing a weekly feature. But it’s not ideal. It’s not The Village Voice.”

It may well be that the advent of a younger generation not bred on sixties idealism made changes inevitable. When Charles Campbell entered the picture in 1986, he was 26 and still a relative newcomer to journalism. His background included contributions to the Ubyssey, the University of British Columbia’s campus paper, one summer at the Canadian Press bureau in Vancouver, a two-year stint as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun and some freelancing. The Straight job was his first big break. Since then, Campbell has proved a remarkable success?”a one-man show”-described by his contemporaries in almost heroic terms, as though he single-handedly turned the Straight into a respected, award-winning enterprise. “Charles is the architect of the paper as it is now,” says former Straight managing editor Bob Mercer. “It’s Charles’ vision that’s driving the paper,” adds Naomi Pauls.

Campbell didn’t waste time putting his vision into practice, adding serious pieces to the lighter mix right away. He broadened the range of arts and entertainment coverage from the usual rock reviews and mainstream movies to include local theatre, art and dance. Next, he shifted the front-section highlights away from the local music biz and featured political profiles to counter the celebrity interviews that were given full-cover play. Then, in 1991, the Straight broke style and put an investigative piece on the cover: “Who Was Robert Satiacum?” blazed the headline for a story about a controversial Native American activist who had sought refugee status in Canada and landed in a Vancouver jail. It was just a taste of things to come under Campbell’s tenure.

In October 1994, Campbell asked Charlie Smith, a CBC journalist, to join the Straight as news editor. The idea was to introduce news to complement the front-section features. Today, Smith usually writes four news pieces each issue, along with his “Straight Talk” column. In those pages, Smith routinely breaks news the dailies have missed. “He’s not just the news editor, he’s his own bureau,” says contributor Mark Leiren-Young. “It is really quite astonishing-by rights it should be impossible for a weekly to scoop a daily, and yet Charlie does it on a regular basis.” Smith’s scoops are an understandable source of pride at the paper. “I think the dailies are embarrassed to follow the Straight,” says Campbell. “There’s a generalized discomfort at the Sun that the Straight is beating them to far more stories than we ought to, given our resources. “

But if the editors at the Vancouver dailies are smarting, they don’t let on. Gary Mason, deputy managing editor at the Sun, admits reporters in the Sun newsroom read the Straight, but adds, “I don’t know if it’s the first thing we grab to see whether we’ve been scooped because I really haven’t seen a lot of that’ ” Province city editor Fabian Dawson says he “hasn’t seen them break any major stories,” either. Smith insists otherwise. “I believe I break a lot of stories all the time,” he says, citing an example of a November 1994 article on the new, faster B.C. ferries. The Sun followed up on the story, but took a different angle. In another case, the Straight ran a story about the scandal surrounding the appointment of a Simon Fraser University professor’s wife to a faculty position. “We came out on a Thursday,” Smith recalls. “The next week the Sun and the Province did virtually a carbon copy of the story.”

Smith says even if the editorial departments of the dailies claim not to feel threatened by the Straight beating them to the news, “On the corporate side it is a huge concern there’s no doubt of that. The concern that the Straight is successful and we’re making money and reaching a large readership, it bugs them ‘ “

Other things may bug them, too. Over the past 10 years, the Straight has featured first-rate local writers and reporters in its pages, including disenchanted former daily reporters who were attracted to the weekly’s magazine-style format (and undeterred by its lower pay) and the chance to explore some serious issues at length without being chastised for expressing a point of view. “The Straight’s strength is to be able to look at stories that may have been covered by the mainstream media, but do it in a more comprehensive way,” says Ben Parfitt, a former Sun forestry reporter who now writes for the Straight. “People don’t have time to follow stories day-by-day, but they can pick up the Straight and get a good idea of what the story’s all about.”

Since introducing the investigative cover features, the paper has raked in awards. Nineteen ninety-five was a record year for the Straight, which managed to pull in five Western Magazine Awards. In the last two years, the paper has been nominated more than 40 times and has won 20 prizes, including three National Magazine Awards. By now, it’s impossible not to know the Straight takes journalism very seriously and is taken seriously.

Despite all of The Georgia Straight’s success, owner Dan McLeod, now 52, has a lot on his mind these days. As the presence that binds today’s Straight with its notorious past, McLeod prefers to remain behind the scenes, running the financial side of the operation and leaving the editing to a capable editor like Campbell. The reserved publisher spends most of his time holding management meetings in his rose, beige and grey office, tucked away from the newspaper’s hustle and bustle. “You could work there for five years and never speak to him,” says Pauls.

McLeod and his paper have withstood various threats of competition over the years, most recently from the owners of two alternative weeklies, Toronto’s NOW magazine and The Seattle Weekly. Ironically, the dailies have overlooked the Straight as both a financial and editorial competitor, to their detriment. Pacific Press, the publisher of both The Vancouver Sun and The Province, is a subsidiary of Toronto-based Southam Newspaper Group, which, despite its stranglehold on the Vancouver market, has experienced three bleak money-losing years and become distanced from its readership. “The biggest failing of the dailies is that they just don’t cover local news well enough,” says Campbell. Without a healthy competitive atmosphere to keep the papers in top form, stories in the Vancouver papers started to read like press releases.

Meanwhile, business is booming at the Straight. Now the 100,000-circulation weekly reaches 472,000 readers in an average week through its 1,600 city-wide outlets, which accounts for 42 percent of adults in Greater Vancouver. Demographically, it’s an attractive sell: a typical Straight reader has at least some post-secondary education, eats out a lot and has an annual household income of $40,000 plus. Most sobering of all for the dailies, 50 percent of all Georgia Straight readers don’t read the Saturday Sun; 65 percent don’t read the Sunday Province.

