This inconspicuous web server – and others like it – will probably play a crucial role in the long-term health of Canadian magazines. Large and small publications have started their own websites, though they aren’t seeing profits yet. Shift Online is leading the way with the most impressive, and most expensive, site. Other magazines are wary of investing too much money in an unpredictable medium, but they’re also afraid to miss an opportunity to build reader loyalty. Nor do publishers want to be mere onlookers if the profits do come rolling in.

Less than a decade ago, people laughed at the Internet. Back then, CD-ROMs got all the attention. “The Internet was CD-ROM’s poor bastard cousin who won the lottery,” laughs Dave Sylvestre, lead online designer at Shift. “Everyone used to sneer at the Internet, but now it’s where all the action is.”

With the number of wired Canadian households growing – it blossomed to 24 per cent by December 1999 – publishers can no longer ignore the promising medium. “The demographic that is not interested in the Web is dying. I mean actually dying,” says Rachel Ross, an interactive producer at MSNBC. “I’ve heard of kids who don’t know how to turn on the TV but love to go online and surf.”

In 1994, Shift became the first Canadian magazine to go online, and it remains the trendsetter. “Shift Onlineis the model that everyone would like to aspire to,” says Craig Saila, online Money editor at CANOE, Canada’s leading news and information site. For a magazine devoted to digital culture, a website was a natural – perhaps even essential – offshoot. “When we started, it was just the beginning of the World Wide Web,” says Andrew Heintzman, who recently resigned as publisher of Shift. “We just had a hunch that this was an interesting new opportunity for us.” But it didn’t take long for other magazines to join the growing Internet frenzy. Around 1996, several magazines launched sites that mirrored their print versions, but these trial balloons soon took on lives of their own.

For some magazines, the Web became a valuable way to build the brand. The Canadian Business site, which started in September 1997, has done this so effectively that the magazine now plans to expand the site until it becomes a self-sufficient hub where business-to-business transactions take place. “There was an awareness that sooner or later we had to get more serious about the Web and having a brand that is an information provider, not just a magazine,” explains Alex Beckett, website manager at Canadian Business.

Other magazines wanted to get on the Web to reach a wider audience. As Paula Gignac, web business manager at Chatelaine Connects, says, these sites link Canada’s population, which is small compared with the huge distance it spreads across. The Chatelaine site, which started in 1996, gets over one million page views (the number of times a page is fully downloaded) per month, putting it in the top three Canadian magazine sites for traffic, according to 11 CORINFO Research and Information Services, Inc.

Although the Web still involves a lot of experimentation, there are a few basic guidelines to building successful magazine sites. In a 1997 study published in the Canadian Journal of Communication, researchers found that two main factors influence the acceptability of electronic journals: human factors (such as the searching capabilities of a site) and economic factors (such as online subscription fees). Given that few Canadian magazines currently charge users, the success or failure of a site can rest on the design. Since very few people who get information from the Web read every word on a page, it is crucial for designers to incorporate easy-to-read text into their layouts. Jim Carroll, co-author of the Canadian Internet Handbook, says readers are used to professional layouts in print magazines and expect the same high calibre from websites. “People won’t go to a site and stay there if it looks amateurish,” he says.

Many magazines continually redesign their sites to keep up with demanding audiences, but the small staffs at most sites make this a difficult task. These changes range from minute text alterations to massive navigation modifications. Working within the limitations of HTML, Alex Dordevic, the editor and publisher of TRIBE Magazine, and Dan Rice, the brains behind the colourful TRIBE site, put a hard-to-miss Pictures icon on their main page after readers complained they couldn’t find the popular snapshots of raves and clubs. In an effort to make listings more accessible on the simply designed broken pencil site, which went online in 1995, Hal Niedzviecki, editor and publisher of the indie-culture magazine, added a search engine in 1998.

Another central element to these sites is editorial content.In March 1999, the Saturday Night site underwent a massive redesign to better reflect the site’s print sister. In addition to the Canadian Letters section and other content from the magazine, the site now offers Web-exclusive material. Clive Thompson, a technology columnist for Newsday and editor at large at Shift, likes the way the Saturday Night site, which started in spring 1998 with a budget of $25,000, holds many archives – a read-’em-and-toss-’em subscriber’s dream. But MSNBC’s Ross, who worked as an online editor at the Toronto Life site in 1997, stresses the importance of posting more than just shovelware from the print magazines on these sites. “You know how you can just watch Canadian television and tell it’s Canadian television just by looking at it?” she asks. “I think the mark of a Canadian online magazine is a lack of original content.”

If Canadian sites are short on fresh content,many try to make up for it by building online communities. Reader interaction, a key part of successful websites, can be anything from signing electronic guest books to emailing staff. Chat rooms, which are usually monitored by an editor or webmaster, make people feel like part of a community – and that brings them back to the site.

Today’s Parent has had success with its well-used forum groups, which span topics from nutrition to single parenting. The five original message groups have increased to 16. Online editor Dan Bortolotti was shocked to learn how popular the site’s old chat room was when he shut it down for a few weeks of maintenance. So many readers complained about the disappearance that the online team had to put the simply designed chat room back up.

Michelle Houlden, a graphics editor with a young daughter, visits Today’s Parent‘s forums daily. She gets as excited finding out whether fellow users have had babies or become pregnant as she does watching her favourite soaps. “The forums are a place to meet cyberfriends, share ideas and unload frustrations to willing ears,” says Houlden, who got hooked after asking how to get her daughter to brush her teeth.

In addition to offering interactivity, by including a users’ poll, the Shift site takes advantage of advanced design technology – another element that sets it apart from the sometimes drab world of online magazines. When Barnaby Marshall became online editor and producer of Shift Online in December 1996, he knew he wanted to use Shockwave Flash technology, which allows designers to create moving images that combine sound and animation. When Marshall first introduced the alternative Flash version of the site in 1997, most users became frustrated with the problems they had downloading the program, though they could have opted for the standard HTML version of the site.

Today, Marshall feels vindicated by his decision to use Flash because 88 per cent of Web surfers now have it. More important, Shift Online records 1.2 million page impressions (which are measured by how many times a rectangular banner ad is shown) each month. One of the benefits of Flash is its ability to make a simple image come to life by simply rolling a cursor over it. “It’s a good visual metaphor for the idea of digging deeper,” says Sylvestre, who has been at Shift for three years. “With the Web, even at its best, you can drill down until you’re exhausted, or you can just sort of skim the surface.”

Marshall is not interested in people who skim the continued on page 69 surface. With his tech-savvy audience in mind, he’s constantly working to improve the suspension of disbelief on the site. When you watch a movie, he explains, you aren’t thinking about the frames of film or the projector. “But with the Web, the technology is so in-your-face – crashing, burning, not working properly – that it is very difficult to lose oneself. Not knowing how somebody does something, that’s the magic of all entertainment media. You look at it and let it wash over you and you’re absorbed in it.”

Ruining the suspension of disbelief is one of many complaints about the technology. Peter Giffen, editor ofSympatico NetLife, says some print publications try to recreate their magazines online without taking full advantage of the multimedia aspects available. This defeats the purpose of having a site. But Peter Wilson, Net Works editor at The Vancouver Sun, says technology for technology’s sake can also be bothersome. “Fill a website with all the latest dancing, jiggling, morphing bits and then add them to various forms of music streaming and you just have a dancing, jiggling, morphing, all-singing, all-dancing jumble,” complains Wilson. He cites Shift Online as an example, dismissing the Flash-enhanced version of the site as irritating and distracting. “Nothing seems content to stay still or remain solid for a moment. Sorry, but reading is a linear activity.”

Whatever their design, few people expect websites will replace traditional magazines. “The vast majority of readers still like to curl up on the couch and look at a good magazine,” says Carroll. “When VCRs came out 20 years ago, everybody ran around saying ‘Movie theatres are dead.’ And look where we are today.”

But like a VCR in fast forward, the Internet shows no signs of slowing down. Bortolotti, whose Today’s Parentsite cost less than $30,000 to launch in 1996, says publishers have reached the point where they’re no longer content to simply have a website because everyone else does. They now want to make money. “It’s a business,” he says. “You can’t provide a service to readers if you’re just pouring money down the tubes.” Carroll suspects there is great frustration in magazine boardrooms across the country. Publishers think they need sites because their competitors do, but it’s costing a fortune. “You have to feel kind of sorry for them because it’s a massive sinkhole,” he says. “Nobody wants to talk about the fact that they’re losing their shirts.”

With this grim thought in mind, publishers are still confident that profits are possible. Judging by the approximate $100,000 in revenue the Shift site made in 1999, the potential exists. “There’s such an opportunity for growth that what you’re doing by forcing it to make a profit early is capping its ability to grow,” Heintzman explains. At this stage, Shift is still putting resources into it, trying to boost traffic. Shift Online‘s original budget of $1,000 has soared in the past six years, but because Shift Media is a privately owned company, Heintzman will only say it is now somewhere under $500,000.

For online magazines to flourish financially, they also have to start thinking about subscription fees. Canadian Business may soon collect micropayments (minimal fees that readers are charged to read online articles) for archived stories. “The Web is a good environment for offering archived information,” says Beckett. “We’re probably not enthusiastic about offering it for free.”

In 1999, 11 CORINFO reported that 74 per cent of Canadians would be willing to pay for online content, up markedly from only eight per cent in 1996. E-commerce is also part of the industry that is expected to explode. Many sites, including youth-culture oriented Vice, have major plans for this type of business in the near future. Within two years, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice, wants to bring in at least U.S. $100,000 a week selling products such as streetwear and sex toys from its site. And Shift Online may soon start an online store that would catalogue merchandise of interest to their readers, like electronics and clothing.

Money is never far from a publisher’s mind. “The Web is this great opportunity, but at the same time, it’s not the kind of thing that you can stick one toe in. You have to be fully committed to it,” says Heintzman. “The problem for a lot of people is they’re like, ‘Oh well, we’ll put up a website, and then we’ll be rich.'” Most of these sites are not raking in much revenue yet, but the Internet is growing and has gained mainstream acceptance. And just like retail stores with “clicks-and-mortar” strategies (meaning they have both an Internet and a physical presence), Carroll says Canadian magazines will have to get online to be successful.

Adds Ross, who now works in Seattle: “Canada better catch up because it’s getting fast-kicked at the moment. I think Shift is the only one that could even compete in the ring with U.S. magazine websites.” With that weight on its back, the magazine industry may have to stop flipping pages and spend more time at its computer screen to brace itself for an online future.

Pulling herself up, she tells them to wait and tells me that we are going to the bathroom. Once inside, she brushes her hair, takes a few notes and tells me how happy she is to see someone “normal” finally. “I’m ready to die,” she says. “I need some decent food.”

We walk out of the bathroom, past a baby who has been left alone in his carrier on the floor. “What is that?!” she asks in disgust, as we walk over to the food concession. They serve only hot dogs, so we opt for instant oatmeal and their poor-excuse-for-coffee instead. Gale enters (curious as to why we haven’t returned), and we sit next to a urine-scented man in a black-and-white sweater who offers us an assortment of drugs. It’s a scene with all the elements of a typical Eckler postcard from the edge: real people on the fringes of society, locales that are exotic by virtue of their ordinariness and, of course, Eckler herself, a carefree 26 year old. The bus trip is part of a promotional deal that Greyhound Canada and its new U.S. counterpart were offering on the longest bus route in North America: Whitehorse to Miami. “Here’s the deal: If you make the trip in less than a week, you get a full refund,” she writes. “All you need is the signature from a Greyhound employee at each end. I was determined to get my dough back.” When Ken Whyte, editor in chief of the National Post, first called to suggest the idea, Eckler responded by singing “Welcome to Miami” from Will Smith’s song and said yes on the spot because she knew it would make a great story. “I want to be the world-weary traveller who does wacky things,” she says. “I just think it’s so cool.” But now, sitting in this dirty station, she feels more weary than cool, more grumpy than wacky.

While Eckler is masquerading as just another bus traveller, it’s clear she’s anything but: she’s more Starbucks than bus-station grind, and the Roxy cargo pants she’s wearing cost almost as much as the bus fare she wants refunded. In fact, she’s one of the Post’s most popular columnists, a writer of stories that have been described as fluff – and she admits they are: pieces about football games in sports bars, courier party hangouts and pancake days with firefighters. They’re first-person with a youthful view rare in the mainstream press, and if they lack analysis, some argue that they at least provide a voice for a class of people who are largely absent from the pages of the Post. But is Eckler an old-fashioned, feet-on-the-pavement reporter, sniffing out stories from the fringe and giving voice to the concerns of the dispossessed? Or is she simply a dilettante, exploiting the poor in a kind of cross-class tourism for the enjoyment of the Post’s more affluent readers?

It was in the kitchen of the Eckler’s North York home that Rebecca first envisioned herself as a journalist. Her mother’s friend Maxine started a typical “You’re in Grade 12 – so what are you going to do with your life?” afternoon chat. Although Rebecca was an avid reader who had been writing stories since she was a kid, the answer had never been clear to her. She didn’t read newspapers. She watched little television news. Amazing as it seems, she decided on the spot – “I want to become a journalist.”

After squeezing through the current-events test, Eckler made it into Ryerson j-school. She attended all her journalism classes and skipped most of the others. School “never figured too heavily,” says Dick Snyder, a former j-schooler who was her boyfriend at the time. “It was just something to get done.” Eckler says she didn’t learn much from her classes, finding fulfillment instead in the features and profiles she was writing for the North Toronto Post, a small, swanky community paper that covers Leaside and Rosedale. Although she was leaning toward specialization in print journalism, she applied for the broadcast program. Part of the attraction was the intense competition, part of it was because many of her friends were opting for broadcast. Once in, she earned the third-highest grade in the class. Mark Bulgutch, senior executive producer of CBC Newsworld, says Eckler exceeded his expectations for students in his third-year broadcasting class. One of his assignments required them to bring in a guest for a live interview. “You can bring in anybody,” Bulgutch says. “Rebecca got Tyley Ross, the star of Tommy.” Her impressive guest was a sign of the relentless tenacity that would become her hallmark: she called and faxed the press people, begging until he agreed.

In fourth year, Eckler earned an internship at Pamela Wallin Live, working with five bookers/researchers lining up guests for 201 shows each season. After a semester of interning, she was hired to produce full-time. Wallin says the decision was instinctive. “You have to assess their judgement, and either you trust it or you don’t,” Wallin says. “You watch somebody work and you see the kind of judgement calls they make. They have to understand both the idiosyncrasies of the program and of me.” Eckler’s judgement calls were good – good enough to book Jacques Parizeau, who hates doing English media, by promising him the entire show. She also used charm and persistence to book Jean Charest after he took the Quebec Liberal leadership.

Eckler prides herself on booking Parizeau, but says he wasn’t her most difficult interviewee. That honour goes to magician David Copperfield. Eckler interned at the Calgary Herald as an arts reporter for the three summer periods during Wallin’s off-season. In her second summer term, Copperfield was to perform in Calgary but the press releases said he wasn’t doing interviews. When Eckler requested time with the magician anyway, she was told by the press agent to send her questions by email instead. “But I begged him,” she says. “I said that I was a huge magic fan and my whole life I’ve always wanted to meet him.” Her story (a lie: the only thing about him she found engaging was the fact that he wouldn’t talk to her) worked and she got a five-minute telephone interview with magic’s pinup boy, sandwiched between two of Copperfield’s Vegas shows. Copperfield gave her enough for her story, but called her bluff. “He asks me, ‘So, who are your favourite magicians?’ I was like, ‘Damn, well, you are one, and David Ben, have you heard of him?'” Copperfield had not heard of the Toronto performer, but Eckler embellished a bit, complimented Copperfield again and then went on with her questions. When the story ran, mentioning the interview, The Calgary Suncalled the press people, furious that they hadn’t been granted the same access. Some would trumpet the scoop, but Eckler claims it was no big deal; it was all done in the name of competition. “By the end of the day, it’s still David Copperfield,” she says. “I mean, how ridiculous.”

When all you see, mile after mile, are highways and trees, conversation is a great time killer – and most bus conversations are far from unexciting. I asked Darren, my first bus buddy, where he was going.

