In the spring of 1996, in a tower of blue glass in what was then the city of North York, Ontario, the small staff of Equinox gathered around the fax machine for what had become a yearly ritual: reading the list of National Magazine Awards nominees. The staff’s excitement grew as the pages spilled out. For a moment, the struggling publication’s rough times were forgotten. But in the background, a dolly rolled by, pulled by the magazine’s publisher, Kerry Mitchell, and piled with the contents of her office. She was leaving Equinox, moving on to bigger and-by some standards-better things at Canadian Living.

It wasn’t a personal abandonment. The move was a directive from the brass at Telemedia Inc., the company that had been publishing Equinox for almost a decade. Telemedia saw potential in Mitchell, and was getting the smart young publisher off the sinking ship. Equinox was no place for an up-and-comer.

By the end of the year, Telemedia had sold Equinox to the small, Montreal-based Malcolm Publishing. The new owners had reduced the staff to a single editor, Alan Morantz, and the remarkable magazine was well on its way to a decidedly unremarkable end. But during its nearly 19 years of publication, Equinox constructed what may prove to be a lasting legacy. For many that read it, Equinox was a cultural expression. On the first pages of its first issue, Equinox proclaimed its desire to “capture the imaginations of its readers” with an exploration of the land and people, the flora, fauna and folkways of a country it felt was underestimated, even by Canadians. And through successes and failures, and several incarnations, the one feature Equinoxmaintained was an extraordinary literary and visual ambition. The magazine achieved critical kudos and respect throughout the publishing industry. It functioned as a showcase for writers, editors and photographers of the highest calibre. But it never had much success as a business. And with its passing,Equinox illustrates the Darwinian nature of the Canadian magazine publishing world. Equinox failed under the smallest of publishers, it failed under the biggest of publishers and finally, it failed somewhere in between. At times just bad business and at times a victim of more complicated circumstances, Equinox was the product of a faulty equation from the start: it was built in response to a personal vision, and for a time it was allowed to ignore the realities of business to fulfill that vision. But business realities have a way of making themselves heard.

A half-hour drive northwest of Kingston, at the edge of the tiny town of Camden East, a tall, square house of dark red brick with shuttered windows overlooks farmers’ fields and the Napanee River. Home to a small magazine and book publishing company, this is the place where Equinox began. It was born in December 1981, a crucial progression in the young life of Camden House Publishing, and part of the grand scheme envisioned by the publisher and would-be visionary James Lawrence. His earlier creation, Harrowsmith, which focused on the joys of country living, was already a few years old and successfully gathering an audience. For Equinox , Lawrence expanded his ambitions to create a broad, bimonthly exploration of Canada and the world. His objective, he explained in its pages, was to create “the most beautiful magazine in Canada.”

Equinox‘s launch was one of the biggest successes in the magazine’s short life. A direct-mail campaign helped create enough anticipation to secure a paid circulation of 116,000 for its first issue. A year after its creation, it was selected magazine of the year by the National Magazine Awards Foundation. Partly inspired by the success of National Geographic in Canada, Equinox was perfect-bound and glossy-paged, and featured jaw-dropping nature photography. Its articles were sprawling explorations of nature, often running close to 5,000 words. For Alan Morantz, a long-time staff member and eventual editor, encountering the magazine was a revelation. “I had never seen any publication, and I never have since, that set the bar so high in terms of the narrative and visual storytelling. It was a magazine meant to be read and a magazine meant to be looked at.”

With Lawrence at the helm as publisher and editor, Equinox filled a curious void in the Canadian magazine industry, and in the lives of its readers. It delivered Canada to Canadians through a passion for the wild. However, Equinox was a magazine publishing beyond its means, beautiful but hopeless. After a promising first year, its growth levelled off and revenues began to decline. By 1985, advertising income was falling fast, and Lawrence stepped down as editor to work exclusively as publisher. He handed the reins to Barry Estabrook, a capable editor who understood Lawrence’s vision of the magazine, but Equinox continued its slide. In 1986, it ran fewer than half as many advertisements as in the previous year.

While the business slowly suffered and declined, the small staff continued to put out a big-budget magazine with only the means of a tiny publisher. Still working out of the brick house, sharing resources and editorial staff, the people working on the two Camden House publications enjoyed an unusually idyllic working environment. There were barbecues and the occasional volleyball game, offices set up in what once were bedrooms, with windows overlooking pastures of grazing cattle-certainly an unconventional backdrop for magazine publishing. But the work environment lived up to the country lifestyle that Lawrence embraced. Everywhere, from the family atmosphere in the house to the rural surroundings, were the physical reminders of the cooperative spirit that began with Harrowsmith and carried on through Equinox .

While the atmosphere may have been idyllic, all was not well with Equinox. The magazine continued to be a creative showcase. And though it carried on commissioning epic adventure articles, spending top dollar on writing and photography, its revenues were disappearing. With each issue, Lawrence’s continued publishing of the magazine became at best an act of philanthropy, at worst stubborn pride. In the spring of 1987, Lawrence sold Equinox and Harrowsmith to the Toronto-based publishing branch of Telemedia. In Equinox, the big publisher was acquiring an acclaimed prestige product. At the magazine there was a sense thatEquinox would finally have the backing to make it a success-that Telemedia would flex its publishing muscle to put Equinox on shelves and into more homes.

There were changes under Telemedia, most noticeably a new editor. Another capable editor and Equinoxpurist, Bart Robinson would continue to steer the magazine in its well-established direction. Jeff Shearer, a Telemedia executive at the time, remembers trying to evolve the magazine to take advantage of the very large geographic market. “Because in many ways,” says Shearer, “Equinox had a lot of the editorial properties of a really good geographic magazine. But I don’t think we were picking up their subscribers because the name and positioning didn’t say ‘geographic’ to people who didn’t know the magazine.” Telemedia had plans to broaden Equinox ‘s audience, but for a few years, the company’s hands-off approach to editorial allowed the staff to carry on almost as if the sale had never taken place. Sequestered in small-town Ontario, they kept putting out the magazine the way they always had. But their time in Camden was limited.

Eventually, things at Telemedia proved different than at Camden House. While Equinox‘s staff continued to turn out quality content, the standard by which Telemedia judged its new magazine was a reality check. Unlike the old publisher, Telemedia was big business. “The moment it became a part of a major company,” says Shearer, “of course it would have to be accountable. You know, it may not have had to be sold to us if it had been accountable from the beginning.” But just being part of the big company was not a cure-all. Telemedia had acquired a losing proposition in Equinox, and turning it around proved to be impossible, especially given the financial climate of the early ’90s, “a dramatically difficult time for magazines,” according to Shearer. In 1992, after a few good years of rising circulation and improved ad sales, Equinoxresumed its old pattern of slipping numbers. But Telemedia wasn’t publishing magazines for the spiritual fulfillment, and it wasn’t interested in taking a financial loss. After almost five years of near-autonomy,Equinox was reined in. Telemedia resolved to make Equinox a little more like its other publications-a little more profitable.

Telemedia hired Jim Cormier in 1993, an excellent editor, but for the first time one who hadn’t been brought up in the Equinox tradition. His vision for the magazine was different from the one established by Lawrence, and different from the one carried on under Estabrook and Robinson. Cormier’s Equinox had a new feel. But the differences seemed small compared to what was coming. In 1994 Telemedia moved the two magazines from Camden East to its offices in North York.

When Equinox stepped into the city, everything changed. The days of gazing at cattle were gone. The magazine was set up in an office tower at the corner of Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue, a shiny blue spike in a dirty sea of construction, crowned with the word “Nestl?.” Equinox was a peculiarity, asked to settle quietly into a setting as distant from Lawrence’s vision as from its old home several hundred kilometres away.

In Camden East, the staff ate together in the dining room of the old house. “There was nowhere else to have lunch,” remembers Morantz, “so for a period, they had somebody come in and make lunch for everybody. At about 10 in the morning, you would smell muffins being baked, or pasta, and it would create this ambience of a family, you know, working together on a purpose.” In Toronto, the only place to eat was across the street at the Sheppard Centre, in a food court with orange plastic chairs and a KFC.

Cormier’s specialty lay in packaging stories in arresting ways. Under him, the magazine became hipper and edgier and carried more mass appeal, but it was a far cry from the Equinox readers were accustomed to. The magazine was approaching a new audience, but it wasn’t a bigger one. Paid circulation continued its decline, and many charter subscribers sent letters announcing their disapproval of the new Equinox .

The biggest indication of the editorial changes under way was the redesign that came just before the move to Toronto. The conservative black border on the cover, one of Equinox‘s most recognizable features, was shed in favour of a new full-bleed cover. The magazine began to run more single-page items, and reduced the length of its features. Along with these changes came the occasional nod to the urban reader, someoneEquinox had seemingly avoided in the past.

In the space of a year or two, Equinox had become a totally different magazine. Even with the same title on the cover, it hardly looked like its older incarnation. And it was a different read. There were fewer animal and adventure stories, and more about science and culture. Liberally interpreting its role as “Canada’s Magazine of Discovery,” it ran pieces on the culture of harness racing in the Maritimes and the science of hockey. Still, the magazine industry held the new Equinox ‘s content in high regard. The redesigned book won more awards than ever.

Despite the editorial kudos, the atmosphere at Telemedia was less cooperative than at Camden House. Instead of working side-by-side with the publishers, and sharing a vision, the magazine’s editors worked on a different floor from the people in charge, with only a vague idea of what Telemedia expected of them. AndEquinox‘s editors didn’t always get along with its owners. Moira Farr, a senior editor during that time, recalls heated battles between Cormier and the publishers upstairs. “I remember a day when Jim was given some of the marketing material that had been sent out for Equinox , and it had grammatical errors in it. And he had not even been consulted about this letter that was going out to potential subscribers. He hit the roof and called marketing. He felt this was misrepresenting the magazine.” There was an example, too, of a glaring mistake made by the publishers. In the March/April 1996 issue, they ran an Export “A” cigarette advertisement-a ridiculous depiction of a huge cigarette hovering like a spaceship over a clearing in the woods. The ad clashed violently with the spirit of the magazine. Readers reacted with angry letters-so the next issue contained a formal apology and a vow never to print another cigarette ad.

Though it would be poetic to portray Telemedia as a misguided captain, steering the ship astray, the company can hardly be held responsible for the death of the magazine. Telemedia was trying to breathe new life into a failing business at a time when magazine publishing was becoming more difficult. Even the big companies were tightening their belts, and changes in management affected the way the company approached its titles. “There was a different management style in the ’90s,” says Shearer, who left Telemedia in 1990, “and it was not an expansion of properties.” Telemedia’s role in Equinox‘s story is probably closer to providing a terminal patient with a decade of life support. Telemedia is a big company. And, as big companies do, it answered ultimately to the bottom line. In almost 10 years at Telemedia,Equinox rarely, if ever, turned a profit. And a good business can’t hold on to a losing proposition forever.

In 1996 came the day the award nominations came streaming in by fax, and the day Telemedia moved Kerry Mitchell from Equinox to Canadian Living. The publisher’s exit was a message the editors understood clearly. “Time’s up,” it said. It was soon common knowledge that Telemedia was looking for a buyer for the magazine. For a few months after Mitchell’s departure, as Telemedia shopped Equinox around to less-than-excited potential buyers, heartening rumours circulated among the Equinox staff. The names of wealthy philanthropists were murmured in the hope that some guardian angel would rescue Equinox .

Telemedia sold the magazine in 1996, but the buyer, the tiny Montreal-based Malcolm Publishing, was hardly an angel. Dan Bortolotti, then an editorial assistant at Equinox , remembers when Telemedia finally broke the news. “I have two memories of it,” says Bortolotti. “The first is of us being asked to gather around in our office, and [Telemedia vice-president] Graham Morris coming up and saying the magazine had been sold. After that, we had another meeting in the boardroom, and they explained that everybody there would be laid off.”

The events of the next three years were essentially denouement. Everybody was let go but Alan Morantz, who became the magazine’s editor. Cormier stayed on as an adviser for a few months before he left, too. The budget was cut by 25 per cent, and the page count was slashed. But Morantz was eager to take on the new job. While most saw the sale as the end of Equinox, Morantz saw an opportunity to take the magazine back to its traditional format-the magazine he had wanted it to be, and not the mass-market model of the Telemedia years. Morantz had been with Equinox since Camden East, since the country house, and he had a strong sense of the magazine’s roots. “And that’s why they kept me,” he says, “because of continuity.” Malcolm Publishing wanted Morantz to bring the magazine back to what it had been 10 years before, and to reestablish the relationship with some of the older readers. “And that’s what I wanted to do, regardless,” he says. “So that’s what we set out to do, with a little bit of success, or a lot of success, or no success. I’m happy to leave that to others to judge.”

Morantz brought back the black border that had disappeared in 1993. And he returned somewhat to the heavy adventure and wildlife stories of the old days. It was recognizably Equinox , but with the funding cut, the pages grew fewer and fewer. “In the end,” says Morantz, “it did prove to be something they were just not able to execute.” Many who had read or worked on the magazine stopped buying it, preferring to pull the plug than watch an old friend waste away. Malcolm Publishing had a hard time paying contributors. Morantz found himself on the phone with writers he had worked with for years, pledging he would get them their cheques. He would call Montreal, and the publishers would make promises they didn’t keep. “For a couple of years,” he says, “people were willing to trust me and the relationship I had with them over many years. But that began to suffer.”

Finally, in 1999, frustrated, he stopped communicating with Malcolm altogether and quietly packed his bags. Longtime contributors like Wayne Grady and Martin Silverstone filled in near the end, but there was no long-term replacement.

Equinox died in August 2000-swallowed up by rival Canadian Geographic . Sold for parts, so to speak, it amounted in the end to a subscriber list of 100,000 or so names, a handful of unpublished stories and a collection of memories.

And while it would be easy to blame the magazine’s failure on the lack of a market, or to describe its long, slow demise as a measure of a decline in the vogue of environmental matters, Equinox‘s failure was not a function of its content, but of its approach to business. Similar magazines have been able to succeed. WhenEquinox began publishing, National Geographic had a paid circulation of more than 850,000 in Canada-part of the inspiration for Equinox‘s launch. And by the end of Equinox‘s 19-year run, Canadian Geographic had a paid circulation of close to 250,000. While both Canadian Geographic and National Geographic have subscriberships based on membership in an organization, they are also clear indications of an audience forEquinox‘s material. Canadian Geographic may have been less acclaimed, but anyone attempting to pass judgement is left with the fact that when Equinox ran aground, Canadian Geographic was doing well enough to buy what was left.

The house still stands in Camden East. The cows still graze in the fields, and the river runs by just the same as ever. And while the small town remains a reminder of a vision, there is no visible trace of the magazine at all. And precisely because of this-because Equinox arrived so dazzlingly, and went so dejectedly-the sights of the little town of Camden East tell the last verse of the magazine’s story well enough. Ambition, while undoubtedly Equinox magazine’s greatest virtue, was probably the reason for its failure. Its vision forced it to operate beyond its means. Equinox was special because it was not a business. It was a labour of love, and an expression of James Lawrence’s ideals. And the magazine’s story illustrates an obvious truth: kudos can’t pay the bills.

From downtown Manhattan, it’s a 10-minute ride on the L train to the warehouses and loading docks of recently gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn, once the heart of New York’s industrial park. Outside a former toy factory, among renovated lofts and studios filled with artists and young urban hipsters, the words “Vice Magazine Publishing” are scrawled across a Dumpster in black marker. If that Dumpster were moved for some reason, you would never know that you had arrived.

Upstairs, on the third floor of the building, eight desks are littered around the outskirts of the Vice office, which is about the size of a small parking lot and has much the same ambience. A pair of leather chairs and a sofa sit in the middle of the room, positioned around a bamboo coffee table and rug. Otherwise, a vintage Asteroids arcade game in the corner is the only decoration. The low-key decor perfectly matches Vicemagazine’s rude-boy, DIY ethic. Suroosh Alvi’s, Gavin McInnes’s and Shane Smith’s sense of style hasn’t changed much since they founded Vice in Montreal four years ago, publishing their newsprint repository of urban culture out of an apartment that McInnes and Smith shared. Today, however, Vice maintains editorial offices in both Montreal and New York, having successfully crossed the uncrossable border between Canada and the United States and expanded its distribution into England and Japan. Now glossy and perfect-bound,Vice distributes 100,000 copies in four countries and has spurred a designer clothing line and streetwear boutiques in New York, Montreal, Toronto and London, England.

Smith, who handles many of the publisher’s duties, is 31 and the most style-conscious of the three. He keeps his quarter-inch-long hair combed forward and his goatee trimmed. When wearing a tank top, he displays a tattoo of a dragon across his broad shoulders. Alvi, who is also 31, wears secondhand jeans and a messy beard. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses gives him the look of a tormented graduate student. He is a jack-of-all-trades in the office, performing business duties and occasionally dipping his hand in the editorial.

But it’s the 30-year-old McInnes who controls most of the editorial. He is also Vice‘s resident loose cannon, known for speaking first and thinking later, such as the time on Politically Incorrect when he told Bill Maher and the Episcopalian bishop sitting across from him that Jesus was a fag. It used to be, if you were lucky, you could spy McInnes puttering about the office in a pair of Y-front briefs with a T-shirt tucked into them. Under a pair of unnervingly shifting eyes, he wears his mustache Stalin-style. His work space is neatly organized. On the shelves behind his desk are copies of Spin , which are carefully sorted and dated, as are the copies of Hustler beside them. Asked about the positive press Vice has recently garnered from Canadian media (Marketing Magazine, National Post, The Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette have for the past year been trumpeting the success of his small underground publication), McInnes claims he is bored with it.

“You’re so fucking lazy,” he says to me. “You’re not doing this article because you like us. You’re doing it because you read about us somewhere else. You’re probably the hip guy at the office because you wear cargo pants or you snowboard or something.”

Confused by the sudden attack on my character, I ask if he is talking about me specifically.

“Well, do you snowboard?”

“No.”

“You’re probably okay then.”

One quickly learns that cool is not a subjective term at Vice. There is a certain type of self-reflexive irony that one is expected to strive for. For example, under the Vice rules of cool, it’s okay to do something lame, as long as you’re sincere about it, like sitting up all night listening to the records of ’70s metal band Mot?rhead and loving every minute of it. Understandably, the nuances in Vice‘s brand of cool, the uncanny sensibility that has propelled the magazine’s success, escapes most Canadian journalists.

“That’s why we lie to them,” continues McInnes. “We convinced Le Devoir we were all gay. We convinced the Globe we were addicted to heroin. We told them we all met in rehab.”

“But you’re not addicted to heroin?” I ask, wanting to be sure.

“It’s not an addiction. I do a lot of different drugs,” he says, leaving me to wonder if the statement was meant with an ironic wink.

Precariously balanced between the covers of every issue of Vice are stories that range from the pointless to the profound. Profiles of independent pornographers sit uneasily beside serious pieces like last year’s “The Authority to Kill a Minority,” an investigative article about how NYPD officers were hired to train militia in East Timor. But be sure that it is the pointless articles for which Vice has earned its street credibility. Take the Vice Guides, an ongoing series of serVice pieces offering counsel on everything from which drugs to take while being tattooed, to surviving your first day in prison, to properly giving head, the last of which was achieved through interviews with “piles of sluts and exactly one homo.”

Or there is Dos and Don’ts, a monthly look at fashion disasters and triumphs taken straight from the streets of Montreal, New York and around the world. Candid photos are accompanied by cruelly sarcastic cutlines. In one typical Don’t a man walking down a Montreal sidewalk warrants the comment: “Whoa, it’s the walking police sketch. Did you purposely set out to look like the personification of rape or is that a look that sort of just toppled out of the closet onto your head.”

McInnes writes most of the Dos and Don’ts himself, explaining that their irreverent nastiness is at the core ofVice‘s M.O. “I think people appreciate the honesty,” he says, asserting that Vice contributors are encouraged to be as subjective as possible, conveying their raw opinions.

The prose of Stephen Reid is about as raw an example as one can imagine. Currently serving an 18-year prison sentence in British Columbia for bank robbery, he writes a recurring column about life on the inside from a first-hand perspective, never skimming over the dirty details. In a recent article, “Like Father, Like Son,” which appeared in last December’s issue, Reid tells the story of Gordie, an inmate with a penchant for raping transvestites. Gordie, who is capable of inhuman acts of cruelty, was sexually assaulted in a New Brunswick boys’ home. He came to win a class action lawsuit on the matter, but couldn’t read the results. “Only a god could contrive a day like that day in the law library with Gordie,” writes Reid. “I was being given instructions on what it is to be human, in the most cruel and tender of ways.” This is Vice at its best, insists Alvi: providing a voice for and perspective on stories deemed too marginal or irrelevant by the mainstream press.

