Three years ago, while it was still owned by Thomson Newspapers, the Niagara Falls Review’s newsroom was organized by the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild. Mark Skeffington, a general reporter at the Review for four years, was its union steward. The paper’s first contract came into effect just over a year later, around the same time Hollinger bought a majority interest in Southam. The Review was a profitable paper and Hollinger had taken on Thomson papers in worse shape, including The Guelph Mercury and Cambridge Reporter, without any sudden job cuts. So when the Review starting laying off employees within days of the takeover, everyone was bewildered. Suspicion set in when the firings—which were done strictly according to seniority, as the SONG contract dictates—reached further and further back—two years, three years, four years…. Zap! Skeffington was gone, as were the four reporters with less time at the Review who had to be let go before he was.

Among the most suspicious was Lorne Slotnick, then a local representative for SONG. “I believe they reached back in the seniority list to get one guy,” he says. “Mark Skeffington was clearly one of the leaders in forming the union at the Niagara Falls Review. He was the chair of the union.” David Beattie, who took over as Review publisher last November, after the publisher who let Skeffington go left the paper, doesn’t buy Slotnick’s theory. “It strictly was a financial situation based on a reduction of manpower,” he says firmly.

Whatever the truth, the Skeffington incident was nothing compared to the management practices that were standard in the 1930s, a decade before Canadian papers were first organized. In 1980, Jessie MacTaggart Geissler, a former Mail and Empire general reporter, recalled those days in a SONG newsletter. She and other Mail and Empire employees worked six days a week, from 2 p.m. to 1 a.m., for $20 a week. Overtime pay was unheard of. When Mail and Empire merged with the Globe’s in 1936, almost all of the Mail and Empire staff were fired, including a 26-year veteran. The Toronto Star would spend “big money on big stories,” MacTaggart remembered, then fire four or five people at a time just to get its budget back on track. No wonder that talk of forming a Toronto Newspaper Guild was met with enthusiasm.

At that time, legendary Toronto Star publisher Joseph E. Atkinson supported organized labour in the pages of his paper, but when it came to the guild, management demoted employees who were openly affiliated with union activity and intimidated those who were not. MacTaggart recalled how a rumour once spread that Atkinson had suffered a heart attack upon receiving news that his employees were threatening to strike fi they didn’t get a contract. Feeling guilty, workers gave up the strike. The next day, employees who had been demoted were given back their old positions and Atkinson showed up at the paper grinning from ear to ear, the picture of perfect health. Nevertheless, Newspaper Guild Local 87 was formed in 1947, although the union dates its official founding to its first Toronto Star contract, signed on April 12, 1949, a year after Atkinson’s death. (Ironically, the union side was led by Beland Honderich, then financial editor of the paper.) The contract was the beginning of many years of successful representation of staff at Ontario newspapers.

Today, however, there are signs that SONG may be in decline. Like other unions, it seems to have lost the support and appreciation of some of its members, perhaps because they no longer believe in the union or perhaps because they fear reprisals. The conservative mood and economic uncertainty in Ontario today haven’t helped either. Nor has the purchase of Southam by Conrad Black’s Hollinger last fall, which further concentrated press ownership in the hands of a company not known for its union sympathies. After 50 years on the job, will SONG survive to the age of retirement?

The provisions of the first Star contract included weekly salaries of $45 for a five-day, 40-hour week, plus time-and-a-half, in cash, for overtime. By the mid-fifties, the Toronto Newspaper Guild had also organized The Globe and Mail and the Brantford Expositor; in 1978 it became the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild, to reflect its wider-ranging membership. Today, SONG represents almost 3,000 reporters, photographers, editors, and advertising and circulation employees at over 50 publications in Ontario. Gail Lem, president of SONG until last September, characterizes the union’s history as a “50-year track record of successfully negotiating collective agreements with the largest newspapers in the country and the most powerful newspaper chains.” Its achievements including winning some major concessions at Macleans’s, The Expositor and the Cambridge Reporter, among others. Most memorable was the five-week strike at The Toronto Star that started in June 1992 and cost the paper approximately $1 million a day in lost ad revenue. Three weeks into the strike, on a Friday afternoon, union members prevented the paper from going to press for the first time in 100 years. They locked arms in front of the paper’s main office on Yonge Street to bar nonstriking employees from getting in. A little over a week later, the 1,600 members of the Star unit accepted a contract offer from management.

The Star strike was a major event in the lives of many of the SONG members affected, but is the union still a big part of their lives today, five years later? It’s probably fair to say that most don’t give the union a second thought. As Star reporter Nicolass van Rijn says, “As long as the situation here is relatively peaceful and stable, you come in and do your job and that’s it. You don’t think of a union.” In a 1993 Columbia Journalism Review article about the U.S.-based Newspaper Guild, Walter Brasch, a journalism professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, identified what he thought contributes to the apathy toward newspaper unions in general. “The guild has a problem with a whole lot of reporters who’ve gone through college or journalism school, wear suits and ties, and don’t see that they have anything in common with labor,” he’s quoted as saying.

SONG members, however, say that it’s not that they feel they’re above the labour movement; it’s more that SONG’s activities have changed as the times have, so the union is no longer a visible force. “I think the days of unions going in and hitting the bricks for big wages increases—that’s gone,” says Brian Thompson, a photographer at The Expositor. “Now unions are, a lot of the time, in more of a defensive role to try to maintain job security and fairness.” Slotnick also feels that the problem with the union movement has little to do with class; rather, it seems some reporters are simply too wary of getting involved in a union when that can easily become their ticket out the door. Slotnick certainly believes it was in Mark Skeffington’s case.

And since then, it’s become easier for employers to identify staff involved in union activity ad harder to organize a paper, due to the Tory win in the last provincial election. When employees are thinking about unionizing, someone at the paper will call SONG, sometimes anonymously. If the staff are still interested after SONG outlines how it can help, the union proceeds to try to sign up as many people as it can. Under the legislation put in place by the provincial Tories’ NDP predecessors, SONG or any other union could apply directly to the Labour Relations Board for certification once 55 percent of the employees signed union cards. The board then simply ordered the employer to start bargaining. The Tories changed the rules, so now the LRB conducts a secret ballot vote, then notifies management of the result. If the vote is in favour of organizing, the employer has a chance to try to dissuade staff members from joining the union; only if a majority still supports the union in a second vote does certification proceed.

One journalist who isn’t upset by such obstacles to organizing is Catherine Ford, national columnist for the Hollinger-owned Calgary Herald. Ford frankly abhors media unions. “At the very least, like plastic silverware, military intelligence or tight slacks, ’journalists’ union’ is an oxymoron,” she wrote in a column for the Ryerson Review of Journalism in 1994. Today, her opinion of unions has hardly changed. “The adversarial system infects our whole country,” she says haughtily. “I am profoundly tired of guys and their methods of negotiating, which is ’Let’s pull down our zippers, stick it on the table and see whose is longest.’”

When SONG got into that sort of contest three years ago at the Thomson-owned Oshawa Times, the results were disastrous. The Times had been published for over a century until it officially folded on December 4, 1994, during a month-long SONG strike. Management had proposed turning the paper into a triweekly and retaining only a quarter of the staff. According to Hank Kolodziejczak, then a Times reporter/photographer, that offer was monumentally rejected by the employees as demeaning. Instead, SONG helped its members launch a rival twice-a-week newspaper, The Oshawa Independent. By the time it folded six months later, SONG had poured over half a million dollarsinto the Independent. Because of this, Kolodziejczak says, very few of the employees blamed SONG for the Times’ shutdown; its closing was virtually inevitable. “Should we have gone on strike? It probably was, in retrospect, a dumb decision,” Slotnick says now. “But it was a decision made by the members there. It might have been a stupid decision, but it was a democratic one.”

Other recent SONG actions have been more successful. There was, for example, in 1994 split from Maryland-based Newspaper Guild to join the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Unions of Canada. At issue were concerns over a lack of local services, such as organizing grants, and the distinctly undemocratic nature of the union’s internal structure. For instance, Canadian leadership of the union was supposed to be elected, but for years the Canadian director was appointed by the Newspaper Guild president. It was only when 93 percent of SONG members voted in favour of leaving the Guild in 1994that Mike Bocking became the union’s first elected Canadian director. “The struggle to get out of the Newspaper Guild and join a Canadian union took up seven years of my life,” Lem says. “We did it because it was the right thing to do. Being in a Canadian union, being able to be a part of the labour movement and talk about issues that affect us, was something that was going to make the union much more relevant.” SONG is now the largest media local in the CEP and the largest print local in Canada.

For Lem, part of the impetus to join a domestic union was the unusually high level of ownership concentration that exists in Canada—a level that shot up when Hollinger bought its controlling interest in Southam last year. Twelve of SONG’s 22 bargaining units are now Hollinger-owned, and Hollinger has majority control of 58 of Canada’s 104 dailies, plus numerous weeklies, community newspapers and free-distribution papers and magazines. The purchase sent several groups, including SONG and the Newspaper Guild, racing to the federal courts for a judicial review of the Southam takeover approved by the federal Bureau of Competition. While the presiding judge dismissed their suit last December, the Federal Court of Appeal rejected that ruling late last month and the groups and Hollinger will be back in court April 9.

The takeover, however, may actually work to SONG’s benefit, by reminding members of the union’s utility. Michael Allen Marion, the agriculture and rural reporter for the Expositor, thinks so. Without the guild, he says, jobs would always be in jeopardy; he credits SONG with “saving the newsroom” when Hollinger bought his paper in December. Hollinger’s aggressive expansion may even result in more organizing drives at papers that are outside the guild. In mid-February, for example, there were certification votes at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and the Regina Leader Post, which the company bought in February 1996. The ballots came after nine months of organizing by the Newspaper Guild of Canada, a branch of the international union, that began when 173 of 800 employees at the papers were cut right after the takeover. Neither vote carried, but the fact that the drive occurred at all suggests a renewed respect for guild activity. “We used to think Thomson was the worst employer we had but Conrad Black is worse,” Lem says gravely. “Thomson cared only about profit; Black cares about profit but he also cares about power and influence.”

While Black has gained both power and influence, recently SONG has seemed to be losing some of its clout. Of the four full-time union local representatives SONG had before joining the CEP, three are now national representatives for the new parent union, assigned exclusively to SONG business. Lem left the position she held for nine years as SONG president last fall to take on the role of national media vice-president for the CEP. The one full-time local representative left at SONG was Slotnick, and he quit at the end of last year, after almost 10 years with the union, saying he simply needed a change. The small office on Queen Street in Toronto now only has three secretaries, a full-time Toronto Star unit chair (because the Star’s membership is so large) and the newly elected part-time president. Joe Matyas, an editorial writer at The London Free Press, devotes two days a week plus whatever spare time he has to SONG. One of his priorities is membership participation in the union, the lack of which he believes has contributed to mild apathy and dissension within SONG, particularly among those units outise Toronto, where members have sometimes felt “lost in the shuffle.” “We have big, strong units in Toronto in The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. The people who work at those two papers are the cornerstones of our local; they have the bulk of the membership,” Matyas says. “But we still have 20 other bargaining units from outside Toronto and they require attention too.”

Can SONG overcome all these challenges? Lorne Slotnick admits these aren’t the union’s glory days. “With the economy and political regime in Ontario the way it is, I would say we, like other unions, are suffering right now,” he says. But he also believes better days are ahead: “I think that’s just a cyclical thing.” People always need and want what a union provides: a counterbalance to the power of the proprietor.

Joe Matyas makes the point even more strongly. “Bargaining is getting tougher and things are getting a little tougher for employees,” he says. “If you’re unorganized and you’re not protected by a union contract, you’re very exposed to the whims of the employer. When you have a contract, you don’t have absolute protection— there’s no such thing—but you do have the means to fight arbitrary measures.”

My best friend in the whole wide world just bought Space Invaders for his brand new Atari 2600. The game is so cool. He saved up all the money he got from delivering the weekend newspaper just to buy it. Me, I couldn’t do a paper route. Gettin’ up in the morning—before the street lights even turned off—to stuff all those inserts together: the movie sections, the travel sections, the comics, and the news. No way. It’d take him half an hour to do that, then he’d lug the papers from house to house. And in the winter he’d freeze his ink-covered fingers off. My buddy would hafta take each bulky newspaper from his bag and carefully put it inside 43 different screen doors. Now that he’s got Space Invaders, he’s gonna quit. It’s just way too much work.

His leaving was a smart move, because in 1983, the great paperboy phaseout began. The recession 10 years later, combined with a shrinking readership and skyrocketing newsprint costs, and—like the paperboys a decade earlier—journalists were laid off. In a six-month period leading up to September 1994, Canadian newspapers lost nearly 130,000 readers. Society was changing at a rapid pace, and newspapers were asking for a time commitment their readers could no longer give them. They’d become increasingly irrelevant to a generation that grew up with home computers and television. To stem their plummeting readership, the major dailies began to redesign themselves. In the early nineties, many papers—like Canada’s biggest, The Toronto Star—began running shorter articles with full-colour illustrations on their clearly designed pages. But these changes seemed ineffective against the exodus. Perhaps, newspaper publishers thought, there was something to all those column inches given to the “Information Superhighways.” There was almost no additional cost to publishing electronically and it was an untapped audience. By early 1994, American newspapers started moving online. Canadian papers followed suit almost a year later. Did they know what they were getting into? Jon Katz, Wired magazine’s media editor, doesn’t think so, and he wrote “Online or Not, Newspapers Suck” to explain why. The 1994 article has become the unofficial manifesto for critics of Web-based newspapers. “With few exceptions,” he wrote of online newspapers, “they seem to be just what they are, expensive hedges against onrushing technology with little rationale of their own.” But a lot can change on the World Wide Web in three years—after all, that’s almost half its embryonic life.

With elaborate graphics, clickable image-maps and its own Internet software kit, The Toronto Star moved on the Web on March 30, 1996. Like hundreds of other North American newspapers already on the Net, the Star (www.thestar.com) transferred almost every section of its paper online: News, Entertainment, Life, Wheels and the money-making Classifieds, among others. Each of the stories appeared exactly as it did in the newsprint version, but without the discipline of column rules. Unformatted, these stories spilled across the page like a typographer’s nightmare.

While many online newspapers have this problem, it’s one that is easily solved with simple formatting. Given that the Star has been online for almost a year, it’s surprising that the site still has such disorderly pages. Even more surprising is that the Star has apparently disregarded the Net-culture’s emphasis on user-friendly interaction. The best way to get a Star employee’s e-mail address is not through the Web site—as one might think—but rather to phone the person and ask for it. And even then, I had difficulty actually contracting someone, anyone, to talk about the site. After months of trying both voicemail and e-mail, I finally was able to speak with someone at the Star’s parent company: Michael Pieri, the operating director of Torstar Electronic Publishing. He did mention—in a very brief interview— that the paper does plan changes for its Web site, but wouldn’t specify what they were.

Unfortunately, my experience is a common one for online newspaper readers across North America, as J.D. Lasica noted in a November 1996 article for the American Journalism Review. “Anyone who has ever called a newsroom,” he wrote, “only to be shuffled from one gruff or impatient voice to the next, knows full well the message we in the news media project. Inaccessibility. Aloofness. Remoteness.”

The Toronto Star site operates, it would appear, within a closed system—much like the print version, where reader feedback exists exclusively as letters to the editor. By contrast, successful online publications allow people to interact with one another and the site by encouraging readers to comment on stories and the threads they create. Interaction on the Web can range from simple e-mail-based comment forms to full-scale discussion forums.

In mid-February, I managed to track down Mike Erlindson, a Web-site producer for the Star. His e-mail responses to my questions about the site’s future arrived mere hours after I sent them. “We would like to have more information about our readers,” he wrote. “Except registration and search engines.” These additions would allow the site to be personalized according to readers’ individual preferences, and let them immediately search for the information they want. But the Star’s site is still a long way from creating a sense of community for its readers. The paper’s online edition tries to overcome these shortcomings with news. And the site’s 100 or so articles are presumably what made the Star the 25th best news source on the Web, at least according to the 32,000 people who responded to an electronic straw poll conducted in December 1996 by the American Journalism Review at its Web site.

Unlike the Star, The Globe and Mail’s Web site, called GLOBEnet (www.theglobeandmail.com), devotes an entire section to public discussion of current articles and issues. The National Issues Forum provides an area for readers to debate topical GLOBEnet articles. The forum is one of the site’s top five areas, according to Derrick Cho, the marketing manager of interactive services at the Globe. This interaction is an effective way for online newspapers to develop an entirely new base of readers—and avoid criticism from people like Katz. Publications that merely move their content online and augment it with a few links have earned the derision of new media critics. About that, Cho agrees with people like Katz. “That’s repurposing of material,” Cho says, “and that’s not our intent. What we’re trying to do is figure out a way to enhance our content—make it more interactive—to take advantage of what the Internet does and what it’s all about.” And GLOBEnet’s begun that with its WebExtra section, featuring articles and columns produced especially for online reading. Additions like this have helped draw over 10,000 visitors a day to the site. While not as extensive as online American newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post—which feature comprehensive stories and sidebars with related links—GLOBEnet is working hard to create an informative and interactive site. In the rush to slap a URL on their flag, some newspapers have missed the point. Too often, online newspapers dump stories from the printed page to the Web page, creating sites derisively known as “shovelware.” Interaction on these passive sties is limited to sending e-mail to the Webmaster or filling out a questionnaire. Without original online content or even a discussion forum, these sites risk becoming stale, attracting only the occasional reader. And most advertizers ignore a publication—be it physically or digitally printed—without a solid audience.

As newspapers slowly feel their way around the Net, others are attracting advertizing dollars, and readers, by cornering the online news market. Though varied, these news services all offer the news you want, when you want it. A successful model is the California-based news service PointCast. Launched in February of last year, it carries content from Reuters, AccuWeather, Pathfinder (which hosts magazines like Time and Money) as well as stories from the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times. Within seven months, The Globe and Mail’s New Media Centre had acquired the Canadian distribution rights an launched PointCast Canada (www.pointcast.ca). This service also carries content from GLOBEnet, Canadian Corporate News and Canada NewsWire. By mid-February, the Canadian version had almost 150,000—registered users.

