Faysal Hussain lies sleeping in his home in Oakville, Ontario, oblivious to the eruptions in the night. Hours later, he is woken by his radio alarm clock: Good morning, Oakville…d’you hear about that bomb explosion last night…?

Faysal, dark-skinned with cropped black hair and a goatee, pleads with the announcer, “Let it be the Serbs, the IRA, crazy cults from Japan….”

-two Middle Eastern men are considered suspects.

“Noooo,” Faysal howls.

This bombing has all the markings of Islamic fundamentalists: a large hole in the ground, charred grass and dead animals. What else could you ask for?

The morning paper arrives bearing the headline, “2 Suspects Wanted in Oakville Bombing.” Accompanying the story are amateurish sketches of men with stereotypical Muslim features: beards, black hair, beady eyes.

“Remind you of anyone?” Faysal, now hysterical, asks his brother Iqbal. The neighbours clearly think so. They stand outside the Hussain house, gathered around the smouldering remains of the Hussain’s barbeque.

“Damn those bloody camel-jockeys,” says one neighbour. “They never should have let them into this country.” A burly police officer arrives shortly and arrests the Hussain brothers on the grounds that their description “fits the profile of some very dangerous Middle Eastern terrorists.”

The Oakville bombing is a fictional event in Zarqa Nawaz’s satirical short film BBQ Muslims, but the treatment of Muslims by the media and police is all too real. Nawaz made her film in the wake of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, which killed 168 people.

The lead in The Vancouver Sun‘s headline story the next day reported that FBI and counterterrorism officials were “probing a suspected Middle East terrorist connection.” Other Canadian papers were more presumptuous: “Islamic Fundamentalists Suspected in Explosion” (The Toronto Star); “Islamic Militants Draw Suspicion” (The Globe and Mail); “Some Say It Looks Like Work of Islamic Terrorists, but [U.S. Attorney-General Janet] Reno Is Cautious” (The Gazette).

In the days following, many in North America’s Muslim community were harassed. In the U.S., mosques were defaced and Arabs and Muslims questioned. In Toronto, on the day after the bombing, two plainclothes RCMP constables dropped by the Pathfinder Bookstore-which sells socialist literature-to question 19-year-old Nojan Emad, then a volunteer at the store. The Canadian Arab Federation, which documented the complaint, said the agents queried Emad about his views on Cuba. He refused to answer. Four hours later, two other RCMP constables arrived and, without a warrant, forcibly dragged Emad from the bookstore into a waiting van, where they interrogated him for nearly an hour with questions like, “Have you ever been to Oklahoma?”, “Do you know how to make a bomb?” and “What is your religion?”

Several days later, Oklahoma police arrested Timothy McVeigh, a white American, who was sentenced to death late last year. “There was a collective sigh of relief [in the Muslim community],” Nawaz says, “[but] then there was justifiable anger toward the media, like, ‘How dare you be so wrong, you had nothing to go on, not a scrap of evidence.'” Nawaz, a second-generation Muslim Canadian, says the event galvanized the Muslim community in Canada and impelled her to make the short film, which premiered at the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival. “I remember my little brother had said that in The Toronto Star there were all these pictures of suspects in the Muslim community that they were looking for,” says the 30-year-old, who previously worked in Saskatchewan as an associate producer for CBC Radio. “I remember the entire community was just like, ‘Oh my God, don’t let it be us.'” Now living in Calgary, Nawaz visualizes chronicling her faith in film the way “Woody Allen does intellectual stories about the Jewish community.” Her next short film is called Death Threat.

Many Canadian Muslims regard media coverage of the Oklahoma bombing as a classic example of our society’s predilection to assume the worst of Muslims. The anti-Muslim bias seems to be predicated on the false assumption that Islam is an inherently violent religion. Inaccurate as it often is, the media’s reporting is influential: Muslims are often harassed by police and maligned by the general public.

The media’s distortion of Islam is not a new phenomenon. During the Gulf War in 1991, Canadian broadcast and print media inadvertently vilified Canadian Muslims. Local Arab and Muslim reaction was often reduced to opposition to Canada’s action in the Allied war effort. Youssef Chebli, the imam of the Al Rashid mosque in Edmonton and an outspoken critic of Canada’s participation in the war, contested Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, but applauded Hussein’s continued support of the Palestinians. (Chebli had opposed Hussein’s policies during the eight-year Iran-Iraq conflict.) Infuriated that military aggression in the Persian Gulf jeopardized innocent civilians, Chebli called the Allies the “satanic coalition.” The two Edmonton dailies tagged the story with hot-headed and blatantly inaccurate headlines: The Edmonton Journal ran the story on January 23, 1991, under the dramatic head “Local Muslim Cleric Sees Saddam as God’s Agent”; The Edmonton Sun‘s story read “Muslim Backs ‘Hero’ Saddam.” In the days following these sensational reports, Chebli and his family were harassed and received anonymous death threats; the Canadian Security Intelligence Service also paid Chebli a visit. Zuhair Kashmeri, then a reporter for The Globe and Mail, encountered dozens of similar stories across Canada. By the end of the year, Kashmeri had written The Gulf Within, a book detailing the experiences of Canadian Arab and Muslim families with the media and Canada’s intelligence community during the war. Kashmeri believes the media’s reporting wasn’t ill-intentioned or malicious, but was, and remains, willfully ignorant.

“[The media] pick something out and just run the thing without even trying to understand what the event is all about,” Kashmeri says. “They don’t interpret it, analyze it or try to put it in context. I don’t know if the media, in their zeal to get sexy headlines, realize the damage they do. It’s the whole thing about ‘run it and let the chips fall where they may,’ which is a kind of journalism that you don’t need.”

The misrepresentation of the North American Muslim community was not helped by the fact that media accounts of the Gulf War were censored by the U.S. government. As noted media critic Ben H. Bagdikian observed after the war: “Newspeople were sequestered and forced to transmit totally controlled military versions of what was happening.”

Haroon Siddiqui, editorial page editor at The Toronto Star and one of the country’s most prominent Muslim journalists, feels that the backlash against Muslims in Canada during the Gulf War reflected society’s tendency during wartime to lash out at those who resemble the enemy. But he believes debates about civil liberties provoked by skewed reporting actually improved coverage of Muslim issues. Fair treatment of minorities and Muslims especially became “the predominant thinking in the public arena,” Siddiqui says. “I hold [the Gulf War] up as an example of [the media’s] maturity and growing up as opposed to an example of how bad we were.” As for harassment and CSIS interrogations in the Canadian Arab and Muslim communities, he contends that these were “isolated incidents.”

But Kashmeri’s book illuminates how CSIS took its cues from conjecture in the Canadian press, so much so that following a flurry of CSIS investigations, the Canadian Arab Federation published an instructional pamphlet entitled “When CSIS Calls,” apprising community members of their rights. “We were fighting fires for the duration of the war,” says Jerry J. Khouri, who monitors media coverage at the Canadian Arab Federation. “What happens over time is that [the media] take the liberty of generalizing.” By recklessly tossing around terms like “Muslim extremists” and “Islamic fundamentalists,” the media fail to acknowledge the great diversity of the world’s approximately one billion Muslims.

Sitting in the Canadian Arab Federation’s Toronto office, Khouri brandishes the federation’s press clippings of stereotypical portrayals of Arabs and Muslims. He has files on the Gulf War and racist editorial cartoons, and a particularly thick dossier on True Lies, the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger star vehicle that cast a group of Arabs called the “Crimson Jihad” as the enemy. Khouri says the Canadian media’s propensity to publish the slightest suspicion of Muslim involvement in an event colours readers’ perceptions. “When it’s in the papers for a couple of days, people have already accepted it in their mind that Arabs or Muslims have done something.” Muslim Media Watch, a national monitoring group, was established in the wake of the Gulf War to stem the media’s negative and inaccurate portrayals of Islam. Seven years after the Gulf War, the Canadian Arab Federation still receives on average three calls a month from community members being investigated by CSIS.

For Canadian Muslims, who feel that the Canadian media deem them culpable for what goes on in other parts of the world, circumstances are unlikely to improve. Dissension between the U.S. and Iran and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict have kept Islam in the news, as have terrorist attacks on tourists in Egypt, civilian slaughter in Algeria (which may or may not be attributed to insurgents) and a brutally oppressive regime in Afghanistan. Though not all Muslims come from the Middle East or are linked to violent political activities, the media have forged an indivisible connection between Muslims and Middle Eastern strife.

Islam is the fastest-growing faith in the world-more than 60 countries acknowledge it as their main religion. Canadian Muslims stem from a variety of states, including Iran, Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey. The first record of Muslims in Canada dates back to 1871. By 1911, there were 1,500, two-thirds of whom emigrated from Turkey; the other one-third were Arabs. The first wave settled primarily in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, and as they did not assimilate easily, maintained close-knit families. After gaining some economic security, they formed Muslim associations like the Arabian Muslim Association in Alberta, which in 1938 laid the groundwork for the Al Rashid mosque in Edmonton, the first mosque built in Canada. The 1991 census (1996 figures were not available at press time) estimated that approximately 253,000 Muslims live in Canada, though Muslim groups estimate the number to be as high as one million. (Until recently, the Canadian census included Muslims in the category of “other” religious groups.)

Most of the misconceptions surrounding Islam stem from misguided interpretations of the Qur’an, the faith’s holy book, which is the Word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel beginning in 610 A.D. The Qur’an sees some Jews as misrepresenting the Scriptures and Christianity as worshipping Jesus as the Son of God, although God had commanded His followers to worship only Him; regardless of this, Islam does not assume a combative stance toward these or other religions, maintaining that believers must not force their faith on non-Muslims. Islam is based on five pillars: submission to the will of one god, Allah; prayer five times a day; fasting during the holy month of Ramadan; a levy of 2.5 percent of every Muslim’s excess wealth, usually distributed to the needy by the local mosque; and, for those physically and financially able, a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime. The religion also prohibits ingestion of intoxicants (alcohol or drugs)-as they inhibit a person’s judgement-and forbids sex before marriage. Extreme groups, claiming to be carrying out the will of God, interpret the Qur’an to suit their goals. Female circumcision, which ranges from cutting off the tip of a young girl’s clitoris to removing all external genitalia and sometimes sewing together the labia, is sometimes cited by misguided Muslims (and often the press) as a doctrine of the Islamic faith to ensure a woman’s virginity before marriage. But genital mutilation is not sanctioned by Islam, and is rather a cultural ritual practised in countries like Sudan and Egypt (in December a top court in Egypt upheld a ban on female circumcision, despite the recriminations of some clerics who ardently believe it to be a requirement of Islam). The Canadian media often fail to distinguish between extremist groups and mainstream Islam.

“The paucity of voices who confidently put forward the peaceful and humanistic Islamic values that most Muslims hold quietly allows the militants to hijack the public agenda,” says Karim Karim, who teaches international communications at Carleton University and worked as a reporter for the Rome-based Inter Press wire service. “This then presents a view to journalists and other outside observers of a society dominated by the militants.”

The issue of female circumcision is only one example of how the Qur’an is manipulated by various extreme groups to justify political ends. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan is another. There, women are forced to wear burqas (garments covering them from head to toe) and are beaten if they expose any skin; they are also banned from working and attending school. Media coverage does little to explain the nuances of the Taliban’s misrendering of Islam. A September 25, 1997, article in the Globe entitled “Growing Fear, Frustration Mar Life in Afghan Capital” suggested that the Taliban is run by “Muslim clerics” who have the “intention to create a ‘pure Islamic society’ modelled on the teachings of the Koran.” The reporter confuses the edicts of the local regime with that of the Qur’an, which grants every individual-male and female-the right to work and a full education.

The media often align the extreme fringe of political Islam with mainstream Islam, thus contributing to a general demonization of the faith and a moral climate in the West that believes there to be an Islamic conspiracy. “Because [journalists] don’t have a clear understanding of Islam, anytime there is a political movement that happens in an Islamic country, it gets perceived as Islam, as opposed to a political movement that has taken over the religious banner [to justify its means],” says Sadia Zaman, a journalist who has worked for the CBC and is currently a producer and story editor at Vision TV. Political Islam is akin to the political extension of Christianity-the Christian Coalition in the U.S. being one example-in that it tends to interpret the Scripture more literally.

“They tend to be antiliberal in their social attitudes, and they tend to be authoritarian in their attitudes to how a state should be organized and how society should be run,” says Jim Graff, president of the Near East Cultural and Educational Foundation, an organization that furthers understanding of the history and culture of the Arab world. “Most Muslims are not members of political Islam or Islamist movements.”

The invocation of religion to relate news about specific political movements is misleading. A story in Maclean’s on September 9, 1996, about People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, an organization that uses brutal methods to fight street crime in South Africa, is deceptively titled “Islamic Vigilantes.” This gives the impression that religion alone ordains PAGAD’s cause. “If you use that kind of terminology, eventually what you’re saying is Muslims are inherently violent because of their religion,” says Thayyiba Ibrahim, coordinator of the Canadian Association for Islamic Relations. Unfortunately, both the media and top-ranking world officials continue to make that connection. The late Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, made the audacious claim that “the religion of Islam is our only enemy,” although the Palestinian fight in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, led by the military wing of the Palestinian group Hamas, is motivated not by religious invective but rather by resistance to Israeli occupation.

Insurgents may invoke Allah, but they are not necessarily engaged in religious battles. Some in the media feel that it is not their place to make that distinction. “Some of these [extreme] groups actually say they’re Muslim militants,” says Garry Dwyer-Joyce, foreign editor at CTV News. “Unfortunately, it’s not the business of news to say that 99 percent of Muslims are not like that.”

Those who believe there to be an Islamic conspiracy cite recent terrorist acts as proof. The Globe and Mail suggested on April 20, 1995, that “Middle Eastern” terrorists were suspects in the Oklahoma bombing because counterterrorism specialists thought “the bombing resembled four previous Muslim fundamentalist attacks against U.S. citizens,” namely, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that killed six and injured 1,000; the destruction of a Pan American jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 that killed 259 passengers; and the 1983 truck bombings of both the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that altogether killed 287.

Some Islamic countries openly harbour anti-American sentiment. In December, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told an Islamic conference in Iran that the main threat to security in the Middle East was “the poisonous breath” of the U.S. and its military presence in the region. It is this sort of vitriol that has put the media on guard and prompts CSIS, according to its 1996 report, to remain alert to what it perceives as “the continued rise of Islamic and other forms of religious extremism.” But the terrorist acts aimed at the U.S. are hardly religious in nature, and most conflicts occurring in Islamic countries become irrelevant beyond their borders: Iran is primarily concerned with keeping Western influence from eroding Islamic values, and Hezbollah, often cited as one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups, simply wants to establish an Islamic state in Lebanon.

The media’s view of Islam as a fanatical religion, according to renowned scholar Edward W. Said of Columbia University, stems from orientalism, an ethnocentric Western mind-set whereby the East is seen as the “other.” As a result, the media reduce Islam to “a special malevolent and unthinking essence,” Said writes in his 1981 book Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. “Instead of analysis and understanding as a result, there can be for the most part only the crudest form of us-versus-them.” Orientalists denigrate Islam and the Middle East in order to legitimize the West.