Almost a decade ago, Jon Katz, in his famous Rolling Stone essay called “Rock, Rap and Movies Bring You the News,” decreed that pop culture had unwittingly become a news source in itself for those who consume it. He explained how the then-emerging hip-hop genre was the CNN of black America. It is not a stretch to say that Vice is performing the same function for its audience. “Straight news, the Old News, is pooped,” wrote Katz. Replacing it was a “hybrid New News, dazzling, adolescent, irresponsible, fearless, frightening and powerful.” Now, consider for a moment that Vice‘s readership ranges in age from 17 to 26, so its audience is the least likely to read a daily newspaper or watch a nightly newscast. To a middle-class parent who might find an issue of Vice in a teenager’s school bag, the magazine will most likely seem like nothing more than perverted gibberish and sophomoric poo jokes. But to its readers, Vice is nothing less than a trusted source of useful information.

Vice‘s readership transcends the usual assortment of drug users and DJs, drag queens and criminals found in its pages. Instead, it has found a valued audience among the educated urban hipsters of the world who are fascinated with, but are often outside of, “the underbelly of urban culture,” which is how Alvi describesVice‘s content. This quickly becomes apparent when you take into account the social circles Vice‘s staff circulate in.

Recently, at a launch party for Satellite Records, a record store on Manhattan’s Bowery Street, the broad spectrum of Vice readers was in attendance: sketched-out kids, young urban bon vivants and fledgling counterculture entrepreneurs. Inside, the crowd’s fashion was a mix of clubber-cum-snowboard chic and SoHo high-fashion. The DJ was spinning house records and a three-year-old boy was dancing in a three-year-old way next to his mom, who, like everyone else in the room, was busily engaged in small talk. A buffet set up in the centre of the room, which had the appearance of a sparsely decorated Ikea showroom, offered everything from spinach crab cakes to flat-crust pizza. Smith was in the corner drinking a beer, disengaged from the schmoozing going on around him. Sarah Bronilla, Vice‘s fashion director, tried to get Smith to dance, but with the exception of a brief and token hip swing, wasn’t having any luck.

Parties like this are an opportunity to meet and greet, and everybody there seemed to have a project he was working on or a script to sell. A sketchy looking blond kid in an oversized T-shirt and big pants, who couldn’t have been more than 19 years old, introduced himself to Smith. The kid’s pupils were fully dilated. The music was loud and the lights were distracting. He was trying to tell Smith about his business plan, but neither of them had the attention span. Smith took another sip of his Red Stripe and turned to me to say, “Hey, it can’t be all that bad. Free drinks.” As comfortable as Smith looked rubbing elbows in this miasma of urban hip, his demeanour that night testified to how tedious the scene has become for him.

The story of Vice begins in 1994, when the three founders returned to Montreal from stints teaching English abroad. It was Alvi’s idea to start a magazine called Voice of Montreal that would chronicle the city’s thriving punk scene. He found an editor in Gavin McInnes and financial backing from a nonprofit Haitian group called Images Interculturelles. There would be just one condition: Images Inter

culturelles was only allowed to give grants to welfare recipients. At 24, with a degree in philosophy from McGill, Alvi fudged an application and received his first welfare cheque. McInnes followed suit, and when Smith arrived back from Budapest to attend his brother’s wedding, they convinced him to do the same.

“I was fucking pissed,” recalls Smith. “I was rich, I was living in a dope pad and had a car and all this shit, and they were saying you have to get on welfare?” The first time Smith completed the forms, he mistakenly did it honestly, mentioning his MA in political science. The next day, Smith returned with McInnes, who coached him to fill out the forms with his left hand and to let out a deranged “Ernhhh” every time a clerk tried to assist him. The first issue of Voice was printed with the limited funding supplied by Images Interculturelles and featured an interview with the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten.

“It was like publishing in the Third World,” remembers Alvi. “We didn’t have the money to do our mail-outs. We hustled, we figured out how to sell ads, write articles, take pictures and copyedit.” It was all done on the fly. In 1996, Voice magazine dropped the “O” and became Vice. The magazine’s tag line declared it was “rumoured to be among the best.”

The key to Vice‘s success came in the lucrative advertising contracts it found with specialized urban clothing labels like Snug and Geek Boutique. For many of the advertisers, it was the beginning of a long and loyal relationship. Vice offered something no mainstream publication could: street cred. Advertising with Viceallowed a company to reach its audience directly without compromising any of its underground cachet. Whether they were peddling pocketed pants to ravers or clunky shoes to skateboarders, advertisers in Vicecould bypass risking their integrity as underground labels by advertising with magazine giants. Vice also enabled these companies to be more provocative in their ads than they could be in mainstream media. Clothing label Serial Killer in particular was known for pushing the envelope by running ads featuring porn stars in various states of undress alongside its T-shirts. In 1998, Carleton University banned Vice from distributing on its campus because of one of the ads.

In the same year, Vice began courting major publishers such as Larry Flynt Publications, owner of Hustlerand Rap Pages, and News Corporation, which owns the underground hip-hop label Rawkus Records, to back an expansion and redesign. There was little interest. But when the Montreal Gazette phoned, Smith told the reporter there was a bidding war between those two companies and Behaviour Publications, the company responsible for buying and revamping Shift magazine. It was a lie. When Behaviour owner Richard Szalwinski read the article, he called the boys into his office. The guys stumbled their way through some explanations and, when they were done, Szalwinski asked them to come back Monday with a valuation of their company.

“We didn’t know how to value a magazine, and it turned out to be our greatest asset,” says Smith. “If we would have valued it traditionally, it would have been worth nothing, and we valued it at four million bucks.” They walked out of Szalwinski’s office that Monday, cheque in hand-a cheque they really didn’t know what to do with. “We actually just ran around in circles outside for a while.”

“We were rolling around in the grass,” recalls Alvi. With the newfound wealth, Vice became perfect-bound, increased its page count and moved to Manhattan to share offices with Shift .

“Shift were in our offices,” maintains Smith. Vice, he explains, had 14 people working out of those offices, while Shift merely ran a satellite operation with three people in New York (the editorial operations remained in Toronto). This is a sore point for the staff of Vice, who are vocally bitter over the publicity Shift received for moving into the American market.

“We always used to boast that Vice was the first Canadian magazine in history to come down to the States and make it. And then Shift came along and said the same thing. We had a bit of a beef with them because we were the little kids and they were the big kids; then we just shot past them and they didn’t like it. Shiftwould have died two years ago if it weren’t for fucking Richard Szalwinski. He spoiled them,” says Smith.

But Vice was spoiled too. Under Szalwinski, it opened streetwear boutiques in Toronto, Manhattan and London. It started its own fashion line headed by Peter Trainor, a former Diesel designer. The phrase of the day was “multichannel strategies.” Then, after a phase of explosive spending, Behaviour (which by then had changed its name to Normal Networks) found itself in the red and running out of cash reserves. When the money dried up, Vice was owed nearly $500,000 in ad fees that it had neglected to collect. In May 2000, Normal Networks gave the word to operate on minimum burn. The Vice founders saw the writing on the wall. If Normal Networks was to become just another Titanic of the New Economy, Vice was going to sink with it.

Meanwhile, Szalwinski had fled New York and was nowhere to be found. After a month of calling his secretary and other contact numbers, McInnes, Alvi and Smith jumped in a car, drove to his home in Nantucket and persuaded him to sell them the magazine back, after which they vacated their lush Manhattan offices and rented the warehouse space in Brooklyn.

Today, the Behaviour fiasco seems to be nothing more than a small bump in the road for Vice. It’s business as usual at the flagship store on Lafayette Street, a short scooter ride from trendy SoHo. Perched on a stool behind the counter is Sarah Bronilla, who wears brown leather boots and a knee-length skirt, completing her mod go-go girl look. The store is modelled after a turn-of-the-century men’s club locker room, complete with tiled floors and toilets in the change rooms (though if anyone had the idea of urinating in one, he would be discouraged by the goldfish swimming in the bowl). An effeminate middle-aged man is modelling a pair of wool dress pants in the mirror and Bronilla is doing her best to part him from his $100. Turning to me she says, “You should write your story about how the magazine spawned a fashion line.”

Since the first streetwear boutique opened in Toronto in 1999, Vice wanted to start a fashion line. When asked whether running a magazine and a store and a fashion line infringes on the magazine’s editorial integrity, McInnes becomes upset. “It’s just stupid fucking Canadian bullshit!” he says about the perceived conflict between church and state. One of the main reasons clothing lines advertise with Vice is to make it appear as if their products receive a personal seal of approval from the magazine. Nonetheless, the Vicefounders are adamant the magazine is beholden to no one.

“There are some advertisers in there that make me cringe,” says Alvi. We’re having what he calls brunch: a burnt bagel and about a dozen coffees in a Brooklyn cafe. Jnco Jeans, for instance. “It’s wack. Ugly clothes. Ugly ads. There’s nothing cool about it,” he says. He understands the consequences of what he just said. Jnco, after all, has bought the inside back cover spread in several recent issues. He’s not worried though: space in Vice is golden. Advcrtisers rarely take issue with Vice‘s nasty content-over 60 of the December issue’s 132 pages were full-page ads. “Independent publishing is hard as hell,” he explains. “It’s a game of survival. In America we’re an anomaly. Everybody’s got backing. Everybody’s got investors,” says Alvi.

As Vice continues to build its empire of magazine publishing and fashion, as well as dabble in film production and Internet content, it seems to be effortlessly weaving counterculture and capitalism into a Zen state. Paradoxically, the magazine exists in the urban underbelly of the counterculture and in mainstreet consumer culture, two worlds that are, by definition, opposites. What has allowed this uneasy existential state to continue and not implode on itself has been an ironic detachment on the part of the Vice founders.Vice‘s content has always been self-reflexive, but has grown more so in the past few years as its notoriety has grown.

In the December 2000 issue, for example, the coverlines that are supposed to tease the stories to be found in the magazine instead tease the ads. “555 Soul Two Page Spread p.2,” they read. “Droors p.8, Ben Sherman ad p.4, Transfer Ad p.6.” It’s like advertising the advertisements. Be sure, this is not a ploy on the part of Vice to get more money from sponsors. Rather, it is the magazine reaching a new plateau on the mountain of irony the Vice empire is built on. The prank is both confusing and brilliant, forcing readers to question their relationship to the magazine and media, subversive and mainstream altogether.

Of course, Vice isn’t the only medium using irony to explore our media-saturated culture. In 1994, Sprite launched a series of TV commercials declaring that “Image Is Nothing.” These anti-ads, as they were called, featured intelligent spoofs of modern-day soda advertising. In one, a teenager sitting on a couch opens his soda can and a party spontaneously commences in his living room, complete with roaring music and vapid bikinied models. The effect was to convince viewers that they were smarter than advertisers generally gave them the credit for. It was an ironic wink to say that, yes, we manipulate you into buying our soda, but please buy it anyway. Thus began a revolution in advertising. Clothing companies like Diesel followed suit, unveiling its Brand O campaign, in which the ads contrast scenes of the oppressive living conditions in North Korea with the all-too-perfect world that advertising portrays. In an age where consumers are becoming more wise to the come-ons of Madison Avenue, advertisers have been forced to become more subversive and reinvent the anti-ad again and again.

Vice has extended this ethos to journalism. The image Vice sells is that of anti-image, and the effect leaves readers clamoring to understand exactly what the road to cool entails. Clive Thompson, who has been an editor at both This Magazine and Shift , thinks Vice does this better than anyone else: “They’ve managed to sound unbelievably subversive while trying to sell something. People feel bad about being consumers,” continues Thompson, “and the way Vice counteracts that is by being subversive, by buying the right stuff.” It’s the yin and yang of Vice: to consciously-or not-meld together the ideals of countercultural rebellion and capitalism. It’s what Alvi calls “punk capitalism,” and what it means is that Vice has become the news source for what is cool.

But is there anything cool left? Now that mainstream marketers have co-opted every aspect of underground culture and turned it into a parody of itself, the very act of trying to be subversive becomes an exercise in what Naomi Klein calls ironic consumption. Klein articulates the theory in her book No Logo , where she examines how mainstream items are mass-marketed as punk-rock lifestyle choices and have come to “elicit sneers from those ever-elusive, trend-setting cool kids.” Instead, she observes, “they are now finding ways to express their disdain for mass culture “not by opting out of it but by abandoning themselves to it entirely, but with a sly ironic twist.”

It’s in this realm of “so-bad-it’s-good” consumption that Vice dwells.

“Musically, Vice has always been a little bit ahead of the curve,” explains Alvi. Vice has long been an advocate of the resurgence of ’80s hair metal bands like Skid Row and Guns N’ Roses, a sentiment growing in support, as evidenced by Spin magazine’s recent “150 Sleaziest Moments in Rock” cover. Vice was the first news source to chronicle the world of horror rap, a Detroit hip-hop movement known for its serial killer?style lyrics, of which rapper Eminem is a descendent. The problem is that no sooner do people begin liking and consuming the right things than they no longer become right.

Vice is specializing in a product that loses its shelf life soon after it hits the newsstand. The result is that reading it can feel kind of like listening to your sarcastic older brother and his friends give you adVice about sex. It doesn’t work. As Vice‘s popularity grows, it is in danger of becoming a snake eating its tail. Pretty soon people will be listening to Mot?rhead albums all night long, simply because it’s a lame thing to do.

How precariously Vice teeters on the edge of self-parody was apparent in March 2000, when McInnes was invited to discuss religion in the White House on Politically Incorrect. McInnes’s shirt was stained from sloppily drinking the cans of Guinness he smuggled into the show’s greenroom. He also admits to being “wasted” from a few lines of cocaine. The other guests that night were actress Lisa Ann Walters, star of The Parent Trap remake, Robert Conrad, who played Agent James T. West in the ’60s gunslinger series Wild Wild West and John Shelby Spong, an outspoken liberal bishop of the Episcopalian church. Host Bill Maher mentioned how strange it was that both presidential candidates had claimed to base their platforms on, among other things, what Jesus would do. This prompted McInnes to exclaim that Gore and Bush were “asking the adVice of a gay man.”

“What’s this?” Maher asked.

“Well, Jesus was gay. He was a gentle guy. He had long hair. He wore a dress,” McInnes responded.

“I’m just saying it’s open to debate,” he then backpedalled. At which point Maher took the opportunity to point out McInnes’s faulty logic: “A second ago it was known fact,” he said, throwing McInnes’s words back into his face. The audience exploded in applause at Maher’s deconstruction of the statement. McInnes, embarrassed and ridiculed by the studio audience, jumped on his chair and yelled: “Stop clapping. Stop all your clapping.”

But the audience didn’t.

“Ever see a team advertise?” asks Roy MacGregor of the National Post, and one of Canada’s most respected hockey writers. “Why would you advertise when you have a daily advertisement called the newspaper?” Though pro teams do occasionally buy ads, MacGregor’s point is well taken: the sports pages are just another cog in the publicity machine of professional sports. The machine itself is greased by a symbiotic relationship in which the sports pages need the pro franchises as much as the franchises need the sports pages. “I’m thankful for newspapers getting the message out to the public,” says Howard Starkman, media relations director for the Toronto Blue Jays. “If we weren’t covered by the media, there would be no need to be in business.”

It’s a quid pro quo, of course. The newspapers, in turn, use their coverage of big-league sports to attract the demographically desirable readers (18- to 49-year-old men) they need to sell to their advertisers. This audience wants to read all about the latest Leafs’ game, not what’s happening in amateur rowing or cycling. So that’s what they get-in abundance. And when they don’t, as The Globe and Mail found out in 1990, reader rage is sure to follow. The Globe’s editor at the time, William Thorsell, a culture maven who’s now head of the Royal Ontario Museum, decided to slash the paper’s sports coverage from four pages a day to two. Readership survey after readership survey showed he’d made a serious miscalculation. By the fall of 1997, the missing pages were back and The Globe and Mail was heralding its revamped sports section.

“Sports journalism is an oxymoron.” So says Mark Lowes, a communications professor at the University of Ottawa. In his view, its underlying purpose is not so much to inform and entertain as to market pro franchises. It doesn’t matter how much criticism Damien Cox heaps on the Leafs and the NHL or how troubled the Globe‘s Stephen Brunt gets about everything from the fate of baseball to the fall of boxing; they and their colleagues are still in the business of keeping pro sports on the lips of fans across the continent.

This public buzz, or, as Prof. Lowes would have it, this discourse, is indispensable to the franchise owners whose profits depend on filling their stands with paying customers and selling the whole spectacle to television. “The sports section is a finely tuned, high-performance promotional vehicle for the North American (and increasingly global) sports entertainment industry,” writes Lowes in his book Inside the Sports Pages. “As long as the sports press continues to deliver such effective service to the relatively concentrated group of corporations and individuals who own and control the major-league sports industry, its profitable synergy with the industry will continue apace. And that means the continued saturation of the sports pages with news about the big-time sports.”

“As a newspaper trying to do business,” asks Damien Cox, “should we then go cover amateur rowing because it’s ‘the right thing to do’ and ignore the Leafs?” That’s not really the choice. There’s a big difference between ignoring the Leafs-or any other commercial sports franchise-and showering them with space. A glance through the sports sections of Toronto’s four dailies shows that the amount of ink devoted to pro sports, especially the NHL, the NBA, the NFL and major-league baseball, could easily be cut back. The endless number of game stories, previews of coming games, player articles and columns make for repetitive and often boring reading.

At times, this stuff amounts to little more than cheerleading. When a team loses or ties, the excuses start flowing. The Toronto Sun‘s account of the Leafs against New Jersey last January 14 is typical. “If they could have overcome a few earlier brain cramps, they might have tamed their playoff nemesis, the New Jersey Devils. But the Leafs contented themselves with a 4-4 draw last night.” When the home team does well, the tone can get downright celebratory. “Start spreadin’ the news,” wrote the Star‘s baseball columnist, Richard Griffin, after David Wells won his 20th game. “The Jays are alive. They’re alive. The race to be the best second-place team in the AL is alive and well.”

There’s a lot of ambivalence among sportswriters and editors about this kind of rah-rah writing. “If a team’s going well, the columnist can say that and it’s not cheerleading,” says Pat Grier, associate sports editor at the Sun. But if the columnist were to write, “Let’s all get behind the Jays,” and “Go Jays Go,” Grier adds, it would be. That’s too fine a line for the Star‘s Cox. “I can’t stand the Sun,” he says. “Once upon a time they did a great job in sports and now they’re still trying to believe that they still do when in fact they don’t. I think whether it’s the Leafs or the Raptors or the Blue Jays, the way that the paper approaches coverage is that they’re behind the home team.” But, in the end, these differences scarcely matter. In the ambivalent world of the sports pages, Cox gets to keep his integrity, Grier gets to keep his hype and big-league sports get to keep on reaping the benefits of all that attention.

“Sure, it’s about winning and losing, plus how you market your product,” Grant Kerr of the Globe wrote in early 2001. Sports journalists give practically the same answer when asked if their pages have a marketing function. Most agree they do, but insist it’s unintended. The sports pages themselves, however, provide a different answer. When zealous coaches, including the Leafs’ Pat Quinn, decide to protect their players from the pestering press by dictating who can talk after games, the press protests-loudly. Not so much because the fans are being deprived of their right to absorb still more locker-room clich?s, but because the teams are hurting their chances to promote their product. “What’s odd is that the management types seem to be oblivious to the practical side of this,” wrote the Globe‘s David Shoalts for Fox Sports’ website. “By denying the media access to their players, they’re denying themselves millions of dollars of free publicity.”

In fact, there is almost as much marketing news in the sports pages these days as in the business section. Writers unabashedly comment on putting a quality product on the ice or the field or the court. When Mario Lemieux returned to the NHL last December, ecstatic press response rivalled the second coming of Michael Jordan-and for the same reason: such superstars make it easier to sell the game. “The financial and business elements of his return are obvious, especially to a man whose future security is tied up in the Penguins’ franchise,” wrote the Sun‘s Ken Fidlin. “So what? Isn’t just about everything in modern pro sport rooted in the almighty buck?” More often than not, then, Lemieux’s heroics were gauged not by the fans’ delight but by his contribution to the private profit of professional franchise owners, including himself.

“What is cast in stone, though, is the obligation for reporters to write something about their beat every day. This is not negotiable-the newspaper has too much invested in its sports beats for them to sit idle.” Mark Lowes made that observation in a chapter of Inside the Sports Pages on beat reporters. They’re the rank and file, file, file of sports departments, forever under the gun to come up with any morsel of information that might be remotely interesting, while making sure the competition doesn’t scoop them. They spend 13- to 15-hour days trying to reconcile the irreconcilable: struggling to be balanced and fair when their mainstream sources want them to be anything but. Team management and the athletes themselves expect a positive spin-and if they don’t get it, they’re prepared to make it very difficult for writers to do their job.