What makes the PointCast model different is the application. Operating independent of the Web, it can be set—like an alarm clock—to automatically update the news. PointCast “wake up,” logs onto your Internet service provider, downloads your information, then logs off, all in about five minutes. No more dialing into your provider, searching for the right Web address and eating up online time while jumping from link to link looking for a story of interest. Instead, PointCast pushes its content by replacing those flying toasters with a screen saver that displays the news. Click on a headline and Point Cast serves the story up. What has really caught people’s attention, however, is the service-’s marriage of content to advertizing. Twenty percent of PointCast’s application is devoted to playing TV-like commercials. Jennifer Stewart, the marketing manager for PointCast Canada, says the user is hooked because PointCast offers compelling content. “Once you’ve got the viewers hooked,” she says, “then they’re going to be seeing the ads that are running there. It’s just another way for advertizers to communicate their message.”

PointCast may be the most publicized news service online, but it’s not alone. The popular Net search utility Yahoo! listed 34 at the beginning of 1997—including its own version, My Yahoo! Like Yahoo!, most serious new media companies have their own personalized news services. IBM has a business-oriented service called infoSage, while Microsoft has partnered with NBC to offer MSNBC. Yet another online news service is CRAYON (www.crayon.net). During a boring class, Pennsylvania college student Jeff Boulter decided to create a site that allowed people to assemble their own online newspaper, CRAYON, which has been around since March 1995, creates a Web page with customized links to various news services. American newspapers have also begun to get into personalized news business. The Los Angeles Times has a service called Hunter; “the golden news retriever” is known as an intelligent agent, and can be found at www.latimes.com/HOME/hunter.htm. The amount of customizable information offered by Hunter is so high that it’s only a matter of time—and initiative—before other papers start mirroring it. Others, like Netscape Communication’s In-Box Direct, send news stories to your e-mail box as they happen. Without a mail program that filters may e-mail, though, I found that In-Box Direct quickly overwhelmed me with news.

The tremendous variety of online news services challenges the papers’ traditionally loyal readers. Newspapers must re-establish their identity online. But monopolies can’t exist on the Net, so every Web site is on relatively equal footing. To attract the readers, a site must have a solid content, be user-friendly and be willing to create an environment that is not only suitable to the medium, but one that offers a degree of interactivity. Robin Rowland, who teaches computer-assisted reporting at Ryerson and writes for CBC Newsworld’s Web site, thinks it will be difficult for newspapers to survive online. Newspaper publishers must be willing to invest in their online ventures. “It takes money and you need a broad spectrum of staff people. I don’t see that happening here yet,” he said in December 1996. Three months later some sites are showing signs of life. The Edmonton Journal (www.southam.com/edmontonjournal) offers a wide variety of content, and now has a few people working on the site. But even GLOBEnet, one of Canada’s leading online newspapers, is operating in an administrative limbo. For example, while Cho’s job is focussed on the site, he also deals with new media throughout The Globe and Mail’s various companies. “We don’t have a dedicated unit that works on the site specifically,” Cho says. Erlindson, looking at the American model, thinks that “all major Canadian media players will have dedicated online reporting staffs within the next five years.” The Star has no plans for such a staff. After all, as Erlindson wrote, “This is all contingent on the bottom line.”

Yet another challenge for online newspapers is keeping the reader’s attention. “All over the screen you have your buttons to click and there are hypertext links,” says Evan Solomon, the editor of Canada’s new media magazine, Shift (see page 52). “Imagine reading a book and all over the margins were: ’Close the book here.’ ’Skip to page 40.’ ’Check out another page now!’ Start bombarding your reader with ways out and there’s not a lot to encourage the reader to stick around.”

Reading on the Net is a different—and sometimes difficult—experience. Too many bright blue, underlined words linking to other pages are as distracting as screens full one-sentence paragraphs. Once again design plays a key role. The New York TImes’ Web site, for example, avoids overwhelming its reader by placing relevant links at the end of the story. Like many new-media journalists, the Star’s Net columnist, K.K. Campbell, feels that those links can be put to good use; after all, the Web was woven from the fibres of the academic and research communities. Since moving Toronto’s eye WEEKLY onto the Web in March ’94—making Canada’s first publication online—Campbell has written tens of thousands of words both for and about the Net. “You can have a 600-word story at the top and then under it have all kinds of information,” he says. “So the research and information is richer. It’s a lot more work, though, so I can see that journalists may not want to do it. But as an information consumer, that’s why I love. That’s why I love the Web.” And there lies the attraction of online news services. When services like PointCast bring together dozens of related articles from a wide range of sources, the user is presented with a virtual library of information from a variety of perspectives. Along with more information, relevant video and audio clips can be added to stories to fully utilize the Web’s potential. The Chicago Tribune has done this on a few occasions, most notably in the July 1996 story “Code Blue: Survival in the Sky,” which used interactive animations and the browser plug-in RealAudio to play sound clips. As bandwidth increases, allowing for high-speed access, these multimedia stories will blur the line between TV and print reporters.

Ironically, newspapers on the Web have a unique chance to return to their roots, to their community base. Discussion forums can eliminate the barrier between the readers and the newspaper in a way printed op-ed pages could never do, and free access to archived stories can transform the online newspaper into a community encyclopaedia. And this, according to Erlindson, is what the Star’s online readers want. For example, the Star’s Web site could act as a database for readers concerned about the unsafe trucks on Ontario’s highways. The user could then search for every story printed about that issue. While some papers, like the Journal, do offer this service, many contemplating this service want to change a subscription fee to use their online archives.

Campbell and other new media pundits think newspapers should provide the basic news stories free, then charge a small fee as the user reads more detailed layers of the story. This idea of “micro-billing” lets the reader access a certain level of free information, while providing a solid revenue stream for an online newspaper that offers quality content. A similar model made Netscape a multibillion-dollar company overnight—it gave away its browser on the Web, then charged for additional Net software, like Web services. “Online newspapers should do a similar sort of thing,” says Campbell, “but newspapers aren’t doing it.” Instead, they’re trying to impose a print-based economic model onto the Internet. Witness the contracts from publishing companies like Thomson demanding the rights for freelancers’ articles. Or the subscription fee charged by The Wall Street Journal’s Web site. Or the “downsizing” of Southam’s new media division: the Conrad Black-owned company fired or laid off 26 employees, leaving only 13. Like many publishers, Southam’s parent company, Hollinger, is hesitant to invest in online ventures right now. Though Marianne Godwin, the vice-president of strategy and corporate development at Hollinger, see new media as a solid business opportunity, she says, “We have to date, and rightly so, limited the amount of resources in terms of time and money invested on electronic services. Once the time is right, we are streamlined and flexible enough to take further advantage of what technology has to offer.” Waiting for high-speed access to build, in the words of Godwin, “exciting, interactive Web sites” may mean online newspapers losing their readers to pioneering new media companies who have kept up with the ever-evolving Web.

Already, newspapers in Canada are losing valuable ground in new media. American online newspapers have created engrossing sites, rich with information that attracts readers and advertizers. Other services like PointCast have established themselves as global leaders in the personalized news market with versions in the U.S., Canada Japan and, soon, Korea. And now non-traditional media companies like Microsoft and IBM have become content providers. Bill Gates’ company has dedicated $400 million a year to its editorial content, including the partnership with NBC that created MSNBC, an online news service like CNN. Michael Kinsley’s online magazine, Slate, is operated by Microsoft, as is a chain of community-based, online newspapers called Sidewalk, being launched in the first half of 1997. The software giant’s goal on the Net is to create the kind of Web sites people want to visit. “Those information technology companies are doing something,” Campbell says, whereas too many Canada’s online newspapers report to repurposed material.

Solomon is more forgiving, saying that one of the problems is that technology evolves faster than the media can keep up with it. But he thinks they will catch up. “It’s pretty early to say,” he says, “that what we see in the next five, 10 years, will be what we see in the next 20.” Canadian online newspapers can’t wait that long. They must change with the Net, where new developments appear faster than Starbucks coffee shops. Newspapers have a responsibility to their community, and online, that’s the ever-evolving Net-culture. The best way for a newspaper to become a hitless site is to remain static, expecting readers will go out of their way to visit it. Most won’t. They’ll check lists of the top 10 news sources on the Net and go to those non-Canadian sites. Or they’ll wait for the news to come to them.

Successful online news services supply their readers with content, as opposed to expecting users to “pull” it from them. Many new media companies are moving toward this idea of “pushing.” And it’s a trend that will continue as this new medium evolves into the next century. “As we watch where the Web is going,” says Andrew Leonard, a former Web culture critic for HotWired, “it seems to be catering to the ’slippers’ [users of pushing] and away from the ’zoomers’ [Web users like pulling content].” And it is one that several American papers have already tapped into: witness Web agents like Hunter, and the San Jose Mercury Times’s NewsHound service, which was launched in 1994. Unless Canadian papers quickly respond to these U.S. services—as GLOBEnet has with PointCast—they may find their market share already taken by the likes of Microsoft and the large American dailies. It’s like the early fifties, when Canadian TV stations finally got on the air, only to find their viewers already hooked on U.S. shows. In fact, the poll placing the Star as the Web’s 25th best news source listed CNN Interactive as number one.

The cable news giant’s Web site combines “pushing” with an early example of what Net-watchers call “The Convergence.” CNN Interactive offers soundbites and streamed—or compressed—video, along with written articles. Once high-speed transmission devices like cable modems are common, “The Convergence” will allow the Net to carry live, broadcast-quality video and audio along with the traditional hypertext-based Web pages. It’s part of what lies behind media merges like that of Rogers and Maclean Hunter, and Time-Warner’s purchase of CNN. When “The Convergence” finally happens, the Web could explode beyond the hype and into the everyday world of the VCR. And one small click was taken this past Christmas when the first generation of NCs—cheap network computers, like WebTV, that allow Net access through a television—were released. As millions of new users descend upon the Net, Canadian newspapers must revolutionize themselves online, or watch the risk-taking new media companies attract their readers and their advertizers.

Besides, it’s too late to rehire those paperboys.

On the evening of January 20, 1994, Angela Lawrence sat in disbelief as she watched a TVOntario program featuring a panel discussion on diversity in Canadian newsrooms. Among the four panelists was radio and television commentator Dick Smythe, who argued that the dearth of newsroom diversity was due to a lack of qualified candidates in the field. “How many dark-skinned people do we see out there?” he asked, noting how few minorities there were in the audience of mainly journalism students.

Like many of her peers, Lawrence, senior editor of Canadian Select Homes, had been hearing about an idea to form an association for black journalists for years, but nothing had come of it. Inflamed by Smythe’s comments and inspired by her sister, who had helped form the Black Law Students Association of Canada while studying at the University of Toronto, Lawrence decided to pursue the idea. She tracked down CBC Evening News reporter Hamlin Grange, who had once discussed the prospect of forming a group with a few fellow journalists. He told her that if she was willing to put in the time, then he was willing to help. A year later, on February 2, 1996, at Ryerson Polytechnic University, approximately 200 people attended the launch of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists with Lawrence as its president. For many in the black community, the common sentiment was that it was about time.

Hamlin Grange, who became the CABJ’s vice-president, remembers that 20 years ago all of Toronto’s black journalists could fit around one restaurant table. Today, while there have been no surveys of staffing patterns across all media, smaller studies show that the number of black journalists is still lower than population patterns would suggest. For example, a 1993 survey conducted by the Canadian Daily Newspaper Association (now the Canadian Newspaper Association) of 41 daily newsrooms showed that of the 2,620 professional journalists working there, only 67, or 2.6 percent, were visible minorities, although visible minorities make up 9.4 percent of Canadians. In an attempt to change this, one of the CABJ’s goals is to encourage black students to pursue careers in journalism. But the organization’s main aim is to establish a network of black journalists.

In an industry where success is often determined as much by who you know as what you know, the importance of networking and building contacts is incalculable. Many black journalists and other minority journalists have felt isolated over the years because they had virtually no contacts or mentors within the industry. Citytv videographer and assignment editor Dwight Drummond was one of them. He wishes the CABJ had existed while he was a radio and television arts student at Ryerson six years ago. While it seemed that many of his classmates had solid contacts within the industry, he had to search endlessly for a connection. “I had no one to really turn to who could help me and I actually had to go out and find these people,” says Drummond, a CABJ member. His search ended when he spotted reporter Royson James’ picture and byline in The Toronto Star. After giving James a call, Drummond was able to shadow him for a few days. From that time forward, Drummond was able to rely on James as a resource and mentor whenever he had questions or concerns.

Now, at the CABJ’s monthly meetings at Toronto’s central YMCA, the 70 members have the opportunity to meet other working professionals in the industry. (Membership is open to those in media-related occupations, including researchers, photographers and public relations professionals; students are welcome if they are at an accredited college or university studying journalism or journalism-related subjects). Some evenings’ programs are designed to help members build their connections. At one of last year’s meetings, Trevor Wilson, a diversity management consultant and former host of CFMT’s Black World, ran a networking workshop. He talked about networking in light of the ineffective employment equity legislation currently in place, stressing the importance of maintaining contacts among members and keeping each other informed of job opportunities in the workplace.

On a larger scale, the association has entertained the idea of a future affiliation with the U.S.-based National Association of Black Journalists. Founded by a group of 21 journalists in 1975, the 3,000-strong NABJ is the largest media organization for people of colour in the world. Its mission is, not surprisingly, very similar to the CABJ’s. The NABJ’s accomplishments provide a glimpse of what the CABJ might achieve in the next 20 years.

Each year, the NABJ awards over $70,000 in scholarships to black journalism students and offers fellowships to seasoned journalists. Its renowned annual convention provides hands-on education and training for members, whether they are at entry level or already well established. At the gathering, students also receive hands-on training in the various journalistic disciplines. In print, for example, a number of students produce a daily newspaper under the supervision of professionals.

At last year’s convention in Nashville, guest speakers included U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, presidential candidate Robert Dole and Church of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan. President Bill Clinton has indicated he will attend the 1997 conference. Another feature of the convention is the job fair, which routinely attracts 150 or so recruiters from media outlets across the U.S. The association also runs two toll-free, 24-hour joblines (one each for print and broadcast) that members can call to hear of available job opportunities.

While an affiliation with the NABJ has been considered since the CABJ’s launch, the idea of ties with the Canadian Association of Journalists was never an issue. The CAJ, which has 1,500 members across the country, is home to seven subgroups, including ones for women, journalism educators, critics and photojournalists, but has never had a caucus for minority journalists. The reason, according to CAJ national president Tom Arnold, is because “the issue has never been addressed.” Does that mean there isn’t a need for one? “No, I don’t think so. You just have to take a look around the newsrooms to see if minority journalists are represented and they’re not.”

Still, some critics of the CAJ think the absence of a minority caucus isn’t the only issue that’s never been addressed. The association frequently talks about general issues-the CBC cutbacks, freedom of information, the concentration of ownership by Conrad Black-but seldom spends time on anything of specific concern to racial minorities. “The things that are put on the front burner aren’t necessarily issues that concern us as journalists of colour,” says Hamlin Grange. “I don’t see employment equity and portrayal of blacks in the media.”

To begin putting some of these issues on the front burner, the CABJ organized a panel discussion last April about crime reporting in the media. Participants included Toronto Sun columnist Christie Blatchford, Toronto Star Life and Diversity editor Carola Vyhnak and Michael Van Cooten, publisher of Pride, a Toronto weekly for the black community. The occasion was an opportunity for members to air important questions, questions such as why the media continues to stereotype black males as criminals. The discussion was especially relevant for Dwight Drummond, who became a journalist because of his desire to report on his community accurately. Growing up in the Jane and Finch area, he saw firsthand how unfairly blacks were being portrayed. “I felt that there were a lot of positive people in my neighbourhood and if people watched the news or read the papers, they would think only negative things were happening.”

Another criticism is the lack of “mainstreaming” in the media-that is, including minorities in all types of news stories, so that a story on, say, the effects of the recession on Canadian families would focus on an Asian or East Indian family, or a piece on innovations in dentistry might feature a black dentist. Instead, the major media often include minorities only in race-related stories. Even then, they get it wrong. Freelance PR consultant and CABJ secretary Valerie Wint says the media “will call on a black person to talk about the whole black community and not understand that the black community is actually several communities.”

But perhaps the biggest challenge for the CABJ is tackling institutional racism in the industry. The 1993 CDNA study explored the reasons given by the papers as to why they weren’t hiring more minority journalists. More than half blamed a hiring freeze, while others cited the availability of qualified candidates as the problem. Jules Elder, editor of Share newspaper, calls the latter reason a “cop-out.” He says many CABJ members are university graduates coming out of journalism schools. Not only do they have the academic qualifications, but the experience as well, with some having worked in the United States, England or the Caribbean. “I think that they will use excuses,” says Angela Lawrence. She recites the experience of a colleague wanting to progress to a larger city newspaper from the black community paper where he’d been working. When he contacted one Toronto daily, he was told no positions were available because of a hiring freeze. A month later, while covering an event, he met a young, white reporter newly employed by the same paper.

An isolated incident or typical of what many minorities have been experiencing for decades? According to CABJ member Fil Fraser, president and CEO of Vision TV, “One of the things that coming together in an association does is to allow you to compare notes and see just what the landscape really is.” Throughout his own 45-year career, Fraser fortunately has faced virtually no discrimination. Initially, being black may even have worked in his favour since he was considered “exotic,” being one of the very few black men working in the industry at the time and the first in broadcasting. “But what’s different today is there are thousands of blacks trying to get into these professions and they are a threat to the people who are there. It doesn’t need to be a threat, but people respond in that way; it’s just a part of human nature.”

Representation, access, equity, portrayal in the media-Hamlin Grange believes the CABJ has already begun working to resolve these issues by talking about them in workshops, discussions and forums. As problems present themselves, the association can pen letters and meet managers of media outlets to voice recommendations and grievances. In a more proactive way, the CABJ has created a speaker’s bureau that provides members to address students at public schools, universities, and colleges.

However, Ashante Infantry, a city reporter at The Toronto Star, doesn’t think the CABJ can resolve representation or equity problems, nor does she necessarily see that as its role. But Infantry does endorse the CABJ’s commitment to encouraging young people to enter journalism. “Once there are more blacks and other minorities working in news organizations, they’re going to be more sensitive to those issues, they’re going to think about it and are going to force everybody else to think about it.”

To this end, the CABJ has sent letters to the 15 elementary and secondary schools with the highest population of black students in the greater Toronto area, inviting them to contact the association if they would like to have members as guest speakers. “Schools can come to us and say we’d like a journalist to come out and talk to the kids so they can see that journalists aren’t always white. They can be black, they can be East Indian, they can be Asian,” says Lawrence. By the end of June, the association will have a career resource centre set up so students and journalism schools will be able to find out about job openings and internship programs. The CABJ is also planning two scholarships in the names of the late Al Hamilton, publisher of Contrast, a now-defunct black advocacy paper, and Mary Ann Shadd, the first black woman in Canada to be the publisher of her own newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, an abolitionist newspaper she established in 1853.