Canada’s Muslim journalists agree with Said-to a point. “Any media is a reflection of total societal values,” says the Star‘s Siddiqui, and at present “a genre of anti-Islamic sentiment runs right through the mainstream society.” But for the most part, they see the Canadian media’s skewed reporting on Islam as the result of something far less sinister: shoddy reporting.

“It’s easy to peg somebody into a slot, like they’re Muslim,” says Kashmeri, who spent three days interviewing Yasser Arafat back in 1986 for the Globe. Born in Bombay, Kashmeri was a stringer for Associated Press and Reuters, and worked for The Indian Express before coming to Canada 25 years ago. “Are you going to spend like half a minute explaining the fact that Arabs don’t even make up 18 percent of the Muslims of the world? That Indonesia is the biggest Islamic country in the world? That takes time to explain, it takes time to research.”

Kashmeri cites the inherent pace of journalism-the lack of time to adequately research a story-as the biggest encumbrance to a better understanding of Islam. The result, he notes, is that many Arabic words are used recklessly. The press often translate the word jihad as “holy war”; in fact, jihad is a much more intricate concept for which there is no direct translation. It roughly means “struggle to bring out the best of oneself,” and with regards to battle, means “defensive war” as, according to the Qur’an, Muslims are only allowed to engage in war as self-defence. The media also misrepresent the word fatwa, which also has no direct translation, but is basically a religious injunction that can be decreed on anything from the wearing of garments to the consumption of certain foods. Unfortunately, since Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against writer Salman Rushdie, the word has come to mean “murder contract,” according to the media’s definition.

As a result of lopsided and often inaccurate representation of Islam in the media, many Canadians feel threatened by local Muslims. In June of this year, pamphlets were disseminated at Toronto’s Weston Collegiate bearing titles like “Islam: A Religion of Darkness and Deception…” and “Are All the Muslims Living in Canada Today TERRORSITS? [sic] This Is a Warning to all Canadians and Their Families.” Metropolitan Toronto Police arrested Mark Harding, operator of the Christian Standard-a hate group based north of Toronto-and charged him with three counts of willful promotion of hatred. Harding was incensed that Muslim students were using the school’s auditorium for their prayers. “Since when is it okay to turn our schools into Mosques?” he wrote, arguing that “the Muslim religion is full of hate and violence as we in Canada can see by the national headlines.”

Harding shored up his argument by citing specific articles from The Toronto Star and The Toronto Sun that included details of strife in Algeria (“Muslims butchered 47 victims including babies and pregnant women”). “The Muslims who commit these crimes are no different than the Muslim believers living here in Toronto,” he wrote, “their beliefs are based on the Koran.”

Muslim advocacy groups such as the Canadian Association for Islamic Relations and Muslim Media Watch are trying to quell the media’s hyperbole through education. Both groups have met with editorial staffs of broadcast and print media. A sign of increased sensitivity to the issue is evident at The Toronto Star, where the diversity editor, Carola Vyhnak, monitors her paper’s coverage of minorities. Vyhnak says that the Star tries “not to identify the person’s race or religion if it isn’t necessary.”

Despite this mandate, the newspaper sometimes still publishes inflammatory stories painting Islam as violent. An article on the Algerian conflict on November 2, 1997, by Martin Regg Cohn of the Star‘s Middle East Bureau used the terms “Islamic guerrillas,” “terrorists” and “Islamic fundamentalists” interchangeably. Vyhnak defends this reporting by saying that extremists in Algeria “are claiming to be doing all this in the name of religion.” However, a letter to the Star several days later articulates the misconception: “A fundamentalist is one who adheres to the fundamentals of his religion. I am a fundamentalist; I am not a terrorist!”

Advocacy groups see the media’s response to their apprehensions as mere lip service. “[Editorial boards] give the impression that they’re concerned about issues we have raised,” says Ahmed Motiar, director of Muslim Media Watch. “But the effort to correct the situation is not reflected.”

At the end of BBQ Muslims, Faysal and Iqbal Hussain, despite their pleas of innocence are thrown in jail. Outside the police station, three men wielding picket signs protest this action. They are antibarbeque activists and are furious they are not getting credit for their act of terrorism on the Hussains’ barbeque.

The moral of Nawaz’s satire is all too clear: even when wrongly accused, Muslims still receive all the attention.

THE RIMMER HATED COGNAC. RUM AND Coke, stingers, gin and tonics, whiskey; now those were drinks. But as a reporter on assignment in Paris in 1967 at a sidewalk cafe; on the Champs-Elysees, Rimstead dutifully followed in the path of his idol Ernest Hemingway and ordered cognac. In fact, Rimstead often found himself doing things Hemingway had done: fishing off the coast of Bimini, reporting for The Toronto Star, fighting a bull in a bullring. And after the action was over, he, also like Hemingway, delighted in portraying his manliness. For example, after a bull gored him in the leg, Rimstead told an observer, “I kept picking at the scab to try and get a real good scar. But the damn thing kept healing up.” Even on paper, the clear, short phrases of Rimsteadese resemble classic Hemingway. No wonder, since both men came of age in an era when women were wives not journalists, when drinking with the boys was serious business and when reporters hunted for good times as hard as they hunted for scoops-sometimes harder.

The Rimmer was a classic, old-style newsman who had a gift for the craft of journalistic storytelling. When he took notes-which was rare-it was on a matchbook, which he’d lose or absently toss in the trash. His violin-shaped briefcase carried a bottle of scotch, not paperwork. If there was a deadline to miss, he’d miss it; a round of drinks to buy, he’d buy it; an excuse to be irreverent, he’d take it. At the Toronto Men’s Press Club, his adventures were spun into the boozy folklore hard-living reporters loved. Unfortunately, he didn’t have Hemingway’s self-control whenever he had an opportunity to try to write a novel, which was something he claimed he always wanted to do. He could not restrain himself or be restrained. That was both his blessing and his curse. The upside was that he became a respected sportswriter, a magazine writer and a columnist the likes of which Canada has rarely seen. The downside was that he could never toast to his success with just one drink.

Fred Ross says that if Rimstead were alive today, there’d be no one like him. An old friend and former Toronto Starsenior editor, Ross worked with the Rimmer at The Kingston Whig-Standard and The Globe and Mail. He believes Rimstead, like Hemingway, had a special gift that would transcend any era. Never mind that today’s newsroom is drastically different from that of Rimmer’s heyday. Never mind that his work habits would no longer be accepted. Never mind that most of his supporters are no longer in positions of authority. “If you’re a painter of pictures with words, you’re always going to be a painter of pictures with words,” Ross says. While this may be true for Hemingway, Ross is wrong about Rimstead. If he were still with us, he might still be able to paint colourful pieces, but he’d have trouble finding an art dealer.

In the early days, however, there was always someone to write for. By the time he was 30, Paul Rimstead’s words had appeared all over Ontario. As a young reporter he’d zig-zagged from The Elliot Lake Standard to The Sudbury Star to the Whig to The Toronto Star. By 1966, he was at the Globe. At that time, ties were four and a half inches wide, the help wanted ads were divided into male and female positions and Paul was specializing in sports stories. Very good sports stories;ones that were getting noticed. There was never an ordinary game summary or dry trade update with his byline on it. No sir. Paul Rimstead wrote about the crowds at different stadiums. Or he wrote about the home-cooked food a sagging hockey team was served. Denis Harvey, former editor at The Toronto Star, says the story of the game was minor to Paul. He looked for the people stories, the characters, the strangeness. Then clearly, cleanly, he wrote so that their personalities climbed off the paper. “Without question, he is the greatest sportswriter this country’s ever seen,” Harvey says.

Which is why when Harvey took over The Canadian Magazinein 1966, he recruited Rimstead to be sports feature writer. Rimstead was rewarded with pieces like “The Goal That Death Was Watching,” about a dying minor-league hockey player who left his sick bed to score a last heroic goal.

“March 4, 1967-It was 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 11, and in a few minutes the Hershey Bears would skate out on the ice to warm up for their game against the Providence Reds.

They sat there now waiting, shifting uneasily as the tension built. Coach Frank Mathers paced nervously, wondering, perhaps, if he had made the right decision.

The game itself wasn’t worrying them. The Bears, storming along in first place in the American Hockey League’s Eastern Division, didn’t figure to have much trouble with the last-place Reds.

Yet, even the hardest veteran felt soft inside. Some of them said a prayer in silence

“Hey, you guys!” boomed Bruce Cline, an assistant captain, “Looks like we got a rookie with us tonight.”

Bruce Draper, wearing number 21, smiled, embarrassed, as his teammates laughed with the release of tension.

It was a preview of one of the most dramatic moments I have ever seen in sport-the night Bruce Draper came back. It is a story of courage and a young man’s faith in God.”

Rimstead’s tale of the young man’s brave fight before he succumbed to cancer wasn’t just a reader-pleaser, it made Harvey cry. “You could just see that person,” he says. “He had a wonderful eye for drama.” Of course, getting the Rimmer to actually produce his stories was another matter. Next door to the magazine’s office on Toronto’s lower Yonge Street was the Victoria Hotel. Harvey would book Paul a room, close the door and say, “Paul, you’re going to sit there until I get a copy out of your hands.”

Paul just didn’t have it in him to be concerned about deadlines. They were for the Serious, the Organized and the Reliable. He was an Adventurer. When the Rimmer was born in 1935 in Sudbury, his grandfather misunderstood his mother’s orders and registered him as “Napolean Rimstead” in the church and government logs. It was quickly corrected, but it started him off on a fittingly comedic foot. His family would later move to a farm in Bracebridge, where Rimstead would spend three years in the 10th grade because he couldn’t stop disturbing the class; he says the teacher eventually passed him because he “printed good.” He never bothered finishing Grade 11. At 16 he fled Bracebridge in search of adventure. A series of short-term jobs followed, one of which was as a Fuller Brush man when Hurricane Hazel hit southern Ontario in 1954. A few years later, he landed at his first job at the North York Enterprise.

To read the rest of this story, please see our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.
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It’s lunch time in Montreal, but the day’s just getting started for the editors at the alternative newsweekly Hour. Six staffers have gathered for a meeting around an egg-shaped boardroom table strewn with notepads, ashtrays, latte bowls and candy wrappers. At the moment, they’re puzzling over an ad that a local theatre company has placed in this week’s edition of the English-language paper, which serves up a mix of news and entertainment for the young nightlife crowd. The unusual ad is an open letter to the public that complains how Hourcritic Gaetan Charlebois recently slandered a company production. As it happened, Charlebois, a passionate if slightly zany reviewer, stood up before the curtain call and shouted, “C’est d’la merde!”

Hour‘s editor, Peter Scowen, a 39-year-old who sports a George Clooney crop and the clichéd head-to-toe black of the urban hipster, is used to handling unruly characters such as Charlebois. (He jokes that managing the guitar-smashing band the Who in its heyday would have been easier than keeping his Hourteam in line.) He turns to his young staffers and in his teasing, fatherly manner quips that at least there was an economic bonus to the theatre company’s act: “If they were really mad at us, they would have put [the ad] in the Mirror.“

The Mirror is Montreal’s other English-language alternative newsweekly-Hour’s competitor and arch rival. The two papers target roughly the same batch of 18- to 35-year-old readers; they’re both circulated as giveaways, to the same restaurants, shops and bars; they both chase the same stories and advertisers; and they even fight over the same small pool of writers and editors. To make things more complicated, both the Mirror and Hour are owned by publishing companies that in turn each own a second alternative newsweekly aimed at francophone readers. The Mirrorhas a brand-new baby sister, Ici; and Hour has a big sister, Voir. While Montreal may be best known as Canada’s historic home of lively political and linguistic battles, right now it’s host to one good old-fashioned, rock ’em, sock ’em newspaper war.

The battle is playing out in an incestuous professional community where the personal intrigue rivals Melrose Place, and in an embattled local economy that guarantees little room for all the players to survive and prosper. “We’re faced with an increasingly divided pie vis-a-vis the amount of advertising that exists,” says Carlos Madruga, who’s familiar with the local market through his work as the Quebec sales manager at Montreal-based Reader’s Digest. “I quite frankly don’t see any long-term potential for two English newspapers. French is another story I think there’s enough for two newspapers. But to support two English papers….” His voice trails off ominously.

As the Hour editorial crew huddle in their smoke-filled room and work through a postmortem of last week’s paper, their publisher and battle captain Pierre Paquet is hard at work one floor above them. He’s determined that his company, Communications Voir, and its papers Voir and Hour will win the battle for local-market survival. “I’ll do everything to make it happen,” he says. His French-language flagship, Voir, launched in 1986, is Montreal’s alt-weekly giant, with a circulation of 100,000. Hour, the English paper he launched in ’93 to crush the Mirror, is now at 70,000 and has been growing since day one.

Smoking at his desk like a true Montrealer, in an office that overlooks the notoriously hip Rue St-Denis, the 38-year-old francophone is a collage of surface contradictions: He’s the publisher of two alternative newspapers, yet he talks the language of capitalism and finance. He’s a successful businessman who has landed well-known Quebec publishing executives Remi Marcoux and Claude Dubois of GTC Transcontinental as partners in Voir yet he’s dressed like an elegant roadie in a blazer, faded jeans and a T-shirt. And he’s a separatist who owns an English newspaper. “We’re prosovereignty and pro-Anglo,” he once told The Gazette. “That’s not a contradiction. Voir is for a multicultural, tolerant Quebec.”

More to the point, economics force Paquet to publish in English. If he had to rely on only local retail advertising, he might choose to ignore the anglophone market – less than a third of the city’s population. But even a French-language paper such as Voir needs to land national advertising, and the national ad business is run by Toronto-based anglophones. What Paquet began to discover in the late eighties and early nineties was that it was hard to bag national ads from big companies such as Labatts and Ford when no one who bought the ad space could actually read Voir.

After watching the Mirror get more big national movie and music ads than his paper, then seeing a lot of big Quebec accounts hopping on the 401 to Toronto, he knew trouble was looming. Even when advertisers would buy in Voir for the French market, they would at the same time buy in the Mirror to hit the anglophones. Paquet felt caught. “There I am looking at my future and saying, ÎHow can I make the paper grow? How can I make it a 100 pages one day without having to translate every word?'”

So he tried to buy the Mirror. When the owners wouldn’t sell, he gathered a few former Mirror staffers and launched Hour. Today, he attracts national ads from English Canada for both it and Voir, and he encourages his local francophone advertisers to put out a little more to get into Hour, too.

Paquet’s main competition, publisher Catherine Salisbury and her company Communications Gratte-Ciel Ltée, is just as determined as he is to survive and flourish in Montreal. She’s also betting on the same tag-team strategy of French and English papers. Sitting in her first-floor office in Old Montreal-a place that’s home to both old-world charm and a slow erosion of anglophone businesses-35-year-old Salisbury declares she’d love the Mirror and Ici not just to be well received in Montreal, but to be the only alternative papers it receives. “The best papers that exist-I don’t know if it’s by chance or by squatters rights tend to be the single papers in their markets. The Mirror could be stronger and Ici could be stronger if we had the whole market to ourselves,” she says. With each of her two newspapers circulating 80,000 copies a week, she’s ready to fight. “I’m a terribly stubborn person,” she says.