To combat this kind of bullying, beat reporters develop an arsenal of inside sources, who provide juicy tidbits that the team’s PR department would never give out. Cultivating confidential relationships with general managers, lesser bureaucrats and player agents allows them to break stories that go beyond the company line. But these relationships are tricky; sources can swiftly clam up if a reporter writes something they don’t appreciate. Since beat reporters without inside sources are sunk, they constantly have to weigh the importance of a story against the chance of losing a key contact if they go ahead and write it. Sometimes they write the piece, sometimes they censor themselves-and the reader’s the loser.

Operating under such a demanding system can make cynics of the best reporters. “The more you see behind the scenes,” says the Globe‘s Stephen Brunt, “the less majestic it gets.” The beat reporter’s daily ritual of trying to make the often mundane events of pro sports fresh and absorbing can lead some writers to question the value of what they’re doing.

In the Columbia Journalism Review last year, Gene Collier, a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, explained why he left the sports beat after 22 years. He found himself hanging around in a locker room, waiting to interview a young quarterback who was as uninterested in talking to Collier as Collier was in talking to him. They both had ritual roles to play, which would result in placing a hero’s mantle on still another pampered athlete. “The joke,” Collier wrote, “is this: an actual living hero is 10 times as likely to walk down your street, sit next to you on a bus, or hold the door for you at the library than to appear on your television between the never-varying pre-game yammer and the post-game lament.”

“It’s not fun and games for the sports journalist anymore,” says former Globe columnist Marty York, “and anyone who tells you otherwise is woefully mistaken or lying.” York’s right: before television sports and all-sports television, a reporter’s job consisted mainly of finding out who won and who scored. Those were the days of myth making when the florid prose of sportswriters turned Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio into cultural icons. “The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail,” wrote Heywood Broun in 1923. “You built up the hockey players,” says Trent Frayne whose remarkable sportswriting career began in 1938. “They were brave, tall and tremendous. They were 10 feet tall. Later on in my career I found out they were guys who spit.”

Nowadays, when readers already know who won and who scored and what the highlights were, the premium is on analysis and opinion. What’s news has spilled over into business (management and marketing), labour (strikes, threats of strikes, peripatetic players and stratospheric salaries), and cops and courts (out-of-control athletes). You can’t tell the players without an annual report-or a police blotter.

Back when Trent Frayne was starting out in the 1930s and ’40s, the relationship with pro athletes was easygoing. All a reporter had to do was stroll over to a player and ask, “What do you think about this?” Writers and players would play cards in the clubhouse and hang out together in bars. They weren’t all that far apart in status and salary. Now the young millionaires of pro sports disdain the working press. “They’re so rich they don’t have much time to talk to a lowly scribe,” says Frayne. Mitch Albom, of the Detroit Free Press, puts it much more specifically: “Baseball players are the biggest assholes on the planet,” he once told a GQ magazine writer.

By consensus among Albom’s peers, he could have added football players, basketball players and, to a lesser extent, hockey players. These role models have been known to grab reporters and oust them from the dressing room, fart in reply to an innocent question and curse out any writer who crosses them-or simply makes them cross. “Fuck you, you fucking jerk. Get the fuck out of here,” the Leafs’ designated hitter, Tie Domi, demurred to Damien Cox in front of a dressing room full of players and media during the 1999 Eastern Conference finals. It seems Cox’s reporting was too accurate for Domi’s tastes.

The mistreatment of Marty York is legendary. He defines what it is to be a despised writer. Over his 28 years in the business, players have visited upon him “everything from threatening to murder me, literally, to throwing things at me on team flights or just deciding to give me the cold shoulder.” That’s what he gets for sticking his neck out to gather, without fear or favour, anything he feels will be of interest to his readers. He lists among his career highlights a 1985 confrontation with former Blue Jays slugger Cliff Johnson in the Jays’ dressing room. York had written that Johnson had been caught having a beer in the team’s clubhouse during a game when he was with the Texas Rangers. “Hey [expletive],” yelled Johnson. “Where do you come off writing that bull about me?” When York tried to walk away, Johnson wrapped his arm around him and had to be restrained by his teammates.

That kind of intimidation is rare, but scorn for sportswriters is the order of the day. It makes it hard for the writers to do their job, which is, among other things, to help make these guys get even wealthier.

“Any person with half a brain should know if they should get rid of a coach,” says Laura Robinson, a former national team cyclist and now a crusading author. “Anyone can be an armchair athlete.” She thinks most sportswriting is that superficial; it also supports the violent nature of male professional sports. In her bookCrossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport, Robinson paints a picture of the dark side of junior hockey, the breeding ground for the NHL, that the sports pages wouldn’t show-until they had to. It’s a picture of institutionalized abuse in which it’s common for the players to sexually assault female fans. So much for the apprenticeship of tomorrow’s stars.

The papers sometimes come close to this kind of reporting. For instance, while all others were losing their heads over the last days of Maple Leaf Gardens-Stanley cups! legendary players!-Damien Cox was keeping his. In a column entitled “Why I Won’t Miss the Joint,” he wrote of the “hockey shrine” where, among other scandals, nearly 90 kids were sexually abused: “The Gardens, then, to me represents failure, greed, mistakes, selfishness and a near total absence of class and consideration for the past. It is a powerful symbol of waste and sadness and, above all, the vicious exploitation of Toronto hockey fans.”

No one should be surprised that there’s so little of this kind of work being done. It isn’t in the interests of the Toronto papers or the city’s three major-league teams. In fact, as Lowes points out, the prevailing ideology of the sports pages is really “a means not to know.” He writes, “The routine work practices and professional ideologies that constitute sports newswork-while eminently successful in capturing the goings-on of the major-league commercial sports world with precision and in admirable detail-are principally ‘a means not to know’ about another, more expansive world: the world of noncommercial spectator sports.” Laura Robinson would applaud that notion. She passionately believes that the papers should give much more space to amateur sports, particularly women’s sports. “Why do they run five articles on why the Leafs lost a game?” she asks. “Why is that space devoted to men who lose?”

Because others, mostly men, stand to gain: owners, management, players, players’ agents, union leaders, sports equipment companies, ad agencies-everything that’s integral to the professional sports behemoth, including the sports press. Seen that way, it didn’t much matter if, say, Eric Lindros did or didn’t come to Toronto; his big play in the papers was much more vital to the NHL than any he’ll ever make on the ice.

That is a stupid question. But it is a richly stupid question-the kind any journalist should slaveringly pounce on, because what delights in those news stories is how marvellously they underline the fact that there is absolutely no difference between what normally gets called kiddie porn and the kinds of pictures stored in family albums. Those One-Hour Photo employees who generally get condemned as dirty-minded, sanctimonious and meddling are, knowingly or not, basing their judgement on quite sophisticated aesthetic principles.

Now: finish this essay I’ve just started in those first few paragraphs. Prove that kiddie porn can be morally neutral. I assure you-it can be done. I’ve given you a good, solid lead, and there’s a forceful argument to make here that can draw on a history of aesthetics, on cross-cultural and historical data, on labour law, on what sex means and can mean, on a history of the kinds of jobs we have allowed children to do. It may well be a splendid piece. But people will hate you for it. Tentative definition of a shit-disturbing journalist: a perfectly lovely person whom everyone hates.

It is one of our jobs, as journalists, to be hated. But it is not enough to be merely hated. It is also important to be hated for the right reasons. Gossips can be hated and feared, but journalistic gossip, at least in its contemporary incarnation, exists principally to provide a set of relationships for people who seem incapable of developing their own. The purveyors of brute opinion (one thinks of Michael Coren here) are more likely to be despised than hated, given their reliance on sniffy innuendo, inadequate research and contextless facts. No, the only good reason to be hated is because you are actually asking the questions that are, in fact, staring everyone in the face-and because you are trying to answer them honestly, thoroughly and wittily. And because you are a constant reminder that there is no right not to be offended.

That is a difficult role to play, particularly in an era when, often for very good reasons, we go to extraordinary lengths not to offend. But outrage can be the beginning of wisdom-I recall, as a pious young Roman Catholic student at St. Michael’s College in Toronto, being deeply offended by a philosophy professor who taught that it was possible, even necessary, to question the most sacred tenets of our religion. I was outraged-but somehow I kept going back to his class for more. By the end of the year, I had left the church and was beginning to lead a real life, not an imitation one (pace Thomas ? Kempis-not even Jesus Christ is worth imitating). I should add that that professor’s contract was not renewed the following year-the Church no longer needs an auto-da-f? to help manage dissent.

A crisis of religious faith as a spur to independent thought may seem quaint today, but every generation will have its own special set of questions to ask, questions that are staring everyone in the face but that almost everyone has tactfully decided to ignore. When I began my journalistic career, one obvious but apparently unaskable question was why there were so many fags around, and why much of the time they were pretending not to be fags, and why everyone else was happy to join in and pretend that they weren’t there. Over the last 30 years those questions have been more or less answered, and fags are now so cool just about everyone wants one, but I can assure you that back then, asking those questions did make one hated-even by many fags. Today, as the profile of Naomi Klein starting on page 10 makes clear, one obvious and up-till-now-mostly-ignorable question is quite literally written on one’s body. What does it mean to be “branded”? What does it mean for us as individuals, and what does it mean for the society in which we live? And if it means things we don’t like, what should we do about it?

Some advice, then, on the art of being loathsome:

The questions to ask are usually obvious-so obvious that no one is asking them.

Wit is an important element of loathsomeness-without wit, one runs the danger of being merely wholesome.

Remember that it is good to provoke, but it is even finer to offend.

The process of becoming loathsome will be considerably hastened if you never watch TV or listen to the radio. The electronic media constitute a machine for the erosion of the single element most critical to those who wish to attain loathsomeness: a personality. (It is wise, however, to follow the Gore Vidal rule: “Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”) To be out of touch is essential to the shit-disturbing journalist. To be out of touch is also one of the few luxuries the modern world can provide that a journalist can afford.

Never allow yourself to make permanent connections with the right people. In journalism, the ultimate insider is the ultimate zombie-the living dead of letters. One need only read John Fraser to realize that.

Ask yourself under what circumstances you would break the law.

Ask yourself who was wiser: Socrates, who drank hemlock rather than recant, or Galileo, who recanted and was allowed to live.

Once a year, ask yourself if you might just possibly be wrong. Celebrate when the answer is still no.

Gerald Hannon is a Toronto writer, a one-time Ryerson instructor, a part-time prostitute and a perfectly lovely person who has, from time to time, been much loathed.

Tonight, a blustery November evening more than a decade later, is the time, and Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre, the place. About 500 people, mostly teenagers, have gathered to discuss globalization, or, more specifically, to belt out snide remarks when panellists Bill Dymond, director of the Centre for Trade Policy and Law, and Greg Fergus, policy advisor for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, take the stage-both are representing the opposition. Naomi Klein is there too, and when she strides up to the podium in a denim skirt and knee-high black leather boots, something strange happens: the once-jittery audience becomes inexplicably quiet, intent on hearing every word. Naomi talks for seven minutes, and when she’s finished-and she isn’t really finished, just out of time-the crowd explodes in triumphant applause, the kind of exuberant reaction you’d expect at a movie theatre when justice is finally served, when the bad guy is dead and the good guy wins. For the crowd here tonight, Naomi Klein is the good guy.

Only it isn’t always this way. In recent years, Klein has certainly made a name for herself, a name that’s just as likely to conjure up an image of the bad guy-particularly if you’re a multinational corporation with brand-name visibility. Only 30 years old, the award-winning journalist, best-selling author and antibranding activist has already served as editor at This Magazine and has had her own column in The Toronto Star. Every Wednesday her thinly veiled attacks on everything from the Liberal government to the World Trade Organization appear in “Unlabelled,” her aptly named column in The Globe and Mail.

But what really catapulted her career came early last year, when Klein took the corporate world by storm with her antibranding bible, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, a book so firm in its message that its publisher’s tiny greyhound colophon is slashed out on the spine. In it, she writes, “This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high brand-name recognition.”

Whether you agree with her or not, one thing is clear: people are taking notice. So much so, in fact, that even her would-be archrivals are inviting her opinion. Last September, Klein was the unlikely speaker at the Canadian Marketing Association’s annual branding conference. In an earlier instance, she was invited to take the stage at an informal gathering of top-level executives from CIBC, Nike and the Bank of Montreal, some of the very companies under attack in No Logo. While she won’t talk to individual companies as a consultant, she doesn’t want to exclude them, either, “because these are human beings and they are engaged.” And so, in what might be an exercise in futility, she tells them about the dangers of branding in a world on the brink of an antibranding backlash, often prefacing her speeches with the warning that her ideas are enormously unprofitable. In a way, her decision to talk to corporate bigwigs in their “capacity as citizens” is trademark Naomi: she’s trying to reach the unreachable.

And though her intentions may be good, her countless television appearances, speaking engagements and media interviews make it hard not to think of her as a walking, talking corporation, a “Naomi Inc.” of her very own. In fact, there was even talk among her publishers about copyrighting the term “No Logo” (Klein refused).

But to reduce her to a brand would be the ultimate irony for a woman whose most important work to date rests on the argument that branding is leaving us in a world with no space, no choice and no jobs. To hear Klein tell it, we’re living in the midst of hollow corporate culture: Starbucks sells community, but all you really get is coffee. A Polaroid isn’t just a camera, it’s a social lubricant. Just don’t turn to Klein in search of something that brand names fail to deliver. She doesn’t offer any easy answers or quick fixes in her critically acclaimed book or her fact-heavy column. Read anything by Naomi Klein. At worst, you’ll get a scouring critique of issues you didn’t even know were issues. At best, you’ll get hope that someone is finally using her journalistic voice for something important.

So who is this hard-nosed reporter, anticorporate crusader, culture critic and reformed mall rat called Naomi Klein? The short answer is she’s everything you wouldn’t expect. Readers know her as the black-and-white photo behind an ultraserious lefty column, an interesting combination of old-fashioned reporter and militant activist-journalist. And yet, something doesn’t quite fit. Klein’s weapon isn’t so much the message as it is the medium. Let’s face it: her speeches about trade policies and global economics wouldn’t be nearly as interesting coming from a balding 40-year-old man in a suit-and she knows it. Young, hip and decidedly unpreachy, the woman behind the words isn’t the hard-core tightass you might expect. Packaged in cool clothes and a hint of an attitude, Naomi Klein makes serious issues look good-or, at the very least, a little less scary. Her attacks on the branded world as we know it notwithstanding, meeting her in person would remind you that she is, after all, just an ordinary pop culture junkie who doesn’t have all the answers. (In fact, despite her denunciation of consumerism, she admits that she actually likes to shop.)

And one more thing: she won’t be apologizing for any of it. On why she writes about the things she does, she explains simply, “That’s what I do: I go out there and I fight with assholes.” If Naomi Klein is a brand-a notion she heartily rejects-then this product can sure pack a punch. After all, this is one former Esprit girl who learned from the enemy.

When I meet Naomi for the first time, she’s huddled in the backseat of a cab, cell phone on her lap, shoulder bag at her feet, lip gloss carefully applied. We make small talk for a while: the weather, my classes, her crazy schedule. She’s pleasant at first, but not overly friendly; her friends tell me that I probably won’t see her lighthearted side, and I don’t right away. A few minutes later she’s quiet, preferring to look out the window or at the highway. We’re on our way to U of T’s Scarborough campus, where she’s scheduled to deliver a speech to a class studying culture. She’s not nervous, she says, even though she suspects her audience won’t be particularly engaged with what she’s saying. Like a politician hoping to convert a few people, she can do no more than wait.

While Klein didn’t initially aspire to a political career, some might say it was inevitable. Her grandfather, a Marxist, lost his job as an animator at Disney for organizing the company’s first strike. In the ’60s, her American parents moved to Canada to protest the Vietnam War. They settled in a suburb of Montreal, where Klein’s father, Michael, a family doctor, was a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility; her feminist mother, Bonnie, joined the National Film Board’s Challenge for Change studio.

While Klein’s childhood was average on many levels, it was hard to ignore her parents’ political values, particularly her mother’s. At a time when most children her age were battling for later bedtimes, Naomi was becoming acquainted with the controversy surrounding her mother’s 1981 antipornography documentary Not a Love Story. The idea for the film came when Naomi, then only eight years old, was greeted by a row of “tits and ass” magazines at a local convenience store. The scene is reconstructed in the film’s introduction, during which Bonnie narrates, “What could she think of her own self and her own little body surrounded by this?” In retrospect, Bonnie admits that it was a “tremendous invasion of Naomi’s privacy,” a fact that Naomi was quick to recognize. The film made her mother the subject of vicious attacks from major national newspapers and mega-porn magazine Hustler, which awarded her the title “Asshole of the Month.”

If there was a lesson to be learned from her mother’s nervy assault on pornography, it wasn’t lost on Klein. At the age of 12, she had to prepare a speech for her bas mitzvah, a Jewish rite of passage in which one assumes religious responsibilities. While her more traditional peers delivered feel-good accounts of their grandparents’ history, Klein had a different idea. On the day of the ceremony, she stood up in front of the congregation and spoke candidly about discrimination among members of the Jewish community, a subject that was not, shall we say, kosher. But when young Naomi spoke, people listened. She had done her research, complete with interviews with leaders of major Jewish organizations. So taken were they by the speech, the synagogue members rose to their feet in applause, an event more unusual than a pork roast dinner on Yom Kippur.

While it appeared to be a promising step in the right direction, Naomi certainly had her turn playing the teenaged rebel. In high school she and her friends were accused of arson (for starting a small fire in the girls’ locker room), landing her in a strict all-girls school for a year. It seemed the politics that so enraptured her parents failed to spark the same enthusiasm in their daughter. “I wanted them to leave me the hell alone,” Klein said of her parents in Britain’s The Guardian last September. Much to her parents’ dismay, Naomi retreated to the world of clothes, the mall and gossipy telephone marathons with girlfriends. But despite her indulgence in the whimsies of typical adolescents, her parents recognized her underlying potential. “She was mature beyond her years even when she acted like a brat,” laughs her mother.

Her bratty behaviour eventually gave way to an older, more serious Naomi-a woman comfortable with the prospect of addressing a roomful of students quite possibly like her former self. When we arrive at U of T, Klein greets the class with an easy smile, and within minutes she abandons her spot behind the podium to get closer to the audience. She starts pacing the room, clacking her heeled boots across the linoleum floor, sipping on her Master’s Choice bottled water. Her speech is somehow both serious and funny: one minute she’s making a crack about the lack of oxygen in U of T’s classrooms, the next she’s explaining the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, or the MAI, “another goddamned acronym.” The audience, bored-looking suburbanites, become a little more alert. Someone is swearing in their classroom. When her time is up, a handful of students approach her to sign their copies of No Logo, and she obliges politely. She seems at ease here among the students. It wasn’t so long ago that she was one of them. After graduating from a CEGEP, Klein moved to Toronto to study English and philosophy at U of T. It was about the same time that a man by the name of Marc Lepine marched into a Montreal university, pulled out his gun and opened fire, killing 14 women and changing Canada forever. The event was somewhat of a turning point for Klein, and the dissenting spirit that had made a cameo appearance at her bas mitzvah some 10 years earlier began to reemerge. Klein started writing feminist articles, many of them controversial, for the campus newspaper The Varsity. Perhaps the most memorable of these was the one entitled “Victim to Victimiser,” in which she wrote, “[N]ot only does Israel have to end the occupation for the Palestinians, but also it has to end the occupation for its own people, especially its women.” The 800-word piece elicited such a strong reaction among her fellow Jews that she received bomb threats at her home. While Klein admits that it was indeed a terrifying time of her life, she didn’t stop writing. “I thought that’s what journalism was,” says Klein. “You wrote stuff, you pissed people off, you got bomb threats.” She went on to serve as editor.

Klein didn’t finish her degree. Instead, she started writing for the left-wing alternative publication This Magazine. At only 23, she made her cover story debut with “Give Us a Break: Generation X and the Boomer Media Shut Out,” a rant about Canadian youth’s diminishing presence in the mainstream media. In it, she wrote, “Sure, in the short term the boomers are a lucrative market (they do have job security and enjoy reading), but could anyone really be so shortsighted, so completely unable to see beyond their own life span?” When “Give Us a Break” hit newsstands, the media were quick to place a watchful eye on the new, left-leaning young journalist.