The only obstacles to CABJ success seem to be money and numbers. It’s almost impossible to find anyone who doesn’t think the organization is a good idea. “Every credible black journalist I know belongs to it and I think it does a very strong job of being available to up-and-coming journalists in a way that other journalistic associations could only admire,” says Globe managing editor Colin MacKenzie. “They’re certainly among the people who keep the diversity fire burning under the bums of people like me.”

As for the argument that the association represents reverse discrimination, Hamlin Grange has this to say: “It’s not segregation, it’s specification. It’s saying that these people have specific needs and requirements and concerns that are not being addressed elsewhere and they come together as a group to talk about it. Anyone can join as long as you support the goals and objectives of the association.

But I think it also becomes a self-monitoring kind of thing,” he adds. “For example, would you join the Ukrainian Association of Journalists if you didn’t speak the language? Probably not. The important thing that people have to come away with this association is that ultimately it will become a place where industry and the people entering the business can come to for information.”

But more importantly perhaps is the group’s ability to provide a positive community of people who have the same goals and interests. As Fil Fraser says, “They’re really interested in improving the lot of its members, they’re not out there to walk around with chips on their shoulders looking for battles to fight. They’re out there to solve problems, not to fight battles.”

By the end of his first day as This Magazine‘s new business manager, Trevor Hutchinson knew that the historic left-wing magazine was in serious financial trouble. He began his new job by studying the accounts of the Toronto-based title, starting with payroll. He concentrated on the figures for a few minutes, and then looked at the numbers on the computer screen again. Confused, he asked whether This had another bank account, wondering how he would meet the next day’s payroll. There wasn’t another account.

Through fund-raising, calling people who owed money to This and preselling an entire year of ads, Hutchinson was able to raise the $3,000 for payroll. But as soon as that crisis was solved, others followed. “My first day marked my beginning and really outlined what I would do for a year,” recalls Hutchinson, “which was just crisis management.”

Hutchinson was surprised by the extent of the problems. Before joining This in May 1995, the 28-year-old had worked as a financial manager for the Ontario Federation of Students. He certainly knew that many nonprofit organizations had some financial problems, but he never realized that This Magazine, which is published by the nonprofit Red Maple Foundation, was in so much trouble. After all, he had joined the magazine at a time when it was infused with a fresh editorial energy that seemed to signal a promising future.

After years of being shaped largely by a collective of 1960s leftists, This Magazine wanted to focus on a broader audience, mainly younger readers. This new shift was sealed with the hiring of 23-year-old Naomi Klein for the top job as managing editor in early 1994. Klein brought new ideas and a handful of talented young writers to This, and freshened and broadened the magazine’s focus beyond politics to embrace subjects such as youth culture, advertising, fashion, music and the media. At the 1996 National Magazine Awards, the new spirit received industry approval as This Magazine enjoyed its best year ever, being nominated for seven awards and winning two golds for articles and a silver for art direction of a single issue. Clearly, the new This contained a lot of quality work at the same time as it carried on the magazine’s long-term role as one of the few Canadian forums for intelligent left journalism. “This Magazine is alternate opinion; it’s new voices, progressive voices and criticism of the conventional wisdom,” says admirer Val Ross, publishing reporter for The Globe and Mail.

However, it takes more than progressive views and quality editorial to make a magazine viable. Although Hutchinson has worked for close to two years to improve the finances of This, its very survival continues to be threatened by outside factors beyond its control. The right-leaning political climate of the times makes it tough for a left-wing magazine to find broad respect and readership. And the uncertain future of government arts policies threatens the grants that form a critical financial base for a nonprofit publication such as This Magazine.

On the readership question, This Magazine‘s new editor, 27-year-old Andrea Curtis, who assumed her position in March 1997, faces the same problem as the last couple of editors: to redefine the voice and purpose of the magazine at a time when the Canadian left is in a state of disarray. Since the arrival of Klein, This has stepped up its struggle to attract a new generation of politically progressive readers. In doing so, however, it risks losing its critically valuable base of older subscribers who grew up with a magazine focussed on their intellectual preoccupations: Canadian nationalism, union activism and left-wing party politics.

“We don’t have a typical reader, I swear we don’t,” says Clive Thompson, 28, who succeeded Klein as editor, but left last February after a draining 15 months on the job. “We compose an issue thinking, here are some of the stories that are going to appeal to people that are really old guard; here are some of the stories that are going to appeal to the new guard; and here’s some stuff that will probably float in the middle. It’s fucking impossible, it’s crazy. It creates a really strange mandate for the magazine.”

And the meagre finances of This, a relatively small magazine with a paid circulation of about 5,500, make it tough to fulfill any mandate, let alone maintain quality editorial. With its annual operating budget of $200,000, This can only offer its editor and associate publisher entry-level salaries of $20,000 and pays its writers about $250 for features-compared to the $1,500 to $4,000 range of major consumer magazines.

Of all its problems, the most threatening may be its reliance on government grants. As a nonprofit title with a mandate of public education, This is kept alive by grants from by the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, which account for about 25 percent of its revenues. Through the 1980s, such grants were easier to obtain; however, in the last half-decade or so, tight-fisted governments have been progressively cutting subsidies to small magazines such as This. To produce its May/June 1996 to March/April 1997 issues, This received only $25,500 from the Ontario Arts Council-a 15 percent cut from the year before-while its Canada Council grant has been reduced by 25 percent over the last six years, from $32,750 to $24,500. Insiders now worry that This may soon be reclassified as ineligible for any funding at all. At government whim, the national media may lose a valuable forum for voices and views that aren’t likely to find a home anywhere else.

This Magazine was founded in 1966 under the title This Magazine Is About Schools. Focussed originally on the alternative education movement, its goal was to “bring together the utopian counterculture in schools and communes,” a mission accomplished through a mix of letters, commentary, essays and fiction. By 1973, the magazine’s collective editorial board decided that education and schools were no longer the key to changing society. And so the periodical was reborn as This Magazine, with coverage broadened to include more arts and culture. The goal was to “contribute to the discussion that was needed to build an open and just society,” remembers author and columnist Rick Salutin, who for 21 years was a member of the This board, which for many years was largely made up of union organizers and left-wing activists. By the end of the 1970s, the magazine’s list of contributors was quite impressive, including the likes of novelist Margaret Atwood and journalist Linda McQuaig.

In the late eighties and early nineties, This focussed primarily on political issues, especially the trade union movement, Canadian nationalism, the Meech Lake Accord and free trade. At one fateful meeting in the late 1980s, a board member suggested that This needed editors who had been born since the Korean War. (At that time, Lorraine Filyer had been working at the magazine since 1971 and as its managing editor since 1976.) Discussions followed, and there was general agreement that the magazine needed a new generation of board members and writers-to avoid growing old and out of touch, appealing only to its aging long-term readers. “We actually had this situation,” Salutin recalls, “where some of the subscribers were starting to say the print was too small.”

Filyer left the magazine in the spring of 1990 for a position at the Ontario Arts Council, and, under the direction of a new managing editor, Judy MacDonald, and her successor, Moira Farr, younger writers were brought into the magazine. Old cover stories on Big-P politics gradually gave way to pieces on youth-culture subjects such as fashion, media and advertising. One of the new writers was Naomi Klein, who at age 21 debuted in This with a piece on how university students were really more concerned about their own financial problems than about the faddish subject of political correctness. In March 1994, Klein became the new managing editor of This Magazine and quickly pushed the magazine into the sharpest transition in its 31-year history. “It was her laser-keen concentration on areas of youth culture that This Magazine had previously ignored,” says Clive Thompson. “In terms of understanding where progressive activism is taking place, she realized that a lot of it is happening outside political parties.”

For new voices, Klein drew heavily on people she had known in the student press. Over the next year, many young writers joined This Magazine‘s editorial board, while some long-time members stepped down. “She did something that hadn’t been done for 20 years-she created a new group of people around the magazine,” says Mel Watkins, an economics professor at the University of Toronto and This board member since 1979. Historically, the board had operated as a collective in guiding the magazine-even though the managing editor ran the show, she could be outvoted on any story idea by a majority of the collective board. “I found it incredibly offensive that I was there working for basically no money, and same with the staff, and we were the ones doing the work, and yet nothing could run in This Magazine if it was vetoed,” says Klein. The newer, younger board decided to restructure the old system and give Klein the title-and true decision-making power-of editor. “Within six months, the whole composition of the board had changed, and it was the salvation of the magazine,” adds Watkins.

Klein’s influence was soon clear as she filled the pages of This with articles on pop culture and youth issues. “My target was to get young, progressive people reading This Magazine.” she says. “Left politics has changed and we wanted to reflect that change. And we didn’t want to do it at the exclusion of the older generation, but we had to broaden the definition of what is progressive politics.” Klein’s first full issue, April/May 1994, signalled the shift with coverlines such as “Rock On! Why Real-Life Politics Were too Much for MuchMusic” and “I Was a Cog in the Gen X Marketing Machine.”

Speaking to a younger crowd also meant updating the magazine’s design. Dismissing the notion that ideas publications should only concentrate on content, the This board decided to execute a makeover by hiring Carol Moskot, an experienced designer who was then working as an art director for the beauty and fashion magazine Images. The board asked Moskot to do a redesign that would reflect the magazine’s history but also make it visually exciting to the new left. “It not only had to be a reflection of the desires of the left, it also had to be somewhat Gen X,” says Moskot. Her new design, which premiered on the newsstands in March 1995, featured strong typography, bold headlines and hard-edged illustrations, a look that echoed a graphic style used by the left earlier this century.

While many of Klein’s initiatives had a fresh feel, it was soon clear that defining a new left-wing sensibility for Generation X was going to be a challenging job. For instance, one of Klein’s most celebrated moves was her July 1995 special issue on the New Right. It examined how right-wing thought has influenced public opinion and explored the Canadian media personalities on the new right, including Kenneth Whyte, Andrew Coyne, David Frum and Michael Coren. Ultimately, however, the package of stories ended up saying as much about what was wrong with the contemporary left-and, by extension, the prospects of This Magazine-than it exposed flaws in the right. In a profile of neo-conservative writer Andrew Coyne, who is now a national affairs columnist for Southam News, This author Doug Saunders congratulated Coyne for asking his readers to imagine what a new government would look like, and wrote, “Why isn’t that question being asked by anyone on the left? Possibly because they’re busy defending themselves against Andrew Coyne. Or maybe they just haven’t thought about it for a while. In any case, Coyne’s the one who’s trying to imagine a new government.” Coyne himself comments: “What was interesting about that issue was, while it was ostensibly about the right, the subtext, it seems to me, was about the left. Over and over again, in that issue, you hear basically the theme of, ‘Okay, we don’t like these people, we don’t agree with them, but how come they seem to have all the ideas?'”

When Clive Thompson succeeded Klein as editor with the November 1995 issue, he joined the struggle to find a voice for This Magazine. He admits that this was a balancing act, and even involved a bit of sophistry. “I basically define This depending on whom I’m talking to,” he says. “If I’m talking to my mother, I will not use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘left wing.’ If I’m talking to a left-wing audience, I’ll say, ‘This is a hard-core, left-wing magazine.'”

Instead of worrying about labels, Thompson decided to focus his energies on articles that would appeal to both younger readers and older subscribers-mainly innovative economic stories, investigative reports and literary writing. Last summer, the staff set up a debate between right- and left-wingers at downtown Toronto’s trendy Bar Italia to coincide with This Magazine‘s July/August issue cover story, “Going for Broke,” in which author H.S. Bhabra satirically argued that Canada should declare bankruptcy, just like the Reichmanns. Another story that Thompson went after was “Labour’s Dirty Secret,” written by Jason Ziedenberg. The investigative article, which appeared in the November/December 1996 issue, looked at why a large number of people in the labour movement in Ontario are voting for neo-con politicians, as well as the growing power of highly conservative unionists.

Although the quality of the work done by Klein and Thompson has been applauded by industry peers, some readers have been angry and confused by all the changes. Klein admits that she thought that these changes might have alienated some older subscribers, but not most of them: “I wasn’t too afraid. Maybe I was just stupid,” she says. “We lost a handful of readers, but that’s life. There were people out there who just wanted a nostalgia magazine and were not interested in listening to these new voices and thought that we were writing about a culture that was basically their kids’ culture.” In Klein’s last issue as editor, one reader wrote: “Naomi Klein is leaving. I just may resubscribe.”

Thompson, Klein’s successor, admires her for the changes that she made to the magazine. But he also inherited a readership that was at least in part disgruntled by them. “I had to deal with people going, ‘Enough of this youth culture shit.’ People were cancelling subscriptions, writing letters, saying, ‘Forget it, you just lost me. This is not what This Magazine should be.'”

One of Thompson’s own gambles was his May/June 1996 issue, which focussed on high technology, including articles on digital cash, interactive pornographic CD-ROMs and biotechnology regulations. Even though he knew some of This Magazine‘s older board members were not too interested in the idea and that the left is extremely technophobic, he went ahead with the issue, with the board’s blessing, because he sees media technology such as the Internet as both a tool of social activism and a way to communicate with the new left. “I know that the technology issue pissed off a lot of people,” he says. “In many ways, I think that was probably one of the most controversial things that we did that year.”

Though Thompson was willing to take such a risk, he is also well aware that This cannot afford to lose all of its long-time subscribers. He points out, for instance, that many loyalists donate $50 to $100 each year to the Red Maple Foundation, along with their regular subscription renewal fee of almost $25. It is that kind of loyalty that colours the views of board old-timer Mel Watkins. While Watkins says he is proud of the editorial rejuvenation executed by Klein and Thompson, he is also worried that the kind of younger readers they may have attracted aren’t ideal from a business perspective. “You have to make sure people don’t just browse on the newsstands, but buy the magazine, subscribe to the magazine, have a permanent address,” he says. “And we want to make sure that our older subscribers stay with us.”

Beyond all of the philosophical questions, the future of This Magazine hangs on some cold, hard business facts. If the magazine fails, it will have succumbed to the perennial problems of small-magazine publishing. Clive Thompson received a harsh lesson in them when he joined as editor in September of 1995. At the time, the magazine owed more than $60,000 to about a dozen major creditors. During Thompson’s first few weeks that fall, a debt collection agency began calling the office, demanding payment of a $13,000 printing bill. Bell called, threatening to shut off the phone lines, and Canada Post was refusing to issue any more postage unless an outstanding bill was paid.

By November of that year, then-business manager Trevor Hutchinson realized that This Magazine was in serious trouble-it had lost more than $100,000, cumulatively, in the three years before he came aboard. He also found out that the magazine would be faced with a huge deficit, as well as cash flow problems, unless its expenditures were cut. The editorial board conducted emergency meetings and considered a number of dire solutions-even ceasing publication. By the end of December, they decided to cut one staff position (managing editor), one contract position (circulation manager) and to reduce publishing frequency from eight to six issues annually. “For the first little while after this change, it was just crazy,” recalls Hutchinson. “Both Clive and I were doing jobs that used to be two other people’s jobs-and for $20,000 a year.”

These days, Thompson credits Hutchinson, who is now This Magazine‘s associate publisher, for saving the magazine. “The reason we are still publishing owes, I would say, entirely to him,” says Thompson. “He could be finance minister after this.” So far, through aggressive fund-raising campaigns and sophisticated financial planning, Hutchinson has managed to pay off most of the magazine’s old debts. For the year ending January 31, 1996, This Magazine recorded a $5,500 surplus, its first in five years; the 1996-97 surplus was higher-$20,000 (although Hutchinson says that this didn’t mean actual dollars in the bank).

“I never really thought of quitting,” says Hutchinson. “The challenge was just too big. First it was the challenge of saving it-and I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet-and now it’s a challenge of growing it.” Hutchinson’s dreams face one potential final obstacle that is as unpredictable as it is severely threatening. In October 1996, the Red Maple Foundation, the registered charity that publishes This, was audited by Revenue Canada. After spending two days reviewing the foundation’s accounts and charitable records, the auditor went away with a few back issues of the magazine. Her intent is to check whether its content fulfills the mandate that the magazine outlined when Red Maple applied for charitable status in 1983: to educate the public through informative and thought-provoking articles on issues of public interest in the fields of politics, education, labour and culture.

Hutchinson is extremely worried that This could lose its charitable status and therefore its ability to accept tax-deductible donations. Charitable donations are a major revenue source. For the 1997-98 year, they will account for about 17 percent (while circulation sales account for approximately 35 percent, grants 24 percent and ads about 10 percent). Hutchinson’s fears are not unfounded. In September 1996, Briarpatch, an alternative magazine based in Regina, Saskatchewan, found out that its charitable status had been revoked. Another concern is the possibility that This may lose grant funding in the future. New Maritimes, another left-wing magazine, was recently denied Canada Council grant money and has since ceased publishing. “Our problem is how do we survive without advertising? And it’s always been by government subsidies, but they’re frozen or they aren’t going anywhere, or they say, ‘Well, you’re doing so well, you’re using funds you don’t need so much,'” says Watkins.

Revenue Canada could take up to two years to come to a decision. Meantime, Hutchinson can only try to plan for the worst and wait. He has done the best he can to improve the business state of This-the accounts are in order, most of the major creditors have been paid and the magazine has made a paper surplus two years in a row. For all that, one of Canada’s most historic, progressive magazines is still up against an endangered future, as it awaits the decisions made by various faceless bureaucrats on various committees of the federal and provincial governments.

The only certainty is that Andrea Curtis, the new editor of This, will face the grinding task of conserving thoughtful left journalism in Canada, trying to offset an age of right-leaning politics and left-wing confusion. “People have a real craving for a voice of dissidence in this era of neo-conservatism. I think that This Magazine can be that place,” says Curtis. And the new editor has the full sympathy of the last two. Clive Thompson thinks the new candidate probably won’t make a long career of it. “You’re never, ever going to get someone to work for five years in downtown Toronto for 20 grand a year,” he says. Naomi Klein suggests that it’s hard to keep an editor at This because of the salary, as well as the limited resources of the magazine. “The model, and I don’t think it’s a bad model,” she says, “is that you come in, you work like hell, you give it everything you have, find a good replacement and then you leave.”

Yet if you were holding auditions for the role of a business journalist you probably wouldn’t have chosen Sandy Ross from among the hopefuls. Rather than the well-groomed patrician in the crisp blue suit, Sandy would have been the distracted, scruffy-looking guy standing beside him. The one with the big grin, the shock of brown hair, the unkempt suit (if he decided to wear one that day) and the genial, go get ’em manner of a happy schoolboy: “Sounds good,” “Great idea,” “Fooled ’em again!”