The Mirror was launched in 1985, when Salisbury and a bunch of other local student newspaper veterans got a government grant and launched the title as a gritty street paper that dug through the mayor’s garbage for a story, exposed CBC-TV for rejecting National Film Board pieces; and produced serious pieces such as “A Tale of Two Refugees,” a look at the lives of some of Montreal’s poorer citizens. The paper was grungy, bordering on sophomoric, and worked in the feisty tradition of New York’s The Village Voiceand Toronto’s Now.

Salisbury, a Montreal-born anglophone, began at Mirror as a listings editor out for a summer adventure. She eventually worked her way up to publisher and is now the only founding member who’s still involved. Recently, in a move that would have been unimaginable in the early, ideological days, Salisbury and her now ex-partner sold a majority share of the company to Quebecor Inc., the massive, international corporation that publishes the tabloid Le Journal de Montréal, among many other mainstream titles. Though the decision was scorned by many in the North American alternative newsweekly community, Salisbury felt she needed the deep pockets of Quebecor to finance the launch of Ici, her new French-language sister publication that allows her to compete head-to-head with Paquet’s two papers. “Myself and my partner chose Quebecor as partners,” she explains, “because they have this very decentralized approach to partnership. They don’t have enough people to get involved, they don’t want to get involved.” Without this move, she adds, “on a strategic level, over the years to come, the Mirror would have lost ground.”

While the strategies of Paquet and Salisbury may make self-contained sense to each player, from a more detached perspective the two seem to be fighting a futile battle for meagre spoils. Do young Montrealers and Montrealais possess such boundless joie de vivre that they require four separate weeklies to help them plan their nightlife and entertainment? David Klimek, the manager of advertising research and information at the English-language daily the Montreal Gazette, views the weekly publishers as conducting a bizarre fight. “It does defy logic,” he says.

The main problem is that Montreal, which was a generation ago Canada’s most thriving, populated city, is now in many ways a saggy, economic has-been. The city is still Canada’s second-largest, but it ranks 26th out of 54 for retail marketing potential. And local retail advertising dollars are an extremely important revenue stream for the free newsweeklies. The English-language market is particularly imperilled. For instance, since the collapse of the daily Montreal Star in 1979 and the disastrous Daily News, which disintegrated in 1989 after two terrible years, The Gazette has stood alone and no would-be publisher would dare venture into that market again. And while the four papers have created more jobs for young journalists and have slightly improved the dismal freelance rates, it’s hardly enough to make a dent in the city’s major unemployment problem. Almost 60 percent of Mirror and Hour readers are between 18 and 35, the group most likely to leave la belle province for sunnier, job-filled pastures.

The upshot of all this is that there are only so many English readers and English dollars. And the political and economic situation of Montreal doesn’t promise much improvement. Now, with Salisbury’s team able to square off evenly with Paquet’s, the market will continue to shrink and the two competitors will only get hungrier.

To gain an edge in their battle for limited dollars, each of Montreal’s four alt weeklies strives to be editorially distinct. While the most direct and obvious competition happens along linguistic lines, Montreal is such a bilingual city that all four are essentially fighting for many of the same readers. Historically, the first two existing papers, Mirror and Voir, did separate themselves in ways that went well beyond language. Working under the influence of the alternative giants, the Mirror staff has always been committed to underdog topics and traditional lefty beats. But it’s also been big on the wacky, raunchy and sexy stuff, too, running countless stories about drag queens (“The Third Sex Hits the City!”), and featuring Sasha, a fabulously naughty sex columnist.

Voir, by contrast, was founded in a francophone culture that had no real tradition of alternative journalism. While Pierre Paquet did partly look to Toronto’s Now as his model for journalism, for design he had other models. “We gave it this cross look between European and American, which is what Quebec is more about,” he says. And the paper’s content has been slanted more toward the arts, reviewing plays, classical music and art alongside hot Quebec rock groups, films and personalities. It’s an older read, yet still unlike anything you find in a daily.

As for their chippy younger sisters, Hour and Ici, they’re clearly shaped by their older siblings. Hour is a relatively subdued, column-driven paper that, like Voir, aims at the wrinklier end of the young-adult crowd: the people with jobs, money and education. And while Hour has a news editor who’s not afraid to show some claws when it comes to protecting his section, the paper also has a strong commitment to the arts community, covering books, dance and theatre. Ici, by contrast, follows the Mirror‘s lead to chase the 18 to mid-20s college-age crowd who want a funkier, livelier, slightly more political product. It launched in September of 1997 under the somewhat hokey manifesto “To speak the truth,” and with a plan to focus on the real-life social issues of multicultural Montreal.

For all the editorial strategizing, however, the four papers do often run the danger of blurring together. The French ones tend to feature French cover personalities, while the English feature English, but beyond that they are covering the same beats. In one week, Montreal singer Lhasa de Sela will appear on Hour and Voir‘s covers, and all four papers might review the same opening of a film. And the differing age skews of the papers’ target markets may not clearly inform every single story: it’s tricky for a writer to direct his story about an asbestos scandal to a 22-year-old instead of a 31-year-old.

It doesn’t help matters that Montreal’s talent pool of alternative journalists is so small that the papers are frequently swapping staffers. Since Hour’s launch in 1993, Catherine Salisbury has watched Paquet steadily pilfer away many of her valuable Mirror staff members, including Peter Scowen, who was snatched from her paper’s editor’s chair in 1996 to be the editor of Hour. Paquet has also managed to attract key sales people. What this does, says Salisbury, is cloud the content of the two papers in the eyes of readers and advertisers.

“Voir Communications wants to sort of blur the distinction between the Mirror and Hour, because if they do that, they can capture the market,” Salisbury says. “And the other thing is, I guess they just figure it’s a way to try to destabilize the people who work here.”

What it also does is cause a lot of gossip-mongering and nasty infighting among editors and writers. Peter Scowen, who has worked at both English papers and lives with a partner who also worked at the Mirror, knows firsthand the extent of the hennish lunacy. “Both papers are convinced that the other one is filled with cheating, lying advertising salespeople,” he says. He adds that the general level of squabbling in his professional community can be a distraction: “It’s a big pain in the ass. It’s so full of the same people who are all so mad at each other and so distrustful of each other and so convinced that the other screwed them.”

The Mirror‘s editor, Annarosa Sabbadini, takes the theatrics more in stride, and says it’s all just part of the game. “The anglophone community is very small and the journalistic community is even smaller,” she says. “We all kind of frequent the same bars, have mutual friends, have crossed paths for different reasons. It’s just like that. When I first met someone who worked at Hour, he told me, I didn’t realize that you were such a nice person. I had for years this image of everyone at the Mirror being evil and horrible.'”

A widely held impression in the community is that Paquet is the better boss than Salisbury, and his company a more hospitable place to work. He is seen by his employees as enlightened and fair, and by the business world as determined and shrewd. Salisbury’s management style, on the other hand, is not popular with many of her colleagues. While it’s normal to make an enemy or two on your way to the top, many of Salisbury’s onetime staff membersÛoften talented and ambitious have left her paper at least in part because they didn’t have a good working relationship with her. More than goodwill is at stake: when powerhouse salespeople go to the competition, they often bring ad clients with them.

To compound Salisbury’s problems, she’s caught up in a rather ugly lawsuit with some of the Mirror‘s founders. They claim she and her former partner privatized the paper illegally. (It was originally set up as a nonprofit outfit, where any surplus revenue would go directly back into editorial and salaries.) Because Salisbury is involved in a life-or-death battle for the market, contending with unrelated conflicts takes her away from the more important fight.

As Montreal’s four alternative weeklies look toward their uncertain futures, one thing that’s clear is that they and their readers will continue to be plagued by Quebec’s seemingly ceaseless separation battle. With a possible provincial election next year and another referendum on the horizon by 1999, Quebec’s economy can’t really prosper. While separation politics make great material for lampoons in the papers (Scowen calls the subject of separation “one big needleful of piss pumped straight into your day”; the Mirror teases with slogans under its front-page banner such as “Bloc memberships on sale at reception,” or “Our bomb squads on permanent alert”), the situation is no great help to the local economy.

So what would jump-start the city and bring back the lost Anglos and businesses? What would help keep all four papers safe so their reporters could continue to taunt bad theatre and enjoy the rush of being part of an old-fashioned newspaper war?

Pierre Paquet, the determined newspaper publisher who says he knows his city, also says he doesn’t know what will happen. “It’s not for me to decide,” he says. “It’s the market that will decide. It’s the readership, it’s the advertisers.” In other words, everyone involved will just have to keep fighting. This is, after all, Montreal. As Peter Scowen once wrote in his weekly column, “The National Beverage”; “The meek shall inherit the earth-everyone else gets Quebec.”

It is 1978. Women’s lib is a hot topic. Women are busy getting in touch with their ovaries and men are busy getting in touch with the dishes. Marty Goodman, editor of The Toronto Star, is in his office with his newly hired women’s columnist.

“Do you understand,” he asks her, “what we mean by a women’s column?”

No, she’s not quite sure.

“Well,” he says. “Look out the window. There’s the CN Tower. If I look out and see a man climbing that CN Tower, that’s news.Now, if I look out there and I see a woman climbing that CN Tower, that’s women’snews.”

“Oh, I see Marty,” she says sweetly.

She had to wait until she left to laugh out loud. This was the woman who as a 12-year old wrote indignant essays to herself about the injustices of the masculine pronoun. This was the Bad Girl who lit her matches on the crotch of her jeans and taught her entire Girl Guide pack to smoke. This was the MPP’s wife who threw spitballs at the Tories from the spectators’ gallery in the Legislature. CN Tower. As if. ” I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I certainly wasn’t going to do something as dumb as what he said.”

One week later, Goodman and the Starhad a feminist columnist. They never knew what hit them. But she sold, so they let her stay. On May 15, 1998, Michele Landsberg celebrates the 20th anniversary of her first column in the Starat a time when a recent survey by the paper showed that she is its most-read columnist. Since theStarhas the largest circulation in Canada, this makes Landsberg the most regularly read columnist in the country and one of our best-known feminists.

The 1990s has seen a backlash against many of the gains the feminist and social justice movements have made over the past quarter century. People in positions of power, like Ontario Premier Mike Harris, think that if only women were cooking breakfast for their husbands and reading Mr.Silly to their children every night all would be well. It seems that a distinctly feminist voice in the mainstream media is as important now as ever, but is Michele Landsberg effective?

Some people think she couldn’t put a pink-gilded feminist foot wrong. Some think she’s an easily written-off raving lefty who’s high on hysterics and low on rationale. But one thing everyone agrees upon is that she’s crazy. And it’s her crazed passion, her over-the-top devotion to advocacy, feminism and the like and her ever-present indignation that have bolstered her in her long-time role as crusading journalist. While many of us abandon our youthful outrage and start salivating after RRSPs by 30, she has kept her knickers in a perpetual twist by constantly finding new things to rant about. Michele Landsberg embodies the notion of column writing as a political act. Some people wave signs. She waves her word processor.

But how did this meshugina feminist end up angry enough to land on Toronto’s kitchen tables for 20 years? How did she begin her oh-so-perilous journey through the mountains of dinosaurs, patriarchs and Tories?

She hitchhiked.

It is the fifties, or, “the fucking fifties, the worst decade of the century” as our plucky heroine likes to say. She is pissed off. She is 14 and stuck in Willowdale where there are no damn books. Since there is also no TTC in Willowdale, well, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do when she needs a decent bookstore. So after yelling “No!” to a policeman who tells her to get back on the curb and stop hitchhiking, she finds herself at the police station. Arms crossed, pigtails twitching, she refuses to divulge her name, but they manage to wrest a book registered to the Holy Blossom Temple religious school from her. The rabbi comes fuming down to the station to identify her. The rabbi (she thought) is a good guy. A progressive guy. But after bawling her out, he turns despairingly to the officers and says, in hushed tones, “Her mother works, you know.”

Girl, if those pigtails could have caught on fire….

To read the rest of this story, please see our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.
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The Globe and Mail‘s veteran science reporter–a tall, burly, balding man with green/grey eyes and greying hair that stands straight off his head was at the bottom of Inco’s Creighton Mine near Sudbury, Ontario. His mind was filled with the day’s experiences: the four_minute, ear_popping elevator ride straight down (a distance equivalent to five stacked CN Towers), followed by a 15 minute walk through a dusty, grimy, 41_C mine shaft before arriving at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) site, where Strauss washed and changed into a clean outfit and hat before entering the scrupulously clean observatory.

Strauss was there to chronicle the near_completion of a $70 million scientific instrument designed to detect and determine the mass of subatomic particles called neutrinos. When SNO begins to produce data in early 1999, scientists may finally learn whether neutrinos make up a portion of the universe’s “dark matter” the undetectable matter which accounts for roughly 90 percent of the universe. In tracking the story, Strauss had accumulated a massive amount of information about the project, most of it articles and faxes filed in a battered and overflowing folder in his cluttered cubicle at the Globe. And now, and seven interviews at his disposal, Strauss was ready to write his article about the plan to count “atomic ghosts.”

The result was a finely crafted, 37_inch feature. It’s classic Strauss: intimidating passages about fusion taking place within a stellar core are tempered by descriptions of “teeny_tiny” neutrinos. Through creative, clear and compelling writing, Strauss was able to add context and give his readers an accurate sense of the significance of the research being done–the hallmark of great scientific journalism.

But work like his is a rarity. While Strauss and a small group of other dedicated science journalists in Canada produce articles rich with detail, context and style, there simply aren’t enough of them working at Canadian daily newspapers: according to Matthew’s Media Directories, only 37 science writers and editors work at Canada’s 108 dailies, amounting to only three per cent of all editorial staff. At a time when science plays a crucial role in many stories from the decline in fish stocks on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts to the effects of ozone depletion over the Arctic, from the use of genetically engineered crops in the Prairies to the climatic upheaval affecting all of Canada the coverage of science in most Canadian dailies remains inadequate.

It’s also error prone; while research on error rates is hard to come by, those working in and studying science journalism doubt that much has changed since a 1974 study in Journalism Quarterly reported that only 8.8% of science articles were found to be error free, compared to a 40.1% to 59.5% error free rate in general news stories. These errors included the omission of relevant material, quotations being used out of context, and no linkage or continuity shown to previous work. That’s bad news in more than just the most obvious sense, since more than half of all Canadians get their science information from newspapers. So why aren’t Canada’s dailies doing a better job at covering science?

Think back to the last time a political story made the front page of the daily newspaper you read. It’s not much of a stretch, right? Or something about business? Okay, now, what about the last time you read a front_page story about science–excluding medicine, since it constitutes its own category of journalism. Can you come up with five?