The bus pulls out of the Chicago station, Eckler and I huddle under a blanket and jacket, fighting off the air-conditioned breeze. She tells me how her adventure started when she left the quaint station in Whitehorse and boarded her first bus, where she struck up a conversation with Darren. Darren was a man in his twenties with a mouthful of bruised and chipped teeth, wearing a bandanna on his head and jeans tucked into a pair of army boots. The longest bus trip he had ever taken was a nine-day journey from Whitehorse to Tennessee through a snowstorm. Now, he was on his way to Saskatoon to meet his girlfriend. Sitting across from Eckler, this tiny woman in her Expedition hiking socks, Darren could understand the distance ahead of her, but the distance between them was far greater. “So where are you going?” she asked. His answer led to his life story – how his sister, a heroin-addicted prostitute, was in jail for theft; his mother, also an addict, had hepatitis B from a needle and hepatitis C from a transfusion; his father was also in jail, 10 months for assault, until he got out and hanged himself. Actually, it wasn’t his real father, Darren was told after the suicide. This was exactly what Eckler had come here for. He finished his story and she scribbled notes. Sitting on those rainbow-striped seats with me later, she reflects. “What can I tell him? Nothing. Nothing. I don’t even have parents who are divorced, that’s how normal my family is. Or abnormal maybe.”

The episode made for a gripping start to Eckler’s bus adventure. But what some praise as her fearless ability to talk to anyone, anytime, and then whip it into an entertaining story, she describes as indifference. “The funny thing is, I don’t care about my stuff. I mean, I care enough that I want to write a good piece, but at the end of the day I just don’t care.” It seems odd for her to have so little feeling for her work, but that lack of connection allows her to attack every story, no matter how light, with impersonal vigor. Eckler admits that this approach often makes her feel guilty because once a story is done, it leaves her head. The guilt, she says, comes from comparing herself with other reporters who get wrapped up and emotionally engaged in their work, while she simply moves on. She confessed this sin to Ken Whyte once and he told her it was her “greatest gift.” And it’s a gift that’s been put to notable use in the Post‘s pages, though Eckler wasn’t part of Whyte’s first string when he built his Post team in 1998. Eckler first approached Whyte to profile him in 1995 for the North York Post, and later for an interview on Pamela Wallin Live – both in his pre-Post days. Eckler kept in touch, bluntly telling Whyte that she wanted a job. While Whyte had wined and dined practically every young journalist in Canada, he didn’t hire Eckler until a couple of weeks before the Post launched. Almost immediately, Eckler established her personal style: a print version of Ally McBeal – feminine, slightly neurotic, self-absorbed and cute. It wasn’t long before her editors were using her to write entertaining stories about unconventional subjects.

Mark Stevenson, an editor at the Post, says Eckler is good at going into a situation or event and finding a humorous, offbeat story. “She’s best when she’s playing off other people,” he says. When I ask him what he thinks of the term “fluff,” he says, “I don’t have a problem with it. Her stuff is fluffy and I like it. People want news and they want to be entertained, and I think it is critical for a paper to have both.” Stevenson has edited several pieces by Eckler, including her work in the “Best of Summer Festivals” series, which took her across Canada. Eckler visited a variety of “odd” people: a lighthouse keeper, a static mime and Dick Assman, a Petro-Canada station employee made famous when late-night talk-show host David Letterman repeatedly made fun of his name on air. In Edmonton, she visited the Strathcona Hotel, where you can walk in and get a room with bath for $29.15; without for $19.95. It was a story made for Eckler, with a run-down setting complete with slanted floors and communal co-ed showers at the end of the hall. The characters – like the housekeeper who makes beds with a smoke in her mouth and occupants who happened to be actors from the Fringe Theatre Festival – were people, like those on the bus, who can’t afford mint-on-the-pillow options.

But will Eckler’s position as the queen of fluff limit her career options? For now, she’s content with her place at the Post. She was given a raise, has her own columnist’s sketch (which, depending on your artistic sensibilities, can be seen as punishment or reward) and enjoys the freedom to pitch and write what she pleases. Not bad for a reporter just four years out of school. But she also says she’d like to write more weighty stories and possibly try political writing. Mark Stevenson feels that she should stick to what she’s doing now. “I imagine that public policy readers find her too frivolous,” he says. “Can I see her on Parliament Hill? I don’t know. I always like to think that people should play to their strengths, and for now, I think her strength is what she’s doing.”

Sitting on a bus for long periods, simply put, sucks. After two days, you feel like you’ve finished a marathon. Every muscle aches, even though the only exercise you’ve had is running to the washroom during pit stops….By Day 4, you start playing crazy mind games. My two were: Who do I know who would do this? (Answer: no one). What would I kill for now? (Answer: sushi, Starbucks, bed, massage, shower.)

If Day four produced mind games it was because Day three brought mental breakdown. It was noon on Wednesday at the Seattle bus stop and Eckler was, to put it plainly, breaking. The stench of her hair and the grease on her skin had become unbearable. Exhausted, she checked into the nicest hotel within walking distance (at a cost of U.S. $125, too expensive for any of her travelling companions); ordered room service and a movie; bathed, showered, bathed again, then tried to sleep. Five hours later, she returned to the station. There were people sitting everywhere, the restroom stalls were barred and the smell of bleach was overpowering. For the first time Eckler felt unsafe. She’d come an hour and a half early so she could get a pair of empty seats (she’d bought two tickets, in fact, to ensure it). But the line was full. She walked to the end, past three teenagers who turned and spat at her feet and four women who sucked their teeth and yelled, “White girl, white girl!” “I started to get teary,” she says. “I was like, ‘Rebecca, just swallow, just swallow, count to three.'” Reaching the end of the line, she found refuge with a couple who were deciding how many more mickeys of liquor they should have bought before coming. Finally, the bus doors opened; Eckler found a seat and started to cry. The man seated next to her, a cab driver from Guyana named Samuel, noticed and started talking to her. “He said that he missed his bus, that it must have been intended so that he could help me, that God had planned it. And I started to believe that. I mean, maybe I don’t believe that now. I’m not Christian, but still, they [Christians] calm you,” she told me later. Writing about the experience, Eckler was as keen-eyed in her observation of herself as she was of others. But, as usual, the observation didn’t go below the surface: no deep thoughts, just on to the next scene.

Finally, just after noon, six days, 15 hours and 22 minutes after I left Whitehorse, we arrived in Miami. I hailed the first cab I saw and booted it out of the terminal. I lost my temper when the cab driver took me to a crappy hotel after I specifically asked for a nice one. He called me The Mean Lady. After that long on a bus, I think it was justified.

Justified? I wasn’t sure, because Eckler had impatiently accused our cabbie, Paul, who had lived in Miami for 15 years, of trying to scam us. He had told us that the Miami Airport Hilton hotel at which she had a reservation was the same distance away as this fun little spot next to the beach. Eckler didn’t like the place, so he apologized, and then he dropped us off at the four-diamond, 20-acre Fontainebleau Hilton, an old favourite of Sammy Davis Jr. and Sinatra, where some rooms run up to $6,500 per night. The cab fare was U.S. $32. “That’s when it hit me,” Eckler wrote later in the Post. “I’d forgotten to get my bus receipt signed at the Miami bus station. This has convinced me that Greyhound’s $129 deal is foolproof for the company. The bus company knows that by the time a passenger gets to Miami, she is so damned tired she is going to forget to confirm that she made the trip.” We walked into the plush resort tower laughing at the situation, only to find out that they didn’t have any room. So we made our way over to a Days Inn instead. Early the next morning I hopped onto a SuperShuttle Van and headed to the airport to fly home. Out of curiosity, I asked my driver, Eddie, where the Miami Airport Hilton is. “From the bus station? Ohhh, that’s only about three minutes away.” Apparently I had witnessed a little bit of Eckler’s good judgement, even when the intent wasn’t to charm. Who’s feeling naive now?

Back in Toronto, a week later, I was walking down Bloor Street, heading home from a visit to Eckler’s apartment. Her story had hit the stands just four days ago, and the consensus from the people I had spoken to was “it’s great.” In my bag, however, was a critical letter from a doctoral student in Vancouver who has plenty of bus experience. He says the story was entertaining, but he was hoping to read “more about how [Eckler] may have grown as a result of the trip.” He ends the letter saying: “P.S. I can tell you that most of the hard-luck cases with limited cash flow would never have forgotten to get that signature in Miami. The rebate would have been the first thing on their minds.”

Eckler’s oversight – and her interpretation of it – probably rang true to the Post‘s readers, readers she admits are more likely to be lawyers and stockbrokers than bus riders. While she says her own lifestyle is more university-student than upscale, she, too, is a visitor to the bleach-scented reality displayed in her stories, where people most of us would avoid on the street become amusing characters whose sometimes painful life details are played for colour and laughs. But Eckler says she’s no voyeur: she’s a truth-teller who pokes fun at her own inadequacies along the way. “I’m telling the truth,” she says, “and if people can’t deal with that, then they just aren’t opening their eyes to what I see.” But it’s truth without insight, storytelling without a point. In Eckler’s columns, the afflicted stay afflicted and the comfortable, well, for them a pricey hotel room and a good cup of coffee are just a credit card away.

Others on the boat – 123 passengers in total – include farmers, students and fishmongers. Some have been given money by members of their village in hopes that once they are established in Canada, the sponsors might have the opportunity to follow. Some of the men have boarded because they fear imprisonment or a forced vasectomy by government officials who have discovered they have more than one child. They make the trip knowing that if their gamble is unsuccessful, the families they leave behind will have to pay off the smugglers. The voyage takes 39 days. Wooden slats placed over bags of rice are used for mattresses, and full buckets of human waste spill onto the decks. The only food available – chicken and rice – becomes contaminated. The stench is overwhelming, and several on the ship fall ill.

On July 20, the boat is tracked by the Canadian fisheries department and is towed to shore. The passengers are filthy, starving and confused. The fruit seller is handcuffed along with the others and put on a bus headed for a Canadian Forces Base in Esquimalt, B.C., where he realizes his ordeal, which looked to be almost over, is just beginning.

Over the next few months, three more boatloads – 599 Chinese migrants in all – would arrive on the shores of British Columbia. Although Canada routinely accepts 25,000 refugees every year with minimal media uproar, the plight of the 599 would become the most-talked-about domestic news story of the summer. As one reporter put it: “You’ve got hundreds of people standing on a ship out in the middle of nowhere – on a ship that looks like if you touch it too hard, it’s going to sink. For lack of a better way of putting it, it’s eye candy.”

While reporters found the human drama irresistible – and compelling visuals kept it consistently in the front sections of the papers – editorial writers and columnists across the country were incensed. They manufactured an immigration crisis where none existed. An examination of the newspaper coverage over the summer reveals not only blatant inaccuracies and misconceptions but also decidedly xenophobic undertones.

Just after the arrival of the first boat, three of Canada’s major dailies – The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and the National Post – ran editorials condemning the Chinese migrants. They were portrayed as criminals, ungrateful for the special treatment they were receiving in Canada, and as a drain on the country’s financial resources. Even worse, they were often depicted as an uncontrollable threat to public health.

The headlines said it all: “Ship’s passengers must be sent home” (The Vancouver Sun, July 23), “Boat people who need a return ride” (The Globe and Mail, July 23), “Gatecrashers are not welcome” (National Post, July 22). Canada’s immigration and refugee policies are admittedly complex, but while reporters managed to cobble together facts from government and armed forces spokespeople, a number of columnists and editorial writers didn’t appear to make any effort to understand the system. They simply jumped to conclusions. TheGlobe protested that “entry into this country must be orderly.” Editorials complained that the migrants – people who boarded floating death traps in a desperate attempt for a better life – didn’t enter the country through the proper channels. They were called queue jumpers. The fact is, a majority of the newcomers claimed refugee status, and under this country’s immigration laws, would-be refugees have, in effect, a separate queue. At the very least, they’re entitled to a hearing to determine whether their claim is legitimate.

Nevertheless, the migrants’ actions came under media criticism from the start. When the first boatload arrived at CFB Esquimalt, food was provided by Ming’s Chinese restaurant. Peacefully protesting the quality of food they were being served as well as a lack of time for personal hygiene, the migrants refused to eat. The Globeran the story under the inflammatory headline “Smuggled Chi- nese revolt in B.C.” Two days later, the paper published a column by Vancouver writer Paul Sullivan. “They’re not even grateful, staging a brief hunger strike apparently in protest against the quality of Ming’s noodles,” he wrote. “If it goes the way these things normally go, their desperate gamble will pay off.” This, despite the fact that between April 1994 and March 1999, the Vancouver acceptance rate of finalized refugee claims was only 14.4 per cent of 1,492 people.

Later, government sources told reporters they had increased RCMP presence after the migrants were found hoarding everyday items – pens, combs, safety pins and, in one instance, a folded tinfoil plate that a man was using to cut his hair. Although there were no reports of violence, the Sun trumpeted: “Migrants face tight security after police find weapons.”

Articles across the country were laced with xenophobia. But the most egregious examples, perhaps not surprisingly, appeared in the National Post. Diane Francis, whose column runs in the Financial Post section, used the arrival of the migrants to fuel an anti-immigrant crusade.

In an effort to uncover the immigration “boondoggle,” she aligned herself with an ultraconservative organization called the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee. The group is responsible for a website that posts what is widely considered hate literature. It features the phrase “Immigration Can Kill You!” with the word “kill” dripping with blood, and such headlines as “Diseases from the third world can be passed by not washing hands!” A box at the bottom of the site proclaims: “Made with European culture, accept no substitute!” The director of the CFIRC, Paul Fromm, is a notorious racist who has defended hate-mongers such as James Keegstra and Ernst Zundel. He was once videotaped addressing skinheads at a “Martyr’s Day” rally and was later removed from teaching high school students and reassigned to teaching adults. His group’s site has links to Francis’s anti-immigrant articles online.

In her column on August 21 – headlined “These refugees and immigrants can be deadly” – Francis shared “health horror stories” that were brought to her attention by the CFIRC. She portrayed immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe as diseased and unacceptable for admittance into Canada. In the past decade, she wrote, the influx of refugees means “an awful lot of Typhoid Marys are probably in our midst. Who knows how many Canadians have died or been injured as a result?” To support her contention, she cited several vague examples, including this one: “In 1986, a Manitoba woman died of a rare blood parasite from Central and South America even though she had not travelled there.”

On August 24, Francis defended her opinions and those of Paul Fromm by writing, “anyone who criticizes immigrants or refugees, or the policies and process in place, is labeled a ‘racist’ by vested interests.” Fromm, she added, is merely “a Canadian [trying to take] a stance against immigration/ refugee practices.” She went on to list reasons why her views are not racist. “It is not racist to enforce borders. It’s racist to insist that anyone of colour can intrude on our society at will because they have superior rights. For those who agree with me,” her justification continued, “remember it is not racist to prevent undesirables from entering our country.” The migrants housed in the gym at CFB Esquimalt “are accessories to a crime and should be punished, not given room service and lawyers….Canada is our home. No one can force us to invite someone to supper if we don’t like them, can’t afford to feed them, can’t communicate with them or they don’t know how to behave.” For Francis, “it is really that simple and has nothing to do with bigotry.”

It is late September and about 70 people have gathered in Toronto at the Bloor Street office of the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigrant Settlement. They are here to discuss the media portrayal of immigrants and refugees as a threat to public health. Francis’s xenophobic columns, both before and after the arrival of the Chinese migrants, were the impetus for Dr. Morton Beiser to organize the discussion. Beiser is the director of CERIS and a professor of cultural pluralism and health, Clarke Division Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, at the University of Toronto. He is also the author of Strangers at the Gate: The “Boat People’s” First 10 Years in Canada, in which he demonstrated that Indochinese boat people, 10 years after their arrival in 1979, were more likely than the average Canadian to be employed, were using fewer social services and were giving back to society more than they had originally taken out.

At the CERIS gathering, Beiser speaks softly, in the measured tones of an aca- demic. “There are some real issues with respect to health and immigrants and refugees that we don’t want to lose sight of,” he says. “And if health issues are being used as a kind of metaphor for other kinds of anti-immigration feelings, I think that has to be revealed.” Beiser sees a significant subtext to Francis’s tirades on supposed immigrant health problems. Referring to her August 21 column about disease-carrying immigrants from other continents, he says, “If you eliminate all of those places as sources of immigrants, what’s left? Presumably, the only people pure enough to come here are Americans and Western Europeans, people just like Diane Francis.”