Not that he couldn’t perform. Sandy was a song-and-dance man at heart, “a journalistic Fred Astaire” in the words of his first wife. His initial shot at fame came in the form of a satirical song mocking B.C.’s ruling Socreds, he’d penned in college, and he was definitely not cast in the mold of the analytical types who inhabit the dimly lit offices of the Report on Business. As a business journalist he was playing against type. When he died in 1993 at the age of 58, it was the end of a life imbued with an enormous theatricality: remarkable achievement, outlandish behavior, reckless romance and a heartbreaking personal tragedy that may be the encryption key to the Ross paradox.

In the opening of The Risk Takers, his groundbreaking 1975 book about Canadian entrepreneurs, he could have been talking about himself when he wrote about a flamboyant mining promoter named Murray. A friend of Murray’s tries to articulate what motivates the businessman to do the seemingly reckless things he does in order to succeed. “‘What you guys are doing,’ says the friend, ‘is trying to defeat death. You’re trying to build monuments that’ll stay around longer than you do.’ But Murray had the last word. ‘It’s not about death and it’s not about monuments. It’s about living – living to the hilt….I enjoy everything I do. Everything.'”

It would be easy to mythologize Sandy Ross, a man for whom there is already “an enormous amount of hagiography,” says Penny Williams, who worked with him from 1984 to 1988.

A glimpse at his résumé will help explain why: editor of the University of British Columbia’s Ubyssey in the mid-fifties, the days of the infamous “Vancouver Mafia” that included Pierre Berton, Allan Fotheringham, John Turner, Joe Schlesinger and Helen Hutchinson; London correspondent for UPI; award-winning columnist for TheVancouver Sun; managing editor of Maclean’s; story editor for the CBC’s legendary (that word again) This Hour Has Seven Days; co-author of the famed 1970 Report of the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media (headed by Senator Keith Davey); columnist for The Financial Post and The Toronto Star; editor of Toronto Life; and author of two highly acclaimed books about the Canadian business scene.

That peripatetic record would probably be enough to reserve him a spot in the pantheon of great Canadian journalists, but Ross’ most resonant achievement was the re-creation of Canadian Business magazine. In 1977, along with business partners Michael de Pencier, owner of Toronto Life and other publishing ventures, and Roy MacLaren, then president of advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather’s Canadian branch and now Canada’s High Commissioner to London, Ross purchased the original Canadian Business, a bone-dry, 49-year-old Canadian Chamber of Commerce house organ steeped in the diction of the trade press.

Some sample features from the pre-Ross CB: “The Long Term Returns from Advertising Can Be Measured,” or how about “Wheat: The Big Business Story of the Year”? The first issue of the new CB in September 1977 featured a cover illustration of the Lone Ranger holding a briefcase, with a stylized factory with smoking stacks in the background. The headline: “Management Consultant as Hired Gun.” Under Ross, the magazine would bring business to life and focus on the people who made commerce click. A typical story might detail the shady business practices of previously unassailable megacompanies (“The Arrogance of Inco”) or celebrate the successes of young Canucks at U.S. business schools (“The Canadian Whiz Kids at the Harvard Bschool”)-all with an eye on the humanity behind the numbers.

“‘Business as a spectator sport’ was the line we used,” says de Pencier. “Sandy had this idea that he and all of us together could produce a business magazine that people would really like to read. One that would have profiles of real live business people and would take chances and risks.” Margaret Wente, a former Ross protégé and now editor of the Globe‘s Report on Business section, explains the approach this way: “He was generally looking for heroes, for people who were larger than life and had done really neat and interesting things. He liked entrepreneurs, he liked buccaneers, and he was essentially an entrepreneur himself.”

Substitute Peter Munk for Michael Jordan and the drama and high stakes of a professional sports match could be injected into a corporate acquisition battle. By putting the personal into what had always been a specialist genre, Ross and the stable of young writers whose careers he helped establish spoke to a generation of post-sixties executives tired of the grey-suited facelessness of corporate culture. He reflected their growing desire to see their work humanized, dramatized – lionized – and placed them squarely into the Canadian social context.

That stable of young writers reads like a Who’s Who of the Canadian business journalism and media establishment. People like Wente, Diane Francis, David Olive, Der Hoi-Yin, John Partridge and Charles Davies, to name just a few. They are a key part of Sandy’s professional legacy. “He was extremely generous with young talent. He would take tremendous chances on people,” says Wente. “He would send young, untested people out, throw them into the deep end and give them absolutely plum assignments to see what they could do. He’d also exploit them mercilessly by paying them nothing, but he gave a lot of talented people a chance to show what they could do, and that’s a tremendous gift if you’re a young journalist trying to test yourself in the world. He gave me that chance.”

In 1964, when Sandy Ross was himself a young journalist, he won a National Newspaper Award for a series of articles he wrote for The Vancouver Sun on Quebec’s fledgling separatist movement. Sandy was a brilliant stylist with a keen eye for the new and the unique, and the award brought him to the attention of Maclean’s national affairs editor Peter C. Newman. He decided to visit Ross in Vancouver and offer him a writing job with the central Canadian monthly. Ross, his first wife, Bess, their newborn son, Darby, and their two-year-old son, Alec, were living in a small house on the slopes of North Vancouver when Newman came to call. They made a lasting impression. “I always remember sitting on the top of a mountain,” says Newman. “His wife had long, long blonde hair and she had a sort of peasant blouse on and she played the guitar beautifully, in candlelight. It was very difficult not to hire him.”

Allan Fotheringham, a college buddy and colleague from the Ubyssey, says Ross was quite a sight in those days, oblivious to his personal appearance and all the more striking for the lack of effort. “I guess his father [a doctor in a B.C. penitentiary] had been an ambulance driver in the war, and Sandy inherited his army boots. This was in the days before anybody wore them, but this was Sandy. He always wore these boots. After Sandy moved to Toronto, Borden Spears became the editor of Maclean’s. They were having a party and they were talking about the usual thing: Maclean’s getting old and fuddy-duddy and being written only for people in Moose Jaw. Spears was talking about how the magazine had to appeal to younger readers and this guy came walking in. It was Sandy [who was writing for Maclean’s], hair all over the place and some crazy suit and his goddamn army boots, and Spears says, ‘Who’s that guy? That’s the type of guy we want.’ So Spears sat down and had a long talk with him and hired him to be managing editor.”

The spokesman for a new generation? Hardly. Despite his pre-protest-era musical forays at university, Sandy’s politics were small-c conservative for most of his life. His carefree persona wasn’t so much an attempt to match the tenor of the times as it was a function of his constantly shifting attention span. He was able to use it to his advantage and channel it into his creative process, but as is often the case with gifted soloists, he sometimes ran into difficulty when working in an ensemble.

According to medical experts, attention deficit disorder is the most common of an entire category of childhood developmental disabilities, what people used to call hyperactivity. It occurs in three to six percent of children and is caused by a kind of glitch in the brain’s maturation process. Some of the more common symptoms ADD sufferers exhibit:

1. Excessively fidgets or squirms
2. Easily distracted
3. Difficulty remaining seated
4. Difficulty sustaining attention
5. Shifts from one activity to another
6. Difficulty playing quietly
7. Often doesn’t listen to what is said
8. Often loses things

Meet Sandy Ross.

The same guy who had the entrepreneurial vision to reshape Canadian journalism was also a notorious scatterbrain who could barely contain the rush of creative urges that seemed to bombard him or maintain a single focus for any length of time. There was so much to see, so much to experience. At CB he kept a vintage pinball machine from the fifties in his office. “It’s how I work off nervous energy,” he told a friend. He would do handstands in the middle of editorial meetings to emphasize a point or, completely oblivious to the effect on those in attendance, lie down on the floor while he outlined a particularly interesting association or plan. If he wasn’t talking he was biting his nails, humming, fiddling with his hair, tapping his fingers on the nearest desktop.

In 1975, two years after the breakup of his first marriage, Sandy moved to the free-spirited cottage community on Toronto Island with Linda Rosenbaum, an American expatriate and writer. He was editor of Toronto Life at the time. She was in her late 20s. He had just turned 40. No doctor ever diagnosed him as having a neurological disorder, even a mild one, but Rosenbaum, who now has a son with ADD, says, “We just didn’t have a name for it then. It would be sort of a running joke. You’d be talking to him and he’d pull out a pencil and start playing drums on his desk in the middle of a deep, meaningful conversation. It could make you crazy, crazy, crazy. And it did definitely affect his relationships with people.” For the editors who followed him when he vacated the editor’s post in 1980, Sandy’s shifting interests and behaviours had broader consequences.

Canadian Business was almost an immediate success, so much so that by 1980 “the Boys” as Ross, MacLaren and de Pencier had become known-to friends and enemies-were looking for fresh ventures. They hit on the idea for a magazine that would chronicle Alberta’s then-burgeoning oil scene. Sandy and his new wife, Minette, went to Calgary and Energy got under way.

Meanwhile, Ross had hand-picked Margaret Wente to be editor of CB. Her tenure was a great success-at least in part because Sandy was half a continent away. But the troubled apostolic succession of editors who followed her endured everything from minor tampering to outright interference in CB‘s editorial affairs when Sandy returned from Alberta in 1982. It would come full circle in less than a decade: Sandy Ross, then Margaret Wente, Charles Davies, Joann Webb, Wayne Gooding, and then, in 1990, Ross redux. Wente seems to have fared best, but Davies, Webb and Gooding, who laboured under a new CB management structure that made Ross a sort of “uber-editor” after Energy magazine hit the skids, still show the scars. “I just don’t want to be part of the contingent that glorifies him,” says Webb when asked to comment about her time working under Sandy. For his part, Davies is cordial but still wary about dissing his former boss: “Best to let sleeping dogs lie.”

Davies and Webb are reluctant to say much at all about their stints as editor of CB, but Penny Williams, who was editor of Your Money magazine, which was launched by CB Media, Canadian Business’ parent company, has some observations about the goings-on with her counterparts at the flagship magazine. “My sense, looking from the Your Money side of the fence, seeing it over more than one editor, was the other side of Sandy’s restlessness, of his creative energy and enthusiasm. What I thought I saw happening more than once was that Sandy would come back into the life of CB magazine with whatever red-hot enthusiasm of the moment. And because he had the power and because he was an owner and because he was no slouch, he got to have his ideas listened to and implemented, which meant that when Sandy would come in all afizz with something they’d have to crank the machinery around to go in that direction. But what could also happen is Sandy would lose interest and just move on, leaving people stranded.”

Wayne Gooding followed Webb as editor of CB and held the job from 1987 to 1990. His tenure preceded a complete editorial repositioning at CB, a move to take it away from the consumer magazine focus that had made it such a success and target more of a senior-management audience. The Report on Business Magazine and the Financial Post Magazine, consumer-business publications that followed in CB‘s wake, had diluted the market and CB needed to respond, but Gooding fought the move. “We [Gooding and then CB publisher Michael Rea] started to have disagreements, which eventually got to real screaming matches.” Rea and CB’s vice-president of publishing, Allan Singleton-Wood, were keen to change the magazine’s editorial focus and kept butting heads with Gooding. At one point they travelled to Ottawa to propose an advertising supplement to the federal government. The supplement was a major initiative and was to be edited by someone outside the CB organization. Gooding only heard about the plan in an editorial meeting, by which time it was a fait accompli.

Gooding decided this was the last straw and resigned, but an appeal from Roy MacLaren convinced him to withdraw the resignation and continue the battle. Besides, Sandy was still CB’s editorial director and Gooding felt Ross had been supporting him throughout his battles with Rea. If Sandy would just remain consistent, he thought, it might be worth another go. Shortly after…. “Sandy phones me up and wanted to talk to me and I went over to his office. His office was set up in such a way that when you sat down, his computer screen was right in front of you. And I was sitting there and he said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went out of the room. I don’t know what it was, curiosity or whatever, and I looked at the computer screen. And it says, ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa. I know I’ve been supporting Wayne but I think I’m wrong.’ It was the beginning of a memo to Michael Rea.” After five or 10 minutes Sandy came back into the room and the two men had a conversation about something with no relation to the memo. But Gooding took it as a sign that-as Sandy had warned him when the conflicts with Rea began-“the Hun was at the gate.” He resigned for good.

Within his extended family, Sandy’s verve brought a lot of joy, but a lot of stress too. Sandy was romantically hyperactive, and many of his escapades read like the outtakes from the last season of Knot’s Landing. He had a succession of girlfriends that included many of the young, intelligent, attractive women to whom he had given that first big chance as a writer. He couldn’t resist. “I don’t think he was womanizer,” says his son Alec, now a freelance journalist, editor and author in Kingston, Ontario. “He liked women. There’s a difference. A womanizer is sort of one-night stand and toss them away. That’s not the way it was. He was a good-looking guy in a powerful place and women – I mean in publishing, God, it’s swarming with women. Especially at Toronto Life in the free-and-easy seventies, you know? Put it together. There were many temptations for a guy like Dad and it was in his nature to succumb to them sometimes.”

Maybe it was the era, but people seem to accept his philandering, at least in hindsight, as just another aspect of his character. “That was just Sandy,” they say indulgently.

It’s been emblematic of pop psychology in recent years to connect male infidelity with a sublimated fear of death. Call it the Moonstruck syndrome: men of a particular age come to believe, on an unconscious level, that they can ward off the grave by indulging the procreative impulse. By doing that which creates life, you negate death.

That probably didn’t apply to Sandy. He wasn’t some caricature of middle-class, middle-aged insecurity. Anything but. The creative impulse, however, was central to his approach to life and journalism. His extended family fortified him at home – Minette and children Alec, Darby, Kent, Thea and Paget-while the search for new enthusiasms drove his efforts at work. Here’s what he had to say about it in The Risk Takers, the book that solidified his reputation as a business journalist and, two years later, would define the editorial strategy for Canadian Business. “My friend [a businessman engaged in a new venture] was really doing what artists do: creating something where nothing had existed before. To me there is nothing ignoble about this basic entrepreneurial impulse, because it lies very close to my notion of what human beings are all about.

“In every aspect of human affairs, from building button factories to achieving nirvana, growth necessitates risk. And this risk-taking impulse, this rare human capacity to make the next jump outward into the unknown, has something of the divine about it.”

External forces, parental influences, traumatic events, biological and neurological dispositions – they all coalesce with varying degrees of resonance within the human soul, helping to shape our behaviour, our motivations and our responses to the random circumstances life throws at us. In Sandy’s case, the primary influence in the second half of his life, the half where he achieved so brilliantly, was the death of his son, Darby.

Darby Ross was born in Vancouver on September 19, 1963, to Sandy and Elizabeth-“Bess” to her friends and family. She says Darby was very different from Alec. “They used to call him ‘the little professor.’ He was very, very measured. Very calm. For example, say you had a pile of Legos on the floor. Now, Alec would get frustrated and he’d knock it down if it didn’t go the way he wanted it to. But Darby would persist and persist patiently until he got it exactly the way he wanted it.” She recalls how Sandy and the kids would go off on goofy excursions, using their imaginations to find fun in odd places. “He’d take the kids to a used car place and they’d arrive home with a used muffler. They’d rig it up in the backyard and put hoses through it and pretend that it was something. And it was actually Darby that loved these kinds of thing. He liked these kinds of gadgety things.”

At age five, Darby was diagnosed with a rare tumour in his right ear, and for the next four years he went through a series of debilitating complications and treatments. But in the end it was more than science could handle. He died on January 19, 1973. “He was not a complaining child. It was sort of like, children who go through a lot of things become very different from others. They seem sort of wiser. I can’t explain this to you, but Sandy would have known what I meant,” says Bess.

Alec, just 12 years old at the time, remembers the night after Darby died. “Dad and I went and played pool. That was one of the things we liked to do sometimes, and we weren’t really talking much. There was a lot of suppression of feelings and there was a long walk across this bridge, in the dark, and it was cold. We were playing pool and sort of trying to aim with our eyes filling up with tears and not really talking about it.”

The loss hit Sandy hard. So hard that he could not bring himself to go near Darby’s grave. So hard he couldn’t bring himself to ask Bess where their son’s ashes were buried for nearly 20 years after his death.

It may help explain the direction of his personal and professional behaviour. Minette Ross says he was “so sensitive, so vulnerable, that he built up layers like a pearl. A lot of life is an irritation to someone that sensitive and so, like an oyster, they build up little, beautiful, luminous defenses. Layer upon layer upon layer, so that they can cope. That’s why he bit his nails and that’s why he hummed. He had all these little distancing, defensive mechanisms,” she says. “He had a large part of himself that was intensely private.”

For Ross, a lifelong autodidact, writing was the balm that helped him heal himself, reinvent himself after Darby. Sandy told many people that his 1971 to ’73 Toronto Star column, a daily slice-of-life piece about the characters and calamities that defined Toronto, helped him reconnect with people after Darby’s death. But he connected with something else during the period. He had discovered something primal and life-affirming in business, in the productive activities of entrepreneurs like those celebrated in The Risk Takers who “made something from nothing.” He came to associate business with creativity on a whole other level, somewhere down deep, well past the distraction and the laughter and the enthusiasm. It’s no coincidence that he started writing The Risk Takers in the same period.

By embracing business, Sandy was embracing life-joyous, creative, exuberant life, and maybe finding a way to forgive himself for Darby’s death, for not being able to protect his boy.

There are echoes of it in almost everything he wrote after 1973. A rough estimate shows he composed some 1,500 pieces for publication in the years following Darby’s illness-1,500 celebrations of lives well-lived, 1,500 tributes to a beautiful, earnest nine-year-old boy.

Atop a warehouse, high over Santa Monica Boulevard and just under the shadow of the Hollywood sign, a ghetto blaster blares the chorus of Elvis Costello’s “This Year’s Girl.” The view is panoramic, and each surrounding building looks like a confection of sugar cubes, glazed with pale pink frosting. Late afternoon sunshine casts a warm, amber glow on the hair and makeup assistants, dressed in head-to-toe black, who swarm around their subject. It’s a photo shoot for GQ magazine, it’s on the rooftop of big-shot photographer Herb Ritts’ studio and for these bit players, it’s the closest to heaven that a mere mortal could hope to get.

A white stretch limo idles on the street below, waiting to whisk away the tired, young ingenue at the centre of the whirlwind. But Johanna Schneller’s still got work to do. “That’s beautiful. Pick your neck up a little bit-yes, more of that!” Schneller leans back, the palms of her hands scraping the tar and gravel roof, listening to Ritts’ directions. It’s all she can do to stay out of the way as a nubile Julia Roberts slithers her way across the roof, her sinuous limbs clothed only in a shirt and men’s Jockey shorts.