Not surprisingly with stats like that, the Straight’s ad revenues have shot up 24 percent annually, and Pacific Press is worried. “They’re even more concerned how we’ve grown,” says McLeod. “It’s become a serious competition. You have to remember that these dailies are still 100 times bigger than we are. We are still small change, relatively. I guess it doesn’t matter how much of your turf somebody wants to grab away from you, you’re still going to defend it. If there’s a little fly buzzing around, you’re going to want to swat it.”

Right now, McLeod’s biggest concern is the presence of John Cruickshank, the new editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun. Since September 1995, Cruickshank has set about reshaping the Sun with a personnel shuffle that left the much-coveted city editor’s position open. Instead of narrowing his prospects to in-house staff, Cruickshank posted the job across the Southam network and courted Campbell over lunch (albeit at a B-list restaurant).”Cruickshank has the reputation as somebody who can and might shake things up at the Sun and make a better paper,” says McLeod. “So that’s something to worry about for us, if the editorial quality improves. They’re definitely trying to beef up the content.”

For Cruickshank, the Straight’s local coverage is definitely something to watch. Impressed by the quality of the Straight’s investigative reporting, the Sun’s new top editor has been watching the weekly closely. He thinks the Straight does a fine job catering to a “more upscale urban audience,” just the readership the Sun is trying to attract. “For that reason, it’s important that we keep an eye on what they’re doing. Sure. And learn from them when they’ve got something to teach us.”

Campbell has his own glassed-in office now, although he preferred the old place, where he shared two rooms with the entire editorial staff. “He’s a very reluctant executive,” says Pauls. He would sooner wear his Cat-in-the-Hat shirt to the office than a suit and tie. “I don’t like the boss thing,” he confesses, although he’s getting pushed in more serious directions now that the paper is growing. “I think it’s good that an independent paper nips at the ass of the dailies,” says Campbell.

“Competition is a good thing. Because of the Straight, the Sun has been forced to get better, and in return the Straight will have to become better still.”

A good challenge is obviously something Campbell will relish. “I like working for an underdog,” he says, perhaps unaware of the irony. Under his editorship, The Georgia Straight is hardly the underdog it used to be.

Last spring, eight people were kneeling on the chancel steps at the front of Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto. Heads bent, eyes closed, they listened as the minister delivered the service of ordination, admitting them to the congregation’s elders. One of the eight was writer and journalist Stevie Cameron. Shaking slightly from kneeling-years of playing sports have left the 52-year-old Cameron with weak knees-she watched the minister touch each of the elders-elect with his right hand, explaining not only the importance of faith, but of humility. Elders should be humble; feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy are proof the eight are indeed worthy of the honour. Cameron needed help to stand up when the short service ended and the hymns started. Kneeling for so long had made her dizzy. She joined her husband, David, at their regular place in the church, close to the back. At a small reception after the service, Cameron seemed tired as she spoke cheerfully to people milling around big tables heaped with tiny, crustless sandwiches and bowls of jellied salads. She talked distractedly about a speaking engagement the next night for a PEN benefit and having to make the red-eye flight to Halifax after that. She was defending herself in a libel suit, ironically, not for her latest book, On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years, but for an article she had written nearly five years earlier in The Globe and Mail. When she was congratulated on her appointment as an elder, she shook her head and said quietly, “But why me? I’m not good enough for this.”

Cameron can be humble about her accomplishments, like the work she’s done for the past four years feeding and sheltering homeless people through a program she and a friend helped organize at her church. She is usually gentle with her characterizations (even of people who aren’t as delicate when they describe her), tempering each barb with a compliment; and she’s stingy with her expletives, sometimes choosing a cute euphemism over a more colloquial expression. (“I promised myself in ’87 I’d never do another decorating story,” she says, referring to her Globe expose on the scope of the Mulroneys’ renovations at 24 Sussex. “They always get me in deep poo.”) But her Presbyterian politeness fades to black when Cameron is confronted with a cover-up, a conflict of interest or an instance of corruption. And she’s not as gentle when responding to the accusations of her critics. “He’s a perfectly nice guy,” she says of conservative Report on Business columnist Terence Corcoran, one of the latest to hurl accusations of inaccuracy at Cameron’s research. “He’s a shitty reporter, though.”

Cameron admits criticism does affect her. “I’m just the kid from high school who wants everyone to like her,” she says. And a lot of people do. Even though he believes that she made mistakes in her book, Allan Fotheringham has written that Cameron “just possibly surpasses John Sawatsky as the finest investigative reporter in the land.” In a Globe review of On the Take, former managing editor Clark Davey concluded that “Conservatives who read this book will weep for their party. Other Canadians must weep for their country.”

But there are still those who dismiss her work as gossip and innuendo. In a review of On the Take published in his magazine, Saturday Night, Conrad Black described Cameron as an “inelegant, hectoring writer, endlessly patting herself on the head for original revelations of no significance” and wondered where she got off making her accusations. It’s a question Cameron has asked herself, one that led her back to church as an active member after a 25-year hiatus, but in the end her “capacity for sustained moral outrage,” as Richard Gwyn put it in a Toronto Star review of On The Take, compelled her to tell the story. In a letter to the editor published in Maclean’s in 1989, Cameron described herself as a “run-of-the-mill equal-opportunity offender; not anti-Tory, just anti-sleaze.” It’s that morality and Presbyterian conscience that make Cameron a confusing combination: vicious in print and benign in person.

To read the rest of this story, please see our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.

 It can be purchased online here .