Sure, Dolly leaps to mind, and the Mars Pathfinder mission, and there’s a good chance that you’ve read about El NiÒo, but if you stalled out there, you’re not alone. It’s hard to find science anywhere in a Canadian daily, much less on the front page. And when you do find it, more likely than not it’s a two_inch blurb pulled off the wire, headlined “breakthrough.” “If you did a study of North American science coverage headlines, that’s probably the single word you would find most often in headlines on science stories, because that always galvanizes somebody’s attention,” says Chris Dornan, the director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. A restless, almost frenetic man with nearly black hair and an easy grin, Dornan did his doctoral thesis on the academic view of science in the media. “But if that’s all you get, you get a skewed portrait of science. You get a portrait of science as inexorably progressing, just cracking problems one by one.”

“Science presents journalism with a problem, because journalism would like science to be about discovery. But it’s also about process,” says the Globe‘s Strauss. “It’s hard to fit into the temporal mentality of newspapers.” So what happens is this: if an assignment editor picks up a science story on the wire, the task of writing the story usually falls to a staff reporter. In a few hours, this staff writer (who probably has spent the last couple of years covering a mix of local beats) is suddenly faced with a field that is completely foreign to him. He reads the wire copy, calls the University of Toronto for a quote from someone, anyone, and distils it all into a few inches of copy. All too often, it’s “gee_whiz” coverage, which fails to include adequate explanations, oversimplifies complex concepts, and completely bypasses discussions of the implications or importance of that discovery. While the writer may have the best of intentions, the result is often as thin as the paper it’s printed on.

What a science writer can provide is the experience to handle science stories with depth. This doesn’t mean a boring story: in fact, science writers are arguably some of the most skilled writers at papers, because they have to turn complex material into a story that is interesting, accurate and accessible to readers. Shelley Page was the science writer for The Ottawa Citizen from 1990 until 1995. Known for her exhaustively researched profiles that revealed the human side of scientists, Page has won the respect of her colleagues, as well as a 1993 Science in Society Journalism Award for her profile of Alan Hildebrand, the Canadian geologist who discovered a 65_million_year_old impact crater beneath Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, made by a meteorite that may have wiped out the dinosaurs. Despite the pressure of a daily’s deadlines, Page was determined to document the process of discovery, and after reading through his scientific articles, she spent hours interviewing the reticent Hildebrand. “I can’t think of better training to be a good journalist than being a science reporter, because that’s the one beat area where you can’t go in and fly by the seat of your pants,” says Page, pointing to the hours she spent poring over dense, jargon_heavy scientific papers while researching science stories. “You’ll blow the interview, and you won’t be able to write a story that anyone will ever understand.”

That total immersion is common among science writers. The Globe is Stephen Strauss keeps his edge by reading journals, other newspapers and seeking out up_to_date information on the web. He doesn’t have a science education–he studied history, political science and law–but like most good science reporters, his desk is cluttered with textbooks, scientific journals and popular science magazines. And he tackles science news gathering using techniques that might make reporters on other beats cringe like double_checking quotes with a source. “Science is different,” says Strauss, “because if someone has misstated something about their research or someone else’s research, you’re not interested in the misstatement. You want the second thought. It’s better, it’s more accurate. So you end up with a different modus operandi.”

But even at the newspaper with the best science coverage in the country, at least one editor believes science still gets short shrift. “We don’t have an applied technology reporter,” says Jerry Johnson, editor of the Globe‘s now_defunct Middle Kingdom section. “We don’t have a news reporter dedicated to computers.” While there are positions such as “small business reporter” and “municipal affairs specialist,” science reporters typically cover all science from astrophysics to zoology–and that’s if there’s a science reporter at all.

Why the shortage of science reporters? Carleton University’s Dornan says that for most dailies, it’s a question of money. He presents the Montreal Gazette-which doesn’t have even a single science reporter as an example. “The Montreal Gazette is the only English_language daily in Montreal,” says Dornan. “So, it’s basically at saturation readership, they’ve blanketed their available market”. And the costs of a science reporter’s salary, benefits, expenses, travel and resources are too great to justify a beat that would not generate revenue. “It wouldn’t get them anymore readers. Would it bring them any more advertising? No, because there is no natural advertising constituency for science. It’s not like the manufacturers of gas chromatography equipment are going to suddenly start advertising in the Montreal Gazette.” (It’s interesting to note, though, that The New York Times, which publishes the grand old dame of science sections, successfully sells pages of computer and technology advertising around it.)

The Gazette relies instead on wire services for big science stories, and assigns a reporter only if there is a local angle. For example, a research project at McGill will be covered by their universities reporter. “I think it’s better to have a dedicated science reporter, but we do what we can,” says Eva Friede, editor of the Gazette‘s weekly science page. “As editors, we always wish we had more reporters, more specialized reporters. It’s a fact of life that there isn’t always the staff to do what we want done…but we try to cover what’s happening in the city, either with a reporter who’s beat includes that field or just anybody who’s available.”

“If science was sort of local, in that regard, if people cared about their science in Montreal, then you might get more robust science coverage, but science is not that type of enterprise,” says Dornan. “As well, if science were more political in nature, then you might get more robust science coverage, but scientists don t see their work as political in that regard–they see it as precisely apolitical.” Political reporting has prominence because of historical precedent, but also because it’s about power, power that affects people’s lives in a very direct way. “Science actually does impact on people’s lives in many profound ways, but it’s not quite so visible,” says Dornan. “So all of that tends to conspire to make science less prominent in the news agenda.”

The inevitable result is a lower level of scientific literacy among newspaper readers. And while “Which came first science illiteracy or lousy science reporting?” has a “chicken or egg” ring to it, newspaper publishers have to take some responsibility for the problem. A national science literacy survey done in 1995 for The Discovery Channel reported that for 55 percent of Canadians, newspapers were the primary source of scientific information. The same survey reported that 58 percent of Canadians still believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. (Despite what you see on The Flintstones, Homo sapiens never walked the earth with dinosaurs, let alone used them as lawn mowers.) “Science journalists have done themselves and the Canadian public no great favours by always assuming, Well, I can’t go back and explain some of this,'” says Peter Calamai, an Ottawa_based writer, editor and visiting associate professor at Carleton University. With a heavy emphasis, he adds, “Yes, you can.”

Calamai, who has spent more than 30 years writing for Canadian papers, is convinced that science literacy must be improved amongst both readers and reporters. “We’re graduating people from schools who are basically ignorant. They know less than a well_educated person in the Victorian times did about science–and most of what they know is wrong.” It’s not because they don’t think science is important: one study found that more than 80 percent of Canadians over 15 thought being informed about science was important. But clearly it’s not all that important at many journalism schools: Calamai points to a 1992 Impact Group study of the number of courses offered at Canadian journalism schools. Law and politics top the list. At the very bottom are science, environment and technology. And so we end up with scientifically_illiterate general reporters writing for a scientifically_illiterate audience–all at a time when science is getting more complex, and its impact has spread to all aspects of our lives.

On December 17, 1997, dailies across Canada ran short wire stories about a popular Japanese cartoon featuring bright flashing explosions that had triggered seizures in hundreds of young children. “Cartoon yanked after it gives kids seizures” read the Associated Press wire story when it appeared in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. The Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and the Toronto Star ran virtually identical versions of the AP story, while the Globe ran a tiny Reuters story near the back of the front section.

Around 1 p.m. on the 18th, Stephen Strauss was asked to add some context about epilepsy. He called a contact at an epilepsy society in Montreal, who referred him to an expert in Vancouver. Thirty web sites and a medical textbook on photosensitive epilepsy later, Strauss approached the foreign desk to suggest melding his information with the latest wire copy from Tokyo. By 6 p.m., Strauss’s 14 inches of copy was combined with an equivalent amount from an Associated Press writer in Japan.

Along with explaining what can cause photosensitive seizures, Strauss suggested how television or video_induced seizures might be prevented. “Instead of…explosions with a regular ‘bang-bang-bang’ visual beat to them, they should pulse to a pattern that feels something like bang-bang, bang, bang-bang-bang’,” he wrote, practically inviting his readers to tap it out with their fingertips. By translating the multi-syllabic, intimidating language of science into something interesting and understandable, a dedicated science reporter brought the hidden science story to light. Too bad that kind of writing is still as elusive as a neutrino in a nickel mine.

We were acting like rave DJs, who are the hottest shit in music right now,” says Stephen Marshall, ex-frontman of the now defunct Channel Zero “video-news company.” “DJs take tracks and they assemble them into collages that keep people dancing for eight to 10 hours. I think that’s what we were doing. It wasn’t that conscious. We just sort of take out cameras out and shoot on digitals that shoot in broadcast qualtiy. We sampled the sound bite, linked them together without any narrative in-between. That’s what DJs do.”

Only, DJs don’t get to broadcast their “shit” on CBC’s The National Magazine. Channel Zero did, which is why it was such a peculiar move for the Mother Corp to give the troupe just as radical with its politics as it was in production style three nights on its flagship time slot. “The Electronic Eye: Canada as a Surveillance Society” was the ominous title affixed to Channel Zero’s investigation of privacy issues in the coming digital age. Though the subject was familiar territory for The National Magazine, the shows were like nothing the 650,000-plus viewers had seen before: a collage of images and text that skipped to and fro with no apparent logic; talking heads that flashed, floated or were juxtaposed over every corner of the screen; a sound track of ambient rave-beats; and a story structure that was more blitzkrieg than narrative.

“We were creating a music video for the news,” says Marshall, speaking to whom is a fractured experience eerily similar to watching Channel Zero productions. With his words streaming at a pace I thought humanly impossible, Marshall hits on everything from how news is driven by accountants and out-of-touch producers (“And I know that because I’ve been invited to speak at NBC, BBC and fuckin’ CNN”) to how the music videos of OMD and the Beastie Boys have paved the path to TV worth watching. And to answer his critics, who disagree with his approach to producing news, he engages himself in conversation and flickers between his usual nasal-pitched self and a deeper, pedantic tone.

“What’s the problem with revolutionizing through entertainment?”

“Well, they’re not compatible.”

“Well, of course they are. Who says they are not?”

“Prevailing wisdom.”

“Who is that? Conrad Black or Jesus? Well, I’m not really into either of them right now,” he says, finishing the exchange.

The fact that Channel Zero even made it onto The National, Canada’s bastion of traditional broadcast journalism, is proof that prevailing wisdom is in retreat. And Marshall isn’t the only one transforming how news is transmitted through the airwaves. From Big Lifeand Undercurrents on the CBC to Media Television,Ooh La La and The NewMusic radiating from Toronto’s CHUMCity Building, these shows speak the semantics of news but use the syntax of MuchMusic a language, if you will, that is as dissimilar to that of The Nationalas English is to Mandarin.

WHILE THESE SHOWS ARE AS ECLECTIC AS THE videos MuchMusic will play on any given day, there are similarities binding them. Quick cuts are the norm. Computer graphics alter the visual field. Images are shot from camera angles you wouldn’t see anywhere else on TV. Split screens and multiple images, including a lot of text, are commonplace. A heavy use of music is just as common. And never, ever, is there a person behind a desk. In fact, minus Undercurrents, none of these shows uses a studio. Perhaps the most profound stylistic similarity between, say, Media Television, which has never used a host or a reporter’s voice-over, and Big Life, which is always as aesthetically intriguing as any video installation at a museum of modern art, is that neither of them, nor any of the other of these so-called new-format shows, for that matter, looks like a news program.

“I think you can make a fairly clear statement about why this is happening,” says Saturday Night TV critic and University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell. “There are conventions that grow up at certain times in the communication of information via a given medium. Somebody breaks an existing convention, then everybody is going to break that convention.”

“Personally, I would like to see the envelope pushed more,” says Tony Burman, now head of CBC Newsworld, who assigned Channel Zero its three shots at the big time after hearing Marshall speak at a 1996 broadcast journalism conference in Berlin (Burman was The National’s executive director at the time). Marshall was asked to be a keynote speaker after meeting NBC’s London bureau chief, Karen Curry, who was helping to organize the event. Marshall laughs and tells me it was one of the few times he’s been completely coherent. He was also completely unprepared. Arriving with no prewritten speech, he asked the audience rhetorically, “Why do so many young people watch MTV and not the news?” Answering: “Well, because they would rather watch that style of picture design.” He accused the news of being anachronistically “anchor-driven”: “To my generation, a full-screen shot of Tom Brokaw or any other news anchor doesn’t mean anything. We look on them as fillers between Ford commercials.” Instead, he said, TV news needs to be “design driven”: “You have to think about redesigning the very palette of television and facilitating a far greater experience. It needs to be more stimulating.” Until then, Channel Zero was a small, anticorporate documentary producer seeking to revolutionize the public by revolutionizing the medium the public watches the world through. After Berlin, it accepted The National spots and Marshall was hired to consult to those monopolistic news organizations he had made his mark criticizing.

Marshall had struck a chord (the speaker following Marshall, Bruce Gyngell, a director of an independent British news station, called him “the most exciting young man I’ve heard in a decade”). While similar numbers are not available for Canadian networks, a survey of the “believability” of the three U.S. network anchors found that viewers were restive. Between 1985 and 1996, the percentage of people who said they “believed” Dan Rather (CBS) dropped from 40 percent the highest rating of the three network anchors to 29 percent. Peter Jennings (ABC) dropped from 33 to 27 percent. Tom Brokaw (NBC) went unchanged, but was at only 29 percent in 1989 when he was first rated. The drop in believability also mirrors a drop in TV news viewership, which fell from 60 percent of the U.S. population saying they regularly watched at least one of the network newscasts in 1993 down to 42 percent today. But what is more interesting was the age spread: for viewers over 49, 62 percent said they watch network newsÛthe same number that did in 1993. For viewers between 18 and 29, however, the decline was most dramatic, falling from 36 to 22 percent.

“What the new-style shows have done for straight newscasts is blow the facade of objective journalism,” says Laurie Brown, host of Newsworld’s On the Arts. “You talk about those days when everyone believed something because Walter Cronkite said it. That doesn’t exist anymore, and I think that most people under 40 have enough savvy and are media-literate enough to know that.”

The emergence of these new-format shows is really as much a critique of old-style shows as it is a break with convention; it’s a realization that the audience is becoming all too familiar with the medium-so much so that they see through the artifice of anchors, reporters and voice-overs that provide traditional broadcast news with the pretense of authority and objectivity.

“The only thing that is different is that it is unashamedly visual, where the old-style news, for some time, anyway, maintained the illusion that it was journalism as your morning newspaper,” says Kingwell. “They had the correspondents, the anchor was a kind of editor. Of course, we all knew it was nonsense.” The facade is a long-time pet peeve of Tim Knight, who for 10 years headed journalism training at the CBC. “We are still doing newspaper journalism on TV,” he vents. “The only difference is, for one you read the news and the other reads it to you.”

It is an orthodoxy that hasn’t changed since the Columbia Broadcasting System first started airing daily 15-minute newscasts nearly 60 years ago. When in 1942 Pearl Harbor was bombed and visuals were unavailable, the CBS anchor spoke over an American flag waving in the breeze of a studio fan. Following Morley Safer’s footage of U.S. Marines applying their Zippos to the hay homes of unarmed Vietnamese villagers (prompting this call to CBS station manager Frank Stanton: “Frank, this is your president, and yesterday your boys shat on the American flag”), TV news executives started to understand the medium’s visual and emotional power. From there, producers increasingly began to exploit raw, emotional images, culminating today in American nonfiction shows like Real TV,Hard Copy and A Current Affair, which bandy among themselves the duty of broadcasting the most exploitative and sensationalistic images competition joined of late by the network news and magazine shows. But whether tabloid or 60 Minutes, the image is always moderated: between it and the audience is the anchor and reporter presenting the narrative through what Knight calls “the omnipotent voice of God.”