The other celebrity present, Ritts’ Rhodesian Ridgeback-a long-bodied, tan dog named Jack-sits in the corner beside Schneller. “Hi, Jack-Jack, gooood dog,” the assistants coo as they glide past, ignoring Schneller, GQ‘s Los Angeles-based senior writer, who is there to profile Roberts for a cover story. The supporting cast aren’t the only ones snubbing her, though. Earlier, Roberts whispered and giggled with her makeup artist while Schneller tried to ask questions. It seems the popular girls don’t want to be friends with her. Schneller feels like a stone in the stucco. “Well, I’m gonna go,”; she says to no one in particular. No one in particular answers her. “It was ridiculous,” says Schneller of her role, six years later. “In that world, the dog is way more important.”

Schneller’s no pup when it comes to the Hollywood beat. The girl from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, got a crash course in glamour at her first New York job in 1984 as an editorial assistant at GQ (where she doubled as 5 p.m. ice-fetcher for editor Art Cooper’s daily cocktail). Since moving from L.A. to Toronto in 1994, Schneller has freelanced for magazines like Vanity Fair,US, Chatelaine and Toronto Life. But after schmoozing and interviewing more than 30 celebrities, she’s learned that it doesn’t get any easier-profilers can never stop hoping celebrities will throw them a bone.

The world of celebrity journalism is a throwback to high school, where the cool kids were unapproachable. Celebrities move in tight cliques and usually only date one of their own. They’re wary of outsiders. So talking to stars isn’t easy; it’s an art form. You’ve got to lie around waiting for the phone to ring, you can’t sound dumb and you can never let them know you’re intimidated. And if profile writers are the nerds in the metaphorical high school of celebrity journalism, they don’t fare much better in the world of journalism as a whole. They are the loud-laughing, lampshade-wearing uninvited party guests at the bottom of journalism’s hierarchy. Of course, celebrity journalism has done much to deserve its shoddy reputation, filling papers with ridiculous rumours and puffy profiles. But the upper echelon is entirely different and shouldn’t be confused with its tabloid country cousin. Truly talented practitioners of the genre in Canada and the United States are gifted storytellers, applying the principles of literary journalism to their celebrity subjects. So if journalists can play it just right, exorcise the demons of insecurity, reverse the illusion of power and maybe even get the celebrity to think they’re a little bit cool too, then the celeb will talk. And the writer’s got the story.

The unit publicist for Rob Roy opens the trailer door. “Liam, this is Johanna from Vanity Fair,” she says, leaving the two alone in the small trailer. Neeson is in the middle of making a cup of tea. As he turns and walks toward Schneller, he swings his six-foot-four inch frame to the side and ducks, without looking, to avoid the hanging kitchen light. Neeson is dressed in full Highland regalia, but his shirt and kilt are filthy-Rob Roy had just been dragged by a horse. His arms and legs are encrusted with fake scabs, his nose looks bruised and broken and his hair is matted. Still, Schneller thinks, he is knee-bucklingly handsome.

“Oh my god,” she mentally squeals as they sit down. “I’m in Scotland; I’m in Scotland with Liam Neeson!” She notices the table is littered with scripts, books of Scottish lore and the latest issue of Vanity Fair, with Tom Cruise’s admissions of his father’s abuse on its glossy pages. Neeson picks up the magazine and swats the table with it as he speaks.

“You know-whap-I’ve been readin’ this Vanity Fair with Tom Cruise talkin’ about his father and I thought, ‘I would never-whap-tell anyone anything like that. I would never, ever tell a journalist anything nearly that personal about myself.’ And then I started thinkin’, ‘Why-whap-am I doin’ this at all?’ Why are you here? I’m in the middle of a movie, I’m in every scene and I’m workin’ really hard. I just-whap-don’t want to do it. In fact, I thought you were comin’ tomorrow so I was goin’ to call my publicist today sayin’ I want to cancel it. But you’re here now and we have to try to do something. I have 15 minutes, so what’s your first question?”

Schneller remembers a hot flush creeping over her face. “I thought, ‘Okay, I don’t want to be in Scotland with Liam Neeson anymore.’ What the hell do you ask somebody who just said that?” Schneller quickly learned she wouldn’t get to ask much at all. After several days and limited time with a cranky Neeson, Schneller called the magazine in New York to say she was in trouble-something she’d never had to do before. Vanity Fair in turn called Neeson’s publicist in L.A., who faxed him in Scotland. An hour later, Schneller got a phone call from the film’s unit publicist: “Yeah, you can come to the hotel for an hour. Meet him at seven, but he has to go to dinner at eight.” Neeson was slightly more cooperative for this brief meeting but Schneller knew that what he’d given her wasn’t enough. She also knew there was nothing more she could do-she’d already used every ounce of her skill as an interviewer.

It wasn’t until Schneller was on the plane home to L.A. that indignation set in. She was a professional writer, damn it, not some pesky high-school kid begging for help with a book report. And although she had just the skeleton of a story, Schneller realized she was in control. She could write whatever she wanted because Neeson was a jerk and that was what she would say.

But jerks aren’t necessarily stupid. Within a week, Schneller got a call from Neeson himself. Suddenly he’s Mr. Nice, totally apologetic. “Somewhere the realization sunk in that yes, in fact, this measly high-school-book-report girl had some power-the power of the pen,” Schneller says.

Everything about celebrity journalism reeks of power. Celebrities-the very term suggesting their role in society-are used to having all the control. But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when celebrity journalists were star makers instead of just star watchers. The gossip column was born during the Roaring Twenties, the era of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, of Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. In those days, Louella Parsons was the matriarch of the Hollywood scene and she alone controlled the grapevine with her column. Established and aspiring stars alike recognized her reign and bowed down to Parsons in hopes of a mention in her column. But by the early 1930s, Depression-era fans flooded the theatres to escape the reality of lean times. Soon, interest in matinée idols grew and others began gossiping for the masses: Hedda Hopper, Sheilah Graham and Walter Winchell. It wasn’t only gossip, though, that found its way to the printed page. Harold Ross’ magazine, The New Yorker, began featuring longer celebrity profiles, sending acid-tongued Dorothy Parker to capture Ernest Hemingway and assigning Virgilia Peterson Ross to render Greta Garbo. Clearly, a new species of writing had evolved. In the late sixties and early seventies, a cluster of new magazines would devote themselves to celebrity profiling-Rolling Stone, People, Interview, the list goes on.

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. 

When The Globe and Mail‘s medical reporter Wallace Immen was covering the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans last November, a PR representative from one of the pharmaceutical companies was anxious to speak to him. Paul Taylor, another medical reporter at the Globe, was working on the assignment desk that morning when the call came in. The representative said he had arranged for Immen to talk to a Canadian physician about the company’s new cholesterol-lowering drug. Taylor never passed the message along because, ashe later put it, the company “was just trying to get its name in the paper.”

Not all journalists reporting on medicine are as perceptive. For all the good, solid medical reporting by the lay press, there is a lot of poor reporting that creates undue worry and alarm-and sometimes unfounded hope-in the public. Abortions cause breast cancer. Estrogen replacement therapy causes breast cancer (or, depending on the reports, prevents heart disease and sharpens the memory and concentration). Cold viruses can kill cancer. Calcium channel blockers can kill too (but not cancer cells). And there are terrifying, drug-resistant bacteria lurking at hospitals, preying on the sick.

Newspapers, magazines and television news stories are full of sloppy, inaccurate and sensationalist reporting of medical news. How has this state of affairs come about? Why is there so much medical misinformation floating about in the media, masquerading as truth?

Perhaps one of the primary reasons is that the public wants to hear that science has provided a simple solution to life-threatening illnesses. Not only that, we all seem to enjoy doomsday stories. This appetite for medical news actively encourages the press to indulge in extra helpings of hyperbole. Dr. Marcia Angell, executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, believes that the insatiable hunger for health news leads to cutthroat competition among journalists, which in turn affects the quality of medical reporting.

Dr. Angell is referring to the kind of stories that present a simple conclusion at the expense of a complex one. A case in point was a November 1996 article in the Boston Globe (reprinted in The Globe and Mail the same month), which made the stark statement that cancer “can be avoided through eating well, exercising regularly and not smoking.” In other words, meat-eating, cigarette-smoking, fibre-shunning, hedonistic sloths are condemned to die an agonizing death that they could have prevented through a virtuous, prudent lifestyle. The piece came out of a Harvard School of Public Health report, and granted, the main thrust of the article was to re-emphasize healthy life choices rather than overplay environmental threats as causes of cancer. In the end, though, the article, with its set of basic diet guidelines for the reader, not only came across as didactic but came close to reproaching the victim.

Dr. Angell is concerned about such reporting: “We have come to believe that good health and long life are a matter of character, of doing things right,” she says. “If people keep their cholesterol down and exercise, they’ll live forever.” A balanced diet, exercise and avoiding tobacco will always stand a person in good stead, it’s true, but there are also myriad other factors that cause cancer. In fact, as any cancer researcher will tell you, the complete etiology of cancer is not known. Sometimes, difficult as it is to admit, science does not have all the answers.

Dr. Angell worries that articles like the one in the Boston Globe may lead some readers to believe there is a magic formula for a long life. The recent rash of stories on breast cancer illustrates perfectly this kind of simplistic reporting. Apparently, Japanese women have an enviably low incidence of breast cancer, and many researchers have concluded that it may be due to their low-fat, high-grain diet. In October 1996, The Toronto Star, in an entire section on breast cancer, discussed the research that is currently in progress and referred to the famous salubrious Japanese diet. “Once Japanese women come here, their rates of breast cancer start to increase,” reporter Trish Crawford wrote ominously, “until their granddaughters end up with the same levels of incidence as those who have been here many generations.” However, what she failed to note is that this is a tenuous link at best. The Japanese also have a high incidence of stomach and esophagus cancer-diseases that are more likely to be a result of dietary habits. And if readers perused the whole section carefully, they would have seen a comment from Steven Narod, chair of breast cancer research at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, to the effect that dietary research so far has proved disappointing.

Faced with Crawford’s piece, however, breast-cancer patients could end up feeling guilty, angry or just plain confused. A woman who has been diagnosed with this disease might wonder how she could develop such a devastating illness when she has done all the right things. Once again, the assumption is that a regimen of meticulous calorie-counting, abstaining from fat, alcohol and sugar, quaffing elixirs, popping vitamins, exercising vigorously and twisting your body into yoga contortions are a panacea for all of life’s ills. Yet the media’s how-to guides for a long and healthy life seem to ignore that sometimes, for still-mysterious reasons, the body’s immune system breaks down.

Blame for this kind of oversimplification can’t be placed solely on reporters’ shoulders. Pharmaceutical companies-which are, after all, in the business of making money as well as finding cures for what ails us-can subtly influence our perspective. In Canada, such companies are forbidden by law to advertise prescription drugs directly to the consumer, but they can-and do-try to use the media to carry their message. Immen’s mailbox overflows every day with promotional material from drug companies that proclaims the benefits of the latest cure-all. Sometimes the material is cleverly disguised as a press release, often with the words “important breakthrough” blazoned across the top. Seldom, though, are these genuine breakthroughs. In most cases they are variations on a theme: similar medications with a different set of side effects than the ones already on the market. Late last fall, for instance, Immen received a so-called breakthrough announcement from a company that made a migraine pain reliever in the form of a nasal spray called DHE. Immen realized the same drug had been around for 45 years and DHE was just a new way of administering it. “There are a number of stories that I haven’t written because I found them too blatantly a pitch for a drug that isn’t even new,” he says. “It seems as if they are trying to use the press to promote their products.” In fact, on the CTV News later that evening, the drug was hailed as a miracle by a neurosurgeon.

The drug companies have also found other indirect ways to reach the people who might walk into a doctor’s office and demand a particular drug. Last October, for example, a study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine on the effectiveness of a cholesterol-lowering drug for cardiac patients. After the study came out, Bristol-Myers Squibb took out a full-page advertisement in The Globe and Mail, heartily congratulating the Canadian study researchers and the men and women who participated in the study. It wasn’t exactly advertising the drug itself, but it came startlingly close.

What was more alarming, however, was the advertisement’s distressing message. The reader was bombarded with frightening facts: “2 out of 3 heart attack survivors have cholesterol levels in normal ranges” and “Most heart attack survivors are not on treatment aimed at controlling cholesterol levels.” To push the message home, the third fact was in bold type: “The CARE [Cholesterol and Recurrent Events] study will help save lives.” At this point, the poor reader, convinced that his heart is a ticking time bomb because he’s not been taking the right cholesterol-lowering drug, is ready to race to the phone and call his doctor, clamouring for the new medication.

At least in this case, the physician would be able to decide, based on the data in The New England Journal study, if the treatment is appropriate. Sometimes, however, neither doctors nor the media have a complete study to evaluate, yet the press will report on premature results nonetheless. Last autumn, some particularly promising-and fascinating-research results were released. It seems that the simple cold virus, which plunges the rest of us into the depths of sniffling misery every fall and winter, could help those suffering from cancer. The newspaper stories, taken from a study in the journal Science and reported by Associated Press in some Canadian dailies, were accompanied by astonishing headlines that trumpeted “Cold Bug a Cancer Killer” and “Docs Find Cold Virus That Kills Cancer Cells.” Glancing at the papers, it would appear that an infected sneeze or cough would be enough to attack cancer cells. Once more, though, most of the stories failed to mention that this is a complex theory, in which only one of the viruses that causes colds is first mutated and then injected into tumours. The articles enthusiastically pointed out that about 60 percent of the human tumours grown in laboratory mice disappeared after they had been injected with the genetically engineered virus. The writers didn’t emphasize the fact that this is still only a theory. Human trials just started in October, and the results will not be known until this spring. Even then, the research has a long way to go before it can show any definitive results.

The media-and their audience-may be impatient for quick conclusions, but the truth is, all scientific studies take a long time. The true Gold Standard for research is what’s called the “prospective randomized double blind control study,” in which the patients participating in the study are not told whether they are receiving a placebo or the treatment itself. Often, to avoid bias, even the researcher doesn’t know which form of treatment a participant is getting until the scientists unlock the code at the end of the study.

Then there are the different phases of trials: phase one occurs in the test tube, phase two is tests on animals and the third and final phase is human trials. Not surprisingly, reporting problems inevitably occur when the phase one and two trials are written about by the lay press. Pat Rich, managing editor at The Medical Post, says that at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research last spring, a lot of early results seemed promising and were picked up by the lay press-especially the wire services-as potential “breakthroughs,” particularly the militaristic-sounding gene bomb (a chemical injected into tumours that strategically destroys malignant cancer cells while sparing healthy cells) and a study that explored the relationship between overcooked meat and stomach cancer. What may look good in a test tube, though, may look less promising in real life. Dr. Bruce Squires, former editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, says, “Very few reporters understand the orderly progression of scientific information, where everything is a relative truth that has to keep being refined. A lot of the new things are just ‘me toos.'”

Even if a complete study or series of studies is available, looking carefully at the results is frequently not the media’s strong suit. Last October, a study was released that connected induced abortions to breast cancer, and the Globe reprinted a report that had appeared in The New York Times. Medical reporter Paul Taylor was disappointed that, due to time constraints, the Globe was unable to run a similar story from The Wall Street Journal, which, he says, was a much more thought-provoking and critical analysis of the study. Even though the Times report did note that the author of the study is a fervent anti-abortionist, the paper said that only 23 studies have been conducted on this link, when in reality, according to Taylor, there have been over 40 studies. “You can skew your results if you don’t look at the total data, so you have a flaw in the analysis right there,” says Taylor. The Times article also omitted an extensive study conducted by the National Cancer Institute in February 1996, which found no relationship at all between abortion and breast cancer.

Another good example of conflicting studies that weren’t adequately reported by the press occurred in March 1995, when The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that linked the use of short-acting calcium channel blockers (for the treatment of hypertension) to an increase in heart attacks by as much as 60 percent. What the press either didn’t realize, or chose to ignore, was that Boston University’s Dr. Hershel Jick had also presented findings around the same time that were strikingly different: calcium channel blockers decreased the risk of cardiac arrest. “The press just ran with it,” complains Dr. Angell. The result, of course, was sheer panic among patients, many of whom stopped taking the drug-which can also lead to medical problems.

It didn’t end there. In February 1996, The Lancet, a British medical journal, compiled all the calcium channel blocker studies and noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had deemed certain calcium channel blockers safe for the treatment of high blood pressure. Yet, six months later another worrisome report emerged in the Globe stating that this anti-hypertensive medication might increase the risk of cancer, even though the evidence was mostly anecdotal or culled from general observations of patients and might not be scientifically significant.

Obviously, different studies can propound different, often conflicting, points of view. They should be seen as an informed debate, and treated that way, but the press frequently assumes a single study is the final word on the matter. Medical journals are not medical textbooks, however, and the contradictory studies have to be put in their proper context. Far from being confused, most of us would find it helpful to read about different viewpoints of a piece of medical research. Paul Taylor likens conflicting journal studies to debates between opposing parties in the House of Commons. When people hear one politician haranguing another, they assume that both people are expressing their opinions, not the ultimate truth. But as Taylor points out, when readers hear about a study in a journal, they tend to forget that most research is itself a point of view, a piece of a puzzle, and not the whole picture.

For their part, Dr. Angell and Dr. Squires read most popular media accounts skeptically. They both believe that for an article to be truly understood, truly worthwhile, it is always best to have the original journal article beside you. As physicians, however, their expertise and education enables them to do just that. For the lay reader, on the other hand, most of the articles in medical journals can be extremely dull, complicated and full of arcane facts-certainly not the stuff of gripping banner headlines.

Perhaps in an attempt to spice up what may look like a dull story, some reporters build their articles around the idea of breakthroughs, miracle cures and epidemics. The word “epidemic” is often used loosely by the press; its real meaning is a highly contagious disease that affects a large percentage of the population at the same time, like polio, typhoid or the Spanish flu. The last real epidemic in Canada was the outbreak of Spanish influenza in 1918. According to the press, though, the latest epidemic is drug-resistant bacteria. Stories have been told of patients entering a hospital for a routine procedure, only to be invaded by mutant bacteria that the array of modern antibiotics is powerless to stop.