The panel is a mix of health officials, journalists and politicians. The experts include Dr. Ron St. John, director of global surveillance and field epidemiology with Health Canada; Dr. Barbara Yaffe, director of communicable disease control for Toronto Public Health; and Dr. Jay Keystone, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and part of the Toronto General Hospital’s tropical disease unit. Among the journalists is Margaret Wente of the Globe, and Haroon Siddiqui, editor emeritus of The Toronto Star. The most lively comments from the participants, all of whom agree that there are imperfections in Canada’s lengthy immigration and refugee determination policies, relate to the role that journalism plays in informing public debate. Conspicuously absent from the panel, although she was invited, is Diane Francis.

Wente feels that there have been some purposefully inflammatory pieces on the migrants and that there is a market for scaremongering in Canadian journalism, mostly in columns. In news reporting, journalists are generally obliged to get the facts right, she says, while in commentary there is a mandate to get an audience and hold it. “There is an old adage in column writing: don’t make that call; you’ll wreck your thesis.” Keystone points to several instances when Francis apparently chose not to make that call before offering her anti-immigrant rants as fact. In one of her columns, she had written that “Asians are bringing syphilis and malaria, too, spread through prostitutes in that area of the world.” As Keystone explains to the panel, “malaria is not an STD. It is transmitted by mosquitoes.” He also takes issue with Francis’s claim that 25,000 refugees are let loose in Canada every year without being screened. Within 60 days of their arrival, all refugees must have a medical examination that includes a chest x-ray, urinalysis and, if they are over the age of 15, a test for syphilis. The department of citizenship and immigration could improve the system, he admits, but Francis’s notion that the current practices have allowed “an awful lot of Typhoid Marys” into the country is simply false. “There are 40 to 80 cases of typhoid fever in Canada every year, and most of those aren’t in immigrants,” he says. “The majority are in Canadians who travel abroad in high-risk areas.” The idea that closing the gates will keep out disease became obsolete with the advent of air travel. Refugees can’t be held responsible for the spread of diseases that could just as easily be brought to Canada by Post columnists returning from vacation.

For Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, a nonprofit umbrella organization that works to protect the rights of refugees in Canada and around the world, xenophobia in media coverage of the migrants was not surprising. “While there were some good pieces,” she says, “they came in reaction to some really very, very negative ones. And the negative ones continued to be prominent throughout. The extent of it and the viciousness with which the coverage was formulated was much worse than we’ve been used to in recent years. It was extremely discouraging.” Dench feels that Francis and the Post are not alone in their negative portrayal of refugees, although Francis “uses stronger language and less attention to accurate facts than others.”

For several months before the arrival of the Chinese migrants, the CCR tracked the dailies’ treatment of immigration issues. It found a pervasive anti-immigrant bias, particularly in the Post. In a letter dated May 21, 1999 – two months before the first boat of migrants arrived – the CCR wrote to Ken Whyte, the Post‘s editor in chief, pointing out “a significant disproportion of negative news stories and commentary concerning immigrants and refugees in Canada.” During the month of April 1999, the letter continues, the Post ran “17 articles and columns that referred to immigrants and refugees in Canada in an antipathetic context,” compared with only six articles and columns “in which the context was positive or supportive.”

The CCR singled out Francis, citing her depictions of “refugees and immigrants in this country as ‘undesirables’ (January 9), people who’ve made Canada ‘a nation of suckers’ (February 27), ‘trash’ (April 3), ‘criminals, warlords, and terrorists,’ ‘bogus and expensive’ (April 6) and ‘scum’ (April 8).”

The letter concluded: “The overall antipathetic attitude towards immigrants and refugees…is of grave concern to us and our 140-plus membership across Canada. In our opinion this is an urgent matter that requires immediate attention. As such we are requesting a meeting with you and your editorial staff in hope that we can 1) further discuss the concerns raised in this letter; and 2) foster a relationship to facilitate a better understanding of immigrant and refugee issues.”

What came in response was a fax from the Post‘s lawyers that ended: “The menacing tone of your letter and its slanderous allegations cannot form the basis of any constructive discourse between your Association and the newspaper. We have, therefore, counselled the newspaper not to meet with you.”

The powers that be at the Post are obviously reluctant to comment on accusations of bias. Over a three-month period, repeated efforts, via phone and email, to set up interviews with Whyte and Francis were ignored.

Outside of her columns, the only public forum in which Francis discussed her opinions was on The Editors, a round-table show that aired on CBC Newsworld in December. The panel of guests included Barbara McDougall, the former immigration minister, and Iona Campagnolo, chair of the Fraser Basin Council, with Keith Morrison of Dateline NBC as moderator.

Francis opened with comments familiar to those who read her column: that immigrants are contributing to the national unemployment problem, and that the current standard of living will be sacrificed if we don’t reduce the number allowed into this country. Good immigration is good for Canada, she maintained, while bad immigration is not. Asked to define what she meant by good and bad, she refused to go there. “Anybody opposed to immigration is [considered] a racist or a white supremacist,” she said, “and that’s where the whole thing gets bogged down. It’s politically very incorrect to even question it.”

She went on to accuse the government of arbitrarily choosing a magic number of immigrants granted entry each year. In response, McDougall (a Progressive Conservative) found herself defending the policies of the current citizenship and immigration minister, Elinor Caplan (a Liberal). The immigration target, McDougall pointed out, is one per cent of the population, and even that is rarely reached.

The discussion heated up when Campagnolo questioned whether her co-panellist was qualified to dictate public policy. Francis, who for months demonized immigrants and refugees in her columns, complained that she herself was being demonized. “You’re personalizing it again – Diane Francis, that right-winger from the United States, is an immigrant,” she said sarcastically to the panel. “You know the demonization that goes on in the debate. It’s always the demonization.” At which point, Morrison piped in: “Don’t be defensive, Diane; it’s all right.”

Unable to convince them of her point, Francis sighed: “It’s exasperating; it’s hopeless. People will not talk about this except on an emotional level.” Having already referred to newcomers as “guests in our living room,” however, she had made her feelings quite clear. “It’s a privilege to come to our country. [Immigrants] are here at our pleasure, because we need them.”

Many of the 599 Chinese migrants who came to Canada last summer won’t have the privilege of remaining. Some have been found to be illegitimate refugees and face deportation. Whether journalists influenced the process is impossible to say. But when its coverage is intelligent, accurate and balanced, the media can, and often do, play a valuable role in informing public debate. The misinformation spread by Francis and her ilk seriously undermined that function. The story of the fruit seller was never really told. It was lost in politicized editorial rants that tried to suggest our way of life was somehow threatened by a few hundred desperate foreigners arriving on our shores. The sad truth is that the anti-immigrant sentiment expressed in the coverage, the ugly racism that rose to the surface, is the real threat.

There are two personal-finance magazines here in Canada – or, at least, two with deep pockets. Toronto-based IE:Money is effectively a relaunch under a new editor, Charles Oberdorf, and, as of June 1999, a new owner (Transcontinental Publishing). MoneySense is a new publication by Rogers Media Inc., launched that same spring. Editorially, these two demonstrate how similar personal-finance magazines have to be, while also exhibiting how different they can become.

While IE:Money and MoneySense inevitably cover many of the same topics – investing, mortgages, estate planning, RRSPs, RIFs and the like – they are different in their respective focuses and approaches to those topics. These differences are driven by visions of their respective audiences: IE:Money expects its readership to have a previously existing penchant for personal finance, while MoneySense assumes that much of its readership has little (if any) prior financial understanding or interest. Given these different assumptions, it is likely that the two magazines will increasingly diverge in terms of content and personality as they develop.

The editorial assumptions being made by IE:Money flow logically from its business model. The magazine started in 1996 as a spin-off from Investment Executive, an 11-year-old trade publication distributed nationally 16 times a year. Whereas Investment Executive targets financial advisers, IE:Money is aimed at their clients – outsiders to the industry like you and me who are already involved enough with personal finance to be working with an adviser.

Initially sharing editor Tessa Wilmott with Investment Executive, IE:Money had several other editors before Oberdorf arrived in March 1999. Throughout, the magazine has continued to assume a relatively high level of investment knowledge on the part of most of its readers and to make heavy use of charts and tables to illustrate the subjects under discussion.

Nonetheless, Oberdorf is starting to develop his own editorial strategy for IE:Money. “I’m trying to make the magazine more explicitly about service, really do a lot of bullet-pointing and show readers exactly where their value is in every article,” he says. “I’m showing them, Here’s How You Do This.”

Whatever the editorial changes under way, the distribution method of IE:Money has stayed the same since 1996 and is a key component of the magazine’s business model. A significant portion of the circulation – greater than 40 per cent – is purchased by financial service professionals across the country who then give the copies to their clients. These clients reportedly spend over an hour with a copy of the magazine – a lot of exposure for ads that, thanks to this model, IE:Money doesn’t need as badly as it would otherwise. “We do make money on circulation,” says publisher Liz Martin – a reminder that the magazine is meant to make money, not just talk about it.

This distribution method raises an obvious editorial question: how can Oberdorf and IE:Money criticize the industry that serves as their distribution vehicle? If anything, Martin and Oberdorf argue, the arrangement provides a unique level of accountability. They have consultants look over the material, says Oberdorf, “people who really know the field. They’re not so much fact-checkers as they are personal-financial-planning checkers. I will send something to them and say, ‘Do you see any holes in this thing?’ I pay them for that. They’ll usually email me back the next morning and say something like ‘No, you’re clear,’ or maybe ‘The author missed one point and you should probably add it.'”

Oberdorf insists there is nothing he can’t write about. His main concern is to serve the reader, and the distribution method, instead of restricting content, promotes accuracy. Industry reaction to articles, he contends, proves his freedom of action. “God knows, if you saw the angry email I get from the brokers threatening to cancel subscriptions. If we make the slightest error we hear about it, dozens of times.” Still, it seems more than likely that the partnership with brokers plays a role in what the magazine covers.

Whatever questions may exist about the impact of this distribution method on content, there are no questions about the sophistication of the readers or their interest in the magazine’s investment focus. Virtually allIE:Money readers hold funds or stocks or both, more than half have GICs or T-bills and more than one-third own bonds. They take investing very seriously. “They are very goal-oriented and very interested in their personal well-being and wealth,” explains Martin. “They take courses and seminars, they read books and other magazines.” Despite this thirst for knowledge, she adds, her readers are not do-it-yourselfers. “IE:Money is designed for people who have an investment adviser.”

With circulation of 180,000 and roughly three readers per copy, the magazine has an audience of 541,000 people. The typical reader is 46 years of age, with an above-average household income, an RRSP portfolio worth about $100,000 and a non-RRSP portfolio of $80,000 to $90,000.

“The job of this magazine is to help readers solve problems and get the most from their money,” Oberdorf stresses. “I really try to do that in every story.” He’s like a teacher with a very large class, working through the curriculum and refining his material and methodology as he goes. He is also very much a student of any subject he takes on – one of his great strengths, says Martin.

“One of the things I’m trying to do,” explains Oberdorf, “is broaden the range, so that while we’re covering [recurring issues], we’re also covering some other things, like the Women in Money section [December 1999]. That was something we hadn’t done before and I haven’t seen elsewhere.”

True enough. Personal finance rarely deals in gender. In that special section, the magazine took standard topics, such as finding good advice and investment clubs, and focussed on what women need to know to get the best financial help. “You’re dealing with the same concepts and in some ways the same information, but you’re packaging it differently,” he adds. “That may make it clearer for some people.”

This fits with his editorial image of the magazine. Even though his readership tends to know something about the field, he doesn’t assume a standard level of awareness across the board. “People are sophisticated about different things,” he says. “There are ones who have been investing in funds for years, for example, but are just starting to dip their feet into the stock market.” The magazine concentrates on investment topics, but within that niche, IE:Money understands it must appeal to a significant range of knowledge levels.

Right from the start, MoneySense set itself a different editorial target. Maclean Hunter Publishing Limited, a division of Rogers Media, announced the launch of MoneySense on March 8, 1999, promising “a new magazine for people who want to take financial control of their lives.”

Ian McGugan, the magazine’s editor (and former executive editor of Canadian Business), explains: “Most people who have any assets at all are flooded with brochures and pamphlets. There’s no real information gap as such. What is missing is the quality of information – readable, entertaining information – which, I guess, is where this magazine comes in.”

Oberdorf would make the same claim to quality. Where the two men agree to differ is in the range of topics they wish to address. MoneySense, McGugan says, also looks at the lifestyle aspects of money – making and spending the stuff, not just investing it. “It’s very much a magazine for the middle class,” he adds – people who are more interested in whether they should buy or rent a house than they are in CEO of the year or how to read a stock table.

Publisher Deborah Rosser adds, “Money’s very, very hot. Things are coming around again. People are better off and they’re starting to say, ‘I want to spend my money, I want to enjoy my money, but I also want to do it intelligently and I want choices.'”

Andrew Willis, business columnist for The Globe and Mail‘s Report on Business section, thinks theMoneySense editorial target makes sense. “It’s a great audience and one that isn’t particularly well served.”

The magazine is after people 35 to 54 years old with above-average incomes and approximately $50,000 available for investment purposes. Those people – and the ones coming up behind them – know they have to save and manage money, argues Willis. “They just don’t have any idea where to get started.”

Neither did the producers of MoneySense, initially. “If you had asked me during the summer [of 1998] how sophisticated the magazine and the readers would be, on a scale of zero to 10, I would probably have said eight and a half,” said Paul Jones, senior vice president at Rogers Media and founding publisher ofMoneySense, adding that a 10 constitutes the business savvy of a day-trader.

When the planning group started talking to real middle-class Canadians, Jones saw his numbers slide. “We found that people were extremely nervous about personal finance.” The magic number turned out to be seven and a half: the target audience thought eight material was for “rich people,” while five or six material insulted them. “Very sensible, very Canadian,” says Jones. What this audience wants, and what his staff wants to provide, is “financial information they can use. That’s a pretty noble mission.”

Nobility’s fine, but the magazine has a commercial mission as well: MoneySense is designed to appeal to advertisers as well as readers. Jones believes that from an advertising perspective, this is an attractive audience: middle-class people making above-average salaries and looking for a very sensible, very Canadian magazine dealing with the lifestyle aspect of personal finance.

The IE:Money audience is also attractive to advertisers, but MoneySense, with its lifestyle orientation, hopes to appeal to a broader base. (It may be succeeding: the December/January 2000 issue of MoneySense had four automobile advertisers, while IE:Money‘s February 2000 issue had none, relying instead on ads relating directly to personal finance.)

Being part of Rogers Media didn’t hurt MoneySense, either. Maclean Hunter did not even have a prototype to show potential advertisers before the first issue was put together, just the idea and plenty of planning. “We had a lot of valid research,” says Rosser, “but in terms of talking to advertisers, the credentials of both the company and the people representing the magazine were critical.” They put out four issues in 1999 (June/July, October, November and December), with a circulation of 104,000. MoneySense will go to eight issues this year and hopes to achieve 100-per-cent paid circulation.

Even with advertiser appeal, the business model works only if MoneySense has editorial appeal as well. Rosser says that the MoneySense goal is to provide useful information.

IE:Money says that too, but the two magazines go about it differently. IE:Money likes tables and charts, for example; MoneySense doesn’t. Rosser says research suggested that readers did not think complicated tables and charts were helpful. Don’t look to MoneySense for analyses of hot mutual funds or fund managers, either. Says McGugan, “Fund managers don’t remain hot and there’s tremendous volumes of evidence indi-cating mutual funds revert to the mean. The question you have to ask yourself is: what information is important?” He answers his own question. “The important thing is to reduce the investor’s expenses.” McGugan wants to talk less about the product and more about why consumers should or shouldn’t be interested in it.

That’s consistent with his focus on people and concepts, not products and numbers. A feature in the premier issue, “15 Minutes to the Perfect Portfolio,” illustrates his point. “The execution of the perfect portfolio is easy,” he insists. “The thought behind it is anything but, which to my mind makes a good story.” He continues, “Dressing things up with numbers or making them more complicated than they have to be doesn’t provide any advantage. Quality and thought are the most important points. What we try to do is take the best thought that’s out there and present it in a usable language.”