Thanks to the likes of MediaTelevisionand many other of its CHUM/City counterparts, God is being made mute. “I think people can figure the stories out themselves. There is no need to force it down their throats,” says Reid Willis, producer of MediaTelevision, where voice-overs are anathema. When shots need setting up, text tells the viewers where they are and who is speaking. Willis asserts that the segments retain a point of view. A recent segment shot in Jordan, for example, has a commercial director talking about the necessity of having scantily clad women in TV ads, even as he calls them sluts and whores and congratulates himself on his daughter’s discretion. “There’s no need for one of us to say this guy’s a hypocrite,” says Willis. “The audience can clearly see that.”

Contrast this to a Remembrance Day segment on The National. A ground shot captures Canadian veterans marching in formation, with Jean Chrétien coming in and out of focus from behind their torsos. Only instead of the sound of feet hitting the ground simultaneously, the viewer heard: “A final march past the prime minister.” “See, that’s just telling the audience they’re a bunch of idiots,” says Willis, grinning.

Laurie Brown, who began her career as a broadcast journalist in 1984 at The NewMusic, and then moved on to arts reporting at The Nationalin 1989, has experienced the conflicting sensibilities of formats firsthand. Asked to do the “arty” pieces at the CBC, she used methods developed at The NewMusic. “Those pieces shone in the newscast simply because there was music in them, there was movement in them. It used the language of what people are used to seeing on TV but is never in the news. And people were like, ‘Oh, I love it, I love that piece,it just brightened up the whole newscast.'”

IN HIS SHOW’S LINEAR EDITING SUITE, BIG Lifeeditor Ian Hanna is fiddling with original Starship Enterprise-like knobs and buttons (think William Shatner). “And how you edit on a linear suite is you put one shot in, then you put your next shot in, and sound. All in a very linear and straightforward fashion.” Unlike its new-format cousin Undercurrents, with its own Next Generation computerized nonlinear suite, Big Life has to make do with analog low-tech means. Hanna tells me about using the old magazine trick of photocopying text 100 times to get a grainy look. One Big Life intern spent a whole afternoon pouring coloured milk into an aquarium for a backdrop to a show extro. “I think the technology tends to drive what you do,” he says. Tall, with black hair greased down in an oval bowl, Hanna is wearing all blackÛshoes, socks, slacks, turtleneck, blazer. The show’s aesthetic director is more artiste than techie. And this comes across in the programÛeach week he creates one of TV’s most stunning sights, attaining the creators’ vision of a show that resembles a psychedelic Grateful Dead album cover.

As we talk, a video on MuchMusic that’s playing behind us breaks into a strobing effect. The light reflects off Hanna’s hair into my eyes, blinding me momentarily. It’s an effect more suited to what Hanna describes as the “wow and dazzle” of Undercurrents. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t work there,” he says trying to avoid reproaching the show, but admitting, “In a way it’s overkill.” With its nonlinear suite, Undercurrentscan layer upwards of 30 images on a single frame, then use photo-manipulation and graphics software to make the screen do anything the show’s editors want it to. But while pushing TV’s technological limits, the show’s visuals seem gaudy. There is a sense that somebody just doesn’t get it. Host Wendy Mesley sits on a couch instead of behind a desk but she still reads her script. As do the reporters, who use voice-overs as much as in any traditional newscast. Watching the show, I can’t help but think it’s self-consciously trying to be the fifth estate gone raving. “It wasn’t that there wasn’t style there, it’s just that the style was swamped,” says Hanna. Tim Knight agrees: “It strikes me that Undercurrents is the CBC in disguise trying to be something that the CBC isn’t.”

“I THINK YOU HAVE TO SEPARATE OUT A whole bunch of questions,” says Mark Kingwell, sipping a cappuccino in a cyber-style café. “One is: Does this do damage to content? Does it perhaps enhance the content of the broadcast? Or is it neutral in that respect?” What most new-style shows have done, he says, “is basically added a kind of interesting level of visual stimulation, which has very little to do with the content.” However, he adds, “What people are trying to get, and what Big Life sometimes has, is actual marriage of content and style. So that the visual grammar actually enhances what’s being talked about. But that’s quite rare.

“The other thing you have to notice is we are talking about retinal stimulation and the firing of neurons as a result. We are, in a sense, hypersensitized to that kind of stimulation in our brain. It’s a feature of our culture in every possible way. So constant playing to that, constant speeding up of the delivering of images, the compression of images, the jump-cut style, images that flash so quickly they are almost subconscious we derive a lot of pleasure from that.” To illustrate, he didn’t need to look further than over my shoulder at a young, tattooed longhair virtually encapsulated in the shoot-em-up video game Quake. Without moving his head more than two degrees in any direction, he was eviscerating everything on the computer screen while listening to a Walkman vibrate music into his brain loudly enough that we could hear it across the room. Said Kingwell: “The phrase Îrock-videoization’ really does say it all.”

As these shows shed the skin of a prior print culture and embrace the rock-videoized visual stimulants that have come to symbolize the culture of youth of MTV, Nintendo and, more and more, the Web they are also exposing themselves to criticism intractably linked to those media. In the Web magazine HotWired, David Shenck, author of the much-quoted 1996 book Data Smog, recently lamented: “Our culture is increasingly saturated by a flurry of images created not so much for meaningful expression as for the temporary abduction of people’s consciousness.” Shenck quotes German film director Wim Wenders, who described the social condition as “the disease of images,” an affliction where “you have too many images around so that finally you don’t see anything anymore.” In an April 1997 column in The Globe and Mail, Robert Fulford expressed a similar sentiment, claiming that “many of our fellow citizens live in a place where fantasy and reality can’t be separated.” He went on to write, “[R]ock videos are the perfect emblems of this world view bargain basement surrealism that can’t be understood by anyone, even those who produce it.”

For anyone who practices journalism in the new format, the criticism has a fatal sting. Fulford and Shenck argue that media based on an accelerated flow of images opiate the viewer. Their fear is we’re approaching an era of sensory overload, where news, like heroin, floods the brain’s feel-good neural receptors but makes users oblivious to their surroundings. We will watch this news, no doubt it is exactly what our techno-flooded minds crave but will we be able to derive meaning, analyze, judge? Use it to perform the functions journalism is supposed to enable us to do?

New York University journalism professor Mitchell Stephens, author of the soon-to-be-released book The Rise of the Image, Fall of the Word, argues that we will. “If you want television news to be less superficial, the more information you communicate in the shorter period of time is really the better,” he says. In 1980, Stephens wrote the world’s best-selling broadcast journalism textbook, Broadcast News, where he observed no news cut lasts less than fewer seconds, and now points out that newscasts often run cuts of less than a second. He’s also impressed by how text has become a common element. “I think we are heading to, and will eventually reach, TV news stories that are richer and deeper than conventional newspaper stories,” he says. By having more than one thing at a time, he explains, new-format newscasts can run opposite points of view simultaneously, or show running text to provide context for images.

Something like what The NewMusic’s audience is accustomed to. There, on any given night, the screen is split, with one half showing a concert or video clip and the other an interview with the artist. Text is juxtaposed over everything. Graphics and images shrink and grow. Music, words, natural sounds fill the speakers. “I don’t think they’ll be thrown by a moving camera coming in, or an extra graphic coming up, or a transition, or all that eye candy,” says The NewMusic’s producer, John Marshall. “People can digest all that and still understand the main conversation, the main message.” And indeed, for The NewMusic, whose bread-and-butter is artist interviews, the fractured screen adds an almost tactile depth to the conversation by complementing speech with video clips, concert footage and other visual representations of the conversation. “TV works best when you design it so that it’s working on a lot of different levels,” he says.

“A lot of people seem to complain that these new forms of TV are too engaging, which really fascinates me,” Stephens expands. “As if it would be better if our minds wandered. I think what’s wonderful about television is that it can be so remarkably engaging. All we have to do is figure out ways to communicate significant, powerful ideas through this medium, but the fact that it is so engaging should make it easier, not harder, to do that.” And it is precisely this difference that distinguishes new-format shows from the mainstream. They accept and embrace their medium’s engaging qualities rather than hiding behind the reputation of another.

But what distinguishes Channel Zero’s “Electronic Eye” from the new-format shows is that it appeared in the context of traditional newscast. Big Life,The NewMusic and Ooh La La, whose content is explorations in pop culture, and Undercurrents and MediaTelevision, which look at media culture, appeal to the young. “Electronic Eye” was aimed at a mainstream audience covering a mainstream concern, and in doing so, it represents a seminal crack in a crumbling orthodoxy.

As for Channel Zero itself, in the end, it seems to have imploded. In October, Holiday Phelan, heiress to the Cara Food fortune and Channel Zero’s main backer, moved to San Francisco with three of the editors and any of Channel Zero’s assets that hadn’t been repossessed (hopping in a motorhome for the journey in order to, as one ex-Channel Zero employee told me, “exorcise themselves of Stephen Marshall”).

Marshall, following a string of what he and many others say were “character assassinations” in the Toronto press, fled to New York for “political exile.” After living on friends’ couches and pitching various show concepts to all the major media conglomerates, he travelled through Latin America and studied the works of Che Guevera and JosÈ MartÌ in Cuba. He is now living in Toronto. In its two-year life, Channel Zero released two independent documentary videos and produced the three spots for TheNational.

“When we made The National videos, we had the top DJs in Canada, top animators,” Marshall says. “We spent $150,000 on the three videos, but only got paid $60,000. This was our chance to show what the news could be.” Tony Burman described the audience reaction this way: “Some people found them intriguing, while others scratched their heads and wondered if the future was creeping up on them too quickly.” It’s a sentiment we’ll undoubtedly be hearing more often.

It’s standing room only at the October meeting of the Ottawa Independent Writers. The monthly gathering of local novelists, poets and freelancers awaits the man whom Conrad Black selected a year earlier to transform the Ottawa Citizen into a smart and provacative newspaper worthy of the nation’s capital.

With his scowl and dated clothes, 57-year-old Neil Reynolds is no well-tailored newspaper consultant. In a low, rusty voice that barely reaches the back of the room, he expresses disdain for how most newspapers are managed and says the Citizenneeds to its community. “I think there is very much a sense of priesthood within any newsroom, where, if you’re on staff, you’re privileged, and if you’re not on staff, it’s very tough to get in.”

It’s a well-practised sermon. At three newspapers, Reynolds has made no apologies for editing according to his own idiosyncratic tastes and unconventional dogma. At The Kingston Whig-Standard, the Telegraph-Journal in Saint John, N.B., and during his first year at the Citizen, Reynolds has rejected the notion that readers suffering from time poverty must be pandered to with short news items, flashy graphics and bright colours.

Reynolds’s eclectic style of newspapering, unique among major North American dailies marks a startling change for both readers and journalists in what has traditionally been regarded as a staid, liberal, government town. Over the past year, Ottawa has been offered a flagship paper with frankly right-wing opinions, literate though sometimes verbose features, a smattering of quirky news items and the juxtaposition of sober reports and photos of leggy supermodels.

Just as startling, Reynolds’s formula seems to be working.

The “renaissance,” as Reynolds and his new regime call it, began September 30, 1996, when Citizen publisher Russell Mills spent an afternoon with Conrad Black in his suite at New York’s Carlyle Hotel, absorbing his new boss’s views on the direction of the paper. In the four months since Black’s Hollinger bought a controlling interest in Citizenowner Southam, Black had demanded sweeping changes to what he would describe only days later in a Globe and Mailarticle as the “overwhelming avalanche of soft, left, bland, envious pap which has poured like sludge through the centre pages of most of the Southam papers for some time.”

With neither a national newspaper nor a Toronto presence of any kind, the Citizenwas the closest thing to a flagship the Southam empire had. (Black has yet to decide whether to turn his dream of a new national daily into reality.) And the Citizen– known to detractors as the Shitizen-was especially in need of repair: In the four years prior to September 1996, weekday circulation had dropped 24 percent to 134,266, with similar declines in the Saturday and Sunday editions. Its rivals, The Ottawa Sun and the Globe, had made substantial inroads, with circulations of about 54,000and 20,000 respectively.

With the Hollinger takeover, Russell Mills sensed an opportunity to make changes that would have been impossible under the top-down approach of the previous management. Mills requested the Carlyle meeting to pitch his own plan, which called for the Citizento better reflect changes in its readership. No longer solely dependent on government, Ottawa is facing a future that increasingly lies with the telecommunications, technology and tourism industries.

Mills’s plan fell in line with the transformation at all of Southam’s larger newspapers, which has seen less reliance on wire stories in favour of original, authoritative reporting, especially with local stories. The papers also offer a stronger emphasis on business, national and international coverage and boast revitalized weekend editions, including bigger book review sections. The campaign to improve Southam products has required larger news holes and sweeping redesigns. The Southam papers subjected to an overhaul include Montreal’s Gazette,The Vancouver Sun, the CalgaryHerald, The Edmonton Journal, The Hamilton Spectator and The Windsor Star. The redirection of Canada’s largest paper chain follows the example of the Globe’sdramatic redesign in 1990, which enabled it to stay profitable and even boost its circulation during the recession of the early nineties. Following the example of the Globe’s overhaul, the Southam makeovers herald a rejection ofthe 20-minute newspaper read, a made-for-TV-viewers formula that became popular with the introduction of USA Todayin 1982, and a shift of the industry toward exploiting the print medium’s analytical and literary strengths.

The Citizen‘s changes would be extensive. Mills asked for six months to make the transition and received an initial $2-million investment from Black, most of it spent on more newsprint. Further, he and Black agreed that changes would be needed in the newsroom’s managers.

On October 7, editor-in-chief Jim Travers resigned, commenting, “I absolutely endorse [Hollinger’s] viewpoint or position, if you will, that the editors of newspapers should be of like mind with the proprietor.”

At the Carlyle meeting, Black recommended Neil Reynolds to succeed Travers. Then editor-in-chief and publisher at the Saint John, N.B., Telegraph-Journal, Reynolds had built a strong reputation on his ability to cultivate over achieving newspapers. Born near Kingston in 1940, Reynolds was an editor at The Toronto Starbefore joining The Kingston Whig-Standard in 1974, where he became editor-in-chief five years later. For 13 years, Reynolds produced a literary and worldly newspaper for a small-town audience, gaining national attention with articles dispatched by reporters sent to such remote locales as China and Afghanistan. Reynolds resigned from the Whig in 1992, a year and a half after it was acquired by Southam, concerned by the new owners’ lack of financial support for the newsroom. He was hired in 1993 as editor-in-chief of the J.K. Irving-owned Saint John paper. In a still-foggy set of circumstances, Reynolds was fired in August 1994, but then rehired at Irving’s personal direction two months later, becoming publisher as well. During Reynolds’s time, the Telegraph-Journalwas transformed from a thin, innocuous paper dominated by wire copy into a dynamic and controversial news source with strong local coverage. At both the Whigand the Telegraph-Journal, Reynolds created weekend magazines devoted to literary topics.