While her professional life began to take off, she met her personal and political match in the form of Avi Lewis, now host of CBC’s political debate show counterSpin and son of famous left-wing duo Stephen Lewis and Michele Landsberg. The pair had what Lewis calls “a thoroughly modern media meeting.” It was 1993 and the federal election campaign was in full swing. At the time, Lewis was a political news reporter for MuchMusic and the perfect choice as an interviewee for a story Klein was doing about Gen-Xers’ views of the election process. Lewis describes their conversation as one of the most intelligent ones he’s ever had on the subject. There might have been a spark; one friend says Klein “definitely had her eye on him.” Though the pair aren’t legally married (says Lewis: “We have deeply ambivalent feelings about the institution of marriage”), they had an unofficial ceremony, and Klein is well aware of how much they appear to be a media merger. “I do understand that from the outside it looks like an embarrassment of riches, and that’s why I’m not interested in personality journalism. I don’t write about myself, I write about issues.”

At the same time, This Magazine was following her work, and when the position of managing editor opened up in the early ’90s, she seemed to be the natural choice for the job. Under Klein’s leadership, This went through a successful transformation that recaptured the fresh, exciting reputation it had enjoyed in earlier years. Some attribute the magazine’s turnaround to Klein’s youthful exuberance. “Naomi’s great skill as an editor was her ability to make you believe that you were writing the most important story, not just in the magazine, not just in the entire year of the magazine, but possibly the most important story in Canada,” says Clive Thompson, who succeeded her as managing editor of This. “She was very, very good at creating excitement in you.” Others felt that the media spin surrounding the new young editor overshadowed their own contributions. Says one former staffer, “It was like Naomi was the big person and we were a bunch of goofballs who couldn’t get it together.” Because she was only 24 at the time of her editorship, there was a sense among some staff that she was simply passing through, on her way to bigger and better things.

If that was a prediction, it was a wise one. Klein’s stint as editor lasted a little over two years before the pundit calls came, most notably from The Toronto Star, where she was hired to write a weekly column with a youthful slant. Klein took advantage of her new, more visible platform and soon built a reputation for smart, provocative pieces on everything from the APEC scandal to corporate sponsorship at Canadian universities. But while the pundit hat certainly fit, it wasn’t entirely comfortable. Over a dinner of Diet Coke and chicken souvlaki at a downtown Toronto restaurant, Klein says, “It was depressing the hell out of me because that’s not how I wanted to spend the rest of my life, just being a critic.” Indeed, the Star was just a pit stop along the way to another destination, her column a mere preface for what was to come.

It’s 9 a.m. on the morning after her speech at the St. Lawrence Centre when Naomi picks me up in a rented white Pontiac with Christina Magill, or “Chris,” her assistant since September. I’ve never met Chris, but meeting her is like a reunion of sorts. When I email Naomi, it’s Chris who emails back. When I phone Naomi’s home number, it’s Chris who returns my calls. Chris is driving today, partly because Naomi admits to being the “worst driver in the world.” We’re on our way to the Canadian Auto Workers Centre in Port Elgin, where Naomi will be talking to members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and students from the infamous Ontario town of Walkerton, whose E. coli-tainted water killed seven citizens last year. The drive should take only about three hours, but we get lost so many times that we have to pull into a Canadian Tire somewhere in Barrie (“Where’s Barrie on this motherfucking map?” Klein asks at one point). Naomi calls the CAW to let them know that we’ll be late. Her cell phone is a natural extension of herself: she calls Avi for directions (she’s not lovey-dovey), her mother (they make plans for Christmas), a fact checker (yes, her father’s name is Michael, and yes, she studied at U of T).

Once we’re clear on the directions, Naomi flips through the radio stations but decides to put in a CD instead. She’s brought a few from Avi’s collection, and she chooses Wilco, an American country-rock band. It’s the kind of beautiful late-November afternoon that makes you wish you were outside instead of holed up in a car, but no one complains. Sipping on coffee and listening to Wilco, we decide to leave the interview for the drive back to Toronto.

Here’s what you should know about Naomi Klein: yes, she likes to shop, but she thinks it’s become an insane part of our lives (“It’s not that I’m against shopping, I’m just for culture”), yes, she sometimes wears brand names (Theory, Fendi), and hell yes, when her clothing has logos, she tears them off with a seam ripper (she’s not an advocate of free advertising). But she doesn’t have the holier-than-thou attitude you might expect. She doesn’t object when we pull into Tim Hortons for a snack, and the only acknowledgment she makes about the surrounding factory outlets is the deadpan remark “Brand debris.”

Once at the CAW, Klein quickly takes her place at the front of the room and launches into yet another lecture. She isn’t “on” as she was last night. She has about 12 versions of the speech, and perhaps she should’ve chosen a different one for today. She falters a bit more than she should, taking long pauses to look at her notes. “We have to redefine globalization,” she says at one point. “This is about democracy, not globalization?.” For a minute, her speech brings me back to painful history lectures delivered by my potbellied high school teacher?only this time I’m not doodling in my notes and neither are the people around me. Standing there at the podium, she looks like someone who has, perhaps grudgingly, learned her lesson: image is important. There’s something easy about listening to her. She smiles when she talks. Dressed in black pants, a denim jacket and dark sneakers, she seems more like a hip college student than someone who knows about the broader implications of multinationalism.

When it’s time for questions from the audience, a young girl nervously approaches the microphone and asks, “If you’re against communism and capitalism, what’s the middle ground and how can it be achieved?” The question hangs in the air for a minute before a low murmur fills the back of the room as if to say, “Good luck answering that one.” Klein breaks into a slow smile, a hint of weariness on her face. Leaning into the mike, she looks the girl straight in the face and asks only half-jokingly, “Do you have any easy questions?”

We’re back in the parking lot not even an hour later. Travelling over 250 kilometres for a single event isn’t rare for Klein these days. Since No Logo was released last January, she’s been everywhere from Seattle to Prague to Windsor, Ontario. The idea for the book that’s responsible for “the most amazing year” of her life came over five years ago when Klein was still a columnist at the Star. In 1995, she returned to U of T with hopes of finishing the degree she had embarked on in the late ’80s. But when she arrived on campus, something else captured her attention: young radicals had begun to spray-paint campus advertisements, an emerging phenomenon known as culture jamming. The university climate had certainly changed since her days as a student, a time when the popular idea of activism was simply banning the offending behaviour.

Klein was impressed with the new wave of hand-to-brand contact she saw at U of T; for her, it represented something much more than a student revolt. She saw it as an issue that would help to revitalize the dying left, whether anyone else knew it or not. “When I was researching the book I would tell people I was writing about anticorporate activism,” says Klein. “And they would say, ‘What anticorporate activism?'”

She started writing anyway, and No Logo was born: a book that took over four years to write and countless trips to foreign locales to research, including a jaunt to Indonesia during her “honeymoon.” A whopping 490 pages, the book mentions everything from the Gap to Courtney Love to the World Trade Organization. And yet, it doesn’t offer solutions as much as it tracks the anticorporate movement. As Klein explains, No Logoisn’t her “Here’s how to change the world, a 10-point plan.” She says, “I’m better at finding the evidence and building an argument than saying, ‘I’ve found the solution, follow me.'” It’s a point she makes clear in the book’s introduction, where she writes, “I don’t claim that this book will articulate the full agenda of a global movement that is still in its infancy. My concern has been to track the early stages of resistance and to ask some basic questions?what are the forces pushing more and more people to become suspicious of or even downright enraged at multinational corporations? What is liberating so many people?particularly young people?to act on that rage and suspicion?”

When No Logo made its way to bookshelves in January 2000, Klein was set: critics?most of them, anyway?loved it. The book became an international best-seller, praised by the likes of Gloria Steinem, who called it “invigorating,” and The New York Times, which touted it “a movement bible.”

With this success, Klein’s voice quickly became much sought after. Globe and Mail editor Richard Addis had heard about her from some people in the book business and, being new to the country, naturally wanted to meet her. Addis scheduled an appointment, they hit it off, and Klein was given a space in the Comment section. It was naming the column that proved to be the more difficult chore. When “Unlabelled” was chosen (a clever play on Klein’s book title), the Globe employees responsible for doing a final check on all the copy saw the moniker and thought it was some sort of mistake; surely the editors had forgotten to give the column a name. The confusion was sorted out, and today Klein’s headshot (complete with her eyes gazing to her left) and the word “Unlabelled” accompany her weekly column.

The column itself has been well received by most readers, although one Globe editor says that she’s received email messages from incensed Post reporters that say, “Fuck Naomi Klein.” In the car on the way back from Port Elgin, I ask Klein why she thinks people are so upset about her column. For a second, Klein looks surprised, and then hurt, saying she didn’t know that people were angry. I tell her about the emails. Almost instantly, she’s annoyed, telling me I’m going to have to be more specific?who at the Post? When I tell her I don’t have names, she snaps, “Well, you obviously don’t have any evidence and so I’m not going to respond to that.” She spins around in her seat to face the darkening town of Acton.

Her reaction comes as a surprise to me. This is the same woman who got bomb threats for writing an unpopular article in university. Klein can’t be new to unfriendly criticisms. Fuelled by No Logo‘s attacks on its manufacturing operations, Nike fired back. In a formal response to the book, the company cited several of its supposed inaccuracies, calling it “misinformed” and “unbalanced.” To that criticism, Klein answers, “Nobody took that seriously because if a company like Nike actually finds damaging errors in a book, you hear from their lawyers, not their PR department. Nike used my book as they use almost everything: as just another spin to talk about all the great things they’re doing.”

Nike wasn’t the only one to have a problem with Klein. It seemed that happily handing out seam rippers to remove brand-name tags at her book launch was not enough to distract her critics from where she chose to do business. It was ironic, almost funny, really, that a book that shook such an unforgiving finger at the evils of big-name corporations should embark on a tour that included highly publicized stops at Indigo. Reporters at Marketing Magazine were quick to run some biting critiques of Klein’s marketing ploys with remarks like “The whole thing dripped with delicious irony.”

When I ask about her appearances at Indigo, Klein pauses for a moment in the front seat before carefully saying, “I’m not a purist and I’ve never claimed to be. My book doesn’t advocate boycotts of any kind. I made a decision in the way I did this book that the integrity was going to be in the content and in the argument.” She’s sounding bored now, and continues in a way that tells me she’s been asked the same question a thousand times. “I’ve published with multinational publishers, [No Logo] is being sold in chain bookstores, and I work at The Globe and Mail. I think you make compromises all the time to get your message across. I do it every week and I think my skill is in being a popularizer. There’s not much point in being a popularizer if you’re not willing to reach people.”

But reaching people doesn’t seem to be a problem. Since No Logo‘s release, Klein’s message is being heard loud and clear: Radiohead’s lead singer, Thom Yorke, urged his fans to read the book (Klein has since met the band personally), and her inbox is flooded almost daily with emails from young people who’ve read No Logo and want to get involved. But perhaps the most surprising incident came when popular children’s singer Raffi phoned her up and asked to meet. It turns out her book inspired a new ballad: “Tomorrow’s children got no logo?” he sang to her. “?Tomorrow’s children are not for sale?.”

By six o’clock in the evening, our white Pontiac is more than halfway back to Toronto. Along the way, we stop at Tim Hortons, where Naomi orders the much-advertised chicken stew and jokingly tells me how susceptible she is to marketing. We eat slowly and head back to the car, where any small talk has come down to random reminders about not missing our exit. It’s been a long day, and it seems as though every possible topic of conversation has been exhausted.

And then, somewhere on the darkening highway through Orangeville, Naomi turns around and motions me to turn my tape recorder back on. As if worried about forgetting to tell me something, she begins to talk about her family, and then her writing, and the people who inspire her to use her column as an outlet for saying what other people don’t. “My journalism is so much driven by?.” There’s a long pause. “?really what I think is wrong with this world.” She talks slowly and deliberately, as if she’s hearing herself for the first time.

We talk more about the media’s responsibility to serve the public, and when the subject of lifestyle journalism comes up, she says, “We watch junk TV, we watch shitty movies, we eat junk food. We choose convenience over content at every turn.” And then, perhaps not sensing the irony, she adds, “Something being popular doesn’t therefore make it worthy or important.”

And as she speaks, I’m reminded of the Naomi Klein I knew only a few hours ago, the Naomi Klein who was fun and fresh and popular.

Yet she doesn’t have all the answers-but I wish she did. The branded city looms ahead of us now, seemingly oblivious to the force of the woman in the front seat of our car. There’s no telling what will happen post-Naomi, when the media spotlight stops shining and No Logo, becomes buried on a bookshelf among others of its kind.

In the meantime, she’ll be selling her own brand of journalism, the kind that doesn’t promise to save the world, but sure makes it look as if it’s worth a shot trying. She’s an Esprit girl gone bad, and for now, people are buying in.

With stage fog drifting through the air, acrobats swinging from the ceiling and bass-driven music throbbing through the building, the pace of the party at first seemed oddly out of sync with its purpose. The green, orange and purple overhead spots cast an outlandish light on a milling crowd of journalists, Globe and Mailstaffers and assorted well-wishers who had assembled at the Toronto School for Circus Arts. But with a spotlight sweeping the letters “R.O.B.” around the concrete floor, the venue seemed increasingly right for the relaunch of one of Canada’s three mainstream national business magazines. Those redesigned magazine covers spinning round at every table added just the right touch to a party that seemed to symbolize the churning pace of change at all three magazines.

The Globe‘s magazine relaunch was one of many efforts in the last year and a half as the three magazines-R.O.B., Canadian Business, and National Post Business-have tried to reposition themselves and shed their tired and dowdy uniformity. The prize, of course, is higher readership and a bigger share of the $30-million-plus in annual advertising revenues that fuel the national business magazine sector. In the process, though, all three magazines have lost their editors, as well as many other editorial staffers, and all three have implemented wholesale redesigns in search of the perfect positioning. The only one that seems to have cruised through this major shakeup with most of its readership, credibility and editorial intact is also the only one readers have to pay for-CB, where Joe Chidley is now at the editorial helm. The other two come free with a newspaper subscription, which makes them part of the ammunition in the circulation war between theGlobe and the National Post. The Globe‘s R.O.B., relaunched under the editorial direction of Douglas Goold, is duking it out with National Post Business, the domain of editor Tony Keller. With CB at least confident of what it wants to do, Goold and Keller face the job of figuring out their vision and their mandate. As things are going, you could conclude that the competition between the three magazines has turned into something like a three-ring circus.

At 10:30 on a cold November morning, Douglas Goold, the R.O.B.‘s recently appointed editor, is trying to run a story meeting in his office overlooking the roof of the Globe building in Toronto. Most of his staff have wheeled chairs in from their desks in boardrooms A and B, the magazine’s makeshift office, but they’re spending more time talking about production than future editorial plans. The third redesigned issue has just gone to press after many problems. Goold’s editors and production staff-many of them new to the magazine-seem to be going through the glitches experienced by a start-up rather than an established product. With one leg crossed over the other, the 55-year-old editor faces the crew and tries to deal with nagging details. Senior editor John Daly is having trouble with writers who don’t meet deadlines. “Why don’t you say, ‘We’re giving you one more chance. Here’s the deadline and if you don’t meet it, you’re out’?” Goold suggests in his Joe Clark-like voice. Deputy editor Maryam Sanati wants editors to stop telling writers what heads and decks have been written for their stories. “That’s totally nuts,” agrees Goold.

Part of Goold’s problem is that he has to stabilize an editorial department that’s gone through more staff turmoil than its competitors. Just a few months after the Globe organization brought Nigel Horne over from Britain as editorial director of magazines in February 2000, editor Patricia Best quit. Within months of her departure, most of the advertising sales, writing, production and editing staff resigned, leaving only the art department and two senior editors. The magazine Best left behind was respected for its timely, well-written stories (recognized in several National Magazine Award nominations), but readership was slipping. The problem, according to many observers, was the 1998 redesign undertaken by Robert Priest, which, depending on whom you talk to, was either brave or stupid but certainly not appropriate for the magazine’s older audience. The redesign’s poor reception was only partly alleviated by changes made to the look month after month to soften the bold colour palette and graphics. “What they ended up with was just wrong on so many levels,” says one critic. “It didn’t look good and it was hard to read.”

Horne, along with R.O.B. publisher Phillip Crawley, eventually tapped Goold as Best’s successor, even though he had very little magazine experience. With a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge, he started his career as a university professor before taking a job on the editorial board of The Edmonton Journal almost 20 years ago. After working for the Financial Post, he moved finally to the Globe , where he was editor of the newspaper’s Report on Business section before taking on the magazine. He’s nonchalant about his lack of magazine experience, seeing his move as just one more of the abrupt changes that have characterized his career. “I’ve survived all of it,” he says. “I didn’t find the transition to the magazine difficult. It’s not brain surgery.”

Goold quickly signaled his intention to bring change to the magazine, telling the community newspaper for Toronto’s upscale Forest Hill area that “we need to do a few things differently.” By the October 2000 relaunch issue, after several months of planning, Goold and Horne had completely gutted the magazine. There were 19 new sections, including four regular columnists (three of them technology-oriented) and a fat Globetrotter section spanning at least 10 pages and containing travel information on various regions of the world. Heavy on photography, the more conservative design was developed in-house by Horne and associate art director Domenic Macri. The title was simplified to just R.O.B. Magazine and featured a new logo, created by an outside company, with top-trimmed, Vogue-like type used for the three initials. The tone of cover and feature stories had changed, too. Where Best had favored current business issues, Goold offered cover stories like “Who Has the World’s Best Logo?” and “Our Experts Rate the New Eatons Ad Campaign.” The magazine was deliberately pitched to broaden its traditional middle-aged male readership. “Most business magazines don’t look like fun magazines like Vogue or Vanity Fair , they don’t have a spark,” Horne said at the time of the relaunch. “Why shouldn’t a business magazine have a buzz like that?”

On another miserable November day in Toronto, in a coffee shop with stiff lounge chairs and a view of busy Bloor Street, National Post Business editor Tony Keller settles in to talk about the magazine produced in editorial offices upstairs. At this point, Keller has produced 15 issues of the title, relaunched in September 1999-its predecessor was The Financial Post Magazine-and now distributed with the Post .

The 33-year-old Keller is tall, casual in appearance and manner, and constantly moves his hands and face to amplify his soft, deep speaking voice. Appearances aside, he actually has much in common with Goold, hisR.O.B. counterpart. Keller also started his journalism career on an editorial board, in his case at the Globe, where he worked for the better part of seven years, leaving as an assistant editor on the board. Like Goold, he had little magazine experience when he was hired to revamp the old Financial Post Magazine . There’s a lot of similarity, too, between Goold’s and Keller’s visions for their titles, at least to the extent that they both want a wider audience. It’s just that Keller takes a much broader view. He says his target audience is between 20 and 100 (“I don’t want to exclude anybody”), and that he wants a long-term editorial focus. “Fundamentally, at its core, this is a magazine to help you understand the world and the world of business,” he says, his hands in motion to underline the breathless spin. “[Our readers] want us to help them understand some bigger-picture things. Let’s pull the lens way back and say, ‘Stop thinking about today and let’s think about where this is going in the future, not what you should be doing next week, but where will the world be in a year, two years, five years, where is all this heading?’ “

Keller’s big sell is indeed a very broad and general package. The magazine’s large front and back components are stuffed with smaller pieces on everything from workplace facts and statistics to the history of the bicycle and insight into union boss Buzz Hargrove’s bargaining tactics. Regular columns cover issues from the disadvantages of low-fee mutual funds to why the Bank of Canada should be closed. There are only a handful of feature stories in an average issue, many of them business profiles or book excerpts. The overall design, produced by creative consultant Karen Simpson, emphasizes white space and pale colours, illustrations and black-and-white photography. Like the U.S.-based magazines Fast Company and Business 2.0, NPB frequently uses plain text or illustrations on its covers-no matter, it seems, how unflattering the portraits of people might be.

To realize his plans, Keller beefed up the masthead, although not without the churn that seems to be plaguing all the business magazines lately. Before he even arrived at NPB, four people left, including editor Wayne Gooding. Although Keller has since doubled the staff complement, he has also had to replace a senior editor and the art director. Staffing issues apart, the success of the business titles, like all magazines, depends on their acceptance by readers and advertisers. It’s still too early to tell whether the redesigns undertaken by Goold and Keller have struck the right chords with readers, though recent statistics show both magazines have a job to do to get their editorial positioning right. Readership trends for business magazines over the last decade look as ugly as the economic cycles they sometimes report on. According to Print Measurement Bureau reports, readership of all the business magazines dropped with the severe recession of the early 1990s, but began to grow again along with the economy, peaking in 1994 and 1995. But since then, both magazine inserts have taken big hits. Last year’s PMB numbers suggest that R.O.B.had lost 250,000-or 40 per cent-of its readers since 1996, dropping to an all-time low of 397,000. The decline was attributed by some to that controversial redesign introduced by Patricia Best. After PMB released its 2000 numbers, NPB was able to claim it was “Canada’s #1 Business Magazine,” but that was more becauseNPB didn’t lose as many readers as its Globe competitor: it only lost four per cent from the 1999 survey, dropping to 436,000 readers, compared to R.O.B.‘s loss of over 22 per cent. Of the three major national business magazines, only Canadian Business seems to have found its footing in terms of readership. Although CB has a smaller total readership because it’s a paid-circulation book, its reader per-copy figure is a healthy 3.6. Since its relaunch as a biweekly in 1997, readership has in fact remained steady at just over 320,000.