Encouraging language, too. The magazine is big on people stories – the premier issue had Mike Bullard talking about saving and spending – and not so big on the guilt-tripping that McGugan says pervades the industry. “I’m sure you’ve seen the ads in the subway,” he laughs. “‘If you haven’t saved by the time you’re 30 you might as well put a bullet in your head.'” MoneySense rejects all that. “We’re about opportunities, not obligations.”

Both editors stress the importance of good writing. However, the reason people want to read about personal finance is also the problem with writing about it – it can be complicated. As IE:Money publisher Liz Martin puts it, “You really have to understand what you’re writing about to write it well, and there are not that many people who want to invest the time to really understand it.” Many who do understand it come from the industry, but can’t write. Those who write for a living often don’t understand the issues. Oberdorf tends to use journalists for IE:Money pieces, not people from the finance industry. “[Personal-finance writers] are in a seller’s market these days. There are people who are good writers and knowledgeable about the field, but they’re kind of thin on the ground.”

Rosser agrees it’s a challenge, but points to the success of Canadian Business, where she and McGugan worked, in growing its own talent. “I don’t see why MoneySense couldn’t do the same.”

Glenn Flanagan, who wrote the “15 Minutes to the Perfect Portfolio” piece for MoneySense, writes forIE:Money as well. “The way I see it, MoneySense is headed toward more of a working-class investor. It’s a do-it-yourself magazine. You don’t need a financial planner or broker for a lot of this stuff.” He suggestsMoneySense is consumer-oriented. “It’s more reader-friendly in that regard, while IE:Money is more investment-oriented.”

Already distinct, the two magazines are likely to become more so under their respective editors and editorial mandates. If Oberdorf has his way, IE:Money will be the who’s who and what’s what for an investment-focused audience.

Meanwhile, over at MoneySense, McGugan is developing a lifestyle-oriented message of accessible and entertaining information for readers who want to know what else they can do with their money besides invest it.

Both magazines deal with money. But they deal with it differently, because they target different audiences.

After 15 minutes of countless variations on the how-can-you-support-$1-million-athletes-when- so-many-people-are-hungry-or-need-heat question, Eves heads to his office. The cameramen pack up. They’ve got what they need for their supper-hour newscasts: a classic 10-second pol-at-the-mike clip. Tempers, however, haven’t cooled. “I fucking got elbowed right out of the scrum,” vents Gamey. “The fucker should take a Valium.”

The fucker in question is Kevin Fabish, a cameraman for CFMT, a multicultural station out of Toronto. He denies the charge: “I didn’t elbow him out; I just didn’t let him into the scrum. Doug was late. It was like he was cutting in line.” Later, in a taxi on the way to the Toronto Tourism Awards to get a reaction on the tax break from Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman, Gamey says that cameramen have to work together in scrums. “[We] all need the same shot,” he says. “If no one pushes, everyone can just do their job.”

For more than 40 years, cameramen like the guys who gathered around Ernie Eves have brought images from every corner of the earth into our living rooms. From the fire up the street to the fires of countless war zones, through snowstorms and through swamps, in times of celebration and in times of mourning, they got the perfect shots that helped shape the worldview of several generations. And they did it anonymously. We knew the correspondents but never the guys who shot them – burly, dedicated men who schlepped 30 or 40 pounds of equipment over considerable distances. But now, as a result of technological advances combined with cuts to newsroom budgets, the colourful cameraman of TV’s heyday is a member of an endangered species. He’s being gradually replaced by the videographer, a relative youngster, not at all burly – or even male – who carries both the camera and the pencil.

Ground zero of the cameraman’s testosterone-infused culture is the locker room. Every major TV news operation has one. At Toronto’s CBC building, the room is tucked away in a dingy corner near the parking lot. It looks like a dimly lit 1970s-style shag palace with some pungent leftover Chinese food on a plain wooden table, and a ratty, dark blue couch in front of the large TV. The computer, with its high-speed Internet connection, looks oddly out of place in a room not afraid to flaunt its affinity for the old and ugly. The men’s change room feel of the place, with its overwhelming smell, would be complete with the obligatory beaver shot and towelled men heading for the sauna.

While cameramen wait for the call to shoot a story, they often sit around swapping the latest gossip and exchanging tales about the legends. The adventures of Dave Wilson, now semiretired and living in Kelowna, B.C., are frequently mentioned. The lore that surrounds him stops just short of involving a giant blue ox. Consider his posting to Argentina during the buildup to the 1982 Falkland Islands War with Great Britain. According to legend, he escaped to Peru, sued the CBC for millions, inverted the plug of the playback device in court to blow up evidence, fought with the police and stood 12 feet tall.

What actually happened? After spending eight or nine days in Buenos Aires, Wilson, along with his soundman, the producer and interpreter, drove to the army base at Comedero, in Argentina’s central region. On the morning of their arrival he took establishing shots – images used to support a reporter’s narrative – of the training grounds. Then the group discovered some radar and satellite dishes. After shooting for seven or eight minutes, they spotted a convoy of military police racing toward them. Wilson and his team were arrested, charged with treason, placed under house arrest for 21 days, brought to court several times and interrogated for more than 80 hours. Charges were eventually dropped, but when Wilson arrived back in Canada, the CBC said he wouldn’t be paid for all the hours he had spent under house arrest. After protracted negotiations, Wilson reached a compromise with the CBC.

More satisfying to Wilson, now 59, is another story. Corner him at his local pub and, with a little prodding, he might tell you about the Panama City riots of 1988. At the time, the Central American country was in chaos. Manuel Noriega was hanging on to power but faced a growing opposition, which had set up its headquarters near the hotel that housed the foreign press on the assumption that the Panamanian dictator would be less likely to kill them in front of cameras and correspondents from around the world.

On March 28, Wilson, a soundman and an interpreter were on hand for a huge protest at which 15,000 people marched peacefully toward an enclosed square near the opposition headquarters. However, after everybody had filed in, the army blocked off the square and opened fire with tear gas and water cannons. They also released some thugs from prison to rile the crowd and rob protesters. After capturing the riot on film, Wilson and his team – now joined by a boy incapacitated by tear gas, his grateful father and another couple – raced to what they thought was the safety of their hotel. On their approach they were warned of soldiers indiscriminately beating journalists and grabbing tapes from their cameras. To avoid them, Wilson’s group successfully snuck in the back staff entrance and carefully made their way up to the CBC suite, which had been converted into an editing room.

Before locking themselves in, Wilson and his soundman removed the CBC signs from the door. Once inside, the couple flushed handfuls of notebooks down the toilet and the soundman hid their tapes in the ceiling, including the one with the Panamanian army official promising no violence. The group stayed put for four hours. “I guess I was lucky to survive,” he says, “but I was glad I was able to show what happened to the world.”

Television is a visceral medium, not an intellectual one, and that is why the cameraman is so important,” says Robin Christmas, veteran CBC producer and director. Viewers, he adds, will lose interest if they don’t feel a connection to the story, and the people behind the camera can provide the connection. How? They “function as your eyes,” says Suanne Kelman, a former producer with The Journal. “And if they are any good, they capture the moment even better than your eyes would.” Compelling visuals grab the viewer’s attention and help support the reporter’s narration. To get those vital pictures, the cameraman must effectively use light and skillfully frame the shot. But there is also something intangible involved. “The best see where the emotion is, capture it on film and deliver it to the viewer,” says Howard Bernstein, the former head of CBC News in Toronto. “It’s like great art – hard to define exactly what makes it so moving, just that you are moved.”

Bernstein could have been talking about Peter Zin’s work in Chile for the CBC in April 1998. His assignment was to shoot reactions to the news that former dictator Augusto Pinochet would receive a lifelong senate appointment – a measure designed to give him immunity from prosecution while under medical care in Britain. Each day thousands of anti-Pinochet protesters clashed with the army, which sprayed the crowd with water cannons and plastic bullets. Zin jumped right in and stayed there until he caught on tape the raw emotions on the faces of angry yet frightened protesters as they threw rocks at the soldiers, then retreated when the military fired back.

Coming up with compelling images is a challenge when the segment is about matters more mundane than protests and riots. For example, in 1993, Christmas and cameraman Mike Sweeney were sent to Arizona. Photo radar was about to be introduced into Canada, and the CBC wanted to look at how it worked in the United States. Sweeney realized that without some visual flair, this story would quickly become a boring list of safety statistics that even he wouldn’t watch. His solution: he placed a small lipstick camera, similar in size to a photo radar unit, inside a rented sports car and shot his producer at the wheel, along with shots of him racing past his regular camera. “It was perfect,” says Christmas. “The dramatization helped the viewer understand how photo radar works.”

Sometimes camera operators get their best shots from the reporters who accompany them. Two years ago Robin Benger, a documentary filmmaker, worked with cameraman John Westheuser on a piece for CBC’s Witness. The focus was on the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne streets in Toronto – a hangout for crack dealers. At one point the pair was invited to a user’s apartment. Once inside the smelly, rundown room, Benger noticed a table covered with drug paraphernalia and pointed it out to Westheuser. While Benger interviewed the addict, the cameraman took carefully composed shots of broken bottlenecks, a crack pipe, condoms and a Bible – all of which could be edited into the final piece to show, in a way that words cannot, the grim details of a user’s life.

Camera operators and reporters often form bonds, says Global TV anchor Peter Kent. “It is almost like a romantic relationship. You tend to take things for granted. You start to act like a married couple, squabbling over this and that.” During his days as a correspondent, Kent cherished any opportunity to work with Louie De Guise, a cameraman respected for his talent and his willingness to take chances. In 1970, the pair covered the FLQ kidnapping crisis. After Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau implemented the War Measures Act, De Guise sat with Kent in his Cougar in front of a provincial police office in downtown Montreal and waited for the cops and soldiers to head out and start making arrests.

To pass the time the pair discussed life, love and sports and argued about where to eat. When the combined security forces finally left the station, De Guise and Kent followed, filming them busting down doors and arresting suspected terrorists. The footage was dramatic, graphic and shocking. “The intimate shots Louie got were way ahead of their time,” says Kent. “What he got not only shaped the way people saw the crisis but the way people saw the police.”

De Guise, who now works in the CBC bureau in Washington, D.C., is a craftsman. He says that the secret to great shots is all in the lighting. For example, when he was in Rwanda in 1994, he was scheduled for an interview with a relief worker. But De Guise didn’t want a standard talking-head shot. He wanted to show the scared and starving Hutuus who were crammed in the relief camp as well. So he set up the lights in such a way that he could show both: the pleading relief worker in the foreground, and, clearly visible behind him, the faces of the hungry people he was trying to save.

As corporate bottom lines increasingly dictate news values, the cost-saving benefits of a videographer – one person who reports and shoots a story – are becoming increasingly attractive. At the CBC station in Windsor, for instance, there are now only two news cameramen. “Videographers offer some intimacy advantages, but they hold few editorial advantages. The shots are just not as thoughtful,” says Dave Cook, former cameraman and one of two crew chiefs for The National, Newsworld and The National Magazine. Adds cameraman Neith Macdonald, a 15-year veteran now working for The National, “I just don’t see how a videographer can produce interesting shots. There are just too many other things to worry about.”

Michael Sullivan is the full-time rep with the Communications, Electricians and Paperworkers Union, which represents the CBC’s 165 cameramen and five camerawomen. When a reporter’s or camera operator’s position becomes vacant, he says, a videographer is often hired instead. Since 1997, there have been about 45 new videographers hired at the CBC and just 22 new cameramen and women. The gap grows larger each year.

Sullivan first heard the term videographer about 20 years ago. Michael Rosenbloom in New York was among the pioneers. He shot and wrote his own stuff, but he did it with a sore back. His camera, one of the first ENG or tape machines, weighed more than 30 pounds. Phil Pendry, a cameraman who lugged a unit across Vietnam, compares the experience to carrying two industrial-sized microwaves around the jungle: one for taping and another for recording.

By 1985, the ENG camera weighed a more portable 23 pounds. Since the strength of an Olympic weightlifter was no longer a job requirement, it was easier for women to enter the profession. Shamila Hunter started apprenticing at Global in Toronto in 1982. To gain the acceptance of her mostly male colleagues, she says, she took the tough stories, the ones where she’d have to shoot grieving families at drownings, fires or whatever. “[Being a camerawoman] was something I wanted to do for as long as I can remember,” says Hunter. “I think I would have put up with anything to work with the camera.”

The big broadcasters didn’t adopt the videographer until the early 1990s. While they’ve saved money, they’ve created a situation where there’s often too much for one person to handle. When a reporter is expected to produce as many stories as the standard reporter-and-cameraman tandem, innovation and thoughtfulness suffer. Mike Wise, a videographer for CBC Toronto, is the only full-time entertainment reporter left at the station. Just a few years ago he had six co-workers and regular access to a few cameramen. Now, after two rounds of budget cuts, Wise is left on his own to decide on a story, shoot it, write it, interview for it and sometimes even sit in on the edit. He was hired full-time in 1994 as a reporter. Wise says he’s overworked and bombarded with information. It shows in the quality of his shots.

While shooting a segment at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Wise has to worry about everything at once. Is the lighting too dark? Do I have enough angles and shot variation? Is my battery running low? Should I use the tripod or just rest the camera on my shoulder? The piece that aired the next day was slightly too dark and he should have used a tripod. Because he interviewed the two actors sitting side by side, the camera jerked back and forth, from one to the other, over and over again. Wise, though, doesn’t have time to wait for the perfect shot. “I have to worry about five two-minute segments a week,” he says. “I can’t get hung up on one part of one story.”

On New Year’s Eve, 1986, Dave Wilson was at home in Toronto, sipping on a cold beer, barbecuing some steak and enjoying a relaxing evening with his wife. At 6:15 p.m. the phone rang. It was his assignment editor, wanting him to go to Puerto Rico immediately. There had been a massive hotel fire – 100 or so dead. Could he be at the airport in an hour? Sure. Could he stay for a few days? Of course. Wilson threw some clothes in a suitcase, kissed his wife goodbye and was in his car five minutes later. The CBC arranged to send his camera to the airport. The plane waited while Wilson cleared customs. Five hours later he was in San Juan at the Dupont Plaza Hotel, gathering shots of hotel rubble, rescue crews and grieving families. He captured the emotion of desperate emergency workers frantically searching for survivors. He also filmed an interview with a pair of Canadian survivors in front of the burnt-down hotel, skillfully framing them to the side so the viewer could also see the rescue drama in the background. With the aid of Wilson’s memorable, thoughtfully composed footage, the team at The Journal had the complete segment put together in less than 24 hours.

Two days later Wilson was back in the locker room waiting for his next assignment. On this morning, years before the videographer revolution hit the big broadcasters, the guys listened with respect and deference as he unfolded the story of that tragic night. They relished hearing the tales of one of their own, a cameraman dedicated to the craft of getting the perfect shot, one of the more colourful characters in a profession that seldom steps into the spotlight.

It’s the end of a long week in October for Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan. This was supposed to be her last day in the newsroom before going south of the border on a two-week speaking tour with the other recipients of the International Women’s Media Foundation awards. It’s now the middle of the afternoon and as her deadline approaches, Bolan is an hour and a half behind schedule – she was held up at the Surrey courthouse, where she’s following the sentencing hearing of three Nazi skinhead youths in the murder of a Sikh temple caretaker. When the court recessed for lunch, Bolan checked her voice mail and found two messages – one from a detective with the Vancouver Police warning her that after seven months of relative calm, she could be in danger again and that she should call the RCMP as soon as possible. The second message was from the RCMP, telling her they had received information that if moderate Sikhs beat the fundamentalists in the upcoming Surrey temple elections, there would be violence. And she was specifically mentioned as a target – again.