Black would also find comfort in Reynolds’s brand of Libertarian politics. A right-wing antigovernment movement with origins in leftist anarchism, Libertarianism holds that government ought to be kept out of citizens’ private lives. Reynolds took a year off from the Whigin 1982 to be president of the Libertarian Party of Canada and ran unsuccessfully for the party in a local federal by-election. In the newsroom, where right-wing politics were seen as having pushed Travers and Calamai out, staff felt their jobs were in question. “Everyone was totally terrified,” confides one reporter. “People thought that anyone at all left-wing would be obliterated.”

Reynolds wouldn’t purge the news staff, but he did add conservative voices to the editorial board. Through the hectic redesign period between early December 1996, when Reynolds arrived, and February 20, 1997, when Black approved prototypes (the extent of his involvement), editorialists with ties to the right-wing Fraser Institute (William Watson and John Robson), Donner Foundation (Adrienne DeLong Snow) and the Ontario Tory government (Dan Gardner) were recruited. Watson, a McGill University economist, became editorial page editor in January, and Snow would join David Warren, founder of the right-wing Idlermagazine, as coeditor of the new weekend magazine.

On March 3, Ottawa awoke to an all-new Citizen,in which city, national and international reporting was expanded, supported by a merger of Citizenand Southam parliamentary bureaus. Business coverage had more than doubled and was showcased in a new stand-alone section. The following Sunday saw the introduction of The Citizen’s Weekly, a 16-page “broadsheet magazine” devoted to sprawling articles as long as 12,000 words on the arts, sciences and literature. The Citizen‘s new design by Carl Neustaedter (now with the Globe) and consultant Lucie Lacava was clean and classic with a restrained use of colour and a simple, highly adaptable, layout to cope with the longer and increased quantity of stories. The nameplate now boasted a typeface reflecting the paper’s incarnation a century earlier. Coupled with a detailed etching of the Peace Tower, it proclaimed a new gravitas at the Citizen.

One of the most surprising additions, however, was the six pages of editorials and letters, including two daily pages in the City section run by a separate editorial board. In its editorials, the Citizen unapologetically argues its neo-conservative view of the world. “It has sharper elbows than it used to,” says Chris Dornan, the director of Carleton University’s journalism school. “The new Citizen is not afraid to irritate people. They want an avalanche of letters.”

“Everybody who loves newspapers should be rejoicing,” wrote Globecolumnist Robert Fulford a week after the relaunch. Despite a brashly right-wing editorial slant that was expected to alienate some readers, reaction to the new Citizenhas been favourable. Readership jumped more than five percent Monday to Friday and Sundays, and circulation rose by more than 2,000 copies a day. Circulation would later taper off to a weekday average of 135,724 and 128,092 on Sunday over the next three months, but still didn’t slip below the March 1996-97 average. The steady slide in Citizen readership has been arrested.

The paper’s favourable reception may derive less from its new ideological position than a new spirit of enterprise in its news-gathering practices.

In the final week of April, as flood waters engulfed southern Manitoba, two Citizenreporters went to cover the story: Tom Spears followed the river’s path of destruction, and education reporter Francine Dube filed stories for two weeks on life inside an all-but-deserted town, revealing an intimate and human side to the flood that news wires could not provide.

For Reynolds, the Manitoba disaster was an early opportunity to extend the reach of the Citizenby covering stories outside Ottawa with unusual aggressiveness. The 1997 travel budget, about $200,000 greater than the previous year, was frequently dipped into. If Reynolds could find a reason to send someone, he did. It was also this push for stories that the Citizencould call its own that caused the paper to exceed a freelance budget that had already increased by one-third within eight months of the relaunch.

Ultimately, Reynolds’s goal is to create what he calls a “unique story file” that features Citizen-reported stories, including fun and eccentric items that go beyond the important “news of the day.” One method is to dedicate staff to rewriting international wire stories and, after an additional phone call, use a Citizen byline; another is to take stories that other papers would place in “ghettos” like the Religion and Fashion pages and run them in A-section space, even on the front page.

An early example of Reynolds’s approach was “Mosquito Week,” a series of articles on the increased dangers of malaria-infecting mosquitos that ran the week of the relaunch on the front page and in The Citizen’s Weekly.Written by Reynolds’s wife, freelancer Donna Jacobs, it was a strange story for March, but in August the respected U.S. journal Atlantic Monthlyran the subject on its cover. The Citizenattracted more attention in October when United Church of Canada moderator Bill Phipps told the Citizen editorial board that he doesn’t believe Jesus was God. And stories on the virtues of medicinal marijuana use, a topic that often gets front-page play in the Citizen also show an odd and sometimes compelling sense of story selection. “The joy of a newspaper is its unexpected elements,” says Reynolds. “At the best, it’s a strange mixture of the sacred and the profane.”

It is a strange mixture that doesn’t sit well with some. “I think the paper is quirky as hell,” argues Peter Donolo, head of communication in the Prime Minister’s Office. “Every day there’s a T-and-A shot in there,” he says, referring to the frequent photos of celebrities and fashion models, particularly those of fetching women in immodest clothing.

Despite his successes, Reynolds’s idiosyncratic news judgement has raised eyebrows. Reporters are urged to look for stories in odd places rather than merely react to announcements from Parliament Hill and City Hall. Which explains the appearance of a story in October on the revealing dress worn to a Corel Corp. gala by Marlen Cowpland, wife of Corel chair Michael Cowpland. In some eyes, the prominence of fun and eccentric news injures the authority of the Citizen‘s serious reporting.

The editorials don’t always go down smoothly, either. Donolo, who not surprisingly doesn’t applaud criticism of his boss, calls Citizeneditorials “dilettante.” “[On] Day One of the redesign, the editorial was that the Prime Minister should resign. And through the rest of the week, they went on to say that all the opposition leaders should resign as well. I find them sophomoric.

“Are they becoming the Canadian equivalent of The Washington Post? No. Are they closer to that than they were a year ago? Arguably, but only if you measure in millimetres.”

Reynolds’s preferred comparison would be to Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraphin London. “I find a lot of American content, a lot of Canadian content, too, is very formu-la-istic,” Reynolds declares. In fact, much of his foreign news is scalped from the Telegraph. “It’s got way too many Daily Telegraph bylines on subjects that have nothing to do with Britian,” says Donolo. “It’s just as easily picked up by Knight-Ridder or better yet, by Canadian journalists.”

It is this British-styled “tits-and-analysis” character of the paper that has some in the newsroom cringing, too. According to one reporter, the use of celebrity and model photographs “has troubled virtually everyone who works at the paper, man and woman alike.” Some Citizenjournalists also question the ethics of rewriting wire stories for an in-house byline.

Compounding newsroom anxiety was a drastic change in personality at the top. Gregarious Jim Travers joked and chatted with staff, while Neil Reynolds rarely emerges from his office along the north-west wall of the newsroom, which has earned him the nickname “Bubbleboy.” Reynolds prefers to leave hands-on managing to someone else;in this case, Scott Anderson, a trusted colleague from his days at the Whigand the Telegraph-Journal. “Reynolds has nothing to do with us. He stays in his office all the time,” says one reporter. “Everything is sifted through Scott Anderson. It’s a constant guessing game;things change all the time.”

“If you quote Frank,I’ll sue you,” says Anderson as he marches towards the cafeteria. Dressed in grey slacks and a navy blazer with tie tightly knotted, he marches everywhere, in brisk straight lines, his gait short and stiff. Though he’s only 34 years old, there is no question who holds the authority in the newsroom.

Chatting in his office next to Reynolds’s, Anderson makes it clear that the mood of uncertainty isn’t accidental. He has “cross-polinated,” for instance sending court and police reporters to cover the Quebec bus crash at Thanksgiving that killed 43 people. And he thinks beat reporters should have at least one “off-beat” day a week. When asked if the turmoil has subsided in the newsroom, he responds, “Is there turmoil in the newsroom? If you find none, let me know and I’ll make some. You don’t go through any revolution without some amount of chaos. Chaos isn’t a bad thing. A lot of great ideas come out of the rough and tumble.”

Some Citizen journalists saw the shakeup as an opportunity to try something new and have blossomed, particularly those now writing for The Citizen’s Weekly. On the third day of the relaunch, former city columnist Shelley Page pitched Reynolds an interview that would require a flight to Vancouver. Reynolds sent her, later agreed to a detour through Arizona for another interview and then sent Page to Vienna to complete the story.

Reynolds and Anderson have quietly tested everyone in the Citizennewsroom, even veteran reporters. Those who succeed, like Page, get to do almost anything they want: Page now writes features from home, as does investigative reporter Paul McKay, who works in Kingston. Those who fail, or don’t know how to prove themselves, are marginalized. Former World editor David Evans was shunted to the side after a trip to Europe failed to produce the quality of stories he had pitched. In November, he moved to The Edmonton Journal, and his wife, Citizen assistant arts editor Keri Sweetman, is to join him later. Her only comment is, “It takes a lot to move two journalists with three kids to Edmonton, away from all their friends and family.”

And there have been other defections of accomplished journalists. Ten days after Jim Travers resigned, editorial page editor Peter Calamai resigned under circumstances similar to Travers’s. That led to managing editor Sharon Burnside accepting a buyout that took effect in April and features writer Ken MacQueen, “saddened and disconcerted” by the “removal” of Travers and Calamai, going to The Vancouver Sun in August. In September, Queen’s Park columnist Jim Coyle left for The Toronto Star(now edited by Travers).

Celebrated sports columnist Roy MacGregor, who could draw almost a year’s salary on Southam’s buyout option, has considered leaving the Citizen, too. He has stayed on, though, because he loves Ottawa and finds sanctuary in sports, a section which escapes Reynolds’s feedback. MacGregor is also intrigued by the Citizen’s changes. “It is almost worth the price of admission,” says MacGregor, calling the Sports department the “best seats in the house.” “In terms of the dynamics of journalism, it is an absolutely hypnotic experience to watch.”

That experience will continue in the newsroom and in the Citizen’s pages, challenging journalists and readers alike. According to Mills, the new Citizen,bolstered by a booming ad market, has had one of the most profitable years in its history. Reynolds can afford to take chances.

Not that he has ever shied from risks, nor will he start anytime soon. Reynolds delights in controversy and inducing debate around Ottawa’s water coolers and on his letters pages. For now, at least, he can escape unscathedÛthe extent of the Citizen’s other changes provides some disarming glare for its readers. As Chris Dornan explains about Citizenreaders: “Lots of people are still irritated, but they are probably talking about it and reading it more-simply because there’s more in it.”

And then, there are those Ottawans who actually like the new Citizen.

The Ottawa Independent Writers meeting is dragging out its final questions, when a young woman poses a question on the minds of many in attendance. “How do you justify the increased quality of the Citizen with the fact that I will open the paper every day and see a picture of a woman with a plunging neckline or in a bikini?”

Reynolds requests an example. She offers, “Mrs. Cowpland,” referring to the previous day’s front page photo of Marlen Cowpland in a dress revealing her right buttock.

“I loved seeing that dress,” another woman calls out.

Neil Reynolds’s eyes flash. His scowl becomes a grin.

ON LAND, THE INDUSTRIOUS BEAVER TENDS TO BE SOMEWHAT SLOW and clumsy. It prefers to stick close to home and constantly sniffs the air for signs of danger. When cutting down the trees it uses to construct its lodge, a place of shelter and protection, the beaver cannot predict which way the trunk will fall. Focused intensely on its work, the beaver sometimes gets squashed by its own falling tree.

On a Monday morning last July, Christopher Dafoe, editor for the past 12 years of The Beaver, the 77-year-old magazine of Canadian history, got squashed himself. He’d been invited to the ominously named Velvet Glove Restaurant by Joseph Martin, president of the society that publishes the magazine. After a brief and somewhat awkward conversation about each of their cottages, Martin pulled out an envelope and handed it across the table. Dafoe didn’t open it. He knew what it meant – two weeks earlier a board member had warned him that the tree was about to fall. Dafoe sat there, his coffee going cold, the unopened envelope in his hand, then he left the restaurant, walked to the bus stop and read the letter. His position as editor was terminated, effective that day.

Two weeks later, Laird Rankin, the magazine’s publisher, tried to put a public relations gloss on the event, informing a Winnipeg Free Pressreporter that Dafoe had taken early retirement; Beaver staff were told the same. But Dafoe wasn’t interested in this face-saving exercise. “It makes it sound like I have an incurable disease, or got caught chasing the secretary, or with my hand in the till,” he says. Instead, he launched a wrongful dismissal suit. The Beaverhad spent three-quarters of a century telling stories of war, conquest and conflict. Now, for the first time in its long history, it was experiencing a little drama of its own.

THE BEAVER WAS LAUNCHED BY THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY IN 1920, in time to report on the company’s 250th anniversary celebrations. As a staff magazine, it kept the Bay “family”-as it was called back then-up-to-date on company news. Page after page of the modest journal-size quarterly was filled with bulletins on promotions, vacations, retirements, marriages, births and deaths. The original editor, Clifton M. Thomas, was apprehensive about making it anything more than a staff publication. But the overwhelming response to his invitation in the first issue for employees to submit “notes, narratives, personal news items, history, biography and poems” about the company made it evident that The Beaverhad the potential to tell a larger story: the story of northern progress and the Bay’s role in Canadian history. From then on, along with the birth announcements and gossip, each issue carried a couple of articles like “Little Journeys to the Haunts of Canada’s Fur-Bearing Animal” and “Famous Trips by H.B.C. Dog Teams.”

In 1933, under the editorship of Douglas MacKay, The Beavershed its house-organ feel, changing its tagline from “A Journal of Progress” to “The Magazine of the North.” While the magazine grew to standard size, began using more art and photography and increased the number of features, most of the content continued to touch on the HBC in some way. That changed in the 1940s, when a new editor took a chance and decided that the Bay need not be an ingredient in every story. Over the next four decades, The Beaverremained a general-interest magazine focusing on the North and the West, featuring such worthy pieces as “Cold War on the Fraser” (1955), “Artists in Haida Gwai” (1969) and “Arctic Fur Trade Rivalry” (1975

The Beaver underwent some superficial changes in those 40 years-content became stronger, art and photography more attractive-but essentially, the magazine Christopher Dafoe took over in 1985 was visually and editorially similar to that of the 1940s. Dafoe, then 49 years old, had been a writer, critic and editor for the Winnipeg Free Press, a columnist and critic for the Vancouver Sun and a CBC documentary writer. His work had appeared in the London Times, the Jerusalem Post and the Manchester Guardian. One of his two plays, The Frog Galliard, had been performed across Canada and in London, England. But for him, becoming editor of The Beaverwas the fulfillment of a boyhood dream. “When I was 7 years old my aunt gave me a subscription to the magazine, and I read it for many years,” he recalls. “I thought being the editor would be the ideal job.” And for a while it was.