Certainly, drug-resistant bacteria are a concern, but they are not an epidemic, although that would be hard to fathom looking at the September 9, 1996, issue of Maclean’s. The cover story, entitled “Outbreak,” was accompanied by several photographs of brightly coloured strains of bacteria magnified under a microscope. “How bad could it get?” wonders reporter Mark Nichols. “Terrifyingly bad….” The article reads like a Michael Crichton novel, with references to “superbugs,” “epidemics,” “mutating microbes” and a “doomsday bug” and stern warnings from concerned microbiologists and epidemiologists about the “profligate use of antibiotics” that enables bacteria to change into drug-resistant forms. In the case of vancomycin-resistant enterococcus (a strain of bacteria resistant to most antibiotics, including vancomycin, a drug that doctors prescribe as a last resort), Nichols says that “it is probably gaining ground in Canada, but no statistics are available.” How can there be an epidemic raging in our midst without statistics?

In addition to the obvious sensationalism and fear-mongering, the article has several other problems. According to Nichols, physicians and patients are responsible for this pernicious pestilence. People have come to the erroneous conclusion that antibiotics are a cure-all, and insist on going from one doctor to another until they get a prescription for penicillin to treat a common cold or flu. Admittedly, there is some overuse of antibiotics, but most patients who are prescribed antibiotics are legitimately ill with a bacterial infection that, left untreated, could spread deep into the body’s tissue and cause a secondary (and potentially fatal) infection. Occasionally, people don’t take antibiotics correctly; their vim and vigor return and they stop midway through a course of treatment, giving the bacteria the opportunity to thrive and attack again. But, like many other areas of medicine, the explanation for drug-resistant bacteria is far more complex than Nichols’ article allows.

Nichols does admit that most of the patients who have contracted this disease are already ill, but he fails to define how drastically sick they really are. If the immune system is compromised by severe illnesses such as AIDS or cancer, then it cannot effectively fight any bacteria. Some forms of chemotherapy suppress the immune system, which means that cancer patients are already at risk of contracting an infection. And along with his rather vague definitions, Nichols also mentions the notorious “flesh-eating disease”-again, a misleading term popularized by the lay press. Despite the widely used name, bacteria do not devour flesh. They release toxins that cut off the blood supply to the soft tissue, whereupon the flesh turns a gangrenous black and dies. Then again, “flesh-eating” is more of a headline-grabber than “necrotizing fasciitis.”

Nichols is not alone in his careless use of medical terminology. Inventing a dramatic phrase like “flesh-eating disease” is only one example of many journalists’ casual use and misuse of language in medical reporting. A sound medical story will use qualifying words such as “may cause” or “can increase the risk of” rather than making sweeping statements such as “fibre prevents cancer” or “red meat causes colorectal cancer.”

Dr. Candace Gibson, a pathologist at the University of Western Ontario who also teaches medical reporting to journalism students at Western and has worked on the Discovery Channel and CBC’s Quirks and Quarks, laments the misuse of statistics and loaded terms like “cause” and “prevent.” But more accurate language is not the only solution to poor medical reporting. Dr. Gibson is also concerned about what she calls the “breakthrough mentality” of the media. Even though a new drug has “gone through all the hoops that Health Canada requires,” she says, “the public is a testing ground, and there will always be side effects that show up when huge numbers of people start to take the drug.” Dr. Gibson adds that editors don’t want stories fraught with ifs, maybes and other tentative-sounding words. Science and medical issues often don’t fit into hard news reporting, she points out, whereas if a newsworthy event occurs, “bingo, you just describe the event.” And unlike most traditional news stories, medical reports seldom receive follow-up articles, which then compounds the confusion.

One of the root causes of this situation is that both the press and the public prefer to believe that science can come up with the “right” answers to questions that have mystified medical practitioners for centuries, even though science cannot ever be completely right. Rarely is there a definitive truth to any medical conundrum. Scientific theories are constantly being revised and retested, much to the dismay of the public, who want to find out once and for all whether hormone replacement therapy prevents Alzheimer’s disease or causes breast cancer.

Reading most stories on the subject, it would be hard to know for sure. A front-page story in The Toronto Star, for instance, announced that “Study Finds Estrogen Saves Lives.” The wire-service story stated, in part, “Over-all mortality rate for users was 46 percent below that of non-users…and most of the benefit was connected to preventing heart attack and stroke.” It was an erroneous, if not absurd, statement that could lead readers to believe estrogen miraculously preserves life for all eternity. The second-last paragraph then noted, “There was a slightly higher rate of breast cancer death among estrogen users.” All of this conflicting information can, of course, be mind-boggling for a woman faced with the agonizing decision of whether to take the hormone or not. Either she will be protected from developing heart disease or she is doomed to die of breast cancer. Or, as this article appears to suggest, if she is really fortunate, she’ll achieve immortality.

Dr. Ken Walker, a Toronto gynecologist and journalist who writes under the name W. Gifford-Jones, is one of many doctors who take umbrage at such articles. Dr. Walker believes they muddy the issue with scary statistics and ignore the seriousness of other, more common aging problems such as heart disease and fractures. Menopause, he says, is not a change of seasons; in some cases it is a serious matter. One benefit of estrogen replacement therapy not mentioned in news stories is that it can strengthen bones weakened by osteoporosis. In a 1995 article Dr. Walker wrote for The Financial Post, he attempted to quell some of the fears women have about estrogen. The dangers of a broken hip, he wrote, far outweighed other problems: “…25% die during the next year, 50% are immobilized, suffering disability and loss of independence. Only about 25% return to a normal life.” Dr. Walker also reminded readers that the risk of developing coronary artery disease is greater than developing breast cancer, and there are, in fact, other studies demonstrating that some women who are taking estrogen when they are diagnosed with breast cancer live longer than those who weren’t taking the hormone.

Women may have been slightly reassured after reading Walker’s article until they picked up the February 1996 issue of Chatelaine, in which June Rogers asked the question “Estrogen Forever?” Rogers reflected on her own experience with the old, high-dose birth control pills of the early 1970s, which caused her to gain weight and weep uncontrollably. She also recounted the horrifying story of a woman who was prescribed a low-dose Pill at the age of 44 because she couldn’t tolerate standard hormone replacement therapy. A clot lodged behind one of her eyes, causing it to become dreadfully swollen and eventually resulting in slightly impaired vision. A sidebar to the story did gather up contradictory research reports and statistics, but they weren’t evaluated at all. One disturbing fact was that women who take estrogen for more than six years had a 40 percent chance of developing fatal ovarian cancer, but, Rogers counters later on, it is a very rare disease and only one percent of women will develop it. Rogers obviously tried to do her homework, but her throwing statistics together without much analysis meant the reader was left to drift in a sea of almost random facts.

Rogers’ final thoughts sounded more like a gypsy’s curse than a simple rhetorical question: “Will these powerful hormone drugs be our magic potion, poison pill-or something in between?” It’s true that medical writers are not supposed to wholeheartedly endorse a drug or a form of treatment-that would be just like advertising-but frightening women about diseases, even inadvertently, strikes fear and terror in the heart of the reader and is not responsible reporting.

Doctors, too, have played a role in creating this kind of confusion. Journalists must try to extract information from physicians and researchers who are reluctant to speak to the media, especially concerning new treatments, potential cures or the results of a study. Even though the mere mention of their work or research in an article or during the evening news can bring publicity to a research institute, university or hospital and thus attract the attention of benefactors who may be inclined to donate money for further study, physicians are worried-not surprisingly-that they will be misquoted. An even greater worry is that the reporter will not understand what the doctor is trying to say, and that the doctor will end up appearing foolish or unintelligent. Many Canadian doctors shun the media for those reasons, although in the media-conscious United States, some physicians seek the advice of professional media consultants to help them deal with journalists’ persistent, nagging questions. Like politicians, doctors are counselled on how to dress for a television interview and how to nimbly deflect a manipulative question. Even though such consultants do exist in Canada, very few physicians tend to use their services.

This medical-media standoff has been looming for years. In 1983 Dr. Martin S. Bander wrote an essay for The New England Journal of Medicine entitled “The Scientist and the News Media.” In his piece, Bander suggested scientists avoid interviews that will cause them to reveal the results of a study that has not been peer-reviewed-in other words, a study that has been rigorously scrutinized by scientists to ensure there are no flaws or gaping holes. Unfortunately, rather than endure the tedious and lengthy process of peer review, some scientists go directly to the media with their findings. Often institutions themselves encourage the researchers to hold press conferences to discuss data-even if the study is incomplete or lacks definite conclusions-because benefactors are more inclined to donate money to an endeavour that seems to be making significant progress.

If an article is submitted to a major medical journal, it will generally be subject to peer review, which ought to guard against inaccuracies and misinformation. At The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, a professional staff of close to 20 checks each manuscript not only for errors in copy but also for any leaps in logic or dubious claims made by the author. Then the study is peer-reviewed and analyzed by outside physicians and scientists who can provide an objective view of the tests and results. In addition, most major medical journals have strict rules in place to prevent researchers from going directly to the media. In 1969, The New England Journal created the Ingelfinger Rule (named after the editor of the time), which states that the Journal will not consider publishing a manuscript if its substance has been published elsewhere. Imagine the difficulty, says the New England Journal‘s Dr. Angell, for a reporter who is not trained in medicine or science to sit at a press conference where a scientist is essentially marketing his research. The reporters have to make sense of the press conference without having the primary data in front of them and without the benefit of experts’ opinions.

Dr. Angell says this extensive process of checking and testing does not always guarantee a study is reliable. Articles should also be put in context of other research on the subject, something that doesn’t necessarily happen when a medical journal prints a study. Even if a published work does refer to previous studies, journalists may not be inclined to look up other research, which in turn can lead a writer to draw inaccurate conclusions, much like The New York Times reporter who ignored several important studies on the abortion and breast-cancer question.

The problem of jumping to inaccurate conclusions might be remedied, Dr. Angell suggests, if all medical reporters had science or medical degrees. Yet is this a realistic solution? As the Globe‘s Paul Taylor says wryly, “Physicians become steeped within the mythology of their own profession and are not going to be very critical of it.” It is almost a tradition that a journalist be able to evaluate any topic: politics, business, animal husbandry in Poland or medicine. An inquisitive mind, sharp research skills and the ability to write in a lively and coherent manner are far more valuable than any medical degree, even though reporters frequently do specialize in a particular area and build up a treasury of knowledge. The job of a medical reporter is to take the jargon-laden studies and distill them down to a readable, comprehensible, informative and enjoyable article for their readers.

Good medical reporters such as Immen and Taylor have been on the beat a long time (nine and five years respectively), have immersed themselves in their subject matter and have learned from their mistakes. They take advantage of the advance copies of medical journals and contact a study’s authors to verify facts, then express them in plain, simple language. Wire-service reporters, on the other hand, who cover medicine just as competently as the beat reporters, watch grimly as editors trim their stories to the bone, excising vital content and thus creating, almost inevitably, misunderstandings, errors and distortions.

Why should we care about the quality of medical writing? First of all, of course, it constitutes inaccurate reporting, which is as important in the medical field as it is in, say, foreign news. There are significant human consequences too. Hope springs up whenever a new treatment for AIDS or cancer is announced, only to be shattered when the research proves inconclusive or the trials are unsuccessful. And people become needlessly alarmed when they read what sounds like an announcement of their imminent demise.

Which is why last November, Paul Taylor wrote “The Mind & Matter” series in the Globe on making sense of medical news. Taylor had often wondered, despairingly, how certain stories made it into the newspaper. Finally, it happened enough times that he felt compelled to do something about it. “The best thing is to provide people with the information so that they themselves can be more knowledgeable readers,” he says. Perhaps the next generation of medical reporters will come to its task better prepared. University of Western Ontario’s journalism students benefit from Dr. Gibson’s classes, and now the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is expanding its single course on medical journalism into a full program. Students will learn how to interpret research, new drug developments, ethics, epidemiology and malpractice. Not quite a cure-all for the ills of medical reporting, but at least the prognosis is good.

Alison Gordon is telling me a story. She is telling me of the time between 1979 and 1983 when she covered the Blue Jays for The Toronto Star, which made her the first female baseball writer in the major leagues. When you are a writer and cover a major league team for a daily, she says, you belong to the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. And on Gordon’s membership card, right above where her name appeared, was the title “Mr.” “One late night,” remembers Gordon, “I was on a charter flight full of baseball writers—who all got pretty drunk, I must say—coming from Baltimore. I went up to the head of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, this ancient New York guy, and I said to him, ’When are you going to take the Mister off of my membership card.” He gripped both arms of his seat and said, ’Never!’”

Never. In 1981, when she first started in television, Teresea Hergert (now Kruze) thought she would never be able to work in sports journalism because women weren’t allowed. Now she is going into her 11th year reporting and seventh year anchoring sports for TSN. After graduating from Conestoga College 16 years ago, Brenda Irving was told, “Sorry, no women,” and thought it would never change. She has been covering sports since the late eighties and now reports for CBC Newsworld. While still in high school, Rosie DiManno recalls writing a letter to then Star sports editor Jim Proudfoot, expressing her desire to write about sports. At the time, it seemed an improbable goal.

Without a doubt, since Kruze, Irving and DiManno dreamed, women sports reporters have gained yards on the gender field: today, most television stations and newspapers have at least one full-time female sports reporter. But while many of the women in sports journalism believe they still have a long distance to go before being completely accepted in the sports industry as equals, others see sports journalism as an area where women are never going to be comfortable and where there is not much more they can—or should—do about it. Just because they’re all women doesn’t mean everyone is playing on the same team.

How many female sports journalists are there in Canada? Mariah B. Nelson, former professional baseball player, coach and award-winning author of The Stranger Women Get, the More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports, has estimated that less than 10 percent of sports reporters in North America are women, but no one seems to have broken out numbers for Canada. However, an informal survey of the 10 top Canadian dailies indicates that of the 116 sports reporting staff, 8.6 percent are women.

Alison Gordon doesn’t find this scarcity surprising. “There was one female sports-writer at the Star when I was there and there is still only one female sportswriter [Mary Ormsby], who does a column,” she says. Barb DiGiulio, a broadcaster at 640 The Fan, a Toronto all-sports radio station, is also pessimistic. “I think that there is still a lot of learning to be done. People have to get over the idea of man and woman and just look at their person as who they are.” However, Teresa Kruze feels that female sports reporters are accepted a lot more now than they were n the mid-eighties and that their status will continue to improve. “I equate where female sports journalists are right now with where female news broadcasters were in the seventies,” she says. “Now, you can’t watch a news program without there being a male and a female anchor, and most of the reporters are females. It’s going to take us a few years, but I find more and more women are coming into the industry.” Brenda Irving, sports reporter and anchor for CBC Newsworld, also believes women have scored some victories: “For the first time, a lot of women in sportscasting who have been doing it for a while know they’ve been hired because they are good, not because they are women.”

The odd thing is, most of the women now involved in sports reporting have been there for quite a while, women like Christie Blatchford, Mary Ormsby and Terri Leibel, who prides herself on having become the first woman to host a national sports program on TSN in 1984. So where are the rookies, the new female sports reporters! “I don’t think people are opening doors for them,” says DiGiulio. “I think they are having to push the doors open.” But she does acknowledge that the reception on the other side is a bit warmer than it once was. “The way the world is now, you can’t say, ’Well, that’s ridiculous, Miss, I don’t want you to be in sports.’”

Laura Mellanby, a supervising producer a CTV Sports, believes that opportunities for women interested in sports journalism do exist. CTV is open-minded, she says. “There are a lot of females working here, but I probably would not have received the same opportunities as TSN.” Nevertheless, she feels that the status of women and sports is changing: “In preceding years, it was not part of a Canadian female’s day-to-day culture to read the sports pages.” In addition, when Mellanby was growing up, “There were no on-air women in sports journalism.” Mary Ormsby, full-time sportswriter for the Star for 16 years, ascribes part of the problem to new female writers simply not being seasoned enough. “People have come in here and said, “I’m just out of university and I’d like to work for The Toronto Star,’” she says. “It’s like, ’Oh sure, just drop in.’ Maybe you should get a little bit better first.”

Still, it was because she was a “young chick” and it was a “hot time to have a young chick writing sports” that Christie Blatchford ended up in The Globe and Mail’s sports department between 1976 and 1979. Blatchford joined The Toronto Sun in 1982, and while she no longer does sports regularly there, she has covered every Olympics since the 1988 Calgary Games and reports on the Grey Cup and hockey playoffs if the Leafs are involved. She attributes the death of women to a lack of interest. “My sense is there’s not a huge number of women who want to become sportswriters who are beating down the doors and being denied because of systemic discrimination.” Then shouldn’t they be encouraged to develop an interest in sports? “Is the world going to be a better place if there are more women sportswriters? I don’t’ think so,” says Blatchford. “Nothing much has changed since I first did it in 1973, but I’m not sure that things should change.”

When women first started covering sports, resistance from their male colleagues and athletes certainly was common. Barb Ondrusek, an anchor and reporter for the CBC since 1990, remembers her experience covering the World Series in the early nineties. “I was the only woman in the press box. Every time I went to sit down, the male sportscasters would act like little kids and say. ’Sorry, my friend is coming and this seat is saved.’ I asked about three times and three times it was no. After that I thought, ’I’m going to stand, I’m not going to make a fool of myself begging for a seat.’”

Alison Gordon recalls how night editors would see mistakes in her copy and not correct them. “Early on, most of the people were on the side of the guys who didn’t get the job I did.” But there was also some support. She remembers her first road trip to Texas, where Blue Jays were playing. A few days earlier, in New York, a female reporter, had tried to go into the Texas Rangers’ dressing room to talk to a player. The manager had announced during spring training that their clubhouse was closed to all writers, but had not enforced this policy until the female reporter came along, two weeks into the season. Gordon was travelling with the Blue Jays, who were playing the Texas Rangers, and the world was waiting to see what would happen.

“When I went to the ballpark, there were all these cameras expecting me, and I was thinking, ’Texas, ugh, all these rednecks, this couldn’t be any worse.’ The first sportswriter I saw was a guy named Randy Galloway, who was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and spitting tobacco. I started my pregame stuff and he walked up to me and said, ’You Alison Gordon?’ and I said, ’Yes, I am.’ ’You plan on trying to get into the locker room after the game?’ ’It depends on the game and whether I need to get in there or not.’ He looked at me and said, ’Well, I just wanted to tell you as far as we’re all concerned, we’re on your side.’” The Rangers did win, and Gordon did get into the locker room with the support of the Texas colleagues, who also slammed the Rangers in three Texas dailies for their actions.