The Sun’s assignment editor, Graham “Rocky” Rockingham, has pulled up a chair beside Bolan’s desk, where she sorts through her notes. Bolan is quiet, but Rockingham’s voice rises to emphasize his concern. He gets up and paces back and forth, pulling at his necktie and running his hands through his hair, trying to persuade Bolan that full security measures should be restored at once. She refuses. And she ups the ante: not content with the number of stories she stockpiled in the past week, she asks for a laptop (she calls it a portable) to take with her to New York City. Even though she has a legitimate excuse to turn the heat down a couple of notches, she wants to keep covering the approaching Sikh temple elections while she’s away. This has been her beat on and off since 1984 and she knows more about Vancouver’s Sikh community than any other reporter. Rockingham starts to leave, practically tearing out his hair in frustration, then turns back.

“I’m very concerned,” he says gravely.

“I don’t care anymore. I’m not concerned,” Bolan replies. “Just get me the portable.” Rockingham shakes his head and walks away.

“The portable is mightier than the sword,” Bolan shouts playfully, but this time he doesn’t look back.

There was another person the RCMP said was potentially in danger this time, and Bolan knows him. She calls him at a temple in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver with a large Sikh population, to see if he’s been warned and to warn him if he hasn’t. She speaks quietly, playing with her silver bracelet. Their conversation is brief and ends with her telling him what he already knows – that the appearance of quiet does not mean quiet. With Rockingham out of earshot, Bolan admits that she is alarmed; she’s had no such threats since February. For a time, her life had regained a sense of normalcy.

“I think I’m just going to ignore this,” she says. “I don’t want these people to think they’ve scared me off.”

Rockingham returns, still shaking his head. “I’ll get you a computer tomorrow. But don’t bother going to court – I don’t need that.”

She grins at him, an unthreatening and motherly seeming woman of middle years, so short she can barely see over the half-walls of her cubicle.

“That’s the problem with this, you know,” he says, not for the first time. “This isn’t going to stop. These people won’t give up.”

But Bolan won’t give up, either. After 15 years of reporting about Vancouver’s Sikhs, she feels a connection to them. She admits having seized an opportunity to make a name for herself at the start, but since then it has become a mission: to see charges laid against the bombing suspects of Air India Flight 182, still the most devastating act of aviation terrorism ever. The 329 people onboard, including 156 Canadians, all died when the plane exploded off the coast of Ireland. Justice has been a long time coming. Along the way, Bolan has seen friends and colleagues threatened and murdered as the bombers amassed more and more power in the Sikh community. Earlier in her career, it was Bolan’s dogged reporting that propelled the story. Today, it is the story that grips her. She has been through too much not to see it through to the end.

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

 It can be purchased online here. 

Formed in 1996, the CABJ has a mandate to “educate, support and advocate on behalf of its members and the community in order to achieve truth, excellence and equality in media.” The association is trying to create a strong network of journalists. It works to overcome poor representation in both broadcasting and print newsrooms, as well as troubling coverage of black communities. But so far, the CABJ has avoided protests in favour of power lunches to achieve its political ends. “People expect us to have a radical political agenda because we’re an organized group of black people,” says Hamlin Grange, a reporter for the CBC Evening News in Toronto. “Well, you’re not going to find us marching the streets, gloved hands in the air screaming ‘Black Power.'” Instead, you might find board members schmoozing with the editor of The Toronto Sun, or discussing internships with executives at CFTO. At the CABJ, strong professional development and networking, combined with smooth PR-style manoeuvring with media bigwigs, are what’s really working to get jobs for black journalists.

As Fraser learned, there are still few black journalists in Canada. In 1993, the last year for which statistics are available, a study reported that less than one per cent of journalists working in Canadian newsrooms are black, even in a city as diverse as Toronto, where 10 per cent of the population is black. Discussion of this dismal fact on a TV forum prompted Angela Lawrence, senior editor of Style at Home magazine, to start organizing. She called up Grange, enlisted five other board members and started the CABJ in 1996. Initial membership was 70 people, a far cry from Grange’s early days in the late 1970s, when all the black journalists working in the mainstream media in Toronto could sit around one restaurant table.

Today, it would take a banquet hall to seat the 170-plus members of the CABJ. The association’s growth has enabled it to provide a variety of valuable services to its members – an approximate 50-50 mix of students and professionals. Monthly job postings are emailed to members exclusively, who also attend professional workshops. Last October’s workshop, “Producing Visual Media,” featured a panel discussion with CityTV videographer Dwight Drummond, MuchMusic cameraman Basil Young and news producer Margot Daley. The panellists discussed their jobs and showed tapes of their work. Young showed a documentary, shot in South Africa, about the native music movement that has grown since apartheid was abolished. After the presentations, journalism students approached with questions.

The CABJ offers another prime networking opportunity through the mentorship program, now in its second year. A professional who is working in a student’s field of interest becomes a mentor for one year, offering the student advice and encouragement. The program has proven effective. Nicolette Beharie, a Humber College student, was paired with Ashante Infantry, a reporter at The Toronto Star. “I was new to journalism. I got a mentor who was right where I wanted to be. Now I work at the Star part-time.”

Clearly, at the CABJ the focus is on the tangible benefits of membership. “We’re in a curious position here, because we made the decision to concentrate on our members’ needs on a day-to-day level first,” says CABJ president Jacqui Debique, whose term ended in February. “We invested our resources in services, rather than on advocacy and political work.”

Not all members agree with this approach. Norman Otis Richmond, a broadcaster on CKLN, has never agreed with the CABJ’s policy. “I understand that you have to build bridges, but black journalism originated with a slave press and has always been about liberation. Globally and in Canada, black people are worse off than in the 1960s. We need to push for more advocacy journalism. It’s naive to think that an organization of black professionals can exist without automatic political implications.” Still, Richmond likes the benefits of membership. “Hey, I’m a starving journalist, right? I need contacts like everybody else.”

As the CABJ’s numbers grow, so does its networking power. Older members recall exclusion from the white-boys’-club networking of their day. Jules Elder, a columnist for the Sun and former editor of SHARE, a paper that covers the black and West Indian communities, thinks the connections and job resources offered through the CABJ are invaluable. “Twenty years ago, before the CABJ was founded, there were fewer opportunities for black journalists. In its four-year history, the CABJ has been helpful in developing networking opportunities.” Anyone can join the CABJ, regardless of ethnicity, as long as they supports the association’s mandate. With members at major news organizations, the CABJ’s professional clout is recognized in the journalism community, and it has financial support from organizations including the Star, the Sun and Southam.

Relations with the dailies came about casually. Debique and vice president Robert Payne invited Sharon Burnside, head of training and development at the Star, out for lunch. “Basically, we let Sharon know that the CABJ offers a pool of very talented students and professionals,” Debique says. “We wanted to see how we could work together.”

The CABJ makes no demands on these news organizations in terms of hiring quotas or employment equity. The papers now recognize the benefits of diversifying newsrooms, and they welcome the CABJ’s assistance in catching up. Burnside agrees that the CABJ meetings are useful for getting messages across. “One of my hopes in doing these talks is to overcome any hesitation to apply to the Star. I don’t think the Star has always seemed accessible to black students, so I wanted to send the message – you are welcome here.” In 1999, theStar hired three CABJ student members for its student programs. The Sun also announced an exclusive internship offer for two CABJ students.

Receiving support from a paper like the Sun is a perfect example of the CABJ’s separating politics from its goal of getting jobs for members. Some would think that the CABJ and the Sun would be an uncomfortable alliance because of the Sun‘s inflammatory coverage of the black community, but in truth the Sun is the CABJ’s major financial contributor: $2,000 goes toward the annual Gospel Luncheon (money from ticket sales supports the CABJ scholarship fund).

Still, many members find fault with the Sun‘s coverage. Its reporting of the Scarborough bedroom rapist case in August and September 1999 was cited most often by members as an example of outrageous, racist journalism. “I couldn’t believe when the Sun published the composite sketch on the cover,” says Amorell Saunders, former reporter for Montreal’s The Gazette, and currently a director at Veritas Communications, a public relations firm in Toronto. “I have a son – if he was a few years older, he could have been a suspect based on that picture.”

Grange takes issue with another aspect of the Sun‘s coverage. “I don’t remember ever seeing Paul Bernardo’s mother in the paper, so why was Eli Stewart Nicholas’s mother’s face on the cover? That’s curious.”

While many CABJ members criticize the Sun, they do recognize the paper’s effort to support the association. Carol Charles is a videographer for CHEX TV in Peterborough. “I cringe every time I read the Sun, but the internship they offer is important. If we want representation in the mainstream media, then this is a relationship we have to have.”

But it’s logical to predict conflict as the young association evolves. One of its goals is to become an organized, recognized voice for media criticism. Shellene Drakes, a reporter at the Star, is specific about her ideas. “I want people to turn to the CABJ for its opinion on questionable coverage. I want us to be quoted in the papers and on the news.”

CABJ members all have examples of offensive stories. Infantry and fellow reporter Maureen Murray published an editorial in the Star about questionable coverage of the “Van Bandits” bank robbers story from January 1999. They discussed how a colleague at another paper surmised that the robbers favoured green vans out of allegiance to the African flag. “Not only was it racist, it was also ridiculous for the reporter to extrapolate like that,” says Infantry. Desmond Brown, a reporter at the National Post, has a method for dealing with problematic coverage at his paper. “I’m usually pretty angry first – I go home and rant to my wife about the story, and then in about two days when I’ve calmed down I’ll approach the writer. I was furious about a piece in which Phillippe Rushton’s study on penis sizes of black babies went unchallenged by the writer. I emailed the writer, asking if he intended to endorse such views. He explained that he felt it was a given that people dismiss Rushton and said that he intended for the piece to provoke anyway.”

The CABJ’s ideas for handling its new role as media critic echo Brown’s strategy. The idea is still in the planning stages, but Debique feels that inviting the offending writer or editor to a meeting would be effective. “Getting people to participate in reasonable discussion about the coverage and our problems with it is best. We’re here to keep each other honest. If we determine something to be racist, we’ll deal with it professionally without diminishing its severity. We want to let the mainstream know that there’s a different perspective out there.”

Mike Strobel, editor in chief of the Sun, says his paper would welcome the commentary. “Personally, I appreciate feedback from the black community,” he says. “I think the CABJ is a professional group whose input is valuable. Any member could call me.” At the Star, Burnside agrees. “I’m assuming the criticism would be fair. I know that our newsroom still doesn’t reflect the community, so we need different perspectives on our coverage.”

Black reporters bring a wealth of new ideas and fresh voices into a newsroom. “If I wasn’t at the CBC, theCBC Evening News wouldn’t run half the stories that I pitch, because the stories wouldn’t even occur to them,” says reporter Paul Riley. “The National newsroom has called me before to ask me if I knew any educated young women of colour to be on a panel. They don’t even know any black people – it’s a joke.”

Beyond just pitching new ideas, black journalists sometimes bring with them a whole new set of sources, as Infantry points out. “Because of my background in black community newspapers, people from the black community call me all the time to let me know what’s going on in their neighbourhoods. They’re not calling white reporters.”

Diversifying the newsroom seems to be on everybody’s agenda. Unfortunately, bringing in new faces is a slow process. “Remember, my newspaper isn’t hiring right now. We’ve been letting people go for a while,” says Strobel. “People trickle in mainly after their internships.” The hiring freeze explanation only goes so far to explain the disparity at newspapers. The Posthad the opportunity to start off with a diverse newsroom. Posteditor in chief Ken Whyte says he’s hired at least five black reporters, but Brown is the only one who’s been spotted in the Toronto newsroom. “I fundamentally disagree with the notion that newspapers should aim in their hiring to be representative,” says Whyte. “Editors should hire the most talented people available, period. What questions of this nature do is make an editor wander around his newsroom counting the people of colour. I feel lousy doing it. Far better, to my mind, to be colour-blind.”

The editor of Canada’s newest national newspaper has just articulated the attitude the CABJ is trying to change. Debique remains undaunted. “If he doesn’t support diversity, that’s fine. All we want from the Post is their job information. We have some of the most talented people available.” She admits things are moving slowly with the Post. So far, the CABJ has managed to gain its support only in the form of subsidized photocopying.

Older CABJ members, such as Payne, are patient about the time it takes to make the staff changes that are necessary at TV stations and newspapers. “Journalism is like any other profession. Getting more blacks employed won’t happen rapidly.” Younger members aren’t as patient. Drakes is unsure where her one-year contract with the Star will lead. “The older members have reached their goals. But I ask the TV stations and newspapers, ‘What have you done for me lately? I’m not going to be quiet and hope that I don’t offend you, because I don’t owe you anything.'”

Whether or not the association is moving fast enough, the CABJ is getting things done. Many members attribute their success, at least in part, to their involvement with the CABJ. Vanessa Thomas works in the radio room at the Star. “Initially, I was turned down for the Star’s summer student program. Maureen Murray, my mentor and a reporter at the Star, encouraged me to hound Sharon Burnside. I kept calling, and eventually she gave me an interview.” Students often see their personal contact with Burnside as an asset in their search for employment at the Star. “It’s all about getting people to see your face,” says Kirk Moss, who also worked in the radio room. “It’s a real leg up on the competition.”

For Brown, the CABJ was a two-pronged asset. First, he was inspired by a presentation Murray gave at the 1997 annual general meeting. “I was so impressed by Murray’s speech about her influence as a black woman in the newsroom. I was in journalism school at the time and aiming toward broadcasting, when I totally changed my mind.” He dropped off a r?sum? at the Star. “Donovan Vincent and Maureen Murray were dropping my name all over town. They kept checking with the Star people, ‘So, did you get Desmond’s r?sum??'” Eventually he was hired for the radio room of the Star. He has since moved to the Post.

Clearly, the CABJ is effecting change. In only three years, it has established a solid industry reputation, set up an effective network of journalists and provided valuable services for its members. With these assets in place, as well as a steadily climbing membership, the CABJ is in a solid position to move ahead. And as the CABJ continues to work toward equitable journalism, Fil Fraser’s dream of a representative channel surf gets closer and closer.

BERT BRUSER

A lifelong campaign to broaden freedom of the press

A diminutive, bearded lawyer sits Gandhi-like on a small table in the centre of a large auditorium stage. In soft, carefully chosen words – quite a few of them profane – he captivates students in his media law class at Ryerson with wit and smarts. Many of the leading cases he describes are his own: fighting the publication ban at Karla Homolka’s murder trial or defending the CBC in a libel action brought by the veterans of Bomber Command, who tried to prevent the network from airing The Valour and the Horror. Bert Bruser’s authoritative serenity is based on 26 years as a litigator and media lawyer for The Toronto Star, numerous publishers and other media. Still, there’s something more. Is it his passion for freedom of the press? Undoubtedly. But the essence of Bruser is his intellect. He is, says fellow media lawyer Stuart Robertson, “smarter than God.”

Yet for all his success at law – he heads the five-lawyer media law department at Blake, Cassels & Graydon – Bruser always wanted to be a journalist. In fact, he stumbled into law while trying to make himself a better reporter. He’d started out writing sports for the old Winnipeg Tribune while he was still in high school and, after getting a philosophy degree at Princeton, returned to the Trib as a general assignment reporter. He’d gone on from there to Columbia for his masters in journalism and later to work as a reporter for Canadian Press in New York and Toronto.

“At Columbia, I got interested in journalists who became specialists,” he says. “If you wanted to write about economics, you should be an economist. If you wanted to write about science, you should be a scientist. I now think that’s insane. But when I was a kid, that’s what I believed. So I went to law school thinking I’d write about law as a journalist. Then I came to Blake’s to article and got corrupted by the profession. I started out working on very complicated litigation cases and enjoyed it. As time goes by, you lose your ability to go back. Particularly if you start earning a lot of money. It’s hard to give it up.”

Bruser’s office is on the 27th floor of Commerce Court West in downtown Toronto. The pastel green walls are bare, though a pile of framed photographs lies on the floor. An air purifier whirrs noisily on a windowsill, sucking up Bruser’s illegal cigarette smoke. Stacked cardboard filing cases serve as end tables for a couple of black leather couches that look as though nobody’s ever sat on them. Bruser lost interest in decorating the place after he moved in about a year ago. Even so, there’s something noticeably missing: no computer. Bruser speculates that he’s the only one of the 400-plus lawyers in the firm without one. That’s because he hates them. He doesn’t use a dictaphone either. He writes longhand. “My letters tend to be terse: Dear John, Fuck you. Bert.”