Dafoe was given a free hand to take the magazine in a new direction-a direction that was necessary if The Beaver was to stay off the endangered species list. By early 1980, it had become clear the Bay’s top management had little interest in the magazine. “It was just a relic of company history,” recalls Rolph Huband, a former Bay vice president whose duties from 1983 to 1997 included serving as publisher of The Beaver. The magazine had only 15,000 paid subscribers and an annual deficit around $100,000; it was in danger of being closed if the Bay had a bad financial year. That year came in 1983, when the Bay lost millions of dollars. “The Beaver was on the hit list,” says Huband. But instead of folding the magazine, he hired a consultant to determine if the 60-year-old magazine could be saved from the same fate as the Bay’s trading posts and fur departments. On the consultant’s advice, Huband devloped a strategic plan; it involved aggressive direct-mail promotion, eliminating the 15,000 complimentary copies that went to uninterested Bay staff and refocusing the magazine on Canadian history generally. All of this had been achieved by the time Dafoe arrived. What Huband hoped his new editor would do was raise the visibility of the magazine and help take it from a respected yet relatively obscure HBC publication to a high-profile magazine of popular Canadian history. With Huband’s support, Dafoe broadened the scope of the magazine to include such topics as sports, medicine, the women’s movement and industry, changed the tagline to “Exploring Canada’s History” and started running pieces about all regions of Canada, not just the North and West. With an increase to bi-monthly frequency, a stronger visual presence on the newsstands and a new editorial focus, The Beaverhad a better chance of increasing its readership and becoming self-sustaining. Dafoe asserted his presence as editor by creating a letters-to-the-editor section and began contributing a well-written and witty editorial each issue. His goal was to maintain the historical legitimacy of the magazine while ensuring that the articles were accessible to a general audience.

The salvage plan worked. By October 1990-The Beaver’s 70th anniversary-there were almost 40,000 subscribers and the magazine was close to being self-sustaining. But because the Bay was continually moving further away from emphasizing its own history, there was always a chance it would kill The Beaver. Huband, Dafoe and managing editor Carol Preston were all anxious to devise a way of ensuring the long-term health of the magazine.

That opportunity came in 1994 when the Bay donated its archives and museum collection to the province of Manitoba. Part of the savings arising from the $23-million tax credit were used to fund Canada’s National History Foundation, of which Huband became president. The CNHS, whose mandate is to promote “greater popular interest in Canadian history,” acquired The Beaver in August 1994, just as Huband had planned it would. Huband naturally turned to Dafoe and Preston, who shared his love for The Beaver, to not only suggest how the new society might function but, because they were in Winnipeg and he in Toronto, to take on the administrative responsibilities of the new society. “We thought the CNHS would be the savior of the magazine. We thought any financial woes had come to an end and that the money would be primarily spent to improve the magazine,” Dafoe recalls. “We created all this,” he laughs, and then adds in a slow, low voice, “and then…it got off the table.”

“All this” is the board and committee structure of the society. Dafoe says that when the society was being formed and the board chosen, he suggested that there be an “honorary board” with big academic names and a small board of “useful people.” “Instead,” he says with dry exasperation, “we got the biggest collection of cementheads this country has ever seen.”

Chief among the cementheads, in his view, were the five board members who made up the editorial committee. When the Bay still owned The Beaver, there had been an editorial advisory committee, but Dafoe was able to ignore its suggestions, which he did regularly. On the CNHS editorial committee, only one member-William Nobleman, former Saturday Night publisher turned consultant-had magazine experience, but all five were also on the society’s board of directors. “The editorial committee saw its role as the production of a magazine that met the goals and desires of the organization as a whole,” Nobleman explains. According to him, the board was fed up with having its recommendations and advice dismissed by Dafoe. The list of grievances was long: poor design and layout, articles that were too lengthy, too narrow a range of topics, underedited pieces, lack of editorial planning and an overall product that failed to attract a readership larger than 40,000 and younger than 60 years old. Dafoe, in turn, not only had little respect for the committee’s opinion of how he ran the magazine, but little respect for the board as a whole. “If the editorial committee told the board to drop their pants, they would,” is his assessment.

It’s true that Dafoe’s Beaverhad a somewhat dull and predictable look. Part of the problem was simply a shortage of appropriate visuals. Canada is a young country-there aren’t endless historical illustrations, and much early photography was of poor quality. Dafoe also operated without an art director, and his modest annual budget of $15,000 meant poor paper stock and limited colour. But the committee felt that Dafoe was too slow to implement the design changes it requested. Nobleman says, “I have some sense that Chris wanted to control the design as he controlled the editorial.” Dafoe responds that even after a partial redesign in late 1996 that involved increased white space, better captioning of photographs and bolder display type (all changes the committee had pushed for), the committee was still not satisfied. In turn, one board member says the problem was that Dafoe didn’t implement the changes as quickly and thoroughly as the committee wanted. In 1997, the board added another $10,000 to the art budget in hopes of further improvements. “It was never spent,” says Nobleman. Dafoe doesn’t deny this. “When the committee said the money was for design, I thought, that’s nice, we will certainly spend it when it seems justified,” he says. “My policy was never to spend money just because it was there.”

When it came to the editorial content, one board member claims that even before the society was formed, Dafoe was told that too much material was getting into The Beaver underedited (contributors describe Dafoe as an editor who gave them a free hand to write what they wanted). After the CNHS took over, this criticism intensified. However, Dafoe believed that the magazine would suffer if he didn’t stand up for his editorial decisions.The committee saw this as being territorial; Dafoe saw it as doing what he was hired to do. Besides, he says of the editorial committee, “Pleasing that group was like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

A much more satisfied group was the magazine’s 40,000 subscribers. A 1994 readership survey-conducted by Nobleman’s own company-found that readers were happy with the balance of articles, their length and the overall editorial package. The renewal rate-80 percent-reflected the almost fanatical loyalty of The Beaver’s readers. Many place ads in the magazine for issues they need to complete their collection, and one even requested that his Beavers be buried with him. Last summer, when Dafoe tipped readers that a name change was being considered (every one of The Beaver’s editors has been faced with having to explain that the magazine is about history, not nature or naughty women), more than 300 wrote in to voice their disapproval: “If you are determined to destroy the magazine…then go ahead, but please don’t pretend to consult us”; “Are there some busy bodies in this new Society who have nothing better to do?”;”We are losing our Heritage. Retain the title The Beaver.” And after the news of Dafoe’s firing broke, he received a call from a lawyer in Florida who said his 100-year-old client had cancelled a bequest she had planned to make to the CNHS.

Historian Marian Fowler has a theory about this passion for the magazine. “I think their readers feel a great sense of pride in their country. The Canadians they appeal to are Canadians who grew up here. That’s not to say that other ethnic groups don’t want to learn about Canadian history, but I don’t think they feel quite the same passion as native-born Canadians.” But she also notes that they are, well, rather historic themselves; the main reasons subscribers don’t renew are failing eyesight or death. The board worried that readers had little in terms of a future.

Not responding to this concern is where Dafoe went wrong, Nobleman claims. The board wanted a younger audience, one with an interest in history but also with plenty of reading years ahead of them-they wanted forty- and fiftysomethings. However, Dafoe suggests the problem wasn’t his but Nobleman’s. As well as being on the editorial committee, Nobleman was paid by the society to manage promotional efforts: it was Nobleman’s outdated techniques that kept The Beaver circulation at 40,000, Dafoe charges. He may be right; after Dafoe was fired, someone new was brought in to handle promotion.

Targeting this “younger” demographic and making The Beaver appeal to an audience still a decade or two away from wintering in Florida is part of the long-term plan. “I think there is an interest in history, and if we can give it to people in a way they want to get it, I think we can definitely go for a younger demographic,” says the new editor, Annalee Greenberg. So far, Greenberg, who’s 44, says that the editorial committee has been supportive and has worked with her to establish a set of criteria for the magazine’s content. The board wants to see shorter pieces, a better balance of topics and more commissioned stories; Greenberg plans to feature more social history. But for now¤and probably for the next year-a lot of the articles in the magazine will be ones that Dafoe bought.

Even if The Beaver does take on a flashier look and material with broader appeal, will fortysomethings pick up a magazine about Canadian history? “I don’t see a great future for The Beaver,” Marian Fowler says. “Today, you learn a little bit about a lot-everybody is a generalist now. People are unable to put past events into historical context, it’s like everything is equal time and equal value.” The CNHS board is banking on the 10 million Canadians who are approaching 50, hoping to capture a fraction of them. The theory is that when people reach the second half of their lives, they suddenly realize they’re mortal; as Shirlee Ann Smith, head of the editorial committee, says, “They get off their merry-go-round and start thinking about their past.” The board is also hoping that the pending millennium will pique people’s interest about what has occurred during the last few centuries. “There’s potential for history,” says Laird Rankin. “Therefore, there’s potential for us in the history business.”

So while those at the CNHS are planning for The Beaver’s tomorrow, for the first time in 12 years Christopher Dafoe is planning for a future that does not include The Beaver. “It’s been quite damaging for me to lose this job,” he says. “My reputation is tarnished. I’m 61 years old and the chances of my getting another job are slim.” He’s been looking, though, and in the meantime he’s written a book about the city where he experienced all this grief. He’s toying with the idea of leaving Winnipeg and moving farther west, but that depends on his finding work-and the outcome of his lawsuit against the CNHS.

DAFOE’S SUIT IS JUST A SIDE EFFECT OF THE REAL STRUGGLE THE CNHS is facing. The board kicked out Dafoe in the hopes that, without him, it could attract a younger group of readers. So once it’s done taking on Dafoe in court, it will have to get ready for the true fight: getting Canadians under 60 interested in history. The problem is the future is the big commodity right now. People’s attention is focused on what is yet to come, not what’s already happened. For such a young country, Canada has an endless number of fascinating stories to be told. Can the sleepy little Beaver continue to gather enough readers to tell those stories to?

It’s a dull autumn morning and Suzanne Boyd totters into her seventh-floor office in the Maclean Hunter building in Toronto, on a pair of Karl Lagerfeld stilettos. The office is in its usual state-her desk is covered with papers, her conference table is not much better.

On one bulletin board in the room hang her favourite covers-out of the 15 issues she has overseen as Flare‘s new editor, nine make the grade. A second bulletin board is covered with pictures cut out of various magazines. It’s her collection of aspirational images: “great hair”-a woman with wild hair just like hers; “books”-a floor to ceiling bookcase; “surfing”-an action shot that brings back teenage memories; “surreal”-models lounging in tubes in a pool; “fabulousness”-supermodel Naomi Campbell in St.Tropez; and of course, “stiletto”-because she’s devoted to killer heels.

She sits back with her usual café latte from Starbucks and reads a letter to the editor in the December 1997 issue of Flare. The reader was angry about an interview with the late rock-singer Michael Hutchence, in which Hutchence said that American men, caught up in political correctness, would congratulate a woman on a promotion, then comment on her body as she walked away. Australian men, in contrast, would just be straightforward. “I cannot believe that Flare magazine would publish such drivel,” the letter says, quoting the offending remark: “Jesus luv, you’ve got a great ass and good on the promotion.” Boyd breaks out in laughter. “Don’t you people realize that that kind of comment is grounds for sexual harassment? Please cancel my subscription.” She looks up, still laughing: “That’s great!”

What’s great? A few things. It’s great that Flare is getting more letters to the editor than ever before. It’s great that for the first time since the early eighties, Flare is publishing them. And it’s great that they are about content, rather than “I hate the girl on page 24.” Boyd puts the canceled subscription into perspective by making a literary reference, as she’s frequently known to do. “It’s like what Forster said in A Passage to India about the British settlement: it neither repelled nor attracted, so why was it there.”

In the year and a half since she’s been editor, Boyd’s been making sure her readers have lots to react to. It’s all in her anagram. FLARE: fashionable, literate, aspirational, relevant and exciting-and it is. Covers that are getting sleeker by the month; funky fashion layouts, with as good a balance of inspiration and affordability as Canada’s lone national fashion mag can realistically achieve; weighty issue-oriented articles offset by refreshing satirical pieces (sometimes misunderstood by readers still in serious mode-but that keeps the letters coming); and theme issues, from Men We Love (derivative of Esquire, but it worked) to Motherhood. Even those dreaded paper-thin issues only a Canadian fashion magazine seems capable of, deliver at least $2.95 worth of information.

That probably has something to do with the fact that features now account for 30 percent of the editorial content, up from about 20 percent under her predecessor. As part of the increased features package, Boyd introduced the Flare Forum in April 1997-an issue-oriented panel discussion with experts and lay people, moderated by journalists. The forum tackles a range of subjects, like debating whether RU-486, the abortion pill, should come to Canada; understanding the New Age self-help craze; and unravelling the science of falling in love.

It may also have something to do with the fact that “relevant” is the key word in the anagram. Take October 1997 for example-it doesn’t get more topical than that. The issue featured a panel on breast cancer with doctors who had attended the World Conference on Breast Cancer, a story on a renowned Victoria clinic for anorexics, which coincided with the release of a book on eating disorders written by the founder of the clinic, and an excerpt from the new book, How to Dump a Guy: A Coward’s Manual, by authors Kate Fillion and Ellen Ladowsky. “The issues have become a lot more relevant to what’s going on out there in the world,” says Boyd, who was particularly pleased with the issue.

The move toward relevancy and substance isn’t going unnoticed. Industry colleagues such as Rona Maynard, editor of Chatelaine, Shelagh Tarleton, publisher of Toronto Life Fashion and Robert Lewis, editor-in-chief of Macleans, have phoned Boyd to congratulate her on a mix that seems stronger and heavier.

Now in April 1998, Boyd is introducing the Flare Alert, a regular department that looks at such issues as how a woman’s diary can be used against her in a sexual assault case or how you can have your identity stolen through credit card frauds-and why that matters for women.

Increased weightier pieces is just part of the package. Leanne Delap, fashion reporter for The Globe and Mail, says the magazine is more cutting edge. Using a photo of bad-boy rock-singer Liam Gallagher and his wife, British actress Patsy Kensit, for a satirical piece on the “New Lout”-the nineties “boor” who is gaining popularity among women-is just one example. “You can’t get any hipper than that, says Delap. “That’s like winking at your reader.”

Boyd, a risk-taker, is also shaking things up at Flare by surprising readers-a male model solo on the cover of the February 1997 issue (a first in Flare‘s history and a rarity for any women’s fashion book), a model holding her baby on the cover of May 1997-another first for Flare and the best-selling May issue of the nineties.

Boyd’s changes are reaching a sizable audience. More Canadian women choose Flare over all other fashion magazinesóU.S. ones included. According to ABC, Flare has a circulation of 174,010-the core group of readers are women aged 18 to 34. Numbers have held steady under Boyd, although she is intent on attracting more readers 24 and older-the working women with more disposable income to whom she’s gearing the magazine. Its closest competitor, Toronto Life Fashion, has a circulation of 123,028.

Next to other women’s magazines in Canada, Flare has a much smaller share of the market. Circulation for Chatelaine is 806,757 and Elm Street, 701,378. But Flare‘s smaller audience didn’t affect ad revenue in the past year. In 1997, for the first time, Flare placed more ad pages than any other women’s magazine in Canada: ad revenue increased to $7,387,801, up almost $1 million from 1996.