On yet another dismal November day, editorial staffers gather for a story meeting in a cramped old conference room at the Canadian Business office on the fifth floor of the Rogers Media building in Toronto. Three latecomers sit on boxes or bookcases around the room since there are not enough chairs. After some chitchat about an expensive deli downstairs and boisterous laughter all around, editor Joe Chidley gets the meeting going. “Kevin, story ideas?” he shoots, turning to staff writer Kevin Libin, who is sitting on a box in the corner of the room. Libin proposes covering the opening of the ice hotel in Quebec, which prompts Chidley to start asking the hard questions in between the lighthearted banter. “Do you want to go there, or what? When are they pouring the foundation?” Chidley decides to mull the idea. “What else you got?” he asks, scrawling in his yellow notepad. Libin puts forward another idea. “Is there a Canadian Tire story out there?” Chidley asks, ignoring his staff writer’s suggestion. “Besides the one about how you can’t find a rake in the fucking place.” More laughter, next idea.

Although the meeting seems to have the air of a freewheeling discussion in a college dorm lounge, it becomes evident that the group has a firm fix on the magazine’s editorial positioning. Despite the jeans-or-khakis preferences of its editorial staff (including Chidley), the magazine has a reputation for sometimes hard-hitting business journalism that’s consistent enough to keep subscribers paying for every issue. Last August, CB was one of the first business publications to warn its readers about Nortel’s bloated stock price, two months before the company’s shares first plummeted. (R.O.B sounded a more subtle warning in its October issue, while NPB named Nortel’s John Roth CEO of the Year in its November issue.) More than its competitors, CB publishes tough stories about specific companies or products, such as its scathing critiques of mutual-fund giant Investor’s Group and the Investment Dealers Association of Canada last year.

But like its competitors, Canadian Business, has gone through big changes, most recently among its editorial staff. Under former publisher Paul Jones and long-time editor Art Johnson, it embarked on a redesign, in part to distinguish itself more clearly from its competitors. Jones and Johnson a more news-oriented format to attract subscribers and advertisers, and changed frequency from 12 to 21 issues a year in 1997 (along with a cosmetic redesign frequency increased to 24 issues last year.) But Jones left in 1999 to take the publishers job at Maclean’s, and last spring Johnson moved on to edit the Financial Post section of the Post. The 37-year-old Chidley was Johnson’s recommendation as his replacement. He was already working on the magazine as a senior writer and technology editor before his promotion and had joined CB after working as a senior writer at Maclean’s . When he took over as editor, he inherited a magazine with a sure idea of what it wanted to be editorially. “What we have to continue to do is look ahead and provide context for developments,” he says, promoting his magazine’s number-one goal. He hesitates to have many articles exploring old news (“We give our readers credit for knowing what’s going on”) and prefers forward-looking stories. “We’re in a great position to continue to do what we’re doing, which I would argue we’re doing better than even the papers or competing business magazines.”

The steady PMB readership numbers seem to bear out his opinion of his magazine’s strengths, as does the record on advertising. Despite having the smallest readership, CB nonetheless seems the most attractive option to advertisers. Last year, CB carried 1,110 pages of advertising, including inserts, compared toR.O.B.‘s 843 and NPB‘s 501. “Canadian Business has very, very timely articles and I think it is extremely highly regarded by those of us placing advertising in it,” says Sunni Boot, president of the media management firm Optimedia Canada. “I think between National Post Business and R.O.B., R.O.B. still probably has an edge over NPB right now.”

Editors are notoriously stingy in their assessments of competitors or former competitors, but CB has won praise even in that quarter for its clear sense of purpose. “It seems that the reincarnations of the two magazines [R.O.B. and NPB] are business light,” says former R.O.B. editor Patricia Best, spelling out the last word as l-i-t-e. “It really leaves the field open for Canadian Business , which is the only serious business magazine. They don’t have to do this frantic, ‘What should we do now in order to look like we seem fresh?’ They just are fresh because they stay on top of what we want to read about.”

The reaction from some of the readers the business magazines are supposed to address seems to be the same. Adam Zimmerman, former CEO of Noranda, and a sometime writer himself, has his own definite ranking. “I have always had a bias for Canadian Business,” he says. “It seems to go for more of the non-mainstream things, so it’s kind of interesting.” Beyond that, Zimmerman reads R.O.B., and occasionally looks at NPB. These last preferences, though, may be more the result of fallout from the newspaper wars. He cancelled his National Post subscription to reduce the amount of paper crossing his desk.

As a reader, Zimmerman has noticed what he calls the new “cast of characters” on the mastheads of the business magazines and mentions that he misses the kind of stories that Best focused on when she was editor of R.O.B. “I think Pat Best was injecting a thoughtful content that I don’t think exists right now,” he says. “Maybe people don’t want to think about big things anymore.”

The fog has disappeared and the exotic soundtrack has been turned off as R.O.B. publisher Phillip Crawley steps forward to say a few words to the modest crowd at the magazine’s relaunch. He is standing in front of a hugely enlarged copy of the magazine’s front cover, which features a basketball player posing behind his business manager. When he speaks, he’s full of praise for the new look of the magazine and its new editorial thrust, not saying much about its hand-picked editor Douglas Goold or its (subsequently departed) editorial director of magazines Nigel Horne. “I’ve seen a lot of relaunches and redesigns, some of them memorable for all of the wrong reasons,” he announces, without specifying whether he is talking about his own magazine’s facelift in 1998 or the changes at his competitors’ titles. He seems confident, however, thatR.O.B. has got it right this time. “I knew it was a winner.”

That said, the music comes back on, the acrobats go back to work and the circus continues.

On that fallafternoon in 1993, the crowd at Grano celebrated the much anticipated arrival of the eyetalian, a quarterly magazine that focused on the experience of Italians in North America through the eyes of the second generation. From the cover of the premiere issue, a photograph of a pensive Nino Ricci stared up at the party-goers. Grano owner Roberto Martella, whose parents immigrated in 1950, donated his restaurant for the day. Friends and family filled the envelopes-$100 here and there-to help the magazine pay off bills racked up during its first production. During his welcoming speech, eyetalian editor Pino Esposito echoed the mandate that was laid out inside: to “take in the achievements of the community with one eye, while the other is fixed on the many sources of conflict which flow from its cultural baggage.” It was a large promise and a strong journalistic vision, but could Esposito and his cofounders succeed?

Starting a magazine is never easy. Figures from Masthead magazine show that of the publications that died in 1993, only half had managed to reach the coveted five-year mark. And when behemoths like Hearst, Cond? Nast and Time Warner can stumble with new launches, what chance did the eyetalian have? Certainly there was infectious enthusiasm, but was that enough to overcome the lack of a business plan, too few investors, too little publishing experience and a name that would prove to be divisive and controversial?

The founders and supporters of the eyetalian weren’t the only children of immigrants who felt the need to capture the thoughts, dreams and lifestyles of their contemporaries in magazine form. In the months and years that followed the party at Grano, a number of other similar publications materialized. While the parents of these fledgling editors and publishers had been satisfied with less sophisticated news media, their children desired a more reflective, sophisticated product-something that addressed the experience of growing up while influenced by two competing cultures, and something that showcased their accomplishments in Canada. The eyetalian grew out of this craving, as did Mehfil for Indo-Canadians, launched in 1993, Typhoonand RicePaper for Asian-Canadians, founded in 1995 and 1998 respectively, Zdorov! for Ukrainians, which started in 1996, and brownscene for Filipinos, which materialized in 1999.

However, starting up a second-generation magazine in Canada has proven to be a risky venture. Sooner or later, founders have had to come to terms with the cold, hard commercial reality that there just aren’t enough readers and investors to push these publications into the black. As a result, with few exceptions, sudden changes in focus and/or bankruptcies have followed. The eyetalian provides a model case study that shows how these magazines rise-and fall. It also shows why these publications are often not encouraged to embrace credible journalism.

The genesis for the eyetalian can be traced to one day in the summer of 1992, when Pino Esposito bumped into his old high school friend Nick Bianchi on a Toronto streetcar. Minutes into a conversation about former classmates, Bianchi suggested they form a group to meet regularly to talk about old times. It wasn’t the kind of thing that Esposito normally thought about, but he agreed, and both followed up by making a few phone calls. A group got together at Bar Italia on College Street and discovered they had similar feelings and thoughts about their Italian past and their Italian-Canadian present. At the forefront was their disdain for the existing Italian media outlets. “We felt there really wasn’t a sophisticated media presence for Italians,” explains Esposito. “Really the only thing you could point to was CHIN Radio and CHIN TV, and they tended to be a little steeped in hokey, nostalgic, folkloristic stuff.” Esposito’s friend Teresa Tiano, a production editor at Saturday Night, suggested the group put their thoughts in a magazine. Jokingly, Esposito said: “Yeah, we can call it ‘eyetalian,'” a pronunciation used by many WASP Torontonians in the ’50s and ’60s to describe the newcomers among them. In some quarters, it was used as a racial slur, but Tiano thought the name was brilliant. “It had been a derogatory name, but we claimed it for ourselves,” she remembers. “It said what we wanted to say, which was that we had come into our own.”

The concept for the eyetalian was simple: to provide an English-language forum for Italians across Canada who wished to read about and participate in an ongoing discussion about the North American-Italian experience, from its sensibility and culture to its stereotypes and history. And since neither Esposito nor Bianchi had a job at the time, it made practical sense for the pair, aided by Tiano when she could spare time away from Saturday Night, to run the fledgling operation. With little money, they got down to work in the winter of 1992 to pull the concept together and raise the $8,000 to $10,000 they figured they would need to fund a first-issue print run of 4,000 copies.

Right from the start, the trio focused on folklore, history, opinion, language and popular culture-all areas that they figured their young readers would be curious about. The only topic off-limits was contemporary Italian culture in Italy, since the magazine could not afford to station writers overseas.

On the business side, they needed to build a subscriber base. So Esposito approached the Association of Italian Canadian Writers and other cultural organizations for their mailing lists. To get advertisers, they put together mock-ups of possible eyetalian covers, potential story ideas and a rate card. To get seed money, they contacted a land developer in Markham, Ontario, who liked the idea and put up $1,500 in support. The result of their efforts over the next half year? A few hundred subscribers, who each ponied up $14 for a year’s worth of issues, but little interest from advertisers since the trio still lacked a business plan. Undaunted, Esposito, Bianchi and Tiano pushed ahead with their project, and while they weren’t maxing out their credit cards, they started to pay for office supplies and smaller expenses out of their own pockets. To help ease the costs of the eyetalian, they would look to the community for contributions when they launched the premiere issue in the fall.

Two weeks beforethe launch, Esposito, Bianchi and Tiano were in the midst of production. They took a break on the stoop of the eyetalian headquarters near Dufferin and Eglinton in Toronto, eating veal sandwiches and drinking espresso. Beside them sat John Montesano, an eager volunteer from the suburbs who helped with copyediting and layout.

“The Italian thing is really about family, about neighbourhood-the street you live on,” says Montesano today. “It gives you a warm feeling. It gives you a feeling of home.” Both Esposito’s and Montesano’s families arrived in Canada at the height of a mass emigration from Italy that began in the 1940s. By 1971, almost 170,000 Italian immigrants lived in the Toronto area. Another 230,000 lived in other parts of the country. Men often found work in construction or other jobs that involved manual labour. Esposito’s mother and father found work as a cleaner and a barber respectively, while Montesano’s dad was a truck driver and his mom, a seamstress.

“In the 1950s,children going to Canadian schools were being taught the values of Canadian democracy and supposedly modern ways of doing things,” explains Franca Iacovetta, a history professor at the University of Toronto and the author of Such Hardworking People, a chronicle of Italian immigrants in post-war Toronto. “Then they would go home to a different culture that was somewhat afraid of what they were learning.” During those years, thin, utilitarian newspapers like Corriere Canadese were the news media of choice. “The notion was that these people can’t read English,” adds Iacovetta. Many Italian newspapers were run by pre-Second World War Italian-Canadians who knew that later generations would need an Italian press. Difficult times left little room for contemplative content; advice about unemployment insurance and news of the job situation most often ruled the headlines.

But to the quartet with the veal sandwiches, it was long past time to move beyond basic personal survival issues. Their publication was to be modern, more introspective, more literary, which was why they had chosen to put Nino Ricci on the cover. Ricci, whose parents emigrated from Italy in 1954, was a perfect choice. Though accepted by mainstream Canada, he was largely ignored by the Italian community. To theeyetalian staff, he was a symbol of the cultural displacement they felt. In the accompanying story, which was written by Esposito, Ricci suggested that “the greatest service you can do for the community you come out of is to present it in all of its complexity.” Within Ricci’s works, Esposito explained, reconciling a difficult past is always a central theme.

Elsewhere in that first issue, Franca Iacovetta reported on a 1911 murder case. Her article told the story of an Italian man who was killed by his wife because of the savage beatings he gave her. It was a history lesson that eyetalian readers probably never learned in school. In another feature, the painter Vince Mancuso was profiled. The article describes how the artist’s own community, one with a glorious artistic tradition, had disapproved of his choosing an economically unstable and unconventional profession. In one way or another, each of the stories in the eyetalian‘s first issue cast a stone at rigid thinking, echoing the magazine’s promise to challenge the assumptions of the Italian community.

Not surprisingly, the response to the premiere issue was mixed. On the positive side, Esposito received letters from dozens of pleasantly surprised readers. One of them, Maurizio Barbieri, wrote: “You have provided a vehicle of expression for a people just beginning to tap into their inner feelings. Thank you for documenting the trials, tribulations and joys of a very significant community!” As well, a number of readers phoned the magazine wishing to contribute. Others commented on the name. Many thought it was clever. Others hated it. “Some of the older immigrant generation didn’t like it,” says Iacovetta. “They were too close to it.” Most were outraged that the anglicized, derogatory pronunciation of “Italian” had been used to represent the community. “There was one person in a very good position to give us funding who wouldn’t do it strictly on the basis of the name,” says Esposito. “The whole point of the name was to lighten up and have an ironic tone. It just seemed that changing the name to something really serious would go against the very fabric of what we were trying to do.” A number of readers also found the eyetalian to be unnecessarily negative and critical, which may have driven away potential subscribers and investors.

Despite the criticisms, subscriptions began to trickle in, culminating in about 500 by the end of the first year. And a few more ads were sold, though not nearly enough. The launch at Grano, however, did bring in several thousand dollars. In addition, the NDP government came through with a jobsOntario Community Action program grant of $150,000, providing salaries for those heavily involved, and small compensations for writers and photographers. As the months passed, the content of the magazine changed little. It continued to be controversial. Two examples: the spring 1994 issue, which screamed in bright yellow letters on the cover, “Sex, Religion, Politics: What Does a New Generation Believe?”; and the winter 1995 issue, which featured a piece entitled “The Armani Generation” that focused on the rampant materialism replacing concern for education among Italian students in Woodbridge. “The content was so biased,” wrote one reader, “it appears the information was hand-selected. One must wonder what your motives were for such a survey, and what you expected to accomplish by it.” Esposito, for his part, was thrilled. The eyetalian was being noticed. However, since the article angered a large portion of the potential market, Esposito could not afford to assign more of the serious, investigative work that he longed to do. There was also no money for reader research, which could be used to convince advertisers that the eyetalian had an audience that would be receptive to knowing about their product or service. With money tight, Bianchi and Esposito gave up their apartments and moved back home in order to keep producing the magazine they loved.

By the “Armani Generation” issue, the eyetalian had found a new rent-free home inside the Columbus Centre, the west-end Toronto headquarters for such community organizations as the Italian Chamber of Commerce of Toronto and the Canadian-Italian Business and Professional Association. It was a sign that at least some in the Italian-Canadian establishment had accepted the publication as a member of the cultural community, asking only for a free advertisement in return. As part of the arrangement, the centre even supplied the eyetalian with its athletic membership lists of 3,500 names to help show advertisers the magazine’s potential market. John Montesano, originally just a part-timer, had carved out a role for himself as the eyetalian‘s business and circulation manager in 1994. He helped the magazine develop a business plan and continued the quest for private funding-now a necessity more than ever, since the province’s new Conservative government had scrapped the jobsOntario program.

There were also editorial changes. Esposito quit, perhaps realizing that his vision for the eyetalian could never bring commercial success, although he remained a contributing writer. Montesano was chosen as the new editor. His aspirations for the magazine were slightly different. “To me it’s not about the dark and the bright side of the community,” he explains. “It’s more about attaching yourself to people who just do quality work and letting them figure out the dark and bright.” The symbol for his new direction was also Nino Ricci. But instead of writing about him, Montesano wanted Ricci to write a column. He thought the novelist would help boost readership and respect for the magazine. All Montesano asked was that his column contain some link to Italian culture. Through Ricci, who in one column related the tale of losing his virtual virginity when he searched for “Italian Canadian” on the Internet, the magazine attracted other professional writers, such asGlobe and Mail arts reporter Liz Renzetti.

Under Montesano, the eyetalian shifted from being a critical, journalistic eye on the community to being “A Magazine of Things Italian.” Gone were the reports on conflict, such as “The Armani Generation.” In their place were features like “Your Guide to the Best Italian Stuff in the City” and profiles of such prominent businesspeople as winemaker Rossana Magnotta. “The magazine was not doing business profiles in its first couple of years,” says Montesano in hindsight. “I think inevitably the more you commercialize something, the more it’s going to lose its edge.”

By the end of 1996, the eyetalian had hired Joseph Barbieri, who had previously been working in corporate real estate, to handle advertising sales. Broadening appeal led to upwards of 20 ads per issue, although most were only black-and-white and not full page. Perhaps more important, the magazine had gained nearly 1,000 subscribers and a regular readership of 8,000. It had also grabbed the attention of like-minded individuals from the Ukrainian, Greek, Jewish and Spanish communities who were thinking about starting up a similar publication. Often they approached Montesano for advice. “Generally I would try to discourage people,” he says. “If their goals weren’t working like a maniac and struggling with no money to try to reach people, then I would say ‘You’re probably out of touch with what this is going to take.'”

Still, there were a few who ignored Montesano’s advice and leapt in. One was Nestor Gula, founding editor ofZdorov! Like the founders of the eyetalian, Gula wanted to challenge the traditional way that his culture was reported. Targeted at second-generation Ukrainians, Zdorov! ran journalistically credible stories about subjects most of the Ukrainian press shied away from: articles on mixed marriages and profiles of Ukrainians who had chosen unorthodox professions in Canada. But, like the eyetalian, Zdorov! had a tiny budget. As a result, Gula had no money with which to pay himself and only a little for his writers. “You’re only paying me 75 bucks,” says Gula, mimicking a freelancer refusing to do a revise. “Fuck it. First draft, final draft.”

By the summer of 1998, Nick Bianchi and Teresa Tiano had moved on to other careers, while Esposito remained a contributor. In their place, John Montesano and sales director Joseph Barbieri took over the ownership of “A Magazine of Things Italian,” which by then had 12,000 readers. “I wanted to make it a magazine with far greater and broader appeal,” says Barbieri. “The magazine had grown as far as it could grow, at least from an advertising point of view.” By this point an average of 35 lucrative ads graced each issue, many of them full page, four colour. But Barbieri believed the eyetalian had to put an even greater amount of emphasis on lifestyle; he felt Montesano hadn’t gone far enough in his overhaul, that he wasn’t open to new visions.

Like Barbieri, Montesano wanted the magazine to grow and, at some point soon, prosper. But he disagreed with his new partner. “Barbieri felt it wasn’t commercialized fast enough,” he says. “I thought it was pretty commercialized.” As partnership problems mounted and the magazine’s debt grew to more than $50,000, the most realistic option became to sell the eyetalian. But the two co-owners couldn’t even agree on how to do it. And so, just like that, in the early weeks of 1999, the eyetalian was a memory. John Montesano called the founding staff, Ricci and other longtime contributors with the news that the winter 1998 issue of the eyetalianmagazine would be the last. The next day, Montesano walked into Telelatino Network in Toronto, scrapping his original intention to ask for help in salvaging eyetalian magazine. Instead, the company hired him on the spot to help with market development, his new boss assuming he would bring a piece of his magazine experience to the station.