He shows me the pictures on the floor: a mock front page of the Star with an eye-catching photo of himself playing hockey for Princeton surrounded by stories lampooning him; it was presented to him five years ago as a 50th-birthday present. Then a 1992 photo of his son’s baseball team with a clean-shaven Bruser as coach. And finally, a 1972 shot of a tousle-haired young guy in a rumpled sports jacket receiving the U of T law school’s Dean’s Key – when the photo was taken, Bruser was stoned on booze and pot. Not your typical Bay Street lawyer.

For the past five years, Bruser has spent Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Star going to story conferences, consulting on future pieces (especially long-term investigative ones) and scouring copy for libel. He wants the paper to be aggressive, but leaves the final decisions to the editors.

Just the same, some reporters say he oversteps his legal role. Columnist Rosie DiManno, for one, has clashed with Bruser over changes in her copy: the worst flare-up came in 1995. “Bert told me to fuck off and then hung up the phone,” DiManno says. “What prompted that reaction was that Bert, besides making lawyerly cuts, had tried to tell me how to write a certain passage. I said, ‘So, are you a copy editor now, too?’ That sent him over the top.” She calls him a “frustrated journalist,” but adds, “Bert has gone from being an archenemy to being one of my most favourite people, but don’t tell him that.”

Bruser seldom goes to court these days. He thinks of himself more as the team’s quarterback. He called the plays, for example, in Silva v. TorStar, an important recent case triggered by a series of investigative pieces documenting the abuse of elderly tenants in a Toronto seniors’ home. The stories quoted the tenants’ allegations and named Anabela Silva as the home’s manager. She sued. At trial, Mr. Justice W.P. Somers was sympathetic to the plight of the seniors and the Star‘s role in exposing their abusive treatment. In his reasons for judgement, dated October 7, 1998, he wrote: “This article does not in my opinion repeat libellous statements. Rather, it advises its readers that the tenants…had strong views about their building and stated them publicly.” Though under appeal, the case could establish the principle that newspapers can report libellous statements without necessarily laying themselves open to lawsuits by repeating the libel.

As Bruser hands me a copy of the unpublished case, I can see how proud he is of it. It promises to be another important step in his lifelong campaign to broaden freedom of the press. Journalism’s loss, in his case, was clearly journalism’s gain.

STUART ROBERTSON

“The best lawyers are dedicated to telling the story”

Twenty years ago, in the stacks of the University of Ottawa law library, a young lawyer stumbled upon an obscure case which would become a milestone in Canadian media law. Researching his first book, Stuart Robertson had examined hundreds of cases in row after dusty row of law reports. But he sensed that this case, though overlooked for nearly 30 years, merited a closer look.

It had taken place in the 1950s, when a reporter for the old Calgary Albertan had missed an important trial and the magistrate had refused the journalist access to his notes. The Albertan sought, and won, a court order to see them. In granting the application, the judge cited 46 Edward III, a 1372 British statute written in Norman French, the statutory language of the day. Robertson located the ancient law, which said everything in the King’s courts should be available for inspection and copying. The statute had been repealed in England in 1871, but since Canada adopted British law in 1867, it was still in force here.

Robertson wasn’t sure whether to include such an arcane law in Courts and the Media (published 1981) until he got an SOS phone call from a lawyer for the TV newsmagazine, The MacIntyre Report. Linden MacIntyre was working on a story about an RCMP investigation of political fundraising including kickbacks in liquor licensing. He believed the Mounties might have raided the homes of senior politicians, but he needed the search warrants. The court office refused to release them without the attorney general’s consent, which wasn’t forthcoming.

Robertson realized that 46 Edward III had a bearing on the case and supplied his notes and a copy of the old law to lawyers Gordon Proudfoot and Robert Murrant in Halifax. They brought an application, MacIntyre v. Attorney General of Nova Scotia, to force the court office to deliver the material MacIntyre wanted. They won. Within two days, the attorney general appealed. They won again.

As Robertson tells me this story, his round, bespectacled face lights up with childish glee and his red bow tie bobs up and down. “Well, now all the attorneys general in Canada were saying, ‘This is a disaster, for God’s sake. If people can come in and look at the search warrants, oh Jesus, it’s going to affect policing and everything across Canada.’ There was this amazing scene of all these people getting copies of this stuff.”

The attorney general appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada – but the CBC’s lawyers won again. Robertson calls the outcome “the first real freedom of information decision. It was the one in which the Supreme Court said the courts are open. It was a huge decision.”

It’s a little hard to believe that the man who found the key to that decision and went on to be one of Canada’s pre-eminent media lawyers once led a blues-rock band called Touie and the Fourskins. When Robertson was born in 1947, Touie was the closest his toddler sister could come to pronouncing his name – and the nickname stuck. At Lower Canada College in Montreal, Touie wrote poetry and played drums in the cadet band. The poetry led him into honours English at Bishop’s University. The drumming led him to form the blues-rock group with four musician friends. Touie and the Fourskins played the Eastern Townships, Sherbrooke nightclubs and a few CBC gigs.

After graduation, he enrolled at Leeds University in England to pursue a masters degree in 18th-century literature and bibliography. His thesis dealt with a publisher named Andrew Millar, whose copyright battles sparked Robertson’s interest in both publishing and law. Unable to choose, he applied for a job with a book publisher and to law school at Queen’s University. Even though the publisher’s offer came first, he chose law.

After being called to the bar in 1974, Robertson worked in the CBC’s legal department and eventually became director of litigation. He later joined firms specializing in media law in Toronto and Ottawa before founding the partnership, O’Donnell, Robertson & Sanfilippo in 1994. Today, Robertson represents Canadian Press and the National Post, as well as many magazines and broadcasters.

“The delights you get in this business aren’t necessarily court victories,” he says. “The fun is in the editing. To me, the essence of an effective media lawyer is somebody who’s absolutely devoted to getting the story told. It takes editing skills, a literary sense and an understanding of the factual underpinnings of the case. Plus a sense of defamation law, contempt law, privacy, confidentiality – all that important stuff.” And, of course, a sense of when a 14th-century statute might shake up 20th-century law.

MARK BANTEY

“You’re facing judges who don’t appreciate the press”

Mark Bantey grew up in an ink-stained household. His father, Bill, was a reporter for 30 years, first in Quebec City, then in Montreal. Mark still remembers the time, when he was six or seven, that his father first took him to the newsroom at Montreal’s The Gazette. “Those were the old days of clattering typewriters, jangling telephones and clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke,” he says. They were also the days of brothels and blind pigs, political payoffs and police corruption. “When he was on the police beat, my father would come home with some pretty grisly stories,” Bantey recalls.

Even though his father urged him to avoid journalism because there wasn’t enough money in it, newspapers remained central to his life. At French primary school, he taught himself to read English by poring over The Gazette and The Montreal Star (“starting with the comics, of course”). And that routine has never changed. “I’m still an incorrigible newspaper junkie, reading every paper in sight and stacking them when I don’t have time to read them,” he says. “Much to my wife’s despair, there’s newsprint everywhere on the walls and doors of our home.” Yet another ink-stained household.

Newspapers would also become central to Bantey’s professional life, though it didn’t seem so in the beginning. As an undergraduate at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, he fell in love with philosophy, graduating magna cum laude. He moved on to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he completed his MA with a treatise on the analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He started a PhD program, but then, as a teaching assistant, discovered to his dismay that he didn’t like teaching. He bailed out when his hoped-for career in philosophy evaporated and returned home to start law school at l’Universit? de Montr?al.

Bantey, a self-professed rabble-rouser, who in the late 1960s wore shoulder-length hair and protested the Vietnam War, hated his law courses and only “went through the motions” until graduation. After the bar admission course, he articled at Lafleur Brown in Montreal, where he began practising media law almost immediately with Keith Ham, whose major client was The Gazette. “I sought him out because obviously it was fun stuff,” says Bantey. “Keith was quite a character and a great guy to work with. He was no legal scholar by any means, but he really knew how reporters thought and worked.”

Bantey is still at Lafleur Brown, a mid-sized firm with 60 lawyers, and spends about 70 per cent of his time on media law, both consulting with his clients before publication and representing them in court. He enjoys consulting more (except for the late Friday night phone calls from The Gazette over something worrisome in the Saturday paper). Litigation, though, gives him fits. “Court can be frustrating,” he says. “You’re often faced with judges who don’t really appreciate the role of the press, who, in fact, resent the press. When you walk into court, you already have one strike against you because you’re representing the media.”

Still, Bantey, who has appeared several times in the Supreme Court, doesn’t shy away from litigation. In 1996, representing Southam, he successfully applied for an order requiring the Quebec Bar Association to publish disciplinary matters, including the nature of the complaints and the names of the lawyers involved. (That got Bantey a terse call from the president of the bar association, asking “How dare you sue your own bar?”) And last year, Bantey was prominent in two highly publicized cases: a partially successful fight against a publication ban when Karla Homolka sued Correctional Services of Canada for prison passes, and the unsuccessful defence of a libel suit against Richard Lafferty, who compared Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard to Hitler. Bantey says he’ll appeal all the way to the top court.

But maybe the uncertainties of litigation were most apparent in the libel suit brought by Valery Fabrikant against the Gazette. After the professor of engineering was convicted of murdering four of his colleagues in 1992, the Gazette ran a ten-page supplement explaining who Fabrikant was and, in Bantey’s words, “what a fraud he was.” From prison, Fabrikant sued for a couple of million dollars and conducted his case without a lawyer, which meant there was no possibility of negotiating for a settlement. Bantey won the case for theGazette in the end, but for the entire week of trial, he would wake up in the middle of the night worrying about the outcome: “I sure as hell would hate to be the first lawyer in Canada to lose a libel suit brought by a mass murderer.”

ALLAN LEFEVER

“When asked a question, a journalist won’t shut up”

On the morning of April 20, 1982, three days after the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was proclaimed, investigators from the Combines Investigation Branch barged into the offices of The Edmonton Journal, demanding to search the files, including those of J. Patrick O’Callaghan, the publisher. They refused to say who sent them or what authority they were acting on. Neither the publisher nor the editor was there. So the business manager called Allan Lefever, the local lawyer for the Southam chain.

The instant he got the panicky call, Lefever attacked. By noon, he had served the Combines Investigation Branch with a notice of motion for an interim injunction. In court on May 20, Lefever based his arguments on the new Charter and lost, but eight months later he won on appeal. Mr. Justice H.S. Prowse struck down the search, writing that sections of the Combines Investigation Act “are inconsistent with the provisions of section 8 of the Charter and are therefore of no force or effect.” He ordered the court clerk to return all documents to the Journal within ten days. The case went to the Supreme Court of Canada where Lefever won again. “Hunter v Southam” thus became a cornerstone of media law. The Charter guarantees a broad and general right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure, Mr. Justice Brian Dickson wrote. In seeking to invade privacy, the state has the onus of demonstrating that its interest is superior to that of the individual.

Though the case made Lefever a high-profile lawyer, he has never lost his small-town values. He grew up in Medicine Hat, Alberta during the ’50s. His father was a freight conductor for Canadian Pacific and his mother, a housewife. In high school, he played football, joined the Army cadets, wrapped bread in a bakery and delivered the Medicine Hat News.

Inspired by his high school teachers, Lefever enrolled in a four-year Bachelor of Education program at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1963. He taught junior high for a year, then returned to his alma mater to begin law school. During first year, Lefever studied tort law and became fascinated by defamation; from there media law was only a short step away.

Hurlburt, Reynolds, Stevenson & Agrios, the Edmonton law firm that represented the Southam chain, hired Lefever as an articling student. There he was fortunate to catch the eye of Bill Stevenson, a partner in the firm who went on to become a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. Stevenson became his mentor, doling out stories to him to check for libel. Lefever was full value for the opportunity; he immediately began the arduous work schedule – which includes three evenings every week and one day on the weekend – that he has maintained throughout his career. Media law occupied about half his practice and consisted mostly of reviewing stories for defamation risk, looking at material reporters had gathered and brainstorming with them.

Though he’s an accomplished litigator, Lefever, like most of his media-law colleagues, considers a case that’s allowed to go to trial as evidence of failure by everybody involved in the process. “Having a dispute resolved at a trial,” he says, “is like having your appendix removed with a rusty hacksaw.” Just the same, he’s come awfully close. One of his settlements came just four days before former Alberta premier Don Getty’s suit against The Globe and Mail was set to go to trial in 1997. Peter Moon, one of the Globe’s investigative reporters whose stories prompted Getty’s lawsuit, recalls Lefever coaching him for cross-examination. “Journalists make the worst witnesses,” Lefever told Moon after the reporter had answered his mock questions at great length. “They won’t shut up. I’d rather question a farmer. He thinks about it for a while, then answers, ‘Yup.'”

Lefever himself is anything but taciturn. In fact, he’s gained a reputation over the years of being something of a court-room jester. In the 1995 trial of Marilyn Tan, who was accused of injecting her lover with HIV, he opposed the Crown’s request for a publication ban of a millionaire witness, dubbed the “fairy godfather.” People who testify “come, warts and all,” Lefever cracked. “If humiliation and financial loss were reasons to ban publication of names, then court services should put a brown-bag dispenser at the door.”

But as of last January 24, Lefever had to button his lip. Decorum became the order of the day. Instead of arguing cases like “Hunter v Southam,” Mr. Justice A.H. Lefever of the Provincial Court of Alberta will be adjudicating them.

The Toronto Star‘s Rayner, 25, and The Ottawa Sun‘s Ostroff, 23, join T’Cha Dunlevy at Montreal’s The Gazette, Stuart Derdeyn at Vancouver’s The Province and Bartley Kives at the Winnipeg Free Press as examples of a new breed of music journalists currently changing the way metropolitan dailies cover music. Reporting stories “from the inside out,” adopting a style more in keeping with local alternative weeklies and looking critically, often harshly, at music are characteristics of this new style, as these writers go about setting mainstream rock reporting on its ear. No longer is it enough just to watch a concert and post a half-baked review; young readers are too informed for that and they have other options. These writers know they have to bring more than the facts to the table. They take an active role in the music culture they analyze, and their opinions speak to a younger audience.

The reason for this change, which many in the music industry feel has been far too long in coming, is partly economic. With the launch of the National Post, the battle for readers at local dailies has intensified. Young people have always been the hardest for newspapers to attract, and with most major cities boasting at least one alternative weekly, they’re having an even harder time reaching those 18 to 25 or younger. The marketing department at the Star, whose Monday-to-Friday 18-to-24-year-old readership was 133,000 in 1999, hasn’t seen many changes in numbers over the years, but it would like to. As older readers die off or become less desirable to advertisers, it’s increasingly necessary to bring in young readers, and if young people are happy with the coverage now, they’re likely to stay. One has only to check out The Hamilton Spectator‘s Alt-Spec section, with its progressive entertainment coverage, or the Star‘s Boom! (formerly Life on Young Street) pages, where young adults write about their own issues and ideas, to see the trend toward youth marketing. But it’s in their music coverage that the papers have really tapped into what the kids want.

Rayner, a graduate of Carleton University’s journalism program, was hired two years ago by the Star after a stint as pop critic at the Sun, and from the start his coverage has been very different from his predecessors’. Rayner is part of the culture he writes about. He goes to raves, listens to techno and electronic music at home and is comfortable waxing nostalgic about punk history with members of the new breed of indie rock bands. In Rayner’s style, there’s an element of Nick Kent, the legendary music critic for the British music weekly NME. It’s an approach that suggests this isn’t just a job for him: the music he covers would be part of his life whether he was writing about it or not. His work often appears on the front page of the Entertainment section, though he sometimes leaves older readers scratching their heads.

“There are two ways to go,” he says of music writing. “You either describe it to people as if it’s a tribe of kids in Africa, or you attack it as a participant and critique it from within. If you’re a part of a scene, you start seeing things in that scene that someone who is not a participant – someone who is just making a few phone calls, canvassing other critics and talking to a couple of musicians – doesn’t. They’re not aware of the intricacies. They just have a different outlook.”

This is something kids pick up on, this journalism-from-a-distance that comes from writers who aren’t involved in the music they cover. Younger people are accustomed to music writing in the alternative weeklies, where writers are younger, hipper, more in the loop. They don’t want to read a middle-aged, often uninformed critic trying to write about jungle, hip-hop, acid jazz or trip-hop. “You know when you read something by someone who knows and lives electronic dance culture and then you read something by someone outside,” says Rayner. “It’s a very tangible difference.”