Unfortunately, Neanderthal behaviour is still common in the sports world. “I think there’s a chauvinism in sports that is apparent to anyone who is around it, especially when women reporters might be dealing with male athletes,” says Roy MacGregor, sportswriter for The Ottawa Citizen. “There is a level of immaturity—whether it’s verbal or not being given access to the areas that male journalists are, or whether it is a psychological barrier that goes up.” But when they get past that barrier, women journalists often get more out of an athlete than a male reporter can, and the result is, some believe, better journalism. “I will ask questions that other reporters don’t because they think people will see them as a wimp,” says Barb Ondrusek. MacGregor agrees: “Women journalists have brought so much more of a professional attitude toward sports journalism and have made male sports journalist better journalist and that needed to be done—still needs to be done.” Brenda Irving identifies another advantage women may have. “A lot of men get defensive when other men are around,” she says. “And sometimes they are in awe of the athlete. Women don’t care.”

What they do care about is being taken seriously by the public—and sometimes that is hard. As Teresa Kruze recalls, “I was told by my boss when I began at TSN than my credibility relied on my being 100 percent correct all the time. He said if I made a factual or statistical error, my credibility would be immediately out the window. A man would be forgiven for that because he was just having an off day. A woman will not be forgiven for anything.” Barb DiGiulio compares it with being in a fishbowl: “You’re watched an listened to so much more carefully. In the beginning I felt that people were waiting for me to make mistakes, and as soon as I made one, the phone would ring 10 times.” Mike Day, supervising producer of news and information at TSN, has a different explanation for the close scrutiny. “Statistically or proportionally or however you want to put it, more men have an interest in or a love for lots of different sports and athletes, and as a result they have a bit of an edge in that they come to the table with more knowledge. But I’ve worked with a few women,” Day concedes, “who know every bit as much about sports as men and it shows.”

The credibility problem may be one reason why some women sports journalists are still stuck in the pink ghetto of synchronized swimming, gymnastics and other “soft” sports. “The safe palce you can put a young woman is where she can’t cause too much damage and cover the crap that no one else wants to cover,” says Mary Ormsby, explaining the attitude behind such assigning practices. Teresa Kruze has experienced this at TSN: “There have been times where I felt they haven’t given me professional big-name sports to cover. “I’m given women’s hockey, not men’s, I’m given sports like lawn bowling, whereas my male counterparts are getting the big-name sports.” Roy MacGregor thinks the problem may be more about seniority than credibility. “We’re talking demographics here, and since these additions [of women sports reporters] were made late—they should have been made a lot earlier—guess who gets the worse beat or the least significant beat?”

So are Teresa Kruze, Barb Ondrusek and other female sportscasters mere tokens? In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a female sports journalist was certainly a novelty. “Token” was even the word Alison Gordon chose for her computer password when she was reporting for the Star. Today, Laura Robinson, a former Olympic-class bicycle racer and now a freelance sportswriter whose work has appeared in the Globe and Toronto’s NOW magazine, thinks that tokenism is still a problem. She strongly believes that many female broadcasters, particularly the ones who do nothing but read scores, function as cheerleaders, not journalists. “If you’re going to recite scores, then there’s limited talent involved,” Robinson says. “Most of the time that is what female sportscasters are doing, and then they banter back and forth with the weatherman.” Damien Cox, a sportswriter for the Star since 1989, agrees that talent is something hard to find within sports journalism in general, and believes it may be even more difficult when it comes to women reporters. “Mary Ormsby is to a certain degree an exception,” he says. “She is supremely qualified and we need more people like her. Some of the women in sports journalism don’t measure up to the same degree of excellence and in that area women have a long way to go. There are some that are already there, but we need more.”

But are female sports reporters really in demand in the industry? Globe sports columnist Stephen Brunt thinks so. “there are not enough females in the system to fill the demand,” he says. “If there were two equally qualified people for a position, a man and a woman, the woman would be hired.” Brunt also believes that “most of the real old-school dinosaurs are gone” and that “the world of sports journalism has changed dramatically in the last five years.”

Why, then, is the number of women applying for positions in sports journalism not higher? Are women intimidated? Or are they simply just not interested? If they are not interested, then why should the rules of the boys’ club change? “There are at least as many women in the Sun newsroom—working reporters editors—at any given time and there’s not sexism problem,” says Christie Blatchford. “But the numbers aren’t the same in sports. When the numbers are the same, then the world will change. Until then, it’s not going to and I don’t think the numbers are ever going to catch up, so then I would say to you, why the fuck should the sports world change to suit half a dozen women? It probably shouldn’t.”

Veterans like Alison Gordon believe the sports world will never change. But if women are interested in working in sports journalism, even if they are considered what Mary Ormsby calls “strange animals,” shouldn’t the option exist? It does hold that women working on the sports side still have many hurdles to get over. But perhaps their greatest hurdle is fear. “I don’t know what people are afraid of,” says Ormsby. “Having women in their sports department is not a bad thing. People have to get that through their heads. It is not a bad thing for sports.”

To see life, to see the world, to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machine, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon’…to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.

So wrote Henry Luce in his 1934 prospectus for a new magazine called Life. His understanding of the power of the image continues to define the photojournalist’s mandate today.

The work of the visual journalist is invaluable. When television cameras rush through a scene, the still camera lingers, cutting to the core of an issue, isolating single moments of truth that become etched indelibly in our minds. Despite the strength of the photojournalistic image, the Canadian magazine reader is left hungering for more than a glimpse of it. For today, it is largely the set-up shot of the commercial illustrative photographer, not the fieldwork of the photojournalist that dominates the Canadian magazine page. Perhaps in light of a national magazine market plagued by extreme cutbacks and American saturation, it’s not surprising that most magazines opt for studio photography, which is cheaper, faster, familiar.

Now, in addition to all this, technology is dealing photojournalism a major blow. The electronic media that are hailed as the saviour are in fact hastening the death of the photojournalist as news gatherer. Technology is challenging the notion of the image as truth, while a valuable form of reportage is quietly slipping away without notice.

There was a time when photojournalism reigned. While its Golden Age is long over, photojournalism’s stint in the limelight was revolutionary, awakening and historic. The era began in the United States in November 1936 with the introduction of what is considered the model of the picture-story genre: Life magazine. Frightening, exciting, amusing illuminating images of the world awakened the consciousness of an audience once glued to the radio dial.

Through few are aware of it, Canada had what could be considered a Silver Age of photojournalism. Little of it has been documented, few would recognize the names or works of its Canadian pioneers and its success relied heavily on government support. Its beginnings go back to the end of World War I, when the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau created a still-picture division to provide government departments with photographs of Canada. Under the guidance of the National Film Board, founded in 1939, the still-photography division’s role expanded, and it began to supply Canada’s newspapers and Life-inspired publications such as the Star Weekly and Weekend magazines with images of ware, poverty, travel and the human experience. Until 1984 (when the government transferred all photo services to the archives and various museums), the National Film Board played a principal role in discovering, supporting and promoting talent in Canada—notables such as Richard Harrington and his poignant portraits of Inuit life; Kryn Taconis and his quietly truthful pictures of the Crystal Spring Hutterite colony in Manitoba; and other gifted photographers such as Sam Tara, Tom Gibson, Horst Ehricht, Michel Lambeth and Ted Grant.

In North America, the photographic monopoly over the public’s imagination and appetite for information ended with the advent of television. By the late 1950s, retailers became always of television’s exploding audience and began rechanneling advertising dollars from the printed page to the television screen. The original Life folded in 1972 and other weekly pictorial magazines soon followed. TV’s instantaneous, mesmerizing coverage bumped the magazine, and consequently the photojournalist, out of place as the primary source of news and entertainment.

Today, the 24-hour CNN feed, the satellite dish serving up hundreds of channels and the rise of tabloid television dominate news delivery. What has allowed photojournalism to survive at all is the still image’s advantage over television—its power to fix a scene within a frame, leaving a clear, strong and lasting impression. Ron Poling, the chief of picture services at Canada Press, explains the hire of the still print: “Take, for example, the image of Jean Chrétien with his hands around the demonstrator’s neck. That was actually a TV image, but we managed to take a still from that video. What people remember is the still image, not the moving video. The power of the still image has not in any way diminished because of the electronic media.”

Over the decades, magazines have relied on the work of the photographer to provide stirring, memorable images. There is little mystery surrounding the work of the concept photographer—studio sessions are often dictated by an art director’s grocery list of desired shots. But when it comes to understanding what the photojournalist does, few see beyond the stereotypical image of the wild-eyed, fatigue-clad photographer dodging mines and mortar fire. In reality, the camera-toter can’t rely solely on heroics: journalistic instinct, storytelling ability, a fast shutter finger and a dedication to in-depth projects are essential. Photojournalism is not limited to international, war-torn panoramas—compelling, disturbing and surprising stories also hail from across the country, across the province, across the street. Yet photojournalists continue to struggle for recognition as visual reporters whose work is more than mere illustration for text. The most-decorated Canadian photojournalist, winner of numerous World Press awards of excellence, Larry Towell, is tired of feeling relegated to the bottom of the journalistic ladder. “A writer is a god and a photographer is not seen as an author,” says Towell. “The photographer goes out and does all this work to come up with a beautiful image. Often a journalist is hired who has never been to where the picture was taken to write the central part of the piece. In the end, the photographer’s name ends up under the staple.”

Apart from an editorial mentality that routinely undervalues photojournalism, the fact that survival tops the Canadian magazine wish list works against the visual reporter. Former Equinox editor Jim Cormier says the high costs (both time and money) of financing in-depth fieldwork prevent most magazines from using photojournalism regularly. “It’s tough to do sufficiently compelling and interesting journalistic photography ever single issue when you’re working with Canadian budgets,” he explains. “Equinox paid as much as $12,000 to $14,000 for a feature, which is really high compared to a lot of text-based magazines that pay $6,000, or $8,000 at most. But even when we paid that, these photographers are working on projects that can cost them as much as $40,000 to $60,000.” This leaves the photojournalist to find alternative ways to finance projects.

Canadian photojournalist Robert Semeniuk spends months at a time dedicated strictly to arranging funding for his ambitious photographic excursions. As a result, he has worked in more than 80 countries, documenting stories such as the psychological effects of war on children, the struggles in Angola and the lives of Canadian Ukraininans. “On ’Landmines: The Devil’s Own Device,” Equinox paid me to go to one country. I went to five. I got money from World Vision, from the United Nations, ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) flew me all around Afghanistan, a mining company supplied me with accommodation and transportation, and so on.”

Regardless of the time and know-how expended, there are reasons beyond photojournalists’ control why magazines overlook their work. Vancouver magazine editor Jim Sutherland explains that his magazine’s reliance on advertising restricts the space available, thus limiting the use of photojournalism to no more than a few pages annually. “To work well, most photojournalism requires double-page spreads. We have quite a high advertising ratio, which means that we get between five to 10 double-page spreads in our entire magazine,” he says. “And we have a commitment to do fashion. That also requires double-page spreads and will typically take up three of them. We’re really left with no room to play with.”

Equinox has also had difficulty packaging photojournalism. According to Jim Cormier, “There were a couple of mechanical problems in making photojournalism work dramatically. The physical paper size was shaved two or three times in the last seven or eight years in little increments, which eventually means you don’t have the kind of dramatic-feeling object in your hands.” As well, he adds, a perfect-bound magazine is limited in its design approach—photos don’t run effectively across gutters and arrangement tends to be more grid-like and static.

Layouts and budgets aside, there are deeper causes that explain why the majority of magazine stories are illustrated with highly stylized photographs. Steve Simon is a photojournalist and professor of photojournalism at Loyalist College, Canada’s only program dedicated to the craft. He attributes the rise in editorial-type photography largely to a lack of schooling on the subject: “At journalism schools like Ryerson and Carleton, photojournalism is just a passing mention, whereas in the United States you can receive a degree specializing in photojournalism. I think part of the problem is that the journalism industry is controlled by people who have come up through the system without any kind of formal education regarding photojournalism.” Simon doesn’t think editors consciously downplay the work of photojournalists, but does attribute the lack of attention to an ignorance of exactly what the craft is an the potential impact it can have.

Steve Simon’s concern about the profession’s obscurity is shared by others. According to Toronto photography dealer Jane Corkin, owner of the Jane Corkin Gallery, Canadian magazines do now use the photographic image well because they don’t know who the Canadian photojournalists are and fail to check with the marketplace. “They want to make their own decisions. If I were canvassed by a magazine, I could give them a better name than the person they hired (the art director) to find the name,” Corkin says. “I’m on the best of that market every single day. I know who’s in, who’s out, who’s making good work today, who made better work yesterday.” Jim Cormier agrees that there is a community of photojournalists that Canadian magazines aren’t aware of. “I just don’t think the contacts and connections are there,” he explains. “I think a lot of art directors aren’t used to working with photojournalists and are totally used to working with concept photographers, portraitists and style people who have a lot of studio techniques. It may be that it’s almost like a culture clash.”

Differing approaches are typical of the designer-photojournalist relationship. Some photojournalists expect to have a say in how their work will be laid out in a magazine. But in most cases, determining the usage and placement of the photographs is not a collaborative effort. Margaret Williamson, the photo editor at Canadian Geographic, says this is how most magazines operate. “The photography that comes in on assignment is raw material. What we do with it in terms of the layout and how we play it out is what a magazine does, not what photographers do,” she says. “The same way that when a writer sends in text, our editors spend countless hours on it. It’s cut, pasted, material is sometimes added, sometimes the writer has to do a rewrite. In the case of photography, unless I was going to manipulate a photo, there’s no need to get approval. The design and layout of it is our business.”

While some photojournalists are angered by the drop-off-the-photos-and-you’re-done approach, others are more pragmatic and agree with Williamson. “I think the designer has a job to do and the photographer has a job to do. They have to respect each other.” says Vincenzo Pietropaolo, whose work has appeared in Saturday Night and Toronto Life. “Because these are so few magazines, you don’t want to get a reputation as being difficult. You can’t just leave one magazine and go to the next because there is no next one.”

The Canadian magazine market where photojournalists can sell their work is limited predominantly to Equinox (though less so since its sale last August to Malcolm Publishing) and Canadian Geographic. According to Williamson, Canadian Geographic has slowly been dedicating more space to photojournalism and has consciously moved toward using one photographer per story coupled with a strong photo-driven narrative. She points to the September 1996 article on Yonge Street’s 200th anniversary celebrations where Andrew Danson’s work was features exclusively. “It’s the kind of story that maybe five years ago, it would have been done using stock. Or I’d call up 20 photographers in Toronto and have a mishmash of whatever the subject was. I find that approach so scrapbook. It has no visual continuity.”

Beyond Equinox, Canadian Geographic and the fine art publications that occasionally feature photojournalism (Border Crossings, Canadian Art, CV Photo), some Canadian magazines have attempted to go beyond a dependence on newswire photo services, but with little success. An extreme example of cutting loose from the CP-AP Reuters reliance was the quarterly magazine. This Country Canada, first published in the summer of 1992. The magazine resembled Life—glossy, oversized and photo-driven—and vowed to feature photographs showing “the wonderfully disparate conditions of historic and contemporary Canadian life.” It was to be a celebration of Canadians and their country. But as early as its third issue, editions began coming out erratically because as the then-publisher wrote in a letter to subscribers, “We have had a difficult time attracting the type of advertising support required for a publication of this quality.” By the fall of 1995, the magazine had folded and been resurrected three different times under a variety of owners. As of mid-January 1997, the phone lines for This Country Canada were disconnected despite earlier rumours of distribution and financing deals with Air Canada and Kodak Canada.

Money wasn’t the only barrier to The Country Canada’s success. Despite a claimed paid circulation of 200,000 (although industry insiders believe circulation was more like 9,000), the old-style photojournalism magazine struggled in anonymity. Those who valued the publication were the photojournalists whose work it featured, such as Vincenzo Pietropaolo: “It promoted our work. Instead of two or three pages, the photojournalist was given between 10 and 12 pages with no advertisements in between to interrupt the photo essay.” But according to Margaret Williamson at Canadian Geo, this was actually one of the magazine’s shortcomings. Some of the photo packages, she says, were aesthetically weak, uninteresting and extremely long. In the Summer 1996 issue, for instance, the five cross-country photo essays occupied over 60 percent of the magazine: Côte-des-Neiges in Montreal (10 pages), Race Rocks near Victoria (10 pages), hand-crafted canoes in New Brunswick (10 pages), bread baking in Toronto’s Dufferin Grove Park (12 pages) and dog training in Vancouver (10 pages). While Vancouver magazine editor Jim Sutherland thinks the photography was good, he says it was “deliberately unsexy,” and that he couldn’t imagine finding much of a market for it.

The market that does exist—Equinox and Canadian Geographic—is not big enough to sustain the country’s photojournalists, who must turn instead to lucrative European magazine titles where exposure in French, Italian and German magazines has gained Canadian photojournalists, particularly Larry Towell, international reputations. Many photojournalists are also channelling their efforts into book publishing, where they can fuse together an extended photo essay with text to cover events overlooked by the mainstream press. As well, the Canadian art community, including galleries, museums and private collectors, has developed a well-defined, supportive audience for the work of photojournalists. “When I think that I run a multimillion dollar business out of Toronto selling photographs, that’s pretty amazing,” marvels Jane Corkin. “When I started out (in 1974), I couldn’t sell a photograph for $100. Now it’s not cool not to have photos, not town them.”

The most recent venue for photojournalism—digital technology—is revered as offering the digital reporter limitless possibilities such as the Internet and CD-ROM. But in the larger scheme, the latest technology is jeopardizing any future the craft has in the print world. Admittedly, technology does have its advantage—the speed with which images can now be sent to publications is unparalleled. Robert Silvers is the digital imagist who created the cover for Life magazine’s 60th anniversary collector’s edition, which portrayed Marilyn Monroe’s face using a mosaic of Life issues. “Photojournalism is flourishing because it is so quick to beam images through computer networks. My cover was sent to Life through the Internet because it was even faster than FedEx,” says Silvers. But the benefits of immediate transmission aren’t going to safeguard what is essential to the survival of photojournalism in magazines: the age-old notion that photographs inherently portray reality.

Computer literate readers know that the digital darkroom can seamlessly and radically shift the meaning of a photograph in ways that past techniques couldn’t even approach. Photojournalist Steve Simon predicts that the new-found fluidity of the image will erode photojournalism’s truth-telling claims: “There seems to be two standards in journalism. You’d never think to change the facts of a story, but when it comes to pictures, especially in magazines, there seems to be a very lax attitude when it comes to using the new technology to move things around or change the actual photo. When people have a hard time knowing what’s real and what’s not, you have trouble in journalism.”