In the summer of 1999, Montesano bade a final farewell to his magazine in Zdorov! In a guest column entitled “Notes on eyetalian’s Demise,” he wrote: “So what happened? Why did the magazine fail? I have as many answers to that question as I do to the question of why did the magazine thrive for so long? Money constraints, internal differences, burnout. Regardless of the factors, six years after my first introduction to the eyetalian I still feel a connection to a piece of work that I felt I could call my own.”

Esposito feels the same connection, but continues to wonder if part of the reason behind the eyetalian‘s demise had to do with an old concept in search of a new audience who didn’t care. “I find that I did do a lot of navel-gazing about my heritage,” he remembers. “I don’t know if the new generation of 20-somethings agonize about it.” Esposito, for one, will remember the eyetalian in its youth, when he and thousands like him found their voice.

Other Climbers

Hopefuls

brownscene

Focus: A forum for second-generation Filipinos in North America and elsewhere featuring hard-hitting, controversial reporting and commentary.

Launched: 1999

Circulation: 15,000

Enraged by the class divisions inherited from previous generations of Filipinos, Len Ryan Cervantes and some friends set out to stop the cycle two years ago. Their vehicle: a magazine that began with the nameBrownSugar, a title that had to be jettisoned when they learned Hustler publisher Larry Flynt owned the rights to it. “Our intention is really to present all points of view,” says Cervantes, “and hopefully the person who wins is the reader because they can read all of them and come to their own conclusions.” An early feature was about interracial dating: “White boy, Filipino girl. Filipino boy, Latin girl,” it began. Another warned of endemic sexual violence in the community. Such stories, as the founders of the eyetalian learned, can scare off potential advertisers and investors. The magazine has had mixed success. It has approached mainstream airlines, clothing and car manufacturers for ads but hasn’t made huge gains. “They’re right,” says Cervantes of the advertisers’ decision not to buy space in brownscene. His readers are young and “don’t have a lot of disposable income. There’s not a lot of research that’s been done on us yet.” Still, he is making inroads-and a profit. However, brownscene now includes more profiles of musicians and reviews of CDs, a reflection of the demands of its young readership. Lately, says Cervantes, finding advertising that doesn’t corrupt the editorial has gotten easier since a number of smaller, younger Filipino companies are realizing that brownscene gives them a direct line to the community. “We’re a support system for [advertisers], and they’re a support system for us,” he adds. “It’s a delicate ecosystem with a lot of these companies. It’s going to be a slow climb.”

RicePaper

Focus: Providing a “slanted point of view” that combats racism and showcases the writing, artwork, musical compositions and theatre of Asian-Canadians.

Launched: 1998

Circulation: 2,000-4,000

Hopeless

Zdorov!

Focus: Also known as “The Magazine of Ukrainian Things,” it, like the eyetalian, set out to challenge traditional journalism in its community. It has suspended publication, and has been searching for investors with little success.

Launched: 1996

Circulation: 1,600

Mehfil

Focus: To show second- and third-generation Indo-Canadians what the community was capable of. Focusing on professionals who have made it in Canada, its owners tried to secure an audience both within the community and outside of it.

Launched: 1993

Died: 1999

Peak circulation: 45,000

Typhoon

Focus: A magazine dedicated to East and Southeast Asian Canadians, which quickly folded because of insufficient advertising support.

Launched: 1995

Died: 1996

Peak circulation: 50,000

They’ve got a fire burning outside. Our tongues taste the smoke that seeps in through different wall cracks every time the wind shifts… They’re going to hang us.

The year is 1879. In a ramshackle cabin somewhere near Kamloops, Alex Hare endures a siege. He’s haunted by fragmented memories of a murderous rampage. Maybe those crimes are why he’s on the shack’s floor with a few other fugitives, cold, thirsty, wounded, surrounded by enemies among the snowy pines. Or maybe it’s because he and the other young M?tis have darker skin than the white ranchers outside. Maybe the shots, the smoke, the standoff that support the whole structure of this piece of short fiction, are symbolic of tensions between races, between tribes of men who have fought for generations and will fight again.

Whatever the reason, Hare and his friends are in trouble. Their tongues swell from thirst. Vigilantes surround them, taking occasional potshots. Hare’s leg bone is shattered after one of his friends-the one who drew him into the gang in the first place-goes crazy and shoots him while he sleeps. As a reader, you want to hate the character of Alex Hare; he has slit a white rancher’s throat and licked blood from the blade. But the way he explains it, it wasn’t his fault. You almost find yourself feeling sorry for him.

The year is 2001 now, on the other side of the continent. On the surface, the young outlaw Alex Hare hasn’t much in common with Peter Stockland, the 45-year-old author, editor, columnist and former reporter whose short story about Hare, “Brothers,” appeared in 89 Best Canadian Stories. But the two men’s circumstances are remarkably similar. Stockland, also from Kamloops, is holed up on the fifth floor of The Gazette’s grey office tower in downtown Montreal. He’s putting on a brave face knowing his enemies wait outside. He hears their potshots ricochet off his reputation. They won’t forget what he’s done or written. A bedrock social conservative, he sticks out like a M?tis among white ranchers here in Montreal, one of North America’s most liberal cities. With circulation drying up, he’s thirsty for readers. He says it’s nothing, just a scratch, but he’s limping from where his ally-the one who put him in the editor-in-chief’s office at The Gazette-crippled him by selling the newspaper. You can’t help feeling a bit sorry for him.

Of course, not everybody feels sorry for Peter Stockland. Some complain he got his new job because his libertarian, right-of-centre views were close to those of his former boss, newspaper baron Conrad Black. Then, last summer, Black sold most of his Canadian papers-including The Gazette-to CanWest Global Communications, leaving Stockland at the mercy of a more liberal parent company. His fiercest critics hold little sympathy for a man they describe as a “right-wing asshole,” a “hard-edged ideologue,” a “propagandist.” He faces an especially tough reception in Quebec, where he endures the reputation of being a writer from the West who once called francophone culture “a hoax,” resulting in threats that pressured his family to move briefly.

Even his personality seems at odds with Montreal. A nonsmoker, Stockland could walk into a Harvey’s burger shop in this city and barely read the back-lit menu board through the haze of cigarette smoke. Or, touring his new press plant in the west end, the former columnist, who spouted moral indignation about all varieties of human foibles, might look across the street and notice the Cabaret les Amazones, a strip club that looks like a fast food restaurant-appropriate, since strip shows seem as casually available as hamburgers here. Or, as happened recently, the pink-faced, wide-awake editor-in-chief could stride into a morning meeting with other senior editors who sit bleary-eyed around a table cradling upscale coffees. At first, Stockland’s demeanor suits the newspaper’s reputation as a sober, middle-class broadsheet catering to the city’s upscale Anglo minority: he discusses the day’s stories thoughtfully, asking intelligent questions in his soft, deferential voice. Then he gently reprimands the city editor over a murder story that could have been played bigger-causing a brief pause in the conversation as the other editors remember, yes, their new boss spent most of his career at tabloids. Later, somebody mentions a quirky item in a competing paper about a moviegoer who was so disgusted by a film that he stole it from the projectionist’s booth and unfurled the celluloid in the street. They decide to follow the story with a piece about this and other violent reactions to performances. Leaning forward, his face flushing, Stockland relaxes his quiet, thoughtful persona to reveal a boyish enthusiasm. He tells an anecdote about a comedian who angered an audience member so much that the man climbed on stage and punched the performer in the face. “He just gave it to him!” Stockland chortles, smacking his fist into his palm for emphasis, his thick forearm bulging beneath a rolled-up sleeve. None of the other editors laughs. Their sleeves are neatly ironed and buttoned. Someone takes a sip of coffee. This westerner doesn’t quite fit in. The unspoken question among them is, Where did this guy come from?

Stockland was raised in a working-class neighbourhood in Kamloops, British Columbia. His father, Eyolf, who died when Stockland was 13, worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Stockland’s cousin, uncle, grandfather and most of their neighbours worked on the railroad. The town’s dominant industries were rail yards, cattle ranches and pulp mills. Stockland retains some folksiness from his blue-collar roots: “That was fair ball,” he’ll say, and he’ll refer to men in his anecdotes as “this guy,” as in, “So this guy climbs up on stage and takes a swing at this comedian guy.” Although Stockland has never belonged to any political party and didn’t vote in the last federal election, his famously conservative views have their roots in this western working town and his solid Anglican upbringing. He still goes to church most Sundays, though he has since converted to his wife’s Catholicism.

But while Kamloops shaped him, he was also much too ambitious to stay. When he appeared on a kids’ television show in Grade 3, the host asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. Stockland said he wanted to be a writer and a reader, and everyone laughed. But it was true. He started his hobby of writing short stories in elementary school. Reading The Vancouver Sun often made him late for his paper route. He once failed an English assignment because he imitated his favourite sportswriter’s style. He learned how to get a reaction with controversial words at age 10, when he and a friend put a sign on the local Elks’ hall urging passersby to “Join Hitler’s Youth,” with a phone number for the RCMP written underneath. His father, who had gone hungry during the Nazi occupation of Norway, scolded him severely.

Rather than take up his father’s trade after high school, he enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s English program, working part-time for a suburban weekly, scraping stories out of soporific council meetings. He spent one semester at a daily paper in Medicine Hat before graduating in 1979 and scoring a job covering city hall at the Vernon Daily News. Two years later he moved back to his hometown and joined the Kamloops Sentinel. There he shared a basement apartment with one of the Sentinel’s half-dozen reporters, Steven Edwards, who became a lasting friend. They had to roll Stockland’s blue Volkswagen van downhill each morning to get the engine going.

The 25-year-old Stockland was already so enthralled by the newspaper business, Edwards says, that he once attended a Halloween party wearing enlarged pages of the Sentinel. The ambitious roommates felt they were headed for great things in the news business. (An accurate premonition: Edwards is now Southam’s United Nations correspondent in New York.) Stockland, never staying at one job for very long, remembers working harder during this period than ever since, scrambling to cover general assignments at understaffed dailies. He was also learning French part-time. After all, he wasn’t going to stay in B.C. forever.

Before leaving his home province, though, he met his future wife, Linda Couture. A Quebecer transplanted to Kamloops by a federal program promoting French, Couture arranged lunch with Stockland hoping he’d write an article about her work. She fell in love with the soft-spoken reporter who was learning her mother tongue and they married in the summer of 1982. (Today, they have two children, Marie-Desneiges, 15, and ?tienne, 13.) They had already moved that spring to Edmonton, where Stockland went to work for Sun Media. He would stay with the punchy tabloid chain for the next 14 years.

Though Stockland speaks quietly, almost demurely, often pausing for thought before opening his mouth, there’s another side to his character. His brashness, the same puckish penchant for stirring up trouble that inspired his “Hitler Youth” sign, helped him thrive at the Sun papers. It also provoked him to try some memorable pranks, like the time in 1985 when he got together with a few fellow reporters at The Edmonton Sun and staged a tongue-in-cheek picket in front of CBC Edmonton studios to protest the cancellation of Robert Homme’s television show for children, The Friendly Giant, waving placards with slogans like “Don’t Let Rusty Get Dusty” and “CBC Committing Homme-cide.”

That brashness, bordering on pugnaciousness, could explain an embarrassing incident after his move to Sun Media’s new Ottawa bureau in 1986, where he served as a reporter and columnist. When a television cameraman jostled him during a scrum in Parliament, Stockland waited until the scrum was breaking up, turned to the cameraman and told him to keep his hands off. The guy pushed him again and walked away across the foyer of the Commons. Stockland followed him and remembers saying, “Put your fucking hands on me again and I’ll drop you right where you’re standing.” According to Stockland, the other journalist turned and raised his hands, so Stockland punched him.

Stockland couldn’t stay out of trouble even after he moved to Quebec City as a Sun Media correspondent two years later, where he wrote columns and covered news in the province. In the politically charged atmosphere around Meech Lake, his patriotic westerner’s views were often interpreted as anti-French. A column on November 30, 1989, drew particular criticism: “Quebec’s Culture? Please, I feel an attack of the .44 Magnums coming on. Because the harsh truth is the celebrated Culture of this province is largely a hoax.” A French CBC radio host denounced Stockland’s column and broadcast his address and home phone number. Stockland had just returned home after a week in Montreal covering the massacre of 14 female students by an armed lunatic, so the destructive potential of lone extremists preyed on his mind when his family began receiving threatening calls. He sent his wife and children to stay with some local in-laws for a few days. Stockland says he was only trying, clumsily, to say Quebec has adopted aspects of American culture. He says the severity of the backlash against that column was exaggerated by the overheated atmosphere of Meech Lake. But Robert Fife, Ottawa bureau chief at the time, says he’s never had another writer’s family forced to leave home because of death threats.

Although today Stockland says the family’s return to Ottawa the next summer was unrelated, he couldn’t have been entirely unhappy when Sun Media folded its Quebec bureau and he was transferred back to his old job in the nation’s capital. Stockland moved again in 1994, after being appointed editor of The Calgary Sun, where he continued to write a column. But that single “hoax” column keeps cropping up in certain political and media circles in Montreal when Stockland’s name comes up. It’s burned into memory like a notorious crime. The other troubling episode in the new editor’s history, these Montrealers say, was his part in a regime that cranked the Calgary Herald’s outlook hard to the political right-in the words of Herald columnist Catherine Ford, “shoving our metaphorical nose so far up the Reform Party’s ass we can’t see daylight.” The Herald’s editor-in-chief at the time, Crosbie Cotton, hired Stockland in 1996 from the Sun. When Stockland arrived, Cotton was already trying to correct what he saw as the paper’s drift leftwards away from Calgary attitudes. A common joke before his reforms, Cotton says, was that if Conservative Premier Ralph Klein figured a way to spin lead into gold, the Herald headline would have been “Lead Shortage Looms.”

Cotton gave Stockland a column, widely syndicated through the Southam chain, which he continued to write after becoming editorial page editor in 1999. During these years in Calgary, as he abandoned reporting and focused on opinion writing, Stockland earned a reputation as one of Canada’s most conservative voices. He attacked a Pulitzer Prize-winning play featuring gay men, defended parents’ right to spank their children, scorned the UN’s “social engineers,” denounced abortion and complained about a decision allowing women to bare their breasts in public. He mused that militant right-wing critic Ted Byfield wasn’t critical enough, ridiculed “bourgeois” workers like teachers and journalists who wanted to fight for unions and called human-rights commissions, equity boards and harassment panels “self-sustaining guilt industries.” Liberalism, he wrote, is “debauched” and “poisonous.” It’s not as if Stockland slit a man’s throat and licked the blade, but his attacks on liberal ideas certainly drew fire. Peter Gzowski called him a “right-wing asshole from Alberta.” Andy Marshall, a Herald reporter at the time who later led the local union, says many people muttered about the paper’s tone after Stockland’s arrival. “I thought a kind of nastiness entered the way things were debated.”

The paper’s new outlook was among the many complaints that fueled discontent at the Herald in 1999. More than 100 newsroom workers walked out that November, leaving senior editors like Stockland with only 28 staff. Stockland had long opposed the formation of a union. Even before becoming an editor, he lobbied his colleagues with leaflets and vocal appeals, arguing that the journalists should give management six months to fix what wasn’t working. “He took upon himself the role of company propagandist,” Marshall says.

One day in late December, Stockland was crossing the picket line, driving a minivan out of the Herald’s parking lot. Radio reporter Carol Adams, covering the strike for Calgary’s CKUA, says she saw him gesture at the crowd with the idiomatic finger. Word got around about the insult and Stockland called her, told her she was delusional, swore at her and hung up. (Adams now emphasizes the gesture was out of character for a man she considers a “gentleman.”)

When asked about the incident, Stockland admits he made the call, but says he was angry at Adams only because he hadn’t made the obscene gesture. In an explanation that’s similar to his account of the earlier skirmish with Quebec nationalists during Meech, he claims to have been misunderstood in an emotionally charged situation. The anecdote was widely repeated, he says, but misrepresented how he felt about the strikers. “I gave a damn about what was happening to those people,” he says, his face turning red. Sounding weary, he repeats his family’s working-class origins and ties with the railroad union: “I’m not anti-union.”

Anti-union or not, Stockland’s performance at the Herald must have appealed to his bosses at Southam, whose management had become more politically conservative since Conrad Black’s Hollinger bought control of the newspaper chain in 1996. Last spring, Stockland got a phone call from Gordon Fisher, Southam’s vice-president, editorial, in Toronto, asking whether he’d be interested in an unnamed, soon-to-be-vacant editor-in-chief’s position. Stockland said yes. It’s widely believed that he was Black’s pick because he had a right-wing westerner’s outlook but experience working in Quebec and fluency in French, unusual qualifications that probably limited the number of candidates. Once again, Stockland moved east.

There’s not going to be any chance for us to ride out of here….

In the story of Alex Hare, he’s trapped in winter woods, surrounded by a posse of ranchers. He smells their cooking fires, hears more wagons arriving as they lay siege to his cabin. He’s vastly outnumbered. On July 25, 2000, a Globe and Mail story predicted an equally unpleasant greeting awaited Peter Stockland in Montreal: “The appointment announced yesterday may raise hackles among some francophone media or nationalist circles.” Indeed, Quebec’s media reacted to Stockland by circling the wagons. Le Soleil, Quebec City’s daily, carried an item the same day referring to his “hoax” comment, and an article appeared the next day in Le Devoir, the upscale Montreal daily, focusing on the same thing. A longer story appeared the following day in La Presse, the larger-circulation Montreal daily, also leading with the “hoax” quote and including descriptions of Stockland’s most extreme right-wing Herald columns. For reactions, the press turned to people like Matthew Hays, associate editor of the weekly Montreal Mirror, who says Stockland’s columns at the Herald showed a hostility toward gay rights (despite one of Stockland’s columns mentioning his gay friend who died of AIDS). For Southam to appoint an editor so unsuited to Montreal, Hays says, the company either lacks a sense of the local market or was sabotaging The Gazette to help Black’s new national daily, the National Post.

But media weren’t the only ones taking shots. Many nationalists were surprised by the appointment, says Robin Philpot, head of communications for a separatist group, the Soci?t? Saint-Jean-Baptiste. His fax machine was busy that week as people sent him Stockland’s clippings. But the clips weren’t necessary: like many politically minded Quebecers, Philpot remembers perfectly what the “hard-edged ideologue” wrote during Meech. Language and cultural issues may have faded from public discussion in the rest of Canada, but Quebec is still a place where an English sign is enough to provoke the firebombing of a coffee shop. Nationalists like Philpot can’t abide a man who questioned Quebec’s distinctiveness. “One would hope Izzy Asper would push him out,” he says.

Philpot is referring to an announcement on July 31-less than a week after Stockland’s appointment was confirmed-that The Gazette would be sold to Izzy Asper’s CanWest Global Communications along with other Southam papers. Stockland was visiting Montreal that day and says he didn’t hear news of the takeover until Gazette managing editor Raymond Brassard called him, asking, “How do you like Izzy Asper?” Stockland shrugs while telling the story, remembering his bafflement. “I said, ‘Well, I met him at an editorial board once.'”

Several months later, Stockland still says the new ownership doesn’t mean much to him. But many believe Black’s surprise announcement hit him like a bullet in the night, crippling any plans he might have had to change the paper. A Gazette writer described the week as a “roller coaster”-whereas some staffers had worried the paper would get more conservative, the writer said, the new ownership could mean a drift in the opposite direction. It’s not impossible to imagine Conrad Black appointing Stockland to affect The Gazette’s ideology, but The Gazette’s subsequent sale to more liberal owners left Stockland without that mandate-especially in a predominately liberal city, with a liberal publisher and a liberal newsroom.

When Stockland arrived in Montreal, he soon discovered that French media and nationalists weren’t the only ones waiting for him among the snowy pines. The newsroom was also skeptical about him. “There was some pretty understandable trepidation that this guy was going to come in from the west and work from the top down,” Stockland says. One of the most vocal Gazette staffers was reporter Alexander Norris, who makes no secret of his antipathy toward Conrad Black. Norris has pictures of the rotund newspaper owner tacked outside his cubicle. He even obliquely criticized Southam’s management in his acceptance speech after winning a National Newspaper Award last year. He’s so famously outspoken that half a dozen Gazette insiders offer his name when asked about newsroom reaction to Stockland: I won’t speak for the record, they say, but maybe Alex will talk to you.

When Norris does talk, his only request is that the article mustn’t suggest he’s speaking only for himself. Then he describes Stockland’s appointment with precisely the same phrase others used: “It’s a strange fit,” he says. “This is one of the most liberal cities in North America, and Conrad Black has given us someone from the far-right fringes of Alberta public opinion.”