It’s this sort of reporting that allowed Rayner to bring life to his Woodstock ’99 coverage. Although he provided the facts, there was a spirit to what he wrote, a very modern cynicism that those in their early twenties understand. Writing about the “testosterone-seeped metal savagery and the escapist, no-message digital hedonism of pre-millennial dance culture,” Rayner tied it all up with an Elvis Costello quotation asking “what’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?” that perfectly captured “Profitstock.”

Writing for youth culture has its limitations. When Rayner wrote a front-page entertainment story on electronic music for the December 18, 1999, edition of the Star, Sean K. Robb, lifestyle and entertainment editor atChart Magazine, Canada’s national music monthly, fielded an unusual call from his mother. She wanted to know if Robb had read the article, which he had. “Well, did you understand it?” she asked. Robb admitted that it was dauntingly full of terms like trance, ambient and drum ‘n’ bass, but, yes, he’d understood. Robb is 26, though, and deeply involved in the music business. His mom, who isn’t, gave up reading halfway through, frustrated by the lingo and obscure references.

Rayner looks slightly pained when asked about alienating some of the paper’s readers, as though he’s used to answering that question. He says that the Star has given him the freedom to write about what he chooses, that his editors trust his judgement, but you can tell he’s had to justify his choices more than once. His defence, though, is one that seems to have infused much of the Star‘s music coverage of late. “You can write for the Star‘s audience,” says Rayner, “or you can write for a new audience and hope the old one can get on board.”

Trying to bring new readers on board isn’t easy. With the increased usage of freelancer Jennie Punter, the paper’s editorial managers seem to be admitting that, while they like what Rayner’s doing, they want some mainstream coverage, too. Rayner openly admits that when he was the lone pop critic at the paper, he had so much on his plate that he simply cut out an entire tier of artists. He opted to overlook middle-of-the-road rock acts like radio staples Eve 6, Nickelback and others he deemed uninteresting.

Punter has picked up a lot of those bands, and Rayner has been able to concentrate on the artists he wants to cover and on the reporting of pop culture itself. His selectivity and what some see as his elitist attitude have, however, earned him a reputation in the business. While some publicists rave about Rayner, as do many underground artists in the community, there are those who find him less of a wunderkind than a pain in the ass. One well-respected industry insider opined that Rayner was “one of the most frustrating pop music critics in the country,” noting that he rarely answers his phone at the Star, or returns messages. Nor does Rayner show as much interest in artists who have achieved mainstream success as some think he should.

Rayner, who works mostly at home, shrugs off the criticisms, noting that he gets 25 to 30 messages a day at the Star and that he has to trust his own judgement. He returns phone calls for at least an hour daily, but there’s no way to get to everyone and still find time to write. This has meant a few bruised egos and certain acts not getting the coverage they once expected, but it has also given the Star‘s music pages a fresher, more vibrant feel. There’s still Bryan Adams, but he’s right next to Moby and The Chemical Brothers. Rayner’s editors, for their part, have let him make those choices and, while the numbers are not yet showing it, the feedback indicates Rayner has done what he set out to do – attract a younger audience.

“The best compliment I’ve gotten at the Star is that everybody’s kids read my stuff,” says Rayner. “People have come up to me and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re writing about, but my daughter sure likes it.’ So even though the management might be confounded by a lot of it, they realize that a lot of people out there read it.”

For Lucinda Chodan, entertainment editor at the Gazette, getting kids interested in the paper’s music coverage is the first step in a long battle. She knows that young people are an elusive audience in the newspaper world, but the four weekly alternative papers – two in English and two in French – are a huge part of entertainment culture in Montreal and are popular with young readers. So when the Gazette‘s former rock critic left the section in 1997, Chodan was happy to poach T’Cha Dunlevy from Hour, one of the city’s alternative weeklies.

Dunlevy, 29, a former hip-hop DJ, fell into music writing because he thought hip-hop coverage at the weeklies was weak and that he could do a better job. He spent three years on the hip-hop beat at Hour, developing a strong portfolio and an interest in other forms of underground music. Dunlevy – who, like Rayner, is part of the music scene he writes about – has brought a new respect to the Gazette‘s coverage and given its entertainment pages an edge that is usually found only at weeklies. He does stories about raves and electronic dance culture, phenomena that had received scant mention before he arrived, and he has written extensively about local bands and DJs who might otherwise have been overlooked. He admits that he sometimes finds it hard writing for a mainstream daily, as he’s used to writing for a club-going audience that gets his references, but the Gazette is letting him experiment and make his own judgements about what its audience will understand or be willing to learn about. “It’s actually surprisingly free,” he says of his position at the paper.

For her part, Chodan wants to bring in new readers and compete with the weeklies, but she says this isn’t the only reason the Gazette hired Dunlevy. Aside from improving music coverage at the paper, which, unlike movies and art coverage, had never strayed far from mainstream releases, Chodan also believed there were legitimate musical forms being overlooked in the Gazette. “We, like many newspapers, were caught in a time warp,” admits Chodan. “We had hired writers when they were in their twenties, and as they got older their musical tastes changed very little. They didn’t keep up with the times.” She needed someone young enough to understand the latest musical trends and provide proper critical analysis so that readers could also understand and appreciate them. But Chodan also sought a writer who could cover some mainstream artists. She laughs as she tells me that on the day of our interview, Dunlevy had just filed a column on one of the many ska-punk bands in the city before running off to interview jazz-pop vocalist Harry Connick Jr., two very different stories, but both necessary in the section. Dunlevy, with his DJ background, indie credibility, mainstream knowledge and strong writing skills, fit the bill.

The Province has felt a similar need to diversify and make itself relevant to its younger readers. The paper has a strong suburban base, and record sales in those areas prove that interest in hip-hop and electronic music is strong. That’s why music critic Stuart Derdeyn has never had trouble bringing the underdog bands he champions to the Province’s pages. At 35, Derdeyn is older than most of the new breed of music writers, but he can still go on about Cold Cut and Ninja Tune Records or the latest hip-hop release with a knowledge and a passion that are refreshing by traditional newspaper standards. Many dailies in Canada have been slow to include coverage of hip-hop and other new musical forms, but during Derdeyn’s 10 years with the paper, he has tried to incorporate these genres alongside more mainstream coverage. This has helped the paper keep up with its main competitor, The Vancouver Sun, in music writing, as well as target the interests of its suburban readers. The papers themselves are targeting different audiences, but both seemed to be skewing their music coverage toward a “hipper” sensibility in the past few years. “It’s really important that dailies relate to their readers and provide them with what they want,” says Derdeyn. “A lot of times it takes just one person to say, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and convince the editors in charge that this is what should be done.”

Convincing those editors isn’t always easy, as Rayner can attest. He remembers editors at the Ottawa Sunconstantly asking why he was covering another indie band or little-known artist. His pushing editors to let him write about artists he thought deserved coverage made things easier for his replacement, Joshua Ostroff, who recently left the paper to travel around the world and write about music as a freelancer. Ostroff wrote about electronic and rave music and other genres Rayner had advocated for in the Sun with little interference. Ostroff also brought to the paper a voice that one industry member described as that of “a cynical little fuck,” writing scathing reviews of stars like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Silverchair with the unrepentant snideness of a 20-something music fan in a style typically reserved for zine writers. It’s this cynical voice of a young generation that some believe is exactly what papers want.

Well, maybe not exactly what they want, but by bringing in music critics with stronger voices, that’s exactly what they’ve gotten. Perhaps one of the strongest and most honest voices in Canadian music coverage today is that of Bartley Kives at the Free Press. Kives, 30, prides himself on saying precisely what he thinks, regardless of how many music industry members he rankles. Often, music critics fear angering artists or publicists, so reporting is limited and reviews are rarely scathing. Kives brings a strong point of view to his music stories, which he bases on solid reporting.

His reviews are always tough. Describing a recent Alanis Morissette show, he wrote, “nouveau-Alanis is a watered-down ’90s version of the bong-blowing raga rockers of yesteryear.” Not exactly typical of the respectful treatment Morissette gets in some papers, but Kives’s outspokenness has made him popular with the Free Press‘s young audience and gives edge to his appearances on CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera. Kives is hopeful that the new writers are a sign that things are changing. Having a stronger basis for criticism and a willingness to use it is an important factor in changing how music writing is practised.

“When I listen to music I really think about it. I try to figure out what it means and how it fits into a broader cultural picture,” says Rayner of his own criticism, which has been biting at times. It’s a willingness to step away from being the nice guy and from always championing artists that has helped Rayner find his own voice. He’s able to explain a work, and often its pop-culture significance, rather than simply describe the music and rehash the band bio. And when the artist isn’t meeting his standards, he’s the first one to say so. This has meant scathing reviews for artists, such as the Matthew Good Band, who are CanCon mainstays but whom Rayner finds musically lacking. It has also meant that pop culture itself has been on the receiving end of his disenchantment. He soundly trounced Canada’s major concert tour, Edgefest ’99, in a blistering July editorial calling it “less of a triumph of quality Canadian music than it is largely a testament to the power of seven-figure marketing budgets, CanCon regulations and the concurrent drawing power of the bigger-name imports who’ve been brought in to shore up the less commercially surefire homegrown lineup.” In his wrap-up of 1999 he noted that it was the year of “lobotomized pop made by mannequins with no real connection to external reality for listeners either too young or too purposely blind to realize how dreadful things really are.”

But even the most sardonic music reporter at a daily has to write about things that aren’t necessarily cool, which is why Rayner finds himself at a Mel C concert on October 4, 1999, looking out of place watching The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Sporty-Spice without a four-year-old on his arm. He’s taking notes, standing back from the crowd, and at one point turns to another critic and remarks that it’s like watching your little sister in her first rock band. Tomorrow, this line will appear in a review that is surprisingly gentle considering Mel C is an artist many would have thought of as an easy target. It’s a thoughtful review from a writer known for his pessimistic streak, but who also fears becoming just another cool, caustic music critic. It’s this trait that has probably kept Rayner from moving too far away from the interests of the Star‘s audience, but he’s still leery of making it his signature. For a young music critic, it pays to be factual and fair, but not to be seen as too nice too often.

He’s been lucky to establish a recognizable voice so young, but when being young and in the know is a major part of your appeal, it’s not always easy to picture your future. Like all music writers of the moment, Rayner knows he won’t be 25 forever, and 10 years down the road he too might be that guy trying to figure out what the kids are listening to. “I hope I jump ship before I get out of touch. I don’t want to be one of those idiots who’s totally out of his depth, trying to grapple with whatever’s new,” he says, adding as cynically as ever: “I hope that won’t happen, but I’m sure that it will. Everyone turns into their dad eventually.” For now, though, the dailies won’t let your dad write about music.

Patricia is also my mother, and from Chatelaine‘s point of view, that’s the problem. As Rona Maynard, editor in chief of Chatelaine, says, “It’s very clear that if you just follow the baby boom, you’re going to follow them to the grave.” This fear of going out with the old was partly what drove Chatelaine – at 71, the grandmother of Canadian women’s magazines – to start bringing in the new. A high-profile re-launch that cost more than $2 million in March 1999 was supposed to attract new readers in the 25-to-34 age bracket. The resulting splashy cover, spruced-up logo, slightly risqu? cover lines (“Toys for lovers”) and perky tag line “Passion, Purpose, Possibility” had older readers raising their eyebrows in confusion and younger readers wondering what was going on with their mom’s magazine.

But Chatelaine was not the only women’s book going through “the change.” In the past year Homemaker’sand Canadian Living (see sidebar), the country’s other established women’s magazines, have both undergone redesigns, repositionings or face-lifts. They, along with their younger competitor, Elm Street, have new editors, and in the case of Homemaker’s and Canadian Living, a new owner as well. In the process, women’s magazines, generally viewed within the industry as about as exciting as meat loaf, have been the focus of much scrutiny as each tries to elbow the other out in the fight for readers and advertising dollars. As media critic John Fraser says, all the recent manoeuvrings are a “sign of turmoil and uncertainty.”

“Uncertainty” is also an accurate description of the general climate of magazines in the country, as publishers await what they see as an inevitable incursion of U.S. titles after Canada dismantled most of its protectionist measures for magazines last fall, in the wake of a World Trade Organization ruling. The anxiety is even higher for publishers of women’s titles, since the American magazines that have the highest circulations in this country are largely women’s books. As the women’s magazines alter their content, as well as their look, in response to these forces, it is not just readers’ loyalties that are at stake. Traditionally, Chatelaine,Canadian Living and Homemaker’s have been the cash cows for their parent publishing companies. There have been times, for example, when Maclean’s might have folded were it not for Chatelaine‘s fat revenues. Val Ross, who covered the magazine beat for The Globe and Mail for six and a half years, warns that too radical a departure in style and content “would be like changing the diet of your best milk cow that is providing milk for everybody else.” Now, with each of the women’s magazines struggling with its own identity crisis on newsstands and in family rooms, there are implications not just for these books but for many of the best-known titles in the country.

At the time of Chatelaine‘s makeover last spring, senior editor Peter Carter was nervous. “I was concerned we were throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” he says, “that we were going to lose what we’re strong at in order to gain something we didn’t have.” Chatelaine may not have thrown out the baby, but it did throw out the baby boomer.

“Those readers are not key to our future. I think there is certainly a readership for a magazine that would target women in their 50s, but we can’t be that magazine,” explains the 50-year-old Maynard diplomatically. (Internally, other editorial staff mordantly refer to still-loyal but no-longer-desirable older readers as “Chatelhags.”)

The idea of the redesign was initiated in July 1998 when it became apparent that Chatelaine‘s core readership in the key 25-to-49-year-old group had dropped from 1.14 million in 1988 to 887,000. In fact, readership in general was declining, down from 2.7 million in 1996 to 2.2 million in 1998, while in the same period, readership per copy had dropped from 3 to 2.6. Factor in the looming threat of invading U.S. titles andChatelaine management felt it was time to turn the matron into a swinging young thing. It was also time for a new publisher, someone who could introduce the shiny, revamped product.

“From my experience in packaged goods marketing, I understand that the consumer is everything,” says Donna Clark, 44, publisher of Chatelaine since May 1998. “Pleasing and delighting your consumer is the same as pleasing and delighting your reader. She’s who makes us successful and makes us money, too.” Clark came to Chatelaine with no publishing experience, having spent her career marketing packaged goods for Warner-Lambert, Pillsbury and Campbell Soup before becoming vice president of marketing at Mattel. Her background comes through when she talks about her current position: “I was attracted to the Chatelainebrand. I wanted to see what could be done to make a pretty healthy business even healthier.” Freshening up the brand meant targeting a younger age group.

While, according to Clark, advertisers have responded favourably to the new Chatelaine, numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations show Chatelaine‘s circulation continued to decline post-relaunch, from 819,000 in late 1998 to less than 800,000 by last June. Most significant is the drop in subscriptions, from almost 780,000 in January 1999 to just over 720,000 in June – a loss of approximately 57,000 in the six months on either side of the relaunch.

Clark is predictably upbeat about the numbers: “Yes, we’ve lost some readers, but smaller numbers than we thought and more are coming in on the other side,” she says. However, Clarence Poirier, Chatelaine‘s director of research, says 40 per cent of the magazine’s current subscribers are 50-plus, while only 14 per cent are 18 to 34. “This worries us,” Poirier says. “Not because we see the 50-plus group as lesser value, but it’s the younger group the advertisers want to reach, and advertising is 80 per cent of our revenue.”

To determine what younger readers wanted, Chatelaine conducted extensive research. Out went the knitting patterns and in came passion, purpose and possibility. Gone were gritty reads like Kim Pittaway’s “Who is Jane Doe? (about a woman who proved police used her as rape bait) and in came “Toys in Babeland” (about sex toys) and Bob Reguly’s “The Dominatrix” (a onetime prostitute and drug addict finds her dream job). Pull quotes went from “Teenagers like intimidating people. They like the power, it makes them feel good” to “I have big breasts and a big ass. I remind regressives of their mommy and submissives of my authority.”