Still, not everyone is a fan. Antonia Zerbisias, television reporter for The Toronto Star, says straight out that she doesn’t like Flare. “It’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t tell me enough about what’s available in Canada and it’s not good enough to measure up to the American magazines. What is the point of showing me a $2,795 coat? There is no option here. There is no way to duplicate this look.” According to Zerbisias, Vogue is fantasy because is shows the couture unattainable for most and Marie Claire is true service because it shows the same look at five different prices. Flare is neither of the two. “Who’s it talking to? Is it talking to the woman who makes $140,000 and lives in Toronto? Is it talking to the secretary who makes $30,000 and lives in Regina?”

Boyd acknowledges that as Canada’s only national fashion magazine, Flare has to appeal to a wide variety of people. But she maintains that the magazine is talking to both of those women. Although it may not duplicate Marie Claire‘s approach, Boyd says Flare does show a wide variety of prices. And it isn’t uncommon to see a model wearing a $500 pair of designer pants with a $48 sweater from The Gap. Boyd justifies the pricier items, saying retail trends show that people will pay more if they feel the garment is worth it. In fact, Flare readers are 71% more likely than the average Canadian woman to spend $1,500 or more annually on clothes.

Zerbisias’s criticisms don’t stop there. “I take great exception to the fact that it says “Canada’s Fashion Magazine” across the top, and I’m looking at an American model, in American clothes, shot by an American photographer in an American studio,” says Zerbisias referring to the November 1997 issue of Flare. One reader voiced the same concern in a letter: “I need to understand why a Canadian magazine, with articles hyping up how we rule [April], never features a Canadian model on the front.”

Although a few covers feature Canadian women wearing Canadian designers, the majority indeed show international models wearing international designers. Boyd argues that fashion knows no borders. “That may be true,” concedes Zerbisias, “but when this is in one of the magazines lobbying for cultural protection, it cuts two ways.” Boyd seems tired of arguing this point. For her, the answer is so simple, it’s a non-issue: “The nationality of a model is not content. The Canadian-ness of a magazine is not defined by where its models are born, but what the stories are about. And we have that Canadian angle. We have it right through the magazine.”

At about 10 a.m. in late October the Flare staff convenes in the boardroom to discuss production for the January 1997 issue. Suzanne Boyd, 35, slender and 5’10 1/2″, could be mistaken for a model rather than the editor of the magazine. Her lion’s mane of kinky curls is pinned up at the back. In contrast to her staff, who look fashionably homogeneous in black, white and grey, Boyd is wearing a bright red cheongsam , a dress that her mother bought for her in China, layered over slim black pants and 3-inch-high, thick-heeled boots. Luigi Carrubba, Flare‘s fashion editor, has just returned from the Paris and Milan Spring collections and the staff is trying to decide how to lay out the fashion well . “So what’s hot this Spring?” Boyd asks. “What are the things you have to have?” “Ah…What do I have to have?” Carrubba fantasizes for a moment and then he’s off. “A cropped pant, sort like of capri pants,” Carrubba continues. “Oh, I love that,” says Boyd. “Drawstring,” Carrubba moves down his mental list. Boyd jumps in again, “I bought a dress in Paris-I’ve never worn it-it’s blue with a drawstring. It’s a fierce dress. I found it in some hole in the wall. O.K. what else?”

“A shorter jacket.” The staff looks horrified. “Oh, no. Not bolero,” someone says. Carrubba is quick to appease: “No, no, not bolero-just shorter, like to here.” He places his hands at the top of his hips. “Like my Mimi Bizjak jacket,” Boyd jumps in. “I love that.” Once again, she has a found a wardrobe reference.

If there’s one thing everyone who knows Suzanne Boyd agrees on, it’s that she has style. “You haven’t seen her yet?!” Followed by laughter, as if anyone who hasn’t met her is in for a shock. “She’s quite a statement,” “She has great personal presence,” or “She’s wild,” are typical comments. Delap puts it into a wider context. “Suzanne has great personal taste and that’s important for the role that she has to play for the advertisers, and even for the public in general as a spokesperson. She’s fabulous the way a Diana Vreeland was fabulous in her time and Anna Wintour is at Vogue now.”

This is a woman who at 16 had a friend make her a yellow surfboard to match her yellow bikini, who wore stilettos with jeans long before it was fashionable, and who is photographed for The New York Times’ Style Desk section by fashion reporter Bill Cunningham whenever she’s in New York. This is also a woman who wore a $7 plaid wool coat from the Goodwill Toronto, (a second-hand store where castoff clothes are donated) to a New York fashion show that left fashion mavens Bernadette Morra and Tim Blanks cooing: “Great coat! Where’d you get it?” Boyd, who is proud of her entire wardrobe and seems to get a laugh out of impressing people with her used clothing, told them the truth.

Born in Halifax on January 17, 1963-“The same day as Muhammad Ali,” she’s quick to add-Boyd was raised in her father’s native Dominica from age 3 to 9, until her parents separated. Then she, her mother and siblings-a sister and two brothers-moved to Jamaica. There, Boyd attended one of the island’s finest boarding schools for girls, Immaculate Conception. An academically rigorous school enforced by corporal punishment, Immaculate taught Boyd that she had to always work hard to excel-things should never be fine, they should be perfect. “We were told we were the best and we had to act like the best and we were punished if we weren’t the best.”

When Boyd was 14, her family moved to a prestigious area of Barbados, where she spent her days in private school and her evenings surfing. Straight out of school at 18, Boyd landed a job as a trainee reporter on the island’s tabloid daily, The Nation. Boyd had always wanted to be a news reporter, although her father, a civil engineer who was in Barbados building the island’s airport (and who is still part of her life), tried to dissuade her. “He used to tell me: ‘Journalists don’t do anything for the world. They just tell other people’s stories,'” Boyd wasn’t convinced. “I loved the whole idea of someone running in with information saying ‘Stop the presses!'” She spent almost a year there before coming to Canada in 1982.

At her father’s behest she went to York University in Toronto for about three years, spending much of the money he sent for tuition, on clothes. She dropped out a few credits short of finishing her degree in Mass Communications and English, not telling her parents. “University was giving me nothing,” says Boyd. “When I was at York University, I was reading books in English literature that I learned at Immaculate in first form (grade seven).”

After she dropped out, the now defunct T.O. Magazine hired her on to intern as a fact-checker for 12 weeks. Just a few weeks into the job, Boyd got involved in styling “Hot Shops”-a column that surveyed new stores. “She didn’t know what she was doing at the time but she had great taste and wonderful style,” says Manuel Rodenkirchen, then art director at T.O.

Boyd then spent five years freelance writing and styling and eventually landed a job at Flare as associate beauty editor in 1990. The Flare opportunity came along at the same time as another very different one: a job in Geneva in the communications department of the World Council of Churches, which her mother, then director of development at the YWCA, told her about. “My mother really does help the world, so I felt quite conscioence-stricken that I didn’t take that route of being more serious,” explains Boyd. But sitting at a desk writing communiques sounded dreary. “It felt like it would be a very passive, bureaucratic bore.” And she soon came to terms with her choice. She realized that despite how the beauty industry is criticized for setting women up to feel badly about themselves-women think magazines give them tools to feel better about themselves and the way they look. “I began not to feel so frivolous and to feel that it was useful in its own way to people.”

In 1994, Bonnie Brooks became editor and within a year, had decided to groom Boyd to be her successor. “I identified immediately that Suzanne was bright and extremely with it and a hip girl-a hip girl with her own sense of style. And she was so ready to go further in her career.” Brooks sent Boyd to the fashion shows in Europe (she had never been), got her writing more fashion copy and eventually began teaching her the business side of being editor.

David Hamilton, publisher of Flare, says that Brooks was influential in Boyd’s getting the job. And the staff was grateful. “By the time Bonnie resigned, I think every single person there was hoping that Suzanne would get it,” says Maarten Sluyter, former art director at Flare. The “fun and approachable” Boyd really hasn’t changed much as her career progressed. And despite what Boyd calls her mercurial moods, she is adored by her staff.

In replacing Brooks, Boyd became the first black woman to head a mainstream Canadian publication, a role that she sees as a responsibility because of what it means to the black community. Indeed, young black girls ask her for her autograph and last spring she was honored as a “phenomenal woman”-a black woman who’s made a difference by excelling in her field-by XCLuSV, a Toronto-based group that promotes events within the black community. “If it’s important to other people-and it seems to be because it’s mentioned all the time-then I want to be good for them. I don’t want to fail at this job because I don’t want people to feel that a black person can’t do a job.”

But beyond that she doesn’t see herself as a role model. “I’m a woman and I’m black. That’s fabulous. I’m proud to be black and I’m proud to be a woman. But it really has no bearing on how I should do my job. I’m an editor who does a job. I do that job every day and it doesn’t matter what I look like. It matters what I get done on paper.”

And what she gets done on paper is not far removed from Flare‘s initial mandate. In 1979, Miss Chatelaine (founded in 1964 as the younger reader’s version of Chatelaine), was re-launched as Flare, and as Canada’s only national fashion magazine, it was meant to cover fashion designed for the Canadian climate and available in Canadian stores.

But under Flare‘s first editor, Keitha McLean, fashion and beauty did not take centre stage and the fashion spreads looked more like a catalogue than a fashion magazine. Instead, it ran articles on the arts-fiction, playwrights, dance-as well as jobs, food and, money.

Then came the glamorous eighties-and in 1983, Bonnie Hurowitz. Stylized photography dominated the pages. Gone were regular insightful editorials, gone was the letters page, gone was fiction. It was hello to sensationalism-society pages and interviews with supermodels for beauty tips. For the first time, Flare went international and covered the ready-to-wear fall collections in Paris and London. The magazine would retain all these elements long after Hurowitz became Bonnie Fuller, moved to New York and took over YM, Marie Claire, and then Cosmopolitan with annual profits of $50 million a year.

When Shelley Black replaced Hurowitz as editor, she offered a heightened commitment to showcase Canadian fashion. The look was clean and the fashion and beauty wells were arguably stylish. New departments (nutrition, home, fitness) were added and features were longer. But somehow, the glamour that made Hurowitz’s Flare exciting, went missing.

After six years, publisher David Hamilton says the magazine was no longer on target. So in 1994, Bonnie Brooks, an advertising executive and former vice-president. of merchandising at Holt Renfrew, took over. Under Brooks, the mandate was to offer “service with style.” She wanted the feel of a sophisticated American fashion magazine with a strong service component for Canadian women, since the main appeal of Flare was that the clothes and products it displayed were available in Canada. Brooks approached fashion from a retailer’s point of view-wardrobe workshops and fashion wells packed with at least three dozen outfits. Features were fewer and shorter.

Boyd ran with the repositioned fashion focus of the magazine and built on it with more exciting editorial. Apart from an overall improvement in quality of features, Boyd’s biggest change has been her development of theme issues. For instance, the Motherhood issue in May 1997, which showed fashion for pregnant women and featured a forum on child-rearing along with articles on artificial insemination and postponed motherhood.

As for fashion, women can still turn to Flare for the practical, though the spreads show fewer items and tend to be more artistic. Still, Flare is rooted in reality-it’s not a W or Harper’s Bazaar where you can’t even see the clothes. Boyd draws on nightclubs for social references, so the clothes are generally more funky than corporate.

The nightlife approach stems from Boyd’s life as a “club kid” in the mid-eighties. A time when the fashion scene in Toronto was growing-Queen Street West was a budding fashion centre and young up and coming designers hung out in the popular “Twilight Zone,” where Boyd worked while going to university. The experience has given Boyd a street authenticity and a connection to the fashion scene in Toronto that previous editors haven’t had. “It puts her in a better position as editor because she understands the industry from its roots,” says Delap. “Trickle up from the streets has always been the strongest force in fashion.”

Making Flare a stronger force in fashion writing, senior editor Deborah Fulsang brings in historical and sociological perspectives to her subjects. The tuxedo, for instance, and how it’s just as relevant in the nineties as it was when Griswold Lorillard invented it in 1886 by cutting the tails off his jacket and naming it after his country club. Or a critical piece discussing the caricature and fetishism that dominated last season’s fashion shows. Boyd’s Flare will sacrifice pictures for words, treating fashion as a subject-something that some say was previously missing in the magazine.

It also makes room to be entertaining. In “Demi, Me and More,” (November 1997) writer Liane Kotler recounts how she infiltrated the Paris couture shows. After no celebrities attended Gianni Versace’s first show of the day (to which she had a ticket), she hid out for two hours in the auditorium’s bathroom waiting for the second show to start so she could mingle with the famous. She then sat in a reserved seat at the Dior show (to which she hasn’t been invited) among stars, princesses and famous wives. And interviewed some of them, like Ivana Trump on what she thinks of her 16 year-old daughter modelling: “Well, I prrrrrefer de matematiks to de molelink. Sklool comes first.'” Profound? Hardly. Entertaining? Absolutely. What really makes the piece successful is its ordinary-Canadian-in-Paris premise, which allows ordianry readers to imagine being in the writer’s shoes. Boyd is unapologetic for the frivolity that thrives in fashion magazines. The answer is classic unadorned Boyd: “It should all be there.”

It’s a Saturday morning in January and Suzanne Boyd is lounging in her 17th floor condo in downtown Toronto. She looks casually sophisticated in black slim pants and a bulky dark grey sweater; her curls tucked away under a cowprint fedora. On her pedicured feet are a pair of black Fila slides-it’s a wonder she’s not in heels.

Her home is cozy, and big enough for someone who’s barely there, but a tiny highrise apartment reminds her too much of work. She yearns for a big deck and a garden-which she has no intention of tending herself.

The decor is eclectic-Thai cabinets, an aqua-blue ceramic coffee table with a mosaic of a crusader, a leopard-print area rug, and Oriental paintings on mustard colored walls. Books are stacked up underneath the coffee table, and the four she is currently reading-V.S. Naipul’s Way of the World and Enigma of Arrival, Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha– are piled up on a side chair.

Unlike her office, the house is immaculately tidy-almost too tidy, not quite lived in. The kitchen is stark white and bare, not a single appliance sits on the counters. In the dining room, a large painting takes up most of one wall. It’s oil and house paint on wood, with overlapping graffitti-like writing. Phrases like “smash the wall of,” followed by the words hate, discipline, marriage and silence, cover the canvas. It’s all about breaking inhibitions, says Boyd. She discovered it in a restaurant and had to have it. Sometimes she’ll walk over and just stare at it. “It makes you remember that your life doesn’t have to be in a box.”

Feeling constricted is one thing Boyd hates. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the regimented routine of her young life in boarding school. But her need to be free and to experiment is what arguably has made Flare more hip. She’s not afraid to put a man on the cover or run provocative pieces likely to offend.

She’s already excited about the April issue, a theme issue on single life, in which the magazine will feature an article on “spinsters” in the nineties. “I’m just dying to blast that word on the cover because I know people will be so offended by it,” says Boyd. Point being that whether people voice it, the stereotype that there’s something wrong with single women still exists. And Boyd-herself a single woman-would more likely laugh than cringe if you were to call her a spinster. Political correctness is just not on the agenda-for Suzanne Boyd or for Flare.