Incidents of abuse (Time magazine’s infamous cover on which it altered O.J. Simpson’s skin colour, for example) have brought about the need to distinguish visual fact from fiction. “If you’re altering the position of something within the frame or removing objects from a frame, the audience should be told,” says Toronto gallery owner and photojournalism dealer Stephen Bulger, who supports using an icon to educate the public. While few magazines acknowledge the digitally altered photograph. The Globe and Mail and NOW magazine credit multiple photographers or artists and label images as photo-illustration.

Regardless of how a photograph is labelled, the credibility of the image can never be entirely restored. The once-truthful photograph has lost its status as newsworthy and as a result has been relegated to the role of illustrative add-on or object d’art. Photojournalist Vincenzo Pietropaolo is not optimistic that the profession will be able to break out of this status. “If you’re a younger photographer and you look at magazines, you’re going to get influenced by these magazines. I remember when I was 20 years old, I was looking in magazines at the work of Eugene Smith and people like that.” He is saddened that today’s aspiring photographers will never know the potency of photojournalism as it once was.

A few champions continue to hold tight to the ideals that attracted them to this news-gathering pursuit. These are the veterans who remember the power and impact photojournalism can have in magazines. But even for them, staying true to this vision in becoming nearly impossible. Henry Luce’s words fade before our eyes as photojournalism quietly disappears—and photojournalists can’t do a thing about it.

On the afternoon of Saturday, November 2, as the CBC celebrated 60 years of public broadcasting, I was exposed for the first time to the Peter Gzowski phenomenon. Inside Mother Corp.’s marble mausoleum on Toronto’s Front Street, women and men in their fifties climb on perimeter railings for a better look as the cheering begins. Gzowski, in a worn, pale-green sweater and grey slacks, has just shuffled slowly into the atrium and is greeted by the applause of about 500 people. Less a mere radio journalist than a strangely revered, white-bearded, bifocaled sexagenarian pop star.

Gzowski is not comfortable with the crowd’s attention and heads for cover in one corner of a makeshift stage adorned with a piano and assorted sound and video equipment. Minutes later, the show begins.

“Good morn…whoops, afternoon, everyone. I’m Peter Gzowski and this is Morningside.” Cue soothing and familiar piano intro. The error was likely deliberate, although weekday morning radio is all Gzowski has known for 15 years. The crowd follows Gzowski’s summary of plans for the two-hour special broadcast with more noisy approval. The first hour, which involves a musician in each of Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto and Halifax, will “bring the country together musically,” he says. After hearing a version of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” Gzowski continues to settle in.

“We’re not used to leaving time for applause,” he says while receiving comments from the control room. With tremoring hands, Gzowski combs his hair quickly as three techies adjust the headset that wasn’t secured adequately. His quaky nerves are understandable. Gzowski is not accustomed to fretting about appearance or habits. He would rather be three floors up in the studio where he sits every day as the engine that drives Canada’s most popular radio program.

The atrium crowd is equally out of place, but happier about it. While they’re most comfortable with Gzowski’s voice in their living rooms and dens, a daily companion and friendly provider of current events, they’re eager to meet their Peter in the flesh. At last, in the wide-open atrium, he can be seen as well as heard, a tired, self-conscious, 62-year-old radio host who created a unique broadcasting love affair, and now, one and a half decades later, is ending it with his decision to depart Morningside this spring.

When he leaves the stage, Gzowski is swarmed by admirers hoping for a word, a handshake, some deeper insight into their friend. “It freaked him out,” says Shelagh Rogers, Morningside‘s fill-in host. “People wanted to be close and touch him.” Hype and fantasy surround every pop star and Canada’s Morning Man is no exception. When he finishes his last show in May, he’ll be remembered as the country’s best-loved radio journalist – warm, cordial, unthreatening and genuinely, unfailingly interested in people. That’s the legacy of the on-air Gzowski. The off-air professional leaves a somewhat different impression.

On a Wednesday in early January, Gzowski takes his seat in the studio a minute or so before 8:05 EST, when the show commences live on the east coast. Everyone – from the host to the technicians to the listeners in Glace Bay – is waiting for the signal. “This is the longest minute of the day,” says one of the three studio assistants who sit in an adjacent room to keep Gzowski and the program on track. It’s a standard Morningside lineup: the business column, a talk with Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest, the New Brunswick report, a discussion of flagging CD sales, a chat about artificial blood cells and, wrapping up, listener letters with Shelagh Rogers. On this day, however, Gzowski is battling flulike symptoms. His assistant, Shelley Ambrose, provides him with fresh coffee during a break and heads to the control room.

“How’s he doing?” Ambrose asks studio director Marieke Meyer.

“He’s shaking all the time and says his bones are aching,” Meyer replies.

“Why would he come in?” Ambrose asks the room aloud in a tone of annoyance.

Gzowski plunges into the phone interview with Charest but has difficulty penetrating the politician’s shell of well-rehearsed responses. After the call, he describes the interview in one word over the studio intercom: “Unsatisfying.”

Ambrose is busy being nursemaid to her boss. “Shelagh’s gonna host tomorrow and Friday and he can see the doctor this afternoon,” she tells the control room, calling Gzowski’s illness “a walking pneumonia.”

Listening, one would never know how ill Gzowski was. Through the pounding head and congested lungs came that same interested voice, the easy manner, the rambling conversation that has made him the most engaging of interviewers – an interviewer who approaches a discussion with Brian Mulroney the same way he would one on cooking beaver meat – by asking the questions the listeners are asking themselves. (Gzowski has said there is no better compliment than being told he has done this successfully.) His lack of smoothness (“Can I ask a dumb question?”) and apparent naiveté (“I don’t quite understand”) sound reassuringly ordinary and spontaneous to the folks out there. They don’t know, or care, that in fact these are Gzowski’s subtle techniques for relaxing his interviewees and eliciting more meaningful and lively responses.

The Gzowski touch was evident in his interview with neurologist and author Oliver Sacks in the fall of 1989. Sacks, on Morningside to discuss his new book, Seeing Voices, about deafness in children, was awkward and restrained at first but Gzowski quickly broke the wall down. “Can I ask you some simple-minded questions?” he said. “Because this is not a simple-minded book. Where does language come from?” Far from being a no-brainer, the question galvanized Sacks. A lively conversation ensued about personal contact and communication and their importance in a child’s development. (While discussing the evolution of sign language, Gzowski revealed to listeners that both men were “waving their hands furiously” as part of the give and take.) Sacks, subsequently on Morningside to promote another book, has said of Gzowski: “I’ve never had an interviewer give so much to me.”

When the pink light goes off, however, the “giving” stops. Granted, the Gzowski I watched in the studio that day required antibiotics and rest and had every reason to be withdrawn. But an earlier interview revealed him to be the same: remote, morose, put upon – his whole demeanor, from trudging gait to inanimated eyes, a surprising contrast to the inquisitive, friendly radio persona. To some extent it’s a hazard of the job, or at least that’s the party line. His unsociability is a matter of public record – in Knowlton Nash’s book on the CBC, Cue the Elephant!, Gzowski acknowledged his “limited capacity” for talking to people outside the show. Friend Stuart McLean, host of CBC’s Vinyl Café, says, “He doesn’t have the energy to be in public what he is on radio.” Because of the pressures that come with celebrity, adds Shelagh Rogers, “there have to be two Peter Gzowskis. You have to protect yourself.”

It’s just that there are stories, a lot of stories, floating around about people who’ve encountered something more in the other Peter Gzowski than just the reticence of

a talked-out, over-exposed man. He’s renowned for making his in-studio guests feel about as welcome as lepers, turning the folksy charm on – and off – with the mike. “I’ve been on Morningside twice, and both times I was struck by the difference between his on-air and off-air personalities,” says one. “On air he was warm and friendly. Off air, he was indifferent. I know he has all kinds of information to synthesize – I understand that. But it would have taken very little to be warmer and more welcoming.”

Gzowski’s heard the criticism before and defends his behaviour as necessary. “I have to turn my head from one subject and mood to another,” he explains. “I’m preoccupied. I don’t want to go through the questions twice, I don’t want to leave it on the dressing-room floor.” Which prompts the question, how much of Gzowski’s interest in people is an act? “I would say none,” he replies. “Some people would say a lot. A certain amount of feigning has to be involved, but if you feign long enough, anything eventually becomes interesting.” It’s the host’s job to “suck people in,” says journalist David Cobb, a Morningside listener and longtime acquaintance of Gzowski. “Sometimes you have to perform.” He recalls talking to Gzowski a few years ago about a spot he’d heard him do on classical music. Cobb thought the interview was wide-ranging and informative and told Gzowski that both host and guest were fabulous. “He was very boring,” Gzowski replied. “You have to remember one thing: on radio, it’s all acting.”

Peter Gzowski came to the theatre of radio through print journalism. In his early twenties, he contributed to many newspapers, from The Timmins Daily Press to Moose Jaw’s Times-Herald, before moving over to magazines. He quickly established himself as a feature writer for Maclean‘s, and so impressed the management that in 1962, at age 28, he became the magazine’s youngest-ever managing editor. At the same time, Gzowski began to dabble in radio. His first documentary, for CBC Radio in 1964, was called “How the Beatles Changed the World,” tracing the evolution of the band and its effect on pop music. He continued to climb the magazine ladder, heading The Star Weekly until its demise in 1968. The following year, he assumed the editorship of Maclean‘s. It was a heady era for the ambitious “Boy Wonder,” as the 30ish Gzowski was tagged. Whether it was tossing coins against the walls in the Maclean‘s offices, volleyball and basketball games on Toronto Island with the magazine literati or being known as the best editor of the best magazine in town, Gzowski’s desire to win was legendary.”Gzowski would enter a room and his whole demeanor would say, ‘What’s your game, I’m here to play,'” says Toronto Life editor John Macfarlane, a Maclean‘s staffer at the time. “He wanted to write better than anyone else, do anything better than anyone else.” Jack Batten, who was a writer on Maclean‘s under Gzowski, says he was a demanding taskmaster. “He didn’t just want the best magazine in Canada, he wanted to make Maclean‘s the best magazine in the history of the world.”

An unlikely dream, perhaps, given that the young Gzowski, tending to be sharp-tongued and abrupt, had no patience for nurturing writers. Author Sylvia Fraser, who wrote for The Star Weekly at the time, says Gzowski was a magnet for good writers and could get them to write better than before. However, “he was not good at teaching anyone the basics. He tended to surround himself with people who could do the job. If you couldn’t fit in to that, you fell off the cart.” That’s one interpretation; others have stronger words for it. One freelancer recalls sitting in Gzowski’s office while he scrutinized his story queries, feet deliberately on desk. “He made rude remarks about them and dumped a few in the wastebasket,” he says. “He had the smarts, but not a sense of how to treat people with some kind of respect. I got the impression quite readily that he could be a son of a bitch.”

You’d be inclined to dismiss that as sour grapes from one who “fell off the cart,” until you run into other hints that the nice guy we hear on the radio was not so nice. While describing his boss as “innovative, radical and ready to embrace new ideas,” former Maclean‘s writer Alan Edmonds admits that “he could be a put-down artist.” Put down was exactly what journalist Pat Annesley felt after interviewing Gzowski in 1969, about his appointment as Maclean‘s editor. In such a tumultuous time at the publication (there’d been a rapid turnover of editors), she asked about his deal with management.

“He said, ‘I really want to tell you. But this is off-the-record for the next two minutes. Put up your hand and promise for the next two minutes you are not a reporter.'”

“I said, ‘Sure,'” Annesley explains. “I was genuinely interested anyway.”

“He was about to speak, and then stopped himself. ‘Nope, you’ll write it anyway,’ he said. And I said, ‘No I won’t. If I say I won’t, I won’t.'”

“Then he said, ‘Well, if I were you, I would.'”

Conflicting standards of professionalism. But what kind of pro would doubt a writer’s word, then mock her for keeping it?

Gzowski admits to having a certain arrogance in those days. “I may have given off that feeling,” he says. “I was a cocky young pup.” But, he points out, “[Arrogance] can at times be a case of shyness.” In fact, one of his buddies, writer Martin O’Malley, says that it’s shyness that causes Gzowski to dismiss people coldly. “He’s then misinterpreted as a snob, which he’s not.”

But really, how shy is a guy who leaves the behind-the-scenes world of magazines for a career in radio hosting? After seven months as editor, Gzowski parted company with Maclean‘s, the magazine that marked both the peak and the end of his full-time print journalism career. In 1971, at 38, he and CBC producer Alex Frame co-created the revolutionary This Countryin the Morning and the country discovered the power of Gzowski’s companionable voice. The show was a classic even before it left the airwaves three years later. As Frame, now director of programming for CBC English radio, says, “You were hearing the country talking in a witty, insightful way.”

The success of This Countryin the Morning led CBC management to offer Gzowski the nine to noon chair again in 1982, when Don Harron quit as host of Morningside, but not before Gzowski’s quest for excellence and national attention made him take a dangerous detour into television. The infamous experiment known as 90 Minutes Live struggled through two seasons of criticism, much of it superficial, focussing on the host’s appearance and mannerisms rather than the program’s substance. Gzowski, who suddenly had to fret about climbing pants and exposed shins, was battling insecurity, the “tremendous insecurity that comes with being such a household name,” says Selena Forsyth, one of the ill-fated show’s editors. “If he fell down, the world was going to know.” She got the feeling the reason he rarely took a break from hosting wasn’t so much workaholism, but fear that the world might think his replacement was better. “He wants to keep that edge.”

To lose the edge as badly as he did on 90 Minutes was humiliating and humbling for Gzowski. “It helps the maturing process to screw something up badly,” says Gzowski. “I’m a lot easier on myself and others than I used to be.” Indeed, both Alan Edmonds and the burned Maclean‘s freelancer have noted the difference in dealings they’ve had with Gzowski in recent years. Still, if Gzowski has mellowed, as he feels he has, why are the majority of the colleagues and acquaintances I interviewed afraid to speak frankly about his off-air personality? When people will not even talk off the record for fear of “repercussions,” for fear of jeopardizing their careers or their relationship with this powerful man, it makes you wonder whether Canada’s easygoing broadcaster is more than a little sensitive to criticism.

Sylvia Fraser recalls that Gzowski had the humour to “take criticism and say it about himself,” yet was simultaneously “thin-skinned and could be surprisingly hurt.” Rumours of hurt arose when Geoff Pevere, former CBC Radio host of Prime Time, told his audience of younger listeners four years ago that “if you are bad you will go to hell. And if you go to hell, you have to listen to Morningside 24 hours a day.” His program was subsequently replaced by an evening hour of Morningside reruns. This past fall, Gzowski had Pevere on his show ostensibly to flog his new book, Mondo Canuck, but also to squash the stories that he had “reacted” to Pevere’s slight. “I only thought it was funny,” says Gzowski of the hell-is-Morningside statement. “I didn’t help to get him fired. [The rumour] was out there in the world and I wanted to bring it up.”

The result was a bemusing bit of radio, with Gzowski assuring Pevere he didn’t go “screaming to somebody and say, ‘Get that young whippersnapper,'” and Pevere assuring Gzowski that he knew he would have “laughed” it off – all of which served to draw even more attention to the alleged incident. Pevere says now, “It was not a wise career move to be anti-Gzowski at the CBC. The fact that taking a dissenting opinion on Morningside is so controversial is more revealing than the opinion itself.”

Whether or not Gzowski “reacted” to this particular criticism, it’s apparent that many people believe him capable of lashing back. If there’s any truth to the tales of Gzowski’s thin skin and nasty temper, it may go hand in hand with the enormous self-doubt and need for acclamation that comes from being a celebrity. One source theorizes, “He’s been too long in the public eye. At the radio he needs a lot of upkeep, a lot of catering to, a lot of stroking. To accept that from other people is very isolating. You cease to self-edit.”

Few, however, take anything away from Gzowski’s on-air professionalism. Even his dissenters, self-censored or not, make the point that he’s very observant, intelligent and a damn good journalist. Friend Stuart McLean credits Gzowski with putting out “a magazine every day.” But that might be stretching it a bit. Let’s not forget there’s a large team of researchers and producers who plan the shows, dig up the stories, write the questions and prep the interviewees. Gzowski, while participating in story meetings and reading extensively to prepare himself, is there to ask the questions. And if he has the reputation of being a “soft” interviewer, rarely challenging his guests, Gzowski doesn’t want to hear it. “The too-friendly criticism is made too often,” he says. “People confuse politeness with friendliness.” Certainly, where he excels is in drawing people out by allowing a tightly structured interview to wander from the plan. “He’s a natural on-air,” says his colleague Shelagh Rogers. “And he couldn’t be that natural if he wasn’t such a good journalist.”

But is being a skilled host the same as being a good journalist? Some people have a hard time making that leap. “It’s only conversation – how can that be journalism?” asks magazine writer and novelist Barry Callaghan. “He’s the consummate radio performer and moderator.”

Gzowski bristles when asked if what he does is journalism. “I don’t know what that means,” he says with irritation. “I never set out to be a journalist.”

Not at Morningside, that is. But he did indeed set out in life to be a writer, and even now, on air and off, defines himself as one. Since making the break from print journalism in the early seventies, he’s written four nonfiction books and an autobiography, The Private Voice. Lately, his writing is confined to a light, folksy column in Canadian Living magazine and the occasional preamble at the beginning of Morningside. “I think he senses he’s not spent a lot of time being a writer,” says Sylvia Fraser. “As a broadcaster you ask questions, but you don’t take them into considered analysis. You don’t do the other half.” She thinks Gzowski feels a certain frustration over not having pushed himself harder to realize his early journalistic ambitions. But everything came too easily and fast – from newspapers to magazines, from print to broadcasting. “He got waylaid too long from being a writer,” says Fraser. “He did not pursue what would have been his first love. When you listen to Peter, you hear an edge of regret.”

If not a journalist, then what is he? “A communicator,” she replies.

Sitting in a cramped listening room of the CBC Radio archives, I hear Gzowski attempting to define his life’s work as well – 23 years ago, on June 28, 1974, the final day of This Country in the Morning. His voice breaking with emotion, he said, “I’ve learned that journalism, or communication, or whatever it is we do here, is a two-way street. And the people who taught me that are the people who listen to the program.”

It is a comfortable irony that this man of words should be such a poor communicator with people in the flesh, yet speak so eloquently to the nation from a distance. Whatever regrets ensued, whatever directions it changed, Morningside has allowed the insecure, arrogant and talented Gzowski to project the best possible image. No doubt it will prove to be his strongest and most lasting one.