Another area of Chatelaine that underwent significant change is the front of the book. Traditionally, this section was filled with one-page service pieces, advice columns and short reviews of movies and books. Now, the service pieces are usually on style, fashion and beauty, and the entertainment section, renamed Fast Forward, caters to a younger, hipper audience with quick bites of entertainment news, some of which border on the ridiculous. The relaunch issue carried a picture of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler with a quotation at the top of the page that read: “I’d like to have my ashes spread all over the beach, so even after I’m dead, I’m still gonna get in girls’ pants.” The September issue featured National Iguana Awareness Day, October showed shots of the “pasty Irish butt” of a character on the television show NYPD Blue and November posed the thought-provoking theory that Hollywood actresses’ hairstyles are in fact copied from canines, comparingFriends star Jennifer Aniston’s hair to that of a Chinese-crested dog. Not surprisingly, Fast Forward scored dead last in a readership survey conducted by Chatelaine in October. Maynard says Chatelaine‘s goal is to produce controversial articles to attract the new audience. “Younger readers want an article to come to a conclusion and take a stand. We’re more cutting-edge now.” In case readers don’t twig to this, one feature each month carries the label ” Chatelaine Controversy.” In November, for example, it was a piece about a couple’s struggle over whether to circumcise their son.

Chatelaine is also publishing more of what former Elm Street editor Stevie Cameron calls “good gal” stories: pieces about successful women (such as January’s profiles of 15 women under 40 who are “blazing the way into the 21st century”).

This doesn’t mean Chatelaine is not still producing strong journalism. Associate editor Beth Hitchcock’s profile on Deborah Cox in the December 1999 issue not only unveiled the singer’s personality, but also discussed Cox’s struggle to get the attention she deserves in her home country. (An article about Cox published two months earlier in Elm Street was much less developed.) Maynard’s recent hiring of former Homemaker’seditor Sally Armstrong to write six articles a year was a huge coup; Armstrong’s “Sally goes to war” stories will bring more issues-based journalism to the magazine.

Although Armstrong remains a freelancer, she has the title “editor at large,” a move criticized by her former boss. “I think Chatelaine is putting her on their masthead and trying to make it look like she’s a staff member when she’s not,” says Homemaker’s publisher Barrie Wykes. Armstrong defends her decision to go to the competition. She says she was upfront with her plans to freelance. “I write on women’s issues. Who did they think I would freelance for, The Economist?” Armstrong’s first piece, in the February issue, profiled a female forensic pathologist from Calgary who exhumes Kosovo war victims. “Armstrong may be what saves the magazine, in that she will give it an identifiable personality, much like former editor Doris Anderson did,” says Janet Callaghan, vice president and corporate media director at The Media Company in Toronto.

Reader response to the “new” Chatelaine is mixed. Jennifer Boulanger, a 25-year-old assistant at an investment dealer for the oil and gas industry in Calgary, used to consider Chatelaine her mom’s magazine, but started reading it after the relaunch. “I like the new look. The fashion, beauty and health are more directed at women my age and the articles are more lively,” she says. However, Sandra Dimitrakopoulos, a 24-year-old Toronto student, isn’t as positive: “I used to read Chatelaine for its articles, but after the first couple of new issues since the relaunch, I stopped. It seems they have created a concept of what they think a young person would like, but it’s too trendy for the Chatelaine I used to know.” And what about the Chatelhags? Doris Anderson, editor of the magazine between 1957 and 1977, confesses: “I don’t read it much anymore.” She thinks Chatelaine and other women’s magazines are now only skimming the surface with their features and are not covering many of today’s important stories. “They very rarely tackle articles on the declining middle class, which is particularly hard on single mothers. There is no questioning of the system. The magazines that succeed best challenge the reader with thought-provoking articles.”

Media buyers’ reactions are equally mixed. Sheri Metcalfe, associate media director at Cossette Media in Toronto, believes Chatelaine‘s relaunch was a wise move, particularly with the threat of U.S. titles on their way to the Canadian market: “It was looking kind of stodgy and old and needed some freshening up,” she says. But Callaghan identifies the magazine’s greatest challenge: to appeal to both moms and their daughters. ” Chatelaine is really struggling,” she says. “They face a difficult task and are damned every step they take, in fear of losing a very large and loyal readership if they are too radical, and not attracting new readers because they are too staid, too Chatelaine.”

It’s 11:30 p.m. on a September Friday, and Mary McIver, managing editor of Homemaker’s, is leaving work. The November issue has finally been put to bed and she’s looking forward to going there, too. She feels as if she just did six months’ work in one week. Production is not usually this demanding, but the new editor in chief, Dianne Rinehart, took over on Monday and wasted no time putting her stamp on the magazine. “All the copy was in and we were putting it together, but she wanted to revisit everything, and certain things she didn’t like, she pulled, no bones about it. I felt like I was galloping just to keep up.”

Although heads were spinning with the arrival of an energetic new editor, a week earlier they were hanging low as the staff said goodbye to Armstrong, who had been the editor in chief for 11 years. “By the time she left we were a pretty emotionally wrecked bunch,” says McIver, who worked with Armstrong for more than 10 years. Armstrong had almost single-handedly shaped the identity of the magazine with her hard-hitting, award-winning stories on international women’s rights. A 1997 piece about the women of Afghanistan brought 9,000 letters from readers demanding that action be taken to halt the human rights catastrophe in that country. A 1998 story on the efforts to end female genital mutilation in Senegal generated more than $6,000 for a program aimed at eliminating the practice.

“Women’s magazines have been marginalized as fluffy and light reading, but if you think about it, it’s women’s magazines that have changed the status quo of the entire country,” says Armstrong. “People often asked me how we could publish these hard-hitting stories in the same magazine as recipes, and I thought, is there some bizarre notion that if you’re interested in human rights you’re not interested in making a birthday cake for your child?”

This combination of conventional women’s-book fare and investigative coverage of women’s human rights won Armstrong four National Magazine Awards and helped Homemaker’s successfully convert from controlled to paid circulation – a feat that Quill & Quire publisher and circulation expert Sharon McAuley calls “a circulation miracle.” By last year, the subscription base was 780,000 paid (albeit at a modest $9.95 a year for 10 issues). Then, at 56, Armstrong left her job – not with retirement in mind, but rather to go back to school, write a book on the stories of six women in the Balkans and continue her crusading journalism. “I realized I didn’t want to be the editor of Homemaker’s for the rest of my life,” she says frankly.

Homemaker’s Wykes puts a positive spin on her departure. “Parallel to Sally needing change, Homemaker’sneeded to make some changes, too – not wild and dramatic change, but change,” he says. A new editor is a surefire way to alter a magazine, and Rinehart, a journalist with 25 years’ experience, was eager to take over. “At 9:02 Monday morning she had her sleeves rolled up and was right in the thick of it,” says Wykes.

Rinehart, 47, worked under Bonnie Fuller at Flare in the 1980s before leaving for Moscow to freelance for USA Today; she then moved on to Ottawa, where she was a parliamentary correspondent with Canadian Press. Following that, she spent three years as a senior news reporter with The Vancouver Sun. “She’s feisty, tenacious, competitive,” says Graham Rockingham, who was her assignment editor at the Sun, where Rinehart’s main beats were native issues and immigration. “She loves this business. She eats, sleeps and breathes a story,” he says. “Kind of like the Energizer bunny?” I ask. “More like the Energizer bull,” he replies.

Just before Rinehart’s takeover, Homemaker’s concluded an extensive survey that showed readers asking for more. They wanted arts and entertainment, travel, gardening and finance, as well as more health and nutrition. Rinehart implemented these changes. “It’s not like I’m tearing the magazine apart and starting from scratch, but we are going to respond to their requests,” she says. Rinehart changed the front-of-the-book section, which seldom contained pieces longer than 200 words, to even quicker hits of newsy items such as the Hot List, which features everything from movies to women, and The View, which covers trends in food, fashion, beauty and travel. She also cut McIver’s eight-and-a-half-year-old column of quirky news and notes at the back of the book and replaced it with Parting Shot, a full-page photo of a “good gal.” (In the December/January issue it was ballerina Kimberly Glasco.) Rinehart’s short, snappy newspaper style comes through in the entire magazine. “She doesn’t seem to care as much about whether we have four or five features as long as there are some meaty reads in there, because she views other sections as features,” says McIver. “Sally wrote stories that were very passionate, compassionate, pulled at the heartstrings and celebrated good work. Dianne has a less emotional style. She doesn’t seem to favour long, introspective pieces as part of the narrative.”

But Rinehart insists she is still committed to issues-based features that call for change – and so far, she is following through. The December 1999 issue featured a piece on homelessness, which included reports from Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The February/March issue included a piece on raising awareness of heart disease, the number-one killer of Canadian women. The Homemaker’s tradition of conventional women’s fare and investigative journalism is not expected to change under Montreal’s Transcontinental Publications, which bought Homemaker’s, Canadian Living and Telemedia’s nine other consumer titles in late January. Rinehart feels comfortable with the new ownership. “I think it’s the best group we could have been sold to,” she says, pointing out that Transcontinental – unlike Rogers Media, Chatelaine‘s parent company, which also aggressively bid on the Telemedia books – does not own magazines that directly compete with Homemaker’s. Had Rogers succeeded, it’s possible that either Homemaker’s or Canadian Living might have been folded to reduce competition with Chatelaine. “Transcontinental has an interest in making us grow,” says Rinehart, who is optimistic the new parent company will protect her book. “They want to take care of us.”

It was Friday the 13th, 1995, when Greg MacNeil resigned from Telemedia to start Multi-Vision Publishing. He had spent 10 years at Telemedia – where he was, at different times, publisher of Homemaker’s andCanadian Living – but left, he says, because he had a different point of view from Jim McCoubrey, Telemedia’s CEO at the time. The speculation is that he launched Elm Street to spite his former employer; whether this is true or not, it can be argued that Elm Street‘s identity crisis started at birth, when MacNeil, along with his partner, Lilia Lozinski, hired Stevie Cameron as editor. “We wanted to do something nontraditional, and we thought her reputation would add buzz to the mag,” he says. There’s no doubt Cameron has a strong reputation, but as an investigative newspaper reporter, not a magazine editor. Her vision of what the magazine should be diverged from MacNeil’s from the beginning. Cameron says she wanted a city magazine for men and women: “I wanted a mix of things. I wanted a Toronto Life for the entire country.” MacNeil wanted a magazine with the tag line “For Canadian Women.”

The dissonance was apparent last fall when I visited Cameron, 56, at the Elm Street office. As we began to chat, she commented on some copy she had on her desk. “It says, ?Tis the season,’ and I want to gag. I hate that stuff. I’m a journalist. I don’t like exclamation points in headlines or sappy stuff. I like to write. I don’t move back and forth well between editor and writer mode, and I’m a writer,” she confided. “I’m just going to get the holiday issue out.” A few days later her decision that she could no longer be editor in chief of Elm Streetbecame public.

“She didn’t want the job in the first place,” said MacNeil in his smooth salesman’s voice at the time of Cameron’s resignation. “I’m not surprised by Stevie’s departure. I knew it was coming.” Nevertheless MacNeil spent most of last fall trying to keep her at the magazine in some capacity. During that time, Cameron signed a multibook deal with her publishing company, Macfarlane Walter & Ross – which brought out her big-selling Mulroney-bashing book On the Take – and took a stint with the Globe as a “writer at large.” Her successor is Gwen Smith, a longtime pal whom Cameron has described as “tough, careful and curious.” She adds that Smith will have a different idea about how to run Elm Street. “We’ll see more sports, I think, and perhaps more health stories.”

Patrick Walshe, vice president of media management company Harrison, Young, Pesonen & Newell, believes the impact of Cameron leaving Elm Street is definitely more significant than Armstrong leaving Homemaker’s. “Stevie is the founding editor and it was her energy and vision that formed a lot of what Elm Street is.” But what Elm Street is has always been hard to define. Articles have ranged from fluffy pieces on Canadian personalities (a cover story on actor Matthew Perry appeared in the premiere issue) to strong, investigative pieces (such as Michael Valpy’s profile of Dr. Nancy Olivieri in the Holiday 1998 issue). As Anne Kingston, aNational Post columnist and self-confessed magazine junkie, says, “Elm Street needs some retooling in order to get some cohesion. There is no sense of progression as you read it. There’s some strong journalism in there that has gotten lost in the midst of everything. It doesn’t have a clear identity, and given the amount of stuff out there, this is a problem. You must have a strong editorial voice.”

This lack of a clear identity is reflected in the magazine’s performance. Although Elm Street claims a 700,000 readership base, almost 660,000 of that is non-paid and its readership per copy is an embarrassing 0.9. Advertising revenue fell six per cent from 1998 to 1999, and ad pages dropped 5.2 per cent during the same time.

To boost income, Elm Street is trying to convert a portion of its controlled circulation to paid, offering eight issues for $9.95. Although Elm Street is modelling its conversion after Homemaker’s, it is questionable whether it has the same presence and reader loyalty to succeed. While Homemaker’s was 30 years old when it started its switch to paid circulation, Elm Street is only four, and its single-copy sales per issue are a miserable 1,700.

Will Elm Street‘s new editor, Gwen Smith, be able to create a magazine with an editorial voice strong enough to appeal to readers and advertisers? “I’m going to make sure we have a killer piece in every issue,” she says, adding she favours Cameron’s style of investigative journalism. Still, like both Cameron and Rinehart, she has little background in magazine editing. Her 21-year career has been spent at newspapers such as the Globe and The Toronto Star as well as seven years in broadcasting. Although she has freelanced for Cottage Life and Toronto Life among others, her sole magazine editing experience was six months at Elm Street while Cameron was on leave writing her book Blue Trust in 1998 and, most recently, as an assistant managing editor at Maclean’s. “I’m not going in imposing my will on the magazine,” she says. “But one of the first things we will do is an internal review of the magazine to find out what is liked and what is not so liked.” But Elm Street’s new tag line, “Canadian Life, People, Issues, Style,” which debuted on the February/March issue, illustrates the magazine’s greatest insecurity: in trying to be everything, it may not master anything.

The news in mid-January that Telemedia was putting its entire stable of magazines on the block signalled many publishers’ current pessimism about the future prospects for Canadian magazines. The subtext to the sale was the federal government’s decision last year to back away from legislation it had drafted in the aftermath of an unfavourable ruling by the World Trade Organization. At issue were Canada’s longtime ban on the importation of magazines carrying advertising aimed at a Canadian audience and its more recent law that clawed back any advertising revenue that non-Canadian magazines received from domestic advertisers. The WTO found that both initiatives contravened its rules. The measures had been developed to ensure that Canadian advertisers put their ad dollars into Canadian magazines, reflecting the fact that magazines depend on advertising for more than 50 per cent of their revenues. Publishers feared that American split-run magazines – with the same editorial content as in their home editions but different ads – would skim off ad dollars, perhaps even putting Canadian magazines out of business. However, before Bill C-55 was passed, the government bowed to pressure from the U.S. and gutted its bill.

Instead, the revised Bill C-55 allows foreign split-runs with no Canadian content to carry up to 12 per cent Canadian advertising (this will rise to 18 per cent in several years). For the first time, it is legal for foreign publishers to purchase up to 49-per-cent interest in domestic titles and, as of later this year, to start their own magazines in Canada. Concern about the impact of these changes is wide-spread in the industry, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the women’s book sector. The American titles with the largest circulations in Canada are women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan, YM, Good Housekeeping and Woman’s World, all of which have a Canadian circulation of just under 200,000.

Masthead editor Patrick Walsh notes that “to date, American publishers have been testing the Canadian waters with subscription drives to determine if they can drive up their rate bases before selling ads against split-runs or spillovers. “Now,” he predicts, “expect to see more U.S. initiatives to penetrate this market, as well as the emergence of powerhouse cross-border partnerships.” Telemedia reportedly tried, and failed, to find an American partner before selling to Transcontinental, while Rogers Media is seeking a deal with a large U.S. publishing company.

Meanwhile, the women’s magazines, in trying to position themselves with ad agencies to survive the anticipated invasion from the south, seem in danger of overlooking the most important person in the business: the reader. I’m sure my mom isn’t the only one who wants more than risotto recipes.