Norris views Stockland as another part of The Gazette’s shift to the right under Black’s ownership, which began, he says, when former editor-in-chief Joan Fraser was forced out and replaced with the more conservative Alan Allnut, then continued when right-wingers Peter Hadekel and Brian Kappler were named editorial page editor and city editor respectively. He believes appointing Stockland was Black’s last attempt to influence The Gazette before it was sold to CanWest. “Appointing someone like Stockland is like stacking the Senate when you’re defeated,” he says. The barrage of bad press about the appointment wasn’t good for The Gazette, he continues, though Stockland was an easy target. “There seems to be such a record of intemperate, ill-thought-out, intolerant, offensive things he’s written.”

But Stockland faces other challenges, too. The Gazette is thirsty for readers. NADbank figures for adult weekday readership dropped more than 16 per cent in the last five years, with lighter losses on Saturdays but an even steeper slide on Sundays. The Gazette’s old unilingual readership dwindles every year in Montreal, replaced by a new category of reader: the allophone, typically a multilingual child of immigrant parents who doesn’t identify with either side of the language wars. But Montreal’s increasing bilingualism and multilingualism undermine the paper’s traditional monopoly on English-only readers, since more English speakers feel comfortable reading French. In the daily fight for news, The Gazette faces an uphill battle: its medium-sized readership means it can afford only a medium-sized staff to cover a big city. Another difficulty for Stockland, who always saw himself as a writer, is the budgeting and paperwork for his 180 employees. When asked about budgeting, he chuckles, shakes his head and says, “I have the unique ability to take my own head off and stuff it up my ass.” In a more serious moment, he reflects that the logistics of running a newspaper are more complicated than he’d imagined. Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that rumours circulate, suggesting the new editor-in-chief might not last long.

Our tongues are swelling and turning black from thirst… We clawed open a chink in a wall, scraped snow onto our fingers, pulled our hands back inside before their bullets hit.

In Stockland’s story, it doesn’t look as if Alex Hare will last much longer. He can’t walk. His friends have run low on ammunition. He takes a lump of charcoal, scribbles a plea for leniency on a scrap of paper and sends it to the ranchers outside. But it’s unlikely his message will persuade anyone. Hare is pathetic, but he doesn’t inspire sympathy. In a Globe review of the book, where Stockland’s story was rated the worst in a collection that included stories by gifted writers like Alice Munro and Steven Heighton, the reviewer concluded: “We never really become involved enough to care.”

In this story of Stockland, the opposite is true. Several weeks after the volley of critical articles by Quebec reporters-who only spoke to Stockland by phone-a writer named Marie-Andr?e Amiot interviewed him at The Gazette for a French media journal, Le 30. Entering his spacious office, she might have noticed his bookshelf stocked with just the kind of conservative tracts she expected to see, by the likes of George W. Bush, Neil Bissoondath, Ted Byfield and William D. Gairdner. But then, surprisingly, tucked in beside Ezra Levant’s Youthquake, there’s the screenplay for Atom Egoyan’s dark, obsessive, sensual film Exotica-suggesting subtler tones in Stockland’s personality. And there’s the man himself, smiling, taking a visitor’s coat and gesturing disarmingly at a chair. His choirboy face and gentle, fluent French are at odds with the image of a man who inspired what Amiot calls “horror and distress” in the Gazette newsroom. She wrote, “One cannot help but ask oneself, Where is the monster?”

It’s a question on many staffers’ lips. Like Amiot, they’re noticing aspects of him that weren’t included in press reports. They see him walking around the newsroom and talking with reporters, a habit that would have been out of character for his more bureaucratic predecessor. He seems open to new ideas, they admit, and he makes bold editorial decisions. Before his arrival, The Gazette might not have given its whole front page to the text of Justin Trudeau’s eulogy for his father-including the French passages, no less. And the photos of Karla Homolka enjoying herself in prison-a scoop that resulted in Homolka’s transfer to a stricter facility-might not have hit the front page with quite the same impact, boosting single-copy sales and attracting national attention. Indeed, the Homolka item ran with a heavy, black headline that read “Karla’s Prison Party,” but tabloid veteran Stockland had wanted something even stronger: “Cakes in Jail,” or “Killer in a Cocktail Dress.” Reporter Bill Marsden says the paper is long overdue for someone that gutsy in the editor-in-chief’s office. “A lot of people here are screaming about the fact that he’s a right-wing fanatic, or some religious freak or God knows what, some Catholic nut-case. But I don’t care. What I care about is, is he a good journalist?”

But journalism wasn’t the only factor in Stockland’s boldest decision so far. In a deft managerial move, he posted a memo in November announcing city editor Brian Kappler would leave the department to become a political editor in the new year. Stockland says his only reason for relocating Kappler was because he’d be well-suited to a column on national issues. In an email, a Gazette writer warned that giving space to Kappler’s “Fraser Institute/libertarian/Newt Gingrich views” could make the paper more conservative.

But to judge by the effect of the memo on Stockland’s staff, he could have scribbled it with a lump of charcoal on scrap paper. Many reporters disliked Kappler, and Stockland had heard their feelings in meetings he’d held with newsroom staff during the summer. Whether or not it was his intention, ousting Kappler made Stockland more popular. A group of staffers held an impromptu celebration the next night at a pub on Avenue Duluth in the Plateau Mont-Royal entertainment district. The party was well attended, recalls Alex Norris. “It’s the happiest I’ve seen The Gazette staff in years.” Although he remains skeptical, even Norris says this decision changed his view of Stockland. Enunciating each word to make sure he’s correctly quoted, he says, “I can only praise this bold move.” In fact, Norris says he wouldn’t have spoken about his misgivings at all if he’d been asked for an interview after the announcement about Kappler.

Stockland says he’s pleasantly surprised he’s won over many of his staff. He has been saying since he arrived that he isn’t interested in imposing a political agenda, that he hopes to transcend divisive squabbles. He likes to talk about ways of escaping the journalistic “conflict model.” One of his favourite projects at the Herald, he says, was a series of profiles of regular people. He once wrote a short review of a Chinese restaurant and didn’t think much about it until he returned to find the article taped to the restaurant’s door and people reading it, laughing. This is good journalism, he says. We don’t have to write about fights. In other words, it doesn’t have to be about tribes of men who fought for generations and will fight again. The middle-aged Peter Stockland seems to have outgrown his old persona as a feisty cameraman-puncher, spoiling for a fight. What separates him from his bloodthirsty fugitive is his supernatural ability to limp out of that cabin into the snowy woods, throw his rifle aside and talk to those who surround him. It looks impossible; surely they’ll shoot him. But instead, he seems to win their respect.

Sometime after the snow melts in spring, after this magazine hits newsstands, a redesigned Gazette is expected to start rolling off the presses at a new, $63-million production facility on Rue St-Jacques in the city’s west end. The plant isn’t much to look at now, just brick and aluminum siding plunked down in an empty lot choked with weeds and young sumac trees. Not much is being said about the redesign, either, which has been in the works for a year. But executives at the paper promise it will be livelier and more compelling. Each issue will get more colour pages and more colourful content. Perhaps most importantly for a publication that is losing readers, it will get a fresh start.

In the end, that’s what will decide the fate of Peter Stockland in Montreal. If he can make this new Gazette work, his staff may forget that he’s a tabloid man at a broadsheet paper. They’ll forget he’s a right-wing columnist transplanted into the top job at a liberal newsroom. His “hoax” comment will fade into history. It’s happening already, although he’s not out of the woods yet.

But this is no ordinary homeless man. This is Globe and Mail reporter John Stackhouse, who spent seven days and six nights on the street to find out about homeless life firsthand. The result was a controversial three-part series published in December 1999 called “Living with the Homeless.” The response was electric. One defender applauded Stackhouse for emotionally engaging readers in a topic previously debated between “agenda-ridden left and right-wing pundits.” Another critic attacked him for demonizing the poor.

This was not the first time Stackhouse challenged the status quo. He spent most of the 1990s living in India as the Globe ‘s first development reporter, travelling to more than 40 countries in eight years. In a decade where Canadian papers’ coverage of international development issues lacked scope and continuity, Stackhouse made a name for himself writing difficult stories that weren’t being told. He focused on the forces that contributed to the slow-moving social, political and economic development of some of the world’s poorest people, acting as a surrogate for his readers back home and trying to understand a world most of them would never see. Stackhouse covered wars, droughts, natural disasters, authoritarian regimes and the effects of failed development schemes. He saw death and human suffering on a scale unimaginable to most people. But he also witnessed accomplishments and small victories that reinforced his faith in the strength of the human spirit.

Along the way he’s had victories of his own. His awards coffer, which holds five National Newspaper Awards, a National Magazine Award and an Amnesty International-Canada media award, coupled with his prominent play in the paper’s International and Focus sections, attests to his skill as a feature reporter. He’s survived the often rocky transition from working out of a suitcase to working out of a newsroom. And now the Globehas rewarded its marquee player with a new mandate: the opportunity to cover a mix of the best foreign and national stories, and the privilege to experiment with some more creative reporting. But when he’s on his home turf, looking for innovative ways to tell Canadians stories about themselves, he may be facing his biggest challenge of all: the temptation to trade in-depth reporting for gimmicky, “slice-of-life” journalism.

Sitting across from me, in one of Toronto’s ubiquitous coffee shops, is an unassuming young man who bears little physical resemblance to the scruffy-bearded character in the pictures published with the homeless series. Dressed in a blue denim shirt and green corduroy pants, he’s slighter than I expected, clean-shaven and younger looking, except for tired-looking hazel eyes that mark 38 years. Noting his dark, tousled hair and crooked front teeth, I scrawl “boyish” in my notebook.

This isn’t our first meeting, but he seems reserved, almost wary, even though I’m only lobbing a few easy questions. A friend of his later assures me this is characteristic Stackhouse-someone who would forgo celebrity status if it meant an intrusion into his private life. I ask Stackhouse what it’s like to be known as the guy who wrote the homeless series. “It was upsetting for a time,” he says, swirling the coffee in his cup. “I’d done what I thought was this great body of work overseas and then came back, and this became what people knew me as. It was like eight days of work overshadowed eight years of work that I thought was more meaningful.”

Stackhouse’s hunger for meaningful work has its roots in a comfortable middle-class upbringing. In 1976, after his theologian father became principal of the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College, Stackhouse moved from a scrappy public school in Scarborough, where he was at the top of his class, to a more challenging environment: the venerable and exclusive private boys school, Upper Canada College. From Grade 9 to 13, while his classmates spent their summers on cruises or at country clubs, he mowed lawns and painted to pay part of his tuition. He says he wasn’t a rags-to-riches kid, but adds, “One of the things that attracted me to journalism was at UCC I was always an outsider, and I was able to sit at the back of the classroom and watch a different type and class of people that I really didn’t fit in with.”

Wanting to avoid the plight of unemployed English degree graduates hit hard by the recession, in 1981 Stackhouse entered the bachelor of commerce program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, expecting to go on to law school. In his second year, craving a creative outlet otherwise absent from his accounting classes, he started writing for the Queen’s Journal and soon became assistant sports editor, followed by sports editor. When he was appointed editor in 1984, he initiated a radical redesign for the school’s then 110-year-old student newspaper. After university he wanted to go to Asia to live and work, but decided on a Toronto Star summer internship instead, having already worked part-time at the Kingston Whig-Standard. He finally got to Australia and Southeast Asia in August 1986, but returned after four months for a job at The London Free Press. He later moved to Financial Times of Canada, before joining The Globe and Mail‘s Report on Business Magazine as a senior writer in late 1989. Throughout this time, though, in the back of his mind, was the idea of returning to Asia.

That chance came with the Globe in 1991 when William Thorsell, then two years into his tenure as editor-in-chief, introduced a groundbreaking model for the paper’s new foreign bureau based in New Delhi, India: a beat bureau with an almost exclusive focus on development issues in South Asia and Africa. “It was a much more ambitious and self-directed assignment,” says Thorsell. “We weren’t just covering the events as they came to us-we were bringing an agenda to bear on our foreign coverage.” Many noteworthy newspaper people clamoured for the job, but Stackhouse was awarded the position in June, having won the favour of senior management for his storytelling ability and voracity for development issues. He travelled back and forth between Toronto and India for six months before he and his wife, Cindy Andrew, a freelancer for the photo agency Gamma-Liaison, settled in New Delhi in January 1992. But the Globe ‘s “star” reporter had been born two months earlier, when Stackhouse officially opened the development issues bureau with a three-part series on Ethiopia. In the first part, his poetic, grassroots way of telling development stories was evident as he introduced his readers to a poverty-stricken widow who had to walk 70 kilometres in search of food:

“The drought has come again,” she said, standing in line with about 300 families. “My farm can’t produce anything. My cattle have died. Maybe we will be next.”… What is remarkable this year is that Mrs. Fatuma and tens of thousands like her have received any food at all. For this year’s hunger season has been made worse not by the cruelties of nature but by the cruelties of man.

In May 1995, when former Middle East correspondent Patrick Martin was made foreign editor, Stackhouse was told to redirect some of his attention to the political forces at work in the region. Stackhouse complied, but continued to maintain his relationship with the villagers of Biharipur, 300 kilometres southeast of New Delhi. While most western media dropped in to report the standard “death and destruction” stories in the Third World (tales of tragedy with a few quotes), Stackhouse wanted to immerse himself in this village, a microcosm of the tragedies and triumphs he saw elsewhere, to try to understand the complex human dynamics of poverty. “I used to drive my colleagues mad because I would have hour-long interviews with a poor village person because I wanted to know their life story,” he says. He visited at least 20 times and listened to the testimonials of villagers over those of government officials and aid agency staff, to get a sense of poverty from the ground up.

It was this grassroots approach that appealed to Stackhouse’s loyal following back home. Peter Desbarats, former dean of the University of Western Ontario’s Graduate School of Journalism, praises Stackhouse for his ability to write the difficult stories about development issues and capture the attention of Canadians used to reading sensational reports about wars, riots and famines. “He had the ability to bring you right into the villages, without romanticizing at all, to really give you a feeling for their problems and their achievements,” says Desbarats.

But by fall 1999, Stackhouse and his family had been in New Delhi twice as long as most foreign postings. For almost eight years he had shared his ground-floor flat with rats, weathered threats of malaria and breathed polluted air that left his lungs permanently scarred. He and his wife had one small child, and another on the way. It was time to go home.

The transition from autonomous foreign correspondent to newsroom-based reporter can be notoriously difficult, but by all accounts, Stackhouse weathered it relatively smoothly. He spent two months finishing his first book, Out of Poverty and into Something More Comfortable (published by Random House Canada in May 2000), a personal account of his experiences overseas. (The best-selling book was shortlisted for the $10,000 Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize.) He returned to the Globe ‘s newsroom in November 1999 with a new title-correspondent-at-large-and a mandate to cover a mix of foreign and national issues.

It is inevitable that time overseas changes the way you see not only your adopted country but also your home. “I think that I see this country through slightly different eyes, even today, and I’ve been back here for three years,” says CBC correspondent Dick Gordon, who shared the international beat with Stackhouse and crossed paths with him on some stories. Stackhouse was surprised by the number of homeless people and the level of public debate surrounding the issue of homelessness. Even more surprising was the absence of voices from the street. He was irritated by newspaper reports that focused on the “experts”-commissions, discussion groups and social agencies that spoke of homelessness in terms of simple solutions like more government funding-and the lack of imaginative, probing journalism.

In India, when he wanted to learn about poverty, Stackhouse lived with poor villagers. Back in Toronto, after seeing his own reflection in the face of a young panhandler, he decided to live on the streets as a homeless person. There’s a rich journalistic tradition of going undercover to explore another world, from Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Madhouse, first published in 1887 (she spent 10 days in a mental hospital to capture the ill treatment of patients) to John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me , published in 1961 (he darkened his skin to better understand the experiences of black Southerners). Although Stackhouse isn’t the only modern-day journalist who favours this kind of participatory research, the approach still raises ethical concerns within the profession and has been the subject of criticism from those within the communities being infiltrated. Their charge? That a reporter who parachutes into someone’s life for a short time is just a tourist who can never know what it’s really like to live like that, day in and day out, with no end in sight. Call it a twist on the appropriation of voice argument-appropriation of life.

But Stackhouse saw no other way to do the story. “To identify myself as a reporter would have undermined the whole process,” he says. “This wasn’t an investigation of the shelter system in Toronto. This was a reporter trying to understand what it’s like to be homeless.”

He brought his idea to Richard Addis, who had replaced Thorsell as editor-in-chief in August 1999, and asked for a month on the street. He says Addis argued most papers would send him for a few days at most. They agreed on a week, a decision Stackhouse caught flak for later. (In a recent email, Addis disagreed with this account, saying he gave Stackhouse all the time he wanted.)

Day 1: I did not appreciate the true meaning of homelessness until a white stretch limousine stopped beside me in Toronto’s downtown theatre distrct, blowing its exhaust in my face for five, then 10, then 15 minutes as I slouched against a fire hydrant, panhandling for dinner. It was the humiliation more than the pollution that grated me….

On the frigid morning of Monday, December 6, 1999, Stackhouse started his day on Yonge Street rather than in the cozy comforts of the newsroom, scrounging through a garbage can looking for a coffee cup with which to panhandle. He had with him a change of clothes, a sleeping bag and $5, and he had no idea how he would get lunch or where he would sleep that night. Over the next seven days he spent four nights in various shelters and two nights out in the cold in Nathan Phillips Square with the drunks, the bag ladies, the squeegees and drifters. He learned enough about the art of begging to net $350 (which he donated to charity). And he met a cast of characters, the voices of whom he used to tell stories about living on Toronto’s streets. At the end of it all, he returned to his middle-class north Toronto home to write about his seven days. He was completely unprepared for the torrent of public reaction that would be unleashed the following Saturday, when readers read his diary and learned about his “life without a home.”

When I ask him about the criticism-including the charge that a week wasn’t long enough to really experience homelessness-the previously understated and reticent Stackhouse becomes animated. “I don’t do what I do to change government policy,” he bristles. “I’m just trying to help my readers understand and try to understand things better myself.” The instant celebrity status, the intense scrutiny, the massive public outcry-most visibly on the Globe ‘s Web-based discussion forum, which received almost 800 postings-all left their mark, though. “It was overwhelming. It was humbling. Some days it was very upsetting. I was attacked viciously by a lot of people, and I wasn’t prepared for that, that it would become so personal.” He tells me of a letter he received from a friend of Indian descent who wrote that he could understand homelessness no more than he could understand what it’s like to be a brown female. “That’s an absurd, absurd link,” he stresses. “The whole point of this is that any one of us could be homeless.”

Reading through the scores of letters to the editor and email messages, it is clear Stackhouse’s story struck an emotional chord, ranging from charges that his “flirtation with homelessness is an incendiary for the flames of intolerance and (willful) misunderstanding,” to suggestions that he, a privileged member of society, was only playing homeless and exploiting the poor to further his career. But for all this criticism, there was an outpouring of support, praising him and the Globe for “having the courage to run this story, and all its gritty realism,” and applauding him for bypassing the rhetoric and presenting the simple facts of life on the streets. (The series would win him his fifth NNA.)

His week on the street captured the unique perspective of an outsider who had missed the politically charged social policy debates of the ’90s. “This was very much a series of someone just back in the country,” says John Fraser, National Post media critic and the Globe ‘s former China correspondent. “It’s invidious to some people’s ears to even be compared to a Third World country, but in fact there are some interesting parallels which someone like John Stackhouse would see particularly clearly when he first came back.”

So how does a reporter who spent eight years living with some of the world’s poorest people write about Toronto’s own “untouchables”? “It isn’t strange to me that people sleep on the streets,” says Stackhouse. In India, he explains, he lived in a city where two million people sleep on the streets and he’d step over bodies on his way home. Does having seen conditions of such abject poverty make him unsympathetic, predisposing him to view a church basement breakfast as luxurious? Or does it give him clear eyes and perspective?

“I wasn’t shocked by anything that I saw. I wasn’t horrified. I wasn’t scared. I think all of those years overseas gave me a context, and that’s how I see pretty much everything now,” he says. He agrees that he has seen people living in far worse conditions, but it’s not as if he used a “scale of suffering” to compare people’s circumstances. “I didn’t fall to my knees in pity the way so many journalists do because they see people living in a certain hardship,” he says. “I thought I could really see beyond the initial conditions of a person and try to understand other things going on in someone’s life, rather than just the visible signs of poverty that a lot of journalists cling to and that’s all they write about.”

While Stackhouse’s criticism of other journalists sounds severe, he’s equally critical of his own work. With a reputation for demanding high standards of himself and the people he works with, he says he owes it to his readers and subjects to spike his own first drafts when the story “deserves better words” than he has written.

Stackhouse is known for his intensity and doggedness, but also for his frankness. “John is always willing to take a contrary position and defend it, if that is what he believes to be the case. He’s a great one for not particularly liking the prevailing wisdom,” says Mark Nicholson, a correspondent for London’s Financial Times and Stackhouse’s friend and former colleague in India. He says Stackhouse is loath to take complex stories at face value and praises him for being “one of life’s natural skeptics.”

An example of this skepticism lies in Stackhouse’s opinion of the experts. “A lot of activists present social problems [like homelessness] as being a simple problem with a simple solution,” he says. “There are no simple problems, and no simple solutions.” It’s the kind of line that could sound naive, except that it’s grounded in his firsthand experience of complicated realities and the shortcomings of experts. For instance, Stackhouse saw the dramatic results of failed expertise in war-torn Somalia, where starving villagers died before him while food was stockpiled in the capital city. Such incidents have left him with little or no patience for quick-fix solutions, but this doesn’t mean he thinks he has the answers. He says his take on an issue should augment-not supersede-what the social agencies are saying. He posted this entry to the Globe ‘s “Living with the Homeless” discussion forum: “I certainly have not tried to trick readers into believing I know anything more than I saw and experienced.” The diary, albeit candid, was his perspective, and never purported to be anything different.

And yet he’s not a crusader because he sees his work as more of an intellectual quest. “One of the things that attracted me to journalism is that it’s a constant search for understanding,” he says, crediting his success to “unending curiosity and ignorance.” John Fraser sees something more. “There seems to be a steely resolve in the man. He’s a reserved human being, yet quite passionate. I think there’s a lot smouldering there, and I think he’s quite capable of finding an expression for that in his journalism.”

But does his recent work in Canada live up to the reputation he established as a foreign correspondent? He’s denounced other journalists for writing superficial stories about complex development issues, and yet his own portfolio is full of what some might see as gimmicky quick hits: “Running on Empty” (24 hours riding with a trucker), “ER Diary” (a week with paramedics and emergency room staff at Hamilton General Hospital) and “Notes from the Road” (a month hitchhiking across Canada). One newspaper reporter, upset with Stackhouse’s line that Winnipeg is “awash with social problems,” even joked his next project would be from the windows of a tour bus.

Yet others familiar with his work overseas would see these projects as classic Stackhouse, recognizing, for example, that his approach to the hitchhiker series is reminiscent of his NNA-winning “After Midnight” series (3,000 kilometres across India and Pakistan by train), published three years earlier. It’s a trademark theGlobe is trying to capitalize on, positioning Stackhouse prominently in its showcase of brand-name writers. He still has to fight to do work that’s different, though, and he doesn’t always win.

But he’s not out to be intentionally provocative, he says. He’s just trying to bring some clarity to confusing, complicated issues by exploring them from every angle. In doing so, the man who often appears to be rushing off somewhere admits to having wondered whether he’s now flitting from subject to subject. But Stackhouse says he weighs the risk of generalizing an issue against the benefit gained from looking at the broader picture. He uses the hitchhiker series to illustrate how he’s purposely transplanted a foreign correspondent’s extensive style of reporting and applied it to a domestic story. “I spent a total of five days in Quebec, so that’s a pretty quick trip through such an important part of Canada,” he says. “Had I spent a whole month in Quebec, I would have been able to write in more detail and probably with more authority, but I would then lose being able to write about it in the context of a larger picture, that being all of Canada.”

Perhaps Stackhouse takes for granted that because Canada is his own country, he has an intrinsic connection to the people he’s writing about. His creative storytelling leaves him vulnerable to accusations of becoming a parachute journalist himself. But he can’t be faulted for his ambitions: to breathe new life into stale debates and to bring fresh eyes to issues other Canadian papers sometimes disregard because the story has been done before. Over the course of his career he’s developed a range of reporting tools that he uses to try to tell a story. Often it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But no matter what the critics say, Stackhouse seems to know where he’s going, and he’s not going to let anyone else tell him what to see, what to think-or how to get there.

Day 5: A social agency with its own van also serves soup and cookies, and offers to take me to a shelter if I want. One of the volunteers, realizing I am one of the only people in the square still sober, warns me of the risk I’m taking outside. He says I can call any time in the night and be picked up, and for a moment I feel patronized, like a child on an overnight camping trip. My freedom has been compromised, but I thank him just the same.

Despite the fact that the Cuba assignment was only one highlight in the reporter’s long and varied career, her byline never became a household name. It should have. At a time when female reporters were routinely relegated to softer “women’s” issues, she refused the easy route and jostled with the best of the men, covering politics, crime and the courts with aplomb.

Ruth Worth was born on August 18, 1933, in Timmins, Ontario. By this time, female journalists in Canada had been fighting to gain acceptance for some 50 years. Before the mid-1880s, women were not even allowed into newsrooms-the noisy places filled with gruff men banging away at typewriters beneath clouds of cigarette smoke were considered unsuitable for any respectable middle-class woman. When women did write, it was at home, and their items were sent in by messenger. Almost always, the byline on the piece was a man’s; this allowed women to write while still upholding their modesty.

The women who were able to break through these conventions-paving the way for later generations of female reporters-did so because they shunned the traditional roles of the times. In 1889 Kathleen “Kit” Coleman, ofThe Toronto Mail, was the editor of the first women’s page, entitled Women’s Kingdom, which also addressed “men’s concerns”-international events, federal politics and social issues such as female suffrage, poverty and prostitution. And making a name for herself as an agricultural expert, reporter E. Cora Hind was one of the very few women to rise to a senior position as agriculture editor of the Manitoba Free Press in 1902. Although she was chastised for co-opting such a traditionally male subject, the accuracy of her crop forecasts became world renowned.

The Canadian Women’s Press Club was established in 1904, and women slowly made their way into the newspaper business. Editors had begun to realize they were ignoring half of their potential readership. TheGlobe had introduced its first society column in 1893, and by the end of the century, almost every paper would have a society or women’s page-with reports on charity events, fashion trends, recipes and social teas. Around the turn of the century, a new breed of female reporter came into vogue: “sob sisters,” who wrote sentimentally about personal hardships. Others, like Lotta Dempsey, who started writing for the Star in the ’60s, were able to make a name for themselves penning society gossip columns. Eventually, proving themselves through their writing and their spirit for treading new ground, women began seeing their work make more of an appearance in the news pages in the ’50s and ’60s. Ruth Worth was part of this second wave of pioneering female journalists.

The limited career options during the ’40s meant there were certain paths Worth was expected to follow. After high school, a shortage of teachers in Timmins spurred her to begin teaching an elementary class. But Worth had an unfulfilled interest in writing, sparked by her role as the editor of her high school newspaper, and she thought teaching paid too little. So in the spring of 1953, at age 19, she travelled 140 kilometres east to Kirkland Lake, Ontario, to find herself a newspaper job.

When she first walked into the newsroom of the Northern Daily News, she made quite an impression. Joan Hollobon, who had just begun general reporting at the News in the spring of 1952, still remembers Worth’s grand entrance. “She just floated into the room. She looked as though she was honouring you with a royal visit. And her red hair-the first time I saw her she was wearing a striking green chiffon scarf.” Hollobon later learned that Worth was very shortsighted and the vague look she often had was nothing more than an attempt to see what was in front of her.

Despite her familiarity and comfort with small-town life, Worth wasn’t satisfied at the News for long-the big city was the place to be. It wasn’t unusual for journalists, especially women, to move to Toronto to launch their writing careers at one of the city’s big dailies. She arrived in Toronto in the spring of 1954, and soon after found employment as a copy writer for an ad agency, which lasted until she began attending the University of Toronto in the fall. She then headed for The Toronto Daily Star in search of a job.

“At the News she led the editor to believe she knew everything, when she really knew nothing,” says Hollobon, who herself moved to Toronto in 1956, to work as a religion reporter and then medical reporter forThe Globe and Mail. The Star hired Worth to cover the night police beat, monitoring the radios and police blotter for stories. “She wanted to be where the action was, not at a society wedding,” says her daughter Catherine, now 33.

A full-time English student by day, Worth was a part-time reporter by night-until a few months after her father died in December of 1954. With only his pension for income, her mother and two brothers moved into Worth’s tiny Toronto apartment. Her mother found a job at Simpsons downtown, and Charles and John continued high school. In order to free up more time for work to help her family, Worth quit school.

These were the days when the joint court bureau was shared by the Telegram and the Star, when copy was sent from the old city hall through pneumatic tubes under Bay Street, when newspapers still specified that they were looking to hire a female reporter. Worth soon moved to the Star‘s court beat, which was where she found her niche, interacting with the characters who moved frequently in and out of the court system. Day after day she climbed the few flights of stairs to the small room at the top of the College Street police headquarters, where crime reporters would crowd around old tables to write their running copy, sending each page to the newsroom as soon as it was finished.

At that time, the five reporters covering the courts for the Tely were all men, and the Star‘s five were women. “All the other women worked in the women’s section,” recalls Dottie (O’Neill) Wilson, who was with the Starfor 42 years. “They had two token female reporters working on the general news beat with the guys. And the women who covered the women’s pages were paid a lot less than we women reporters were. Because we were like the guys, so to speak.”

Wilson says she encountered little sexism in her job in the late ’50s, but she was treated differently than other reporters because she was a woman. “For a period of time I was in one of our editor’s bad books, and he decided I was going to work nights”-until one of the other editors spoke up. “He said, ‘I want that girl taken off that beat. It’s not fair for her to be in here with a bunch of guys and all this foul language. Put her back on days.'”

Worth found there were unexpected advantages to being a female reporter. She told her brother Charles that potential sources thought she couldn’t really be a serious reporter-reporters were old men in hats and suits. While waiting to go into court she’d engage people in conversation, and often they’d just tell her what she wanted to know. She’d find any way to get the story-while in Vancouver on her way to cover a mining accident in Alaska, Worth found that the small plane she wanted to take was full, so she waved $100 in the air. “This money will go to anybody who will give up their seat,” she said, and got her ride, as well as her story.

After a few years on the court beat, Worth was chosen to join the ranks of a handful of female general reporters at the Star‘s 80 King St. W. office. But her interest in foreign affairs proved to be a strong draw, and a year later Worth quit the Star to travel and freelance. She had never finished any university courses, but in 1960 she enrolled in a Russian-language course at the University of Toronto, with the plan to visit Eastern Europe. The Star‘s managing editor at the time, Borden Spears, wasn’t willing to send the 27-year-old reporter to Russia-he thought she was too young and probably wouldn’t get any good stories anyway. During her holidays, armed with a student visa and a few words of Russian, Worth left with a student group for the communist country. She returned with stories and photographs of Moscow and Kiev, exposing the country’s food shortages, education system and the meagre living conditions people experienced under the Soviet system. The Globe bought the articles and the photos, running what was one of the first Canadian newspaper reports direct from the Soviet Union.

Though her Soviet feat was impressive, Worth’s proudest journalistic achievement involved something closer to home: the Canadian legal system. Entitled “What’s Wrong With the Courts?,” her 10-part series for The Globe and Mail ran in January 1963. It began with a compassionate look at the problems of the overcrowded facilities at Toronto’s old city hall, at 60 Queen St. W. She noted that the situation had the “atmosphere of a bull ring, jammed full of prisoners” and was “hardly conducive to a calm, reasoned discussion of a defense.” Throughout the series, Worth offered many viable interim suggestions, including updating the accounting procedures in the court and moving some of the courts to other buildings. The tone of her writing never wandered toward sympathy for the accused, but stressed the need for humanity in the system: “The treatment given the shabby, dejected persons who are charged with criminal offenses is lacking in dignity, consideration and understanding,” she wrote in her introduction to the series.

The articles also focused on the inequalities of the legal aid system in Ontario. “There is considerable evidence to indicate that justice is for sale in the law courts of Metro Toronto because legal advice is not available to everyone who cannot pay for it.” She outlined the fact that the Ontario Legal Aid Plan, which assigned lawyers to represent the accused, did not cover all cases. For example, anyone charged under the Highway Traffic Act or Liquor Control Act or anyone wishing to appeal a conviction or a sentence was not entitled to aid. She found compelling ways to make a point: “The total budget for 1961 for both civil and criminal cases in the entire province was $26,000-to defend over 7,000 cases. This works out to an average of $3.71 a case, scarcely enough to pay for stationery and stamps.” A few months later, the provincial attorney general would establish a joint committee of the Ontario government and the Law Society to look into the existing legal aid system. Most of the points raised in the committee’s findings were ones that Worth had pointed out earlier in her series. And the series itself had drawn letters of praise from local MPPs and magistrates. In 1965 the committee concluded that it was “unreasonable to expect lawyers to be responsible for providing legal services, without payment, to low-income Ontarians” and the system was changed to correct these inequalities.

Other times Worth herself landed in trouble with the law. In the early 1960s, a bomb exploded at Toronto’s Town Tavern, and mobster Max Bluestein was a suspect. Worth reported on information still unknown to the police, and a judge ordered her to reveal her source. She refused, and the court held her in contempt, although later the judge relented and Worth avoided jail.

Throughout the ’60s and early ’70s, Worth was in her element as a freelance crime reporter for the Star and the Globe. She was always up for an investigation-whether into a prostitution ring, Ontario’s mental health system or Toronto’s slum landlords. Not that all her stories were hard-hitting. Sometimes her assignments involved relatively trivial subjects, such as the use of the city’s pools by suburbanites (“Early Birds Enjoy Pool, but Rest Wait in Line”). Another article, which appeared on the Globe‘s front page in February, 1963, showed her lighter touch and ironic tone. In it, she described the Hot Stove Lounge, a posh club set to open on the east side of Maple Leaf Gardens, as planning to use “bits of old harness and pioneer lanterns” to decorate the dining room, and hockey equipment to be incorporated into the light fixtures and coat racks. “The board of directors hasn’t decided whether they should accept female members,” she wrote, “but they have decided about another accoutrement of key clubs in the United States-bunnies. There won’t be any. Just ordinary waiters.”

In 1963, Worth was part of a three-reporter team covering the Royal Commission on Crime. Allegations had emerged that former Attorney General Kelso Roberts and some Ontario Provincial Police inspectors had had communications with organized gambling syndicates in Canada and the United States. In her typical fashion, Worth found a way to inject energy and vitality into the story, no matter the subject, describing the “shrewd, evil, cunning men who are public menaces and who succeeded in establishing a gambling empire in the province despite the efforts of dedicated police officers.”

That fall, Worth got the chance to try her hand at something different: political analysis. The only woman on the Ontario election coverage team, she was assigned to the Liberal campaign trail, accompanying leader John Wintermeyer throughout his tour. In “Wintermeyer Follows the Graham Trail,” published September 13, 1963, in the Globe, she compared the Liberal campaign to the style of evangelist Billy Graham: “[Wintermeyer’s speech writer] adds the flesh and all the pungent phrases he can devise to turn out the pile-driving speeches Mr. Wintermeyer hopes will carry him to the Premier’s office.”

Because of the experience she gained during the election, in November 1963 the Globe sent her to its Vancouver bureau to cover politics, as well as child welfare. While in Vancouver, she met a handsome young man by the name of Tom Hazlitt. He was 6 foot 4 with dark, wavy hair-a reporter who had worked atThe Province in Vancouver since 1948-and he became smitten with Worth. The pair dated and eventually moved in together. But after two years in the West, Worth couldn’t resist an offer to cover her favourite beat as the Globe‘s crime reporter.

Her work life was flourishing, and her personal life was about to change dramatically. After remaining with theProvince until 1966, Hazlitt moved to Toronto to work for the Star-and to be with Worth again. The couple married later that year, and when Hazlitt was transferred to Ottawa, Worth, pregnant with their first child, quit her job to go with him.

The Ottawa of the ’60s was as much a politician’s town as it is today, and the Hazlitts were often found in the midst of the fray at the press gallery. Tom-whose work won praise from former prime minister John Diefenbaker and garnered two National Newspaper Awards-worked as a parliamentary reporter for the Star. Ruth freelanced for CBC Radio, writing commentaries on the Canadian political climate and preparing hosts for political interviews.

Although Worth took some time off when Jessie, their first child, was born in 1966, and again when their second daughter, Catherine, arrived in 1969, she could not stay away from journalism for long. Juggling two small children and demanding careers, the Hazlitts moved when Tom returned to the Star‘s Toronto office in 1970, settling in the neighbourhood of Cabbagetown, in a white Victorian home at 113 Amelia St. Ruth continued to freelance for the Star and the Globe, while writing scripts for a CBC Toronto television documentary series on children’s early development, entitled Their First Five Years.

It was a time of high prosperity for the Hazlitt family. With their daughters in private day school and a Jamaican housekeeper to run errands, they were free to pursue their careers. Hazlitt was covering the FLQ crisis in Quebec, while Worth was often among other journalists at the Royal York Hotel bar, where she did her best networking, gleaning information from the other reporters.

No matter what kind of assignment she was working on, the demands of work and family could sometimes conflict. Jessie remembers that when she was about 10, a cab would sometimes arrive after school instead of her mother. “When I was in kindergarten,” Jessie recalls, “they asked me what my parents did for a living. And I said they ‘drank martoonies and watched Watergate on television.'”

Still, there were advantages to having media-connected parents. The children spent their summers in a mansion on Georgian Bay-albeit with a nanny-while their parents commuted back and forth to work. Alex Laurier and Bear of the Polka Dot Door came to one of Jessie’s birthday parties, and Heather Conkie from TVO lived down the street in Cabbagetown. “My mother knew she was not one of those women who was going to bake cookies,” Jessie, now 35, says. “She told me it was a waste of time.”

Always game to tackle new challenges, in June 1974, Worth expanded on her vast media experience as the first on-air medical and science reporter for CBC television news. It was a time when the network was beginning to hire specialist reporters, and Worth would often visit hospitals to put a human face on a new treatment or terrible disease. But many journalists often have difficulty switching mediums, especially when faced with a camera-and according to Trina McQueen, assignment producer of national news at the time, Worth was no exception. “I think she found it difficult to make the transition to the very difficult task of putting complex subjects into a very short period of time. You either make the transition or you don’t.”

Worth looked stiff on camera, perhaps because she disagreed with the image CBC wanted her to project on air. “They wanted her to look fluffier and more like a weather girl,” recalls Jessie, “which just infuriated my mother to no end.” Co-workers tormented her, naming her “Little Orphan Annie” because of her glasses and bright red curls. When she decided to get her hair cut one morning, the newsroom buzz was about what Worth looked like rather than what her story was for the day. She loathed the emphasis on appearance.

While Worth struggled with her television work, her husband was diagnosed with lung cancer in early 1975. Unable to cope with two young children, her work and an ailing husband, Worth took a leave from CBC to take her family to San Diego, so that Hazlitt could begin experimental cancer treatments over the Mexican border in Tijuana. The treatments failed, and on September 14, 1975, he died.

Perhaps it was because of her disdain for her colleagues or her dislike of television, but in 1976 Worth quit her job at the CBC. She studied for her real estate license and began selling homes. But she wasn’t a salesperson-the intimidating gaze that was so effective when interviewing sources didn’t convince clients to buy pricey Rosedale homes.

Jessie remembers that gaze as just part of her mother’s personality. “She had no patience for anybody, especially shop girls. [But] she didn’t care who they were, they could be a senior person or an editor, and she’d say, ‘You are incompetent.'”

Then, in her late 40s, the unimaginable happened. Hollobon remembers Worth just started falling down. “She’d be walking down the street and all of a sudden she’d be on her face on the sidewalk. And she wouldn’t know how she got there.” Relatives speculated she’d been drinking too much and had lost her balance, but a few years later she would be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. From then on she would spend her time travelling across Canada and visiting with friends, before settling into an assisted-living apartment in Don Mills, in northern Toronto.

When Worth moved to St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1998, Jessie remembers that reporters at the St. Catharines Standard were on strike and her mother followed the conflict on television. “She kind of thought St. Catharines was a one-horse town. But she got to watch news all day long, read her two newspapers a day.” Living out the rest of her life in the company of Jessie and her family, she died on November 9, 1999.

Perhaps it is a sign of the times that Worth the reporter is sometimes remembered by colleagues as the woman who married Tom Hazlitt, who was widely celebrated in his day. Back then only a few women were able to make a lasting impression. If Worth did not break a major news story, she did achieve significant accomplishments that were virtually unheard of for women at the time: travelling through unstable countries before she turned 30, working for almost all of the country’s largest media outlets-in print, radio and television. Her Globe series made waves in the Ontario legal system and she brought Russia to Canadians before any other reporter.

Ruth Worth was one of a handful of Canadian female reporters in the mid-20th century who broke new ground for women. Like her counterparts, she was career-driven and motivated, and she worked for the thrill of the news.